15. Systems (w/ Georgina Voss)

Update: 2024-07-08

Description

In this episode, Georgina Voss helps Roberto and Marek kick off on a journey to think about the relationship between human agency and political scale, specifically how that relationship is mediated by technology. The next few episodes will stick to this theme.
Georgina's work spans the arts, anthropology, policy, technology, cultural theory -- and, critical to this episode's scope: systems theory. Her new book Systems Ultra is a GREAT read, beginning with a kind of xenoanthropology of one of the tech sector's most... extra... events: the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
Georgina's work further referenced here includes:

Supra Systems Studio, specifically the exhibition "Everything Happens So Much" (ref. Horse E-Books) with Eva Verhoeven and Tobias Revell
Situated Systems (artistic work with Ingrid Burrington, Deb Chachra, and Sherri Wasserman)
Stigma and the Shaping of the Pornography Industry

Talking to an extremely practiced and principled researcher like Georgina means aggregating a ton of very real, tangible references to existing work, including:

Donna Haraway's Situated Knowledge
James Bridle's New Dark Age
Tega Brain's magnificent The Environment is Not a System
Donella Meadows' Thinking in Systems
James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State
Clifford Siskin's System: A History Ideas of the Idea of System
Valerie Olson's Into the Extreme
My newest obsession and one of the more mindblowing things I've read recently (thanks Georgina!) is Marilyn Strathern's Kinship as a Relation
Silvio Lorusso making me rethink some of my recent terminology choices in Against Complexity
Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects (which we're now calling the OMG theory of climate change)
Rachel Coldicutt's work in and out of Careful Trouble, e.g. Tech for Today and for Tomorrow or this (awesome) essay.
Dan Lockton's work, e.g. Lockton, D. (2021), ‘Metaphors and Systems’, Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD10) 2021 Symposium, Delft, The Netherlands: 2–6 Nov. 2021.
Maya Indira Ganesh's work, e.g. Ganesh, M. I. (2022), ‘Between Metaphor and Meaning: AI and Being Human’, Interactions 29: 5, 58–62.
AI As Super-Controversy by Noortje Marres, Michael Castelle, and James Tripp

Really, really enjoyed this one! You can find more information relevant to this episode at Georgina's website as well.