Panel II: Sensing Technology Narratives

with Orit Halpern, Melissa Littlefield, Ashley Shew
by Nicole Schimkus , Alice Soiné, Daniel Stoecker

Abstract

This panel focusses on sensing technologies that promise to make available what was previously understood as inaccessible – a promise which could also be discussed as the claim to interface with an other. We want to discuss modes of intervening and accessing not as mere achievements of sensing technologies but as powerful guiding imaginaries for their envisioning, planning, designing, implementation and usage as well as the politics and decision making going along with them. The aspirations, obsessions, ideologies, myths, and fantasies surrounding sensing technologies are wide ranging. Contemporary narratives our panelists tackle in their work suggest that mental states may be approachable through EEG (Melissa M. Littlefield), that what are seen as bodily limitations may be overcome/eliminated through technological enhancement (Ashley Shew), and that humans and computers can and should coexist symbiotically by forming resilient cognitive networks (Orit Halpern).

Imaginaries of intervening and accessing implicitly or explicitly delineate and make normative claims about an other, justifying that it can be accessed, conquested and controlled in some way by the means of technological innovation/adaptation/optimization. As the contributions of our panelists impressively show – each from a different perspective –, these narratives inevitably reduce the complexities, ambiguities and contradictions correlated with sensing technologies, their conditions and effects. Imaginaries of intervening and accessing play a central role in the question not only of how something (or someone) can be made available, but also of how it itself is constituted as an other.

The Smartness Mandate – Theorizing our Nervous Present

Orit Halpern (Concordia University, Montreal)

The COVID 19 pandemic has seemingly naturalized the relationship between computation and human survival. Digital systems sustain our supply chains, labor, vaccine development, public health, and virtually every manner of social life. Nowhere has this link become more powerful then at the intersection of statistics, artificial intelligence and finance. This paper links a genealogy of neural nets through the psychologist Donald O. Hebb, economist Friedrich Hayek, and perceptron inventor Frank Rosenblatt to contemporary efforts to model and gamify markets, populations, and networks. I argue that the idea of a networked, population based, ecological cognition unifies neo-liberal governance and conceptions of cognition and intelligence through the figure of the neuron; what I label the “smartness mandate”. This imaginary has political and ethical implications for our present underpinning contemporary reactionary politics and increased volatility and precarity (for many) in economy.

Orit Halpern

Orit Halpern is an Associate Professor in Sociology at Concordia University. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design. She completed her Ph.D. at Harvard. She has published widely and has held numerous visiting scholar positions including at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, IKKM Weimar, and at Duke University. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a history of “intelligence” and decision making in post 1970’s design, economics, artificial intelligence, and the life and human sciences; the second project examines extreme infrastructures and the idea of experimentation at planetary scales in design, science, and engineering.

Amplification and Access – Mechanical Brain Wave Imaginaries in the X-Men and Flash Gordon

Melissa Littlefield (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

Over the past decade, human electroencephalography (EEG) has gradually moved out of the laboratory and into various wearables: hats, headbands, and even costumes. But what are these devices recording and for what purpose? According to NeuroSky’s website, their EEG wearable devices measure “Brain waves. Not thoughts.” This distinction between brain waves and thoughts ostensibly makes EEG wearables appear objective: data in, data out, with no messy translation from thought in between. However, there is a more complex story behind the brain wave discourses upon which these devices rely. Indeed, and as I explore in this presentation, brain waves are an invention—part of a larger imaginary—that constructs the brain’s electrical activity as accessible and modifiable. In this presentation, I analyze one very small slice of this imaginary: representations of accessible brain waves from mid-century American popular culture. “The Brain Machine,” which appears in Flash Gordon (1955) and Cerebro, popularized by the X-Men (1964) are exemplary EEG-styled helmets. Their presentation in popular culture reveals discourses of mechanical access and amplification alongside arguments for brain waves as thought, as markers of individuation, and as opportunities for control or connection. In order to better situate these examples, I first discuss a longer history of twentieth-century references to brain waves, which notably shift into mechanically mediated phenomena after the news of Hans Berger’s pioneering EEG work spread in the popular and scientific media of the 1930s.

Melissa Littlefield

Melissa M. Littlefield is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is also affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Technology. Her books and co-edited collections include: The Lying Brain: Lie Detection in Science and Science Fiction (2011), Instrumental Intimacy: EEG Wearables and Neuroscientific Control (2018), The Neuroscientific Turn: Transdisciplinarity in the Age of the Brain (2012), and The Art of Identification: Forensics, Surveillance, Identity (forthcoming 2021). She has been the co-editor of Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science & Technology since 2013.

Disability Tech Narratives

Ashley Shew (Virginia Tech, Blacksburg)

Drawing from the stories disabled people tell about the technologies they use, I introduce the term technoableism and talk about how designers and engineers get the story wrong when it comes to disability technology – and how to reconsider expertise in light of disability narrative. I consider the role of media, both in the sense of multiple mediums of sensing/expressing and of media coverage of disability technologies.

Ashley Shew

Ashley Shew is an associate professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech (U.S.). Shew authored Animal Constructions and Technological Knowledge (2017), where she considers how non-human animal tool use fits into the philosophy of technology. She is co-editor of three philosophy of technology volumes and current co-editor-in-chief of Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology. Her current work concerns technology and disability.