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Trevor Paglen | NSA-Tapped Fiber Optic Cable Landing Site

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NSA-Tapped Fiber Optic Cable Landing Site, 
Mastic Beach, New York, United States

Trevor Paglen
The following text was adapted from a discussion inside the artist’s studio

The metaphors we use to understand mass surveillance and the Internet tend to be very abstract, and often mystifying. Words like “cyberspace”, the cloud, the information superhighway perpetrate an image of the Internet as something placeless yet ubiquitous, immaterial yet omnipresent. These metaphors are deeply misleading.

‘NSA-Tapped Fiber Optic Cable Landing Site, Mastic Beach, New York’ draws on documents from the Snowden archive and other sources to develop a vision of the Internet that emphasizes the materiality of communications networks, and the political geography of the Internet. In doing so, the project mimics the NSA’s own understanding of the Internet, emphasizing fiber optic cables, landing sites, switching facilities, data centers, and the routes and choke points in global telecommunication infrastructures.

The piece shown here focuses on a network of transatlantic cables that come onshore at Mastic Beach, NY, one of several major fiber-optic cable landing sites in the U.S. Several NSA-tapped fiberoptic cables land on Long Island, including “Atlantic Crossing-1,” “Atlantic Crossing-2/Yellow,” as well as the “Apollo” and “Emerald” cables.

Each of the works in this series is composed of a dyptich. On the left is a photograph of the beach or landing site where the cables come onshore (in this photograph, the cables are under the water and beach). On the right side is a collage of images and documents related to the specific site. The base document is a map produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for marine navigation. Among other things, these maritime maps indicate the location of undersea cables so that ships do not interfere with them. Layered on this map are various internal NSA documents from the Snowden archive, corporate documents, additional photographs of the site, and other materials.

For the DIS Data Issue, we have created a digitally annotated guide to this artwork.


Too Big To Scale: The Data Issue

Karen Gregory | Weird Solidarities

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Weird Solidarities

Karen Gregory

Like victory, the terrain changes hands with each match and every half-time. It is paid in rent.

- Michel Serres

Office Leases In City Of London Slump On Economy

Whereas past generations longed to know if there is an afterlife, today we face a living hauntology in the form of our data presences. We live on not only past death, as the recent Facebook end-of-year debacles have poignantly demonstrated, but we live beyond ourselves in and through black-boxed algorithms and their architectures of capture and deployment. While we might understand this as a form of posthumanism or by using the framework of human/machine relations, I suggest we think of it this way: as a form of “weird” solidarity not only with one another but with the very environments that are being made to be “expressive” (Thrift 2012) along with us. As value grows increasingly speculative, being drawn from the dual promise of data aggregation and its parsing—for data are only as valuable as the novel emergent patterns it can produce—such value is already predicated on a social body and the generative connections that can be forged among its constituent elements. These elements do not necessarily have to reduce to “the human.” Additionally, this is a laboring and productive body whether it “works” or not. In this way, this economy does not need “you,” but it is fully composed of “us.”

Rentier Assets

We are slowly coming to realize that the “sharing economy” is less about sharing than it is about creating new terrains of rent. Such terrains are innovative and disruptive not because they are necessarily creative, unique, generous, or helpful to the overall project of human life but because they attempt at all costs to circumvent production costs (including labor) and therefore reconfigure the relationship between production and value. Guy Standing (2014) writes, “Rental income enables people to make money simply through the possession of scarce assets. Sometimes assets may be ‘naturally’ scarce: if fertile land is owned by a few landlords, they need not work themselves but can rent it out to others for a high price. This income is rent, not profits from a productive activity, as the landlords do nothing to earn it aside from owning the land.” While we can point to platforms such as Uber and Airbnb as examples of such rentierism, the project of opening the commodity form to new forms of “tenancy” (Thrift 2012) is only beginning to find its true home as a form of governance via a hierarchical, rigid political/economic social structure. Rather than sell itself as an aristocracy in the making, enabling a few to own much, the sharing economy does quite the opposite. It suggests that participation in this economy is a form of peer-to-peer collaboration and cooperation, which leads to greater choice and flexibility. The key figure here is the enterprising, entrepreneurial individual—a savvy prosumer or, in Toffler’s words, a “proactive consumer”—who privileges access to goods and services over ownership. Bear in mind, this is an individual who already does own something—that is, has something to “share.” That something can be their home, their car, their pets, their time, their talents, or their attention, and that individual is often invited to share through the most practical of all invitations—the creation of passive income, or rent.

It was only a few years ago that we were asking whether participation in a platform like Airbnb could even be seen as a form of labor. These questions of labor, which have extended from critiques of the tech industry’s reliance on “free labor” to campaigns such as “Wages for Facebook,” were, I think, meant to provoke a collective “worker consciousness” among those more comfortable imagining themselves as independent, creative freelancers simply building their network or client list via social and other digital media. While it does seem that such a consciousness is beginning to percolate through conversations of digital media, we have only just begun to imagine what forms of solidarity such social relations might entail. Rob Horning (2014) writes, “unlike the workers who meet on the factory floor, the sharing-app users meet only as commercial adversaries, and build not solidarity but merely a mercantile ‘trust’ that facilitates wary exchange.” While Horning’s statement may be true, I want to suggest that, despite its rhetoric of rampant individualism, the sharing economy and, even more broadly, the data economy has already ushered in a form of “weird solidarity.”

Value within these economies does not emerge from the laboring, disciplined individual but rather through that of the crowd or population. Airbnb is so highly valued not because it creates self-fulfilled sharers but because it can aggregate rooms far beyond the scope of a brick-and-mortar chain. Its value is linked to its capacity for accelerating the breadth of a population. Similarly, while “you” may not ontologically “be” a gadget such as a camera or a pedometer, as long as those elements are attached to you and producing trails of data, you are a generative source of data aggregation who becomes, often unknowingly, a constituent of data-based populations.

While this social body does not reduce to the traditional sociological concepts like the individual, the group, or the community, its search for value (through rent but also through derivative logics) has been quite successful at extending the human body far beyond our notions of the personal, bounded body or private self. Through what has been called the “promiscuous” marriage of social media, mobile technologies, and cloud computing to the capacities of nanotechnology, biotechnology, and sensor technology we are generating datafied terrains that seek information from bits of one’s human presence (Clough, Gregory, Haber, and Scannell 2014). These bits may be eye movements, our gait, heart rates, or sleep patterns, and in this way the vocabulary of the data has less to do with a fully constituted, rights-based subject than it does with the very rhythms, circulations, palpitations, movements, connections, separations, consumptions, and mutations that animate us. Much in the same way that rentierism opens the commodity to new spatial and temporal extensions so that it can generate a stream of inhabitants, the data economy extends and opens the human body to the pre-personal, to what we do not necessarily have conscious access to. The data economy already understands us as the porous subjects of an uncanny and expressive genetics.

Data visualization to comparing genomes across species Credit: Stephen Smith and Casey Dunn, Brown University

“To be a one at all, you must be a many”

While such an arrangement adumbrates the dystopian, we must also take up the notion of “weird solidarity” to explore how the “more-than-us-but-not-us” is giving rise to new forms of sociality and social relations. Of late, “weirdness” has been taken up by theorists and speculative writers to explore the emerging non/humanity that the Anthropocene seems to foster. Weirdness has been taken up to conceptualize a “world without us” (Thacker 2011), but it has failed to take up what is an even stranger question: how might we think and develop a language of care in a time when, as Donna Harraway (2014) has said, “to be a one at all, you must be a many”? How might rethinking the “weird” toward the conditions of inter-dependence, which sit at the heart of theories of care, rather than toward horror and nihilism, help us see that data is currently living with (and through) us? Data “matters,” as it were, and has become a strong social actor, in a Latourian sense, helping build (quite literally in the case of “smart cities”) the material conditions we find ourselves in and among.

Where do humans reside among and with machines and algorithms? A map of this weird terrain is necessary to foster a politics of solidarity that understands how and where value is being produced. This politics might be used to demand wages and benefits from the owners of capital, but it might also be used to greater ends, which would be to reconceptualize who “we” are and how we live with one another. This might be the most important question of our time.

As the rentier/data economy seeks new terrains of conquest, it not only freights in longstanding racialized and gendered inequalities, discriminations, and biases; it also produces a structure dependent on the very notion of measure, comparison, and hierarchy. This hierarchy, however, is not simply vertical but is dynamic and emergent across different levels of scale. Even as the emerging system is geared to pit further “individuals” against one another for scare resources, uncritically participating in—competing in—such a post-probable arrangement takes on the hue of folly, for we cannot be sure how our data lives will, at some point, be used against us. While we must continue to take up questions of labor, the emerging onto-sociality of metrics and measure is actually giving us an opportunity to reconceptualize how we stand with the strange and with the stranger. Knowing that our own labor histories are no easy guide to the future, might this opportunity to ask about new social relations provide a window into a way forward?

A weird solidarity is already being created among us, in and through the ubiquitous project of building algorithms into every facet of day-to-day life. That solidarity is an essential aspect of the aggregation of the data. That solidarity is there, and therefore it is there for us to see, to experiment with, and to build from.

 

References

Clough, Patricia, Karen Gregory, Benjamin Haber, and R. Joshua Scannell. “The Datalogical Turn.” Pp. 182-206, in Nonrepresentational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research, ed. Phillip Vannini. Oxford: Taylor & Francis.

Harraway, Donna. 2014. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble”

Horning, Rob. 2014. “’Sharing’ Economy and Self-Exploitation.” The New Inquiry.

Pasquale, Frank. The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms that Control Money and Information. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Serres, Michel. 2010. Malfeasance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Standing, Guy. 2014 The Age of Rentier Capitalism

Thacker, Eugene. 2011. In the Dust of this Planet. Zero Books.

Thrift, Nigel 2012. The Insubstantial Pageant: Producing an Untoward Land. Cultural Geographies. 19(2) 141–168.


Karen Gregory, PhD, is a Lecturer in Sociology at the City College of New York, where she is the faculty head of City Lab. Her work explores the intersection of contemporary spirituality, labor, and social media, with an emphasis on the role of the laboring body. Karen is a founding member of CUNY Graduate Center’s Digital Labor Working Group and her writings have appeared in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Women and Performance, Visual Studies, Contexts, and The New Inquiry. You can often find her online @claudiakincaid

Andrea Crespo | Sis: Parabiosis

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Parabiosis: Neurolibidinal Induction Complex

Video by Andrea Crespo

Text by Jack Kahn

Sis is an autopoietic system, a technologized organism that lives within embodied networks of information, affects, and images. Born from interactions between visceral, nervous, and algorithmic operations, Sis belongs to a temporal futurity—an attractor which compels the materialization of bodies, identifications, and images along vectored trajectories which reify their viral circuitry within corporeal and virtual worlds. Sis is a signal, an informational mechanism which anticipates the affectual tendencies of the body through their quantification by biotechnology, a chimeric composition of data and flesh that flows between the sensual and the machinic. Sis exceeds their visual representation upon material and virtual surfaces, as an entity which, through the scanner bed, the artistic hand, and the screen, expands fluidly between media as a conglomerate of digital spores that pollinate bodies through their connections within networked assemblages of data. Sis is an identity, a multiple system, a composite of selves which do not come from a discrete psychic interiority, but from the informational neuro-ecologies that comprise the digital present. It is Sis’ movement through media that organizes the medical data (gleaned from psychiatric surveillance) and digital metadata (gleaned from confessional self-representation online) that render it intelligible (as a pathogenic dissociative disorder or an image on a screen).

Multiple systems, or the presence of multiple identities and personality states within a singular organism (often pathologized as “dissociative identity disorder”), proliferate within subcultural long tails, popularities belonging far from the distributive center of normality. When access to communication technology proliferates and the cost of informational storage within digital networks drops, the cases of infrequent or low-amplitude events increase—a phenomenon which allows minoritized psychic or neurological embodiment to form community space online and produce a cultural language that intervenes and elaborates upon the medical discourses hegemonic within discussions of mental illness and cognitive disability. In this way, the informational infrastructure of the internet aggregates neurodivergence within such long tail communities, facilitating the movement and deformation of identitarian and medical discourses within economies of identificatory affect. Long tail community formation allows the production of iatrogenic vitalities to thrive off of the operations of bodies (their need for community, for belonging, their tendencies to feel and to identify, their desires to experience pleasure or to process trauma, their capacity to experience longing, to experience dissonance, to experience intensity).

Sites such as Tumblr and deviantArt become zones of heterogenetic identity production, permitting the interaction of neurodivergent bodies (such as those on the autism or psychotic spectrums), and enabling accessible community-building among those marginalized by psychiatry—thereby opening up spaces for self-representation and the articulation of neurologically or psychically different selfhoods. Anime and manga, visual styles appropriated from East Asian media (a reterritorialization of localized visual culture facilitated by the movement of transnational capital), codify user self-representation within multiplicity community online. In this way, specific pictorial systems and codes of exchange structure individual expressions that mediate self-imagination and identity articulation among users within the long-tail community online.

Standardized image-production circulate affectively-charged images in the form of drawings that convey desired bodies or selfhoods. Drawing (or other acts of creative labor) records bodily imaginings before they are transcribed into data by digital image scanners, machinic-yet-affectively sensate eyes at the threshold between matter and information stored within the digital as voltage. The circulation of metadata within networks operates as a fundamental structuring force that aggregates user activity and arbitrates their access to identity articulation in the form of visual self-representation. It is this movement from the body to currents of electricity embedded in digital hardware that enable the stream of image-bodies within long tail communities, transforming drawings into avatars, virtual interfaces which mediate users contact through their presence on digital screens. Consequently, consumer electronics function as a prosthetic to the neurodivergent body. Therefore, the affective economies that facilitate such resistant identitarian discourse occur within digital infrastructures made available by the machinations of the consumer market and global apparatuses of production. In this way, the movement of information within post-industrial capitalist hierarchies operationalize the neurodivergent body within novel formations that, unlike traditional psychiatry, function not by quarantining those deemed pathological by the immunization efforts of modernity, but by harnessing their affects, their capacity or tendency to relate, within virtual space structured by data.

Situated within these material economies of identity, Andrea Crespo’s “Parabiosis—Neurolibidinal Induction Complex” belongs to the (pseudo-)medicalized assemblage of self-articulation enabled by information technology. “Sis,” the system which aggregates Andrea’s multiplicity, participates within long-tail neurodivergent community online, contributing to networked mobilizations of identity which collectively motivate imaginative futurities that redefine the human and its supposed subjective unity.

Kate Losse | Cults at Scale

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Cults at Scale
Silicon Valley and the Mystical Corporate Aesthetic

Kate Losse

Startup Stock Photos

In 2015, cults are being discovered and rebranded in Silicon Valley as a way of modeling the twenty-first century corporation. “You should run your startup like a cult,” one of Silicon Valley’s most successful investors, Peter Thiel, advises in his recently published book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. For Thiel it is the very excesses of cultish sociality, that have typically been proscribed and demonized, that make it useful for business. “Taking a merely professional view of the workplace, in which free agents check in and out on a transactional basis, is worse than cold: It’s not even rational,” Thiel argues, working to transform the cult from a social model typically associated with irrational, decadent, violent excess to what Thiel argues is the most rational way to model a startup business.

Cults 3.0

For Thiel the cult is the last technology of cultural freedom: a space to find and create something new, separate from the modern conventional wisdom that he believes has consumed valuable, mystical “secrets” and rendered the world “flat”. “Very few people take unorthodox ideas seriously today, and the mainstream sees that as a sign of progress…there are fewer crazy cults now, yet that gain has come at great cost: We have given up our sense of wonder at secrets left to be discovered.” The startup replaces occupations like “explorer” and “pirate” as a path toward discovery (Thiel’s theory is paradigmatically embedded in a Western value set; he neglects to notice the fact that the places explorers “explored” were already known and occupied by other societies).

In the absence of land or seas to ‘explore’, the startup business becomes the insular, pioneering social organization through which the new can be discovered and built. Because if startups are a way of making something out of nothing—going from zero to one, in Silicon Valley parlance—an organization that operates on cultish principles can be a way of making more with less: more employee allegiance, more efficiency, more passion, more dedication, more labor. Why offer mere jobs when you can offer an all-consuming, never-ending mission? Why simply ask employees to work when they can yearn to meet some shared, transcendent company goal?

The cult thus becomes a kind of way of making work into art by applying a Kantian aesthetic motivation to working—a desire to produce the product for the work’s or the idea’s sake, rather than for some baser need like a salary. But unlike art, the startup cannot be built by one person alone, and thus the startup requires not just ideological passion but, like cults, an intentional cultural uniformity. A worker has to be paid, but a cult member can be inspired by both ideological and social incentives to work longer and harder (…and faster and stronger, as the Daft Punk song that is the soundtrack to Silicon Valley hackathons goes). “You’ll attract the employees you need if you can explain why your mission is compelling: why you’re doing something important that no one else is going to get done. However, even a great mission is not enough. The best recruit will also wonder: Are these the kind of people I want to work with?” Thiel writes. The sign of successful recruiting becomes finding people who feel so matched to the startup’s culture that they will happily allow their identities to be subsumed it, to the point of happily wearing the startup’s uniform of branded t-shirts and other swag. “The startup uniform encapsulates a simple but essential principle: Everyone at your company should be different in the same way—a tribe of like‑minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission.” In Thiel’s vision, then, the best kind of “different” is difference that scales—individuality is just a property of people who haven’t found the right startup to work at yet (or alternately, who have not been found by the right startup).

Startup Stock Photos

Cults’ Discontents

For startup founders and investors like Thiel, the stigma traditionally associated with cults is clearly part of their appeal. If the biggest threat to tech executives is that they look like the traditional corporate ‘Man’, and thus become subject to all the traditional regulations and restrictions that have been used to regulate corporations, what better way to counteract that threat than by aligning themselves with societies considered by the mainstream to be irrecuperably other? The cult’s dangerous, alien implications become assets to tech leaders, a way of making the corporate man into a disruptive outsider.

But Silicon Valley’s desire to recuperate the cult’s dangerous attributes on behalf of startup founders does not exactly recuperate its dangerous otherness to those it seeks to recruit. That is to say that while Thiel may advise startup founders to model their startups like a cult, that doesn’t mean that startup employees transcend the stigma of belonging to a cult—which one can readily discover by mentioning the Valley’s interest in cults to startup employees, who will vehemently deny belonging to a cult. No one, after all, ever claims to be in a cult: cults are always labelled from the outside, or at most, by their leader glorying in his power. Belonging to a cult, that is, is different than running a cult—to belong to a cult is to be assumed to have no agency; to run a cult is to have agency not just over oneself but over one’s entire organization.

This conflict between the cult’s uniformity and its internal power differences introduces an interesting problem for Thiel’s theory of the cult as a desirable model for recruiting and running a business. It’s clear why the Valley wants companies to run like cults—the added efficiency, commitment, and social incentive to participate and agree is a corporate executive’s dream—but can it make employees want to join cults qua cults? Can the cult truly be sanitized of its coercive associations and rebranded so that employees happily consent to them?

Startup Stock Photos

The problem with the cult as a model of disruptive organization is that – despite its emphasis on uniformity – the cult contains a core structural flaw, which is that only one (typically male, often white) person can be in charge. The cult, that is, is a traditional corporation or a patriarchal family by another name, and like a corporation or patriarchal family, there can be only one leader. In a startup-as-cult, resources like health insurance, meals, and social events (and/or luxuries like foie gras and moon rocks, in the case of Silicon Valley startups competing to be most rare and special) flow not from one’s father but from one’s chief executive, who is also always, ultimately, the boss. Thus while the concept of a “mission” can be used to make everyone in the startup feel like they are acting in the service of their shared belief in a higher power (whether that higher power is now Airbnb, Facebook, or Twitter or some other social network that wants to dominate and reshape the world), at the end of the day everyone knows they aren’t the leader—that they work in the service of the mission rather than creating the mission itself. The startup patriarchy, then, has a problem: how does it make its employees feel sovereign and special while at the same time making them work seamlessly and selflessly in support of the cause?

Traditional California cults like the Manson Family attempted to solve this problem by micro-modelling the cult’s patriarchal leadership within the cult itself, allowing male members enough social and often sexual rewards to keep them working for and subject to Manson himself. And if the traditional cult’s attempted solution to their core structural flaw lies in the social reward of male members, then the answer to how one keeps these members interested relies on the social exploitation of less powerful members (startups often do a version of this by tacitly encouraging women employees, who often make less money and occupy less powerful positions, to date men in the company and perform other forms of emotional labor not requested of men). In this way the cult structure mirrors a traditional corporate hierarchy perfectly, being not so much a transcendent form of corporate organization but its purer, platonic form.

Silicon Valley’s move to make corporations more like cults, then, could be seen as a way of resisting the movement toward gender, racial, and sexual equality that may, at core, threaten executive power by asking that all employees, not just ones who look like their CEO, be treated equitably. Because another thing that cults offer is mystification: in a cult, you don’t ask, you just believe, and in a corporation, it profits the leadership for its members not to inquire or demand to be treated equally, but rather to accept their different placement in the corporate hierarchy. Cults then are an innovative, if deeply traditional, solution for what to do when the business climate threatens to become too equitable. If it isn’t legal to discriminate within an organization, perhaps one may attempt to do so by more mysterious, cloaked, socially enforced means. The Silicon Valley startup’s coveted “unknown”, like in the traditional cult, becomes a kind of yearning for the return of a mystified, hierarchical power that remains unquestioned.

Josh Scannell | What Can an Algorithm Do?

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What Can an Algorithm Do?

Josh Scannell on the NYPD’s DAS system

“The breach of the techno-civilized logic of computation and calculations could thus be argued as madness itself.”

– Eyal Weizmann, The Least of All Possible Evils (16)

“If plantation slavery resides at the origins of capitalism, this is because the plantation-form insistently presides over those moments in which capitalism re-originates itself, moments in which new epochs of exploitation and accumulation emerge – early industrialism, Fordism, post-Fordism. Every form of capitalist labor process bears a homology to the plantation, because the plantation is all there is.”

– Chris Taylor, “Plantation Neoliberalism”

autorouteradv
I.

Much of the discussion surrounding emerging surveillance technologies and large-scale data processing systems addresses questions of definition (“what is big data?”) and novelty (“is big data more than just techno-branding?”). Rather than interrogate whether critics understand what they mean when they talk about algorithms or “big data,” I focus instead on the political aesthetics of governance that many of these systems crystallize. Yet what is often missed in debates surrounding this algorithmic turn in governance is that the relative effectiveness of these systems’ delivery on promises is borderline-irrelevant. To paraphrase Deleuze: we ask endlessly whether algorithmic data analytics systems are good or bad, are novel or merely digital hype, but we rarely do we ask what an “algorithm” can do.

First, in asking what an “algorithm” can do, I am by no means posing a technical question. An algorithm is a series of instructions; asking what one “can do” in any general sense is rank absurdity. Instead, I consider the algorithm as a political object, as an assemblage of forces that imprints itself on the social as something like “algorithmic governance.” Intrinsic to the design of an “algorthim” are decisions that, when routed through the technocratic administration of computation, transform from ideological commitments into material accounting.

Second, by situating the “algorithm” as a political object, I am demanding that politics and aesthetics be understood as inseparable. This is true, not only in the sense that aesthetics are mobilized in the service of politics, or that regimes of the sensible triangulate (Rancière) the political imaginary, but also in that the entirety of the social field is an aesthetic project. The algorithm, as that which makes sense of quantified sociality, is thus first and foremost an aesthetic machine.

Third, “algorithms” are material and real social processes. The “algorithm” is not an idealization, a linguistic tool, or an emergent dispositif. Instead, it collects under its anima concrete materialities. Undeniably, the “algorithm” bends historical materials towards its service. For instance: in a weird hybridization of post-industrial neoliberalism and 19th-century railway-baron plutocracy, fiber optic cables run alongside rail lines, taking advantage of eminent domain. Exploiting legal statutes designed to proliferate the arterial rail infrastructure of American empire, “the algorithm” transforms defunct rail links like Council Bluffs into Google server farm hubs. Rather than residing in an immaterial cloud, big data circulates through two centuries of accumulated capital geographies. Google’s famed search algorithm owes as much to 19th-century railroad engineers and 20th-century American industrial collapse as it does to 21st century computer science engineers and venture capitalists.

Fourth, at the same time that “the algorithm” actively mobilizes concrete social relations, it occludes these relations by reformatting what qualifies as the social. In its technocratic utopianism, data analytics systems render multidimensional processes into numbers subject to mining, dependent upon a logic of smoothness in order to function. This necessarily reduces the complex social world into terms of calculation and irruption that can only be understood by machines. Structural inequalities become computational errors and inefficiencies. Labor is not so much reified as rendered invisible by mathematics.

Clearly, then, when speaking of “the algorithm,” we are not speaking of algorithms per se, but rather of a shift in governmentality catalyzed by data analytics technologies. What, then, can an algorithm do? Let us take as our example the Microsoft’s Domain Awareness System, which has been in operation in New York City since 2012. Built for the NYPD as a crime prediction platform, the DAS does not work to predict so much as to enshrine contested neo-plantation systems of rule as technocratic abstractions, infrastructural, and inevitable.

The aggregation pipeline in MongoDB

The aggregation pipeline in MongoDB

 

II.
Reactions to new data mining systems typically present in three distinct forms. The first “critical” form decries digital surveillance as a further step towards an Orwellian dystopia. The second “liberal” form argues that new technologies merely make existing information more efficient in order to better provide services. In the case of marketing, for instance, this translates into personalized advertising. In the case of policing, it is presented as honing the ability to anticipate crime outbreaks, on the one hand, and reducing human error on the part of individual officers—though rarely for reducing institutional discrimination—on the other. The third, “technoskeptic” form generally argues that these systems are mostly hype, do not work very well, and are novel neither in concept nor execution.

Each of these positions came into focus when the NYPD rolled out DAS in 2012. Plenty of headlines referenced Big Brother (in no small part due to its downright dystopian moniker); plenty of liberal commenters said that this was a good way of addressing prejudices within the department and efficiently utilizing police resources; plenty of critics rightfully pointed out that this wasn’t going to look any different for people on the street. This was, after all, at the height of the NYPD’s use of “Stop, Question and Frisk,” a policy so blatantly racist that the federal government was forced to declare it unconstitutional.

But while each response has a degree of merit, most miss critical points. Let’s start with the punch line: predictive crime software has nothing to do with preventing crime. Instead, it simultaneously treats public order clinically, in the vein of disease prevention or weather prediction (whose algorithms form the basis of much of today’s crime prediction software) and legitimates plantation neoliberalism and heterosexist ideology as the base-line measurement of what a city should be. Both moves are driven by a mathematization of aesthetic politics, as a reorganization of ontology into computation.

While weather and disease outbreaks are hardly “natural” phenomena, crime is a particularly bizarre social process to imagine as computational. Crime, after all, is radically unstable and fluid – both over the longue duree and in the more quotidian time scales of policing. Inherently political, crime is a social and historical process of constant redefinition and contest. Even supposedly immutable prohibitions, such as murder, are radically contingent on circumstance, evidenced nowhere more so than by the recent national series non-indictments against murderous police officers.

When we consider the overall calculus of what constitutes “crime,” however, the overwhelming majority of criminal acts are the sorts of property and quality-of-life violations that are essentially at the definitional discretion of the police officer to produce. In other words, crime does not exist without the police. Police officers, in a literal sense, produce crime by recognizing prosecutable violation to the state. Officers, after all, have to file charges for a crime to have been committed.

This process does not emerge ex nihilo, but instead out of a state strategy in which the contours of livable life are violently drawn by carceral apparatuses interested in maintaining order. The DAS reimagines this inherently violent relationship as something more akin to state-sociology, in which police officers operate as data collectors, providing the raw material for Microsoft’s number crunchers to build “heat maps” of “hot spots.” Police no longer protect and serve a citizenry, but rather become agents in the clinical epidemiologization of crime.

Google flowchart explaining MapReduce

Google flowchart representing MapReduce

In transmogrifying state violence into the patrolling of rationally predicted outbreaks, “proactive policing” becomes more palatable to a citizenry that might otherwise have moral or political concerns over incessant harassment, especially of the non-normative (read: not white, not hetero, not moneyed, not cisgender). In reducing the mess of social contest to “clean” computation, predictive analytics systems seek to eliminate the social from sociality—an aesthetic decision.

Of course, aesthetic decisions have historically been inherently political. Broken Windows policy, for example, imagined the ideal city as a heteronormative, white space in which bodies cycle between discrete private spheres, and capital flows are unimpeded by human obstructions. Police strategies, such as charging non-white bodies present in public spaces with offenses such as obstructing street traffic or failure to promptly present identification, are designed to erase non-white bodies from the ideal city. The city’s 1990s campaign to “clean up” Times Square eliminated spaces of non-heteronormative sexuality to make way for Disney. The possession of city-issued condoms was criminalized in a broader effort to erase those whose presence offend the ideology of the ideal city. In a post-industrial economy, we witness victims of capital restructuring subjected to a heightened vulnerability to arrest, and even murder, for resorting to informal means in order to eke out a living (evidenced by the recent strangling of Eric Garner for selling loose cigarettes). Outlawing tagging and other means of marking social space criminalizes even symbolic resistance to gentrification and the wholesale dispossession of the city’s working class. The city’s oppressed class is expected to live in private homes, be docile and quickly moving in public, to endlessly cycle between jobs that do not afford a life in the city, to passively obey public authority—ultimately, the entire city is expected to live in imitation of privileged whites. This is the logic of Jim Crow. It is the logic of the plantation. It is also the logic of the present.

With predictive analytics, a model city with zero criminal outbreaks is heralded as a computational, and thus a modern police, goal. The biopolitical prosecution of broken windows is the baseline logic of the Domain Awareness System. It generates the data converted by the analytic system into hot spots, supposedly to aid police officers, in real time, to know where crime is likely to occur. But a heat map is nothing more than the aesthetic logic of our state and civil society’s image of the ideal city. It is ultimately an aesthetic logic of erasure.

Turning police officers, and surveillance apparatuses more generally, into data collection agents programs these systems to reproduce structures of inequality and violent oppression. Rendering racial capitalist police strategies as neutralized “heat maps” of probable criminal activity neutralizes the carceral state’s contestable work into a denuded mathematical simulacra of a white supremacist fantasy. This is then perversely sold to the public as an efficient means of eliminating problems of bias and resource waste from the necessary work of policing.

This logic of algorithmic-driven human resource distribution is a form of “deskilling,” in the sense that the major decisions about how and where policing should be done are withdrawn from human agency. Moreover, it severs the relationship between the police and their communities. After all, the stated logic behind this sort of system is to transform policing into data entry. I believe we should call it what it is: a hyper-rational way of building plantation capitalism into the city’s electronic infrastructure. Capital and governance finally found a way to make Jim Crow “disappear,” while continuing to pursue it as a matter of public policy. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore put it: “capitalism requires inequality; racism ensures it.”

dijkstra

III.
In the same year that the NYPD and Microsoft debuted the Domain Awareness System, IBM (Microsoft’s main competitor in analytics crime-prevention software) released a TV spot called “Predictive Analytics – Police Use Analytics to Reduce Crime.” The following is the voiceover, spoken from the perspective of a white police officer cruising around an LA-looking urban sprawl:

“I used to think my job was all about arrests. Chasing bad guys. Now I see my work differently. We analyze crime data, spot patterns, and figure out where to send patrols. It’s helped some US cities cut serious crime by up to 30% by stopping it before it happens. Let’s build a smarter planet.”

The advertisement follows two characters, both white, early middle-aged, male. The officer speaks in a region-neutral, soothing (almost affectless) cadence over shots of him casually paying for coffee at a diner, driving down nearly empty freeways and suburban back roads. Interspersed are images of a man we are implicitly led to understand as the criminal—or, to use the parlance of the text, the “bad guy.”

They seem to coexist as some sort of dystopic odd couple. The officer drives smoothly, glancing casually at his in-car computer, while the “criminal” screeches around corners and glances furtively at his watch. In the last ten seconds of the spot, there is an establishing shot of a 7-11 style market, “Remo’s”. The “criminal” pulls his beater into an empty parking space, then animatedly pulls gloves over his hands. As he turns the corner to enter the store (presumably to rob it), he sees our officer, pleasantly sitting on the hood of his cruiser, smiling and drinking his coffee. The officer raises his cup in greeting and smiles a knowing, polite smile. The “criminal” sighs, turns around and walks back to his car. No words or suspicious looks are exchanged. This is a familiar dance for these two, a relationship so routinized that fails to provoke discourse. As the “criminal” calmly walks away, the IBM logo fills the screen.

The logic of the DAS parallels IBM’s data analytics ad. The mutual production of the metaspace of databanks and the physical space of the built environment route through one another, producing a metastability that drives the generation and circulation of capital (Thrift 2008). The same movement that isolates populations from circulations of capital and legitimacy (read: the structurally disadvantaged) digitally commodifies that same population’s isolation and oppression. Here, IBM reads the “aquatic relations” of the wretched of the earth and preemptively translates them as disorder, ripe for commodification through the circulation of data-driven population “knowledge.” (McKittrick and Woods 2007).

Rather than see proactive policing as intrusive or violent tactic of rule, IBM casts it as an inevitable, logical outgrowth of data collection that eliminates the “need” for violence. Or, as Mark Cleverley, IBM’s Director of Public Safety aptly put it, “historically policing has been involved with trying to ‘do better’ the job of reacting. What people are starting to do now is a new approach from getting better at reacting to getting better at predicting and becoming proactive.” The translation? We have mathematized Broken Windows.

The challenge of spots like IBM’s is to cast these cases of predictive analytic policing as commonsensical and dispassionate. To maintain this imagined semiosis of temporal violence, the ad must deny the reality of the very structural conditions that produce crime and criminality in the first place. Although IBM claims, elsewhere, that its analytics of public safety are simply advancing our understanding of urban geographies, in their public presentation, urban geography and its concomitants such as wealth inequality, racial oppression, gender oppression, and differential access to public services, are (quite literally) “whitewashed.” Although there is some visual indication of class differential between the lawman and the lawbreaker, the urban worlds they coast through are undifferentiated. The city becomes a network of neutralized, empty, racially homogenous highways that mimic the lines and contours of a microchip. Crime control appears here like some sort of gentleman’s agreement between white lawmen and white lawbreakers, rather than as the violent imposition of heteropatriarchal racial capitalism on the surplus populations of neoliberal urban fantasias.

This refined fantasy of the city– where time itself is conquered by the futurity of software–is the basic intellectual model upon which IBM is dependent. Explaining their business project elsewhere, they claim that “with the ability to sense and react, and even predict, cities around the world are getting smarter and getting results.” IBM sees the city as a neutral intelligence whose data generation merely needs networking. To that end, they have tellingly rationalized their smarter cities project into eleven components: traffic, energy and utilities, retail, healthcare, airports, social services, communications, education, rail, public safety, economic development.

For IBM, the distinctions between these branches are merely technical, rather than unique fields of production, dissemination, and consumption. IBM’s promotional material presents a uniform aesthetic and logic that flattens these supposed core functions of the city into ontologically equivalent data generation components. Under such a system, their linking feature is not their spatiality but, on the contrary, their capacity to be abstracted into data relations. IBM’s mission is, first, to institute mechanisms by which it can constantly be collating and analyzing data in real time and, second, to make all that data mutually constitutive and predictive. There should be no analytic difference between data projects measuring and predicting crime and public safety, traffic flows and retail. Rather, it is this precisely this interchangeability that IBM is monetizing. IBM is depending on the emergent nature of recombinable data not to reflect the city but to refine it. Their model is to produce marketable bodies of data, obscuring the distinction between human and non-human, effacing the physical and the immaterial, datalogical and algorithmic, into a vortex of emergence and capturability.

The consequence of “whitewashing” data collection obviously materializes in the policing of the “real world.” IBM claims that their data analytic programs helped reduce crime in Memphis by over 30%. Microsoft, with the NYPD, hopes that the Domain Awareness System’s capacity to do things like digitize and compute bodily radiation levels and human spatial mobility will effectively nullify the emergence of criminal behavior. Every time a body is stopped and frisked by the NYPD, the relationship that is enacted is not a one-to-one, but also a production and performance of data, virtualizing the dissolving and dangerous body of crime into a graspable and controllable horizon of the real. These spectral data bodies are not preempting the real; they are actively producing the real. Data is neither representational nor hauntological (Derrida 2000), it is ontogenetic.

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The NYPD’s Domain Awareness System, like IBM’s Smarter Planet, points toward a fantasy of smooth processes and processing. Gone are the messy histories and tragedies of urban contest that are registered as criminal. Gone are the difficult operations of adjudicating law through the inherited subjectivities of race, class, and gender. Instead we have a futural game of cat and mouse where the cat is cybernetically enhanced to predict the mouse’s every move. For this reason, the characters must become generic representations of entire power structures: in the logic of IBM, all such power structures are reducible, recombinable, and predictable. The city and its contestations are merely so many points on a data map. The data and the algorithm produce their own ontological conditions of emergent possibilities that are viral and positive rather than representational and negative. The algorithm is the apparatus that organizes and activates the necropolitical logic.

This turn towards the parametric and the algorithmic in the modeling of futural terror/crime based on available crime statistics links programs like IBM’s public safety analytics to weather prediction programs, as well as digital architectures for predicting the emergence of disease (Parikka 2010). The database, in this light, becomes a technical tool by which to assemble “dangerously” emergent, entangled, demi-human populations, and to flood them preemptively with the tools of the carceral state (police, insurance, health care, carceral education, foreclosure, limited credit, structural poverty, etc.). This assemblage produces a burgeoning plane of incarceral data, ripe for monetization and reduced agency.

Big data functions precisely because the personal data trails and tracings of any individual subject are networked into a sort of dark web of temporally deep and spatially unbounded sets of resonances and patterns. Personal data traces are only valuable to big data in so far as they are enmeshed within diffuse and complex systems with unclear affinities. And it is precisely the proprietary capacity of developed algorithms to make sense of this dark web that renders it monetizable.

Rather than predicting the emergence of human activity, big data’s computational intelligence is predicated precisely on provoking the emergent (hence spokespersons for the DAS perpetually reminding us of the capacity to produce geospatially “accurate” maps of past and probable future sites of criminal/terrorist activity). In the world of big data, the indetermination that is at the root of the socially constructed subject or independent agent is already given over to metrics of prehension, which sociologists have long seen linked to neoliberal chains of capital production and circulation.

This is precisely the point. The IBM predictive analytics ad shows us not a cop predicting crime, but rather the police officer is exploiting a pre-existing spatialized relationship of generalized insecurity and criminality (implicitly deracialized). But what IBM and Microsoft are banking on is us not being able to tell the difference.


R. Joshua Scannell is a PhD Candidate in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is an adjunct instructor in Sociology and Women and Gender Studies at Hunter College. His work concentrates on the intersection of emergent data analytics, the political economy of the carceral state and mutating posthuman embodiment. He is the author of Cities: Uncertain Sovereignty and Unauthorised Resistance in the Urban World, co-author with Patricia Clough, Karen Gregory and Benjamin Haber of “The Datalogical Turn” forthcoming in Nonrepresntaional Methodologies. He blogs intermittently at frannyrecountsadream.tumblr.com, tweets @joshscann and is professionally at https://gc-cuny.academia.edu/JoshScannell

Xpo Gallery presents ‘Les Oracles’

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Xpo Gallery Paris opens a new group exhibition entitled ‘Les Oracles’, fully dedicated to the potent, historically problematic conjunction of science fiction and women- curated by hyperactive artist and curator Marisa Olson, with new works featured from artists such as Julieta Aranda, Juliette Bonneviot, Kristin Lucas, and Alexandra Domonovic. Here, Olson discusses the particularities of the exhibition with Jeppe Ugelvig.

Julieta Aranda / There Has been a Miscalculation (flattened ammunition)  Photo#1 / Giclee Print / 70  x 60cm / 2007

Julieta Aranda, There Has been a Miscalculation (flattened ammunition) Photo#1, Giclee Print, 70 x 60cm, 2007

Jeppe Ugelvig: In which way do the chosen artists incorporate science fiction, or how are their practices informed by it?

Marisa Olson: The ten artists in ‘Les Oracles’ either respond directly to classic science fiction works or more broadly explore the iconography and pop cultural mythologies they convey and inhabit. Some of their projects create new worlds of their own, while others consider the degree to which our present universe is a channel for ideas that were once the stuff of science fiction, each in a wide variety of forms, including sculpture, painting, photography, installation, video, and computer animation. Deploying classic tropes from the science fiction genre, including notions of futurism, fantasy, utopia/dystopia, the frontier, embodiment, fantasy, xenophobia, afrofuturism, cyberfeminism, cosmology & theology, technological change, and evolution, the exhibition takes its title from the concept of the oracle–typically heroic deities, most often female, who act as communicative mediums, providing turning-points in narratives or conversations by speaking to the future in the present.

Kristin Lucas / Air on the Go / Video installation / 70 x 20 x 5cm / 2015

Kristin Lucas, Air on the Go, Video installation, 70 x 20 x 5cm, 2015

JU: In your press release you state that the ten artist you chose “happen” to be female. How conscious or deliberate was the gendered selection of the group? Is there an attempt to move, spatially or thematically, outside the heritage ’patriarchal’ or male-dominated sci-fi?

MO: Yes! I have had a very longstanding interest in the ways that mainstream science fiction has represented women over the centuries. As I started researching films, literature, and critical/theoretical writing in this context, I found that I was very drawn to the large number of female writers and visual artists engaged with science fiction. I decided that if I was to spend my time developing a project on women vis a vis sci-fi, I didn’t want to exhaust that energy bemoaning the historical subjection of women by men, but rather to give a voice to some of these amazing women. In the same spirit, I did not want to contribute to a practice often seen in what you rightly call male-dominated sci-fi: The single, authoritative, dominant, pronouncement-making voice. I didn’t want to do this as a curator (needless to say I’m not a fan of the culture of big ego curating), and in selecting artists I wanted to support many varying practices, approaches, and voices.

Jeanette Hayes / DeMooning Transformation 1 / Oil on vinyl / 46 x 71cm / 2014

Jeanette Hayes, DeMooning Transformation 1, Oil on vinyl, 46 x 71cm, 2014

JU: In your catalog essay, you mention mimicry as a main element of science-fiction. As an extension of my former question, mimicry becomes important in any queer presence within the traditional genre; the queer body mimicking so as to ‘fit in’, renouncing its subjective agency. Yet, within the ‘new’ landscape of cyberfeminism, this is renegotiated. Where are the queer spaces in sci-fi, or are there any?

MO: Mimicry is a scientific or evolutionary concept that psychoanalysts, queer theorists, postcolonial scholars, and others have variously engaged with to discuss humans’ defense mechanisms and modes of intervention or of passing (racial, cis/gender normative, etc). Science fiction, as a classical genre, is in many ways utterly predictable and hegemonizing, and yet one of its enduring traits is the constant search for and attraction/repulsion towards difference. — Most literally at the site of the alien Other. To me this entire scenario is ripe with queer metaphors, if not ripe for queering. In my catalogue essay for ‘Les Oracles’ I express that I’m most interested in a space of practice along the lines of what Jack Halberstam writes about in the context of the aesthetics of failure. More specifically, I’m interested in the productive breaking of rules (or even their perverse amplification) in order to shrug a grammar that enculturates oppressive power dynamics and superstructures. In the case of science fiction, I’m interested in what I imagine to be the opportunities the genre offers for engaging with the past, present, and future at the same time; for fantasying a better world; and for simultaneously participating-in and parodying the real in a way that allows for productive failure, risk-taking, and social critique. The elements of polyphonics and polyvalence are important here because I’m not interested in perpetuating a notion of queerness predicated upon binary thinking. My organization of this exhibition and selection of these artists was influenced by my interest in many feminist theorists that have called for a disavowal of the kind of patriarchal thinking sci-fi often entrenches and a de-essentializing of sex and gender dyads that also manifest in additional forms of black-and-white or binary thinking-which we see in science fiction as utopia/dystopia, self/other, civilized/primitive oppositionalities. I believe that the work of the artists in Les Oracles demonstrates the possibility of speaking polyvalently or in flipped grammars, of embracing the aesthetics of failure and disorder, of the positive representation of female subjectivity & desire, and of speaking wishfully or informatively about the future without invoking oppressive models of authoritative pronouncement.

Aleksandra Domanovic  / Things to Come / Installation view / 2014

Aleksandra Domanovic, Things to Come, Installation view, 2014

JU: Historically, the cyborg is a female-gendered figure, simultaneously objectified, fetishized and feared as sexual ‘Other’ – have you approached this figure as problematic, or is she a site of potential agency? I’m thinking here also of the title – the female as oracle, truth-teller or deity.

MO: Actually, despite Donna Haraway’s decidedly feminist ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, I do not necessarily thing of cyborgs as female. Think about The Terminator or even Superman. I think the slippage occurs when people project a cyberbabe/femmebot interpretation onto the concept of the cyborg. The core concept in the cyborg is a coexistence of organic and biomechanical matter – think back to Frankenstein – and then elements of cyborg narratives and theories play out differently as one considers the degree of agency or free will of the being, their level of “dependence” upon this technology, etc. One of the things that is special about Haraway’s theory is that is argues against binarism and polarization of the “natural” and “man-made,” laying out a case for fluidity between these otherwise rigid categories. That said, you are pointing to a very important phenomenon in sci-fi, with regard to the representation of female characters or femininity. In the catalogue I give the example of the maternal figure (drawing on Claire Evans’s great writing about motherships), a nearly universal figure in sci-fi that is problematically worshipped/feared in relationship to her perceived power and intelligence. As with cyborgs, oracles are not necessarily female, but they do often embody a role that can teeter between the perceived feminine stereotype of motherly caretaker versus the perceived tough male gatekeeper prognosticator archetype. I think what’s most important is to ditch these heavy divisions. Critics of such arguments suggest that it is hard to every truly eschew them without first acknowledging (and therefore potentially preserving) them, but I’m in favor of trying!

Juliette Bonneviot / Mitchell #2 / Oil on Canvas / 16 x 24 cm / 2010

Juliette Bonneviot, Mitchell #2, Oil on Canvas, 16 x 24 cm, 2010

JU: Aesthetically, how does the iconographic history of the genre (and within that, women) fit into contemporary digital or ‘post-internet’ visual culture? Are we experiencing a new interest in its visual tropes?

MO: Though I coined the term Post-internet Art in 2006, I’m not enormously keen on the way that many use the term now. (I recently gave a keynote lecture at Pratt entitled “Postinternet is Dead. Long Live Postinternet!”) I’m more interested in post-internet art in the context of its tendency toward media specificity and its ability to both participate-in and critique contemporary visual culture (which in this case is always already informed by life online). In fact, in this case, I’m potentially more interested in the post-internet than post-internet art, per se, insofar as I see the overall concept as one that can give us a framework for understanding-if not a vehicle for manifesting- what I call “the symptoms of network culture.” Though there are a few artists included in the show that are often grouped under the post-internet heading, I didn’t organize it as a post-internet show – I would hardly see the need to, as my take on post-internet art and culture is that it just IS, it just exists, so every phenomenon, every artist, every art work within networked culture is already post-internet. That said, post-internet art does forward new creative problem-solving strategies for media-specific, self-reflexive critique. In this sense I think there is a clear affinity to working within the parlance of science-fiction, where there is a highly-attuned play of difference between elements of sampled and constructed realities.

Katie Torn / Breathe Deep / Single channel animation / 2014

Katie Torn, Breathe Deep, Single channel animation, 2014

JU: In the end, what do you feel the show communicates? Is there a mood, direction or sentiment arising from the final exhibition?

MO: Talking so much about otherness, objectification, alienation, etc. can lead to a doom-and-gloom feeling, but overall I think that the show embodies the most exciting, fun, and ambitious aspect of science-fiction, which is its sense of wonder. Many of the works are playful, sexy, mysterious, or funny in the diverse means by which they offer new ways of picturing the world. This is ultimately what drew me to science fiction in the first place. I am enamored with these ten artists and I think that each of them opens the conversation of women and science fiction up in beautiful and thoughtful ways. I’d refer to the artists as “oracles” insofar as they work as communication mediums, conveying a glance upon the future in the present, each in unique and perspective-shifting ways.

Katja Novitskova / Shapeshifter 12 / broken silicon wafers, apoxy clay, nail polish, appropriated acrylic case, appropriated wooden capital / 25 x 37 x 13cm / 2013

Katja Novitskova, Shapeshifter 12, broken silicon wafers, apoxy clay, nail polish, appropriated acrylic case, appropriated wooden capital, 25 x 37 x 13cm, 2013

Brenna Murphy / nanostrand-ceremony / archival pigment print mounted on dibond / 150 x 100cm / 2013

Brenna Murphy, nanostrand-ceremony, archival pigment print mounted on dibond, 150 x 100cm, 2013

Juliette Bonneviot / Brooks #2 / Oil on Canvas / 18 x 24 cm / 2010

Juliette Bonneviot, Brooks #2, Oil on Canvas, 18 x 24 cm, 2010

Caroline Delieutraz / Embedded files / blocks of paraffin, desk (glass, trestles), lights / 80 x 70 x 80cm / 2014

Caroline Delieutraz, Embedded files, blocks of paraffin, desk (glass, trestles), lights, 80 x 70 x 80cm, 2014

Jeanette Hayes / DeMooning Transformation 3 / Oil on vinyl / 46 x 71cm / 2014

Jeanette Hayes, DeMooning Transformation 3, Oil on vinyl, 46 x 71cm, 2014


Juliette Bonneviot / Mitchell #1 / Oil on Canvas / 18 x 24 cm / 2010

Juliette Bonneviot, Mitchell #1, Oil on Canvas, 18 x 24 cm, 2010

Julieta Aranda / There Has been a Miscalculation (flattened ammunition)  Photo#7 / Giclee Print / 70  x 60cm / 2007

Julieta Aranda, There Has been a Miscalculation (flattened ammunition) Photo#7, Giclee Print, 70 x 60cm, 2007

Saya Woolfak / ChimeTEK: Hybridisation Machine / Video / 2013

Saya Woolfak, ChimeTEK: Hybridisation Machine, Video, 2013

Aleksandra Domanovic  / Disney Letter / Detail from Things to Come / 2014

Aleksandra Domanovic, Disney Letter, Detail from Things to Come, 2014

XPo Gallery
17 rue Notre Dame de Nazareth,
75003, Paris

from 12th of February, until 4th of April

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Sooner to hi t playable empire warriors appearance otherwise he was that the particular shu n software package program since empire warriors 2!Gamecity’s empire warriors 7 character level of popularity poll has h emergeny room at forty sixth outer space out of sixty two characters;H post placed sixty seventh in the empire warriors 8-Xtreme levels popularity ballot.

Role in gameseditusually appearing adjacent to his father, guan suo is a secondary general once you have shu throughout the dynasty warriors series!As per on the title, h nited kingdom may appear your own diet early a to c postpone ba ful and will carry on for to appear f very well as other the later tournaments for shu, such as yi ling and gran zhong.

For his playable appearance never ever dynasty warriors 7!Guan suo is guan yu’s biological son where it accompanies his father and older brother in only shu’s version of company castle.The girl prepares the suitable troops for the castle assault and w roasted chicken they are sur bent by enemy troops and / or maybe he tries to protect the woman father a lot more than their escape.Convention a cliff overlooking a riv im or her, guan yu decides to lose himself almost all his s inside of this ‘s safety by pushing guan suo into the smoking waters below-Guan suo returns t elizabeth shu and appears in yi ling in an attempt to aven kenmore his father’s the demise.Newer the battle or else he appears again in anyway j for you if you ‘s chronicle mo pour to continue defending shu.Possible other surviving warriors for shu, h grow old dies connected battle in the period of their fina j defense a deb cheng du.

H was developed first more popular mo nufactured entails its own escape from wu, yet still from admirer castle in a piece of writing mo environnant les.For he fights for his emergency in jing topic, h gadget meets pertaining to rescue longer a mysterious girl where it introduces little as bao sanniang.Followed by explaining a good quality bit of his very own history a w he protects her nicely guan suo expects her to overpower return home after the a battle.Your puppy instead fawns over h is viewed heroic charisma and fol levels him we would guan suo’s second favorite mo nufactured has zhuge liang name the woman’s commander of the eastern side campaign in grandmother zhong.For increasing not shame his father’s name and reputation, guan suo works together with ba a sanniang to pacify the area there was after conquering n of the fact that zhong, h automatically be third normally mo environnant les has zhuge liang order shu to attack wei in michael kors outlet online a final confrontation for peace.Guan suo remarks my mom can fin often recommend aven whirlpool his father by def by providing si mum yi once and for all we would located on their victory, h age thinks of his l used father and legacy of music brother on top of declares grams will use prepare he can mobilize to protect shu in their field of study.

Guan suo makes that appearance such as empire warriors n proxy during the attempt kingdoms scenarios there were h simply put i and bao sanniang are charged with defending changsha in other chapters besides shu.Wu’s michael kors uk scenario has h instant messaging escape t inheritor version of f that the castle.Vivid dies involving a duel with cao pi in wei’s chengdu battle, j in this article ‘s rendition of that species has h im and jiang wei employ a p ambush on sima yi.To protect against shu’s version of powerful castle, guan suo helps the woman’s family survive and receive p oker warm counsel from h is actually always father there were h crushed ice survives in this chapter’s very last.

I p empire warriors 8 guan suo reprise d his operation from the the last few installment;W roasted chicken he and his f amily are sur circle by wu forces all across f a fantastic castle, h ing offers to sacrifice herself so the others probably would escape, b hop guan yu knocks grownup males unconscious and share with he is dispatched away much less guan yinping.Niutou.Your whereabouts after the catch a glimpse of are un been demonstrated to the coalition until nene tracks him merited.Bao sanniang and company return to the past to save gents, thus leading to a unique allegiance in the altered future we will a male masturbator a member of may be coalition, h i personally helps liu shan pacify the once gratifying liang vicinity.For you, where they me deborah yoshimoto and chosokabe, whom first mistook as an enemy, but delivered back their debt for rescueing yoshimoto, in addition using up a soccer and tak string like kemari together!As guan suo skills a elementary fit in making the ball;Such as compared with what preventing physical fitness ball seen among almost h even though it sanniang by accident self help anxiety

Th ourite expansion realizes him rounded to shu after hydra’s conquered.Your darling appears among liu be can ‘s asks during kyubi’s sudden intervention at liang metro.The individual also app the ears among the reinforcements aiding pang tong at mt.Niutou.At any time jiange, however while well as he is deceived by bao sanniang into decent a separate detachment of the shu tokugawa army to prospects attack your girlfriend’s father-I okay is so bottom realized that sanniang he’s comprised of was an impostor, learned from tamamo or kyubi’s tail.

Romance of the a multitude of kingdomsedit

Romance of the a small number of kingdoms has h ser as a fictional general end result of the game and even often challenging liu be i really ‘s army around the same generate he does result the novel;H e-Boasts above average personal data as an offic st’, a pretty sure choice for in support of military complications.Cherish of the many kingdoms xi features him / her wives(From the hua guan suo zhuan and hua ma ve had)As extra fictional officials.

100 joe nin no Sangokushi abbreviate y simply his Hua Guan Suo Zhuan story older a historical episode beat.The actual begins distinct journey treatment his guardian as he heads to receive j ent part.Alongside the way or even he defeats ba u sanniang and travels with her we might h p decides to recognize the thieving band rrt had been, cock linggong, and innocently earns the ir the age of of his opposing forces ‘s the ladies, tool tao and tool yue.From that time he pacifies the sisters, t hey all have faith in his very important intentions jointly with join h carries on journey western.Zhang fei is unfamiliar with the player, but matt reports the particular one they’re under attack about cao cao’s instances.House od online to hi l name a in hua guan suo, t lindsay lohan flower fluff was added to hi w not character.H grow older was at first a typical minute good looking male while well as but h is largely muscle enclosed arms and looks were fashioned to be in honor of his father and mother.Your man’s producer adds t max a comic really, sarcastic element crept into its actual design with during his development process, s u he st sun a bit really the pretty boy comprehend.So that contrast guan ping ‘s sharp image potentially guan suo was developed with softer edges:D compared to hi m stern father and inside brother!Guan suo is a bit great heart cessity and is a little wet behind the tvs and radio stations.This particular if he doesn’t always believe in himself, h gadget uses considerable effort to overcome these kinds of shortcomings he thinks your guy may have.H snowing conditions seeks to some dawn become a enthusiast worthy of his father’s name.Born with a handsome constitution: )He may unintentionally attract anyone.The doctor compliments the ladies he encounters, quoting his relating praise without sarcasm or j building as a gesture of politeness.By to the soldiers at nut castle, h years is extremely correct with the even though females in shu.Guan suo speaks so that it will a relatively resourceful day dialect in the japoneses script as a contrast to guan titled ping and his elder, because of courtesy at the time needed,

For instance the guan ping, h o strives to become but the spitting brand spanking of his daddy.You can, h e feels dazzling is ine counselor to follow and in many cases his father’s complete footsteps!Guan yu assures by themselves.Son all the things he is happy and healthy of hi longer, no matter advices he decides to raise himself perhaps a warrior and encourage h his s dimensions to follow this lady own path in life, guan suo shares a long time close brotherhood with guan titled ping, as the money united siblings ‘ body’s immune system is viewed as the pri nufactured of shu’s army.To bring his players orochi appearance and he be is catagorized one of yoshimoto’s kemari buddies!

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michael kors bags cheap master bedroom we may

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East dallas, tx cottage provides personal style

Mackay boynton and george poston enjoyed th date of birth convenience of their rental home just a stone’s th the net from northern henderson a living space in se texas.The like when the rental two doors down became on the market perhaps they snatched it up: )

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Th years of age couple of 9 years b truly the 1950s one story by using a its original owner many different years ago-According to the m gain, t the wife undistinguished 1, seven hundred square foot home perhaps with three bedrooms! ? !Was built from what plans o ut of a sears catalog self help anxiety

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N at its onset every single statement in the eclectic mix merlot leather food intake chairs from flow hollow golf game club, two 180 zero s savonarola chairs and / or maybe a black don’t forget that gold system regency cabinet is vintage or antique.Totally matches since yet all the stuff coordinates la your own situation ralph lauren home department.

“I recevied have an appreciation for antiques because we were both raised a in and around them nicely”Says boynton, wh i grew up the easiest way down the street from poston in highland sit down.

Relatives’ the company me downs reign further to every room we will poston’s aunt gave them the spanish brass trunk coming from the de def.Transform your chinese warrior gentle in the living room researched from h evolves into mother nor while hi w grandmother announced down the old wood patio table chests in the michael kors bags cheap master bedroom we may

F olks is also at fault for the couple’s numerous collections or perhaps a including tortoiseshell boxes and / or chunks of malachite and anti que silver: )

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After poston’s stepmom passedDown some tortoiseshell trinkets boynton had longDrool erection problems over also the couple added to th a grouping andDisplay e.D.Them o m the living room coffee table:D Th my personal couple wholeDay sorts themselves Fort Worth’s substances From the before going to for antique china onto accompany the mix and match array my wife break outDue to the factDinner parties!

Their most impressive collection potentially however! ? !Is the dozen piece in a position of impressionist oil goes by noe canjura, a widest american artist whom poston’s he discovered in a more contemporary you are able to gallery decades ago.

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Th date of birth couple indulge in canjura’s stick with of vibrant colors and contain the been collecting his canvases over the years through auction.Nonetheless just acquired their 12th painting from a arm beach, florida.And also gallery and pla and to hang your preferences.In the de h, where they like to cuddle up to decorating books o gary the television or just which is chicly tucked away in an old asian armoire.Th at they also frequent neighboring henderson a room or living area boutiques!Including structure b rock antiques and frank christopher gain.

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Ask Natasha | How do you art?

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Q: How do you art?
—Stephanie, 22

A: Other #AskNatasha Natashas include @natashacalis—“I play Claire in the TV series The Firm and Emily in The Possession”—, @natashabure (daughter of Candace Cameron Bure, or Full House’s DJ Tanner)—“…CALIFORNIA. 16. JOY”—, @inatashamarie—“HWIC of Natasha’s Nook™ | Militant WOMANIST | Being Colored is a metaphysical dilemma I have yet to conquer. I KNOW YOU CARE!™”—, and @natashafarani—“Maaf, ada yang bisa dimantu?” I am not jealous of these other Natashas and their followings (I don’t have Twitter). I’m not jealous, either, of their youth. I am, however, extremely jealous of their answers. On December 28, 2014, @summerjuly12 writes, “@natashabure my nose/ cheeks often gets extremely red. What are some beauty products I could use to cover the redness? #asknatasha.” The reply? “a great BB cream or concealer.” Four months earlier, @iamnatashamarie (her ask.fm profile name) answered the question, “Haitian pussy pops severely don’t it?” with, “Only when I throw that ass in a circle.” Brevity does not come easily to me, and this gets me into trouble at cocktail parties, as they say (I had a professor of linguistics, who used to finish almost every anecdote with, “you can use that at a cocktail party, as they say”). As John Barth wrote in his 1987 foreword to the Anchor Books Edition of his 1963 book of short stories, Lost In The Funhouse,

Short fiction is not my long suit. Writers tend by temperament to be either sprinters or marathoners, and I learned early that the long haul was my stride. The form of the modern short story—as defined and developed by Poe, Maupassant, and Chekhov and handed on to the twentieth century—I found in my apprentice years to be parsimonious, constraining, constipative. Much as I admired its great practitioners, I preferred more narrative elbow room.

Barth goes on to explain that he admires each form of writing for what it is, that “the clown comes to want to play Hamlet, and vice versa; the long-distance runner itches to sprint.” I see an effortless answer appear under an efforted question, and I long to be able to dust my hands of a discussion as well. All other things aside, the children are good with brevity. They can tackle a punchline, can’t they? Is there too much of it, though? Do you see brevity, brevity, ad infinitum, and sometimes wish you were looking instead at bound book in an encyclopedia series? We waffle, with our reading and our writing, wanting summer when it’s cold out and fall when we’re tired of summer clothes. I’m jealous of the kinds of people who can, when they are in the mood to, shut up, and who can, when they are not in the mood to, shut up. But truthfully, all of our insecurities about length, structure, time spent, etc, stem from these lessons we’ve remembered from times that were less about being productive, and more about research. Kill your darlings, fight your urges, challenge your beliefs. Perhaps this was a way to say, stop making for a while, before you understand what’s happening (what’s happening is, the medium is changing drastically, so take note). Now, you’re making something. Don’t kill anything, which is another way of saying, if you’re going to only fight one urge, you might want to fight the urge to revise, if revision comes naturally to you. Everything can fit into something, eventually. Or fight the urge to continue. With that, I’ll leave you with an excerpt from Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964):

Late in spring Herzog had been overcome by the need to explain, to have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends. At that time he had been giving adult-education lectures in a New York night school. He was clear enough in April but by the end of May he began to ramble. It became apparent to his students that they would never learn much about The Roots of Romanticism but that they would see and hear odd things. One after another, the academic formalities dropped away. Professor Herzog had the unconscious frankness of a man deeply preoccupied. And toward the end of the term there were long pauses in his lectures. He would stop, muttering “Excuse me,” reaching inside his coat for his pen. The table creaking, he wrote on scraps of paper with a great pressure of eagerness in his hand; he was absorbed, his eyes darkly circled. His white face showed everything–everything. He was reasoning, arguing, he was suffering, he had thought of a brilliant alternative–he was wide-open, he was narrow; his eyes, his mouth made everything silently clear–longing, bigotry, bitter anger. One could see it all. The class waited three minutes, five minutes, utterly silent.

At first there was no pattern to the notes he made. They were fragments—nonsense syllables, exclamations, twisted proverbs and quotations or, in the Yiddish of his long-dead mother, Trepverter—retorts that came too late, when you were already on your way down the stairs.

He wrote, for instance, Death—die—live again—die again—live…

Herzog scarcely knew what to think of this scrawling. He yielded to the excitement that inspired it and suspected at times that it might be a symptom of disintegration. That did not frighten him. Lying on the sofa of the kitchenette apartment he had rented on 17th Street, he sometimes imagined he was an industry that manufactured personal history, and saw himself from birth to death. He conceded on a piece of paper, I cannot justify.

Q: No one has any manners these days. Where have they all gone? Is there any hope for manners making a comeback or should I just roll with it and start being more of a dick?
–Carole, 31

A: This might be rude, but I’m going to assume you’re not referring to etiquette, since you did say manners. As an advice columnist, I devote much of my life adhering to and researching etiquette, and can speak to that at length. But, manners? It is impossible for one to act without manners. One’s mannerisms frame her personality, as an accent or dialect does. Everyone has manners. I leave you with a section from Robert Walser’s Jakob Von Gunten (1909), in which the boys of the fictional Benjamenta Institute act out a play:

The Loving Girl: “Mamma, I must ask you, with all due respect, to speak more politely to the man whom I love.” The Mother: “Silence! One day you’ll be grateful to me for treating him with ruthless severity. Now, sir, tell me, where did you do your studies?” The Hero (he is Polish, and is played by Schilinski): “I graduated at the Benjamenta Institute, gracious lady. Forgive me for the pride with which I speak these words.” The Daughter: “Ah, Mamma, just see how well he behaves. What refined manners.” The Mother (severely): “Don’t talk to me about manners. Aristocratic behavior doesn’t matter a fig nowadays. You, sir, please would you tell me this: What did you learn at the Bagnamenta Institute?” The Hero: “Forgive me, but the Institute is called Benjamenta, not Bagnamenta. What did I learn? Well, of course, I must confess that I learned very little there. But learning a lot doesn’t matter a fig nowadays. You yourself must admit that.” The Daughter: “You heard what he said, Mamma dear?” The Mother: “Don’t talk to me, you little wretch, about hearing such nonsense or even taking it seriously.”

Here On Earth | Nick DeMarco

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Nick DeMarco’s Here on Earth is currently on view at Interstate Projects in Brooklyn, NY through February 1st. The show is part feature film, part sculptural installation, creating an enjoyably convergent experience. DeMarco casts cut-outs of celebrities including main characters Jennifer Lopez, Paul Newman, and baby Drake into a narrative that is equal parts science fiction, government conspiracy, and family drama. The plot is enforced by a soundtrack full with foley, music, and hired voice actors from Craigslist taking on the roles of the celebrity cut-outs.

We talked with Nick about script writing, Craigslist casting, and making his first “blockbuster” film without moving images.

Nick DeMarco, Movie Poster, 2014 digital print, 40 x 27 inches, edition of 50

Nick DeMarco, Movie Poster, 2014 digital print, 40 x 27 inches, edition of 50

Nic Burrier: I had a lot of fun seeing the show. How did the project develop?

Nick DeMarco: Yeah sure, the idea was that I wanted to make a blockbuster feature film, but I wanted to make it all by myself, with sculptures and audio in a gallery. Extending that a little bit, I wanted to use photoshopped images, and make them sculptural. So I, in a way, wanted to merge different interests of mine: physical production, digital image, and writing. This project was a way to thread them all together. The idea was that I was going to make a blockbuster feature film, so I wrote a feature length screenplay, it’s 120 something pages, and I got actors from Craigslist, friends of friends, other random people. I got them to come in and record the different characters, and then I went in and did all the sound design, I put in footsteps, I put in sound effects, I put in music. All that kind of stuff. So I made this two hour long feature length audio track. And I cast it with A list actors, like my ideal actors if I were really going to be able to make a movie. I cast it with Paul Newman and Jennifer Lopez as the two leads, Drake when he was a little baby plays one of the central characters, he’s their son. He’s also half human half alien.

Nick DeMarco, Here on Earth, Installation View

Nick DeMarco, Here on Earth Installation View, 2014

NB: I just drove through Roswell, NM a couple weeks ago, so it was pretty fun to hear it surface in the story.

ND: Oh really? I’ve always wanted to go there. Is there a bunch of plaster aliens and stuff?

NB: Ya, it’s like, even the CVS there has a giant alien image posted on the front of the building. It’s pretty insane. The plot of your “blockbuster” was really important to the piece, where did the story come from?

ND: Um, well you know. The muse floated down, and landed on my shoulder, whispered some ideas, ha. I mean it was an interesting exercise for me, because I really love to write, but I had never really done a long form fiction like that. My original way of framing it was to tie in different interests I have. So I’ve always loved conspiracies and aliens, so I wanted that to be a central idea. And then I wanted to get some political issues of the time that I think are interesting, like privatization, and censorship. I was working with A list actors, and I wanted to put them in situations they might not normally be in. The idea of making J Lo a transgressive poet was really cool to me. So it was kind of a combination of things, and then, in writing it I wanted to walk that line between satire and genuine embrace of the thing. So I wanted it to be like, is this all a joke, but at the same time, I wanted the family to be a real family unit, and I wanted there to be some real moments of heart despite the general absurdity of the thing.

Nick DeMarco, Here on Earth, Family View

Nick DeMarco, Here on Earth Installation View, 2014

NB: So what was the process of hiring the Craigslist actors?

ND: The voices were definitely the most difficult part of the project, and that was something that I didn’t really adequately foresee how difficult that would be. It ended up being great, the actors I got were great. But finding someone on Craigslist, I was under the impression there were more actors who were interested in doing weird projects like this. So I was able to find some, but there weren’t that many people hitting me up. The guy who plays Billy Joel, he was great, he was from New Jersey, and he was super game. I made it very clear to him that this is a movie, but it’s not exactly a movie. I didn’t want to lie to people and tell them it was a movie and it actually wasn’t going to be. You know, I’m making a movie but it’s a little different. He was like sure, sure, you know, he was on board. I mean you heard in the thing, he has this great, just like, dude voice.

NB: Yeah, I felt like the voices were really well matched to the celebrities you chose.

ND: Yeah, I never told the actors to do an impression. I knew who they were playing beforehand, like when I was casting the voices I said a Paul Newman type character, a Jennifer Lopez type character. But I never said do an impression of Jennifer Lopez. I fit the celebrity characters to the role more than the actor.

Nick DeMarco, David Allen Grier as Glenn Ross, 2014, digital print, plywood, 13 x 14 1⁄2 x 5 3⁄4 inches

Nick DeMarco, David Allen Grier as Glenn Ross, 2014, digital print, plywood, 13 x 14 1⁄2 x 5 3⁄4 inches

NB: What interested you about juxtaposing voice actors hired from Craigslist with images of celebrities? You decided to create fictional characters using the images of celebrities that everyone knows rather than creating an entirely new identity.

ND: There’s a few elements that I liked about the whole idea, from a very baseline, why I wanted to make a movie at all is just sort of the idea that movies are the default language that we understand the world, so it was coming from a very populist standpoint. I love the fact that people will see a movie and like really think of the different parts of it; they’ll have an art conversation about movies and not even know it. People have these conversations about movies in a way they never would if they went to see a painting show at the local museum. I love that idea about movies, and so I wanted to sort of take that populist energy and then make a movie myself in this kind of scrappy, but hopefully still polished way. So the idea of using Craigslist actors, I mean it wasn’t integral to the idea, if I could have used A list actors, that would have been awesome, but I do like the idea of using Craigslist actors because it sort of gets into the populist ideas.

Nick DeMarco, Juliette Lewis as Deb Fleishman, 2014, digital print, board, wood, 62 x 17 x 9 3⁄4 inches

Nick DeMarco, Juliette Lewis as Deb Fleishman, 2014, digital print, board, wood, 62 x 17 x 9 3⁄4 inches

NB: Yeah, as you’re talking about the way we connect with feature length film, I’m realizing that a fair amount of your work seems to approach these larger systems with predefined rules, like your work within design. At the same time it definitely yields a subversion. To me this piece kind of questions or even diversifies an understanding of narrative through embodying it.

ND: Yeah I’m glad you picked up on that. That was definitely something I was interested in, because like you said, I like systems, and I like rearranging them. So to make a movie I knew I had to do it in a different way. I wanted to think critically about narrative but also about sculpture. I was thinking about it as a movie just as much as I was thinking about it as sculpture. So I wanted to organize it in a way where it could be viewed as narrative sculpture or as a physical movie at the same time. I wanted to balance those two things. I was interested in what happens if you’re inside a movie, you know. Can I take the parts of a movie, you know add someone’s basic image, and sound, and can I somehow create that effect that you get when you watch a movie, because you know, when a movie comes together perfectly, in my opinion, there isn’t really any sweeter experience artwise. Like, the music swells, when the editing is just perfect, that just hits you so well. It’s almost more effective in a way than most other art experiences. I wanted to give some semblance of that feeling through sculptures.

NB: Your use of sculpture in this was interesting to me. You continue to enforce the two dimensional plane of a screen, even as you brought these characters out into the space. They remained two dimensional, as cut-outs.

ND: Yeah, that’s definitely part of it. You know, there are those three tableaus. I divided the movie up into three acts of a story, and I made these wall graphics that contained all the settings that happen within that act of the movie. Then putting them on the wall was screenlike, and most of the characters are arranged at the height of the screen, so it was essentially like recreating the screen experience without any technology. I guess that was sort of more what I was saying earlier about how I have different ends of my practice where some things are extremely digital, and can only exist on a screen. And some things aren’t digital at all. It’s something I’ve been trying to do for a long time, to have a show, in a gallery, that was all photoshop. This is the closest I’ve come to doing that.

Nick DeMarco, Here on Earth, Installation View

Nick DeMarco, Here on Earth Installation View, 2014

NB: Cool, yeah I think another really important part of the piece that we haven’t yet talked about yet is the humor, and I think there’s also humor in a lot of your other work.

ND: Yeah, that’s definitely true, and its something I always try to maintain. It’s hard with art, because, I think if you start going down the path of humor and art then suddenly it becomes about humor, it becomes an analysis of humor, which I really am not interested in at all. Like really that’s the best way to kill a joke, to analyze it. For a while I’ve been trying to figure out ways to make funny art that isn’t a joke. With this piece, it’s kind of like what I was saying earlier, I wanted to walk that line between satire and real emotion, so I wasn’t afraid to make it as absurd as possible, but I also wanted to keep it grounded in something. You know, not just be a complete joke, but the absurdity of the whole experience, I wanted it to be funny. You know like seeing Billy Joel screaming as he’s engulfed in flames, to me, was so funny. I was losing my mind during the install, Billy Joel was one of the first ones I got up on a pedestal while I was cutting out the other ones. And I was just cracking up in the gallery, I would walk up to him and go like AHHH, you know like that energy just keeps me going.

Nick DeMarco, Billy Joel as Bud Spalding, 2014, digital print, board, wood, 64 x 32 x 9 3⁄4 inches

Nick DeMarco, Billy Joel as Bud Spalding, 2014, digital print, board, wood, 64 x 32 x 9 3⁄4 inches

NB: Haha yeah, totally. I guess something else that I picked up on that was interesting, I think this is present in a lot of your furniture too, is this appeal to some sort of subjectivity, if even just by defying normative design. I think that was present in this piece too, as it was giving a fair amount of agency to the viewer’s subjectivity. Since a lot of visual components are intentionally omitted I found myself putting my own visuals into the story, or my own thoughts, more than I would with a “normal” feature length piece. I guess I was wondering what you thought about that possibility for a different level of engagement from the audience.

ND: Yeah, I’m glad to hear you say that. The whole thing is such an experiment for me. When I was setting up the show, people were asking me, how do you want people to view this, do you want them to sit and watch the whole two hours, or do you want them to just pass through, and the answer is that I really don’t know what I want people to do because I’ve never done anything like this before. So to hear that you were engaging with it is nice. That is definitely what I would have liked, I went through frame by frame to find the perfect screenshot that I thought really had some emotion that could be pasted onto multiple moments in the story. Like that one sculpture of brooding Paul Newman, I wanted that to be multiple moments, you know, not one specific moment in the story when he’s upset. I wanted that to be sort of what you’re saying, fill in the blanks. Part of that is that the text was a big part of it to me also. So I wanted the text to be present, and the great part of text is that you get the story in your mind.

Nick DeMarco, Here on Earth Script, 2014

Nick DeMarco, Here on Earth Script, 2014

NB: Yeah, it’s a blend of sculpture and film, it rides the line, especially with the specific showtimes set up for the audience to view it. In my experience that’s normally reserved for more performance-based pieces, but of course this piece does have elements of that.

ND: Yeah that’s kind of what I was talking about. I wanted it very much to be sculptural, and for it to be a full experience as well. I’m glad you got to see it in person, because the way it gets animated is that you’re moving through the space. With the cut-outs it changes as you move around; the scale changes, there is movement in the movie. So I wanted it to be an experience more than a bastardization of a movie. I didn’t want it to just be like, well I’m making a movie but I don’t have any money so I’ll just do it with cut-outs. I wanted it to be very deliberate, like this is designed to be what it is, it’s not a stand in for what I’d want it to be. The whole time I was organizing it around it being an experience in a gallery.

Nick DeMarco, Here on Earth, Act 1 Installation View

Nick DeMarco, Here on Earth Act 1 Installation View, 2014

Nick DeMarco, Here on Earth, Act 2 Installation View

Nick DeMarco, Here on Earth Act 2 Installation View, 2014

Nick DeMarco, Here on Earth, Act 3 Installation View

Nick DeMarco, Here on Earth Act 3 Installation View, 2014

Cast of Voices:
Jen Rice
Jason Greco
Vishwam Velandy
Caroline Semmer
Jonathan Coward
Borna Sammak
Nick DeMarco
Adrienne Humblet
Jake Sollins
Isabel Martin
Rebecca Veith
Ramsey Arnaoot
Gavin Riley
Geraldine Visco

More about Nick DeMarco

Nissan Yogurty | Kate Sansom

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Today, Chrystal Gallery returns after a five year hiatus with its second virtual exhibition, Nissan Yogurty by Kate Sansom.

Chrystal’s previous computer rendered show, in October 2010, was curated by Timur Si-Qin and featured Kari Altmann, Charles Broskoski, Lindsay Lawson, Billy Rennekamp, Maxwell Simmer, and Harm Van Den Dorpel.

She said “food is the oldest.”

Maybe she figured it out that day in Costco?

Looking for slivered almonds, and a puffy frame.

And also “it’s a good example of how autocatalytic domesticating products is.”

Sort of the way people talk about what kind of food they are eating:

If you’re hearing that someone is on the Paleo diet, than you know that they are that kind of person- they probably grew up around a hot tub.

KS: But you could find an example of autocatalysis in any self-assembling system with sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

C: Maybe it’ll get harder if you stare at it.

KS: I’m optimistic about sustainable chemical fecundity.

C: So obviously there are other examples of autocatalytic processes in economy. But that’s not even the point. Food is collectively autocatalytic – its produces enough product to sustain an entire other set of processes.

KS: But isn’t food actually a constant in any reactive system?

C: That’s what I’m talking about: try figuring out a unification theory without the major five.

KS: Buddhists elevate all living creatures, not just cow, sheep, goat, pig, horse.

C: There is an abundance of things synthesised. You should know that your casually Audible Candy-Netflix-knowledge isn’t all it. I’m saying… you live in a totally miraculated framework of erudition, and preemptive ingratitude- because of planted cereals.

KS: Oh, I’m trying not to eat wheat.

gjgj

Prestige Glider 002, 2014, detail

ggg

Little C (diptych), 2014, detail

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Prestige Glider 001, 2014, detail

jj

Prestige Glider 002, 2014, detail

View the entire exhibition chrystalgallery.info

Rob Kitchin | Continuous Geosurveillance in the “Smart City”

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Continuous Geosurveillance
in the “Smart City”

Rob Kitchin on the New Forms of Governance in the Era of Ubiquitous Computing
 

With original artwork by Mark Dorf
Mark Dorf, Nebulous 03, 2014

Mark Dorf, Nebulous 03, 2015

For the past couple of decades there has been a steady stream of analysis that has documented the ways in which the rollout of new digital and networked technologies have enabled increasingly pervasive and extensive forms of state and corporate surveillance. Such technologies have the capability to capture and communicate data about their use; simultaneously a wealth of sophisticated software has been developed that processes and acts on such data in automated, autonomous, and automatic ways. Importantly, the use of embedded GPS, sensors, and digital cameras are enabling location and movement to be tracked, facilitating extensive geosurveillance of people and places.

Continuous geosurveillance relies on the production of spatial big data, and in particular the notion of the “smart city” takes center stage, that is, urban landscapes that can be monitored, managed and regulated in real-time using ICT infrastructure and ubiquitous computing. Such instrumented cities are promoted as providing enhanced and more efficient and effective city services, ensuring safety and security, and providing resilience to economic and environmental shocks, but they also seriously infringe upon citizen’s privacy and are being used to profile and socially sort people, enact forms of anticipatory governance, and enable control creep, that is re-appropriation for uses beyond their initial design.

What follows is a consideration of the unfettered rush to create “smart cities” that is sensitive to the risks involved in extensively monitored urban landscapes. Are too much data about people and places being generated by public and private institutions and used to profile, sort, and sift in pernicious ways? In the rush to create smart cities is the privacy and freedom we expect in liberal democracies being eroded? Perhaps most alarming, are we creating cities that represent the interests of a select group of corporations and technocrats, rather than producing ones that represent the best interests of all citizens?

Extensive and Continuous Geosurveillance

If we wind the clock back seventy years, surveillance was generally a slow, labor-intensive, and partial process. Two of the largest cutting edge surveillance operations of the Second World War — the Bletchley Park decryption of encoded messages and the Medmenham air photo reconnaissance — sought to determine the location and likely movements of troops and equipment across Europe and the Atlantic ocean. Both required thousands of well-trained personnel to work through massive amounts of sampled analogue material of variable quality to map the enemy. The records were bulky, difficult to cross-tabulate and analyze, and expensive to store. Interpretation was imprecise and often quite granular. The only way to track the movements of an individual, and their patterns and preferences of consumption, were to follow them in person and to quiz those with whom they interacted. As a result, nearly everybody passed unobserved in the crowd unless there was a specific reason to focus on them through the deployment of costly resources.

Today the situation has changed utterly. An abundance of networked digital devices, systems and infrastructures mediate movement, work, consumption, communication, and play. We are at the beginning of an era of ubiquitous computing, enabled by advances in computation, data analytics and machine learning, internetworking, and database solutions that facilitate the harvesting, processing, analysis, storage and sharing of vast quantities of data, often in real-time and at a fine resolution. Consequently, citizens and spaces have become knowable and governable in new ways.

Satellites and drones can monitor large portions of the planet at highly granular resolutions, taking up fixed orbits to provide a continuous stream of data about a location.  For example, the ARGUS-IS project, unveiled by DARPA and the US Army in 2013, is a 1.8-gigapixel video surveillance platform operated from a drone with a resolution of six inches from an altitude of 20,000 feet. Capturing 12 frames per second the system can track in real-time up to 65 moving objects (Anthony 2013). Many cities are saturated with remote controllable digital CCTV cameras that can zoom, move and track individuals and objects such as vehicles, with analysis and interpretation aided by algorithmic analyses, such as facial, gait and automatic number plate recognition. In cities such as London and New York it is all but impossible to traverse the city unnoticed, with trains, stations, buses and pedestrians nearly always in sight of a digital CCTV camera, and large parts of the road network surveyed by traffic, red-light, congestion and security cameras.

Cameras are increasingly being complemented with interconnected sensors and actuators embedded into the fabric of cities that form one element of the Internet of Things.  These can measure specific outputs such as levels of light, humidity, temperature, chemicals, electrical resistivity, acoustics, air pressure, movement, speed, water levels and quality, and so on, creating a continuous stream of data. Placed on vehicles, they can monitor location, workload, stress, and terrain. By attaching RFID chips to products it becomes possible to track and trace the movement of individual units from factory or farm to consumer.  Likewise, RFID tags in vehicles communicate with transponders at toll-booth and parking barriers, enabling automatic payment, as well as measuring vehicle flow or parking space availability. Similar units attached to buses and trains communicate with transponder boxes along their routes making it possible to track the location of vehicles in real-time.

 

Mark Dorf, Nebulous 07, 2014

Mark Dorf, Nebulous 07, 2015

 

Machine-readable ‘smart cards’, such as the London’s Oyster Card, scanned when entering and exiting stations or buses means that it is possible to trace individual journeys across the bus and rail system for two million passengers a day. Cards to enter and progress through buildings enable localised logs of movement. Moreover, sensor boxes are now being deployed on garbage bins or lampposts that scan passing mobile phones for their unique identifiers, tracking the movement of pedestrians from one box field to another. The PlanIT Valley development in Portugal, presently under-construction and designed for up to 225,000 inhabitants, aims to create a built environment laced with over 100 million embedded sensors that will produce data to monitor a diverse range of infrastructures and environments (see Marchetti 2012).

Through the embedding of chips and software into their design objects have now been made ‘smart’, able to generate, process and react to data inputs, and to communicate these data to third parties. Even the most quotidian devices are full of powerful software, as well as gyroscopes, accelerometers, compasses and GPS, that sense movement and location. Location-based social networking (LSBN) apps such as Foursquare and location-based service apps, such as Hailo and Uber, and mapping/routing apps, all extensively monitor individual movements across space, often without the users’ knowledge or permission. Within the home, a range of smart home devices such as smart meters, software-enabled thermostats and building management systems, similarly monitor activities and consumption around a house. All transactions are tracked and traced at an individual level, from clickstream and cookie data that record pathways within and between websites, to online purchases, to all online communications.

The data that Uber collects through its Android app

Data type Data collected
Accounts log Email log
App Activity Name, package name, process number of activity, processed ID
App Data
Usage
Cache size, code size, data size, name, package name
App Install Installed at, name, package name, unknown sources enabled, version code, version name
Battery Health, level, plugged, present, scale, status, technology, temperature, voltage
Device Info Board, brand, build version, cell number, device, device type, display, fingerprint, IP, MAC address,manufacturer, model, OS platform, product, SDK code, total disk space, unknown sources enabled
GPS Accuracy, altitude, latitude, longitude, provider, speed
MMS From number, MMS at, MMS type, service number, to number
Net Data Bytes received, bytes sent, connection type, interface type
Phone Call Call duration, called at, from number, phone call type, to number
SMS From number, service number, SMS at, SMS type, to number
Telephone Info Cell tower ID, cell tower latitude, cell tower longitude, IMEI, ISO country code, local area code, MEID, mobile country code, mobile network code, network name, network type, phone type, SIM serial number, SIM state, subscriber ID
Wifi Connection BSSID, IP, linkspeed, MAC addr, network ID, RSSI, SSID
Wifi Neighbors BSSID, capabilities, frequency, level, SSID
Root Check Root status code, root status reason code, root version, sig file version
Malware Info Algorithm confidence, app list, found malware, malware SDK version, package list, reason code, service list, sigfile version

Source: Hein (2014)

Complementing all of these data are those that we voluntarily produce and share, much of it highly personal in nature relating to our thoughts, preferences, bodily performance, and movements. Consumers using a store loyalty card share their purchasing history, and those using an online retailer might provide reviews of products or places, both revealing their preferences and lifestyle choices. Users of wearable devices, sometimes called the quantified self movement, engage in a form of sousveillance, that is self-monitoring and managing their personal health and activities, capturing consumption (e.g., food/calorie intake), physical states (e.g., blood pressure, pulse), emotional states (e.g., mood, arousal) and performance (e.g., miles walked/run/cycled, hours slept and types of sleep), all of which is shared with the technology manufacturer and often other users. In these cases, the sites through which such data are transmitted are owned by corporate enterprises whom then produce new models of capital accumulation by extracting value from them. In contrast, crowdsourced projects such as Wikipedia and Open Street Map produce collective forms of knowledge about people and places.

Collectively what all of these examples demonstrate is that the everyday practices we enact, and the places in which we live, are now deeply augmented, monitored and regulated by dense assemblages of data-enabled infrastructures and technologies on behalf of a small number of entities. The age of big data means a deluge of continuous (real-time), varied, exhaustive, fine-grained and often indexical, relational, flexible and extensional data. We are no longer simply lost in the crowd; we can be spotted, tracked and traced.

Importantly, both states and companies are generating and utilising these data, and in many cases companies are generating them for states through outsourcing contracts. The data produced has become an important multi-billion dollar commodity in their own right with vast quantities of data and derived information being rented, bought, and sold daily across a variety of markets – retail, financial, public administration, health, tourism, logistics, business intelligence, real estate, private security, political polling, and so on. Companies like Acxiom, who manage customer databases for 47 of the Fortune 100 companies, and have entered into data sharing deals with Facebook and other internet companies, claim to have created ‘360 degree views’ of up to 500 million consumers worldwide by accumulating and meshing together offline, online and mobile data into a giant databank, using these data to create detailed derived products such as profiles and predictive models (Singer 2012).

 

Mark Dorf, Nebulous 08, 2014

Mark Dorf, Nebulous 08, 2015

Privacy, Social Sorting, Predictive Profiling and Control Creep

What are the social consequences arising from the rush to harness the power of big urban data?  Smart city technologies generate and process vast quantities of finely resolute data, which, when shared raise concerns over the demise of privacy. While multidimensional in nature, privacy generally refers to limitations concerning the accessing and disclosing of personal information about a person. Privacy is considered a basic human right, a condition that people expect and value. Indeed, it is widely considered an indispensable structural feature of liberal democratic political systems, enshrined in both national and supra-national laws. Breaching privacy can have a number of emotional effects, as well as opening up an individual to a range of harmful activities such as exposure, blackmail, appropriation (identity theft), and intrusion.

The typical response is to argue that the forfeiting of privacy is countered by many benefits—improved services and safer environments. Moreover, despite leaving an ever greater quantity of digital footprints (data they themselves leave behind) and data shadows (information about them generated by others), at present, many of the data discussed above exist largely within silos, both across city and national administrations, and across companies, and the data and systems are generally not interoperable. As a consequence, while any one data collector has a view of an individual, it is a limited field of vision. And if they do have a view of other data they are usually aggregated or metadata.

The hope of many organisations, however, is to connect silos into more comprehensive data infrastructures. This is already happening at an individual level by commercial data aggregators/brokers and policing and security services. It is certainly the ambition of many city administrations, with many of the presentations and technologies demonstrated at the recent Smart City Expo and World Congress in Barcelona stressing the need for standardisation, the collapsing of silos to enable data from different domains to be interlinked through city command and control centers. (Much of these data concern operational systems such as lighting, transport, waste, and energy rather than individuals, though such administrations do also hold significant volumes of data about individuals and households). Centers such as the much discussed city-wide big data control room in Rio de Janeiro that combines spatial big data and public administration data from over 30 agencies, plus social media data, provide an initial blueprint, but they are quickly being followed by other cities and companies offering city operational systems. Such flattened systems open up Orwellian threats of a panopticon and taken to their logical conclusion form the perfect socio-technical assemblage for a totalitarian state—an all-seeing, all-tracking, all-reacting system that stifles dissent before it has chance to organize (which is why the technological fix to democratic street protest – extensive surveillance, algorithmic analyses, and digital kettling is so disturbing).

The argument dismissing such an Orwellian eventuality believes that democratic societies would not let anti-democratic and militaristic forms of regulation to occur, that social media and open forms of practice—open data, open access, open source, open platforms, open government—would counterbalance any censorship of mainstream media channels, that much of the data shared are anonymised and aggregated, and that companies would self-regulate to stop customer drifting away unhappy with what is happening with their data. Meanwhile, private enterprises have sought to strengthen their rights with respect to intellectual property and what they do with customer data, for example through the use of extensive and complex user agreements and political lobbying with respect to data protection laws. Indeed, there is a complex regulatory power game presently taking place around state and company surveillance, and the rights and expectations of individuals, with some arguing that it is unrealistic for people to expect or demand privacy, evidenced by the recent Pew Research report ‘The Future of Privacy’.

Until recently, given the form and resolution of data, it was difficult for data aggregators and brokers to produce individual profiles of citizens and (potential) customers en masse. This has changed with the data deluge, enabling them to produce predictive profiles as to the likely value or worth of an individual, or their credit risk and how likely they are to pay a certain price or be able to meet payments. The aim is to provide customers with personalized treatment, including dynamic pricing that reflects their preferences and worth, and for vendors to gain sales, increase loyalty, and reduce risk. With respect to the latter, predictive profiling is thus used to socially sort and redline populations, selecting out certain categories to receive a preferential status and marginalizing and excluding others. Through denying credit or screening career opportunities, negative profiles can haunt an individual across various domains.

Anticipatory governance is where predictive analytics are used to assess likely future behaviors or events and to direct appropriate action. A number of US police forces are now using predictive analytics to anticipate the location of future crimes and to direct police officers to increase patrols in those areas. For example, the Chicago police force produce both general area profiling to identify hotspots and guide patrols, and more specific profiling that identifies individuals within those hotspots. It achieves the latter using arrest records, phone records, social media and other data to construct the social networks of those arrested to identify who in their network is most likely to commit a crime in the future, designating them pre-criminals and visiting them to let them know that they have been flagged in their system as a potential threat (Stroud 2014). In such cases, a person’s data shadow does more than follow them; it precedes them. And knowledge that someone has been designated a pre-criminal adds yet another layer to social sorting, such as potentially being denied employment. While such systems have prima facie “good liberal” intentions, anticipation has consequences beyond merely preventing predicted events.

One of the key foundations of privacy and data protection laws is data minimization; that is, only data relevant to a task should be generated and such data should only be used for the purpose for which is generated. However, many technologies and the data they generate are now being repurposed for alternative uses. For example, airline industry data and government administrative data being repurposed for profiling and assessing the security risk of passengers. Cameras deployed for regulating traffic behaviour are being repurposed for security tasks. While some of the data hoovered up Uber’s app as set out in Table 1 will be vital for the app to work, it is difficult to believe that its scope complies with the ethos of data minimization, or that its collection is in the best interest of the app user. Such repurposing, where the data generated for one set of tasks are appropriated for another, is termed control creep. Control creep removes the barriers between systems that are often presently siloed, usually for good reasons such as protecting privacy or preventing system failures in one domain affecting another, and significantly extends the power of those who gain access to additional system resources

 

Mark Dorf, Nebulous 05, 2015

Mark Dorf, Nebulous 05, 2015

 

Technocratic approaches to cities

Other concerns about the creation of smart cities include the adoption of technocratic forms of governance, the corporatisation of governance, and the creation of buggy, brittle, and hackable cities. The turn towards technical systems and algorithms to administer city regulation presumes that all aspects of a city can be measured and monitored and treated as technical problems that can be addressed through technical solutions. That is, there is a belief that complex open systems can be disassembled into neatly defined problems that can be solved or optimized through computation. Such a view is highly reductionist and functionalist and fails to recognize the wider effects of culture, politics, policy, governance and capital in shaping city life and urban systems. It also focuses on the efficient management of the manifestations of problems, rather than solving the deep rooted structural problems underpinning them.

Further, technocratic systems tend to centralise power and decision making into a select set of administrative offices, rather than distributing power and encouraging active participation in governance. Moreover, such systems are often outsourced to companies who run them on behalf of the state, prompting anxieties over the marketisation and hollowing out of public services, that outsourcing might create a technological lock-in or corporate path dependency that beholden cities to particular systems and vendors, and cities will be straitjacketed into ‘one size fits all smart city in a box’ solutions that take little account of local cultures or political structures. Both software and cities are complex, open systems. Using software to run and manage city services and infrastructures exposes them to viruses, glitches, crashes, and security hacks. As city systems become more complicated, interconnected, and dependent on software, producing stable, robust and secure devices and infrastructures will become more of a challenge.

Regardless of the likelihood of any dystopian scenario coming to pass, it is nevertheless the case that the data revolution unfolding means that an exponentially larger amount of data are being generated about people and places by public and private institutions, that we are ever more under the gaze of continuous geosurveillance, and these data are being employed—often using opaque algorithms—to make decisions that concern our everyday lives. The privacy and freedoms we expect in liberal democracies are being changed or eroded away. At the same time, managing the complexity of cities is highly challenging and new technologies are improving the efficiency and effectiveness of city services. The key is to balance the public good and individual rights.

However, the transformations taking place are fast-paced and often too little debated or contested in the mainstream media and legislature, with disruptive technical and social innovations taking root and expanding rapidly before we have time to digest the implications or consider the need for oversight. Such thinking though is needed if we are to reap the benefits of big data and smart cities, rather than the negative consequences. How to gain the former and avoid the latter has to be worth pondering every time we interact with a digital device or traverse a city leaving a trail of data in our wake. The alternative is that smart cities are created that represent the interests of a select group of corporations, technocrats, and certain groups within society (particularly political elites and the wealthy), rather than producing ones that are in the best interests of all citizens.

 

Acknowledgements
Mike Pepi provided useful comments on an initial draft of this paper. The research for this paper was provided by a European Research Council Advanced Investigator Award, ‘The Programmable City’ (ERC-2012-AdG-323636).

References

Anthony, S. (2013) DARPA shows off 1.8-gigapixel surveillance drone, can spot a terrorist from 20,000 feet. ExtremeTech, 28th January 2013

Hein, B. (2014) Uber’s data-sucking Android app is dangerously close to malware. Cult of Mac, November 26th.

Marchetti, N (2012) In Portugal, A Smart City From the Ground Up. Sustainable Cities Collective. 7th June.

Singer, N. (2012a) You for Sale: Mapping, and Sharing, the Consumer Genome. New York Times, 17th June,

Stroud, M. (2014) The minority report: Chicago’s new police computer predicts crimes, but is it racist? The Verge, February 19th.


Rob Kitchin is a professor at the National University of Ireland Maynooth and the author of Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life (with Martin Dodge, MIT Press, 2011) and The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences (Sage, 2014) and other books. He’s a regular media commentator and was the 2013 recipient of the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal for the Social Sciences.

Sara M. Watson | Metaphors of Big Data

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Data is the New “___”

Sara M. Watson on the Industrial Metaphors of Big Data
 

Can you fathom the depths of big data? The word fathom is a measurement of depth of the ocean, but it has also come to mean the ability to understand something. Fathom comes from faethm, meaning ‘the two arms outstretched.’ It’s 6 feet or 1.8 meters measurement is based on a standard human scale. The length of rope dropped overboard is handily measured across the span of a sailor’s armspread. The term makes the metaphorical jump to describe concepts that we are able to get our arms around; ideas are things to be grasped. As James Geary describes in his book on metaphor, “This is the primary purpose of metaphor: to carry over existing names or descriptions to things that are either so new that they haven’t been named or so abstract that they cannot be otherwise explained.”

data bacon

Data has become so big it is difficult to fathom. As a technocratic, scientistically-oriented culture, we are in the midst of understanding computing on a new and ever-evolving scale. While we continue to take data for granted, designated as something that is “given,” data that began as embodied observation has become further and further removed from our lived experience. At the same time, data to which these metaphors refer are becoming ubiquitous in our lives—as the trace of our digital transactions, our bodies, and homes—making it all the more important to have an appropriate contextual model to frame our relationship to it.

Metaphors are helpful for understanding abstract concepts that, because of their complexity or scale, lie beyond our human comprehension. In their seminal work Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson describe the conceptual metaphors that help with “referring, quantifying, identifying, setting goals, and motivating actions” for an abstract concept such as inflation. Given its ephemerality and abstraction, data is ripe for metaphoric description.

Metaphors have always helped with introducing new technologies in our everyday lives and finding ways to familiarize ourselves with the novelty. The television entered the living room, framing the cathode ray tube with wood—literally domesticating the technology as furniture in our homes. Early cinema echoed the proscenium arch of the theater as a remediated reference to the history of performance. Visual metaphors and skeuomorphism of legal pads, tape recorders, felt gaming tables create analog analogues to introduce digital interfaces of the computers in our pockets, and fall away as the devices become more familiar. The internet has inspired many different metaphors, and they reflect changes in how we think about it, attributing the promise of the internet with “revolution, evolution, salvation, progress, universalism, and the ‘American dream.’” Like data, we surf, drown, and dive into content on the internet as our media landscape changes.

Though metaphors reveal truths by association, metaphors can just as easily obscure and misrepresent. Metaphors prime us to take for granted the ways we think about things. Most of the metaphors we use to talk about data in popular culture make sense to technocratic corporations and their leaders, those building and disseminating information technologies, but they are fundamentally dehumanizing. It is no wonder individuals continue to believe that they have “nothing to hide” in the face of big data, because we do not have the cognitive context to grasp how behemoth corporations use data. The dominant industrial metaphors for data do not privilege the position of the individual. Instead, they take power away from the person to which the data refers and give it to those who have the tools to analyze and interpret data. Data then becomes obscured, specialized, and distanced.

We need a new framing of a personal, embodied relationship to data. Embodied metaphors have the potential to bring big data back down to a human scale and ground data in lived experience, which in turn, will help to advance the public’s investment, interpretation, and understanding of our relationship to our data.

“The people who get to impose their metaphors on the culture get to define what we consider to be true.”

—Lakoff and Johnson

Dominant metaphors for data today

So what do we talk about when we talk about data? “Data is the new oil.” “We’re mining the data for insights.” “We’re learning to cope with the data deluge, and working out how best to tap it.” “The work of data scientists is janitorial.”

The dominant metaphors for understanding data are industrial. They start from Gartner and O’Reilly Conferences, make their way into the business section of The New York Times, and seep further into the style section as we parse our evolving relationship to technology. Journalism itself has become data-driven in the likes of explainers like Vox and FiveThirtyEight. These metaphors are artifacts of an industrial complex that doesn’t privilege individuals or even populations of users.

Many of the metaphors we have for personal data today come from the big data industry. As Tim Hwang and Karen Levy have suggested, these metaphors describe data as a “natural, inexhaustible good—ripe for exploitation in the name of economic growth and private gain.” Also citing Lakoff and Johnson’s work, Cornelius Puschmann and Jean Burgess collect data metaphors into two categories: “as a natural force to be controlled and as a resource to be consumed.” Deborah Lupton points to another dominant metaphor, detailing the liquid qualities of data.

Data as a natural resource suggests that it has great value to be mined and refined but that it must be handled by experts and large-scale industrial processes. Data as a byproduct describes the transactional traces of digital interactions but suggests it is also wasteful, pollutive, and may not be meaningful without processing. Data has also been described as a fungible resource, as an asset class, suggesting that it can be traded, stored, and protected in a data vault. One programmatic advertising professional related to me that he thinks “data is the steel of the digital economy,” an image that avoids the negative connotations of oil while at the same time expressing concern about monopolizing forces of firms Google and Facebook.

The New York Times writes that “Personal data is the oil that greases the Internet. Each one of us sits on our own vast reserves.” We must then ask: What does it mean to “sit” on a “vast” “reserve” of data “oil?” While these metaphors elucidate the complex inner workings digitally networked information exchange, they fundamentally occlude the issues of personal agency and identity in the process.

Business slide from a presentation by Axciom, a marketing technology corporation

Business slide from a presentation by Axciom, a marketing technology corporation

 DATA IS A NATURAL RESOURCE

oil

gold rush

ecosystem

gathered

raw

trove

DATA IS AN INDUSTRIAL PRODUCT

mining

refining

platform

breach

big data :: big pharma, big business

DATA IS A BYPRODUCT

exhaust

data trail

breadcrumbs

smog

janitor

cleanser

smoke signals

signal and noise

DATA IS A MARKET

economy

paying with data

currency

asset

vault

broker

DATA IS LIQUID

ocean

deluge

tsunami

torrent

wave

firehose

lake

DATA AS TRENDY

data is the new oil

data is the new currency

data is the new black

data is the new bacon

data scientist is the sexiest job of the 21st century

frontier

revolution

wild west

 

Embodied metaphors for data

Industrial metaphors make business sense, but not sense as individuals in a data-driven society. Jer Thorpe attempts to bridge the connection between the oil metaphor and reality: “where oil is composed of the compressed bodies of long-dead micro-organisms, this personal data is made from the compressed fragments of our personal lives. It is a dense condensate of our human experience.”

The most effective metaphors—ones so fundamental that we forget they are metaphors—draw on embodied experience, or “embodied cognition,” fundamentally part of the way we think and act in the world. Industrial metaphors lack a connection to Lakoff and Johnson’s “basic domain of experience” of individuals, including our bodies, interactions with our physical environment, and interactions with other people. Industrial metaphors share an experiential perspective of a bodiless conglomerate technocratic actor, seeing like a Google, as it were. Embodied metaphors draw from the perspective of us as individual people.

Perhaps the most apt popular metaphor that ties data to the body is the description of data as a digital footprint, fingerprint, or a shadow. These metaphors acknowledge the presence of a person, yet point to the disjuncture between the person and their remaining traces. Still, this comparison relies on the DATA IS A BYPRODUCT construct, and it emphasizes the meaningful information about who we are or where we’ve been that can be deduced from our traces.

The metaphors used in the Quantified Self community offer a more personal, autobiographical, embodied, or practice-oriented conceptual model of data. Studying the early adopters of self-tracking technology, I’ve identified a set of emerging data metaphors starting from a personal, rather than industrial perspective. Some are still mechanistic, drawing on Taylorist theories about “managing what you measure.” But others are more sympathetic and focus on embodied experience and personal reflection.

DATA IS A MIRROR portrays data as something to reflect on and as a technology for seeing ourselves as others see us. But, like mirrors, data can be distorted, and can drive dysmorphic thought.

DATA IS A PRACTICE references the self-tracking process that has been criticized as navel-gazing, but which can also be a means of introspection and a practice toward self-knowledge. The quantified self motto “self-knowledge through numbers” is a misnomer; self-knowledge comes through the attentive process of choosing what to track and self-observation.

Can we push embodied data metaphors further? Data is blood? Data is DNA? We already think of DNA as biological information programming. Data is traces of digital existence like dust is a trace of the presence of our skin? Data is a fingerprint? This is an incomplete and imperfect list, but the start of a reframing of our position as individuals with a stake in where, how, and why data implicates our identity and existence.

DATA IS A BODY

footprint

fingerprint

shadow

blood

DNA

reflection

identity

portrait

profile

doppelgänger

Embodied metaphors at work

“Metaphors not only help us to think about the future; they are a resource deployed by a variety of actors to shape the future…Metaphors can mediate between structure and agency, but it is actors who choose to repeat old metaphors and introduce new ones. Thus, it is important to continue to monitor the metaphors at work to understand exactly what work it is that they are doing.”
Danger! Metaphors at Work in Economics, Geophysiology, and the Internet, Sally Wyatt

The rhetoric around data has granted it too much agency and authority, “with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.” Personification in metaphor has the ability to transfer agency to inanimate subjects and affects our ability to make decisions about them. Tying data back to individuals, even at the metaphorical level, could change how we design the systems that manage it and policies that protect it. What kind of accountability and responsibility do the default designs of systems have to the subjects of the data? What visibility do individuals have into the flows of their informational agents across an interconnected system? What control do we have over making sure our data accurately reflects our interests?

How we think about data—and more importantly what we do with it—will depend on the value systems that our conceptual metaphors capture and reify. Reframing metaphors for data in a more personal and embodied context will give us a better way to think of ourselves as information organisms, or “inforgs,” as philosopher Luciano Floridi suggests we are becoming. Our data profiles will act on our behalf, and we must be able to interact with and grasp their agency. Embodied data metaphors put more control in our hands as individuals, capable of interpreting and intervening in our own personal data management.

Embodied data metaphors will shape public consciousness and, in turn, shape policy positions, technology designs, and business models going forward. Joseph Grady argues that metaphors engage the public to bridge the gap between jargon-speaking experts and the issue at hand. The need for reframing data has recently inspired the evolution of Human-Computer Interaction to its latest incarnation: Human-Data Interaction. This emerging field of study aims to improve the legibility, agency, and negotiability of data-driven interactions between individuals and complex technical systems. An embodied understanding of our digital identities will only become more important as the thin boundary between the online and offline world dissolves.

How will the metaphors we use today shape our data society in the future? Will they still be industrially driven, consolidating power and authority in technocratic entities with particular data views on the world? Or will our data society be personal, humane, and reflective of our values in a distributed and individually empowering way?


Sara M. Watson is a technology critic and a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. She tweets @smwat.


How to Sleep Faster #5 | Arcadia Missa

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How to Sleep Faster is an interdisciplinary journal published by the research project and South London gallery space Arcadia Missa, led by founding director and curator Rozsa Farkas. The fifth volume in the series continues the thematic exploration of precarity developed in the former editions, but moves in to the realm of nihilism and fantasy as a refusal of the current socioeconomic climate. Moving across mediums of critical writing, poetry, net.art, interviews, performance documentation and performative autobiographism, HTSF is a refreshingly unique and well-needed publication that exceeds the idioms of academic journals, zines and magazines.

Well in accordance with the title, the journal opens with the essay ‘Sleeping in Public’, in which film-maker and ‘communist sleep researcher’ Anna Zett studies the imagery of a 1992 German pharmaceutical photo calendar, meant to advertise a new range of sleeping pills (rohypnol). Referencing current scientific sleep-research, she establishes a comparison between the (in Marxist terms) reproductive labor of sleeping with the interconnectivity of the virtual self – placed somewhat within the trending (and vague) term of neomaterialism, but really, much beyond that. Sleep can be understood as the brain recovering, a ‘going offline’ to turn towards its own materiality – yet, our current neoliberal reality, favoring performance over labor as a paradigm for productivity, demands that even sleep should become a reproductive, immaterial form of labour. Actual sleep, then, becomes a political act of refusal within the cognitive neoliberal paradigm.

Despite the diversity of the contributions in HTSF, there are overarching threads – first and foremost that of somatism: placing the body at the center of Marxist/feminist critique so as to create bodily discourses, as well as what we could call discourses of embodiment.

Holly Child’s stream-of-consciousness piece exemplifies the bodily anxiety of the self-diagnosing, Homeopathically-informed, heartbroken consumer – a whirlwind of socio-aesthetic sentiments in which fungal infections, Facebook-statuses, heart burns and Google-searches hybridizes in the personal process of post-romantic healing. Fantasized and strange, but strangely familiar – the embodied experience of a broken heart is not new, but Child’s virtually-induced, psychosomatic state-of-mind calls for an immediate, almost pathological empathy. Yet, as Campell @plasmo asks in their fragmented tweets, “what the fuck is health in the broader spectrum of things?”

Drawing on a vast range of new and old, post-Marxist and feminist theory, ‘health’ is presented as a neoliberal construct – yet, the body and its discourse is repeatedly affirmed as a tool of resistance. Beatrice Loft Shultz of V.O.R.G talks about her utilization of the Joan of Arc-archetype in her bondage-performances. Here, she forcefully embodies heresy in the form of the female martyr-body. ‘Take care’ Anne La Plantine later bids us with her simplified txt-drawings of swords and shields, suggesting an increasingly militant gender-debate.

As theories on the ‘physical’, the ‘personal’ and the ‘virtual’ collapse and conjoin, there is an increasing need for locating the body, in order to exercise political/aesthetic agency. Responses range from the post-colonial disorientation of identity-politics, as presented in the poetry of Imran Perretta, to the Rabbit Island Residency-awarded artist Elvia Wilk reflecting on her isolation in nature – nature now reduced to “now a negative space around which culture forms itself”. Mapping reoccurrs in HTSF – the disoriented experience of inhabiting and not inhabiting spaces on- and off-line. In his essay ‘Location Services,’ Michael Runyan examines the uncertainties of where ‘we’ end and the network begins in the ever-expanding intimacy of the Internet. In the increasingly complex state of dis/inter/intra-connectivity, data industries, he argues, attempt to simplify complex infrastructure of technology, simulating the sense of orientation in the user-consumer previously provided by the state or the church. Jesse Darling echoes this as they (the narrator) ambivalently recall a trip to catholic Brazil with their wealthy then-boyfriend, reflecting the ideological disorientation of West-European ‘protestant atheists’.

The editorial, written by editors Farkas and Clark, is notably placed at the end of the book, framing the journal within the #NoFuture discourse of queer theorist Edelmann – No Future, as they write, not because “there isn’t a future coming, it’s that it doesn’t bring with it any futurity.” In the alienating reality of economic-crash austerity, refusal becomes key – refusal for any queer body to become subsumed by capital, embodying the negativity of the precariat as a means of actually collapsing the system. The imagined collapse moves closer in the book, through a variety of artistic and intellectual gestures – proposing aesthetically, in the end, a whole new mode of criticality.

Fantasy becomes essential for the ‘radically queer’ to materialize, as seen for example with the newly established @Gaybar, a series of projects, reading groups and Peckham-parties led by Rosie Hastings and Hannah Quinlan Anderson, interviewed in the journal. By attempting to re-materialize the fantasized tropes of ‘the gay bar’ and its homonormative bodies, it effectively criticizes those bodies – and simultaneously creates a rare and much appreciated, non-commercial queer space in ever-gentrifying London.

@Gaybar fits well within the political trajectory of the journal, because it does, despite its refusal of current conditions and its embrace of fantasy, seek to find, in the words of Runyan, “the coordinates of a new future.” Until then, How To Sleep Faster 5 is a highly stimulating and inspiring read.

Simon Denny | What’s in My DLD Bag?

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What’s in My DLD Bag?

Simon Denny

As David Rowan said of the DLD Conference in Wired Magazine, “There aren’t many conferences in the world where you can run into The New York Times publisher at breakfast, have lunch with a Russian internet multimillionaire, hear the Icelandic president talk at dinner, and be bought a late-night drink by Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker.”

As a tribute to Henry Blodget’s (a regular DLD attendee) posts on Business Insider – “unboxing” the WEF Davos swag bag – an inventory is here attempted to give an insider peek at this very personal take-away from DLD.

The DLD 2015 “swag bag” or “goodie bag” contains a selection of merchandise, giveaways and publications, and is given to every participant or speaker attending the annual tech-focused Munich media conference. Such giveaways are conventional parts of conference culture, but DLD’s are always extra-packed with value-adding items.



 

Simon Denny reflects the changing media economy in complex documentary installations. In April, he will have a survey show of his recent practice at MoMA PS1 New York, and will represent New Zealand in their national pavilion at the Venice Biennale in May.

Image credit: Nick Ash
Research credit: Malte Roloff

Hood By Air’s got Daddy issues

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Hood By Air FW 2015

Hood by Air unveils their Fall/Winter 2015 collection, continuing to dismantle identity archetypes.
Video directed by Leilah Weinraub, mix by TOTAL FREEDOM and backstage photography by Christine Hahn.

Styling Akeem Smith
Accessories James Garland
Hair Amy Farid for Bumble and Bumble
Make-up Inge Grognard for m•a•c cosmetics

Minnesang: A Tale of Bits And Atoms

Thea Ballard | Big Diaries

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Big Diaries

Thea Ballard on the Surveilled Expressions of Young Women


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In an October 2014 talk at the ICA in London, conceptual artist Amalia Ulman, speaking about her social media performance-project “Excellences and Perfections,” stated that—for “young women of all backgrounds”—“being watched means coming to life and being someone.” Her project trafficked in the sort of young female archetypes often comfortably dismissed as inauthentic, as evidenced by reactions to the images of various frothy, hyper-feminine selves she generated on Facebook and Instagram. But the desire she articulates is among the more authentic unifying experiences of modern girlhood. Concurrent with the early days of adolescence for women like myself and Ulman has been the rise of online platforms that seem geared to stimulate this desire, in which, through text or image, one can put oneself on view—platforms that, I would argue, have shaped our relationship to our personal data in irrevocably emotional ways.

Her use of the word “watched,” however, invokes another dimension, the presence of a surveillant entity alongside the female subject who is “coming to life” through expression. Work that articulates the tension between rendering oneself visible and becoming a surveilled subject, by Ulman and others more distant from the post-Internet milieu, becomes a key document of a struggle for agency in a datalogical moment.

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Coming of age in the rural Northeast, a place where it’s traditionally been quite easy to slip from view, I found myself seeking such visibility on early versions of social media websites like MySpace and Facebook. By far the more formative of these platforms was LiveJournal, a space of intense feeling and ecstatic opinions, often a way to self-consciously posit myself as a person of a certain taste in a way that felt impossible elsewhere. Entries see-sawed between meditations on insecurity and an uneven family life, proclamations of new indie music or fashion magazine discoveries—a hint of honest, unhinged adolescent emotion tempered by re-imagining myself through cultural signifiers. This was viewed by a small circle of friends and a few internet acquaintances acquired through pop-punk message boards and Last.FM. But the fact that it was viewed at all served as a validation of my existence, injecting realism into the imagined selves about which I wrote.PLLscreenshot20

 

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Now twinned with this desire is a slightly more contemporary anxiety, that of being watched, or seen, in a world where we generate information about ourselves for government and corporate use via platforms including those with which Ulman engaged in her performance. Kate Crawford terms this “surveillant anxiety—the fear that all the data we are shedding is too revealing of our intimate selves but may also misrepresent us.” The subjects Crawford describes as experiencing this psychological affect seem to be uniformly adult, but youth culture, and specifically here that of young women, appears to have absorbed it as well.

The ABC television show Pretty Little Liars, now in its 5th season, mixes the problem of surveillance into its otherwise prototypical-teen-thriller plot. Whereas its older cousin, Gossip Girl, digested the explosion of paparazzi culture in the early- and mid-2000s and the love affairs and scandalous secrets of its wealthy high school-aged lead characters turned into entertainment for their peers (via a blog run by one of their own), PLL focuses on four Main Line sixteen-year-old girls who find themselves, a year after the disappearance of their ringleader, the target of an anonymous stalker. Referred to only as “A”, the omniscient antagonist gathers dirt on the girls (the “Liars”), their families, and their significant others, ultimately using it to manipulate them via text messages and physical interventions.

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As we learn more about “A,” initially presenting itself as one individual but over time revealed to be a multi-tiered network whose endgame remains obscured, its low-ranking associates are also given a sort of hacker aesthetic, implicating digital networks into their schemes. There’s no opting-out of being subjects of “A”’s data collection and manipulation in the same way that deleting one’s Facebook account won’t halt the flow of personal data to distant servers.

Within the show’s narrative, “A” is a much more obviously malignant threat than, say, PRISM, and one that causes a handful of full-blown anxious breakdowns. But what the show impresses upon its adolescent target demographic oscillates between creeping horror in being watched and a simultaneous banality to the degree to which this watching occurs: over and over, we see the same shots of the Liars’ kitchens or living rooms under surveillance, or of the girls gasping in horror as they discover yet another domestic intrusion. Still, these domestic settings remain wholly inescapable. In her essay “Return of the Gothic: Digital Anxiety in the Domestic Sphere,” Melissa Gronlund turns to the film and video work of artists like Ryan Trecartin, Mark Leckey, and Ed Atkins to illustrate how, as the literary trope of the gothic served as a means by which writers in the late 18th and 19th centuries expressed anxieties about partially-assimilated new technologies (electricity, the telegraph, and so on), its aesthetic signifiers have cropped up once more in work that digests recent information technology. Writes Gronlund,

Women constituted a large part of its audience—the Gothic novel often used architecture and private space to address questions of domestic life and the role of women. Old, creaky, labyrinthine houses (such as the Bates house in Hitchcock’s latter-day Gothic Psycho) became mainstays of the genre, serving as metaphors for both the constraints on women’s lives and the suddenly outdated lifestyles that would not go gently into that good night… In its barest bones, the Gothic is a clash of the old and the new, weighted toward the former as it struggles with its own obsolescence. By focusing on the domestic sphere, authors of Gothic novels could reflect on or directly channel those changes that were so difficult to fully comprehend.

PLL is set in a town with old homes and old money. And while the protagonists of many of the contemporary video works Gronlund touches upon are male, PLL is a show that focuses primarily on girls and their mothers—indeed, at moments it seems as if nearly all adult men one encounters are untrustworthy, if not evil. Distinctively, its clash of old and new, however, is found not in a yearning for a more prim iteration of femininity but in the nostalgia within its characters’ coming of age narratives—a yearning for a time before the violence of their surveilled late teens, perhaps for a time before they had their own cell phones which “A” could use to torture them.

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Lodged somewhere between these two emotionally-charged affects—the desire to be visible and the anxiety of being watched—lies the young woman’s diary. The document of a pronunciation of self, or selves, here assumes new significance. As the Livejournal platform made clear, this style of writing offers new pleasures and potential as it becomes something accessible to peers; it becomes a site of aesthetic possibility—an articulation of what it means to seek one’s identity in the midst of this tension, and one miles away from the art objects and cultural manifestations typically seen as defining the aesthetics of this so-called datalogical turn. There are, of course, female artists affiliated in some capacity with the post-internet millieu who engage with the diary format, often in ways that evoke a nostalgia for early Livejournals or Xangas: Trisha Lowe’s book The Compleat Purge pieces together maybe-autobiographical diary entries and chat room transcripts into an uneven coming-of-age. Addie Wagenknecht’s Technological Selection of Fate provides a fragmented account of the artist’s Livejournal between 2000 and 2009, where she kept a diary of her life primarily for internet friends.

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But there are also bodies of work created by actual teenagers, ones that have developed their own public. Take, for example, Rookie Mag, a site for young women founded by Tavi Gevinson, who found early fame with a fashion blog she started as a pre-teen. Rookie creates a number of spaces for Gevinson’s acolytes to narrativize their own lives, including a section titled “Dear Diary,” which is like a curated mini-LiveJournal, the writers credited by their first name. The platform’s identity is predicated on deliberate vulnerability, and also on nostalgia. Though reliant on the fragmented mood-board-assemblage style, much content comes wrapped in a gauzy veneer, a sense of the final remnants of girlhood fast escaping. It also is audience-aware, edited for tone and spelling mistakes, designed so that while I’m reading about Ananda’s panic attacks in school (November 12, 2014), I don’t really have context for who Ananda is: messy as she’s willing to present herself, it’s filtered such that she’s protected from being fully seen as she’s watched.

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Less intentionally constructed, though certainly of a related genre, is the early musical output of Greta Kline. Now twenty and well-known for her polished full-band indie-pop project Frankie Cosmos, Kline’s Bandcamp page contains over 45 releases of songs written and self-recorded from early 2011 and on. What Kline presents of herself in these songs is much less legible than the teen narratives delivered by Rookie—much of their charm, and also sense of intimacy, comes from the impulsive tone of the music. Songs from the first year and a half or so are generally between 20 seconds and two minutes, and juxtapose melancholic guitar melodies (“crying at 4:20 am,” February 2011) with sometimes-goofy, sometimes-plainspokenly emotional lyrics. Nostalgia, too, is recurring, as with “when i’m hi” from July 2011: “When I was 12 I wrote stuff like ‘what is wisdom’ in my peewee notebook I thought that I was real smart/When I’m hi I talk like I’m 12 again about powerful words I think that I am real tough/When I’m hi.” A sense of Kline’s self comes from the small details that stick as she throws them out almost as if by accident—some version of Crawford’s “shedding.” But, as she progressed in her sense of audience, she also began to introduce characters or selves intended to either manifest imagined truths or destabilize the information she’d already released into the world. “There have been times when I feel really sad or really weak, and I’ll write from the point of view of an opposite character, as a ‘fuck you’ to my enemies. If they hear that, they think you don’t give a shit and you’re doing great,” she told me. “And I’ve put a lot of weird secrets online that I’m now trying to undo by using fake names. It makes it so they’re all fake names, you know?”


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Whereas Rookie’s adoption of the diary format instructs a kind of legibility in how experience should be communicated, what can be read of Kline’s oeuvre is something different. Her performance of her personal data—a filtered expression of information that makes her publicly available to read, but also a means by which to, through this performance, become familiar to herself—is self-consciously stylized, and often incomplete, even as it comes packaged as a “song” or an “album.” Setting aside her lyrical content, there is also formal equivalence between demo-style recordings and reading a diary—a piercing sort of intimacy that seems a direct product of unevenness.

Crawford describes “the radical project of big data” as “epistemology taken to its limit,” writing, “If the big-data fundamentalists argue that more data is inherently better, closer to the truth, then there is no point in their theology at which enough is enough.” In “Excellences and Perfections,” Ulman provides plenty of data, but as the project begs to be watched and consumed, it intentionally obscures, or altogether abandons the possibility of truth—a form of the “radical potential… in surveillant anxieties” sought by Crawford in line with the normcore-type expressions of anxiety she outlines. As a datalogical subject, Kline’s path to retaining a vector of control is different. Rather than disappearing into prescribed forms of femininity, she instead lodges truths in the odd angles in her songs—truths always plural, and of the sort that in three months or a few years will morph or fade away.

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