The NCM, where #AusSTS25 was hosted, is currently running an exhibition on Quantum Futures.
Standing in those rooms, you get a sense of how strange and beautiful it is to imagine computation beyond the binary: machines that think in waves, harmonics, and probabilities.
ncm.org.au/exhibitions/...
The good folks at @aussts.bsky.social and the National Communication Museum in Melbourne have worked a little magic: a remastered version of our #AusSTS25 panel has landed, rescuing signal from the noise. The original was a bit corrupted—but fidelity prevails!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op-z...
If you were interest in #AusSTS25, or @aussts.bsky.social in general, the best thing to do is to join our Google group: groups.google.com/g/ausstsgrad
#AusSTS25 was a blast. Such cool plenaries from @elizabethstephens.bsky.social, Jaya Keaney, @blueskychris.bsky.social, @wombatscholar.bsky.social and @karilancaster.bsky.social. Huge thanks to the organizers for such a great ride!
A lovely surprise at #AusSTS25 was meeting with @sonjavw.bsky.social!
Did you know we have an open call for proposals for Palgrave's #Biolegalities series? We welcome projects that critically examine the evolving relationship between law, life & (bio)technology: link.springer.com/series/15629 #STS
It was an absolute pleasure to attend the #AusSTS25 conference in Melbourne/Naarm this week with the fab @aussts.bsky.social community!
#signalsandnoises #STS @hss.springernature.com
That’s a wrap for my first AusSTS conference @aussts.bsky.social! Talked about COVID conspiracy theories in the Philippines—always fun!—and moving beyond thinking about them as mere ‘unscientific noise’. Naarm has been swell, but this weather is something else.
#AusSTS25 #signalsandnoises
Thanks @aussts.bsky.social for a great three days at #aussts25 #signalsandnoises 💚 Amazing you’ll be heading to Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington next time! (Put me and @tristam.bsky.social down for local donkey work jobs!)
What will you take from the last three days that you didn't have before?
What has surprised or struck you?
What do you want to keep thinking about?
#AusSTS25
Anyone who was part of the conference, it'd be great to see your thoughts in the replies ⬇️ #AusSTS25
To really really close, @carinatruyts.bsky.social leads a reflection on the conference:
I heard
I saw
I felt
I made
#AusSTS25
We cannot control ghosts. We can only let them get on with their work. #AusSTS25
Some theorists want to pathologize noise. Others see it as a valuable hauntology: noise as specter, interference, a disturbing tone, disorienting. A hauntology disturbs an ontology, overthrows a hegemony.
#AusSTS25
Closing us out, it's @wombatscholar.bsky.social (University of Sydney), with "noise as an attention ecology, or hauntology"
#AusSTS25
Public health can benefit from taking multiple ways of knowing on board: health humanities, ecological science. Help to attune to the noise, to the extending set of relations between drugs, bodies, waters, politics, inequalities, ecologies. #AusSTS25
The potential for drug harm is a transferable concept. Can we attribute addiction and withdrawal to fish? Hyper-aggressive meth-gators? Coke-eels? #AusSTS25
Tons of research have established that harm from drug use is socially mediated. Wastewater testing, with the social elements removed, can be a proxy for use, but not for harm. #AusSTS25
Testing wastewater promises a non-invasive, accurate, real-time stream of evidence about drug use, about which other kinds of evidence are noisy. In the water, the signal is meant to be clean: drug use, separated from bodies and social practices. #AusSTS25
In wastewater epidemiology, we can see how human activities, like drug use, entangle much more than human worlds. It's ecological, an environmental problem. #AusSTS25
The value and risks posed by feces are now on everybody's minds. #AusSTS25 www.wiley.com/en-ae/Specta...
Checking wastewater for evidence of drug use -- both medical and recreational/illegal -- is now widespread around the world. It's a technoscientific solution that aims to clean up the mess and eliminate noise. #AusSTS25
Up next, Kari Lancaster (University of Bath) with "Shitty signals: wastewater epidemiology, addicted fish, and an ecological wrong-turn." Some wild entanglements here. #AusSTS25
Now everyone can be a quantified selfer, but the use of this data is moribund. It still takes real medical expertise to make any sense of the data. Meanwhile it's being financialized by the insurance industry, and turned to biopower by RFK Jr. and MAHA. It's the opposite of emancipatory. #AusSTS25
From a niche, to the world. In 2014, Apple launched the Health app; in 2015, the Apple Watch. Now self-measurement is a data practice to which there seems to be no alternative. #AusSTS25
Ok then: so the recent "quantified self" movement: a NoCal, tech-savvy group of people measuring everything about themselves, learning from their own data and doing self-experiments, "decoding" themselves in a way they felt the medical establishment couldn't or wouldn't. #AusSTS25
Foucault's intervention is to say, "you're both wrong:" neither patient nor illness is sending a message. The body is noise, and the doctor attends to that noise, seeking elements of a message. No single approach will "informatize" all that noise. #AusSTS25
The essay was part of a public debate at the time about how patients should be diagnosed, around patient-centered or illness-centered approaches. Is a "message" from a patient the signal? Or is it noise, corrupting the true signal sent by illness? Can you take patients at their word? #AusSTS25
Now it's Christopher O’Neill (Deakin University), as part of the closing plenary panel, which starts from Foucault's 1966 essay, "message or noise?"
#AusSTS25
First up is Christopher O'Neill @blueskychris.bsky.social speaking on Foucault's essay "message or noise" and how the phenomenon of health and the body can be filtered through information theory #AusSTS25 #signalsandnoises
The system depends on every actor's willingness to share data -- when data sharing creates vulnerabilities. #AusSTS25
