Research

June 2021- Conference Presentation “Humans and place-making:far future mobility in the case of “Mortal Engines” at Science Fiction Research Association THE FUTURE OF/AS INEQUALITY

Abstract

Planetary survival and co-existence after transformative historical and climate events is a recurrent theme in science fiction scenarios. The transformative outcomes are depicted through paradigm-changing reorganization of life after events such as: massive migration, resource scarcity, wars, extreme weather conditions, tsunamis. The response to these groundbreaking events is deployed in science-fiction either as the main focus of an adventure-plot or through scenarios already set in the emergent period after the epic event. In this paper, I focus on one of these responses to global catastrophes materialized in the future scenario of nomadic mobility in the case study of the film “Mortal Engines” (2018).

In general terms, nomadic mobility is a prevalent discourse in art and architecture since the 60’s (Bottinelli, 2015). It has been often associated with fluid boundaries in geo-spatial relations that adopt a utopian undertone evoking concepts like ‘deterritorialization’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980) that allocate to nomadism a disruptive quality towards border defined geography. In recent years, it has also been approached as a possible solution of inhabiting a damaged world in the future prospect of massive climate refugee flows. (Tacoli, 2009).

In this paper, I outline fictional nomadic mobility as a far-future scenario of habitability in the film “Mortal Engines” (2018). Established 1.000 years after the cataclysmic war called “Sixty Minute War” the canon of mobility in the film, called the “Tracton Cities” is based on an adaptation of the theory of Municipal Darwinism, namely the idea that the city could evolve into an ever-growing organism that carries internally its resources. It is represented as a mobile machine structure that is fed by other cities-organisms who all compete in the Darwinian law of the survival of the fittest. The analysis of this film case-study will serve as an entry point to a general discourse that frames nomadic mobility as a future habitability scenario involving design, art and architecture examples.

January 2021 - Lecture "Sixty minutes back to the future" at FutureBased

October 2020 - Conference presentation at the international “Conference of Philosophy of human-technology relations PHTR”, organised by University of Twente

Abstract
This paper draws on the analysis of science fiction world imaginaries to discuss the generating process of narratives of technoscientific progress. It uses, in specific, the theoretical accounts on the modalities of “cognitive estrangement” (Suvin 1979, Mather 2002) as a framework to analyze two case studies: the figure of the robot and space exploration. The concept of “cognitive estrangement” is implemented to understand how the figure of the robot and outer space are staged as Other(ed) forms of intelligence and as indicators of advanced knowledge. The fictional design of such figures is thought to provide a dialectical space of interrelation between human/robotic intelligence and earth/space that informs the popular techno scientific consciousness. This point is further elaborated through the concept of “science-fictionality” (Csicsey-Ronay 2008) that exemplifies how science fiction can evolve inside the cultural fabric as a “habit of the mind.”

This analysis implies that scientific knowledge and the aesthetic experience of “cognitive estrangement co-shape the “science-fictionality” of the myth of progress. The term myth is used according to Mary Midgley’s theorization in The myths we live by (2005) to indicate a network of imaginative patterns that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. The scope of this enterprise is to understand how specific technoscientific projects gain meaning, not only through their specific epistemological and political enquiry, but also in what Mary Midgley calls the “mythical culture-units” (Midgley 2005).

July 2019 - Paper Publication on HCI Proceedings

Abstract

In the last 20 years, the concept of ambient intelligence has been at the centre of technological research and philosophical dialectic around the human experience of technology. Part of this dialectic includes gaining a phenomenological understanding of the interaction of the human body with its environment, in order to adjust the environments to its needs (i.e., the being-in-the-world of Heidegger). Into this perspective of technology’s convergence with the philosophical phenomenological line, this paper proposes to explore the notion of worldly experience in its different theoretical connotations, and focus on Mark Hansen’s concept of worldly sensibility, that reconstructs human sensory experiences as not only determined by the subject/user, but heterogeneous and multi-scalar. The paper will raise explicitly the issue of how the understanding of worldly experience under the lens of Hansen’s worldly sensibility could inform and propose models of thinking of ambient-human coevolution and entanglement. The paper will reflect into why this shift on theorization of the sensory experience is useful for ambient intelligence environments, focusing on the advances that ambient intelligence can achieve.