A Companion of Feminisms for Digital Design and Spherology

182 Pages·2019·3.477 MB·English

by  Amanda Windle

A Companion of
Feminisms for
Digital Design
and Spherology
A Companion of Feminisms for Digital Design
and Spherology
Amanda Windle
A Companion
of Feminisms
for Digital Design
and Spherology
Amanda Windle
London College of Communication
University of the Arts London
London, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-02286-0 ISBN 978-3-030-02287-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02287-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957450
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
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A
cknowledgements
Alison Marlin encouraged me back in 2012 to write this book. Thanks
to Alison along with Christine Battersby, Annika Joy, Lara Houston, Kris
Cohen and Simon Willmoth for critically reading draft chapters; and for
the book proposal, thanks Kat Jungnickel. Special thanks to Alex Taylor
and Noortje Marres for helping review the book in addition to the anon-
ymous reviewers.
I gained thoughtful feedback from Tom Gieryn and Lisa Messeri dur-
ing 4S, in San Diego (2013), where I first wrote about GIS-mapping.
And to Steve Cross for loaning me copies of Slot-machinen’s texts.
Thank you.
Thanks to the graduate students at the University of the Arts London
(UAL) who have participated in discussions about Spheres, particularly Carl
Grinter. Thanks to Helga Steppan’s invitation to workshop a chapter with
the visual communication third-year undergraduates at Linnaeus University,
Sweden, especially exchange student Antara Madavane, from Srishti
University. Thanks Ivor Williams for your encouragement about my story
on Venn diagrams and for welcoming me to Università Iuav di Venezia
(IUAV) where I began drafting that chapter. Thanks to Nina Wakeford for
supporting me through other short-form writing—and whose advice car-
ried into finishing this book. Thanks to Janet McDonnell for mentorship.
Thanks also to Maurn Turner for psychotherapeutic listening.
The research for this book has been funded by Microsoft Research
Ltd., the Higher Education Innovation Fund (earlier in my role as
the DigiLab Fellow), and the Higher Education Funding Council for
v
vi ACKNoWLEDGEMENTS
England, for the roundtable event. Thank you to Lucas Joppa, Kristin
Tolle, Kenji Takeda and Matthew Smith for all your generosity on the
Threat Mapping design interface project at Microsoft Research Ltd.
The departments of research and international at UAL have given me
countless travel grants to get parts of this book peer-reviewed at 4S and
EASST in Barcelona, Boston, Buenos Aires and San Diego. Thanks also
to UAL’s ethics committee, legal team and library, and to the Research
Management and Administration team because their work often goes
un-thanked.
Many thanks to the editors and co-editors at Palgrave Macmillan: I’m
indebted to Holly Tyler, Joanna o’Neill and Sophie Li, but particularly
to Josh Pitt for writing out thoughts about peer-review for Backchannels
(4S). Thanks to Jenn Tomomitsu for copy-editing pre-manuscript sub-
mission.
Thanks Annika Joy and Andrew Hill for your friendship. Thanks
Ranjita Dhital, Geoff Morrow, Ian Storey, Silvia Grimaldi and Nela
Milic for encouragement. Thank you Jason Rainbird for your love,
design companionship and for accompanying me whenever I need to go
hike a volcano.
c
ontents
1 Finding a Spherology of Feminisms for Designing Media 1
2 Situated Design Reading: The Air Pockets in Spheres 19
3 An Atmosphere Ethics for Digital Transcription
and Reading Spheres Communally 31
4 By Count and Diagram, Is the Indexicality of Spheres
Diverse Enough? 53
5 A Baroque Performance of the Female in Body Copy
and Page Layout 87
6 How to Design Spherically as a Matter of Recursion 115
7 Conclusions on Atmosphere Design 143
Bibliography 149
Index 161
vii
A
bbreviAtions
BoAB Boundary objects and Beyond
CCR Critique of Cynical Reason
I Spheres I: Bubbles
II Spheres II: Globes
III Spheres III: Foams
INS Inspiration
MTP Making Things Public
PW Phenomenal Women
SN Sloterdijk Now
Spheres The Spheres trilogy
TFA Terror from the Air
TTM Talking to Myself
ix
l f
ist of igures
Fig. 1.1 Exhibition of the Polyvagina de Fan Riots; a flexible skin
that creates “una condición de interioridad”; a “condition of
interiority” to host Fan Riots; an artistic event curated by Ivan
Lopez Munuera for the SoS music festival. Design: C+ arqui-
tectos: Nerea Calvillo with Marina Fernández. Assembly:
Workshop with students of architecture of the University of
Alicante led by Miguel Mesa del Castillo. Photographers:
Miguel de Guzmán and Rocío Romero (Image Source http://
imagensubliminal.com/polivagina-de-fan-riots/?lang es. Last
=
Accessed 3 Aug 2017) 6
Fig. 4.1 A visualisation of the proportion of Bubbles (I) (Source Windle) 73
Fig. 4.2 The bubbles are proportional to the range of disciplines
represented in Sloterdijk’s Globes (II) (Source Windle) 74
Fig. 4.3 The shape of each bubble is proportional to Globes (II)—the
macrospherology. The shading of each bubble (i.e. the darker
the shading, the more prevalent a discipline) is proportional
to Bubbles (I)—the microspherology. The Voronoi were
initially made using opensource, Voronoi 3D modelling
software by inputting a Microsoft ExcelTM .csv file. These
initial visuals were reconstructed using Adobe InDesignTM
(Source Windle) 75
Fig. 4.4 The computer screen shows the adjustment of shading to
the bubble forms (editing Fig. 4.3) by increasing the white
in the colour percentages of the gradients window of Adobe
PhotoshopTM CC. The gradients refer to the handwritten notes
made on earlier versions of Figs. 4.2 and 4.3 (bottom right).
These were then adjusted first by hand (bottom left) using
xi
xii LIST oF FIGURES
TextEditTM (bottom right of computer screen) in conjunction
with PhotoshopTM (Source Windle) 76
Fig. 4.5 To counter the Spheres index, the spiral of who counts pro-
vides at a glance an alternative dance of the indexes to both
Spheres and A Companion of Feminisms for Digital Design and
Spherology. Along the shortest spiral of concentric circles are
all the women in Spheres including those that I’d argue were
important enough to include in the Spheres index, notably—
Haraway and Margulis. The longest spiral shows are all the
women that appear in my companion text. In the community
spirit of an activist spiral dance, the two indexes pass by one
another. I could have turned this sphere upside down to
emphasise feminisms rather than Spheres, but the reader can
rotate the page just the same. Like many ancient spiral
petroglyphs, the spiral index can be approached from many
perspectives (Source Windle) 80
Fig. 5.1 I’ve drawn into Spheres the full figure of Santa Teresa d’Ávila
by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (I, 561). Two aspects of this work are
missing. The theatre box of patrons situated above and to the
side of Santa Teresa, and the elliptical dome that leads up to a
lozenge-shaped window created from smaller panes of amber,
yellow and white stained-glass from which a radial light emits as
if from heaven above (Source Semiotext(e)-Sloterdijk-Windle) 96
Fig. 5.2 Digital and hand-rendered mock-ups of Sloterdijk’s contri-
butions to the Making Things Public catalogue. The circular
numbers show the range of crediting formats (Source Author’s
own) 104
Fig. 6.1 A cartographic marker appears when a polygon shape file is
completely drawn point-to-point (Source Windle) 116
Fig. 6.2 Wireframe shows threats drawn as a point, line and polygon
onto a base layer map. It’s a fictional example to illustrate the
range of drawing tools to be developed. Figures 6.2, 6.3, and
6.4 show only bingTM maps as base-layers (Source Microsoft
Research Ltd.) 125
Fig. 6.3 Wireframe shows several shape files and the process of draw-
ing a square shape, which identifies a Fir species in the region
of Fire Island, New York. This isn’t part of a user-scenario,
but simply illustrates some of the tools and palettes (Source
Microsoft Research Ltd.) 126
Fig. 6.4 The wireframe shows the search function for finding an exist-
ing threat in the Kabo Forest Concession (Source Microsoft
Research Ltd.) 127