I’ve missed some days here as the multi-multi-tasking burnt up writing time and space. But just finished a work deadline, little one had a nap today, we finally found out the landlord will fix the heating and I even managed to listen to a webinar on an Internationalist Response to Covid19. So.. back soon X
Writing sometimes feels like survival. Writing from the inside out. One word after another. One step at a time. Climbing out of the suffocating layers of precarity and non-stop circumstances. Getting a breath. Seeing some light. Filling some of my own space. Getting to grips with own agency again. Making a plan.
I have some relatively advanced work on a “universe” of concepts around Collective Intelligence. Many very different politics surface in a collective intelligence space, from a Brexity “Will of the People” to Zapatista inspired swarming strategies. Mapping out these concepts has many uses, and potentially it help us navigate the kind of “cognitive slippage” between left and right popular approaches. For any map to be accessible and actually usable for a wide range of people, it needs to be attractive, intuitive and easy to use. Data visualisation techniques seem key here, which leads us to Gephi, and also “Arc Diagram” code which I found through the brilliant Dictionary of the Revolution project.
Many versions of collective intelligence are active around us. From the social media Hive Mind, to wikipedia’s Wisdom of the Crowd, to the ant colonies under our feet, to Extinction Rebellion’s swarming tactics, to talk of citizen assemblies solving Brexit or even climate change. To name but a few. My PhD aims to organise different conceptualisations and manifestations of collective intelligence into written and visual meta-analysis. In the wider video work, I am also working with audio-visual analysis and am currently exploring “The Sound of the Hive”. In other words, exploring an understanding of collective intelligence and the hive, through sound and patterns of sounds.
Image of Dr Gisela Carlos Fregoso showing a photo-message exhibition on racism, self-produced by students in her Linguistics Class. This image is a still from a video to be uploaded soon. Video/Image by Gisela Carlos Fregoso.… Racism: distributed messages