[-empyre-] Reclaiming creativity as agent of change

[Simon Biggs]

I was just reading about LulzSec's News International exploits and wondering
which archetype they channel. That are not pirates. Their graphic image is
suggestive of a dandy - which reminds me of Lovink's data dandy. But there
is more to their identity than that. They also echo the jester character, a
very different identity to the pirate but equally anarchic. The jester
worked up close and dirty with authority, right by the monarch's side, but
often in conflict with them. However, they refer to their Twitter channel as
a boat. Perhaps they consider themselves pirates after all?

Best

Simon


On 19/07/2011 10:35, "magnus at ditch.org.uk" <magnus at ditch.org.uk> wrote:

> Hi Julian,
> 
> I've enjoyed thinking about this post and reading about newstweek
> especially. There are some challenging possible directions! But right now,
> just a few questions:
> 
> I wonder what, if anything, the Critical Engineer borrows from the pirate
> persona?
> 
> How essential is the educational component in Critical Engineering? Apart
> from the 'shared learning' approach in the Lima workshop, I saw that for
> Newstweek there are instructions (a how-to) for building your own.
> 
> Newstweek seems to realize several aspects of the discussion so far -
> about virality and produced relations, about exchanges that can occur on
> both sides of capital and creativity.
> 
> What contexts do you see Critical Engineering operating most successfully
> in? I am thinking about mobility, autonomy. Where do you see the limits?
> 
> Are there other archetypes, beyond that of the pirate, which are closer to
> Critical Engineering?
> 
> I would also really like to read more on the connections with Baudrillard.
> 
> Best wishes,
> 
> Magnus
> 
>> 
>> 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre


Simon Biggs | simon at littlepig.org.uk | www.littlepig.org.uk

s.biggs at eca.ac.uk | Edinburgh College of Art
www.eca.ac.uk/circle | www.elmcip.net | www.movingtargets.co.uk



Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201