Epistemologies of sensor systems

Where people live, they also network. Networking practice is a guarantee for dynamic stability. Humanity in particular derives much of its supremacy from emphatic networking.
Indeed, human existence is characterised by a profoundly inter-subjective mode of existence. In the present, this fact explicitly includes the existence of techno-social hybrids: almost every contact between living actors is influenced by the omnipresent technosphere, which is increasingly environmentalising its access to social realities. The fact that technological sensing and social sense-making are difficult or even impossible to separate from one another is primarily due to the successive synchronisation of these two aspects of world genesis. The question of sovereignty of interpretation and sovereignty, which is directly linked to these facts, must be asked again and again in the digitalised present. Attempts to answer it will have to deal with the manifest in-between, namely techno-social hybridity.

In the context of this workshop on "Epistemologies of sensor systems", the technical devices are to be placed in an epistemological light and taken seriously as a part of social reality that is both shaped and shaping. The much-invoked power to act (or "agency") is a pivotal point of the hybrid (world) context, which the event aims to approach in the same way as the respective ends of the techno-social continuum.

The contributions to the event will range from the genealogical dimension of the genuinely techno-social to contemporary (media) ecological considerations that are capable of shaking up our traditional view of ubiquitous (sensors) technology. In addition to the indispensable theoretical foundations, practical approaches will also be used as examples. The relevance of understanding the design of specific technical sensing routines and their synchronisation with narrative sense-making is an important issue, especially in times of excessive complexity, and one that has explicit emancipatory potential.

Bernhard Dotzler
Sensor intelligence: On the epistemology of the control loop
Sensors are reagents, but not every reagent is a sensor. A sensor reaction is only a reaction at all in a network of elements that constitute it as a reaction. Sensors, in other words, only exist within the framework of at least implicit cybernetic knowledge. According to Heidegger, however, the "main features of the cybernetically designed world" is "the control loop".
Bernhard Dotzler is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Regensburg. 2010 Visiting Kade Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 2018 Charlotte M. Craig Distinguished Visiting Professor, Rutgers University - Book publications include: L'Inconnue de l'art. On Media Art (2003); Discourse and Medium (3 vols., 2006-2011); Media History as Historical Techno-Logic (2017); Back to Foucault (2020).

Angela Krewani
Genealogies of sensory experience
The separation of medium and body has a long theoretical and practical tradition. The lecture offers a brief historical overview of the contouring of the senses through apparative media and the correspondingly distinctive practices, which can also be read as a strict disciplining of perception. This overview provides a better understanding of contemporary media dispositives as well as the enforced hierarchisation of the senses. In traditional media, the focus on the gaze and the development of a visual regime becomes clear. As a corrective to the visual regime, works have emerged, particularly in digital art, that elude the focus on the visual and emphasise synaesthetic experiences
Synaesthetic experiences to the fore. Selected examples will be used to highlight the significance of sensory technologies for aesthetic processes. Finally, the lecture is dedicated to the cultural dimensions of the penetration of sensors into contemporary media technologies
Media technologies.
Krewani, Angela, Dr phil. Professor of media studies at the Philipps University of Marburg since 2003. Studied British studies, Anglo-American history and political science at the University of Cologne. Dissertation in 1992 at the University of Siegen in British studies with a thesis on Modernity and Femininity. American women writers in Paris. Habilitation 1999 on Hybrid Forms - New British Cinema - Television Drama - Hypermedia. Research stays and visiting professorships in the USA and Canada, 2006-2007 Fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Bielefeld. Summer term 2008 visiting professor at Brooklyn College, New York. Her research focusses on digital media and their theories, media art and aspects of media mobility. Her most recent publications
are a monograph on Media Art. Theory - Practice - Aesthetics. WVT Trier, 2016. Current editorships: With Christiane Heibach and Irene Schütze, Constructions of Media Authorship. De Gruyter 2021 and with Alena Strohmaier Media and Mapping Practices in the
Middle East and North Africa. Amsterdam University Press, 2021. She is currently working on media constructions of submarine worlds.

Anna Tuschling
Affective Sensing
Parts of computer development, and affective computing in particular, rely heavily on the availability and performance of appropriate sensor technology, such as facial recognition, eye tracking, but also the measurement of skin conductance (GSR sensors)
(GSR sensors), temperature measurements, etc. What affective computing can "know" about emotions and affects is based on this sensor knowledge. However, affective sensing does not begin with the era of affective computing, but builds on experimental forms of sensor development in the history of science. The lecture will highlight these historical-genealogical foundations of sensory perception in the field of affectivity and emotionality and, with epistemological interest, ask in particular about the continuities and discontinuities of sensor intelligence in the field of emotionality and affectivity in order to recognise sensors as an overlooked basis of affective computing.
Anna Tuschling is Professor of Theory, Aesthetics and Politics of Digital Media at the Ruhr University Bochum and works on the following research areas: Emotion AI, affective computing, self-documentation and digitality. Recent publications include: Tuschling, Anna (2019): Affective/Emotional Computing. In: Dawid Kasprowicz, Stefan Rieger (eds.): Handbuch Virtualität. Wiesbaden: Springer, pp. 1-12, doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-16358-7_21-1.Tuschling, Anna (2021): "Foldings of Analogue and Digital. Affectivity and the social media dilemma". In: Rieger, Stefan, Schäfer, Armin and Tuschling, Anna: Virtuelle Lebenswelten. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 125-138. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110638127. (external link, opens in a new window)

Andreas Bischof
Sensing the Social? Epistemology of sensors in social robotics.
For a whole range of application fields, robots are to leave laboratories and industrial cages in order to interact with people in everyday environments. Corresponding research projects, prototypes and even commercial products are being developed for nursing and geriatric care, schools, museums, shopping centres and transit points such as airports and private households. The lecture will first discuss what the unprecedented, no longer just technical challenge is in these cases. This will be followed by concrete examples of
"social sensors" in human-robot interaction will be shown. Starting with simple workarounds for detecting people, their position and movements and moving on to more advanced practices in current projects, it will become clear that the social sensorium of social robotics essentially consists of the researchers themselves and their everyday experiences.
Andreas Bischof, Dr phil., heads a junior research group at Chemnitz University of Technology. A graduate in cultural and social sciences, he works on human-technology relationships, digital cultures and methods of technology development. In addition to his involvement in
in addition to his involvement in various interdisciplinary networks, he heads two research projects, one of which is investigating alternative concepts for care robot applications.

Johannes Hess
Infrastructures of automatic reading. Address readers at the German Federal Post Office from 1960.
The lecture deals with the automation of reading. In the 1960s, the German Federal Post Office began experiments with the automated reading of addresses. These reading machines are based on the optical scanning of addresses and the processing of this data by character recognition systems
data by character recognition systems. In the context of the history of pattern recognition, these and similar reading devices thus represent early forms of artificial intelligence. However, the lecture will not analyse this intelligence in terms of the underlying circuits and algorithms of character recognition. Instead, it will look at the infrastructural, organisational and economic contexts that enable the "automatic" recognition of an address. From the provision of cheap, unskilled labour to the standardisation of the presentation of addresses and the introduction of a nationwide system of postcodes, very different factors come into view. The lecture argues that such factors are a necessary
Extension of the narrative of a computer- and algorithm-centred history of artificial intelligence.
Johannes Hess studied chemistry, media culture and media studies in Bayreuth and Weimar. He has been a research assistant at the Chair of Theory of Media Worlds at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar since 2018. He is working on a doctoral project
on the history of optical text recognition.

Christian Doeller
Presentation CYTTER
How do machines see the world? What transformations do environments, things and living beings undergo in the process of digital translation? And to what extent do our own perspectives, our behaviour and our coexistence change through the omnipresent filters of technical systems? CYTTER is an artistic research project "lost in translation". It is based on experiments in the CYTTER.datalab: a speculative data laboratory in which people, algorithms and machines work on digital translations of physical objects
physical objects. Visitors to the lab are invited to have an object translated into its digitally modified VERSION, explore the processes in the lab and experience them in real time. The CYTTER.datalab is a place of exchange and collaborative
collaborative research, a place of fruitful dialogues and flourishing misunderstandings.
Christian Doeller is a visual artist and artistic researcher. His projects operate in the field of tension between perception, scientific research and technological change. With process-based installations, algorithmic systems and generative
generative sculptures and images, he explores entanglements and transitions between physical and digital states. He explores the limits and readjustments of perception, relationships and dependencies in human-machine interactions, the social effects of digitalisation processes and the
Effects of digitalisation processes and the properties of non-human agency, noise, chance and autopoiesis. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Neue Galerie Kassel, Vasulka Kitchen Brno, Czech Republic
and at the NKNU Art Space in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. He has taken part in numerous artist-in-residence programmes, led workshops and initiated performances and events in public spaces. Doeller is a lecturer in "Design of Media Environments" at the Bauhaus University in Weimar and a member of the curatorial collective KV - Verein für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig. He lives and works in Leipzig.

25.06.2021 // Day 1

09.30 o'clock
Log-in // Start of conference

10.00 am
Welcome and introductory words (Christiane Heibach, Jonas Kellermeyer, Jan Torpus)

10:15 a.m
Bernhard Dotzler Sensors-Intelligence: On the epistemology of the control loop

11.3 p.m
Angela Krewani Genealogies of sensory experience

12.3 pm
Lunch break

13.45 hrs
Anna Tuschling Affective Sensing

14.45 hrs
Christian Doeller Presentation CYTTER

END OF DAY 1

26.06.2021 // Day 2

09.30 hrs
Get together & digital morning coffee

10.3 pm
Andreas Bischof Sensing the Social? Epistemology of sensors in social robotics.

11.3 pm
Johannes Hess Infrastructures of automatic reading. Address readers at the German Federal Post Office from 1960.

12.3 p.m
Short refreshment break

12.30
Team "Paradigms of Ubicomp" Showcase Ubicombs + Outlook on EdS II (Basel, December 2021)

END OF THE CONFERENCE // END OF THE CONFERENCE