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

[Julian Oliver]

Hey Magnus,

..on Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 10:35:57AM +0100, magnus at ditch.org.uk wrote:
> 
> 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?

I think there are perhaps one or two antics in common. One would be positioning
Disobedience as often necessary toward the end of increased mobility. 

The Critical Engineer takes black-box technology and infrastructure as
something that must be pared back, cracked open and or re-purposed before both
the object and its engineering effects upon the user can be fully understood.
> 
> 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.

I've long made it my habit to share the technical underpinnings of what I make.
You can find thousands of lines of code I've written out there in several
languages. Occasionally they are usefully commented and if not a manual and/or
description accompanies the work. Danja (fellow Critical Engineer and Newstweek
developer) also shares much of the understanding of his own projects.
Workshops make a great frame for this of course. Many of my colleagues/peers do
also.

With the idea that increased freedom of movement comes through knowledge,
sharing is of socio-political importance to the Critical Engineer.

> 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?

A great many thinkers, from Guattari and Foucault, through to younger writers
like Raunig, consider machines to be much more than discrete objects.  Rather,
they are an assemblage of social, psychological, technical and bodily forces;
expressions of these interacting, intersecting elements. 

In this way the Critical Engineer opening, reading and refactoring any sort of
machine or system is conversing with the conditions (ontological, material,
technical, political) and agential dimensions of his/her time.

> Are there other archetypes, beyond that of the pirate, which are closer to
> Critical Engineering?

A good question! Certainly there's a lot to be said for the 'hacker' in it's
original sense (M.I.T, 1960's, technology enthusiast, reverse engineer). Aside
from that I haven't come across any other. 

> I would also really like to read more on the connections with Baudrillard.

Well, this is a big topic, one I've been thinking about a bit lately. Excuse
the <rant>text splurge</rant>! 

So far I've only considered Baudrillard in relation to distancing my practice
from Art lately. He's helped clarify why I feel Contemporary Art especially to
be an increasingly impotent environment from which to exert tangible change in
the world.

I share Baudrillard's disdain for what he refers to as a conspiracy of Art and
art making, especially after Warhol (as if that punk Duchamp didn't shake
things up enough). 

We like to think of Art as that reflexive practice whose narrative can be
traced by the breaching of assumptions and questions endemic to the time,
configured as Limits. So much has this become Art's cherished character that
the limits themselves are no longer important. Art need only perform or mimic
transgression to satisfy its anticipation. Here, for instance, strategies like
subversion becomes an aesthetic, dissent 'punk' and intervention spectacle etc.

The enactment sees that boundaries are constructed and dramatised, 'played up',
just as a fireman might light fires and ring the bell, to keep himself
employed. 

Any gain in mobility therefore is also an enactment in that expresses the
anticipated limits of this stage. Art, then, is left so impoverished that it
cannot even speak without speaking of itself. Rather than "changing the way we
see the world" -a promise you see in catalog texts all the time- art merely
changes the way we see art.

Meanwhile lambs are sacrificed, guitars burned and religious idols are fitted
with sexy underwear..

The second issue I have with positioning my own work in an art context is the
increased expression of art within a capital logic, where cultural value is
ultimately affirmed in the marketplace; market value determines how work is
distributed, the critical exposure it receives and its subsequent protection
(museums, archiving). And so the art world is flooded with artists making work
with the intention of it becoming a valuable commodity. 

The market 'solves' art and art-making by giving it both a vector and a metric,
evading disillusion as to its own suspect powerlessness.  Art becomes a force
effective at maldistributing capital and so shapes the world this way, aligning
with the broader machinery of the state and property in turn. Political
volatility and critical rigour are all /rewarded/ through transduction into
commodity and only then are discussed widely and given desirable protection in
museums.

Art is contained in this way -defaulted to discussion- and so the world is
protected from suffering the implementation of its ideas. Art has become safe,
basically a form of entertainment as fellow Newstweeker Danja says.

Contemporary Art is not all Art of course; Intervention Art, Performance Art
and much of New Media Art is not cursed with this same conspiracy. These areas
are still pretty rigorous I think, pushing things around. Nonetheless I see
that they 'want in' more and more. Many curators throughout Europe call for New
Media 'recognised' by the art world, as though it isn't properly real without
it.  Dealers are popping up and trying to work out how to sell limited edition
software art without the stigma of DRM, etc..

While all of that stuff is irrelevant to my practice, I'm certainly happy to
show what I make and make with others in galleries and museums from time to
time. That said I don't /need/ the language or business of art to relate to my
own work and nor do I care if what I make is factored into that broader legacy.

It doesn't matter if I call what I make Art or not, it seems others will do it
for me anyway ;)

Cheers,

Julian

> 
> >
> > 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

-- 
Julian Oliver
http://julianoliver.com