Ian Pollock

A movie you’ve seen more than 7 times with a gif.

The Clothworkers Textile Project have been looking at two 'Pua Kumbu' textiles from Sarawak. Collected a century apart in 1908 & 2019, they were made using a combination of ikat dyeing and backstrap loom weaving, a technique unique in its use of fibres and dyes endemic to the jungles of Borneo.

I'm writing a study of a social/economic system that makes a better future by storing wealth in relationships.

Soon I'll start a new job leading human-centered research to make aged care in Australia safer and better.

Oh wow... when it spreads to Ruteng and Waingapu we'll know we've really got something

Looks like NTT has been spared DPRD fires so far...?

"Hey you know that bit in the Name of the Rose where he talks about how great lists are?!"

Indonesia rn

High-pitched voice theory - Neanderthal - BBC science YouTube video by BBC Studios

Start your sunday with this

I just came within a hair's breadth of telling my actual son to "measure once cut twice" @dungeonsanddads.bsky.social

Hello, I'm an anthropologist in a film. I am grossly appropriative and condescendingly academic, and I have a moral relativism the audience finds disgusting. The heroes will see my support for my community as both foolish and traitorous.

I once saw a sign like this at ANU, something like, "Do not remove the stack of paper below this sign: it is blocking an air vent with a possum inside."

What will you take from the last three days that you didn't have before?

What has surprised or struck you?

What do you want to keep thinking about?

#AusSTS25

Anyone who was part of the conference, it'd be great to see your thoughts in the replies ⬇️ #AusSTS25

To really really close, @carinatruyts.bsky.social leads a reflection on the conference:

I heard

I saw

I felt

I made

#AusSTS25

(There's some old French intellectual history and theory in here that I'm sure plenty of people in this room are familiar with, but I'm not)

We cannot control ghosts. We can only let them get on with their work. #AusSTS25

Some theorists want to pathologize noise. Others see it as a valuable hauntology: noise as specter, interference, a disturbing tone, disorienting. A hauntology disturbs an ontology, overthrows a hegemony.

#AusSTS25

Closing us out, it's @wombatscholar.bsky.social (University of Sydney), with "noise as an attention ecology, or hauntology"

#AusSTS25

Public health can benefit from taking multiple ways of knowing on board: health humanities, ecological science. Help to attune to the noise, to the extending set of relations between drugs, bodies, waters, politics, inequalities, ecologies. #AusSTS25

The potential for drug harm is a transferable concept. Can we attribute addiction and withdrawal to fish? Hyper-aggressive meth-gators? Coke-eels? #AusSTS25

Tons of research have established that harm from drug use is socially mediated. Wastewater testing, with the social elements removed, can be a proxy for use, but not for harm. #AusSTS25

Testing wastewater promises a non-invasive, accurate, real-time stream of evidence about drug use, about which other kinds of evidence are noisy. In the water, the signal is meant to be clean: drug use, separated from bodies and social practices. #AusSTS25

In wastewater epidemiology, we can see how human activities, like drug use, entangle much more than human worlds. It's ecological, an environmental problem. #AusSTS25

Spectacles of Waste <p>The modern bathroom is an ingenious compilation of locked doors, smooth porcelain, 4-ply tissue and antibacterial hand soap, but despite this miracle of indoor plumbing, we still can&rsquo;t bear t...

The value and risks posed by feces are now on everybody's minds. #AusSTS25 www.wiley.com/en-ae/Specta...

Checking wastewater for evidence of drug use -- both medical and recreational/illegal -- is now widespread around the world. It's a technoscientific solution that aims to clean up the mess and eliminate noise. #AusSTS25

Up next, Kari Lancaster (University of Bath) with "Shitty signals: wastewater epidemiology, addicted fish, and an ecological wrong-turn." Some wild entanglements here. #AusSTS25

Now everyone can be a quantified selfer, but the use of this data is moribund. It still takes real medical expertise to make any sense of the data. Meanwhile it's being financialized by the insurance industry, and turned to biopower by RFK Jr. and MAHA. It's the opposite of emancipatory. #AusSTS25

From a niche, to the world. In 2014, Apple launched the Health app; in 2015, the Apple Watch. Now self-measurement is a data practice to which there seems to be no alternative. #AusSTS25

Ok then: so the recent "quantified self" movement: a NoCal, tech-savvy group of people measuring everything about themselves, learning from their own data and doing self-experiments, "decoding" themselves in a way they felt the medical establishment couldn't or wouldn't. #AusSTS25

Foucault's intervention is to say, "you're both wrong:" neither patient nor illness is sending a message. The body is noise, and the doctor attends to that noise, seeking elements of a message. No single approach will "informatize" all that noise. #AusSTS25