Wired Magazine just published an article on social media, assembly, and dissidence. Way late to the game but a nice read none the less. We should be thinking about what comes next.
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In the first 18-month phase of the program, the Pentagon wants researchers to study how stories infiltrate social networks and alter our brain circuits. One of the stipulated research goals: to “explore the function narratives serve in the process of political radicalization and how they can influence a person or group’s choice of means (such as indiscriminate violence) to achieve political ends.”
H+ article Propaganda 2.0 and the rise of ‘narrative networks’ highlights new DARPA concept of narrative network control. By manipulating flows and feeds of information, DARPA is attempting to influence the force of news narratives in ways which designate thematic and semantic influence to precisely control reader responses–to achieve political ends.
Narratives and meanings which constitute our quotidian world view (reality) are now under threat of neurological stimuli/response management. In this scenario, information narratives (of the world around us) become paired with neurological and technological reorientations of meaning as seen fit by control society, thus opening up new ways of managing behavioral outcomes and perceptions of (information) society. Our narrative reflexivity with the world around us is sectioned off and stretched into spaces of predetermined outcome. Baudrillard talks about this already occurring, but now neurology of perception is employed as a new legitimizing force of narrative/info feed control.
When poetry averts conformity it enters into the contemporary: speaking to the pressures and conflicts of the moment with the means just then at hand.
“The greater part of the world’s troubles are due to questions of grammar.” (Montaigne)
Protocol. Perhaps one dimension of the aesthetic appeal of the mechanical is in the ‘purity’ of the interleaving of dynamisms — the quality of being a kind of ‘moving’ and even ‘living’ diagram that excites certain sensitivities. Each machine is already a manifold network of various configuration-spaces (involving significant mechanical, environmental, logical factors, etc.) — its singular and intricate behavior produced ‘simply’ by becoming activated and operated. I ask: how was it possible to lay out a common plane where signs and objects, code and data and things and people could all participate ‘democratically”?
Everything unfolds as though some master plan were pre-existent, as though the very organization of society, language and thought itself implicitly support a certain orientation, a certain set of virtual borderlines and existential territories establishing a kind of plane of consistency. The capitalist mode of production engenders the conditions for a radical destruction of the consistency of classical plans in place of a generalized decoding of flows; that is to say, flows of words, devices, actions, passions, people, all swept up into a decoded ‘polyvocity’, a collective elocution of a machinic assemblage complete with black holes and lines of flight, bursting with fractal islands of knowledge and complexity. The network illuminates.
The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace
. . .
The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the “sculpture” of rhyme.
video still performing visual poetry of new media
architectural error; acceptance; passive user; disregard;
A dog-eared page — a folded corner — is the simplest memory system: it marks a stopping point, a favorite passage, a place to remember. Along with marginalia, underlining, and other notational strategies, dog ears map a history of reading and remind us that reading is a physical act: an encounter with words, to be sure, but also a tactile experience with paper and individual pages of a book. A dog ear is legible as a readerly engagement with the material text. Someone read this; someone stopped here.
Erica Baum’s book Dog Ear (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011) makes this point and takes it further. In Baum’s rendering, the dog ear presents an activist readerly engagement: by folding a page, the reader creates a new site of meaning, a square of text to be encountered not as placeholder but as a rich cluster of words, selected (appropriated, deformed) by the reader’s hand.
Here, Jacket2 presents eighteen photographs from Dog Ear, whose publication coincides with a solo exhibition, Shuffled Glances, at the Bureau gallery in New York (April 3–May 18, 2011). Click on any image below to enlarge it. Go here to read an essay by Kaegan Sparks about Baum’s work.
things else with
known limits
fallout from
cooling
lovely
ruin
of
For all the diversity of the contemporary media ecology – network, broadcast, games, mobile – one technical form is entirely dominant. Screens are everywhere, at every scale, in every context. As well as the archetypal “big” and “small” screens of cinema and television we are now familiar with pocket- and book-sized screens, public screens as advertising or signage, urban screens at architectural scales. As satirical news site The Onion observes, we “spend the vast majority of each day staring at, interacting with, and deriving satisfaction from glowing rectangles.”
Evolution of Type
“When and to whom in the dim past the idea came that man’s speech could be better represented by fewer symbols [to denote certain unvarying sounds] selected fromthe confused mass of picture ideographs, phonograms, and their like, which constituted the first methods of representing human speech, we have no certain means of knowing. But whatever the source, the development did come; and we must deal with it. To present briefly the early history of the alphabet requires that much collateral matter must be disregarded and a great deal that is omitted here must necessarily be taken for granted; the writer desires, however, to present what seems to him to be a logical and probable story of the alphabet’s beginnings.”
Frederic W. Goudy, “The Alphabet and Elements of Lettering” (1918)A letter, a sign suggesting a sound and thus in combination suggesting a world, has to be of organic origin. In this belief I continued to dissect further letters. In some of them, to my utmost surprise, I discovered calcium carbonate skeletons, similar to sea corals. It is only the beginning of my journey into the evolution of letters but I dare to assume conform evolution to mammals at this stage.
This second Video Vortex Reader marks the transition of online video into the mainstream. Staggering statistics of hypergrowth no longer impress us. Discussing a possible online video project for the first time in late 2006 in Melbourne with Seth Keen, the topic was still a matter of ‘becoming’. One collaborative research project, six conferences and two anthologies later, the Video Vortex project seems at a crossroads. Massive usage is not an indication of relevance. Heavy use does not automatically translate into well-funded research or critical art practices. Is the study of online video, like most new media topics, doomed to remain a niche activity – or will we see a conceptual quantum leap, in line with the billions of clips watched daily? So far, there is no evidence of a dialectical turn from quantity into quality. It is remarkable how quickly both pundits and cultural elites became used to online video libraries containing millions of mini-films. In our ‘whatever’ culture nothing seems to surprise us. Who cares about the internet? Continuous technological revolution, from social networking to smartphones, seems to have numbed us down. B-S-B: Boredom-Surprise-Boredom. Instead of an explosion of the collective imaginary we witness digital disillusion – a possible reason why online theory has had a somewhat unspectacular start. The low quality of YouTube’s most popular videos certainly indicates that this platform is not a hotbed of innovative aesthetics.
“Distributed media can be defined as social information circulatingin theoretically unlimited quantities in the common market,stored or accessed via portable devices such as booksand magazines, records and compact discs, videotapes andDVDs, personal computers and data diskettes. Duchamp’squestion has new life in this space, which has greatlyexpanded during the last few decades of global corporatesprawl. It’s space into which the work of art must projectitself lest it be outdistanced entirely by these corporate interests.New strategies are needed to keep up with commercialdistribution, decentralization, and dispersion. You must fightsomething in order to understand it.”
sourced for the New Museum’s exhibit Free
Via Mille Plateaux‘s YouTube video collection.
The Network Architecture Lab is an experimental unit at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation that embraces the studio and the seminar as venues for architectural analysis and speculation, exploring new forms of research through architecture, text, new media design, film production and environment design. Specifically, the Network Architecture Lab investigates the impact of telecommunications, digital technology, and changing social demographics on architecture and urbanism.
Netlab’s Network Culture project explores networks not merely as a technology with social ramifications, but as a cultural dominant that unites change in society, economy, aesthetics, and ideology. Just as the machine made modern industrialization possible and also acted as a model for a rationalized, compartmentalized modern society while the programmable computer served the same role for the flexible socioeconomic milieu of postmodernism, today the network not only connects the world, it reconfigures our relationship to it. We argue that many of the key tenets of culture since the Enlightenment: the subject, the novel, the public sphere, are being radically reshaped.
An important dynamic of a Network Culture within a metropolitan space is the transportation of bodies–particularly the commute. In dense urban life involves with (mobile) technology in efficient and smooth integrations. As Alexis Madrigal points out, “car time is wasted time, but commuting time doesn’t have to be. Look at well-heeled Silicon Valley companies. They offer their employees cushy, WiFi-enabled buses for commuting. That first hour of the day, Apple and Google employees are banging out emails and getting ready for the day, not sitting in traffic carrying out a set of repetitive, low-level, and occasionally dangerous tasks to maneuver their exoskeletons southward.” This implies a new sort of movement that will simultaneously nurture and create the new type of human possible in a network culture. I am not speaking on the use or dangers of this quite yet. The latest network to overspread our country — the wireless electromagnetic one — is just not fully compatible with driving, at least for human brains. We cannot pilot a vehicle and text with our fingers–the brain becomes unfocused. “You can listen to Howard Stern in a car [on your commute]; you can run your business from a train or bus’s wi-fi network. What new sort of human is possible?
The physical displacement performed by an individual on a reoccurring basis; commute, occupies the blurred territories of home and transportation. A transition of not only body but mind. Each mode of transportation in the urban environment is connected to a specific set of displacement criteria, offering its own unique environment through which one moves. Variability of speed, flexibility, and exposure generate different scales of connectivity to these environments and the occupants within. Experiential connectivity calibrates the different moments of motion, pause, and stop in order to expand connection to one another at a multiplicity of scales from the intimate routine to the urban commute.
Netlab seems to investigate how space is reconfigured by/reconfiguring our relationship between technology and bodies. As the contemporary city evolves, the ways in which it stimulates the human pysche and body transforms as well.
The program Simultaneous Environments experiments with representation and the real. Our public presence becomes increasing augmented as we assimilate into technology–reshaping and reveling new relationships with material objects, places, and people we encounter while “jacked in” to a screen amidst a wireless landscape. The real and th virtual begin to merge and transform into a new concept of space. Simultaneous Environments “documents the invisible structures produced by data exposes moments of individual absurdity, public anonymity, false security, and collective behaviors of isolation while also underscoring the ethereal environments that increasingly surround us.”
Netlab’s program Core iii situates information (network) society into practacle navigations of space and living.
Video Lectures:
Tan Lin’s Introduction for Peripheral Writing in EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts
“This issue looks at how and in what spaces writing takes place, i.e. the ambient environment of reading as well as the ecology of writing practices. If the amount of text being generated today is voluminous and threatens to transform a once-visual era into one structured by data and various communications protocols, the site specificity of the EOAGH cluster is distributive and ethnographic, like a reblog. What would an ethnography of writing look like? In an environment of re-circulated PDFs, scripting languages, the built environment, e-commerce, photo sharing as a discursive practice, network architectures, and the social more generally conceived, forms of non-writing comprise a re-distribution within the sphere formerly known as poetry. From this generic standpoint, the spaces poetry is said to occupy, or drift in create shared or communal references and appropriations. A few authors are a few allusions. Although individual authors are listed, a page functions best without them.
Tim had initially inquired about an issue of ambience, as a literary idea, and this section of EOAGH tries to site ambience, where ambience is understood as a medium rather than a genre. Non-writing is one of the forms such a medium might take.
For this particular issue I asked individuals to: send anything that is PERIPHERAL to their current writing (these could be actual words) or current writing practice (more generally), i.e. not immediately sensitive to a desire to do writing or intended to “be” writing. It can be an image, a text you’ve read and not really thought about, a thought about something that you didn’t write about etc etc etc. It can be a series of linked items or it can be a single item, anything really but unconstrained by a desire to make it into something that it is not. It should not have much to do with you, at least textually speaking.
I’m hoping this project might continue beyond the strict bounds of the invitation, with further entries submitted post February 1.”
Top 50 Internet Acronyms Parents Need to Know as decided by NetLingo, the internet dictionary.
Darren Wreshler (Henry) is the author or co-author of 12 books, most recently, Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, and Update, with Bill Kennedy. Darren is an Assistant Professor of English at Concordia University, where he works with the Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) group, and is also part of the faculty at the CFC Media Lab TELUS Interactive Art & Entertainment Program.
His Blog alienated.net–the most visible part of Darren’s brain.
PDF’s of The Tapeworm Foundry, a single unpunctuated sentence of pro-Situ proposals that resembles a social virus more than a functioning data-organism, its litany of avant-garde projects linked only by the seemingly innocuous, but progressively more imperative-sounding, “andor.”
http://www.ubu.com/ubu/wershler_tapeworm.html
Internet poem Nicholodeon, a seemingly exhaustive survey of the possibilities of concrete and process-based poetry in the Nineties, organized like a paper database with icons to guide the wary reader toward conceptual handles.
http://archives.chbooks.com/online_books/nicholodeon/
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Hyper-poetics 