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====<span style="color:blue;">ON THE DELUSION THAT TECHNICAL WORK IS MORALLY NEUTRAL</span>==== | ====<span style="color:blue;">ON THE DELUSION THAT TECHNICAL WORK IS MORALLY NEUTRAL</span>==== | ||
There are people -very well educated people- designing our schools, our communication systems, our social media plateforms… There are also people designing the prisons, there are people drawing maps, drawing borders… there | There are people -very well educated people- designing our schools, our communication systems, our social media plateforms… There are also people designing the prisons, there are people drawing maps, drawing borders… there are people desiging the extermination camps. | ||
The original drive for both my project and my thesis was to explore the idea of the "impossibility of innoncence" of the architect, the master creator : the delusion that technical work is morally neutral, in the hopes of understanding how different forms of power have been sustaining their dominion by appropriating and corrupting infrastructures to their advantage. | The original drive for both my project and my thesis was to explore the idea of the "impossibility of innoncence" of the architect, the master creator : the delusion that technical work is morally neutral, in the hopes of understanding how different forms of power have been sustaining their dominion by appropriating and corrupting infrastructures to their advantage. |
Revision as of 00:59, 3 December 2020
CONTEXT
INFRASTRUCTURES&CORRUPTION
"Urban infrastructure is a gear of political power. Its aim is to conquer the territory of the city and hold dominion over certain city relationships. Public space is more than just a polygon delineated by coordinates, it is a factory of social realities."
- Ximena Peredo in "Infrastructure & Corruption", a photo project by Alejandro Cartajena
SHIFT OF POWER
There’s this cycle of Jupiter and Saturn.
They come together every 20 years, roughly, and it is called the Grand conjuct.
According to it’s astrological meaning it is cyclical conjunction and is a marker of historical eras in traditional astrology. When Jupiter and Saturn come together there is both the intensity of old forms dying and a new growth taking shape.
For the last 200 years, Jupiter and Saturn have been aligning in earth signs. They’ve been in earth signs since 1802, and this year, in 2020, Jupiter and Saturn will align in the air sign of Aquarius. It’s a new cycle that will last until 2159 ! Also known as the great Upheaval, this conjunction is extra special because it marks the start of a new roughly 200-year cycle during which Jupiter and Saturn will form conjunctions in the same element: air.
In 1980, we got a glimpse of it, when they briefly conjunct in Libra, the beginning of the internet revolution, of information technology revolution, if you like. But it really gets moving at the end of 2020. That’s a very significant point.
Any way this means that these planets that have been ruled by earth up until now (oil extraction, heavy machinery, earth industries) have just shifted into the air sign of Aquarius, the sign of progress, innovation, and community. That means that the extractive forces that have been focusing on earth for the past 200 years will now re-orient their interests (the strive towerds more and more data, more controle over communication ressources).
THE CONTINUING AFFILIATION
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO MAKE?
![](/mw-mediadesign/images/thumb/7/72/UNDP.png/300px-UNDP.png)
Recognizing the patterns is the first step to healing.
THE INSTITUTION OF CARE FOR CORRUPTED INFRASTRUCTURES (OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT)
I will set this dual approach of "Infrastructure" & "Corruption", coined in the eponym work cited above, as a framework to try and define the outlines and patterns that constitute what I might consider a corrupted infrastructure.
Then I will develop a system of nodes, research units, and other modalities. When the developed protocol is up and running, it will be weaponized as a tool to further analyzing all the aspects that constitute what might be considered as infrastructure and infrastructure and corruption.
A CARE SHEET (Feuille de soins, in fr), that will be designed to support both the writing of my Thesis and my prototyping practice. If the protocole is followed properly, this care sheet should provide you with all the key notions you need to dissect the concept of Infrastructure & Corruption.
This system will be prototyped into a system that will guide you through organizing elements in order to achieve an all-encompassing networked power, resulting in this platform for experimenting with providing diagnosis and engaging in prognostic speculations.
This platform would be an aggregation of the studies of the recondites practices that take place in the fields of prediction and past readings.I want the person arriving on the website to feel like they have to engage with the stucture in order to make sens of it, like they have just entered a world they have yet to understand.
As the project grows, it will also become a collective archive for these story tellings, that will inherently be decentralized and modular, as the forms the enter a project in a database are only guidelines for you to situate your questited project to its roots, and explore subconscious pattern, and speculate on later outcomes, potential future implications.
While developing this platform, I will strongly be referring to the concept of survival architecture (Yona Friedman for the moment, might expand it to other researches) and following the models of self-organization, through the use of modules, of nodes, ect… I would like to investigate if, and if so, how, can the researches in the fields of architecture and sociology intersect, could be adjusted to conceive new digital spaces. How can I translate and aply the patterns to digital space and digital resources, see how this might merge into new forms.
"When we decide to approach architecture as “the discipline that organizes bodies in space,” countless texts can be commissioned and written about how architecture materializes various forms of political violence. Yet, it is much harder to articulate a tactical ‘positive’ discourse about political architectures as we propose to do throughout this issue - The Funambulist Nº23 - Insurgent Architectures
I will also be trying to articulate the different ways in which some of the tactical ‘positive’ discourses about political architectures could be translated or applied into the digital realm, where the needs to materialize resistance against imperialism, border enforcement, capitalism, and/or patriarchy, are just as urgent.
References :
"A multidisciplinary systematic review of the use of diagrams as a means of collecting data from research subjects: application, benefits and recommendations" : https://bmcmedresmethodol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2288-11-11
my devotees
https://n-o-d-e.net/zine/index.html#
HOW DO YOU PLAN ON MAKING IT ?
I will be using a narrative of insurgency through a transdisciplinary perspective, in the hope that it might offer a sharper, all-encompassing vision of the different ways architectural projects, frameworks, technologies, and institutions (non-exhaustive list) have been utilized to ensure the well functionning of a corrupted system.
What is it then that is clearly defined as an infrastructure of corruption ? Does it have a clearly defined beginning and a clearly defined end ? How can I access this esoteric knowledge ? With the little amount of knowledge that I have of structures and organizations (I’m a Virgo), I have been working on suggesting some sort of mystical research center for corrupted infrastructures, a care unit. This platform will be supported by a carefully designed structure, that will guide you through establishing an a sharp diagnosis for your quesited project.
This formation of nodes, aggregations, clogs, and all sorts of linking systems that will allow for an almost infinitely expandable research platform, and will propose an alternate trajectory to reading, a non-linear reading paths for the archive.
References :
Here and Now? Explorations in Urgent Publishing Key notions of relations, trust, and remediation : https://networkcultures.org/makingpublic/2020/05/20/here-and-now-explorations-in-urgent-publishing/
The way of the shovel - Dieter Roelstraete
WHY DO YOU WANT TO MAKE IT ?
ON THE DELUSION THAT TECHNICAL WORK IS MORALLY NEUTRAL
There are people -very well educated people- designing our schools, our communication systems, our social media plateforms… There are also people designing the prisons, there are people drawing maps, drawing borders… there are people desiging the extermination camps.
The original drive for both my project and my thesis was to explore the idea of the "impossibility of innoncence" of the architect, the master creator : the delusion that technical work is morally neutral, in the hopes of understanding how different forms of power have been sustaining their dominion by appropriating and corrupting infrastructures to their advantage.
(Partnerships with the "cognitivists", the "experts", the "technocrats".)
WHO ARE THESE GHOSTS THAT ARE STALKING OUR SYSTEMS ?
I guess the starting point for this research was the idea that architectures and infrastructures can be corrupted to support and cement certain ideologies. Even though ideologies can be criticized, and political regimes can be overthrown and disowned, it always leaves behind some kind of heritage, some ways of thinking and feeling, some good old habits, some obscure and abstruse drives.
In The Funambulist : "ARCHITECTURE AND COLONIALISM", they state these two arguments : "colonialism is not an era, it is a system of military/police, legal, administrative, social, and cultural system of domination; and, architecture is not (only) an aesthetic vessel, it is an apparatus organizing and hierarchizing bodies in space"
With this project I hope to somehow contribute, righfully I hope, in embeding the discussion around media and information theory within the context of the imperial and colonial heritage of its infrastructures. I would like to participate in this research by using the insurgent narrative of this shift of power to engage in a process of investigation, through cross examination and juxtaposition, of the varied pervasive methods that have been used on land, and look for analogies, similarities, and translations that could be happenning in our more intangible (soft) networks.
WHAT IS BENEATH
Infra- is what is below; beneath; after. We can understand infrastructures as not only the basic systems and services that are needed to support a company, an industry, economy, or any other system, but also as a network of technologies built to support all that constitutes the ideologies, philosophies, the true aspirations of these said "any-system", and the doctrines embeded whithin the minds of whoever is building these networks.
Lately we’ve been (un)lucky enough to see quite the explicit picture of the disfunctionning of our political infrastructures, and the course of events has been depicting what tends to look like some ugly hybrid formations coagulating someplaces inbetween economical unilaterality and increasingly martial policies.
Why does it feel like there’s such a gap between the current state of democracy and even the bare minimum aspirations I might have towards a truly responsive and democraticly fair system ? (I know democracy falls out of nowhere here, I have intentions of clarifiying this over time).
The words we use, the streets we walk, the flats we’ve lived in and the language.s we speak shape us, and themselves are deeply rooted, embodying, and/or adapting from the forms they have taken throughout history.
Maybe that’s what’s urging me to be researching infrastrure. Something with that infra-, this places in the realms of the whithin, of the around, but never of the "as". It feels like this question can only be answered by understanding what is further, more deeply, rooted within it. By understanding corruption as not only active methods, but as a constant and perpetual abuse of entrusted power for private gain, deeply deeply rooted into our infrastructures.
WHAT IS YOU TIME TABLE
- End of november, mid december, I will have finished my first module for the project : "My contribution to the e-death industry". Technically this means that the Astrology chatbot I’ve been working on (at my own little pace) for the past 2 months needs to be up and running.
- End of november, mid december, too, I will have commited to my system and will have clearly defined the nodes that will constitute my research project (see thesis proposal), I will have observed if there are (and there will be) swelling points in each of my research unit. Then I will take a bit of time to focus on writting the first chapter, but from the 4th of december on, I will have all the material needed to support my prototyping practice : Case studies, swelling points, diagnisis.
- By January, I will have started the conception of a second module for the project of the a second research unit.
- By Febuary, as I will be hands on prototyping the structure for the plateforme and I will be embeding some of the modules in it already. I expect that I will have at least 5 research units either a finished or at least 70% into the process (40% at worst)
- Mid-febuary, as I conclude the first draft of the thesis, I will start carry on perfecting the plateforme structure and the last modules (By then there will have been massive amount of thinking about it done).
- April should be all done just perfecting everything (would rather have some margin for that)
WHO CAN HELP YOU AND HOW ?
everybody can help everybody can help everybody can help everybody can help everybody Manetta can help everybody can help everybody Micheal with prototyping can help everybody Clara & Amy can help everybody can help everybody can help my friends here everybody can help everybody can help everybody can help everybody can help anyone new I meet that stays at 1.5 m everybody can help everybody can help everybody can help my friends back home everybody can help everybody can help everybody can help Marloes everybody can help everybody can help everybody can help everybody can help everybody can help everybody can help everybody can help everybody can help everybody can help everybody can help
RECENT PAST (PREVIOUS PRCATICE)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6rq_GT6RIk
As I came in to this Master program, my major focus were Myth-Science and Science Fiction. I was singing the song of Outer Space incorporation at least six tmes a day and I was reading "La Horde du Contre Vent" by Alain Damasio. My ideas were mostly revolving around the idea of "Myth-science" that I understood as fiction works that produced alternative perspectives and models to revealing "the habits of thought of the physical, historical and social realities as yet more myth".
The central project was a story telling project called "The depravity of denial", which was also the story of a collective called the "Metatown Spirit committee". Now that I look back on it, actually, I was spending most of my time trying to fabricate fake legal document (post search reports, transcrits from official conversations that never happened, a Fake Writt or Cert*.)
References : FROM FINANCIAL FICTIONS TO MYTHOTECHNESIS - Simon O’Sullivan (Mythotechnesis being the ways in which technologies enter into discourse and life through projections of the existing and future influence of machines)
(*We had been to see a trial with a friend and then we’d been speculating on the idea of making an appeal to the supreme court, how could it be heard ? Then the project turned into this, "allegorical reading of constitution", as we had humbly defined, a facetious and absurd version of governement procedures, a performance of the impossible. Have I mentioned that I was reading Kafka at the time ?)
During SP #12, Radio implicancies, I was working on the "MYTH, MYTHODOLOGY, MYTHOD" with Ioana and Tisa, where we investigated, for 3 weeks, the different ways in which we could fiction as a method to convey messages. The "Insecurity Hotline", for example, "the hotline where we turn insecurities into securities", was a fictive phone service that you could call all day, any day, so that together, we would "reshape a community for you to fit in." This framework allowed us to tackled subjects like memory loss, individual identity, or even the impostor syndrome, in a playful yet compasionate way.
Two other works I have done for the Radio Implicancy project were called "Democracy (60 Hz Gamma Waves for faster learning)" and "Public Damage N2992". Both of them were already a first step in trying to identify (in a playful yet critical way) the eventual points of corruption within our systems. The first one, a read out thread about how the incarceration system in the USA is corrupting Democracy, and in the second one, how the abusive french police system is being supported by an increasingly authoritative and censoring governement. (Both of them can be listened to on our station : https://issue.xpub.nl/12/ )
I might re-use the case of "Louis XV will save us all" as well, to explore the dynamics of communication powers under the King Louis XV. Not that it really needs to be proved to anywone that communication systems under the 18th century monarchy was pretty corrupted, the idea is to explore an incredibly wide range of case studies in order to define what an infrastructure of corruption really is, and what it has been throughout history.
Some of the earlier works from last year also resonate with this project, and more particularly the work I had started during SP #11, Post digital Itch, where I embarked in the journey of "recongnizing patterns". With the rich archive I had at hand, I had started to delineate the different ways in which a dictature forms itself. What are the coagulation points, how can we define and observe the rise and fall of a dictature, of an Iperial form of power. This work was never published, or shared, but I will be using it to form some of my arguments throughout this project.
Relation to a larger context
(I will be adding references as I go)
The Funambulist : WEAPONIZED ARCHITECTURE /// THE ARCHITECTURAL DRAWINGS AS MILITARY AND JUDICIARY DOCUMENTS
The Funambulist : ARCHITECTURE AND COLONIALISM ///
Architecture Without Architects, Another Anarchist Approach - Marion von Osten, e-flux journal reader 2009
Architecture of Survival - Yona friedman
How to ensure this right to those to whom it belongs?
How to do it in a world that is heading towards increasing poverty?
How to survive in such a world?"
For the shape :
Fiction as method, HALF 10K, TOP SLICE PLUS FIVE - Matthew fuller - Edited by K S Shaw and Theo Reeves, Sternberg Press