Selena Savić
I am an Assistant Professor for Protohistory of Artificial Intelligence and Machines in the Arts at the University of Amsterdam. After a PhD at EPFL and an SNSF-funded postdoc at ATTP, TU Vienna, I worked at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design Basel, where I was the Head of the Make/Sense PhD programme. I edited three books (Radio Explorations, forthcoming, Ghosts of Transparency, 2019 and Unpleasant Design, 2013) and I research and write about computational modelling, feminist hacking, and posthuman networks in the context of art, design and architecture. My research interests animate a practice at the intersection of computational processes and posthumanist and postcolonial critique of technology. My current research addresses data and measurement, offering a generative perspective on the interrelations between technicity for making and circulating art.
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Papers by Selena Savić
Auf der Grundlage von Informationen, die Genossenschaften bereitstellen, formulieren wir verschiedene Prinzipien in Bezug auf Zusammenarbeit und Entscheidungsfindung und kodieren diese in agentenbasierte Modelle von Gemeinschaftssituationen. Wir verwenden das Modell und seine verschiedenen Erscheinungsformen, um mehr über zukünftige Verhaltensweisen und Verstrickungen in der Gemeinschaft zu erfahren. Wir entwerfen Modellschnittstellen als Denkspielzeug: Artefakte, die es Forschenden und Mitgliedern der Community ermöglichen, zukünftige Strategien zu erkennen. Mit den Denkspielzeugen untersuchen wir die Rolle von Artefakten bei der Schaffung von Wissen.
The system was tested in the context of interactive installations as well as long-term observations of user behaviour in space. These experiments facilitate the conceptualization of a communication landscape, high- lighting the activity of people and devices in the network layer. The system can, thus, be useful for post-occu- pancy evaluations. Moreover, it enables a profound understanding of signal propagation and use patterns in space. We argue that the compound measurement of these two phenomena, which are rarely related, forms a productive base for understanding the relevance of built architecture for the design of wireless infrastructures, and vice versa.
of such research practices, hoping to form a base for understanding the nature of research design artifacts and their evaluation.
We will examine the process of translation from the research question into the design brief, into the prototype, back to the question, back to the prototype; until the design artifact is fit as a tool for research; or is (temporarily) discarded. The artifacts produced in this way do not necessarily serve a utilitarian purpose, but provide an explicit feedback about their use and the experience they invoke. In terms of design, they are like code with a lot of debugging print statements. It possibly never leaves the studio and when it does, different levels of independence from the studio setting and context can be identified.
Parallel to this development, massive structure and power-operated environments conflated in several ways. We can locate smart building development in this lineage of immixture of power-operated environment with massive structure. Rich data collection from sensors and logging of users actions permit to orchestrate, to a certain extent, the co-operation between buildings and their human users. The discourse on scarcity, however, still haunts the discipline. Scarcity of resources and our attempts to measure them have been a strong drive behind technological developments. This starts to change slowly, with the advances in renewable energy technologies and proliferation of communication networks. By moving away from the scarcity discourse and placing more value on abundance of information, I pertain to address the interplay between user agency and build- ing automation. I discuss three cases of scarcity that can be read in a different key: energy, wireless communication and attention. It is in this way that we can work towards turning mere automation into sophisticated orchestration.
The relationship between commoning and technology is explored here in the scope of the research project Thinking Toys for Commoning, looking into the ways media-based tools, such as computer-based models, can make complex commoning processes not only visible but also comprehensible. The multidisciplinary team gathers around questions raised by both lived experiences of commoning in a community of individuals, and the experimental approach to computer modeling. We explore, expose and make explicit different phenomena related to common living. We collaborate with three Swiss housing cooperatives, probing organizational and communication challenges they face.
Auf der Grundlage von Informationen, die Genossenschaften bereitstellen, formulieren wir verschiedene Prinzipien in Bezug auf Zusammenarbeit und Entscheidungsfindung und kodieren diese in agentenbasierte Modelle von Gemeinschaftssituationen. Wir verwenden das Modell und seine verschiedenen Erscheinungsformen, um mehr über zukünftige Verhaltensweisen und Verstrickungen in der Gemeinschaft zu erfahren. Wir entwerfen Modellschnittstellen als Denkspielzeug: Artefakte, die es Forschenden und Mitgliedern der Community ermöglichen, zukünftige Strategien zu erkennen. Mit den Denkspielzeugen untersuchen wir die Rolle von Artefakten bei der Schaffung von Wissen.
The system was tested in the context of interactive installations as well as long-term observations of user behaviour in space. These experiments facilitate the conceptualization of a communication landscape, high- lighting the activity of people and devices in the network layer. The system can, thus, be useful for post-occu- pancy evaluations. Moreover, it enables a profound understanding of signal propagation and use patterns in space. We argue that the compound measurement of these two phenomena, which are rarely related, forms a productive base for understanding the relevance of built architecture for the design of wireless infrastructures, and vice versa.
of such research practices, hoping to form a base for understanding the nature of research design artifacts and their evaluation.
We will examine the process of translation from the research question into the design brief, into the prototype, back to the question, back to the prototype; until the design artifact is fit as a tool for research; or is (temporarily) discarded. The artifacts produced in this way do not necessarily serve a utilitarian purpose, but provide an explicit feedback about their use and the experience they invoke. In terms of design, they are like code with a lot of debugging print statements. It possibly never leaves the studio and when it does, different levels of independence from the studio setting and context can be identified.
Parallel to this development, massive structure and power-operated environments conflated in several ways. We can locate smart building development in this lineage of immixture of power-operated environment with massive structure. Rich data collection from sensors and logging of users actions permit to orchestrate, to a certain extent, the co-operation between buildings and their human users. The discourse on scarcity, however, still haunts the discipline. Scarcity of resources and our attempts to measure them have been a strong drive behind technological developments. This starts to change slowly, with the advances in renewable energy technologies and proliferation of communication networks. By moving away from the scarcity discourse and placing more value on abundance of information, I pertain to address the interplay between user agency and build- ing automation. I discuss three cases of scarcity that can be read in a different key: energy, wireless communication and attention. It is in this way that we can work towards turning mere automation into sophisticated orchestration.
The relationship between commoning and technology is explored here in the scope of the research project Thinking Toys for Commoning, looking into the ways media-based tools, such as computer-based models, can make complex commoning processes not only visible but also comprehensible. The multidisciplinary team gathers around questions raised by both lived experiences of commoning in a community of individuals, and the experimental approach to computer modeling. We explore, expose and make explicit different phenomena related to common living. We collaborate with three Swiss housing cooperatives, probing organizational and communication challenges they face.
The book develops an intersectional perspective on information technology, articulating multiple points of observing, experiencing and being attentive to forms of social and environmental in/justice it may perpetuate. Contributors present post-disciplinary research into the material, logical and onto-epistemological properties of radio signals. These approaches to radio signals specificity and situatedness expand the feminist materialist resistance to dualistic and universal readings of the world.
Operating between media theory, philosophy and social studies of technology, architecture, art, music and engineering, the book contributors and research approaches offer access and vocabulary to discuss digital information, communication technologies and socio-political ecologies, as a clear example for post-disciplinary studies across different levels, experiences and domains of concern.
Radio explorations articulate an encounter between radio signal recordings, data feminism, and experimental design, offering innovative tools and fostering interdisciplinary collaborations.
This book is above all about architectonics and communication. What, you may ask, does this have to do with ar- chitecture and urbanism? Data and software are thought to reshape the city, while the word ‘architecture’ refers equally often to buildings and to the organization of computer software and hardware components. With this book, we want to cast a projective space that accommodates various Auseinandersetzungen (settings, or setting ups, articulated dispositions of grounds that are quarrelsome) with implicit and explicit mixtures of these two domains interpenetrating each other. Contributions are short enough to make a point, yet long enough to glimpse the great variety of ‘scales’ of abstractive contemplation that these points index.
I propose a more complex view of wireless connectivity, encompassing these different perspectives through an intellectual framework that is based on the notion of architecturality. Architecturality, a property common to all architecture but exceeding the limits of built artefacts, is a measure of the effect something has on the experience of space. Through the lens of the built environment, I expose the complex transactions that take place between networks, people and space.
In order to evaluate architecturality of wireless communication signals, I conducted a series of practical design experiments, involving people and interactive installations, and using data gathered from mobile devices and wireless access points. The design of these experiments relies on the principles described by human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers as seamful design. Seamful design reveals underlying structures and relationships behind what appears as a utilitarian infrastructure. The design experiments contribute to the discussion on the use of design artefacts in practice-based research methodologies, thus challenging the different agents of knowledge production and the superiority of established research traditions.
The insights gained from this complex examination of wireless networks are important for architectural design, as a way to account more adequately for signal propagation through buildings. The experience of internalising wireless networks in the process of design engenders a designerâs sensitivity towards the presence of wireless communications in space. This sensitivity, similar to the one we have for the distribution of natural and artificial lighting, will be needed in the ever more challenging design of the built environment. The sensible designer can account for, and envision, more dynamic environments that are able to accommodate change and information in completely new ways.