A Billion Gadget Minds: Thinking Widgets, Data and Workflow

A growing body of research, including literature on cognitive anthropology, software studies and cognitive capital suggests that whatever is called ‘thinking’ occurs amidst mechanisms, habits, codelike systems, devices and other formally structured means. If intelligence, far from being a property of ‘the human’, is an informal and provisional function of the ensemble of mechanisms and relations that comprise a social field, then we need to explore the co-relation of cultural and experiential practices, thought and intelligent devices.

In this day-long workshop, we would like to evaluate the ways in which contemporary hardware and software augment and distribute intelligence, as well as the ensemble of social relations which form around thinking practices as they synchronise, mesh, de-couple, breakdown and collapse with variable effects. To this end we are seeking contributions that propose analyses or working experiments with thinking work as imbricated in cultural, material, corporeal, technical, economic and psychic practices. These might include design, creative, analytic, management, personal, administrative, scientific or technical thinking.

We are particularly keen to solicit contributions from researchers, practitioners and writers who want to develop a transdisciplinary engagement with novel philosophical, aesthetic and political problematisations of ecologies of extended cognition / ubiquitous computing / social intelligence.