User:Silviolorusso/research2/reflectionsonpreviousworkandresearch

Some Reflections on Previous Research and Practice

In my essay titled Tangible Networks: A Non-digital Journey into Cybernetics, I dealt with some cases of translation of the cybernetic metaphor in form of printed matter during the sixties. Analyzing the evolution of punch cards, and specifically the subversive use of those by the members of the Free Speech Movement, I highlighted their growing symbolic value. Punch card became synonym of dehumanization and homologation of society. One of the modalities of subversion that I found particularly meaningful consisted in punching the cards with slogans and acronyms not readable by the machine. In this way students were affirming the dominance of the human being over the machine, which was the most direct representation of the techno-bureaucratic system. So I connected this episode to the current practice of filling CAPTCHAs, those distorted string produced by the machine but only readable by an human being. The function of those strings indeed, is to distinguish between human beings and bots in order to prevent spam. A drastic modification can be noticed: while in the sixties the alphabet represented a way to define a distance to the machine, currently it is an interface for access. Humanity is declared in order to access the services offered by the machine. As first result of these reflections I designed a poster in which the two approaches are related and therefore put in contrast: the founding manifesto of the Free Speech Movement is visually rendered in form of CAPTCHAs.

Another aspect of this evolution I wanted to focus on was the paradox regarding the relationship between human and machine: filling a CAPTCHA is a way to demonstrate humanity, but the process of demonstration is a machine-like, mechanic one because it consists of copying a string of text. In order to interactively enact this paradox, I designed a webpage whose content is protected in first place. To have access to it, the user is asked to fill a CAPTCHA. The copied string of text is then added to the ones copied by previous users, contributing this way to recompile an article by Alan Turing in which for the first time he proposed his famous text to discern between human and machine. At this point the user can either continue to fill CAPTCHAs or g through the text already compiled. Each operation is archived with a number, date and IP address. The project allows to quantify the time and labour invested in a such unconscious and routine operation and reflects upon the general mechanism of user-generated content.

The second case study of the essay is the Whole Earth Catalog, a groundbreaking magazine founded by Stewart Brand. It was an absolute novelty in the publishing field because it was organized as an ecosystem able to connect very diverse realities from the members of the communes to the technologic avant-garde of the university laboratories. I found particularly interesting the comparison, made by such personalities as Steve Jobs and Mike Kelly, between the Whole Earth Catalog and Google. Therefore I tried to analyzed the relationships between a printed catalog of disparate tools and a search engine whose boundaries and perspective on its contents is not easily detectable. Steve Jobs describes the Whole Earth Catalog as “a sort of Google in paperback form”, but how would appear Google if actually translated to printed paper? The matter of the medium is an indicative to the issue of Google's content in its whole. Converting Google in printed form would imply the emergence of a selection and therefore a totality. The aim of this operation would then be to represent Google as a totality, with a beginning and an end and its consequent inclusions and exclusions. An inside and an outside.