=> (lost) body of information => the cyborg => posthuman body => (found) body of information

“Speculative fictions constructs a semiotics of virtuality by showing how the central concepts of information and materiality can be mapped onto a multilayered semiotic square”
(Towards embodied virtuality, Hayles, 1999, p24)

“Metaphor performs essential functions in orienting and guiding thought; it connects abstraction and embodiment; it allows us to discover regularities between what we perceive and what exists outside of ourselves; and it entwines cultural presuppositions with scientific frameworks.”
(Desiring Agency, Hayles, 2001, p.144)

“a definition formation originates in human experience and imagining: a concept exists in the world – humans experience the concept – humans create concept images in their minds – humans create concept definitions – humans operate with concepts”
(Creating and reading images, Lakovic, 2010, p.128)

Constrained Constructivism: “is that reality is never present to us as such; rather, our sense perceptions are self-organising processes that construct the world we know from the unmediated flux, unknowable in itself”
(Desiring Agency, Hayles 2001, p.145).

This all seems like one big experiment to me! An experiment to explain the existent. We are all ‘information’ bound by materiality (that seems to accepted), the 20th C and Modernism, bound by atomic physics has uncovered a journey to posthuman. If information has no dimensions, no materiality, no necessary connection with meaning (Shannon, in Hayles, 1999, p21), and that “Metaphor performs essential functions in orienting and guiding thought; it connects abstraction and embodiment;” (Hayles, 2001) – So! The dichotomy between the analogue domain and the digital domain is key to this narrative… Virtuality (Posthuman) is the link, the tool that leads to a semiotic interpretation of information, information that has no dimensions, no materiality, no necessary connection with meaning – that’s why ‘critical design’ exists – making better sense of ‘Bridget Riley’ at last!

Better start the journey then…

Right back to Berger again, hmmm…

Week eight has seen me viewing and engaging with other #ededc ethnographers. It interests me how varied other ethnography’s have been, from almost academic writings to possibly abstract undertakings. This has concerned me, not because of the range of outcomes, but because of how these outcomes will be classified. The goal of explicate meaning within an academic essay in my opinion cannot be matched in true modality, modality offers broader understanding which in turn leads to the development of notion. So, take Ginas ethnography, I would suggest, that ethnography is wide open to interoperation, and has great ability to further notional thinking because of that values set. Where others are carefully designed, take my own and Steph’s appear to be a more semiotically closed loop, onto the more literary academic approach nature of Nikki’s. All of these approaches are valid (in my opinion) but can grading criteria cope with the vagaries of interpretation and abstraction? This issue appears to be globally recognised.

Week eight has also seen my thinking move towards spatial mobility and transformation, being facilitated by my ethnography. The notion of Fellrunnners moving across existent landscape, while virtually connecting, describing that movement. This leads me to consider (in response to our own modernity at the beginning of the 20th Century) using Designing Modern Britain (previous post) as a vehicle for thought, having similarities with our current period of flux and change in our postmodern period. For instance, the consideration of the possibilities of the ‘new’ delivering existent manifestations of those notions (read Designing Virtual Britain). Example being the London tube regeneration (Frank Pick) leading to an almost ‘Wellian’ vison of time travel and the future, this leading nicely into our final study block ‘Posthuman’, and how virtual educational experiences can be defined or designed in relation to design as an academic study (Critical Design).