User:E.zn/Methods3
'I don’t think we’re ever going to get to utopia again by going forward, but only roundabout or sideways; because we’re in a rational dilemma, an either/or situation as perceived by the binary computer mentality, and neither the either nor the or is a place where people can live.' -- Ursula K. Le Guin
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- ⌗ Mindy Seu - Cyberfeminist Index [~1990s-present]
- ⌗ Addie Wagenknecht - Alone Together
- ~ Books with an Attitude : constantvzw
- ~ Library Stack
- ~ Critical Engineering
- ~ Mindy Seu - PDF Library // are.na
- ~ Mindy Seu - Queer OS // are.na
- ~ hyperreadings
⯐
- ⯐ Deep Lab Lecture Series: Addie Wagenknecht, Allison Burtch, Runa Sandvik, Harlo Holmes, Ingrid Burrington, Maral Pourkazemi, Denise Caruso, Lindsay Howard, Maddy Varner, Jen Lowe, Lorrie Faith Cranor
- ⯐ Cybernetics Conference: Wendy Chun, Paul Pangaro, Shannon Mattern, Adrian Chen, McKenzie Wark, Paul Soulellis, Frank Pasquale, Mimi Onuoha, Zabet Patterson, Allison Parrish, Michael Yap, Lars TCF Holdhus
- ⯐ Recontextualizing Type in Motion: Mindy Seu at the San Francisco Public Library
- ⯐ Michael Madsen - Into Eternity
- ⯐ Med Hondo - Soleil O
- ⯐ Kodwo Eshun - After Year Zero [Geographies of Collaboration since 1945]
- ⯐ James Baldwin - "The Price of the Ticket"
- ⯐ Mika Taanila - The Future Is Not What It Used to Be [ :: Erkki Kurenniemi]
My reading list for SIXII
- __Fred Moten - Black and Blur
Held in the very idea of white people — in the illusion of their strength, in the fantasy of their allyship, in the poverty of their rescue, in the silliness of their melancholy, in the power of their networks, in the besotted rejection of their impossible purity, in the repeated critique of their pitiful cartoon — is that thing about waiting for vacancy to shake your hand while the drone’s drone gives air a boundary
- __Andrea Sick, Claudia Reiche - Technics of Cyber ‹ › Feminism. ‹mode=message›
- __Juliana Huxtable - Mucus in My Pineal Gland
They had developed the most advanced systems for mapping desire known to man [literally]. They all seemed satisfied to live in a world of tops/bottoms, mascs/fems divided into various size, shape, hair level, affiliations. It was less a result of sexual exploration than a marketplace that mimicked the artificial volition offered by a shopping mall. The complexities of sensual want were denied prima facie in lieu of the easy, greasy, sleazy, and cheap alternative. Fucking or getting fucked for one night only... possibly more if you could tolerate his breath...
- __Helen Hester - Xenofeminism
- __Shulamith Firestone - Dialectic of Sex
- __Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex
- __Derek Jarman - At Your Own Risk
- __Frantz Fanon - A Dying Colonialism
The highly trained French services, rich with experience acquired in modern wars, past masters in the practice of "sound-wave warfare," were quick to detect the wave lengths of the broadcasting stations. The programs were then systematically jammed, and the Voice of Fighting Algeria soon became inaudible. A new form of struggle had come into being. Tracts were distributed telling the Algerians to keep tuned in for a period of two or three hours. In the course of a single broadcast a second station, broadcasting over a different wave-length, would relay the first jammed station.
[...]
Every evening, from nine o'clock to midnight, the Algerian would listen. At the end of the evening, not hearing the Voice, the listener would sometimes leave the needle on a jammed wave-length or one that simply produced static, and would announce that the voice of the combatants was here. For an hour the room would be filled with the piercing, excruciating din of the jamming. Behind each modulation, each active crackling, the Algerian would imagine not only words, but concrete battles.
- __Gerda Lerner - The Creation of Feminist Consciousness
- __Siegfried Zielinski - [...After the Media]
- __Alessandro Ludovico - Post-Digital Print
- __Yiannis Colakides, Marc Garrett, Inte Gloerich - State Machines
- __Taeyoon Choi - Poetic Computation [Reader]
- __Frank Pasquale - From Territorial to Functional Sovereignty: The Case of Amazon
- __Loes Bogers and Letizia Chiappini - The Critical Makers Reader: (Un)Learning Technology
- __Paul Virilio - The Aesthetics of Disappearance
- __Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism
- __Shannon Mattern - Extract and Preserve [Underground Repositories for a Posthuman Future?]
- __Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton - Black Power: The Politics of Liberation
- __Eldridge Cleaver - Soul on Ice
- __Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek - Inventing the Future
- __Naomi Klein - The Shock Doctrine
- __Fredric Jameson - The Political Unconscious
- __Eric Schrijver - Copy This Book: An Artist's Guide to Copyright
- __Josephine Bosma, Geert Lovink et al. - Readme! Filtered by Nettime: ASCII Culture and the Revenge of Knowledge
- __Deep Lab
- __Engine Failure: Safiya Umoja Noble and Sarah T. Roberts on the Problems of Platform Capitalism
- __L. M. Sacasas - One Does Not Simply Add Ethics To Technology
'Different ideas of social and political life entail different technologies for their realization. One can create systems of production, energy, transportation, information handling, and so forth that are compatible with the growth of autonomous, self-determining individuals in a democratic polity. Or one can build, perhaps unwittingly, technical forms that are incompatible with this end and then wonder how things went strangely wrong. The possibilities for matching political ideas with technological configurations appropriate to them are, it would seem, almost endless. If, for example, some perverse spirit set out deliberately to design a collection of systems to increase the general feeling of powerlessness, enhance the prospects for the dominance of technical elites, create the belief that politics is nothing more than a remote spectacle to be experienced vicariously, and thereby diminish the chance that anyone would take democratic citizenship seriously, what better plan to suggest than that we simply keep the systems we already have?' -- Langdon Winner [1977]
- __Feminist Data Manifest-No [A declaration of refusal and commitment. It refuses harmful data regimes and commits to new data futures]
Suggested readings and references
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Saidiya Hartman - The plot of her undoing
- ``Saidiya Hartman - The plot of her undoing [Read collectively during the session]
- ``Seda Gurses - Apple & Google Partner to Promote Coronavirus Contact Tracing. Should You be Worried? [> link to mp3]
One World in Relation Edouard Glissant
A Giant Bumptious Litter: Donna Haraway on Truth, Technology, and Resisting Extinction
Natalie Jeremijenko & Kate Rich - The mutual synchronisation of coupled oscillators
- ``Natalie Jeremijenko + Kate Rich Track 12: The mutual synchronisation of coupled oscillators [This was one track from a CD released as an "insert" to Mute Magazine: Vol. 1 No. 21 . September 2001]. The other tracks are available as well. In the recording, Jeremijenko speaks; the audio production/remix was done by Rich. They worked together as the Bureau of Inverse Technology.
Ramon Amaro - Artificial intelligence: Warped, colorful forms and their unclear geometries
Sylvia Wynter - On Being Human as Praxis
- ``Sylvia Wynter - On Being Human as Praxis [interview with Katherine Mckittrick . 2015]
Elodie Mugrefya - Mise en Valeur et Omission
- ``Elodie Mugrefya - Mise en Valeur et Omission [2019]
Denise Fereira Da Silva - On difference without separability
- ``Denise Fereira Da Silva - On difference without separability [2016]
Katherine Mckittrick - Mathematics Black Life
- ``Katherine Mckittrick - Mathematics Black Life
Zach Blas & Micha Carde - Imaginary Computational Systems: Queer Technologies and Transreal Aesthetics
- ``Zach Blas & Micha Carde - Imaginary Computational Systems: Queer Technologies and Transreal Aesthetics [2015]
Noah Tsika - CompuQueer: Protocological Constraints, Algorithmic Streamlining, and the Search for Queer Methods Online
- ``Noah Tsika - CompuQueer: Protocological Constraints, Algorithmic Streamlining, and the Search for Queer Methods Online [2016]
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun - Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race
- ``Wendy Hui Kyong Chun - Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race [2009]
Syed Mustafa Ali - A Brief Introduction to Decolonial Computing
- ``Syed Mustafa Ali - A Brief Introduction to Decolonial Computing [2016]
Sara Ahmed & Anne-Marie Fortier - Re-imagining communities
- ``Sara Ahmed & Anne-Marie Fortier - Re-imagining communities [International Journal of Cultural Studies . 2003, Volume 6[3]: 251–259]
Michael Murtaugh - Eventual consistency
- ``Michael Murtaugh - Eventual consistency
Alexis Pauline Gumbs & Julia Roxanne Wallace - Black Feminist Calculus Meets Nothing to Prove
- ``Alexis Pauline Gumbs & Julia Roxanne Wallace - Black Feminist Calculus Meets Nothing to Prove: A Mobile Homecoming Project Ritual toward the Postdigital [P. 305]
Taskeen Adam - Digital Neocolonialism and Massive Open Online Courses
- ``Taskeen Adam - Digital Neocolonialism and Massive Open Online Courses [MOOCs: Colonial Pasts and Neoliberal Futures [2019]]
Ursula Leguin - She Unnames Them
- ``Ursula Leguin - She Unnames Them [1985]
A couple of problems did come up with pets. The cats, of course, steadfastly denied ever having had any name other than those self-given, unspoken, ineffably personal names which, as the poet named Eliot said, they spend long hours daily contemplating though none of the contemplators has ever admitted that what they contemplate is their names and some onlookers have wondered if the object of that meditative gaze might not in fact be the Perfect, or Platonic, Mouse. In any case, it is a moot point now.
[...]
None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to feel or rub or caress one another’s scales or skin or feathers or fur, taste one another’s blood or flesh, keep one another warm -- that attraction was now all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food.
Denise Ferreira Da Silva & Arjuna Neuman - Four Waters: Deep Implicancy
- ``Denise Ferreira Da Silva & Arjuna Neuman - Four Waters: Deep Implicancy [2019]
- - Cryptochrome and Magnetic Sensing
The avian magnetic compass is a complex entity with many surprising properties. The basis for the magnetic sense is located in the eye of the bird, and furthermore, it is light-dependent, i.e., a bird can only sense the magnetic field if certain wavelengths of light are available. Specifically, many studies have shown that birds can only orient if blue light is present. The avian compass is also an inclination-only compass, meaning that it can sense changes in the inclination of magnetic field lines but is not sensitive to the polarity of the field lines. Under normal conditions, birds are sensitive to only a narrow band of magnetic field strengths around the geomagnetic field strength, but can orient at higher or lower magnetic field strengths given accommodation time.
[...]
Despite decades of study, the physical basis of the avian magnetic sense remains elusive. The two main models for avian magnetoreception are a magnetite-based model and a radical-pair-based model (for review see, e.g., Solov'yov, Schulten, Greiner, 2010). The former suggests that the compass has its foundation in small particles of magnetite located in the head of the bird. The latter idea is that the avian compass may be produced in a chemical reaction in the eye of the bird, involving the production of a radical pair. A radical pair, most generally, is a pair of molecules, each of which have an unpaired electron. If the radical pair is formed so that the spins on the two unpaired electrons in the system are entangled (i.e. they begin in a singlet or triplet state), and the reaction products are spin-dependent (i.e., there are distinct products for the cases where the radical pair system is in an overall singlet vs. triplet state), then there is an opportunity for an external magnetic field to affect the reaction by modulating the relative orientation of the electron spins.
[...]
The question remains as to where, physically, this radical pair reaction would take place. It has been suggested that the radical pair reaction linked to the avian compass arises in the protein cryptochrome. Cryptochrome is a signaling protein found in a wide variety of plants and animals, and is highly homologous to DNA photolyase.
- - Cryptochrome and Magnetic Sensing
- - Birds measure magnetic fields using long-lived quantum coherence
Long-lived spin coherence in proteins found in the eyes of migratory birds could explain how the creatures are able to navigate along the Earth’s magnetic field with extraordinary precision.
[...]
One of the most popular theories is based on the idea that incoming photons excite light-sensitive proteins called cryptochromes in the retina of a bird’s eye. This results in an electron being transferred between two molecules within the protein. The two resulting free-radical molecules each have an unpaired electron but, because they were produced simultaneously, the spins of the two electrons are correlated. The two electron spins form a coherent quantum state that is affected by weak external magnetic fields, such as the geomagnetic field. This interaction affects the chemical reactivity of the free-radical molecules and ultimately the signals that they send to the brain.
- - Birds measure magnetic fields using long-lived quantum coherence
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- pwd:hand
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Four Rooms – Elizabeth A. Povinelli
- ``Four Rooms – Elizabeth A. Povinelli - On Virus and Interdependence of Lives [2020]
- - Raafat Majzoub
- -- The Khan
The Khan started as a generative, transnational place in The Perfumed Garden, referred to as Khan El Thawra, or the khan of the revolution—and later developed into an experimental NGO registered in Lebanon under the title The Khan: The Arab Association for Prototyping Cultural Practices.
In the novel, Khan El Thawra references Khans present in historical Arab cities…- -- The Perfumed Garden [Read]
- -- Writing as architecture: Performing Reality Until Reality Complies
- - Raafat Majzoub
- - Elizabeth A. Povinelli
- -- 'Either your thoughts are practices, or they are not thoughts'
- -- Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism
'The Virus is the figure for that which seeks to disrupt the current arrangements of Life and Nonlife by claiming that it is a difference that makes no difference not because all is alive, vital, and potent, nor because all is inert, replicative, unmoving, inert, dormant, and endurant. Because the division of Life and Nonlife does not define or contain the Virus, it can use and ignore this division for the sole purpose of diverting the energies of arrangements of existence in order to extend itself. The Virus copies, duplicates, and lies dormant even as it continually adjusts to, experiments with, and tests its circumstances. It confuses and levels the difference between Life and Nonlife while carefully taking advantage of the minutest aspects of their differentiation. We catch a glimpse of the Virus whenever someone suggests that the size of the human population must be addressed in the wake of climate change; that a glacial granite mountain welcomes the effects of air conditioning on life; that humans are kudzu; or that human extinction is desirable and should be accelerated'
- --- Marjie Short - Kudzu [src]
- - Elizabeth A. Povinelli
- - Anna Tsing
- -- The Mushroom at the End of the World
'Might it encounter the roots of a receptive tree? A change in substrate or potential nutrition? Through its indeterminate growth,the fungus learns the landscape. There are humans to encounter as well. Will they inadvertently nurture the fungus while cutting firewood and gathering green manure? Or will they introduce hostile plantings, import exotic diseases, or pave the area for suburban development? Humans matter on these landscapes. And humans (like fungi and trees) bring histories with them to meet the challenges of the encounter. These histories, both human and not human,are never robotic programs but rather condensations in the indeterminate here and now;the past we grasp,as philosopher Walter Benjamin puts it,is a memory “that flashes in a moment of danger“'
- - Anna Tsing
- - Saidiya Hartman
- -- Scenes of Subjection [4. The Burdened Individuality of Freedom]
The limits of political emancipation appear at once in the fact that the state can liberate itself from constraint without man himself being really liberated; that a state may be a free state without man himself being a free man. -- Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question [1843]
The emancipation of the slaves is submitted to only in so far as chattel slavery in the old form could not be kept up. But although the freedman is no longer considered the property of the individual master, he is considered the slave of society. -- Carl Schurz, Report on the Condition of the South [1865]
Are we to esteem slavery for what it has wrought, or must we challenge our conception of freedom and the value we place upon it? -- Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death [1982]
The entanglements of bondage and liberty shaped the liberal imagination of freedom, fueled the emergence and expansion of capitalism, and spawned proprietorial conceptions of the self. This vexed genealogy of freedom plagued the great event of Emancipation, or as it was described in messianic and populist terms, Jubilee. The complicity of slavery and freedom or, at the very least, the ways in which they assumed, presupposed, and mirrored one another—freedom finding its dignity and authority in this “prime symbol of corruption” and slavery transforming and extending itself in the limits and subjection of freedom—troubled, if not elided, any absolute and definitive marker between slavery and its aftermath. The longstanding and intimate affiliation of liberty and bondage made it impossible to envision freedom independent of constraint or personhood and autonomy separate from the sanctity of property and proprietorial notions of the self. Moreover, since the dominion and domination of slavery were fundamentally defined by black subjection, race appositely framed questions of sovereignty, right, and power. The traversals of freedom and subordination, sovereignty and subjection, and autonomy and compulsion are significant markers of the dilemma or double bind of freedom. Marx, describing a dimension of this paradox, referred to it with dark humor as a double freedom—being free to exchange one’s labor and free of material resources. Within the liberal “Eden of the innate rights of man,” owning easily gave way to being owned, sovereignty to fungibility, and abstract equality to subordination and exploitation. If sovereignty served “to efface the domination intrinsic to power” and rights “enabled and facilitated relations of domination,” as Michel Foucault argues, then what we are left to consider is the subjugation that rights instigate and the domination they efface.
[...]
The advent of freedom held forth the possibility of a world antithetical to slavery and portents of transformations of power and status that were captured in carnivalesque descriptions like “bottom rail on top this time.” At the same time, extant and emergent forms of domination intensified and exacerbated the responsibilities and the afflictions of the newly emancipated. I have opted to characterize the nascent individualism of emancipation as “burdened individuality” in order to underline the double bind of freedom: being freed from slavery and free of resources, emancipated and subordinated, self-possessed and indebted, equal and inferior, liberated and encumbered, sovereign and dominated, citizen and subject.
[...]
The civil and political rights bestowed upon the freed dissimulated the encroaching and invasive forms of social control exercised over black bodies through the veneration of custom; the regulation, production, and protection of racial and gender inequality in the guise of social rights; the repressive instrumentality of the law; and the forms of extraeconomic coercion that enabled the control of the black population and the effective harnessing of that population as a labor force.
[...]
When we examine the history of racial formation in the United States, it is evident that liberty, property, and whiteness were inextricably enmeshed. Racism was central to the expansion of capitalist relations of production, the organization, division, and management of the laboring classes, and the regulation of the population through licensed forms of sexual association and conjugal unions and through the creation of an internal danger to the purity of the body public. Whiteness was a valuable and exclusive property essential to the integrity of the citizen-subject and the exemplary self-possession of the liberal individual. Although emancipation resulted in a decisive shift in the relation of race and status, black subordination continued under the aegis of contract. In this regard, the efforts of Southern states to codify blackness in constitutions written in the wake of abolition and install new measures in the law that would secure the subordination of freed black people demonstrate the prevailing disparities of emancipation.
[...]
The legacy of slavery was evidenced by the intransigence of racism, specifically the persistent commitment to discriminatory racial classifications despite the prohibition of explicit declarations of inequality or violations of life, liberty, and property based on prior condition of servitude or race.
[...]
“Burdened individuality” designates the double bind of emancipation—the onerous responsibilities of freedom with the enjoyment of few of its entitlements, the collusion of the disembodied equality of liberal individuality with the dominated, regulated, and disciplined embodiment of blackness, the entanglements of sovereignty and subjection, and the transformation of involuntary servitude effected under the aegis of free labor.
[...]
The mantle of individuality effectively conscripted the freed as indebted and dutiful worker and incited forms of coercion, discipline, and regulation that profoundly complicated the meaning of freedom. If it appears paradoxical that the nomination “free individual” illuminates the fractures of freedom and begets methods of bondage quite suited to a free labor economy, it is only because the mechanisms through which right, exchange, and equality bolster and advance domination, subjection, and exploitation have not been interrogated. Liberal discourses of freedom enable forms of subjection seemingly quite at odds with its declared principles, since they readily accommodate autonomy and domination, sovereignty and submission, and subordination and abstract equality. This can be attributed to the Lockean heritage of U.S. constitutionalism, which propounded an ideal of liberty founded in the sanctity of property, and the vision of liberty forwarded in the originary narrative of the Constitution, which wed slavery and freedom in the founding of the nation and the engendering of “we the people.”
[...]
it is necessary to consider whether the effort of the dominated to “take up” the universal does not remedy one set of injuries only to inflict injuries of another order. It is worth examining whether universalism merely dissimulates the stigmatic injuries constitutive of blackness with abstract assertions of equality, sovereignty, and individuality. Indeed, if this is the case, can the dominated be liberated by universalist assertions?
[...]
the transition from slavery to freedom cannot adequately be represented as the triumph of liberty over domination, free will over coercion, or consent over compulsion. The valued precepts of liberalism provide an insufficient guide to understanding the event of emancipation. The ease with which sovereignty and submission and self possession and servility are yoked is quite noteworthy. In fact, it leads us to wonder whether the insistent, disavowed, and sequestered production of subordination, the inequality enshrined by the sanctity of property, and the castigating universality of liberalism are all that emancipation proffers. Is not the free will of the individual measured precisely through the exercise of constraint and autonomy determined by the capacity to participate in relations of exchange that only fetter and bind the subject? Does the esteemed will replace the barbaric whip or only act as its supplement? In light of these questions, the identity of the emancipated as rights bearer, free laborer, and calculable man must be considered in regard to processes of domination, exploitation, and subjection rather than in the benighted terms that desperately strive to establish slavery as the “prehistory” of man.
- - Saidiya Hartman
Four Rooms – Denise Ferreira Da Silva
- ``Four Rooms – Denise Ferreira Da Silva - On the Logics of Exclusion and Obliteration [2020]