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<p class="MsoNormal">Many thanks to Renate and Tim for the invitation and the
energy they give to keep empyre alive.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Picking up on the subject of social media, I am reminded of
Critical Art Ensemble’s essay on activist video and the notion of documentary (Patricia
Zimmerman’s focus of research) and I still think that its premise is still
valuable. Many other artists and theorists working and thinking of media (Brecht,
Guattari, Berardi, the Zapatistas, etc., etc.) have made similar arguments under
different concepts and times. <span style><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style><br></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Social media as some of you indicated cuts both ways; it is
a tool that can be and is used for surveillance and for counter-surveillance. Though
counter-surveillance is a fine use of social media, it is still very much
caught up with the logic of control that frames technology’s premise on (overwhelmingly)
efficiency. This same deadly logic as you know cuts through language and
through images, with which social media is very much caught up. <span style><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style><br></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I think that we must think beyond this logic and continue to
push for other imaginaries around media. This work is as much needed as a way
of going forward toward more progressive horizons as the work done by those
engaged in so-called ‘alternative’ media. I see them as complementary. The use
of poetics is such a avenue (I am thinking for instance of Dominguez’s and EDT’s
“poetic gestures” which include the understanding of code as poetry chalked on
the sidewalks for the “floodnet” project and more recently the incorporation of
poetry in the transborder project). These gestures are crucial for imagining media
as truly “social” (that is beyond its reductionist understanding of
communication in information science, as medium—>receiver). <br></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Another ‘tradition’ of non-linear exists tracing as far back
as typographic poems, through Dada, up through the Estredentitas, the
Surrealists, and so on… Dick Higgins of Fluxus is as far as I know one of the first
artists to take up this line of communication in his homage to his dead brother (killed
in Vietnam if I am not mistaken) <i>A Book About Love & War & Death</i><span style>, which was partly written with software (he
coded it in Fortran IV) [his first experiments with computer poetry were done
alongside his partner and artist Alison Knowles in the mid-sixties].</span> Computer-generated
poetry around the unspeakable horrors of recent date includes, “Guantanamo”
(Frank Smith) and “The Interrogators: A Novel Based on the CIA Torture Report, Written
by a Machine”. <span style><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style><br></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">These ideas form part of the base of “Art for Spooks”
(<a href="http://art-for-spooks.org">http://art-for-spooks.org</a>) my collaboration with Nick Knouf. The project, in
the form of an augmented book and an app (complete, but waiting in the approval
queue at Apple), consists of images and texts from leaked documents. The images
(some of which are appropriated from the art historical canon) come from documents
labeled ‘secret’ and as far as we can tell are part of presentations on psychological
operations. The texts are taken from ‘Ask Zelda,’ an internal NSA advice
columnist, sort of a Dear Abby for spies, where NSA analysts ask for advice on
mundane topics ranging from office gossip (“my coworker smells”) to complaints
about managerial misconduct (“I think my superior is spying on me”) . We took
these texts and algorithmically recombined them to create new questions and
answers whose logic mirrors the paranoiac method of the spy agencies. The book
is activated through an iPad interface that juxtaposes images (static and
moving). Through the act of reading, altered images and words are uploaded to
Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. The metadata on the images (the
information embedded in the image itself, such as geographical coordinates) is
mangled in various ways. We replaced, for example, the “location” of the image
with the coordinates of drone strikes based on information available from The
Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The “caption” for the image includes
extracts from texts on surveillance and looking by people like Deleuze, hooks,
Mulvey, and Magid. (See, for example, this image on Flickr, and click on “Show
EXIF”: <a href="https://secure.flickr.com/photos/126630681@N03/16013932436/">https://secure.flickr.com/photos/126630681@N03/16013932436/</a>
.) In this way, ‘falsified’ information is fed into social media channels,
which are regularly surveilled, and thus we are hoping to provide “art for
spooks”.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The project is dedicated to Mary-Ann Grady Flores, known to
many Cornellians for her generosity and phenomenal rum cakes, whom was recently
arrested and convicted (for one year) for her protest against drone warfare (at
the Syracuse Hancock airbase). In face of the unspeakable, we must push for a
social media beyond rationalization. What if we think of it as the poetry of our times?<br></p><p class="MsoNormal"> <span style><br></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Cordially,</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Claudia.<br>
<span style> </span><span style> </span><span style> </span><span style> </span><span style> </span><span style> </span><span style> </span><span style> </span></p>
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