The 4S-EASST Congress is coming!

Today in POBICS, we have perfomed a rehearsal about the 4S-EASST Congress (remember: next

August 31th - September 3rd). The main part of the congress will be held in the CCIB of Barcelona (Port of Maresme, you have the original webpage here). 

In this work, our role was act as if we have performing a real communication, in order to test the sound and if there was some problems between the voices of one table and the voice of the other one (in this big room fits four tables, that is around 100 persons in four tables listening and talking at the same time).

We have seize this opportunity in order to test our next communication to the ESHHS-CHEIRON Congress (last June 30th), we will post the report soon, but it was a very interesting congress and especially, the rest of communications in or round-table (about health, bios and medicine). You cannot lose it!

By the way, we want to announce that our webpage has a new design! We hope you like it and for that, we invite you to watch it: www.pobics.com. You can read our blog there directly, and also know more about future events and come if you want.  

Photo Credit: Alan Light

Closing spring & Summer events in POBICS

We are about to end June, and POBICS have some news and upcoming events, so we think is

interesting to show and post them. Here our state of affairs:

• This morning we have held the "panel" anual meeting: our PhD students Mariana, Pedro and Enrique have been assessed by two chairs professors. They have fold our current research topics and professors have exposed some suggestions and improvements. The main concept has been the "focus" on the particular question or objective for each one: digital epidemics, drones and the role of lay-people in biosurveillance. 

• Tomorrow we have an "essay" in the ICCB  within the tests that 4S/EASST Congress coordinators are perfomed. We will seize this chance in order to prepare our next Congress, the ESHHS-CHEIRON Joint Meeting, next Thurday. 

• In this vein, ESHHS-CHEIRON Joint Meeting is being held from 06/27 (today) to 07/01, so if you are interesting in any kind of History of Science topics, you could go to the Psychology Faculty at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

• Next mont of July we will close some still-open works like slides to our 4 contributions to the 4S/EASST Congress, our drafts in Biosurveilling Citizenships, Drones & Epidemics and Images as State of Emergency.

• POBICS has a new domain! From now, our webpage is pobics.com and not more pobics.wix.com/pobics. In this form, we think our work will be easier to find and our SEO will improve.

Photo Credit: Rob Leeming

Some notes about Epidemics, Future and Time

How is the global time? does it exists? It would be defined in those papers.

The global time is not an ubiquitous, univerisal, or almighty time, but a time of greater scale than the individual level, beyond the scale of you and me. It is a terrestrial time, mediated and supported by technologies that "track" both epidemics and other factors like earthquakes, climate change, etc.

What relationship would have to aión time, kairos and chronos in the Deleuze theory??

Global Time is a time linked to action; it is a global time, which is intended to represent (provide maps and graphics). It is a time we try to capture with the eye, a time trapped because the space set its limits (in a display, the limit of what you can see).

It is a time turned image, that allows us to see all the same, it homogenizes. It is a translation ANT terms.

What interest does analyze / study scenarios in this kind of image-of-future-time?

Time and the future are elements that are always on scenarios. In the new scenarios based on epidemics, visuality is very important.

Dichotomy Strategy-tactic: we could ask to search within scenarios a third way between these two, or between planification and chaos ... it could be area of indistinction given by Agamben.

Scenarios are a spectacle. And the more spectacular, the better they are. And a very important element within this spectacle is the image. The image is equated with spectacle, not scenario. If you see a work where everything looks well-defined, you have a representation, a categorization. The fact that everything is mixed and is a mess, is what makes it a chaos.

We must not equip scenario to spectacle, but there are moments of indistinction where all scales merge and create time-spectacle moments mediated by images.

Photo Credit: Surian Soosay

Society of the Spectacle report: our last POBICS seminary

Yesterday in POBICS, we held a new meeting and, among other topics, we discussed one of the best

known books written by Guy Debord: The Society of Spectacle. Here the report, where we tried to answer two main questions: 1) What is a spectacle? and 2) What are images, and what are the role of images in the Debord's sense?

Spectacle is a reversal (the other side) of life, spectacle is a shift where life goes to the re-presentation (in the Simulacrum's sense given by Baudrillard)

Spectacles are dispositiffs, whilst spectacle is power. The second one is not visible but the first ones it does. 

Spectacle is the opposite of dialogue, that is, in spectacle there is not text, neither words or a discursive situation. Instead, spectacle is the inheritor of the weakness of the whole Western philosophical projects, and so, it is an understanding of the activity dominated by the categories of vision.

The spectacle is the conclusion of the everyday reality of the image. The image has nothing to do with our everyday reality, but it (the images that appelas to itself) becomes our reality. It is the maximum output of the spectacle. The spectacle is an image that is the experience itself, an image that refers to itself. And we thinkg that mage epidemics operate in the same way.

Spectacle then, is chiasmus, the separation between art and life. But what separates, is it art or image?

In any case, what is the image? Knowledge, a fragment of it which has lost all reference and is self-referential. Furthermore, it goes in one direction: the eyes (although it can be completed with other sense like ear. The image is more than the world and impose themselves as the only reality. The concept of image given by Debord may have to do with the etymological meaning (portrait, copy, imagination), and therefore does not have to be only visual (eg, a "mental" imaginary or invidividual which is also self-referential and superficial, the sense that if you escavas find the same, nothing else).

Image = knowledge, epistemic cut, which comes to us through one-way (eyes). It is a piece of knowledge, not an image as something that is visual: it is a knowledge that comes to us through the eyes. Baudrillard idea of simulacrum is very similar.

Spectacle as "Trompe l'oeil" (trampantojo in Spanish) = as a simulacrum, in urban planning, capitalism, imaginary ... The spectacle is the moment when the goods have arrived to the total occupation of social life. Not only the relationship the merchandise is not visible but she is the unique we can look: the world you see is its world

Relationship between images as a state of emergency and images - show.

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. For instance, romantic love in movies, (how a girl sees her boyfriend for instance), is mediated by the set of images of the Twilight movies, sexism Love Hollywood, etc ... and then, real girls in their daily life applied this romantic-hollywodean images to the relation with her boyfriends. Then, romantic-hollywodean images (a more than the lay meaning of images) mediate in the relation between couples.

The starting point for spectacle is not me, is the "bounce", thanks to a formal structure comes to me.

Spectacle are looking for our alienation. The society of spectacle corresponds to a concrete manufacture of alienation.  Image as spectacular uniqueness.

Espectuacular means "means to see, to witness", that is, mediation by sight, or sight.

What is spectacular time, in relation to time-event (Aion) and linear time (kronos)? It may be a time to start the expropriation of time (sentence #159: "To bring workers to the status of producers and "Free" time-goods, consumer preliminary condition It was the violent expropriation of their time. Return spectacular time has not become possible only from This first stripping producer. "). It would be kairós FREECODE, a bubble or invagination in which an event occurs.

Photo Credit: gwynydd michael

Alternative actors, Epidemics and Digital Data

Today in POBICS, we have held one of our last meetings in this course. We have reviewing and

commenting papers, drafts or ideas from each of us, lately. In this time, we have commented some ideas about our colleague Mariana Gavris, an expert researcher in the field of big data and digital epidemics. There are the main topics about this meeting and in this post, we want to offer some ideas about it. 

Here you have it:

One important task we want to make is to analyse the relationship between on the one hand, Big Data, Hacking Data, Internet; and on the other hand epidemic and biosurveillance. Yes, we know this is not new at all, because of this we want to offer an STS view using both the alternative actors and intelligent scenarios concepts.

About the first one, alternative actors, it was understood firstly as hackers and this kind of people that carries out digital activities "by other means". But then, we understood that alternative actor are not only people but those materialities (people, devices, technologies...) which can make or create clinamen (in the Serres sense) or a vanishing point (in the deleuzian vocabulary). That is, and event that suddenly happens and it was not planned. 

Thus, related to epidemics, alternative actors can be understood as mediators which "open" new futures, new possibilities (i.e. forecasting an epidemics at the basis on the last "El Niño" phenomenon; or at the basis of the number of passengers between two big cities around the world). In this sense, we want to link it with the modes-of-existence concept given by Bruno Latour in his last book: How can be created new modes of existence from alternative actors? or maybe: are alternative actors created from different kind of modes of existence? What are the modes of existence performed by the mediations enacted by this alternative actors?

About the second one, intelligent scenarios, is a concept that brings from two places: the first one, the smart cities imaginary; and the second one, from our concept of scenario. In this vein, we want to create a concept wich gathers this state of emergency where medical and legal knowledge, history and time, experts and lay people are mixed; and the digital use of big data and the smart city technology. 

The sense of this is understand and analyse the actors involved in this new digital epidemics, and also deepen on the implications about this new dispossitiff in terms of biopolitics, biosurveillance and control of the bios.

Photo Credit: KamiPhuc

Michel Serres: brief report about his conference on 01/06/2016 at the Institute Français de Barcelone

Yesterday, some POBICS members and other colleagues went to the Michel Serres conference held at

 the Institute Français de Barcelone. As you will know, Michel Serres is a very important philosopher in the 20-21th with several book published, for instance, the two we read this course: "Atlas" and "The Natural Contract". 

In this ocassion, the old French sailor talked about knowledge and information and the main shifts this apparatus have endured along the humankind existence; as well as about one of his most known books: "Le Petit Pucet" among other topics like academia&university, language, or computers

Here we left our report:

Information and Knowledge:

Information is not the same that knowledge. Knowledge carries a cognizance, but currently, informationis related with the access to Internet in any kind of devices.

Along the existence of the humankind, we have (at least) three kind of knowledge within three diferents revolutions: a) Oral form, supported on memories; writing, supported on books (and some time ago in prints and faster spread of information); and c) Computers supported on Internet. 

In the third moment, phisical money, paper... enter into crisis. This third revolution is not a "tough" revolution, but a "soft". Why? because for Serres, computers have no invented anything: we read books in computers like they were physical books. Personal computers have memory, images, resolve problems... as we did with other devices (books, sheets, abacus...). Some years ago, memory, imagination and reason were within us; nowadays they are outside.

What are the difference between computers and us, then? For Serres, the answer is innovation, the "vanishing point" from Deleuze. He explained it with an history: Christopher Columbus was not looking for America, but for India in order to make bussiness. But what happened? He came across with America. Invention happens when you are looking for a particular thing and you find other different. 

Academia & University:

Academia is also in crisis, and this is due to the ever-faster aknowledgment of new words in the Academy of Letters (30000 in the last years; 3000 in the gap of the years in the 70-80's).

In jobs the speed is just the opposite: we use ever less words to define rural and farming jobs. 

Related to university, with Internet and smartphones knowledge are entangled and mixed: subjects are fused and emerge new kinds of them. Nowadays, a teacher give about a 15% of his knowledge. At the beginning of the 20th Century it was about a 80%.

Politics and Languaje. Le Petit Poucet:

In french, "maintenant" meand literally "in the hand". And this definition is currently more true than ever. We have information and knowledge "maintenant". The classical meaning of this word is "in the front of something". Alexander the Great of Napoleon Bonaparte never could say the have the world on their hands, and now, 3.000.000.000 of persons in the Earth can say it. As Serres said, we have "maintenant" stadistics, forecasts, global datas... and for that, is possible someone of us wants to conquer the world as this emperors pretended.

Photo Credit: ebaes