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 to 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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James Harkin, Cyburbia, The Network Effect

The chapter The Network Effect starts of with an analogy that describes the influence of network theory. P. Bayard, professor of French Literature at the University of Paris, argued in 2007 that reading books from cover to cover was a waste of time. What he ment with this was that to understand books it’s more effective to look at literature as a system of books that interrelate and reference each other rather than to understand literature as a sum of it’s books. Therefore he argued, it is more useful to have a general knowledge of books and to study the relations between books instead. ‘Books have ceased to be objects in their own right… and [he] replaced them with a newer kind of medium, based on the shifting and manifold ties and associations that can be drawn between books in a system”[1]

Social network theory is the study of relationships between nodes in a network. The network effect is the fact that the value of these networks rises faster than the number of the nodes in the network. The theory found fertile ground around the late sixties and early seventies in both the academic and the counter cultural circles. Both had interest in not seeing people as individuals but as the relationships that bound them together. ‘While the academics were studying social networks, what remained of the counter culture was busy building them’ [2] The remnants of the counter culture were attracted to it due to commercially available pc’s. However ‘what really attracted the hippies to the computer industry was not the computers themselves but the possibility to […] talk to their peers outside the reach of authority or hierarchy.’[3]

As the high-tech economy started to spread, so did the idea of networks. It was borrowed and applied by economists and business leaders. Not only because of the growth of the high tech industry but also because of the decline of the strict Fordist economy of manufacture. Network economy was not only about computers in the workplace but also about leveling the old hirarchic structure in a company, stressing flexibility instead. The emphasis lay now on companies’ and employee’s relationships with other firms, their customers and their products. Companies began to to engineer their operations according to cybernetic principles. Not in the last place because the generation of ‘68, who had critized the hirarchies of the old system, found jobs in the same systems they sought to reform

The succesfull application of the network effect to communications equipment at the end of the 20th century seemed to prove that the value of the information infrastructure was to rise far faster than the cost of constructing it. Thus the network effect was believed by stock analysts to apply to conventional economic principles as well. Heralding what some believed to be “The Long Boom”

There were also sceptics however, since scientists failed to properly explain ‘why theory aimed at understanding how computers could communicate with each other could be a reliable guide to human behaviour’.[4] Also Stanley Milgram’s famous research that lead to the idea the six degrees of separation and the power of the weak ties in networks seemed to founded on the negation of the contradictory data also produced by that research.

With the invention of hypertext in 1990 and the ensuing world wide web societies were becoming really networked. The early internet was still fairly one-directional. At the same time it became apparent true the rise of reality-tv and cctv based television that people wanted to be more intimately involved in the information loop. However, the network that was more true to the cybernetic idea only rose after the Long Boom turned into the Dotcombubble and a new web rose from it’s ruins.

[1] Harkin, J. (2009). Cyburbia. (p. 73).
[2] Harkin, J. (2009). Cyburbia. (p. 77).
[3] Harkin, J. (2009). Cyburbia. (p. 78).
[4] Harkin, J. (2009). Cyburbia. (p. 88).

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Metahaven, Captives Of The Cloud 1 (partly)

Abstract
Captives of the Cloud is a text by Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden about the consequences of our mass migration from the internet into the ‘cloud’. In this essay they assume a critical stance towards the super-jurisdiction and pervasive surveillance that have become (unwanted?) side effects of our recent shift towards cloud computing.
Coming of the Cloud
The cloud came about through the success of American ‘web 2.0’ internet companies. Their vision of the internet is one that always works, to this purpose they have constructed their own infrastructure and started offering services that run on their own servers. This to guarantee that any device, regardless of OS can have access to the servers. Computation and storage take place on a variety of different servers, domains, countries and jurisdictions. However the user no longer needs to know how the software works or where his or her data really is as long as it works.
The US cloud and the Patriot Act
Who registers a website and where they do it is very important to determine who gains access or control over the data. For example, all data stored by US companies in non-US data centers falls under the jurisdiction of the USA Patriot Act. This includes all your favorite cloud services. Both Google and Microsoft have publicly confirmed that the US government has ‘lawful access’ to data stored in other countries than the US. It is not only the US government but many other governments that enjoy similar forms of access under their own laws. For the streamlining of exchange of data used in investigations the US has signed Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties with other many other countries. Then (as exemplified by the unwarranted handing over of user details by Skype to a private security firm recently) informal contacts between cloud service providers and governmental or private law enforcement agencies also play a big role in access to data.
Super-Jurisdiction
An example of the powerlessness of sovereign states over the US cloud is is the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt where Facebook and twitter played a big role. In part, according to the author, “because the servers of these wildly popular services were beyond the reach of local authorities”. Mubarak was unable to censor the messages on these platforms because his power did not extend beyond egypt’s borders. As a consequence he shut down the Egyptian internet altogether, showing the dictators lack of power over the network’s larger structure. Sovereign control over the cloud is a difficult issue. The world’s embrace of the US’s cloud gives it what Metahaven calls “a super-jurisdiction”. Super-jurisdiction is when one country’s law can be extended into that of another through various forms of cooperation and association implied by server locations and network connections. The US has for example jurisdiction over all websites registered with a top-level domain (.com, .net etc) because these must be registered through a VeriSign, an American company. An example would be the arrest of Kim Dotcom and the seizure of his website megaupload.com.
Cloud Surveillance
The same infrastructure that allows us to connect with each other lend themselves to surveillance. “The quest for information control is now beyond denial” according to Access Controlled an MIT Press publication cited by Metahaven. The threat of terrorism and child pornography have created a mandate for the state to police the net without restriction. It’s referred to as the security-first norm. For this reason internet censorship and surveillance are no longer an exception but have become the norm. As technologies evolve the governance, legislation and legalities of surveillance become increasingly complicated. The US government is routinely criticized (or praised) for their ability to spy on Americans, but in because of the dominance of the US cloud the US has the same far reaching ability to spy on everybody else.