This session of EF has been postponed – we hope to reschedule for later in the summer! Watch this space…
seed: A Cache Society – Secrets of Transacting Things
catalyst: Rachel O’Dwyer
date/time: Friday, 21st April 2017 at 6:00PM
location: Seminar Room, CONNECT, 34 Westland Row, Dublin.
For the 4th session of Engineering Fictions this year, CONNECT researcher Rachel O’Dwyer will catalyze some ideas and questions around possibility and implications of “transacting things” in an internet age. It’s a pretty important topic, here’s what Rachel says about it:
Today, we use the Internet to communicate with one another, with friends, colleagues, family, strangers. In the near future, everyday objects (things) could use the internet to send and receive all kinds of messages. One business model in the Internet of Things (IoT) focuses on how connected devices can be used for payments, often referred to as ‘transactions’.
The internet of things that transact means for some that your fridge could buy your milk or your car might buy petrol without you being aware of it. For others its about new ways of paying where cold hard cash might become obsolete in favour of watches and wearables. The Internet of things that transact also suggests new forms of what anthropologists Bill Maurer and Lana Swartz have called ‘money-like things’, where airtime tokens, fitbit units, social media data and computer cycles all become ways to pay for goods and services.
This new space of networked objects trading and transacting has implications for cultures of value and exchange. The contours of this space are still fuzzy and shaped by speculation and imaginaries…
This EF writing session aims to embrace the vagueness of this space by setting up a platform for imagining transactions between everyday things through conversation and improvised writing.
We’ll loosely draw upon the “Novel of Circulation“, the Still Life and Dialogue as rough guides for critically imagining the secrets of transacting things…
About Rachel O’Dwyer:
Dr Rachel O’Dwyer is a Research Fellow at CONNECT in Trinity College Dublin. She researches, publishes, speaks and organises events on the political economy of communications and software studies with a particular emphasis on digital currencies, mobile networks and the Internet of Things.
Rachel is the leader of the Dublin Art and Technology Association and the initiator and lead curator of Openhere, a festival and conference on the digital commons. Rachel is an active contributor to the Platform Cooperativism Consortium and core member of the P2P Foundation where she coordinates the P2P academic research network and 100 women in peer-to-peer. She is a regular contributor to Neural magazine and the founding editor-in-chief of the open access, peer-reviewed journal ‘Interference: A Journal of Audio Culture‘.
To take part please email engineeringfictions@connectcentre.ie – places are limited to 12.
Please feel free to share this session with anyone you think would be interested.
No prior experience required, just bring along something to write with (pen/paper) and an open mind. Some herbal teas/water will be provided, you’re welcome to bring along any brain food to share 😉
Sessions usually last 90mins or so.
engineeringfictions.org 