Fellows SS 2015

Simulation in Digital Environments for Auditory Design

Two central questions will need to be examined in this context: What technical and dispositive framework arises from the simulation processes in auditory design? And where in this framing can degrees of freedom for the exploration of new aesthetic strategies be found? In answering these questions, both the traditional lines of historical design practices and phonographic electronic music as well as the analysis of current technical configurations will play a role.

 

Climate Modelling and the Visibility of Climate Change

I’m interested in exploring the history of how regional climate modelling came to offer a new kind of ‘political vision’ of climate change. By examining the institutionalisation of climate prediction in the UK and the subsequent development of a new visual culture of high resolution, regional cartographies of climate change, the project will offer new understandings of how climate change has been rendered governable.

 

Simulated Aspects of the Living

My project will explore and compare contributions obtained by using simulations in research fields like synthetic biology, artificial life, embodied cognition and evolutionary robotics. It will outline the obvious shift in understanding the most fundamental processes that living systems utilize to perform their functions in dynamic and diverse environments. The connection with the developing field of complex systems theory will be highlighted by referring to concepts such as autonomy, adaption, order and self-organization, teleology and homeostasis, and the role of stability and destabilization.

 

Fidelity of Simulation in Safety-Critical Domains

By reviewing previously collected ethnographic and archive material on simulations in computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) environments, my project examines and synthesises the mechanisms of how simulator fidelity, as a product of organisational, informational and architectural design, is practically governed by related guidelines and organizational policies. It lays out a continuum of fidelity, onto which high-level use cases are mapped, particularly from distributed simulations that rehearse decision-making processes or the handling of complex events in international command and control environments.

 

Simulation in Digital Environments for Auditory Design (Research project with Prof. Rolf Grossmann)

Two central questions will need to be examined in this context: What technical and dispositive framework arises from the simulation processes in auditory design? And where in this framing can degrees of freedom for the exploration of new aesthetic strategies be found? In answering these questions, both the traditional lines of historical design practices and phonographic electronic music as well as the analysis of current technical configurations will play a role.

 

Exploring Uncertainty

It is a book that uses computer games as a medium for theory: what do computer games tell us about our current medial world relation? What kind of knowledge is encapsulated in these explorable digital worlds? What is the relation of hand, eye and mind in computer games? What kind of medial practices do computer games induce? The book describes computer games as emblematic for digital media as a whole because digital media already work as performative media par excellence: they do what they say in the act of saying it. Digital code doesn’t ‘mean’ anything, it ‘does’ what it ‘says’ in the moment of its actualization and realization. The ‘ontology’ of computer games therefore consists of a practice of signs and perception.

 

Standards of the mind

Intelligence tests are experiments that intrinsically rely on mediation. As they strive to measure what cannot be immediately observed and claim exactitude where apparatuses fail, they had to originate their own methods of collecting data. Founded by French scholar Alfred Binet (1857-1911), modern psychometrics could at first sight seem vintage with regards to such gadgets like questionnaires, picture puzzles or fill-in-the-blanks, especially when compared to the psychophysical approach conducted in Germany by Binet’s contemporaries Wilhelm Wundt or Gustav Theodor Fechner.