the Internationale :: content to be different

Tweets for the week :: 2012-02-05

praxis — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 13:45:00 +0000

er followed a pining child round the sluppery table with a forkful of fat. But a king of whistlers. Scieoula! When he’d prop me atlas agains #
Zuckerberg the Hacker. http://t.co/YkLo03GA #
http://t.co/jTn4uVcp New platform, chasing a different beam. #
New iBooks EULA restricts form not content. Our protocol our form our rights our market our money http://t.co/DVdKzc6X #
“@mashable: Get Ready for the Apple … Treadmill? – http://t.co/kDzgsXaG” I thought they already had their Chinese workers on them. #
t his goose and light our two candles for our singers duohs on the sewingmachine. I’m sure he squirted juice in his eyes to make them flash #
The Like economy and now the Cheers economy. Where everyone knows your name presumably. http://t.co/SZ5r2Hp6 #
35 objects Zuckerberg doesn't want to connect with. I particularly like no. 25 http://t.co/xupfNhVQ #
Interesting machinc/human hybrid photo project. Apple fan'boy' connecting with his beloved. http://t.co/0ImzwkFJ #
Facebook's Timeline as a scopic apparatus. I feel anther publication brewing. http://t.co/EKkKSGi6 #quadJPEG #
So, what to do with my Voyager hypercard copy of Neuromancer? http://t.co/kaDJ5kjU Chapeau @glynmoody #
Interesting object-oriented media experience: watching my supervisor live tweet my favourite philosopher's talk while watching stream. #
for flightening me. Still and all he was awful fond to me. Who’ll search for Find Me Colours now on the hilly-droops of Vikloefells? But I r #
It's official. It's gonna be a 'hot' summer: http://t.co/t5twyClv #
At #WSA launch of 'Centre for Global Futures in Art, Design & Media' #
Police can't give me my stolen laptop back until the scallies can get bail so can get their data off it. #DailyMailstyleoutrage #
ead in Tobecontinued’s tale that while blubles blows there’ll still be sealskers. There’ll be others but non so for me. Yed he never knew we #
media studies the Miss Piggy Way chapeau @the_eco_thought http://t.co/hBsjnf4M” #
Just how many references should there be? My literature review is looking more and more like a clown car. #
seen us before. Night after night. So that I longed to go to. And still with all. One time you’d stand fornenst me, fairly laughing, in you #
http://t.co/ZtwN1yWh Surely it should have been ecstasy or maybe you only get that in Kindle books. #
Sometimes you find a thing, and it reminds you how cool all this stuff is: http://t.co/tRCoiNcR #c2bd #
r bark and tan billows of I branches for to fan me coolly. And I’d lie as quiet as a moss. And one time you’d rush upon me, darkly roaring, #
RT @mashable: what Apple could do with its $100 billion http://t.co/pFqDChwv" They could pay their workers properly. #
RT @nsrnicek: "you can't post PirateBay link on Facebook. Tells you it's spam or unsafe site" but if use JPEG http://t.co/VxSdIv7R #
like a great black shadow with a sheeny stare to perce me rawly. And I’d frozen up and pray for thawe. Three times in all. I was the pet of #

A constellation

praxis — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 15:55:09 +0000

A guitar. A fireplace. Dark coal-scuttle. A carpet and a banjo. Things left around. A domestic photoshoot, homes and gardens, good house keeping, interiors. Objects of light, photons, stream through the pinhole to the sensor, connecting with silicon, releasing charge-objects to be encoded. photons, cells, pixels, data.

Software actants go to work, arranging data, colourspaces. Discarding through Cosine logic. Crumbs from Huffman’s Table. Arranged and standardised on a card. Packaged and piped to an IPad.

Data loaded. Standard accepted and read. Software objects fit together, connecting standards like stickle bricks, two plus two. Pinched and stroked. I caress data, haptic scopicality. New images appear as I zoom. Powers of Ten. New constellations of data and pixels. Glitches and dust speckle the sensor interfering in the seamless move from light to data. Physical and software noise add to the constellation of objects.

Tweets for the week :: 2012-01-29

praxis — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 13:45:00 +0000

everyone then. A princeable girl. And you were the pantymammy’s Vulking Corsergoth. The invision of Indelond. And, by Thorror, you looked i #
re Twitter boycott. Why are we surprised/upset corporates behave like… er corporates. If we want 'our' media/control DIY cf @dmytri Thimbl #
Mistype bookface's address on an iPad and it redirects you to http://t.co/vrIJFaym Scopic social governmentality. #
http://t.co/3HdVha6r Nice bit of object-oriented guerrilla politics. Chapeau @pennywilson #
#2012 open ceremony feature "NHS nurses + 900 pupils". Hope they're getting share of the £90m. Who needs pay or EMA? http://t.co/lUmJaxlt #
"Facebook Wants to Own Your Social Graph" Surely they already do. At least one of my Graphs http://t.co/JcX5fAyj #
Nice object-oriented game? "Cheese or Font" http://t.co/kwzIHiYA chapeau @berrydm #
t! My lips went livid for from the joy of fear. Like almost now. How? How you said how you’d give me the keys of me heart. And we’d be marri #
“@Beschizza: You know Newt's fingers are steepled in this photo, even though you cannot see them. http://t.co/2SQ0Rjpk” Excellent! #
ed till delth to uspart. And though dev do espart. O mine! Only, no, now it’s me who’s got to give. As duv herself div. Inn this linn. And c #
Chapeau Meredith Alexander. At least some real #2012 legacy. http://t.co/Nf4i6adm #
I wonder what this project would have been like without images. http://t.co/8uHAu4M7 #
Google gives the algorithms more to eat. Gotta keep cash cows well fed. http://t.co/K31gj4vy #
an it be it’s nnow fforvell? Illas! I wisht I had better glances to peer to you through this bay-light’s growing. But you’re changing, acool #
Thanks to @juspar for the feedback on #quadJPEG v1. Good to know the object isn't completely anomalous. #
http://t.co/alKGGkb2 I remember getting students to 'programme' dissertations in HyperCard. Steve wouldn't have liked that cf iBooks EULA. #
sha, you’re changing from me, I can feel. Or is it me is? I’m getting mixed. Brightening up and tightening down. Yes, you’re changing, sonhu #
If it can work with tech publishing why not with art books? http://t.co/wP53PvOA chapeau @glynmoody #
“@jennifermjones: http://t.co/AmbQLBQ5” sometimes I regret my research shifting towards protocol. Governmentality is 'bigger' than software. #
this is a good day #
sband, and you’re turning, I can feel you, for a daughterwife from the hills again. Imlamaya. And she is coming. Swimming in my hindmoist. D #
Short is the new longform http://t.co/a6ch84yb Chapeau @mckenziewark #c2bd #
RT @cshirky ""I have never seen a license as mind-bogglingly greedy and evil as Apple’s ebook authoring EULA" http://t.co/Wqlb0itM" #

Small objects in the city

praxis — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 11:50:37 +0000

Natural and un-natural objects. Toy chairs probably manufactured in Taiwan. A sod of grass and a rose of England. Dirt. A miniature TV flown around the world to a doll’s house shop. Maybe a charity shop.

Positioned and repositioned on a street. In a street. Connecting with an office block and a gutter. Privatised street cleaner and voluntary police officer. Reconnecting with a cyclist’s rubber tyre whose carbon footprint entangles with that of the Chinese shipping container. Residents, immigrants, migrants, White-British data points, mothers and Friends. Followers and citizen (journalists) see, experience and connect the objects. Different patterns of object connections. Flashes or echoes. Short or long-lived patterns of object connections.

Not a grand gesture or statement. Not a challenge to a Subject or the power-full King’s head. An Exploit, a swarm, a flood not a gesture or a strike (Galloway and Thacker). There is no claim or Occupy challenge, simply a rearrangement of objects, a reconnection. A resonance.

When no object takes primacy, all are open to Exploit. All are available for rearrangement and resonance. When there is no privileged Subject or Object of power or politics, reclaiming the streets becomes a matter of connections, reconnections, flashes and echoes of new object relations.

Tweets for the week :: 2012-01-22

praxis — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 13:45:00 +0000

iveltaking on me tail. Just a whisk brisk sly spry spink spank sprint of a thing theresomere, saultering. Saltarella come to her own. I pity #
Bit of circuit bending. Chapeau Isaac http://t.co/5U9HKL9Q http://t.co/5U9HKL9Q #
your oldself I was used to. Now a younger’s there. Try not to part ! Be happy, dear ones ! May I be wrong! For she’ll be sweet for you as I #
And as if to rove the point: "crushing authoritarianism and Cold Cynicism" http://t.co/Rgm3a440 #
RT @berrydm: http://t.co/JQuMRjQF "Economist on Apple – A textbook manoeuvre" absolutely. Textbook Economist 'democratisation'? purleese #
was sweet when I came down out of me mother. My great blue bedroom, the air so quiet, scarce a cloud. In peace and silence. I could have st #
New iBooks Author. Create interactive image objects… as long as you use the right Protocol. #quadJPEG http://t.co/Nzj7HWfb #
Two new 'content to be different' courses: http://t.co/tAoqIOeG and http://t.co/HuUfpxFY #
Thing of the day: 19.01.12 http://t.co/pnytA8al #
ayed up there for always only. It’s something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall. And let her rain now if she likes. Gently or strongly a #
Sometimes this practice-research is fun. Playing @ibogost A Slow Year #
s she likes. Anyway let her rain for my time is come. I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a ti #
the of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights? All me life I have been lived among them but #
now they are becoming lothed to me. And I am lothing their little warm tricks. And lothing their mean cosy turns. And all the greedy gushes #

Imag(in)ing 2012

praxis — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:09:33 +0000

Submitted a photo essay to a ‘real’ academic journal. They didn’t want it so, heh I’ll publish it in my own publication:

Text here ::

’2012′ is an event, a brand, a spectacle, a geographical space, a cultural and media practice, a political and economic assemblage. As “Big Build”, “London 2012″ or “legacy”, ’2012′ is a panoply of human and unhuman, material and virtual, real and imaginary objects: athletes and activists; journalists and websites; sponsors and contracts; TV rights and logos; ideologies of ‘participation’ and ‘regeneration’; Siberian pine velodrome planks and toxic chemicals; database algorithms and surveillance drones… and photographs.

’2012′ is, in part, being built and imagined online. There are the official images but also the distributed montage of photographs, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Instagram images; those taken as the East End has been transformed and those which will form part of the documenting of the Games and its legacy.

The JPEG protocol is one of the software and imaging actants (as Bruno Latour would call them) in play in that imagining of ’2012′. As the most popular codec for photographs online, the standard that underpins the 300,000 photographs uploaded every second to Facebook’s Timelines (Beaver 2008), it enables searches, geotagging, embedding and viewing of the images or imaginings (what we might call ‘imag(in)ings’) in browsers, apps and mashups: the social imag(in)ing of 2012.

The images on the following pages are part of a practice-research project exploring that protocol and the imag(in)ing of 2012. My project uses the object-oriented philosophy (OOP) of Graham Harman (2011) as a way of both understanding that assemblage and imaginary and as an impetus to new imaging.

In brief, OOP holds that all objects – whether real or virtual, human or unhuman – have an equal ontological position. They are all equally present and actual. Further, they have different dimensions. In a Heideggarian sense they withdraw – we can never access their full reality, there is always more. As with Heidegger’s famous hammer, an object’s reality remains hidden until something goes wrong and it breaks, suddenly emerging into consciousness. In a Husserlian sense they have a sensual dimension that we encounter as different instantiations or a myriad of qualities accessible in particular moments and spaces. The JPEG protocol slips out of reach. All we ever encounter are its instantiations as it encodes dot jpg files.

My project understands the distributed web of imag(in)ings on Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and the infinite acrhives of Google’s cache as a mesh (as Timothy Morton calls it (2010)) of objects connecting and reconnecting in a myriad of ways. The images, the things they capture, the photographer, her camera’s CCD, the software, the server on which the image sits, the browser that understands that data, the social network’s business strategy… are all objects. They connect and reconnect, forming new objects (the ‘Photo Stream’, the ‘data-open-to-datamining’, the ‘archive’, ’2012′).

As well as offering a way of understanding distributed imag(in)ing networks, computational assemblages and cultures, OOP offers a way of approaching practice. What I am calling ‘object-oriented photography’ (OOPh) looks to imag(in)e with a flat ontology (a ‘democracy’ as Levi Bryant calls it (2011c)) of object-actants. Here the objects in front of the lens, behind the lens and within the camera, as well as in the wider computational, scopic assemblage are all in play within the photography. The JPEG protocol, myself as photographer, the silicon in the chip, the WiFi router, browser, Facebook’s server farm as well as the 2012 Fence I photograph are all complex, multi-faceted objects connecting and reconnecting within new objects for Facebook to datamine, Google to map, the State to surveil and you to share. The photographs themselves are only one object in that assemblage.

I look to photograph with and through that mesh. In concrete terms, following Jane Bennett’s call to pay attention to ‘Vibrant Matter’ (2010), I photograph objects around the Fence that still surrounds the Olympic site in East London. Litter, laminated notices, workmen’s gloves, cable ties, the mooring rings on the canal from a previous industrial era, plants enfolded with the wire… any object. Part of the liminal spaces of 2012. These are not merely ‘representations’ of ’2012′. They are active players with an ‘agentic capacity’. They have a materiality. The molecules in the glove react with those of the Fence. The concrete has a carbon footprint. That materiality is part of 2012′s presence in the East End and its purported legacy. Just as my digital image-data has a materiality and a carbon footprint as it exists on server farms and an agentic capacity as it circulates and collides with other data on mobile networks.

As well as 2012 objects, I look to include 2012 imaging objects. The pinhole allows a direct connection between the photons that cross the Fence – that had an existence before the bid was won and will have a presence long after legacy has been forgotten – with the sensor and camera hardware. Similarly, by handholding a digital pinhole camera I created, I make my own object-presence apparent. The images carry the trace of my (human-object) breathing.

The images are presented as pairs. As I photographed, I set my camera to encode the light hitting the CCD using two protocols simultaneously: JPEG and RAW. The same light-as-data was encoded in two forms, creating two image files – a dot jpg file and a dot orf file (the RAW format used by my Olympus camera). When it came to laying out the images whether online or in print, other software actants (PDF, Word, InDesign, HTML) could connect with the .jpg file but not the .orf file. One could be laid out or visible, one could not. By encoding the light-as-data through the two protocols simultaneously and presenting the results of those encodings side-by-side, I explore the relative powers of the protocol object-actants. One (JPEG) makes my light-as-data-as-imag(ining)e visible, social and shareable. The other (RAW) makes the same light-as-data-as-imag(ining)e unvisible, proprietary and discrete.

Beaver, D 2008, 10 billion photos, facebook.com. Retrieved October 18, 2011, from https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=30695603919
Bennett, J., 2010, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology Of Things, Duke University Press, Durham.
Bryant, L.R., 2011, The Democracy of Objects, Open Humanities Press. Retrieved October 18, 2011, from http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=ohp;idno=9750134.0001.001
Harman, G., 2011, The Quadruple Object, Zero Books, Ropley.
Morton, T., 2010, The Ecological Thought, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.; London.

And the designed version with the pix (as a PDF) here ::

Imag(in)ing 2012

Tweets for the week :: 2012-01-15

praxis — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 13:45:00 +0000

out through their small souls. And all the lazy leaks down over their brash bodies. How small it’s all! And me letting on to meself always. #
Thing of the day: 14.01.12 http://t.co/xFrRqmR4 #
And lilting on all the time. I thought you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage. You’re only a bumpkin. I thought you the great #
Update on my practice-research post. Scraped into a 'carpentry' site. You gotta love algorithm's sense of humour http://t.co/EQzAfuYS #
in all things, in guilt and in glory. You’re but a puny. Home ! My people were not their sort out beyond there so far as I can. For all the #
Thing of the day: 12.01.12 http://t.co/8uWdyh0T #
“@byrne_ed: @Internationale finished the social media management proposal. Thanks for advice when visiting #Wsa

A bit of new year carpentry: Ekaw Snagennif

praxis — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 09:23:02 +0000

As you may know, I’m engaging in a bit of my practice-research around object-oriented photography and publishing on/in/through Facebook. Using my favourite new camera (the screengrab facility on my phone), I’m ‘taking’ photos of the images in the Haystack, uploading them back into the space (where they JPEG-encoded as visible images). I’m (re)mixing these with OOPh images of material objects connecting and reconnecting in the molten core of objects located in the flat ontological mesh that Harman, Morton, Bryant and Bogost speak of. These works (as well as other non-Facebook practice-research experiments) are my photographic/media/publishing version of what Ian Bogost calls carpentry, crafting things as a philosophical practice. For Bogost that is software, games etc – Cow Clicker being only the most famous. In ‘carpentry’-based practice -research, the artefact is not illustration or even simply source material for philosophical musing or critique. Rather it is the site of that musing or research. In my case, my ‘experiments’, artifacts, works are where I (or anyone else) finds out about the workings of JPEG and distributed imag(in)ing.

Anyway, when I saw that on New Year’s Day 2012 that copyright on James Joyce’s work ended, I decided to carve out another work. Following Ken Goldsmith’s idea of ‘uncreative writing‘ which he explores in his new book (which I’d just finished – of courses as an eText!), I decided to (re)wrte Finnegans Wake on Twitter and Facebook, 140 characters at a time. Because I’m particularly interested in Facebook’s new Timeline, I decided to work with that new time-space and write it backwards. One day I (and you)’ll be able to look at my Timeline (NB not Twitter page because they will have fallen into Twitter’s non-space, although they will be archived/republished here) – and read from “riverrun, past Eve and Af=dam’s, from swerve of shore” and on. A few rules:

Each passage must be 140 characters exactly even ifg that means splitting aword.
Each passage must be 140 characters including ay space at the beginning or end.
Each passage must be copied and pasted from the Web to the Web.

A few initial ‘findings’:

1. One friend on Facebook spotted what I was doing:

But of course to open up the experiment to other ‘writers’, not that I could stop them, would be to reverse the Timeline. Here carpentry/practice-research opens up issues of Facebook’s logic, software objects and reworking of time and space.

2. As the work moves forward (or backward) on Facebook and Twitter, Finnegans Wake (or maybe Finnegans Wake’ [single quote being the Maths symbol for not-negation]), the passages will become entangled with other Facebook/Twitter objects – photos, links, friends’ news etc. Here carpentry/practice-research opens up the object-oriented nature of distributed media and media spaces as well as the sensual/real splits and the vicarious causation apparent as objects connect with other objects within the heart of the Timeline object, the Facebook database objects, the Social Graph object.

I’m interested in how Facebook and Twitter work (and can be used) as publishing as well as research spaces. The best way to explore what Facebook ‘does’ to our ideas of content, stories, images, creativity, media is to use it. The best way to research it as object space is to connects some objects with it and through it. I would argue that carpentry/practice-research opens up more questions, issues, ideas and frameworks – as well, to my mind, demonstrating the power and reach of OOO – than attempting to stand outside (as a Subject rather than object) and figure out the connections, references and allusions… hence my choice of Finnegans Wake.

STOP PRESS:

Another thing I just noticed. When I post a fragment on Facebook or Twitter that has a space at the beginning, the software corrects it for me.

STOP PRESS 13.01.12

Wonderful Pingback on this post. Scraped into site on ‘Carpentry’. You gotta love algorithm’s sense of humour!

O-Zone and object-oriented photography

praxis — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 08:33:45 +0000

My video response to Ian Bogost and Robert Jackson’s thoughts on objects, images and photography on OO Frequency part of the O-Zone Journal.

Also available on YouTube.

Tweets for the week :: 2012-01-08

praxis — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 13:45:00 +0000

and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere #
size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms. I see them rising! S #
ave me from those therrble prongs! Two more. Onetwo moremens more. So. Avelaval. My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. #
I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair! If I s #
een him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he’d come from Arkangels, I sink I’d die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only #
to washup. Yes, tid. There’s where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here #
. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thous-endsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given ! A way a lone a last a loved a long the #