User:Eleanorg/2.1/dischorus

I took part in a residency, '(dis)chorus', organised by this year's LUX associate artists. (dis)chorus info

Notes

We were joined on the residency by Adam Moon, a professional stenographer, who for the first two days of the residency sat with us transcribing everything that was said. This silent practice of transcribing seemed to set the tone for the week, and became a recurring theme. I was fascinated by this idea of acting as a mute amplifier for another person..

I began the year with the intention to create a system for "writing about consent consensually." This would not necessarily be a practical publishing model, but rather set up a scenario which would invite people to consider what it means to consent, and confront their own values and limits.

'The Dissolute Image' begun this process last trimester. I want to improve upon it in the following ways:

* Content not to be chosen centrally, but by participants (more meaningful, more like real life) 

• More opporutnity to engage with the content hosted (not just abstracted units like pixels)
• A viable, replicable model for publishing-together by 'broadcasting the other'

'consent' and/vs 'broadcasting the other'

There are a number of cases where the problem of 'consent' relating to 'broadcasting the other' arises in a networked context:

• Physical hosting - what will you give space to?
• Transmission - what will you allow on your network (net neutrality)?
• Dissemination - what will you post on your website/retweet etc?

During the residency I was concerned mainly with transmission, ie, enabling a message to be transmitted without necessarily putting your name or endorsement to it. My question here was the same as when I was looking at hosting: does doing this mean that you endorse the message in question, or is it possible to be a neutral carrier of content?

I became fascinated by the process of transmission itself, noticing the small errors - and deliberate distortions - that messages are subjected to as they travel across the 'network' of people transcribing them. This expanded my focus from simple, rational 'consent' (agreeing to host something) to the murkier territory of human error, unconscious resistance, the inevitable imperfection of the copy. So now I have two fields of interest as they relate to the idea of 'broadcasting the other':

* physical hosting
* transmission via copying etc.

I want to figure out how to integrate these two, or perhaps if they are separate to explore them as parallel strands. For example, where previously I was looking at physical storage media and what it means to 'host', now I will spend some time looking at what it means to 'transmit'. I need to understand better how data travels over the internet from server to client, how and where copies are made, and where the points of intervention might be in this process.

next steps:

• continue reading on 'consent' - consider how this relates to broadcasting the other
• read up on net neutrality debates
• read up on internet censorship re copyright

Steve tutorial:

• 'consent' is ubiquitious online - constantly clicking 'i agree' - but I'm trying to problematize what that means
• what's the link to YR 1 interest in 'anxiety' - the crisis of agency
• problematizing agency - we're not individual subjects
• Central paradox - joining group seems to mean surrendering autonomy, but actually we only gain autonomy/agency through the group
• Read Katherine Hales - my mother was a computer - talks about how code affects our agency and the anxiety provoked by 'participatory surveillance system'
• Tell stories about what I've done - what interested me, what situations i set up to test it, what happened (eg workshops, experiments etc)
• Jonathan Culler - 'Fortunes of the performative' - essays in Red reader in Black binder, reader for Amsterdam arts & humanities < traces history of how the idea of 'performativity' (actions producing subjects)

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