trans in Stalder 2018
axy -- fell into crisis, new
forms of personal and collective orientation and organization emerged
which have been shaped by the affordances of this new condition. Both
the historical processes which unfolded over a very long time and the
structural transformation which took place in a myriad of contexts have
been beyond any deliberate influence. Although obviously caused by
social actors, the magnitude of such changes was simply too great, too
distributed, and too complex to be attributed to, or mold
ndas.
These new institutions are well adapted to the digital condition, with
its chaotic production of vast amounts of information and innovative
ways of dealing with that.
From this, two competing trajectories have emerged which are
simultaneously transforming the space of the political. First, I used
the term "post-democracy" because it expands possibilities, and even
requirements, of (personal) participation, while ever larger aspects of
(collective) decision-making are moved to arenas that are st
"pagebreak"
title="viii"}
I traced some aspects of these developments right up to early 2016, when
the German version of this book went into production. Since then a lot
has happened, but I resisted the temptation to update the book for the
English translation because ideas are always an expression of their
historical moment and, as such, updating either turns into a completely
new version or a retrospective adjustment of the historical record.
What has become increasingly obvious during 2016 and in
surveillance capitalism have been strengthened more quickly than the
commons-oriented practices could establish themselves. But it does not
change the fact that there are fundamental alternatives embedded in the
digital condition. Despite structural transformations that affect how we
do things, there is no inevitability about what we want to do
individually and, even more importantly, collectively.
::: {.poem}
::: {.lineGroup}
Zurich/Vienna, July 2017[]{#Page_ix type="pagebreak" title="ix"}
:::
:::
:
readability. I am likewise grateful
to Heinrich Greiselberger and Christian Heilbronn of the Suhrkamp
Verlag, whose faith in the book never wavered despite several delays.
Regarding the English version at hand, it has been a privilege to work
with a translator as skillful as Valentine Pakis. Over the past few
years, writing this book might have been the most important project in
my life had it not been for Andrea Mayr. In this regard, I have been
especially fortunate.[]{#Page_xi type="pagebreak"
tit
hardly moved at all, she nevertheless incited the audience to
participate in numerous ways and genuinely to act out the motto of the
contest ("Join us!"). Throughout the early rounds of the competition,
the beard, which was at first so provocative, transformed into a
free-floating symbol that the public began to appropriate in various
ways. Men and women painted Conchita-like beards on their faces,
newspapers printed beards to be cut out, and fans crocheted beards. Not
only did someone Photoshop a be
egories:
::: {.extract}
Agender, Androgyne, Androgynes, Androgynous, Asexual, Bigender, Cis, Cis
Female, Cis Male, Cis Man, Cis Woman, Cisgender, Cisgender Female,
Cisgender Male, Cisgender Man, Cisgender Woman, Female to Male (FTM),
Female to Male Trans Man, Female to Male Transgender Man, Female to Male
Transsexual Man, Gender Fluid, Gender Neutral, Gender Nonconforming,
Gender Questioning, Gender Variant, Genderqueer, Hermaphrodite,
Intersex, Intersex Man, Intersex Person, Intersex Woman, Male to Female
(MTF), Male to Female Trans Woman, Male to Female Transgender Woman,
Male to Female Transsexual Woman, Neither, Neutrois, Non-Binary, Other,
Pangender, Polygender, T\*Man, Trans, Trans Female, Trans Male, Trans
Man, Trans Person, Trans\*Female, Trans\*Male, Trans\*Man,
Trans\*Person, Trans\*Woman, Transexual, Transexual Female, Transexual
Male, Transexual Man, Transexual Person, Transexual Woman, Transgender
Female, Transgender Person, Transmasculine, T\*Woman, Two\*Person,
Two-Spirit, Two-Spirit Person.
:::
This enormous proliferation of cultural possibilities is an expression
of what I will refer to below as the digital condition. Far from being
universally welcomed, its growing prese
ed by putting the
initiative on ice. However, according to the analysis presented in this
book, leaving it on ice creates a precarious situation.
The rise and spread of the digital condition is the result of a
wide-ranging and irreversible cultural transformation, the beginnings of
which can in part be traced back to the nineteenth century. Since the
1960s, however, this shift has accelerated enormously and has
encompassed increasingly broader spheres of social life. More and more
people have been pa
facilitate certain types of
connection between humans and
objects.[^7^](#f6-note-0007){#f6-note-0007a} "Digital" thus denotes the
set of relations that, on the infrastructural basis of digital networks,
is realized today in the production, use, and transformation of
material and immaterial goods, and in the constitution and coordination
of personal and collective activity. In this regard, the focus is less
on the dominance of a certain class []{#Page_8 type="pagebreak"
title="8"}of technological ar
was in fact introduced at the margins of
society, in cultural niches that were unnoticed by the dominant actors
and institutions. The new technologies thus evolved against a
[]{#Page_11 type="pagebreak" title="11"}background of processes of
societal transformation that were already under way. They could only
have been developed once a vision of their potential had been
formulated, and they could only have been disseminated where demand for
them already existed. This demand was created by social, polit
on. In order to do justice to their
complexity, I will treat them on different levels: I will depict the
rise of the knowledge economy as a structural change in labor; I will
reconstruct the critique of heteronormativity by outlining the origins
and transformations of the gay movement in West Germany; and I will
discuss post-colonialism as a theory that introduced new concepts of
cultural multiplicity and hybridization -- concepts that are now
influencing the digital condition far beyond the limits of
still
made by more or less educated tinkerers, during the last third of the
nineteenth century, invention itself came to be institutionalized. In
Germany, Siemens (founded in 1847 as the Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von
Siemens & Halske) exemplifies this transformation. Within 50 years, a
company that began in a proverbial workshop in a Berlin backyard became
a multinational high-tech corporation. It was in such corporate
laboratories, which were established around the year 1900, that the
"industrializatio
ginning of the 1960s,
Machlup brought these previously separate developments together and
thus explained the existence of an already advanced knowledge economy in
the United States. His arguments fell on extremely fertile soil, for an
intellectual transformation had taken place in other areas of science as
well. A few years earlier, for instance, cybernetics had given the
concepts "information" and "communication" their first scientifically
precise (if somewhat idiosyncratic) definitions and had ass
c1-note-0014a}
and in the 1990s the debate revolved around the "network
society"[^15^](#c1-note-0015){#c1-note-0015a} -- to name just the most
popular concepts. What these approaches have in common is that they each
diagnose a comprehensive societal transformation that, as regards the
creation of economic value or jobs, has shifted the balance from
productive to communicative activities. Accordingly, they presuppose
that we know how to distinguish the former from the latter. This is not
unproblemati
accordingly. Since the 1970s, there has
thus been a feedback loop between scientific analysis and political
agendas. More often than not, it is hardly possible to distinguish
between the two. Especially in Britain and the United States, the
economic transformation of the 1980s was imposed insistently and with
political calculation (the weakening of labor unions).
There are, however, important differences between the developments of
the so-called "post-industrial society" of the 1970s and those of the
order to achieve economic success
in this new capitalism, it became necessary for every individual to
identify himself or herself with his or her profession. Large
corporations were restructured in such a way that entire departments
found themselves transformed into independent "profit centers." This
happened in the name of creating more leeway for decision-making and of
optimizing the entrepreneurial spirit on all levels, the goals being to
increase value creation and to provide management with more
nts of the "project" at
hand.[^19^](#c1-note-0019){#c1-note-0019a} Aside from a few exceptions,
companies in their traditional forms came to function above all as
strategic control centers and as economic and legal units.
This economic structural transformation was already well under way when
the internet emerged as a mass medium around the turn of the millennium.
As a consequence, change became more radical and penetrated into an
increasing number of areas of value creation. The political agenda
o
from a
monogamous relationship to nightclubs and public bathrooms until, at the
end, he is enlightened by a political group of men who explain that it
is not possible to lead a free life in a niche, as his own emancipation
can only be achieved by a transformation of society as a whole. The film
closes with a not-so-subtle call to action: "Out of the closets, into
the streets!" Von Praunheim understood this emancipation to be a process
that encompassed all areas of life and had to be carried out in pu
ty between
homosexual and heterosexual relationships" and, on this basis, made an
argument against discrimination.[^34^](#c1-note-0034){#c1-note-0034a}
Around the year 2000, however, the classical gay movement had already
passed its peak. A profound transformation had begun to take place in
the middle of the 1990s. It lost its character as a new social movement
(in the style of the 1970s) and began to splinter inwardly and
outwardly. One could say that it transformed from a mass movement into a
multitude of variously networked communities. The clearest sign of this
transformation is the abbreviation "LGBT" (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender), which, since the mid-1990s, has represented the internal
he
diger Lautmann quoted above -- "homophobia
lives on in the depths of the collective disposition" -- continued to
hold true.
If the gay movement is representative of the social liberation of the
1970s and 1980s, then it is possible to regard its transformation into
the LGBT movement during the 1990s -- with its multiplicity and fluidity
of identity models and its stress on mutability and hybridity -- as a
sign of the reinvention of this project within the context of an
increasingly dominant digital condition. With this transformation,
however, the diversification and fluidification of cultural practices
and social roles have not yet come to an end. Ways of life that were
initially subcultural and facing existential pressure []{#Page_28
type="pagebreak" title="28"}are gra
#c1-note-0044a}
:::
Hybridization is thus a cultural strategy for evading marginality that
is imposed from the outside: subjects, who from the dominant perspective
are incapable of doing so, appropriate certain aspects of culture for
themselves and transform them into something else. What is decisive is
that this hybrid, created by means of active and unauthorized
appropriation, opposes the dominant version and the resulting speech is
thus legitimized from another -- that is, from one\'s own -- posit
hird," which becomes especially virulent when it
"emerges in the middle of semantic
structures."[^46^](#c1-note-0046){#c1-note-0046a} The recognition of
this power reveals the increasing cultural independence of those
formerly colonized, and it also transforms the cultural self-perception
of the West, for, even in Western nations that were not significant
colonial powers, there are multifaceted tensions between dominant
cultures and those who are on the defensive against discrimination and
attribution
ns survived,
however, which go beyond design and remain characteristic of the
culturalization []{#Page_37 type="pagebreak" title="37"}of the economy:
the discovery of the public as emancipated users and active
participants; the use of appropriation, transformation, and
recombination as methods for creating ever-new aesthetic
differentiations; and, finally, the intention of shaping the lifeworld
of the user.[^57^](#c1-note-0057){#c1-note-0057a}
As these patterns became depoliticized and commercialized
ltering it within a set of guidelines. This was taken a step
further by the idea of "user-centered innovation," which relies on the
specific knowledge of users to enhance a product, with the additional
hope of discovering unintended applications and transforming these into
new areas of business.[^63^](#c1-note-0063){#c1-note-0063a} It has also
become possible for end users to take over the design process from the
beginning, which has become considerably easier with the advent of
specialized platforms
chanically processed and stored data on
punch cards. The idea was based on Hollerith\'s observations of the
coupling and decoupling of railroad cars, which he interpreted as
modular units that could be combined in any desired order. The punch
card transferred this approach to information []{#Page_41
type="pagebreak" title="41"}management. Data were no longer stored in
fixed, linear arrangements (tables and lists) but rather in small units
(the punch cards) that, like railroad cars, could be combined
essage a medium might be conveying. From this perspective, reality does
not exist outside of media, given that media codetermine our personal
relation to and behavior in the world. For McLuhan and the Toronto
School, media were thus not channels for transporting content but rather
the all-encompassing environments -- galaxies -- in which we live.
Such ideas were circulating much earlier and were intensively developed
by artists, many of whom were beginning to experiment with new
electronic media. An
duction, with the newly arrived medium of the internet. Despite still
struggling with numerous technical difficulties, they remained constant
in their belief that the internet would solve the hitherto intractable
problem of distributing content. The transition from analog to digital
media lowered the production hurdle yet again, not least through the
ongoing development of improved software. Now, many stages of production
that had previously required professional or semi-professional expertise
and equ
e difference between media and
political activity.[^77[]{#Page_47 type="pagebreak"
title="47"}^](#c1-note-0077){#c1-note-0077a}
This difference was dissolved entirely by a new generation of
politically motivated artists, activists, and hackers, who transferred
the tactics of civil disobedience -- blockading a building with a
sit-in, for instance -- to the
internet.[^78^](#c1-note-0078){#c1-note-0078a} When, in 1994, the
Zapatista Army of National Liberation rose up in the south of Mexico,
several med
ression "rough consensus." The second was that, in accordance with
the classical engineering tradition, the focus should remain on concrete
solutions that had to be measured against one []{#Page_52
type="pagebreak" title="52"}another on the basis of transparent
criteria. Such was the meaning of the expression "running code." In
large part, this method was possible because the group oriented around
these principles was, internally, relatively homogeneous: it consisted
of top-notch computer scientists -
among programmers as theft.[^90^](#c1-note-0090){#c1-note-0090a}
Previously it had been par for the course, and above all necessary, for
programmers to share software with one another. The former culture of
horizontal cooperation between developers transformed into a
hierarchical and commercially oriented relation between developers and
users (many of whom, at least at the beginning, had developed programs
of their own). For the first time, copyright came to play an important
role in digital culture.
nnium, the number of users already exceeded 53 percent. Since
then, this share has increased even further. In 2014, it was more than
97 percent for people under the age of
40.[^95^](#c1-note-0095){#c1-note-0095a} Parallel to these developments,
data transfer rates increased considerably, broadband connections ousted
the need for dial-up modems, and the internet was suddenly "here" and no
longer "there." With the spread of mobile devices, especially since the
year 2007 when the first iPhone was introdu
olent backlashes
and new forms of fundamentalism that are attempting once again to remove
certain religious, social, cultural, or political dimensions of
existence from the discussion. Yet these can only be understood in light
of a sweeping cultural transformation that has already reached
mainstream society.[^98^](#c1-note-0098){#c1-note-0098a} In other words,
the digital condition has become quotidian and dominant. It forms a
cultural constellation that determines all areas of life, and its
character
ormation,
Medien und Wissen -- Eine Einführung* (Wiesbaden: Verlag für
Sozialwissenschaften, 2009).[]{#Page_178 type="pagebreak" title="178"}
[17](#c1-note-0017a){#c1-note-0017} Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello,
*The New Spirit of Capitalism*, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso,
2005).
[18](#c1-note-0018a){#c1-note-0018} Michael Piore and Charles Sabel,
*The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities of Prosperity* (New York:
Basic Books, 1984).
[19](#c1-note-0019a){#c1-note-0019} Castel
anzeiger, 2001).
[35](#c1-note-0035a){#c1-note-0035} This process of internal
differentiation has not yet reached its conclusion, and thus the
acronyms have become longer and longer: LGBPTTQQIIAA+ stands for
lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, transgender, transsexual, queer,[36](#c1-note-0036a){#c1-note-0036} Judith Butler, *Gender Trouble:
questioning, intersex, intergender, asexual, ally.
ntly that there seems to be
no way out of the existing dependent relations. For an overview of the
debates that Said has instigated, see María do Mar Castro Varela and
Nikita Dhawan, *Postkoloniale Theorie: Eine kritische Einführung*
(Bielefeld: Transcript, 2005), pp. 37--46.
[44](#c1-note-0044a){#c1-note-0044} "Migration führt zu 'hybrider'
Gesellschaft" (an interview with Homi K. Bhabha), *ORF Science*
(November 9, 2007), online \[--trans.\].
[45](#c1-note-0045a){#c1-note-0045} Homi K.
rman Parliament (June 4,
2014), online \[--trans.\].
[51](#c1-note-0051a){#c1-note-0051} Andreas Reckwitz, *Die Erfindung
der Kreativität: Zum Prozess gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung* (Berlin:
Suhrkamp, 2011), p. 180 \[--trans.\]. An English translation of this
book is forthcoming: *The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and
the Culture of the New*, trans. Steven Black (Cambridge: Polity, 2017).
[52](#c1-note-0052a){#c1-note-0052} Gert Selle, *Geschichte des Design
in Deutschland* (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2007).
[53](#c1-note-0053a){#c1-note-0053} "Less Is More: The Design Ethos of
Dieter R
langspaziergänge durch Zürich* (Zurich: NZZ Libro,
2009).
[62](#c1-note-0062a){#c1-note-0062} "An alternate realty game (ARG),"
according to Wikipedia, "is an interactive networked narrative that uses
the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to
deliver a story that may be altered by players\' ideas or actions."
[63](#c1-note-0063a){#c1-note-0063} Eric von Hippel, *Democratizing
Innovation* (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
[64](#c1-note-0064a){#c1-note-0064} It
e-0065} Beniger, *The Control Revolution*,
pp. 411--16.
[66](#c1-note-0066a){#c1-note-0066} Louis Althusser, "Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)," in
Althusser, *Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays*, trans. Ben Brewster
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 127--86.
[67](#c1-note-0067a){#c1-note-0067} Florian Becker et al. (eds),
*Gramsci lesen! Einstiege in die Gefängnishefte* (Hamburg: Argument,
2013), pp. 20--35.
[68](#c1-note-0068a){#c1-note-0068} Guy Debord, *The Society of the
Spectacle*, trans. Fredy Perlman and Jon Supak (Detroit: Black & Red,
1977).
[69](#c1-note-0069a){#c1-note-0069} Derrick de Kerckhove, "McLuhan and
the Toronto School of Communication," *Canadian Journal of
Communication* 14/4 (1989): 73--9.[]{#Page_182 type="page
utonomedia,
1996).
[79](#c1-note-0079a){#c1-note-0079} Today this method is known as a
"distributed denial of service attack" (DDOS).
[80](#c1-note-0080a){#c1-note-0080} Max Weber, *Economy and Society: An
Outline of Interpretive Sociology*, trans. Guenther Roth and Claus
Wittich (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 26--8.
[81](#c1-note-0081a){#c1-note-0081} Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, *Small
Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered*, 8th edn (New York:
Harper Per
formats that can
be registered by human perception. It is impossible to read the content
of billions of websites. Therefore we turn to services such as Google\'s
search algorithm, which reduces the data flood ("big data") to a
manageable amount and translates it into a format that humans can
understand ("small data"). Without them, human beings could not
comprehend or do anything within a culture built around digital
technologies, but they influence our understanding and activity in an
ambivalent way
em: re-mix, re-make, re-enactment, appropriation, sampling,
meme, imitation, homage, tropicália, parody, quotation, post-production,
re-performance, []{#Page_59 type="pagebreak" title="59"}camouflage,
(non-academic) research, re-creativity, mashup, transformative use, and
so on.
These processes have two important aspects in common: the
recognizability of the sources and the freedom to deal with them however
one likes. The first creates an internal system of references from which
meaning and aestheti
o embed
a source in its original context in order to re-determine its meaning,
but also a departure from classical forms of rendition such as
translations, adaptations (for instance, adapting a book for a film), or
cover versions, which, though they translate a work into another
language or medium, still attempt to preserve its original meaning.
Re-mixes produced by DJs are one example of the referential treatment of
source material. In his book on the history of DJ culture, the
journalist Ulf Poschar
nchita Wurst, the bearded diva, is not torn between two
conflicting poles. Rather, she represents a successful synthesis --
something new and harmonious that distinguishes itself by showcasing
elements of the old order (man/woman) and simultaneously transcending
them.
This synthesis, however, is usually just temporary, for at any time it
can itself serve as material for yet another rendering. Of course, this
is far easier to pull off with digital objects than with analog objects,
though these categor
as Marshall McLuhan repeatedly underscored,
did not fully develop until the advent of the printing
press.[^8^](#c2-note-0008){#c2-note-0008a} It was the printing press, in
other words, that first abstracted written signs from analog handwriting
and transformed them into standardized symbols that could be repeated
without any loss of information. In this practical sense, the printing
press made writing digital, with the result that dealing with texts soon
became radically different.
::: {.section}
##
he internet.[^20^](#c2-note-0020){#c2-note-0020a} At the
same time, new providers have entered the market of free access; their
method is not to facilitate distributed downloads but rather to offer,
on account of the drastically reduced cost of data transfers, direct
streaming. Although some of these services are relatively easy to locate
and some have been legally banned -- the best-known case in Germany
being that of the popular site kino.to -- more of them continue to
appear.[^21^](#c2-note-0021){#
hat these costumes are usually not exact replicas but are rather
freely adapted by each player to represent the character as he or she
interprets it to be. Accordingly, "Cosplay is a form of appropriation
[]{#Page_74 type="pagebreak" title="74"}that transforms, actualizes and
performs an existing story in close connection to the fan\'s own
identity."[^30^](#c2-note-0030){#c2-note-0030a} This practice,
admittedly, goes back quite far in the history of fan culture, but it
has experienced a striking surg
rthy features remain: the power of the desire to appropriate, in a
bodily manner, characters from vast cultural universes, and the
widespread combination of free interpretation and meticulous attention
to detail.
:::
::: {.section}
### Lineages and transformations {#c2-sec-0008}
Because of the great effort tha they require, re-enactment and cosplay
are somewhat extreme examples of singling out, appropriating, and
referencing. As everyday activities that almost take place incidentally,
however, these
ifferences (through design, for instance) are ubiquitous.
Established civic institutions are not alone in being hollowed out;
relatively new collectives are also becoming more differentiated, a
development that I outlined above with reference to the transformation
of the gay movement into the LGBT community. Yet nevertheless, or
perhaps for this very reason, new forms of communality are being formed
in these offshoots -- in the small activities of everyday life. And
these new communal formations -- ra
he term was introduced at the beginning of the 1990s by the social
researchers Jean Lave and Étienne Wenger. They observed that, in most
cases, professional learning (for instance, in their case study of
midwives) does not take place as a one-sided transfer of knowledge or
proficiency, but rather as an open exchange, often outside of the formal
learning environment, between people with different levels of knowledge
and experience. In this sense, learning is an activity that, though
distinguishable, c
itself -- the constitution of space and time. How? The spatio-temporal
horizon of digital communication is a global (that is, placeless) and
ongoing present. The technical vision of digital communication is always
the here and now. With the instant transmission of information,
everything that is not "here" is inaccessible and everything that is not
"now" has disappeared. Powerful infrastructure has been built to achieve
these effects: data centers, intercontinental networks of cables,
satellites, hig
whose expanse
is confined to milliseconds. This process is far from coming to an end,
for massive amounts of investment are allocated to accomplish even the
smallest steps toward this goal. On November 3, 2015, a 4,600-kilometer,
300-million-dollar transatlantic telecommunications cable (Hibernia
Express) was put into operation between London and New York -- the first
in more than 10 years -- with the single goal of accelerating automated
trading between the two places by 5.2 milliseconds.
For socia
luence, temporal rhythms have to be redefined as well.
What counts as fast? What counts as slow? In what order should things
proceed? On the everyday level, for instance, the matter can be as
simple as how quickly to respond to an email. Because the transmission
of information hardly takes any time, every delay is a purely social
creation. But how much is acceptable? There can be no uniform answer to
this. The members of each communal formation have to negotiate their own
rules with one another, even
ame;
whoever opts not to []{#Page_96 type="pagebreak" title="96"}accept them
will remain on the outside. Protocols establish, for example, common
languages, technical standards, or social conventions. The fundamental
protocol for the internet is the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet
Protocol (TCP/IP). This suite of protocols defines the common language
for exchanging data. Every device that exchanges information over the
internet -- be it a smartphone, a supercomputer in a data center, or a
netwo
c texts will be automated in
the future. Entirely different applications, however, have also been
conceived. Alexander Pschera, for instance, foresees a new age in the
relationship between humans and nature, for, as soon as animals are
equipped with transmitters and sensors and are thus able to tell their
own stories through the appropriate software, they will be regarded as
individuals and not merely as generic members of a
species.[^87^](#c2-note-0087){#c2-note-0087a}
We have not yet reached this p
rhaps the best-known algorithms that sort the digital infosphere and
make it usable in its present form are those of search engines, above
all Google\'s PageRank. Thanks to these, we can find our way around in a
world of unstructured information and transfer increasingly larger parts
of the (informational) world into the order of unstructuredness without
giving rise to the "Library of Babel." Here, "unstructured" means that
there is no prescribed order such as (to stick []{#Page_112
type="pagebreak" t
ch as "central"/"peripheral."
Even though the PageRank algorithm was highly effective and assisted
Google\'s rapid ascent to a market-leading position, at the beginning it
was still relatively simple and its mode of operation was at least
partially transparent. It followed the classical statistical model of an
algorithm. A document or site referred to by many links was considered
more important than one to which fewer links
referred.[^104^](#c2-note-0104){#c2-note-0104a} The algorithm analyzed
the gi
a
greater amount of contextual []{#Page_115 type="pagebreak"
title="115"}information, which influences the value of a site within
PageRank and thus the order of search results. The algorithm is no
longer a fixed object or unchanging recipe but is transforming into a
dynamic process, an opaque cloud composed of multiple interacting
algorithms that are continuously refined (between 500 and 600 times a
year, according to some estimates). These ongoing developments are so
extensive that, since 2003, se
flowing or stuck in a jam.
If enough historical data is taken into account, the hope is that it
will be possible to redirect cars in such a way that traffic jams should
no longer occur.[^110^](#c2-note-0110){#c2-note-0110a} For those who use
public transport, Google Now evaluates real-time data about the
locations of various transport services. With this information, it will
suggest the optimal route and, depending on the calculated travel time,
it will send a reminder (sometimes earlier, sometimes later) when it is
time to go. That which Google is just experimenting with and
alized
and efficient service that provides a quasi-magical product. Out of the
enormous haystack of searchable information, results are generated that
are made to seem like the very needle that we have been looking for. At
best, it is only partially transparent how these results came about and
which positions in the world are strengthened or weakened by them. Yet,
as long as the needle is somewhat functional, most users are content,
and the algorithm registers this contentedness to validate itself. In
im, namely that of borrowing sources without
acknowledging them.
[3](#c2-note-0003a){#c2-note-0003} Ulf Poschardt, *DJ Culture* (London:
Quartet Books, 1998), p. 34.
[4](#c2-note-0004a){#c2-note-0004} Theodor W. Adorno, *Aesthetic
Theory*, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 151.
[5](#c2-note-0005a){#c2-note-0005} Peter Bürger, *Theory of the
Avant-Garde*, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984).
[6](#c2-note-0006a){#c2-note-0006} Felix Stalder, "Neun Thesen zur
Remix-Kultur," *i-rights.info* (May 25, 2009), online.
[7](#c2-note-0007a){#c2-note-0007} Florian Cramer,
ise decided in
Google\'s favor. The Authors Guild promptly announced its intention to
take the case to the Supreme Court.
[14](#c2-note-0014a){#c2-note-0014} Jean-Noël Jeanneney, *Google and
the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe*, trans. Teresa
Lavender Fagan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
[15](#c2-note-0015a){#c2-note-0015} Within the framework of the Images
for the Future project (2007--14), the Netherlands alone invested more
than €170 million to digitize
tary film *TPB AFK:
The Pirate Bay Away from Keyboard* (2013), directed by Simon Klose.
[21](#c2-note-0021a){#c2-note-0021} In technical terms, there is hardly
any difference between a "stream" and a "download." In both cases, a
complete file is transferred to the user\'s computer and played.
[22](#c2-note-0022a){#c2-note-0022} The practice is legal in Germany
but illegal in Austria, though digitized texts are routinely made
available there in seminars. See Seyavash Amini Khanimani and Nikolau
t al. (eds),
*Geistiges Eigentum und Originalität: Zur Politik der Wissens- und
Kulturproduktion* (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011).
[33](#c2-note-0033a){#c2-note-0033} Roland Barthes, "The Death of the
Author," in Barthes, *Image -- Music -- Text*, trans. Stephen Heath
(London: Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 142--8.
[34](#c2-note-0034a){#c2-note-0034} Heinz Rölleke and Albert
Schindehütte, *Es war einmal: Die wahren Märchen der Brüder Grimm und
wer sie ihnen erzählte* (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn
oday is indicative
of how difficult []{#Page_188 type="pagebreak" title="188"}it has become
for any single organization to attract broad strata of society.
[39](#c2-note-0039a){#c2-note-0039} Ulrich Beck, *Risk Society: Towards
a New Modernity*, trans. Mark Ritter (London: SAGE, 1992), p. 135.
[40](#c2-note-0040a){#c2-note-0040} Ferdinand Tönnies, *Community and
Society*, trans. Charles P. Loomis (East Lansing: Michigan State
University Press, 1957).
[41](#c2-note-0041a){#c2-note-0041} Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
"The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)," trans. Terrell Carver, in
*The Cambridge Companion to the Communist Manifesto*, ed. Carver and
James Farr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 237--60,
at 239. For Marx and Engels, this was -- like everything pertaining to
the dynamics of cap
ment. For,
in this case, it finally forced people "to take a down-to-earth view of
their circumstances, their multifarious relationships" (ibid.).
[42](#c2-note-0042a){#c2-note-0042} As early as the 1940s, Karl Polanyi
demonstrated in *The Great Transformation* (New York: Farrar & Rinehart,
1944) that the idea of strictly separated spheres, which are supposed to
be so typical of society, is in fact highly ideological. He argued above
all that the attempt to implement this separation fully and cons
ecise term
"dividual" (the divisible) has also been used. See Gerald Raunig,
"Dividuen des Facebook: Das neue Begehren nach Selbstzerteilung," in
Oliver Leistert and Theo Röhle (eds), *Generation Facebook: Über das
Leben im Social Net* (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011), pp. 145--59.
[53](#c2-note-0053a){#c2-note-0053} Jariu Saramäki et al., "Persistence
of Social Signatures in Human Communication," *Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America* 111
(2014): 942--7.
arf der Chef
ständige Erreichbarkeit verlangen?" *Zeit Online* (June 13, 2012),
online \[--trans.\].[]{#Page_190 type="pagebreak" title="190"}
[57](#c2-note-0057a){#c2-note-0057} Hartmut Rosa, *Social Acceleration:
A New Theory of Modernity*, trans. Jonathan Trejo-Mathys (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2013).
[58](#c2-note-0058a){#c2-note-0058} This technique -- "social freezing"
-- has already become so standard that it is now regarded as way to help
women achieve a better balance be
ine Tribes* (London: Pluto Press, 2009).
[74](#c2-note-0074a){#c2-note-0074} Eric Steven Raymond, "The Cathedral
and the Bazaar," *First Monday* 3 (1998), online.
[75](#c2-note-0075a){#c2-note-0075} Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of
Babel," trans. Anthony Kerrigan, in Borges, *Ficciones* (New York: Grove
Weidenfeld, 1962), pp. 79--88.
[76](#c2-note-0076a){#c2-note-0076} Heinrich Geiselberger and Tobias
Moorstedt (eds), *Big Data: Das neue Versprechen der Allwissenheit*
(Berlin: Suhrkamp,
6a){#c2-note-0086} Steven Levy, "Can an Algorithm
Write a Better News Story than a Human Reporter?" *Wired* (April 24,
2012), online.
[87](#c2-note-0087a){#c2-note-0087} Alexander Pschera, *Animal
Internet: Nature and the Digital Revolution*, trans. Elisabeth Laufer
(New York: New Vessel Press, 2016).
[88](#c2-note-0088a){#c2-note-0088} The American intelligence services
are not unique in this regard. *Spiegel* has reported that, in Russia,
entire "bot armies" have been mobilized for the "p
in the sense of
unprocessed, and "cooked," in the sense of processed, derive from the
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who introduced them to clarify the
difference between nature and culture. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, *The Raw
and the Cooked*, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
[114](#c2-note-0114a){#c2-note-0114} Jessica Lee, "No. 1 Position in
Google Gets 33% of Search Traffic," *Search Engine Watch* (June 20,
2013), online.
[115](
w a line between production and reproduction. Thus, this set
of concepts, which is strictly oriented toward economic production
alone, is more problematic than ever. My decision to use these concepts
is therefore limited to clarifying the conceptual transition from the
previous chapter to the chapter at hand. The concern of the last chapter
was to explain the forms that cultural processes have adopted under the
present conditions -- ubiquitous telecommunication, general expressivity
(referentiality),
rs, and everyone else with access
to the underbelly of the infrastructure, including the British
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the US National
Security Agency (NSA), both of which employ programs such as a MUSCULAR
to record data transfers between the computer centers operated by large
American providers.[^10^](#c3-note-0010){#c3-note-0010a}
Nevertheless, email essentially remains an open application, for the
SMTP protocol forces even the largest providers to cooperate. Small
prov
do -- and the resulting experience of failing to shape one\'s
own activity in a coherent manner are ideal-typical manifestations of
the power of networks.
The problem experienced by the unwilling-willing users of Facebook has
not been caused by the transformation of communication into data as
such. This is necessary to provide input for algorithms, which turn the
flood of information into something usable. To this extent, the general
complaint about the domination of algorithms is off the mark. The
problem is not the algorithms themselves but rather the specific
capitalist and post-democratic setting in which they are implemented.
They only become an instrument of domination when open and
decentralized activities are transferred into closed and centralized
structures in which far-reaching, fundamental decision-making powers and
possibilities for action are embedded that legitimize themselves purely
on the basis of their output. Or, to adapt the title of Rosa von
Praunh
ge) but rather for
political repression and the protection of central power interests --
or, to put it in more neutral terms, in the service of general security.
Yet the NSA and other intelligence agencies also record decentralized
communication and transform it into (meta-)data, which are centrally
stored and analyzed.[^41^](#c3-note-0041){#c3-note-0041a} This process
is used to generate possible courses of action, from intensifying the
surveillance of individuals and manipulating their informational
ealth
insurance.[^55^](#c3-note-0055){#c3-note-0055a}
According to the legal scholar Frank Pasquale, the sum of all these
developments has led to a black-box society: More social processes are
being controlled by algorithms whose operations are not transparent
because they are shielded from the outside world and thus from
democratic control.[^56^](#c3-note-0056){#c3-note-0056a} This
ever-expanding "post-democracy" is not simply liberal democracy with a
few problems that can be eliminated through well
ntees the freedom of unlimited use, modification,
and distribution. The developers understand this primarily as an ethical
obligation. They explicitly regard the project as a contribution "to the
free software community." The social contract demands transparency on
the level of the program code: "We will keep our entire bug report
database open for public view at all times. Reports that people file
online will promptly become visible to others." There are both technical
and ethical considerations behi
but the main work
of the developers -- the program code -- flows back into the common pool
of resources, which the explicitly non-profit Debian Project can then
use to compile its distribution. The freedoms guaranteed by the free
license render this transfer from commercial to non-commercial use not
only legally unproblematic but even desirable to the for-profit service
providers, as they themselves also need entire operating systems and not
just the kernel.
The Debian Project draws from this pool of
ive Commons (CC), a California-based foundation that
began to provide easily understandable and adaptable licensing kits and
to promote its services internationally through a network of partner
organizations. This set of licenses made it possible to transfer user
rights to the community (defined by the acceptance of the license\'s
terms and conditions) and thus to create a freely accessible pool of
cultural resources. Works published under a CC license can always be
consumed and distributed free of ch
x rules, lack of young personnel, and
systematic attempts at manipulation, have been well documented because
Wikipedia also guarantees free access to the data generated by the
activities of users, and thus makes the development of the commons
fairly transparent for outsiders.[^84^](#c3-note-0084){#c3-note-0084a}
One of the most fundamental and complex decisions in the history of
Wikipedia was to change its license. The process behind this is
indicative of how thoroughly the community of a commons can
es and communities
in terms of open data, the use of open-source software, the availability
of open infrastructures (such as free internet access in public places),
open policies (the licensing of public information,
freedom-of-information laws, the transparency of budget planning, etc.),
and open education (freely accessible educational resources, for
instance).[^95^](#c3-note-0095){#c3-note-0095a} The results are rather
sobering. The Open Data Index has identified 10 []{#Page_169
type="pagebreak" ti
eak" title="175"}
:::
::: {.section .notesSet type="rearnotes"}
[]{#notesSet}Notes {#c3-ntgp-9999}
------------------
::: {.section .notesList}
[1](#c3-note-0001a){#c3-note-0001} Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy*, trans. S. W. Ryazanskaya (London:
Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), p. 21.[]{#Page_196 type="pagebreak"
title="196"}
[2](#c3-note-0002a){#c3-note-0002} See, for instance, Tomasz Konicz and
Florian Rötzer (eds), *Aufbruch ins Ungewisse: Auf der Suche nach
Alternativen zur kapitalistischen Dauerkrise* (Hanover: Heise
Zeitschriften Verlag, 2014).
[3](#c3-note-0003a){#c3-note-0003} Jacques Rancière, *Disagreement:
Politics and Philosophy*, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 102 (the emphasis is original).
[4](#c3-note-0004a){#c3-note-0004} Colin Crouch, *Post-Democracy*
(Cambridge: Polity, 2004), p. 4.
[5](#c3-note-0005a){#c3-note-0005} Ibid.
nce in a special issue of the journal
*Neue Soziale Bewegungen* (vol. 4, 2006) and in the first two issues of
the journal *Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte* (2011).
[8](#c3-note-0008a){#c3-note-0008} See Jonathan B. Postel, "RFC 821,
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol," *Information Sciences Institute:
University of Southern California* (August 1982), online: "An important
feature of SMTP is its capability to relay mail across transport service
environments."
[9](#c3-note-0009a){#c3-note-0009} One of the first providers of
Webmail was Hotmail, which became available in 1996. Just one year
later, the company was purchased by Microsoft.
[10](#c3-note-0010a){#c3-note-0010}
note-0021a){#c3-note-0021} Carlos Diuk, "The Formation of
Love," *Facebook Data Science Blog* (February 14, 2014), online.
[22](#c3-note-0022a){#c3-note-0022} Facebook could have determined this
simply by examining the location data that were transmitted by its own
smartphone app. The study in question, however, did not take such
information into account.
[23](#c3-note-0023a){#c3-note-0023} Dan Lyons, "A Lot of Top
Journalists Don\'t Look at Traffic Numbers: Here\'s Why," *Huffington
Post*
ty Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the
purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or
by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
P. 51, Brautigan, Richard: From "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving
Grace" by Richard Brautigan. Cop
trans in Constant 2009
re 141
figure 138
figure 136
figure 139
figure 137
figure 140
15
15
15
16
16
figure 144 Séverine Dusollier:
I think amongst many of the
movements that are made, most are
not ‘a work', they are subconscious
movements, movements that
are translations of gestures that
are simply banal or necessary
figure 142
figure 145
figure 143
16
16
16
17
17
figure 146 Sadie Plant: It is
this kind of deep collectivity,
this profound sense of
micro-collaboration, which
has often been tapped into
ytri Kleiner & Brian Wyrick, 2007. Anti-Copyright. Use as desired in whole or in part. Independent or collective commercial use encouraged. Attribution optional.
Text first published in English in Mute: http://www.metamute.org/InfoEnclosure-2.0. For translations in
Polish and Portuguese, see http://www.telekommunisten.net
figure 3
Dmytri
Kleiner
MICHEL CLEEMPOEL
License: Free Art License
figure 12
Every single
passing of
a visitor
triggered the
projection
of a
simultaneous
registration
figure 14
emporary and unlikely encounters between
persons.
Doppelgänger
Born in September 2001, represented here by Valérie Cordy et
Natalia De Mello, the MéTAmorphoZ collective is a multidisciplinary
association that create installations, spectacles and transdisciplinary
performances that mix artistic experiments and digital practices.
With the project Doppelganger, the collective MéTAmorphoZ focuses on the thematic of the electronic double(duplicate, twin) in a
society of control and surveillance.
“Ou
aginary media in the end are not the
machines, but the human aspirations that more often than not are
left unresolved by the machines. . . ”. Powers of imagination are then
based in the human beings doing the imagining, in the human powers
able to transcend the actual and factual ways of perception and to
83
83
83
84
84
grasp the unseen, unheard and unthought of media creations. Variation remains connected to the principle of the central point where
variation is perceived.
Talking of the prim
eavers', and also as ‘the original inventors of a system of telegraphy'. Spiders' webs offer themselves as ingenious communication
systems which do not merely signal according to a binary setting
(something has hit the web/has not hit the web) but transmits information regarding the “general character and weight of any object
touching it (. . . )” Or take for example the book Beautés et merveilles
de la nature et des arts by Eliçagaray from the 18 th century which
lists both technological and
The harmonious scene, “like a great
89
89
89
90
90
amphitheatre”, is filled with life that easily escapes the (human) eye.
Like Alice, the protagonist wandering in the meadow is “lulled and
benumbed by dreamy sensations” which however transport him suddenly into new perceptions and bodily affects. What is revealed to
our boy hero in this educational novel fashioned in the style of travel
literature (connecting it thus to the colonialist contexts of its age)
is a world teeming with sound
e and Guattari.' In: Postmodern Culture, vol. 15, issue 1,
2004.
Steven Connor, fly. (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).
Manuel DeLanda, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. (New
York: Zone Books, 1991).
Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Transl. Robert
Hurley. (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988).
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold. Transl. Tom Conley. (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
Ernst Kapp, Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Kultur aus neuen Gesichtspunkten. (Braunschweig:
Druck und Verlag von George Westermann, 1877).
Wil
of thin metal wires which he suspended from the ceiling of
the haunted house in the La Bellone courtyard.
Through these metal wires, loudspeakers without membranes were
connected to a network of resonating cans. Sinus tones and radio
recordings were transmitted through the speakers, making the metal
wires vibrate which, in their turn, caused the cans to resonate.
figure 26
A netting
of thin
metal wires
suspended
from the
ceiling of
the haunted
house in the
La Bellone
courtyard
figure 27
93
93
93
rs has gone missing, leaving them at heightened risk
of identity theft. The CD, which contained data relating to 15,000 Standard Life
pensions customers including their names, National Insurance numbers and pension
plan reference numbers was lost in transit from the Revenue offce in Newcastle to the
company's headquarters in Edinburgh by ‘an external courier'.
Thefts: In November 2007, MoD acknowledged the theft of a laptop computer containing the personal details of 600,000 Royal Navy, Royal Marine
e different companies –
including Standard Life and Liontrust. (In May, Standard Life sent around 300 policy
documents to the wrong people.)
106
106
106
107
107
Legal frameworks intended to safeguard a conception of privacy by
limiting data transfers to appropriate parties exist. Such laws, and in
particular the UK Data Protection Act (DPA, 1998) 7, are the subject
of investigation of the film Faceless.
From Act to Manifesto
“I wish to apply, under the Data Protection Act,
for any and all C
ar locations, but the CCTV recordings were not always
obtainable, so the story had to be continually rewritten.
Faceless treats the CCTV image as an example of a legal readymade (‘objet trouvé'). The medium, in the sense of raw materials
that are transformed into artwork, is not adequately described as
simply video or even captured light. More accurately, the medium
comprises images that exist contingent on particular social and legal
circumstances – essentially, images with a legal superstructur
‘Evolving Documentary' was intended to support complex stories that would develop
over time, and which could best be told from a variety of points of
view.
3.
Like published books and movies, television is designed for
unidirectional, one-to-many transmission to a mass audience,
without variation or personalization of presentation. The remote-control unit and the VCR (videocassette recorder) - currently the only devices that allow the viewer any degree of independent control over the play-out of te
tone - ubiquitous requests almost go unnoticed - and other times
they take us by surprise because of their authoritative
and demanding nature: “Put That There”. How can we
think about such feed back loops in productive ways?
How are interactions translated into software, and how
does software result in interaction? Could the practice of
using and producing free software help us find a middle
ground between technophobia and technofetishism? Can
we imagine ourselves and our realities differently, wh
l or scrape websites have been
widely used in new media art and activism.
By contrast, DSP code is not based on set-making. It relies on
a different ordering of the world that lies closer to streams of signals that come from systems such as sensors, transducers, cameras,
and that propagate via radio or cable. Indeed, although it is very
widely used, DSP is not usually taught as part of the computer science or software engineering. The textbooks in these areas often do
not mention DSP. The distinction
d in physical senses, such as the movements of air involved in
hearing, or the flux of light involved in seeing. Because they are often
irregular movements, they cannot be easily captured in the forms of
movement idealised in classical mechanics – translation, rotation, etc.
Think for instance of a typical photograph of a city street. Although
there are some regular geometrical forms, the way in which light is
reflected, the way shadows form, is very difficult to describe geometrically. It is much e
ll see, to think of an image as a
signal that distributes light and colour in space. Once an image or
sound can be seen as a signal, it can undergo digital signal processing.
What distinguishes DSP from other algorithmic processes is its
reliance on transforms rather than functions. This is a key difference.
The ‘transform' deals with many values at once. This is important
because it means it can deal with things that are temporal or spatial,
such as sounds, images, or signals in short. This brings
here is
only one thing I want to point out in this code: the list of ‘precomputed' numerical values is used for ‘jpeg fast DCT'. This is a typical
piece of DSP type code. It refers to the way in which video frames are
encoding using Fast Fourier Transforms. The key point here is that
these values have been carefully worked out in advance to scale different colour and luminosity components of the image differently. The
transform, DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform), is applied to chunks of
sensation – video frames – to make them into something that can be
manipulated, stored, changed in size or shape, and circulated. Notice
160
160
160
161
161
that the code here is quite opaque in comparison to t
). A powerful media-technological imagining of
video moving everywhere, every which way, has taken root.
The growth of video material culture is associated with a key dynamic: the proliferation
of software and hardware codecs. Codecs generate linear transforms of images and
sound. Transformed images move through communication networks much more quickly
than uncompressed audiovisual materials. Without codecs, an hour of raw digital video
would need 165 CD-ROMs or take roughly 24 hours to move across a standard computer
network (10Mbi
also has a codec,
usually implemented in hardware. Instead of 32Mbyte/sec, between 1-10 MByte/sec
streams from the DVD into the player and then onto the television screen.
The economic and technical value of codecs can hardly be overstated. DVD, the transmission formats for satellite and cable digital television (DVB and ATSC), HDTV
as well as many internet streaming formats such as RealMedia and Windows Media,
third generation mobile phones and voice-over-ip (VoIP), all depend on video and audio code
and repetition of video comes at
a cost. Enormous complication must be compressed in the codec itself.
Much is at stake in this logistics from the perspective of cultural studies of technology
and media. On the one hand, codecs analyse, compress and transmit images that
fascinate, bore, fixate, horrify and entertain billions of spectators. Many of these
videos are repetitive or cliched. There are many re-runs of old television series or
Hollywood classics. YouTube.com, a video upload site, offers 13,5
visual pleasures and excitations attached to video
cultures. Would that beheading, a corporeal event that takes video material culture to
its limits, occur without codecs and networked media?
163
163
163
164
164
its purpose is to receive and transmit information wirelessly, and
that it accommodates a variety of wireless communication standards
(WiMAX, HSPA, 802.16m, etc). In this context, much of the terminology of performance and low cost is familiar. The chip combines computing performance a
idualising change, the movement of images, messages and data, and the
movement of people, have become linked in very specific ways today.
The greater the degree of individualization, the more dense becomes
the mobility of people and the signals they transmit and receive. And
as people mobilise, they drag personalised flows of communication on
165
165
165
166
166
the move with them. Hence flows of information multiply massively,
and networks must proliferate around those flows. The networks need
for digital signal processing,
the problems of interference, of unrelated communications mixing together, would be potentially insoluble. The very possibility of mobile
devices and mobility depends on ways of increasing the sheer density
of wireless transmissions. Radio spectrum becomes an increasingly
valuable, tightly controlled resource. For any one individual communication, not much space or time can be available. And even when
there is space, it may be noisy and packed with other people and
thing
and people, which
obstruct waves and bounce signals around. The same signal may
be received many times through different echoes (‘multipath echo'
). Because of the presence of crowds of other signals, and the limited spectrum available for any one transmission, wirelessness needs
to be very careful in its selection of paths if experience is to stream
rather than just buzz. The problem for wireless communication is to
micro-differentiate many paths and to allow them to interweave and
entwine with eac
w can many signals pass by each other without needing
more space? These problems induce the compression and folding of
spaces inside wireless processing, the folding that we might understand as a ‘centre of envelopment' in action.
The Fast Fourier Transform: transformations between time
and space
I have been arguing that the complications of the mathematics
and the convoluted nature of the code or hardware used in DSP,
stems from an intensive movement or constitutive difference that is
interiorised. We can tra
illustrate how this happens
in practice.
167
167
167
168
168
Late in the encoding process, and much earlier in the decoding
process in contemporary wireless networks, a fairly generic computational algorithm comes into action: the Fast Fourier Transform
(ffT). In some ways, it is not surprising to find the ffT in wireless networks or in digital video. Dating from the mid-1960s, ffTs
have long been used to analyse electrical signals in many scientific
and engineering settings. It provides the component frequencies of
a time-varying signal or waveform. Hence, in ‘spectral analysis', the
ffT can show the spectrum of frequencies present in a signal.
The notion of the Fourier transform is mathematical and has been
known since the early 19th century: it is an operation that takes
an arbitrary waveform and turns it into a set of periodic waves (sinusoids) of different frequencies and amplitudes. Some of these sinusoids
make more important contributions to overall shape of the waveform
than others. Added together again, these sine or cosine waves should
exactly re-constitute the original signal. Crucially, a Fourier transform can turn something that varies over time (a signal) into a set of
simple components (sine or cosine waves) that do not vary over time.
Put more technically, it switches between ‘time' and ‘frequency' domains. Something that changes in time, a
als means that DSP does use the set-based approaches I
described earlier. Once a complex signal, such as an image, has been
analysed into a set of static components, we can imagine code that
4
Humanities and social science work on the Fast Fourier Transform is hard to find, even
though the ffT is the common mathematical basis of contemporary digital image,
video and sound compression, and hence of many digital multimedia (in JPEG, MPEG
files, in DVDs). In the early 1990s, Friedrich Kittler wrote an
3}. His key point was largely to show that there is no realtime
in digital signal processing. The ffT works by defining a sliding window of time for
a signal. It treats a complicated signal as a set of blocks that it lifts out of the time
domain and transforms into the frequency domain. The ffT effectively plots an event
in time as a graph in space. The experience of realtime is epiphenomenal. In terms of
the ffT, a signal is always partly in the future or the past. Although Kittler was not
referring
s the ffT is
used to slow everything down rather than speed it up. Rather than
simply spatialising a duration, the ffT as used in wireless networks
defines a different way of inhabiting the crowded, noise space of electromagnetic radiation. Wireless transmitters are better at inhabiting
crowded signal spectrum when they don't try to separate themselves
off from each other, but actually take the presence of other transmitters into account. How does the ffT allow many transmitters to
inhabit the same spectrum, and even use the same frequencies?
The name of this technique is OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing). OFDM spreads a single data stream coming
from a single device across a large number of sub-carriers signals (52
in IEEE 802.11a/g). It splits the data stream into dozens of separate signals of slightly different frequency that together evenly use
the whole available radio spectrum. This is done in such a way that
many different transmitters can be transmitting at the same time,
on the same frequency, without interfering with each other. The advantage of spreading a single high speed data stream across many
signals (wideband) is that each individual signal can carry data at a
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169
169
170
170
ch bit of data
can be spaced apart more in time. This has great advances in urban
environments where there are many obstacles to signals, and signals
can reflect and echo often. In this context, the slower the data is
transmitted, the better.
At the transmitter, a reverse ffT (IffT) is used to re-combine
the 50 signals onto 1 signal. That is, it takes the 50 or so different
sub-carriers produced by OFDM, each of which has a single slightly
different, but carefully chosen frequency, and combines them i
components. The waveform that results from the IffT looks like
'white noise': it has no remarkable or outstanding tendency whatsoever, except to a receiver synchronised to exactly the right carrier
frequency. At the receiver, this complex signal is transformed, using ffT, back into a set of 50 separate data streams, that are then
reconstituted into a single high speed stream.
Even if we cannot come to grips with the techniques of transformation using in DSP in any great detail, I hope that one point stands
out. The transformation involves ‘c'hanges in kind. Data does not
simply move through space. It changes in kind in order to move
through space, a space whose geography is understood as too full of
potential relations.
Conclusion
A couple of points in conclusion:
ven productive in other areas into
the domain of DSP. What would that look like? How would it be
sensed? What could it do to our sensations of video or wireless
media?
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173
173
References
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul
Patton, Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers. (London; New
York: Continuum, 2001).
Panesar, Gajinder, Daniel Towner, Andrew Duller, Alan Gray, and
Will Robbins. ‘D'eterministic Parallel Processing, International Journal of Parallel P
will become
reverend TIMOTHY ARCHER and
read about TIME (something that
has mainly been forgotten is
Palestine).
figure P el curanto is
to be made together with
PEOPLE and for EVERYONE.
WOOD found in a dismantled
house. It helps to find a ride
to transport it.
SPICES,
leaf.
rosemary and bay
MICHAEL or some DEDICATED
friend that will assist with the
execution of the performance
and keep the pictures of it afterwards for months.
figure Q You can eat from
the shell by using your hands
or a little
s a collaborative research project between several artists
(currently: Alice Chauchat, Frédéric de Carlo, Frédéric Gies, Isabelle
Schad and Odile Seitz).
Praticable proposes itself as a horizontal work structure, which
brings research, creation, transmission and production structure into
relation with each other. This structure is the basis for the creation
of a variety of performances by either one or several of the project's
participants. In one way or another, these performances start from
the
0 sec.
32. VENOUS BLOOD
Initiate movement in your venous
blood, rising and falling and following its waves.
20 sec.
33. VENOUS BLOOD
Initiate movement in your venous blood, slowing down progressively.
184
184
184
185
185
Less than 5 sec.
34. TRANSITION
Make visible in your movement a
transition from venous blood to
cerebrospinal fluid. finish in the
same posture you chose to start
PART 3.
1 min.
35. EACH flUID
Go through each fluid quality you
have moved with since the beginning of PART 3. Th
s a scattered
form of being, where the relationship
with the controlled human world literally explodes. Abolition of oneself,
explosion of oneself.
“I was concerned with something like
the notion of ‘language speaking the
subject', and with the transformation
of the woman herself into a sign in
a system of signs that represent a
system of food production, a system
of harnessed subjectivity.” (Martha
Rosler)
Semiotics of the Kitchen
Choreography
Video by Martha Rosler, U.S.A., 1975,
05:30 min
fore her are a variety of
utensils, each of which she picks up,
names and proceeds to demonstrate,
but with gestures that depart from the
normal uses of the tool. In an ironic
grammatology of sound and gesture,
the woman and her implements enter
and transgress the familiar system of
everyday kitchen meanings – the securely understood signs of domestic
industry and food production erupt
into anger and violence. In this alphabet of kitchen implements, Rosler
Video installation preview by Anke
Schäfe
y on
the new dream screen of the Internet, and its impact on the global circulation of women's bodies from the
‘Third World' to the ‘first World'
. Although underage Philippine ‘pen
pals' and post-Soviet mail-order brides
have been part of the transnational
exchange of sex in the post-colonial
and post-Cold War marketplace of desire before the digital age, the Internet has accelerated these transactions.
The video provides the viewers with
a thoughtful meditation on the obvious political, economic and gender inequalities of these exchanges by simulating the gaze of the Internet shopper
looking for the imagined docile, traditional, pre-feminis
, what do the log files look like?
MT: So the log files are all in XML, and generally we compress
them, because they can get rather large. And the reason that they
are rather large is that we are very verbose in our logging. We want
to be completely transparent with respect to everything, so that if
you have some doubts or if you have some questions about what kind
of data has been collected, you should be able to look at the log file,
and figure out a lot about what that data is. That's how we designed
the XML log files, and it was really driven by privacy concerns and
by the desire to be transparent and open. On the server side we take
that log file and we parse it out, and then we throw it into a database,
so that we can query the data set.
FS: Now we are talking about privacy. . . I was impressed by the
work you have done on this; the pr
, they will keep the data internally, so you don't have this risk of someone outside figuring something out about a user that wasn't intended to be discovered. We
have to deal with that risk, because we are trying to go about this
in a very open and transparent way, which means that people may
be able to subject our data to analysis or data mining techniques
that we haven't thought of, and extract information that we didn't
intent to be recording in our file, but which is still there. So there are
fai
n't this body of
experience of what kind of data should we collect, and what shouldn't
we collect.
FS: As we are talking about this, I am already more aware of what
data I would allow being collected. Do you think by opening up this
data set and the transparent process of collecting and not collecting,
this will help educate users about these kinds of risks?
MT: It might, but honestly I think probably the thing that will
educate people the most is if there was a really large privacy error
and that it
re many models, many activities,
many things that we do in our everyday lives, which might inform
and expand our ideas about technology and how we work with them.
So, I too will begin with this idea of cooking, which is as Femke
said a very magical, transformative experience. Femke's clip from
the Cathérine Deneuve film was a really lovely instance of the kind
of deep elemental, magical chemistry which goes on in cooking. It is
this that makes it such an instructive and interesting candidate, for a
m
fect women and all the other bodies that
haven't quite fitted the philosophical ideal. Both the Platonic and
Christian traditions have tended to dismissing or repress the body,
and with it all the kind of messy, gritty, tangible stuff of culture,
as transient, difficult, and flawed. And what has been elevated is of
course the much more formal, idealist, disembodied kind of activities
and processes. This is a site of continual struggle, and I guess part of
the purpose of a weekend like this is to keep
that reason it has been fantastic that we have had such strong
input from people involved in dance and physical movement, people
working with bodies and the real sense of space. Sabine Prokhoris
and Simon Hecquet made us think about what it means to transcribe
the movements of the body; Séverine Dusollier and Valérie Laure
Benabou got us to question the legal status of such movements too.
And what we have gained from all of this is this sense that we are all
always working with our bodies, we are al
anger of becoming a very
kind of abstract and formal kind of cyberspace. It brings us back into
touch with ourselves and our geographies.
The interaction between actual space and virtual space, has been
another theme of this weekend; this ability to translate, to move between different kinds of spaces, to move from the analogue to the
digital, to negotiate the interface between bodies and machines. Yesterday we heard from Adrian Mackenzie about digital signal processing, the possibility of moving between that real sort of analogue world
of human experience and the coding necessary to computing. Sabine
and Simon talked about the possibilities of translating movement into
dance, and this also has come up several times today, and also with
Simon's work in relation to music and notation. Simon and Sabine
made the point that with the transcription and reading of a dance,
one is offered – rather as with a recipe – the same ingredients, the
same list of instructions, but once again as with cooking, you will
never get the same dance, or you will never get the same food as a
consequenc
thought about
cooking, but cooking has happened, not only with the mussels, but
also with the fantastic food that has been provided all weekend. We
haven't just thought about dancing, but dancing has actually been
done. We haven't just thought about translating, but with great
thanks to the translators – who I think have often had a very difficult job – translating has also happened as well. And in all of these
cases we have seen what might so easily have been a simply theoretical discussion, has itself been translated into real bodily activity:
they have all been, literally, brought into play. And this term ‘play'
, which spans a kind of mathematical play of numbers, in relation to
software and programming, and also the world of music and dance,
has enormou
Bettina Knaup
EN
Cultural producer and curator with a
background in theatre and film studies, political science and gender studies. She is interested in the interface
of live arts, politics and knowledge
production, and has curated and/or
produced transnational projects such
as the public arts and science program ‘open space' of the International Women's University (Hannover,
1998-2000), and the transdisciplinary
performing arts laboratory, IN TRANSIT (Berlin, House of World Cultures
2002-2003). Between 2001 and 2004,
she has co-curated and co-directed
the international festival of contemporary arts, CITY OF WOMEN (Ljubljana). After directing the new European platform for cultural exchange
Labfo
earcher at the
Research Centre for Computer and
Law. His interest in legal matters is
complemented by socio-anthropological research on virtual communities
(free software community), the human/artefact relationship (prothesis,
implants, RfiD chips), transhumanism and posthumanism.
Manu Luksch, founder of ambientTV.NET,
is a filmmaker who works outside the
frame. The ‘moving image', and in
particular the evolution of film in the
digital or networked age, has been
a core theme of her works. Character
as ‘Copy.cult
Michael Murtaugh
http://automatist.org/
EN
Born in September 2001, represented
here by Valérie Cordy and Natalia
De Mello, the MéTAmorphoZ collective is a multidisciplinary association that create installations, spectacles and transdisciplinary performances that mix artistic experiments
and digital practices.
EN
Freelance developer of (tools for) online documentaries and other forms of
digital archives. He works and lives in
the Netherlands and online at automatist.org. He tea
n Birmingham,
where she is involved with the Ikon
Gallery, Stan's Cafe Theatre Company, and the Birmingham Institute
of Art and Design.
EN
Praticable proposes itself as a horizontal work structure, which brings into
relation research, creation, transmission and production structure. This
structure is the basis for the creation
of many performances that will be
signed by one or more participants in
the project. These performances are
grounded, in one way or another, in
the exploration of body prac
ll participants in the
practice, the research and the elaboration of the practice from which the
piece will ensue.
304
304
304
305
305
Sabine Prokhoris
EN
EN
Psychoanalyst and author of, among
others, Witch's Kitchen:
Freud,
Faust, and the Transference (Cornell
University Press, 1995), and co-author
with Simon Hecquet of Fabriques de la
Danse (PUF, 2007). She is also active
in contemporary dance, as a critic and
a choreographer. In 2004 she made the
film Ceci n'est pas une danse chorale
toge
widespread.
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312
312
312
313
313
This publication was produced with a set of digital tools that are
rarely used outside the world of scientific publishing: TEX, LATEX and
ConTEXt. As early as the summer of 2008, when most contributions
and translations to Tracks in electronic fields were reaching their final
stage, we started discussing at OSP 1 how we could design and produce
a book in a way that responded to the theme of the festival itself. OSP
is a design collective working with Free Sof
oftware. In previous projects, Scribus' rigid workflow challenged us to relocate our creative energy to another territory: that
of computation. We experimented with its powerful Python scripting
API to create 500 unique books. In another project, we transformed
a text block over a sequence of pages with the help of a fairy-tale
script. But for Tracks in electronic fields we dreamed of something
else.
Pierre Huyghebaert takes on the responsibility for the design of
the book. He had been using various g
in electr(on)ic fields is a publication of Constant, Association for Art
and Media, Brussels.
Translations: Steven Tallon, Anne Smolar, Yves Poliart, Emma Sidgwick
Copy editing: Emma Sidgwick, Femke Snelting, Wendy Van Wynsberghe
English editing and translations: Sophie Burm
Design: Pierre Huyghebaert, Femke Snelting (OSP)
Photos, unless otherwise noted: Constant (Peter Westenberg). figure 5-9: Marc
Wathieu, figure 31-96: Constant (Christina Clar, video stills), figure 102-104:
Leiff Elgren, CM von Ha
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