[-empyre-] Mediated matters and design abjections

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

from or along dataveillance zombification (subjectless datapolitik) to what Ross today posted as his envisioning of the total "destructive urbanization of the planet" ... " the nature of this form of power is one of controlling life. So the expansion of life and the ever greater control of it occur simultaneously through the construction (and expansion—urbanization) of a sophisticated, technologically managed and machinic spatial template that can be reproduced across the surface of the planet.>

Hmm, most would think that's a very dystopian vision leaving little room for critical design and odd design, for the provocations Oron was to tell us about 
(tinkering biological regeneratives, immortal design [see Revital Cohen/Tuur van Balen's 'organ replacement machines' [http://www.cohenvanbalen.com/work/the-immortal], tissue culture, third ears, titanium legs,  or - an example from the dance world - Jaime del Val's "Disorientations,"  i.e. abstract telematics mixed with amorphous presence and proximity of bodies without identity, moving on the limits of the recognizable or legible.

Interestingly,  perhaps ironically revising Davide's datapolitik & surveillance assemblage, del Val's performance between Madrid and Dresden, in what he calls a corporeal space of Social Commons even at the moment of its capture/telematic transmission and de-visualization (the "idea" and form of the moving bodies here regenerated via chains of data [software engineer Frieder Weiss speaks of communications of blob and contour processing via particle engines, genetic algorithms, sprite rendering, etc]), nevertheless acts as kind of datamining of the lovely absurd, disorienting desire or, so the project hopes, undermining capitalism's (and datapoliitk's) expansion of life and Lebensraum, to be interfering with the technologies of standardization and control, and the grand spatial templates.  When the lively real bodies dance, the proximate other bodies were of course only imaginable - through the particle physics -  but still could be felt as the behavior of the translocal virtual created moments of great intensity and strange beauty.... 

I suppose one would need lots of time now for conversation, Davide, do you agree? you argue that "Software code is indifferent to content, which means that datapolitik is indifferent to identities."  Well, my experience of the telematic dance was otherwise: I sensed the software (called 'Kalypso,' like the mythic figure on her island; her name: griechisch: »Verbergerin« /gr.:  someone who hides], ) was not indifferent to us at all.

regards

Johannes Birringer
dap-lab