In connection with the exhibition Controlling_Connectivity by Gretta Louw and the series Time and Technology Art Laboratory Berlin is presenting an artists’ talk on the theme current art practices on time and technology featuring Gretta Louw and plan b (Sophia New & Daniel Belasco Rogers) as well as the internet artist Igor Štromajer. The talk will be introduced and moderated by Christian de Lutz.

Controlling_ Connectivity a performance and exhibition by Gretta Louw researches the pervasiveness of internet-based social networking, as well as the obligation and opportunity for constant connection with these platforms as a paradigm for a severe and systematic disruption of normal, socially accepted patterns of life and interpersonal interaction during a self-documented performance. In her work Louw seeks to explore to what extent an extreme use of the Internet and our belief in the online connectivity can have psychological consequences. Her inquiry questions self-censorship and socially acceptable forms of behavior in the face of the constant pressure put in place by society’s inexorable increasing need for connectivity

Her 10-day online performance (November 2-12, 2011) has laid the basis for an exhibition which includes screen capture footage, photographs and an installation. The exhibition runs until 15 January, 2012.

Since 2007 the British artist duo plan b (Sophia New and Daniel Belasco Rogers) have been investigating the archiving of every journey they make using GPS. For a similar amount of time they have collected every SMS text message they have sent each other. For a year each has reported their mood three times a day. These archives are then evaluated and processed artistically, the outcomes of which are videos, objects, works on paper and performances reflecting and manifesting this intimate data.

Their first German solo exhibition Navigating the Everyday will open at Art Laboratory Berlin on 27 January, 2012 at 8PM as part of the current Time and Technology series in conjunction with the Transmediale program Vorspiel.

More information at here
and here.

Concept:: Technology can no longer be understood as an alterity (otherness) that stands in opposition to biological and social relationships. Going about our regular practices of everyday living we inhabit complex technological spheres of life that require a different, a more ‘ecological’ understanding of our relationship to technology. In analogy to the ‘deep ecology’ movement, philosopher David Rottenberg recently suggested that the notion of ‘deep technology’ relates user and context in an ecological, symbiotic way [1]. Similarly, the idea of ‘inhabiting’ technological ecologies emphasises our connectedness to our environment (material, natural, technological) and our dependence on the resources available in that environment (material, energetic, biological, cultural). Mastering these conditions, which necessarily transcend the personal experience, is vital to our survival on this planet.

The concept of technological ecologies as spheres of life invites a more careful consideration of the relationships between the natural and the artificial - or even the collapse of the boundaries between them - in favour of looking at such techno-ecologies as complex assemblages, comparable to how for instance philosopher Bruno Latour treats them. Our perspective should, however, not be limited to these technological ‘actors’. In The Three Ecologies (1989) Felix Guattari expresses his worries about the intense techno-scientific transformations the Earth is undergoing. Guattari observes an ecological disequilibrium generated by these transformations, which leads to a general reduction of human and social relationships and the sustainability of the living environment.

According to Guattari it is the relationship between subjectivity and its exteriority - be it social, animal, vegetable or cosmic - that is compromised, in a sort of general movement of ‘implosion’. He warns against a merely partial realisation of the severity of these changes and inadequate responses that may come from a purely technocratic perspective. It is the ways of living on this planet that are in question, according to Guattari, in the context of the acceleration of techno-scientific mutations and exponential demographic growth. Only an ‘ethico-political’ articulation ‘between’ the three ecological registers that he identifies - the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity - would be able to clarify these questions.

The paradox is that these techno scientific transformations are both the source of the current ecological disequilibrium, and even so the only realistic means to address and potentially resolve the problems they create. Somehow, however, we cannot seem to make them work.

Siegfried Zielinski has pointed out that one important fallacy to overcome is to view the course of technological development as ‘progress’, or to consider our current state of technological sophistication as the best possible and necessary outcome of a predictable historical trajectory. In his ‘Variantology’ project Zielinski makes a radical break with any idea of technological progress or determinism [2]. The Variantological approach emphasises that at any point technological development (and human development along with it) is contingent (it can go anywhere). Variantology does not look for ‘master media’ or ‘imperative vanishing points’. Instead it seeks out the moments of greatest possible diversity and individual variation. It operates in carefully chosen periods of particularly intensive and necessary work on the media,# across different cultural and physical geographies - exploring the ‘deep time relationships of the arts, sciences and technologies’.

Finally, an exploration of inhabitable technological ecologies needs to take into account the phantasmatic dimension of technological apparatuses and systems. Such a more psychographic understanding of the depth of technology aims to uncover hidden, or not immediately visible or discernible psychological layers attached to the technological apparatuses - perhaps we might refer to this as a ‘technological unconscious’ - that underpin human experience and our subjective ties with technological environments. It considers technology not only as an extension of the body but also as an extension of our deepest desires. It explores the void between the ‘real’ and that what is mediated by systems of language, media, and technology. It acknowledges the existence of a ‘third body’ (Klaus Theweleit) [3] that inserts itself between us and the (technological) objects. This third body only emerges in our interaction with these objects, but it is neither held by us nor by the objects alone.

Beyond questions of finite resources and obvious forms of pollution and environmental degradation, attempts to develop sustainable relationships with technology and our living environment should take into account far more complex layerings of the way we inhabit our current technological ecologies. Such a deeply informed ethical and philosophical perspective is indispensable if we hope to find less hazardous routes into the future.

Eric Kluitenberg, Amsterdam, June 6, 2011

Notes:

1 - www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.10/rothenberg.if.html
2 - http://entropie.digital.udk-berlin.de/wiki/Variantology
3 - www.debalie.nl/player/balieplayerpopper.jsp?movieid=93125&videofragmentsid=ank2

We welcome submissions — articles, conceptual and artistic texts, conference papers and visual contributions — from artists, theorists, designers, environmental scientists, technologists, activists and
other lateral thinkers who are engaged with issues of social and ecological sustainability, and who are interested in a deeper understanding of technology.

Length of texts: between 2500 and 8000 words (i.e. 20 000 - 45 000 characters). Submitted texts should include: 1) short abstract (ca. 250 words, i.e. 1500 characters), 2) 5 - 6 keywords, and 3) short bio of the author (ca. 100 words, i.e. 800 characters). References should be either in APA or Harvard style. Language for submissions: English (all texts will be translated into Latvian as well).

Please send abstracts and texts to the editors: Eric Kluitenberg (epk (at) xs4all.nl) and Rasa Smite (rasa (at) rixc.lv)

With the practices of art, science and technology increasingly converging, the concepts of origins and originality raise some of the most pressing questions in contemporary research, including issues of agency and accountability, hybridity and identity, intellectual property and oeuvre, intention and authority. These, and a constellation of related philosophical, economic, aesthetic, legislative and political concerns, are today subject to rapid reconfiguration due to the current pace of technological and theoretical change. Second Nature accordingly brings into a productive, interdisciplinary dialogue scholars working at the intersections of art, science and technology. Contributions explore how technologies of reproduction alter the meaning of concepts such as origin and originality, and how the borders between what we think of as “authentic” and “fake,” “natural” and “artificial,” are under constant negotiation and transformation. 
Interdisciplinary – and transdisciplinary – research demands rethinking our existing discursive and methodological orthodoxies. Second Nature arrives as a timely response, illuminating contemporary debates concerning digital and biological reproduction, nature and technology, art and authenticity, criticality and hybridity.


Five years ago, I installed an ant colony inside my old scanner that allowed me to scan in high definition this ever evolving microcosm (animal, vegetable and mineral). The resulting clip is a close-up examination of how these tiny beings live in this unique ant farm. I observed how decay and corrosion slowly but surely invaded the internal organs of the scanner. Nature gradually takes hold of this completely synthetic environment. The ants are still alive: the process will continue…

Part of the WORLD EXPO Shanghai 2010, presented by “OPEN THIS END”
music : Franks - Infected Mushroom.

In the wing mirror of the passenger side of a vehicle, objects are closer than they appear.

The texts re-published in the Rearview series are those that we wish to draw attention to perhaps because they reveal certain “blind spots” in contemporary art criticism. Each month, these “found” reviews (indeed, quasi-artifacts) will be prefaced by one of our writers.

After stumbling across Robert Smithson’s vituperative response to the 1966 Armory Show, I had to wonder what exactly it was that he saw. “Bovine formalism, tired painting, eccentric concentrics or numb structures”? His focus on the “funeral of technology” made me imagine that he’d seen a really bad Tinguely (which wouldn’t have surprised me) or maybe a bad Nam June Paik (which would). As it turns out, his ire was directed at a side-dish show at the Armory organized by Billy Klüver (an engineer) along with 10 artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Öyvind Fahlström, and Yvonne Rainer. Under the witty acronym E.A.T., the performances nonetheless pioneered the way for the now-common practice of artists collaborating with practitioners from different fields. For the most part, the result of bringing 30 engineers together with 10 artists yielded performance kitsch at its worst (John Cage’s recordings of brain waves being the exception). You can watch a condensed (20-minute) version of the “Nine Evenings” here. — April Lamm

Robert Smithson: An Esthetics of Disappointment on the Occasion of the Art and Technology Show at the Armory

Many are disappointed at the nullity of art. Many try to pump life or space into the confusion that surrounds art. An incurable optimism like a mad dog rushes into the vacuum that the art suggests. A dread of voids and blanks brings on a horrible anticipation. Everybody wonders what art is, because they’re never seems to be any around. Many feel coldly repulsed by concrete unrealities, and demand some kind of proof or at least a few facts. Facts seem to ease the disappointment. But quickly those facts are exhausted and fall to the bottom of the mind. This mental relapse is incessant and tends to make our esthetic view stale. Nothing is more faded than esthetics. As a result, painting, sculpture, and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues. The more transparent and vain the esthetic, the less chance there is for reverting back to purity. Purity is a desperate nostalgia, that exfoliates like a hideous need. Purity also suggests a need for the absolute with all its perpetual traps. Yet, we are overburdened with countless absolutes, and driven to inefficient habits. These futile and stupefying habits are thought to have meaning. Futility, one of the more durable things of this world is nearer to the artistic experience than excitement. Yet, the life-forcer is always around trying to incite a fake madness. The mind is important, but only when it is empty. The greater the emptiness the grander the art.

Esthetics have devolved into rare types of stupidity. Each kind of stupidity may be broken down into categories such as bovine formalism, tired painting, eccentric concentrics or numb structures. All these categories and many others all petrify into a vast banality called the art world which is no world. A nice negativism seems to be spawning. A sweet nihilism is everywhere. Immobility and inertia are what many of the most gifted artists prefer. Vacant at the center, dull at the edge, a few artists are on the true path of stultification. Muddleheaded logic is taking the place of clearheaded illogic, much to nobody’s surprise.

Art’s latest derangement at the 25th Armory seemed like The Funeral of Technology. Everything electrical and mechanical was buried under various esthetic mutations. The energy of technology was smothered and dimmed. Noise and static opened up the negative dimensions. The audience steeped in agitated stagnation, conditioned by simulated action, and generally turned on, were turned off. This at least was a victory for art. — Robert Smithson

Originally published in The Writings of Robert Smithson, edited by Nancy Holt, New York, New York University Press, 1979.

Text © Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

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Abstract: Could it be? Could it be that Deleuze’s most lasting legacy will lie in his “Postscript on Control Societies,” a mere 2,300 word essay from 1990? Such a strange little text, it bears not the same Deleuzean voice so familiar from his other writings. Cynics will grumble it falls short of the great books of ’68-’69 or the radical collaborations with Félix Guattari during the 1970s. In the “Postscript” he indicts capitalism by name. He raises his wrath against corporations and television shows. Yet his frame includes the culture at large, not just the mode of production. He talks about snakes and surfers and other features of the dawning millennium. He references such figures as Roberto Rossellini, Paul Virilio, Franz Kafka, and most importantly Michel Foucault. He tells us exactly what is wrong with the business sector, as well as with the prisons, schools, and hospitals. It reads almost like a manifesto, the “Manifesto on Control Societies.” In this talk we will investigate the last few years of Deleuze’s life, a period in which he elaborates, however faintly, an image of what it means to live in the information age.

Alex says: “i mention Paolo Virno in the opening minutes when i obviously meant to say Paul Virilio.”

This talk was made possible by the UMass Graduate School, the University Libraries, UMass Free Culture, and the Department of Communication.

Recorded by JC Sawyer, produced by Zach McDowell

We have just finished two and a half glorious days at the University of Michigan. Soon we at HASTAC Central will write a formal thank you blog to all the incredible planners, organizers, and participants of our fifth HASTAC Conference, Digital Scholarly Communications, sponsored by the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Kidder Residency in the Arts, and led by two of our HASTAC Steering Committee members, Danny Herwitz and Julie Thompson Klein. And many others. Incredible event.Incredible people.

Now some overview thinking, not just about the #hastac2011 but about what it all means at this point in HASTAC’s history:

In 2002, David Theo Goldberg and I left a formal meeting of humanists who were determined “to take a stand against technology” because we knew that kind of stand would be the death of humanism and the impoverishment of whatever is meant by “technology.” That luddite stance also didn’t jive with the multidisciplinary passions of the students we were seeing in our classrooms and the brilliant colleagues we knew in so many different fields who understood the revolutionary implications of new forms of interactive communication and interaction. In 2003, we gathered our first groups of scholars, at UCHRI, at NSF, and then at Stanford and Duke, and among our founding principles was the idea that we could take the practices and principles of open web developers, the collaborative methods through which the World Wide Web was created, and explore the ways that those principles and methods could transform higher education.

Some basic other parts of this include these aims: to rebalance intelligence for the interactive digital age with emphasis on collaboration, on interdisciplinary crosstalk (“collaboration by difference”); by remelding the two cultures of arts, humanities and social sciences on one side and technology and natural and computational sciences on the other; by erasing the distinction between theory and practice, thinking and making; to think about all research as public (in process as well as in final product) and shared and sharable; to use historical perspective and the archive to substitute either “techno-utopianism” or “techno-apocalypse” with “technopragmatism” and “technorealism” based on hands’ on practice not punditry (most punditry is based on what I call the “baseline of nostalgia” — an imagined past from which declension can be measured); to meld research with teaching, and teaching with perpetual learning; to re-examine pedagogy; to challenge contemporary modes of assessment; and to realize that professional seniority often does mean privilege but does not necessarily mean excellence.

That is why HASTAC is largely a network of networks, why membership simply requires signing into the website, and why we work very hard to instill the idea of productive creativity moving forward rather than critique of one another’s foibles as the best basis for the “critical thinking” that we all prize. From the beginning our three areas have been new media (building it, using it, modding it, thinking about it), critical thinking, and participatory learning. I personally do not believe you can have participator, connected interactive learning without a generous view of critical thinking, where one learns from mistakes — one does not strive to humiliate others for making them. To me, a practice based on flaming others for their failures is inherently conservative. It means that you set your own bar only at “higher than that last stupid guy’s bar” and that, to my mind, is way too low.

Here’s another part of that: calculated optimism. That is, if everything around you is a disaster, if the future only looks bleak, if there seems to be some devolution from some (mythical) past that was free of problems, easier, where everyone who went before you had a “pass,” made it in a simple way whereas you have to deal with catastrophe at every turn, then, well, why bother? The past is never as simple or easy as we think it was — either through imagination or memory. The baseline of nostalgia is more like quicksand … we get stuck there, unable to move. It is self-defeating and self-undermining. (NB: if you are a theorist and haven’t read Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, you should!)

I am very happy to say that, in paper after paper at HASTAC2011, I saw productive, collaborative, process-oriented, creative, imaginative, interdisciplinary, engaged, and critically optimistic thinking that began with its own goals and ideals as the high bar and didn’t waste a lot of time yapping about what some other random strawperson had done badly. The critical thinking was turned towards one’s own project, how to make it better, rich, full, and, well, critical.

I was mulling these thoughts when I went to Josh Greenberg’s excellent talk “Data, Code, and Research at Scale.” I’m going to take some of the basic insights from that talk and apply them to general and personal observations from my experience at #HASTAC2011. In this endeavor I am aided by the public notetaking of HASTAC Scholar Karen Petruska, from Georgia State, whose notes for all the keynotes are on the HASTAC site and are just brilliant. I have used hers to supplement my own. You can find them here. Some HASTAC Principles Going Forward (inspired by Josh’s talk and, needless to say, my own Now You See It ideas about how we got here and where we need to be going):

(1) Learning/research as Macroscope: “Telescopes let you see far, microscopes let you see small, now we are talking about a macroscope — that let’s you see big and complex.” One of HASTAC’s founding ideas is that, if individual achievement in highly specialized research on even more specialized topics as credentialed by a hierarchy of institutions is key to the Industrial Age project of task-oriented, quantifiable, measurable productivity, then what is key to our age? Learning as Macroscope is a good metaphor for the post-1993 Internet-inspired Information Age project of collaborative, self-publishable, collectively editable thinking that aims at thinking big and complex and developing better tools for that job. Over and over at #hastac2011 I heard talks that were doing exactly that.

(2) Code is Never Finished. Josh asked, “what if scholarship worked like code?” In code, there is version control, you release an idea time stamped and you can go back and revise it later. Code is always evolving. The whole point of the HTML that Tim Berners-Lee evolved for writing the World Wide Web is that it was open and anyone could contribute, including those he had never met whose credentials were unknown or located in their skill, not in their certification or degrees or reputations. A system grants its terms of access and anyone who meets that standard can then contribute. But everything you contribute has attribution, and what you contribute becomes your reputation — and your gateway to continued participation or denial of access. Version control: that means, in part, that if an editor is doing something that impedes the improving of the code, he or she might not be invited to edit in the future. In a loose way, that is exactly how we have structured HASTAC membership. You cannot contribute to the network, to the www.hastac.org website, without signing in, but once you sign in you can contribute as you wish, as long as you realize your contribution has attribution. You are responsible to the participatory community’s flourishing by your contribution. Trust is a key component of open web development, attribution is part of that trust.

(3) Ability to tell stories with data. In every field I know right now, the ability to make narratives, to tell stories of the massive amounts of data we now have access to is absolutely key. Collaboration by difference should be sending social scientists, computational scientists, and natural scientists into massive collaboration with humanists and artists right now — and vice versa — because it is almost impossible to be brilliant at story telling and brilliant at data mining all on your own. Macroscopic research is almost always collaborative and cross disciplinary because, despite our highly successful lifelong training as academics in, for, and by Industrial Age timed, item-response testing, reaching beyond those restrictive modes is the only way to succeed in the world we live in now. The ability to tell stories with data requires understanding where, how, why, and when that data is generated, to what purpose, and by what means. Very #hastac2011.

(4) Forking. In writing code together, sometimes there are crucial and key disagreements. You come to a fork in the code and one participant wants to go one way, one another. Forking allows you to mark the place of disagreement and get past it. You agree to follow one fork. If it isn’t working, if it isn’t giving you the macroscopic view, you can then go back to the fork, and try to pursue the other path. What is great about this method in open web development, is returning to the fork, having pursued the other one, almost always means that you disagree with your original position, and now pursue the opposite form but in a way that has been transformed by having followed the other path for a time. We do not have a built-in practice — yet — of forking scholarly discourse, but, in the many papers I heard, I was seeing this open web practice incorporated as an intellectual, collaborative practice.

(5) Building Better Tools Together. As Josh said, we do not yet have forms of scholarly communication that allow us to express collaborative differences and the divergent, forked modes of working out disagreement and profiting from it. We need better modes. Having written The Future of Thinking on an open Comment Press platform and having worked to create a potential Master’s in Knowledge Network on that platform, I am all to aware of its clumsy, frustrating, difficult, and clunky affordances — yet it is also helpful because it does allow line by line annotation by others without changing the original tesk and attribution is part of contribution. But we need better tools to serve our goals.

For now, #hastac2011 was the best possible “tool” for all these goals. I leave for the airport now, returning back to Durham, energized, inspired, grateful, engaged, and, well, fired up and ready to go again. THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR PARTICIPATION AND CONTRIBUTION.

And next time, Toronto: I can’t wait. Our first international conference. Hosted by Caitlin Fisher (York) and Maureen Engel (Alberta). It is going to be awesome. I can’t wait for our reunion, can’t wait to see you all there, and to meet others new to our HASTAC network. Sixteen months from now, in Toronto, April 25-28, 2013, HASTAC’s 10th Anniversary Celebration.

Internet Rising is a labor of love comprising a rapid fire mashup stream of live webcam interviews all conducted within the web sphere. The film’s participants include many profound personalities and key internet influencers ranging from professors, corporate academics, futurists, researchers, writers, bloggers, media creators, activists, gamers, educators, scientists, artists, innovators - real humans, all of whom provide amazing insights into how our state of the world is changing and transforming via various forces of economic, social, geographic, political, philosophical development… all centered around technology’s transformative and generative power.

The Centre for Internet and Society announces the launch of its Dialogue Cafe, where every month, we approach seminal thinkers, scholars and practitioners to help explore knowledge paradigms that help us understand and research techno-social realities through innovative thought, concepts and frameworks.

The Dialogue Cafe draws upon different disciplines, histories, perspectives and intellectual legacies in order to respond to a seminal piece of writing that has changed, challenged and shaped the contours of interdisciplinary science and technology studies.

The dialogue cafe initiates several strands of dialogues — between critical thinkers and canonical texts, between different paradigm of knowledges that interact with digital and internet technologies, and between interlocutors located in different disciplines, to initiate critical thought/work for new and innovative research in the field of Internet and Society.

For its first brew of conversations, the Dialogue Cafe serves you…

Computation and the Humanities: Revisiting a Silent Revolution

Steve Jobs’ comments on how “technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities” made Apple hearts sing is today widely re-circulated, but not fully comprehended. We often take this to be the mark of one man’s genius, rather than the symptom of a broader interdisciplinary history. Noted Artificial Intelligence scholar Philip Agre recalls, “When I was a graduate student in artificial intelligence, the humanities were not held in high regard. They were vague and woolly, they employed impenetrable jargons, and they engaged in “meta-level bickering that never decides anything”.

What happened, in the formative decades of Jobs and Agre’s generation, to bring technology and the humanities into conversation? What have the results been, other than well-designed personal computational devices, and what is the significance for us? The Centre for Internet and Society invites you to a Dialogue Cafe, where we engage in exploring what this all means and what kinds of labour it might take to ‘marry’ these disparate ways of knowing.

As a response to Philip Agre’s seminal essay on Critical Technology Practice, the cafe will begin with an exposition by Kavita Philip (University of California, Irvine), opening up into a critical response spearheaded by Cherry Matthew, and leading to a larger dialogue with the audience, exploring fault lines of interdisciplinary research and challenges of integrated technology studies.

For more background on these questions, audience is encouraged (but not required) to explore the materials at Agre’s home page http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/, and STS related links from
Wikipedia’s page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science,_technology_and_society

Why is a form of media technology — immersive VR — known as a ‘non-pharmacological analgesic’? Can a robot reduce anxiety? How might novel forms of social media combat the social isolation experienced by seniors who have chronic pain? What do Sufi practices and phosphorescent creatures have to do with pain?

Members of the Transforming Pain Research Group comprise artists, musicians, computer scientists, engineers, designers, psychophysicists and pain physicians. All are exploring the ways that new technologies may help the 1 in 5 people who suffer from chronic pain. Referred to as the silent epidemic, this relatively new disease has no known cause and no cure. While health care researchers explore its etiology, experts from diverse disciplines are working on ways to help with managing chronic pain. See what a group of innovative researchers north of the border are doing.

Works include technologies ranging from robotics, social media, immersive VR, non-traditional immersive projection spaces, biotechnology and theoretical work by new media theorist Andrea Zeffiro, PhD.