Approaching Place, Time and Knowledge Production
Introduction
In 2006, Marshall indicated that in the past fifty to sixty years we had witnessed fundamental change in the economy from its basis in industry to a basis in information and symbol manipulation. Traditional neoclassical models focused mostly on the production and accumulation of the material capital, while recently the emphasis has been made on human resources, knowledge economy and their interdependence. Consequently, the change of the means of production was followed by the transformation of the configuration of spaces, where these processes come to pass. Toffler argued that in the pursuit for innovation and creativity we had lost the sense of commonality, when the workplaces developed from standardized and uniform setups into individually oriented and ambiguous ones. Whereas workers of the industrial era could gather on the ground of shared experience, there is a gap between intellectual workers created by the very environment (1984, 38). Already existing knowledge architectures such as libraries, laboratories, workshops, art studios, rehearsal rooms, various spaces within academia have also progressively loosened their strict programmatic distribution of spaces. They have passed from hierarchical dispositions of servant and served spaces, parallel facilities and technical cores to a larger degree of general indeterminacy, adaptability and flexible plans without inner obstructions. This meant embracing what was previously inconceivable in such environments, including performative areas, indoor squares, arcades, free open spaces, gardens and patios. There was thus a more focus on fluxes and literally making room for the unexpected.
As noticed above, development in society, technology, culture, politics and many other areas inevitably affects the structure of the spaces we inhabit. However, this dependence is not one-sided. From the eighties onward spaces have been recognized as not only socially constructed but also constructing the social. Yet the architectural geometry is not the only factor that influences relations or individual behavior — the space is not limited by the configuration itself but expands into human and non-human relations. In the seventies Woolgar and Latour conducted research demonstrating that the construction of facts depends on non-scientific contexts of activity such as specifics of communication among scientists. In knowledge production processes each element is understood as essential — who we are, when, where, with whom, what surrounds us, what is behind the walls.
Elusive Spaces
In her contribution to Medium, Miriam Posner explores Genres of Scholarly Knowledge Production conference as kairotic space. Referring to Margaret Price, such spaces appear in the world of academia during less official and unregulated events, yet playing an important role in the establishment and distribution of power relations. I want to point out the nuances that should be discerned within a wide range of kairotic situations that one could observe during the conference. There is a distinction between the scheduled discussion or questions and answers session in a prescribed setting and the talks during the break, when people mingle and move from one group to another. The former is what can be seen in the program and the latter is everything beyond that, though these two types can co-occur in the same room at the same time. During the great talk by Franco Moretti in HUMlab-1, some part of the room was arranged in a traditional way for the lecture. The rows of chairs were set facing the lecturer and the projection screen. Nevertheless, the configuration of the room itself and furniture (apart from the rows of chairs) provided an opportunity for a parallel medium to emerge. Further back behind the last row of chairs, there were a number of couches along the outer side of the arch of the wall. Participants in that area could feel freer to exchange comments with their neighbors. While paying attention to the lecturer and physically being in the same space, they were also creating an almost intangible but at the same time definite connection and exchange through their conversations. These concurrent happenings (the talk and the back seat conversations) overlap one and another at a specific point in time and in a place, and there is an emergent complexity here in terms of material elements and other factors. Elaborating on kairos, Price as well points out the difficulty of studying these illusive environments due to their “unscripted nature”.
Experiment
We had planned to conduct a study during the conference in order to seize the elusive, although this study could not be carried out fully at the time. Taking Goskp2014 as an example, I will briefly describe the methodology that will be the basis for investigating future events. All participants are encouraged to carry a tracking device in the form of a notebook or a badge during the days of the conference. Each device incorporates a combination of technologies gathered in a separate unit with an RFID tag as the main component. This tag allows us to track and map its location within a certain area: it is limited to locate one’s movement inside HUMlab’s setup (with the exception of some zones, including restrooms). The tracking is anonymous; a tag cannot be related to the individual carrying it and does not contain any ID data except a number. The badge only transmits information about the location and direction that person is facing. Gathered information can be interpreted through evolving maps that provide an understanding of the dynamics during the event and gives an opportunity to analyse data by relating it to the physical space itself, the broader context and time.
The notebook can be used as an ordinary notebook that one can keep after the conference, but by writing on specified pages and submitting them, the person enables us to gather key words and refer them to the location and the moment at which they were put on paper. Key words are the sentences or other types of expressions such as sketches, which appear during conversations, debates, small talk or other events that have triggered particular interest of the person. For example, specific topics were discussed during the break and some of the thoughts appeared to have a potential for future investigations or just appealed to curiosity. Presumably, it would be possible to not merely relate these words to the time-place position but also interrelate them to one another on the level of meaning. Thus, the notebook becomes a powerful tool to create and locate knowledge database of the event. Correlations can also provide us with the base to speculate and suppose that either the keyword authors attended the same inspiring event or both participated in a fruitful discussion, which in a future can lead to collaboration or projects. This speculation is connected to the theory in Strength of Weak Ties (1973) by Mark Granovetter, who stated that as persons with strong connections (from the close circle of family, friends) are familiar with each other’s ideas, weak ties among people from separate networks are inevitable for the spread of ideas and consequently their further development. Such processes are critical for bridging otherwise disconnected social (in our case as well scientific) clusters. Locational and keyword data captured in this way will add to our understanding of the spatial situatedness of knowledge production, but it is important to emphasize that this type data will be complemented by other types of data and analysis, including qualitative studies, interviews and manual walk-throughs.
Genres of Scholarly Knowledge Production
While the technical framework is still under development, we made some empirical observations during Goskp2014.
The first morning of the conference. Participants slowly start to probe the space in different ways depending on whether the venue is familiar or not. One enters HUMlab-1, the spaciousness of which is reduced first by the carved out smaller technical areas on both sides separated by partitions though partially made of glass, and further by the columns seemingly placed in the space in random order. The space also seems smaller through the unclearly defined shape of the room, its windowlessness, the excess of furniture specially added to create enough seating for the participants, and technologies pervading the space. One person makes her/his way through an artificially created labyrinth all the way to the safe wall with the sofas, where one can establish her/himself keeping a distance from the unknown happenings. A second person going through the same environment encounters a third one, whom is probably open to engaging in conversation, and they stay somewhere in between the glass partition and the table. The scheme repeats and five small groups can be found standing, keeping approximately the same distance (around two meters) separating one group from the other in the area ranging from the entrance to the opposite wall. By that wall some people who prefer to stay alone, are sitting with almost the same distance between themselves as the groups (partially because of the placement of the seating places). Many aspects such as background, personality, social connections come together to suggest why participants use the room in this particular way, but the space itself is undeniably influential actor.
After the welcoming part, participants are invited to proceed to the adjacent room. Though the shape of the room is not less complicated than the first one, it gives an impression of a bigger space. At first sight, it can spatially confuse the visitor. For instance, HUMlab-2 has two entrances, one of which connects it with HUMlab-1 through the glass sliding door. The columns follow a similar pattern. The irregularity of the shape produces two recesses, which often are less lit than the central zone. There are no fixed seats, folded chairs are stuck in several spots providing freedom for each person to decide if and where to be seated. There is no front, no back, everything blends; the space is driven from the center of the room outwards in all directions.
The strongest element in the environment is 11 screens that are situated on the perimeter, either on walls or on columns and this screenscape is the main infrastructure for presentations. They become an obstacle for the audience to get to places by the wall and by doing so to they distance themselves from the happenings. The room and the infrastructure encourage people to be fully engaged not only mentally but also physically, acknowledging the inherent presence of their body and others in the space. As Patrik Svensson has elaborated in his post-event curatorial statement, we have seen remarkable number of ways presentation technologies can be used in such untypical settings.
Participants fill the space, grouping in the centre. The voice of Mark Ratto sounds and is accompanied by the media, that at some point start to lead the audience anticlockwise, appearing on one screen after the other. The flow emerges in the room. Like in a spiral, audience in the furthest from the middle of the room zones move in big radius following the screens, closer to the centre the motion weakens to the one’s slow rotation around own axis. Audience mixes in the choreography of the wrong watches and one appears neighboring to someone she or he did not expect and certainly would not in the frontally oriented auditorium with specified seats.
Many of the following presentations suggest the audience to explore both the present and the virtual. Eleanor Betts is expanding the space bringing in Ancient Rome, participants are wandering around enjoying media and again meeting each other, when their paths intersect on the way to new virtual artifacts. Though on the second day participants are more familiar with the space and feel free to take any relatively fixed position, be that by the wall, by the screen, in the open area, some of the speakers such as Nicolo Dell’unto can still create new fluxes, actively moving from one screen to the other with a very expressive talk.
The dynamics of the room obviously change when the enthralling performance by Carolina Backman takes place in the midst of it. It is not only the event itself that defines where the audience should preferably be, where is the front, what is the distance between the performer and the audience, but also the small architectural form that has been mounted in the space. The portable dance floor changes the level, the color and the materiality of the core of HUMlab-2. It stays in the room for the next couple of presentations and participants change their trajectories from a Brownian motion that covers the whole area to being more careful in order to avoid the alien object. Curiosity takes over and some of the guests examine the new ground walking on its borders, while the main flow continues in the circle around.
In the afternoon of the second day, participants are introduced to the settings of HUMlab-X. Thanks to the glass walls, the room in a seamless connection with the nearby riverbank. Apart from the almost square main space that meets the visitors when the participants enter, there are five smaller areas separated either by the glass walls, rubber translucent curtains or by walls with or without windows. As the walls are painted white or made of glass, the room gets visually bigger and brighter. The programmatic division of space is more defined than in the previous one. The visitor cannot disregard 4 x 5 m floor screen and the triptych screen in a shape of a pyramid on one side of it — the main technological basis for presentations. Seats of different types — from chairs to couches — surround the floor screen from three sides, the first rows in a regular structure, more informal facilities placed on some distance, but also directed towards the screens.
Guests first take the furthest places from the screens but as soon as the floor screen is activated through the play of colors and lights, the first rows are gradually filled. When the floor screen is less active, the audience draws back again; such tides repeat depending on the structure of the presentation until public gets tired and settles. During the breaks it is harder to rely on the ability of the space to produce collisions and intertwining the way it works at HUMlab-2; the open area here is corridor-like, it occurs in between last row of chairs and the couches. At the same time, small adjacent rooms are left almost without attention.
Final Remarks
There is much to be done in analyzing the connection between physical space and social, political, cultural environments. However, in doing so we should not fall into what Zeynep Celik Alexander calls neo-naturalism (2014, 23) — state of science when the signifier is replaced with data, as in the search for soft and clear data we can disregard many factors that do not fit in the maps, statistics, graphs.
The research and development described here is part of the project “Knowledge production in interactive environments (funded by Akademiska Hus, PI: Patrik Svensson).
References
Celik Alexander, Z. 2014, Neo-naturalism, Log, Issue 31 Spring/Summer 2014.
Granovetter, M. 1973, The Strength of Weak Ties, Americal Journal of Sociology, Volume 78 Issue 6. Available at: https://sociology.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/the_strength_of_weak_ties_and_exch_w-gans.pdf
Heidegger, M. 1997, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (Lovitt, W., trans.), New York and London: Garland Publishing, INC.
Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. 1979, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.
Marshall, J. 2006, Negri, Hardt, distributed governance and open source software, PORTAL vol. 3, no. 1 January. Available at: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal/article/viewFile/122/84
Price, M. 2011, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Toffler, A. 1984, The Third Wave, New York: Bantam.
