[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 2]

Fri Jun 15 00:20:48 AEST 2018

>From Minerva to MAVEN and back again or (What is to be Done)

Hola Tod at xs,

These are all excellent questions in the face of navigating the ruins behind us, around us now and those yet to come.

>>How do we create forms of life that no longer reproduce the machines

>of capital. How do we desert the system that has no outside. How do we

>refuse to become the fools in the palace, providing the progressive

>masks to the institutions whose very life blood is in the corporate

>military industrial realmâ€¦

Exit cultures or escape routes are now and perhaps always have been useful to have available and build. With the dream of a great outside as a possibility. Certainly Capitalist Realism always like plays with the “no outside” gambit as its ontological certainty-but it works constantly to maintain this manufactured state. The Zapatistas ecology starting in 1994 created an outside that is nested within the post NAFTA state and its multiple ruins with the force of having fought back during the last 500 years plus.

>

> >>How do we not separate our ethics and aesthetics ( as wittgenstein

>urged us not to do )

The Zapatistas do not separate their ethics from the aesthetic-no Wittgenstein silence from them.

http://scalar.usc.edu/anvc/dancing-with-the-zapatistas/table-of-contents

> >>Do we refuse to collaborates ?

We have to work fractally to some degree. Some gesture must be of complete refusal. Some for invisible work. Some for non-relational-relational collaboration. Some as a part of the system.

Gestures built on strange shrooms and in between the ruins. As the Zapatistas say, we do not need your support-but if you would like to walk beside us that can be done.

> >>Can we hack from the inside ?

Yes, it can be done to some degree. Electronic Disturbance Theater’s Transborder Immigrant Tool navigated the Minerva institutional condition. (In good, bad and ugly ways):

http://tbt.tome.press/

https://anthology.rhizome.org/transborder-immigrant-tool

[https://anthology.rhizome.org/user/pages/transborder-immigrant-tool/mobiles.jpg]<https://anthology.rhizome.org/transborder-immigrant-tool>

NET ART ANTHOLOGY: Transborder Immigrant Tool<https://anthology.rhizome.org/transborder-immigrant-tool>
anthology.rhizome.org
The Transborder Immigrant Tool, devised by Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, was a mobile phone application intended to guide individuals who were making their way to the United States through the deserts of the U.S./Mexico borderlands to water. The application delivered poetry to i...

> >>Do we desert and build counter powers ?

Yes.

>Or do we just cook up the poison mushrooms and feed them to those making money from death ?

Yes.

P.S. The MAVEN Tale of Reversing #TheRuinsYetToCome

In early May 2018 I received an email request from Prof. Lilly Irani, a colleague of mine at University of San Diego (UCSD) and Prof. Peter Asaro, who participated in a #DronesAtHome project that I did at Gallery at CALIT2 in 2012 on UCSD’s deep entanglement in developing these remote controlled killing machines and spreading them around the world.

The e-mail concerned signing a letter to support Google A.I. division workers shutting the DOD’s MAVEN funding to develop a weaponized use of A.I. imaging systems that were be developed:

“Project Maven is a United States military program aimed at using machine learning to analyze massive amounts of drone surveillance footage and to label objects of interest for human analysts. Google is supplying not only the open source ‘deep learning’ technology, but also engineering expertise and assistance to the Department of Defense.”

The letter the ended with these demands:

  *   Terminate its Project Maven contract with the DoD.
  *   Commit not to develop military technologies, nor to allow the personal data it has collected to be used for military operations.
  *   Pledge to neither participate in nor support the development, manufacture, trade or use of autonomous weapons; and to support efforts to ban autonomous weapons.

The letter got a total of signatures by academics: 1171

https://www.icrac.net/open-letter-in-support-of-google-employees-and-tech-workers/

[https://s0.wp.com/i/blank.jpg]<https://www.icrac.net/open-letter-in-support-of-google-employees-and-tech-workers/>

Open Letter in Support of Google Employees and Tech ...<https://www.icrac.net/open-letter-in-support-of-google-employees-and-tech-workers/>
www.icrac.net
Researchers in Support of Google Employees: Google should withdraw from Project Maven and commit to not weaponizing its technology.. An Open Letter To:

The above letter expanded the networks of support for the Google employees protesting any weaponization of Google A.I and beyond:

The internal debate over Maven, viewed by both supporters and opponents as opening the door to much bigger defense contracts, generated a petition signed by about 4,000 employees<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-ceo-pentagon-project.html> who demanded “a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/technology/google-project-maven-pentagon.html

[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/05/31/business/31GOOGLE/merlin_138827160_6293d3a2-9bb3-49cb-84e8-3a186ce45a71-facebookJumbo.jpg]<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/technology/google-project-maven-pentagon.html>

How a Pentagon Contract Became an Identity Crisis for ...<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/technology/google-project-maven-pentagon.html>
www.nytimes.com
A $9 million deal for the use of artificial intelligence technology has fractured the internet giant’s work force and risks driving away top engineering talent.

>From these series of gestures among the ruins yet to come. Google was forced to end the contracts with DOD:

“Google will not seek to extend its contract next year with the Defense Department for artificial intelligence used to analyze drone video, squashing a controversial alliance that had raised alarms over the technological buildup between Silicon Valley and the military.

The tech giant will stop working on its piece of the military’s AI endeavor known as Project Maven when its 18-month contract expires in March, a person familiar with Google’s thinking told The Washington Post.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/01/google-to-drop-pentagon-ai-contract-after-employees-called-it-the-business-of-war/?

#FractalNetworks

So here is a case of rapid fractal gestures that gather multiple inside and outside communities that can at least for a moment A.I. weponization. So that the question of growing living forms inside the poison atmospherics of the institutions towards living forms networks that can create tunnels and wings to Zapatistas from the roots-we at EDT 1.0 and 2.0 do believe to be more than possible.

#SoEndthThisTale

________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of patrick lichty <p at voyd.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2018 8:35:18 AM
To: 'soft_skinned_space'; 'shu lea cheang'
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 2]

----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
I am fascinated byt the notion of the invasive species.  Perhaps for me
the notion of invasiveness at one point or another in a closed system like
the biosphere is to be assumed.  What is more interesting to me is the
insertion of the species into the new environment, the method in which it
does it, and the rate of
spread/invasion/assimilation/integration/homeostasis.  For example, we
could consider the Indigenous American's introductionjn across the
Beringian land Bridge as form of invasive introduction, which led arguably
to the elimination of much of the meggfauna on  the continent save the
Bison - That would take the invasion of H.Sapiens Europensis (sic).

But the cooperative introduction of invasives may be more interesting,
such ad the Zebra Mussel's hooking to human vessels to get to the Great
Lakes, the Us Navy's intridcution of caribou onto Adak Island in the
1950's for an alternate food source for the base, only to let them
multiply out of control with only hunters as predatoprs when the land was
ceded baclk to the Unangans in the early 2000's.  Of the fact that spores
can go halfway around the world, or even the theory in testing that DNA on
Earth may have originated on Mars, and was placed here by asteroidal
panspermia....

This spinning set of relations constructs in my mind a series of tectonics
of relation - speed, temporal expansion, location, and cooperation.

_______________________________________________
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