FROM INFORMATION TO AGENCY�Delivered July 2016, at Tate Modern, by Daniel Rourke
Session 1
Hito Steyerl: �Poor Image Politics
Session 2
Morehshin Allahyari: �Decolonising the Digital Archive
Session 3
Mishka Henner: �Big Data and World Making
Session 4
Forensic Architecture: �Blurring the Borders between Forensics, Law and Art
Data is the lifeblood of today’s economic and social systems. Drones, satellites and CCTV cameras capture digital images covertly, while smartphones we carry feed data packets into the cloud, fought over by corporations and governments. How are we to make sense of all this information? Who is to police and distribute it? And what kind of new uses can art put it to?
This four-week series led by writer/artist Daniel Rourke will explore the politics and potential of big data through the lens of contemporary art and the social sciences. Participants will assess the impact the digital revolution has had on notions of value attached to the invisible, the territorial and the tangible. We will look at artists and art activists who tackle the conditions of resolution, algorithmic governance, digital colonialism and world-making in their work, with a focus on key news events yet to unfold in 2016.
Session 1
Hito Steyerl: �Poor Image Politics
Hito Steyerl, works since 2010
Apart from resolution and exchange value, one might imagine another form of value defined by velocity, intensity, and spread.
Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image (2009)
SPAM -> clickbait
‘Prosumerism’
‘Prosumerism’
[We] have already been touched by and altered by these sensations, even before [we] have had the chance to become conscious of them.
Dan Harmon, who was executive producer of the television sitcom Community, shared that he tried, “many times a season” to put star Alison Brie “in a situation, wardrobe-wise, that I know is going to end up as an animated GIF file!”
Photos taken by soldiers in Iraq between 2001-2009, most notoriously in Abu Ghraib prison
UC Davis pepper-spray incident (2011)
video screencap of Eric Garner, 2014
‘Arab Spring’(2011)
Apart from resolution and exchange value, one might imagine another form of value defined by velocity, intensity, and spread.
Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image (2009)
How Not to Be Seen is a sketch from British comedy show Monty Python's Flying Circus.
It was first aired on 8th December 1970.
Hito Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013)
Session 2
Morehshin Allahyari: �Decolonising the Digital Archive
NEWS THIS WEEK�July 4th - 11th 2016
Deaths of Philando Castile & Alton Sterling
Dallas ‘activist’ sniper shoots dead five police officers
ALSO THIS WEEK
Augmented reality Pokémon fever:
In collaboration with UNESCO, engineering specialists at Oxford University, our other academic partners, and the government of the United Arab Emirates, we are in the process of capturing millions of 3D images of threatened objects. Armed with lightweight, discreet and easy-to-use 3D cameras, our dedicated volunteer photographers are capturing high quality scans at important sites in conflict zones throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Approximately 5,000 of these low-cost, high-tech cameras will be distributed by early 2016. Images from these devices are uploaded through our web portal for inclusion in the open-source Million Image Database. The images will be used for research, heritage appreciation, educational programs and 3D replication – including full-scale 3D replication using proprietary cement-based 3D printing techniques. The first full-scale replication will occur in April, 2016 with further replications scheduled throughout 2016 and 2017. This program is the first of its kind in both purpose and scale. However, it is our hope that it will become a model for future similar endeavors. While there are those who seek to encourage us to forget the past – to forget the shared history that unites us – we are dedicated to ensuring that the visual reminders that keep that history alive remain a part of the human experience.
see also: Letter from the Director, Roger Michel
Nefertiti Hack / The Other Nefertiti
Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles
“The Other Nefertiti” also known as #NefertitiHack is an artistic intervention questioning singularity and originality as well as ownership of material objects of other cultures. The artists went into the Neues Museum and secretly scanned the bust to release the data at the 32C3 under a public domain. The data leak was a part of a counter narrative to inspire a critical re-assessment of today’s conditions and to overcome the colonial notion of possession in Germany's museums. The head of Nefertiti represents all the other millions of stolen and looted artefacts all over the world currently happening for example in Syria, Iraq and in Egypt. Archaeological artefacts as a cultural memory originate for the most part from the Global South, however, a vast number of important objects can be found in Western museums and private collections. One should face the fact that the colonial structures continue to exist today and still produce their inherent symbolic struggles.
“With the data leak as a part of this counter narrative we want to activate the artefact, to inspire a critical re-assessment of today’s conditions and to overcome the colonial notion of possession in Germany”
Morehshin Allahyari, Material Speculation: ISIS (2015/16)
#Dark Matter (2013-2014)
Dark Matter (2014/15)
Morehshin Allahyari
#Dark Matter(second series)
Cody Wilson, ‘The Liberator’ (2013)
What is Radical?
Among the provisions of the Firearms and Weapons Prohibition Legislation Amendment Bill 2015 (PDF) is an amendment to the Weapons Prohibition Act 1998 stating that a person "must not possess a digital blueprint for the manufacture of a firearm on a 3D printer or on an electronic milling machine."
The maximum penalty is 14 years' jail.
The provision does not apply to any person with a licence to manufacture firearms or the police.
'Possession' is defined as "possession of a computer or data storage device holding or containing the blueprint or of a document in which the blueprint is recorded" or "control of the blueprint held in a computer that is in the possession of another person (whether the computer is in this jurisdiction or outside this jurisdiction)" - SOURCE
Megumi Igarashi, or Rokudenashi-ko, the “Good-for-nothing Girl”
The charges on Igarashi include three counts of distributing “obscene” data via the internet through the sale of CDs. These CDs did not include any photographs of her genitals, but did include the digital files needed to recreate various 3D printable products featuring her vagina. If she is convicted, she will face up to two years in prison.
project by Golan Levin with
F.A.T. Lab + Sy-Lab (2012)�http://fffff.at/free-universal-construction-kit/
Morehshin Allahyari’s artist talk was here :-)
Session 3
Mishka Henner: �Big Data and World Making
There are two components to the work that I do. One is writing and speaking. I make arguments about these places, about these infrastructures, the economies and the legal regimes that they are a part of. Images are not so good at making linear arguments in that way. As an artist, I am interested in seeing, and I am interested in how we see the world. Which is potentially a very different set of questions to “how do we understand the world?” or “how do we make sense of the world?” Seeing and images are a way to point towards things, but there is very little evidentiary material in the images that I create.
As Trevor Paglen has said: Wikileaks and the NSA have essentially the same political position: there are dark secrets at the heart of the world, and if we can only bring them to light, everything will magically be made better. One legitimises the other. Transparency is not enough – and certainly not when it operates in only one direction. This process has also made me question my own practice and that of many others, because making the invisible visible is not enough either.
James Bridle, Big Data: No Thanks
Calico has the self-appointed mission of fighting aging and extending the human lifespan.
Google X lab: Driverless cars
The Google Glass wearable computer (will return)
In a November 2015 Google CEO Larry Page confessed that he was no longer sure what his company was for. He admitted that, as the corporation moves into pharmaceutical research and bodily monitoring, it had outgrown its original mission statement to “organize the world’s information.” “We’re in a bit of uncharted territory,” he said. “We’re trying to figure it out. How do we use all these resources?” - source
Ingress is an augmented-reality massively multiplayer online location-based game developed by Niantic, originally part of Google
NEWS THIS WEEK�July 11th - 18th 2016
(self) surveillance big data: big brother, wikileaks, edward snowden, chealsea manning, julian assange
Facial Weaponization Suite protests against biometric facial recognition–and the inequalities these technologies propagate.
The Fag Face Mask, generated from the biometric facial data of many queer men’s faces, is a response to scientific studies that link determining sexual orientation through rapid facial recognition techniques. Another mask explores a tripartite conception of blackness: the inability of biometric technologies to detect dark skin as racist, the favoring of black in militant aesthetics, and black as that which informatically obfuscates. A third mask engages feminism’s relations to concealment and imperceptibility, taking veil legislation in France as a troubling site that oppressively forces visibility. A fourth mask considers biometrics’ deployment as a security technology at the Mexico-US border and the nationalist violence it instigates. These masks intersect with social movements’ use of masking as an opaque tool of collective transformation that refuses dominant forms of political representation.
Zach Blas, Facial Weaponization Suite (2011-2014)
Hans Haacke, Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real‑Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, (1971).
(from America is Hard to See exhibition, 2015)
Julian Stallabrass argues that “subjective, creative choice has been subsumed in favour of greater resolution and bit depth, a measurable increase in the quantity of data. The manifest display of very large amounts of data in such images may be related to a broader trend in contemporary art to exploit the effect of the ‘data sublime’. In providing the viewer with the impression and spectacle of a chaotically complex and immensely large configuration of data, these photographs act much as renditions of mountain scenes and stormy seas did on nineteenth-century urban viewers.” - October Journal, 2007
Simon Norfolk
Simon Norfolk
“NSA/GCHQ Surveillance Base, Bude, Cornwall, UK”, 2015
“Columbus III, NSA/GCHQ-Tapped Undersea Cable Atlantic Ocean”, 2015
“Untitled (Reaper Drone)”, 2013. The drone is just visible in the lower left-hand section of the image
Simon Norfolk:
BlueGene is designing and thinking about a space that is only about 30cm across and exists for about a billionth of a second, and that’s an exploding nuclear warhead. BlueGene is thinking about and modeling that space very intensely, because what happens there is very complicated.
That computer is as much a battlefield as a place in Afghanistan is, full of bullet holes. - source
Mishka Henner, No Man’s Land (2011)
Narrative / World Making:��The world is making a digital copy of itself… digital copies become ever more faithful representations of the actual, they’re no longer shadows of the real world. They’re worlds in their own right. - source
Mishka Henner’s artist talk was here :-)
viewing for next week
Eyal Weizman keynote lecture, Transmediale (2016)
further materials:
Eyal Weizman HKW Anthropocene keynote lecture (2014)
The Threshold of Detectibility: essay + materials
Session 4
Forensic Architecture: �Blurring the Borders between Forensics, Law and Art
On Friday, Wikileaks published 20,000 emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. They reveal, among other things,thuggish infighting, a push by a top DNC official to use Bernie Sanders’ religious convictions against him in the South, and attempts to strong-arm media outlets. In other words, they reveal the Washington campaign monster for what it is.
Considerable evidence shows that the Wikileaks dump was an orchestrated act by the Russian government, working through proxies, to undermine Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign. “This has all the hallmarks of tradecraft. The only rationale to release such data from the Russian bulletproof host was to empower one candidate against another. The Cold War is alive and well,” Tom Kellermann, the CEO of Strategic Cyber Ventures told Defense One.
NEWS THIS WEEK�July 18th - 25th 2016
Forensic Architecture - based at Goldsmiths, Uni of London (founded 2011)
BUT FIRST…
Walter Benjamin was a Marxist literary critic whose most popular essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1934 - 1936) examined the connection between art and technology.
Walter Benjamin fled Germany in 1933
His theory is that aura is a “strange web of space and time” or “a distance as close as it can be.” Aura is associated with the traditional, nostalgic notions of artwork and was lost with the onset of photography.
…which was surpassed by film.
Sallie Gardner at a Gallop, Eadweard Muybridge (June 15, 1878)
The aura of artwork is portrayed through its presence in time and space
A sense of awe is perceived from its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
Aura implies authenticity but there is no authenticity without its destruction in mechanical reproducibility. Confronted with its manual reproduction the original preserved all its authority.
Even the biggest Hollywood box office flop has been seen by more people than have actually seen the original Het Meisje met de Parel (Johannes Vermeer).
John Berger, Ways of Seeing, BBC TV series (1972)
A film actor’s performance isn't whole, it is done in several takes and camera angles. The connection to the audience is presented by a camera.
The artistic performance of a stage actor is presented to the public by the actor in person; the actors aura is present.
Dziga Vertov, The Man with the Movie Camera (1929)
The political aestheticisation of film lies in the - director’s ability to direct our eye and senses to a particular place and view.
Distraction is introduced as a mode of reception.
The individual no longer contemplates the film but - the reverse occurs. Through film and its inherent technical properties - perception has forever changed.
“Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.”
Hito Steyerl: In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective
Hans Vredeman de Vries, plate in Perspective, 1604-1605.
Hito Steyerl, In Defense of The Poor Image (2009)
Thomas Ruff, jpeg rl104, 2007
“The poor image is an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image. Its genealogy is dubious. Its filenames are deliberately misspelled. It often defies patrimony, national culture, or indeed copyright. It is passed on as a lure, a decoy, an index, or as a reminder of its former visual self. It mocks the promises of digital technology. Not only is it often degraded to the point of being just a hurried blur, one even doubts whether it could be called an image at all. Only digital technology could produce such a dilapidated image in the first place.”
Nicolas Maigret, The Pirate Cinema (2012-2013) �link to video
The following slides examining the work of Forensic Architecture are based on these materials:
Forensic Architecture - Violence at the Threshold of Detectability
Consequence of ‘bearing witness’: oral testimony, material testimony, capacity of technology = THRESHOLDS
The proflieration of media and material ‘evidence’ is useless without two things:
“With the global spread of smartphones and social media, conflicts and protests around the world are increasingly reported by the very people that experience them first- hand. Syria, Ukraine or the Ferguson riots, are all cases in point. But it's also difficult to make sense of this mass of data, and to distinguish between the facts and rumours. PATTRN sets out to address these new conditions, and to support more transparent and citizen-driven information about these complex events.”
"For us, the question is how the city senses war… A war starts; tens of thousands of foreign people enter into a familiar city that has hundreds of thousands of people in it and at that moment everything starts recording. People's memory records, the grass records, the trees record, the plumes in the air record, the concrete records. Everything is recording in a variable way. But these sensors are weak, fucked-up sensors. You need to develop ways of interpreting and reading and mediating those things."��
Artist
Also see work of…
The proflieration of media and material ‘evidence’ is useless without two things:
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2. A shared ‘construction of reality’
Forensic Architecture is ‘future orientated’, establishing the rhetorical, political, material understanding that allows the conditions of ‘truth’ to be registered
“an archaeology of the present‚ unpacking present histories in order to critically engage with the dynamics of political events as they are unfolding, in contradiction to archaeological obsession with the past”
“State and corporate denial are not just about the accountability of past event(s): denial is a condition of possibility of ongoing perpetration - the condition that allows future crimes to take place.”
All the evidence that we produced is not located very comfortably within the centre of what is accepted as evidence by legal bodies. What Forensis is trying to do is to push the boundary of what can be seen, said and qualify as truth, and what can be qualified as evidence.
In several instances our cases were thrown out of court for the excuse that our technology has not yet been verified, that we being artists and architects… our team does not have the right expertise. This shows, how forensis is at the threshold of science and at the threshold of the law.
��
Because our work exists at the threshold of science and the law, it could also be in excess of science and law. This kind of fragile evidence calls for political mobilisation, political commitment to gather around them. Truth is a common project under construction.
This description of the world is an aesthetic act.��I would also say that with regards to the manipulation of imagery, everybody should know that by now, and nobody should naively believe in power point presentations of evidence. But to shout ‘manipulation!’ also doesn't lead us anywhere, as if there was a world without that possibility, one that wasn't sutured with ‘manipulation’. All that makes sense today is to actually train the eye.
To make something visible you need not only to come up with an image, but to try to transform political relations around what you show so you need the language, to speak about it. The apparatus of vision is much wider and more complex and involves a host of technologies, techniques, sensibilities and aesthetic moves.
Hito Steyerl: In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective
“Forensis demands for transformations both on the level of the subject and that of the object. It is produced through an entanglement of technologies, articulation of objects, materials and human memory. Articulation of truths is composed of things, technologies of detection and technologies of presentation. When any border erodes – like this between subject and object – both sides of it are also transformed.”
Consequence of ‘bearing witness’: oral testimony, material testimony, capacity of technology = THRESHOLDS