Writer
Confirmed & Contented Outsider
| Website | https://michaeljmaguire.com/ |
| Longer form writing | https://medium.com/@clevercelt |
| Real Life Stuff | https://www.linkedin.com/in/clevercelt |
| My Substack Newsletter | https://open.substack.com/pub/clevercelt/p/stuffafizing-01?r=36wiy&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web |
When I explain what I do (research the use of heritage-inspired patterns-as-algorithms in creative tech) and that I work as part of a non-profit (@thentrythis) people generally then ask me which University I'm affiliated to. I'm really not part of any University and generally avoid going in them. There's an assumption that research council funded, fundamental research is only done in Universities, and that when a researcher exits academia to work elsewhere they're a failure.
At the same time at least here in the UK, University-based researchers readily talk about how difficult/impossible it is to get any actual research done in their institution, due to rigid hierarchies, excessive workloads, and focus on metrics/bean-counting rather than the work itself.
It's really time to push for alternative ways of doing things.
The European Culture and Technology Lab (ECT Lab+) is part of the European University of Technology (EUt+) which commenced in 2020 and is funded by the European Universities Initiative. The ECT Lab+ poses questions about the relation between culture and technology, the emerging environments (or milieux) of technology which are cultural, cosmological, technical, social, economic, and political. The emerging environment could be considered as a study of evolution, a history of technical organs, this we can term a general organology. The ECT Lab+ brings together researchers who are interested in the impacts of technology on society, these impacts can be both positive and negative; this we can term a pharmacology. Following on from the recent material turn in philosophy of technology, the ECT Lab+ conceives of technology as part and parcel of the process and practices of becoming human in the world. Hence the title of the ECT Lab+ reflects the positioning of technology within a culture, acknowledging that technology is not built in a vacuum but in and for society. The second aspect of the cultural environment of technology stems from the philosophical positioning of technics, technē and technology within their cultural locality or milieu. The ECT Lab+, therefore, encourages research which recognises the localised and situated knowledge contexts of technological innovation. The ECT Lab+ acts as a metastable structure, which is akin to supersaturation, a crystallising that can occur in relation around certain thematics, for example Technological Foresight and responsibility or epistemology, ethics and artificial intelligence. The ECT Lab+ takes into account the instability of the milieu (locality) and allows for the undecidability, contingency or indeterminacy of the cultural environment of technology or technological tendencies.
Alex McLean
Nick Montfort
Conor McGarrigle