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Technology
Descriptions & Essays
Shane Finan 29-04-2024
Working across technology and environmental contexts, Shane Finan considers how nonhuman entities such as animals, plants and geologies might contribute to a technological artistic process. This interest has led him to develop relationships with sheep and fungi as part of an interactive process of ‘making-with’ and collaborating ‘in’ a more-than-human art process. As the artist states:
‘Researchers, artists, farmers, technologists and designers have already considered this type of more-than-human making-with…….To reconnect, we need to cross both human and more-than-human boundaries. The textureless sheen of an LCD screen or the smooth surface of a contactless plastic card both only offer a “detached touch”. We don't recognise the work in a single item - the thousands of years of geological evolution that led to this transistor being built, or the thousands of critters involved in its construction.’
For the exhibition at Leitrim Sculpture Centre Finan has constructed three installations each using technology in a different way to explore the complex relationships between place, networks, technologies, critters and human activity, and how all these things are linked together.
Shane Finan: , 29-04-2024, in: Archive of Digital Art Curatorial statement by Seán O'Reilly (director, Leitrim Sculpture Centre)
Working across technology and environmental contexts, Shane Finan considers how nonhuman entities such as animals, plants and geologies might contribute to a technological artistic process. This interest has led him to develop relationships with sheep and fungi as part of an interactive process of ‘making-with’ and collaborating ‘in’ a more-than-human art process. As the artist states:
‘Researchers, artists, farmers, technologists and designers have already considered this type of more-than-human making-with…….To reconnect, we need to cross both human and more-than-human boundaries. The textureless sheen of an LCD screen or the smooth surface of a contactless plastic card both only offer a “detached touch”. We don't recognise the work in a single item - the thousands of years of geological evolution that led to this transistor being built, or the thousands of critters involved in its construction.’
For the exhibition at Leitrim Sculpture Centre Finan has constructed three installations each using technology in a different way to explore the complex relationships between place, networks, technologies, critters and human activity, and how all these things are linked together.
Shane Finan 29-04-2024
making interactive art with non-human collaborators
Shane Finan July 2021 (unpublished essay)
A friend reminded me recently of the adage “give someone a hammer and every problem will look like a nail”. This saying is used to describe the problems inherent in violent technologies like guns, but also underlines a more subtle point about technology – whatever we use influences our behaviour, as pointed out by philosophers Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour. The researcher Sylvio Lorusso has illustrated the connection between human behaviour and speed of technology, pointing out that we learn how we engage with technologies and that this learning is based on past human behaviours.
A technology can seem simple, like a pencil or a scissors, but is usually a useful extension of our human bodies, or potentially of human cognition. The history of western technology, and of how it developed, is often seen as linear (for example, assuming that the telephone led to the internet), but the more this is questioned the less believable it becomes. Bernard Stiegler pointed out the folly in this, using cinema and television as ways to highlight the social or power-driven angle of technology development, eventually suggesting in his later work that care has a potential role in how we should create technologies. This care includes an understanding of where the design and development of technologies come from, and why this should be reconsidered to include elements like the social and political bias of techne.
The feedback loop of technology design is often iterative. We design something, it reflects something back, and a cycle commences. At a certain point, that loop of design can start to shape behaviour - as Heidegger wrote, the hammer forces the invention of a nail, which influences how humans build houses. So too does the smartphone insist on a specific (individualistic) type of communication or a contactless NFT card influences how we consider money and debt.
To define a technology, we have to define the complex reltaionships that that technology is part of. One technology that is of particular importance to all digital communications is the transistor, which makes up part of a microchip. Transistors are made of semiconductor materials, first discovered in western science 200 years ago in 1821. Semiconductor materials are formed through millions of years of geological shifting, compressing and eroding, through the work of thousands of trees, fungi, worms, beetles, birds and other critters that move soils and minerals around, and through hundreds of human hands and minds that conceive and build the materials. Inside a single smartphone there are hundreds of millions of transistors. Inside the ear of a sheep there are microchips with at least a few thousand transistors on them. Each can contain data on the animal such as an identifying number and information such as how prone that individual is to certain diseases like footrot.
As an artist working with technology and complex connections, I am considering the following: how can the nonhuman become part of a technological artistic process? My work has led me to begin developing relationships with sheep and fungi as part of an interactive process of making-with, collaborating in a more-than-human art process.
More-than-human experiments and ideas
Researchers, artists, farmers, technologists and designers have already considered this type of more-than-human making-with. In the 1970s, pigeons were trained to help the US coast guard find ship wreckage. The birds pecked different panels depending on what they saw, and were flown in a unit attached to the bottom of a coast guard helicopter as spotters. Their keen eyes were more efficient at spotting flotsam than human or digital devices (with over 90% accuracy in some cases).
The scientist Andrew Adamatzky is a professor in Unconventional Computing at the University of West England, Bristol. He and his colleagues build technologies that are often known as “biocomputers”, using living material like slime mould, fungi and DNA to perform computations. These are not designed to replace digital computing, but to experiment with what we could learn if we build with organic material rather than what the philosopher Bernard Stiegler regarded as technics: “organised inorganic matter”. Adamatzky, when asked about the practical applications, stated that it is not necessarily about building something, but about understanding: "If you manage to understand their language and communicate with them, then our world will become better."
Beyond experimental creativity with fungi and moulds, theorists and practitioners have also studied and collaborated with mammals and birds. The philosopher Vinciane Despret has pointed out many of the flaws in how western scientists have observed animal behaviour, showing how our prejudices as humans have guided laboratory experiments. She uses examples such as how scientists set up tests by starving animals and then forcing them to compete for food, and use the results to prove that the animals are competitive in their nature. Poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs takes this mistreatment of animals (in particular marine mammals) and applies it to postcolonial theory, positing that violence is embedded in the practice of how we see and interact with one another, from the human to the more-than-human. In her book Undrowned, she presents a dreamlike world of her own personal world intertwined with that of the mammals that have suffered through human technological and colonial actions, offering readers a chance to meditate on body, action, and interconnectivity between animal and human.
Others have found ways to collaborate with farm animals as part of their design or artistic practice. Anne Galloway (More Than Human Lab, New Zealand) and Jocelyne Porcher (Institut national de la recherche agronomique, France) incorporate sheep and pigs respectively into their design practices. Their more-than-human practices present ways of making-with farm animals that try to pull away from human-centred design. Porcher's work has included showing how animals are not just inanimate actors in the work of humans, but are active actors. If a cow refuses to work, then a farmer’s work will not get done without either patience or mistreatment. This is a simple reminder that human beings are not the only actors in the complex arrangements that we perceive as solely human. Galloway, similarly, uses sheep to show the mirrored process of action and reaction in more-than-human design.
More-than-human making-with is experimental and is difficult to discern whether or not this type of experimentation, design, writing, theory or artistic practice can be described as “technological”. The iterative process of working with nonhuman collaborators presents possibilities for a type of technics that defies Stiegler’s definition mentioned above, and instead presents “organised organic matter” as a possible candidate for technological or social engagement.
Arguably, the distinction between organic and inorganic is flawed in the first place, as there is so often a desire to hide the human from the natural, or to hide the nonhuman in technological progress. As processes engage more and more with nonhuman collaborators, this dichotomy becomes hard to reconcile. This difficult reconciliation is brilliantly presented by ecologist David Haskell in his book The Forest Unseen. The book is a documentation of Haskell’s revisiting the same square metre of forest over the course of a year. Each time he describes what he finds. One day he finds a golf ball, and descends into a difficult argument with himself about why this foreign object disturbs him so much more than a chestnut or an animal dropping might. He concludes that “to love nature and to hate humanity is illogical. Humanity is part of the whole…”.
Making With
Our technologies are built with the flaws of how we see the world embedded within them. After the last 150 years of computing technology development, we have systems that carry the flaws of embedded behaviours from western history. While many of these technologies have improved lives, many have led to new and different problems. As Paul Virilio suggested, each technology comes with its own advances and its own hidden accident. In farming, many of the technological progressions have led to the erosion of soil and an over-reliance on chemicals to meet high food demands on exhausted resources.
Aside from environmental or ethical concerns with technological advancement, there are also potential social pitfalls. The researcher Timnit Gebru was recently at the centre of a scandal after she published a paper on the inherent white, male perspectives embedded in Google's computing systems while working for the company. Google are not alone in being called out for the weighting of white male voices that underpin both their code and their user-base.
Those artists, designers, farmers and technologists that are reaching out to the more-than-human want more than just to continue a status quo - they want to find a new way to work that avoids the mistakes of the past. Undoubtedly, this will lead to new mistakes, and should not be seen as a panacea, but as an attempt at discovery.
I have spent time on ten different farms, building relationships through time spent with sheep, cows and farmers. The sheep have taught me very specific lessons about vulnerability and sociability. I recount a story here, from one of my farm visits, published elsewhere:
The farmer had given her a name: Dandelion (I do not know what she called herself). Dandelion showed her vulnerability readily, reacting to my presence as I entered a field with the farmer by emptying her bladder (the farmer said this is “proving that she is lighter so ready to run away”) and warily keeping her distance. She had a problem with two of her hooves, causing her to limp – the front-left was worst. I spent time with this small flock, and as they got used to me, the other ewes approached me with friendly curiosity. But Dandelion kept a distance. She acted up, bullying another ewe that was new to the herd despite the fact that the exertion clearly hurt her hoof. I guess that she wanted to appear tough – I was a strange presence to this flock and to her, I presume, I was a threat. But soon she jealously looked on as I petted some of the most comfortable of the flock. At one point, she decided to brave the danger and approached me eagerly with ungainly lunges on her injured feet, only to freeze around three metres away, looking straight at me. I believe that in that instant I was at least two things to Dandelion: a threat and a friend. And the fear of the threat outweighed the possibility of a petting, so she kept her distance.
The complex reasoning that Dandelion the ewe presented to me helped me not only to understand her perspective (whether correctly or not), it also presented myself to her. I saw first-hand something that had been witnessed before by the primatologist Thelma Rowell, who has shifted her focus form primates to sheep in recent years. Rowell witnessed that the farmer (or any human) presents a threat as a predator, and a protector as their presence will keep other predators away. This complex reasoning by the sheep gives them a role as an active participant in a complex network of human-sheep-unknown.
The complexity in behaviour returns us to the idea of technology, and how we use technologies. Contemporary communication technologies rely heavily on sight and a specific type of touch - a “detatched touch” (to borrow a phrase from Maria Puig de la Bellacasa's concept of speculative ethics). The touchscreen-as-interface is without texture, smoothed to the point of impersonalism, just as the numbered card that we use to pay on “contactless” readers is a detatched, touchless experience.
So can these ways of engaging with technology be challenged? Can we use our relationships with more-than-human critters like sheep as a way to reconsider the ethics, use or role of technology?
Observing patterns and behaviours is not enough. It is better to make with than to make from.
Shane Finan: , 29-04-2024, in: Archive of Digital Art More-than-human landscapes
making interactive art with non-human collaborators
Shane Finan July 2021 (unpublished essay)
A friend reminded me recently of the adage “give someone a hammer and every problem will look like a nail”. This saying is used to describe the problems inherent in violent technologies like guns, but also underlines a more subtle point about technology – whatever we use influences our behaviour, as pointed out by philosophers Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour. The researcher Sylvio Lorusso has illustrated the connection between human behaviour and speed of technology, pointing out that we learn how we engage with technologies and that this learning is based on past human behaviours.
A technology can seem simple, like a pencil or a scissors, but is usually a useful extension of our human bodies, or potentially of human cognition. The history of western technology, and of how it developed, is often seen as linear (for example, assuming that the telephone led to the internet), but the more this is questioned the less believable it becomes. Bernard Stiegler pointed out the folly in this, using cinema and television as ways to highlight the social or power-driven angle of technology development, eventually suggesting in his later work that care has a potential role in how we should create technologies. This care includes an understanding of where the design and development of technologies come from, and why this should be reconsidered to include elements like the social and political bias of techne.
The feedback loop of technology design is often iterative. We design something, it reflects something back, and a cycle commences. At a certain point, that loop of design can start to shape behaviour - as Heidegger wrote, the hammer forces the invention of a nail, which influences how humans build houses. So too does the smartphone insist on a specific (individualistic) type of communication or a contactless NFT card influences how we consider money and debt.
To define a technology, we have to define the complex reltaionships that that technology is part of. One technology that is of particular importance to all digital communications is the transistor, which makes up part of a microchip. Transistors are made of semiconductor materials, first discovered in western science 200 years ago in 1821. Semiconductor materials are formed through millions of years of geological shifting, compressing and eroding, through the work of thousands of trees, fungi, worms, beetles, birds and other critters that move soils and minerals around, and through hundreds of human hands and minds that conceive and build the materials. Inside a single smartphone there are hundreds of millions of transistors. Inside the ear of a sheep there are microchips with at least a few thousand transistors on them. Each can contain data on the animal such as an identifying number and information such as how prone that individual is to certain diseases like footrot.
As an artist working with technology and complex connections, I am considering the following: how can the nonhuman become part of a technological artistic process? My work has led me to begin developing relationships with sheep and fungi as part of an interactive process of making-with, collaborating in a more-than-human art process.
More-than-human experiments and ideas
Researchers, artists, farmers, technologists and designers have already considered this type of more-than-human making-with. In the 1970s, pigeons were trained to help the US coast guard find ship wreckage. The birds pecked different panels depending on what they saw, and were flown in a unit attached to the bottom of a coast guard helicopter as spotters. Their keen eyes were more efficient at spotting flotsam than human or digital devices (with over 90% accuracy in some cases).
The scientist Andrew Adamatzky is a professor in Unconventional Computing at the University of West England, Bristol. He and his colleagues build technologies that are often known as “biocomputers”, using living material like slime mould, fungi and DNA to perform computations. These are not designed to replace digital computing, but to experiment with what we could learn if we build with organic material rather than what the philosopher Bernard Stiegler regarded as technics: “organised inorganic matter”. Adamatzky, when asked about the practical applications, stated that it is not necessarily about building something, but about understanding: "If you manage to understand their language and communicate with them, then our world will become better."
Beyond experimental creativity with fungi and moulds, theorists and practitioners have also studied and collaborated with mammals and birds. The philosopher Vinciane Despret has pointed out many of the flaws in how western scientists have observed animal behaviour, showing how our prejudices as humans have guided laboratory experiments. She uses examples such as how scientists set up tests by starving animals and then forcing them to compete for food, and use the results to prove that the animals are competitive in their nature. Poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs takes this mistreatment of animals (in particular marine mammals) and applies it to postcolonial theory, positing that violence is embedded in the practice of how we see and interact with one another, from the human to the more-than-human. In her book Undrowned, she presents a dreamlike world of her own personal world intertwined with that of the mammals that have suffered through human technological and colonial actions, offering readers a chance to meditate on body, action, and interconnectivity between animal and human.
Others have found ways to collaborate with farm animals as part of their design or artistic practice. Anne Galloway (More Than Human Lab, New Zealand) and Jocelyne Porcher (Institut national de la recherche agronomique, France) incorporate sheep and pigs respectively into their design practices. Their more-than-human practices present ways of making-with farm animals that try to pull away from human-centred design. Porcher's work has included showing how animals are not just inanimate actors in the work of humans, but are active actors. If a cow refuses to work, then a farmer’s work will not get done without either patience or mistreatment. This is a simple reminder that human beings are not the only actors in the complex arrangements that we perceive as solely human. Galloway, similarly, uses sheep to show the mirrored process of action and reaction in more-than-human design.
More-than-human making-with is experimental and is difficult to discern whether or not this type of experimentation, design, writing, theory or artistic practice can be described as “technological”. The iterative process of working with nonhuman collaborators presents possibilities for a type of technics that defies Stiegler’s definition mentioned above, and instead presents “organised organic matter” as a possible candidate for technological or social engagement.
Arguably, the distinction between organic and inorganic is flawed in the first place, as there is so often a desire to hide the human from the natural, or to hide the nonhuman in technological progress. As processes engage more and more with nonhuman collaborators, this dichotomy becomes hard to reconcile. This difficult reconciliation is brilliantly presented by ecologist David Haskell in his book The Forest Unseen. The book is a documentation of Haskell’s revisiting the same square metre of forest over the course of a year. Each time he describes what he finds. One day he finds a golf ball, and descends into a difficult argument with himself about why this foreign object disturbs him so much more than a chestnut or an animal dropping might. He concludes that “to love nature and to hate humanity is illogical. Humanity is part of the whole…”.
Making With
Our technologies are built with the flaws of how we see the world embedded within them. After the last 150 years of computing technology development, we have systems that carry the flaws of embedded behaviours from western history. While many of these technologies have improved lives, many have led to new and different problems. As Paul Virilio suggested, each technology comes with its own advances and its own hidden accident. In farming, many of the technological progressions have led to the erosion of soil and an over-reliance on chemicals to meet high food demands on exhausted resources.
Aside from environmental or ethical concerns with technological advancement, there are also potential social pitfalls. The researcher Timnit Gebru was recently at the centre of a scandal after she published a paper on the inherent white, male perspectives embedded in Google's computing systems while working for the company. Google are not alone in being called out for the weighting of white male voices that underpin both their code and their user-base.
Those artists, designers, farmers and technologists that are reaching out to the more-than-human want more than just to continue a status quo - they want to find a new way to work that avoids the mistakes of the past. Undoubtedly, this will lead to new mistakes, and should not be seen as a panacea, but as an attempt at discovery.
I have spent time on ten different farms, building relationships through time spent with sheep, cows and farmers. The sheep have taught me very specific lessons about vulnerability and sociability. I recount a story here, from one of my farm visits, published elsewhere:
The farmer had given her a name: Dandelion (I do not know what she called herself). Dandelion showed her vulnerability readily, reacting to my presence as I entered a field with the farmer by emptying her bladder (the farmer said this is “proving that she is lighter so ready to run away”) and warily keeping her distance. She had a problem with two of her hooves, causing her to limp – the front-left was worst. I spent time with this small flock, and as they got used to me, the other ewes approached me with friendly curiosity. But Dandelion kept a distance. She acted up, bullying another ewe that was new to the herd despite the fact that the exertion clearly hurt her hoof. I guess that she wanted to appear tough – I was a strange presence to this flock and to her, I presume, I was a threat. But soon she jealously looked on as I petted some of the most comfortable of the flock. At one point, she decided to brave the danger and approached me eagerly with ungainly lunges on her injured feet, only to freeze around three metres away, looking straight at me. I believe that in that instant I was at least two things to Dandelion: a threat and a friend. And the fear of the threat outweighed the possibility of a petting, so she kept her distance.
The complex reasoning that Dandelion the ewe presented to me helped me not only to understand her perspective (whether correctly or not), it also presented myself to her. I saw first-hand something that had been witnessed before by the primatologist Thelma Rowell, who has shifted her focus form primates to sheep in recent years. Rowell witnessed that the farmer (or any human) presents a threat as a predator, and a protector as their presence will keep other predators away. This complex reasoning by the sheep gives them a role as an active participant in a complex network of human-sheep-unknown.
The complexity in behaviour returns us to the idea of technology, and how we use technologies. Contemporary communication technologies rely heavily on sight and a specific type of touch - a “detatched touch” (to borrow a phrase from Maria Puig de la Bellacasa's concept of speculative ethics). The touchscreen-as-interface is without texture, smoothed to the point of impersonalism, just as the numbered card that we use to pay on “contactless” readers is a detatched, touchless experience.
So can these ways of engaging with technology be challenged? Can we use our relationships with more-than-human critters like sheep as a way to reconsider the ethics, use or role of technology?
Observing patterns and behaviours is not enough. It is better to make with than to make from.
Shane Finan 29-04-2024
An interactive artwork about microchips, critters & touch.
'it seemed like we were moving closer together' invites visitors into a gallery to create collages on a monitor from photographs with linked themes about human contact with nonhuman entities. Visitors changed the artwork using RFID cards that were programmed to display different sections of images based on which card was tagged at which device. The use of RFID technologies was due to their ubiquity in animal microchipping and in human data-logging and contactless money. The cards used a process made very familiar since the COVID-19 pandemic, tapping with a contactless card, with a result that presented new entanglements of images of human, nonhuman and more-than-human entities.
The artwork encourages people to participate alone or together with other groups, and full images or mythical collages are possible from the images. Designed without audio and with care taken to ensure accessibility and interactivity for those with disability and limited mobility.
The artwork draws influence from speculative ethics, posthumanist philosophy, and time spent with critters. It was made on residency at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Manorhamilton, Ireland (June-August 2021) and presented at the solo exhibition "Detached Touch" (August 13th-September 4th 2021). The residency and exhibition were supported by Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Wicklow Arts Office and the Arts Council of Ireland. The research preceding this work was developed as artist in residence on FIELD, a 6-university interdisciplinary project investigating the relationship between human and livestock through disease.
More information on this exhibition: http://www.leitrimsculpturecentre.ie/index.html
More information in FIELD: https://field-wt.co.uk/
More information on the artist: https://shanefinan.org/
Shane Finan: , 29-04-2024, in: Archive of Digital Art An interactive artwork about microchips, critters & touch.
'it seemed like we were moving closer together' invites visitors into a gallery to create collages on a monitor from photographs with linked themes about human contact with nonhuman entities. Visitors changed the artwork using RFID cards that were programmed to display different sections of images based on which card was tagged at which device. The use of RFID technologies was due to their ubiquity in animal microchipping and in human data-logging and contactless money. The cards used a process made very familiar since the COVID-19 pandemic, tapping with a contactless card, with a result that presented new entanglements of images of human, nonhuman and more-than-human entities.
The artwork encourages people to participate alone or together with other groups, and full images or mythical collages are possible from the images. Designed without audio and with care taken to ensure accessibility and interactivity for those with disability and limited mobility.
The artwork draws influence from speculative ethics, posthumanist philosophy, and time spent with critters. It was made on residency at Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Manorhamilton, Ireland (June-August 2021) and presented at the solo exhibition "Detached Touch" (August 13th-September 4th 2021). The residency and exhibition were supported by Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Wicklow Arts Office and the Arts Council of Ireland. The research preceding this work was developed as artist in residence on FIELD, a 6-university interdisciplinary project investigating the relationship between human and livestock through disease.
More information on this exhibition: http://www.leitrimsculpturecentre.ie/index.html
More information in FIELD: https://field-wt.co.uk/
More information on the artist: https://shanefinan.org/
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