A Billion Gadget Minds: Thinking Widgets, Data and Workflow A One Day Workshop at the Swedenborg Society

A growing body of research, including literature on cognitive anthropology, software studies and cognitive capital suggests that whatever is called 'thinking' occurs amidst mechanisms, habits, codelike systems, devices and other formally structured means. If intelligence, far from being a property of 'the human', is an informal and provisional function of the ensemble of mechanisms and relations that comprise a social field, then we need to explore the co-relation of cultural and experiential practices, thought and intelligent devices.

This day-long workshop seeks to evaluate the ways in which contemporary hardware and software augment and distribute intelligence, as well as the ensemble of social relations which form around thinking practices as they synchronise, mesh, de-couple, breakdown and collapse with variable effects. Contributors are proposing analyses and discussions of thinking work as it is imbricated in cultural, material, corporeal, technical, economic and psychic practices, and adopt a range of disciplinary perspectives - from cognitive science and systems theory, through science and technology studies, to cultural theory and philosophy

There is no charge for attending the workshop but numbers are restricted. We will be starting the workshop promptly at 10.00

Keynotes and Speakers (in alphabetical order)
Anna Munster Nerves of data: 'the neurological turn' in/against networked media
Mike Wheeler Thinking Beyond the Brain: Arguments and Implications

- Ingmar Lippert Administering Carbon Thinking
- Gabriel Menotti The interpenetrating boundaries between coding and computation in the performance of Livecoding
- Luciana Parisi and Stamatia Portanova Soft thought in architecture and choreography
- Chryssa Sdrolia Intelligent Accidents. Towards an Ethology of Mental Heterogeneity
- Ting-jieh Wang Intelligence as system-specific property: systems, emergence, and structural coupling

The Swedenborg Society
20-21 Bloomsbury Way
London
WC1A 2TH
United Kingdom

Location