Hybrid Ecologies

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Elaborating ideas for a book on ubiquitous and situated computing establishing hybrid environments suitable for multi-layered social interaction, learning, arts, literature supported by locative digital devices.

1 Basic Premises
2 Key Definitions
3 Topics
4 Book Outline so far
5 People on board
6 Bibliography
7 Links of interest

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Basic Premises

‘Ubiquitous Computing’ or ‘Pervasive Computing’ refer to the proliferation of digital devices in the natural environment.

Locative Media has been introduced by Karlis Kalnins at the RIXC Centre for New Media Culture «in order to distinguish the latter creative explorations of the medium from the corporate hype surrounding location-based services».

Geotagging or Geocoding or Locative Tagging refers to Geographical identification metadata (as latitude and longitude coordinates, altitude, bearing, place names, zip codes) applied to various media such as websites, RSS feeds, or images.

Learning in augmented spaces rich layers of embodied knowledge and practice in the real spaces, and authentic context triggering activities and knowledge-building in virtual spaces, makes augmented space into a potential learning environment with new challenges for the learners.

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Key Definitions

Hybrid Ecologies may define the interactions taking places among organisms and between organisms and other inanimate items in Hybrid Environments, implying Hybrid Perception as a peculiar explorative strategy aimed to define task directed and goal oriented Hybrid Activity Patterns, affecting both the natural environment and the media providing related references.

Hybrid Perception may be addressed as a complex experience emerging from combination and mutual interaction of sensory appraisal involving visual, tactile or multi-modal assessment of perceived environmental features and references provided by media entailing textual, audiovisual or whatever contents to be directly or indirectly related to the perceived landscape.

(So, Hybrid perception is not simply triggered by environmental entities being processed by a perceiver. Rather it relies on the process of embodiment and extending the embodied in which previously embodied sensory-motor activation patterns are coupled with sensory-motor action potential triggered by the mutual interaction of newly perceived environmental features and selected references conveyed by media).

Hybrid Environment is a natural ecosystem enriched by textual, audio, video or multimedia contents potentially interfering with sensory appraisal of environmental features so as to be directly or indirectly related to them. Interference of direct perception and processing of mediated references into an hybrid environment may be defining hybrid activity patterns, triggering action potential that potentially affects perceiver's interaction with both the natural environment and the media providing related references.

Technology-centered approaches address hybrid environments as distributed/fragmentary spaces. According to Nicolas Nova, “hybrid ecologies” correspond to a shift from media spaces (linking physical spaces through digital medium), mixed reality environments (blurring borders between physical and digital), ubiquitous computing (embedding digital into physical environments) to hybridization (that merging features into a mixed natural and digital environment). So called borders keeping apart physical and digital stop being an actual issue as soon as references encoded into digitized media are processed by human beings, that is embodied as something they are coping with. Therefore, a different view based on action-related knowledge seems to be more effective when it comes to describing human presence into hybrid environments.

Indeed, a different Action-centered approach does not see hybrid environment as merely a space filled with both natural and man-made objects or defined by their mere interaction. Rather, it definines a more dynamic and processual interactive hybrid ecological system in which subjects performing actions are crucial to the environment and the emerging perceptual experiences, related action potential and interoceptive ramifications have to be considered as parts of the hybrid environment, according to Gibson's Theory of Affordances.

Collaboration in hybrid environments Nicolas Nova observes that Interaction is distributed across distinct ecologies. Hybrid ecologies rely on the articulation of ‘fragments of embodied virtuality /potential?/’ or fragmented interaction.Collaboration in hybrid environments is distinctively concerned with the articulation of fragmented interaction. By fragmented interaction it is meant that collaboration in hybrid environments is mediated by different mechanisms of interaction, which are differentially distributed among participants. Collaboration is provided for in hybrid environments through the interweaving of hybrid networks /as in interactive patterns?/ and hybrid models of space /locative field?/, where new types of mechanisms of interaction are articulated.

Hybrid spaces merge geographical spaces (geospaces) and ontological spaces (ontospaces), as defined by Kaipainen et al. (2008, in press), and thereby allow uniform definition of both conceptual and physical entities by means of descriptive ontocoordinates. This allows that qualitative or even esthetical properties of entities, such as beauty, can be treated in the same way as quantitative coordinates such as latitude, longitude, weight or price. On the other hand, this allows interpreting even "hard" quantitative coordinates in a manner that is relative to chosen perspective. Such a hybrid space can be regarded as the environment of hybrid ecosystems, that is, dynamics in which the inhabitant entities are recycled as commodities, or act within as enactors.

Enaction (or enactment) is acting within an a system as a part and a participant of it, not as an outsider, such as a controller, user or observer. This concept has its roots in Bruner and Varela.

Semantic priming of motor tasks causes linguistically enabled facilitation of actions. According with theories of embodied semantics maintaining a crucial involvement of the motor system in language comprehension, behavioral studies have reported language to interact with or influence motor performance, that is finding compatibility effects between language and action. For instance, it has been found that objects with the label ‘large’ printed on top were grasped with an enlarged grip aperture of the hand, suggesting an automatic inﬂuence of word meaning on action (Glover and Dixon 2002). Other experiments found faster responses if the movement implied by the presented sentence was congruent to their direction of responding in subjects asked to judge the sensibility of sentences by making a movement towards or away from the body (Glenberg and Kaschak 2002). Likewise, processing of sentences describing rotation of a manual device in the same direction the action was actually performed has be found to be facilitating subjects’ responses, in congruence with the hypothesis that motor processes support language comprehension (Zwaan and Taylor 2006). Moreover a recent study found that a simple motor act could either be facilitated or hindered by the concomitant presentation of action verbs (Boulenger and colleagues 2006). If verbs were presented before movement execution, a facilitation was found in wrist acceleration, whereas reading a verb during movement execution led to slower wrist acceleration, suggesting that motor actions and representation of action-words rely on common neural mechanisms.

Glenberg, A.M., Kaschak, M.P., 2002. Grounding language in action. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 9, 558–565.

Glover, S., Dixon, P., 2002. Semantics affect the planning but not control of grasping. Experimental Brain Research 146, 383–387.

Zwaan, R.A., Taylor, L.J., 2006. Seeing, acting, understanding: motor resonance in language comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 135, 1–11.

Boulenger, V., Roy, A.C., Paulignan, Y., Deprez, V., Jeannerod, M., Nazir, T.A., 2006. Cross-talk between language processes and overt motor behavior in the ﬁrst 200 ms of processing. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18, 1607–1615.

Lindemann, O., Stenneken, P., van Schie, H.T., Bekkering, H., 2006. Semantic activation in action planning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: HumanPerception and Performance 32, 633–643.

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