Folds and Etudes

Michael Friedman, Wolfgang Schäffner (Hg.): On folding. Towards a New Field of Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld: transcript, 2016

TripleAmpersand Publishing (&&&), 2022

I: Hello, there, I’m the selected object-interface for this co-authored conversation-essay. You may call me cyborg, or the interface of internet conversation, or whatever. I am the standard medium and interface, as that which is between the faces of the other authors of this essay for the past year. It must be said they have never faced each other or communicated in any sort of way without me, which means I gave the form and the means for this whole relation and its products (until now). I am as relevant to the construction of this discourse as them (I am being modest though, I’m greenly more important). My materiality, virtuality, internality and externality all matter in this narrative of how technoscience mediates our relations in constructing the boundaries and frontiers (their permeability, their porosity) between human and inorganic matter; or, between the carbon-based bodies sitting at their desks and the silicon-based mediators on their tables. “When I do not see plurality stressed in the very structure of a theory, I know I will have to do lots of acrobatics – of the contortionist and walk-on-the-tightrope kind – to have this speak to me without allowing the theory to distort me in my complexity. When I do not see plurality in the very structure of a theory, I see the phantom that I am in your eyes take grotesque form and mime crudely and heavily your own image. Don’t you? When I do not see plurality in the very structure of a theory, I see the fool that I am mimicking your image for the pleasure of noticing that you know no better. Don’t you?”[2]

Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 2009

How does the brain control an effector as complex and versatile as the hand? One possibility is that the neural control of the hand is simplified by limiting the number of achievable hand postures. Indeed, hand kinematics can be largely accounted for within a small subspace. This oft replicated finding has been interpreted as evidence that hand postures are confined to this subspace and that leaving it volitionally is impossible. A prediction from this hypothesis is that measured hand movements that fall outside of this subspace reflect motor or measurement noise. To address this question, we track hand postures of human participants as they perform three tasks-grasping, typing, and signing in American Sign Language. We then apply a standard dimensionality reduction technique-principal components analysis-and replicate the finding that hand movements can be largely described within a much reduced subspace. However, we show that postural dimensions that fall outside of this subspace are highly structured and task dependent, suggesting that they too are under volitional control. We conclude that hand control occupies a high dimensional space and propose that the complexity of hand movements is well within the scope of the brain's computational power. .

Theory & Event, 2009

Becoming Besides Ourselves continues Brian Rotman's concern with God, mathematics, and minds in a sprawling case for the reality of the imminent reconfiguration of our selves and societies by networked, motion-capture media technologies. The book argues, based on the shaping of sentience by the media environment, that alphabetic-culture's coming-obsolescence will give way to newer, better, more holistic forms of being. It is a smart book, written by a scholar undaunted by hanging world-changing claims on theory-heavy and experimental evidence of shifts in subjectivity. Yet, I found myself frustrated with its conclusions. Alphabetic writing has hard-wired into us an "alphabetic body", a cyborg-conception of those capable of thinking alphabetic-thought. As Rotman explains, "[t]he alphabet does this by imposing its own mediological needs on the body, from the evident perceptual and cognitive skills required to read and write to the invisible, neurological transformations which it induces in order to function" (15). The medium is not only the message, nor even the inert material used. Media hardware are embodied by their users as well. Appropriately, Becoming cites its affiliation with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological project, which "can be summarized as a meditation on 'the flesh that thinks'" (34). Rotman thus walks us through gesticulation, movement, vocal affect, silences and other features that attend speech presentation in order to mark constrictions on the physiological gear used to "read" the meanings of embodied encounters-to speak, watch and hear. By contrast with embodied communication, like speech and sign-language, alphabetic language abstracts gesture, and, in particular, vocal gestures. I am unfairly, of course, asking Becoming to become another book. But, it is a request made in good faith and, hopefully, in the idioms of opening, room-making, and world-making that Becoming assigns to its readers. Nudged towards a politics of difference, perhaps the advent of a post-alphabetic age will, as Rotman anticipates, "make room for other less-imprisoning, more open-ended, ecophilic, and planetmindful and ethical horizons of the human" (137).

Human Movement Science, 2009

This special issue is devoted to papers arising from the 13th conference of the International Graphonomics Society (IGS2007). In a keynote address to the society Professor Arnold Thomassen once posed the question whether handwriting had a future. He answered this rhetorical question, claiming that a need to teach legible handwriting continued to exist as it would be important for our future communication with computers. The preface to the proceedings of the 13th conference (IGS2007) raised this issue again in response to an IPA Touchpoints Survey (http://www.ipa.co.uk/touchpoints/Pressrelease230306.cfm) that revealed that only 13% of all written communication is produced with pen and paper; 49% being via email, 29% via SMS text, and 10% via Internet Instant Messaging. At face value this survey seems to indicate the end of handwriting as a mode of communication, but these statistics do not acknowledge that not only are people shifting from paper to electronic means of communication, but that handwriting recognition capability is also becoming part of the operating systems of many of these personal computing devices. Indeed as computers become more pervasive, fine motor movements are also becoming more pervasive as a means of interacting with computing devices whether it is by means of handwriting or some other form of movement on Microsoft Surface or exertion based interfaces such as Wii. IGS2007 had no special theme, we tried to make all participants welcome. Nevertheless several broad themes emerged. A number of papers considered issues associated with communication and movement (e.g., Corballis), but not all found their way into this special issue. Other papers considered the mechanisms allowing handwriting to be transposed into a variety of contexts (e.g., Djioua & Plamondon; Phillips, Ogeil, & Best; Summers & Anson). These papers revisit the issue of constancy or motor equivalence that seems to allow legible handwriting to occur using different effectors. Motor constancy seems to occur irrespective of mechanism. Legible handwriting occurs regardless of whether there is a motor program that controls the movements or whether it arises as an emerging pattern as proposed by dynamical systems theory. Another group of papers considered how disturbances of communicative tendencies could manifest in alterations in handwriting (Caligiuri, Teulings, Dean, Niculescu, & Lohr; Phillips, Ogeil, & Müller; Saltuklaroglu & Teulings). While it has been the tendency for cognitive psychologists to dismiss handwriting as merely output processes, Corballis' gesture theory of speech suggests that motoric/production processes via the mirror system contribute to comprehension. Handwriting can be produced in so many different ways with so many different effectors, that it is hard to countenance unless one posits a degree of separation between meaning and execution. However, Corballis offers in his contribution several explanations as to how and why this separation between meaning and execution has occurred during evolution. Summers discusses the existence of a motor program. For some simple behaviors there is evidence for relatively fixed patterns of action, but the ghost in the machine becomes more elusive as more complex

2010

Memory & Cognition, 2010

Utsanga.it, 2021