touching base after B21 potluck: prototyping social forms

Dear friends of prototyping social forms from Building21 & Synthesis --
Yves, Yanjun, Todd, Stanzi, Shomit, Rebecca, Matthew, Garrett, Gabriele, Erik, Damian, Cordelia, Brandon, Anita, and Adrita, Kando,

prototyping-social-forms@googlegroups.com is a mail group for chatting about prototyping social forms in an open, unbounded way. Each one should be comfortable posting queries, propositions, announcements about our own proposals and projects for imagining social forms other than what is the case.  Most importantly, in addition to reading, discussing and imagining, this is for creating sketches of those alternatives at lifescale  so that we can inhabit or try them out and get a sense for how it would be to live in such alternatives.

Some examples are alternative: 
(1) modes of experiencing complex adaptive systems like weather (Dr. Brandon Mechtley), urban heatscapes (Dr. Ariane Middel), or other infrastructures like energy, finance; and 
(2) ceremonies of conviviality around taking food and drink in public in multiple cultural and social settings (Shomit Barua, Lyu Yanjun), and 
(3) festivals of indeterminacy (Stanzi Vaubel),
(4) economies-ecologies (Garrett Johnson)

Speaking of (2), thanks to Sophie for graciously hosting the dinner at her house Friday, and Cordelia for providing such rich, thought-provoking questions/ topics :
Designed to break.
What makes most people respond to something emotionally?  
CRISPR the technology.   
Harvest moon.  
How our relationships structurally suboptimal?  And what do optimal relationships look like?  
Does quick gratification serve a purpose, or is instant gratification of product of suboptimal system systems and encouraging sub optimal decision making?  
What is the difference between healing and curing? There are three uniting factors life, death and disability.
What is digital currency?
Would you agree, you can know 200 people but only 20 people you know well.  
Can we touch the future?
Discuss Michel Serre’s notion of para-site.   
Discuss Felix Guattari’s three ecologies.

Of course we only got to explore a few of these questions (boldfaced), and some neighbors...

I’ve shared with those of us who were at the dinner Friday, the link to the otter transcript (with audio!) if you want to review your own contributions to the conversation.  I’ve gone through and tried to correct the speech transcriptions for my segments :). Those of you who were at the dinner, after you have a chance to look over the otter.ai transcript, please let me know if you’d be ok to share this with the rest of the cc’d folks, in prototyping-social-forms@googlegroups.com ...

I think we said, going forward, that we’d write up some scenarios or propositions that could be open to experiential experiment — to prototyping.   Maybe we can post them to this group.

Let's arrange to meet up next time in the week of March 9, shall we?  Next time, inviting Synthesis / ASU folks to beam in ?  I don’t remember if we set a date, but for me this could be March 9 or 10….

Thanks, looking forward to our next conversation.

Warmly,
Xin Wei

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Senior Fellow Building21 McGill | Fellow ASU-Santa Fe Center for Biosocial Complex Systems
Professor European Graduate School | Founding Director Topological Media Lab
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On Feb 24, 2020, at 2:53 PM, Sophie Strassmann <sophie.strassmann@mail.mcgill.ca> wrote:

Perfect!
From: sxw asu <sxwasu@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, February 24, 2020 1:04 PM
To: Sophie Strassmann <sophie.strassmann@mail.mcgill.ca>; Cordelia Dingle <cordeliadingle@gmail.com>; Damian Arteca <damian.arteca@mail.mcgill.ca>
Cc: Yanjun Lyu <ylyu16@asu.edu>; Shomit Barua <sbarua5@asu.edu>; Garrett Johnson <Garrett.L.Johnson@asu.edu>; Brandon Mechtley <bmechtley@asu.edu>; Emiddio Vasquez <emiddiovasquez@asu.edu>
Subject: Re: Touching base about the potluck
 
Dear Sophie, Cordelia, and Damian,

Sophie, yes it’s best to meet in person to plan the Friday meal.  
Let’s meet Wednesday 5-6 pm at B21

I plan to be in B21 this week in the afternoons, though I realize with midterms people will be very busy.

Then again people may be quite happy to have a meal together.  Let’s pull together the community of people interested in
alter-eco!

But let’s seize the precious opportunity to substantially deepen this  initiative at B21.  That’s why i propose we read and discuss Guattari’s Three Ecologies this week, and fortnight.  

Or we  could also work on  a concrete event choreography...building on recent work at Synthesis for the augmented meal(s) we (Shomit, Yanjun, et al) plan to create in May hopefully with you.  Or the  experiential experiential games we (Garrett, Brandon, et al) are designing for play this summer.

One important question — how can we engage the researcher-creators  in Synthesis ?

One way is to incorporate  a formal portion on Friday where we grapple with some substantial motivation  eg using Guattari’s Three Ecologies as a main course.   Garrett Johnson, a PhD very engaged with this stream, might be a friend to such a discussion / appetizer.

Xin Wei

On Feb 24, 2020, at 12:07 PM, Sophie Strassmann <sophie.strassmann@mail.mcgill.ca> wrote:


Dear Professor,

Cordelia and I have worked out the potluck for Friday March 28 from 5 to 9 PM. 

All of my availabilities are:
  • Wednesday after 5 PM
  • Thursday after 4:30 PM
I understand if you want to be home by that time. If you are able to talk today in-person I can get myself to B21. Otherwise we'll have to talk over email/video call which is possibly suboptimal. Let me know if you have any creative ideas/preferences.

Best,
Sophie
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