" johoka shakai "

Truth and the information society.

Manual Override

By Evan Calder Williams, thenewinquiry.com

• View Original
• March 21st, 2016

The history of sabotage is the history of capitalism unmaking itself

And if linesmen make connections, can’t you make dis-connections? —Guy Bowman to telephone company workers, The Syndicalist, 1913

"In extending productivity measures to the person as a whole, whereby the self becomes a site of work not only for the labor of self-reproduction but also a project and product to be optimized, biometrically tuned, and circulated as image, the idea of sabotage receives its final twist: that of “self-sabotage,” a buzzword stalking the blasted earth of self-help rhetoric. As in, “3 Steps to Stop Sabotaging Yourself”: “Do you have a talent for self-sabotage? (Sure, you’re on a diet, but another doughnut won’t kill you, right?)” From the same article: “When your animal and computer selves are after the same goal, the two-beings-in-one arrangement works wonderfully. Say you’re a morning person and you work the morning shift. No problema! You know broccoli is good for you, and you love broccoli. Hooray! But when your computer self tries to force your animal self to do something it doesn’t inherently enjoy, you run into trouble. Self-sabotaging trouble, to be exact. In fact, self-sabotaging is almost always your animal self rebelling against not-so-much-fun conditions imposed by your computer self. The computer self builds a sort of cage of obligations and beliefs. Bad habits are your animal self’s attempt to ease its distress while living in that cage…” Or: “Why ‘self-sabotage could be ruining your career.” This belies more than the well-known shift of value production away from a clearly delineated working day. It also suggests that the slow dissemination of sabotage, as a concept, has itself tracked along shifts in the organization not only of capitalism itself but also of its self-narratives, roaming out from industrial waged work as central source of productivity to military contestations over access to territory and energy resource to corporate and office culture to the global subject of flexible accumulation."

Source: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/manual-override/

a contiguous expanse

a sweeping uninterrupted view captures the surrounds of a periphery ... the slow circular movement... clockwise / anticlockwise – forwards / backwards . a revolution is stretched by the interruption of the "interplay of directed actions" ... a transformation or a compression of movement / the panorama extends our field of vision in the hope of revealing a wider truth but the lateral return to its point of origin feels like a second take, a cut, a 'flicker' moment which embeds itself in uncertainty. not perfect, did it miss something? is there something else there to be seen? as it returns to record its passage it leaves behind a stretched pixel, a moment in time when it was something else, attached to something else. a remix, "a rough-cut of sequences"...

information shadows - a brief digest

updated as of : 2015.06

2015_01_install_wall

where is the interface? why can't a wall be an interface? how about a space, a void? is that not an interface? things are unfinished. some patterns seem to be emerging. talk is not about the things, object/images or otherwise, that occupy the wall but more about the ideas which surround them. the embedded meaning or rather the residual value which they impart. their place in the context of greater meaning or whether they even have a place within the space they temporarily inhabit? how to transport a viewer elsewhere? i enjoy encountering a space and making decisions in the moment. how much content to include? where should they be positioned? what is their relation to each other? is there one? a minimalist aesthetic? can one object/image carry that much weight? ...

... i was told to wait ...

images below from 'global / local' summer seminar whitecliffe college of arts and design mfa mid-course submission : 2015.02.16-22 : install at Pearce Gallery and SGBR Studio, 130 Georges Bay road, parnell, auckland

Information shadows

Our thirst for knowledge and our appetite for understanding is what has propelled humanity forward. As we continue to broaden the knowledge based economies of our interconnected lives the data and information we manufacture acts as a conduit where the content we exchange contains a new form of labour. This ‘user activated labour’ results from a transaction where the value of exchange is not immediately one of economics but rather an exchange of information ripe for harvesting. Objects and resources are embedded with an information shadow and as we engage with our data driven society we extend the value of any given resource beyond its sole purpose as a commodity. The information presented here acts as a mediating point and seeks to explore the possibilities where concepts and ideas might exist beyond the boundaries of their function and intent. The accompanying QR codes link to a digital space where ideas exist in another dimension. These black and white cryptographs act as an interface between a physical world and the digital universe.

You will need to download a QR reader to your device to scan and follow the links.

blended-theory

update: 2015.06

This project began as the Data Syphons project.01 on blended-theory. It has since been absorbed into the transparency in exile: eighty-eight or there abouts project. They straddle the same subject matter and as these projects continue to be refined they will migrate into more specific lines of inquiry.

in search of data

For centuries humans have been collecting data. Ever since the first scientists, cartographers and philosophers began to question the boundaries of their existence and to explore the possibilities of the unknown, humans have been collecting, classifying and documenting their observations.

Today we continue to explore the possibilities of pushing our boundaries further outward where we extensively collect the bits and bytes of our interactions. In a series of online projects, blended-theory aims to open up a dialogue around the function of data in the contemporary; who is collecting it, what is it being used for and how might it shape us as we unknowingly participate in a world immersed in the shift to a digital existence.

dataSyphon_03

/ project . 01 encouraging a culture of : remix / sampling / sharing / zero copyright.

bitflips and battlefields : Hito Steyerl

[image] Hito Steyerl, Is a Museum a Battlefield? was shown at the Adam Art Gallery Wellington - 4th July to the 10 August. http://www.adamartgallery.org.nz

If you have never considered a museum as a battlefield, consider again. In Hito Steyerl's lecture/video installation/performance Is the Museum a Battlefield, she gives a convincing presentation that might make you consider otherwise. Her ‘work’ traces the debris from a battlefield in the mountainous areas south of the city of Van, Turkey where the Kurdistan PKK has been fighting for independence from Turkey. Some of the items collected includes the ‘invisible’ shell casings of a 20mm Gatling gun made by General Dynamics.

Steyerl goes on to retrace the origins of these shells back to their manufactures which implicates various corporate and industrial giants in a technological ‘bit-flip’ linking them to the biggest museums in the world through architecture, software, the 'gentrification of culture' and the corporatisation and sponsorship of art institutions by some of largest weapons manufactures in the world.

Steyerl’s uses the term ‘bit-flip’ to describe the dual use of technology, where it can be both culturally and scientifically important but at the same time can act as the collaborator to humankinds atrocities. This usage resonated with my views on the ‘new and disparate interactions’ which we are enacting through our mobile devices. Technically, ‘bit-flip’ is not a word but it suggests a manipulation of sorts where a 0 becomes a 1, an off an on and vice-versa. For me, it conjures up images of multiplicities where intent is polyvalent, where technologies ‘flip back’ on themselves, masking one of their binate ambitions.

The following video is an edited version.

[vimeo 76011774 w=700 h=393]

Documentation of Hito Steyerl's lecture "Is the Museum a Battlefield", first shown at 13th Istanbul Biennial. Steyerl’s new lecture, pro­duced for the 13th Istanbul Biennial, takes as its departure point her March 2013 talk ‘I Dreamed a Dream: Politics in the Age of Mass Art Production’ and focuses on the arms industry, a phenomenon constantly re-conceptualized by the media through the regular flow of images. It asks the question of how a museum and a battlefield could be related. The question emerges when Steyerl follows the trace of an empty bullet casing which she found in the area where the mass grave of Andrea Wolf and her friends were located in Van, Turkey.

disinformation :

DeBord quote

"... disinformation [...] is openly employed by particular powers, or consequently, by people who hold fragments of economic or political authority, in order to maintain what is established; and always in a counter-offensive role.

If occasionally a kind of disinformation threatens to appear, in the service of particular interests temporarily in conflict, and threatens to be believed, getting out of control and thus clashing with the concerted work of a less irresponsible disinformation, there is no reason to fear that the former involves other manipulators who are more subtle or more skilled: it is simply because disinformation now spreads in a world where there is no room for verification."

Debord, G. (1998). Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. London, UK: Verso

debord-Rad America V4 I5-page-001

recomposited : from code to cortex to cognition

As we endeavour to navigate the contemporary our reliance on the mobile device to mediate an interstice between our reality and our imagined environments has become more and more evident as we increasingly shift from an analogue interaction into a digital interface. Our new devices facilitate a transaction whereby they operate as the inputs and outputs to our everyday life. They function as both a gathering device and as the transmitters of information which not only manifests itself through the vast amount of data we consume but also through the treatment and proliferation of images in our contemporary media.

recomposited : from code to cortex to cognition

recomposited_cover2

extracts ...  a dichotomy of mind where we are consumed by the sheer volume of its existence yet simultaneously define its very being through our participation.... As everyday life increasingly becomes immersed within the digital environment how might our codification affect our visual perceptions, cognitive processes and our rationality ... will this type of assimilation exclude our ability to interpret those unseen spaces, those moments which are composed through a process of intuition and experiment ... click/tap image to download PDF

experiments in motion :

abandoned technologies : a lonely construct acts as a sensor, receiving inputs from an invisible source, air and wind activate its function . do these unseen forces intervene? if so, in what? are we complicit? what do we do with the things we leave behind? the things we have ignored? the objects which have been infected, lost their function? ( # )

a critical self analysis of process, intent and outcomes ...

Capturing images from the interface intrigued me and the possibilities that came from those investigations led me to think more about digital corruption/debris and the loss of clarity and intent; of the role of the artist as voyeur and documenter/observer and the possibilities that the screen provides, to not only extend and alter reality, but to also act as a catalyst for dissent and a vehicle for transporting change. // These moving images serve as a platform for further explorations into the interface and the unseen. They require further inquiry and they raise more questions than providing any tangible answers. The space that resides between intent and action, code and cortex is complex and within there lies a mass of unknown and untested possibilities which pass us by without a register or a trace.

preliminary research ::

A Scalable Image Processing Framework for Gigapixel Mars and Other Celestial Body Images, Mark W. Powell, Ryan A. Rossi† and Khawaja Shams, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, {Mark.W.Powell, Ryan.A.Rossi, Khawaja.S.Shams}@ jpl.nasa.gov : http://ryanrossi.com/papers/SIPF-Mars-JPL-IEEE.pdf ( | )

Scalable Pixel-based Visual Interfaces: Challenges and Solutions. Mike Sips, J¨orn Schneidewind, Daniel A. Keim1, Heidrun Schumann2 1{sips,schneide,keim}@dbvis.inf.uni-konstanz.de, University of Konstanz 2 schumann@informatik.uni-rostock.de, University of Rostock . Germany https://kops.ub.uni-konstanz.de/xmlui/bitstream/handle/urn:nbn:de:bsz:352-opus-69112/Scalable_Pixel_based_Visual_Interfaces.pdf?sequence=1

IDL Reference Guide: IDL Direct Graphics Devices http://northstar-www.dartmouth.edu/doc/idl/html_6.2/Devices_with_Scalable_Pixels.html

Toolglass and Magic Lenses: The See Through Interface – Eric A. Bier, Maureen C. Stone, Ken Pier, William Buxton†, Tony D. DeRose‡, Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304 †University of Toronto, ‡University of Washington : http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=166126

Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM). / CHI '95 Proceedings : http://www.sigchi.org/chi95/proceedings/top.html