[-empyre-] grappling with collective capture, differences amongst distributed identity

[simon]

Dear <<empyre>>, Johannes, John,

Reading your questions, Johannes, I have John Hopkins's wonderful 
"meta-commentary" in my mind, with its "altered states" of memory and 
the "explicitly definable forms and shapes" "abstracted from the 
universal flux". What I wonder at here is that and whether:

"individual embodied memory is directly experienced as a changed body 
state. externalizing memory is a particular and collective phenomena 
which arises when the pain of actual experience and its associated 
memory is too much to bear. externalizing is available from the same 
technologies (tele) which cause the pain to begin with — dislocation and 
the pain of separation. perhaps technological development may not 
proceed fully until the relevant memories are externalized to begin 
with, then the pain of alienation is transferred to a painless place."

I am more familiar with Henri Bergson's notion of matter as memory in 
its most contracted form... to which it would be easy to add, "forms and 
shapes" "abstracted from the universal flux". Is pain caused by the same 
"technologies (tele)" which 'externalise'? and do both "dislocation and 
the pain of separation" go with externalising memory? The latter 
convokes the Fort/Da game which plays "too much to bear" without too 
much "technological development".

The crux, however, of John's meta-commentary remains with the particular 
notion of mediation through technology which is the coinage of this 
discussion - and has been variously coined throughout this discussion's 
threads. So it is perhaps as injudicious to elide child's play with 
serious, collectively reticulated, techno-social concerns, as it is 
discursive threads with widow's weeds, the outward symbolic of private 
mourning pain.

Is it? Who's to judge? when so many of these power-plays are certainly 
playful? Facebook, I've heard tell, is a game: and the kids think it's 
all right; and the kids, I've heard tell, are all right. It has also 
been said that without football there would have been revolution in 
England long ago. We can come together and play as if meta-data - or 
metaphor, for that matter - did not exist. Socially responsible 
application of media might literally be impossible where art can't  
play, where it insists on meta-commentary and on itself as metaphor; or 
"real virtualisation".

John mentions the cloud "as one example of a centralized architecture 
that removes the trace of the digital artifact wholly out of the purview 
of the individual (creator, participant)", where the problem is 
artifacture, but the cloud isn't really a problem, it's the fact, the 
factiture (the embodied individual's manufacture of facts out of 
collective illusions), that it can cause any resentment, be resented for 
"removing the trace" from (of/f) the "individual" - and here we again 
feel the telepresence of the gesture. The cloud is as much the problem 
as Big Data is the solution. As John wittily points out, do we have the 
collective will to commit energetic resources, howsoever they may be 
derived, to maintain Big Data? or your data?

A fear of "loss of autonomy" is inescapable, where - again, John - there 
is "any externalization", and the degree to which the individual "falls 
under this regime", this ideological regime, I would add, occupies a 
place on a sliding scale. Then, what occupation does the sliding-scale 
place, but that of the factitioner, the quantic surveyor, the data-garnerer?

I think, however, John does provide for escape - from the inescapable 
pervasion of the phenomenological virtual - in the image critical for 
the "fundamentally ordered system" (which is the control society of 
global capture), since "timely retrieval is critical for a functioning 
archive": "stepping out applies not only to the making of the artifact 
but also to the (onerous) process of archiving". Yes, the archive 
reticulates back into the archive - but, note, only as "functioning", 
functional, not as useless or failed or with whatever kind of abjecture 
or minoritarian becoming artifacture likes to (ad)dress to itself, and, 
of course, /archive/ itself, which is the timely calling and can be 
playful certainly.

Minus Theatre is up to this stepping out or escape in the time-images we 
are making. (Clayton Crockett's book, /Deleuze Beyond Badiou/, has been 
useful here.)

I am proud to say that I "would argue that facebook's daily and 
undisclosed experiments on "us" have affected [my] performance 
faculties" in so far as a previous social network project called company 
bears down with all the pain of its failure (to get sufficient 
investment - a critical success), temporal dislocation, memorial 
externalisation on the faculties, including ethological, I bring to 
Minus Theatre. But this is more an aside.

Since you have asked, Johannes, thank you, Minus Theatre is a group of 
performers - whether with backgrounds in theatre, dance, art-performance 
or no performance - who, by luck, happen to be interested enough in 
performing or playing, certainly, to meet regularly to experiment in 
what we, laughing, call theatre, which is my background, as well as 
languages, illumined by luck, since we are mostly 
English-as-second-language speakers, out of which has arisen a practice 
with five languages spoken in performance, including this very capacity, 
which we flatter with the phrase "our own theatrical language". You are 
welcome to come and join us; as Johannes indicates, we have a gesture on 
FB, make a showing, https://www.facebook.com/minustheatre

The best practical vocabulary I've found so far to talk about what we're 
doing comes from Esa Kirkkopelto's work in Helsinki so I'm pleased to 
meet Carrie Noland, thanks. The provisory performance white flower 
gathered a series of pieces or stories, each having a different lead, 
the rest of the group playing parts: to hint - I am concerned lest I 
too-overburden this discussion with data! -, exploding the individual 
life (a theatre of the individual life) and the time-frame of the story, 
putting its rhythm's out of phase, towards a critical phase-shift to 
perhaps "a "beyond that is found in the virtual embodiment of a crisis 
which is brought to us in art" - I am afraid to disappoint in this also, 
since I don't fear this "beyond", it is the subject of our current 
workshops. (The thinking being, beyond the sum of time-images we make 
following our methodology, there is a ... something, maybe it's Goya, 
maybe Bacon! ... Again, your input by other channels, gestures, would be 
welcomed.)

Best,
Simon Taylor


On 30/07/14 03:44, Johannes Birringer wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> dear Simon, dear all
>
> thank you for re-reading the stipulation on the pervasion effects of what you call the "real virtualisation" --
>
> [Simon Taylor schreibt]
>> A real virtualisation of collective experience as it is represented by popular
> social media means to distribute mind, agency and identity.
>
> I apologise for taking the time to re-read the statement and my
> re-reading is highly tendentious but I think it at least listens to the
> assumptions under which such a stipulation is being made since there is
> a ready dissimulation already in process, that is, a given illusion,
> given that the logic of inescapability of collective experience of VR
> captures - like a war photograph or snapshot of conflict, or dramatic
> (and critical) image - us, both lurkers and discussants, in its view.
> Has the discussion captured the collective virtual experience enough? I
> would humbly answer that it has been captured by it.>
>
>
> Well, this is hard work now, how to get out or try and get out of the spell of such ready dissimulation (the l'effet Baudrillard was long overhauled, I thought)
> if one were to assume that social media were indeed pervasive and the corporate operations (say by google or facebook) underneath the aforementioned "social physics" (Morozov's article on
> digital surveillance) constituted a logic of inescapabilty. As to the inescapability, I remember that earlier in the month we mentioned the covert Facebook "experiment to influence the emotions of more than 600,000 people",
> and Susan Kozel and Sue Hawskley and other comments on it,  Sue asking -
>> Is it possible people could giving up more of their privacy as they put their 'movement signature' out there in the view of giants like Facebook etc.? I wonder if/how our distinctive movement patterns and rhythms might be collected, collated, forged and what might be done with them? It’s alarming to think of movement data being acquired, but almost worse to think of being rendered into some ersatz version, bad copies of ourselves.>
> and to some extent our discussion did focus on distinct and isolated "embodiment" in arts and performance practices, even somatic and internal experiences (e.g. I could pick up here on my posting yesterday on inward migrations of gestures, on internally resonating gestures/movements that are more about adaptive performance faculties [in my bones, skeleton, organism] that I doubt are controllable by social media technologies or even capturable -- and did you not mention, Simon, the natural political of time-images in live embodied theatre, your work with Minus Theatre ("....rehearsal of the unrehearsable .. before white flower premiers"   , your set list is most intriguing, including buried flowers and the beach...!). Please tell more (I note that Minus Theatre announces things on facebook), and why you fear a beyond, a "beyond that is found in the virtual embodiment of a crisis which is brought to us in art".
>
> The social physics promoted by economists like Mr Pentland seem to indicate an end to politics; thus a "distributed mind agency identity" would be thoroughly disagreeable, and even if Morozov is right in laughing at the small outrage at the facebook scandal (he writes: "Der Zorn über eine neuere Studie, bei der Facebook glücklichen Nutzern positive und unglücklichen Nutzern negative Posts zeigte, erscheint recht naiv. Schon einige Monate vor dem Skandal hatte ein Datenwissenschaftler von Facebook erklärt: „Wir führen täglich mehr als tausend Experimente durch. Während viele dieser Versuche zur Optimierung spezieller Ergebnisse dienen, sollen andere die Grundlagen für langfristige Designentscheidungen liefern.“ Übersetzt heißt das: Sie sollten sich besser Sorgen wegen der vielen tausend täglichen Experimente machen, von denen man uns nichts sagt."), I am not sure that you would argue that facebook's daily and undisclosed experiments on "us" have affected your performance faculties. facebook barely registers in my life, certainless less than the flowers in the garden.
>
> In fractured and (still) politically divided or contested societies or in (Western Europe or North  America, as far as I can speak; Chris Domingo had also told us his story from Whyalla, Australia) only superficially integrated and non-isolated cultures and cultural communities, what would "distributed identity" mean -- would not such a term capture only an illusion?
>
> regards
> Johannes Birringer
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>

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