Interfaces, Spaces Between
This is a talk I gave for the Distributed Immersive Participation group, Stockholm University on 28 March 2025. I was happy to have a reason to update my talk, as the ones I gave on this topic in 2019 and 2022 were terribly out of date by now.
Slides: https://indiebio.co.za/curiosity_metaverse_adapted_24mar2025.html
pdf (27MB)
recording: on youtube
This is a complement to another post focusing on the ethic of care as it relates to my next project. In that post, I try hard to remove any man vs woman, masculine/feminine, patriarchy mentions because it triggers things I do not wish to shine a light on in that context.
But the whole point of the book is about those splits. In my project I am trying to apply it in a different way, but some things deserve to be mentioned. So, another post then.
page 17: where patriarchy is in force and enforced, the human voice is a voice of resistance.
Continue reading “notes from in a Human Voice for the patriarchy stuff”Carol Gilligan wrote an article in 2014 “Moral Injury and the Ethic of Care: Reframing the Conversation about Differences” and it has stayed with me. An ethic of care is a core tenet to my next project, and I would hope the next stage of my academic career. So I was more than pleased to see this book published in 2023, updating her thoughts.
Continue reading “notes from In a Human Voice – Carol Gilligan”My project explores the potential of emergent games to foster curiosity-driven learning and facilitate new knowledge alliances in interdisciplinary fields. By combining emergent game design, open process practices, and a feminist ethic of care, my collaborators and I aim to create a platform that promotes curiosity and accountability while exploring politically charged scientific questions.
In one such collaboration, the Industry of Integrations (IOI) project (Nevelsteen 2021) will be applied to scientific databases, known collectively as Open Data Infrastructures (ODIs). We intend to use these ODIs at high levels, and integrate them with Collaborative Data Platforms at more local levels (for example through Citizen Scientists) to create a citizen-driven ecosystem. In this system people can build integrations, bridging scientific ODIs between different disciplines, and integrate with their own citizen contributed data – the scientific equivalent of user generated content (UGC). In addition, we hope to bridge scientific ODIs and game platforms, to allow the incorporation of physical world elements into casual games. In this way, by bridging science and creativity, we can dissolve the boundaries between laypeople and experts, and build new knowledge alliances. And also build super cool games.
Continue reading “The potential for emergent games to foster curiosity”
I enjoyed reading this book; a lot of nuances I didn’t quite get before is explained – like the ongoing grumbles between the “Free” and “Open” camps, what KDE and Gnome is, why there’s a Wayland and why despite it being better I have to keep going back to X11 instead. I also read this book to try and gaze into the crystal ball to see if we could perhaps learn from the mistakes of the earlier FOSS developments as we build the Metaverse. I add some questions regarding that after some of the highlights below.
Continue reading “Notes from the book For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution by Christopher Tozzi”Graham took out his earrings when he went in for some dental work, lost some of them, and we were wondering if the holes were still open. So I unpacked my earrings to lend him some, those not lost over the passage of time and many moves, and fell down a rabbithole in memory lane.
A group of us recently applied for EU funding for a project, to, basically, bring water into the metaverse. Here’s the TL;DR of what the project is trying to do, should we be successful.
Continue reading “AquaSavvy (regenerated)”Some days the writing comes down on you like you need to take an urgent loo break. Today is one of those days.
I’m about to email my potential posts-doc supervisor explaining why I went silent for a long time. Two pivots, that’s why.
Continue reading “Project 3.0”I was doing a web search for hits that contain both pluralism and feminism and found this article by Esther Turnhout, which is adapted from her inaugural lecture as Chair of Science, Technology and Society (STS) at University of Twente: A better knowledge is possible: Transforming environmental science for justice and pluralism. Articles are written in such terrible ways, so I read the lecture instead. It explains a lot of the concerns I have, and I mostly enjoyed reading it. Here’s some bits I highlighted, and then some thoughts about how this relates to my work going forward.
Continue reading “A better knowledge is possible, but “better” is undefined.”Four recent blogs inspired me:
Starting with how to represent truth, moving to play, and then to belonging. The TL;DR:
The advances of structuring data in mapping unlocks potential for using physical world assets in games. Using physical world assets in emergent approaches to game design is well suited to allowing players to interact with their game worlds in varied ways. Exploring playing with the physical world – morphing and changing it – through games can allow us to learn about the world not through a top-down education, but through a curiosity that does not even have to involve the truth. Through these games we can build a new sense of belonging, that builds a common language across polarised opinions, because it’s just for fun, after all.
Continue reading “Playfulness and truth.”