Lisa
Messeri

This talk explores scale and simulation. In the scientific context, simulations are often epistemic tools that can be larger or smaller or faster or slower than the target of study. But in cases where the thing of interest is that which is remote or inaccessible, the scale is simply 1:1. How ought we think about simulations that are drawn to scale; simulations that claim to be a faithful replication of the real thing? Lisa Messeri draws on three examples of simulation from her research as an anthropologist of science and technology: a landscape on Earth meant to simulate a landscape on Mars, a virtual reality experience meant to simulate being in a different body, a large language model meant to simulate being in conversation with another human. While simulations are generally accepted as intentional fabrications of the real, there is something tricky about the 1:1 scale. Those fabricating and experiencing this scale often desire to forget that the simulation is meant to be ‘like’ something else, wondering if it might simply ‘be’ that other thing. Each of the cases teases out a different hazard of these 1:1 simulations, as well as the pleasures that come from engaging with things at scale.

Lisa Messeri is an associate professor at Yale University, specializing in the anthropology of science and technology. Her research focuses on the norms, aspirations, and consequences of work done by expert communities as they forge new fields of knowledge and invention. She is the author of Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds(Duke University Press, 2016) as well as In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles (Duke University Press, 2024). Her research has been covered in numerous outlets, including The New York Times, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, Wired, Forbes, Scientific American. She is currently researching the epistemic risks that AI holds for the scientific enterprise.

ICI Berlin

Scales are used to quantify properties such as length and temperature, or also to measure popularity and affect. But as Alice discovers in Wonderland, a change of scale can also have dramatic qualitative consequences. It disrupts customary ways of perceiving, acting, and being — to the point of feeling as ‘queer’ to her as a caterpillar’s metamorphoses. Helped by the arguably inextricable intertwinement of different meanings and aspects of scale, Alice’s experiences continue to provide apt metaphors for the disorienting importance and effects of scale and scaling at a time of hyperglobalization and the so-called anthropocene.

Scale is indeed a highly ambiguous notion, even when one only considers the meanings deriving from the Latin or Italian scala, ladder. It simultaneously denotes the whole ladder, one of its steps, and the relation between two steps: The scale of a cartographic map is the ratio between a distance on the map and a distance on the ground, but any particular length also defines a scale, and the range of scales from the subatomic to the planetary scale is part of the spatial scale. Paradoxically recursive, scale combines and helps mediate quantity and quality, as well as subjective perception, objective material properties, and contingent construction.

If different disciplines, discourses, and dispositives each have their privileged scales to which they tend to reduce others, what may be gained by thinking them together, acknowledging both the relative autonomy of particular scales — each with their own affordances, limitations, rules, even laws and ontologies — and their interdependence — each affecting and being affected by other scales? What is the critical purchase of developing multiscalar architectures or patchworks of scale-specific, mutually inconsistent and irreducible descriptions, theories, and models? How might the tensions be made productive where they overlap or come into contact? The ICI’s Lecture Series ‘Scale’ will address such questions by reflecting upon the critical role of scale within and across a wide range of different fields.

The audience is presumed to consent to a possible recording on the part of the ICI Berlin.
If you would like to attend the event yet might require assistance, please contact Event Management.