[-empyre-] July on empyre: Reclaiming creativity as agent of change

[Julian Oliver]

Thanks for the introduction Simon!

There's a great thread already well underway and I look forward to pulling
ideas in from there over the next days. I really do enjoy the Evil Media
Studies direction, a refreshing angle indeed. While a fan of many of Fuller's
projects, I was entirely unaware of Evil Media Studies. I especially like
Jussi's comment that it recognises "the collapsing of the technical into the
cultural, social and ecological", a direction close to my heart at present.

In a related frame I'd like to introduce the term Critical Engineering, one my
colleague Danja Vasiliev and I came up with last year in an effort to emphasise
our own relation with technology in a critically and creatively transformative
context. 

We firmly believe that the most transformative language of our time, one that
defines whole economies, how we trade, how and what we eat, how we communicate,
how we move around the world -and increasingly how we think- is that of
Engineering.

We feel art itself, as a frame, is increasingly diluted in transformative
power; more a contemporary past-time of playful reflection where the strategic
re-appropriation and displacement of cultural tropes are anticipated and
coveted in turn (to follow Baudrillard's 'Conspiracy of Art'). As such, art has
become safe: so bold in its crusade to cast aside boundaries there is little
left to break..

Critical Engineering takes the language of engineering and lifts it out from a
strictly utilitarian space, positioning it as a language for rich, creative and
critical inquiry, away from this kind of black box reality of corporations
making things for civilians and not explaining to us how they work, competing
for our attention with an end to designed dependence. 

In a race condition between consumption and planned obsolescence (coupled with
ever shrinking componentry, ubiquity and technical sophistication) a worrying
ignorance sets in, one that writers of media studies, artists and public are
equally vulnerable to in their effort to critically engage their cultural and
political environment. 

The Critical Engineer takes this predicament as a challenge, working at the
level of the very stuff of media; the hard stuff of circuitry, code and cables.
The Critical Engineer positions the soldering iron, work of philosophy and code
editor as equally critically capable tools.

Here is an example of Critical Engineering at work.

Four days ago Danja and I gave a 'Networkshop' in Lima, Peru, where we took
artists and creators through the process of learning all about low level
networking using only command line tools. The workshop was held at Fundación
Telefonica, an important point, as you'll see shortly. 

Network routes (and thus topologies) were created and manipulated. Network
packets were captured and examined. Strategies for surveilling other users of
the network were explored, viewing the images they are viewing in their
browsers, etc. In doing so we answered two questions few people can: "What is a
computer network?", "What is the Internet?" "Where am I on the Internet?".

Only by learning about packet tracing (a method for following the flow of
network packets from source to destination) and network topologies, could
students see that the entire Peruvian route to the internet passed through
Madrid, Spain, by way of the Spanish telco monopolist Telefonica. Spain, one
could see, can effectively turn off the Peruvian telecommunications
infrastructure. While Peru is politically and geographically sovereign, the
colonial imperial process has merely shifted into the corporate domain and
Peruvians it seemed, were completely unaware of this. Much discussion
followed..

Network topologies are, in themselves, political topologies. Only by
understanding how networks actually work, on the level of their stuff and the
routing of electrical events over them, can you understand your political and
capital subjectivity on that network. The Critical Engineer is a practitioner
that engages the network it on its own terms, on the level of its stuff, as it
already is, and reads and writes from there.

This workshop follows on from other work we've done in this line under the
banner of Network Insecurity.  

Another example of Critical Engineering is our latest project Newstweek, for
which we were lucky to get the Golden Nica, at Ars Electronica this year.

Newstweek addresses the bizarre reality that modern democracies entirely depend
on private entities called news corporations to summarise the economic,
environmental, socio-political reality we understand ourselves to be living in.
We place all our trust in these entities. A capital entity rather than a state
separated power (such as the justice system), the news corporation is free to
have and exert political and economic ambitions, inevitably factoring into what
news we read and how it is written.

By reading summaries written by private companies, along with the experience of
first hand symptoms of our political choices, our democratic decisions are
informed. 

Increasingly we read our news in the browser, something we refer to as the
Browser-defined Reality.  En-route from the server to your tablet computer,
smartphone or laptop, news might flow through some 30 different machines, each
with a number of employees responsible for the given machine. 

Newstweek provides a strategy for manipulating the news on a per-network basis,
fixing back the facts where otherwise they might be awry. 

In the form of a small and unobtrusive wall-plug, Newstweek appears part of the
infrastructure. Once plugged into the wall it boots up and manipulates the
local wireless network, re-routing all traffic through itself. With the aid of
a remote browser interface, a Newstweeker can manipulate the news experienced
on that network, whether it be at a library, airport, business or school. Each
network becomes a sort of 'reality island'; people reading news on that network
will experience a different reality than those using other non-tweeked
networks. 

News sites currently targeted by Newstweek include The Guardian, CNN, Newsweek,
BBC, La Vanguardia, El Comercio, El Pais, to name a few.

You can read more about it here: http://newstweek.com/overview,
http://newstweek.com

I hope that's doesn't come across as a rather selfish first post on the topic.
Again, I introduce these ideas in the interests of adding what I find to be a
fruitful dimension to repositioning creativity as an agent of change.

Greetings from Berlin,

-- 
Julian Oliver
http://julianoliver.com