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

[magnus at ditch.org.uk]

Thanks for the Baudrillard <rant>text splurge</rant> ! I gather that he
declared himself an iconoclast on at least one occassion. Does this have
anything to offer the Critical Engineer's perspective?

Concerning a few strands of our discussion, I found interesting "Art and
Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique" Gerald
Raunig & Gene Ray (eds) http://mayflybooks.org/?page_id=20

Best wishes,

Magnus

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>