Neste artigo faz-se uma descrição do Sistema Global de Posicionamento e dos dispositivos de navegação de uso rodoviário que o constituem, enquanto artefatos, com vista a uma leitura semiótica destes últimos em articulação com a sistematicidade. De uma semiótica tradicional dos objetos passa-se a uma que se centra na sua materialidade, a partir da qual é possível detecar sentidos performativos na tecnologia. Esta abordagem permite uma compreensão mais detalhada do caráter global das tecnologias móveis em articulação com a sua individualização. (...) A tese que se defende é a de que é possível dar conta do que é próprio da materialidade deste fenómeno, explorando, a par dos elementos tradicionalmente simbólicos, aspectos não redutíveis a estes. Não obstante, destaca-se como o material e o simbólico permanecem numa relação que permite identificar mais claramente a complexidade dos sistemas e artefatos técnicos, bem como os elementos que, neste domínio, estabelecem uma interação entre produção e consumo. Deste modo, chega-se a uma semiótica material que permite uma interpretação mais fiel do que é específico da componente funcional da tecnologia, em particular de um sistema e artefatos que se instalam cada vez mais no quotidiano, evitando a redução a uma valoração utilitária. This paper makes a depiction of the Global Positioning System and the navigation devices that are part of it, as artifacts. It aims to develop a semiotic reading of these artifacts in articulation with systematicity. From a traditional semiotics of objects, it goes to a material one, in which it is possible to find performative trends on technology. This approach is an opportunity to understand in a detailed way the global character of mobile technologies in articulation with individualization. The thesis held here is that this is a better way to handle with the specificities of materiality, exploring, besides the traditionally symbolic elements, aspects not reducible to the latter. Nevertheless, both the material and the symbolic layers are in permanent relation. The observation of this helps to understand systems and artifacts' complexity, as well as some of the elements that are involved in the interactions between production and consumption. By doing this, the paper tries to achieve a material semiotics frame that allows an interpretation more faithful to the specificities of the functional aspects of technology, particularly those that are part of a system and artifacts so present in daily life, avoiding a reduction to a utilitarian valuation. (shrink)

Drones deployed to monitor endangered species often crash. These crashes teach us that using drones for conservation is a contingent practice ensnaring humans, technologies, and animals. This article advances a crash theory in which pilots, conservation drones, and endangered megafauna are relata, or related actants, that intra-act, cocreating each other and a mutually constituted phenomena. These phenomena are entangled, with either reciprocal dependencies or erosive entrapments. The crashing of conservation drones and endangered species requires an ethics of care, repair, or (...) reworlding. Diffractions, disruptions that expose difference, result from crashes and reveal the precarious manner by which technologies, laws, and discourses bring nature and culture together. To support crash theory, this article presents three ethnographic cases. A drone crash in the United Kingdom near white rhinoceroses while building machine learning training data exhibits the involvement of the electromagnetic spectrum; the threat of crashes in the Pacific Northwest near Puget Sound orcas discloses the impacts of drone laws; and drone crashes in Sri Lanka among Asian elephants presents the problems of technoliberal ideals around programming natural worlds. Throughout the article, a methodology is developed, parallelism, which attends to the material similarities in lateral phenomena. (shrink)

Devoted to the late Paul Virilio (1932–2018) and in the advent of debates surrounding the Anthropocene and in light of corresponding changes to conceptions of scale and image, this paper attempts to extrapolate a Virilian pedagogy of the image. It is Virilio’s work which remains timely and singularly fecund in this area and it is for this reason that it may help to shape a new pedagogy of scale and image. This may allow us to better grasp the decentring of (...) human conceptions of time and space as we come to better understand the vastness of cosmological space and time. To demonstrate this, his work is read in tandem with Félix Guattari’s work on ecosophy and Bernard Stiegler’s work on negentropy to show how Virilio’s critique of the diminishment of perspective diverges from their respective approaches to forge an arresting pedagogy of the image vis-à-vis geographical and ecological conceptions of Earthly spatial and temporal scale. The perceived poverty of Earthly perspective is read in the light of a scalar perspectivism which understands the enormity of the universe and humanity’s microscopic place within it. As Virilio is concerned with the changes in scale which manifest with the onset of globalization, the question arises as to how an applied dromology (that is the philosophy of speed) may work alongside both Guattari’s schizoanalytic and ecosophical research and Stiegler's pharmacology of the image in a way that mounts a robust and unique critique of the mental pollution of the image as such. Here the pedagogical implications are significant as the diminishment of world perspective for Virilio – a consequence of the singular global time of capital – devastates our understanding of the cosmos. This understanding of the poverty of scale and perspective is contrasted with a multiscalar approach to the world, which is itself searching for a philosophical and pedagogical response to the reduction of the world to nothing. (shrink)