User:Roelroscama/gradreserach

Tentative Title

The Providers?

Introduction

During my first year at the PZI I became interested in the infrastructure of the internet. That year I began experimenting with Traceroute and I started producing maps and diagrams that explored how I connected to the internet and what countries I would visit while doing so. During the summer I did a Summer Sessions residency where I made Border Check that further explored this topic.

My research lately has been focussed on the history of telecommunications and as a consequence I began seeing the internet in a broader historical and geopolitial perspective. This grew out of an interest I developed last year into the seemingly contradictory aspects of the internet as simultaneously controlling and empowering. Silicon Valley, geeks and other proponents on the other hand keep describing the internet solely in terms of it's potential for empowerment. One of the things I would like to explore in this context is the construction of the internet as a a-historical phenomenon and juxtapose this with vision of the internet as descendant of telegraphy (and all the implications that has!). In this I will follow Evgeny Morozov's ideas on 'internet-exceptionalism' and 'epochalism'.

After having explored multiple possibilities for the graduation's practical project I feel it's best to continue to develop Border Check as a graduation project. Although I managed to make a good start during the summer the project is far from finished. It remains quite fascinating to map out the infrastructure and to combine and use multiple sources to provide extra context to those maps.

Relation to previous practice

During the previous year I worked on two projects that will serve as a point of departure. Telewar was a publication on the mediated nature of war, it described both the current drone war and the then reignited conflict between Israel and Hamas where social media played a large role. Telewar had a very strong visual component in which we tried to gain a deeper understanding of the people behind the drones by examining the iconography of military badges.

The other project, Border Check, developed out of working with tracerouting and investigating the geopolitics of the internet. Border Check is a browser extension that shows how you connect to websites around the internet. It will show you which states and networks you pass through. Each of these states or networks might have different views on whether they can retain or monitor your data.

Key Words

 infrastructure
 history
 people in a system
 symbols/semiotics
 self-representation
 networks of control

Relation to a larger context

Some artists and projects I find interesting in this relation: Melle Smets de Snelweg Safari, about vernacular highway culture. Trevor Paglen, on secretive infrastructures. Metahaven's design/image centric approach to infrastructure.

There is this thing called 'stacktivism' which seems to be to the infrastructure discussion what 'The New Aesthetic' was to digitally native aesthetics. It's dealing with questions of determinism in net infrastructure and the geopolitics of it. I'm not too enthousiastic about it but people active within this context could be considered peers.

Practical Steps

Do a visual research into how members of (on-line)communities of network administrators represent themselves.

Ask technical questions on these forums designed to get answers that might reveal a bit about the way they perceive a network in terms of politics (should everyone be given as much rights on the machine? If so why? What are the hirarchies?)

Bibliotecha will be set up within the school and I will experiment to see how it's use is built into the system, eg. do certain systems illicit certain behaviours?

Go to Are You Being Served?

References

Alexander Galloway, Protocol

Evgeny Morozov,To Save Everything Click Here

Tom Standage, Victorian Internet

Wendy Chun, Control and Freedom

Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the societies of control

Descriptions of previous work

Border Check

Screenshot of Border Check

Border Check (BC) is a browser extension that maps how your data moves across the internet’s infrastructure while you surf the web. It will show you through which countries and networks you surf to illustrate the physical and political realities of the internet’s infrastructur using free software tools.

www.bordercheck.org

Telewar

Telewar is a research project by The Force of Freedom and Dave Young on the topic of drone warfare. The project was initiated in november 2012 during a three week residency at Upominki in Rotterdam. The result of the residency was a self-published booklet containing an heavily illustrated essay. In it we try to make some sense of the drone warfare phenomenon by looking at how the users of military UAVs represent themselves both officially and unofficially. This is done by examining places, images or artifacts where an official and regulated narrative on drones intersects with with a more spontaneous and uncensored one. Examples include public facebook profiles of UAV squadrons, the online second hand market for drone-related insigna and offical documents conerning the topic.

The latest iteration of the project consists of two film loops. One is a taxonomy of UAV uniform patches. In this film a collection of patches is categorized and classified into four distinct topics, animals, flight hours, mythology and the earth as a grid. By making this taxonomy and studying the symbols for their connotation and their history the viewer gets a better insight in how UAV operators view themselves and the world. The second film is a lexicon of drone terminology. By juxtaposing military jargon with images it tries to scrutinize the pentagon euphemisms that are used to talk about UAVs and the Global War on Terror.

Traceroute maps

http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/wiki/User:Roelroscama/trim2/protoyping2#Traceroute_maps_II

One week of browsing, one of the first visualizations.