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Prototyping by Moving for Virtual Reality
Get PDFMovement interaction is now placed firmly within contemporary digital culture and the creative domain, particularly performance, interactive and immersive media. However, though there has been considerable work on embodied ideation for movement interaction, implementation tools have lagged behind. We present a design methodology that incorporates a bespoke implementation toolkit (InteractML) with an embodied ideation methodogolody. The ideation methodology was developed specifically for creative practitioners in designing embodied interaction for immersive creative work, particularly in virtual reality
Third Nature: On Shu Lea Cheang’s Film UKI and Nature’s Infestations of Technology
Get PDFShu Lea Cheang's film, UKI, (2023) presents a 'sci-fi viral alt reality' diagnosing the present via elaboration into a future. The film, made in a game engine, narrates cunning and desire in the interlacing of Biotechnology, the state, hacking, ecology, the formation of waste and the invention of sexual practices. UKI proposes a way of thinking the interaction of technology and nature.
First Nature is that given by evolution. Second Nature, as the figure of speech goes, is arrived at through training, tools and technologies shaped by abstractions, such as capital or the scientific bifurcation of nature. Third Nature is brought about when First Nature starts to overspill and inhabit, even rework, the terrain of Second Nature.
This article maps this typology and works with UKI to assess the stakes of Third Nature
Person as Character
No full textStarting from questions raised when we encounter in fiction people whom we know from life, this essay examines how theories of character – from the referential vs. non-referential approaches that dominated the discussion until the 1980s to more recent interventions that have sought to go beyond such opposition – help us reflect on the amphibian nature of the character of biofiction, suspended between reference and invention. Three novels are analysed to develop the discussion: Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover (1992), with its multifaceted exploration of character as screen onto which desires and representations are projected, as economic and aesthetic object, as subject to historical forces and prejudices, or as possessing autonomous agency; Virginia Woolf’s Flush (1933), whose non-human protagonist, the dog, prompts considerations about the possibility of cognitive representation, sympathy, possession, and the nature of the (in)human; and Zoë Wicomb’s Still Life (2022), in which characters appear as ghosts, in-between the human and the no-longer human, apt correlatives of the status of the (once-human) biofictional character. All three cases raise questions of justice, pointing directly to the ethical commitment that lies at the core of biofiction
Language and onward migration: Bridging applied linguistics with migration studies
Get PDFThe two-day British Association for Applied Linguistics–Cambridge University Press (BAAL–CUP) seminar, organised by the three authors of this article, was held on 13–14 February 2024 at the University of Westminster. A total of 42 academics from the fields of applied linguistics and migration studies, working with a range of onward migrant groups and communities in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, engaged in an interdisciplinary conversation around the concept of the onward migrant (OM) over the two days. The term ‘onward migrant’, which we broadly define as a person whose life course involves extended stays in two or more destination countries (Ahrens & King, 2023, p. 5), has primarily received attention from migration studies. These studies address language as a key aspect that shapes the experiences of OMs. Research within applied and sociolinguistics has only recently started to pay attention to OMs and how they mobilise and reconfigure their linguistic repertoires in complex social and communicative contexts. Our main aim was to critically reflect on the affordances, limitations, and possibilities of working together across traditional disciplinary boundaries to enrich our understanding of this concept. We collectively reflected on some of the following questions: What does the social category OM mean, and for whom? When does it becomes relevant? What do we use this category for? What do OMs need and understand as important for them to investigate? When does language matter in processes of onward migration, in what contexts and for what purposes
Visual Cues in Survey Design- A Strategic Use of Emojis in Research
No full textEmojis are increasingly designed into surveys to intuitively capture users’ emotions and opinions on products and services. Survey design and layout also significantly shape the user experience (UX) of survey takers. However, significant concerns exist regarding emoji misinterpretation, influenced by factors such as age, gender, culture, and operating systems. Despite the growing use of emojis, limited research addresses their effectiveness within bipolar differential rating scales, a common tool in survey design. This paper addresses these concerns by using a within-subjects design to compare three versions of an emoji-based bipolar differential rating scale. Data is collected through surveys to assess preferences, eye tracking to measure attention, and interviews for detailed feedback. The analysis of both subjective and objective data resulted in nine actionable design recommendations for survey designers, aimed at optimizing the UX of emoji-based surveys and reducing potential miscommunication between designers and respondents
Remembering Rain: Pluvial Poesis and Marronage in Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon
No full textDionne Brand’s novel At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999) addresses the transgenerational memory of slavery and marronage through the lives of a family stretching from a moment of rebellion in Trinidad in the 19th century into the lives of descendants in diaspora through the 20th century. Informed by literature on fugitive and maroon ecology (Wright, 2020; Ferdinand, 2022) this chapter reads rain as a device of both memory and forgetting. Brand’s treatment of rain and memory begins as an insurgent botanical agent that affords moments of flight, concealing a Maroon camp from plantation militias, while preventing clear memory markers for maroon characters themselves. Brand is not concerned with neat formal boundaries of space and chronological order, instead, the water of the initial rains of
fugitivity changes as it seeps and floods into the second half of the novel and across generations into the lives of descendants in Amsterdam and Toronto. No longer in the clouds and not yet on grounds or in rivers, rain acts as a hydrologic intermediary between air, plants, humans, rivers, and seas, and as a transtemporal mediator of memory. Reading the novel for rain (Nuttall, 2021) helps to consider the significance of weather and water in full hydrologic spectrum and advance the scope of meteorological traces in literary memory studies
Hauntological Structures of Communication and Feeling: Making Space for the Non-Rational
No full textIn this chapter, I offer an analysis of embodied hauntological experiences that have been the subject of my research over many decades. They are often associated with the irrational, with moments of craziness, and framed through pathologizing discourses. In different ways they are embodied phenomena that are characterised by traps, knots, binds, masks, mazes, parasites, shadows, and forms of “topological looping” (see Chow, 2012). I include the phenomenon of hallucinations and related experiences, like grief, that are associated with the past, or multiple pasts, encroaching in the present. The experiences that I focus on can destabilise self and other, near and far, dead and alive, real and imaginary, sane and insane, and the human and more-than-human (see Blackman, 2001, 2012). They disrupt borders and boundaries, staging what has become lost, separated, and disjointed, yet maintaining an absent presence. I approach these phenomena as part of an embodied hauntological apparatus of sensing and feeling that has much to say, if only we could listen in new ways
‘All the allurements of beauty and eloquence’: Aspasia of Miletus and the Intellectual Woman in the Nineteenth Century
No full textThe aesthetics of more-than-human design: speculative energy briefs for the Chthulucene
Get PDFThis paper is a theoretical contribution to HCI that considers the more-than-human (MTH) as an intrinsic part of human–computer interaction design. In particular, it focuses on MTH as central to responses to the climate crisis as manifested in energy-demand reduction and smart meters. This is explored by expanding on the notion of the ‘design event’, defined aesthetically as the patterns or conformation of unfolding and becoming of heterogenous human and non-human elements. It is with this version of the design event that the MTH can be more directly and effectively engaged. We do this with reference to environmental problems as signaled by Haraway’s speculative future ‘the Chthulucene’ – a worlding for liveable futures. The paper views design briefs in HCI, and design more broadly, as problematics for exploring and determining aesthetic-possible pathways for invention, which necessarily involves MTH elements. Three interrelated design briefs are presented that propose how practitioners might go about addressing energy-demand reduction and metering and provide a set of guidelines on how to devise and write speculative more-than-human briefs. This, the paper argues, involves becoming sensitive to speculative MTH compositions where novel forms of ‘sense making’ orient alternative possibilistic – idiotic – relations to energy