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.

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.

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 [2]. 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.

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.

Special Issue 2

Johanna Hedva Sick Woman Theory

Listened to a reading of Sick Woman Theory from Sen's Anarchist Library here [3]. (The text could be found as a pdf as well [4]) 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.

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 [5] which influenced quite a bit of my thoughts about this topic.