<div dir="ltr"><font color="#000000">Hello Bishnu, Renate, Tim and everyone!</font><div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div><div><font color="#000000">Bishnu writes, <br></font><div><span style="font-family:Arial"><font color="#000000"><br></font></span></div><div><font color="#000000"><span style="font-family:Arial">"Terranova argues infinite zeroes and ones better simulate the “sudden discontinuous variations” in microscopic states. In this view, organisms are not complex machines but aggregates of large populations of simple machines whose variable actions are calculable. Therefore new media (as in disease surveillance networks) are most capable of predicting where and how the next radical disturbance, the new event will emerge."</span><br></font></div></div><div><span style="font-family:Arial"><font color="#000000"><br></font></span></div><div><font face="Arial" color="#000000"> A fascinating recognizance around organisms in aggregate beyond merely (20th Century) machinic dispositives. Terranova's observation (or reommendation?) leads me to a reading I just encountered in Katherine Behar's edited compilation, Object-Oriented Feminism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). In the last essay in this volume, , R. Joshua Scannell takes up the temporal and managerial effects of</font></div><div><font face="Arial" color="#000000">new media's capacity to attempt prediction of forthcoming 'radical' disturbance, where and how together. Scannell refers to a compelling and currently operational real world example--- as a case study -- the New York City Police Department's "Domain Awareness System," co-developed with Microsoft. "At once proactive and reactive, the system is designed to syncretically loop, making a cybernetic circuit aimed at clarifying generalized surveillance data into actionable policing information. DAS applies massive processing power to rapidly sort through NYC"s surveillance data. Built with Homeland Security funds under an anti-terrorism mandate, its surveillance extends far beyond the obviously 'criminal' to include data as exotic as feeds from radiation detectors--sensitive enough to pick up recent chemotherapy treatment in passing bodies--and sophisticated enough</font></div><div><font face="Arial" color="#000000">to rapidly recall up to five years' worth of stored 'metadata' and temporally unbounded (and undefined) 'environmental' data in its continuously mined</font></div><div><font face="Arial" color="#000000">databases."</font></div><div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div><div><font face="Arial" color="#000000">Here's where the overlap to Terranova's assertion around predictive capacity enters into an ominous glare. Scannell writes,</font></div><div><font face="Arial" color="#000000"><br></font></div><div><font face="Arial" color="#000000">'The DAS converts these massive information streams, on the order of several petabytes, into preemptive spatial representations (maps) that are rapidly filtered down the department hierarchy to identify locations and classes of possible criminal activity. The department argues that if it 'knows' where the 'criminals' will be, when they will be 'there.' and what 'crimes' they will commit before the 'criminals' do, then the department can proactively prevent them. 'Real time' capacity to process massive streams of seemingly innocuous or unrelated bits of surveillance data will, the logic goes, produce patterns in the space-time and human geography of criminality that will allow police personnel and material to be applied with maximum efficiency." (Scannell, "Both a Cyborg and a Goddess: Deep Managerial Time and Informatic Governance," in Object-Oriented Feminism, pp. 255-6). </font></div><div><span style="font-family:Arial"><font color="#000000"><br></font></span></div><div><span style="font-family:Arial"><font color="#000000">For me the really innovative way this writer thinks about this 'predictive' capacity has to do with how temporalities and the so called new events</font></span></div><div><span style="font-family:Arial"><font color="#000000">come into being and sustain themselves from within a structural context he calls 'deep managerial time' -- structural in literally an ontologic sense.</font></span></div><div><span style="font-family:Arial"><font color="#000000"><br></font></span></div><div><font color="#000000" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Scannell is scathing (pardon the bad alliteration, but it's irresistable!)-- about the customization of 'deep managerial time' as an epic transfer from plantation economies to neoliberal statehood. He writes, <span style="font-style:inherit">I call this ontological stabilization of populations deep managerial time. I do so in an effort to push back against a narrative of neoliberalism as an individuating practice that upends coherent space-time, and as a reminder that the violent organization of populations subjected to state violence is an inheritance of plantation capitalism given a technocratic veneer. </span></font><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-style:inherit">The ontological requirements of plantation capitalism’s metamorphosis into neoliberalism demanded a putatively “flexible” human subject in order to mask the essential stability of state violence and capital expropriation, particularly against women, people of color, and queer populations." (p. 251).</span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-style:inherit"><br></span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-style:inherit">(Happily, if you want to read more excerpts from this analysis, a blogger has kindly culled a set for online readers here: </span><a href="https://rowanlear.wordpress.com/2017/06/16/both-a-cyborg-and-a-goddess/#more-3742">https://rowanlear.wordpress.com/2017/06/16/both-a-cyborg-and-a-goddess/#more-3742</a> ) </div><div><br></div><div><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Arial"> From my own perspective, aesthetically and politically, the presumed-criminal, formerly citizen 'object'-constiituencies are as particulates in large population-mass-mappings, they no longer enjoy representation as actors (whether Latourian actors or just people on the street in the most quotidien and banal sense), rather, they percolate through the already-auto-producing data-strata as chemical or chimerical re-agents, whose presenceing as detected by the DAS simultaneously justifies the existence of DAS and allows the proliferation of its 'inherent vice,' aka managerially-induced physical violence, not from 'crime' but indeed from the state apparatus itself, which remains transcendant to and 'othering' or 'exotic' outside the DAS system. A cosmology opens from this bleak vista. </span><br></div><div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div><div><font face="Arial" color="#000000">Scannell infers, rather playfully but with startling resonances to the net-based sound and image work I did with 'Wired Ruins' Tim has just cited--</font></div><div><font face="Arial" color="#000000">the 'cyborg goddess'. This is the piece "47REDS," (2002), accessible if you can launch Flash, via </font><a href="http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu/issue3/rewiring.htm">http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu/issue3/rewiring.htm</a> . At the very top of the user interface you can find small titles in red, including 'Smash', "Ropes" etc. Click on those to find sound scapes with still images. There used to be a quicktime panorama file associated with each of these but the tech is outmoded and not available as far as I know, now. </div><div><br></div><div>To resist re-agency from within the chimerical polity of the "cyborg-goddess." How to do that? all my paintings, drawings, and media works make this attempt. </div><div><br></div><div>Back into the wayback machine, I 'll cotton to this:</div><div><br></div><div>"<b style="color:rgb(24,5,4);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12.800000190734863px">CTHEORY</b><span style="color:rgb(24,5,4);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12.800000190734863px">: Could you say that you are definitively, a cyborg? Or are you a witness to the cyborg?</span></div><p style="color:rgb(24,5,4);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12.800000190734863px"><b>McPhee</b>: I feel my body is like a border; but, no, it is not itself a cyborg, because it (I) exist in some kind of condition of alterity outside technology even though I experience its operational architecture from the inside, as if from the inside of my body, heart and brain. It's a strange condition, liberating and uncomfortable: but better than the old psychotropic condition of enslavement, when in former times (before I entered the media labyrinth) my mind was hostage to the repetitive, unpredictable onslaught of triggered memories of violence to my body. Now I may be lost in the borders of the labyrinth, but I have no longer lost my psychic self. I remember who and what I am while I move through the operational constructs of media. Thus I escape media. Perhaps (I) is simply this: the consciousness of a space beyond any formulation of 'landscape' or technology', that paradoxically resides inside my body. And anyway, I will die, and cyborgs don't. They are a conditional, or subjunctive tense within a larger grammar.</p><div>(<a href="http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=485">http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=485</a>) </div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><font face="Arial" color="#000000"><br></font></div><div><span style="font-family:Arial"><font color="#000000"><br></font></span></div><div><span style="font-family:Arial"><font color="#000000"><br></font></span></div><div class="gmail_extra"><font color="#000000"><br></font><div class="gmail_quote"><font color="#000000">On Tue, Nov 14, 2017 at 10:14 PM, Bishnupriya Ghosh <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:bghosh@english.ucsb.edu" target="_blank">bghosh@english.ucsb.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br></font><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-style:solid;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><font color="#000000">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br></font><div dir="ltr">
<p class="MsoNormal">..... (snippet) </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial"><font color="#000000">Your students’ proliferating images—so gorgeous!—resonate with this
understanding of mediatic virality. The contamination jumps to the new, something
creative and qualitatively different, a series of micro-actions generating a
network.<span></span></font></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial"><font color="#000000"> <span></span></font></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Arial"><font color="#000000">Of course, it is now commonplace to think biological and machinic
together in some strains of new media criticism. I find Tiziana
Terranova’s <i>Network Culture</i> (2004) most persuasive: thinking
of virality, she theorizes the actions of “relatively simple machines” as the
bases of radical transformation, social and political. Emphasizing the
informatic turn in the biological sciences, Terranova argues infinite zeroes
and ones better simulate the “sudden discontinuous variations” in microscopic
states. In this view, organisms are not complex machines but aggregates of
large populations of simple machines whose variable actions are calculable.
Therefore new media (as in disease surveillance networks) are most capable of
predicting where and how the next radical disturbance, the new event will
emerge.<span></span></font></span></p>
</div><div class="gmail_extra"><font color="#000000"><br></font><div class="gmail_quote"><font color="#000000">On Tue, Nov 14, 2017 at 9:27 PM, Renate Terese Ferro <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:rferro@cornell.edu" target="_blank">rferro@cornell.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br></font><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-style:solid;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><font color="#000000">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br><br></font></blockquote></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>... (snippet)</div><div><br></div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-style:solid;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-style:solid;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><font color="#000000">
Thanks Tim for the link to C-Theory Digital Terror and also reminding us of how contemporary networks of contamination can fluidly slip across borders via politics, language, images, and media My intention in introducing this topic was to encourage cross-disciplinary ways that contamination manifests itself in contemporary global environments and this week’s news of North and South Korea is a great example.<br>
<br>
Earlier this semster my students in Introduction to Digital Media brainstormed a list of media—books, tv, movies—inspried by a prompt I posed to them. What happens when bio-networks go awry? We looked at ways that artists, writers, filmmakers simulate contagion and other models of contamination. With the creative research as inspiration the students wrote creative narratives. After writing they were asked to collect an assemblage of found natural objects from nature and with high definition scanning they composited visual models. Using magnification, repetition, overlap, inverting color and other visual strategies they imapped the microsopic contamination of their narratives. We took multiple projectors and projected their simulated models on bodies and surfaces interjecting them back into the environment as a final intervention. The simplified prompt I gave to these 1st year art students prompted engaging discussions about health and safety, politics, the environment, language, truth, and more not to mention to resulting creative visual interventions.<br>
<br>
I have attached a couple of images here. Hoping you will share more about your ideas of media, viruses, and panic this week.<br>
Welcome back Christina McPHee who should be joining us tomorrow.<br>
<br>
Renate<br>
<br></font></blockquote></div></div></blockquote></div></div></div>