On Friday, October 26, at 10.15-12.00, we will have an extra K3 seminar with the title Memory of Scent. An exhibition with the same name will take place at Wanås Konst between October 27 and November 4 (https://www.wanaskonst.se/en-us/Art/Art-projects-2018/Doftminnen-en-US), and in relation to that, two of the exhibitors, olfactory designers and artists Yoko Iwasaki and Boris Raux, will come to K3 to present their works and discuss what olfactory art could be.

Yoko Iwasaki will talk about The necessary conditions for olfactory art.

The title of Boris Raux’ talk is To meet each other around smells.

The seminar will take place in the K3 studio, fifth floor, Niagara.

Here are abstracts for the two talks:

The necessary conditions for olfactory art

I want to talk to you about olfactory art, a concept that everyone is more or less unacquainted with, and discuss its definition and potential. I have personally been involved with olfactory art for the better part of the past five years, not only in a theoretical manner, but also in a practical capacity, which included organizing exhibitions. I personally am an expert in the French arts and aesthetics, originally studying the Theory of Painting based in Body Theory. However, as I progressed with my studies, I became skeptical of the so-called Body Theory in Western thinking. I wondered: Is Body Theory really focused on our everyday bodies—bodies that are equipped with five senses, bodies that we eat and smell with? Is Body Theory not focused simply on bodies intended for perception in terms of seeing or hearing? In the modern world, our sense of vision has evolved into a tool that stands apart for taking in information, but should we truly be content with that?

In 2001, I was in Kyoto in Japan and was exposed firsthand to kodo, the art of appreciating Japanese incense. The shock that hit me was tremendous. Realizing that scents were a traditional Japanese art and that kodo was the world’s only art form making use of scents, I began to study kodo. That’s when I had the thought: somewhere in the very essence of kodo existed the veritable conditions for olfactory art to take hold and do so in a way that clicks with our modern art scene.

Consequently, I will first introduce many prototypes in Western art that come to mind when you hear the phrase olfactory art. Afterwards, I will provide commentary on Japanese kodo.

Finally, I would like to present my conclusions on the conditions for olfactory art to take hold.

Yoko IWASAKI

Associate Professor of Kyoto-saga College of Arts

http://perfumeartproject.com/

To meet each other around smells

Through examples taken from my own practice, I will point out how smells deal with the common and the singular. Because olfaction still resists to normalization and standardisation, smelling something together is also experiencing inner references and values of the other. It pushes the Relational Aesthetic logic forward by creating a wonderful prelude to the sharing of a hand-in-hand culture.

Since more than 10 years, I am developing a practice that introduces the olfactory dimension to Contemporary Art.

Through this perceptive filter, my work is an invitation to rediscover the multiple facets of our constructed identities. Artwork after artwork, I build a kind of “olfactory chronicle” that try to cover some chapters of our existence.

This olfactory perspective highlights our ambiguities in order to better understand our selves. Smells force us to further encounter art from a social and contextual perspective, placing it within the « here and now » of life.

So as to go beyond the inevitable singularity of our olfactory references, I always shape the olfactory dimension by others media such as visual.

On one hand, it helps to build and share a common experience and meaning between the audiences. On the other hand, the olfactory dimension questions in return the already built conventions behind the other media.

Besides a touch of humour, my work is determined by the impossible but needed quest of understanding and representing the complexity of life and especially socio-construct life.

As for scents, my approach is based on infiltration into the real.

BORIS RAUX

Website : www.borisraux.com 

Welcome to a K3 seminar on the Logics of Academic Article Writing. Academic work is increasingly focused on the writing of articles for international peer-reviewed journals. Given this, how do you decide which journals to aim for, and how should you think about the writing of such articles in order for them to not only be accepted but also read?

At the seminar, initially Susan Kozel and Jakob Svensson will share their experiences of writing in this particular genre, and we will then open for a discussion inviting all participants to share their thoughts on how to conduct this kind of academic work. On December 12, we will have a follow up workshop devoted to discussing concrete ideas for articles that participants may have. So if you are working on an academic article, or are planning to do so, these two occasions could be very useful!

As a bonus, on Wednesday Aron Lindhagen from the university library will talk a bit about open access journals and impact factors. He will also describe the support the library can give article writers.

The seminar will take place on October 24 at 10.15-12.00 in the K3 Open Studio,  NIC 0541, Niagara.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Lars Holmberg, Lecturer and PhD student in Interaction Design, K3/TS. The title of the seminar is:

Machine Teaching, a Human in the Loop Perspective on Machine Learning

It will take place on Wednesday, October 17 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.

Here is an abstract for the talk.

Machine Teaching, a Human in the Loop Perspective on Machine Learning

Or: why you at the end of our time can’t say: I only delivered the milk.

On the second year of my PhD, a research area arises for me that combines many of my interests. In this talk I will paint a broad image of the landscape I have walked this far, and I hope to spark a discussion that helps me to move forward and focus my work for me, and/or at least equally important in the eyes of my supervisors :/.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning opens up for a new type of products that often are described as disruptive to our way of living. Our prospect of handling this emerging technology is not altogether reassuring, this in the light of a 20th century that to a large degree relied on techno-fixes. Already the complexity of our connected society makes it increasingly difficult to anticipate the consequences of new technology; this in turn contributes to a technosocial opacity. This opacity indicates: the time when we could equal innovation with progress and handle the consequences afterwards is over.

Following my heritage from K3, I focus on use, users, design and technology during the whole design process. As a tentative approach in this field I have turned my attention to the relations we can build with Machine Learning agents. This shift is indicated by my use of the term “Machine Teaching” instead of “Machine Learning”. I see teaching as a relational activity that among other things builds on an understanding of the student’s prerequisites cultivated over time. This turns the focus from what ML-artefacts can learn towards a focus where we ask ourselves: What and how do we want to teach ML-artefacts if we see them as learners? This shift from a technology focus towards a human-technology relational focus might open a door to a technological development in this area through and for humanity.

I have planned my presentation as follows:

• Tech presentation: a Machine Teaching prototype that uses state of the art tinker friendly Machine Learning technology (Fastai, Jupyter notebook).
• Overview of the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning landscape and an outline over current research in in the area of Machine Teaching.
• Areas surrounding a Machine Teaching thinking.

On the ethical and moral side, I will mainly present and discuss work by Shannon Vallor

On the human-technology relational side, I will mostly lean on postphenemonology.

• Questions and discussion

Main references:

2016. Vallor, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting. 2016.
2017. Ihde, L. Langsdorf, K. Besmer, A. Hoel, and A. Carusi, “Postphenomenological investigations: Essays on human–technology relations,” 2015.
2018. Zhu, A. Singla, S. Zilles, and A. N. Rafferty, “An Overview of Machine Teaching,” 2018.

On Wednesday, October 3, we will offer two seminars:

At 10.15-12.00, Berndt Clavier, Senior Lecturer in English Studies, will hold a lecture with the title Strindberg and Technological Framing.

At 15.15-17.00, landscape architects and artists Fabio Ciaravella and Mimì Coviello will lead a seminar titled Let’s talk about Shame. Malmö Dialogues on Architecture and Shame.

Both seminars will take place in the K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.

Below you will find abstracts for the two talks.

Berndt Clavier: Strindberg and Technological Framing

In an article from 1994, Ulf Olsson, complains about the state of Strindberg research. According to Olsson, there is surprisingly little work done on Strindberg in the Nordic countries. The work that is done is often fearful and wary—usually focusing on very small details and “unable” (Olsson’s word) to give any account of larger aesthetic formations in Strindberg’s oeuvre. The few forays that have the ambition to explain more are often biographically oriented, focusing on what Olsson calls “Strindberg’s material,” the stuff from which scholars assume that his aesthetic energies grew and which usually boils down to catalogues of the books Strindberg collected in his library or might have read while travelling. In order to find new and more comprehensive work, Olsson argues that we need to look outside the Nordic countries, particularly to the United States where the same theoretical limitations do not seem to apply (but where other limitations apply, such as a basic unfamiliarity with the Swedish language and cultural history). Recently, I have been part of a US-based initiative to understand Strindberg as a “site” of impulses and energies, rather than as an author bound by genres or biography (or cultural history, for that matter). So far, this work has generated one study published by Bloomsbury, August Strindberg and Visual Culture: The Emergence of Optical Modernity in Image, Text and Theatre (2018). In the research seminar, I would like to begin my presentation talking about my contribution (co-authored with Tim Engström) to that work, but end somewhere else, in the relationship between technology, subjectivity and the aesthetic. I will begin in a few concrete individual works (By the Open Sea, The Ghost Sonata, some Wunderkamera photographs, and one of Strindberg’s attempt at natural science, Antibarbarus), and end up in aesthetic philosophy and how the construction of subjectivity is understood to relate to the individual work of art. This theoretical space, I argue, allows me to understand Strindberg apart for the constraining history of his reception in Sweden.

Fabio Ciaravella and Mimì Coviello: Let’s talk about Shame. Malmö Dialogues on Architecture and Shame

Matera is a Southern Italian city that was elected to be the European Capital of Culture for 2019 partly because of her relationship between shame and architecture. What we are trying to do is to build a form of European identity through a collective psychoanalytic session on Architecture. Shame will be used both as a tool to reevaluate parts of European culture that have not yet had considerable attention, as well as a filter through which to recognize mistakes that perpetrate through the forms of the space. During the seminar, the AoS group will expose the structure and the method of the research as well as the outputs that will be presented in Matera (2019).

The participants will be asked to contribute on the debate about possible relationships between architecture and shame and, together, we will finally open the Malmö dialogues on Architecture and Shame, starting from the interventions of the participants. Malmö will be one of the European check-points for an international dialogue on the relationship between architecture and shame and the final results of these dialogues will be presented in Matera in 2019. These dialogues will be part of a wider process that is actually involving the whole Europe.

Fabio Ciaravella

Architect and artist, art in public space and new relationships between art and architecture.

PhD in Architecture and Urban Phenomenology (Università della Basilicata,IT), one of the founders of the art collective Studio ++. He was Fellow at the MIT Art, Culture and Technology program in Boston and he is part of LabSo, unit of Urban Sociology of Università di Firenze (IT) where he is actually teaching “Social Innovation and Public Art” at the Postgraduate Master Program “Futuro Vegetale”. He is the coordinator of the project “Architecture of Shame” for Matera 2019 European Capital Culture.

www.studioplusplus.com

www.architectureofshame.org

Mimì Coviello

Landscape architect and baroque singer, urban regeneration and smart cities

PhD in Architecture and Urban Phenomenology (Università della Basilicata,Italy), previously fellow at Peking University (Beijing,China) and at VWA Landscape Lab (Vevey, Switzerland), founder of C-FARA professional collective in Matera, Italy. She collaborates and has collaborated with several Italian universities and international research centers (Versailles Ecole de Paysage, Swiss National Science Foundation, Università di Roma Tre, EPFL Lausanne), teaching as well as developing research projects based on a prototyping approach (www.agrinetural.it). Mimi is an active landscape architect, partner of a young practice based in Matera, meson ro studio. She is a team member of the project “Architecture of Shame”.

www.mesonrostudio.it

www.c-fara.com

www.architectureofshame.org

Welcome to a K3 seminar on Experiments with Utopias, based on the exhibition held at Ystad Art Museum this summer. The seminar is organized by Gunnel Pettersson, Senior Lecturer in Moving Image, K3.

It will take place on Wednesday, September 26 at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara. It includes a small exhibition, which will open at 10.00 on September 26.

Seminar structure and content

1 “Continued Conversation” – Exhibits from Experiments for Utopia: Anders Emilson, Gylleboverket, Gunnel Pettersson and Amit Sen.

2 ” Experiments for Utopia – Rough concept for a comic based on the exhibition of the same name at the Ystad Art Museum, June 2018″ A reflection on the exhibition by the cartoonist and archaeologist John G. Swogger. Contribution from Visual Communication-workshop 2018 (Jakob Dittmar)

3 Documentation and press material from Experiments for utopias (partly in Swedish) www.experimentutopier.org

4 Presentation and conversation

In this seminar I want to problematize the exhibition practice and, if possible together with the participants, identify research questions that may be a matter of interest for knowledge production within exhibition design and cultural production linked to K3’s research areas.

The starting point is the museum and gallery as a public space dedicated to “knowledging” dialogues and the creation of meaning. I see art as a platform for societal- and existential questions.

A concrete experience is presented from “Experiments for Utopia” at the Ystad Art Museum 2018. A production that I curated and participated in together with fourteen other artists and researchers. It is about efforts to create dialogues between the exhibitors, between the exhibited and the audience, with focus on the process and with the art institution’s tradition of mediation as context.

In the presentation I refer to Chantal Mouffe’s writings on artistic practice as something that still play a critical role in society, and Sarah Pennington, who uses the concept of “care” in design research, with examples that criticize galleries and museums reproduction of a dominant and normative tradition of representation and sentence construction.

Mouffe, Chantal, Agonistik: texts about thinking the world politically, Atlas 2016

Pennington, Sarah, Design as a catalyst for change: Vol 2, Paper 6, Taking care of issues of concern: Feminist possibilities and the curation of Speculative and Critical Design, DRS 2018, Limerick

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Pille Pruulmann Vengerfeldt, Professor of Media and Communication Studies. The title of the seminar is:

Proof of concept: Affordances of civic and cultural engagement?

It will take place on Wednesday, September 19 at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.

Here is an abstract for the talk.

I am planning to put together a proposal for a European Research Council (ERC) grant (https://erc.europa.eu/funding/consolidator-grants) concerning museums and public broadcasting organisations, the project aim being to develop an inventory of affordances that relate to cultural engagement. At the seminar I would like to discuss with you:

1) whether the research can be considered frontier and ground-breaking, and

2) whether there are colleagues in K3 who could consider this topic something they would like to contribute to.

Here are the rudiments of the idea:

The context:  In today’s media-rich cultural landscape, one could argue that with the raise of user-generated content, do-it-yourself movements and increasing number of cultural activities to diverse tastes and preferences, there is also continuing discontentment and feeling of lack of possibilities for engagement. On the one hand, we have an increasing number of digital cultural resources that are made available to the public, on the other hand, these resources are not used to the extent that their creators imagined. On the one hand, we have a diversity of opportunities to engage with different media outlets or create your own media; on the other hand, there is an increasing group of people who justify their actions by arguing that their voice is suppressed. These contradictions make me ask if there could be a way to investigate what kind of engagement opportunities are offered by the different content creation organisations and how these offers are received and understood by the public. Can we identify specific affordances that address people well in concrete contexts, where the affordance of the programme is recognised, and engagement possibilities are perceived by the audience members?

The cases: The investigation would draw on two sets of similar, yet very different cases – museums and public broadcasting organisations. Both of these organisations are publicly funded, and there are perceived public duties, among which is upholding the democratic order within society. Both of them are increasingly facing the challenge of digitalisation where their existing practices are both undermined and vastly enhanced by the idea of digitalisation. They both need to address large societal groups and need to create content that is engaging to the highly demanding audiences. Both organisations are losing on their traditional standing in society, but are in general agreed to be a valuable part of societal structures. Both organisations are turning to public participation as a way to overcome the above-listed challenges and have successes and failures to account. Both also deal with highly specialised knowledge for which they have had authority for a long while and at the same time that knowledge is challenged by digitalisation making skills more easily accessible.

The how: The project will consist of case studies and being inspired by grounded theory, the iterations of data collection and work with theory and literature, will allow the building of analytical framework that supports understanding as well as designing affordances for cultural participation.

Theoretical premises: Audience engagement discussions from audience theories as well as civic engagement and cultural engagement discussions. Affordances in design studies. Democracy and cultural institutions as part of their democratic assignment. The broader sociological framework through societal domain theories from Layder, discussing how individual choices and practices can lead to societal change.

The K3 fall seminar series will start on September 12, and there will be three talks on comics.

At 10.15-12.00, Jakob Dittmar, Senior Lecturer and Docent in Media and Communication Studies, K3, will talk about Narrative Strategies – African Types and Stereotypes in Comics.

At 13.15-15.00 Jacob Habinc, Master’s Graduate, Lund University, and Magnus Nilsson, Professor of Comparative Literature, K3 will give a joint seminar on Klass och arbete i samtida svenska serier.

Below is an abstract for Jakob Dittmar’s talk.

The use of types and stereotypes of Africans in comics is looked into. Focus is put on some distinct strategies of representing and negotiating race in comics, most notably one example by Birgit Weyhe and several by Anton Kannemeyer a.k.a. Joe Dog because of their exceptional high quality of reflected experimentation. Keep in mind that there is a close relation between the genre of a comic and its visual style: a distorted, caricatural representation is expected in humoristic comics. This is different from the notion of prototypical figures and behaviours argued for from a narratological perspective, where specific figures have to act according to their own and the stories’ established formal demands. To be able to discuss types and stereotypes in comics, some backgrounds and contexts need to be introduced. Some brief reminders about comics storytelling and character design are given before looking into several distinct ways of depicting Africans in recent comics. The discussion of figures and their uses in comics narratives is centring on the way in which comics place information on various visual layers that combine to become their narratives.

Jacob Habinc’ talk will focus on his Master’s thesis Arbetartecknaren: Svenska serieromaner som arbetarlitteratur. You can download it here: http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=8953144&fileOId=8953145

Magnus Nilsson will discuss his article Working-class comics? Proletarian self-reflexiveness in Mats Källblad’s graphic novel ”Hundra år i samma klass”, to be published in Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. You can download it here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21504857.2018.1500383

The morning seminar will be in English, the afternoon one in Swedish. Both will take place in the K3 Studio.

The program for the fall of 2018 is now finalized. You can reach it at “Seminar Series Fall 2018” in the frame.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Johan Farkas, PhD student in Media and Communication Studies. The title of the seminar is:

Beyond Fake News: Exploring Digital Propaganda, While Arguing Against the Post-Truth Era

It will take place on Wednesday, May 30 at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.

Here is an abstract for the talk.

With the rise of digital media, new ‘platformed’ modalities of disinformation and propaganda have emerged. This has lead multiple scholars, journalists and politicians to argue that we live in a ‘post-truth era’ flooded by ‘fake news’. PhD Fellow at K3, Johan Farkas, is not one of them. Through a series of empirical studies, Farkas’ ongoing research on the one hand explores the dynamics and workings of new forms of disguised propaganda online. On the other hand, his theoretical work argues against the notion of fake news and the post-truth era, criticising both their conceptual unclarity and problematic democratic underpinnings. At the K3 seminar, Farkas will present these two different ‘pillars’ of his ongoing research, posing the open question for discussion, whether the arguments connected to each of these pillars complement each other, contradict each other or occupy two different spheres with few direct connections. Moving forward, this question remains the primary uncertainty of his PhD thesis.

Welcome to a K3 seminar with Veera Virmasalo, PhD student in Media and Communication Studies. The title of the seminar is:

Discursive construction of bourgeois civic culture(s) in the tech innovation scene of post-apartheid Namibia

It will take place on Wednesday, May 23 at 10.15-12.00 in The K3 Open Studio, NIC 0541, Niagara.

This is Veera Virmasalo’s 30 percent PhD seminar. Jacob Svensson, Docent and Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies, will function as discussant.

If you would like to read the text that the seminar is based on beforehand, please send a mail to Veera (veera.virmasalo@mau.se).

Here is an abstract for the talk:

Namibia, a southern African country of 2.2 million inhabitants, and my home since 2007, is one of the most unequal societies in the world. 28 years into independence from South Africa, a new black elite and middle class has emerged but little is known about how they see their role in the unequal society, or whether the new generation of white Namibians has adopted dispositions different from their parents. My PhD project explores these questions through the lens of ‘tech innovation’, focusing on discursive negotiation involved in attempts that aim to persuade the Namibian bourgeoisie to support inclusive tech innovation, which is purported to benefit the marginalised.

Using a combination of ethnographic and practice-based methods, the research will produce thick descriptions of discourses circulating around tech innovation in Namibia. It will also challenge dominant discourse(s) through scenarios, counter-images and coproduction of media. Much of the work will be based on my involvement in a 2-year project called The Inclusive and Collaborative Tech Innovation Hub. The project is implemented by the faculty of computing and informatics at the Namibia University of Science and Technology and funded by the Finnish government as part of its support for developing an ‘inclusive economy’ in Namibia. The Hub trains marginalised youth in skills needed in developing for-profit innovations, promotes their inclusion in innovation projects undertaken by local ICT companies, and rallies to engage the local private sector as supporters for its work. Finally, it will also organise a series of workshops to co-design digital media concepts with the aim to increase social justice thinking among privileged Namibians.

The research aim is to explore the role of international development industry as a discursive vassal of global ideologies and simultaneously chart possibilities and instances of resistance by local actors, as well as from within the development industry. In this way, it is a research project within the ethics of Communication for Development and Social Change, calling development organisations and communicators within them to reflect on whether the discourses used by them in fact promote what they are purporting to promote. This call is not restricted to international development organisations, as there are also many local actors from government entities to non-governmental organisations and private citizens reproducing discourses, which at least at first sight seem to erode the potential of collective action towards a more just society. This research takes a closer look of such discourses and their specific articulations, trying to understand what is actually suggested by and understood through them in today’s Namibia. 

With an emphasis on Communication for Social Change and the communication aspect in Media and Communication Studies, my project will contribute to existing research on discourses of development, and the role of media and communication in promoting civic culture.

Keywords: Communication for social change, civic culture and privilege, digital innovation; discourse theory (Laclau & Mouffe / Essex school)