Cite as: Anke Gründel, Introduction to the lecture Noortje Marres, ‘The Non-Human Standpoint: Living Environments after AI’, part of the conference Planetary Design Reclaiming Futures, ICI Berlin, 25 October 2024, video recording, mp4, 03:12 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e241025-1_2>
25 Oct 2024

Introduction

By Anke Gründel

Video in English

Format: mp4
Length: 00:03:12
First published on: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/noortje-marres/
Rights: © ICI Berlin

Part of the Lecture

The Non-Human Standpoint: Living Environments after AI / Noortje Marres

The world is living with a tiring paradox today: the perspective of the non-human is validated as never before after AI has been widely embraced as the new ‘engine of change’. But at the same time, anti-environmental attitudes are ascending and seem to be only amplified, consolidated, and fed by the embrace of machine intelligence. How to break this coupling of two contradictory validations through ‘AI’, of the non-human perspective with withdrawal from the world? The collaborative project, ‘AI in the street’ moved into city streets to explore a different logic of activating the non-human standpoint, and this in the following ways. Walking the street, the researchers encountered AI first and foremost as a barrier to interaction, in the form of oversized 5G antenna, cluttered lampposts, and opaque road furniture. But they also encountered hesitating machines, demonstrating that technology is humbled by contingency no less than any other entity and breaking the spell of mechanical objectivity. Finally, adopting the non-human vantagepoint of the street opened up a critical perspective : assuming the vantage point of a tree, but also of a thistle, the researchers could suddenly see what technology disables, the sheer inhabitability of the place. At the same time, the time frame expanded, into what was here before and might be, what grows through the cracks.

Noortje Marres’ work contributes to the interdisciplinary field of Science, Technology and Society (STS) and investigates issues at the intersection of innovation, publics, the environment and everyday life. Trained in the sociology and philosophy of science and technology, she has led research projects focused on emergent forms of public engagement in technological societies, in work on sustainable living and related practices of ‘material participation’ such as everyday carbon accounting, and more recently, automated and connected environments created in city streets. Noortje has also contributed to methods development across social research, digital media and activism, in work on online issue mapping and situational analytics. Her current research focuses on experiments ‘beyond the laboratory’, examining diverse forms of testing in societal settings – street trials of intelligent vehicles, fact-checks in media environments and Covid testing situations – as critical interfaces between science, engineering, nature and society. Much of her work, then, is concerned with experiments in society as forms of knowledge, intervention and engagement that are gaining fresh relevance in our compute-intensive, ecologically challenged age.

Venue

ICI Berlin
(Click for further documentation)

Organized by

Claudia Mareis
Kenny Cupers
Orit Halpern
Laura Nkula-Wenz
Özgün Eylül İşcen
Nadia Christidi
Sudipto Basu
Anke Gründel
Tania Messell
Governing Through Design project team, in cooperation with the ICI Berlin

The conference marks the culmination of Governing Through Design, a collaborative research project supported by a Sinergia Grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Partners: Humboldt Universität Berlin zu Berlin, Technische Universität Dresden, Universität Basel, Concordia University, Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz (FHNW)

Part of the Conference

Planetary Design Reclaiming Futures

Today, many people are experiencing the uneven impacts of climate change, pandemics, wars, market crashes, biodiversity loss, and supply chain disruptions on a global scale. That a shared planetary future is, at best, uncertain is widely accepted. Governments, corporations, consultancies, and design firms are trying to tackle this uncertainty by envisioning various future scenarios and ways to get there. They are developing policies, strategies, and cutting-edge technologies to anticipate and prepare for potential future challenges while minimizing damage and maximizing profits. In response, a growing number of activists and intellectuals invest hope in design to foster political alternatives grounded in radically different ways of being and speculating on futures.

The conference Planetary Design: Reclaiming Futures brings together critical thinking and doing around the role of design in making, unmaking and remaking worlds. Starting from the intersection of design, infrastructure, and the planetary environment, it offers a generative platform open to artists, academics, and activists for rethinking design’s role in producing the present and for developing alternative planetary futures. Reflecting on how design makes worlds in the 21st century requires an interdisciplinary effort that addresses it as an intersectional, multi-faceted phenomenon. Design becomes not only an object of empirical study but also a conceptual lens that might open up new ways of articulating transdisciplinary critique.

A central goal of this conference is thus to open up a novel field: the planetary study of design. This aspiration motivates studying design as an expansive field of socio-material processes and place-based practices with planetary implications. The conference aims to delineate this field by focusing on how epistemological and ontological aspects of design inform our understandings of planetary change, environmental management, coloniality, governmentality, and the climate crisis but also democratic reconstruction. The insistence on ‘planetarity’ comes from a recognition that these are world-historical conditions, without overlooking the locally situated, contested, and contingent nature of their manifestations. Planetarity evokes the concepts of synchronicity, discontinuity, and friction.

Supporting historically, conceptually, and ethnographically rich inquiries, the conference hopes to develop a new conversation about design that spans diverse disciplines, geographies, and methodological orientations that straddle the poetic and the pragmatic, the critical and the constructive. Thus, this gathering is at once looking ahead while also reckoning with inherited and continuing injustices that still haunt collective planetary futures.

Venue

ICI Berlin
(Click for further documentation)

Organized by

Claudia Mareis
Kenny Cupers
Orit Halpern
Laura Nkula-Wenz
Özgün Eylül İşcen
Nadia Christidi
Sudipto Basu
Anke Gründel
Tania Messell
Governing Through Design project team, in cooperation with the ICI Berlin

The conference marks the culmination of Governing Through Design, a collaborative research project supported by a Sinergia Grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Partners: Humboldt Universität Berlin zu Berlin, Technische Universität Dresden, Universität Basel, Concordia University, Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz (FHNW)