User:Roelroscama/R,W&RM

Assignments

Descriprion of previous projects / Assignment 1

Work 1:
The work is a video documentation of a workshop. It fades into an opening shot made from the front window of a driving van. Then the scene is overlaid by two texts "Freekea Woerkshop" and "Reverse engineering Ikea products and building them yourself". The next scenes show more driving, the passengers of the van and a big Ikea store. In the following scenes the passengers get out and enter the store, where they stand in line for breakfast. Some footage of breakfast ensues. Then the video cuts to a hand getting ikea's typical pencils, measuring tapes and note sheets. After that in several scenes the people measure down various types of furniture in the store using these instruments. Then they get free furniture fittings.

In the next shot the scenery changes and the group is seen in an office building working with computers and a laser cutting machine. They make a lampshade and then compare it to an identical one on the ikea website. This kind of comparison between self made product and the ikea product is repeated with several other objects. The video ends with a panning shot of all kinds of self made furniture with the Ikea product names next to it, a last shot of the building and the text www.partsba.se

Why:
The motivation behind the video is to document in a narrative way a workshop we organized in may 2012. We organized this workshop during a series of events and actions we undertook as part of the Partsba.se project. The goal of this project is to try and find out if rapid prototyping technologies (like laser cutting) are already advanced enough to have people 'download' useful physical objects, such as pieces of furniture. And to test wether these technologies can already fulfill the promise of individual empowerment that these machines suggest. More specifically the intention of this workshop was to see wether reverse engineering and reproduction of existing furniture was a feasible option (both technically and economically).

How:
We organized a workshop with various artists and designers, each from another discipline or field of interest. With this team of around 9 people we tried to maximize the output of a single prototyping day. Each sought his own interest within the assignment to reverse engineer furniture from Ikea. At the same time we sought out to exploit Ikea's infrastructure to the fullest, making use of the 1 euro breakfast offer, using it's free pencils and measuring tapes and taking the free furniture fittings. At a laser cutting company called Snijlab we turned all the measurements into digital designs and proceeded to cut and build them.

watch?v=E6rwQy75U8M

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Work 2:
The work is a website under the domain www.theragepage.net. It has a black background and starts loading and playing approximately twelve different youtube clips at the same time. The videos are scattered around the browser window and are partly overlaid on top of each other so the viewer is required to scroll around to see them all. The videos are footage and sound of people and animals screaming. Examples include rabid cats, people on a roller coaster, a rooster, a woman getting a tattoo and two videos no longer available. When the sound is on, all the sounds played at the same time are very annoying. At the same time the heavy load of the website tends to freeze the computer a bit, making it unable to alter or close the website until most of the videos have been played. Every time the website is reloaded the same videos seem to load in a slightly different order creating a different sound scape.

Why:
The work was made as part of a series of small experiments on the question of digital archiving. We wanted to create online works with an expiry date. Works built around content on other websites. This work for example is gradually falling apart as content is removed from youtube. At the same time we wanted to deal with the hysterical nature of a lot of youtube videos.

How
The work is technically really simple, it is a website coded mostly in HTML that has various youtube videos embedded. Using div tags the videos are partly overlaid on top of each other to create a chaotic appearance. All the videos are set to autoplay so they start playing as soon as the website loads. The videos where selected in part due to their popularity, others because they fit with the other videos.

Synopses of Future Map and Societies of Control

Brian Holmes, Future Map

Holmes' text starts out by giving a brief introduction to cybernetics and it's core idea of man being part of a machine or system in a feedback loop.

He then uses the ideas of cybernetics to argue how surveillance went from a passive function to a proactive one, from mere seeing and listening functions to functions that shape and thus predict the future. To better understand this he explains four technologies that show the role of man in a (machine)system and that work to predict his future actions. This is done by predictive algorithms that work by data mining statistics that are gathered.

This predicting the future through surveillance is done most effectively not by discipline and punishment but by shaping the system in which humans live. A neoliberal society governs by producing and organizing freedoms. The liberal government works not by intervening on the players (through sovereign or disciplinary power) but by intervening on the 'rules of the game'. To stimulate and channel probable behaviors of the population.

The society's obsession with controlling the future and insuring accumulation has at least two consequences according two Holmes. The first is the organization of a consumer environment for the satisfaction of anticipated desires. The second is to remove those who might conceivably trouble tranquilized consumer environment with any kind of disturbing presence or speech. This 'colonization of the future' the author adds has lead people to fall back onto the 'known' religious fundamentalism of the past.

The author concludes by stressing that artists, hackers and cultural critics when joined by scientists, sociologists, economists and philosophers with the purpose to transform this situation, can give a deep and distributed critique of military neoliberalism, and of the surveillance that articulates it.

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Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control

In Postscript on the Societies of Control Deleuze outlines the gradual shift from a society of discipline to a society of control. Using the institutions that characterize a society of discipline, schools, barracks, factories, hospitals and prisons he draws out the characteristics of the emerging society of control.

Hereby he contrasts the 'molding' properties of the environments of enclosure that represented the society of discipline and contrasting it to the 'modulating' properties of the control society. He uses the example of a factory salary versus deeply the modular bonus system in a corporation.

An individual in a disciplinary society is based on two poles: the signature that designates the individual and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. The society of control does away with this divisoin instead there exists a 'dividual' and masses have become samples, data markets or 'banks'. What is important in a society of control are not the signature or number, but the code. A password that marks access to information.

There are also types of machines associated with each society. The disciplinary ones equipped themselves with machines involving energy, the control ones equip themselves with computers instead.

Where discipline was about concentration and enclosure, man going through each phase for a specific period of time. Control is both short term and continuous. In a society of control man is no longer enclosed, he is in debt. Control is about knowing the position of an element within an open environment at any given instant.

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