These are the contexts of our work. Detailed notes of explanation are below. For more information about our work, please visit the Approach page and the Services page.
Diagram of Contexts
Worlds (and Signs)
"everybody", "everything", "everywhere"
Association (and Difference)
networks, circulations, sharing
Provision (and Adequation)
machines and professional services
Development (and Machine)
desiring, organic, technical, and social
Analysis (and Movement)
connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive syntheses
Conception (and Naming)
real abstract (pragmatic) considerations
Time (and Event)
durations, and eternity
Notes of Explanation
What is contextualized by these contexts?
These are the contexts of our work. Each context comprises a real domain (or world) where productive acts take place. Each context is distinguished by its particular mode of recording. Together, the contexts form a stack - things further up are essentially more complex (more specific, more particular) than things further down.
How are these contexts related?
The lower contexts on the page are broader and support the higher ones. Time is the broadest context in which we work, every action has a duration. Acts can be thoughtful, and so thoughts can be analytic. Analysis can enhance productions, and productions can be made to adequate to an external purpose. In this way, vital networks can be generated, and can be made to support desirable worlds.
Conversely, the higher contexts on the page are narrower and occur within conditions provided by the lower ones. The narrowest context is that of virtually closed "little worlds" (a world of worlds). They are situated upon more open and extensive multiplicities, which are used to form them, just as a novel fashions a world out of a city (worlds of association). Component machines are provided only after a passage of production, which continues to envelop them after their consummation has begun (worlds of development). All this takes on a material surface of analysis that is conceived and repeated throughout as an event (a world of time).
Why this particular series of contexts?
Each context is essentially individuated by the kind of recording devices it involves. Like stones in a wall, events are recorded as a matter of eternal accretion. Concepts accumulate within the cerebral cortex. And analysis is determined by the recording devices it conceives.
Roughly speaking, development casts its object machines as the recording devices of its improvements. Associations coordinate their component machines on the surface of general society - 'a socius of inscription where the essential thing is to mark or to be marked' [AO] - as deemed necessary for a given level of provision. And, as they see fit, worlds inscribe their narratives on the surfaces of whichever machines they appropriate.
It is in this sense that 'our civilization runs on software. Without understanding software you are reduced to believing in “magic” and will be locked out of many of the most interesting, profitable, and socially useful technical fields of work.' [Bjarne Stroustrup]
Who benefits from recording these contexts?
The value of recording our contexts lies in mapping our own little world, a changing world of moving between other changing worlds. We benefit by having an invariant diagram, not of the entire territory which we will encounter, but of encountering and operating on territory as such, including our own.
Finally, we can understand software as a social machine as well as a technical machine. Our software-based worlds run on concepts. [Fred Brooks] Without understanding the concept from the standpoint of the event [WiP], we are reduced to the confusions of “magicians” and will be delayed from producing many of the most joyful, desirable, and continuous lines of development.
Where is information about the contextualised work?
Our work is described on the Approach and the Services pages. You can also browse the Projects page, where our development work is organised.