Privacy Culture

Privacy remains both contentious and ever more pertinent in contemporary society. Yet it persists as an ill-defined term, not only within specific fields but in its various uses and implications between and across technical, legal and political contexts. This research offers a new critical perspective on privacy in terms culture. This is based on promoting a shift from the negative, fear-based representations we are offered by mainstream media and art alike, towards performing privacya as a collective and creative endeavour.

Research in this area has led to engagement with press and policy.

Speculative Media

This research creates a mixed method combining the creative practice of speculative design, the social thought experiments of speculative fiction, and the applied future critique of speculative ethics, to explore issues of inclusive and sustainable technology in the present.

The Speculative City : This project, funded by a Solent RIKE grant, uses the speculative media method - combining speculative design, fiction and ethics - and mixes together machine, natural and human creativity, to reimagine a more ethical and sustainable future Southampton. This is being developed with a team of students to build a VR experience. The project can be found here.

Fractal Media

Digital technologies propagate similar processes of mediation across the globe. However, this process is also chaotic, emphasising difference and creating spaces for emergent media practices. Society is both converging and fracturing through technology. Will we come together in new forms of collective consciousness? Or destroy one another in feedback loops of conflict? This ongoing project seeks to understand the technologically mediated future of humanity as a fractal process. Described by Benoit Mandelbrot as a method of understanding seemingly random patterns in the world, fractals remain loosely defined. Instead, they display characteristic tendencies which are applicable to digital technologies:

• Detail on arbitrary scales
• Irregularity beyond conventional geometry
• Self-similarity (exact or approximate)
• Dimensionality beyond topological space
• Simple definition or recursion

Falconer also reminds us that there are no fractals in nature - they are a human-imposed process of pattern recognition. This is an essential component of understanding technology - it is an artificial realm of human creation. How then can we understand and use the simultaneous order and chaos of fractals? Can we ever see the full picture of relations between humans and technologies? How can we creatively use these processes to critically approach the future of technology and society?

Fractal media is an interdisciplinary project consisting of a number of partial strands of enquiry, spanning theory and practice.

The Cyborg Subject

"The age of humanity is at an end! The cyborg cometh! This does not, however, represent cause for alarm; it is not the apocalypse, the new age will cause no sudden doom in which every last human is scoured from the earth by the rise of maleficent technology. Neither does not it constitute a technological singularity; there are no preparations underway for the ultimate party at the joyous moment of simultaneous transcendence by the entire species. It is not a single event at all. It would not be possible to define the moment at which humanity ceased and cyborgs appeared, for it is a process that has been decades, centuries, even millennia in the making, and it is far from complete. The cyborg is evolving just as humanity evolved."

"But what is the cyborg today? What constitutes the result of this process that has taken thousands of years to develop? To understand the cyborg we must define its difference from humanity, the shift in modes of thinking that have allowed a new consciousness to evolve. This shift is the introduction of a gap between physical and digital worlds... The conventionally human consciousness rests firmly within the physical mode of thinking and of reality, while the cyborg straddles this gap as it engages with both physical and digital realities, both physical and digital modes of consciousness. The gap between physical and digital worlds is thus formed as an irreducible gap of consciousness. Central to this book will be the formulation of the cyborg as such a gap, spanning the two perspectives of physical and digital reality within one functioning consciousness."