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Prosthetic Knowledge Picks: Turntables and Records

Rhizome — Mon, 20 May 2013 09:30:00 -0500

A collection of items from the Prosthetic Knowledge Tumblr archive and around the Web, taking a brief look at creative and sometimes poetic plays with the familiar audio technology of vinyl records.

Art of Failure, Flat Earth Society

Sound art project from Art of Failure places geophysically-proportioned grooves onto a vinyl record:

From the artists' website:

Flat Earth Society proposes a transposition of the earth elevation at the scale of a microgroove record. This engraving of elevation’s data on the surface of the disk generates in consequence a subtle image of the earth. When played on a turntable, the chain of elevation data crossed by the needle can be heard.

More here.

Avoka, Dyskograph

Interactive sound installation developed by Jesse Lucas, Erwan & Raguenes Yro / Avoka lets participants create music by marking sequences on a paper disk with a pen, which is then read by the machine--a sort-of Oramics Machine in turntable form:

From the Avoka website:

DYSKOGRAF is a graphic disk reader. Each disc is created by visitors to the installation by way of felt tip pens provided for their use. The mechanism then reads the disk, translating the drawing into a musical sequence.

The installation is above all a tool, which allows the creation of musical sequences in an intuitive way. The notion of a loop, closely linked to electronic music, is represented here by the cycle of the disk. The disk passes indefinitely in front of a camera fixed onto an arm. This substitution for the needle converts the drawing into sound by way of a specific application program (software). Through this system, the sequential ordering of music is learnt in a playful way, at the same time creating a unique object, souvenir of the musical composition.

More here.

Yuri Suzuki, The Sound Of The Earth

From the artist's website:

The Sound of the Earth is a content of Yuri Suzuki`s spherical record project, the grooves representing the outlines of the geographic land mass.
Each country on the disc is engraved with a different sound, as the needle passes over it plays field recordings collected by Yuri Suzuki from around the world over the course of four years; traditional folk music, national anthems, popular music and spoken word broadcasts.

An aural journey around the world in 30 minutes.

Suzuki's website includes a full audio recording of the piece.

Wojciech Bruszewski, Gramofon

A work by Polish artist Wojciech Bruszewski from 1981. There isn’t much written online about this in English, apart from:

Record Player with four arms.
The best results: Pablo Casals - plays the cello in a ‘quartet’.

You can see a short Quicktime video of the work here.

More about the artist and his works here.

Katie Paterson, Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Solheimajökull

A fantastic piece from a few years ago by Katie Paterson comprising sound recordings of glaciers pressed into records made of ice:

Sound recordings from three glaciers in Iceland, pressed into three records, cast, and frozen with the meltwater from each of these glaciers, and played on three turntables until they completely melt. The records were played once and now exist as three digital films. The turntables begin playing together, and for the first ten minutes as the needles trace their way around, the sounds from each glacier merge in and out with the sounds the ice itself creates. The needle catches on the last loop, and the records play for nearly two hours, until completely melted.

An audio excerpt can be heard at Katie's website.

Guy Debord Limited Edition Action Figure Giveaway

Michael Connor — Fri, 17 May 2013 11:27:42 -0500

To mark the launch of McKenzie Wark's new book The Spectacle of Disintegration, Verso Books have offered Rhizome readers in the UK a chance to win a 3D printed Guy Debord action figure.

3D-printed Guy Debord action figures (2012). Produced by McKenzie Wark, design by Peer Hansen, with technical assistance by Rachel L.

The figure is part of a limited edition run of 200 made by Wark, who was inspired to delve into maker culture because of Debord's own investment in craft as evidenced in the twelve handcrafted issues of Internationale Situationniste. (You can read more about this in Brendan Byrne's recent interview with Wark on Rhizome). It's important to note that you can also make your own Debord figure based on Wark's 3D model, which will be released under a Creative Commons license.

The questions, which were supplied by Verso, are after the jump. They are not to be taken lightly...

The prize will go to first person with all correct answers to the quiz below. Two runners up will receive a complimentary copy of the book. The competition is open to UK residents only; entrants must email [enquiries AT verso.co.uk]. Please put SPECTACLE COMPETITION in the subject line or your entry may not be counted.

1.The Critique of Everyday Life is a seminal book that opened up a whole line of critical thinking about the small, everyday situations outside of the factory walls and beyond the official political sphere. Who wrote it, and in what year was it first published?

2. McKenzie Wark calls the experience of the everyday in our time the disintegrating spectacle. He is adding a fourth kind of spectacle to the three described by Guy Debord. Writing in the 60s, Debord thought both sides of the cold war were just variants of spectacle. Later, he thought that states such as France and Italy had combined elements of both into a third kind. What were the names Debord gave to these three variants?

3. The Surrealist leader André Breton wrote a poem, published after World War II, dedicated to the famous utopian writer Charles Fourier. Breton’s poem starts out with the narrator noticing a flower placed beneath his statue. During the Occupation, the Germans melted it down to use the copper for munitions. On which Paris street was that statue?

4. Debord’s comrade Raoul Vaneigem was rather more influenced by Surrealism, and via Surrealism by Charles Fourier, than some other Situationists. He even edited a paperback edition of Fourier’s ‘queer theory’ manuscript, The New Amorous World. What was the name of the Fourier-inspired utopia Vaneigem wrote about in 2005?

5. The great art historian T. J. Clark, who was briefly a member of the Situationist International, once recalled a demonstration in London which found him on the steps of the National Gallery in London. He and his friend debated there which painting within they would feel obliged to consign to the flames should the people ever storm through those illustrious portals. The masterpiece that Clark would have chosen was painted by whom?

6. The Situationist Gianfranco Sanguinetti pulled off a stunning prank in Italy, by publishing The Real Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy. Purporting to be from some insider to ruling circles or someone cognizant of ruling opinion, it argued that there was no harm in admitting Communists into government, as the Communists were not a revolutionary party, but were already acting in the interests of power in keeping workers in line. Under what name was the Real Report issued?

7. Next to Guy Debord, René Viénet is the best known Situationist film maker. His détourned films have a lightness and charm all of their own. His film Can Dialectics Break Bricks? uses a martial arts film as its raw material, and by gently moving a few minutes of film around and dubbing the actor’s voices into French, Viénet turns it into a critique of the Stalinization of the left during ’68. Who directed the film on which Can Dialectics Break Bricks? is based?

8. Debord’s ‘70s films Society of the Spectacle and Refutation of All Judgments were a quantum leap forward in complexity over his earlier cinema work, in part due to the resources of his new patron, Gerard Lebovici. Who was the film editor with whom Debord worked on these films, and who was the other famous French director with whom she worked?

9. Besides being Guy Debord’s second wife, Alice Becker-Ho wrote some very interesting books on the influence of Romani language on the ‘jargon’ of the dangerous classes, and as an important source for words not only in French but in other European languages. According to her glossary of jargon, what is the meaning of the word ‘baron’?

10. Besides his many accomplishments in the arts of writing, editing, cinema, and revolution, Guy Debord was also a game designer. On the writings of which military theorist did he claim to have based The Game of War?

11. Who was the member of the Situationist International who thought the SI should attempt détournements of porn and comics? Who praised Latin American militants for taking over an electronic BBS system? Who advocated fake issues of well-known periodicals? Who thought any militant thinker should be as capable of making a film as writing an article?

12. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale had the holograph manuscript of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle on display for a while. Did that manuscript and other items from Debord’s papers end up being sold by Alice Becker-Ho to the Beinecke, or somewhere else?

Performance GIFs 2: Maja Cule

Rhizome — Thu, 16 May 2013 13:17:58 -0500

Over the next few weeks, Rhizome will present a series of performance GIFs curated by Jesse Darling, beginning with this work by Maja Cule. Darling's introduction to the series can be found here.

Hanging from the 8th floor of the South side of The Trump Building at 40 Wall Street (Click to view artwork)
Maja Cule, May 2013
(featuring: Marlous Borm)

In May 1930, The Trump Building was the tallest building in the world. In the ninth episode of the Season 4 of The Apprentice, Donald Trump claimed he only paid $1 million for it.

The window depicted in Cule's work is located on the eighth floor, which is currently under construction. It looks out over Isamu Noguchi's Sunken Garden, a series of black boulders of varying sizes that Noguchi collected from the bottom of the Uji River in Kyoto, and Jean Dubuffet's sculpture Group of Four Trees, commissioned by David Rockefeller(then chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank) in 1969 for the One Chase Manhattan Plaza building. Designed in 1961 by Gordon Bunshaft, One Chase Manhattan Plaza is the 200th tallest building in the world with 60 floors and sealed windows.

Jack Goldstein, GIF Artist?

Loney Abrams — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:53:51 -0500

“The first show I did was with Jack. He showed a new work—the extraordinary film loop The Jump. I watched that film loop every day for three weeks and never got tried of it. I was hypnotized. I can still see it: The endless red and gold gleaming figure, rotating and tum- bling in a non-space, outside of time and place. It was beautiful and miraculous. I still believe that it was one of Jack’s greatest works; he made it long before the video effects that are available today. It was an absolute vision." - Robert Longo in Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia

Animated GIF from extract of YouTube video of Jack Goldstein, The Jump (1978).

The endlessly repeating moving image loop has become an important means of conveying and digesting information in the digital era, thanks to the animated GIF. Perhaps our new familiarity with loop-based viewing allows us to appreciate anew the films of Jack Goldstein, which, like animated GIFs, comprise short cycles of imagery that engage the viewer through repetition, anticipation and expectation. The GIF presents no new information as it loops; it is the same every time, yet we continue to watch with anticipation - not in anticipation of something new, but of the satisfaction of expectations fulfilled.

Animated GIF from extract of YouTube video of Jack Goldstein, Shane (1975).

In revisiting Goldstein’s films through an eye conditioned by the Internet, it is important to note a crucial distinction between his films and the GIF. GIFs aren't formatted to have a beginning or end; they start when we begin watching, and they stop when we've had enough. In contrast, Goldstein's films are not continuous loops lacking a defined start or finish. They begin with a title screen, and end between one and three minutes later with a fade to black. Goldstein‘s decisions regarding duration were made, at least in some cases, with the predicted attention span of the viewer in mind. In Shane, a German Shepherd sits before a black backdrop, repeatedly barking on command as he looks slightly off camera (at, presumably, a hired dog trainer). In a conversation with Morgan Fisher in 1997, Goldstein stated: "In film time there's a definite point when something becomes boring. At around three minutes you begin to twitch in your chair. Shane is three minutes long.”^[1] Maybe in 1975, we could have watched GIFs for three minutes; in the fast-paced reality of 2013, it’s probably more like three seconds.

Animated GIF from extract of YouTube video of Jack Goldstein, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1975).

While Goldstein's films do have endings, they also loop back on themselves. Goldstein's 1975 film Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer appropriates MGM's iconic production logo, a lion surrounded by a gold emblem under the words, "Ars Gratia Artis" (Art for Art's Sake). In its original context, the image lasted a few seconds and announced the beginning of a narrative film; here, it repeats over and over again: "The lion of the MGM logo roars in an endless loop and announces in permanent deferral a film that never actually begins."^[2] Goldstein’s film is perpetually beginning without being the beginning of anything.

Thus, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer--like many animated GIFs today--pits the moving image loop against linear, narrative cinema. Douglass Crimp, in his catalogue essay for Pictures in 1977, could have been talking about many animated GIFs when he wrote of the piece, "The impression of a completed action…combines with a structure of repetition…so that no action is really brought to a closure; the performance or film stops, but it cannot be said to end."^[3]

Jack Goldstein X 10,000 is on view at The Jewish Museum in New York through September 29, 2013.

References:

[1] Crimp, Douglass "Controlling Pictures" Jack Goldstein x 10,000 Orange County Museum of Art, DelMonico Books, Munich 2012, p. 51.

[2] Kaiser, Phillip Jack Goldstein x 10,000 Orange County Museum of Art, DelMonico Books, Munich 2012, p. 126

[3] Crimp, Douglass "Pictures" October, Vol. 8 (Spring, 1979) p. 79

The Download: Jonas Lund

Zoë Salditch — Wed, 15 May 2013 11:00:00 -0500

This month The Download features We See In Every Direction (2013) a Web browser for collaborative, synchronized surfing by Swedish artist Jonas Lund. Browsing the Internet is typically an intimate and personal experience for just one person, but in We See, users traverse online information streams in a collective surfing environment. Users can type, click and change URLs in real time together; they can jockey for control of the browser--akin to fighting for the TV remote--or choose to sit back and let their friends take care of the surfing. Like many of Lund’s previous online works, the piece opens up the walled-off spaces of the Internet for shared use.

The Download is Rhizome's ongoing digital art exhibition and collecting program that features new works by great artists for free download.

Performance GIFs 1: Curator's Introduction

Jesse Darling — Tue, 14 May 2013 10:48:14 -0500

Over the next few weeks, Rhizome will present a series of performance GIFs curated by Jesse Darling. Darling's introduction is below; the first work (by Maja Cule) will be on view from Thursday May 16.

2012. The year of the doomsday apocalypse. The world didn’t end, though some of us thought it might, and perhaps we even hoped it would, if only to give us something to look forward to. Žižek, paraphrasing Jameson, famously said that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism—and this was in a speech given at Zucotti Park during Occupy Wall Street, in which we tried, and failed, to imagine the beginning of something else.

But following the natural order of events, as well as what Jameson called “the temporal paradox” (in which history stops but time grinds remorselessly onward in a continuous, cyclical production of “newness”), 2012 came and went and we all kept on doing what we were doing. A perky 25-year-old acronym beat the competition – teeth-grindingly zeitgeisty notables such as YOLO, superstorm and Eurogeddon – to become the Oxford Dictionary’s US Word of the year. You probably know that. What you may not know is that the OUP award went to a verb, rather than a noun: not to the name of a file format, but to the act of making one. To GIF.

To GIF is defined, somewhat redundantly, as “to create a GIF file,” but what would it mean to decouple the verb from its referent? To GIF: to capture a moment on an endless loop.

Now it’s 2013, though nothing has changed. Seeping, soul-level post-Fordism and the precarization of the labor market mean that most of us never stop working: socializing bleeds seamlessly into networking, and meanwhile, each tweet and retweet and Like and click and comment all converge in the production of demographic data. You could say there’s a Sisyphean aspect to life in late Capitalism. Energy drinks and Adderall, cuz sleep is for sissies and the stock market and Internet never sleep at all. An animated GIF never stops cycling silently in the ether, even as your tabs are closed and your laptop shut.

Perhaps in the necessarily entrepreneurial spirit of the new cognitariat, much of the Post-Internet art currently being produced and circulated is visually indistinguishable from the aesthetic language of advertising and corporate branding. The idea that art should be a mirror to life is taken to terrifyingly literal conclusion in gleaming surfaces and brushed chrome effects and knowing selfies in which every artist becomes a cover girl, a stock photography catalogue of white people mugging in streetwear. 50 shades of sexy empty, glistering in flat[-screen] virtuality. So far, so familiar.

The animated GIF, meanwhile—whose origins go back to the antediluvian age of dial-up modems and whose natural home is the resolutely non-artistic bottom-feed of Internet image production—rudely interrupts the unbroken sheen of all the slick shit, since to GIF an image is not only to create a loop, but—in very literal terms pertaining to the effects of LZW compression—to apply a verfremdungseffekt, or distancing effect. The shiny mirror finish of HD video is dithered to dust, dots and dashes, and all the smoothing of Photoshop reduced to a crude cartography of color. The v-effekt was one of political playwright Brecht’s theatrical techniques to ensure an audience never get too comfortable: a device to make the abstract immediate and the political relatable. Here, the distancing effect allows the moving image to circulate widely on low-bandwidth connections, bringing it closer to home. To GIF is to reduce a picture to the “poor image” defended by Hito Steyerl; the conditions of its own circulation made visible. “The poor image is no longer about the real thing—the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities… In short: it is about reality.”

The animated GIF is a Brechtian medium not only in the distancing effects of image compression, but also in that the repetition of a single gesture ad infinitum constitutes a sort of gestus—a symbolic moment that is amplified in context to represent a whole paradigm of existence. Brecht believed that art “is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it”—and it is in the attempt to imagine a micromodular, low-cultural political theatre that this series has been curated. I wanted to stop talking about “the work” as though it exists somehow separated from our labor and from our bodies. I wanted to put the body back into the frame, since this is what we learned from OWS and Tahrir: that bodies still signify, no matter how posthuman we might imagine ourselves to be. At a time when social media is a stage and a theater where we're all supposed to play ourselves (each status update a script cue for the spectral self) I wanted to expand the discourse to include artists whose work deals with performance or performativity. Laboring bodies in the spectral ether; from body to bot and back again, and again, and again, and again, and forever and ever, whatever, amen.

JD, LDN 2013

The Week Ahead: Rhizome Commissions Edition

Michael Connor — Mon, 13 May 2013 15:28:00 -0500

It looks a busy time out there for those interested in art and technology, with lots to do and see and apply for. Here are our picks for the week; good thing your proposal for the 2013-2014 Rhizome Commissions was finished and submitted weeks ago, right?

Rick Silva, from the series En Plein Air.

Events

São Paulo

If you’re looking for art that isn’t afraid to raise the stakes, check out Still Fighting Ignorance & Intellectual Perfidy – African video-art project. In a text written to accompany an earlier presentation of the project (in Malmo), Yvette Greslé pulls no punches:

Why is it that - in the wake of prolific work by twentieth century scholars, curators, artists, writers and critics - we need to draw attention to the category [of] African video art as if it is something unusual, idiosyncratic and unexpected? Why are we still fighting ignorance and who is committing intellectual perfidy?

New York

We’re very excited for Rick Silva’s solo exhibition En Plein Air, which opens May 18 at TRANSFER Gallery in Brooklyn. The show features digital images and animations that are made on location, updating the tradition of plein air painting for the mobile computing age.

On May 16, Kristin Lucas will launch her new book DOLLAR STORE QUALITY piece of SCRAP as part of Publication Studio’s Residency at Eyebeam.

For those who want to drink from the manguera de incendios, the work of 86 artists will be screened as part of Region 0 – The Latino Video Art Festival of New York on May 16-18 at NYU’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center.

Deadlines

Writers

May 15: Transart Insitute in Berlin is calling for papers and proposals for their first ever symposium, an examination of the prefix “trans.”

May 15: Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Artists

May 15: Rhizome Commissions and Rhizome Tumblr Grant!

May 17: Deadline for Open Call 3, exhibition series in New York open to emerging and mid-career artists.

May 20: Send short animations by email to Squeaky Wheel in Buffalo for their Outdoor Animation Festival.

Jobs

May 22: Deadline for the position of Medialab Director at the Prado Museum.

From the Mixed-Up Files: Ten Years Ago Today

Michael Connor — Mon, 13 May 2013 10:00:06 -0500

From the Rhizome archives, here's a discussion that unfolded ten years ago today on our mailing list, prompted by an article in The New York Times about curator Steve Dietz' dismissal from the Walker Art Center. Rhizome's founder Mark Tribe posted an excerpt, which began:"The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which has been a strong supporter of Internet art, has dismissed the curator for its online art projects... the center's director, Kathy Halbreich, said plans to build a digital-art gallery would be deferred for at least five years... "

Dietz had built up a major program of online commissions at the Walker, and his dismissal was seen as a major blow to net art's institutional acceptance. But in spite of the bad vibrations, Tribe predicted that "in ten years time every major museum (and many of the not-so-major ones) will have a signficant commitment to new media art in some form." At the same time, he suggests that "The walls of the new media ghetto are crumbling. Bring 'em down!"

Alex Galloway characterized the times as the "unglamorous phase of net art;" Pall Thayer responded with the suggestion of hosting net art shows in Kinko's (this was offered up as a joke, although it sounds a lot like Aram Bartholl's Speed Shows). Galloway then invited everyone to see The Matrix (presumably Reloaded, which seems unlikely to have improved anyone's mood).

Surf Report: Sext Me So I Know It's Real Edition

Zoë Salditch — Fri, 10 May 2013 11:10:47 -0500

TIME Magazine, May 20, 2013.

TIME Magazine, January 1, 2007.

Jon Rafman, New Age Demanded Microfiche Archive, 2013. Microfiche machine and custom microfiche. 51.5 x 33 x 48.4 cm. Via Future Gallery.

Sim Chang, from the series Flawless Love. (H/T to jemchan).

Jonathan Zawada.

Amy Snodgrass, via Internet Poetry.

Steph Davidson, Illustration for Businessweek article on Bitcoin, 28 March 2013.

sext me with spelling errors and bad grammar so i know it's real
— so sad today (@sosadtoday) May 10, 2013

Did 'Vertigo' Introduce Computer Graphics to Cinema?

Tom McCormack — Thu, 09 May 2013 10:40:14 -0500

Extract from Vertigo (1958).

As Slavoj Žižek and others have argued, the credit sequences designed by Saul Bass for Alfred Hitchcock's unofficial trilogy of late masterpieces—Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960)—announce the visual motifs of each film and suggest their psychological underpinnings. The broken lines in Psycho are echoed in the slashes of the killer’s knife and the broken pathway from the Bates motel to the old Victorian cottage in which Norman lives, supposedly with his mother. The grid in North by Northwest mimics the Manhattan skyscrapers where Cary Grant’s dopey adman initially toils, as well the train tracks on which he travels as his identity is further and further confused and effaced, and the cornfield in which he famously ducks for cover under the attack of a faceless machine. The spirals that open Vertigo suggest the roads through hilly San Francisco on which Scotty pursues Madeline, the twist of her hair, the staircase that causes his eponymous vertigo to flare up.

Each credit sequence is echoed by the soundtrack of each film, all composed by Bernard Herrmann. The theme for Psycho is the famous staccato ee-ee ee-ee. North by Northwest is set to an interlocking, pulsating orchestra. And for Vertigo, Hermann lifted the most famous musical phrase from the Liebestod of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde: a rising and falling sequence that fails to ever resolve itself.

All of which suggests that Hitchcock—a famous tyrant—was actually, or also, one of the most canny collaborators of the 20th century.

For the title sequence to Vertigo, Hitchcock had an additional, often unnoted, collaborator: John Whitney. A pioneer of computer animation who worked in television in the 50s and 60s and in the 70s created some of the first digital art, Whitney was hired to complete the seemingly impossible task of turning Bass’s complicated designs for Vertigo into moving pictures. A mechanism was needed that could plot the shapes that Bass wanted, which were based on graphs of parametric equations by 19th mathematician Jules Lissajous; plotting them precisely, as opposed to drawing them freehand, required that the motion of a pendulum be linked to motion of an animation stand, but no animation stand at the time could modulate continuous motion without its interior wiring becoming tangled.

John and James Whitney in their studio, c. 1943-1945. Courtesy of the estate of John and James Whitney.

To solve this problem, Whitney made use of an enormous, obsolete military computer called the M5 gun director. The M5 was used during World War II to aim anti-aircraft cannons at moving targets. It took five men to operate it on the battlefield, each inputting one variable, such as the altitude of the incoming plane, its velocity, etc.

Whitney realized that the gun director could rotate endlessly, and in perfect synchronization with the swinging of a pendulum. He placed his animation cels on the platform that held the gun director, and above it suspended a pendulum from the ceiling which held a pen that was connected to a 24-foot high pressurized paint reservoir. The movement of the pendulum in relation to the rotation of the gun director generated the spiral drawings used in Vertigo’s opening sequence.

John Whitney drawing a Lissajous spiral, 1963.

The M5 weighed 850 lbs and comprised 11,000 components, but its movement was dictated by the execution of mathematical equations; it was very much a computer. Whitney’s work on the opening sequence for Vertigo could be considered an early example of computer graphics in film—and a clever détournement of military equipment.

Today is the 65th 55th anniversary of the release of Vertigo.

The Greatest Hits of Rhizome April 2013

Michael Connor — Wed, 08 May 2013 17:19:08 -0500

In April 2013, the most viewed article on Rhizome was Daniel Rourke's richly illustrated interview with David OReilly, animator and director of a recent episode of Cartoon Network's series Adventure Time. The most commented-upon thread was, of course, Breaking the Ice, in which generational differences emerged, future directions were debated, pasts relived, and present staff members reminded of founding ideals.

We added Oliver Laric's "An Incomplete Timeline of Online Exhibitions and Biennials" to the ArtBase following Laric's decision to withdraw from BiennaleOnline. Later, organizer David Dehaeck fired back in the pages of El País, saying "The BiennaleOnline is about art and not bits and bytes." Got that?

In the month's longreads, Tom McCormack probed the links between ASCII art and Apollinaire, and Part 3 of Jacob Gaboury's well-researched 'Queer History of Computing' series continued to bring sexual politics into technology history.

Daniel Rourke profiled Alex Myers and Emilie Gervais, Megan Heuer delved into Peggy Ahwesh and Sadie Benning's use of Pixelvision, I wrote about Ryder Rypps' Red Bull-fueled endurance performance Hyper Current Living and visited Eyebeam's F.A.T. retrospective, and Alexander Keefe dug up screeds by occultist techno-utopian Xul Solar.

Our Seven on Seven conference was always on our minds; in case you missed it, check out the videos of all presentations, my recap, Giampaolo Bianconi's remarkably lucid live blog, and profiles of participants Jill Magid, Fatima Al Qadiri, Jeremy Bailey, Cameron Martin and Harper Reed.

Notes on ASMR, Massumi and the Joy of Digital Painting

Michael Connor — Wed, 08 May 2013 13:43:13 -0500

When I first came across ASMR, it struck me as an Internet meme that bordered on a vast consensual hallucination, like the stories of fainting spells that sweep village schools.

ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, which sounds quite scientific but was, they say, coined on Facebook by an IT specialist (to be fair, she does reportedly work in the healthcare field, at least). In most cases, ASMR is characterized as a “tingling sensation” (or, unfortunately, a "braingasm") experienced in response to various kinds of sensory triggers. These “triggers” are quite diverse, including close-ups of tactile objects and related sound effects (brushing, rubbing, especially when recorded in 3D), the depiction of tasks requiring great concentration, whispering voices and the classic television show The Joy of Painting. YouTube videos featuring such triggers sometimes reach huge audiences despite their seemingly mundane content; one in which a woman pretends to give the viewer a haircut has 2.4 million views.

ASMR may be a fad and a made-up word, but that doesn't mean there's not something to it. Some ASMR videos do give me something like a tingle. The scrape of Bob Ross’ knife across his palette; his brush daubing oily color onto dry canvas: these generate tactile sensations that are, in fact, quite pleasurable. Not only that, they are pleasurable in a different way than the real act of painting. Similarly, watching ASMR videos of people folding towels is more pleasurable for many people than the real act of folding towels. It's almost like what is satisfying about them not the tactile sensation itself, but the fact that this tactile sensation is triggered by other sensory inputs.

What is going on here?

Watching these videos made me think of a performance work by artist Stephen Lichty which he performed for me during a 2011 studio visit and subsequently presented for my class at SVA, although no documentation currently exists. In this work, which he refers to as Untitled O.B.E., a single participant dons a pair of video goggles and looks in the direction of their hand. Through the goggles, I saw a live video image of an approximately hand-sized object (a folded, colored handkerchief). Stephen performed a series of operations on my hand and the handkerchief at the same time. As I looked toward my hand, I saw Stephen pressing on the handkerchief, and I felt him pressing on my hand.

Then came the big moment. Stephen stopped manipulating my hand at all. Now, as I watched him tap on the handkerchief, I still felt the tapping sensation in my hand. I had developed an empathic link with this object, a phantom handkerchief-hand. And it was a crazy feeling.

Untitled O.B.E. strikes me as somehow similar to ASMR, in that a relatively mundane tactile sensation takes on an incredible affective charge when it is triggered through non-somatosensory inputs. I emailed Stephen to ask if he had any more information about the neurological basis for his experiment, and he pointed me to the Brian Massumi article The Archive of Experience. In it, Massumi quotes from the psychologist Daniel Stern's book The Interpersonal World of the Infant:

For instance, in trying to soothe an infant, the parent could say, ‘There, there ...,’ giving more stress and amplitude on the first part of the word and trailing off towards the end of the word. Alternatively. the parent could silently stroke the baby’s back or head with a stroke analogous to the ‘There, there’ sequence, applying more pressure at the onset of the stroke and lightening or trailing off toward the end. If the duration of the contoured stroke and the pauses between strokes were of the same absolute and relative durations as the vocalization-pause pattern, the infant would experience similar activation contours no matter which soothing technique was performed. The two soothings would feel the same (beyond their sensory specificity).

For Stern (and for Massumi), the important thing is not the individual sensory input, but the cognitive linking together of diverse sensory events. These linkages form the basis of the infant's understanding of the objective world, and they hold incredible fascination and power, but they gradually recede into the background. As Massumi writes, "the stronger that the awareness of this objective organization of the world becomes," the more these affective links "recede into the state of a trace."

Perhaps the "tingle" associated with ASMR videos and Lichty's performance work are a result of the recuperation of these traces, a renewed experience of the sensory links that we forge in infancy, when we first are coming to grips with a world that bombards us with strange new sensations.

For Massumi, this recuperation can also be experienced simply by viewing a painting, or indeed any virtual space. In the aforementioned text, he quotes from philosopher Susanne Langer's work on perspective in painting and writes that "the couching of the non-visible [that is, touch, movement, etc.] in visible form can only be achieved if the artist 'departs' from 'direct imitation.'" In other words, what satisfies us in representational imagery is not that it places us directly in another environment, but that it activates the sensory linkages that allow us to experience touch and movement through our visual sense. The appeal of virtual reality may not be in its realism, but in its virtuality.

"Combined with this is another perversity, an innate preference for the represented subject over the real one. The defect of the real one is so apt to be a lack of representation. I like things who appear. Then one is sure." - from Oliver Laric's Versions (2010), riffing on Henry James' The Real Thing.

A Cavalier History of Situationism: An Interview with McKenzie Wark

Brendan Byrne — Tue, 07 May 2013 10:00:42 -0500

McKenzie Wark’s new book The Spectacle of Disintegration: Situationist Passages Out of the Twenty-First Century (Verso, out today in the US and May 20 in the UK) completes his non-trilogy of writings on the SI, begun with 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008) and continued with The Beach Beneath the Street (Verso, 2011). I sat down with Wark to discuss the application and recuperation of SI tactics in the contemporary mediated landscape.

3D-printed Guy Debord action figures (2012). Produced by McKenzie Wark, design by Peer Hansen, with technical assistance by Rachel L.

BB: You’re very upfront about how you didn’t intend to write a “great man” history of the Situationist International, instead incorporating marginalized and forgotten figures. Yet The Spectacle of Disintegration focuses on Guy Debord, especially in its second half, if simply because there is no one left.

MW: The place were I started the whole thing was just an obsession with two late texts of Debord’s, Panegyric and In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni. I think they’re two of the most luminous critical Marxist texts, avant-garde texts, prose poems, of the late 20th Century. It took me a long time to even understand what they were doing. And so the whole thing grew over 20 years, just returning to those texts and trying to figure out a framework for interpreting them. The whole project was somehow leading up to writing about those. I learnt to read French by reading these texts. I just taught myself. And my French is terrible. I make no claims to be a scholar of the language or anything like that whatsoever.

BB: Debord’s conception of the interactivity of the spectacle seems to be a bit limited in terms of where we are today. I believe you refer to his conception of it as “a one-way street.”

MW: One of the premises of The Spectacle of Disintegration is that there’s the myth of the overcoming of the spectacular form in the age of the Internet, but what it does is make it microscopic and distribute it throughout the entire media sphere, so we now have micro-spectacular relations rather than one big macro one. So if you think about the old culture industry, everybody was critical of it, but at least it fucking entertained us! You would have all those flaws that Adorno spoke about, the extorted reconciliation of the ending, the equivalence of exchange values, but at least it was offered to you as something to consume. We’ve moved from the era of the culture industry to what I would call the vulture industry, which is companies like Google. I mean, in terms of culture, they don’t make shit. They just allow you to get to stuff that somebody else made. So now we have to even entertain each other. Go on, make some cat videos! So there’s a sense that on one side there’s the outsourcing of the production of the thing, and on the other what I would call the insourcing of the production of the affect. It becomes everyone’s job, but no one is to expect to get paid for it anymore. It was always a struggle if what you wanted to do was be a creative person, to make any living at all. I don’t know if that got any worse. It was always terrible. But the conditions of its terribleness change with each technical evolution.

BB: So now we have all these writers and artists policing the area of ‘we still get paid to do this’. It’s almost like fetishizing outsourcing. Like, can’t we get back to the 1970s when you could make a fuckin’ record and make some money.

MW: Yeah, well, no one ever really made any money. That was like a tiny handful of people. The myth of that tends to leave out the real life of working musicians and writers. We sort of focus on and fetishize a few people who made good. It is worth asking—so now we’re in favor of the commodification of culture? Is that necessarily a bad thing? In some ways, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to have a day job. There’s part of your mind and life that’s completely separate. The fly in that ointment is that whatever version of capitalism this is requires so much affective labor. You’re supposed to be invested in the company and its products. You see people in coffee shops who have become the brand they’re speaking on behalf of, and you’re like, man that’s sad. The Situationists put this on the agenda. They didn’t necessarily have the answers. For example: the idea of détournement, that the whole of the cultural past is a cultural commons that belongs to all of us from which you can appropriate at will—but to correct in the direction of hope. There’s a plagiarism in the correcting gesture. They were thinking about this stuff already in the fifties, and now it's everywhere. We know all of Debord’s major texts are heavily plagiarized. There’s an anticipating in that of the whole of remix culture, but a critique of it as well. To simply mix shit together is not all that. The advertising industry’s been doing that since the days portrayed in Mad Men. You have to do it in such a way that you reveal that culture is really a commons. That’s the sense in which Debord is speaking to the present, even though the tools he did it with are now antiquated.

BB: Remix bots like @KimKierkegaardashian seem to be accomplishing détournement without conscious human input.

With Spring around the corner I’ve been playing with more cream & white instead of just all black. But beneath it lies despair just the same
— KimKierkegaardashian (@KimKierkegaard) March 20, 2013

MW: I followed that one for a while; it’s hilarious. I kind of love that stuff because it’s so revealing. The side of culture that’s really a giant automatic repurposing machine. Can you build a bot that would, for example, build sentences? And then flip that into the space where it’s the negative, the critique of that very practice? Can you create protocols using a search engine to generate language? That reveals exactly the great poison sea we’re swimming in.

BB: Which kind of feeds into all these recent copyright scandals, like the ones involving Jonah Lehrer and Quentin Rowan, who didn’t even attempt to use arguments about intellectual property being fair game. Rowan could have come out and just been like, I’m just fucking with you guys.

MW: It’s a shame. The Society of the Spectacle is really brilliant prose. There’s entire chunks of all sorts of things not even entirely digested into it. Like it suddenly starts to read like Hegel translated into French. That’s because that’s exactly what it is! Or the films Debord makes after Gérard Lebovici becomes his sponsor. I tracked down Martine Barraqué, Debord’s film editor. She explained that all the newsreel footage, you could just buy that, but the feature films, they just straight up lied about what they wanted them for. They created all these elaborate stories like, “Oh, I’m the production assistant to a famous American film director who would like to see something. We need it for three days...” Because that’s how long it takes to copy a piece of a feature film, so it could be stuck into The Society of the Spectacle or so on. You just sort of think, wow, it’s just so friggin’ hard and laborious to steal this stuff outright. And Martine talks about how they had to build whole databases of film by category. The Internet just does all this for you now, but they were kind of inventing a practice of making remix, détournement cinema from scratch. But yeah, we still live with the myth of the romantic author, the creator. This idea that, oh I made that with my own labor, so it must be my property. So it’s like yeah, you and whose fucking army made that? Labor’s always social and collective. Including the labor that produces culture. Let’s not forget all the scandals about often very prominent historians in the US writing about really well-worn topics who can’t even tell the difference between their own prose and somebody else’s. And it’s like, oh it’s an accident, I just forgot to put the quote marks around it. Well, you’re just revealing that all of bourgeois thought is identical with itself. You really have no ideas, you’re just moving it around a bit.

BB: If the SI prized concealment almost to the point of fetishization, do their analyses and strategies lose something in a society where concealment has become not only more difficult to achieve but almost undesired?

MW: I write in The Spectacle of Disintegration about Debord’s widow Alice Becker-Ho’s work on "gypsy" or rather Romani language as being the source of underworld cant or slang or jargon. Slang not in the sense of how it turns up in hip-hop, but in terms of ways of both concealing and stating at the same time. It’s a kind of cliché that we live in this culture of over-exposure in which, if you even attempt to secrete part of yourself, you’ll just draw more attention—from companies as well as from law enforcement. But I think there are ways of stating things that are intelligible for "those who are in the know," to use a Becker-Ho phrase. Ways of being public that aren’t quite what they seem. It reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. We now know that “earnest” was late 19^th-Century slang for homosexual. So that strikes me as kind of useful, that you can occupy a place in the disintegrating spectacle but not quite be what you seem. And that struck me as being kind of the last space available. ‘Cause if you try and do a withdrawal thing like the Tarnac Nine, it will get you arrested. And who really wants to be Žižek? There’s only one at a time, occupying a space in the disintegrating spectacle in a certain way.

BB: This kind of plays into the whole anonymous with a lowercase “a” thing—the whole fight to be able to create an independent identity on the net and, to take it to an extreme, to be a troll and not to be exposed.

MW: What I learned from the comrades in the labor movement back in the day is: always assume you could be under surveillance but not that you are. There’s a certain vanity in assuming you are. So all of your statements need to be able to pass muster. Debord has this lovely riff in, I think it’s in Comments on the Society of the Spectacle where he says, I don’t abjure any of the statements I made to the police, but I don’t want them in my collected works because of scruples about the form. That is brilliant. So those statements would pass muster as literary texts, but they’ve been redacted by a police officer who’s garbled all these sentences. You have to earn even those statements.

BB: Does maker culture, and its mass-market mirror of “artisanal” production, have any shared roots with the SI’s emphasis on producing highly-designed, limited-run free journals and books?

MW: Yes and no. One wouldn’t want to be part of this whole disruptive technology language, which is pure California ideology [Ed. – “The Californian Ideology” was a 1995 essay by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron exploring the “counter-culture libertarianism” at work in Silicon Valley technoculture]. One would not want to get too close to the petit bourgeois Brooklynization of everything, the organic beard oil for 20 dollars. But, I think, not just Marxists, but a lot of people with pretensions to critical theory got very remote from practices of making, and to not understand the production technologies of our time is an enormous oversight. To at least know how to make one thing is an extremely helpful way of understanding what production is, what labor is. So with the launch of The Spectacle of Disintegration, I’m doing limited edition Guy Debord action figures that are 3D printed, and we’re gonna release the file to print your own for free. There is something that is really interesting about 3D printing, but it’s a proprietary technology. On the one hand, it enables a certain kind of détournement, but on the other hand is already being recuperated before it’s even on the market. I actually walked past MakerBot on my way here. Just down on Houston, there’s a little showroom down there, and it kind of reminds me of the Apple 2 before the Mac. It’s at that stage. So yeah I really recommend that one do what Debord did in that sense. He learned how to produce journals. He was really good at it. He was a good editor and production manager. The twelve issues of the Internationale Situationniste are really lovely handmade objects.

BB: Is the “attention economy” some kind of corruption of the concept of potlatch?

MW: The Letterist International journal, Potlatch, was never to be for sale. It was only given to certain selected people and then some other people randomly selected from the phone book. Apparently, it would turn up for sale in those little book stalls along the river in Paris. And it was very, very low-rent. Michèle Bernstein would rent a typewriter and bang out—she was the woman, so she had to do the physical labor—all the texts on the typewriter and then duplicate it. But it was already posing questions about economies of access and attention. You’re in the post-war period, and there’s a myth of production of images and stories, which there was an intimation of back in the 19th Century, but by the post-war period the deluge kind of begins. They paid attention to the strategies of the advertising industry and were looking for ways to create work that partially subtracts itself into another kind of temporality. It’s a sort of partial invisibility to create a different kind of attention for different people. In the critical theory tradition, this is really quite new. For the Futurists and the Surrealists, it was still early days for a spectacle. The Futurists start by taking out an advertisement on the front page of a newspaper. You could still do that in 1909. But I think there’s a canniness about the fact that the attention-seeking strategies of the older avant-garde would no longer work in the post-war period.

BB: Researchers at Northeastern University in Boston have developed an algorithm which can, with an approximately 93% accuracy, tell based on a person’s mobile-phone records “where that person is at any moment of the day”, according to The Economist. This seems to, in a certain way, back up some of the SI’s theories.

MW: Yeah, Debord is reading Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe, who is this great urban sociologist, the first person who was trying to map people’s pathways, and Debord, riffing off Henri Lefebvre’s The Critique of Everyday Life, is gonna start with the predictability of that. Now we’ve reached the point of real-time analysis and application—which runs almost exclusively to selling you stuff. One thing the Situationists were doing was looking for the free space in the Paris of the 1950s, with this massive police presence and surveillance. In the division between work time and leisure time and its routine, there was still a place of play, provided you live by the slogan Never Work. Well, there is no longer any difference between work and play. There’s no such thing as leisure and non-leisure. We’re all working all the friggin’ time. But when we’re working, we’re goofing off half that time anyway. Does anyone even know when they’re working anymore? I’m talking about in what the Situationists called the 'overdeveloped' world. I do all my work in coffee shops, and I see people constantly juggling stuff that’s either work or not work, god only knows what it is. As the grid tightens, it in certain senses becomes more diffuse. So it’s not to deny how geolocation is involved in surveillance or 3D printing is rapidly becoming proprietary, but it’s to figure out what can you produce within the space of those things that suggests another world entirely.

Paul-Henri Chombart de Lauwe, map of a young woman's movements in Paris, 1957

BB: In your first book, Virtual Geography, you define Global Media Events as “singular irruptions into the regular flow of media”, and focus on four, including the Wall Street crash of ‘87 and Tiananmen Square. Do you think that such “singular irruptions” are still possible in our current mediated landscape?

MW: Yeah! In the sense that they were defined in that book as completely unanticipated in the media narratives of the time. And then of course someone comes along and says, “Oh, that crash is just like the last one.” But in the rhetoric of the time it was unthinkable, just as 2008 was unthinkable to all but a tiny handful of folks. So, yes I think there are still interruptions in the narrative space-time, and it’s a question of method. As soon as a weird global media event like that happens, start recording everything, because when the media has no idea what the narrative is, then they experiment with all kinds of weird shit, like interviewing crazy people who would never otherwise be on the air, speculating wantonly and randomly, and that’s the stuff. You capture that, and that gives you a window into that break in the narrative space-time the spectacle can imply. The scariest one I went through personally was 9/11. Truly extraordinary stuff went on the air. You saw people jump out of the fucking building. Live. That stuff’s never been shown on television ever again. The event has been edited down to two or three images. So yeah, I think the method still works. Don’t give me this shit about Twitter revolutions, I was writing about this in the ‘90s! About how things like fax machines play into the space of Tiananmen Square. The first Twitter revolution is 1848, when the telegraph is already beginning to change the space-time in which things happen. We always have the same ridiculous debate about, Ooh it’s the new media, and it’s like, no, events only happen because of the political actors. It’s a total category mistake; there’s no such thing as politics outside of the media. Or vice versa.

BB: In The Spectacle of Disintegration, you specifically state you don’t want to name the inheritors of the SI’s spirit, yet in five years earlier in 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International, you named a small group, including the Bernadette Corporation, DJ Spooky, and the Critical Art Ensemble. I was curious why you revised your stance.

MW: Well, not to slight those folks, but it just struck me in retrospect as a bad idea. Anyone can "inherit" the spirit of the Situationists. One of the sources of this whole project was I was on a Listserv in the ‘90s called Nettime which was kind of like media central for a whole series of avant-garde actions. I thought, I want to write about that, but it was too rhizomatic, so I started by rereading The Society of the Spectacle, something everyone involved probably read, and I said, “Holy fuck, it doesn’t say what I thought it said!” So I got sidetracked into this whole thing. It’s still a project I’d like to do some day. It’s much broader than just one or two groups, and all of them have their locations in a sense, the Bernadette Corporation folds back into the art world, a bit precipitously I suppose. The myth in the art world was that the avant-garde disappeared. No it didn’t, it just had nothing to do with the art world anymore, because when art becomes contemporary art, it’s just another category of commodity production. The avant-garde is now attached to media and design. There’s still a project to kind to recover those stories, extract what’s living and what’s dead, extract the concepts, make it available for folks to do it all over again. Avant-gardes are always extremely historically aware. They just want to deny it and pretend they’re not repeating.

BB: Do you see any of today’s social thinkers who stand in opposition to the gadget age, and here I’m thinking of people like Sherry Turkle and Evgeny Morozov, as coming from an SI background?

MW: No, and the most common mistake is to mistake the current form of a technology for technology at its basic potential. How many times do we have to do the same old stupid bullshit over and over again? It’s all one-sided and undialectical and frankly very uninteresting. So alright you don’t like technology. Technology is the human. We’re the tool-making species. There is no human independent from its tool apparatus. The question is: does it have to be these tools? Absolutely not. So how does one reimagine the potential, the set of the scientific discoveries and their technical applications, and open up so life could be otherwise? That’s the critical task. There’s an absolute failure to perform the critical task in relation to technology. There’s a kind of "No, I don’t like the iPhone." Well, what the fuck do you like then? What do you want? Describe another world. Describe it to me. For seven billion people. Among the Situationists, someone like Constant Nieuwenhuys did exactly that, he imagined an entire other planet based on mid 20th Century technology. That’s more of a conceptual exercise than a real engineering project, but it opens a door to asking question about how, well, how do you reengineer cities? So that they’re survivable would do for a start, but better than. We really could abolish work, y’know? Not completely. But we could really get it down to a few hours a day. So, well, how’s that project going? We’re gonna run out of cheap labor eventually. It can’t go on forever. There’s signs that China has turned a corner. They just don’t wanna do these boring factory jobs. Alright, so we’ll go exploit cheap labor in Vietnam. But it can’t go on forever. So that opens the question of, well, we’re only using this cheap labor ‘cause it’s so cheap, sitting there all day with a screwdriver assembling those cheap plastic toys. Now you look at all those plastic toys with ten screws in them. Well, they’re only designed to have ten screws because it’s cheaper to use the labor than to design the fucking thing properly so it snaps together. So at some point technology has to be part of the critical conversation. And that’s where hackspace culture, hacker culture, some of maker culture, is so incredibly helpful. It’s equipping people with a basic knowledge of how our world actually works. But you have to add the question of how could it work better, how could it work differently. And as a totality, not just "I want a better widget." What would be a better system? That’s the whole critical design question. The central question to me now is the avant garde of design.

BB: There’s a certain strain of tech utopianism, personified now perhaps in the figure of the late Aaron Swartz, who are for using tech to bring about an “open culture.” How at odds with the SI’s interest in concealment is this?

MW: Aaron Swartz’s story is tragic in more ways than one, but you have to ask how politically aware his mentors actually were. Marx says in The Communist Manifesto, who are the forces of social change? Those who ask the property question. And Swartz did. It got him into all sorts of trouble. So I think there’s a kind of reformist dimension to openness, but there’s also an attempt to recuperate the energy of a social movement that has basically decided that all of culture really does belong to all of us. It’s file-sharing. That to me is one of the biggest social movements of the early 21st Century: 'These are my dreams, these are my desires. So I’m taking them back thankyouverymuch.' And then some people, not everyone, go, 'Oh and then I’ll share it with everyone as well, because it all belongs to all of us. We all made this!' So there’s a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between gift and commodity going on there. And it gets recuperated back into industrial structures. The whole of what I call the vectoralist class is attempting to recommodify at a different threshold. Google doesn’t give a rat’s ass who owns whatever it is you’re searching for. It just wants your data and to sell ads at you based on that data. Here’s all this free information, you can have that, but we want you to give up more information than what we’re giving you. If you see it as a political compromise between the fact that information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains, it’s like, Oh we’re just gonna rearrange the chains a little bit. So we need that historical perspective of the shifting of frontiers that respond to the social movement. That’s the crucial bit that’s often missing from popular writing about this stuff.

BB: There’s been kind of a second wave of recuperation of the SI since the mid to late aughts. What do you think the drivers of this wave are?

MW: It’s hard to tell if it’s a pattern or if it’s random. But there were a bunch of attempts in the late ‘80s to tell the story. The famous show was at ICA Boston and the Pompidou Center, which Debord famously refused to attend. And Greil Marcus’ book came out. As the SI said: 'our ideas are on everyone’s mind.' They really understood the boredom of commodity capitalism. While they’re dealing with an earlier phase of it, it’s still true. There’s still something about boredom in the way the commodity responds to desire imperfectly. So maybe it’s just that it still speaks to people. Debord’s widow Alice Becker-Ho just sold the archives to the Bibliothèque nationale for an astonishingly large sum of money, if the rumors are true. She tried to sell it to Yale, I think, knowing that this would provoke the French government into declaring Debord a national treasure, which means that the manuscripts can’t leave the country if the price can be almost matched. There’s a way in which the museum industry and the scholarship industry require rare, special things to base whole careers around. You now have to go the Bibliothèque nationale to see the holograph of Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle. I saw it in a glass case; I’ve never actually read the manuscript. “Real scholars” have to work in the presence of the sacred aura of the thing. It’s kind of ironic given the nature of the stuff. One of the reasons I like to teach the SI is that all the texts are free in translation on the Internet. It’s everywhere and done by amateurs, but done lovingly. So there is a kind of auto-museological side to avant-gardes themselves. These are the folks who are in this, creating it. Rather than the sense that, now that almost everyone’s safely dead we can add this to a canonic succession and teach it after all. I don’t really care. There’s two competing histories. There’s what I call low theory. This stuff is now part of high theory. I really couldn’t care less. But this other tradition of low theory has already decided that this is stuff it wants to curate and share freely and give away. I’m part of that.

The Week Ahead: Bloc Party Edition

Michael Connor — Mon, 06 May 2013 18:45:02 -0500

Events and deadlines that are on our radar this week:

Montréal

The fifth annual Sight & Sound festival hits town this week, marking the fifth anniversary of the artist-run new media venue Eastern Bloc. The lineup features such treats as a workshop and street installation by Paolo Cirio, a panel on networked performance featuring the likes of Jennifer Chan and Emilie Gervais, and a performance by Raphael Lyon and Area C that is about "the ingestion of foreign objects and the history of noise as it relates to Futurism, the sound of thermonuclear detonation, and the universal Turing machine."

One thought - the festival's theme is described as an exploration of "the rhizomatic and permeating structures of society’s concealed systems." Here at Rhizome, where the word rhizomatic is often on our minds, we tend to think of these concealed systems as being rather un-rhizomatic (at least in the Deleuze/Guattari sense); they are riven with power imbalances and hierarchies. Regardless, les boîtes noires are our bêtes noires. Santé!

Deadlines

May 11: COLLISIONcollective's open call for technology-based artwork to be included in a summer exhibition at Boston Cyberarts Gallery.

May 12: Artists, designers, or developers making artistic apps for smartphone or tablet will want to apply for ZKM's annual AppArtAward, which offers three EUR10,000 awards in various categories.

May 13: Emerging artists living in NY, NJ or New England are eligible to apply to STEP UP, a juried competition for solo exhibitions (with publication) at Real Art Ways in Hartford.

May 15: Published authors who are US citizens over the age of 25 can apply for the fantastic Warhol Arts Writers Grant, including a category for new and alternative media.

May 15: Deadline for Rhizome Commissions (awards of $1,000 to $5,000 for artists in various categories). Toot, toot! That's the sound of our own horn.

A Queer History of Computing: Part Four

Jacob Gaboury — Mon, 06 May 2013 00:11:01 -0500

In Part Four of our ongoing genealogy of queer computing (Part One, Part Two, Part Three), we introduce a second generation of queer scholars who made important contributions to the field of computer science, and from whom we may trace a direct connection back to those familiar foundational figures.

On June 20, 2009 at 4pm at The Hampstead Quaker Meeting House in London, a memorial service was held for Professor Peter Landin. In attendance were his family and the friends whose lives he had touched over the last 78 years. It was a collision of worlds, a sudden mixing of two communities that Landin had kept separate his entire life. Landin's friend and colleague Olivier Danvy likened the event to the memorial for the French mathematical logician Jean van Heijenoort, author of From Frege to Gödel (1967).^[1] In the early part of his life, van Heijenoort had been the personal secretary and bodyguard of Leon Trotsky, the famous Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army. Van Heijenoort left service only two months before Trotsky's murder in Mexico City by Stalinist assassins, but was a devout Trotskyist until his death, publishing extensively on his relationship with the revolutionary figure and editing a volume of Trotsky's correspondence before his own death in 1986. In attendance at van Heijenoort's funeral, Danvy recalls, were two disparate groups of people: on one side the logicians, and on the other the Trotskyists, each one incapable of communicating their own sense of importance of the man to the other.

Peter Landin had also led something of a double life. He was a foundational figure in computer science, and a pioneer of programming language design based on mathematical logic and the Lambda calculus. He was responsible for the invention of the first abstract process virtual machine—a kind of software emulator of a real world computer—ever defined. Many modern programming languages—such as JavaScript, the programming language that underpins much of the Web—make use of or fully rely on Landin's work on functional values, and have implementations based on his definition of a "closure," a programming function that “encloses” a set of variables so that it can be used in different contexts. Yet there was more to Peter Landin than this. All his life he had been a political radical, and since coming out in the 1970s he had been an active member of the Gay Liberation Front, protesting and campaigning on behalf of gay rights in the UK and abroad. His home on Rona Road in Camden had been a famous gay commune, and from the dinner parties he hosted many movements and collaborations were born.^[2] And so on this Saturday afternoon two worlds met to commemorate his passing, and once again there seemed an impassable divide between these two parts of Peter Landin's life, these two worlds he simultaneously occupied.

Landin was part of what we might describe as the second generation of influential queer figures in the field of computer science. This lineage is not simply chronological; there is a direct, genealogical connection between early foundational figures such as Alan Turing and Christopher Strachey, and those who lived through the pioneering gay rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The clearest queer lineage that begins with Alan Turing leads to Robin Gandy, his longtime friend and associate. Gandy first met Alan in 1939 as a student at Cambridge,^[3] but they became particularly close when they were stationed together during the War and in the years following, and remained friends until Turing's death in 1954.^[4]Gandy was never very explicit about his sexuality with friends and colleagues, but he and Turing seemed to share a mutual understanding and often discussed men and sex in a coded, joking way both in person and through correspondence. Landin shares a similar lineage with Christopher Strachey, having spent as brief period as Strachey's assistant after meeting in a bizarre set of circumstances that unite a number of key figures. Similarly, Landin spent a brief period as Christopher Strachey's assistant, the two having met in a bizarre set of circumstances that unite a number of key figures.

***

Peter Landin was born in Sheffield, England on June 5, 1930, eleven years after Robin Gandy and eighteen years after Alan Turing. The only child of an accountant father who had been disabled in WWI, he was educated at King Edward's Grammar School. Later, at Clare College Cambridge he completed a mathematics degree in a rushed two years, and then attempted the very difficult Part III course, but came away with only a 3rd class degree. As Landin tells it, he was unsure of what to do with his life after college, which led him to a now-infamous group of early computer science pioneers:

When I ceased to be an undergraduate, and because of being fast-laned through all these things and leaving with a rather ambiguously low grade degree I was very uncertain of what to do with my life and spent the next six months in a Sheffield reference library trying to avoid making a decision about my life. I used to go out to a cafe just around the corner from this reference library … and one day I was having my coffee in Fields cafe, and a voice came booming across the crosswise tables, and this voice said "I say didn't I see you reading Principia Mathematica^[5] in the reference library this morning?" And that's how I got to know the legendary Mervyn Pragnell who immediately tried to recruit me to his reading group.^[6]

Mervyn Pragnell is the mysterious figure orchestrating many of these early connections. He is not only responsible for introducing many of these figures to one another, but also for introducing them to the lambda calculus of American mathematician and logician Alonso Church, which was essential to the development of a mathematical theory of computability. Not much is known about Mervyn Pragnell, as he does not appear to have ever held an academic post or published any research paper. Nonetheless, he was fascinated by mathematical logic in general, and Church's lambda calculus in particular. Much as with Landin, he was known for hanging around London bookshops approaching individuals he saw purchasing volumes on mathematical logic and recruiting them for a reading and discussion group. In an interview from 2000, Rod Burstall—one of many important logicians to get his start in Pragnell's groups – recalls that, while looking for a logic text in a London bookshop, he asked a man whether the shop had a copy. "I'm not a shop assistant," the man responded, and "stalked away," only to return to invite him to join the informal seminar where he would meet Peter Landin and, subsequently, Christopher Strachey.^[7]

The sessions were held illicitly after-hours at Birkbeck College, University of London, without the knowledge or permission of the college authorities.^[8] Pragnell knew a lab technician with a key that would let them in, and it was during these late night sessions that many famous computer scientists cut their theoretical teeth. This also appears to be the place Landin would first meet Strachey, and it marks the beginning of an important intellectual relationship between these two men. It is unclear how open either man was about his sexuality at the time—Landin, who identified as bisexual, would marry his wife Hanne that same year, and their marriage would last until 1973—but the connection is nonetheless meaningful, as it shows how intimately linked the world of computing was at this time, and how powerful these connections would be to research and development within the field.

Thus in 1960, nearly a decade after Strachey's love letter generator and six years after the death of Alan Turing, Peter Landin was taken on as a research assistant to Christopher Strachey, who at the time was an independent computing consultant working out of his home at 9 Bedford Gardens in Kensington. Having left the National Research and Development Corporation (NRDC), Strachey formally started activities as a private consultant on June 1, 1959. By 1960 he was fully occupied with a number of contracts, many of which he had begun while employed by the NRDC. Strachey took Landin on as a full-time employee specifically for a contract with the Ferranti electrical engineering and equipment firm, for whom he had agreed to deliver a scientific autocode – the term for a family of "simplified coding systems" or programming languages devised for early computers – for the company's new Orion computer. Landin set upon the project with great ambition, imagining an innovative compiler that functioned "as an automatic product of the semantics of the autocode, matching its forms to semantic representations of the instructions of the machine, and generating LISP expressions that could be executed."^[9]

[9 Bedford Gardens, London]

While Landin was working for Strachey full time, he was not fully occupied by the Ferranti project, and with Strachey's encouragement he spent much of his time on a theoretical study of programming languages. It gave Strachey a certain satisfaction to be able to claim that he was funding "the only work of its sort being carried out anywhere (certainly anywhere in England)."^[10] Whether due to this split in the time spent on the Ferranti project, or due to the overly ambitious and theoretical work Landin was attempting with his compiler, the work was never fully finished, and required additional work by Ferranti's own programming department to bring it into workable condition. Still, the research Landin began here with the support of Strachey was foundational to his study of programming languages. It allowed him to clarify his ideas about programming semantics and led to the publication of "The Mechanical Evaluation of Expressions" in 1964,^[11] which showed how to translate programs into lambda calculus and defined the SECD machine, a landmark virtual and abstract machine that emulates a hardware environment within which lambda calculus expressions may be evaluated.^[12] Landin hoped this work might form the basis of the design of future computers, and in many ways it has.

As Landin was conducting research and raising his children, a cultural shift had begun. In the US and Canada a transformation was underway. The former had seen the now infamous Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village and the beginnings of a social movement for gay and lesbian rights. The Gay Liberation Front, or GLF, was formed by thirty-seven women and men who broke ranks with the conservative homophile establishment and urged a candlelight march in response to the riots. The GLF first took hold in the UK in 1970, growing rapidly over the next three years before splitting into a number of spin-off organizations such as the London Gay and Lesbian Switchboard, many of which still thrive today. In 1971 it issued a manifesto comprising a list of immediate demands, including the decriminalization of homosexual acts. While the law criminalizing homosexual activity that led to the arrest of Alan Turing had already been overturned by the Sexual Offenses act of 1967, that legislation set out explicit terms by which homosexual acts would be deemed legal, namely mutual consent, a minimum age of 21, and that sex take place in private between no more than two people. Thus, it was far from the end of the struggle to end homosexual persecution, and in many ways it marks the beginning of a long legal battle that is still ongoing.

1970 would be a transformative year for Peter Landin as well. The previous ten years had truly shaped his career, but he was set to undergo a massive change. In 1964 Landin had ceased working for Christopher Strachey and, through contacts provided through their relationship, was "brain drained" to the US and—along with his wife and two small children children—he moved to New York City to work for Univac, then a major computer manufacturer. The family first took up residence in a hotel, but after asking for a home with a garden they were moved to a half-house in Greenwich Village. Landin published several key works during this time period, perhaps most famous among them a short work titled "The Next 700 Programming Languages" (1966), in which he gave a witty account of how all programming languages of the time were just sugared^[13] versions of the lambda calculus.^[14] By 1966, Landin was tired of the corporate world of New York City, and so moved with his family to Cambridge, MA to take up a teaching position at MIT. Still, he was disheartened by what he saw as a secretive environment that shunned collaboration, along with a group of colleagues with very different ideas about the logic of programming languages. And so in 1967 he was tempted back to London with the chair position at Queen Mary College, where he remained for the rest of his career.

Then suddenly, in 1970, Landin made the abrupt decision to walk out on the discipline of computer science. After serving as the evaluator on a student's PhD committee, he decided that the field had become too theoretical and retired. Having attained the position of full professor, he was given emeritus status and continued on in a reduced capacity at the university for the next forty years, but for Landin something had changed and he was no longer interested in the kind of innovative research that had occupied the previous fifteen years of his life. It was also during this time that Landin's personal life underwent a transformation. In 1973 he separated amicably from his wife, though he remained close to her and his children for the rest of his life. He was also becoming involved with the GLF and other burgeoning gay organizations, and was even arrested during a gay rights protest in London.^[15] A regular on the lawn at Hampstead Heath, frequent dinner party host, collaborator, facilitator, and activist, Landin underwent a substantial transformation as he moved from one life into another.

It is in this period that Peter Landin's life begins to recede from view. The archive fails, and forty years are devoured by the impassable partition that he erected between his personal and professional life. No doubt there exist many people who could share fond memories of Peter's activist years and his role as an organizer and friend, but these stories have not yet come to light.^[16] Instead, it is his professional service and contacts that remain. What little that exists in the way of memorial and biography has been produced by university colleagues, and while it is currently unclear what will happen to Landin's papers, correspondence, and materials, too often in such cases these details are deemed "personal" and are either excluded or reserved until some future date. Toward the end of his life, Landin became "convinced that computing had been a bad idea, giving support to profit-taking corporate interests and a surveillance state, and that he had wasted his energies in promoting it."^[17] It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that there exists almost nothing online about the last forty years of Landin's life and that, despite his influential role in the development of the field of computer science, Landin did not own a computer, a television, or a car.^[18]

This is, in part, the reparative work that this essay hopes to accomplish. In linking the professional accomplishments of these men with those personal parts of their lives that even they may have deemed inappropriate for public discussion, my hope is to create a queer archive that links foundational developments in the history of computer science to explicitly queer figures and politics. It is, in part, a refusal of the separation of these worlds, and an acknowledgement of the way in which the sexual lives of these men are part of the historical significance of contemporary computational technologies. It's not that these facts have been hidden or are not known, it's that there is often a compulsion for historians to pass over them in silence. As with Landin, many of these figures have only recently passed away, and many others will be gone in the coming years. As a result, preserving these histories is of particular importance, as is producing an archive that reflects the complex divisions and connections that constitute these lives and this history.

[1] Olivier Danvy, "In Memoriam Peter Landin," Vimeo.

[2] His colleague Richard Bornat notes in a commemorative article in the Formal Aspects of Computing journal, that "It was at one of his dinner parties that those who reinvigorated Gay Pride marches in the mid 80s met, just in time for the battle over clause 28" Richard Bornat, "Peter Landin: a computer scientist who inspired a generation, 5th June 1930 - 3rd June 2009," Formal Aspects of Computing (2009) 21: 394.

[3] The two met at a party in which Gandy was arguing in support of the Communist line in the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland. For many years Gandy was a member of the Communist Party, yet somehow escaped scrutiny even after the controversy surrounding the Cambridge Five, the group of Soviet spies believed to have been recruited through the Apostles society at Cambridge.

[4] Gandy was a mathematician and logician, but not technically a computer scientist. In this sense he does not neatly fit into this history, but as one of Alan's closest friends he was the strongest link to his life and work until his death in 1995. Moreover, while Gandy's work in mathematical logic was not explicitly in the field of computing, it should be clear by now that the fields share a common history and are very much aligned.

[5] Principia Mathematica, mentioned previously with regards to Turing, is a three-volume set of texts written by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, published in 1910, 1912, and 1913 respectively. It is an attempt to derive all mathematical truths from a well-defined set of axioms and inference rules in symbolic logic. It is widely considered to be one of the most important and seminal works in mathematical logic and philosophy.

[6] Peter Landin, Untitled talk at "Program Verification and Semantics: The Early Work," BCS Computer Conservation Society Seminar, Science Museum, London, UK, June 5, 2001.

[7] Donald MacKenzie, Mechanizing Proof: Computing, Risk, and Trust, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 273.

[8] Rod Burstall, "Christopher Strachey – Understanding Programming Languages," Higher Order and Symbolic Computation 13 (2000), 51.

[9] Bornat, Ibid., 393.

[10] C. Strachey, Curriculum Vitae (1971), Strachey Papers, A3.

[11] Landin, P. J. 1964. "The mechanical evaluation of expressions." Computer J. 6, 4, 308-320.

[12] Bornat, Ibid., 394.

[13] The phrase "syntactic sugar" was also coined by Landin in 1964 to describe the surface syntax of A Programming Language (APL) which was defined semantically in terms of the applicative expressions of lambda calculus. It has come to refer to any syntax within a programming language that is designed to make things easier to read or to express, that is, it makes things "sweeter" for humans to use, even if they might be expressed more cleanly or succinctly in a number of alternate styles.

[14] The phrase "The Next 700…" has since been adopted as a kind of meme among computer scientists, spawning a number of speculative papers charting the future of a given field.

[15] Landin had previously been arrested while on a demonstration with the Committee of 100, the 1960s anti-war group founded by Bertrand Russell. He was sentenced Pentonville Prison, but only lasted a week before he became so bored that he paid the fine to be released. (via)

[16] In writing this piece I reached out to one of Peter Landin's children, but did not receive a response.

[17] Richard Bornat, Peter Landin Obituary, The Guardian, September 22, 2009.

[18] In fact, Peter Landin never learned how to drive. He was well known for biking everywhere he went, even into his old age.

Videos of Seven on Seven Now Online

Zoë Salditch — Fri, 03 May 2013 15:06:14 -0500

On April 20, 2013, a nice spring Saturday, some brilliant minds from art and technology met to share the ideas and projects that emerged from a one-day interdisciplinary collaboration. For those of you who were unable to join us for Seven on Seven this year, below are videos from each presentation so you can see their presentations for yourself.

Seven on Seven 2013: Keynote by Evgeny Morozov

Seven on Seven 2013: Jeremy Bailey + Julie Uhrman

Seven on Seven 2013: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer + Harper Reed

Seven on Seven 2013: Cameron Martin + Tara Tiger Brown

Seven on Seven 2013: Paul Pfeiffer + Alex Chung

Seven on Seven 2013: Fatima Al Qadiri + Dalton Caldwell

Seven on Seven 2013: Matthew Ritchie + Billy Chasen

Seven on Seven 2013: Jill Magid + Dennis Crowley

"Art and Not Bits and Bytes"

Rhizome — Fri, 03 May 2013 05:43:12 -0500

Last Friday, Rhizome published a new artwork by Oliver Laric that was originally made for BiennaleOnline, but which could not be shown because HTML code and outgoing links were (surprisingly, for an online biennial) proscribed. Today, BiennaleOnline organizer David Dehaeck fires back in the pages of El País, saying "The BiennaleOnline is about art and not bits and bytes."

The Strange Rituals of TEDxSummerisle

Rhizome — Thu, 02 May 2013 11:05:16 -0500

I woke up early that morning with the intention of helping to fake a TEDx Conference.

I prepared tea and oatmeal in the usual way. Then I opened a Google Drive document, in which more than ten people were convening for the last-minute plotting of our hoax. My partner woke up and settled in on the couch with her computer, and opened the same document. I was at my desk, in my usual place, watching the traffic pass our apartment in the sunshine. The clock turned over slowly, towards 10:00 AM, when the fake Conference would begin. 10:00 AM, Pacific Time. It was 1:00 PM Eastern Time, where some of the other members of this plot were located. And it was 5:00 PM Greenwich Mean Time in Summerisle, where the non-event would not take place.

We’re getting started. #TEDxSummerisle organizer James Morrison is on stage welcoming everyone.
— TEDxSummerisle (@TEDxSummerisle) March 20, 2013

Summerisle is not a place. If you Google it, the first result will tell you that it is the fictional setting of the 1973 film The Wicker Man, in which a police inspector travels to a small island off the western coast of Scotland in search of a missing teenage girl. He discovers a pagan society that believes in a collection of natural magic and fertility rituals. I won’t spoil the entire film for you, but suffice it to say, human sacrifice is involved. Our plot, hatched in a late night conversation between the two central planners, was a mashup of cult film fan performance art and Internet-savvy TED-culture satire.

The following fake events took place that day: the island of Summerisle, looking to infuse their society with a much-needed dose of spiritual energy and innovative thinking, hosted a TEDx Conference, after which a number of the presenters and guests were sacrificed to guarantee the success of the island’s agricultural economy. We performed this entire drama using nothing but social media, predominantly Twitter. We crafted a simulacra of an event, live-tweeted a fiction and attempted to make it as real as the Internet could manage.

I was invited into the plot fairly late in the game, via one of my back-channel lines of communication. “If there was to be X, would you be interested in taking part?” I replied yes, and received a link via email. Inside Google Drive, the conspiracy: a timeline, a list of names, and the general idea of what will happen on the date and time in question. Over the next week, the document grew in complexity. The names of the fake conference talks were added, and their themes elaborated. Characters were born as their Twitter accounts were registered, and their back stories were seeded with innocuous tweets to nearly no followers. Places on the island were described, so that we might refer to them simultaneously. Tweetable quotes were written for the TEDx sessions that we could all post simultaneously, as if we’d heard them spoken aloud, and at the last minute, the brilliant idea of fake PowerPoint slides was made a reality, thanks to some clever computer screen and lighting effects. The images were shared so that all of the tweeting characters could upload them as if taken with cell phone cameras. My partner and I went out into the woods, and devised a way to film Vines—short looping six-second films that are posted to Twitter via an iOS app—and save them for later posting. We did our best to recreate the “Blair Witch” aesthetic in the coniferous forest of the Pacific Northwest, pretending we were running for our lives through the woods of the Northern UK.

Most of our energies, though, were spent in faking the conference, rather than the sacrifices that followed. As the process went on, I came to understand that without the foundation of a fake conference, the descent into horror would have no point of reference, no literary fulcrum, and the tweets would cascade out into nothingness. By setting the stage with a bit of fakery and allowing the TEDx conference to percolate through our social networks, we drew our audiences in, creating a sense of normalcy which would be shattered as soon as the knives came out.

I’m in thw oods I dont want to say where. there is a clearing. they made a statue. #TEDxSummerisle
— TEDxSummerisle (@TEDxSummerisle) March 20, 2013

And this was the major lie. I was never personally concerned about the potential consequences of staging of an act of violence on Twitter, because the moment anyone attempted to ascertain where precisely this violence was occurring, they would see the Wikipedia page revealing that Summerisle is a fictional locale. On the other hand, with the TEDx conference, we all exploited the trust of our social networks. Our fake Twitter accounts prattled away, posting silly observations and chatting with each other, as we enjoyed mocking some of our less favorite (real life) personalities. But with our real Twitter accounts, through which we typically voice our real opinions and observations in a way that we hope people will generally take seriously, we retweeted the postings of our fake Twitter accounts. By association, we shared our followers’ trust of us with these non-persons, these digital patsies. Among all of our past tweets—the articles we’ve shared with our real Twitter accounts, the experiences we broadcast, the history-making events we’ve witnessed, the photos of breakfasts we’ve taken—are these lying tweets like black marks in our streams. They are not ironic “retweets do not imply endorsement” posts, but as precisely the opposite. We knew that retweeting these tweets implied reality, and we used that to give our fairy tale the weight of truth.

And a fairy tale is what it was. The talk titles and subject matter were ridiculous, each a parody in and of themselves. One talk implied that bees’ honeycomb is a social network—rampant nature/technology metaphorism (as well as a veiled reference to an important precursor):

“Bees have evolved Augmented Reality as a way to survive.” Amy Damron #TEDxSummerisle twitter.com/TEDxSummerisle…
— TEDxSummerisle (@TEDxSummerisle) March 20, 2013

Another supposed solar industry CEO played fast and loose with renewable energy statistics and environmental ethics, claiming that not using solar power was the equivalent of literally pouring oil on the ground. Some of the fake conference slides included photos of women in suggestive outfits, in a mockery of the sexist attitudes present at many conferences:

A new kind of fertility goddess. #TEDxSummerisle twitter.com/TEDxSummerisle…
— TEDxSummerisle (@TEDxSummerisle) March 20, 2013

And one talk about magic and ecology specifically mentioned Graham Hancock and Rupert Sheldrake, two presenters previously “censored” by the TED organization for giving insufficiently scientific TEDx presentations. And some people in our networks responded to this, either mentioning that this non-event strained credulity, or that it was it was “all too typical” of the sometimes poorly organized nature of TEDx events (there being so many—over 5000 from 2009 to 2012).

This is not the first fictional story that I’ve told via Twitter, and I imagine it won’t be the last. There is a range of stories that you can tell with any medium, and TEDxSummerisle is merely one type of story that the medium of social media enables. To be precise, the medium was not just the online platforms we used (Twitter, Vine, and the various image services that we used to post content to the Internet). The medium was also live-tweeting, the performative act of witnessing and reporting an ongoing live event to people who may or may not care about it.

While this story shared certain characteristics with other forms of fiction, the element of trust that it relies on is unique to social media. We needed to harness the trust of our networks in order to give credence to the fake TEDx conference.

I have no idea how many people were involved with perpetuating this fiction, either in planning or in performance, either with explicit knowledge of what was planned, or following along as it happened. Perhaps some who came across the performance became aware of the fiction and embraced it, helping to propagate the story. Perhaps others were taken in for a while, and annoyed or angered by our duplicity. There were at least twelve people deliberately taking part, perhaps as many as forty at the climax. I could not give the real names of more than eight, and I have met only one of them in real life, though I have known many for years. Given that we do not really know each other, have no collective existence, and our artistic studio was a Google Doc, to what extent was TEDxSummerisle even an artwork performed by artists? I might think of my part in it as an elaborate experiment with story-telling and online mediums, but I could not begin to guess the details of how others consider their roles.

And what record of this work will there be? How long will the tweets remain, saved as part of the continuum of a hashtag? Can they really be recorded in this way, if they are not seen in the context of all the other tweets anyone might have seen in their timeline, before we inserted this tangent into their social media sightlines? It’s better if they disappear, of course; sudden presence followed by sudden absence. At the appointed time, at 12:30 PM Pacific Time, 3:30 PM Eastern Time, and 7:30 PM GMT, we took our collective bow in the form of one last post, a link to a disclaimer—a Tumblr post—saying that what was real was that it was fake. There is no TEDxSummerisle and there never was.

Commissions Deadline Extended to May 15

Michael Connor — Wed, 01 May 2013 13:21:35 -0500

Over the past couple days, my inbox has been filled with pleas for deadline leniency from bleary-eyed artists around the world who, presumably upon stumbling from their beds after several weeks of napping, suddenly realized that proposals for Rhizome commissions were due imminently. Never fear: we hear your pleas. You now have until May 15. Get cracking!

I would like to remind you of several salient facts. Awards are typically between $1,000 and $5,000. Four of the awards will be given to artists from New York. One of the commissions will go to an artist (from anywhere) with a proposal for a socially-engaged project to take place in New York. Three commissions will be given to projects that engage with Tumblr. I'm not sure of the math, but some grants will also go to artists who are not from New York and engaged neither socially nor with Tumblr.

As always, members will vote for one of the commissions; voting will now open on May 16.

Prosthetic Knowledge Picks: The Gaming Canvas

Prosthetic Knowledge — Wed, 01 May 2013 10:20:00 -0500

Brent Watanabe and Cable Griffith, for(){};(2013). Projection-mapped video game on canvas.

A collection of items from the Prosthetic Knowledge Tumblr archive and around the Web, taking a brief look at creative works that bring gaming literacy to the canvas plane.

Brent Watanabe and Cable Griffith, for(){};

Brent Watanabe, for(){}; (2013). Projection-mapped video game on acrylic hand-painted canvas.

Playable art by Brent Watanabe based on acrylic hand-painted canvases by Cable Griffith which function as the setting for a video game, with sprites projected onto their surfaces:

In for( ){ };, there is no beginning or end to the game, just collecting and wandering, birthing and consuming, an arbitrary point system rising until your inevitable death and the birth of another generation. It is a game mechanism without the game. An addictive but essentially aimless experience.
The piece is a triptych of playable acrylic paintings, controlled by the viewer using a NES controller.

(Watanabe's project page)

(PK)

Shinobi Marilyn

Ashley Anderson, Shinobi Marilyn (2012). Digital print.

A collection of pieces by Ashley Anderson that were inspired by an act of appropriation: the famous Pop Art icon was used as a backdrop in the video arcade game Shinobi (SEGA, 1987). After discovering this, the artist then made a series of prints in which Marilyn's image is re-created using visual elements drawn from video game culture.

Still image from Shinobi (SEGA, 1987).

Ashley Anderson, Magoo (2012). Digital print.

Ashley Anderson, Super Mario Clouds (2012).Digital print.

Here is a talk by the artist explaining the background to the series:

(Ashley Anderson's website)

Kristoffer Zetterstrand

Kristoffer Zetterstrand, Wanderer (2008). 33x37 cm oil on canvas.

Kristoffer Zetterstrand, Fighters (2007). 20x20cm oil on canvas.

Kristoffer Zetterstrand, Dante and the Three Beasts (2007). 20x20cm. Oil on canvas.

Zetterstrand’s work (since 2002) has combined space, perspective, historical fine art and the presentation of video games. As the artist explains,

I work with painting. For some years I have experimented with virtual still lifes, often in the form of stage design in which I explore how two-dimensionality (and painting) relates to computer-generated 3D worlds. I am interested in visual spaces created online, in computer games and 3D programmes, and especially in what happens when the illusion is shattered and the underlying construction emerges -like when there is a bug in a computer game. I am interested in visual failures, which I try to use in my painting. Among other things, I have produced paintings based on the landscapes that you can see only if you are “dead” in the online game Counter-Strike, and paintings with motifs created by crashed landscape generators used in film and computer game production. Presently my work process is like this: I start by sketching the motif in 3D on the computer, where I can move the scene about, rearrange pictorial elements, redirect the light, reposition the camera, and so on. I sculpt the architecture and the various parts of the environment and dress the parts in different textures, which I often sample from images of my own earlier paintings, from pictures I have found on the net and screen dumps from computer games. I also use a lot of material from my art archives, which comprises some sixty-thousand paintings. While working with a sketch on the computer, the simpleness of the tools means that I can follow my impulses and try out new angles, change backdrops and pictorial elements, redirect the light, rearrange the shadows, etc. For me, the 3D programme is a tool that I use intuitively when I construct my motifs. The scenes are often influenced by the dramatic composition of computer games, where familiarity with some kind of mythology is essential in order to play the game, in a similar way as an artist relates to art history. That the end result is painting is a prerequisite of my work. The physical aspect of painting and the space it allows for improvisation and painterly reformulations of the motifs are the most important parts of the process. You could say that when it comes to the painterly part of my work process, I improvise on a theme that I have determined on the computer.

(Artist’s website)

Alice Shintani

Autoestrada, 2008. Acrylic resin on fabric. 40 x 50 cm.

Alice Shintani, "Atari Series," 2008-2010.

A series of paintings, made from 2008 to 2010, that are based on graphics and isolated sprites from the old Atari console game River Raid.

(Artist's website)

Tiananmen Squared by Casey Weldon

Casey Weldon, Tiananmen Squared.

Following on from the Atari-inspired artworks by Shintani, this piece inspired by the game Combat was a submission to the Gallery1988 Old School Video Game Show.

Emoticon, Emoji, Text II: Just ASCII

Tom McCormack — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:39:32 -0500

Artwork from ASCII Art Dictionary (possibly 1999).

This is the second in a three-part series to be published on Rhizome. The first part, exploring the history of the emoticon, can be found here. The final installment (forthcoming) will explore the history of the emoji.

Following in the footsteps of Baudelaire—and paving the way for the Surrealists and the French New Wave—early 20th-century artist Guillaume Apollinaire cultivated a cerebral taste for the most sensational elements of modern life. A poet by calling and a publicist by trade, Apollinaire seized on the outrageous whether he found it in the avant-garde (he coined the term "Cubism" in praise of early paintings by Braque and Picasso) or mass culture (he called the serialized tales of fictional super-villain Fantômas "one of the richest works that exist.") Apollinaire’s poetry fed on the chaos of Paris in the early 1900s. Take this representative passage from 1909’s "Zone":

You read handbills, catalogues, posters that shout out loud:
Here’s this morning’s poetry, and for prose you’ve
got the newspapers,
Sixpenny detective novels full of cop stories,
Biographies of big shots, a thousand different
titles,
Lettering on billboards and walls,
Doorplates and posters squawk like parrots.

Apollinaire’s 1918 book Calligrammes delved further into its source material, imitating its typographic forms to create pictograms in which the text echoes the image. For obvious reasons, the calligrammes are notoriously hard to translate, but to give you some idea: the following picture of a woman wearing a hat is made up of a text about a woman wearing a hat:

Guillaume Apollinaire, Extrait du "Poème de 9 fevrier" (1915).

In this one, the Eiffel Tower addresses the reader:

Guillaume Apollinaire, "Salut monde dont je suis la langue éloquente que sa bouche Ô Paris tire et tirera toujours aux allemands" (Published in Calligrammes, 1918).

In "Il Pleut," Apollinaire rendered the rain as cascading letters, suggesting the interplay of natural phenomena with his beloved billboards and street signs.

Guillaume Apollinaire, "Il Pleut" (Published in Calligrammes, 1918).

Glossing Calligrammes in a letter to a friend, Apollinaire wrote that they were "typographic precision made in a period when typography is winding up its career brilliantly, at the dawn of the new means of representation, cinema and the phonograph." If Apollinaire was correct that typography was witnessing a brilliant period, he was wrong that it was winding up its career.

As for cinema and the phonograph...

Handbills, catalogues, posters that shout, and posters that "squawk like parrots" all betray a modern impulse that found its fullest expression in the full-page Sunday comics, which freely layered text and image while juggling—whoosh! splat!—their connotative and denotative values.

Early picture shows—nephews of the Sunday comics—employed narrators who stood in front of the screen and talked to the audience, explaining what was going on or making jokes. The movie theater was marketed as an oasis from the chaos of urban life, but as screens got cheaper and more portable, moving pictures took their logical place in the city, which was everywhere. People could offer explanations or crack jokes themselves.

The two categories of representation that Apollinaire defined—“typography” on the one hand; “cinema and the phonograph” on the other—collapsed into each other on the World Wide Web, which hyperbolized the vernacular of the modern city.

It’s no accident that today’s Web-romantics embrace the same aesthetic and social agenda as a previous era’s city-romantics. Aesthetically: speed; sensation; the blending together or overturning of traditional forms; one-upmanship; creative trickery. Socially: pluralism; agonism; the wisdom of crowds; justice in numbers and witnesses.

All of which could be summarized as: the sheer nearness of everything to everything else.

Early interfaces for the Internet offered only official characters from the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII).

Developed and codified in the early 1960s through an obscure and prolonged collaboration between corporate technologists and government bureaucrats, ASCII (pronounced "ass-key") is based on the English alphabet, and comprises the characters we now recognize from contemporary computer keyboards.

Some of the most interesting artifacts of the early Web were termed "ASCII art," and consisted of pictograms and other visual patterns made from ASCII characters. The emoticon is an early, and relatively simple, example.

ASCII art was an aesthetic foreshadowing of what would become the culture’s social vision for the Web: the Internet would be the paradisaical city of our dreams; the ultimate melting pot; the high-tech global village we’d been promised. Home to a natural, nearly-inevitable democratic virtue, it would be a place where your identity could merge with the crowd, and even be shed entirely; and a super-speed air-tram could transport you from uptown to down in the amount of time it takes to register for a gonzo pornography subscription service.

Just as the fresco thrived in the chapels and mansions of Early Modern Europe, the golden age of ASCII art took place on Usenet in the 1980s. Usenet improved the functionality and expanded the scope of bulletin board systems; the trick was abrogating the need for a local server/hub, and instead transferring information just from one to server to the next, and the next, and back and forth and so on—similar to modern day peer-to-peer file-sharing programs. Usenet took advantage of the Internet by creating an interface that was cognate with the Internet’s structuring conceit: decentralization, an important idea in the US in the 1980s.

In addition to the emoticon, the foundational works of ASCII art were "Spying at the Wall" and "Silly Cows." "Wall" and “Cows" were, like the emoticon, iterative and multi-authored, and the three works can be seen as the earliest known "Internet memes."

The purportedly first version of "Spying at the Wall" was composed of two underscores, an "m," another underscore, two "o"s, another underscore, another "m," and two more underscores. It conjures a little peeping Tom, wide-eyed, hands braced; a rapt but inscrutable gaze traveling endlessly through a burgeoning World Wide Web, peering over "the wall":

Initial variations sought only to add emotional complexity.

ASCII art techniques developed quickly. The kind of line drawing seen above developed into “Spying” animals such as these:

But in other animal variations, line drawing took a different shape:

Developments in the genre can be understood by comparing this simpler, presumably earlier, butterfly:

With this more elaborate, presumably later version:

In the above image, the wall serves little purpose, except to tell us that the butterfly is in repose, not flight. The idea of 'spying' remains visually underdeveloped.

In “Horny giant girl spying at the wall,” neither the conceit of the wall nor the spying seem to serve any purpose whatsoever, except to bait the audience into giving themselves over to another fixation entirely.

The original iteration of “Silly Cows” was more complex, and so its variations were less free-form.

Though the premise, like “Wall,” gave rise to an interest in anatomy:

ASCII artists took the form in many different directions, but the most common model they claimed for themselves was the graffiti artist. So there came to be “Oldskool” and “Newskool” ASCII art, neither named in reference to the date of its development, but rather in reference to a vibe; and so ASCII artists, somewhat vertiginously, became obsessed with rendering words out of and within images.

For example, this undated scene, by an artist calling her or himself “ejm,” not only pictures the weather but remarks on it:

This more famous piece from 2007, by artist Roy, was done in a Newskool style and, somewhat ominously, renders the phrase “closed society” mostly out of dollar signs:

Roy, Closed Society (2007). Screen capture of ASCII artwork.

The introduction of graphical interfaces for the Internet put an end to the high period of ASCII art. The most common graphical interfaces for the Internet are called "Web browsers." These interfaces interpret many different character sets and file formats and establish a sense of continuity for users engaged in sending and receiving billions of fractured electronic signals around the globe.

The first commercial Web browser, Mosaic, was released in 1993. The first video live-streamed on the Web was a June 24, 1993 performance by SoCal garage rock group Severe Tire Damage, whose bassist at the time was the chief scientist at Xerox, a company in the middle of developing live-streaming software.

The following years saw several different companies—Windows, Apple, and RealNetworks, mostly—frantically trying to codify Internet video and image formatting.

These years saw two other, related developments: the creep of Internet culture into popular culture at large in films like Hackers and The Net (both 1995), and the first recognizable net-native avant-garde art movement.

Mid-90s artists such as Vuk Cosic, JODI, and Alexei Shulgin were grouped under the term “net.art,” and while the work under this label was various, all of it shared a desire to disrupt the system of continuity that had been introduced by Web browsers and codified by corporate Web design.

Art collective JODI, for instance, made websites that would pop open so many windows that browsers would malfunction and close down. The strategy was called “browser crashing.”

Throughout the 90s, net.artist Vuk Cosic worked primarily with ASCII characters. His most famous work is "ASCII History of Moving Images," from 1998.

The series renders iconic scenes from the history of cinema and television in ASCII characters. With selections from Eisenstein, Hitchcock, and Antonioni, the series climaxes with Cosic's most brilliant choice. Nowhere else in Cosic's work is his representational mode so perfectly at odds with the aim of the original work. And it was eerily apposite for Cosic to finish his series by transforming an early representation of an act whose depiction would become central to so much of our Internet culture.

User FILMDATA01 updated the artwork to YouTube in 2008—Cosic's ASCII rendering of a scene from the 1972 film Deep Throat.

The look of Cosic's “ASCII History of Moving Images” was borrowed by the Wachowski brothers, who, somewhat poignantly, used it in their 1999 film The Matrix to imagine what a simulated city might look like to someone who could see through its illusions.

ASCII art only ever flourished as a truly popular genre in the form of emoticons, which in the 2000s were eclipsed by the Japanese Corporation SoftBank's supplemental character set of “Emoji.” (Emojis will be the subject of the next and final installment of this series of essays.)

ASCII art persists now mostly as a connoisseur's medium.

The majority of extant ASCII artworks remain undated, but this rendering of Apollinaire's “Il Pleut” was probably created after artists in the medium started historicizing themselves, maybe some time around 1998, the year the “Dancing Baby” became the first Internet meme to attract the attention of corporate media, appearing on news stories and making its way into Fox's Ally McBeal.

Personally, my favorite piece of ASCII art, also undated, is a map of Leopold Bloom's path through Dublin in James Joyce's Ulysses. A painstaking labor of love, and a work that knots together its form and subject to make visible the conditions of its own historical occurrence, the image recalls the dream of a city knit together by people’s stories and desires—a world wide web that never came to fruition.

Jorn Barger

Ryder Ripps' "Hyper Current Living"

Michael Connor — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:06:22 -0500

Ryder Ripps, Screenshot of portion of project website for Hyper Current Living (2013).

Tilda Swinton hasn't reappeared in her box at MoMA since Ebertfest, but there's a new endurance performance in town. Through May 5, Ryder Ripps, artist and co-founder of Dump.fm and digital agency OKFocus, will be living and working among the music studios at Red Bull Music Academy in a residency space that he designed with Chen Chen and Kai Williams. Wearing a karate uniform featuring bull-themed graphics, he will be drinking cans of Red Bull and generating new ideas for artworks and online projects.

Ryder Ripps, Self-portrait with costume for "Hyper Current Living" (2013).

A visualization on the project website displays the number of Red Bulls consumed and the number of ideas generated; all ideas are shared online via Twitter; at press time, 9 Red Bulls had been consumed, and 71 ideas generated. Example:

a temp staffing service to make your company seem larger than it is for a meeting #hypercurrentliving
— retweeted (@ryder_ripps) April 29, 2013

Ripps' ill-advised endurance performance could be seen as a distillation of many of the worst things about being an artist today: the over-emphasis on hypertrophic creativity and easily digestible ideas, the ever-present superego injunction to produce and publish, the endorphin rush that comes from positive online feedback (and the terror of the negative - or of the lack of any attention at all). Ripps' project makes these conditions visible, suggesting that they are at work not only in his performance, but, to varying degrees, in nearly all cultural production in the age of social media.

Hyper Current Living is a direct collaboration with the Red Bull brand, or at least created with their explicit knowledge and permission. As with The Jogging's contribution DISImages or the 2012 exhibition Brand Innovations for Ubiquitous Authorship, Ripps' performance suggests a fascination with the power of branding and an interest in working with brands and embodying their "values," while also developing a brand of his own. This is distinct from the appropriation of a logo à la Warhol or the adoption of a corporate persona à la the Yes Men; it is living and working according to the strange logic of contemporary marketing. Hyper Current Living is art in the age of biobranding.

Hyper Current Living runs from April 28 through May 5, 2013. It is accessible online only.

The Week Ahead: Inaugural Media Orgy Edition

Rhizome — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:12:13 -0500

Gary Viskupic, poster for HPSCHD, 1969

For the next few Mondays, we're going to be test-running a weekly feature that spotlights some tantalizing looking events from Rhizome Announce, in New York and around the world. More in-depth event listings, as well as open calls and job listings, are always available here.

Hackney, London, UK

Thursday, May 2: Pyramid Schemes | A Collaborative Project

The White Building

48 contemporary artists and writers each submit short texts that describe and visually depict architectural spaces, which are collected in a book and projected as a "panoramic cityscape." Referencing both ASCII art and Apollinaire, this event is going to tie in nicely with part two of Tom McCormack's series Emoji, Emoticon, Text, out tomorrow.

Troy, NY

Thursday, May 2: The Films of Laurie Anderson with Special Guest Pauline Oliveros

EMPAC Concert Hall

This. "The 8PM presentation will be capped off with a screening of a silent film to which Anderson and Pauline Oliveros play together."

New York, NY

Friday, May 3 / Saturday, May 4: Essential Repertoire: John Cage & Lejaren Hiller, HPSCHD (pictured)

Eyebeam

Because a performance of John Cage's first foray into computer-based work should be a must-see for frequenters of this site. Because it is described as a "mass media orgy." As with any orgy, make sure to bring your smartphone. #massmediaorgy

New York, NY

Saturday, May 4: Perambulant

Rivington St., between Bowery and Christie

This entry in the New Museum's IDEAS CITY festival brings together live performances and workshops exploring the theme of the body in urban space. It includes a Butoh-inspired street performance of the children's book Madeline.

Oliver Laric's Response to BiennaleOnline

Michael Connor — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 06:00:00 -0500

Screenshot of Oliver Laric, An Incomplete Timeline of Online Exhibitions and Biennials (2013). Web page with text and still images.

Rhizome is pleased to present a new artwork by Oliver Laric, An Incomplete Timeline of Online Exhibitions and Biennials (2013). Initially intended for inclusion in BiennialeOnline 2013 organized by ARTPLUS, the work is now launching as part of the Rhizome ArtBase instead.

Initially billing itself as "The first exclusively online biennial exhibition of contemporary art," BiennaleOnline 2013 convened 30 leading international curators to select a total of 180 artists to be included in the project. Initially, as ArtFCity reported, the site planned to charge $80 for access in its first week, followed by a $10 subscription fee thereafter; later, organizers said it would employ a "pay what you want" model.

For his submission to BiennaleOnline, Laric compiled a list of exhibitions and biennials that had taken place online between 1991 and the present. The list is not meant to be definitive, but to offer an introduction to the great many precedents that the organizers of BiennaleOnline might have cited.

In the end, a more careful look at these precedents might have been useful for ARTPLUS. Their format requirements were narrowly defined; for example, Laric was not allowed to include any outgoing URLs in his work. Ultimately, ARTPLUS was unable to find an acceptable way to display an HTML-based artwork within the exhibition, and so Laric yesterday asked curator Martin Germann (who Laric credits for being supportive throughout the process) to notify the organizers of his withdrawal from the show.

Rhizome has added this work to the ArtBase not for its merits as an art historical resource (although it will undoubtedly be useful for many researchers), but rather for its as value as an example of online site-specificity. The work engages not only its intended exhibition site (the BiennaleOnline) but also the less tangible "discursive site"^[1] in which it is situated.

In particular, it touches on an issue that was discussed in a recent must-read article by Caitlin Jones for Mousse Magazine:^[2] the history of new media is often treated by critics and art historians as if it functioned within a "specialized field of its own,"^[3] having no contact with or relevance to "the mainstream art world."^[4] Laric's work can be seen as a response to this fallacy, an assertion of one artist's belief that these histories are, of course, thoroughly intertwined.

Disclosure note: Laric's piece makes mention of an online exhibition curated by Michael Connor for Rhizome in 2005.

References:

1 Miwon Kwon, "One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity," October Vol. 80 (Spring, 1997). p 103.

2 Caitlin Jones, "Conceptual Blind Spots," Mousse Issue 38 (April 2013). Online. Accessed 25 April 2013.

3 & 4 Claire Bishop, "Digital Divide," Artforum Vol. 51, No. 1 (September 2012). Online. Accessed 25 April 2013. Also quoted in Jones.

Datamoshing the Land of Ooo

Daniel Rourke — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 06:00:00 -0500

Screenshot of work in progress, David OReilly, "A Glitch is a Glitch" (2013). Episode of the television series Adventure Time.

David OReilly is a 3D animator’s 3D animator. Embracing a stripped-back aesthetic that foregrounds the very processes of animation, OReilly—whose past short films include award-winning titles "The External World" (2011) and "Please Say Something" (2009)—is recognized as much for his astute grasp of dark, abstract comedy as for his unique approach to visual design. Drawing on glitch aesthetics, underground Japanese Manga and the most parasitic of Internet memes, OReilly forges original compositions from the debris of contemporary culture.

On April 1, Cartoon Network aired an episode of primetime television series Adventure Time that was written and directed by OReilly. Entitled “A Glitch is a Glitch,”^[1] the episode tells the story of a villain who creates a computer virus to delete all of the other characters in the show, with the exception of his love interest. The other characters must weed out and destroy this glitch in the system.

“A Glitch is a Glitch” arrived a couple of weeks before a new ‘viral’ trailer for Superman reboot Man of Steel, which also used glitchy datamoshing techniques to deliver its message. It seems significant that as glitch aesthetics take root in the Hollywood mainstream, a young animator, who has creatively embraced glitches for years, would make a television cartoon devoted to weeding them out.

Screenshot of work in progress, David OReilly, "A Glitch is a Glitch" (2013). Episode of the television series Adventure Time.

DR: How did you become involved with Adventure Time?

DO: Pen (the creator of the show) was a fan of my short films and got in touch in early 2010. At the time I was making The External World and wasn't able to jump ship, so it was put on hold. About a year later I had moved to LA and we ran into each other a few times and started talking about it again.

DR: At what stage did the music producer Flying Lotus (Steven Ellison) become involved with the project?

DO: Steve is a friend and knew I was doing this early on. We were originally planning on doing a completely different intro that he would score, so he sent over some tracks during production. In the end we didn’t have time or money to do that intro, so the end credits sequence was born.

DR: Were there any restrictions and/or stipulations on what you could do with the show?

DO: Creatively, Pen really wanted me to do my own thing. The writers on the show are really good, and I would have been happy to animate one of their storyboards—but he really wanted me to do all that stuff myself. I can't think of a precedent for that. It may be the only animated show in history to let a total outsider write and direct an episode. As far as restrictions, there were a few because ultimately it's for children's TV. A few jokes were cut or toned down, which was frustrating at the time, but I'm proud of what made it to air.

In-progress footage from David OReilly, "A Glitch is a Glitch" (2013). Episode of the television series Adventure Time.

DR: A Glitch is a Glitch features a clip from another work of yours where a grey, doll-like woman swallows her own hair. In Adventure Time, the clip arrives through the window on a floppy disc taped to a brick. Jake and Finn watch the clip, which then seems to bring the glitch into being. There’s a couple of references here to the Japanese film, Ring (1998), in which a VHS tape must be watched, copied and passed on in order that the "original" viewer not die. Your doll woman in particular echoes and subverts a memorable motif from the Ring franchise, having the long-haired spectral figure literally eat herself like an ouroboros.

DO: I think that was misinterpreted by the fans. That clip isn't an earlier work—I made it alongside the episode and released it a week before. For that scene I was kind of thinking about those shock sites you see when you're younger. Back in my day it was tubgirl or goatse; they were passed around and became these enigmatic things you had to see. Kids now are way more exposed to that stuff—and probably at a far younger age. A lot of people complained that scene was too extreme for kids' TV, but I think people don't give them credit for what they can tolerate. If they have the Internet they're pretty much exposed to the open mouth of hell at all times.

Process images, David OReilly, "A Glitch is a Glitch" (2013). Episode of the television series Adventure Time.

DR: The shock value of your work is often emphasised by your allegiance to cute—kawaii—figures. Adventure Time feels like a good fit for that contradiction to play out. Do you have any major influences when it comes to addressing this balance? Other than Goatse, of course.

DO: I should say the scene of the girl eating her hair wasn't about shocking the audience, it was about getting Finn & Jake to feel sick. Only a few seconds of it appears in the actual episode.

In general I never think about shock value in any project because it implies there’s no meaning behind the images. Surprise might be a better word; I'm interested in using animation for ideas that it isn't typically used for. Of course, some people were shocked, but that’s mainly because they expected a regular 2D episode—and the story existed outside of the show's canon.

DR: In your essay Basic Animation Aesthetics, you talk about bringing consistency and coherence to the 3D worlds you create. At a few points in the Adventure Time episode, as the glitch tears through the Land of Ooo, things get stripped back to their elements, which in this case appears to be the software interface itself . I wondered whether you could talk about restrictions in relation to 3D animation. How did you force yourself to “think outside the box” with this project?

DO: In general I try to find ideas which justify being in 3D animation. On this project, I wanted to focus on glitch as a narrative device. I had been doing that stuff a fairly long time ago, but my interests shifted to story, so I abandoned it for a while. This was a chance to really use both these interests in one project.

It’s a back and forth between what works for the story and what's interesting visually; you can't structure a narrative around a bunch of interesting visual ideas and vice versa. The world being deleted allowed for a lot of visual corruption of things so that seemed to fit.

Still image from "Treehouse of Horror VI" (1995), segment entitled "Homer³. Episode of The Simpsons.

DR: I was reminded of the 1995 episode of The Simpsons, "Treehouse of Horror VI," which featured a segment titled "Homer³." I couldn’t resist this reference I found on Wikipedia: "One of the key shots in Homer³ was where Homer steps into the 3D world and his design transitions into 3D. Bill Oakley considers the shot the 'money shot' and had a difficult time communicating his idea to the animators." I wondered whether you could think of an equivalent, troublesome "money shot" in your AT episode?

DO: There were a lot of technical hurdles. In general, doing stylistic glitch is easy compared to doing good character animation. Mixing the two gets very tricky though. One of the hardest things was corrupting the scene near the end of the entire broadcast so that the earlier clip is superimposed over Finn & Jake to give them an idea (i.e., using glitch as a kind of thought bubble). It was easy to storyboard that idea, but making it work properly took a lot of grind.

DR: How much of the "stylistic" glitching came directly from "real" glitches? In other words, what processes did you use to introduce random, glitchy elements into the design process? Did you have to cheat to get the "stylistic" results you wanted?

DO: It was all generated from "real" glitches—but since everything is run through compositing software and sort of controlled you could also say it was all fake. The glitches needed to begin locally—inside objects—then spread out until they became part of the scene itself. The local stuff was done by generating a ton of sprites that had random pixels move outwardly to create the colorful flourishes we associate with video compression. These had a decent amount of control—a blob of glitchy stuff could move around a scene, for example. Once the scenes were fully animated and rendered the global full-frame glitches were done. There was some jpeg corruption added on top of the battle scene at the end.

Screenshot from design process, "A Glitch is a Glitch" (2013). Episode of the television series Adventure Time.

Screenshot of work in progress, David OReilly, "A Glitch is a Glitch" (2013). Episode of the television series Adventure Time.

DR: Some of the behind-the-scenes images you sent me are overlaid with interface elements that appear as part of the glitches that engulf Jake and Finn. This made me think again about the hand-drawn corrections made at the design stage (the scribbles repositioning Jake’s thumb, for instance). Your work merges and disguises the layers that exist between design, interface, 3D environment, characters and story. All of them are blurred via post-produced digital effects that seem to mimic the story itself (with characters having to literally swallow themselves in order reboot the glitchy world of Ooo). I wondered if you could say something about all these story arcs, design self-references and post-produced "mistakes"?

DO: In every case with design, it has to be intentional. Even if there are chaotic elements, it still has to be intentional or controlled in some way—otherwise you're just showing off the tools and probably not communicating an idea. Some people might disagree but that's my feeling about it.

There's a kind of back and forth between software and idea that goes on when I work in 3D, because to me it’s weird NOT to acknowledge that everything is fake and animation is basically an optical illusion - but it’s still ultimately a medium to get ideas across. I don't want style or design to be center stage—it’s just something that happens in the translation process from brain to screen.

DR: To my eye some of these effects look painterly, like video codecs corrupted on purpose, or what is commonly referred to as "datamoshing." Could you let us into some of the processes you used to make that painterly aesthetic?

DO: There was a few layers of stuff going on. Some effects were applied as part of the 3D scene and others as a post-process. The painterly aspect of compression comes from the codec trying and use motion data over a static image, so that image is pushed and smudged around leaving these colorful trails and blotches.

I also generated a lot of moiré patterns for the "time tunnel" sequence. I’ve wanted to use moiré effects for a while, they’re another example of the computer generating seemingly organic results from limited input. They're also really damn pretty.

DR: You’ve talked in the past about viewers becoming used to 3D aesthetics over time, meaning that a technical approach "that once would stun an audience with its realism now barely has any effect." ^[2] I wonder whether you think glitch can become more than just another addition to the "rapidly expanding aesthetic library"? ^[3]

DO: Glitch in its current incarnation will date like everything else. It’s a motif associated with jpeg and DivX compression, and we won’t be using those formats forever. In the 80s & 90s, there were a lot of analog errors being explored, and the errors in the 2020s will probably look a lot different.

Screenshot of work in progress, David OReilly, "A Glitch is a Glitch" (2013). Episode of the television series Adventure Time.

DR: A lot of your distinctive visual style stems from the way you strip back the clutter of 3D design. Was there ever a chance you might have stuck with the 2D look of Adventure Time?

DO: I don't think so. As much as I loved getting to know those characters and trying to write for them, I also really love 3D. I still feel it's at its earliest stage and I get excited about doing ideas that only work in that medium.

DR: I'd like to move on to the question of how your work circulates on the Internet and feeds into a culture of artistic re-use. You recently released all 65 character rigs from your project The External World, allowing anyone to modify and re-use them in their own (non-commercial) projects. Have there been any surprising results from doing this?

DO: It's still early days with those, I haven't seen more than a few tests done with them. One animator has decided to use them for 51 animation exercises. I’d like to see them do interactive stuff, but that may take a while.

DR: A few months ago you collated some of your creative influences for a Russian design magazine. Who inspires you at the moment?

DO: The Adventure Time storyboard writers are awesome (literally all of them). In 3D I like the work of Andrew Benson and Robert Seidel. In comics I can’t get enough of Chris Ware and Jason. About 100 other people. I can't list them all off because I'd think of another 100.

David OReilly, "Mindsploitation Timelapse" (2013). Single-channel video with sound.

DR: You recently shared a video showing the design process behind your cover for Mindsploitation, a book by Vernon Chatman. What are you working on next?

DO: I had been working on that book for about a year. As with every project, I never talk about it. As much as possible I try to maintain the lowest expectations from people.

DR: And finally, do you have any advice for young, aspiring visual designers? The next generation of glitchers and creators!

DO: It's hard to not use clichés for questions about advice. Most people say the same thing over and over, which 99% of the time is a way to dodge it. Here is some random crap I would tell my 15 year old self: get off social networks, finish every project even if you think it's bad, be happy to have free time and use the hell out of it, do more drugs, keep a diary.

This conversation between Daniel Rourke and David OReilly took place between April 10 and 24, 2013, on Google Drive.

References:

[1] The Glitch is a Glitch is not available on YouTube or Vimeo – here instead is an unofficial, unendorsed link to the episode from the darkest recesses of the web

[2] David OReilly, “Basic Animation Aesthetics,” 2009, 7.

[3] Ibid.

Seven on Seven 2013: Recap

Michael Connor — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:03:11 -0500

This past Friday, seven artists and seven technologists, working in pairs assigned by Rhizome, took up residence in workspaces across the city. The rules of engagement were simple: they were given one day to make something, which would be made public the following day at Rhizome’s Seven on Seven conference, presented by HTC.

Seven on Seven can have the feel of an Olympic figure skating mixed pairs event in which the pairs have never met before. Part of the drama is around whether they hit the triple axel, so to speak: will their projects be any good? But there is another dimension to the drama as well, which has to do with the conversations and relationships that unfold on stage, the sparks that fly when two interesting minds come together.

What follows is a description of the projects, as well as the sparks, that came out of Saturday’s event.

KEYNOTE: EVGENY MOROZOV

Morozov has earned a reputation for having a sharp tongue as a result of his biting critiques of intellectual laziness in techno-culture. In his keynote, he struck a more diplomatic note, re-affirming his belief in the importance of technology: "The message, especially in my book that just came out, is that technology is very powerful." He emphasized the importance of looking at the histories of art and technology history in tandem, as a way of understanding the origins of old ideas that are packaged as new solutions. In particular, he called on artists to create friction and complexity where technologists offer oversimplified solutions.

As the conference continued, it became increasingly clear that there are technologists out there who do have a keen understanding of the complexity of their field. One of these, without a doubt, is Alex Chung, who presented in the leadoff slot with artist Paul Pfeiffer.

Animated GIF extracted from Giphnosis (2013). Website with downloadable screensavers.

1. PAUL PFEIFFER + ALEX CHUNG

Pfeiffer and Chung's project Giphnosis is a website offering two downloadable screensavers, each comprising a series of tiled animated GIFs. One features a fragment of The Shining: aquaking Shelley Duvall in the corridor of Overlook Hotel, wielding a large knife. The other stars an ensemble of five cats who look to the left, the right, up and straight into the camera, in perfect synch.

Pfeiffer and Chung clearly came into this collaboration with shared interests. Both use moving image media as a kind of database of shared raw materials; Pfeiffer subjects his source material to digital manipulations, while Chung’s startup Giphy allows users to find looped, animated images on the Web. Their presentation was rich with ideas, including a comparison between Marcel Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema (1926) and the animated GIF file format, as well as the revelation that Giphy was inspired by Chung’s interest in Wittgenstein.

In particular, Pfeiffer and Chung found a shared fascination in the idea of the loop. In an effort to determine why this cultural form holds so much power over our minds, they turned to the idea of hypnosis, reasoning that the constant repetition of media imagery in the age of the 24-hour news cycle has a kind of hypnotic effect on viewers. By offering their own looping imagery, Pfeiffer and Chung position Giphnosis as an act of resistance against this type of media bombardment. In a kind of self-administered experiment, it might be used to re-program one’s mind through exposure to looping images.

It might also be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Constant Update (2013). Single-channel video with sound.

2. FATIMA AL QADIRI + DALTON CALDWELL

For their contribution to Seven on Seven, Al Qadiri and Caldwell created a video work with an original musical composition. White words appear against a black background, one after another: “Constant... Continual… Dread.” On the soundtrack, a steady stream of digital alerts play over a steadily building rhythm. The effect is hypnotic and anxiety-inducing in equal measures.

In the "About" section of the project website, Al Qadiri and Caldwell describe the video as "a work dedicated to the exploration of data-related anxiety. The rate of updates and notifications required of society, from media outlets to social networks, is stressful to say the least…This site will never be updated."

Al Qadiri and Caldwell used the term "infobesity" to describe the feeling of bloating that comes from indulging in an excess of information. Both clearly had strong feelings on the matter; a which can be seen in their past work: Caldwell is the founder of a tech company that launched an ad-free social network, App.net, while Al Qadiri often appropriates technological content, such as beats drawn from videogames, and turns it against itself. This message of data desaturation may seem incongruous for an art and tech conference, but Constant Update likely inspired many in the audience to turn off their glowing LED screens—for a short time, at the very least.

Audience volunteer Diego high-fives technologist Tara Tiger Brown after designing and printing his first 3D model based on instructions from the audience. Photo by Jesse Untracht-Oakner.

3. CAMERON MARTIN + TARA TIGER BROWN

Martin, a self-taught artist and musician, and Tara Tiger Brown, maven of maker culture, found a common ground in their shared passion for informal education. During their daylong collaboration, they decided to teach themselves a new skill: 3D modeling and printing. They set out to make a model of a balloon dog à la Jeff Koons; the results were amateurish, but endearingly so.

Building on this experience, Martin and Brown devised an experiment to conduct on stage at Seven on Seven. They asked for a volunteer from the audience with no prior knowledge of 3D modeling or printing, and invited a man named Diego onto the stage. Members of the audience (many of whom presumably know a great deal about 3D modeling) were asked to guide Diego through the process of making and printing a simple model by posting messages to Twitter using the hashtag #3DHelper.

The signal-to-noise ratio on the Twitter hashtag was quite low, and soon the experts in the audience were shouting their advice directly to Diego, allowing him to successfully fabricate a small 3D-printed badge with his name on it. Even if the hashtag proved not to be quite the right tool for the job, the broader point was made: informal and collective pedagogical models can be both generative and fun.

But even if Twitter didn’t pan out perfectly as a collaborative tool, it was an important part of the experiment. At a time when educational institutions are rushing to add paid online courses to their curricula, the use of network technology to support a more collective model of learning can be seen as an act of resistance with profound political implications.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Harper Reed demonstrating friendfracker (2013). Online service for use with existing Facebook accounts.

4. RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER AND HARPER REED

With the online service friendfracker, users of the popular social networking website Facebook can slightly reduce their overall number of “friends,” or people with whom they are connected on the site. When users log into the service using their Facebook account, friendfracker will randomly delete some of their “friends.” A message appears onscreen informing the user how many friends have been deleted (a randomly selected quantity, between 1 and 10), but they are not informed which friends have been deleted.

Lozano-Hemmer and Reed embarked on their collaboration with a shared interest in collecting personal data. Reed confessed that he often collects a lot of data about himself for “no reason,” saying that “it might be important someday.” As Giampaolo Bianconi observed in Rhizome’s liveblog of Seven on Seven, the duo “asked one of the most asked questions of our time: what do we do with all this data?”

From their shared interest in data, Lozano-Hemmer and Reed (echoing Al Qadiri and Caldwell) moved on to the topic of erasure. In their presentation, they offered examples of erasure that included artworks (Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased Willem de Kooning Drawing) and technology projects (Snapchat, in which users can send messages to one another that automatically self-destruct after a pre-determined amount of time).

But what makes friendfracker so compelling is not just that it is an act of erasure. Self-erasure online has many precedents: in 2005, Cory Arcangel deleted his Friendster account in front of a live audience in a performance titled Friendster Suicide, while Giphy founder and Seven on Seven participant Alex Chung has gone to great lengths to erase himself from the Web. friendfracker offers something else: it injects uncertainty into one’s online social life. Because any of one’s “friends” may be deleted, it asks users to rethink the importance they place on their online social connections.

Screenshot of Dabit (2013). Online lottery and charitable donation service.

5. MATTHEW RITCHIE AND BILLY CHASEN

Dabit is a platform that uses humans’ inherent irrationality with regard to lotteries as a way of driving charitable donations. The site collects contributions for a list of pre-selected charitable foundations; 50% of each donation goes to the charity of the donor’s choice, while the other 50% goes into a kitty. At midnight each day, the kitty is paid out to one of the donors from the day.

After what must have been a fairly heroic coding effort by Chasen, and a less heroic beer-drinking and logo design effort on the part of Ritchie, the site went live at Seven on Seven—although it has since been taken down while its organizational status is formalized. By the end of Ritchie and Chasen’s presentation, $953 had been raised. According to the website, $471 was paid out at midnight to an anonymous donor.

For Ritchie and Chasen, the project emerged out of the idea that Seven on Seven participants often view technology as a way of cultivating "good" behaviors. As Ritchie put it, Dabit "appeals to both the best and the worst." As with any lottery, the house (in this case, the charities) always comes out on top. It is possible to “game” the system by making a very small contribution in hopes of winning a big prize, but the pair decided to allow this kind of behavior; they see the money paid to individual winners as a form of charity as well.

Jeremy Bailey demonstrates “Big Penis Mode” at Seven on Seven 2013. Photo by Jesse Untracht-Oakner.

6. JEREMY BAILEY + JULIE UHRMAN

Bailey and Uhrman's project turned attention to the presentation itself as a cultural form in need of reinvention. Taking the approach that presentations can be thought of as a kind of game, they developed a system that allows presenters to earn points for moving about dynamically onstage, for earning Twitter comments, for being loud or for earning applause. The game is a basic augmented reality system, with the typical PowerPoint deck replaced onscreen (TEDTalk style) by a video image of the presenter overlaid with text and graphics, such as a score that hangs above their head, showering them with coins when they earn a reward.

Following a pitch by Uhrman that felt at times like a stand-up routine (she explained that her common ground with Bailey was a shared narcissism and desire to “win” Seven on Seven), Bailey (clad in rather revealing cut-off shorts) demonstrated the project, moving manically about the stage and throwing glowsticks to the audience while keeping up a high-energy, high-volume commentary in order to earn the highest possible score. He also revealed that he’d been up all night working on the project, which is not surprising—it had no shortage of bells and whistles, with networked data, live video and real-time 3D graphics, and it worked without a hitch.

The show-stopping moment, though, was when Bailey and Uhrman invited moderator John Michael Boling to present the last feature of the project. As a way of boosting the presenter’s confidence, their system includes "big penis mode," which superimposes a 3D animated penis over a presenter as they move about the stage. (It really loses something in the telling. Just look at the picture.) Boling handled this with supreme aplomb as the audience broke down in laughter, observing that "Google Image search results for me are going to be bad."

"Big Penis Mode," while hilarious, does warrant some serious thought: why, when we try to invoke confidence and power, do we always have to rely on the male symbols we inherit from a patriarchal society? It’s certainly not Bailey and Uhrman’s fault that the big penis plays the role that it does in our cultural lexicon; their project could even be seen as a satire of this. The big penis certainly looks ridiculous. Still, it’s a question that could be thematized in future versions of Bailey and Uhrman’s project – once Bailey manages to catch up on his sleep.

7. JILL MAGID AND DENNIS CROWLEY

Crowley had a difficult week; after a close shave at the Boston Marathon (he was several miles from the finish when the bombing took place), he came down with a 24-hour virus on the allocated one day for collaboration. Still, he and Magid gamely continued to talk via Skype as much as possible, presenting their project at the conference as a dialogue rather than a finished work.

What was immediately clear from their conversation was that the two had a great deal in common. A former student of NYU’s ITP program, Crowley is the co-creator of projects such as Pac Manhattan, a real-life version of the iconic videogame played in the city streets, as well as the location-based social networking platforms Dodgeball and Foursquare. Magid is a contemporary artist who has won acclaim for embedding herself in systems of surveillance and power, from CCTV operators in Liverpool, England to the Dutch Secret Service. As a result, they have a shared interest in individuals’ relationship with the wider systems that surround them. If they had time to make a project, it might have been something that makes visible the workings of these systems, something like Bruce Nauman’s Performance Corridor for the technologically-mediated city.

It also became clear, though, that there were important differences in their respective approaches. Crowley is a founder of social networking sites, Magid is a social networking refusenik. Crowley builds systems and collects data that might (someday, somehow) be useful, whereas Magid is interested in the aspects of systems where they begin to break down, uncovering the human drives that run throughout seemingly rational, impersonal systems. At one point in the discussion, Crowley shared that he often collects data that he has no known use for, such as the output of a heart-monitoring device. In a moment that recalled Christian Nold’s project Bio Mapping, he recounted looking back at his data at one point, suddenly realizing that his heartrate had spiked during his purchase of an engagement ring. For Magid, this represented a moment of beauty within a seemingly impersonal data stream. “You should give a data visualization of your heartrate to your fiancée,” she suggested. “It’s so much more beautiful than a photograph.”

A Shimmering Analog Memory: Artists' films in Pixelvision

Megan Heuer — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:00:13 -0500

Still image from Peggy Ahwesh, Strange Weather (1993). Single-channel video with sound.

Ed. – Strange Weather will be shown at the New Museum this Friday, April 26, at 7:00 PM as part of “The Art of PixelVision: A lecture and screening by Peggy Ahwesh” curated by the author. “It Wasn’t Love” by Sadie Benning is on view at the New Museum as part of NYC1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star through May 26.

In 1987 a low-cost and lightweight video camera that could record moving images on a standard audiocassette appeared in toy stores. The PXL 2000, or Pixelvision, was mass-produced and marketed by the child-focused Fisher-Price, and at $100, it was the cheapest self-contained camcorder ever made. With a molded plastic body powered by six AA batteries, it was also significantly lighter than any other moving image camera on the market in the late 1980s. In some ways, the PXL 2000 was an early glimpse of a world in which cameras can go anywhere and be operated by anyone.

Today Pixelvision is a technological unicorn: rather than a mass cultural phenomenon, the format is now a shimmering pre-digital memory. Marketed to teenagers with the slogan “You’ve always been heard, but now you can be seen,” the imagery produced by the PXL 2000 was a pale shadow of the glossy and colorful TV commercial that heralded its arrival. The camera’s technological appropriation of audiotape for video recording resulted in an extremely lo-fi aesthetic, grainy and high-contrast. Video requires far more data than audio tape is designed to hold: about four minutes of footage could be recorded on a single cassette with a resolution of 100 vertical lines at 15 frames per second. The degraded quality probably contributed to the camera’s commercial failure. It would have been hard to convince a teenager enthralled by the saturated color and slick editing of commercial television (the kind at work in the Fisher-Price ad campaign) that the PXL 2000 offered an adequate substitute. Production and marketing of the device stopped in 1988, and it now has an almost mythological aura.

"BMX Freestyle." Television advertisement for Fisher-Price PXL 2000 (1987).

If teenagers were unimpressed with the limited tonal range of Pixelvision images, the pictures’ ghostly quality appealed to some avant-garde filmmakers, who began to use its distortions for aesthetic ends. James Wickstead, the camera’s inventor, said that he had in fact insisted on keeping the device “simple and crude” and cited Ingmar Bergman as a stylistic progenitor.[1] As recently as the mid-2000, odes to PXL’s artistic possibilities stressed its technological primitivism. “Filmmakers love what they describe as Pixelvision’s dithering, a process designed to fill in the information between the pixels but resulting in unpredictable fluctuations in the image quality from frame to frame. Dithering, they say, calls attention to the properties of the recording medium in the same way that Jimi Hendrix’s use of feedback called attention to the properties of the electric guitar.”[2]

Perhaps it was this seemingly in-built modernism that inspired filmmaker James Benning to give the camera to his 15-year-old daughter Sadie in 1987. The younger Benning gained attention in the early 1990s for her Pixelvision films – also the stuff of lore – which she shot in her bedroom. Featuring herself and her friends along with shots of toys and handwritten texts, her works were charged with an erotic teenage energy. The most well known of these is “It Wasn’t Love” (1992), which combines shots of baby dykes posturing and slow dancing to Billie Holliday with views out of a window onto a sleepy suburban street. The narrative, told in a retrospective voiceover, concerns a Hollywood-style romance between two women. The intimacy of Benning’s films is intensified by the PXL 2000’s lens, which allows for extreme close-ups without adjustment, while the shoddy image quality and unsteady shots impart an unstudied realism. At the same time, her carefully constructed montage (often read in terms of a DIY aesthetic popular in the early 90s) systematically undercuts the cinematic fantasies described by the narrator.

Still image from Sadie Benning, "It Wasn't Love" (1992). Single-channel video with sound. Image courtesy of Video Data Bank.

The sophisticated weaving together of mainstream film and avant-garde aesthetics in “It Wasn’t Love” was largely overshadowed by Benning’s own biography in her reception as a filmmaker. She became a darling of “New Queer Cinema,” showing at gay and lesbian film festivals and speaking about her approach and her subjects in terms of her own sexuality and subculture. In a 1993 interview with Linda Yablonsky published in Bomb, Benning noted how her practice relied on a certain domestic interiority. “I guess it’s because the world’s not safe, my bedroom is. It’s my space and all my things are mine, and there’s no one there, passing judgment. Out in the world I see a lot of things and can be influenced.”[3] Benning’s diaristic aesthetic fit in well with the autobiographical impulse that ran throughout the “1993 Whitney Biennial,” in which it was included by curator John Hanhardt; the visibility of her work helped codify Pixelvision’s aesthetic in terms of personal narrative and an increasingly visible queer subculture.

Although Benning is the artist most often associated with Pixelvision, she was not the only artist to use the camera. Peggy Ahwesh began using a PXL-2000 in the early 90s; she bought hers at a yard sale for $25.[4] In 1993 Ahwesh made a feature-length film shot entirely in Pixelvision. Set and shot in Florida, Strange Weather observes four 20-somethings on crack during a single afternoon, tracking their addiction in paranoid freak-outs, tense phone conversations with dealers and laconic engagements with the camera as they wait for a hurricane to hit. Ahwesh uses the gritty quality of Pixelvision to create an aesthetic of documentary realism, despite the fact that Strange Weather is a work of fiction (Ahwesh’s collaborator Margie Strosser wrote the script and they worked with actors). The film ends with a long monologue shot in a single eight minute take. As Ahwesh recalled in a 2003 interview with Scott McDonald in Millennium Film Journal, “It’s a cliché from cinema verité that the longer a shot goes on without a cut, the more believable it is as reality. It was great working with Pixel because, even though I’d imagined the scene many times, I had to reinvent it when I shot it—so that it looked like the first time I was seeing it, like in a documentary.”[5]

In Ahwesh’s hands, the close proximity possible with PXL feels more claustrophobic than intimate, producing an anxious tedium that mirrors the affect of the characters. The fragmented and jumpy camera work also does far more than depict the psychological and physical effects of intoxication. Strange Weather produces a complex picture of technologies’ (chemical and visual, among other kinds) impact on and presence within bodies and minds. The effects of this storm are still being felt.

References:

[1] Andrew C. Revkin, “As Simple As Black and White; Children’s Toy is Reborn as an Avant-Garde Filmmaking Tool,” New York Times, January 22, 2000. Online. Accessed April 11, 2013.

[2] Henry Jenkins, “Taking Media in Our Own Hands,” MIT Technology Review, November 9, 2004. Online. Accessed April 11, 2013.

[3] Linda Yablonsky, “ Sadie Benning,” BOMB, issue 44, Summer 1993. Online. Accessed April 11, 2013.

[4] Conversation with Peggy Ahwesh, December 22, 2012.

[5] Scott McDonald, “Interview: Peggy Ahwesh,” Millennium Film Journal, no. 39/40, Winter 2003. Online. Accessed April 19, 2013.

Readers' Survey

Rhizome — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 13:20:17 -0500

Time is running short to participate in a survey of Rhizome readers organized by Nectar Ads (who organize the art-related advertising that you see in our sidebar).

Many of you will have seen my recent post "Breaking the Ice," which has generated a lively discussion about the editorial direction of this site (not to mention the role of community at Rhizome); think of this as an easy and anonymous opportunity to weigh in on the debate. If enough people respond, we'll share some of the insights we get from this in a follow-up post.

Xul Solar's Possible Futures

Alexander Keefe — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:36:07 -0500

Pan-Arbol (1954)

Only collective inventions have any real value, Xul Solar once told his close friend and fellow Porteño Jorge Luis Borges, trying to convince him (unsuccessfully) to write in Neo-Criollo, one of the two languages he had invented and the one he himself preferred to use for writing and conversation. Such was the importance to Solar of friendship, sodalities esoteric and otherwise, and cooperation. These days the artist, who died 50 years ago this month and whose close friendship with Borges is at the heart of an ongoing exhibition at the Americas Society in New York, is remembered less for his hermetic, often illegibly coded mystical watercolor paintings than for the collective séance that he made of his particular corner of Buenos Aires' cosmopolitan avant-garde of the 1920s and the decades that followed. But this emphasis on the collective nature of invention also acts as a connecting thread—an axis around which to organize Xul's otherwise deeply idiosyncratic mundus. His diverse ideas and projects—his "Pan-Chess," an antipodean Glasperlenspiel that combined language, numerology and astrology; his invented languages and religions and piano keyboards and mathematics; his cosmic vision of the American future, floating somewhere between the pre-Columbian and the post-Sputnik—all point to the irresoluble paradox at the heart of the artist's techno-utopian vision, at once impossibly scaled and communal, and yet at the same time deeply, even inaccessibly idiosyncratic.

Sometime around 1957 Solar, who was born Óscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari, proposed to do a series of articles for a Buenos Aires-based magazine called Mirador: Panorama de la Civilización Industrial. These would mark the culmination of a body of technological research he had pursued since the early 1940s, delineating a vision of the future at once utopian, post-human and profoundly unsettling. One text, "Autómatas en la historia chica" ("Automata in the little history"), presented an eccentric history of robotics, tracing its evolution from the steam-powered mechanical pigeon described by ancient Greek philosopher Archytas in the fourth century BC, through the brazen heads of medieval wizards, to Solar's own post-war present and the advent of what he called the “new Prometheus.” This latter stage was characterized by factory machines with “pincher-fingers” “that feed on electricity,” destined to free mankind from the necessity of labor.

In his article for Mirador, the author provided an autobiographical note, calling himself, among other things, a "painter, writer and little else.…Re-creator, not inventor, and world champion of Pan-chess and other serious games that almost nobody plays; father of a Pan-language that is meant to be perfect and almost nobody speaks and godfather of another, vulgar tongue without a vulgus; the author of useful grafías that almost no one reads, exegete of twelve (plus one universal) religions and philosophies that almost no one listens to."

If he sounds a bit disillusioned, one can hardly blame him: in the end, "Automata in the little history" was the only article of his proposed series that Mirador agreed to publish. But two others survive from the same period, and together they comprise an unusual, if fragmentary, glimpse into Solar's vision of possible futures. As the Second World War raged and then the Cold War simmered, Solar was contemplating cyborgs and celestial cities.

"Proposals for a future life. Something semi-technical on anatomical improvements and new beings," published in Lyra magazine in 1957—and illustrated with three of Solar’s visionary watercolor paintings from 1935-1936—imagines a post-human world of hybrids, mestizos—to use Solar's word—at once whimsical and disturbing: communal wet-nurses with tremendous breasts branching "into multiple tubes or natural tentacles (…) some longer than others, up to several meters, in order to accommodate even the most distant sucklings of the numerous brood;" men endowed with "a muscular tail of some kind (…) long and prehensile, capable of supporting the body like a third arm"; or the development, through careful breeding and technological enhancement, of arms like "parachute cords, or better yet wings."

Two Mestizos of Airplane and Human (1935)

One of the three illustrations for "Proposals for a future life" is a painting from 1935 called Two Mestizos of Airplane and Human—another is one from 1936 titled, in Solar’s own Neo-Criollo language, Vuelvilla, or The Flying City. The latter painting also gave Solar the title for the third of his texts from the late 1950s, in which he imagines a liberated, airborne metropolis, a techno-utopia held aloft by enormous gas-filled balloons and moving with the wind, its inhabitants beyond race, creed and national border. Solar described them as "just below the zenith, as in the book of Revelation, chapter 21, verse 2: 'And I, John, saw the holy city, the New Jerusalem, coming down from heaven, from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.’"

The artist's interest in new technologies and their implications may seem to be at odds with the way he is usually understood: as avant-garde occultist and proto-New Age demiurge playing the enigmatic gadfly and cosmic prankster to Buenos Aires' potent generación martinfierrista. But Solar’s techno-utopianism combined a destabilizing Rabelaisian grotesquerie with pulp sci-fi speculation and a post-religious mystical reconstitution of the world, making it very much synthetic and of a piece with his broader ludic metaphysics.

References:

A. Xul Solar. “Propuestas para más vida futura. Algo semitécnico sobre mejoras anatómicas y entes nuevos”. Lyra . Buenos Aires, a. 15, n. 5, 1957, p. 31-33.

Alejandro Xul Solar. “Autómatas en la historia chica”. Mirador . Buenos Aires, n. 2, junio 1957, p. 37.

#7on7HTC: Liveblog Part II

Rhizome — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 14:45:54 -0500

Here's a fresh new liveblog for part II of Seven on Seven.

2:44: We're back with John Michael Boling on stage: "A lot more exciting things to come." Next team: Cameron Martin and Tara Tiger Brown. They're both open about webstalking each other.

2:54: "Technology also serves as a wall or box that gets put up around you." - Cameron Martin

Cameron Martin and Tara Tiger Brown! #7on7htc instagram.com/p/YVllx6Qfyy/
— DISmagazine.com (@DISmagazine) April 20, 2013

2:59: Martin and Brown produce a great 3D model of a blue Koons baloon dog. "Today we're going to conduct an experiment we call real time crowdsource learning ... we want you the audience to transform from passive listeners to active participants." - Cameron Martin. Hands go up as Tara Tiger Brown asks who has done 3d modeling or 3d printing. Many more hands go up when Cameron Martin asks who hasn't.

3D model dog #7on7htc twitter.com/chrislr/status…
— Chris Romero (@chrislr) April 20, 2013

3:05: Tara and Cameron utilizing #3DHelper to crowdsource volunteer Diego's 3d modeling:

Tweets about "#3DHelper"

3:10: Did we?

I think i just witnessed participatory art #7on7htc
— «» (@1aurabrown) April 20, 2013

3:12: 60 seconds left for Diego's crowdsourced 3D printing challenge. 3D printer starts doing its work as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Harper Reed take the stage.

Harper Reed, hacker and CTO for 2012 Obama campaign, has a sticker on his laptop: "My other computer is your computer." #7on7htc
— Kareem Estefan (@KareemEstefan) April 20, 2013

3:20: Overlap between Lozano-Hemmer and Reed: metrics. Reed is a devoted self-tracker, has collected a lot of data about himself for "no reason." "It might be important some day." - Harper Reed. Reed and Lozano-Hemmer have asked one of the most asked questions of our time: what do we do with all this data? Sometimes you just end up knowing bulldogs hate tape measures.

3:28: Eventually, Reed and Hemmer came to the idea of erasure: Snapchat, A.R. Luria, and Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing share the screen. "Forgetting is fundamental to being able to transform." - Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Their creation: Friend Fracker. From the website: "The site deletes 1 to 10 friends from your Facebook account. Use friendfracker to decrease the number of people connected to you." It cannot be undone. Lozano-Hemmer deletes 3 friends to great applause!

3:30: "This is aggressively against the Terms of Service of Facebook ... let's keep the Tweets quiet. Or whatever." - Harper Reed

"The art is not knowing who was deleted. And if you don't remember them, good riddance." - Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

"We can take things away from our lives and we just won't miss them." - Harper Reed

#7on7HTC Rafael Lozano-Hemmer just deleted 3 facebook friends! #Rhizome "Good riddance unknown friends!" twitter.com/jsnhff/status/…
— Jason Huff (@jsnhff) April 20, 2013

#7on7htc tech trend update: deinstall
— joelHolmberg (@dotkalm) April 20, 2013

3:38: Team 5: Matthew Ritchie and Billy Chasen. They've created Dabit. "The concept of Dabit is that you can choose your charity and everyday we're going to collect money for these charity. Only 50% of the money will go to the charities, the other 50% will go to somebody that donated that day." - Billy Chasen.

3:39: Live data visualization of Dabit donations takes the screen:

Wow digital fundraising genius. A captive audience and data visualization = lots of giving #7on7HTC cc: @ferra
— zoë (@zoesalditch) April 20, 2013

3:45: Ritchie and Chasen take Seven on Seven from intellectual to financial interactivity.

3:46: Ritchie deploys reality diagram by Graham Harmon:

3:49: Overarching sentiment at Seven on Seven that we can use technology as a training ground for goodness. Dabit "appeals to both the worst and the best," says Ritchie.

3:55: "The division of labor between art and technology became apparent: I drank beer while Billy did all the coding." - Ritchie, before taking us through the evolution of Dabit logos:

"kind of like an eastern european airline?" #7on7htc instagram.com/p/YVsxpQQf_v/
— DISmagazine.com (@DISmagazine) April 20, 2013

3:58: $953 raised by Dabit in the last 30 minutes.

4:01: "We can always be charitable to big organizations, bet we can be charitable to each other too." - Billy Chasen

Ritchie emphasizes the exciting danger of Dabit: part philanthropy, part gambling.

"This sounds like a great project. I'd like to see it continue if it doesn't get shut down." John Michael Boling. #7on7HTC
— Paddy Johnson (@artfcity) April 20, 2013

4:04: 30 minute break before the last 2 teams: Jill Magid + Dennis Crowley and Jeremy Bailey + Julie Uhrman.

4:17: While you were getting coffee:

Prepping tech is always a fun affair. @jeremybailey #7on7htc vine.co/v/bUtDDedOB2t
— JK KELLER(@jk_keller) April 20, 2013

4:28: Jeremy Bailey and Julie Uhrman are cracking glowsticks on stage.

4:39: Moderation John Michael Boling introduces famous new media artist Jeremy Bailey and Julie Uhrman. "The famous is self-proclaimed, right Jeremy?" - Boling

Uhrman: "I'm not so sure why I was invited as a technologist ... and after seeing previous presentations, I'm even less sure."

Jeremy Bailey repping #cutoffs and a #turtleneck. Signature look! #7on7htc instagram.com/p/YVxx-Fwf4D/
— DISmagazine.com (@DISmagazine) April 20, 2013

4:44: Uhrman and Bailey both love winning and video games. They're both "enablers." "What I try to do is create the best platform to enable your genius." - Uhrman. Takes the entire presentation apparatus as a target!

Throwback:

infobesity might actually be a word from the 1970s book future shock and not in reference to the current media culture. #7on7htc
— alyssa wright (@alyssapwright) April 20, 2013

4:46: "We wanted to reinvent the presentation so that you get feedback to how you're doing halfway through." - Uhrman.

4:47: "We're vain, but we're vain enough to know ... it's all about you." - Jeremy Bailey. He's taken to the stage with a live projection on screen, the interface rewarding him based on movement, Tweets, and loud noises. It also gives motivational cues.

#7on7htc @jeremybailey winning! twitter.com/chickfoxgrover…
— chickfoxgrover (@chickfoxgrover) April 20, 2013

Hot gams and glow sticks! #7on7HTC
— nick hasty (@jnhasty) April 20, 2013

4:51: "The future of presentations is measuring their success in real time." - Bailey. Another instance of the dominance of metrics and looping-- I wonder what Paul Pfeiffer and Alex Chung think about this?

4:53: John Michael Boling takes advantage of "big penis mode" in the reinvented, gamified presentation. He says it feels amazing.

IT ALSO HAS A BIG PENIS MODE: #7on7HTC @jeremybailey @juhrman twitter.com/thebeff/status…
— Jeff Frank Petriello (@thebeff) April 20, 2013

4:58: John"Google Image search results for me are going to be bad"Boling introduces the final duo: Jill Magid + Dennis Crowley

5:04: Dennis Crowley: "We're presenting this more as a conversation than a presentation." Magid: "We both engage privacy and surveillance in different ways." Metrics and tracking foregrounded once more. Watching these two translate each other is really interesting, both have a focus on the city and its transformation by technology. Crowley wonders whether we are statistics or indivduals -- Magid tries to make herself an individual through "the system."

@foursquare founder @dens & artist @jillmagiddiscuss tracking/love affair with the city for finale of @rhizomedotorg #7on7HTC
— Elena Soboleva (@elenasoboleva) April 20, 2013

5:10: Magid forces the system to see her as an individual. Some ideas discussed by Orit Gat. How to combat the anonymity of techno-masses is a big question for Crowley. "We kept getting deep into these conversations and then asking: 'What do we make of this?'" - Jill Magid.

5:13: "Could there be something in technology that delays, that makes us more aware of how we appear?" - Jill Magid. Brings up Bruce Nauman's Performance Corridor:

5:17: "What does a Twitter mirror look like? Something that allows you to see your online persona." - Crowley. Crowley says of his tracking devices: "Someday, someone will find all that interesting, and make something of it," much like Harper Reed's conceptualization of his own self-metrics. In the future all this data will be useful.

Aww @dens talking about looking back his heart-rate monitoring watch's data & seeing a huge spike when buying his engagement ring. #7on7htc
— Jeff Frank Petriello (@thebeff) April 20, 2013

5:20: Jill Magid: a data visualization of your decision to get engaged is so much more beautiful than a photograph.

The quantified self - body as data source.Tthe last pair of the day at #7on7htc thinking about the potential for beauty in bio readouts
— Kelani Nichole (@KelaniNichole) April 20, 2013

5:24: Crowley brings up Timehop as an example of interesting things to be done with our archived social media selves. "We've all done a lot of work to create all this meda. We've been taught to think of it as ephemeral. How powerful can software be that goes through all this stuff and finds the meaningful nugget that you need to see right now to change your perception." - Dennis Crowley

5:26: Interesting to think of awkwardness as an intended consequence of social media.

5:28: "I'm never out to screw a system so that it collapses ... but it's interesting to use them for their latent purposes." - Jill Magid. Says her instinct is always to think of how a system can fail.

@dens just mused on a map app that gets you lost. Sounds like the experimental Drift app, which I love: brokencitylab.org/drift/ #7on7HTC
— Jason O. Gilbert (@gilbertjasono) April 20, 2013

5:31: Too bad circumstances prevented Magid and Crowley didn't get to create an object together -- but their thought process was rigorous enough to make up for it. Perhaps the system they made together would have been fully realized by Crowley; taught to fail by Magid.

5:40: "We're all trying to do the same things, just through a different lens." - Dennis Crowley

5:41: "All systems and all technologies are defined by how you use them, how you interpret them ... I think you make meaning from a system" - Jill Magid

5:44: Moderator John Michael Boling announces the end of Seven on Seven, Rhizome Executive Director Heather Corcoran thanks everyone. This liveblog is officially over.

#7on7HTC: Liveblog

Rhizome — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 11:54:45 -0500

Hi, I'm Giampaolo Bianconi and I'll be liveblogging today's Seven on Seven conference. Check back throughout the day for realtime updates from the conference, as well as Tweets and thoughts from attendees, participants, and other Rhizome contributors.

Crunch time is now:

Raphael Lozano-Hemmer and @harper making last minute preparations #7on7HTC twitter.com/rhizomedotorg/…
— Rhizome (@rhizomedotorg) April 20, 2013

Excitement builds:

About to start - best crowd ever! #7on7HTC event is why I moved to BayC #digitalgc
— manovich (@manovich) April 20, 2013

12:28: It begins! Heather Corcoran takes the stage to welcome everyone to the 4th annual Seven on Seven Conference. "Seven on Seven represents a chance to put critical contemporary artists with technologists whose ideas have tremendous reach ... We are not so naive as to think that art and technology are totally seperate realms."

12:34: This year's Seven on Seven is dedicated the memory of last year's participant Aaron Swartz. John Borthwick speaks to his memory. Here's his Image Atlas from last year.

12:37: Moderator John Michael Boling made his first website in 1994. It was about Muppets.

12:40: Keynote speaker Evgeny Morozov, on the other hand, never made a website about Muppets. "There is a tendency to think that my argument says technology doesn't matter -- it's not the message. The message, especially in my book that just came out, is that technology is very powerful."

Keynote from Evgeny Morozov #7on7HTC twitter.com/rhizomedotorg/…
— Rhizome (@rhizomedotorg) April 20, 2013

Virtually anything can be preceded by "smart". Will Cisco do a better job in defining the word than, say, Robert Moses. #7on7HTC
— Paddy Johnson (@artfcity) April 20, 2013

12:44: "In the context of urban planning and city planning, we know that not all solutions are alike ... trying to understand how we can start differentiating between different technological solutions is very important. We need to go beyond the technophiles/technophobes discourse." -- Evgeny Morozov

12:51: "If we start bridging art history and the history of technology, we might see that ideas presented as solutionism today are not so new: they have histories ... beyond that, I think we need to find a way for artists to push technologists away from their tendency to think they know all the answers." -- Evgeny Morozov

In his @rhizomedotorg #7on7HTC keynote, @evgenymorozov is asking for more ontological problem makers.
— Ben Fino-Radin (@benfinoradin) April 20, 2013

12:56: Here's the MAICgregator from Evgeny Morozov's keynote.

12:58: "Finding ways to articulte why friction and conflict matter is something artists can do." -- Evgeny Morozov

1:05: Moderator John Michael Boling takes the stage to give some context to Seven on Seven: "Not a conference in the traditional sense, but more an experiment ... It can be kind of a wild ride." Participants met for the first time two nights ago and were given some loose guidelines: a day, eachother, and a deadline. "The main deliverable here is a conversation." First team Paul Pfeiffer and Alex Chung take the stage.

1:06: Applause for Alex Chung's correct pronunciation of GIF!

@jmb833 getting to the bottom of proper pronunciation of gif #7on7htc
— joelHolmberg (@dotkalm) April 20, 2013

1:11: "He's kind of the Michael Jordan of video art." - Alex Chung on Paul Pfeiffer

some video art #7on7HTC instagram.com/p/YVZmZOwf_3/
— DISmagazine.com (@DISmagazine) April 20, 2013

1:15: Alex Chung approaches GIFs with Wittgenstein in mind. Paul Pfeiffer approaches GIFs with Rosalind Krauss in mind.

1:17: Anemic Cinema takes the screen:

1:19: "The top 3 searches of Giphy are cats, sex, boobs." - Alex Chung

1:21: Dancing Lana Del Rey in the bloody Shining hallway. "There's no way to explain this right now, we don't have the vocabulary." - Alex Chung

1:25: Evocation of shock and survivalist preparation in regard to the condensed image loop.

Paul Pfeiffer and Alex Chung talk about Krauss, GIFs, language, and cinema @ #7on7HTC -read-> rhizome.org/editorial/2012… for some background.
— Jason Huff (@jsnhff) April 20, 2013

1:30: Trying to define the Loop Function drove Alex Chung and Paul Pfeiffer to hypnosis, with some help from Herzog's Heart of Glass.

1:38: Chung and Pfeiffer introduce GIPHNOSIS: reprogramming yourself using GIFs in your subconscious. "In a way GIPHNOSIS already exists: it's news media." - Pfeiffer. Chung and Pfeiffer's GIPHNOSIS is collection of downloadable screensavers to reprogram your mind. Two choices: Shelley Duvall with a knife or five surprisingly coordinated kitties.

Reprogram yourself with Gifnosis: the first #7on7htc product explores the loop function instagram.com/p/YVcolbBGBA/
— New Museum (@newmuseum) April 20, 2013

"The image is becoming more powerful, but the looped image hasn't been defined yet." - Chung

1:40: "GIPHNOSIS is not necessarily evil, it's not necessarily good: it's a new way of communicating." - Pfeiffer

1:44: John Michael Boling introduces Fatima Al Qadiri and Dalton Caldwell. Their dicussion centered around questions of "infobeisity"
and "data detox." How much digital information can one person process.

@fatimaalqadiri re-defining media bombardment as "data-dread" #7on7htc
— ale ^____^ (@calkul8) April 20, 2013

1:47: "Information becomes obsolete the moment it becomes updated." - Fatima Al Qadiri identifies the enemy of this ambitious liveblogger.

about to get ASMR in here #7on7HTC
— DISmagazine.com (@DISmagazine) April 20, 2013

#7on7htc” I think that information bomb of early 20th c was much more shocking than today' flow of emails and notifications..photo, film,
— manovich (@manovich) April 20, 2013

1:51: "How do we talk about the fact that a bottle of water wants to be your friend and give you updates?" - Dalton Caldwell

1:54: constantupdate.net: "This is something that's finished. Don't like it on Facebook." - Dalton Caldwell

it's Artspeak Smackdown Saturday in my tweetfeed: #7on7HTC floats GIFNOSIS & Datobesity; #lasky2013 counters with Embodifying & Gestaltative
— gregorg (@gregorg) April 20, 2013

I gotta say, the soundtrack achieved the intended effect. All these update sounds, meditative as they are, make me really anxious. #7on7HTC
— Paddy Johnson (@artfcity) April 20, 2013

Dalton + Al Qadiri: Text as a permanent symbol to explore information overload/data dread: constantupdate.net #7on7HTC #NewSublimity

— LS:N Global (@LSNglobal) April 20, 2013

2:05: Al Qadiri ties things up by bringing it back to fact checking. Next up: lunch.

#7on7HTC Dalton and Fatima's topic reminds me of @wilsonminer's talk at Build2011 > vimeo.com/34017777

— Jason Huff (@jsnhff) April 20, 2013

A constellation of laptops and smartphones @rhizomedotorg #7on7HTC twitter.com/zoesalditch/st…
— zoë (@zoesalditch) April 20, 2013

I'll be continuing the livestream here.

#7on7HTC: Fever Pitch

Michael Connor — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 22:57:34 -0500

Seven on Seven is tomorrow! It's sold out, but never fear: Giampaolo Bianconi will be hosting a liveblog of the event, so you can follow along here as it happens. As our stellar interim editor for the site over the past few months, Bianconi also commissioned the texts we've published over the past couple of weeks, profiling several Seven on Seven participants: Fatima Al Qadiri, Jeremy Bailey, Cameron Martin, Jill Magid and Harper Reed.

Meanwhile, our Twitter hashtag #7on7htc is already heating up. Alyssa Wright of OpenGeo set high expectations for our keynote speaker, noted contrarian Evgeny Morozov:

highlight of this crazy week? seeing @evgenymorozov speak tomorrow at the @rhizomedotorg #7on7HTC no pressure. rhizome.org/sevenonseven/
— alyssa wright (@alyssapwright) April 19, 2013

Tara Tiger Brown, who is paired with Martin, was excited about her gift from our sponsors:

Learning how to use our new HTC One phones. (at @newmuseum) [pic]: 4sq.com/177WNkH
— Tara Tiger Brown (@tara) April 19, 2013

Julie Uhrman took planes, trains and automobiles to get here:

@jeremybailey On the bridge. Getting closer.
— Julie Uhrman (@juhrman) April 19, 2013

While Jeremy Bailey prepped the workspace for her arrival:

@juhrman oh it's ready all right! It can't wait to lift you into the heavens of our impending neuro-entwined-ecstasy
— Jeremy Bailey (@jeremybailey) April 19, 2013

DISMagazine is doing their own liveblog:

Tomorrow: DIS will be covering Rhizome #7on7HTC live. See you there! dismagazine.com/blog/43991/eve…
— DISmagazine.com (@DISmagazine) April 20, 2013

And at the eleventh hour, Rhizome's Ben Fino-Radin sent out words of encouragement:

Now is the moment when most @rhizomedotorg #7on7HTC teams typically experience their breakthrough moment.
— Ben Fino-Radin (@benfinoradin) April 20, 2013

Visions of sugar plums are dancing in our heads. See you tomorrow!

Fatima Al Qadiri: Game Game Games

Buyong Kim — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 11:35:03 -0500

Fatima Al Qadiri

Fatima Al Qadiri will participate in Rhizome's Seven On Seven Conference on Saturday, April 20th, paired with technologist Dalton Caldwell.

Fatima Al Qadiri. Google her, visit her website. As you enter her website, you are invited to take part in a simulation, or rather, fall prey to a prank. Sounds, images, and even programs appear as familiar yet somehow renewed appropriations of the Mac OS X desktop interface. As if you have stumbled upon a secret drive on your MacBook and entered a makeshift display, you’ll have to rummage through “files” and “folders” to find what you are looking for at your own peril.

Image from http://fatimaalqadiri.com/ as it appeared at press time.

Brooklyn-based artist Fatima Al Qadiri works with a broad range of media, touching base with writing, composing, performance, and more. This year, Al Qadiri breaks ground on commissioned work for art fairs, taking on the Official Soundtrack of the Fair for Art Dubai, followed by a talk at The Armory Show, “On Commissioning Work in an Art Fair Context,” with Gianni Jetzer and Sarah McCrory, moderated by Sarah Douglas. In works such as the Official Soundtrack, Al Qadiri’s use of game beats—with which one may assume familiarity based on one’s practice of playing video games—reconfigure spaces through association with the landscapes, characters, jargon, activities, etc., within the game. Even for those “players” who lack any particular familiarity with Al Qadiri’s source material, the amalgam of unknown beats allows for real-time game participation—that is, with the occupying body as participant, or even as a character, in a virtually transformed space. On this note, Al Qadiri’s soundtracks are not mere backgrounds to a built environment. Rather, her compilations and mixes of familiar, often ubiquitous video game beats introduce a virtual dimension to the built environment, thereby proposing alternate definitions of its space.

Music video for the song “Ghost Raid” from the EP Desert Strike (2012). Directed by Alex Gvojic (2013).

Music video for the song “Vatican Vibes” from the EP Genre-Specific Xperience (2011). Directed by Tabor Robak (2011).

Al Qadiri’s EP release Desert Strike, October 2012, features five tracks that resonate with the Sega Mega Drive video game, Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf (1992). The game was released a year into the aftermath of the US-led Operation Desert Storm, which was surrounded by intense hype among the American audience in conjunction with new technologies and media strategies such as real-time streaming of war as never seen before.^[1] Bringing forth a new way to reflect and re-flesh the "pathology of the game,"^[2] Al Qadiri unleashes beats from video-(war-)games to aurally and visually unfold a new landscape of war—was it the video game or the live stream? In a way, Al Qadiri’s EP and the video of the track "Ghost Raid" reimagine the play of simulation and non-simulation. In reimagining this play, the soundtracks and videos function not only as algospasms to images of war, but also as portals into the sentiments, cellular memories, and shared practices that derive from video games of war.

Still from video of performance Shaytan at Tate Modern, 2010

In an interview with Rhizome earlier this year, Al Qadiri discussed the thematics of her work in relation to the use of technology, invoking the following idea of sentiment: “The reason why people are referencing the popular technology of the fleeting past is because they want to commemorate its obsolescence. It’s a sentimental exercise, at the core.”^[3] From simulation to imagination, from virtual realities to sentimental exercise, there is a sense of a serious-cheeky play on simulations and imaginations (futures and real sci-fi)—and I want more...

^[1] For further reference on new media tactics during the Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm, and Virilio’s foresight into the development of the genre of war games, refer: Virilio, Paul. "January 1991: Desert Storm." In Desert screen: war at the speed of light. New York: Continuum, 2005. 31-73.

^[2] "Poorly adapted to the spirit of the times, the image of acts of courage would give way to a pathology of the game linked to the evaluation of the cost of arms and the material losses, as well as to the benefits that would ensue, as today, in Kuwait." From Virilio, "January 1991: Desert Storm."

^[3] http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/jan/7/interview-fatima-al-qadiri/

3 Excellent Uses of 3D Printing from Eyebeam's 'F.A.T. Gold' Exhibition

Michael Connor — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 19:35:31 -0500

1. Golan Levin's Free Universal Construction Kit (2012). This series of adaptors allows interoperability among different kinds of children's toys, such as Legos®, Tinkertoys® and Lincoln Logs®. The project is decades too late to have helped me with my own childhood battles with proprietary toy formats, but on behalf of future generations, Mr. Levin, I thank you.

2. Addie Wagenknecht's Screwmocracy (2012). To be honest, I mostly just liked the Romney dildo; it seems an apt response to the regressive remarks about rape that hung over the Republican Party like a cloud throughout the last election cycle. The Obama dildo is a bit less interesting, because it obviously already exists as a commercial product. Also, the pairing of black and white introduces a racial element that somewhat obscures the relationship between presidential politics and sex. (Not to mention: where is "Diamond Joe" Biden?)

3. KATSU's Destroyerbot. The rise of 3D printing has not been a uniformly positive development for the visual arts. Artists, if you find that your use of additive manufacturing has led you to create work that is consistently written about in trend pieces by reporters who describe it as "mind-bending," please feel free to place your fabrication equipment in this handy box, and press "Start."

F.A.T. Gold: Five years of free art & technology, curated by Lindsay Howard, ends Saturday at Eyebeam in New York.

Artist Profile: Émilie Gervais

Daniel Rourke — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:00:05 -0500

Animated GIF from the website Parked Domain Girl Tombstone (2013)

DR: On first inspection, a lot of your work appears to be rooted in the 90s, drawing on the low bandwidth aesthetics inherent in GIFs, midi plugins, embedded frames, ASCII art, and forgotten webring hyperlinks. But the 90s comes out in other ways, too. Pop-cultural undercurrents include Nintendo and Leisure Suit Larry; mixtapes and a particular flavor of Europop. How/why do these things speak to you as a contemporary (Web) artist?

EG: The origin of the meaning of most collected n found elements i use in my work is rooted in the 90s. My work itself isn't rooted in the 90s. I've been dragged to use that type of stuff mostly bc i like it n its accurate w the topics im interested in rn. Still tho the source material or what it evokes isn't really important. It jst adds semantic layer/s for some people n so does the aesthetics. Everything linked to that part of my work is treated as game elements (to be inserted) in different contexts of reception w diff codes of conduct. Its about notebooks. All that content is accessory to my work. You could really jst take the whole structure/s n insert totally diff content. It'd still make sense. Maybe Im already doing that but its not linked anywhere rn. Its kinda like people who enjoy playing Canabalt but hate playing Robot Unicorn. The gameplay is literally the same. Jst the content n aesthetic is different. That changes the whole experience. Whats a contemporary web artist?

Blinking Girls Cave (2012)

DR: I love the idea of interchangeable (aesthetic) content, as if Andy Warhol could have changed the contents of a "textures" subfolder and suddenly transformed a Campbell's Soup painting into a Heinz. How is play more than a structural component to your work? I'm thinking about rulemaking and breaking, especially your collaboration with Sarah Weis, Blinking Girls Cave, which the park authorities took a disliking to while it was in progress.

[Ed. – Blinking Girls Cave (2012) was a part of Apache Project, a series of artworks installed at Mother Neff State Park in Moody, Texas, in a cave that was once used by the Tonkawa Indians as a shelter as well as a burial site. After an initial proposal for an installation in the cave was rejected by park management (despite having been initially approved), the project ultimately took the form of a photo shoot, in which GIFs—some of them drawn from the imagery in seduction-based adventure game Leisure Suit Larry—were displayed on tablets, smartphones and laptops that were placed within the cave and documented. This scaled-back version also proved unacceptable to park management.]

EG: I think play is a structural component of life. It's related to how i conceptualize, process n think stuff. It opens space for experimentation. To me, its more related to what sociologists do than anything performance art; like how-to approach different types of social dynamics from diff point of view per example. Also, like that Andy Warhol eating a hamburger video; a partly exhibited learning process. Breaking rules wasn't really a thing in ♡ ♥ Blinking Girls ♥ ♡. What happened at Mother Neff is that our first intended installation, which involved light effects n bubble machines, was disapproved at the last minute bc of the damage it could cause to the cave walls. Blinking Girls Cave thus became about hardwares n gifs. During the documentation - that being the installation - Nate Hitchcock, the director n curator n everything at Apache Project, was interrupted by a park ranger who requested him to leave the park because taking pictures n or making videos in the cave wasn't appropriate.

DR: There’s a real sense of a partly exhibited learning process in your URL works: an ever growing array of Web 1.0 motifs, exhibited as unique URLs. For me these works expose the Internet as a spatial, material thing, still begging to be explored. You spoke of sociology, is there perhaps something archaeological in your practice?

EG: The internet is def abt spatiality and materiality. One can relate to these notions differently. To me, its really more abt physicality. I wasn't really thinking abt them topics when i made these. It's jst kinda there in all websites. Thats the internet. I wouldnt say that these r really web 1.0. The user in both cases isnt primarily a content consumer. Backdoor trojan girl was exhibited at Domain Gallery in a way that highlighted the urls. Under other circumstances, it'd prob be different. The archaeological in my practice is kinda superficial rn.

DR: Your URL artworks, http://backdoortrojangirl.net (2012) and http://w-h-a-t-e-v-e-r.net (2013), both flicker between female and male signifiers. Do you think the Web is gendered? How would you approach gender differently in work produced for a gallery context?

EG: I don't think the web is gendered. Culture is n adds gendered filter/s to it in some cases. I don't know if i would approach it; maybe i'd dig a hole for feminists/feminism or i'd do a show about postpostpostpostpostpostpost-transexualism. It'd be really fun.

DR: For your ongoing collaborative online exhibition Art Object Culture (2011-), you and Lucy Chinen bring together two artists each month to create a new work based on trinkets that were purchased online. These readily available objects accrue value as they pass through the project. I could ask you about the long shadow cast by Duchamp’s readymades, about ownership, exhibition value and artistic identity as they relate to the Web. Instead, I’d really like it if you shared some AOC secrets with us. What criteria do you use to select the artists? Which is your favorite submission so far and why?

EM: Art Object Culture offers a website template for artists to explore art making within one rule: create new art objects from items pre-existing in various online stores. We mainly seek artists that have the ability to bend that rule. I don't really have a favorite submission. I like some more than others but my opinion on this is not important. There is no secret. The current format is a translation of our ideas on AOC related topics from 2011. It might eventually mutate. Hopefully we'll sell all the artworks that were made for it before that n or have a show; some kinda showcase for all of them together w everyone that made stuff for it n other people too.

Émilie Gervais

Age: my age range is 7 to 77.

Location: Paca/FR.

How long have you been working creatively with technology? How did you start?

Since forever. I started by playing games on some used pc and recontextualizing movies, game related stuff as improvised play based on the characters n plot/s with friends at school. I've always spent a lot of time randomly surfing the internet while chatting on microsoft comic chat, mIRC, the palace n was really into customizing anything that was customizable ie. winamp skins, mirc themes, etc... Beside that, my fav drawing thing is Lite Bright n i've been deleting, moving, opening files since ive been typing on a keyboard. I've crashed the home computer a couple of times.

Describe your experience with the tools you use. How did you start using them? Where did you go to school? What did you study?

Experimentation n play! My main tool is the internet or jst even information. In college, ive done a dble cursus in literature n social studies. Then, I dropped out of art school in Mtl n went to Paris. In 2010/2011, i did a dnap/bfa in 1yr at the Ecole d'Art Superieure d'Aix-en-Provence where I'm currently finishing a dnsep/master w a focus in hypermedia. My thesis text thing's title is Fuck Privacy Demo Game Over.

What traditional media do you use, if any? Do you think your work with traditional media relates to your work with technology?

I'm not media based. The traditional/non traditional dichotomy makes no sense to me. I jst use whatever depending on the project im working on. It's more about ideas n processes.

Are you involved in other creative or social activities (i.e. music, writing, activism, community organizing)?

I tweet n play music on my iphone everyday. Before that, i played ice hockey n have done some cycling as a summer training thing. I love dancing. Also, health related stuff; superfoods n other stuff, but i mostly eat pizza n candies. Thats creative. I'm involved with adrenaline, gaming, immersive as non immersive n fun everyday. I'm really concerned about open source n how it affects education/academics. But im not seriously implicated in anything, im jst personally into it rn.

What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously? Do you think this work relates to your art practice in a significant way?

I worked at HMV Megastore n Liquid Nutrition in Montreal while being in college. I spent one summer selling autoportraits on the Pont Saint-Louis in Paris w a friend. I worked at some pizza place on bd de Belleville. The boss never slept, ate one fried egg a day and gave us free pizza n drinks everyday. Clients ordered one expresso and remained seated for hrs jst talking abt whatever. Total Belleville cliche. Everything influences the way i process stuff. RN im an art student.

Who are your key artistic influences?

Toru Iwatani, Kassia Meador, Gustav Klimt n the internet.

Have you collaborated with anyone in the art community on a project? With whom, and on what?

I collaborate w Lucy Chinen on Art Object Culture n conducted the Blinking Girls project w Sarah Weis. I work/ed w friends that are mostly into painting n music. I ghostpost alot n collaborate w lots of people actively n passively everyday on everything. Its mostly passive networked collaboration/s.

Do you actively study art history?

Im surrounded by it. I've been into it for as long as i can remember. My dad always brought the family to museums. When i was living in San Francisco, we went to Los Angeles one time mostly jst to go n visit the Getty museum. My college art history teacher was totally awesome. Art history entertains me.

Do you read art criticism, philosophy, or critical theory? If so, which authors inspire you?

I have phases in which i read alot and others in which i dont at all. Most of the time, i try not to remember the authors so it remains jst about the ideas. RN im reading Critical Play by Mary Flanagan.

Are there any issues around the production of, or the display/exhibition of new media art that you are concerned about?

Yes, but no at the same time. It really depends on the whole concept of a project. I kinda hate almst everything that is JUST about representation when it comes to new media related art tho, so i'd say im concerned about that.

This conversation took place between 22 March and 1 April on a Google Drive document.

Patents Pending: Jeremy Bailey and The Future of Gestural Interfacing

Morgan Quaintance — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:40:27 -0500

Bailey at the AND Festival in 2007. Photo by Paul Greenwood. Courtesy of Pari Nadimi Gallery.

Jeremy Bailey will participate in Rhizome's Seven On Seven Conference on Saturday, April 20th, paired with technologist Julie Uhrman. A new project by Bailey, Famous New Media Art Patent Office, also went live today as part of the New Museum's First Look online exhibition series.

Anyone with a passing interest in the current status of the Internet and World Wide Web will have noticed a curious thing: the tide of popular opinion is changing, and net-skepticism is on the rise. Although we’re not quite at the stage of torch- and pitchfork-bearing mobs, there is a general mood of unease that, at the very least, is causing people to pause before they post. This is a sea change driven by the awareness that certain individual civil liberties are being surreptitiously eroded online: dataveillance is rife, social media platforms are really content farms, the cloud is a ticking time bomb, and nobody really owns any of the digital media they pay for.

New books by giants of net-doubt Jaron Lanier (Who Owns the Future) and Evgeny Morozov (To Save Everything Click Here) are currently whipping the commentariat into think-piece frenzy, but what came like a bolt from the blue was a recent article in the March edition of Artforum. "Gestural Abstractions," written by Alexander Provan (Editor of online art magazine Triple Canopy) was a short, sharp text exploring the possible physiological ramifications of a patent for gestural interfaces pending by Apple. The thrust of Provan’s argument was that Apple were "indisputably striving to corner the market on how we move our fingers across screens, how we scan and massage images," and that simultaneous plans to patent physical movement away from screens, à la Minority Report-style gestural interface operation, were in development. The key question that emerged by the text’s end was a dystopian what-if: what if we find ourselves in a situation where corporations patent everyday gestures like waving goodbye or even throwing up the corna, thereby emptying these signs of meaning, and psychologically associating them with standardized operations for accessing online data? Moreover, how would this new climate affect an artist whose practice uses gesture as an essential bridge between the physical and digital? Step forward Jeremy Bailey, self-proclaimed “world famous new media artist.”

Image from Apple patent application ‘Device, Method, and Graphical User Interface Using Mid-Drag Gestures’ published March 31, 2011. Publication number: US 2011/0074695 A1

Since the early noughties Bailey has ploughed a compelling, and often hilarious, road through the various developments of digital communications technologies. Ostensibly a satire on, and parody of, the practices and language of "new media," the jocose surface of Bailey’s work hides an incisive exploration of the critical intersection between video, computing, performance, and the body. The unique terrain of Bailey’s work sits between a collision of the rarefied and the populist. On one side stands McLuhanite media theory and contemporary art historical debates (specifically the rhetoric of the 1970s Portapak, performance for the camera, era of video art); on the other stands the nerdy world of self-deprecating, super nice webcasters, video game enthusiasts, and computer programmers—see Bailey’s Strongest Man (2003). This meeting of worlds is often formalized in instructional videos that demonstrate software that Bailey designs.

Videopaint 2.0 (2005). Courtesy of Pari Nadimi Gallery.

An essential feature of this work is the generation of graphics from data streams produced by Bailey’s own gestures and movements, which augment real world video footage. For example, in the single-channel video Videopaint 3.0 (2007) Bailey demonstrates a program that tracks the user's movements to produce brushstrokes. In Presentation Software (2009) he uses circling hand movements to rotate objects, and in The Future of Television (2012) his facial movements flip through video footage that has been segmented into slices across his face.

The Future of Television (2012). Courtesy of Pari Nadimi Gallery.

In the hypothetical dystopian future, where all possible human-computer interface gestures, from blinking to waving, fall under the patent controls of monolithic digital communications companies, could Bailey’s work be pushed into a decidedly unexpected sphere: that of political art? Could his catalogue of works be retroactively categorized as emblematic examples of gestural protest? It’s possible, but perhaps unlikely. Still, the idea that Bailey’s videos could one day circulate through the deepweb’s murky depths as illegal and subversive protest art is an interesting one. And, when it comes to leading the ensuing digital resistance, who better than Bailey? In fact, he’s already building the suit.

Concept image for Dialectical Software Gundam Suit (2009). Courtesy of Pari Nadimi Gallery.

Cameron Martin's Nonspecific Landscapes

Rachel Wetzler — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 11:00:44 -0500

Partition Expanse, 2011, 30×45 inches, acrylic on canvas over panel

Cameron Martin will participate in Rhizome's Seven On Seven Conference on Saturday, April 20th, paired with technologist Tara Tiger Brown.

Of all the genres one might associate with contemporary artistic practice, landscape painting is low on the list, more closely aligned with the nineteenth century than the twenty-first. In this sense, Cameron Martin’s canvases, apparently photorealistic depictions of nature executed in an icy palette of pale grays and whites, are paradoxical objects, simultaneously part of an art-historical trajectory dating back to the sixteenth-century Danube School—credited as the first to make “pure landscape” the subject of paintings—and its negation. To create them, he draws on a personal archive of images, culled from advertising, found photographs, and his own staged and impromptu snapshots; selected images are then combined, altered, and manipulated in Photoshop, from which he extracts a stencil, finally applying layers of paint to canvas with an airbrush.

Adivial, 2012, 24×24 inches, acrylic on canvas over panel

In his series “Bracket,” exhibited in 2011 at Greenberg Van Doren (now Van Doren Waxter), spectral images of craggy mountains and dense forests, given elusive titles like Balantane or Icliste, are cropped and bordered with blank space, emphasizing their relationship to not only the photographic image—as one critic noted, registering the barely-there images in Martin’s paintings is akin to watching a photograph develop in a darkroom—but also its use in media, suggesting preparatory layouts for magazines or ads. In more recent paintings, Martin augments the image with thin black lines and tonal shifts, linking them even more closely with graphic design. As Martin stated in an interview with the Brooklyn Rail, “After many years of making full bleed pictures, where the image comes entirely to the limits of the support, I became aware of how with landscape painting in particular, you are encouraged to just dive into the picture, and you don’t think about what’s outside the frame. There’s an inherent illusionism that you buy into as a result of the full bleed. I wanted to think about ways of making the image itself the subject of the painting as much as what was depicted in the image.”

In these paintings, Martin exploits the multiple associations of the term “bracket”: in photography, bracketing refers to taking multiple versions of the same shot at different exposures, while in phenomenology, it describes a suspension of pre-conceptions, setting aside certain assumptions in order to privilege the first-person encounter. On the one hand, they call attention to the formal processes of image production in their conflation of painting, photography, and digital media, but they also function as meditations on absence and presence, inclusion and exclusion.

Album, 2012, 48×48 inches, acrylic on canvas

These scenes might be conceived as corollaries to what the sociologist Marc Augé famously described as “non-places”—interchangeable, transitional spaces like supermarkets and airports that are familiar and ubiquitous, but lack any of the defining characteristics that might root them in a particular culture or location. Martin similarly renders places that are not, beyond the fact that they are literally invented by the artist on a computer: much as his process removes the direct touch of the brush, the extension of the artist’s hand seen as a guarantor of the work’s expressive authenticity, the resulting paintings are not so much landscapes as “landscapes,” images whose mediation is constantly foregrounded. In his work, landscape becomes an empty signifier, much like the intentionally vague, verdant settings of advertising images that are intended to be familiar to everyone, in which, as the artist notes, “the specificity of the location, geographically or historically, is completely eradicated.”

Sempiturn, 2010, 60×60 inches, acrylic on canvas

Breaking the Ice

Michael Connor — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 13:27:02 -0500

Pierre Huyghe, A Journey that Wasn't

Today is the start of my first full week here at Rhizome in the role of Editor & Curator. I’m really excited to have this opportunity to help shape the next phase of the organization.

In its most recent incarnation, Rhizome’s editorial content has taken the form of a journal rather than a blog. Texts such as Jacob Gaboury’s Queer History of Computing series and Paul Graham Raven’s This Is a Game: A (very) Brief History of Larp have offered in-depth, critical looks at Internet art and culture.

Looking ahead, we will continue to foster this kind of scholarly and in-depth writing, but we will also place a renewed emphasis on presenting visual artworks and documentation thereof, as well as more conversational, international and community-oriented content. Content that is, you know, more rhizomatic. (Rhizomey?) This is, after all, a non-profit that began its life as a mailing list.

In this spirit, I want to kick off my tenure by inviting your thoughts on Rhizome’s editorial future. At the end of this post, you’ll see a rarely used function on our site known as a “comments box." What would you like to see more of? Less of? What do you think we do well, and what could we improve on?

Even better, please take this Reader Survey organized by Nectar Ads, who are responsible for the art-related advertising you see in our sidebar. We’ll be looking very closely at the responses and feedback we get through this, and your participation would be greatly appreciated.

Consider the ice broken. I look forward to continuing the conversation!

Prosthetic Knowledge Picks: Arrays and Matrices

Prosthetic Knowledge — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 11:15:36 -0500

Iris

A collection of examples from the Prosthetic Knowledge Tumblr archive on installation artworks which can be characterized by geometric or networked arrangement.

Windswept

Windswept by Charles Sowers

Art installation fixed outside a gallery’s wall, displaying natural flow and turbulence of the wind - via dezeen:

Hundreds of spinning blades reveal the invisible patterns of the wind in American artist Charles Sowers’ kinetic installation on the facade of the Randall Museum in San Francisco.

The installation, titled Windswept, consists of 612 rotating aluminium weather vanes mounted on an outside wall. As gusts of wind hit the wall, the aluminium blades spin not as one but independently, indicating the localised flow of the wind and the way it interacts with the building.

“Our ordinary experience of wind is as a solitary sample point of a very large invisible phenomenon,” said Sowers. “Windswept is a kind of large sensor array that samples the wind at its point of interaction with the Randall Museum building and reveals the complexity and structure of that interaction.”

Angles Mirror

Interactive installation by Daniel Rozin using a triangular method of representation with a motorized array:

The “Angles Mirror” rejects the idea of building a picture based on relative lightness and darkness. Instead, it explores a system of linear rotation that indicates the direction of an object’s contour. A wall-mounted sculpture, the “Angles Mirror” is a sharp triangular block of steel, dotted with yellow indicator arms that pivot. Based on the isometric grid, its structure favors the patterns and angles found in an equilateral triangle. The arms, which do not have the ability to change brightness or luminosity, use input from a camera and reconstruct the view with areas of varying angles. The negative space surrounding a viewer is translated into horizontal lines on the picture plane. Rather than creating a photorealistic image, the three-dimensional movement of a figure is represented, visualizing optical flow as viewer’s proximity to the sculpture changes. A nuanced contour results, as the viewer shifts back and forth, altering how the structure of space is perceived. Similar to “Fan Mirror”, in the “Angles Mirror”, the sequence of movement across the picture plane is directed in part by its audience. When the viewer walks away from the work, or chooses to view the sculpture from a distance, a series of predefined images and transitions cover the object’s surface.

IRIS

Interactive installation is grid of transparent LCDs which display halftone and circular patterns whose display can emulate it’s viewers.

Created by Korena collective HYBE, IRIS is a media canvas with matrix of conventional information display technology, that is a monochrome LCD.Through the phased opening and closing of circular black liquid crystal, IRIS can create various patterns and control the amount (size) of passing lights.

Playa

Sound installation features 14 guitars with hanging computer-controlled fans - the result is beautiful ambient music:

T,E.D.

Installation features 80 wall-mounted teddy bears, all recounting emotional messages posted on the internet with artificial voices.

TED is a large, wall-based installation consisting of an array of 80 Teddy Ruxpin dolls that speak emotional content gathered from the web via synthetic speech with animated mouths. The speaking of the emotional content is accompanied by one of twenty-four musical vignettes that have been paired to the emotional content being spoken. Each vignette, representing one of twenty-four subtle variants of human emotion, have been composed in such a way that the beginnings and ends of the short pieces will seamlessly dogleg in any possible configuration and stream endlessly as a unified whole. The installation is allowed to drift about freely through the emotional landscape being driven only by those who are contributing content to the piece whether unwittingly or consciously. As such the overall presentation of the piece can vary greatly based on external conditions such as seasons, world events and even time of day. The piece is essentially taking the instantaneous emotional pulse of the internet and this collective pulse, like a human pulse, varies over time.

Point Cloud

Mechanical installation is a wireframe form which adjusts it’s shape according to a weather data feed.

Point Cloud is an attempt to reimagine our daily interaction with weather data. Weather has always had a unique place in our lives, because it has a multiplicity that encompasses both the concrete and the indeterminate. It is the intangible context within which we build our lives and our cities, but it is also the physical element against which we create protective shelter. Most of the time it is an invisible network that we can see but are not aware of; yet it can manifest in a spectacle or disaster, come forward and activate our senses, make us forget our rationality in delight or fear. With modern scientific and technological developments, we can now deploy sophisticated monitoring devices to document and observe weather. Yet despite these advances, our analysis and understanding of meteorology is still largely approximate, and in many cases, inaccurate. Weather continues surprise us and elude our best attempts to predict, control, and harness the various elements.

Jill Magid: Effective Storytelling

Orit Gat — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 11:04:36 -0500

Jill Magid. Rhinestoning Headquarters (System Azure). Public performance and permanent installation. Rhinestone encrusted surveillance cameras, posters. Police Headquarters, Amsterdam. 2002

Jill Magid will participate in Rhizome's Seven On Seven Conference on Saturday, April 20th, paired with technologist Dennis Crowley.

They say an average Londoner is caught on camera 300 times a day. Just one of those things in of our lives that we fail to notice—or rather, try not to think of. That is, until someone helps us with that. In her 2002–03 project, System Azure, New York–based artist Jill Magid, then in the Rijksakademie program, decorated surveillance cameras in Amsterdam with colorful rhinestones. What she presented to the police as a public relations initiative was actually part of the artist’s appropriation of surveillance technology to become part of her practice: For example, she wore shoes outfitted with surveillance cameras; in a performance in an MIT lobby (where Magid was a student) she held a small camera that was connected to the monitor at the building’s entrance and shifted it across her body, under her clothes, examining her body and the architecture around it through the openings in her clothes.

Jill Magid. Bring Back the Glam. Silkscreened poster. 93.6 x 66.2 in. 2002.

The stores in the street I live on in Brooklyn have a way to shame the people stealing from them. As you stroll down the avenue, most of the stores have surveillance-camera images pasted onto their windows, usually with the word SHOPLIFTER marked above the person’s head. Sometimes they’ll tell you what they stole. A bad vinyl from the hip record store, a cheap necklace at the jeweler’s, a 5-hour energy drink at the deli. The inclusion of a date and time on these notes makes them into complete stories, and it is the narrative that is contained in the surveillance camera that always interests me: Who buys a 5-hour energy drink at 11 AM?

Jill Magid. Failed States. Installation view at Honor Fraser, LA. 2012. Photo credit Joshua White. 1993 Mercedes station wagon, armored to B4 Level, plus sound. 2012

The stuff of surveillance camera storytelling—an enclosed narrative, immediacy, photodocumentation—are the things that carry over throughout Magid’s work. It ties her books and writing practice with the earlier works seamlessly: because they are all about observation of events and telling stories of those events. It looks into what we see, what it means to see it, and how we document it. Take Failed States, one of Magid’s most recent projects, as an example. In 2010, while she was in Austin, Magid witnessed a young man named Fausto Cardenas shoot six bullets into the air in front of the Texas state capitol. (His motivation remains unknown.) From that incident, the artist embarked on a research project into bureaucracy, the idea of being a witness, and the futility of actions. Taking many forms—a novella, an installation, a video—Failed States is a body of work that puzzles together to form a narrative, in which what is missing from the story is just as interesting as what’s included. It’s almost a victory over documentation.

A Queer History of Computing: Part Three

Jacob Gaboury — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:42:24 -0500

In this third segment of our genealogy we begin to form a connection, and to examine those lesser-known but foundational figures that radiate out from Turing's early work. Perhaps appropriately, given the venue, this second figure leads us to one of the earliest examples of computational art ever produced, though he did not claim the title of artist for himself. This history also moves us forward to those pivotal years surrounding Turing's arrest and death. While Turing underwent a highly visible crisis, Christopher Strachey's work was coming into its own. Once again the connection is tenuous, and little record survives to document more than a passing relationship between these two men, but what remains is a surprisingly poetic attempt to play at the machine.

Christopher Strachey was born in 1916 in Hampstead, England to Oliver Strachey and Rachel (Ray) Costelloe.[i] The Strachey family may be familiar to some, as it has a long and distinguished history in England. Christopher's father Oliver served as an intelligence agent in the First World War and, along with Alan Turing, as a cryptographer at Bletchley Park in the World War II. Christopher's great-grandfather was Sir Henry Strachey, 1st Baronet, and the family has ties back to John Strachey, an associate of the philosopher John Locke.

Perhaps most well known is Christopher's uncle, Lytton Strachey who – along with Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and E. M. Forster – was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, a widely influential group of writers and artists living in Bloomsbury, London in the first half of the twentieth century. Lytton is perhaps most famous for his biographical work Eminent Victorians (1918), which defied Victorian bibliographic norms through irreverent, comedic character assassinations of some of the most beloved moral figures of the Victorian era. The Bloomsbury Group is particularly famous for its modern views on feminism, pacifism, and sexuality. Much like Turing, Lytton was open about his homosexuality – at least between friends and other members of the Bloomsbury group – at a time when homosexuality was explicitly illegal. The Strachey family home was located at 51 Gordon Square, and Christopher would have grown up in the middle of the Bloomsbury group's most productive period.

The Strachey home in Bloomsbury.

Appropriately, Christopher Strachey is also best known for a series of literary works. In 1952 Strachey developed a love-letter generator that ran on the Manchester Mark 1 using a random number generating algorithm, predating the ELIZA natural language processing program by twelve years. The project is considered by many to be the first example of algorithmic or computational art, though such claims are always highly contested. As a mathematician and computer scientist, Christopher Strachey was also one of the founders of denotational semantics and a pioneer in programming language design; yet this is not the path Strachey began on as a young man growing up in Bloomsbury among artists and intellectuals.

By most accounts Strachey was an extremely intelligent child but an altogether undistinguished student. Fascinated by puzzles and with a knack for mathematics and logic, he applied these talents only when it suited him, and wound up at King's College, Cambridge for his undergraduate education. While at King's college Strachey would first come in contact with Alan Turing, who was a junior research fellow at the university. According to Strachey's biographer the two met socially and not through what would become a mutual interest in computing, and as such it is unlikely that they discussed Turing's research on computability. As with the infamous Cambridge Apostles, of which Christopher's father and uncle had been members, King's College had a reputation for homosexuality and Marxist politics leading up to World War II. While Christopher was largely uninterested in politics, it was during this time that he seems to have come to grips with his sexuality, leading to a mental breakdown in the last two terms of his third year.

What little information exists on this episode comes from Strachey’s sister. As Martin Campbell-Kelley notes in his brief biography of Strachey, "The reason for his breakdown is obscure, although his sister supposes it may have been a coming to terms with his homosexuality. At all events, he recovered, and the problem did not manifest itself as a breakdown again." The time away from school was spent partly in a residential home for psychotherapy – Christopher's uncle James was a prominent psychoanalyst credited with first translating Freud's works into English and penning his biography – and on vacation in the United States. This is the only explicit mention of Strachey's sexuality, or indeed any personal struggle he may have had with his identity, in any of the historical material I've been able to gather, aside from passing declarative statements that identify him as a homosexual. Again, the extent to which this breakdown functioned as a transformative moment in Strachey's life is unclear, as is the way in which his sexuality evolved and came to affect his life as an adult. Strachey would return to finish his education in the year following the episode, graduating with a disappointing "lower second" that dashed any hopes of a research studentship. Instead he would turn to education, and spent the next thirteen years at various educational institutions performing the role of schoolmaster.

Strachey's draughts program.

Things began to change in January of 1951 when, through a mutual friend, Strachey received an introduction to Mike Woodger of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL). At that time the NPL was one of three institutions in the UK constructing computers – in this case the Pilot ACE, a preliminary version of the full Automatic Computing Engine or ACE, which had been designed by Alan Turing. Inspired by his visit, Strachey immediately began work on a program to make the Pilot ACE play draughts (checkers). He also worked on a program that would allow the machine to do its own coding, a self-reflexive gesture that reflected Strachey's interest in logical puzzles. The following spring he learned of the Ferranti Mark I computer at the University of Manchester, for which Alan Turing had written the manual. Through his earlier connections with Turing, Strachey managed to acquire a copy of the manual and began reprogramming his draughts program for the new machine.

The Manchester Mark I computer.

Strachey would visit Turing in Manchester twice in the second half of 1951, and on his second visit he was given access to the Mark I to try out his program. Over the course of an intensive session that began in the early evening and lasted through the night, he was able to get the program mostly working, and on running to completion "it finished with a characteristic flourish by playing the national anthem on the 'hooter.'"[ii] In fact during his visit Strachey programmed the Mark I to play a number of songs, including "Baa Baa Black Sheep" and "In The Mood" - which were captured for BBC radio in the autumn of 1951. While his love letter generator would come the following year, and is perhaps more strictly a computational artwork, these tunes are considered to be one of the earliest examples of computer generated music, produced by a total novice and programmed in the course of one evening.[iii] The speed and ease with which Strachey appeared to work the Mark I cemented his reputation overnight, and he would soon become known as the man who wrote "perfect programs," which would lead to a job offer at the National Research and Development Corporation (NRDC) the following year.

Strachey's computer music, captured by the BBC in 1951.

In June of 1952, Strachey began his position at the NRDS. With a lack of projects to occupy him at the start of his employment, he kept himself busy by building his own programs to entertain himself. Then, beginning in August of 1953, short notes began appearing on the notice board of the Manchester University Computer Department. They appeared to be letters of love and adoration addressed to an unnamed, genderless other, signed only with the initials M.U.C.

The list of adjectives in Strachey's love letter generator.[iv]

M.U.C., it turns out, stood for Manchester University Computer, and the letters were the product of an algorithmic generator that Strachey had written in his spare time. Each letter follows a similar structure, and is full of melodramatic Victorian overtones, with pet names like "honey," "jewel," and "moppet" along with other saccharine and yearnful descriptives. The letters were constructed via a generative algorithm that produced a variety of orders and combinations. In "There Must Be an Angel: On the Beginnings of the Arithmetics of Rays", David Link describes its execution in detail:

Apart from position commands like carriage return ("CR"), line forward ("LF"), and spaces ("spaces" or "sp"), the algorithm prints two salutations ("Add." = address). Then it enters a loop, which is carried out "5 times" and, depending on a random variable ("Rand"), follows one of two alternative paths. One generates a sentence following the syntactic skeleton "You are my—Adjective (adj)—Substantive (noun)"; the other path gives "My—[Adjective]—Sub- stantive—[Adverb (adv)]—Verb (verb)—Your—[Adjective]—Substantive" (the static words are underlined, the optional words are in square brackets). [...] Each phrase ends with a "Full stop". After the programme leaves the loop, it closes with the ending "Yours—Adverb (in the schematic this is given erroneously as 'Adj')—MUC."[v]

Previous scholarship by Andrew Hodges and others has suggested that the letters – surviving examples of which conspicuously lacked any variation of the word "love" – might have indicated a negotiation with the terms and legitimacy of desire, and a fascination with or alienation from love. More recent work done by David Link[vi] and Noah Wardrip-Fruin[vii] in the Strachey archives – in which the love letter generator is well documented – shows that in fact the original list of words that the computer could pull from via random number generation did include several variations on the word love, there simply were no examples of such letters in wide circulation.

Schematic of Strachey's love letter program.

Rather than examine the love letter generator in terms of identity, Wardrip-Fruin chooses to view it as a literary project despite the mechanical, even comical tone of these letters. In other words, he attempts to analyze the process of the generator rather than the content of the letters, to understand the materiality of the technical object rather than the meaning of its output. This is a particularly interesting method, one that is especially valuable for the study of computational systems, which function through mechanical processes in which authorship is neither a privileged site to be investigated nor – as Roland Barthes so famously suggested – evacuated. Ultimately this turn suggests that, as Jeremy Douglass puts it in "Machine Writing and the Turing Test," "the true message of this love letter is 'this is a love letter'"[viii] - in other words, that the process by which this message is constructed and conveyed is of greater interest than the content of the message itself.

Ultimately Wardrip-Fruin concludes that the generator is "a process designed to fail that employs a thesaurus-based set of word data and that can result in particularly inhuman surface texts." Thus, "we can see the generator as a parody, though its operations, of one of the activities seen as most sincere by the mainstream culture: the declaration of love through words. That is, [Wardrip-Fruin sees] the love generator, not as a process for producing parodies, but as itself a parody of process."[ix] The letters lack the subtlety and complexity of, for example, the parody of Victorian morality played out by members of the Bloomsbury Group thirty-five years earlier, but this is not where the parody lies. Instead it is a parody of the process of producing love letters, of producing love through this highly formal yet deeply affective medium. It is in this sense a queer critique of normative expressions of love, enacted through a kind of generative, computational performance, through a purposefully deficient simulation.

The interface for artist-researcher David Link's recreation of the love letter generator.

In his biography of Alan Turing, Andrew Hodges writes of the love letter generator, that "[t]hose doing real men’s jobs on the computer, concerned with optics or aerodynamics, thought [it] silly, but [...] it greatly amused Alan and Christopher."[x] It is interesting and perhaps appropriate that what might be considered the first work of computational art was a kind of joke, a critique of "real" epistolary writing and "real" love by means of automation through digitization. It is even more fascinating that it seems to have come from a queer history - not of "passing" as has been suggested with regards to Alan Turing's work on gender and artificial intelligence in the Turing Test, but of camp and the ostentatious performance of "authentic" affect.

[i] The majority of biographical information on Strachey has been taken from Martin Campbell-Kelly's "Christopher Strachey, 1916-l975: A Biographical Note", published in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Volume 7, Number 1, January 1985.

[ii] Campbell-Kelly, Martin. Ibid. p. 25.

[iii] According to the BBC, That honour goes to a third machine called CSIRAC, Australia's first digital computer, which "stunned" audiences with a rendition of Colonel Bogey. That said, no recordings of the CSIRAC music have thus far been found.

[iv] This image and the one that follows are taken from the Strachey archives and reproduced in David Link's essay, cited below.

[v] Link, David. "There Must Be an Angel: On The Beginnings of the Arithmetics of Rays" p. 20. <http://www.alpha60.de/research/muc/DavidLink_RadarAngels_EN.htm>

[vi] Link, David. Ibid.

[vii] Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. "Digital Media Archaeology: Interpreting Computational Processes" in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

[viii] Douglass, Jeremy. "Machine Writing and the Turing Test: From writing to writing system, in accordance with a queer theory of identity and a reception theory of art" <http://www.english.ucsb.edu/grad/student-pages/jdouglass/coursework/hyperliterature/turing/>.

[ix] Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. Ibid. p. 316

[x] Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma. London: Vintage Books, 1992. p. 478.

Harper Reed: Changing Politics and Technology

Orit Gat — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 11:49:01 -0500

Harper Reed

Harper Reed will participate in Rhizome's Seven On Seven Conference on Saturday, April 20th, paired with artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.

On Reed’s website (subheaded “Probably one of the coolest guys ever,” by the way), alongside the bio, blog, flickr stream (don’t be surprised there isn’t an Instagram feed, the man’s not mainstream), and blog, there is also a “books” section. Apparently, for the past ten years, Reed documents all the good books he read. And he reads a lot, “without rhyme or reason,” according to him. No one would be amazed to discover that The Catcher in the Rye, Herman Hesse’s Siddharta, or Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus made the list. Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke are even more obvious. But John Medina’s "Brain Rules" series—Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School and Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five—may catch you a little off guard. And Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and The Virtue of Selfishness are even more of a surprise.

Especially for someone who was the chief technology officer for Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. It could fall under the rubric of “know your enemy” (considering that the enemy, at the time, couldn’t get enough of talking about Rand), but it’s mainly the result of an inquisitive nature. It seems like Reed would try anything—a week sans Internet included—to examine how we consume information and interact online, and what can come of that. The praise Obama for America received for its technological innovation is one extension of this curiosity: it creates new models for working collaboratively, online and offline.

This image came to symbolize the Democratic victory over Republicans in the technological arena. It's an optimistic image that targets a wide audience with a personal message. And it became the single most popular image on both Twitter and Facebook: yet another proof of the effectiveness of social media in an election campaign.

Obama for America was a grand experiment in the way technology could potentially modify politics. The Obama campaign invited Reed, as part of a team of engineers, to develop a data platform that allowed the campaign to track voters and volunteers in real time in order to microtarget voters. Reed worked with about forty programmers, engineers, and scientists to build the platform (compiled of a number of different software that did everything from analyzing Facebook information to matching volunteers with potential voters) that arguably won the recent election. Months after the election, the Republican Party is still busy churning what-went-wrong reports and strategizing on how to catch up in future election cycles.

The Republican Party's Growth & Opportunity Project

Had the technology team for Obama for America failed, we would be thinking differently about the role of technology in politics. It sounds like a lot of entrepreneurs’ dream: bring together a lot of talented people who have a sense of mission and a project (and an enormous budget) and see what comes up. The fact that they created a functional and successful structure is one result of it. The Obama campaign changed the way we think about the possibilities of the conflation of politics and technology: beyond the fact that the data platform they created made technology visibly useful by connecting volunteers with potential voters, it also made it personal. The media coverage of the Obama campaign’s technological efforts sparked the interest of many people beyond the political and technological communities, providing yet another proof of just how groundbreaking their work was.

Rhizome Commissions: 2013-2014 Cycle Now Open, Including New Partner Grant Opportunity

Rhizome — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:22:58 -0500

Screenshot of DISimages.com, 2011-2012 Rhizome Commission

Rhizome is now accepting proposals for the Rhizome Commissions 2013-2014 cycle. Each year, the program supports emerging artists by providing grants for the creation of significant works of new media art. This year, Rhizome places a focus on promoting emerging artists based in New York City. Grants will not be restricted to New York based artists, but made a priority. This cycle, we also have a specific focus on one project that addresses social issues and/or promotes individual advancement through education or participation. Rhizome will award up to six grants for the creation of new works of digital and new media art. Five awards will be determined by a jury of experts and one award will be determined by Rhizome's membership in an open vote. Rhizome Commissions awards generally range from $1,000 to $5,000.

This year, Rhizome has also partnered with Tumblr to offer an additional strand to the commissioning program: The Rhizome | Tumblr Internet Art Grant. The Internet Art Grant expands upon Rhizome's existing Commissions program to specifically target Tumblr's significant artistic community. The Internet Art Grant will make three commissioning awards with a special focus on projects from artists engaged with Tumblr.

The commissions award will be determined by a jury of experts: Laurie Anderson, noted experimental performance artist and musician; Massimiliano Gioni, Associate Director and Director of Exhibitions at the New Museum and Artistic Director of the 55th Venice Biennale; Renny Gleeson, Global Director at Wieden + Kennedy; and Zoë Salditch, Rhizome's Program Director. For the Rhizome | Tumblr Internet Art Grant, jurors include Gioni, Anderson, Salditch and additionally, artist Jon Rafman and Topherchris, Tumblr Editorial Director.

The Rhizome Commissions program is supported, in part, by funds from Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts. Additional support is provided by generous individuals and Rhizome members.

Artist Profile: Alex Myers

Daniel Rourke — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 11:28:28 -0500

Your work spans several distinct, but overlapping areas of discourse. We could start by talking through design, animation, glitch art, code, game play or the interface. I want to start right from the bottom though, and ask you about inputs and outputs. A recent work you collaborated on with Jeff Thompson, You Have Been Blinded - “a non-visual adventure game” - takes me back to my childhood when playing a videogame often meant referring to badly sketched dungeon maps, before typing N S E or W on a clunky keyboard. Nostalgia certainly plays a part in You Have Been Blinded, but what else drives you to strip things back to their elements?

I’ve always been interested in how things are built. From computers to houses to rocks to software. What makes these things stand up? What makes them work? Naturally I’ve shifted to exploring how we construct experiences. How do we know? Each one of us has a wholly unique experience of… experience, of life.. When I was a kid I was always wondering what it was like to be any of the other kids at school. Or a kid in another country. What was it like to be my cat or any of the non-people things I came across each day? These sorts of questions have driven me to peel back experience and ask it some pointed questions. I don’t know that I’m really interested in the answers. I don’t think we could really know those answers, but I think it’s enough to ask the questions.

Stripping these things down to their elements shows you that no matter how hard you try, nothing you make will ever be perfect. There are always flaws and the evidence of failure to be found, no matter how small. I relish these failures.

Your ongoing artgame project, Writing Things We Can No Longer Read, revels in the state of apophenia, “the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data”. [1] The title invokes Walter Benjamin for me, who argued that before we read writing we “read what was never written” [2] in star constellations, communal dances, or the entrails of sacrificed animals. From a player’s point of view the surrealistic landscapes and disfigured interactions within your (not)(art)games certainly ask, even beg, to be interpreted. But, what role does apophenia have to play in the making of your work?

When I make stuff, I surround myself with lots of disparate media. Music, movies, TV shows, comics, books, games. All sorts of stuff gets thrown into the pot of my head and stews until it comes out. It might not actually come out in a recognizable form, but the associations are there.

A specific example can be found in a lot of the models I use. I get most of them, or at least the seed of them, from open source models I find on 3D Warehouse. Because of the way that website works, it’s constantly showing you models it thinks are similar for whatever reason. Often I’ll follow those links and it will take me down symbolic paths that I never would have consciously decided to pursue. This allows a completely associative and emergent composition to take form.

I’d like to paraphrase and link up your last two answers, if I may. How do “relishing failures” and “allowing things to take form” overlap for you? I know you have connections with the GLI.TC/H community, for instance. But your notgames Me&You, Down&Up, and your recent work/proposition Make Me Something seem to invoke experiments, slips and disasters from a more oblique angle.

All are a means of encouraging surprise. In each piece it’s not about the skill involved, but about the thrill of the unknown. In all of my projects I try to construct a situation where I have very little control over the outcome. Glitch does this. But within the glitch community there’s a definite aesthetic involved. You can look at something and know that it’s glitch art. That’s not true for everything, but there is a baseline. For my notgames work I embrace the practice, not necessarily the look. I want irregularity. I want things to break. I want to be surprised.

Your work in progress, the Remeshed series, appears to be toying with another irregular logic, one you hinted at in your comments about “associative and emergent composition”; a logic that begins with the objects and works out. I hear an Object Oriented echo again in your work Make Me Something, where you align yourself more with the 3D objects produced than with the people who requested them. What can we learn from things, from objects? Has Remeshed pushed/allowed you to think beyond tools?

That’s a tricky question and I’m not sure I have a satisfactory answer. Both projects owe their existence to a human curatorial eye. But in both I relinquish a lot of control over the final object or experience. I do this in the spirit of ready-to-hand things. By making experiences and objects that break expectations our attention is focused upon them. They slam into the foreground and demand our attention. Remeshed, and to an extent, Make Me Something, allows me to focus less on the craft of modeling and animation and more on pushing what those two terms mean.

As Assistant Professor and Program Director of the Game Studies BSc atBellevue University you inevitably inhabit a position of authority for your students. Are there contradictions inherent in this status, especially when aiming to break design conventions, to glitch for creative and practical ends, and promote those same acts in your students? Yourecently modified Roland Barthes’ 1967 text ‘The Death of the Author’ to fit into a game criticism context. It makes me wonder whether “The Player-God” is something you are always looking to kill in yourself?

Absolutely. When teaching I try break down the relationship of authority as much as possible. I prefer to think of myself as a mentor, or guide, to the students. Helping them find the right path for themselves. Doing this from within a traditional pedagogical structure is difficult, but worthwhile. Or so I tell myself.

In terms of the Player-God, I think yes, I’m always trying to kill it. But at the same time, I’m trying to kill the Maker-God. There is no one place or source for a work. There’s no Truth. I reject the Platonic Ideal. Both maker and player are complicit in the act of the experience. Without either, the other wouldn’t exist.

Age: Somewhere in my third decade.

Location: The Land of Wind and Grass / The Void Between Chicago and Denver

How long have you been working creatively with technology? How did you start?

Oof, for as long as I can remember. When I was 13 I killed my first computer about 4 days after getting it. I was trying to change the textures in DOOM. I had no idea what I was doing.

Later, in college I was in a fairly traditional arts program learning to blow glass. At some point someone gave me a cheap Sony 8mm digital camcorder and I started filming weird things and incorporating the (terrible) video art into my glass sculptures.

After that I started making overly ambitious text adventures and playing around with generative text and speech synthesizers.

Describe your experience with the tools you use. How did you start using them? Where did you go to school? What did you study?

I use Unity and Blender primarily right now. They’re the natural evolution of what I was trying to do way back when I was using Hammer and Maya.

I did my MFA in Interactive Media and Environments at The Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen, NL. I started working in Hammer around this time making Gun-Game maps for Counter-Strike: Source. During the start of my second semester of grad school I suffered a horrible hard drive failure and lost all of my work. In a fit of depression I did pretty much nothing but play CS:S and drink beer for three months. At the end of that I made WINNING.

What traditional media do you use, if any? Do you think your work with traditional media relates to your work with technology?

I’m not sure how to answer this. About the most traditional thing I do anymore is make prints from the results of my digital tinkering. Object art doesn’t interest me much these days, but it definitely influenced how I first approached Non-Object art.

Are you involved in other creative or social activities (i.e. music, writing, activism, community organizing)?

I’m involved with a lot of local game developer and non-profit digital arts organizations.

What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously? Do you think this work relates to your art practice in a significant way?

I’m an Assistant Professor of Game Studies at Bellevue University. The job and my work are inexorably bound together. I enjoy teaching in a non-arts environment because I feel it affords me freedom and resources I wouldn’t otherwise have. I actually hate the idea of walled-disciplines in education. Everyone should learn from and collaborate with everyone else.

Who are your key artistic influences?

Mostly people I know: Jeff Thompson, Darius Kazemi, Rosa Menkman, THERON JACOBS

and some people I don’t know: Joseph Cornell, Theodor Seuss Geisel, Bosch, Brueghel the Elder, most of Vimeo.

Have you collaborated with anyone in the art community on a project? With whom, and on what?

Yes. Definitely.

Most recently I’ve been working with Jeff Thompson. We made You Have Been Blinded and Thrown into a Dungeon, a non-visual, haptic dungeon adventure. We’ve also been curating Games++ for the last two years.

Do you actively study art history?

Yep. I’m constantly looking at and referencing new and old art. I don’t limit it to art, though. I’m sick of art that references other art in a never ending strange loop. I try to cast my net further afield.

Do you read art criticism, philosophy, or critical theory? If so, which authors inspire you?

Definitely. In no particular order: Dr. Seuss, Alastair Reynolds, Alan Sondheim, Dan Abnett, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, Italo Calvino, Mother Goose, Jacques Lacan, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Carl Jung, H.P. Lovecraft, Jonathan Hickman, Brandon Graham, John Dewey, Umberto Eco... the list goes on and on.

Are there any issues around the production of, or the display/exhibition of new media art that you are concerned about?

I think we’ve partially reached an era of the ascendant non-object. That is, an art form, distinct from performance and theatre, that places an emphasis wholly on the experience and not on the uniqueness of the object. Because of this move away from a distinct singular form, there’s no place for it in the art market. Most artists that work this way live by other means. I teach. Others move freely between the worlds of art and design. Still others do other things.

The couple of times I’ve had solo exhibitions in Europe, I’ve almost always been offered a livable exhibition fee. Here in the States that’s never been the case. When I have shows stateside, I always take a loss. The organizer may cover my material costs, but there’s no way I could ever live off of it. Nor would I want to. I think the pressures of survival would limit my artistic output. I’m happier with a separation between survival and art.

[1] “Apophenia,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopaedia, March 21, 2013, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Apophenia&oldid=545047760.

[2] Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schoclen Books, 1933), 333–336.

Rhizome Digest: Best of Rhizome March

Rhizome — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 10:24:24 -0500

Series

Essays

Interviews

Artist Profiles

Prosthetic Knowledge Picks

Announcing Rhizome's Seven on Seven Conference Participant Teams

Rhizome — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:00:00 -0500

Saturday, April 20, 2013 from 12:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Rhizome's Seven on Seven Conference, presented by HTC, will pair seven leading artists with seven influential technologists in teams of two, and challenges them to develop something new—be it an application, social media, artwork, product, or whatever they imagine—over the course of a single day. The seven teams will work together at locations around New York City on Friday April 19th and then unveil their ideas at a one-day event at the Tishman Auditorium at The New School on April 20th, 2013, from 12–6 p.m. After the conference, the attendees can celebrate with participants at an afterparty from 6–9 p.m.

2013 Participant Teams:

Jill Magid + Dennis Crowley

Fatima Al Qadiri + Dalton Caldwell

Matthew Ritchie + Billy Chasen

Cameron Martin + Tara Tiger Brown

Paul Pfeiffer + Alex Chung

Jeremy Bailey + Julie Uhrman

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer + Harper Reed

Purchase Tickets

Seven on Seven is presented by HTC and organized by Rhizome. Additional conference partners include Betaworks, Wieden + Kennedy, and RRE.

Artifacts: A Conversation Between Hito Steyerl and Daniel Rourke

Daniel Rourke — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 11:12:47 -0500

“But even if the internet is dead this doesnt mean it's over. It is all over.”

When we met recently we talked about the glitch as it relates to contemporary image culture, but we also talked about the glitch as something to aspire to. In your essay, A Thing Like You and Me, you retell Walter Benjamin’s parable of the Angel of History, pushed by the harsh winds of progress away from the rubble of history, its back facing into the unknown future. You say that we are the rubble, or at least, that we should align ourselves with the rubble. I’m fascinated by these allusions to excess and detritus in your writing, and I see something of the glitch aesthetic making its way into your video works. I thought we could start from these bruises and cracks; from the things we can’t predict, control or maintain. How would you relate the glitch to Benjamin’s rubble?

One of the biggest misunderstandings about digital information is that it is replicated identically, without loss or transformation. But anyone who works with such information knows that digital practice is constituted – like perhaps any technology – by malfunction. One has to constantly convert information in order to work with it across different platforms and softwares and on the way it is reformatted, translated, compressed or sometimes even blown up, it is enhanced or diminished: it changes. It changes its format or container or outlook or context.

Digital information is thus characterised by transformation, degradation, circulation, but also by its surprising ability to mutate and produce unpredictable results. The glitch, the bruise of the image or sound testifies to its being worked with and working; being passed on and circulated, being matter in action. History inscribes itself into the image in forms of bruises and scars. In their 1958 essay “Les Statues meurent aussi” Chris Marker and Alain Resnais write that the forces of heaven and earth are getting caught up in the scars of African statues. But all imaginable forces – aesthetic, political, technological, affective, social – are expressed by the scars of the digital image or sound. It condenses the tensions and contestations that constitute the image/sound and rip it open.

Glitches expose us to the inner dynamism of the digital, but I wonder what it is about the current conditions of our society that tend to turn us away from the tensions and contestations locked up there in the first place? Chris Marker and Alain Resnais impelled the ‘dead statues’ of their film to live again, turning colonial trophies into emotionally rendered subjects before the camera lens. The forces that compelled the statues to die in Western museums were, perhaps by definition, unable to render their scars as outward signs of anything.

Yes, we do have the same tension nowadays on many levels of the digital world. Marker and Resnais' film died just the same as the statues – not by commodification and colonialism as the African statues they are describing in their film, but by the wholesale commodification of cinema in the context of post 89 transitions. Their film literally became invisible as its infrastructure was destroyed by a neoliberal revolution that also changed the world of images and media. But it came back in form of YouTube files replete with artifacts, cut up and dispersed in fragments across the web to live again - if only for another while. But of course a similar dynamics repeats online, too and the growing development of the web as a tool for surveillance and conformism will force many of its most interesting phenomena to undergo similar deaths and rebirths in different aggregate states. The statues found a new life in film; the film found a new life as file: let’s see what’s going to happen to the files once they too will be forced to change and reformat within different states of matter.

“Is it an impulse of data, sounds and images to surpass the boundaries of information channels and to manifest”

Digital images feature highly in your work, as poor and bruised icons to their own dissemination; as quasi-subjects, devoid of the illusions of the flesh, and all the better for it. In the title of your collection of essays, The Wretched of the Screen, I hear echoes of Georges Duhamel, who saw the spectacle of cinema as "a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures" (referenced by Walter Benjamin). I also read a direct reference to Frantz Fanon's work, The Wretched of Earth. For Duhamel the masses were subjugated by the flickering images of popular-culture, and for Fanon, by the machinery of colonialism. For Fanon, at least, there was hope in the lumpenproletariat: the abject peasant class, forgotten by industrial rule and, perhaps, beyond psychological subjugation. The only hope of revolution lay with them. In your essay In Defense of the Poor Image, it is images themselves that are wretched, beyond redemption as subjects. Do you see the digital image as a contemporary lumpenproletariat? In what ways are images, and in turn we, subjugated by the flickering of the screen?

The poor image expresses the full ambivalence of Fanons idea of lumpenproletarians, which Arendt already beautifully and much more precisely described as mob in her “Elements of Totalitarianism”. The mob does not consist of the underclasses, but the “refuse of all classes”. The mob is composed of people expelled into a world characterised by violent colonialism, the expansion of industrial capitalism and subjugation; it is unable to make up its mind, distracted, easily corrupted, or rather corrupt by definition and always ready to betray anybody and everything in order to suck up to the elite. In the current moment of globalisation I see a new mob: people who cannot form a class but constitute the refuse of all classes. A mob of freelancers/mercenaries, moving from one country to another, trying to flee the devastations that finance capitalism and algorithms on the loose create, roaming the suburbs and lowlands of the web, scamming, spamming, phishing, pirating and otherwise trying to stay afloat in a fleeting world of dislocated images. Many artists belong to this category, too. Poor images express similar tensions – in the aggregate state of files. A visual mob, defined by mobility and mobilisation, spreading Hollywood preview copies with the same nonchalance as ads for penis enlargement or insurrectionary manifestoes. Contemporary digital mobs are subjected to similar states of compression and capture.

But this kind of images is not a new phenomena. We already see it in a certain genre of wood cuts from the floating world or ukiyo of the Edo period. The ukiyo was the world of fleeting beauty and the hardship of sex work. It was also the world of countless cheap images being reproduced by printing presses, of whores, wrestlers, actors and idols, a world which was essentially fluid and full of unstable reproductions. It was considered “low” art, disposable, defined by circulation and affect.

Claire Bishop expressed concerns late last year that contemporary art had not successfully articulated the ‘digital condition’, yet her argument still pandered to modes of dissemination and display most compatible with the context of the gallery. Today the majority of image production, dissemination, and commentary takes place online. It strikes me that the best place to go to grapple with the digital condition is not the art gallery, but tumblr, youtube and even 4chan. What place does art have in confronting the digital, when today’s most successful digital expressions apparently come from contemporary art outsiders?

I hardly followed the debate around Bishop's text. But it seems to me that she very correctly described a quite ludicrous analog nostalgia in a specific corner of the artworld. Next time I see another 16mm film projector rattling away in a gallery I will personally kidnap it and take the poor thing to a pensioners home. There is usually no intrinsic reason whatsoever for the use of 16mm film nowadays except for making moving images look pretentious, expensive and vaguely modernist, all prepackaged with a whiff of WASPish art history. It made sense to use Bolexes in 1968, and indeed people used them to brilliant end. But today people use cellphones, Kinnect sensors and After Effects to deal with the present and shape it. And if artists do not expose themselves to the workflow and economies that come with contemporary means of production, they become souvenir peddlers. Or worse trying to conveniently package a bygone radical moment as a collectors item. I think Bishop said something similar more politely. Now I also understand people have been disappointed that she´s not been mentioning real contemporary practices more extensively. This complaint should be made to Artforum, though or in extension to the formally and technologically conservative artworld it represents, not to a single writer which isnt an expert in media art and never claimed to be. The debate expresses a real tension, which on the other hand is not so new either. The most interesting and challenging contemporary art was rarely acknowledged as such in it's time and often took place outside the artfield. So the real question is: could one build something outside of the existing artworlds? With what means? It's happening as we speak, because people fortunately don’t usually care what Artforum thinks they should do or even about art as such. It´s happening as you said on tumblr and sites like jogging and many others. Its massively happening in the streets of Syria and Egypt, which are or recently were vanguard laboratories of new media development, with the online dissemination of protests and actions against sexual violence from Delhi to Stupidville or slave labour in the artworld. New media are brought into the world through contemporary social conflicts by the midwifes of violence, boredom, perpetual distraction. Enhanced by rumour and glamour, by uncertainty and intense speculation. Into an aggregate state of matter which is beyond art or the next art or non-art or after art as David Joselit wrote: expressing the tensions of globalising media worlds within post-democracy and accelerated capitalism. Its artifacts may be art or facts.

Another important question: many contemporary artworlds are irrevocably digital; beyond their incorporation of digital art. Their infrastructure and whole mode of operation deeply relies on digital technology. People dropbox their works which unfold in galleries like inflatable chutes. But this economy is also fundamentally based on digital technology, including hedging, betting, reputation engineering, accelerating circulation, aggregating jpegs, tele-exploiting interns, regurgitating 3D point clouds as deconstructive atriums where weapon manufacturers and oligarchs hang their dot paintings. This is the digital base of the artworld; embedded in its modes of operations.

In December I was lucky enough to visit your exhibition at the Chicago Institute of Art which showcased three new works, Abstract, Adorno’s Grey and Guards. In particular I was drawn towards Guards, perhaps because it focussed so clearly on its two subjects, Ron Hicks and Martin Whitfield. As the camera follows Ron around the Chicago gallery, pursuing an imaginary assailant, the messy politics of the art institute became exposed to me. It struck me that subjects are usually more hidden in your video work, or at least, the emphasis of your work acts to distort and dislocate human subjects. I see this in your work In Free Fall, where you map the biography of the Boeing 707 aircraft, but also in more personal works such as November, 2004, in which the central identity of your friend Andrea Wolf is never quite pinned down. I wondered then if we could finish by talking about the relationship between subjects and objects. What is it about the current time that seems to draw you towards the object?

Whoever is an image is an object. Whoever is not an image raise their hand. Images have permeated our environments since long time ago. They crossed screens and incarnated: as junkspace, and all sorts of 3D spam. They materialised in form of our own bodies. Images do not represent reality, they create reality, they are second nature. Things among other things, image-objects, image-events, image-situations, images-bodies.

As to the protagonists of many of my videos, probably all of them inhabit at least two very different realms and negotiate the tensions between them. Andrea Wolf is both a martyr and a trash film heroine, the museum officers take their experiences of urban violence and warfare to a sanitised bourgeois White Cube, Mike Potter in “Free Fall” is both a shrewd scrap salesman and Hollywood consultant, Adorno´s Grey´s photographer is superimposed on an anonymous protester breaking through police lines using “Negative Dialectics” as a weapon. One could go on to extend the list… All of them including the crew and myself are both image and agents, quite uncontrollably and sometimes violently propelled into circulation, participating in images instead of controlling, reading, viewing or directing them. Sometimes one of us manages to twist it´s kinetic energy and to direct it back in a kind of jiu-jutsu move. Other times one can just try to enjoy the ride.

The protagonists of your works are buffered by tensions beyond their control and they act regardless. Perhaps the ride takes us back to where we started, the glitch: that unexpected fold or tear manifest for a moment on the surface of a complex substrate; the actions of images?

I don’t care about what image/objects essentially are or represent. I'm fascinated about what we/they do and what happens along the way, about the interactions amongst image/objects and image/situations.

So it’s not about object-ontologies but image-actions, image-gestures, thing-affinities, chains of reaction of objects, forces, and pixels, that manifest in scars and bruises, but also sometimes in the liquid harmony of the floating world of images.

Utamaro and Shunga JPEGs databent in an impromptu collaboration between Daniel Rourke, Hito Steyerl, and her texts. Glitchy GIF responses by Benjamin Berg (stAllio!).

Mission Creep: K-Hole and Trend Forecasting as Creative Practice

Huw Lemmey — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 10:42:12 -0500

“Determinism would gain credibility if it gave us useful forecasts” wrote Gilles Dauvé and Karl Nesic, referring to those who saw the outcome of political events as written in their formation. Perhaps the same could be said of trend forecasts. What are they for, and why do people keep writing them? They’re certainly not very effective at predicting trends, yet their recurrence and popularity^{^[1]} within the art world over the past 5 years suggests they’re an increasingly important phenomenon in the development of post-internet culture. Unlike forecasts commissioned within marketing organisations, trend forecasts produced within the contemporary art world are nominally produced for public consumption; they act somewhere between an art object and a form of cultural criticism.

Among the pioneers of this form of trend forecast are K-Hole, a New York based crew who recently released their third forecast, a 49-page free-to-download PDF entitled THE K-HOLE BRAND ANXIETY MATRIX. It continues the aesthetic that has marked out K-Hole’s previous forecasts – sharp focus, minimalist stock photography, blocky capitalised typefaces and crisp infographics punctuate their trademark prose, a commercially-aware rhetoric that seems punchy, without ever really landing a punch.

Each forecast revolves around a central theme, an attempt to build a new conceptual model for brand awareness or technological innovation. Synthesis is the name of the game for K-Hole: every issue introduces a string of portmanteaus that successfully walk the fine line between blunt parody and genuine identification. ProLASTination, FragMOREtation, FLATmentation: this is the lexicon of dickheads, yet the carefully produced portfolio of case studies that make up the bulk of each document build each tongue-in-cheek neologism into a more thoughtful model for understanding cultural phenomena and fluid consumer subjectivities as they exist today. The level of cultural literacy and critical engagement with their audience separates the trend forecast produced within the context of contemporary art from the trend forecast produced for the boardroom suits: these are texts which speak to the demographic they analyse, rather than simplify these demographics for paying clients. It’s this difference, this understanding of spectatorship, that activates K-Hole’s PDFs as a hybrid form of art-object and cultural criticism. Paradoxically, however, it’s also this cultural fluency with the target demographic that makes it catnip to smart marketing teams, and it’s this duality which creates an ethical tension within the format that is perhaps an echo of the wider crisis of form that both haunts and drives the world of post-internet cultural production. Whilst the content is interesting, it’s the evolution and reproduction of the form, straddled between the critical and the commercial, that really highlights what is vital and problematic in this phenomena.

K-Hole’s third edition seems to elucidate far more clearly this tension, making the development of cognitive models the main focus of the document and moving away from predictive scenarios. Whereas earlier forecasts offered potential new configurations of existing technologies or products, Issue 3 instead offers a more explicit model for understanding the relationship between potential future everyday technologies and our everyday lives, in the form of a matrix which examines risk assessment.

This is perhaps the key to understanding the reasons why trend forecasting has taken off within the post-internet demographic. The trend forecast represents a displaced subject: rather than being predictive or even speculative visions of what is to come, they actually function as models to conceptualise and contextualise the effects a technological explosion is having upon our everyday lives. The latest K-Hole report hits the nail on the head: the relationship between the demographic and the trend forecast is one of managing anxiety precipitated by the pervasive technology of the internet revolution. Rather than thinking of trend forecasts as commercial documents (or simulations thereof), we should examine them as creative texts which are trying to contextualise and understand that revolution, in a similar vein to science fiction. Rather than science fiction, trend forecasts effectively function as consumer fiction.^{^[2]}

Science fiction emerged as a creative field primarily as an entertainment form, but as the field evolved it quickly came to be seen as something more — a way to understand the deep and significant technological change which revolutionised everyday life in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Automation, the shrinking of space through faster transport and communications, and the development of the massified workers subjectivity under a state model — all these technological changes were profoundly political, and science fiction emerged as a popular and accessible cultural form in which to discuss and understand often terrifyingly fast social change. The worlds of science and technology held the obvious language to utilise — it seemed to be machines that were changing our world: vast industrial machines enabled by state power, by huge actors, to drive deep into the earth, to reach new planets, to reconfigure a society in its entirety.

Today we’re in the opening stage of a similarly enormous technological revolution. The social fabric is being torn and reconfigured by massive infrastructural developments. Changes in capitalist development are likewise revolutionising the everyday lives of working people. In the developed world the age of the mass worker, and its coterminous subjectivity, is being eroded into a new subjectivity — the post-fordist worker. This worker is not defined by the production line but by precarious working conditions, outsourcing, self-employment and self-branding. The division between work and leisure time – produced by proletarianisation and formalised by the labour movement – is increasingly a meaningless abstraction. New digital technologies as well as wider economic and political currents created by the crisis of capital in the late 1970’s – the destruction of labour unions, containerisation and cheap credit through financialisation – have combined to produce a new idea of the productive, creative individual (and the subjectivity of the post-fordist worker is by its very nature individual). Whilst contemporary art attempted to come to terms with the collapse of socialist project in the 1990’s, most notably through relational aesthetics, the post-internet tendency seems to be tackling a much wider change in technology, work and production in a way unseen since Warhol took on consumer capitalism in the early 1960s.

And so what characterises a young, mid-crisis, post-internet productive subjectivity? In a word, anxiety. Uncertainty about our financial and professional futures as a result of the deferred crisis in capital, but more importantly, uncertainty about the future due to the rate of technological change we see happening around us. In dealing with this perfect storm of technological and economic factors, this unique point on the Kondratieff cycle, trend forecasts function as a creative response to anxiety and change. Rather than science fiction, trend forecasts are consumer fiction, imaginative responses to technological change which help us understand the present through speculative future scenarios, told within the dominant language of possibility – the brand.

It is working within the visual language, culture and organisational models of the corporate world which is beginning to characterise post-internet art. Just what is it that makes today’s corporations so appealing? Isn’t there a paradox here, whereby artists are attempting to emulate the organisational aesthetics of corporations at the same time as those very corporations are beginning to take notice of the decentralised, networked aesthetics, and the shift in the role of consumer and spectator, reflected within post-internet art? Perhaps, but the tendency of thinking within the discourse of the brand is understandable. In his influential and engaging short book Capitalist Realism, cultural theorist Mark Fisher clearly defines the environment in which this tendency emerged and now dominates; an environment where political antagonism has given way to managerialism, and where contestation is subsumed into a post-ideological framework of individual success or failure. ‘Capitalist Realism’ is the ideology that now structures our world, the idea that, in the words of Margaret Thatcher, there is no alternative. Neo-liberal capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable. Within that framework, what does the emulation of the creative visual forms of the corporation signify? What’s with post-internet artists and all their corporate swag?^{^[3]} Looked upon favourably, it suggests an ambition for the work. The visual language of the corporation is the language of the possible. Who structures our visual environment on a daily basis, but advertising agencies working on behalf of corporations?

The move towards brand language marks a desire to engage with the visual cultures of daily life. In adopting the form of the commercial policy document, artists are shifting the context of their work back to some form of social engagement, and that’s a tacit admission of just how ineffective contemporary art discourse has been in making practical and pragmatic interventions into the real world of everyday life. Instead, the utilisation of the language of the commercial sphere, then, signifies a genuinely radical shift from the forms of post-socialist contemporary art that came before, in the form of Relational Aesthetics — an attempt or desire to produce art that engages with everyday life, which changes the social or political world it is produced in. We can lament that there is no other political framework in which radical social engagement can occur, but we cannot really deny it.

There is, of course, another key aspect to the development of trend forecasts within the language of the commercial – namely, the moving of artistic practice in post-internet art into a form that can be monetized. This is the ‘crisis of the form’ that has been the primary concern of post-internet art from its very moment of self-realisation. The question posed is how much the work deals with immateriality as a critical concern, and how much the artist is forced to change or direct their practice as a result of the very real material concerns – the ability to reproduce their life and practice. Let’s make this clear – the primary concern of post-internet art is still “how can you represent if you can’t pay the rent?”^{^[4]}

The adoption, then, of forms of presentation and display taken from the cutting edge of marketing seems to be an ongoing concern of post-internet practice, as reflected in K-Hole’s work. Where relational aesthetics was an attempt to build a socially-engaged practice in a post-socialist context (within the ideological and practical constraints of market distribution models), post-internet art appears to adopt the constraints of marketing as an inspiration if not an aspiration. Charitably we can see this as a reaction to the creative revolution digital technology has started; an attempt to create a new consumer fiction genre aimed at processing and critically questioning the enormous changes that digital technology is effecting in our everyday lives.

The crisis in this approach should be clear, however. Is the tendency to re-enact or inhabit the systems of sociality, social or cultural reproduction not just a massive failure of the collective imagination to reach beyond those inherited structures in the first place? If we see the internet as an endeavour of the general intellect to break out of the limits of social and cultural reproduction put upon us by capital – of intellectual property, privatisation of knowledge and culture etc – this tendency represents the recolonisation of those infinite territories by consumer forms. Post-internet art is in danger of presenting itself as a tool of limitations, a rappel a l’ordre, a call to return to the traditional forms of cultural and artistic production that characterised the post-modern era, rather than a creative form worthy of critically engaging with the platform and people who created it.

Huw Lemmey is a writer and artist based in London. He works in marketing for Verso Books. He writes online under the name Spitzenprodukte.

^{^[1]} Two good examples of this tendency are Recreational Data’s Currency Zones of the Future and Deterritorial Support Group’s Ten Growth Markets for Crisis.

^{^[2]} Perhaps these can be seen as a counterpoint to “design fiction”as imagined by Bruce Sterling; however, Sterling’s genre can be seen as a way to creatively map out potential future technologies rather than as a way to cope with and understand the implications of contemporary technology.

^{^[3]} Overheard in the Limazulu kitchen

^{^[4]} http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFNhWOT9hTg

Artist Profile: Paul Kneale

Harry Burke — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 11:30:33 -0500

This interview is being conducted on a Google doc. I’ve seen your Drive; you use it regularly and with a certain energy. Further, there’s an underlying aesthetic reminiscent of SketchUp in your work. How important are these technologies within your practice? Would it be wrong to make a separation between your art practice and the organisation of your life?

First of all, I don’t feel like I make a clean division between technology and not-technology. I think the political reality of today is that we are all subjects of a blended Capital/Information management system, where all of our activity and production becomes a form of power that is transferred to the systems it is deployed within. I was born by caesarean section in a high-tech operating room, and if I walk down the street to sit in the park there’s a subway under my feet, CCTV cameras along the way and scores of planes overhead, so I think it’s a dangerous false dichotomy. To that extent, being knowingly involved with these technologies and articulating that in artworks is a kind of Thanatos. This also leads on to the realization that the traces of this contemporary Thanatos have a new material texture. Something I labeled before as the ‘New Abject’. This isn’t an abject of shit and blood and dirt, that one finds throughout art history in things ranging from Dutch still life to Mike Kelley sculptures, but rather a psychological abject that is in relation to these control technologies and capital systems. To that extent I think the texture of freeware such as Google Drive is one expression of this New Abject. Its pared down, limited range of operating choices reminds you of your subjugation to the provider, normalizing their possession of your activities within, in exchange for the convenience of the free service. If I make an image PDF with Google Drive it’s never going to be as slick as with expensive dedicated publishing software. The layout options are less flexible, and the image quality is limited. So there’s a kind of shitiness that isn’t dirty, it's still a binary affair, but it vaguely expresses these political and subject-relations. I think the aesthetics of this relation are interesting because they display a shift in commodity fetishism. The productive labor-relations behind an object can still be literally concealed, but there are sign systems we are now able to read that desublimate them. In thermodynamics desublimation is when a substance passes from a gas directly to a solid, without becoming a liquid, as in snow forming from water vapor in clouds. I think this is a metaphor that feels right for me to describe the way that these formerly gaseous relations are all of a sudden laying around in piles on the ground. Maybe it makes good sense to pack them into a projectile.

Thinking of projectiles, and thinking of where you project them, maybe we can talk about site specificity. In particular there’s an attention to location in your work; you’ve appropriated the old name sign of the ex-library you live in and turned its letters into sort of fettered sculptures - molding Rotherhithe into Roma. Paul Virilio talks of the shrinking of the world through technology in terms of speed and terror, but maybe this is a reductive way of thinking about it. Are you a nomad? A cyber-real airport flaneur? (Is it interesting to talk about issues of gentrification, globalization and networks, at this point? They’re very real problems that hurt people as much as they help them.)

A year or two ago I sent Nicolas Bourriaud a Facebook friend request -- I have a screenshot of the confirmation -- that at the time struck me as light-hearted joke about his relational philosophies on art. I occasionally still check us in somewhere together, like the Shoreditch Boxpark, and a little while back he even responded saying he didn’t remember being there with me! I think this tenuous level ‘relation’ is the kind of discourse that people found problematic in his theories, even though he was absolutely prescient in identifying that artists had shifted their orientation toward production in line with changes that were happening more generally in global economic patterns and cybernetics. So I think this period of romanticizing the airport dweller is a 90’s or early 2000’s thing for me. I think it reflects a utopianism that was burst in a few different bubbles since then. I definitely spend too much time in airports, but I think what interests me is the bus or train ride to get there rather than the symbolic aspect of the place in general. For example a week or two ago I had to go to a small city in France, and the airport is miles outside the center with only a city bus connecting it if you don’t want to pay for a taxi. As soon as you got outside of the airport the area had this completely unexpected American feeling to it. Big box stores and motels right next to the highway. I started taking photos on my phone out the window of the bus and realized that they looked exactly like google streetview. I must have been at just the height of the their elevated camera. So I was having this experience where I was hyper-aware of my physical place -- trying to kind of visually process a new landscape -- but the results of that processing just looked like I was in front of my computer again. So I find this kind of thing really interesting as well -- places becoming specific or unspecific, sometimes both at once! The Rotherhithe-Roma piece and the others in the same vein (Rotherhithe-NYC, etc.) came from this feeling of understanding your political and spatial existence in a place. Our London studio is in a vacant library in a central area that has so far avoided gentrification, and we are that first wave. I feel conflicted but not necessarily badly about it, as we run a project space whose shows are free and open to the public; people teach classes and do various events here -- and the many people who pass through are great customers of the liquor store and pizzeria on the street. So it’s not like we’re property developers forcing people to sell so we can build a new condo. But of course we do represent that tipping point where the neighborhood starts to slope toward the generic spaces of every major western city. So I think those sculptures were involved in this transition point that I am a part of. Hiring some workers with a lift truck to remove them and fabricating them into these self-consciously glamorous mobiles. Whether they celebrate or mourn this tipping point is ambiguous for me because I’m more concerned with the event itself and how that might become legible in a concentrated form like a sculpture.

How important was it to situate yourself in London, therefore?

I think London’s iconography is really interesting because it’s so removed from the experience of the city. In places like New York or Paris you always have the feeling that you’re participating in the filmic experience of the place you have logged in your memory. London’s pop images feel like a flaky concession to that. The experience you actually have is somehow almost characterless. Pure economy. I think the extreme expense of living also has two important effects. Firstly it means that people have smaller studios and less money for materials, so they are economically drawn to projects that can utilize things they probably already have, like computers. Secondly and for the same reasons of space, when people do get together they usually do it somewhere public -- in bars or galleries rather than people’s houses, so there’s a kind of public character to interpersonal relations, which somehow feels coextensive of networked relations. I really like London because it’s so difficult, but doesn't really offer any models for how you should deal with that. It forces you to keep it real, invent your own.

I feel also you have a relationship with older types of media - Gutenberg media - particularly present in your wall prints. We can of course trace the Internet of today as having emerged from these technologies, although the web may also prove to be a rupture as significant as mechanical movable type in the 1400s. Can you explain more about the use of this aesthetic in your work?

That’s an interesting question because I was watching this video with Jaron Lanier where he plays a 7000 year old instrument from Laos that he describes as being the forerunner to the computer via its relation to the steam driven pipe organ and the Jacquard Loom, which was an important advancement in what came to be known as programming. Anyways, the instrument still makes noise, in fact, it sounds like a traffic jam from the period where people still honked their horns to express frustration in gridlock. I think a lot of what gets labeled as ‘post-internet’ art isn’t actually ‘post’ at all because it deals hyper-specifically with the textures and experiences local to network experiences, especially the logics and experiences of screens, types of exchanges that happen in this environment etc. But I think that it’s more like ‘high’ Internet rather than ‘post’ Internet. If you think of ‘high modernism’ it’s exactly that painting which was completely absorbed in the aesthetics of its own highly specific debate. And if you really think about it, the screen and canvas share virtually all of the same properties. 2D space that can have an illusionistic quality. Messages conveyed through either depictions that mimic binocular vision or shared symbol systems. Everything that happens on your computer screen is already a painting, if not a fancy one. I think for me, being ‘post’ this technology has more to do with understanding your political subjectivity and mental space as being conditioned by this experience, and taking that conditioning back toward the question of ‘how do you make art?’ It’s not really that interesting to just repeat a paradigm’s surface effects.

More specifically to those pieces you mentioned, they are maybe an illustration of this intersection between an ability and a conditioning from technology on one hand, and a material experience on the other. I travel a lot and newspapers still exist in lots of places. I mean, half the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day, which means they don’t have iPhones, so I think there are some old things, like printed media and bread, for example, that are still contemporary things in the literal sense: ‘with time’. They’re with time because in a simple Marxist sense they have a use value. As another example, I found out through looking for one that its actually really expensive to buy a used photocopier in London because dealers pick them up and resell them in Africa where there’s a huge market and need for basic outputs of documents etc. as bureaucratic cities are developing.

I see that there are all kinds of methods of showing, encoding and transmitting, and all of them have material supports. Whether that’s a nuclear power station that feeds electricity to a data center in the US, or a contemporary offset printing press that can produce 70,000 copies an hour. A big part of my work involves language, and as language always has a material aspect that is indivisible from its meaning, these different material supports present different possibilities of working. If I’ve got a newspaper I can cut it up and work with it just about anywhere. You can usually get a pair of scissors, a gluestick and some paper for a few dollars. If the newspaper is in a language I don’t understand, I’ll use the google translate app on my phone to figure out one bit at a time, which also allows you to come to structures that might be outside of your normal grammatical and logical language patterns. I’ll look for words that seem interesting and then try and string them together with the translator. So it's a very hybrid process: on one hand there’s the kind of surfing through the newspaper format, and on the other using the technology to help me make non-sense of it. Which I think ends up incorporating the site of production without excluding the network relation that’s always there now.

I really want to talk about poetry. Maybe a key relationship in your work is that between poetry and LOL. Can you say something about this?

Poetry for me is the broken condition of language that manages to keep going despite being broken, perhaps by using the broken parts for something else -- a kind of repurposing. And also a liminal activity that presupposes an agreement -- that the author and the reader collectively produce meaning, but that this collective production might not be useful, have a particular point, and in that way undermine the agreement that makes it possible. LOL, if it’s a thing at all, is maybe a similar kind of gerrymandering between agreement, performativity and the empty center. I think maybe the added dimension with LOL or maybe even better lulz is a little bit of schadenfreude. It’s the enjoyment of creating a disruption, or simply uncovering one that was already there. Panic can be productive insofar as it forces an identification outside of the obvious systems one exists in. When a normally law abiding character in a film is being chased, they’ll generally run through backyards, even other people’s houses -- they’re not thinking about the property rights that frame that activity under the law as ‘trespassing’.

Age: 26

Location: London

How long have you been working creatively with technology? How did you start?

As long as I’ve been doing anything creatively. It probably started with a Commodore 64 Dot Matrix printer my dad would let me mess around with when I was basically a baby, and moved on to making in-the-can edited videos for all my class assignments with all my friends. I realized early on that doing something ‘creative’ meant you could make up your own rules about how it was done, and if there was a device involved that the teacher didn't quite have a grip on, even better.

Describe your experience with the tools you use. How did you start using them?

I basically use whatever makes sense for an idea, or conversely sometimes an idea will come from a tool. I tend to like things that are at the low end of the spectrum because I think they have a more visible history of relations in the surfaces and aesthetics they produce. HD always just looks expensive, but a cheap laser printer or badly compressed video articulates the level of access that one has more generally. I also expropriate things into my work, so I suppose the tools that someone else may have used become visible and part of a dialogue there as well.

Where did you go to school? What did you study?

I did a BA at the University of Toronto where I studied Physics, Philosophy, Literature and Art -- all in different departments, and then I did an MFA at Slade School of Fine Art in London, which was just art.

What traditional media do you use, if any? Do you think your work with traditional media relates to your work with technology?

I don’t really make that distinction. I think it’s all technology and all tradition all at the same time. Technology is loaded with tradition. I’ve yet to see a consumer digital camera that doesn’t make an image that replicates how your eyes work.

What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously? Do you think this work relates to your art practice in a significant way?

Now I’m just an artist, and I don’t think of it as work. But in the past I’ve had a lot of terrible jobs, none of which I could ever keep for very long since I’m no good at pretending that I liked them. I’ve washed dishes in a restaurant, driven a transport truck, been a night security guard, stocked shelves overnight in a supermarket, construction work, bartender. The nice thing about a shitty job is that you can keep your mental space. I remember when I washed dishes in a restaurant I was stuck in this small back room and I would just play really intense heavy metal so no one tried to make small talk with me, and if the dishes were all washed, no one cared that I was back there writing notes on kitchen-paper. I like to do things intermittently over long periods, so I think the best jobs were the ones that accommodated that. I think it all influences my way of looking at the world, and through that, my art practice. It’s good to know all different kinds of people too.

Who are your key artistic influences?

I look at a lot of art, mostly because I really love it, but I would say the people who really influence me the most are my friends. I think one of the great things about art is that you can get together with some people and redefine things, because on a certain level that’s how works are validated and come to visibility. I think it’s really important to make your own scene. A lot of historical artists I’m not friends with who I admire have been really good at that.

Have you collaborated with anyone in the art community on a project? With whom, and on what?

Yes! Collaboration is great because you get to share the energy of someone else’s ideas. But I don’t see it as some escape from all the issues of ego, more like a magnification of it really. So I collaborate with people all the time. My favorite collaboration would have to be a film I made with my partner Megan Rooney a few years ago when we were still living in Toronto. We both have these yahoo.com email address we made when we were teenagers so checking your mail involved going to the Yahoo homepage all the time. They had this newsfeed embedded in the page that was really notorious for it’s junk news mixed in with issues of real concern. You’d always have a terrible headline about a car bomb in Iraq directly under something about Britney having a meltdown, for example. So one day there was like a 400 word article about a glass-floor walkway that had been built out over the edge of the Grand Canyon in Arizona, and somehow we decided that this article should compel us to go investigate it. No further research, no real plan -- just use this garbage blurb and architectural rendering image as the impetus for a big undertaking. Something about trying to discover what depth of reality could possibly be in this trashy article. So we fleeced everyone for money to buy a video camera and borrowed a car and basically drove across the continent and back, about 10,000 km in total. We ended up running out of money of course and eating way too much Taco Bell, nearly getting robbed sleeping in a tent by the highway one night, scoring a free hotel in Las Vegas, etc. In the end we made and showed a 2+ hour, 2-channel film that was a fairly unwatchable, deep meditation about the relation between the glass-floor construction and this replica of a Hulapai Indian building that was in another section of the canyon. We always say that we should recut it, because there was really so much footage from the whole trip, but maybe it’s better as something left unfinished in a way.

Do you read art criticism, philosophy, or critical theory? If so, which authors inspire you?

Well, I studied Philosophy, Literature, and Art History and I still love to read. I think what I really like in some ideas-oriented texts is when the author is clearly trying to understand the world around them in a complex and situational way -- their perceiving self, wrapped up in political-economic systems, social histories, and entertainment technologies. I think what’s great about this approach is that it has to constantly be renewed by every generation. I’m also really interested in texts on Language. And at night I read fiction and poetry, and I also really enjoy what a lot of people are doing with short writing on Twitter. That’s a format I’ve been experimenting with for a few years now.

A Queer History of Computing: Part Two

Jacob Gaboury — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 11:37:07 -0500

In this second part of our genealogy, we move not forward in time, but look back to an encounter that took place between two foundational figures in logic and mathematics, in an attempt to identify the conflicting role of contradiction, misunderstanding, failure, and disagreement in the queer history of computation. While again these figures are well known, the encounter between them is often dismissed as a missed connection and a failed opportunity. As such, it is often relegated to an uninteresting footnote in the history of mathematics. By reengaging this encounter I hope to blur the lines between computing, philosophy, and mathematics, and to disrupt the narrative trajectory that would see Turing as the single foundational figure within this history.

An Encounter

In the spring of 1939, Ludwig Wittgenstein taught a course at the University of Cambridge on the foundations of mathematics, a topic that occupied much of his work from 1922 through to the end of the Second World War. That same semester Wittgenstein was finally elected chair of philosophy at the university, acquiring British citizenship soon thereafter. At fifty years old, he was an established figure in analytic philosophy, having published his groundbreaking Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus almost twenty years prior, and having written extensively on the work of Gödel, Russell, and Whitehead. While Wittgenstein is considered by many to be the most important philosopher of the 20^th century, he published very little in his lifetime, and much of his thought and character can only be derived from what survives of his lectures, notes, and seminars. Still less is known of his sexuality, and until the 1980s it was a subject rarely discussed among colleagues or in the many biographies written about his life and work.[i] Even now that Wittgenstein's homosexuality has been largely acknowledged, most scholars are hesitant to imply a connection between his philosophy and his sexuality – that is, between his work and his inner state, emotions, or personality. If, however, in a contemporary light we understand queerness as a structuring mode of desiring, we might view Wittgenstein's thought not as emerging from his sexuality, but as structured by the way in which it shaped his mode of being in the world.

Wittgenstein with Francis Skinner in Cambridge ca. 1933

Wittgenstein is widely regarded to have fallen in love with three men; David Pinset[ii] in 1912, Francis Skinner in 1930, and Ben Richards in the late 1940s.[iii] While it is clear these were relationships of love and affection, the extent to which they were physical is often contested. What seems to make many Wittgenstein scholars uncomfortable in confronting his homosexuality is that it conflicts with the ascetic, almost priestly view of a man so revered by contemporary philosophy. As Bruce Duffy suggests in a 1988 New York Times article on the life of Wittgenstein, "In their effort to put forth a plain, unvarnished record of what Wittgenstein did and said, some of these memoirs have almost the feeling of gospels – hushed, reverential, proprietary."[iv] The philosopher – or indeed, the mathematician – as a carnal, sexual being produces a seemingly irresolvable contradiction. Even those accounts that do concede his affection for other men often suggest that those feelings were purely aesthetic or emotional, and were never acted upon. That said, in perhaps the most controversial section of his 1973 biography of Wittgenstein, W. W. Bartley suggests that the philosopher frequently engaged in a kind of anonymous cross-class sexual contact facilitated by public cruising spaces such as parks and high streets.

By walking for ten minutes to the east . . . he could quickly reach the parkland meadows of the Prater, where rough young men were ready to cater to him sexually. Once he had discovered this place, Wittgenstein found to his horror that he could scarcely keep away from it . . . Wittgenstein found he much preferred the sort of rough blunt homosexual youth that he could find strolling in the paths and alleys of the Prater to those ostensibly more refined young men who frequented the Sirk Ecke in the Kärntnerstrasse and the neighboring bars at the edge of the inner city.[v]

These kinds of exceptional spaces as sites for anonymous sexual encounters continue well into the 20^th century, and are instrumental in the structure of being and interaction that the author Samuel Delany identifies as contact:

[C]ontact is also the intercourse—physical and conversational—that blooms in and as “casual sex” in public rest rooms, sex movies, public parks, singles bars, and sex clubs, on street corners with heavy hustling traffic, and in the adjoining motels or the apartments of one or another participant, from which nonsexual friendships and/or acquaintances lasting for decades or a lifetime may spring . . . a relation that, a decade later, has devolved into a smile or a nod, even when (to quote Swinburne) 'You have forgotten my kisses, / And I have forgotten your name.'[vi]

Bartley's sources have been called into question by many historians, but it is less the detail of his description than the acknowledgement of an embodied sexuality that is significant to this history; it is the difficulty we often have in finding the sexual in the everyday, in the lived work of a person beyond these exceptional moments of contact. While such effects may be invisible or to a degree, unknowable, that does not mean they aren't real and do not have a direct effect on the world.

The Prater park in Vienna

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein defines truth as a tautology, that is, a result achieved through the mere repetition of the same meaning. While he insists that there exist religious or ethical truths, he argues that they cannot be put into words, that they are unknowable through language, and that claims to express ethical truths through philosophy must fail. Wittgenstein summarizes the Tractatus with the maxim: “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.”[vii] What does it mean that for Wittgenstein truth is something that can be known but not discussed, that is indescribable? And how does he apply this critique to truths we understand to be beyond language – the truth of the body, or the truth of mathematics?

Missed Connections

Back at Cambridge in 1939, another young scholar and philosopher was also beginning his research at the university. After two years working under Alonso Church at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, Alan Turing took up a position as an untenured research fellow at Cambridge, having failed to acquire a full lectureship. Turing and Wittgenstein had been introduced the summer of 1937, but it was not until two years later in 1939 that they would have any meaningful interaction. That spring Turing was also teaching a course on the foundations of mathematics that shared the same name as Wittgenstein's lecture.[viii] Perhaps intrigued, Turing enrolled. Over the course of the semester, Turing engaged in a lengthy dialogue with Wittgenstein, challenging and outright refusing much of Wittgenstein's thoughts on logic and mathematics.[ix] Despite their disagreement, this seems a pivotal moment in the history of computing, in which two queer figures engage with the limits of knowledge and computability, questioning that which exists outside of or beyond.

As a young man, Wittgenstein had thought logic could provide a solid foundation for a philosophy of mathematics. Now in his fifties, he denied outright there were any mathematical facts to be discovered. For Wittgenstein, a proof in mathematics does not establish the truth of a conclusion, but rather fixes the meaning of certain signs. That is, the "inexorability" of mathematics does not consist of certain knowledge of mathematical truths, but in the fact that mathematical propositions are grammatical, a kind of language game through which meaning becomes fixed. One the first day of class, Wittgenstein begins by stating, "I shall try and try again to show that what is called a mathematical discovery had much better be called a mathematical invention."[x]

The Erkenntnis from the Königsberg Congress of 1930

Throughout the semester, Wittgenstein attempts to demonstrate that, if we may identify a single contradiction within a system such as mathematics, it ceases to function and loses all meaning. In one particularly memorable exchange, Wittgenstein puts forth one of his favorite contradictions – known as Epimenides' paradox, or the liar's paradox – in which I make the claim "I am lying," thereby creating a paradox in which if I am lying I am telling the truth, and if I am not lying I am telling a lie. Such an example may seem like nothing more than a silly logic puzzle, but it is significant that they produce a paradox that cannot be made meaningful to mathematics, and that these contradictions exist outside of any functional or productive applications. This, of course, is an affront to the very practice of mathematical logic. As Andrew Hodges notes, "Getting statements free from contradictions is the very essence of mathematics. Turing perhaps thought Wittgenstein did not take seriously enough the unobvious and difficult questions that had arisen in the attempt to formalize mathematics; Wittgenstein thought Turing did not take seriously the question of why one should want to formalize mathematics at all."[xi]

Wittgenstein uses Turing as a straw man of sorts, tasked with defending the philosophical validity of mathematics as a whole. Over the course of the two-term seminar, one can't help but get the sense that the two men are speaking past one another; that their concerns and interests diverge on a fundamental level. On the whole, Turing argues for a rather conservative approach to mathematics and its use in material applications. Surely, Turing argues, mathematics must be more than language games, as it enables us to build bridges that do not fall down, and to calculate with great precision measurable truths in the world. Yet despite his philosophical refusal, Turing's own work and research during the three years prior to the lectures touches on many of the same themes Wittgenstein was pursuing in his lectures, and addresses those invisible or unknowable truths that escape mathematical calculation through computation. While the two are clearly are at odds over their importance, both are nonetheless explicitly preoccupied with these externalities, these meaningless contradictions.

Turing's most famous work on this subject is On Computable Numbers, published in 1936, in which he establishes the definition of computable numbers as "the real numbers whose expressions as a decimal are calculable by finite means," stating that "a number is computable if its decimal can be written down by a machine." Turing expands his thesis, proving that his formalism was sufficiently general to encompass anything that a human being could do when carrying out a definite method. Importantly, Turing also established in this work the limits of computation, identifying the existence of uncomputable problems that cannot be solved through a definite method.[xii] The most famous such problem is the halting problem, in which an algorithm is built to calculate whether a given program will halt and produce a solution, or run forever. If such a program were to exist, we might in turn apply it back onto itself, asking it to find if it will ever halt, and in doing so creating a paradox not dissimilar to that of the liar.

More interesting to this project, however, is a supplementary paper published in 1939, titled Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals, in which Turing asks if it is possible to formalize those actions of the mind that do not follow a definite method — mental actions we might call creative or original in nature. There exist certain sets of uncomputable problems which are functionally solvable by human means, but for which there is no definite method for calculating an answer. Here Turing suggests the impossibility of accounting for this intuitive action through computation, stating:

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the combination of two faculties, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgments which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning.[xiii]

It is unclear how such intuition functions, or how to understand and successfully implement it, but Turing's biographer Andrew Hodges suggests that "the evidence is that at this time [Turing] was open to the idea that in moments of 'intuition' the mind appears to do something outside the scope of the Turing machine." That is, outside of computation as Turing has defined it.[xiv]

Outside

How then to bring together these two moments of the founding and formalization of computing? In one we have the refusal of the truth mathematics would hope to claim and an investigation of those contradictions that exist within, but are beyond the scope of logical inquiry. In the other there is an investigation of those exceptional sites and the suggestion that there is a process that exists beyond computation that nonetheless allows us to make truthful claims about the world. Two views on the same problem, and a seemingly impassible philosophical divide.

For most historians of mathematics and technology, this encounter is viewed as a failure of recognition, and of the inability of Turing and Wittgenstein to reach across and make contact with one another on these fundamental questions. Much as it is unclear what one may have known about the other's sexuality, or if such similarities were even legible as a form of community or even commonality, there seems here to be a misrecognition, a failure to connect. And yet I would like to suggest that this is precisely the point, that this is precisely what makes this a queer encounter. It is the impossibility of narrativizing this encounter in legible terms, and the way in which this impossibility mirrors the indescribable, external truths that so preoccupied the minds of both men, that unites them. It is in these exceptional spaces outside of formally describable systems – binary code, language, mathematics – that we may identify a queerness at work.

In choosing this, perhaps the earliest moment at which such an inquiry is made possible, it seems meaningful that such questions are being posed by two queer men who met only briefly and, perhaps appropriately, were unable to come to an agreement, or to even understand the questions the other sought to answer. And yet each man's work seeks to investigate the limits of a particular system of knowledge that functions by delimiting the analog world through the construction of a hermetic system; one that rejects those externalities that might otherwise cause it to fail. If we consider queerness simply in terms of sexual preference or as an alternative formation within an established set of desiring modes, then describing any form of computing as "queer" may seem absurd. If instead we understand queerness as a process of self-shattering rather than self-fashioning, then we begin to align it with these exceptional objects and practices that exist beyond the limits of a system such as computation. While it is no doubt true that queerness is not the only means by which we might ask these questions of technology, or through which we might seek an alternative to the universalizing structures of computing technology, it is my suggestion that is an ideal lens through which to examine that which exists outside or beyond, and one that begins here in these earliest moments in the history of computation.

[i] W. W. Bartley III's Wittgenstein (1973) devotes 4-5 pages to the philosopher's sexuality, based on interviews conducted in the 1960s and translations of Wittgenstein's own encrypted journals – many of which were destroyed at his own insistence in 1950, a year before his death. Based on these passages the book was attacked vehemently and repeatedly by Wittgenstein's family and colleagues, in the pages of the New York Times Literary Supplement, and at the annual Wittgenstein Congress at the Wittgenstein Documentation Center in Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria. The book was called sensationalist and false despite the availability of multiple documents corroborating Wittgenstein conflicted feeling towards his sexuality.

[ii] David Hume Pinset was a descendent of the philosopher David Hume, and was a friend and colleague to Wittgenstein, collaborating on research and traveling on holidays with him to Iceland and Norway. In 1918 Pinset was killed in a military flying accident, and Wittgenstein would later dedicate his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) to his memory.

[iii] Monk, Ray. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. Free Press, 1990, pp. 583–586.

[iv] Duffy, Bruce. "The Do-it-Yourself Life of Ludwig Wittgenstein" The New York Times November 13, 1988. <http://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/13/books/the-do-it-yourself-life-of-ludwig-wittgenstein.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm>.

[v] Bartley: Wittgenstein, p. 47.

[vi] Delany, Samuel. Times Square Red Times Square Blue. New York: NYU Press, 2001 p. 123-124.

[vii] Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. New York: Routledge, 1921-2001, p. 3.

[viii] Diamond, Cora (ed.) Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics: Cambridge, 1939 Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976.

[ix] These encounters have been collected and recorded based on the notes of four students who attended the lecture, and were subsequently edited and published. As such they form an imperfect, but essential archive.

[x] Diamond, Ibid. 416.

[xi] Hodges, Andrew. "Alan Turing: One of the Great Philosophers" Web. <http://www.turing.org.uk/philosophy/ex4.html>.

[xii] Turing's work on uncomputability does not emerge from nowhere. It is informed by several decades of debate in the early history of mathematics – what is often referred to as the foundational crisis of mathematics, or Grundlagenkrise der Mathematik – over the question of whether mathematics had any foundation that could be stated within mathematics itself without suffering from irresolvable paradoxes. This led to competing schools of thought, the most important of which was Hilbert's program, named after the German mathematician David Hilbert. The program proposed to ground all existing theories to a finite, complete set of axioms, and provide a proof that these axioms were consistent. However, in 1931 Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems showed that any consistent system with a computable set of axioms which is capable of expressing arithmetic can never be complete, that it is possible to prove a statement to be true that cannot be derived from the formal rules of the system. Turing would take Gödel's work further, applying this theorem to the concept of computability, defined as that which can be stated within a formal system and may therefore be executed by a machine with a procedural grasp of computational logic.

[xiii] This train of thought belongs to a field in the philosophy of mathematics known as "intuitionism."

[xiv] To be clear, these externalities and paradoxes are not simply language games, but can be applied to real world problems as well. One famous example is that of Zeno's paradoxes, formulated by the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea (ca. 490-430 BCE). In Zeno's dichotomy paradox, he states that "locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal" (Aristotle, Physics VI:9, 239b10). In other words, if any possible finite distance may be divided in half, then in order to reach a given goal, a moving object must first get halfway there. Before it can get halfway there, it must get a quarter of the way there, before traveling a quarter it must travel one-eighth, and so on. The resulting solution requires the object to complete an infinite number of tasks, which Zeno maintains is an impossibility – yet clearly in the observable world objects move from location to location and arrive at their destination despite this contradiction. The same limits exist for computation, and have led to a hypothetical computational models that allow for a countably infinite number of algorithmic steps to be completed in finite time. The resulting hypothetical computer is often referred to as a Zeno machine, and is an example of a super-Turing machine – that is, a computer that functions beyond universal Turing computation. It is interesting to note that Zeno, like many Greek men, participated in homosexual erastes-eromenos mentor relationships, and was loved and mentored by Parmenides of Elea, the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy.