Apollonius of Perga

Today, the average user is obliged to stay on top of the technological curve, thrust into a vortex of consumer myths, riding waves of both euphoria and disappointment. This has prompted artists and theorists alike to break these assured flows of media, for instance by zooming into the otherwise transparent Human Computer Interface and turning its limiting, characteristic blueprints into a revolting yet delightful spectacle. On other occasions, artists bend particular devices, or even create completely new technologies. Through these subversive tactics artists show the governing filters of not only noise, but also “unwanted functionalities”, and how limiting these shiny black-boxed commodities have become. This panel will pay special attention to nostalgic problems, subversive tactics (like glitch) and media archeology as an artistic practice.

Yoko Ono, Painting for the Wind, 1961

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was an enormously influential French philosopher who wrote, among other things, historical analyses of psychiatry, medicine, the prison system, and the function of sexuality in social organizations. He spent some time during the last years of his life at UC Berkeley, delivering several lectures in English. And happily they were recorded for posterity:

• Four Lectures on Truth and Subjectivity (1980)

• Six Lectures on Discourse and Truth (1983)

• Three Lectures on “The Culture of the Self” (1983)

These last lectures are also available on YouTube (in audio format):

One of Foucault’s more controversial and memorable books was Discipline and Punish (1977), which traced the transition from the 18th century use of public torture and execution to–less than 50 years later–the prevalence of much more subtle uses of power, with a focus on incarceration, rehabilitation, prevention, and surveillance. Here he is in 1983 commenting on that book (thanks for the link to Seth Paskin). The Partially Examined Life podcast recently discussed the book with Katharine McIntyre, doctoral candidate at Columbia. Foucault’s image of the panopticon well captures modern privacy concerns in the electronic age.

Finally, we leave you with a Schoolhouse Rock-style presentation of Foucault’s book The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 and some vintage video of Foucault’s 1971 debate with Noam Chomsky. Foucault’s lectures have been added to the Philosophy section of our Free Online Course collection.

in/compatible systems 

Keynote by Graham Harman (us)Moderated by Christopher Salter (ca/de)

The idea that everything is interconnected has become a staple of intellectual life. As a related phenomenon, “contextualisation” is now the method of first resort throughout the humanities. This lecture opposes the general trend of emphasising systems and wholes over autonomous individuals. Among the greatest drawbacks of holistic ontology is its inability to explain disruptions and surprises in any system it studies. At best, one posits some sort of “materiality” lying outside all formatted systems that serves as their underground source of change, a theory that fails for a variety of reasons. The only alternative is to adopt an object-oriented model of fully formatted entities lying beyond the grasp of the human mind and even of each other. After providing some theoretical background for this claim, I will consider several recent political phenomena that are better understood by an object-oriented approach than a holistic one.

An amazing essay by Tim Morton - I recommend listening to George Atherton’s reading for the full weight of oozing of spilt oil and worlds that don’t exist.

The End of the World

When Neo touches a mirror in The Matrix it adheres to his hand, instantly changing from reflective surface to viscous substance. The very thing that we use to reflect becomes an object in its own right, liquid and dark like oil in the dim light of the room in which Neo has taken the red pill. The usual reading of this scene is that Neo’s reality is dissolving. If we stay on the level of the sticky, oily mirror, however, we obtain an equally powerful reading. It’s not reality that dissolves, but the subject, the very capacity to “mirror” things, to be separate from the world like someone looking at a reflection in a mirror – removed from it by an ontological sheet of reflective glass. The sticky mirror demonstrates the truth of what phenomenology calls ingenuousness or sincerity (I’m thinking here of the work of Ortega y Gasset, Levinas and Graham Harman). Objects are what they are, in the sense that no matter what we are aware of, or how, there it is, impossible to shake off. In the midst of irony, there you are, being ironic. Even mirrors are what they are, no matter what they reflect. In its ingenuous sincerity, reality envelops us like a film of oil. The mirror becomes a substance, an object. Hyperobjects push the reset button on sincerity, just as Neo discovers that the mirror no longer distances his image from him in a nice, aesthetically manageable way, but sticks to him. The beautiful reversibility of the oily, melting mirror speaks to something that is happening in a global warming age, precisely because of hyperobjects: the simultaneous dissolution of reality and the overwhelming presence of hyperobjects, which stick to us, which are us. The Greeks called it miasma, the way blood-guilt sticks to you.

Selected works by Robert Beatty (born 1981)

Warren Ellis on Iain Sinclair’s ‘Ghost Milk’:

There’s a sense that the life of the deep urban flaneur closes when corporations and governments can do in concrete and steel what the derive can achieve only in air and ink – remake the streets according to their own will.

Images of ruined spaces are like temporal ghost stories: it is difficult to be sure if what we see is truly a fragment of an objective past, an echo of our own future, or simply a shifting chiaroscuro–a play of digital shadows and light.

The Software (Corrupt.Video) allows its users to glitch videos stored on their computer, videos from their webcam or their desktop in realtime. When a clip is recorded, a 10 seconds video and an animated GIF are saved locally and automatically uploaded to uglitch.com. Currently only available for Mac, iPhone/iPad version is in the works.

A small camera fitted to the glasses can capture 400 facial images per second and send them to a central computer database storing up to 13 million faces.

The system can compare biometric data at 46,000 points on a face and will immediately signal any matches to known criminals or people wanted by police.

If there is a match a red signal will appear on a small screen connected to the glasses, alerting the police officer of the need to take further action or make an arrest.

The devices will soon be tested at football matches and concerts and police in Brazil, South America’s biggest country, are already planning to use them during the next World Cup.

The camera will generally be used to scan faces in crowds up to 50 metres (164ft) away but can be adjusted, if searching for a specific target, to recognise faces as far as 12 miles away.

The non-verbal documentary Robot World depicts the evolution of robots from a mechanical somnambulist to an autonomous sensorium. The neoclassical violinist Matt Howden emphasizes the film’s message: these artificial people are our alternate doubles.

Velocity applied to every traveller.  Every pedestrian given escape-pod momentum and jettisoned clear of shantytown. In someone’s conception.  I look at this and see a launchpad for all the feared criminals of Comuna 13 to speed up into all the nice places where the quality live.  Saves having to nick a car.

“Noah Eli Gordon’s The Source, stretches a permeable skin around ruptured repositories of human thought-structures while sustaining itself, and us, on a nutritive broth of glorious language plunder, bibliomancy, Kabbalist numerology, and exquisitely attuned appropriations. Just as The Source“understands a pattern and works against it” it also is a finely hewn compendium of appropriations culled systematically from page 26 of thousands of the books in the open stacks of the Denver Public Library. What is contained is what is content: socio-cultural shards of language, “like a Roman shirt, stitched from the scraps of various sources, keeping us warm.”The Source embodies a text that is at once time binding—a product of it’s own placement in current conceptual poetics, as well as an archive of it’s own body through constrained ingestion of borrowed material. According to the Source’s own page 26 “…the spirit of the Source—the creative urge it represents…even in large part its subject matter, comes from only two words ‘is’ and ‘are.’” In other words, Noah Eli Gordon’s The Source gifts us with a methodically repurposed text that keeps on giving.”

I know the monks on the tops of mountains have been saying the real world is immaterial for eons, but the difference is that now we say can it precisely, and in such a scientific way that we can predict what else we should see if this view is correct. So far we can’t use ordinary words to describe what this fundamental intangible is. Wavicles don’t mean anything. Neither does the concept of a quantum particle being in two places at once. All we have is the language of mathematics, which few can speak. And what the maths say is that the tons of water rolling in under the light of a sun 93 millions miles away and pounding the sand in front of me is all really mostly nothing, and the little that is not nothing, is really just another kind of nothing.