This miniature museum was founded in 2050 to commemorate two decades of a fossil-free internet and to invite museum visitors to experience what the coal and oil-powered internet of 2020 was like.
Gasp at the horrors of surveillance capitalism. Nod knowingly at the plague of spam. Be baffled at the size of AI training data and lament the binge culture of video streaming.
In this participatory workshop, we'll explore the major contributors to the internet's carbon emissions as well as build upon and dream of positive steps towards a more sustainable internet.
In this workshop participants will make their own version of the science fiction/novel game, [Peek](http://thepeekgame.com/). Peek is an entertaining game for exploring the complexities and twisted narratives of the future, using a variety of story structures from traditional literature. In a series of exercises, participants will learn strategies for developing narrative games and will ultimately use Peek as a basis to create their own version of a speculative futures game, with their own stories and characters. No experience is required.
How can you be anybody in Zoomspace? Very recent developments in deep-learning, allow creating synthetic media of unprecedented quality and ease. The first-order-motion-model can do facial reenactment in real-time, provided with only a single image of your desired avatar. This came not a moment too soon, as Human communication was forced to move online due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Can this be an opportunity to fulfil the long promised cybernetic utopia, where we could shed our physical shells and become however we wish to be? And how does this pertain to issues of privacy, identity and trust? I will review the contemporary technologies and show how I use them in my artistic and activist practices. This is a hands-on participatory tutorial, where you will create deep-fake videos using your own materials, and play with various options of becoming an online avatar. No prior knowledge needed.
PGPoetry (Pretty Good Poetry) celebrates the aesthetic, poetic and political possibilities of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption protocol. Using PGP encryption protocol, I create abstract random poetry, readable only for the eyes of a specific recipient and of spying agencies (if they can decrypt them). For the rest of the world, the poems are basically digital Rorschach inkblot, and its meaning, as in every piece of art - depends on the audience's interpretation (interpretation is decryption!). With the rise of state surveillance in these emergency times, this project is more relevant than ever. PGPoetry workshop is an algorithmic poetry workshop which is also a crypto party for emergency times. In the workshop, the participants will try to figure out (and probably fail) how to read these poems, while I put them in the context and tradition of digital poetry and encrypted poetry, and raise questions about their meaning and artistic value. Then, I will teach the participants how to use PGP protocol via web based tools, and guide them as they experiment with creating PGPoetry.
We use the future everyday: when we plan what to eat for dinner, when we ruminate on life after COVID, when we demand action on carbon emissions and racist policing. But when we stop to think about the future itself, rather than what we want to happen in it, something quite profound can begin to happen. Karl Popper spoke of the ‘poverty of the imagination’, whereby fallacies of determinism begin to colonise our understandings of what is possible, and our hopes and fears begin to obscure the emergent, unpredictable nature of our complex world. As Riel Miller has said: “We betray the potential of our imagination to illuminate and invent the present if we cannot be liberated from the tyranny of using-the-future to win.” Our heterodox world of resistance has a host of compelling images and narratives of the future encoded into it, but how often do we make all of their assumptions explicit, play with them, and test and nurture our resilience by troubling them? This workshop has three stages, following the Futures Literacy Novelty Laboratory model (FLL-N): Reveal, Reframe, and Rethink. Each stage is carefully designed to guide participants from utopia, into uncertainty, and back again, availing of co-creative heuristics from Critical Futures Studies to distil the myths of our ‘anticipatory assumptions’, and to point the way to a ‘decolonisation of the future’, so that life is lived values-first in the present, rather than in anguish over the plainly unforeseeable. We will take as our subject matter on this journey:‘futures of the regenerative economy’
Attendees will explore our aesthetic and socio-economic landscape and how it applies to possible futures and ways we can influence them. In a workshop format, the attendees can explore the following zones and ideate ways to create Turbo Mañana in their professional and personal lives.
How and why is it that some experiential products that sell a feeling or vibe have license to “own” radically futuristic visions? Why do others all look the same? —
At its core, it’s just about money. C.R.E.A.M (Humanist Blandcore)
Attendees will explore what lies beyond capitalist realism.
Philosophical/Existential/Socio-economic forces —
I’ve mapped out philosophical axes and socio-economic drivers that motivate and fuel aesthetics and cultural production.
We must realize that capitalism will consume Earth’s resources until it’s exhausted unless we find another way to live in-between abundance and scarcity. (McDaas/Capitalocene)
What’s Next? —
Are we going to get medieval again? (Neo-Feudalism)
Or will we wake up and places bets on activities, provocation and cultural production that inspires imagination and multitudes of possible futures? (Turbo Mañana)
What is feminist data inside of social networks, algorithms, and big data? How can we queer data, the archive, and the internet? How can a data set act as a form of protest, of a creation of bias mitigation? This talk looks at ways of intervention, from art, design, and technology that combat and challenge bias. How can we create data to be an act of protest against algorithms? Part of this talk will focus on Caroline's research and current art project, Feminist Data Set. Feminist Data Set acts as a means to combat bias and introduce the possibility of data collection as a feminist practice, aiming to produce a slice of data to intervene in larger civic and private networks. Exploring its potential to disrupt larger systems by generating new forms of agency, her work asks:can data collection itself function as an artwork?
In order to understand the complexities of our existence, the task of archiving needs to be inclusive. It is inevitable that no archive can ever be entirely complete but there should not be premeditated erasure. Our interest in archiving is not merely to gather information or to catalog it within the walls of a private institution. We have been working for six years to generate an archive that can be sent into the world -- with the goal to create something that can be freely seen in an undeniable way.
We believe in a world rooted in the practice of archiving. To record and review creative self-expression, something that can be an extremely empowering and humbling experience. To be witnessed and be a witness with empathy. To share our personal stories with each other without the threat of violence or imprisonment. Each shared archive has the ability to become a resource and generate conversations that have the potential to aid in reckoning with past and present injustices of the world.
Excerpted and edited from [archive.org/details/awaytobegintoregainaccesstoyourself](http://archive.org/details/awaytobegintoregainaccesstoyourself)
personal archive / public action III
access is a key component to obtaining data. data is written in many formats with various permissions. your personal archive informs your public action. when access is granted to others, there is potential for collaborative action to be set in motion.
digital content for personal archive / public action III will livestream and then be archived on HUMAN TRASH DUMP on [archive.org](http://archive.org/) as a public repository. files generated during the duration of the event might be audio, image, video, or text among other formats. Potential considerations for digital content will involve ideas around privacy, collectivity, equity, tools, and manuals. Public Domain and Creative Commons will be encouraged.
personal archive / public action launched on June 29th, 2020 for a live virtual audience as part of PERFORMANCY FORUM:CORPUS COLISEUM, produced in collaboration between the Operating System/Liminal Lab, and PPL (Panoply Performance Laboratory).
“I try to depict the inner life of the subject, to give outward form to an inner state. I think my pictures have stories behind them, but I like to leave a feeling of openness. I hope that things keep going in the viewer’s mind. There’s nothing more boring than a story too quickly told. Once all the elements of a story are nailed down, the viewer is left with nothing but the artist’s technique.”
I would like to present the Lithuanian artist Republic of Užupis as one possible example of how to approach societal change – in the past and today.
Užupis was once established as a counterculture to challenge and support the authorities' promises of freedom and democracy after the breakdown of Soviet Union. At the same time it was a desperate attempt to create a sense of unity within a neighbourhood formerly dominated by poverty and violence. With the help of arts, humour and paradoxy, Užupis managed to survive and unintentionally became a role model for friendly and tolerant community life. Užupis e.g. created a code of arms, a currency and even had a 13-men-army - which was later abandoned, because it was against the constitution. This constitution best reflects the unique world view of the citizens, which is the first one to ever mention artificial intelligence.
Since 1997 more than 500 ambassadors and honorary citizens worldwide were appointed like Jonas Mekas and his holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. The ambassadors have the task to build bridges between people and to explore the power of paradoxy to solve problems.
Today Užupis faces new challenges. It turned from the most rundown area to the most expensive area of the baltics. It seems the threat of Socialism was substituted by the pervasive power of techno-capitalism. Therefore, I would like to show how the republic and its embassies currently approache a productive conversation with the "outside" world, while at the same time caring less and less about the rest of the world and creating their Užupis ways of doing things.
To quote Lizzie O’Shea in Future Histories, “The purpose of a usable past is not simply to be a record of history. Rather, by building a shared appreciation of moments and traditions in collective history, a usable past is a method for creating the world we want to see.” Very often past events and history can give us important signs to understand contemporary systems and technologies, and sometimes, also where decisions - good or bad - might be rooted. This talk will explore how algorithmic systems are becoming essential bricks for building and reorganising big parts of our society, but also how, while these systems are being adopted across different areas, we start to perceive the world through a less human and more machine-like lens. Touching on historical and literature references the talk will look at the politics and consequences of an algorithmically driven world and how artistic and activist groups can inspire critical conversations around the deployment of these systems, while enabling us to rethink and redesign these, for the shift to a more equitable AI.
“The future is already here..it's just not very evenly distributed.” William Gibson 1993
”From cradle-to-grave :Tech won’t save us” explores the social and environmental impacts of information and communication technologies, using the life-cycle analysis as a framework for that research.
Using this systemic analysis, Benjamin will introduce works by new media artists, designers, researchers and hacktivists that are addressing those issues, using strategies such as Tactical Media, Retail Poisoning, Urban Hacking and more.
With the passing of the North American Free Trade Agreement on January 1st 1994, the indigenous municipalities of Chiapas in Southern Mexico rose up to demand an end to the unregulated cycle of abuse they had been subjected to since the arrival of the Spanish Crown. Under the name of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), the armed organization declared war on the Mexican State, demanding "work, land, housing, food, health, education, independence, liberty, democracy, justice, and peace".
Chiapas has since become a symbol of the resistance to the peculiar form of globalization that grants priority to capital (and the private tyrannies that control it) while leaving the interests of the people as incidental. The argument put forth by the Zapatistas painted a future for an alternative model of ruling structures that moves away from the conception of a Western modernity — one in which a globalized system would allow for the multiplicity of identities, conceptions, and ideologies.
Mexico 44 acts as a catalyst for the collective redefining of our relationship to these prevailing structures of coloniality. Through the elaboration and execution of speculative critical narratives, the project proposes a space for contemporary design practices to engage in the spatial transformation of individual identities with hopes of fostering a dialogue that translates the argument put forth by the indigenous communities of Chiapas.
The talk will present a brief overview of the Zapatista movement, introduce the opportunities and challenges presented by Latinofuturismo, and will go over the execution of Mexico 44 as case study.
Technocapitalism has radically changed and impacted the manifestation of desire. Physical spaces where queer communities were meeting to have sex, to cruise are diseappering. Public bathrooms are being deserted, clubs are closing <span class="sup">(1)</span>, the act of cruising in urban, natural territories, spaces not designed for such purposes, is increasingly rare. With their disappearance, whole histories and narratives are erased <span class="sup">(2)</span>. In the absence of extensive queer archives, cruising utopias vanish, witnesses of liminal and forgotten histories.
Our video proposition investigates contemporary sites of affection-making online. Digital platforms owned by conglomerates offer the prospect of finding love, whether easily, fast or through self-promoted complex algorithms. We investigate such sites and contradictions inherent to their business model <span class="sup">(3)</span>. Acknowledging how apps like grindr, tinder, okcupid actively support the perpetuation of normative capitalism on one hand, we dig into the possibility of counter-discourse through acts of hacking, subversive behavior. Thus, such sites can offer windows of opportunity for users to create networks, exchange practices and knowledge. We investigate how online-dating apps can be localities for radical practices. Flirting, dating, sex are powerful catalysers for production of knowledge <span class="sup">(4)</span>. Following epistemologies that are rooted in alternative pedagogy methods, we explore what knowledge can be created on such platforms, which narratives can be expressed.
Unlike other dutiful female characters of Russian folklore, Baba Yaga is a powerful, anarchic witch. She lives alone in the woods; rejects household labour, repurposing the mortar and pestle for high-speed transportation, with broom as anti-tracking device; commands the undead; cannibalises. Baba Yaga is shape-shifting and gender-ambiguous, by turn gatekeeper, helper, or child eater. In her spirit, I propose Baba Yaga Myco Glitch, acts of refusal that use bread, the sacred ‘staff of life,’ as a carrier for ideological hypnotism.
There is a conspiracy theory in Russia that industrially produced yeast bread is infected with a ‘killer yeast’ designed to destroy the human organism from the inside out. It has also been suggested that rye bread caused the Salem Witch Trials. The symptoms of the ‘cursed’ girls were akin to ergotism, caused by mycotoxic parasitic fungus that thrives on rye. The same hallucinations, convulsions, and gangrene halted Peter the Great’s attack on the Ottoman Empire in 1722.
Inspired by ergot distribution and the symbiotic mycorrhizal networks of our tree kin, Baba Yaga Myco Glitch seeks to disrupt rigid structures from Salem to Shanghai to Siberia. We hijack yeasty-conspiracies and use them only for good. We misbehave in the kitchen. We harvest mind-altering wild yeasts, knead incantations into the sourdough, use it as capacitive sensor to transmit kneading data to the network, bake Yagic sigils. Glitch yeasts ferment and metabolise energy anew. We distribute our starter, infecting its ingesters with powerful hallucinogenic visions of alternative futures.
I will present a contextual research talk on BYMG, which may seep into a performance of a digital-fermentation ritual of intoxication and kneading out of capitalist kinks in our systems.
_What is the rural future in the era of postcolonial uprising? How do we dismantle modern industrial capital that extracts labor from disenfranchised black womxn workers?_ _Agro Commune_ is a para-fictional investigation where architecture is utilized as a lens to expose and respond to current geopolitical labor conditions. It began with the belief that architectural realities rarely start from a tabula rasa state. Rather, existing systems stand as a catalyst for new imaginations through disrupting and reconfiguring the present. The project imagines reparations for postcolonial states through farmland reform and renounces current global industries that thrive on the extraction of labor, capital and lands of others.
In sub-Saharan Africa, foreign corporations are vigorously irrigating vast rural areas for agro-industrial purposes, displacing local smallholders from their land to secure stable supplies for the rest of the western world. Since the global food crisis of 2007-2008, there has been an exponential growth in large-scale land acquisition in Africa. Western, Chinese, and Middle Eastern companies are leading a 21st-century land rush in African farmland where more than a forty million hectares are now under 99-year leases. Greenhouse colonies have become one of many architectural representations of unequal exchanges fostered by global capitalism. This workshop is based on research on the production system of Kenyan floriculture - and uses architectural language as a lens to investigate a speculative rural cooperative system for smallholder farmers.
Computational thinking is now taught in many higher technical courses. CT involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior, by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. In this presentation we will take a critical look at the CT approach and its epistemological foundations. I will present the paradigms on which the problem solving process is based, introduce the "Conquer & Divide" method, and illustrate the sometimes unhealthy interaction of CT with society through examples and anecdotes. I will end this critical overview with initiatives that assimilate CT in a critical gesture, such as de-computation. My wish is to generate astonishment and reflections that participants can share after the talk.
Polls and predictions could not foresee the wide appeal of voting for Brexit, for Trump, against the predictions, against the future that was set in the numbers. As worrisome as these phenomenons may be, we can see some hope in this turn against data-driven-determinism. How could we seize this call to action to reignite our political imagination and reclaim the future?
In a time in which death is moving rapidly online (funeral streaming services during COVID-19, #RIPcelebrity hashtags trending on Twitter), we all have to face the question of what happens to our own digital afterlives, as well as those of our loved ones. Digital death is the ultimate clash of familiar human concepts of time with the ubiquitous computational time. Facebook and Instagram offer possibilities for “immortalisation” with a memorialised profile, Twitter only offers deactivation. The need to humanise algorithms is now vital; Facebook friend suggestions and birthday reminders of the deceased aren’t exactly perceptive. Cue capitalising companies offering to use AI to analyse activity and learn how to post for you after death. But are their promises really immortal? And if, as predictions suggest, the dead soon outnumber the living on Facebook, who’s going to pay for their upkeep? Dead people aren’t very useful consumers; they won’t be clicking on those targeted ads. So what happens to the feedback loop when it’s the deceased generating the data? And who ultimately owns this data? This research began from a personal note following the death of my father. Unprepared, I found myself clinging to the digital traces that remained of him. Using participatory methods, I conversed with Facebook users who were vocalising a death on the platform. This research explores the presentation of the self across public platforms and negotiates a physical absence in light of a persistence digital presence. Anthropological research into death and grief online faces new challenges:omnipresent online traces, ethical algorithms, data storage and an online field-site. Essentially death is an inevitable accompaniment to our existence and, like in other fields, we are constantly catching up with technology and surrendering our control; this is no exception, perhaps we just need to acclimatise quicker than the companies.
"I can remember"is a project that probes our relationship with machines by exploring the collectiveness of memories in the cycle between humans and machines. What is today often named artificial intelligence technologies are, in fact, cyborg technologies. They encapsulate an array of sentient experiences; they are the result of many different experiences of the world.
This piece links three types of memories that, in interaction, form a new collective representation of moments of the past where the contributions of humans and machines can no longer be told apart.
**Personal,intimate memory**
The piece starts from photographs documenting daily life in the rural area as seen through a subject's lense. They are the images of this moment, the memories that remain, partial, biased and framed. They represent the personal and intimate memory of the subject.
**Algorithmicmemory**
The photographs are then put into poems and written words based on the memories of image recognition algorithms which can only recognise what they have been trained to recognise. The algorithms' reading of the imagery unearths what the images represent to them who are restricted by the labels and words embedded inside them. The memories become a new kind of sentience, encapsulating the algorithmic understanding and experience of the world.
**Dataworkers memory**
Often unaccounted for, the poems are also shaped by the data workers memory, the memory of the people who trained the algorithm or on whom the algorithms have been trained. Image classification algorithms rely on people labelling data, classifying them or contouring them. The image description, the colour names, the handwriting styles in this piece are all derived from human work. This piece encapsulates their memories (muscle memories, lexical memories, and phenomenal memories).
Among the various waste streams that our companies produce, e-waste (electronic waste) is the one that has been growing rapidly for several years, due to the constant replacement of telephones and laptops, televisions and game consoles and other miscellaneous peripherals. This kind of digital rubbish, which remains when their use is over, are generally discarded, sometimes stuffed in a box in the attic, sometimes in the trash, or in more or less serious recycling circuits. In addition to the refurbishment of digital objects such as smartphones, computers or connected objects, many unique and original reuse practices exist to make these machines last, or reinvent them:techniques for the conservation or enhancement of past machines, reuse of parts and components taken from unused devices to create low-cost information systems, electronic craftsmanship aimed at customising, adapting or creating digital objects in limited editions, competitions, festivals and workshops for the design of video games, demos or musical content on computers and consoles from the 1980s and 1990s, etc. On the basis of an ongoing investigation of the re-use practices of digital objects, this presentation will address the anthropological issues of the second life of digital objects. In doing so, it will address ways of returning to the idea of progress, of questioning it and of finding original avenues by integrating the sustainability of our digital devices.
During the past years 5G has been adverstised by industry leaders as the future of the tech. Nevertheless there is little data about its environmental impacts and about the necessity of such infrastructure for future challenges (global warming, resource scarcity, ...). This talk intends to describe the 5G infrastructure and some of the different controversies around it like energy and environmental impacts. The rise of big tech infrastructure, such as 5G, without any public consultation is heavely problematic as it locks down on a specific, and presumably unsustainable, technological path. 5G is likely to be a keystone to reclaim governance and democratic debate on future infrastructures. 5G also asks a key question :can we collectively steer and manage the evolution of internet traffic or are you condemned to an exponential growth to the benefit of some private actors ?
A speculative project made in response to the ongoing discussions raised by numerous futurists and technologists on the hypothetical point called the technological singularity. Often, the technologists and futurists talk about how this technological growth can become uncontrollable and irreversible. Either this hypothetical point be consequential or beneficial, there are a lack of conversations touching upon how the relationship between the human and technology should be. The narratives are established within the perspective from one of the people who decided to escape the city tending towards the technological singularity. The vision is to resettle a new community with a vision that speaks against technological centralisation. As mining was one of the early operations that sparked the industrial revolution, the new community is built on top of an abandoned mine settlement to invert the conventional notion of a technological revolution. The project sits in 2050 and speculates on an alternative reaction to the city tending towards the technological singularity by decentralising themselves to an extreme. The concept is inspired by the theory of relativity in space-time physics and how blockchain technology operates on its own internal time system
The form of the digital datum is discrete, fungible, and familiar, and digital mediation presupposes commensurability between various ontic, epistemic, and aesthetic phenomena. My paper asks whether digital media may nevertheless yield new, unrecognizable or sui generis forms. I take philosopher M. Beatrice Fazi’s reading of Gilles Deleuze’s aesthetics as my primary hermeneutic lens. Deleuze claims that aesthetic novelty, or that which has no formal precedent, issues from numerically continuous fluxes. Thus it cannot originate in digital media, which are discrete. Fazi intervenes by distinguishing the form of the digital datum from the process of computation. She indicates that the latter partakes of infinite and indeterminate sources and is continuous across time. As such, computational processes retain the capacity to yield the Deleuzean new.
Offering Deleuzean novelty as a theorization of “the new,” I argue that the cultural phenomenon of live-coded music exemplifies the computational production of novelty. Live-coding musicians improvise by writing source code which instantaneously plays out loud. I examine live-coding programs and artists’ reflections to propose that the new emerges at the interface of software and musician for the duration of live-coding performances. I also draw from Henri Bergson’s work on creative processes, which emphasizes improvisation and immediacy, to attest to the salience of live-coded music as a study in digital novelty.
The final section of the paper situates my arguments politically. I write that digital capitalism secures its hegemony by means of algorithmic homogenization, statistical prediction, and cybernetic enclosure, and proceeds as an unfolding of similitude. That which is wholly new, I claim, defies and subverts this normative political program.
lookingGlass developed from a question NYC theatre company Mangeont asked itself late last September:
Can we, given today’s social, political, economic, and ecological realities, responsibly maintain hope?
Reading this back today, it strikes with different, but not dampened, significance.
Taking Murray Bookchin’s phrase “Demand the impossible” as a guide, the aim of the project was always to explore the possibility of a “better world,” whatever that may mean. The process was to be one of public engagement, wherein the artists involved would all participate in a personal interview with company members, and subsequently create a piece of art responding to that connective, imaginative experience, which would then be incorporated into a staged show entitled The Future is Not a Dream.
Though the performance dates for the theatre version were postponed, the project has been completely re-envisioned for the virtual world we currently inhabit.
The resulting project, lookingGlass, is an online immersive gaming experience, built with Unity, that functions as a site for virtual interaction with recorded artwork, giving the audience-player agency in their participation, much as would be encouraged at a live interactive show. This, combined with (secret) live elements and web interaction push the bounds of what a video game can be, offering a potentially unique digital art experience presenting the work of a wide range of visual, audio, text, and mixed media artists.
The interviews that are at the core of the process, held over the course of March and April, and the resulting artistic responses, bear witness to the reality each day has brought with it since the onset of the global pandemic. They mark out space for pain, but also for joy, for longing, and
In the last decade, several public stories have hit the headlines, underlining the necessity to rethink our relation to digital technologies and our behavior with regard to privacy. Whether it be Snowden’s revelations, Cambridge Analytica, or Facebook political advertising, all of these narratives seem to turn public opinion towards skepticism and defiance. However, they also seem to dissimulate the more subtle means of coercion existing in the digital realm, both technical and psycho-sociological aspects. In 2018, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented what is now known as the World Wide Web, gave an interview in which he admits that “the web has failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done, and failed in many places”. He had envisioned a system that would provide means of empowerment to its users. He thought, as some still do, that a standardized platform in which people would be able to participate openly in the elaboration of a common interest could provide a radical shift from a centralized capitalist political system. Nonetheless, this has proven to be a failure. By his own admission, the web has become quite the opposite : centralization has brought monopoly to only a handful of services, hiding behind a Utopian vision embodied in personalized services and recommendations. We think that this failure also illustrates the lack of understanding the public has of the implicit technical dogma guiding online services and their technical interdependence. How can we accurately identify coercion and the potential means of re-decentralizing ? We propose to analyze this re-decentralization via these talking points :1) the psycho-sociological analysis of the relation between one’s opinion and the tools of capitalist coercion, 2) the technical aspects of the dissimulated interdependence of various services, notably privately owned and/or controlled APIs.
title_ :Melancholic Cryptonymy and the Aesthetic Threshold of Detectability- The Blue Conceptualists, The Haunted Painter and The Existential Crisis of the Cadaver.
“Animism had endowed things with souls; industrialism makes souls into things.” - Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno
The talk circles around notions of care for the non-human and more specifically for the technologies that we surround ourselves with. Anne-Marie Willis’ ontological design describes how we not only design objects, but also how these objects design our ontologies. Consumer electronics and algorithms became steady companions in our life. Not only do we interact with them on a regular base, they also accompany us throughout the day. We could call them companion technologies, following Donna Haraway’s concept of companion species — digital technologies and people, who are bonded in significant otherness.
These technological products and processes are highly designed and branded experiences, to be consumed and discarded. They gift us a membership of specific cultural demographics. They’re not made to last, unlike you would expect from a good pair of shoes. Their frictionless design makes them easily replaceable, which also expresses itself in the sheer unrepairability. Following these lines of thought, design practices disable not only the care for the thing, but also our understanding of the importance to care for our immediate environment.
Alternative ways of caring for companion technologies are found in animistic practice. Animistic epistemologies enable us to level the ontological field and create social ties to things. These epistemologies then enable different ways for caring and respectful relations to the non-human. In the light of the environmental impact of todays technologies, cared for and long-living companion things seem to be a desirable alternative.
How then can we imagine our relationship to technological products and processes otherwise? How can we imagine their ontological status and our entanglement with them anew?
The last fifteen years has seen a surge of interest in decentralised technology. From well-funded blockchain projects like IPFS to the emergence of large scale information networks such as Dat, Scuttlebutt and ActivityPub, this is renewed life in peer-to-peer technologies; a renaissance that enjoys widespread growth, driven by the desire for platform commons and community self-determination. These are goals that are fundamentally at odds with – and a response to – the incumbent platforms of social media, music and movie distribution and data storage. As we enter the 2020s, centralised power and decentralised communities are on the verge of outright conflict for the control of the digital public space. The resilience of centralised networks and the political organisation of their owners remains significantly underestimated by protocol activists. At the same time, the decentralised networks and the communities they serve have never been more vulnerable. The peer-to-peer community is dangerously unprepared for a crisis-fuelled future that has very suddenly arrived at their door.
NOD is an acronym for Neural Optimal Decisor, a subcomponent of a big artificial supreme entity in charge of monitoring and analyzing massive amounts of data from people who agreed to delegate personal life to this ubiquitous organism.
This Artificial Intelligence takes advantage of every device connected to the vast network, and it obtains real-time biometric and social information from users. People do not need to handle struggle situations because data collected by each NOD will be a valuable asset to optimize human decisions by them. NODs will enhance people's lives supported by reliable information and probabilistic evidence.
The experience drives the player into the NOD perspective in charge of improving human lives. In this sense, players can track people's actions, communications, and variables through devices connected to the internet. Smartphones, smartwatches, and other devices become interfaces to take an in-depth look at people's private life. A simple game mechanic allows players to identify people as metadata of their physical dimension, accompanied by lectures that label people's current status. The NOD must make decisions by humans based on their probabilistic measurements of well- being. However, for better or worse, humans seem to want to run away from predictability.
The game arises from a series of questions. What range of options do we have to make a decision? Is our identity being demarcated by algorithms? Are we an extension or part of a kind of digital monoculture? Do we govern our lives, or are these driven by the influence of data presented to us in seemingly harmless and casual ways?
