Unit 2 Scale
- What does it mean to frame something and what gets left out when you do? We can’t see all at once, that’s a delusion of omnipotence, a God Trick as Donna Haraway would put it, given my theme of AI Data Centres, scale is very resonant, scale of infrastructure but also the scale of delusional omniscience, ‘AI’ represents an eviscerated and very limited form of knowledge, reducible to probability, not all knowledge, it is not all knowing but corporatised reduction.
- How might the same site look entirely different depending on the scale through which you approach it?
- Mapping and satellite imagery shows the scale of infrastructure and the networks it always connects to, but also the scale of human movement, globally. Eyal Weizman, 2002 and others warn of the limits of deploying satellite imagery without ground-truthing it with situated knowledge.
- Which of the 3 scales (microscopic, human or networked) feels most instinctive to you right now and why?
- I’m drawn to all as a form of triangulation, I can’t approach these themes in the isolation of one particular scale. But there is also the scale(s) of Habitus and Field (Bourdieu, 1993), how individuals and social structures, rituals and practices are entangled.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1993). The Field of Cultural Production. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Weizman, Eyal (2002) Introduction to the Politics of Verticality. opendemocracy.net
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