User:Senka/Notes Thoughts and Annotations

Special Issue 1

☽ Peggy Phelan Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction ☽

I'm kind of in conflict with this work a bit. Mostly because Boris Groys's essay "Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction" [1] really informed how I see performance and tech-mediated performance. He for instance posits that all digital files are performed, since their "score": the metadate and encryption has to be read and executed for the content to be generated, which is a kind of reproduction.
What also served as thought is all of this talk of visibility, and the position of invisibility sometimes being a survival strategy. Perhaps not formally but this idea that if there is no representation for you, sometimes you can also circumvent the violence and discrimination that a system that sees you can subject you to.

★ Legacy Russell Glitch Feminist Manifesto ★

Read this manifesto for the radio show Nightly Manifesto I host with Julia Wilhelm. It really spoke to the experience I had growing up in predominantly queer spaces on Tumblr, and the liberty that offered compared to the real world. I like that Legacy proposes that we should use AFK (away from keyboard) instead of IRL (in real life) so as to not prioritize real life and say that the lives we live digitally are 'lesser than'. After all, so much happens online that has consequences on the lives we live afk and vice versa. Politically, socially, economically... to name a few. Legacy's idea of not being named, working from the point of invisibility as a strategy to enact change is also something that makes me quite excited. The idea of the glitch and error as being this disturbing forces that dismantle and confuse the system is also very seductive (although I did start thinking about the fact that even errors are named).

★ Saidiya Hartman Venus in Two Acts & Intimate History, Radical Narrative ★

I read both of these texts for a research fellowship I'm doing and was really blown away. Critical fabulation as a method might be one of the most important writing and thinking tools I have encountered, in relation to archival practices but also on it's own. It really searches for loopholes in oppressive archival structure and dares to imagine otherwise, an alternative. In one of the talk I listened to, Saidiya also described how does she go about shifting the power dynamics through her writing. Because many times, she'll encounter these archival material that are filmed, recorded and preserved by the white gaze. So she gave the example of an image of girl on a balcony that was taken. Instead of narrating from the perspective of the photographer, she will narrative from the perspective of the girl observing the camera man. By doing so she destabilizes who is perceived and observed.
Talked to a friend about Hartman's work since she's reading Lose Your Mother now, and she brought up the wonderful quote:

If the past is a country, I am it's citizen.

☽ Making tapes ☽

When we did this prototyping class we manipulated and re-recoded things on manual tape. At one point while playing around the group I was in (with Victor, Wang, Michel and Maria) figured out that we manually move the tape to achieve different speeds of recording. So we made this ghostly, haunting slowed down version by manually moving the tape. It's a very finicky process but I enjoy moments when you can use a machine how it's not meant to be used. Later Joseph build a crank for it so that his action is more streamlined.

☽ Jo Freeman The Tyranny of Structurelessness ☽

In short: no organizing structure (collective, initiative, group) is without a structure, it has either an informal or formal structure. Without an effort of making explicit what the structure is, an informal structure, power dynamic and hierarchy will arise regardless, based on what roles we take on or are put in normally.
I've read a piece called Conversations are a Cybernetic Technology by Dan Taeyoung, that builds heavily on this piece positing that no conversation is structureless either, and gives possible methods and recipes one can experiment with. [2] It's a good read for anyone who works with conversation, interviewing or workshops.

☽ Simon Yuill All Problems of Notation Will Be Solved By the Masses ☽

Dense, dense, dense BUT really useful. When I think of the running collaborations I have, for instance with ARK, they generate a truly collaborative practice and not a distributive one. There's a prominent dissolution of roles and knowledge, what we often talk about as "knowledge convergence", so gaining a shared pool of knowledge by learning from collaborators. This is my preferred way of working in collaboration.

☽ Wendy Chun Queering Homophily ☽

This piece was dense but really asked me to reconsider some ways in which I perceive behavior and the online realm. It poses that homophily, the idea that we love people who are like us, has been treated as if it's a biological fact. It's just how we as humans are, yet this is not really the case. It is just a weapon to further perpetrate segregation. If homophily was a principle that held some truth to it, the majority of people would be homosexual, which is not the case. To make matters worse this is the principle that is the heart of network sciences, informs algorithms, design online platforms... It's not looking pretty
I talked to my friend's partner, who's a biologist, about homophily and he also rightfully pointed out that if homophily was something we could observe around us, there would only be monocultures. So biodiversity would not really exist or be present in the way that it does now.

★ Svetlana Alexievich In Search of the Free Individual: The History of the Russian-Soviet Soul ★

A text that really spoke to the work I was doing around memory and trying to understand how it is mediated through digital technology and text.

It took me a long time to find a genre that corresponded with the way I viewed the world... to the way my eyes saw and ears heard... a genre that corresponds to my memory. I choose the genre of the human voice.

Svetlana goes into the generational divide, how the generation of her parents were bewitched by utopia and mortally infected with communism, and how her generation has trouble understanding them. She searches for answers through what she calls domestic socialism.

Feelings are documents too. I study missing history, the things that history usually overlooks.

Her resistance to portraying a 'hero journey' often causes anger among those trauma victims that have grown to expect this kind of narrative, instead of something along the lines of what Ursula K. le Guin suggest with the The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.

We lived together in a country where we were taught to die beginning in childhood. We learned death and dying. We weren't taught that humans are born for happiness, or love, it was drilled into us that humans exist in order to give of themselves, in order to burn, to sacrifice.

This kind of deeply instilled militarism is not just characteristic of the Russian condition of course, and brings be back to some ideas I was raised with too. Not by my direct family, but but the informal and formal education I went through. This Orthodox Christian insistence on suffering and sacrifice, coupled with the socialist and collectivist ideas that you do not belong to yourself, but to a larger community. Your life is not just your own, it is the the family's, the neighbourhood's, the nation's life. This last ideological conditioning is one which I never managed to escape in life, and admittedly, it has not always been bad. In the context of queer community and kinship, these thoughts have been the support structure I needed to take care of myself but didn't want to. So I took care of myself for the benefit of the community, as without that care, I could not care for others.

★ Paul B. Preciado An Apartment on Uranus ★

This is a book Riviera recommended to me. I'm still in the process of reading it but it's resonating with me a lot from the point of trans embodiment. Equally it is bringing me back to some of the queer currents I'm more fond of: such as embracing the monster label society has stamped on us, reclaiming slurs and similar. It also brought me back to Ece Canli's lecture Monserizing the Master's Tools [3]. The title and core ethos is tied to Audre Lorde's work The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House, and Canli's suggestion here is to embrace the monstruos tools the master does not and will not recognize as valuable.

⛆ When Computers were Women ⛆

The title says it all. Important read, especially if you are thinking about how many of these professions not are presented as being for men in some form or fashion. It also points to how deeply devalued the women that joined this labour force were, only for them to be working on the same computers that replaced their labour.

☆ Dead Web Club with Kendal and Thomas ☆

The lecture of Marijn Bril brought up come interesting thoughts and references I charted down:

• "Archive now ask difficult questions afterwards" - this is an archival approach a lot of archival practitioners applied in preserving digital matter such as websites. The didn't make overcomplex protocols in the initial time of archiving, but instead just scraped everything and made sense of it later.
• A network of care - a concept from Annet Dekker in which she proposes experts and laypeople who are enthusiasts about archiving the digital to work together in archiving the web
• Informal and Formal memory - the informal being the individual/personal one and the formal being the more institutional memory. Archiving the digital is of course comprised of both but largely impacted by informal memory.

Questions

Retrospectively, I guess a lot of questions I was thinking about during this term were what to preserve in case of an emergency. As a radiomaker of Worm radio, I'm far to familiar with small emergencies where things get lost. Just recalling the leaks from NRC, the club upstairs, which could have whipped all of the recordings from the playing archive which is the USB hard drive. Thankfully it only damaged the keyboard. Anyhow, digital files are fragile, this is nothing new. Somehow with this question of preservation, the audio files themselves seemed too many, too disorganized, too irrelevant in the face of live radio. Not everyone there even records their sessions. But the space is something that we all share there, and it is present in small interruptions throughout each radio show. The sound of the kitchen during a talk show, the sound of the vacuum bursting at the beginning of a dj set, or the clamoring and party of people just outside the aquarium, the radio studio room. This seemed like something to preserve, not for eternity, but as a snapshot from which we can rebuild after, not a 1:1 ratio, but from the principles of how this studio was assembled.

Special Issue 2

☆ Johanna Hedva Sick Woman Theory ☆

Listened to a reading of Sick Woman Theory from Sen's Anarchist Library here [4]. (The text could be found as a pdf as well [5]) It was really created from this urgency of Hedva wanting to participate in BLM protest but not managing to because of sickness, chronic illness and disability. They advocate for radical kinship, an inter dependent sociality, a politics of care, since we we will all sooner or later encounter disability in our lives. (I live with a few chronic illnesses myself, and the space of this text carries me thru it all).

And, crucially: The Sick Woman is who capitalism needs to perpetuate itself. Why? Because to stay alive, capitalism cannot be responsible for our care—its logic of exploitation requires that some of us die. “Sickness” as we speak of it today is a capitalist construct, as is its perceived binary opposite, “wellness.” The “well” person is the person well enough to go to work. The “sick” person is the one who can’t. What is so destructive about conceiving of wellness as the default, as the standard mode of existence, is that it invents illness as temporary. When being sick is an abhorrence to the norm, it allows us to conceive of care and support in the same way. Care, in this configuration, is only required sometimes. When sickness is temporary, care is not normal. Here’s an exercise: go to the mirror, look your self in the face, and say out loud: “To take care of you is not normal. I can only do it temporarily.” Saying this to yourself will merely be an echo of what the world repeats all the time.

The lecture To Those Mad, Sick, Crip Selves [6] also just so important, a lot on productivity capital and disability...

☽ Keywords for Radicals entries care and accessibility ☽

I've mostly described this in the Care entry of the ((in)ter)dependence editorial teams reader here [7].

▵ Third Spaces ▵

After our first method's class I found myself thinking a lot about third places. Partly because the architecture of the Netherland has always puzzled me in many ways. In front of buildings, there are no places to sit outside with your neighbours, there are just chairs placed by the brave few, most socializing happens in house, in the garden tucked away in the back, out of sight of the streets (not to mention that a garden is a sign of either luck, privilege or both). Generally third places—places where you don't have to spend money to socialize—are rare. Which is troubling because without them, communities cannot form, at least not easily. And if they cannot have a shared place, they cannot organize, unionize, protest, and the rest. As with many other issues one glances at capitalism with a side eye. I was listening to the video essay Nowhere to Go: The Loss of Third Places [8] which influenced quite a bit of my thoughts about this topic.

▵ Bleja ▵

I've been thinking a lot about the Serbian concept of bleja. It's a mix of hanging out without a purpose, wasting time with a group of people who gather usually at a third place of sorts (parks, abandoned buildings, ruins and forests are all up for grabs). In its original form it is non-hierarchical, no one is a host or a guest, most people are familiar with the gathering location and there is no pressure to perform an activity of any sorts. On Vukajlija[9], an online slang dictionary that any user can contribute to, a lot of people posit bleja as socially looked down upon by elders, because of its association with not being productive (and drinking or smoking). I think there's something really valuable to be gained from the idea of passing time together, resembling a herd of sheep just grazing grass (the word bleja comes from the onomatopea for sheep in Serbian).

★ Johanna Hedva In Defence of De-Persons ★

Here Hedva really builds on their work around crip justice. They advocate for what they've titled 'de-persons' or people affected by depersonalisation and derealization. They write in favour of the messy thought pattern and construction that riddles people with these states. This work speaks to me not just because I am often affected by these states, but because they ask for a different narrative approach when trauma is involved, something I have also tried to highlight in my own work. Some quotes that stuck with me:

To reckon with being haunted is important political work. It can account for why the world right now has come to be as it is. And it can re-imagine a world that is not already foretold.

I cannot think of a form of embodiment that is not somehow disordered. The enforcing of self-possession has happened probably because of the self’s radical disorder. How this can feel unbearable has resulted in the political implication that we are all ungovernable. “Governance then becomes the management of self-management,” as Moten and Harney write.

☽ Susan Leigh Star Misplaced Concretism and Concrete Situations: Feminism, Method, and Information Technology ☽

Dense, but rich text, for not I will just leave the highlight and imprints it left on me, the rest is in the reader:

A method is distinct from a recipe or formula, in exactly the sense that science is not embodied in a textbook and cooking is not a cookbook. It is a real-time, lived, and experiential form of ordering practice.

Method is a way of surviving experience.

[..]how—a fundamentally methodological question.

Patti Lather, a brilliant feminist methodologist, has written about this under the rubric transgressive validity (Lather 1993). Her map of attributes of a feminist method, which I read after I wrote the passage above, has some remarkable resonances. She asks the question, where, after poststructuralism, can we find validity? Her answer has four points that together equal a validity which rests reflexively on the contemporary crisis of representation: Ironic validity (which problematizes the single voice, realist representation of nature); paralogical validity (which emphasizes paradox and heterogeneity); rhizomatic validity (which undermines the taken-for-granted and keeps opening up new ways of situated seeing); and voluptuous validity (which precisely goes too far, and joins ethics and epistemology) (685–686).

A monster occurs when an object refuses to be naturalized (Haraway 1992); a borderland occurs when two communities of practice coexist in one person (Anzaldúa 1987). And feminism has had a great deal to say about this, for borderlands are the naturalized home of those monsters known as cyborgs.

☆ Mindy Sue Design Lecture (On the Cyber Feminist Index) ☆

[10] A lot to be said here, Mindy Sue marry meeee but also love the quote: "Hyperlinks are almost a citational practice" [11] Also this as a presentational/sharing method. Presentation notes in the code when you hit right+click Inspect

☆ Mahmoud Darwish Journal of an Ordinary Grief ☆

Darwish titles his work Journal of an Ordinary Grief when writing about the ethnic cleansing, displacement and systemic oppression of the Palestinian people. He places this as an ordinary part of Palestinian life. It's an incredibly important read, and brings closer the reality that Palestinian people had to go through for almost a century. It's tragic, difficult but absolutely necessary for anyone born or living in Europe.

☆ Ren Loren Britton Turnabouts and deadnames: shapeshifting trans* and disabled vernaculars ☆

Very telling work from a person I admire greatly. Points out the real lived reality of the 'borderlands' of living trans. Really resonates with me in the sense of not erasing the names and identities that we were build on.

★ Kaloyan Kolev Yugoslavia’s Digital Twin ★

Fantastic read on a part of Balkan/Yugoslav history I was not aware of. It's of course not just interesting in that context. It looks at the broader history of how internet domains are given to nation states. What Kalo describes as 'baking borders into the internet'. It also addresses the problematics that may arise when a domain name ending outlives a county, such as with the example of .su (soviet union), but also offers an alternative, how these names could be a kind of place to preserve digital memory of countries and times long gone. (Part of an online heritage) [12]

★ Carmen Maria Machado Dream House ★

So far, this has been nothing short from a mind-blowing book on queer trauma and abuse. The structure that Carmen decided on is taking every chapter, titling it "Dream House as..." and giving a genre, or writing approach to explore while portraying the grueling history of abuse. "Dream House as Haunted Mansion", "Dream House as Gothic Novel", "Dream House as Fantasy".. Many stories have footnotes that explain what motif or phenomena/type they build on from the Motif-Index of Folk Literature. I found this to be a fascinating way of the author sharing what tools and methods she is using. Exposing the seams of a written text, while not undoing the writing itself.

★ Radisav (Rade) Stijovic Between Anxiety and Hope ★

An essay my friend wrote that thinks about the notion of care and betraying traditional bonds to create new meaningful ones. The godparent institution is very powerful where we come from, and he speaks about how his grandmother had many 'non-official' godmothers she mad through their friendships, and how this practice was more meaningful that the tradition. A very inspiring part of the essay is also the double scrolling technique in which the footnotes follow the scrolling of the text and 'travel with the main text'.

★ Dubravka Ugrešić The Confiscation of Memory ★

Recommended by Kaloyan. An essay I was silently looking for while writing Momentary Lapse in Memory. It focuses on the context of memory in the 'former East' with Yugoslavia as the main backdrop, but addresses far more than just this region. It really situates trauma in memory in these regions that have had a very different and difficult history. It addresses the meanings of being born in one country, growing up in another and living in a third while never changing location (I was born in the Yugoslav federation, raised in Serbia and Montenegro, and left just Serbia). I'll leave a particular quote that stuck with me before rambling on about this work:

Things with a past, particularly a shared one, are not as simple as they might first appear from the perspective of the collector. In this ‘post-communist’ age it seems that ‘Easterners’ are most sensitive to two things: communality and the past. Everyone will first maintain that his post-communism is different, implying at the same time his conviction that life in his post-communism is closer to that of the Western democracies than that of the other (post-communist) countries. The ‘Easterner’ is reluctant to admit his post-communist trauma in public, nor does he have the will to try to articulate it. He has had enough communist traumas (he holds the copyright on them, too), but they have worn out, aged, and don’t seem to hurt any more. The cursed ‘homo duplex’, mentally trained to separate his private life from the collective, weary of the constant ideological pressure to live facing towards the future, exhausted by the excessive amount of ‘history’ he has experienced, frightened by memories that keep popping up from somewhere, at this moment the ‘Easterner’ would most like to sink into the compliant and indifferent present, at least that’s how it seems. It is only the younger and more honest of them, like the (former) East German playwright Thomas Oberlender, who will exclaim out loud, ‘Why, I have two lives and one biography...!’

I'm deeply saddened Dubravka died last year.

★ CJ the X What Is To Be Done?: A Manifesto To Return To Web 1.5 ★

An online artist whose work I often go back to and this essay turned out to be so thoroughly connected to the topics of our semester, and ideas I've been fermenting in for a while. As much as I'm not the biggest fan of the idea of paying for using the internet, I can agree that CJ has a bit of a point here and it would cause us to stray away from the advertising model of funding. I'm all for Webrings, digital bulleting boards and newsletters and some of these are already things I incorporate in my practice. But a more intentional wearing is something I need to include (note to self). [13]

⛆ Platformer Toolkit ⛆

Very interesting reference Thijs shared with me that presents features and possibilities in game design in an extremely didactic, hands-on learning approach. I especially enjoyed the element of comparing how you designed the characters jump, running speed, camera with existing settings from well know games like Super Mario. Here's the link to the game: [14]

☆ bagenzo and fotocopiadora A Circle of Charity ☆

This game is a quite linear and heavy story if you are gender non-conforming in any way. I enjoyed how it uses different screens to tell a story of perspective, as well as this conceptualization of angels as virtues of dependencies (angels names are charity, patience, temperance). Each angel is flawed, deeply broken, and stuck in a specific circle of violence and trying to provide help for others where they cannot help themselves.

The game is structured by chronological files that were edited by an unknown force (possibly god), and you navigate through the visual novel purely by clicking through the dialogue, yet the immersion is great. The regurgitated sound bites of pixelized conversation along with the music, change of colour and perspective images offer more immersion than one could expect.
Link to the game: [15]

Questions

The thru line of what I've been researching now is in an intersection, a busy road shared between these questions: * How do we share space (for learning and making) in a non-hierarchical way, that offers support to each participant? (This is a question I've been exploring for ages in the reading clubs I organize) * How can games help us seek alternatives (to the cloud)? Or be a medium that helps with learning? (And how can such games facilitate an interaction between the online and offline space?) ---- Note to self: Look into the serious games Thijs mentioned * Another avenue of research has been largely concerned with disability and providing access, both in an online and offline context. How to not leave who join online behind? (This is also partially connected to ideas of public and private, how to protest and resist when chronically ill, how one hosts when chronically ill..)