TiP Year in Review 2021

The year of 2021 was indeed another fruitful one: we have hosted many wonderful events, accomplished important milestones, visited great exhibitions, and we well published. Before we jump into 2022, let’s look back at the most memorable moments of 2021 and see what we have achieved together. In February, we had 12 new TiP Lexicon […]

Art

In the book What Art Is (2013) influential philosopher of art, Arthur Danto, writes about the distinction between art and other things in the world in an attempt to answer the question, what makes art art? To Danto the answer is an essentialist universalism: art objects are designed for viewers to grasp their intended meaning […]

Brain-body

How Trauma Derails the Time-Keeping Part of the Brain (and One Way to Bring It Back) When a client’s “thinking brain” goes offline Why can trauma be so devastating for our clients’ relationships? The answer could lie in the brain Why Connecting with the Right Brain is Key to Regulation (The National Institute for the […]

Data

‘numbers beat no numbers every time’ (John King, personal communication) “… peremptory quantification risks begging all the big questions” (Neer and Kurke, 2020: 4) In the millennium between about 2500BCE and 1500BCE, a persistent question in China for confucians, taoists and legalists was how to interpret the meta-division between the original undivided and the world […]

Digital Water

‘Digital water’, understood as the uptake of datafied smart technologies within traditional water supply systems, is imagined by its leading advocates to optimize the economy and sustainability of the water utilities of tomorrow. Digital technologies are envisioned to enable informed decision making in an ever more uncertain world, based on real-time interoperable water data collected […]

Edge

On the precarious edge infrastructures sparkle unexpected. On the leading edge the sea is already rising, the low land drowned. On the island edge you can see who you are in this with. On the bleeding edge communities move fast but are not broken. On the ethnographic edge a consultant works inside out, and cannot […]

Environment

Environments can seem to be everywhere and nowhere. They are configured as surroundings and relations, object and process, distant and intimate. Definitional projects of identifying environments are often described as insufficient, or as exclusionary and divisive. Environments could seem to be an artefact conjured by those modest witnesses who distance and abstract planetary life through […]

Inference

Inference is a promise. At the intersection of data and behaviour, inferential moves make ever larger collections of data exciting. A tool of discovery, acts of inference appear to offer an explanatory cause or a future prediction. Sometimes glossed simply as analytics, the nature and use of inference are longstanding mathematical and philosophical debates made […]

Informal Welfare

At a library in Copenhagen, community-supported access to welfare[1] is in plain sight. All citizens living in Denmark should have access to welfare services, yet many citizens struggle to access welfare benefits through state mandated apps and websites. Every Tuesday and Thursday, a library hosts Information Technology (IT) support sessions of two hours for people […]

Infrastructures

Infrastructures are integral to human life. They are also ubiquitous as electricity networks, water pipes, industrial food production, sewage systems, information and communication technologies, financial systems, and much more. They permeate our societies and can be found in all corners of the world (Winthereik & Wahlberg, in press). Offering a vantage point from which to […]

Oil

Oil makes futures and oil breaks futures. The future is linked to our capacity for imagining, for setting trajectories in motion. Unless we actively work against it, the status quo tends to reproduce itself – in our imagination as well as our actions. When we pluralise future(s), the forces that go into shaping particular versions […]

Ontics

Even if you have become comfortable with the words epistemic, epistemological and ontological, and now feel confident using them in sentences, it still may be that meeting the term ‘ontic’ lurking in a lexicon, a set of concepts associated with technologies deployed in practices, will unnerve you. If in our vocabulary we already have ‘epistemic’ […]

The Rat King

The first Rat King was documented in 1564 in Germany, the last in 2005 in Estonia. There were 61 cases during this time. A Rat King (from the German Rattenkönig) is a collection of black rats (rattus rattus) tied together by their tails such that they take on the appearance of a single creature. The […]

Wondering

Crises envelop us. Pick an area of collective life, and a crisis can be found. Look inwards or talk to friends and family. You’ll find your own body emplaced within one or more crises: inequities, racism, climate change, gender violence, xenophobia. Notions of crisis, however, carry a particular philosophy of time. They are framed as […]

TiP Events – October 2021

All TiP Salons will happen both in person at 3F07 (Emil Holms Kanal) and online. Contact Qiuyu Jiang (qiji) for subscription to TiP newsletter for future events and Jessamy Perriam (jper) for more TiP Salon details.