The Esmenger and Hogan readings struck me as introductory material. At this point in the semester, we are familiar with the idea of reintroducing materiality back into the Cloud, so the readings felt like they were summarizing what we've learned rather than pushing us in a new direction. That being said, I tried to focus on the instances when waste cropped up as a motif in these readings.
Most notably, thinking with last week's readings, I noticed there were some insights to be garnered by linking waste with our discussion of labor. When Facebook built a data center in Oregon, labor was brought into being off-site; the construction of the center itself, while providing brief economic stimulation, quickly dissipated. The labor remained visible in the congealed form of the center, while the "waste," the human capital which was discarded after the center was built, comes to be invisible and even ethereal. Hogan quotes a citizen lamenting that the data center has not brought "stimulating, intellectual talent" to bear in the community: the closest the town gets is the ghostly whir of the archive, and they must be content in the knowledge that it is facilitating this labor elsewhere.
More directly concerned with waste was Pasquinelli's treatise on entropy and surplus. He traces the genealogy of the conception of life as fundamentally wasteful; indeed, it is an organism's capacity for surplus which acts as the very pendulum on which it swings back and forth between life and death. That is to say, activity and productivity are themselves actions taken unto death, and the staving off of death is the consumption of order (or negative entropy). In this way, we come to understand Serres's perspective that all life is parasitism, for we must necessarily feast upon the ordered earth that we might direct our inner chaos outward. I'm still thinking about how this philosophical perspective ties into critiquing the ever-popular metaphor of life as code, but I am hopeful.
Wednesday, December 4, 2019
A.I. Art vs. Human Art
In doing research for my final project I came across this video of New York Magazine’s senior art critic Jerry Saltz commenting on A.I. generated art. He definitely had a lot to say about them and his not-so-positive comments reminded me of the discussion of technology vs. art. Is the novelty of A.I. generated art enough to set it apart from other works of art or, like Saltz, are we ready to critique it in the same way that we judge human art, based (most of the times) on the final result alone?
Core Post: the Cost of the Instantaneous
Though we tend to think of digital devices as gleaming and clean gateways to an immaterial expanse, Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of massive e-waste landfills give a sense of the other side of the coin: the enormous scale of digital refuse. Ensmenger and Hogan both clarify that digital technologies are not immaterial, as terms like “the Cloud,” may suggest. In reality, current digital processes require several other environmentally devastating practices, including unsustainable extraction of rare earth minerals to power devices, massive water consumption for cooling servers, and management of the growing landfills of obsolete, toxic products. Despite their invisibility to users, server farms that power the Cloud exhaust as much power as large cities. One compelling metric of this waste is the number of machines on standby (around 90%) in case there is a surge of activity. Ultimately, this 90% wasted energy is a result of the demand for instantaneous recall of information from massive databases by billions of users: “This may be the single most telling insight about the archive—the ideal of instantaneity imparted onto it by users who are simultaneously creating and subjected to such an unsustainable modality. The cost of such instantaneity is that almost all the energy that goes toward preserving that ideal is, literally, wasted” (Hogan, 9). Only a few potential solutions are mentioned in these texts, for example locating server farms in areas with cold climates to reduce water consumption. Or manufacturing devices that require less power. What other actions would help to reverse the ecological impact of digital technologies? Changes in policy? Adjusting expectations away from instantaneous fulfillment? It is helpful to have diagnoses of the mounting problems, but there is a scarcity of solutions. What is the way forward?
Dead Media and Assemblage Art
While reading Garnet Hertz's explantation of the Dead Media Research Lab's project to creatively repurpose e-waste, the strategy of several contemporary African artists came to mind: El Anatsui, Moffat Takadiwa, and Serge Attukwei Clottey. All three of these artists collect, sort, and recombine waste shipped from the United States and Europe to landfills where they live into beautiful textiles, often employing others in their community to help. They sell these textiles back to mostly Western art collectors, essentially sending our trash back to us and benefiting financially from the process. This practice operates at a relatively small scale considering the massive inundation they face, but is a surprisingly effective local response to the unjust distribution of waste and profit.
The links below are for works by these artists on view in Los Angeles:
El Anatsui
Moffat Takadiwa
Serge Attukwei Clottey
Tuesday, December 3, 2019
Core Post - Waste! A Creative Proposition
The Dead Media Research Lab (Medianatures) is a rabbit hole of ingenuity, obsolescence, and delight. It “proposes creative research into the intelligent repurposing and reuse of [abandoned] devices” and provides as inspiration an expansive archive of past media examples. Keeping its definition of media broad enough to include British postal fraud and Chicago freight tunnels (an entire section called “pigeons pigeons pigeons!”), this taxonomy of dead media claims the offshoots and outgrowths that died on the vine or thrived and were forgotten—creating a vast space in which to imagine so much more from the raw materials now poisoning the global South in huge heaping piles of e-waste.
I mentioned the postal cypher, and another favorite were the Flower Codes, which in the 18th Century used different flora to communicate messages of romance and intrigue, e.g. “Mistletoe - difficulties, I surmount,” “Holly - Am I forgotten,” and “Christmas rose - relieve my anxiety” (I went with a holiday/end-of-semester theme). It’s interesting to think of language itself as medium and/or to question whether it’s the material substrates on which it travels that are the medium. Could the codes, cyphers, phonemes, sounds be those substrates as well?
And how can these media be perverted toward alternative ends, such as allowing the poor to send messages postage free? How do subversive infrastructures always form on or in spite of sanctioned infrastructures? Can the more ethical, queer, kind, ecological ones be scaled up? Or are they necessarily antagonistic to but a barnacle on the extractive, late-capitalist systems? In relation to this week’s theme and the project’s stated aim, how does looking back at this cabinet of media curiosities change how one might relate more creatively to contemporary media before it becomes e-waste?
Fisher Price Pixelvision cameras could be a model for how to work with media before labeling them obsolete, because it shifted its own codes of use in a couple different ways. Marketed as a children’s toy camcorder, it was a dud in that market but was taken up by adult professional film makers. Additionally, it uses audio cassette tapes run at high speed as its recording medium, lending “a distinctively hazy, dream-like quality to almost everything it shoots.” By design it distorts the original purpose of its materials and then its unexpected users found additional ways to take advantage of its shortcomings as affordances, distorting them to their own purposes. What digital objects surrounding us might we imagine doing the same with now?
Also of particular interest, thinking about different kinds of archiving and the impulse to digitize: The data from archeological digs preserves less than the ground itself preserved those objects before they were dug up.
I mentioned the postal cypher, and another favorite were the Flower Codes, which in the 18th Century used different flora to communicate messages of romance and intrigue, e.g. “Mistletoe - difficulties, I surmount,” “Holly - Am I forgotten,” and “Christmas rose - relieve my anxiety” (I went with a holiday/end-of-semester theme). It’s interesting to think of language itself as medium and/or to question whether it’s the material substrates on which it travels that are the medium. Could the codes, cyphers, phonemes, sounds be those substrates as well?
And how can these media be perverted toward alternative ends, such as allowing the poor to send messages postage free? How do subversive infrastructures always form on or in spite of sanctioned infrastructures? Can the more ethical, queer, kind, ecological ones be scaled up? Or are they necessarily antagonistic to but a barnacle on the extractive, late-capitalist systems? In relation to this week’s theme and the project’s stated aim, how does looking back at this cabinet of media curiosities change how one might relate more creatively to contemporary media before it becomes e-waste?
Fisher Price Pixelvision cameras could be a model for how to work with media before labeling them obsolete, because it shifted its own codes of use in a couple different ways. Marketed as a children’s toy camcorder, it was a dud in that market but was taken up by adult professional film makers. Additionally, it uses audio cassette tapes run at high speed as its recording medium, lending “a distinctively hazy, dream-like quality to almost everything it shoots.” By design it distorts the original purpose of its materials and then its unexpected users found additional ways to take advantage of its shortcomings as affordances, distorting them to their own purposes. What digital objects surrounding us might we imagine doing the same with now?
Also of particular interest, thinking about different kinds of archiving and the impulse to digitize: The data from archeological digs preserves less than the ground itself preserved those objects before they were dug up.
Sunday, December 1, 2019
Pax Transhumanity
If you recall from my presentation last class, I mentioned that I had wanted to bring in Pax Transhumanity, and I have just received and played it so I can now give my appraisal. Also, if anyone is interested in playing let me know and I would be happy to teach you!
Similar to Emancipation, Transhumanity operates on a logic of epistemes; ideas (the cards comprising most of the play area) cannot be viably commercialized unless the global episteme is favorable. Ideas come in a combination of four disciplines: transbiology, computing, group dynamics, and assembly. Each idea corresponds to one or two of these, represented by colors, and in order to commercialize the idea (leading to endgame points and other benefits) it must be epistemically viable, or viable through a "think tank" card that matches its colors.
The game can conclude in several different ways, but ours ended when the developing world reached a tipping point. In our haste, we had failed to address the possibility of a eugenics movement being precipitated by a new gene-altering technology, and so the developing world fought a bitter conflict over eugenics. Because no one discipline dominated the human progress splay, victory came down to whoever had garnered the most influence in their hidden goal sphere. Both of us had chosen the cloud, but I was victorious 3-2.
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| The play area at the conclusion of the game |
Similar to Emancipation, Transhumanity operates on a logic of epistemes; ideas (the cards comprising most of the play area) cannot be viably commercialized unless the global episteme is favorable. Ideas come in a combination of four disciplines: transbiology, computing, group dynamics, and assembly. Each idea corresponds to one or two of these, represented by colors, and in order to commercialize the idea (leading to endgame points and other benefits) it must be epistemically viable, or viable through a "think tank" card that matches its colors.
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| The "Human Progress" splay, featuring the ideas we commercialized over the course of the game |
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| The included algorithmic flowchart |
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| My player role: a blogger with very little capital. The left side of the card lists all the available actions players can take. |
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| Two of the games's spheres where work takes place. The doctor (red) player has established a company to address the barrier of women's health, while the blogger (blue) player has been focusing on data privacy in the cloud. |
Grindr Remembers
[This site was brought to my attention] a few weeks ago after a picture of presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg posing at the Berlin Holocaust memorial [surfaced online]. This site documents people from the gay dating/hookup app Grindr who have posed for similar photos. While I think it's pretty tasteless to take these pictures, I am curious as to what other people think of this? Is this an appropriate response? What understandings of public space does this blog have? What does it mean to remember in such a way? How does this blog understand historical, cultural, and technological memory? How does it relate to ]"Shoahtecture"' and other large-scale memory architecture?
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