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/

Did Arne Svenson go too far? MCA Denver show explores his photos

[IMAGE] Arne Svenson, "Nighbors #5" is part of "The Neighbors" exhibit at the MCA Denver. Image provided by the MCA Denver.

The MCA Denver's current exhibit, "The Neighbors," presents photos the artist took of his neighbors without permission

By Ray Mark Rinaldi Denver Post Fine Arts Critic

POSTED:   03/04/2016 02:45:58 PM MST16 COMMENTS| UPDATED:   6 DAYS AGO

Like a lot of people, I find  Arne Svenson's photographs deeply offensive. He took pictures of his neighbors through their living room windows, without asking or telling, and put them up for sale for thousands of dollars each.

His neighbors  sued him in New York state courts back in 2013 and lost, setting off a chain of legal, offensive acts that followed: Galleries exhibited them, collectors bought them and a well-respected museum elevated their status by exhibiting them in a solo show. I'm not sure which link of that chain is the most bothersome, although I'm leaning toward the last one.

Maybe it's because enough time has passed to really consider the psychological damage to the folks whose privacy was stolen. You can't, for the most part, recognize Svenson's subjects as individuals, but you understand they're actual humans and their sense of personal concealment has been wrecked. Could you sleep if you worried that a stranger was watching? Relax in your bathrobe if someone was taking pictures of your hairy calfs? Would you feel vulnerable and weak if the art crowd was enjoying shots of your 4-year-old daughter's intimate moments without permission?

Or maybe it's because privacy is such a touchy subject in an era when the government is routinely collecting data on all of us, suing tech companies for access to phones, hunting down whistle-blowers who divulge their tactics. No matter where you stand on the issues, you get that they're serious and that personal privacy is precious.

Or maybe it's because two dozen Svenson photos are now staring us in the face at the  Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, which has taken the controversial step of legitimizing them as high art. Commercial success is nice, but a high-caliber museum show seals the deal on the quality of artists' work and reputation.

This is a notable move for our museum, and there are a lot of ways to describe it: brash, original, assertive, brave. But also goading, punkish and provocative. The MCA has a right to offend us; more than that, a responsibility to offend us when it is needed. More than a few times the MCA has shocked me into a deeper understanding of the world around me.

[IMAGE] Arne Svenson's "Neighbors #1" on display at the MCA Denver. Svenson's photo was shot through an exterior window into a nearby building. (Photos by Ray Mark Rinaldi, Denver Post)

This one just doesn't seem right. Maybe it's the 4-year-old girl.

The MCA (which, let's be clear, I cherish and urge you to visit, and support with donations, and send your kids to since they don't charge anyone 18 and under) does have firm ground to stand on. Thoughtful judges and learned curators alike have acknowledged Svenson's rights as well as his talents.

His photos are interesting and credible. They have a cinematic quality to them. Like film, they relentlessly capture the small instances of our lives that we're not always aware of, and they contain an unedited truthfulness about how we move, relax, relate.

"The Neighbors" at the MCA Denver shows Arne Svenson's photos of the people who live in a nearby building.

They feel present tense, journalistic in the way they record the domestic habits of contemporary urbanites. The photos are important that way, and let's just put on the record here that journalists, and I am one, rarely ask permission before they take photos either, and there is some profit-making in that effort, too.

Plus, Svenson uses the windows he peers through wisely. They act as frames drawing attention to details. Better, he deploys them as filtering tools, impacting the way images appear depending on their reflective qualities at a given time of day. Sometimes they sharpen the scenery, sometimes they soften it. A few of Svenson's pieces, all rich, pigment prints, have a Vermeer-like quality, super deep in detail and color, yet gentle. Even casual scenes — a women dropped into a sofa twirling her hair, another perched on the edge of her bed, post-shower, with her head wrapped turban-style in a towel — take on a timeless quality.

They are best summed up as authentic, and that, ironically, might not be possible if Svenson didn't borrow his methods from the peeping Toms who proceeded him. Could they contain the same veracity if they were set up, lit and posed? It's arguable. Would they be as impactful if the subjects granted their permission after the fact? They'd certainly lose their urgency, and that's why so many people have paid attention to them.

A lot of questions, and none more important than this: Is it worth it? Svenson's photos are undoubtedly beautiful, but beauty in itself isn't all that unique or important or even desirable in contemporary art. It is easy to replicate and more often a distraction from ideas. So much art is so ugly, and that's a good thing.

Svenson's ideas are sound, but many artists and filmmakers, have focused our attention on existential details of our world. He's not performing a crucial service to mankind. As far as bringing attention to privacy issues, if that's what he's doing and I don't think so, there's a lot of that around. Artist  William Betts, for one, recreates frozen frames from actual surveillance cameras at public facilities in acrylic paint. It's effectively creepy, a warning that we are all being watched, though not harmful to any individuals.

There is, of course, immeasurable value in letting artists express themselves, original or not. We've made it a right here, protecting painters as much as politicians and writers. The social critic in me finds Svenson annoying. My inner-journalist deems him a hero and I wouldn't censor him for a second.

But I wonder if he should censor himself. If he might find some balance between what he needs to say about how we live and breathe and move and how it can be said unselfishly. Let's consider that Vermeer did that, though you could argue it needs an update.

There is also, the avoidable aside here of personal profit. It matters that artists and gallerists make a buck, especially if it's off a photo of you with a towel on your head, or playing footsie with your spouse under the breakfast table. Everyone deserves to make a living, and intellectual property is of high value. But money corrupts the purity of art for art's sake. If these photos weren't for sale, I could defend them, and I could defend the museum for backing them via an exhibit, maybe.

Only at its base though is this a conversation about money, or about rights. It's more about assessing the value of privilege and its limits. It's about understanding that we live in both community and competition and that's what allows us to have both shared place and personal space. I want art to be real and somehow, at the same time, I hope it can be polite.

Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, rrinaldi@denverpost.com or @rayrinaldi

THE NEIGHBORS The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver presents photos by Arne Svenson. Through June 3. 1485 Delgany.

Source: http://www.denverpost.com/lifestyles/ci_29596371/did-arne-svenson-go-too-far-mca-denver

DADABOT. The role of algorithms in cultural production

[image] http://www.nicolasnova.net/pasta-and-vinegar/2015/10/7/new-book-dadabot

Nicolas Nova sees dada in big data

Published 19 January 2016 by Annick Rivoire

Nicolas Nova observes our digital practices as did Claude Lévi-Strauss with his sad tropics. In “Dadabot”, a formidable essay on “creolization” in the digital age, he and Joël Vacheron give an overview of this “new human-machine relationship”. Interview.

http://www.makery.info/en/2016/01/19/nicolas-nova-voit-du-dada-dans-la-data/?utm_content=buffer0de02&utm_medium=social&utm_source=plus.google.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Essay about the hybridization of cultural forms (music, visual arts, literature) produced by digital technologies.

The notion of creolization, proposed by linguists, anthropologists and writers, correspond to the hybridization of cultural elements which lead to original forms. The increasing use of digital technologies in everyday culture (video games, electronic music, new media art, literature, visual art) add a new layer of complexity. Machines indeed play a specific role in this sort of hybridization, as attested by the use of samples, presets, sound effects in electronic music, generative art and glitches in visual arts, or the importance of Web mash-up and humoristic Twitter bots. DADABOT focuses on this “algorithmic turn” in contemporary culture and describe it through several components: interviews with artists, experiments with digital technologies, a lexicons and an essay that address the implications of such changes. https://www.idpureshop.ch/web/catalogue.aspx?cat=62

Includes works by:

Diego Collado, Data recovery, 2010–2014

Diego Collado hunted for used digital memory cards of phones and cameras. Then, with the help of a Data Recovery software, the artist started to recompose what could be rescued from the images erased. The digital traces of personal moments from the past are thus reinterpreted by the software.

Daily Dot headline about !Mediengruppe Bitnik‘s The Random Darknet Shopper (via) /: The Random Darknet Shopper is an automated online shopping bot which we provide with a budget of $100 in Bitcoins per week. Once a week the bot goes shopping in the deep web where it randomly chooses and purchases one item and has it mailed directly to the exhibition space. Once the items arrive they are unpacked and displayed, each new object adding to a landscape of traded goods from the Darknet.

Marion Balac, Anonymous Gods

Scouring through Google Street View, Marion Balac realized that the algorithms of the mapping service had anthropomorphized and accidentally blurred out the face of the statues of deities that its car had encountered along the road.

retrieved from : DADABOT. The role of algorithms in cultural production – We Make Money Not Art

to appropriate ::

In a recent post by Justine Giles on her MFA blog, Rhurbard Pyjamas, Giles includes a TEDxKC video of the writer and artist Austin Kleon’s talk Steal like an Artist graciously thanking Tanya Eccelston, visiting scholar at Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design for the link. In the video Kleon describes his methods of research and the role that collecting and appropriating play in his creative process. In contrast, the artist Aleksandra Mir describes in an interview with Lars Bang Larsen how the title of her work Hello came about. Mir tells the story of a student, named Happy, who she knew at art school who would greet arbitrary people as they went through the doors with a simple hello. Twenty five years later she thinks of Happy’s performance and says “it would be hard not to give him some credit for my work with Hello” (Mir, 2013). These two examples probably sit at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of ‘stealing ideas’ but none-the-less they highlight the significance of appropriation to artists in the creative process. I have always had a delicate relationship with appropriating. Somehow I felt like I may be cheating or not being true to my sense of originality by stealing; not from the original author or source, but in a strange way, from myself. It felt like some sort of moral and ethical defeatist paradigm. What I have come to realise is that I have been denying myself the full process of exploration and the irrefutable need to reference not only my past experiences, cultural or otherwise, but also those moments and creative outputs that have influenced me the most through the work of others.

This awakening to the real intent of appropriation is also exemplified by the filmmaker and director Jim Jarmusch. In a recent article in the New Zealand Listener, Alexander Bisley talks with Jarmusch about his recent movie Only Lovers Left Alive. Jarmuch’s approach to the creative process is one of contemplative instinct, referencing historical characters and exotic locations. Jarmusch describes the process in his latest offering to the cinematic world as a “kind of grope around in the dark” (Jarmusch, as cited in Bisley, 2014, p. 38). Bisely closes the piece with an extract from Rule #5 of Jarmusch’s ‘Golden Rules’, a reflective insight into his working process. Here I have included the extended quote:

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to”. (Jarmusch, 2004)

In an age of FOLLOW’s, LIKE’s, SHARES’s and TWEET’s, the appropriation and dissemination of information has become part of a common culture. What once was an intellectual reflection on the uniqueness of individuality today it is an instinctual reflex instigated through an interface that encourages personal disclosure and cultivates a dichotomy of idiosyncratic homogenization. As the digital space become both a mimesis of everyday life and an environment with its own existence, more and more it becomes a space that requires comment and reflection.

References:

Jarmusch, J. (2004). Jim Jarmusch’s 5 golden rules (or non-rules) of moviemaking. Retrieved from http://www.moviemaker.com/articles-directing/jim-jarmusch-5-golden-rules-of-moviemaking/

Bisely, A. (2014, May 3-9). Bloodied, but alive. New Zealand Listener, 243(3860), 38-39.

Mir, A. (2013). Hello: In conversation with Lars Bang Larsen. In Lars Bang Larsen (ED.), Networks: Documents of contemporary art. (pp. 86-88). London, England: Whitechapel Gallery.

R.I.P Hema Upadhyay

[image] Hema Upadhyay, “Modernization” (photo by Anil Rane, image courtesy Chemould Prescott Road and the artist)

The Important Work of Indian Artist Hema Upadhyay, Murdered at 42

by Anuradha Vikram on December 15, 2015

News of artist Hema Upadhyay’s death in Mumbai over the weekend has stunned the international art community. Upadhyay, 42, was a painter and mixed media artist who showed with Mumbai gallery Chemould Prescott Road, and had been featured in landmark shows in the global trajectory of Indian contemporary art, including Indian Highway(Serpentine Gallery, 2008) and Chalo! India (Mori Art Museum, 2009).

retrieved from Hyperallergic : continue reading ...

we make money not art

Régine Debatty is a writer, curator and critic, and founder of we-make-money-not-art.com. Régine is known for her writings on the intersection between art, science, technology, and social issues. She writes and lectures internationally about the way artists, hackers and designers use technology as a medium for critical discussion. From 2012 to 2014 Régine ran the weekly art and science programme #A.I.L. (Artists in Laboratories) on Resonance104.4 fm in London. She is also the co-author of the ‘sprint book’, New Art/Science Affinities, published by Carnegie Mellon University and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art in London.

Retrieved from: http://we-make-money-not-art.com/about/

Silicon Valley exploits time and space to extend the frontiers of capitalism

[image] A Google Project Loon balloon which aims to provide Wi-Fi connections from the edges of space. Photograph: Marty Melville/AFP/Getty Images (Retrieved fromhttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/29/silicon-valley-exploits-space-evgeny-morozov#img-1

Silicon Valley exploits time and space to extend the frontiers of capitalism

Evgeny Morozov

Satellites, drones and balloons can make global connectivity a reality – but this space race is about profits not altruism

The US Congress quietly passed an important piece of legislation this month. The Space Resource Exploration and Utilisation Act – yet to be signed by Barack Obama – grants American companies unconstrained rights to the mining of any resources – from water to gold. The era of space exploration is over; the era of space exploitation has begun! ...

Screen Shot 2016-02-02 at 10.20.51 am

Digital Art: Beyond The Hype

[image] Andreas Nicolas Fischer, Schwarm (2015)

http://www.ignant.de/2015/11/24/digital-art-beyond-the-hype/

November 24, 2015  by Charmaine Li

If you think of the term ‘digital art’, you might conjure up images of twitchy GIFs or glitchy videos. You might think it’s a recent development, but in fact its practice has roots dating back to the 1960s. So – what is considered ‘digital art’? And why are people paying for it? Is it all just hype? We delved into this topic and spoke to some key artists and gallerists about what it means to create, consume and sell digital art…

Charmaine is a Canadian writer and editor living in Berlin, Germany. Currently, she is an online editor at iGNANT. Previously, she was senior editor at Tech.eu and has also contributed to Maisonneuve, CNN Travel, Dazed Digital, Freunde von Freunden and Berlin Film Journal among other publications on lifestyle and cultural topics.

the conjurer

[image] Hieronymus Bosch, The Conjurer - Date unknown. Oil on panel. Original dimensions: 53 x 65 cm. Retrieved from https://excursuses.wordpress.com/2011/06/03/hieronymus-bosch-a-primer/

He who lets himself be fooled by conjuring tricks loses his money and becomes the laughing stock of children." - A Flemish proverb

"The Conjurer, an extraordinary tale of a conjurer trying to persuade the spectator that he's pulling toads or frogs out of his mouth. Meanwhile there's someone standing behind this spectator, who's stealing his wallet. It's a wonderful little painting, we unfortunately don't have the original, but it's a very good copy. It's a secular painting and has got away from the moralising and religious pose which one normally associates with Bosch. This genre painting became very popular in the Netherlands and the north in general, because it was opposed to the mythological painting of Italy. Here you had scenes from everyday life, it was getting away from the porcelain-like saints, down into the street. I think it was very modern.[9]

"Bosch". BBC Documentaries. 3 May 2006. Retrieved 2011-03-07., Bosch and the Delights of Hell [1]

the new romanticism

self driving cars ....

The Dream Life of Driverless Cars

"If the conceptual premise of the Romantic Movement can somewhat hastily be described as the experience and documentation of extreme landscapes — as an art of remote mountain peaks, abyssal river valleys and vast tracts of uninhabited land — then ScanLAB is suggesting that a new kind of Romanticism is emerging through the sensing packages of autonomous machines."

Geoff Manaugh is the writer of BLDGBLOG, a blog about architecture and the built environment. His book ‘‘A Burglar’s Guide to the City’’ will be published in April. The New York Times Magazine. http://nyti.ms/1MWu3ny

Disneyland

Surviving Progress Trailer [HD]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDdhA_qCfYw

Future technologies

How to Eliminate the Hum From a Computer Audio Output

Step 1: Determine the source of the hum by eliminating possibilities. Check all the connections between the speakers and the computer. A poor connection can introduce a ground loop and humming.

Step 2: Wiggle the speaker cables to see if the hum is intermittent or consistent. An intermittent hum may be caused by cracked or broken speaker wire.

Step 3: Ensure the computer is plugged in to a grounded outlet. The three-pronged plug has positive, negative and grounded terminals. Without the ground a ground loop can be introduced into the audio system and cause a hum at the frequency of the alternating current. Computer speakers can add extra, unwanted noise picked up from other electrical signals.

Step 4: Move or remove any radio frequency transmitters close to the speakers. Wi-Fi routers, cell phones, microwaves and baby monitors are all RF signal generators that can cause interference in poorly shielded audio cables, which is interpreted as a humming sound.

Step 5: Add ferrite beads to the speaker cable to block any RF signals that cannot be removed. Higher quality cables often have the electromagnetic shielding material built in, but you can purchase snap-on ferrite beads for unshielded cables. Typically you want to snap the beads close to one end, the other end or both.

by James T Wood, Demand Media

The stability of latent images, 2015

[image] The stability of latent images, 2015 detail

I stared into his eyes, so different without glasses from the huge round eyes of his earlier self. The eyes are narrow behind their contact lenses. Do I trust him? Dare I trust him? He seems a nice old man but he could well be the Hacker ...”

Gore Vidal – Live from Golgotha

Light travels at 299,792,458 metres per second. In all practical terms if information were to travel in a vacuum it would travel as fast as light but realistically it only moves as fast as its method of transmission allows it to. It travels as packets of information, from one machine to another converging at their destination in one piece. Assembled, dispersed and then re-assembled.

[image] The stability of latent images, 2015 - install

exhale_install_3

[image] Exhale, 2015 - 1:19 minute video loop - install

install_detail2

Stan VanDerBeek

http://www.stanvanderbeek.com

Beginning in the 1960s, Stan VanDerBeek worked with multiple projections on movable screens. In his live shows with film, video and computer graphics, he created high visual density comparable to the contemporary music video, which he then developed into computer animation. These experiments of high density in collage forms were conducted through image processing and mark the transition to computer graphics in ways similar to the chroma key experiments by Ed Emshwiller. As early as the 1960s, VanDerBeek managed to create multimedia performances using computer animation with the support of Bell Telephone Laboratories. “In the 1970s, he constructed a ‘Movie-Drome’ in Stony Point, New York, which was an audiovisual laboratory for the projection of film, dance, magic theatre, sound and other visual effects. His multimedia experiments included movie murals, projection systems, planetarium events and the exploration of early computer graphics and image-processing systems.” (1). In VanDerBeek’s video experiments, pulsating rhythm and feedback images created self-reflexive forms of imagery; the ‘content’ of the image was expressed through dynamic and sequential characteristics of these electronic experiments.

Yvonne Spielmann © 2005 FDL

Retrieved from: http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=730

Are some things unrepresentable? a. galloway on j. rancière

Its a question posed by Jaques Rancière in his essay by the same title, and its a question which many others have been debating recently. The question has been asked of me as well, although in a different form, I think, and I am not sure that there is an answer. But in considering the image of our new information environments I have returned to Alexander Galloway's book The interface effect and more specifically chapter 3 where he takes on the very same question. He opens up the chapter with a PowerPoint slide presented at a meeting of military and government officials and asks us to consider what might it be trying to represent? or "what exactly the slide is meant to communicate"?

"Engaging with McChrystal's image is difficult at first glance. But what would happen if one were to talk about this image in strictly aesthetic terms, as if one were talking about a painting? Would it be possible to view this peculiar brand of visual representation as a work of aesthetics? What would be the result? A painting of military life? An image of a network? Or even an interface into the society of control, to borrow a term from Gilles Deleuze? Regarding the image in this way is indeed challenging. Even at a purely aesthetic level it is not clear what precisely the image is trying to represent. Is it trying to represent data, an algorithm, a diagram, a system, a network? These terms all seem to connect to each other, yet they mean very different things. Data would be represented very differently from an algorithm, would it not? Yet it would be safe to say that all these terms fall, more or less, under the umbrella of information. Taken in that light, can this image reveal anything interesting about the nature of information aesthetics? Can it tell us anything about the relationship between transparency and concealment? Between representability and unrepresentability?"

Although this chapter relates more to the representation of violence within images and the ethical obligation we have to engage with such images he does present us with a hypothetical possibility that:

"new media demonstrate, then, that the augmentation of functional or algorithmic efficiency goes hand in hand with a decline in symbolic efficiency. Hence the following law: an increase in aesthetic information produces a decline in information aesthetics."

He goes on to reference the work of Rancière and describes the French philosophers approach to representation as one which Rancière himself described as "being redistributed into different arrangements" through our senses and that through this positioning different "regimes" of art emerge, or what he called "a distribution of the sensible". Galloway goes on to describe Rancière's thinking by summing up his approach as one where:

[...]  The hallmark of the aesthetic regime is a breakdown between subjects and art: "There are no longer rules of appropriateness between a particular subject and a particular form, but a general availability of all subjects for any artistic form whatsoever."  Thus the aesthetic regime shares much with the profanation or secularization of culture that takes place particularly during the modern period, sometimes called simply the nihilism of modernity. But the regime is not incompatible with postmodernism and the so-called "end of master narratives," which itself pronounces a grand leveling of all value into one transcultural soup. On this point, then, Ranciere quite correctly points out that the opposite of representation is not non-figuration, which is to say not modernism. Instead he suggests that one might look to realism for the most non-representational form, for in realism everything is leveled and equally representable, and "this 'equally representable' spells the ruin of the representative system.

In the rest of the chapter Galloway goes on to  expand on these relationships citing works by Harun Farocki, Frank Gehry, Sol LeWitt and others. He suggests that "we do not yet have a critical or poetic language in which to represent the control society" and that "representation always has a relationship with the mode of production." The control he is talking about, I think, is one that is manufactured by a machine, an algorithm, or a set of data points, and that what is required is a "re-mapping of the very terms of representability" so that these "terms (representation/production) return to [...] the social-political realities that produced them in the first place". I'm not sure Galloway answers the question "are some things unrepresentable" and he leaves things, as he puts its "stuck in the gorge of the world". But what he does propose, albeit briefly, is that possibly the aesthetic is found in the failure to be defined by any sort of aesthetic and that "beauty' might be found in the "corruption of function" where "the impetus comes from the fundamentally poststructuralist nature of the information age in which no formal data are immune from their own corruption from within [...]".

Gehry and these other artists merely feign to break the machine, all the while restaging it as broken beauty. While tarrying with the algorithmic, each ultimately sacrifices the algorithmic in favor of the aesthetic. None of these artists is creating new data types, new "if-then" statements, new network diagrams, new syllogisms, or new mathematical functions for their own sake. The artists may experiment with systematicity or functionalism, as many conceptual artists have done, but always ultimately to revert such machinic realities to the staid structures of fine art. They turn the machine into art, but never art into machine - and when at rare moments the latter does come to fruition, it does so only under the sad and cynical banner of "the art factory," be it that of Andy Warhol a generation ago or Jeff Koons today.

Galloway, A. (2012). The interface effect. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

PDF version of : The interface effect - A. Galloway - chapter 3

Pushing Pixels

By MARCEL LAFLAMME

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/pushing-pixels/

"There’s a funny moment toward the end of the book when Vertesi pays a visit to a researcher named Ross, who was known throughout the Rover community for his image processing skills. Vertesi asks Ross to demonstrate his vaunted decorrelation stretch technique; a little perplexed, he opens the image processing suite on his computer, loads some sample images, and explains: “I just push this button.” The distinctive greens and purples that recalled, for Vertesi, the palette of Andy Warhol were the result of a software macro applying a mathematical formula."

Janet VertesiSeeing Like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of MarsUniversity of Chicago Press - 304 pages. April 2015

Retrieved from: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/pushing-pixels/

Seeing Like a Rover How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars Janet Vertesi University of Chicago Press 304 pages April 2015

"The post-photographic condition" – Joan Fontcuberta

[image] Screen-grab :: https://anti-utopias.com/newswire/post-photographic-condition/ [obsolete]

new link : https://moisdelaphoto.com/en/publications/post-photographic-condition-2015/

The Post-Photographic Condition. Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal

In Featured Events / September 16, 2015

“The Post-Photographic Condition is characterised by the proliferation of images and the prominence of the Internet, smartphones and social networks. The world as we know it is now governed by instantaneity and subject to accelerated digital globalisation. Every facet of our lives, from personal relationships to economics, communications to politics, has been shaken to its core by this manipulation. For the first time, we are producers and consumers of images on an exponential scale. The outcome of this unprecedented excess is the immediate access to images. It remains to be seen to what extent this instant availability and universal voyeurism are both a privilege and an obstacle.”

Joan Fontcuberta

<img src="https://anti-utopias.com/admin/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Joan_Fontcuberta_portrait1-670x447.jpg" title="Portrait © Joan Maria Dias, 2014" alt="The Post-Photographic Condition"/>

In addition to his artistic work, Joan Fontcuberta (b. Barcelona, 1955) has carried out a multidisciplinary activity in the world of photog­raphy as a teacher, critic, historian, and exhibitions curator. He has been a visiting professor at different international institutions, such as Harvard University and Le Fresnoy, Centre National des Arts Con­temporains. He has also taught on the Communication Faculty of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.

a layering of bounding boxes

[image] c.valenti - 2015

Unlocking the Mysteries of the Bounding Box

Persistent URL for citation: http://purl.oclc.org/coordinates/a2.htm

Douglas R. Caldwell

Douglas R. Caldwell (e-mail: Douglas.R.Caldwell@erdc.usace.army.mil) is employed as a cartographer and geospatial analyst at the US Army Engineer Research & Development Center, Topographic Engineering Center, Research Division, Information Generation and Management Branch, 7701 Telegraph Road, Alexandria, VA 22315. 

Date of Publication: 08/29/05

Abstract

Few geospatial data representations are more basic than the bounding box; a rectangle surrounding a geographic feature or dataset. Bounding boxes are a key component of geospatial metadata and lie at the heart of many computational geometry algorithms as well as spatial indexing systems. Despite their ubiquity and common use, bounding boxes are more complicated than they first appear. The phrase that ‘spatial is special’ applies to this humble representation as well as to more sophisticated geospatial representations. This paper explores the nuances of correctly understanding, using, and interpreting bounding boxes.

Keywords: Bounding box, Minimum Bounding Rectangle (MBR), metadata, map projection, geographic information systems, GIS

The bounding box is a fundamental component of numerous computational geometry algorithms, indexing schemes such as R-trees, and metadata. As a surrogate for a feature, it provides exact information on the extent or limits of the feature and approximates the coverage. Despite its ubiquity and simplicity, the bounding box remains a subtle and nuanced entity, showing once again that "spatial is special."

http://www.stonybrook.edu/libmap/coordinates/seriesa/no2/a2.htm

Installation proposal - 2015

cval12_july 2015_install_proposal_Page_06

read full proposal here : cval12_july 2015_install_proposal

Exhibition and Audience

11 – 16 July, 2015

A proposal for installation by christopher valenti, Ø (empty-set) and the blended-theory project to Noel Ivanoff, HOD Fine Arts, Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design

2015.06.22/15:06

For consideration :

1. Transparency in exile : factual information may vary according to availability (working title) an intervention to an existing access corridor where information is copied, shredded and then reconfigured.

2. A place like you / a place like me / a place that no longer belongs to us (working title) a situation where visual information is gathered to then be recomposited as an online project at a future date.

Install notes here