Visualizing "the Point" of the Project (https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/sketch-visualizing-point-project/essay)

Getir (Turkish for Bring!) is a grocery delivery company operating in Turkey. These couriers, once thought "unskilled, uneducated, etc." now became "essential". The spectacle is thus; these brave people risk their lives, delivering necessities to your door, so you can stay healthy, inside your house. Getir did a lot of hiring when the first wave of quarantines occured in Turkey, many of those workers are now unemployed as lfie became "normal" once again. What is "essential" in these workers are that they are essentially sacrifices, for even a greater spectacle than their heriosm; the economy. They are forcefuly made martyrs, as living check to check forces them upon these jobs, yet asking for safer conditions means they are simply replaced. Their lives and labour are the very spectacular tools that are used to first make them killable and then execute them.

A 52 yo nurse, beaten by cops in France, for protesting for better woking conditions.
The healtcare workers, too are spectacular killables; presented as heroes to be clapped from balconies, but quite literally unwilling martyrs made to march happily into their doom. What happens if one asks for better conditions in ones sacrifice? The regulatory tools of the sovereign functions.

One part of the general discourse that we have already forgotten about is the eco-fascism that rose to prominence once again, not only in the anti-lockdown protests globally but also in seemingly much more harmless discourse on earthy survival. The "world is healing", "humans are the virus" and "the masks are muzzles" discourses differ only in appearance. Their roots can be traced to that old Mathusian notion of the nobleman, having to "live and let die" the savage that knows not of "earthy survival/preservation". Understood in this sense, and related back to Mbembe's necropolitics, the Covid Pandemic becomes the perfect time to discuss for instance, how "Black Deaths Matter" and dealt/administered.

Having finished selecting my images and describing them below, I thought it worthwhile sharing with any readers that I see each of these images as representing a open science stakeholder's attempt to influence researchers' behavior. That is my phenomenon of interest—particularly when this process is mediated by technology.

Some of the most vocal discontentment regarding open science relates to the reproducibility "crisis" and the individual researchers who have taken it upon themselves to reveal questionable research practices. Such vigilantes (or communities) are who open science resistors call "data thugs" for their bullying. The smile in this selfie suggests the moral certitude of open science advocates, and it can easily be perceived as the smugness open science resistors despise. I chose this photo because it demonstrates conflict and evokes the importance of values to open science and its success.

This image shows an option in an open science web app to make a research object private. I chose this image because it demonstrates that, in this system, the default option is for content to be public. This default is by design, meant to encourage researchers to behave openly. By attempting to structure choices, the system developers are attempting to change how scientific work is done. My dissertation will examine the ways developers and users interact with an open science system and how their values and schemas change and influence that interaction.

This open data badge from the Center for Open Science (https://osf.io/hr67w/) is one of several badges the organization developed. The Center for Open Science (COS) has successfully lobbied for many journals to offer these badges to authors in recognition for their open science practices; authors upload data or materials with their manuscript and their article is then published with this image next to it. Badges have been demonstrated—in work funded and executed by COS—to be effective at encouraging open behaviors (Kidwell et al., 2016: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002456).

In the first picture we can see a ceramic sculpture by the artist Trisha Baga from her series “Hypothetical Artifacts” (2015–2020). Within the series, everyday objects are rendered as imprecise, messy fossiles. Looking at the object of the microscope this seems especially unsettling. Tools that we know as precise, standardised and to be “revealing the truth” of nature are depicted as handcrafted and wobbly. For me, the shiny glaze, usually reserved for art or craft projects like mugs, points to me to the charisma and “aura” and emotions that surrounds certain technologies. I have chosen the microscope, as this is still something many people think of when they think of law enforcement. The question now is what Trisha Baga might depict when she would be asked to make a sculpture of modern day IT-Forensics, possibly based on machine learning applications. 

The picture is rather old and not very sharp, to see their work better I recommend googling “Trisha Baga Hypocritical Artifacts”

The second picture is a depiction of how the artist Stefanie Wuschitz imagines a feminist & anti-racist AI. I am especially drawn to the loose ends, the patches and angular connections and how unrefined and bulky the “input”-tools look like compared to the fine mesh of the “inner workings”. The AI looks particularly peaceful and happy, yet some of the parts might work well as weapons. The long fingernails give the impression of something organic and human, something that is growing, while their hair looks rather mechanic.  

I stumbled upon the last picture when searching for “scarcity + Machine Learning”. It is a nice derivation of the usual ones and zeros, decision trees and cold blue nodes, gearwheels, and light bulbs that are used when depicting ML. It also points to a part that I am really interested in: Skills, embodied and tacit knowledge and gut feelings within both spheres of ML and law enforcement (and/or the scarcity of them). For me, it also depicts what can happen when the two domains meet; processes of negotiating standardization, valuation, and classification of things like gut feelings. 

This image and it's colors conveys some of the isolation of teletherapy, but the fullness of the woman's body also conveys the different things that she is trying to think about or address (e.g., piecework, care work, different clients).

This image I think conveys the sense of the bodily and emotional labor of therapy and the reproductive labor many therapists do on the side. There is a sense of heaviness from the body but a sense of lightness from the flowers flowing from the head which remind me of this idea of "freedom, flexibility and flow" which are in theory what many women are trying to achieve through doing teletherapy platform work.

This is an edited version of an image of a therapist/career coach for teletherapists named Amber Lyda. Her motto is "freedom flexibility flow", and this image I think conveys the highly aspirational, women-entrepreneur image of the teletherapist.