User:Eleanorg/Journal 1.3

3 May

Extended life/project crisis joy. Trying to stay with the not-knowing.

Barbara Hammer, Hammer!

Points out the long history of censorship faced by LGBT communities; trying to articulate some kind of distinctive 'feminine'(?) language of filmmkaing. Not trying to just do DIY porn but to articulate a different language, nice - challenging the dominant narratives in a broader sense; the eroticism of surfaces and moods. To find something new.

where am i

Building the distributed pixel project thing. Feel happy with it, just need to write the code. And original plan was for a Radical X project that paralleled this; physical hosting.

Then Florian bless him was saying the obvious, like er, figure out the problem before the solution! Oh yeh. So what problem was I trying to find a solution to there?

• How to highlight our reliance on the physical guardianship of hardware?
• How to prototype (or at least metaphorically enact) a decentralized, solidarity model of hosting?

And now the factories. And I've been trying to carry this project over into the factory module, bit of square peg in round hole situation. Feeling like I should abandon this and start something new, something factory-like, to make the most of the module. But frustrated that I haven't finished anything yet. There are links though. So for example this:

• How to prototype (or at least metaphorically enact) a decentralized, solidarity model of hosting?

becomes this:

• How to prototype (or at least metaphorically enact) a decentralized, solidarity model of production?

I went to London and chatted to Myles Jackman and Lola about this project - decentralized hosting. And what struck me was how un-bothered they were about this issue, which to geeks like us seems so pressing, and how their priorities were strikingly similar. Eg, the problem that activist communities are splitting over these contentious issues - falling into pro/anti positions that polarize us, and the question is how do you find a space for sensible dialogue? And this was what Radical X initially set out to do, finding common ground, it's why I set it up separately to my own website. To be a space that people felt some ownership of, or at least a semi-neutral space for meeting in the middle maybe. And can it do that again? Can it stimulate some kind of exchange around the issues of pornography for example, or sex work activism which is still so contentious?

But I think the hosting problem could be linked in here. For example, the interesting 'mic check' exercise Alex Brew did at Sex on Trial, where OWS-style we had to repeat phrases from both sides of the debate. Speaking to people after, many of them felt really uncomfortable with it and refused to repeat phrases they disagreed with. Could there be an equivalent in hosting? And actually yes, it reminds me of the video I did for my application to PZI, on the politics of aggregation:

• http://eleanorg.org/pzwartmap

Some quotes I liked that are totally relevant again here:

"Aggregation gives us another chance to get out of our own, heavily conditioned, capitalist headspace. Which is, "this is MY website, this is OUR project, this is OUR collective - and that's what we're promoting. As opposed to linking everybody up, and making sure that everybody grows. Including people you don't necessarily agree with."

"I think there's a difference between censorship, and not providing a platform for somebody's mad ranty blog. I think it would just be a liberal guilt type thing to think you should syndicate every fuckin' nutter in the world. Don't you?"

And therein lies the rub. Here is the crucial opposition, the crucial contention, I want to address. The key anarchist dilemma: how far does solidarity extend?

So I'm creating models where people have to take a part, have to show solidarity, for the thing to exist at all. And this isn't so far removed from the factories really. Like in my dissertation, the idea is that authorship is never solo because even if the idea is a germ of autonomous genius (which is never), you need other people's eyeballs and speech to bring the work into being. So production isn't different from hosting, is it? To "bring something into being" could mean to create or to publish. Is this a contemporary phenomenon? The web collapsing boundaries between making & disseminating, ala Mr. Troemel?

22 April

Construction of the archive

Proposal for BodyBook

WHAT IS IT? BodyBook is a living, distributed archive of unpublishable works - created and maintained by you. You are invited to:

A. Send in an image, text or other file that has been censored. For example: a photo taken down from your Facebook page by admins. and/or: B: Volunteer to host somebody else's image or file.

HOW DOES IT WORK? All files sent in will be temporarily stored by Radical X while they await adoption by a host. Each file will have a short description, which potential hosts will use to decide whether or not they wish to host it. Until an image is adopted by a host, only this description will be visible.

When a host has found an image they want to host, they will send in a photo of themselves holding the machine they propose to host it on, along with an email address. The image is then sent to them. (Not sure about the following part: They will then make it available online: either hosting it on their server, or seeding it on a file-sharing service such as Pirate Bay.)

Radical X will act as an index to this distributed archive, with links to all of the files that have been hosted. Next to the description of each file will be the host's photo of the computer on which that file is stored.

Question: do the images actually need to be online? Isn't it enough that they are stored on ppl's computers? And actually, it's more interesting if it's offline because then you have to email the host to get a copy of the image.

Though I can't control whether ppl put it online I guess. Though having the mystery would be good.

Q2: Should I limit invitations to work that's ALREADY been censored? Or could I invite new work that falls foul of some kind of guidelines - eg, facebook? A kind of Oulipo constraint. Fits more in with the factory theme as well. And it would help to generate more content; give ppl a motivation to participate.

I like the idea of encouraging conversations between participants by maintaining the mystery of what the files actually are. Creating a kind of social network. Should I actually use Diaspora or something for this, rather than Radical X being the central node? But don't want ppl to have to get accounts.

20 April

Gathering relevant projects. Question: do I want to facilitate a one-off, or design a protocol?
{{#ev:vimeo|38786165}} http://www.v2.nl/events/dead-drops-masterclass/leadImage_preview Guardian book swap. Books left out in the open for people to find and re-circulate. http://www.deadswap.net/ How is what I'm doing different from these 'offline file sharing' projects? Based more on holding and less on circulation. More stationary and personal. Asking for individual commitment rather than finding a solution for networking.

Projects based on the idea of 'adoption'?

14 April

So here we are at 1.3. Too many ideas for projects and not enough time.

In prototyping I'll be developing the 'adopt a pixel' project and hope to have it actually working by the end of term, with a database.

Now I have to think about Radical X and where I want to take it. Came up with a rough proposal for a project to do this Trimester, on hosting - the distributed, physical archive of censored works. Realised that if I go with this, there is a clear theme developing in Radical X. All projects will have explored the question of solidarity vs consent; how people with conflicting interests accommodate one another.

So the proposal I wrote was this:

Proposal: BodyBook will facilitate the creation of a distributed archive of images censored from Facebook because of their 'bodily' content (nudity, breastfeeding etc). Participants will be invited to contribute images that they have had removed from their pages by Facebook admins, and the BodyBook website will match them with other participants who are willing to "host" the image for them. Participants will be encouraged to interpret "hosting" in a broad sense: from hosting the image literally on their own server, to physically carrying it with them - provided that the host have bodily guardianship of their chosen image. The BodyBook website will provide an index of this physical archive.

And that leaves me with a list of questions that need answering:

• Why Facebook specifically, and could attention be drawn to the problems of censorship/hosting by widening the net somewhat?
• Do hosts get to see the images they're adopting, or is it a surprise/ blind promise?
• How to make it interesting/rewarding for participants? How to invite their creative input - designing the storage devices; making images specially for it (in which case need to adjust original specs for images)?

Actually funnily enough, I just took a pause to download some music and had to move to yet another pirate bay mirror, as each one seems to get blocked. I find this whole process fascinating - how the 'taken down' page then links to alternate mirrors. How could I make this Rad X project relevant to this more scary form of censorship, instead of just highlighting the obvious fact that FB doesn't like breasts? Is it even relevant to sexuality and if so, how? Or does it fall outside the scope of Rad X? Is it an entirely separate project?

Thinking about physical location. I started off last trimester thinking about actual servers and how they are vulnerable to the 'laws of the land'. But there is something very bodiless and conceptual about all these pirate bay sites and how the same content is served up in a slightly different wrapping with a different URL each time; one gets blocked, and you move to the next one.

a small idea

So we're doing factories right, ie working processes, ie methods. And the most relevant bit for me is I think the question of what it means to facilitate a project - are you just the new boss?. But anyway I had the idea to combine the factory project with the hosting project. So, one the one hand you have 'producers' who make some kind of illicit content. And on the other, 'hosts' who agree to take care of it. And somehow make the argument that 'radical' porn isn't worthy of the name if it colludes with the censorship that's going on now - like Kink.com doing DMCA takedown notices. Not that they ever claimed to be radical.

so continuing in the vein of Open Sauce where the basic idea being advanced is - don't start from scratch; we exist in a world saturated with pornographic imagery and what is interesting is the way that imagery is privately appropriated and made use of by those it isn't intended for.

but how this fits in with censorship and hosting i don't know. Maybe keep it separate. And then what of the factory?

later

Just been reading about http://www.dontmakemesteal.com/en/

I'm not down with the politics but I'm surprised something like this hasn't come along sooner. Sign of the times.

So what do I do next? Get a tutorial and unload my brain. Make notes on that Gondry text - thinking about the role of the project facilitator. Chat to Florian about how to fit the factory in with other project ideas on hosting.