TRIMESTER UNO

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BIG PROJECTS:

> Just Say Yes: • terms and conditions route - met benefits en risks. -> gang met verschillende deuren, hoe verder je gaat hoe meer benefits en meer risicos PULSE OF THE MACHINE/CONTROLLED SOCIETY • ——— begin met terms bij bus halte en dan filmen

> Wifi House: • Ardiuno wifi analyser / NODIG: ARDUINO WORKSHOP • SVG/CANVAS map van huis interactieve wifi signalen plus geluid map afmaken / NODIG: NA NULL LESSEN • INSIDE OF WIFI?? • wifi bij papa - altijd slecht

> Invisibily Visible: • cameras everywhere, much footage of everything plus sound - in interface collage, automatically updates - choose from random - visibile for a split second when wanting to see it larger / me but when looking longer change into yourself / empty footage big screen, me in footage small screen / random short sound clips when clicking on something / when moving over video the video becomes black or distorted • dag lang elke minuut nieuwe clips/geluid van de dag / update every hour, automatically — machine, pulse of the machine

/ NODIG: EXTRA PYTHON/TERMINAL LESSEN?

• insight an sound recording via terminal

• updates automatically via terminal • random choosing terminal

• distortion video ffmpeg - voorbeeld • recognition empty video versus motion video - voorbeeld • cropping recognition empty video versus motion video

• iphone recording

——————— future - live in big archive agreements and system faults dataleaks privacy messages (fb) scanning ‘tappen’ en bewaren zaak tegen fb bijvoorbeeld tor netwerk?????

birgit (phone calls / stored on a server)
octopus mail delivery stem (transmidelliale - tweo years ago)

bij facebook en google naar binnen hele weg naar facebook echt volgen en maken dns systems raspbery pi - mini debian - command and control center • cameras in a place, and videos in another with - supposedly - that footage -

——— • unitary self • dimi-o • Superpanopticon • patterntracer • rhizomes • NetMonster • simulation • interface

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Roads are a fundamental necessary and social good

Enchantment

post-enlightment world has been characterized by a process of disenchantment

enchantment is thus less a form of knowledge or belief and more a ‘mood’, which involves ‘a surprising encounter, a meeting with something that you did not expect and are not fully prepared to engage’

roads retain a generic social promise, even in the face of specific circumstances in which they are acknowledged as having failed to deliver

roads are not just material forms

roads are promises towards a future which is uncertain and unclear

the promise of speed and connectivity

the promise of political freedom

the promise of economic prosperity

livelihoods and life itself are jeopardized by the tyranny of delay

economic prosperity is articulated as both a collective and a personal quest

material instantiations of dominant narratives regarding the ideal shape of an uncertain future

infrastructures are better thought of as a ‘disturbance in a casual mileu, the material entity which motivates interferences, responses or interpertations’

discursive interpretation and representation of social life

attention to enchantment as a way of moving beyond a position of professional cynism towards the forces that appear to construct the worlds within which we live, in order to recover other ways of sensing how the features of modern life become the subject and object of meaningful relations

through the experiences of life within and alongside unstable forces that infrastructures gain their capacity to enchant

[ for each of these aspects of ‘enchantment’, we turn our attention to the relational engagements that are consistently excluded in dominant narratives regarding the promises that infrastructures put in place. These include ethnographic moments when infrastructures seem to threaten to collapse, fall apart or be at risk manifesting fragility and material uncertainty. ]

contemporary forms of governance are premised on a pre-occupation with speed

both ensuring mobility of its populations, and managing

the dream of circulation

state depends simultaneously on their capacity for speed

the benefits that roads would bring to populations

mechanisms of control

standing reserve to describe the way in which nature is made to appear as a resource for human exploitation

described as a technological revealing, the relationship between a technologically framed way of being-in-the-world and the presentation of that world to the human imagination is explored

achievement against the odds

the environment was characterized by a stubbornly refusing to obey rules or orders that needed flexibility and guile to overcome land and water – active substances

to recognize the instability of people and land is to acknowledge the achievement of containment whereby those aspects that constantly threaten a return to halts, delays and interruptions have (momentarily) been subdued

where are the regional, national and local authorities or the bosses of the patriotic front

abandoned plant as a localization and instantiation of that which cannot be known and controlled

hope that there is the possibility of change and that the encounter with processes of material disintegration produce a mood of unease and disquiet about the capacity of the state to perform its role.

At the same time, it is in this challenge and this anxiety that we find conversations and the interventions that re-make the state anew, an enchantment that re-imbues it with the power to change lives for the better

Wether the means through which people are making a living out of new connections that the road makes available are legal or not, the ruins of past economic boom times is a constant reminder of the fragility and reversibility of the promises upon which infrastructural projects are based

Infrastructures can dazzle with the possibilities they hold – the glitter of progress, the lure of profit, the promise of circulation, movement and a better life as rational and scientific plans – interlocking diagrams of modernity

Generate illusory effects supported by numbers, figures and pictures

Do not do the work of enchantment that infrastructures often seem to produce

Processes of transnationalism which supposedly promote mobility and flexibility also engender the opposite: immobility, entrapment, confinement, incarceration

Its is through an articulation with the lived, material encounters of stasis, rupture and blockage that infrastructural promises become reinvigorated and recast

Strengthens the desire for them and constantly renews the sense that sometimes soon they will appear and life will change for the better

Lists of numbers and technical specifications, or as hidden mechanisms subtending those processes more familiar to social scientists

Digging to unearth

Effect of standardization or formal classification on group information, the design of networks and their import for various communities, or on the fierce policy debates about domain names, exchange protocols, or languages

Inaccessible electronic code

embedded strangeness

the forgotten, the background, the frozen in place

identity tourism

plugs, settings, sizes

miss essential aspects of distributional justice and planning power

study an information system and neglect its standards, wires, and settings, and you miss equally essential aspects of aesthetics, justice, and change.

Perhaps if we stopped thinking of computers as information highways and began to think of them more modestly as symbolic sewers, this realm would open up a bit.

System of substrates

Ready-to-hand

One person’s infrastructure is another’s topic, or difficulty

Incomplete platforms, recalcitrant local computing centers, and bottlenecked resources

Part of human organization

Infrastructural inversion – foregrounding the truly backstage elements of work practice

Technological developments move from either independent or dependant variables, to processes and relations braided in with thought and work

Embeddedness

People do not necessarily distinguish the several coordinated aspects of infrastructure

Transparency

Does not have to be reinvented each time or assembled for each task

[ the step of using ftp made the system less then transparent for the biologists, and thus much less usable ]

reach or scope

Infrastructure has reach beyond a single event or one-site practice

learned as part of a membership

strangers and outsiders encounter infrastructure as a target object to be learned

[ it was easy to overlook other things that we had already naturalized, such as information retrieval practices over networked systems]

links with conventions of practice

[ the ways that cycles of day-night work are affected by and affect electrical power rates and needs ]

embodiment of standards

infrastructure takes on transparency by plugging into other infrastructures ad tools in a standardizes fashion

other standards escaped us at first

build on an installed base

it wrestles with the inertia of the installed base and inherits strength and limitations from that base

becomes visible upon breakdown

respondents would say prior to the visit that they were using the system with no problems – during the site visit, they were unable to even tell us where the system was on their local machines.

This breakdown became the basis for a much more detailed understanding of the relational nature of infrastructure

Is fixed in modular increments

It is never changed from above

Changes take time and negotiation

adjustment with other aspects of the systems are involved

Nobody is really in charge of infrastructure

There simple was no magic wand to be waved over the development effort

transform in a surprising or magical manner

an idea that people make meanings based on their circumstances

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structures of control

computer protocols

regulation of attention

the stimulation of desire

the stimulation of consumption

all senses

temperature/speed/florescence

associations with the senses

modernity

mutable

progressive

language to be learned

level of surface

skin/nose/eye/ear - surfaces

taken for granted

only become visible when on breakdown

visibility is necessary to continually renew its political effect

All visibility is situated

Form is loosened from technical function

Mediating exchange over distance

Binding people and things into complex heterogeneous systems

little relation to reality

Excessive fantastic object that generates desire and awe

Encode the dreams of individuals and societies

Vehicles whereby fantasies are transmitted and made emotionally real

Fantasies that stand as filters through which the object is seen

shaping modern society and realizing the future

Mechanisms to control time

Instigating waves of societal progress

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god

promoting circulation

bring about change

enact progress

gain freedom

one technological system comes to dominate over others

when independent systems converge into a network

a technical system originates in one place

move to other places with differing conditions, technological standards, and legal regulations

elaborating techniques of adaption and translation

Practices of routinazation and extension

Requiring an Account of translation (which can be technical, managerial and financial)

matter that enable the movement of other matter

They are things and also the relation between things

Present to the senses Displaced in the focus of the matter

System of substrates

Clear, linear relationship between underlying system and the phenomenal world to which it gives rise

division or contrast between Mind-body

The educational and cultural competence needed to understand its functioning and to operate it

Contort/deform

early technical choices get reinforced as subsequent system elements are built around or on top of them

A wide variety of actors were in a constant tug-of-war or negotiation for the future of the system

Modular

Gradual

Maintenance

dependence on human practices

standardization

(growth in) momentum

(growth in) Interia/trajectory

Leaderless

decentralized

seamless interconnection

translation from one system (or network) to another

Digital natives

Intuitive

user friendly

relative

context specific

historically-informed

Dynamics

Tensions

primitive or template for its template for its parents social choices

transfer across space

transfer across context

growth in scale

Invention

It’s infrastructures all the way down

beyond the control of mere human programmers and analysts

computing werewolves

relation

the subordinate parts (of an undertaking/foundation)

service regarded as essential

system without which contemporary societies cannot function

participate in a common visual and conceptual paradigm of what it means to be modern

elements internal to the object itself, formed as part of a system

originating from outside obtain from a source externally

intractability

circulation

different networks

inceptive

serving to indicate or point out

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The politics and poetics of infrastructure

Society is build on structures of control mediated through the computer

In this society, production has been outsourced, value is produced virtually, infrastructures lie in computer protocols, and the forms of capture engineered into social media platforms, such as facebook and google. In this economy the regulation of attention is central to the production of value.

Beller argued that the rise of cinema represented a transformation in value production away from an industrial economy and toward the stimulation of desire and, trhough that shift, consumption

A new ethnographic and theoretical frame has yet to be devised in anthropology.

Infrastructure stand for an era

It is form of cognition, achieved through taste. Touch, hearing, seeing, smell. Aesthetics in this sense an embodied experience governed by the ways infrastructures produce the ambient conditions of everyday life: our senses of temperature, speed, florescence, and the ideas we have associated with these conditions. Infrastructures create a sensing of modernity. A process by which the body, as much as the mind, apprehends what it is to be modern, mutable and progressive.

Infrastructure is not just a technical object but a language to be learned.

Infrastructures operate at the level of surface, what buck-morss refers to as the terminae of the ouside of the body – skin, nose, eye, ear – rather than the mind inside.

Infrastructurs are by definition invisible, taken for granted, and that they only become visible when on breakdown

Invisibility is certainly one aspect of infrastructure, but it is only one and the extreme edfe if a range of visibilities that move from unseen to grand spectacles and verything in between.

Sneath argues that electricity was such a central symbol of state modernity in Mongolia that it was reffered to as lenins light

For this system of patronage to work or for lenins staging of infrastrucrual modernity to be successful, visibility was necessary to continually renew its political effect.

All visibility is situated and what is background for one person is a daily object of concern for another. The point is not to assert one or another status as an inherent condition of infrastructures but to examine how (in)visibility is mobilized and why.

Hypervisibility - opzoeken

Form is loosened from technical function

Budgets become ;arbirtrary symbolic arcs;

Pipes, in this sense, turn out not to be about pipes but about their production as a representational from that allows reports to be written, budgets to be satisfied and sponsors to be mollified.

By mediating exchange over distance and binding people and things into complex heterogeneous systems and by operating as entexualized forms that have relative autonomy from their technical function.

The realization that these bear little relation to reality

Awarding infrastrcurual projects has far more to do with gaining acces to government contracts and rewarding parton-client networks than it has to do with their technical function.

Unimpendent circulation – opzoeken

But is can also be an excessive fantastic object that generates desire and awe in autonomy of tis technical function. Many infrastrucrual projects are copies, funded and constructed so that cities or nations can take part in a contemporaneous modernity by epeating infrastructural projcts from elsewhere to particapte in a common visual and conceptual paradigm of what it means to be modern.

Building ‘miniature metropolises’ was understood as investing in a new being, a new humanity, a new cosmos.

They encode the dreams of individuals and societies and are the vehicles whereby those fantasies are transmitted and made emotionally real

Fantasies that stand as filters through which the object is seen

Their work is created a deep sense of fulfillment that made the memory of building communication infrastructures a depply emotional one.

Toward practices of conceptualizatyion that come before the construction of the systems themselves.

It is an eetnography that produces different infrastrucrual objects, where the budget as a site of formal rationzaliation is as important as the brute material of technological systems

Enlightment idea – opzoeken

This mode of thought is why the provision of infrastructures is so intimiately caught up with the sense of shaping modern society and realizing the future.

Mechanisms to control time Instigating waves of societal progress Possession of electricity, railways, and running water cam to define civilization itself

With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, wether motory or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god. When he puts all his auxiallry organs he is trulu maginifcent.

Difficult to separate an anyalis of infrastrctures from this sedimental history and our belief that, by promoting circulation, infrastructures bring about change, and trhough cange they enact progress, and htrough progress we gain freedom.

Heterogeneous networks – opzoeken

Infrastructures, for collier, are a mixture of political rationality, administrative techniques, and material systems.

Soviet electricity provision, rhough his lens, is analyzed for how it reveals a system of total planning in a command economy rather than for what it tells us about the effects of electricity on users in Russia.

Infrastructures are not, in any positivest sense, simply ‘out here’. The act of defining an infrastructure is a categorizing moment.

Infrastructures typically begin as a series of small, indepependant technologies with widely carrying technical standards, they become infrastructures when either one technological sustem comes to dominate over others or when independent systems converge into a network.

(ontology of technology is composed of elements internal to the object itself but is formed as part of a system)

a technical system originates in one place but as it grows into a networked infrastruycture, it must move to other places with differing conditions, technological standards, and legal regulations, elaborating techniques of adaption and translation. Practices of routinazation and extension Requiring an Account of translation (which can be technical, managerial and financial)

Infrastrucures are matter that enable the movement of other matter They are things and also the relation between things Present to the senses Displaced in the focus of the matter

System of substrates

Clear, linear relationship between underlying system and the phenomenal world to which it gives rise

Although electricity is the infrastructure of the computer, the computer is the infrastructure of electricity supply

The educational and cultural competence needed to understand its functioning and to operate it

The Internet as infrastructure

Mind-body dichotomy Social Text – opzoeken

Neff interrogates the production processes in new media organizations and argues that their physical location in space is one of the most important ways to understand their development.

How do specific undersea cable routes ‘contort’ and ‘deform’ digital film culture. For them, to do infrastructure studies is to try to heal the dialect between structure and form. It is to cvonsider ‘the mechanics of transduction, storage, transmission alongside creation, distribution, and reception.”

Indeed communication in its original meaning was transportation, a box of goods was said to be ‘communicated’ when it was delivered.

“early technical choices (including some relateviley casual or arbitrary ones) have a tendency to get reinforced as subsequent system elements are built around or on top of them.

Internet begins with http://www altough most of this prefix is no longer necessary – it was originally meant to differentiate web traffic from other protocols that are now defunct (eg.nntp:,gopher), and the prefix refers to an era where individual computers were named by their services (www, news, mail). Sir Tim Berners-lee, inventor f the World Wide Web, recently admitted that some of the characters in URLs never served a useful purpose, and ‘were a mistake.’

A wide variety of actors were in a constant tug-of-war or negotiation for the future of the system.

Modular, Incremental, maintenance, invisibility, dependence on human practices, modularity, standardization, momentum.

Decay and entropy for understanding the system

monolith?, exogenous?

Interia, trajectory (inside system)

Infrastructure itself could be described as an achievement of negotiation, as its interconnectness means that modifying one part requires adjustments in another – and these adjustments are noth social and technical.

The internet is an excellent example of this precept because it is officially leaderless and decentralized.

The task of the analyst in this view, is to find and make comprehensible the invisible negotations that are producing the infrastructure.

Standarization allows seamless interconnection with other systems and processes, and it also promotes the normalcy and invisibilty of the system itself.

Like the internets gateways, these are intermediaries that provide translation from one system (or network) to another.

The significance of the gateways is that by focusing our attention on the boundaries of an infrastructure we can better comprehend its from and its limits. The advice that follows fromt his precept is: to understand a system, study its boundaries and the gateways that allow it to work with other systems.

Yet beyond its material components, the idea of the internet is also invisible, with web pages arriving as if my magic, relying on processes that are totally unknown and unquestioned by most internet users.

Hard and soft inside the system

Digital natives

Computers do not need to be learned at all: they are ‘intuitive’ or ‘user friendly’

Infrastructure is relative and contextspecific, but that all nfrastructure share features such that its proper study must be comparative and historically-informed.

Dynamics, tensions, heuristiscs

Visibility can itself be a site of struggle around infrastructure: for instance, cities exist politically in order to provide shared services, therefore cities often actively work toward infrastructural visibility to try to prove their value.

But with a few expections like this or that brightlylit, iconic bridge, cities are mostly not successful in making these systems stand out.

Infrastructure is taken for granted.

“modernist infrastructural ideal” of homogenization, utopian integration, and master planning under one provider.

Coincident with the rise of the internet, infrastructures of all kinds became ‘splintered’ and unbundled, relying on competition, market mechanisms, and segmentation of users into privileged and the less privileged who were offered different services (or no service at all)

“leading the shift towards the splintering of mass markets under forces of global capitalism and privitazion” by providing a model of a privately managed, transnationally funded distributed system apparently free from the old-fanshioned meddling of government planning

The internet, the newest infrastructure, has become an infrastructure primitive or template for its template for its parents: a model privately organizes system of distributed compulation – the ur-infrastructure.

“Understanding the nature of infrastructural work involves unfolding the political ethical, and social choices that have been made throughout its development.

All Infrastructures, the internet included, passed trhough loose and overlapping but recognizable phases of development. Invention and early development, transfer across space and context, growth in scale, and momentum and inertia.

No particular point in the sequence of infrastructure where things stop being social and become purely technical (or vice-versa), or where infrastructure itself stops – any thing that one points to has ‘subordinate parts’ (therefore it has an infrastructure), and this infrastructure has an infrastructure and so on.

It’s infratrsucture all the way down.

When new largescale computing projects were planned, designed, or introduced, things almost never happened as expected.

Centrainly beyond the control of mere human programmers and analysts. These computing werewolves continue to haunt the industry.

Understanding this situation required systematics reconsideration of ‘the scope of the boundaries that we draw around the computer system’

They initially framed this distinction as ;’hard’ vs ‘soft’ infrastructure, where soft infrastructure denoted things like the everyday habits of the human operators.

Infrastructure is a relation and not a set of things.

When we change the way that we look at something, the background becomes the foreground and vice-versa.

Certain components of the Internet have also been notably singled out for ‘meta-infrastructural’ status as essential components of the internet without which the internet itself would not function: most notably search engines and the internets addressing and naming system introduced in the example at the beginning of this chapter.

“the twin pillars of cyberculture studies are virtual communities and online identities’

this is the internet not as ‘what people say with it’ but as ‘how it works’

Infrastructure refers to ‘the subordinate parts of an undertaking/foundation’ or its ‘foundatiom’

In common usage it is often used in a similar sens to ‘utitliy’ or ‘public utitliy’ meaning ‘a service regarded as essential’

‘infrastructure’ is defined negatively; as those systems without which contempary societies cannot function re-issue the extremely valuable .ly domains it seized from the West to Libyan nationals presenting an economic motive instead of a religious one.

If you tried to reach the popular URL shortener bit.ly in 2011 you would have been redirected to the ungainly URL ‘bitly.com’

This episode led to the financial ruin of some investors in URL shortening firms, the loss of millions of dollars, and at the time it appeared that LTT’s action could have affected millions of English-speaking internet users. Despite all this, the story is an obscure one, receiving only minor press coverage.

It argues that ‘infrastructure’ is the new ‘network’

Inchoate? - opzoeken

URLs for web services to become lengty with codes, id numbers, and ephemera that made them ungainly to remember, type, and share.

URL shortening services: applications that would produce a short synonym that could be used to represent the ever-longer and harder-to-sahre URL.

Every click on a shortened URL generated data that could be captured, and this data about who clicked on which links could have considerable commercial value.

Yet the original engineers of the internet were wary of ‘the business of deciding what is and what is not a country’, so they decided hat the system of names would be based on a recognized international standard dating from 1974 that establishes two-letter abbreviations for countries (arcanely known as ISO #3166 [see ISO 2011])

“GET” smethod - opzoeken