apmcpherson.bsky.social
Professor in Design Engineering and Music, Imperial College London. Researcher, composer, violist, engineer, instrument designer.
Leader of the Augmented Instruments Laboratory instrumentslab.org.
Co-founder and director of Bela.io.
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From belonging.upenn.edu/diversity-at.... "Belonging at Penn: 403 - Forbidden" 🤨
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But Agre's points aren't always limited to AI. I riff a bit on this in the context of mappings for DMIs in my recent JNMR paper -- §3.1, which also draws on some work by @thormagnusson.bsky.social and @adamlinson.bsky.social. www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1...
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The symbolic logic AI in Agre's writing differs in many technical ways with 2020s deep learning, so it's surprising how on-the-mark the critique still reads. There's still the same deliberate vagueness in how the world gets distilled into symbols and representations to begin with.
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But the answer isn't to just stop doing tech! Agre concludes: "A critical technical practice will, at least for the foreseeable future, require a split identity -- one foot planted in the craft work of design and the other foot planted in the reflexive work of critique."
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The paper is about AI in the 80's/90's, but it still rings true in 2025 and, to my reading, goes a long way toward illuminating the mindsets of the master-of-the-universe types who are wrecking so many things in the name of technical progress.
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"... a demand to express disagreements with the existing language within the existing language itself, and this is nearly impossible... Critics will be asked, "what's your alternative?", within a tacit system of discursive rules that virtually rules out alternatives from the start."
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Agre writes about AI as a discursive practice which conflates representations with the things they represent. He also discussing the difficulty in challenging the prevailing discourse: "The seemingly commonsensical demand to prove alternatives in practice is thus actually...
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"A computer, then, does not simply have an instrumental use in a given site of practice; the computer is frequently about that site in its very design. In this sense computing has been constituted as a kind of imperialism; it aims to reinvent virtually every other site of practice in its own image."
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This short paper has been a guide for me in navigating between engineering and critical theory. Some quotes: "Computers are representational artifacts, and the people who design them often start by constructing representations of the activities that are found in the sites where they will be used..."
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It's astonishing how widespread this has been - silence or complicity from organisations that really ought to know better. Every high-profile person or institution who folds just increases the pressure on more vulnerable people.
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Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are silent or cheering, while Dem leaders Schumer and Jeffries (both NY) are tweeting platitudes about inflation and the budget. AOC is one of the few in Congress who seems to care. Seems kinda... bad? Does anyone still want to live in a country with laws?
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The charges could be refiled if the mayor doesn't do Trump's bidding. Then, the US Attorney, the lead prosecutor and 4 other DOJ officials resigned rather than comply. The Attorney General, also one of Trump's criminal defense attorneys, insists the case will be dismissed.
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There are no magic solutions, but kudos to everyone calling things as they see them: journalists, lawyers, professionals in and out of government, individuals refusing to be silenced. Stay safe everyone. And as Timothy Snyder says: do not obey in advance.
snyder.substack.com/p/twenty-les...
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Meanwhile Elon and his code monkeys are perpetrating the biggest data breach in history, strangling whole agencies and trying to take over the treasury. It's brazenly illegal and unconstitutional. That's also the point: to show the rule of law no longer matters.
www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...
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Case in point: this weekend the NIH gutted medical research funding for universities and hospitals. It looks arcane, but it will destroy institutions - and that's the point. US university leadership has been mighty quiet so far. Silence never works!
www.washingtonpost.com/education/20...
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Drawing on traditions of artistic research and first-person research methods, Teresa develops the idea of "technical practice research": design- or engineering-related activities in an arts context, where the locus of knowledge production is in the doing and not just in the final result.
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In the paper, we examine digital musical instrument design using ideas from STS, especially Pickering's "mangle of practice". The post-hoc stories found in research papers are often much tidier than how the design work really unfolded.
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(3) unidirectionality (sensor inputs flow to synthesiser outputs, and not the other way around, drawing on an engineering logic of modularity)
Drawing on recent more-than-human / entanglement HCI, we look at how mapping practices might extend or adapt if these assumptions were to change.
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We revisit three assumptions in mapping discourse:
(1) representational stability (that we can invert analytical concepts about music into its generative elements, without disturbing the validity of those concepts)
(2) spatial metaphors (i.e. mapping as relating dimension spaces)
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Co-written with Landon Morrison, Matt Davison and Marcelo Wanderley, we examine the technical and ideological origins of mapping in digital instrument design, and how it can easily flip from being a useful tool to becoming the very definition of how digital instruments have to work.