World of the News

LAUNCH: 01 Feb 2012. 17-18:00.
transmediale festival/Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

World of the News – The world’s greatest peer-reviewed newspaper of in/compatible research presents cutting edge in/compatible research in an accessible FREE tabloid format. The newspaper partly addresses academia’s increasing demand for publication of academic peer-reviewed journal articles. Perhaps researchers need new visions of how to produce and consume research?

The content of the newspaper derives from a Ph.D. workshop and conference held in November 2011, at University of the Arts, Berlin (organised by Aarhus University in collaboration with transmediale/reSource for transmedial culture and the Vilém Flusser Archive). This provided an insight into current research from academics, practitioners, and Ph.D. researchers from an open call. Leading up to that event, and subsequent to it, a blog (this blog) has been gathering draft articles and discussions, reflecting on the key issues. This collaborative ‘peer-review’ process is further developed during the festival itself, on 01 February, 2012. So, although this may seem like old news in many ways, in terms of research practices, it breaks with some of the current academic conventions of peer-review, academic reputation, and what constitutes proper scholarly activity.

DOWNLOAD: http://darc.imv.au.dk/worldofthenewspaper.pdf
PUBLISHERS: transmediale/Digital Aesthetics Research Centre, Aarhus University
DESIGNERS: Manuel Bürger, Timm Häneke, Till Wiedeck
EDITORS: Geoff Cox & Christian Ulrik Andersen
CONTRIBUTORS: Christian Ulrik Andersen, Cesar Baio, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Zach Blas, Morten Breinbjerg, Geoff Cox, Lina Dokuzović, Jacob Gaboury, Kristoffer Gansing, Baruch Gottlieb, Jakob Jakobsen, Ioana Jucan, Dmytri Kleiner, Thomas Bjoernsten Kristensen, Magnus Lawrie, Giannina Lisitano, Aymeric Mansoux, Alex McLean, Rosa Menkman, Gabriel Menotti, Andrew Murphie, Jussi Parikka, Søren Pold, Morten Riis, Lasse Scherffig, Cornelia Sollfrank, Mathias Tarasiewicz, Tiziana Terranova, Marie Thompson, Nina Wenhart, Carolin Wiedemann, Siegfried Zielinski.

Further info:
http://darc.imv.au.dk/?p=2700
http://www.transmediale.de/content/launch-thematic-publication-world-news

Technical mastery of markets – promised since the London Stock Exchange ‘Big Bang’ of 1986 – is visible today as a bare wire ‘aesthetics of reduction’; Disparities born of the crisis, together with greater transparency in investment business, have exposed the unprecedented complexity and interdependent aspects of today’s world economy. Steep reductions in market value are a counterpoint to growing intricacy in economic circuitry, as efforts to restore confidence in this system give way to fundamental restructuring. Globalized markets are more responsive than ever to events. Around the clock news and social media are alert to government and corporate criminality. Instances like the News Corp ‘phone-hacking’ debacle, raise political awareness and invigorate rumour mills driving market sentiment. Governments are not alone in fanning flames of publicity – in the United States’ with the pursuit of WikiLeaks; In London at St. Paul’s Cathedral, where internal strife has become a conduit for interest in the Occupy LSE protest.

Such events and the responses to them, have exposed fault lines in ground shared by institutions and publics. There is a vying for attention and influence, moreover, for the revision of rules. In the present political climate, geared towards the reduction of cultural, educational and social public goods, commons-related terminology is coming into general use. This language may be at the bedrock of newly evolving social interfaces, embodying moments of public discourse. Debates on openness and responsibility are also at the nub of perceived incompatibility, and can appear far more disruptive than cohesive; As it encounters austerity-led assaults on public social welfare, the ethos of open questioning may be contributing to a moment of profound ‘techno-cultural uneasy’. This is characterized by widespread contesting, and recalibration of authority which will ultimately strengthen, or work against government hegemony.

Cuts have led to protest in many quarters, including from disparate individuals, as well as self-organizing, self-instituted groups. Of these, some have a specific focus on creativity and creative communities. This is alongside a plethora of (also creative) protest groups and wider movements questioning the extent of, and indeed need for cuts. In their re-imagining of relations and in their active dismantling, appropriation and reproduction of social and economic systems, individuals and groups locate and create public interfaces of collectivity and connectedness. ‘Occupy’ war veterans in the US offer easy comparisons with social unrest of the 1960s and 70s. Hacker-inspired public goods institutions, like the Peer-to-Peer Foundation, propose however, that a different dynamic now exists, as the consequence of a generation born-digital (shareable.net, 2011). This effort to describe co-operative, participatory modes and forms of engagement, may be a popularization of Actor Network Theory, a description of human social interaction which emphasises frameworks over the proposition of an existing ‘social fabric’ (Latour, 2005).

Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation talks of inter-meshing patterns in society. Hackers and artists have often seen their practices bound into constellations of extraneous, sometimes occupied, spaces. Is it now time these ‘carved out’ spaces leave reputations as pirate enclaves, for the frame of public goods? Artists, hackers and activists today address representation in new ways, through new processes, re-evaluating conditions for creativity: the evolution of Community Wireless Networking into commons-based advocacy for open hardware and open knowledge, is one example; copyleft, with its heritage in social-technical exchange, is another. How we understand and re-imagine emerging structures of contemporary global society, both from the position of consumers and producers (receivers and creators of value), could be significant to continued resolution of forms addressing technical problems, through social dimensions, for future public good.

References

Latour, B., 2005. Reassembling The Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford:Oxford University Press

shareable.net, 2011. Michel Bauwens: Patterns That Point to the Future [online] Available at http://www.shareable.net/blog/michel-bauwens-patterns-that-point-to-the-future [Accessed 31 October 2011]

Abstract: As the popularization and cultivation of glitch artifacts is now spreading more widely, it is interesting to track the development of these processes and their consequences. One of these consequences is that we can consider glitch as an artistic genre. But what does saying ‘glitch is a genre’ actually say?

The fatal manner of glitch, its orientation towards the destruction of what is, can present a problem to those who want to describe old and new culture as a continuum of different discrete practices. One way to deal with this problem is to repeatedly coin new terms and concepts to make room for splinter practices within the expanding media cultural field. An abundance of designations such as databending, datamoshing and circuitbending have come into existence to name and bracket varieties of glitch practices, but all in fact refer to similar practices of breaking flows within different technologies or platforms.

While technological glitch is primarily a process of shock requiring investigation and cognition, glitch art is best described as a collection of forms and events that oscillate between extremes: the fragile, technologically-based moment(um) of a material break, the conceptual or techno-cultural investigation of breakages, and the accepted and standardized commodity that a glitch can become. To encapsulate a whole range of unstable processes and sometimes almost contradictory intentions of glitch artists, it is useful to consider glitch art as a genre. In thinking about a genre that encompasses both the most rebellious and the most stable or commoditized works of glitch, the first question that arises is whether there can even be any common denominator in these works. What does saying ‘glitch is a genre’ actually say?

To consider glitch art as a genre is to emphasize that genres are social and consensus-based constructs, rather than definitive categories.[1] Steve Neale has suggested that genres are best understood as processes:

The process-like nature of genres manifests itself as an interaction between three levels: the level of expectation, the level of the generic corpus, and the level of the ‘rules’ or ‘norms’ that govern both. […] the elements and conventions of a genre are always in play rather than being, simply re-played; and any generic corpus is always being expanded.[2]

While genres are always ‘in play’, they also – by definition – have some sort of organized and perceived unity. This unity models both how a viewer perceives any work in the genre and how she comes to associate new works within it. Mary Ann Doane suggests that ‘the unity of a genre is generally attributed to consistent patterns in thematic content, iconography, and narrative structure’.[3] In glitch art, this ‘thematic content’ can be found within the work’s language and design, while iconographic and narrative themes are positioned within glitch art’s investment in the rupture of procedures and technique, the break from a flow or the void of meaning in the social understanding and the esthetical references.

To call glitch a genre also means to suggest that it is intelligible as a tendency: to exploit medium-reflexivity and to take on the rhetorical questioning of the perfect use and function of technologies, their conventions and expectations. Paradoxically then, out of its instantiation in error and breakages, Glitch art can, through its play with conventions and expectations, be described as a genre that fulfills certain expectations. This reflexive approach to materiality in glitch tends to, as Katherine Hayles would assert, re-conceptualize materiality itself as ‘the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies’. Rather than suggesting media materiality as fixed in physicality, Hayles’ re-definition is useful because it opens the possibility of considering texts as embodied entities while still maintaining a central focus on interpretation. In this view of materiality, it is not merely an inert collection of physical properties but a dynamic quality that emerges from the interplay between the text as a physical artifact, its conceptual content, and the interpretive activities of readers and writers.[4]

Glitch genres perform reflections on materiality not just on a technological level, but also by playing off the physical medium and its non-physical, interpretative or conceptual characteristics. To understand a work from the genre of glitch art completely, each level of this notion of (glitch) materiality should be studied: the text as a physical artifact, its technological and aesthetical qualities, conceptual content, and the interpretive activities of artists and audiences.

How can we create a digital Utopia based on hardware made under unfair conditions? Bernard Stiegler claims that our age is not properly called post.modern, or post-industrial, but rather hyper-industrial and hyper-modern, all our advanced knowledge still relies on hardware which functions fundamentally mechanically. . Its shadow reminds us that knowledge has its excess, unknown, incomplete, unspeakable, opaque, taboo. This paper will address the apparent incompatibility between faith in science as the guiding light of humanity, and the intractable problem of the persistence of unfair and unjust material human conditions under which the instruments predicating such a scientific Utopia would emerge.
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PAPER

Can we see in the predilections of our hardware the concretion of certain social priorities?

Can such social priorities be said to invoke ethical models?

And if both of these questions can be taken, can we then infer that ethical values are inscribed in our hardware?

If the response to the last question is positive, as I would like to argue, we have a situation where the highly miniaturized, multiplied automated processes of the hardware that make today’s industrial reality run are perpetuating certain overarching ethical values, and that these values deserve our acknowledgement and analysis.

The materiality of our contemporary environment is the product of large, to varying degrees global processes involving the collaboration of myriad people; excavating, smelting, soldering, thinking, planning, moving the materials around until they have settled in the forms we can observe here today. Whatever moves upon the surface is the result of this massive human interaction.

The production of the contemporary surface is always a project which requires collusion, as Bruno Latour put it “An object cannot come into existence if the ranges of interests around the project do not intersect.”(1) these overlapping ranges of interests constitute society. Latour was speaking of the realisation of complex projects like the VAL suburban rail system in Lille but it can be applied to the spontaneous collaboration between myriad disparate companies comprehended in any contemporary technical product.

There is a sociology, and an anthropology of the technological present. Furthermore I claim the physical reality of contemporary objects are materially inscribed with the social processes by which they were generated. Therefore there is an archaeology or an anarcheology of the contemporary surface which reveals social networks and their mores, what Pierre Lemonnier calls “Material Culture”.

The human technological product is the site of a battle for ideological hegemony, and claims of its neutrality are politically spurious. We could, from today, have a very different world of technical effects and objects, engendering different world-views and sociabilities, if, or course, the “ranges of interests” of enough people involved would intersect to support enough divergent projects.

Instead, we today live in a symbiosis of liberationist techno-optimism and conservative techno-pragmatism. Take for example the utopian rhetoric surrounding mobile technologies. The shadow cast by the gleaming LED faces of digital images are in the short- or narrow-sighted design errors which have caused the deaths of (according to the US Congress)(2)(3) over six million people.

A holocaust broke out in the late nineties when engineers at Apple, Nokia, and other electronics manufacturers determined to use tantalum in their circuit boards. Tantalum’s unique heat-resistant and high-conducting properties allowed the next generation smartphones, games and laptops to be designed thinner and lighter. Nobody asked where these materials would come from. Wars broke out for control of mines in DRC and Zambia, and millions were killed. This was patently a design decision which went wrong. Is the design neutral? As neutral as slaughter.

In 2002 the European community decided to ban the use of lead in solder. The project was called ROHS, it came into full effect in 2006. Other, safer alternatives to poisonous lead, such as tin, were available, which would protect tens of thousands of electronics assemblers around the world. No-one asked about where the tin would come from.

World-wide transition to non-lead solder for electronics meant that massive and inexpensive new sources of tin would suddenly have to be found(4). Suddenly a civil war sprung up in eastern Congo over cassiterite (tine ore) mines(5), hundreds of thousands were raped and murdered as militias, and sections of national armies, often supported by multinational mining corporations battled for control of the mines. There will be no Nürnberg for the inadvertent bureaucratic criminals, who simply though ignorance generated mass slaughter.

Since the earliest days of our 200-year industrial revolution, and before, back through to our philosophical ancestors in the greeks and Egyptians, we can observe tolerance for collateral damage, human exploitation, slavery, indentured labour, excused by progressive rhetoric. We need to see that cruelty as part of the pedigree of our technological and scientific accomplishments.

We cannot plan, or even conceive of a technical utopia, a ‘better world thought technology’ when this would have to be predicated on hardware created under unacceptable conditions. Or we can, but it is pure vanity. I disparage the cultural pedigree of this vanity. I deny the neutrality of hardware as I assert its persistence as a record, an archive of the social conditions of its emergence. As Garcia & Sandler concluded in their article about whether human technological enhancement could help resolve social justice problems “We must fix social injustice, the technologies will not do it for us”.(6)

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Project: iMine

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Footnotes
1. Latour, Bruno, “Ethnography of a “High-Tech” Case”, in Lemonnier, Pierre, ed. Technological Choices, p.391

2. 3.5 million people died between 1998-2001 according to U.S. House Sub- Committee on International Operations and Human Rights, “Congressional Testimony of Les Roberts, Director of Health Policy at the International Rescue Committee,” 107th Cong., 2nd sess., 7 May 2001, 2.

3. By 2009, over 6 million are said to have died directly due to the conflict minerals trade: as recorded in U.S. House of Representatives Bill bill H. R. 4128 To improve transparency and reduce trade in conflict minerals, and for other purposes. 111th CONGRESS, 1st Session, November 19, 2009

4. http://www.connectorsupplier.com/tech_updates_Hult_RoHS_6-6-06.htm

5. CONNECTING COMPONENTS, DIVIDING COMMUNITIES Tin Production for Consumer Electronics in the DR Congo and Indonesia FinnWatch / FANC December 2007

6. Garcia, T & Sandler, R. Enhancing Justice, in Nanoethics (2008) 2, 286, Springer, Dodrecht, 2008

*note: this paper is already over 20 typed pages; shortening this research is incredibly difficult, so my apologies that this text is a bit longer*

Queer Viralities: On Technologies and Weapons of Queerness

Queerness and the viral connect on numerous fronts, to its histories with HIV/AIDS, controlling medical practices and rhetorics to bare-backing subcultures and anti-capitalist tactics and frameworks. The virus carries along with it themes common to queerness, such as risk, transgression, amorphousness, and multiplicity. Queerness could be said to exist in a paradoxical relation to the virus, as it is both subjected to viral control yet also finds the virus playful and pleasurable.

A queer interest in the virus might be to experiment with parsing the dominant configurations of the virus and the viral. What a virus is and does cannot only be extracted into the qualifier viral just as the qualities of the viral cannot be reduced to the virus. We could say a virality, or viral, is one of many possible identities of the virus (constructed by the human) or that the viral is a creative opening / disturbance into fictions of the virus. Just as queerness has pulled apart supposedly causal relations between sex, sexuality, gender, and subjectivity, a queer viral politics must experiment with parsing the virus and viral in search of minor, or alternative, viralities. A queer viral politics is one way to expand queerness into the realm of the nonhuman.

Today, everything has seemingly gone viral: there are virus outbreaks, fears of vaccine shortages, Anti-Viral Kleenex, PC computer viruses, and AntiVirus Security Software; and just as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have described the new world order’s institutional structure “like a software program that carries a virus along with it, so that it is continually modulating and corrupting the institutional forms around it,” there is now viral marketing, viral advertising, and viral media to aid, support, and propagate this structure  (Hardt and Negri 2001, 197-198). Concurrently, there is the emergence of theories like viral ecology, viral philosophy, viral capitalism, viral politics, viral affect, and viral aesthetics to diagnose our culture. Perhaps theorist Thierry Bardini is right to suggest that the virus is the major trope of the postmodern condition.

These instances help us attempt to answer the question: What are our viral politics today? While Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker have written that “viruses and diseases are obviously not to be looked at as models for progressive political action,” our contemporary moment forces and urges us to look there (Galloway and Thacker 2007, 96). Galloway and Thacker hint that the virus, as a product of globalization and conquest as well as computer security and digital control, is a dead end for radical politics. Yet, political art collectives like The Electronic Disturbance Theater, 0100101110101101.org, and Queer Technologies use the virus as an anti-capitalist tactic. If these groups create a notion of the virus|viral that does not simply coincide with capitalism, are there other possibilities for a radical viral politics that could function differently?

Virus|Virus 1: Action, or Replication and Cryptography

Representations of the virus|viral today typically hinge on rapid spreadability and mutation. In fact, wherever one looks, the virus has gained the most attention through its abilities to replicate and disseminate. In line with this perspective of the virus, Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, two theorists who have written extensively on viruses, state that the virus is “life exploiting life,” that is, viruses take advantage of their host entities to generate more copies of themselves (2007, 83). The virus succeeds in producing its copies through a process Galloway and Thacker refer to as “never-being-the-same” (2007, 87). Maintaining within itself the ability to continuously mutate its code with each reproduction, the virus propagates itself. Defining the virus based on action, they write:

Replication and cryptography are thus the two activities that define the virus. What counts is not that the host is a “bacterium,” “an animal,” or a “human.” What counts is the code–the number of the animal, or better, the numerology of the animal. [...] The viral perspective is “cryptographic” because it replicates this difference, this paradoxical status of never-being-the-same. [...] What astounds us is that the viral perspective presents the animal being and creaturely life in an illegible and incalculable manner, a matter of chthonic calculations and occult replications (2007, 87).

While social media and viral marketing stress the replication and spreadability of the virus, it ignores the virus’ mutating, never-being-the-sameness. Current theorizations of capitalism, however, focus on both the replication and mutation of the virus. Media theorist Jussi Parikka takes Hardt and Negri’s assertion that capitalism is like a virus further in his writings on viral capitalism. He notes that capitalism is now viral in that it is capable of continuous modulation and heterogenesis (Parikka 2007, 96). “The commodity,” he writes, “works as a virus–and the virus part of the commodity circuit” (2007, 97). Viral capitalism replicates itself through a mutating act of never-being-the-sameness, that is, it continuously modulates and reproduces to maintain a global infection. Viral capitalism is another gesture toward theorizing our phase of control capitalism, which has many other labels–ludic capitalism, Empire, protocological control, Deleuzian Capitalism, and digital and liquid capitalism, all underscoring unstable, rapid fluxes of unhuman flows that induce a general commodification of life itself. Viral capitalism highlights the “infectious” nature of this multiplicitous, morphing control process.

Queer Technologies has, at times, described it work as a viral aesthetics, producing works that attempt to subversively mutate, spread, and modulate in antagonistic relation to capitalism’s own mutating, modulating structure. This has led us to forms of corporate parody and critical design and branding. QT produces queer commodities that attempt to infect capital’s logics and infectiously spread throughout its networks. This work strongly connects to a history of tactical media and hacktivism. View Queer Technologies’ work here. Watch Queer Technologies: Gay Bombs Instruction Video, or How to Build and Use a Gay Bomb.

Virus|Viral 2: Escape

As Queer Technologies began to focus on developments in biometric technologies and their impact on governing bodies’ formations of the definition of identity, we returned to Galloway and Thacker’s concept of never-being-the-sameness and began to formulate a viral as a diagram of escape from forms of recognition-control. Galloway and Thacker have written that, “The next century will be the era of universal standards of identification [...] Henceforth, the lived environment will be divided into identifiable zones and nonidentifiable zones, and nonidentifiables will be the shadowy new ‘criminal’ classes–those that do not identify” (Galloway and Thacker 2009, 259-260). Agamben has previously argued for something similar in The Coming Community: “A being radically devoid of any representable identity would be absolutely irrelevant to the State” (Agamben 1993, 85). What are the techniques for such a practice in relation to biometrics and queerness? What must be done to resist standardizations of recognition and identity capture? Is this viral something that has a presence but aids in processes of cloaking, making invisible, escaping, all through a shifting, altering physical volume. Is this viral dimension a tactic to critically evade identity and recognition control while maintaining a poetic and political never-being-the-sameness?

We have begun to explore this viral through a project titled Facial Weaponization Suite that is focusing on techniques to resist facial recognition capture by becoming unrecognizable with masks fabricated from gay male facial biometric data. We consider these masks weapons, based on various political protest tactics that conceptualize wearing a face as being armed.

Watch Queer Technologies: Fag Face Instruction Video, or How to Escape Your Face.

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. The Coming Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Galloway, Alexander R. and Thacker, Eugene. 2007. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Galloway, Alexander R. and Thacker, Eugene. 2009. “On Narcolepsy.” The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies From the Dark Side of Digital Culture. Cresskill: Hampton Press.

Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Parikka, Jussi. 2007. Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses. New York: Peter Lang.

Endurance – the capacity of continuing through time in spite of difficulty – can be seen as a distinct form of sustainability. Sustainability and sustainable development, defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987: 43), are key concepts in terms of which discourses on nature have been often framed in recent decades. Underlying such discourses has been a longstanding concern with the relation between nature and technology, premised upon an incompatibility between the two.

In one iteration of it, this concern takes the form of the argument regarding “the disenchantment of nature” – “die Entzauberung der Welt,” a term introduced by Max Weber (Weber, 1989: 14, 30) – performed in technology. In the story of the disenchantment of nature, as Bronislaw Szerszynski explains (2005: 5), “as technology’s powers advance, those of nature withdraw.” Technology renders nature fully explainable – calculable and predictable: in a disenchanted world, “there are in principle no mysterious, incalculable powers at work” (Weber, 1989: 13). Disenchanted by technology, nature becomes “a standing reserve” (“Bestand,” in Heidegger’s terminology; 2003: 257) to be used (up). At stake here is the issue of rationality/reason, for calculation is in fact the essence of reason (this, for instance, is the point of Heidegger’s critique of modern technology).

It is precisely this link between rationality/reason and calculation that must be undone according to Jacques Derrida (2005). Derrida undertakes to rethink reason beyond teleology – beyond (and without) necessary determination and certainty. “A reason must let itself be reasoned with” (Derrida, 2005: 159). Unlike teleological reason, which annuls the eventfulness of what comes, “beginning with … the technoscientific invention that ‘finds’ what it seeks” (Derrida, 2005: 128), a reason that lets itself be reasoned with makes possible the unconditioned event (contingency).

To build on Derrida’s thought, I suggest that reasoning with reason is linked to measure (rather than calculation) – to the performance of finding and keeping (the right) measure. “Measure” here means limit, proportion, and standard of comparison. It is the site on which – through the practice of care – seemingly incompatible things and beings can be fittingly brought together and put in relation to one another in ways that make possible the emergence of the event. As such, measure becomes an aesthetic procedure that embraces unpredictability and a form of knowledge that grows from uncertainty, from a place of not (fully) understanding – a place in which, it is worth noting, we often find ourselves in our daily encounters with media technology today.

What difference could such conception of reason make? I would like to propose – perhaps as a thought experiment – that it potentially opens the way for another idea of technology, different from the modern one emphasizing the power of technology to overcome contingency and offer the certainty characteristic of reason (as calculation). This idea would be closer to the one of the classical thinkers (Plato and Aristotle, among others), according to which “technai” – “intrinsically uncertain and unpredictable in their outcomes” – “were activities involving the making of things in a way which was guided by logos, by reason” (Szerszynski, 2005: 52). At the interface between such a conception of technology and nature the possibility of endurance potentially emerges.

Addendum [A Confession]

The last time I felt close to nature was at the Watermill Center, a laboratory for performance and for interdisciplinary research across the arts and sciences founded by multimedia artist Robert Wilson in Long Island, NY. I was there in the summer of 2011 as part of the Watermill international summer program. When I gave voice to my experience (of feeling close to nature), someone remarked: “Funny that you should feel this way here.”

It is funny, indeed, if “nature” means a place unspoiled by human hand. For Watermill is undeniably a (re-)made space, or, rather, a site of constant re-making: it brings together a former industrial facility and various grounds (including woodland, gardens of flowers and of grasses), all redesigned under the artistic direction of Robert Wilson. The inhabitants of this site live amidst and engage with various art pieces, ranging from artifacts of past and present cultures to rocks collected from all over the world. The pots from which they eat and the chairs on which they sit are artworks, too.

Spatially, the Center recalls the (mega)structures of Wilson’s artworks, in which various objects are made to hang together in unexpected ways that make possible different modes of seeing and thinking in the audience. These structures call attention to details and relations among things that otherwise would remain unnoticed. Relatedly, living amidst the artifacts on site challenges the inhabitants of the Center to practice constant care and, thus, to acquire an-other rhythm of being in their environment. Rhythm, the use of time as structuring element, and gesture (the materialization of care in expression), are distinctive marks of a Wilson artwork and instances of his endeavor to find the right measure in performance. In a way, thus, the Watermill Center embodies Wilson’s aesthetic vision and becomes the site of his experiments in rationalizing space and time – reasonably so.

I insist here on the word “site.” As performance theorist Alice Rayner notes, “a site is a creation, not a discovery” – a creation that implicates the pun of site as citation (2002: 352). Indeed, the Watermill Center can be described in such terms. For instance, Andrzej Wirth, co-creator of a video-essay on the Center, observed that Watermill is “architecture quoting theatre, or rather the memory of theatre inscribed in architecture” (Wirth, 2008: online). This act of citation is a matter of performance, which, in turn, is a matter of rendering spatially a present moment elongated in-between the past and the future. In a way, it is a matter of endurance, in its double sense: of that which is capable of being endured (transformation, a process of change), and of that which endures (a structure, a specific mode of being). This concept of endurance is what interests me in this essay.

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. “The ‘World’ of the Enlightenment to Come (Exception, Calculation, Sovereignty).” In Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Ed. Werner Hamacher. Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 2005.

Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology.” In Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition: An Anthology. Eds. Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003, pp.252-265.

Rayner, Alice. “E-scapes: Performance in the Time of Cyberspace.” In Land/scape/theatre. Ed. Una Chaudhuri. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002, pp.350-370.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw. Nature, Technology, and the Sacred. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

Weber, Max. “Science as Vocation.” In Max Weber’s Science as Vocation. Eds. Peter Lassman and Irving Velody. Trans. Michael John. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989, pp.1-31.

Wirth, Andrzej. “Andrzej Wirth and Thomas Martius: Architecture/Theater/Memory.” Accessed October 20, 2011. http://vimeo.com/4515982.

World Commission on Environment and Development. Our Common Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

WARNING: DRAFT – Bib is missing, fine tuning in progress, etc.

Tasunka, Ota (alias Plenty Horses) 1891. Printed caption: 'The Grabill Portrait and View Co., Deadwood, S.D. Our company is incorporated under State Laws. Views all copyrighted. Will give a handsome reward for detection of anyone copying our pictures.'

Wild Wide Web

When talking about new discoveries, and to translate the actions of pioneers pushing the frontier of knowledge into uncharted territories, it is popular to use metaphors related to the 19th century American Old West. In that regard, Internet culture is no exception and is still widely seen as an ex-wonderland of free spirits, that is now suffocating under corporate lobbies. After a few decades of educating savages with marketing best practice, web apps and black box APIs, the Net is perceived today as a bureaucratic conquest where the old world settlers are imposing their law in order to control the natives’ digitally born content. With this fantastic decor set, and as a thought experiment, we can easily push further the comparison and analyse this particular permission issue through the archetypes of Sergio Leone’s ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.’

The Good

The good content creator is respectful of the code and the law and contribute to its ongoing evolution and interpretation. Depending on how she envisions the question of access, publishing and sharing of information, she can either adopt a copyright or copyleft practice. Unlike some popular myths that present copyleft as a radical departure from copyright laws, they are in fact the two sides of the same “good” coin. In the end even though copyleft practitioners manipulate copyright laws to enable culture to be free within the settlers state, they both aim at making legitimate a conditional access to culture and artistic freedom.

The Bad

At the opposite, the bad content creator is an outlaw. She is frequently mashing and remixing material from peers or mainstream sources, following, when available, unspoken rules of attribution and credits. Such practice is nothing new: appropriation artists use material and content produced by others regardless of their right to do so; mail artists aim to develop their relationship outside of copyright laws; anarchists, situationists and many more neoists have been playing with and within the copyright/anti-copyright dialectic; finally some works of art are simply strategically illegal.

Ugliness and systematic ambiguity

Anything that is not explicitly developed within an appropriate framework is constantly threatened to fall back into copyright or be excluded. The artistic software PiDiP released with a copyleft license, has been outcast from the Pure Data community, because the author refused to remove a personal statement that conflicted with the GPL. In a such a dichotomy system, the practice that led to the creation of PiDiP becomes incompatible and impossible. It contradicts the system it is born within, yet the systems survives the paradox, becomes stronger, and bans the mutant software. Tarring, feathering and peace in the community. We are witnessing a systematic ambiguity, a Baudrillard ‘prise d’otage’ that is turning ugly, but one that gives birth to the third archetype of our tale.

The ugly is everything that cannot be expressed by a content creator stuck within this binary morale. The Ugly is the mutation that makes the social and political context of authorship and production both tangible and compatible with the system: the GPL license is mutating into the exception GPL, the peer production license rises from the CC-BY-SA, and the Free Art License turns copyleft into system art.

Where to eat after the movie?

Back to Leone’s work, and just like the symbiosis between the media industry and piracy, while being used for the profit of the Good, the Bad is eventually killed. The Ugly who tried to negotiate its existence throughout the whole tale, is left alive by the hero in a cemetery in the middle of nowhere without any means of transport. That he survives or not, does not matter. On his own, as an accident of nature, he can do no harm in the Good’s post Wild West modernity.

But unlike the movie, this part of our tale is not quite written yet. As we are getting closer to the end of the pioneering era of networked media, it is obvious that content creators are increasingly forced to be good and make legitimate a specific definition of artistic freedom that goes hand in hand with capitalist and liberal agendas. What happens next depends on the Ugly which has yet to prove it is more than a freak of law. Like a mutating opportunistic bacteria, ugly creations are waiting to multiply, strive on and bring to its knees the sterile goodness of a world that forgot how bad it actually is.

Looking back: During the 19^th century, formal and epistemological models of western art, which had to a large degree expressed dogmas of ‘transparent’ communication, were challenged and eventually abandoned. This entailed, for instance, a mistrust in linear perspective, that for centuries served as a general matrix for representing and mediating relations between mathematics and spirituality, reality and perception, objects and concepts. As such, perspective was recognized as a format compatible with a variety of artistic expressions and philosophical ideas, capable of establishing a direct line of communication between represented objects and viewer. Eventually this convention was redefined within the modern, autonomous system of art.

Questions of compatibility were continuously important to artists of the 19^th century, but in ways very different from previous times. Firstly, the scientific theories that now informed artists’ exploration of compatibility between different art media (for example, the equivalence of musical scale and optical spectrum) and between world and artwork (i.e. the search for true representation) no longer hinged on doctrines of geometric harmony and universal order, but had instead to do with discoveries of the propagation and vibration of waves, as well as new insights into the human perceptual system. Secondly, the renewed recognition of relations between reality and perception involved a shift of attention to the apparatus of the medium itself. And thirdly, this shift exposed how the communicative nature of art was full of noises, interferences, and interruptions rather than indicative of ideals of rationality and clarity.

Georges Seurat, "La Parade de Cirque", painted 1887–88. Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA

One example to illustrate this could be the pointillist paintings of Georges Seurat (alongside examples of impressionism, later futurism, cubism, etc). Following a number of contemporary theories of colour and vision, Seurat pursued a scientifically true form of representation by use of ‘pointillist’ technique. The results were generally considered as unsuccessful in terms of being truthful representations of reality, for obvious reasons. However, the artistic-scientific system of Seurat involved crucial aesthetic transpositions. Not only did the pointillist model, anchored in the science of polymaths such as Hermann Von Helmholtz, demonstrate that the optical effect of colour was a subjectively bound construction; a result of interference or ‘noise’ in subjective perception. It also implied a change of the status of the perceiving subject from being a passive receiver of stimuli from external objects into an active contributor to the making of perception itself.

Seurat’s idea of a scientific system of painting that atomized – or, in fact, digitized – the picture plane in order to attain the highest degree of realism, thus, turned onto itself and proved the opposite: Namely, that the intervention of an actively receiving subject implied unexpected degrees of noise in the communicative process. As such this can be seen as the exposure of a fundamental incompatibility between ideals of realist artistic representation and scientific insight. Also, it puts emphasis on the incompatibilities of the medium per se, which in turn had its role redefined from being a ‘silent transmitter’ of meaning between an outside world of objects and a receiver, to instead exploring its inherent means and effects and thereby displaying its noises and distortions.

Listen now: Ideas of ‘in/compatibility’ are an obvious inspiration to many artists working within the field of electronic and digital media. Numerous examples of glitch-, noise-, and malfunction-aesthetics could readily be analyzed under this heading. Furthermore, plurimedial experiments promoted by labels such as Raster-Noton or Touch. deal with strategies of sonificiation and visualization which often gain both aesthetic effect and semantic strength from more or less apparent references to the in/compatibility of formats, media, and diverse data material.

Frank Bretschneider," EXP" live (photo: C. Scorteanu, Conception Lévy)

When looking behind or listening closely to the immediate expressive effect of these ‘purely’ digital art works, similar questions about ideal representation, media-noise, and silent/transparent transmission seem to arise, as they did in connection with, for instance, proto-digitizing pointillism and the countless radical, formal experiments that followed, including the domain of music and literature. Thus, it is exactly these similarities, differences and isomorphisms between early modern artistic-scientific thoughts on in/compatibility and contemporary digital aesthetic strategies that could be investigated further.

Works cited:

Clarke, Bruce & D. Henderson, Linda: From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature (Stanford Univ. Press, 2002).
Crary, Jonathan: Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (MIT Press, 2001)
Demers, Joanna T.: Listening Through the Noise: the Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music, (Oxford Univ. Press, 2010)
Elkins, James: The Poetics of Perspective (Cornell University Press, 1996)
Schiff, Richard, “Realism of Low Resolution: Digitisation and Modern Painting”, in Terry
Smith, ed., Impossible Presence: Surface and Screen in the Photogenic Era (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001).

While recent years have seen the spring of numerous research initiatives for preserving and archiving Media Art, the question remains if these artworks are archive-able at all, archive-able in the traditional sense. Database archives and research initiatives have been launched and then disappeared again, without offering solid, sustainable solutions. Increasing technological decay and the loss or subsequent inaccessibility of data not only poses a threat to Digital Cultural Heritage – of which New Media Art constitutes an important part – but also show the shortcomings of traditional archival practices when applied to this field.

Speculative archiving starts by understanding a work of art as an ongoing process. It therefore qualifies artistic re/production and radical modifications as legitimate ways of contributing new aspects to the discourse of archiving Media Art. Rather than in deep storage, solutions for sustainability seem to be provided by the network, in which artistic practices of hacking, remixing and Open Culture, of versions, glitches and pirating, of sampling, appropriation and wild dissemination, are creating novel perspectives on digital originals and mutant life forms on a daily basis. The accelerating loss caused by (politically implemented) incompatibilities of different hardware, of software versions, of decay and obsolescence force us to rethink the archive and its processes. It no longer is a passive place, but has become a hyperactive non-space. By grasping the ‘currents of current culture’, speculative archiving is a critique of the standard model for particles and forces in economic, academic and cultural realities, the particles that matter in this context, the subtext of coded cultures. It departs from traditional archiving in three major points: First, that the artwork is not a product or a closed entity, but a process and open system. Second, that the scope of an archive can no longer be restrained to storage and the prolongation of the shelf life of assets, but has to embrace the circulation of copies, versions, remixes and other forms of modifications. And third, that the original – the holy cow of art history – is finally slaughtered and Walter Benjamin’s concept of the aura in his seminal text “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” has to be rethought with a different mindset.

Speculative archiving is a re/search for&about methodologies that are compatible with the complex and changing issues of Media Art. Far from seeking or resulting in a standard procedure, it is developing, testing, applying and analyzing a diverse range of fluid, modular strategies and methods. On the massively moving waves of technological development Media Art’s survival depends on how well it can adapt to these constant changes. Not anchored to one standard that might be short lived, but freely floating with the best practices available. For in the end, a moving ship is safer when on the open sea than tied to the coast.

“Know ye, now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?”
(H. Melville, Moby Dick, Lee Shore chapter)

New Media Arts as “artistic research and development”¹ between artistic, medial and techno-scientific discourses is research-based and practice-led. It does not produce “final products” but “process artefacts”. In the age of “loss of control” (“Kontrollverlust”²) a change of reception/perception of audiences can be observed. Through multiple, diverse channels of consumption and participation, the creation of attention and user-engagement is crucial to new media arts. In this sense, previous descriptions of new media arts have to be extended regarding “attention economies”³ and in this context being examined on their interactions with phenomena such as “real-time media” and “real-time participation”. Artistic research can be faster than scientific research and can react much more directly to current social and technological developments. Still, new artistic practices are often misunderstood and there have been many attempts made to move “artistic innovations” to the advertising industry or other “creative commonplaces” such as “R&D labs”. While media art-works often show high technological potential, it is often criticised, if this is the only characteristic⁴. New Media Arts should produce “artistic technologies”⁵ and not “economic technologies” to force a much more strict distinction to creative industries. This distinction would make the profile of a critical new media practice much more clear and it would be easier to generate awareness and respect for that field, since a non-popular artwork does not necessarily mean “market failure”. Media Artworks are cultural products (and processes) that force the “production and circulation of symbolic ideas”⁶ and therefore do not need a market as such. Richard Florida is right when stating “human creativity is the ultimate economic resource”⁷ but there is a different meaning for the terms “innovation” and “creativity” when contextualized with the system art or with the system economy. In times when “creativity” becomes a replacement for the term “art”⁸ we have to rethink what we call »new media arts«, remembering that culture should not only be valued for its economic contribution.

Through “empowering cultural artefacts”⁹ and through “enabling technologies” it becomes possible to integrate technological ideas into artistic practice without having to think about feasibility in the first place. Artistic practices in this context changed over the last years¹⁰ (cf. Arns, 2010: “media arts finally matured”) while still not every cultural artefact necessarily becomes an artistic artefact. In the age of the “query public” we have to radically rethink the concept of the public¹¹. Extending the thoughts of Michael Seemann, as “produsers”¹² the artist as researcher finds a transformed and changed (media) situation and needs to re-position his/her work to contextualise artistic practices with works and discourses from the past.

Questions:

* What does “artistic innovation” stand for and how does it differ to scientific and economic innovation?
* How does New Media Art as “innovation research” work—and how does it create a distinct profile with respect to creative industries?
* Is there still the “artwork” in new media arts or can we only describe “process artefacts” that emerge from a contemporary art-based research practice?
* What is the target audience of current new media arts? (new “digital public” vs. art audience)
* What are the discourses and interactions between art and digital communities?
* What are the motivations of creatives/artists beyond the industries—are there (successful) role models or positions that are neither located in fine arts nor in creative industries?
* Is it possible to re-position aesthetics in new media arts that include aspects of the opinion society (aspects of attention)?
* Are “new media aesthetics” moving towards an “attention-maximizing aesthetic” or “distributed aesthetics”?
* What parts of their output do new media artists compared to “process based cultures” see as artistic output?

^{[1] Borgdorff, H. “The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research” in “The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts”, Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson (Eds.), Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2011
[2] Seemann, M.: “Vom Kontrollverlust zur Filtersouveränität” in: Digitale Intimität, die Privatsphäre und das Netz – #public_life, ISBN 978-3-86928-052-3, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, Berlin 2011
[3] Franck, G.: “Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit: Ein Entwurf.” München: Carl Hanser, 1998
[4] Nordmann, A.: “Experiment Zukunft – Die Künste im Zeitalter der Technowissenschaften” in “Künstlerische Forschung”, subtexte03, Institute for the Performing Arts and Film Zürich, 2009
[5] Nowotny, H.: “Foreword” in “The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts”, Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson (Eds.), Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2011
[6] Galloway, S. and Dunlop, S. “Deconstructing the concept of ‘Creative Industries’.” in: Cultural Industries: The British Experience in International Perspective, pp. 33-52., 2006
[7] Florida, R.: “The Rise of the Creative Class. And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life”, Basic Books, 2002
[8] Raunig, G., Wuggenig, U.: »Kritik der Kreativität. Vorbemerkungen zur erfolgreichen Wiederaufnahme des Stücks Kreativität«. In: Raunig, G., Wuggenig, U. (Eds.): Kritik der Kreativität. Wien / Berlin: Turia+Kant, 2007
[9] see in this context: Schäfer, M.T.: “Bastard Culture!”, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2011; Lessig, L.: “Free Culture”, The Penguin Press, New York, 2005
[10] Arns, I.: “Über Zeitgenossenschaft – Die medialen Künste im Zeitalter ihrer postmedialen Kondition”, Kulturpolitische Mitteilungen Nr. 131 IV, 2010
[11] Seemann, M.: “Vom Kontrollverlust zur Filtersouveränität” in: Digitale Intimität, die Privatsphäre und das Netz – #public_life, ISBN 978-3-86928-052-3, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, Berlin 2011
[12] Schäfer, M.T.: “Bastard Culture!”, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2011}