User:Pleun/grad/Proposal1stversion

Word count 1500 max.

What are you working on now?

I am working on multiple projects at the moment:

WORM (I am doing an internship at WORM, because I wanted to have a place next to graduation where I can produce without thinking too much. I am making quick posters, books, maps etc.)
Bits of Freedom (I am designing for the Big Brother Awards 2016 of Bits of Freedom. An identity and small publication)
XPUB (I joined the first-years in their prototyping sessions)

What are you thinking of making?

Last year I started multiple research projects, but they never fully developed. I am thinking of further developing one now, but it's hard for me to choose. So I will write them out to help me make a decision.

The legend of Jon Postel / Two minutes of Jon Postel; God of the Internet
The Line

Jon Postel

At the end of the last century one man tried to take back power in a time when the influence of the American government over the internet was growing. He emailed 8 of the 12 owners of the root servers to flow their data via his own server, basically making him the most powerful man of the internet. They say it lasted about two minutes, before a government official on the phone with the university director shut it down and took power back. The interesting part to me is that he tried to create freedom through dictatorship.

I am very interested in this moment, because it marks a very important shift in behaviour of government towards the network. Next to that I'm interested in what it is that creates a legend. Could Jon Postel with a second (digital) life have influence on the web today?

The Line

This project is a bit harder to explain, because it entails so much. I thought about it too much, but also too little in a structured way. It started with trying to create a Technology of the Self and ended up touching subjects of sensory deprivation/overload (and the commodification of it), privacy, mass surveillance and public/private space. I was writing an essay for Steve about Technology of the Self in a society of control. How can we still get to know ourselves when we are in a constant state of performance and a by ourself created commodified version of ourselves. Is it an illusion that there is anything underneath this layer or are we becoming our public character. Do we have to be almost schizophrenic and create a private and public version of ourselves?

Meanwhile I was doing two little projects that originated from this essay:
• Watching Me Watching You
http://pzwart1.wdka.hro.nl/~pleun/S-DR/WMWY/
• The Line #1
I'm in a crisis between two forms of society, where I'm conditioned by parents who grew up in a disciplinary society to follow that society which no longer exists, while fighting a society of control I don't really want to be a part of but feel like I have to, because I'm not willing to flee either. A clash is coming, but it's moving slowly. I would like to speed up the process by doing a project about this.
My parents told me a small anecdote of me as a child, where they portray me as the most happy kid ever. My childless uncle also comically describes me as “a walking 'Have Children!' commercial.” It goes like this: When my parents were building their modern white octagonal house, I was only two years old. I could walk, I could crawl and play in the sand on the building plot. One day, a concerned neighbour came by to ask my parents if they weren't afraid of me running away, as there were no fences or anything around the plot. 'But no way', they said. They only had to draw a line in the sand forming a circle around me and tell me not to cross it. And I wouldn't. And I never did. The rest of my life I would continue to stay within the now imaginary lines in the sand. I would explore its borders and move from circle to circle, but I would never fully cross the lines. I was also afraid of grass apparently. But come on, grass is super scary. To me this anecdote explains my fascination with control, borders and legislation. I try to be aware of where my and others' lines in the sand are and if, how and why we (need to) cross it. When is it necessary to make people cross a line?

Readings

(basically for my thesis, but...)

Zizek - Welcome to the Desert of the Real, London: Verso, Interrogating the Real,
Prehistory of the cloud – Tunghui Hu
Postscript on societies on control – G. Deleuze (PDF)
Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (PDF)
A declaration of independence of cyberspace – Barlow (PDF)
Black transparency – Metahaven (PAPER)
Masters Of Reality (Chapter: Nudge Nudge) – Steve Rushton
Discipline & Punish – Michel Foucault (PDF) (To dive deeper into disciplinary society)
Foucault and Databases – Mark Poster (NEED TO GET IT)
‘protocol’ – A. Galloway (NEED TO GET IT)
The rise of the network society – Manuel Castells (PAPER)

Benevolent dictator / Civil disobedience

https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Graduate_Seminar_2015-2016