Fired but Unexploded – Zsolt Asztalos 55th Venice Biennale

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Zsolt Asztalos’ piece, Fired but Unexploded, at the 55th Venice Biannual is a most thought provoking expression of war and precarious life.  Asztsalos’ work is a video installation of unexploded bombs.  The exhibit features multiple videos of unexploded bombs playing on television screens.  The image of the unexploded device alongside the stark minimalism of the overall exhibit invites a thoughtful observance and anxious reverence of the subject.  There is a two-fold precarity to consider in this exhibit, that of the explosive devices themselves and of the people and structures targeted.

Asztalos’ piece gives the subject the opportunity to take an anxious look at the différend and of war and the precariousness of daily life.  The artist invites the notion of precariousness over the entire exhibit with the various television screens composing the piece.  Why are the bombs not present in the room?  The bombs themselves are precarious devices.  Any wrong move might set off an explosion.  Perhaps, the image of potential destruction creates the air of anxiety in the exhibit.  The image of the bomb creates a certain affect that beckons one to consider the possibility of destruction.

Tracing along this same line of precariousness, the image of the unexploded bomb might lead one to think of the symptom of the dormant device: the lives and structures not effected by war, death or destruction.  There is a certain notion of anxious grace that accompanies the malfunctioning bomb.  On the one hand, those who were to be bombed are grateful that the bomb malfunctioned.  Yet, those same individuals and communities continue to expect explosion.  The unexploded bomb is not simply precarious, but also warrants a subjectivity of anxiety.  The presence of the unexploded bomb creates the affect of fear, terror or anxiety among individuals and communities.  Among buildings, apartments, trees and flowers one may stumble upon the unexploded bomb: an anxious reminder of war.

The exhibit mainly shows video of older bombs found in Hungary dating back as far as WWII, however the event of the explosion has only become more prevalent.  The idea of the bomb as a launched device has largely been coopted by the state as a legitimate means of warfare.  However, a more insidious and ad hoc explosive device inhibits the psychic space of explosion contemporaneously: the IED.  The IED, or improvised explosive device, a crudely fashioned weapons used in guerrilla tactics.  Like the explosive devices in Fired But Unexploded, The IED shares a similar pattern of precarious life and use.  Where they are different lies in the legitimation of technique and violence.  Militias, terrorists and guerilla forces assemble the IED.  The IED is not fired-but-unexploded; rather it is buried and always has the possibility of explosion.

            These two symbols of warfare and domination offer up an interesting interpretation when juxtaposed.  The unexploded mortar shell or the bomb dropped from aircraft is representational of the legitimized violence of the state: the fired-but-unexploded.  The more precarious IED of the desperate military assemblage: the always-awaiting-explosion. 

Specialists with the right tools and training produce the fired-but-unexploded.  The state sanctioned forces drops the bomb on the intended target and most often destruction and death ensues.  The state has the luxury of time and resources to make these devices.  If several bombs are defected and do not explode, the state is not concerned.  Only a few among many may fail. 

The desperateness of the IED, the always-awaiting-explosion, does not have the luxury of malfunction or misfire.  The production of the IED is a desperate and clandestine act.  The device itself exudes the same precarity as the one who constructed it.  The life and mission of the militia or other assemblage is anxious and desperate: always-awaiting-explosion.  Like the IED, the militia never knows or has the luxuries provided by the funding and resources of the legitimate state entity: always-awaiting-explosion lives in a desperate anxiety of possible explosion.

Although, fired-but-unexploded is a fluke, a misfire or malfunction it still serves a hegemonic purpose.  The entity that drops the bomb that malfunctions can stand the cost of a few bombs.  Fired-but-unexploded, casts a hegemonic shadow over the enemy and over a people.  “We can do without this one.  You’re safe, for now.”  Asztalos’ piece continues to demonstrate the shadow of state legitimized violence.  In representing fired-but-unexploded, one can see that even now in the bourgeoisie place of art critique, we too are only safe for now.

 

Glitch-Christ

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Reblogged from fluxofthought:

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“To invent the sailing ship or steamer is to invent the shipwreck.  To invent the train is to invent the rail accident of derailment.  To invent the family automobile is to produce the pile-up on the highway.  To get what is heavier than air to take off in the form of an aeroplane or dirigible is to incent the crash, the air disaster.” -Paul Virilio, The Original Accident.

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A short reflection on the Glitch and the Christ event

Haunted Media – Jeffrey Sconce: A Summary and Analysis

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Philosophy of the mind has given a lot of time and energy hashing out the problematic relationships between mind and body: this is a philosophical problem since the very beginning.  Despite these philosophical insights, there is a sort of artificial mind-body split that accompanies electronic media that is largely ignored.  Jeffrey Sconce outlines the history of electronic media through telegraphy, wireless radio and television.  Sconce’s historical survey demonstrates the incorporeal interest and utopian predictions for electronic media.

Sconce’s analysis begins with an intersecting history of 1800’s era spiritualism with telegraphy.  The creation and adoption of the telegraph as an important medium and communication technology lead to the idea of tele-presence.  Sconce, quoting a commentator on the new technology says,

We publish the following novel and interesting account of a meeting of the employees of the American Telegraph Company on the 3d instand, at – what place? That is the question – at no place, or at all places where there were Telegraphy offices…The members together in spirit – in communication, and yet in body seven hundred miles apart! (21)

Tele-presence is the disembodied voice in communion with others.  However, accompanying this new technological feat, there is another more unusual tele-presence that Sconce brings attention to.  Four years after the invention of the telegraph a different disembodiment was communicated through a type of telegraphy.  Kate Fox and her sisters, the well known proto-spiritualists from New York, opened a “tele-graph line to another world.”  The Fox sisters were known amongst spiritualist circles for communicating with spirits through clapping and knocking, much like one would through the telegraph.  This connection between spiritualism and telegraphy started with the Fox sisters and extended to all kinds of spiritual machines and practices.  Perhaps, the telegraphic notion of tele-presence has created a cultural artifact of the electronic transportation of the consciousness.

Sconce’s second historical analysis is with the wireless radio.  Sconce says,

As wireless put more people into contact around the world, then, it did so with a sense of melancholy.  Boundaries of time, space, nation and body no longer seemed to apply, and although this provided a giddy sense of liberation for some, it also threatened the security and stability of an older social order in which the body and mind had been for the most part coterminous. (63)

What is of note in wireless radio is the passive mode it puts the listener.  One is active in mind, but not body.  Sconce uses the language of the etheric ocean in order to talk about the “…seeming omnipresence, unfathomable depth, and invisible mystery” of wireless radio.  The increased connectedness of the wireless brings a sort of personal alienation and individual isolation.  The metaphor of the ocean implies that one can become lost in the etheric sea of radio.  Even more, one knows not what mystery lurks in the depth of this radio ocean.

Sconce explains wireless radio as an entry into an “electronic elsewhere.”  That is, an unknown space of transmission through wireless radio.  As wireless radio became less communication based and used more for the broadcast of information and entertainment it created an experiential change for the listener.

Sconce’s final sections rest on the analysis of television.  Television is certainly significant, because it relies on previous technologies, but goes beyond voices and brings images.  Television subverted the notion of “electronic elsewhere” with what Sconce calls an “electronic nowhere.”  The television does not transport the consciousness, but it puts the body into stasis.  Sconce says,

In these new discussions of television’s uncanny ‘powers,’ the medium’s distinctive ‘electronic elsewhere’ became instead an ‘electronic nowhere.’  Rather than portray television as a magic means of teleportation, these more ominous portraits of the medium saw television as a zone of suspended animation, a form of oblivion that viewers might not escape.

Once again, this emphasizes the passivity of the viewer.  One’s body is put to complete and utter rest as one’s mind is engaged or at least entertained.  Sconce does a great deal of cultural analysis and summary of movements in the cultural imagination through science fiction and horror, but there is a certain critical element missing in the analysis.  Sconce does so much work, but does nothing critical with it.

It is also a bit disconcerting that Scone leaves off at the television. One can make a further haunted analysis of wireless networks and the Internet.  Computer software, including internet platforms facilitating social media follow a similar trajectory as telegraphy, wireless, and television.  There is a similar logic at play with the computer.  In the into to Heidegger’s Parmenides lecture, he notes that the introduction of the typewriter makes us all look the same.  The computer and its software do something similar.  All computer users share a similar ergonomic position.

Even more, software makes similar use of one’s intellectual and creative energies while it leaves the body mostly in stasis.  The difference with computer software is that it facilitates more interaction.  One’s body is in stasis, but computer networks and software take up more intellectual feedback and energy.  The computer software puts a little more of the techno-utopianism back into communication technology with increasing the amount one can interact with others through the medium.  Though, as Sconce notes throughout, this utopianism is problematic and never realized.

Media has a haunted history. Ghosts and aliens run rampant through the historical record of telegraph, wireless, and television and they continue to run through contemporary media.  Our bodies and mind are split in technology as we become tele-present.   One might wonder what would it look like to bring these things together in communication technology.  Would we still be haunted?

A Punk Rock Eschatology

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Reblogged from fluxofthought:

Growing up in the 90’s means participating in any variety of teenage subcultures.  Certainly, the most contentious is punk.  Anyone who has ever listened to The Sex Pistols, The Ramones or The Clash has participated in the endless dialectic of authentic punk and poser.  What is authentically punk: TRUE PUNK™?  Fundamentally, these discussions are absurd.  Cultural movements among all people, though especially teenagers are dynamic and ever-changing styles. 

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The Digital Accident

Posted on by under Baudrillard, postmodernism, Simulacrum, Uncategorized

To invent the sailing ship or steamer is to invent the shipwreck.  To invent the train is to invent the rail accident of derailment.  To invent the family automobile is to produce the pile-up on the highway.  To get what is heavier than air to take off in the form of an aeroplane or dirigible is to incent the crash, the air disaster.  As for the space shuttle, Challenger, its blowing up in flight in the same year that the tragedy of Chernobyl occurred is the original accident of a new motor, the equivalent of the first ship-wreck of the very first ship. – Paul Virilio, The Original Accident.

Could one also add, “To invent the computer is to invent the glitch.”  Is the digital a “new motor?”  Accidents are often catastrophic and violent, but in the case of art, something interesting can emerge from the accident.  In digital media, the accident is the source of the glitch.  The creation of feedback or simply the purposeful destruction of data disfigures the normative representation of the data.

The creation of glitch art is an act of violence and the practice of destruction.  Glitch art is violent, because one purposefully distorts and disfigures data in a variety of ways to produce the glitch.  Certainly, glitch art is an intentional act, but when doing glitch art, one is never sure what one will end up: this is the accident of the glitch.  The catastrophe of data could result in a number of ways.  In fact, the glitch is incredibly precarious: one may end up with something broken and beautiful or something horrendous.  One may manipulate data in a multiplicity of “wrong” ways, this manipulation exposes two things: 1.) The digital image, video and audio are all exposed as simulacra.  The computer is a machine that, through software, simulates media. 2.) the increasingly “digitized” world may be manipulated in like manner.

First, the computer is, as Lev Manovich says, a metamedium machine.  This is to say that the computer is a platform that has the ability to simulate any medium.  However, it may be prudent to push here: it is not that the computer simply simulates media, but it is a platform for the simulacra of media.  The digital image does not refer to the analog image taken by a film camera, it is something without referent.  There is some genealogical resemblance, however it seems to be mostly a novelty.  There is no functional reason the digital image bears any semblance to that of the analog.

The glitch is a means of violence against the totality of the simulacra machine.  Jean-Francois Lyotard calls for a, “war on totality.”  However, the glitch is not war, but it’s an initiating of catastrophe.  The violence of the glitch is a means of dissolution and unconvering.  When one uses software “wrongly”, one exposes the truth of digital media: it’s just hex and binary underneath.  Then, what is the point of this violence?  Certainly, digital violence for the sake of digital violence is (un)reasonable, but perhaps there is more as well.  Initiating this catastrophic event on digital media may initiate further experimentation and new modes of art and life.

Technology often is walled off as a discussion of means to certain ends, but here Heidegger may be helpful.  According to Heidegger technology is certainly a means, but it is also the product of human life.  The increasingly digital state of life makes the glitch, the digital catastrophe, that much more important.  Glitch art exposes what is true about the digital sphere, it is simply data interpreted in a variety of ways by software.  Certainly, the representation of this data is enforced through extra-digital violence (police, military, other biopolitical orders).  One’s debt and financial situation is simply data.  The struggle one goes through to pay debt and other bills is facilitated through software that is prone to glitch and virus.

The glitch as performed in glitch art gives one a small crack to see and understand the creation of other glitches.  Not just manipulating data in the image or video file, but manipulating data elsewhere.  Baudrillard, and in turn Franco Berardi, offer a (non)politics of collapse.  Baudrillard sees no real hope in the human agency of any individual or collectivity: one ought simply acquiesce until the current state of affairs comes to an end.  Baudrillard gives a possible scenario of collapse with the virus, on a similar note one should turn to the computer virus.  What is the computer virus but an automated application that creates a glitch?  The virus is a self-replicating malicious application that attempts to disfigure, gain information or destroy a system, server or database.  The virus is an intentional catastrophic event: the virus is the militant glitch.

Underneath the increasingly digital sphere of life is only data.  Strings of hex, represented by different file formats and software, lie beneath one’s debt, school, government, and so on.  The glitch is the digital accident waiting to happen everywhere.  Let this be an invitation to explore new avenues of media and life.  Manipulate, warp, twist and destroy data, after all, it is ours.

Understanding Media and Software

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“New media” is “new” because new properties (i.e., new software techniques) can always be easily added to it

In Lev Manovich’s new book Software Takes Command, he clearly demonstrates the multiplicity of problems with the term New Media and the possible existence of mediums.  What is new about new media?  Perhaps, what is new is the abolition of the differentiation in media.  Media production has been integrated into the social fabric of the western world.  The production of media takes place in software.  Media is generated endlessly in applications like Photoshop or illustrator, but also in social media platforms like Twitter.  Manovich invites us to consider the following,

What happens to the idea of a “medium” after previously media-specific tools have been simulated and extended in software? Is it still meaningful to talk about different mediums at all? Or do we now find ourselves in a new brave world of one single monomedium, or a metamedium.

Concretely, what is at stake with media software is the falling away of the differentiation of media.  Authoring media digitally means that one is simply simulating a medium.  For example, if one takes a picture and edits it in Photoshop, one is simply manipulating data.  The image one is editing is only an arrangement of hexidecimal code and to edit that code alters the image.  Thinking of the art of the analog camera or physical drawing one thinks of the countless techniques used in the production of these works.  Though, the creation of software digitizes and abolishes these techniques.  The question at hand, then, is what is to be made of media after the digitization of technique.

The metamedium found in software is the simulation of previous media as well as a space for new practices and becomings.  For example, it may be a mistake to equate the .pdf or other text file as a simply a simulation of paper or a book.  The .pdf is both a simulation of paper, but it strikes out in a new direction.  Can the book and .pdf be read in the same way or be considered similar media?  Certainly it is the case that they contain the same text, though reading the .pdf can be a substantially different experience than reading a book.  The .pdf allows one to search through the text instantly.  The software one uses to read the text auto-archives the text.  The .pdf may change the practice of reading, something that is thoughtful and rather slow, into a quick paced search and consumption of information.  The .pdf is one example, but one could certainly make a similar analysis of the .jpg image or any other media format.

What is media after software?  Media after software is the simulation or remediation of other media as well as something new.  The metamedium machine, the computer with software, creates a new topology on the landscape of media production.  The computer is a machine that simulates a number of other machines, though this simulation can be moved forward with the creation of new software.  Software has a certain malleability that allows it to always been redefined and reformed.

EGS Review and Notes

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Here are some notes and pictures from my trip to Saas-Fee and my residency at EGS.

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The European Graduate School is a bizarrely interesting place to be.  Day to day life at EGS is highly regimented and intense!

The Typical Day…

Wake up and eat breakfast.  I wasn’t aware, but the German/Swiss breakfast is most often cheese, bread, eggs, dried fruit, and slices of lunchmeat. After breakfast, there is a long walk up a hill to the EGS campus.

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The morning sessions begins at 10 AM and goes until 1PM, there is a break for lunch and then the afternoon session begins at 4 PM and goes until 7PM.  There is around an 1 1/2 hours to eat dinner and then there is an evening lecture or film screening that begins at 8:30 and can go as late as 11PM.  Overall, the schedule is intense, but definitely worth it.

Courses

During the summer residencies, the student population is split up into four groups.  Two of the groups are first year students and the other two are for second year students.  Third year students float around and can be in either group.  Each group works with a different set of faculty.  My faculty list was:

Thomas Zummer: Foucault - Thomas Zummer is an incredible independent intellectual.  He was one of the last people to work with Foucault directly and has an incredible grasp of his work and the trajectory it might set one.  In this three day session there was a strong focus on arche and apparatus.

Wolfgang Shirmacher – Hegel, Marx, Zizek – The second course was supposed to be with Slavoj Zizek on Hegel, but Zizek canceled last minute due to some health concerns…which wasn’t much of a surprise to anyone.  If you follow his work at all, you’ll know he’s been ill for awhile.  So, instead of Zizek, the School’s founder, Wolfgang Shirmacher stepped in and gave a course on Hegel, Marx and Zizek.  Here we did a lot with Hegel and the discussion of technology.  Shirmacher is mainly a philosopher of technology so we really got more of his Heideggerian technological insight than anything.

Geert Lovink – Politics and Aesthetics of Web 2.0 - Geert Lovink works independently from academia at the Institute of Network Cultures.  His course was largely on the specific problems one might find in social media, search engines and wikipedia.  This is course was a bit difficult for some because it was a clear departure from theory and a discussion of concrete technology and specific platforms.  Though, it was occasionally hard to see what was at stake with some of the critique that was established.

Francois Noudelmann – Affinities in Philosophy, Art and Science – This was by far one of the most interesting and rigorous courses.  The lectures and discussions sought to ask questions about what it means to live a philosophical life.  Is a philosophical life an academic life? Can one live philosophy without speaking philosophy?  To get at these questions concretely we compared the work and biography of philosophers side by side.  One specific example that stands out is reading Simon De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex alongside some of her love letters and talking about the inconsistency in her language.  This sounds a little harsh, but it was approached from a direction of non-judgement.  The goal was simply to discuss the inconsistencies between theory and practice and what that means for the philosopher.

Michael Hardt – The Commons – In this course Michael Hardt gave an overview of his analysis and critique of globalization and his answer to globalization in the Commons.  This was a fascinating course for me, because I’ve spent a lot of time working through Hardt and Negri’s text for my Master’s thesis.  However, there were a few shortcomings that we’re drawn out by our class.  For Hardt a lot of things come down to the management of the commons.  How do we collectively manage social production? it’s certainly possible, but no scheme of management were ever really discussed overtly.

Mitchell Joachim – Architecture, Urban and Ecological Design – This was a rough course. It was the last course, but also a topic many were unfamiliar.  The first few lectures were the most interesting.  Joachim took some time and explained a lot of the interesting technological advances in design, 3D printing, using mycelium to grow bricks, the possibility of organ printing.

Venice

In the midst of all these classes there was also a trip to the Bienniale in Venice.  It’s hard to say much briefly about the Biennialle, it was a 1 day trip with a lot happening!  So, here are a few pictures from Venice.

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Conclusion

EGS is a unique program that requires one to be intensely independent.  You are responsible for our own education and you really get out what you put in.  EGS has an incredibly small administration and most all of the tuition goes to the faculty directly.  This is great because faculty are well paid for their time and you can get around most of the annoying bureaucracies of universities.

The Cult of Speed

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The most interesting and exciting technological advancements of our time all have one thing in common, speed.  As the vector of speed increases, geographical space decreases.  Technologies like horses, trains, cars, propeller plains and jets can all be managed politically and economically, but the speed of networked communications cannot be so easily managed or controlled.  While the development of cars and jets leads to the disappearance of geography, the development of faster networks and communications accelerates reality.  The acceleration of reality through the domination of technologies of speed brings claustrophobia, exhaustion and depression.

Speed and claustrophobia share a specific relationship: speed reduces the field of vision.  Paul Virilio explains, “Screens are like windshields in a car: with increased speed, we lose the sense of lateralization, which is an infirmity in our being in the world, its richness, its relief, its depth of field.”  The speed we get with computer networks fixate our field of vision toward a vector of propagandized progress.  The fixation on this vector leads to claustrophobia in the way it narrows the scope of life and exhausts one’s experience of the world.  Things are simply too quick and too numerous.  There is too much content to be taken in.

Though, the affect of speed is not at all obvious to us.  In our highly technological capitalist economy, speed is associated with freedom.  The logic in the link is clear: speed allows one to perform tasks faster.  One can take a plane and cut down travel time.  Though, this logic becomes problematic with the speed (or maybe non-speed) of networked communications (the internet, telecommunications, etc.).  For example, in the advertisements for new gaming computer processors the language of freedom and speed are employed to demonstrate how fast the processor is.

The relationships between freedom and speed have a lot more to do with productivity than freedom.  Freedom is a practice in making the right choices; productivity (in the sense of computers) is simply about getting things done.  Though, what does the “freedom of speed” do to the human subject?  Perhaps it increases productivity, but it also produces exhaustion.

In daily life all must negotiate the flows of an economy of attention.  Unlike the instantaneity of computer networks there is a point when the human attention economy crashes.  Though, when freedom is paired with speed one simply keeps going.  The speed of technology, of instantaneous communication, is exhausting and perhaps depressing.  It is simply that we become used up.

It is not the case that freedom and speed can be paired so easily.  Freedom is not the ability to do more tasks quickly, or to do a series of tasks so one can get to leisure activities more quickly.  Freedom is a practice that one develops over time.  Freedom is slow: it’s a process of learning to not bend to the dominating flows of speed and productivity.  Freedom can be the ability (or maybe the right) to be lazy, but also the freedom to form different subjectivities.

Grey Ecology – Paul Virilio

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Paul Virilio’s Grey Ecology is the product of a 2007 dialogue between Paul Virilio, esteemed members of the European Graduate School Faculty and PhD Students. What is a grey ecology? Grey ecology is a dromological practice: the study of the “…pollution of the self created world” (p. 26). As green ecology is the study of material pollution and the impact of humanity on the environment, grey ecology is the study of pollution in time and space. Virilio is not a pessimist, nor does he take up the stance of the technophobe, but rather draws attention the “finitude of the world” and claustrophobia (p. 26).

This finitude and claustrophobia that Virilio points out is produced in the dromocratic order of technology and progress. In another work, Virilio puts forth that “Territory has lost its significance in favor of the projectile. In fact, the strategic value of the non-place of speed has definitively supplanted that of place…”(2007, p. 149). However, Virilio demonstrates that the reduction of the size of dromosphere comes with the instantaneity of tele-communications. “We are replacing the expanse of the world with speed” (2009, p. 31).

The notion of speed Virilio is so interested in is also attached to what is called the integral accident (p. 31). Techno-science, as Virilio calls it, carries with it a necessary negative progress. In many places Virilio has made the statement that the creation of the ship is also the creation of the shipwreck. Essentially, this is the integral accident. While, the ship leading to the shipwreck is interesting enough, Virilio applies the accident to what he calls “cinematic energies” (p. 31). Cinematic energies are the energies of perception.

Speed is a non-place that supplants geography: the instantaneity of real time in the Internet and television disrupt one’s perception of history and geography (p. 31). The catastrophes of nature are not being ignored, in a like manner the catastrophe of, the accident, of speed and technology cannot be ignored. The accidents of speed and technology have to be assessed and considered.

It would be an easy mistake to construe Virilio’s position as that of an apocalyptic technophobe, but it is quite the opposite. Virilio’s project is not to dissuade the use of technology, but to be a careful observer. Virilio explains, “…limits and finitude are at the heart of our history. Whether you call it development or progress, it doesn’t matter” (p. 52). Simply, it is not that finitude is the end of the world, but it is a limit. Even more, it is not that a limit is an end, but a new horizon.

Each finitude, each limit, is anticipated by Virilio: this is not an anticipation of revolution, but revelation. Virilio takes much care to explain his position as a “revelationary” (p. 43). Virilio holds an enormous curiosity for what comes when we rub up against finitude.

Additionally, a note must be made on the fact that this text is the record of a conversation with students. If not for the explicit reminder, one might forget that this is the case. Virilio’s words presented on the page offer a beautiful array of critical thought and brilliant tangents.

Overall, Virilio’s project, a grey ecology, is a careful balance between negativity and unconditional acceptance one sees so often taken up in this consumerist society. Virilio invites us into a deeper consideration of technology and its relationship to speed. It is with a fear and trembling one must approach the dromosphere: humans are indeed finite creatures.

Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007.

Virilio, Paul. Grey Ecology. New York: Atropos Press, 2009.