Prospectus

Appiphany

(Outline of the Proposal).   

Here begins a series of posts as inventory of some key issues to be developed in our experiment.  The goal of Appiphany is the design and test of an app for mobile computing (ubicomp), to support egents consulting on behalf of the EmerAgency, to apply Arts & Letters knowledge to situations of public policy formation (each numbered section may be discussed in its own forum in detail).

1.  Mobile computing.  The app is for mobile media (in whatever instantiation), with “Google Glasses” representing the trajectory of invention assumed for the technological dimension of electracy. 

            --Mobile or locative media enable a juxtaposition and correlation in real time between egent perception and representation, that is, between an individual person and the contents of the Internet. 

            --Glossed over in the demo simulations of this effect is the fact that this proposed interface is a problematic that is nearly synonymous with the Western tradition of philosophy and arts.  This interface is not a simple given, but an opportunity for heuretics.

            --A shorthand reference for this problematic is that the gap between perception and representation is the “other” scene, the Unconscious.

2.  EmerAgency.  The app supports a practice, the genre of konsult.  A konsult is intended to sustain a critical public sphere in a way adequate to electracy (the digital apparatus). 

            --EmerAgency consulting educates institutions and citizens regarding the conditions of electracy relevant to democratic decision-making.

            --An apparatus includes not only technology but institutional practices and identify formation (individual and collective).  The primary concern of electracy is well-being, the thriving and fulfillment in the lives of individuals and communities.

            --We focus this general issue with the work of Amartya Sen (Nobel Prize winning economist), who approaches well-being in terms of human capacities.  Sen proposes to measure well-being relative to human capacity to choose one’s own way of life.  The political and ethical claim is that human beings have a right to capability and the opportunity to use it to choose how to live. 

            --Sen’s proposal is extreme, and therefore useful in marking a trajectory that is to institutional invention what Google Glasses are to technological invention. 

            --A shorthand reference for capacity revealing what is at stake in Sen’s proposal is virtue:  “capacity” is associated with the entire question of “power” – potentiality (and impotence), back to Aristotle’s Metaphysics and the distinction between potential and actual being. 

TBC…