Manual Override

By Evan Calder Williamsthenewinquiry.com

manual overide

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/

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 moviemakingRetrieved 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

HemaUpadhyay_Modernization-768x512 [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 ...

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! ...

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Digital Art: Beyond The Hype

schwarm_2015_pink_LRG [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 new romanticism

http://nyti.ms/1MWu3ny

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