Unedited notes:

Introduction

“The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power.” Karl Marx(1858)

In 1958 the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon published On the Mode of Technical Objects to address just this form of cultural alienation implicit in the quotes above. He writes, among other things, about two ways in which people come to know technical objects. He says technology viewed from a child's eye, which I imagine he is seeing as, naive and innocent we gain an implicit, non-reflective, habitual tendency. A baby strapped into a buggy, is given a parent's mobile phone and is happily learning to play a game but cannot yet utter the words to express these interactions. Simondon then imagines an inverse, a trained adult engineer, reflective, self-aware using rational knowledge that is elaborated through science. Something like an Apple engineer who creates closed technologies imagining its users still strapped in that buggy unable to articulate their critical needs. Simondon seeks out another form of relationship with technical objects which he finds in the Enlightened Encyclopaedism of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert (Encyclopédie (1751–1777)) in which concrete knowhow is abstracted and assembled into a technical orchestra. Contemporarily, is it worth considering the internet in this mode of encyclopaedism? An evolving off-grid, red-neck, student, coder, geek pedagogy producing technical information, hacks, howto’s, shakedowns, and open source code repositories, that respond to an evolving technical culture. This technical republic is nothing new, it’s genealogies can be traced to and beyond the amateur experimentalists of the London Electrical Society and William Sturgeon (1783 - 1850) and the artisanal formation that knowledge can be contained in the object built and it’s functioning is its explanation.

Is a tinkering internet a critical technical republic? A social space that potentially can break down the state actors with encryption, corporations by opening up software and proprietary technics by hacking them open, making things public? Is the marginal technics in a teenagers dirty bedroom, the dank basement of a bored salaryman, the ham radio garden shed a strategy to unfold the clean room and its magic men in white coats? Or is this largely a white male space that has eradicated other forms of objectivity and subjectivity from view? How can we attempt to instate a devolved technics that refuses misogyny, racialisation and yet envisages technology outside of the paradigm of human slave or potential human enslaver.

What follows is an introduction to the methods used in Critical Technical Practice informed by YoHa’s (Graham Harwood, Mastuko Yokokoji) pedagogy, collaborations and tinkering practice. YoHa’s work involves the use of art as a mode of enquiry into technical objects. Most recently their investigations have been carried out within the fields of health, war, oceans and death.

The space of YoHa’s inquiry is usually populated by an interconnection of technical objects and other kinds of bodies as in a clinic, hospital, battlefield or at sea. YoHa's focus of this enquiry is where the flows of power can be reconfigured by the uncertain meaning, or intention of  art, not necessarily to make art but to make use of its ambiguity within a wider enquiry.

Critical Technical Practice

Even though there are many genealogies of Critical Technical Practice a good place to start is Phil Agre's 1997 essay Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI. In which Agre stated that computers are not simply instrumental, the computer helps structure the site of practice as part of its very design. He constructs a sense in which computing can be seen as a form of imperialism; as “ it aims to reinvent virtually every other site of practice in its own image”. Agre explores how his thinking was altered by both his learning computer science and his subsequent reading of critical texts across disciplines. Agre goes on to explain how he uses his intrapersonal experience to explore the role of criticality within the field of AI while looking backward and forward in the field. Agre charts how his intrapersonal space, ‘consciousness and purpose‘ changed -- describing it as “ a slow, painful, institutionally located, and historically specific process” .         

From Agre’s thought a number of threads emerge, technologies are positioned as politically, culturally, socially, economically affective. The intrapersonal space of people involved in a project is a legitimate site of enquiry. That each project has associated with it an evolving pedagogy situated in an evolving environment. The complexity of our interrelations with technical objects preconditions the humility with which we approach a subject/object.

Ethics, or their lack interrelated to personal, professional risk create useful checks and balances. Ethics become the context for what is made visible and what should remain invisible to forms of power.^[1] Ethical conflict, risk - personal or within a project - are important motors of engagement with technical objects, institutional, social or discursive critique. They help chart the historical conditions of the path the project has taken.

A related fork of Critical Technical Practice that coincidentally aligns with many of these threads was initiated at the former Centre for Cultural Studies between 2007-2017 at Goldsmiths, University of London. As a way to examine, the live techno-social aspects of contemporary digital culture. This stream of Critical Technical Practice (CTP) also incorporated art methods in a relatively close alignment with threads pulled from Agre above. At its broadest the CTP taught at Goldsmiths can be summarized as the formation of thought and action that incorporates art as a method of enquiry into particular sociotechnical milieu. This is a compacted intellectual form, that makes the space between the technical, theory, practice and the intrapersonal ambiguous. A typical class in CTP would make/explore things, attempting to explain the phenomena caught in the lense of a project or proposition and reflect on the process. The methods first arose in Cultural Studies from the need to figure software as both a technical, cultural and interpersonal object.

A simple problematic could be.

In the Technical domain: if the exact same web browser, runs on a series of machines but has different software dependencies, operating systems and alike, is it the same software given that its functionality changes across different platforms?

In the Social/Cultural domain: If that series of machines happens to run in different enterprises, cultures, societies, political and economic regimes, how can we think about the ways software is affective in these different registers?

In the Intrapersonal domain: How has the browser affected memory, language, learning, sociality.

What boundaries/frames of possibility are created when software exist between the three overlapping domains. The above simple example points to something of the complexity in asking questions of technical ensembles.

In Critical Technical Practice we normally make no absolute distinction between the domains of the technical, social/political, cultural or interpersonal. As a live machine under enquiry will be plugged into action, reaction, enablement and disablement with all of the domains simultaneously. The domains themselves are arbitrary distinctions imposed or imagined to make thinking easier or to express ourselves within forms of well established thought and action. The domains are not a good fit but are, all we have.

As an example of how such complexity can be addressed in class. We might propose that the class create a simple (DOS) Denial Of Service attack on a remote test server by learning to code computers for the first time. It is empowering for students to find out how quickly they can code. The class would learn how to do this from T.J. Connor’s book Violent Python^[2]. After the group had reached a self satisfied tingle of radicalism the group would be asked to look up the author and would find that Connor is a top grade US Military expert. The group would then look at the book's distribution and market penetration and be encouraged to question the affective logics, politics and culture of the book. Then reflect on why the workshop had been constructed the way it was, and their own learning in different registers of technicality, politics of information, personal critique and empowerment was achieved. Critical Technical Practice, then is not necessarily a reduction of phenomena to literature or a system of logics, but can instead be thought of as knowledge incorporated into a thing that the class created, look at or pointed to, through revealing a certain type of gaze.^[3]

A prerequisite of Critical Technical Practice is that it incorporates this form of gaze in thinking through the formation of oneself as a thinker, actor in the world. Enquiring into one's pre-existence helps understand the structuring of potential that has informed what one has become, what one could easily recognise, and what one could easily achieve. As we have seen with Agre this informs one’s intrapersonal experience of a project. This is not a summation of limit but an acknowledgement of the hard work needed to escape a pre-existence, as it may relate to pillars of repression or suppression, class, gender, sexuality and race. The situated knowledge of family and friends, their relation to making things, to popular culture, to oral histories, to struggles with money or law, reading, writing and speaking, all inform this process.

To this end CTP is partially related to a schizoanalysis of Foucault's question “What are we today?” (Foucault 1984: pp. 42ff.) The class is always encouraged to unfold what conditions, constrain, control, resist, govern, determine this moment and not another? What patterns of recognition are we privileging and why does it blind us to others? How does language restrict us at the very moment we are able to say something? How can this engagement be born anew at every instance of examination?

Media at the margins

“...neither mass media nor social media exhaust the ambit of media, any more than historically specific technologies and practices give us the standard by which to define and hence to understand processes and practices of mediation.” Fuller and Goffey

As a second clarifying example of pedagogy and CTP. We can appropriate Matthew Fuller and Andy Goffey’s book Evil Media  for class. The term grey media coined in the book has become a placeholder for forms of machine that alter the conduct/governance of those individuals, both technical and biological that are part of their structural operations. This can be summarised as those parts of Simondon type technical elements, individuals that interrelate to form a autopoietic technical ensemble in collaboration with human agency.

Students in this class are encouraged to find an evil/grey media object and present to the class, concentrating on how it’s materiality is part of the world in which it also participates. This could be anything from a post-it note, antidepressant drug, the corner of a shipping container, a software object to any form or any other media object that is not usually given critical scrutiny. One grey media machine that illustrates the theme of the work would be Electronic Validation Rules here commented on by Felix Drăgan one of our ex-student at Goldsmiths.

“Validation rules are syntactic and semantic criteria applied to the data in form fields. These rules are used to police data input to ensure its uniformity and compliance with underlying database formats and constraints. In the case of electronic forms the automated validation subroutines are also designed as a defence mechanism against accidental or malicious user action. These circumventions or failures in code execution have the potential of revealing otherwise hidden attributes of encoded data with its relational structure, embedded assertions or judgements.”

Pedestrian Barrier

Date of origin: Not known

Author/inventor/context: Qingdao Yongchang Suye Co., Ltd.

“The Pedestrian Barrier, like other portable security fences, is used for general crowd control and demarcation and can be finished in several ways: painted and hot dipped galvanized or hot galvanized only. It has a fixed leg that can be delivered to site and assembled without any additional fastenings, and arguably typifies the “solid mid-sized objects” that philosopher Ray Brassier sees as defined by our common sense understanding of the world. Once deployed, it produces both isolation and kinship in other objects depending on which side of the barrier those objects lie. Its manufacturers also provide an OEM service.”

Simon Pope

This formulation of grey media is explored, in class by proposing that technical objects have a directive side or could be considered desiring in philosophical terms. This can be thought of more widely as how do we create a critical understanding of media interaction and the formation or performance of power. The ability to manipulate the directive side of technical objects through multiple scales of logics can be one place where resides, the kind of evil described in Fuller and Goffey’s book Evil Media, the introduction to which is used as a class primer.  

This class explores how the directive side of technical objects can be thought through  with the design/individuation of the technical element and individuals, ensembles in a simplified Simondonian sense. The space of a desiring technical individual is unfolded as it, among other things, encourages us to alter our minds, behaviors, and bodies in order to better use them. This self-modification in response to technical objects is often rewarded by allowing us to more clearly tune in to things and receive cleaner channels of information from them. For instance, simply put, the programming and use of computers implies both programming the machine in order to perform calculations, and regulating the conduct of users in manipulating mice and menu systems, ordering input to produce desired results.

The class as a whole, is then encouraged to explore how people participate in the flows of power, languages, and logics created in collaboration with technical objects. How the processes of these objects become normalized, and how we become entangled in their interrelations across various scales. As we become unfamiliar again with how software operates within computation and culture more generally, it makes sense for the class to enquire into how such logics operate in other spheres such as social process, politics, economy and the intrapersonal.

The project Evil Media Distribution Centre, Transmediale 2013 was an exhibition involving 50 international artists, 8 of which were ex-students. Tom Keene, ex CCS and current Design Star PhD candidate helped manage the work.

Outside of the classroom: Work with Ex-students, Database Addiction

Produced by Anila Ladwa (Ex student)

Involved Jean Demars, Mark Temple, Juan Pablo de la Vega

Samantha Pen was a current student at the time - who carried on working on the project once she finished MA. Collaboration with Dr Luke Mitcheson at the Clinical Academic Group (Addictions) and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust in Brixton.                   supported by a Critical Friends Group convened by Dr Alison Rooke.

A first enquiry took place at Lorraine Hewitt House, an addictions clinic in the heart of Brixton, London. It is staffed by a busy and engaged, team of dedicated drug workers, clinical psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, administrators and reception staff, with a heavy workload. The clinic is itself a collapsed set services, administrative machines and architectures awkwardly housed together through cuts in funding and policy changes. Along with such cuts comes the conflation of machinery, furniture and forms of administration. All the work at the addictions support centre is interrelated to collections of information that in turn evidence decisions and activities and result in quantifiable structures that reciprocally create other individual actions.

In 2015 YoHa took an ecological and aesthetic approach working with the UK’s National Health Service, addiction clinics to investigate how databases produce an abstraction of the clinical modalities. Database Addiction explored the methods by which the materiality of the care-centres work can be managed and governed at multiple scales from within computation and how such processes transform work based cultures and the lives of addicts. The project close read the structure of the the UK’s National Drug Treatment Monitoring Service which unlocked what is articulated about addiction from an ideological, technical, political, bureaucratic or governmental viewpoint that is used amongst other things for monetising addiction services. This project explored the materiality of database algorithms, from urine and blood samples to entities and relations. This formation can be seen as pointers to a fluid formation of power that is not only a strategy in action for government but holds itself as an emergent ambiguous diagram, a sketch of relations and a technical machine for reticulate discipline. A theatre for the performance of power with a capability to insight, provoke, to compare and combine what ideology can articulate about addiction that is coextensive with creating new knowledge. A kind of abstract R&D that points to the kinds of control governance might find ideal but has not mastered yet.

Talk through Database Addiction 1:

Table of information:

The content for the tables is derived from documented conversations with drugs workers, clinical psychologists, social workers, and administrators including reception staff in the spring of 2015 and from email correspondence with representatives of Public Health England about the inner workings of the NDTMS database. We have also analysed several texts (listed below) to find the collocations of multiple words which commonly co-occur in documents that surround the databases used in the care setting.

When making a project such as Database Addiction you are confronted by what is to be made visible and what should remain invisible to forms of power. Staff would have workarounds - EXAMPLE. Ethical conflict and risk that is both personal or within a project - are important motors of engagement with technical objects, institutional, social or discursive critique. Database Addiction is informed as much by my brothers struggle with the alcoholism and a genealogy of state violence, care systems then it is with the technicity of governance as an abstract mode. As hopefully this example makes clear the academic distance YoHa employ is flexible in relation to circumstances, audience, context and funding. YoHa friends, family, what we eat, drink and do are often conflated into a project. With this lack of distance in mind I want to touch on the subject of mental health and criticality. At some later date I will think through this section in more detail. So please forgive me if this section is a little sketchy.^[4]

Risk, Ethics and Critical acts

The critical in Critical Technical Practice has it’s own genealogies, discourse and armies of academics hurling papers at each other over multifaceted barricades. While I’m happy to raid this battlefield from time time and remix the devastation or causation for a class, I’m certainly not intellectually or educationally equipped or sufficiently interested to reveal the intricacies of such a mire. I leave this to my stunning colleagues, Prof Matthew Fuller, Dr Luciana Parisi who consistently feed the students hungry appetite in this area. However adjacent to discursive threads of criticality there are other forms that can be easily be transposed, digested in a practice class. The type of critical acts that surface from the struggle to survive and flourish in an unfair world or those created by tactical media, the deranged or those taken from the fringes of art. Thinking with such critical acts allows us to address the ethics, or the lack of them and personal risk aforementioned in the introduction.

These forms of critical acts are multivalent in wider culture and it becomes important to both value and interrogate the nature of such phenomena if we are to incorporate them into Critical Technical Practice alongside intellectual critical threads. Students need to comprehend, study what might constitute a critical act at the microscopic and macroscopic scale to be able to chart how it functions as a disruptor/constructor/enable/disable within culture and society.  At the same time students need to discriminate between considered and unconsidered critical acts, their ethics and the worth of personal or institutional risk.

One, maybe, less considered example of a critical act that I came upon this year in my home town was that of Snakey, a paranoid 34 year old who lives on an old 16ft boat plastic boat. Snakey’s boat had been abandoned on the mud for 10 years, no facilities of any kind, no means of propulsion. One night he just pulled it out the Thames marsh and up on the mud of no-man’s land alongside the locale cockle sheds where his estranged dad and brother run a successful business catching and processing sea foods. Snakey eats and throws the rubbish out of his boat and urinates in used plastic drinks bottles, throwing them overboard when the tide is out. Snakey demonstrates his contempt for those who know him and those who know he has committed something considered disgusting. People are forced to witness his light yellow urine contained in plastic bottles, a stand in for his contempt of the for a wider environment. He could have urinated straight  in the sea like all the other men,  but decided to dirty his nest, to contain his bodily wastes for other to witness. In this way Snakey spontaneously produces a critical act in a bottle that fractures the complacency of  those that share this common space. It is a powerful act, a declaration of bodily power that resists, exposes and exploits the preconditions that have created his current situation. It creates an unbearable embarrassment for his dad and brother.

The critical act of Snakey fractures complacency by turbulence being introduced into the cultural, social common sense. The blind equilibrium amongst people of the shoreline that blinds society is temporarily broken.  The energy/discord produced pulls into focus what conditions the moment not necessarily for Snakey but those that exists within the relations surrounding his acts. The multivariate nature of critical acts and their interdependence with cultural, social  norms makes them a compelling subject of study but not necessarily a model to follow.

Searching for someone else who fracture’s complacency but who does it as a from within pedagogy more closely related to the needs of Critical Technical Practice, I turn to the offerings of Mark Fisher formerly of Goldsmiths, a working class intellectual of Felixstowe, a port town on the East Coast of England. Mark who sadly committed suicide earlier this year was able to think through contemporary culture and mental ill health to illuminate contemporary capitalism. Mark Fisher's book Capitalist Realism drips with a politicised depression and bears witness to the annihilation of vitality both in the depressed self and wider society in the early 21st centaury. Fisher's politically depressed vision is not surprising given that his lens was ground by the exhilaration of people making culture for themselves without it first being prehended by large corporations and turned into free labour before you have even had a chance to think about it. Or his lens being tinted slightly pink by a nostalgic collectivity with the 1984/85 miners. The last time their was a class based political power outside of an elected dictatorship. Which it could now be argued has now been supplanted by facebook and other social media.

Mark Fisher’s book offers the class a critical realisation of our own macroscopic entrapment within a totalised capitalist imaginary much like Snakey’s piss bottle challenges the pre/conditions of poverty and mental health at the microscopic level. Just as a critical act unfolds Snakey’s piss bottle into the relations that make it real.  Thinking with Mark Fisher's question, is there no alternative to Capitalist Realism requires us to question Capitalist Realism as a rubric of reproduction to keep us mesmerised by a desiring consumption. It also begs the question, that he usefully does not present, how do we figure the way Capitalist realism performs itself through technical objects and allows the class to ask the further question is capitalist realism the only thing performed through such technical individuals? Mark effectively lays out a concise mapping, a challenge, a landscape of desire, production and consumption that in popular terms, technical critical practice can engage with.

Database Addiction 2

As we have seen in stage one of Database Addiction critical technical practice seeks to understand what a machine system does, why it does it.  At the same time we need to  understand what constraints are created or satisfied by its operation which moves our gaze to understanding how we make ourselves available to computational machines. One useful method is to ask what is the social, political, cultural genealogy of an interface.   In the second stage of database addiction YoHa decided to examine how people in recovery from addiction interface with the machines of clinic.

The starting point was to consider the hard work incorporated in being an addict, finding substances, food, shelter, care, treatment are complicated formations that require knowledge situated in the actions and reactions of being addicted, yet this knowledge never enters into the machinery of governance that purportedly cares for them.  YoHa and the team wanted to explore what situated knowledge could to tell us about forms of reticulated discipline that governs addicts and workers in the care system.

As an introduction to this part of the study I want to lay the general conditions of addiction. As Mark Fisher often stated It is becoming difficult to imagine a world where work does not spill over into the rest of life, emails landing 24/7, increased pressures to achieve more then you are paid for, help demonstrate your commitment, creativity and potential to your employer. In London we have the added pressure of trying to find a home that you can afford and secure 'useful' employment to pay for it. What is the alternative to a world where you desire what you can not have, borrow to afford it and consume to gratify the desires that orchestrate your own entrapment. The pressures, anxieties we experience appear as a realism within contemporary capitalism, a space from which we cannot imagine a different society.

The contemporary life pictured above leads many people to spend a lot of time trying to 'get out of their heads', a desirable state that punctuates the tedium, pressures and slow violence of contemporary life. Sing in a church choir, doing an extreme sport, dance till you drop or take illicit substances or do a little gardening or have a beer or two but not too much. Sometimes though, if things are dark or too much it's difficult to not get off your head a little too often. Then all too soon, your time becomes occupied, obsessed by the pursuit of that altered state. That vantage point where you do not have to be yourself but from which you can see yourself anew. You can easily then, become the subject of reckless behavior which we can think of as addicted to actions, substances which we struggle to control.

Desire and consumption are good we are told, for the economy, for the country, apparently helping make it strong and stable. It is then difficult to understand a society that on the one hand applauds the production of desire and consumption to the highest levels of reward and on the other finds it abhorrent when that involves a fairly random group of outlawed chemicals.

What has interested YoHa in the second stage of Database addiction is what kinds of technical, individual and social bodies are born from how society knows what is 'harmful desire and consumption' when the production of desire and consumption is also highly rewarded. What critical potential can the subjects on the wrong side of this construction bring to bare through their situated knowledge.

The people YoHa have worked with (named places) told us how they have tried to contain 'getting off their heads' they have revealed some of the registers of events and stresses that led their desires to get out of control and what they have left behind, or found as they move forward. ( Sam created a system by which people could deposited items, memories, objects in the reading room that would signifi this process)

Sick self, as a computational interface.

Regaining control of illicit substances can be self imposed such as when a person who on self reflection see flaws in themselves which as led to reckless behavior or it can arise from the criminal justice system or some other external performance of power, social workers threatening to take children into care or from health professionals or the parading the immanence of death or serious disease. Whatever the trigger, the moment one imagines or is forced to imagine regaining control, the spectre of a sick self comes into being. This sick self gains traction by being made or making oneself available for the machinery of treatment and care. Against common sense, the sick self is not located in any part of the body or mind even though this is how it may appear to the person exhibiting reckless behaviour. The sick self produces a body without organs that acts as a conduit through which services, information, chemicals, thoughts and actions flow between the body of reckless behavior and the nascent body that will be in control. The construction of a sick self creates a body of work, a critical direction of flow toward the body of reckless behavior that distances or obscures the wider social and political conditions that where the sick selfs pre-conditions.

As the sick self begins its mitigation through what is termed a journey of recovery it becomes transversal, a figurable narration to be recorded. A series of modalities, crisis points, goals that are imposed and that can be policed . Not only by the body of reckless behavior but in computational registers. It becomes a series of insightful critical thoughts from and about the reckless body. It becomes a digital object that break down modalities into a monetised form on a journey of recovery. It becomes the subject of professions, all kinds of architectures, a political object and project or a medical subject or object. A process to be broken down in the databases we saw in stage one of Database addiction and a reappearance managed through computation.

Show reading room.

Machines in Critical Technical Practice

The intellectual myar of the machine is well explored in the humanities, Samual Buttler, Haroway, Mumford,  Fusser, D&G, Simondon, bla bla, Science has it’s own interpretations from autopoiesis, thermodynamics, information theory, cybernetics. Digital Cultures has it’s own protagonists, Galloway, Fuller, Goffey, Parisi, Bradotti, Mckenzie. If we spent all our time reading we would have no time for clumsy action that could produce surprising results.

Given this wide area of study, it is safe to assume that machines are a way to think through how human and nature, the human and the not not human, the subject and object fold into each other, creating a lens through which we can view the vitality of  functional interconnection. Whether you are a fan of Bradotti’s brand of European post humanism, or an anti-humanist, you await the singularity from the viewpoint of Nick Lang and the Ultra right.   According to D&G “Desire and its object are one and the same thing: the machine, as a machine of a machine. Desire is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it” (Anti-Oedipus 26).

In short this folding and unfolding of machines and humans allows us to cast off the chains of human sexual reproduction as the only evolutionary motor of change that matters and allows the inanimate to take up its place among the aggregates of life. The space of a self ordering universe, dissipative structures, offer us a formation of the inanimate that  phase into new structures independently of a Darwinian evolutionary model.    “Desiring-machines are the nonhuman sex, the molecular machinic elements, their arrangements and syntheses, without which there would be neither a human sex specifically determined in the large aggregates, nor a human sexuality capable of investing these aggregates”(294).