In diesem Video geht es um den Salon Digital 10. Dokumentation des 10. Salon Digital an der Hochschule für Künste Bremen am 29.11.2017. Mit Daniel Rourke. / filmische Dokumentation: Eva Klauss Rather than try and solve the problems we face as a planetary species - political and social problems which have been with us for millennia; or problems which come with new, and shiny names like ‘The Anthropocene’ - Daniel Rourke and Morehshin Allahyari, in their #'Additivism project, look to question the very notion of ‘the solution’: asking how the stories our problem come wrapped in are products of particular privileges, identities, and points of view. In this talk Daniel Rourke introduces The 3D Additivist Manifesto and Cookbook, showcasing some of the 'post-solution' projects it contains, and asking difficult questions of how to act once there are no solutions left. What is #Additivism? In March 2015 Allahyari & Rourke released The 3D Additivist Manifesto, a call to push the 3D printer and other creative technologies, to their absolute limits and beyond into the realm of the speculative, the provocative and the weird. The 3D Additivist Cookbook is composed of responses to that call, an extensive catalog of digital forms, material actions, and post-humanist methodologies and impressions. - The program for Digital Media at the University of the Arts Bremen launched a regular series of salon-style gatherings titled “Spectacle: Reenactments in the Arts, Design, Science and Technology.” The events have an open format and provide a forum for experiments, presentations and performances from a range of different fields, but with a common focus on old and new media, as well as technologies. The salon thereby enables a practice of reenactment as a way to make things past and hidden visible, present and also questionable. Contemporary new technologies and media seem to cover knowledge with complex layers of materials, code/sign systems and history/organization. Reenacting can translate obscured knowledge, ideas and theories into bodies and actions. At the heart of this conceptual approach is a desire to turn past events into present experiences—although the very nature of the past prohibits such an endeavor. The salon pursues the primary goal of opening closed systems and constructions (black boxes). Global power structures, as well as complex processes in development and production—leading to hermetic constructs—have made it even harder to understand science, economy and contemporary media, as well as new technologies. Recipients therefore tend to mostly grasp only their superficial level. The spectacle is a way to condense actions and processes. Reenactment, on the other hand, builds on repetition and history. But the spectacle is a moment in the here and now where everything flows together and culminates. Organised by: Andrea Sick, Ralf Baecker und Dennis Paul salon-digital.comCast: Digitale Medien KuD der HfK

This paper on GIFs and screen-based compulsion is a very extended follow-up to a short, but widely disseminated, piece I wrote in 2011: On the Doctrine of the Similar (GIF GIF GIF). It is presented here as a draft, since I never published this paper officially. I hope it is useful/interesting for GIF lovers everywhere. Rather than designate high resolutions and white-knuckle optical speeds as representative of 21st Century techno-cultural immersion, I consider animated GIFs a more contemporary medium. From their origins in the early 90s as simple linguistic stand-ins animated GIFs have diversified along with the web that birthed them. They correspond quickly and directly, and lend themselves to constant mutation and (re)assemblage at the hands of their producers and consumers; blurring the distinction between these identities along the way. Their poor visual fidelity is made up for by their propensity to repeat and cycle in lieu of the actions and expressions they harbour. By allowing us to wallow in their remixed repetitions animated GIFs feed on the human susceptibility to resemblance and recognition, even as their surface affect remains distanced from any particular media origin. As Sally Mckay describes, “GIFs are simultaneously ‘in your face’ and in your mind, their affects continuous with the immersive experience of daily internet use.” [1] This status enables GIFs as a metaphor for contemporary techno-culture itself, framing our distributed, multimedial space-time in staged, repeatable, and digestible patterns. In its early days, cinema was considered capable of immobilising the world for the purposes of human appreciation and enchantment. Eadweard Muybridge sought to isolate the gallop of the horse from its particular being in time and space, so that it was forever framed for our experience. Today a million versions of Muybridge’s horse careen around the web as animated GIFs of questionable quality, flashing fleetingly, but often, on screens that scroll in multiple dimensions. In turn pictures, depictions and imitations have given way to motions, evocations and impressions, mixing the shared memory of our collective experiences at ever greater speeds, distances and – most importantly – correspondences than ever before. As Daniel Rubinstein points out the content of an animated GIF “can be figurative or abstract, lyrical or macabre, but… the primary materials that the GIF artist uses are rhythm and repetition…” [2] An aesthetics not necessarily of surface reception, but of delivery, temporality and the patterns of configuration. A patterning that calls to mind the work of Walter Benjamin, who argued that metre, rhythm and other heterogeneous impressions had a significant impact on human modes of intuition and experience. [3] It is fascinating to consider Benjamin’s early essays, especially his The Doctrine of the Similar from 1933, in relation to his more widely read work on film. Having established the process by which humans became ensconced in what Susan Buck-Morss calls a “new nature… of matter as it has been transformed by” technology, [4] Benjamin went on in The Work of Art (1936) [5] to explore the significance this technologised environment has on the human “mimetic faculty.” [6] In two 1933 essays Benjamin argues that ‘primitive’ language emerged in magical correspondence with the world. From the surface of the starry sky, or the intestines of a sacrificed animal, early humans “read what was never written,” [7] deriving mystical revelations from the constellations and signatures perceived there. [8] Configurations between patterns were what determined legibility, not just because they carried an intended meaning – being ‘written’ there by the Gods, for instance – but because similarities ‘flash up’ speculatively in the human mind: So speed, the swiftness in reading or writing which can scarcely be separated from this process, would then become… the effort or gift of letting the mind participate in that measure of time in which similarities flash up fleetingly out of the stream of things only in order to become immediately engulfed again. [9] “Nature creates similarities,” and as such, humans being of nature, are driven by a mimetic compulsion “to become and behave like something else,” [10] projecting that same compulsion into the world around them. This compulsion manifested itself in group dances, as song and spoken language, and later, as writing, eventually flattening the speculative space of mimetic experience into inscriptions on stone, vellum, or paper. As Howard Caygill observes: Configuration is thus transformed into inscription, reducing the speculative reading of the similarity between patterns into the transcendental reading of graphically inscribed marks upon an infinite but bounded surface. [11] Like the writing that Benjamin believed ‘captured’ human beings and their mimetic faculty, animated GIFs point to a new type of inscription, born of, and infinitely responsive to itself. We enter into this whether or not we wish too, each time we navigate a browser window, or slide our fingers across a smartphone screen. We are as malleable as our nature. A physiological suspense beckoning from the screen that animated GIFs turn around and loop – indefinitely – as a reminder of their own attention. In creating and sharing GIFs we add depth to the flat surfaces through which the internet is received. We may be ensconced in this space, and pulled along by it, but it is a space whose apparent distribution across screens, browser windows, and multiple devices too readily gestures to our bodies and selves as being fully individuated, rather than to the whole assemblage of which both our bodies, devices, and the images that play between them, are a part. Benjamin believed that, rather than allowing us to attain mastery over nature, technologies such as film give us an awareness over our relationship with nature through the processes of “material complexification.” [12] For Benjamin this training was akin to the relationship between factory workers and the production line, where the ratchet of the gears and conveyors program the workers’ bodies, fusing them together into a larger assemblage. The successive frames of film, made to spool through the mechanism one after the other at imperceptible speed, create an illusion of temporal and spatial fluidity that shock us into an awareness of the complex relation between our psychic and physiological realities. As R.L Rutsky lucidly explains, “this scattered, interrupted filmic reception becomes part of the human sensorium or body… a body that is no longer distanced from—or entirely separate from—the images and shocks that it comes into contact with.” [13] Constituted by what Anne Friedberg describes as a “mobilized and virtual gaze,” [14] filmic subjectivity has often been considered to correspond to the supposed sovereignty of the consumer, predicated on the promise of an enhanced mobility and freedom of choice across a dizzying array of goods and spectacles. Time and space themselves became filmic, opening up onto new mimetic correspondences discoverable in everything from the high-speed montage of flowers in bloom, to the slowed down and isolated gallop of Muybridge’s horse. Cinema goers attain all the nobility of flâneurs exploring endless arcades of experience without ever having to leave their seats. As R.L. Rutsky argues, the audience ‘becomes’ through this collective “state of distraction,” defined by “its ability to ‘take up’ these images in much the same way that the film apparatus does.” [15] And so the mimetic faculty itself achieves a kind of mechanisation in the mass spectacle of moving images, able to reveal correspondences at speeds and densities hitherto impossible to conceive. In the words of Mark Hansen: Despite the vast acceleration of image circulation in the historical interval separating Benjamin’s moment from ours, his effort to grapple with the material impact of… autonomous images remains exemplary: it com­prises an indispensable model that can guide us in our efforts to forge con­nections with our alienating, postimaginary material world. [16] Whereas the mimetic faculty had originally come to correspond with nature through theological ritual or script, with this second nature – of what Mark Hansen calls “the mechanosphere” [17] – the correspondence is material, and sensuous. Our receptivity is physiological, our bodies are shared, and our memories – now dependent on the “alien rhythms” [18] of montage – have become intricately woven into the machine as images. In turn, as noted by Arthur Kroker, “the image machine is haunted by memories of the body,” [19] bodies that depend on the fidelity, malleability and repeatability of film, videotape, and more recently, digital forms of media for their existence. As with its filmic ancestors, animated GIFs often frame fragmented images of time in snippets of montage, giving what Gilles Deleuze termed “common standard of measurement to things which do not have one,” framing “long shots of countryside and close-ups of the face, an astronomical system and a single drop of water” [20] within a single perceptual apparatus. The train whips by on the silver screen, but the instant of each image impacting us is lost as the play of further images moves onwards through experience. As Steven Shaviro has insisted, we “have already been touched by and altered by these sensations, even before [we] have had the chance to become conscious of them.” [21] But unlike filmic time, made to reel at 24 frames per second, the GIF’s loading mechanism introduces a more awkward temporal component into perception: that of bandwidth. Standardized in 1987 by CompuServe, the GIF’s early popularity was based, in part, on their ability to load in time with its download. In the days of dial-up connections this meant that at least part of a GIF image would appear before the user’s connection froze, or – more significantly – the user could see enough of the image for it to mean something. In 1989 Compuserve updated GIFs to use this ‘partial loading’ mechanism to encode animations within a single GIF file. In essence, the hacky update transformed a two dimensional spatial loading mechanism into a three dimensional temporal one. A file format designed to harness correspondences within each single image had become about correspondences between and across images. According to Jason Eppink in 1995 Netscape Navigator, an early popular web browser, “took advantage of [this mechanism] to enable looping, making the GIF viable for animation online over dial-up speeds.” [22] Small in size and made up of few frames, this is where animated GIFs entered their ‘classic’ [23] phase. Corresponding to single phrases or concepts such as ‘Under Construction’, ‘Area 51’ or ‘flying pink unicorn’, the era of personal web pages saturated with spinning hamsters is one anybody born after 1990 will little remember, but its influence on the contemporary ‘folk’ attitude of the web has not abated. As the 2000s came into view, animated GIFs became freed up by an increase in bandwidth and storage capacity to show more complex assemblages, and it was at this stage that the format achieved its common contemporary use as a vehicle for moments framed from cinema, television and – increasingly – video websites like YouTube. Frame grab or video capture GIFs often pay homage to isolated moments in pop culture, but as the ‘craft’ of animated GIFs has grown, so the frame capture form has begun to correspond well outside the filmic and televisual contexts from which they were first appropriated. This leap is, for me, the first point at which GIFs begin to co-ordinate their own realm of mimetic correspondence. An ocean of viral videos turned into a self-serving visual vernacular, looping back on itself ad infinitum. Brought on by their obsolescence, animated GIFs are among the most contradictory of images, able to resist the rigid taxonomies of the burgeoning algorithmic economy, even as they are turned into ‘clickbait’ by sites like BuzzFeed, [24] who rely on them to flash on screens kept in motion by the compulsive scroll of a mouse, or – increasingly – a finger or thumb. From our vantage point, subsumed by the impact of a high-bandwidth internet culture, animated GIFs [25] seem quaint, clumsy, even remedial in their capacity to transmit information. GIFs are easy to share and edit, but difficult for search engines to classify and catalogue. They are usually small in size, but their popularity exerts a significant load on the web servers that host them. As internet speeds have increased, and screen resolutions soared in depth, GIFs have remained; flickering endlessly as visual reminders of the ubiquitous mess the internet has become. Users of sites like Tumblr, 4chan, and Reddit revel in the capacity of GIFs to quickly correspond to the world, capturing token moments of experience or expression that signal well beyond their original context. Images can be made to correspond with increasing immediacy; can be cut, copied, stretched, collected and forced to clash in violent juxtaposition through Photoshopping, embedding, and multiple recompressions, using software interfaces that themselves are infinitely malleable. As Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska argue in Life After New Media, one of the principle ways in which we create meaning through matter is by cutting: Cutting reality into smaller pieces – with our eyes, our bodily and cognitive apparatus, our language, our memory, and our technologies – we enact separation and relationality as the two dominant aspects of material locatedness in time. [26] The affect of a GIF is not just felt, but copied and pasted elsewhere; separated and related in never before seen patterns and expressions. GIFs can be broken into their constituent frames, compressed and corrupted on purpose and made to act as archives for viral ‘memetic’ events travelling the web. It is possible to track the cultural development of some of these correspondences. Often though, the source of the cultural moment they hail from becomes completely lost in the play of images. Finding meaning in the semiotic sludge of these GIFs often requires a sensitivity to similitude bordering on the magical, even if their visceral impact is beyond question. Net artists and archaeologists, Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, have long been fascinated by a GIF known as ‘Real_Dancing_Girl’. Indeed, Lialina cites the GIF as a defining impetus in her desire to become a net artist in the first place. [27] Small in size and given to a multitude of purposes and meanings, Real_Dancing_Girl.GIF found her way onto many thousands of personal web pages during the early ‘classic’ GIF era, made to dance alongside a cast of similar pixelated characters. If you blow Real_Dancing_Girl up to a size well beyond the means of a mid-90s desktop monitor to display, it is easy to see a single aberrant pixel that flashes each time she swings her hips to her left. [28] Throughout Real_Dancing_Girl’s 20 something years of propagation around the web this pixel remained, apparently unnoticed, or at least aesthetically accepted by those who added the GIF to their webpages. The pixel in Real_Dancing_Girl indicates the difficulty the network has in determining what communicates and what doesn’t. Its significance may be slight – a punctum to prick the attention of those enraptured by the image – but the aberrant pixel signals how the mimetic faculty tends to shift inwards. In recent homages to the GIF nameless web artists have incorporated the anomalous pixel in their higher resolution remakes, mimicking the movements of Real_Dancing_Girl as their digitised bodies recoil. A playground of correspondences that at first mimicked language and the wider world now mimics itself. As Graig Uhlin notes, narrative correspondence is not the guiding principle of the GIF, rather “the viewer is caught up in the GIF’s temporal suspension: to view is to be captivated.” [29] A 2015 BuzzFeed article entitled Can You Get Through These 17 GIFs Of Massive Zits Being Popped Without Shielding Your Eyes? [30] poses a challenge to the audience that promises bodily affect, relying on the GIF as its primary vehicle. As BuzzFeed is wont to do the article encourages the ‘reader’ to scroll through each animated GIF for no other reason than for the experience it will deliver. The GIFs are knowingly visceral, their careful ‘listicle’ [31] arrangement down the length of the page no less meticulous than the framing of each individual animated GIF on the spectacle of a zit being burst asunder. Here bodies are vast surfaces closed off by each GIF, so that even though the moment of each zit’s (and therefore each body’s) eruption is reduced to its purest semblance, the affect of bodies in their entirety is alluded to and made significant. Each GIF has its own title that celebrates the compulsion of this activity, and the sense of release and relief they represent for the bodies subjected to by each GIF and, in turn, the body of the viewer suspended among them: Doesn’t this make you feel relaxed? Just imagine how gratifying this must feel… How is it possible to feel such disgust and satisfaction at the same time? Yeah, it’s kind of gross to watch… …but there’s no denying there’s something beautiful about these gifs. [32] The audience is encouraged to excerpt their mimetic faculty, to revel in the correspondences between GIFs and eruptions; to find ‘beauty’ in these captivating physiological rhythms. Indeed, the ‘loop’ of each individual zit and its eruption is enhanced by the further repetition of awareness and reception as the tirade of grotesque releases continues. In the zit article we find a paradigm of the click/scroll/repeat reverie that BuzzFeed has become synonymous with. A compulsion to derive affect, and physiological release, in the navigation of lists of what BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti calls “upbeat, even childlike content.” [33] In an April 2015 article for Vox Dylan Matthews reflects [34] on the success of BuzzFeed by looking over an academic paper written by Jonah Peretti a decade before the launch of the website. [35] Published in theory journal Negations in 1996 [36] Peretti’s paper uses Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism and Consumer Society, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia to offer a definition of the distributed identities of contemporary consumers. Deleuze, Guattari and Jameson use the figure of the ‘schizophrenic’ [37] to refer to an individual without a defined ego or identity. Jameson saw “the rapid fire succession of signifiers in MTV style media” [38] of the 1980s as serving “to confuse viewers, harm[ing] their ability to use culture to build identities.” [39] Peretti fuses this view with Deleuze and Guattari’s more ‘emancipatory’ take on the egoless schizophrenic: a figure able to resist the pre-packaged identities being offered them by capitalism, and act – effectively – on their own desires. [40] For Dylan Matthews, Peretti’s fused rendering of the schizophrenic offers an insight into the principles behind BuzzFeed. As Peretti himself wrote in his 1996 paper: Capitalism needs schizophrenia, but it also needs egos… The contradiction is resolved through the acceleration of the temporal rhythm of late capitalist visual culture. This type of acceleration encourages weak egos that are easily formed, and fade away just as easily. [41] The zit article exemplifies the plethora of visual identifications that BuzzFeed accelerates through social-media echo chambers. Its skill is to create lists and headlines that everyone and anyone can relate to, and will click and scroll through. “23 Euphoric Moments Literally Everyone Has Experienced”; “23 Times Tumblr Went Way Too Fucking Far”; “19 Euphoric Experiences For Book Lovers”; “21 Things Everyone Who Went To Primary School In Wales Remembers.” Once again the GIF becomes not only the vehicle, but the metaphor of identity destruction and rebirth. A bearer of postimaginary perception, through which – to hijack Walter Benjamin’s insights – “like a flash, similarity appears” [42] only to “become immediately engulfed again.” [43] BuzzFeed is far from the only factory to exploit the qualities of digital media to arrest our attentions, but its success at offering its users new identities that appear to merge and interrelate in an endless, mutating mass is unrivalled. Perhaps its most devastating trick was to recognise compulsion as one of the primary driving forces behind internet navigation, reception and – in conjunction – identity formation. Like the unseen bodies of those zit owning GIF subjects, the listicle format reveals just enough of the shared body of human culture – of Benjamin’s “postimaginary material world” – to produce an affective response in its receivers/users/consumers. An ever expanding multiverse of tiny framed portions of experience cut from context so that they can be shared, digested, and repeated indefinitely. Whether viewed in their original format, or as streamed equivalent, the visceral impact of GIFs is beyond question, extending beyond the browser, altering pop culture, our tastes, and even our aesthetic acuity. The different timescales of media production and reception clash in the animated GIF as in no other medium. It is no coincidence that animated GIFs became the web’s primary mode of packaging and delivering visual humour. Just as a joke is the vehicle for the impact of a punchline, so a GIF encapsulates the potential of the having and sharing of its experience. Not only does the animated GIF allow us to wallow in its repetitions, actuating the moving image event in a conscious awareness of one’s awareness, GIFs also enact two modes of experience in their temporal structures. Firstly, GIFs that load in time with bandwidth build frame by frame the structure of the soon to be experienced experience – outside of cinematic and ‘real’ time, at a changeable pace we could call ‘bandwidth-time’. Secondly, the GIF as a mode of display and redisplay tends towards a perceptual sweet spot in its loops and repetitions. The loop of GIFs counteracts some of the uncontainable immediacy of cinema, enclosing the ‘perfect’ amount of time for “the expression of experience by experience” [44] in the cycle of repeated views. Even as bandwidth has increased to alleviate the limitations of the GIF’s short timespan, rather than lengthen animated GIFs, the web community has responded by increasing the resolution and dimensions of GIFs, allowing their visceral impact to expand, even if the perceptive loop has not. Because of this, GIFs still stand as one of the best indications of bandwidth-time. Through the GIF’s jilting appearance on laptop monitors or smartphone screens, viewers are entered into physiological communion with server banks, optical cables, WiFi signals, and 4G mobile phone masts talking in zeroes and ones via invisible protocols. Whilst digital substrates have increased in their capacity to store, distribute and display information, they have also edged towards invisibility. [45] What matters is that media content is received, and that that reception is smooth and immediate. Whether an animated GIF is composed of a seamless loop or a series of incompatible frames made to jolt against one another, the anchor point at which the GIF repeats has a heightened significance upon its first viewing. The browser window opens onto a single frame, that slips to a few more frames incongruently, until the entire GIF file has been buffered by the computer, at which point the loop begins in earnest. This quality of GIFs reminds us of their origins, even as each nudge towards a seamless loop makes us aware how clunky and clumsy our network architecture still is. Throughout the 2010s the Graphical Interchange Format formalised by Compuserve and Netscape has undergone a series of violent transformations into other, apparently related forms. When a GIF is uploaded to microblogging service Twitter or popular image sharing site imgur, for instance, it is automatically transcoded into MP4 or GIFV video format. The resultant GIF/video hybrid retains the frequency of the original looping animation, but the file can now be started and stopped at will, alleviating part of the strain on the servers given the responsibility of delivering it. These hybrids are still colloquially referred to as ‘GIFs’, even though they retain none of the original coding mechanisms of Compuserve’s format. What’s more, these formats are designed to buffer before they stream, separating us once again from the stutters of bandwidth-time. As Mark Nunes reminds us, Internet traffic is predicated on a logic of unimpeded flow. The network demands maximum throughput, with a minimum of noise, a “free flowing system ultimately [dependant] upon a control logic in which everything that circulates communicates… or is cast aside as abject.” [46] For the network it is beneficial to deny bandwidth-time entirely, casting Internet users aloft in the experience of ‘stream-time’; a control logic more suited to arresting our attentions, in which the future image we are about to receive has always already been determined and buffered by the network. We may then wish to read the anchor point of the GIF loop as a cohort of Roland Barthes’ ‘punctum’ – an off-centre compositional “accident which pricks” [47] our attention. The GIF punctum is one frame piled off-kilter with the rest of the sequence; the frame that lingers in awareness just a moment longer as cinematic and bandwidth-time catch up with one another. Whilst the violent subjugation of the GIF to streamable formats allows the content of the GIF to continue in its loops and correspondences, its potential to mutate is cut short by its transcoding to video. In their ‘original’ format animated GIFs retain each of their frames as if it was a separate file among its partners, so that importing the file into a software editing suite retains the quality and malleability of the whole loop across each individual frame. This means that each copied and pasted GIF carries within itself an unspoken promise of its next adaptation. Although the cut/edit/remix culture of the web does not rely solely on animated GIFs for its expression – one need only browse YouTube for a few moments to find a video that has been bent to several wills before its reception – the GIF’s blunt democratic immediacy is less prevalent across other file formats and modes of viewing. As noted by Giampaolo Bianconni in a 2012 article entitled, GIFability: Dan Harmon, who was… the executive producer of the television sitcom Community, [said] that he tried, “many times a season” to put star Alison Brie “in a situation… that I know is going to end up as an animated GIF file!” [48] What in televisual terms is a few moments of particularly well-crafted action, or an acutely framed humorous facial expression, achieves far greater ubiquity and visibility as an animated GIF overlaid with kitschy text, or other hastily layered editorial additions. The acts of recuperation and appropriation carried out by viewers is now considered an integral component of cultural capital. What matters for images is that they are seen, and the mode of their contemporary reception, increasingly, is in appropriated, poor copies, cut out of context – into GIFs or otherwise. The rise of what Hito Steyerl has termed, the Poor Image, is dependent on two, seemingly contradictory, demands: The networks in which poor images circulate thus constitute both a platform for a fragile new common interest and a battleground for commercial and national agendas… While it enables the users’ active participation in the creation and distribution of content, it also drafts them into production. Users become the editors, critics, translators, and (co-)authors of poor images. [49] For a director like Harmon “poor images” of his work are commercially, and arguably artistically beneficial to its reception. What Bianconi calls the ‘GIF-able’ moment is one that harnesses the flash of mimetic acuity in a viewer and drafts them into a productive mode. Harmon’s decision to give his shots a GIF fidelity calls to mind Walter Benjamin’s conclusions in The Work of Art. And yet instead of filmic images training us in new modes of apperception, it has become the images we see daily on our computer screens, flickering in time with new perceptual proficiencies across screens that scroll in multiple dimensions. Now that images can be exchanged, transmitted, copied and edited at frantic light speeds it becomes commercially important for producers of established media forms, such as television and cinema, to maintain the movement and mutation of their images online. In turn, as users and viewers we should tend to concern ourselves with modes of pro-sumption [50] that wrestle a degree of control back from the media machine. In an article published in July 2015, journalist Cleo Stiller explores the phenomena of ‘microporn GIFs’, ostensibly created by and for women: [51] While GIFs may seem like a flash in the pan—really, how can four seconds turn you on?—the nature of the loop… give[s] the viewer time to notice the caress of a hand floating from neck to shoulder to forearm, the tensing of an abdomen, the arching of a back, and the reflex of a thigh. [52] Each microporn GIF teeters on the verge of something happening, gesturing to the possibility of the sexual event; of eventfulness. And the loop gives these moments an infinite capacity to repeat and thus expand experientially, even if they do not expand narratively. The suspense of the GIF is erotic regardless of its content; each loop is a charged instant of imminence. As evinced by Helen Hester, Bethan Jones, and Sarah Taylor-Harman in their paper on microporn, Giffing a fuck, these tensions – and thus affective pleasures – are not reliant on clumsy narrative arcs for their delivery. The illusion of narrative coherence within and across pornography lends itself to easy categorisation. Pornography then tends to be catalogued with simplistic labels such as ‘threesome’, ‘anal’, or ‘blowjob’ by the websites and services that deliver it, reducing the plethora of erotic acts, human behaviours and experiences to a database of homogeneous and heteronormative search terms. [53] For Hester, Jones, and Taylor-Harman the community of microporn GIF creators represents a line of resistance… …against dominant representations of heterosexual acts, and potentially counters the commercial nature of pornography and its narrative linearity. Here lies the possibility for pornographic consumers to critique and deconstruct such dominant paradigms, choosing for themselves instead the bodies and fragmented sexual inter/activities they desire to see presented. [54] Here the GIF’s tight spatial and temporal framing, coupled with its capacity to travel, mutate and multiply, is empowering. If a desire, a feeling, an expression is GIF-able, then it has the potential to create further desires, feelings, and expressions. Fragmentation then becomes a means to disassemble normative narratives and reconstruct them into a shared techno-body that enables and celebrates the diversity of its components and their correspondences. The resulting loops are interrelational in a way not easily captured by the logic of the database and the search term. According to Sally McKay: Brian Massumi describes affective intensity as a “state of suspense, potentially of disruption. It is like a temporal sink, a hole in time…” [55] This is a moment of incipience, before action is taken, before emotions qualify and retroactively determine the affect. [56] Each GIF evokes an affect not just because of its content, but because its loop winds that content tight like a spring. A GIF is always poised in lieu of a release. This promise to spring back, to evoke and disrupt makes GIFs – microporn or otherwise – one of the web’s most enduring forces. The erotic charge of each GIF unites its creator, sharer and viewers in a non-linguistic discourse. Action is inevitable, reaction is desired, and disruption is to be expected. References & Notes [1] Sally McKay, “The Affect of Animated GIFs (Tom Moody, Petra Cortright, Lorna Mills),” Art & Education, 2005, http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/the-affect-of-animated-gifs-tom-moody-petra-cortright-lorna-mills/. [2] Daniel Rubinstein, “GIF Today,” The Photographer’s Gallery: Born in 1987 Exhibition, June 2012. [3] Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (Routledge, 1997), 5. [4] Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (MIT Press, 1991), 70. [5] Walter Benjamin, “The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility (1936),” in The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, and other writings on media, ed. Michael William Jennings et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 19–55. [6] Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty (1933),” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, 1st Schocken edition edition (New York: Random House USA Inc, 1995), 333–36. [7] Ibid. [8] Anson Rabinbach, “Introduction to Walter Benjamin’s ‘Doctrine of the Similar,’” New German Critique, no. 17 (April 1, 1979): 62, doi:10.2307/488009. [9] Walter Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar (1933),” trans. Knut Tarnowski, New German Critique Spring, 1979, no. 17 (April 1, 1979): 65–69, doi:10.2307/488009. [10] Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty (1933).” [11] Caygill, Walter Benjamin, 5. [12] Mark B. N. Hansen, Embodying Technesis: Technology beyond Writing, Studies in Literature and Science (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 234. [13] R. L Rutsky, “Allegories of Emergence: The Generative Matrix of Walter Benjamin” (Constructions of the Future, Heidelberg, 2011), 16. [14] Anne Friedberg, “The Mobilized and Virtual Gaze in Modernity: Flaneur/Flaneuse,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff, 2. ed, repr (London: Routledge, 2001), 395–404. [15] R. L Rutsky, “Walter Benjamin and the Dispersion of Cinema,” Symploke 15, no. 1–2 (2008): 18, doi:10.1353/sym.0.0017. [16] Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 248. [17] Ibid., 262. [18] Ibid., 266. [19] Arthur Kroker, Body Drift: Butler, Hayles, Haraway (U of Minnesota Press, 2012), 1. [20] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1 (Continuum, 2005), 16. [21] Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 46. [22] J. Eppink, “A Brief History of the GIF (so Far),” Journal of Visual Culture 13, no. 3 (December 1, 2014): 299, doi:10.1177/1470412914553365. [23] For a further breakdown of GIF ‘types’ see: Daniel Rourke, “The Doctrine of the Similar (GIF GIF GIF),” Dandelion 3, no. 1 (January 19, 2012). [24] At its most extreme, ‘clickbait’ is any link that draws a user’s attention with a tempting claim or open question in its headline, only to confront them with vacuous or even misleading content once the sought-after click is granted. Although BuzzFeed’s editor in chief Ben Smith claimed in 2014 that the site “doesn’t do clickbait,” (Ben Smith, “Why BuzzFeed Doesn’t Do Clickbait,” 2014) a compelling argument can be made that BuzzFeed does at the very least rely on what journalist James Hamblin calls “curiosity gaps” (James Hamblin, “It’s Everywhere, the Clickbait,” 2014) in order to elicit the necessary click from internet users. [25] GIF is the file extension and acronym for ‘Graphical Interchange Format’, a subtype of bitmap image encoding. [26] Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2012), 75. [27] Olia Lialina, “In Memory of Chuck Poynter, User and GIF Maker,” One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age, March 22, 2011, http://blog.geocities.institute/archives/2466. [28] “Real_Dancing_Girl: Who_am_I?,” Tumblr Blog, Real_Dancing_Girl, accessed January 1, 2016, http://realdancingirl.tumblr.com/WHOAMI. [29] Graig Uhlin, “Playing in the Gif(t) Economy,” Games and Culture 9, no. 6 (November 1, 2014): 520, doi:10.1177/1555412014549805. [30] Jamie Jones, “Can You Get Through These 17 GIFs Of Spots Being Popped Without…,” BuzzFeed, July 19, 2015, http://www.buzzfeed.com/jamiejones/gifs-of-cysts-being-popped. [31] The word ‘listicle’ is a portmanteau combination of ‘list’ and ‘article’. See: Jo Christy, “What Is A Listicle?,” Stir Up Media, March 7, 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20150307191311/http://stirupmedia.co.uk/what-is-a-listicle/. [32] Jones, “Can You Get Through These 17 GIFs Of Spots Being Popped Without…” [33] Andrew Rice and 2013, “Does BuzzFeed Know the Secret?,” NYMag.com, accessed July 21, 2015, http://nymag.com/news/features/buzzfeed-2013-4/#. [34] Dylan Matthews, “BuzzFeed’s Founder Used to Write Marxist Theory and It Explains BuzzFeed Perfectly,” Vox, April 2, 2015, http://www.vox.com/2014/5/20/5730762/buzzfeeds-founder-used-to-write-marxist-theory-and-it-explains. [35] Dylan Matthews builds on a preliminary reading of the paper by Eugene Wolters, “From Deleuze to LOLCats, the Story of the BuzzFeed Guy,” Critical-Theory, April 8, 2013, http://www.critical-theory.com/from-deleuze-to-lolcats-the-story-of-the-buzzfeed-guy/. [36] Jonah Peretti, “Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity Formation/Dissolution,” Winter 1996, http://negations.icaap.org/issues/96w/96w_peretti.html. [37] Much has been written on the inappropriate adoption of the label ‘schizophrenic’ by the likes of Deleuze, Guattari, Jameson and others. It is used here to refer to their definition, rather than the actual illness of schizophrenia as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. [38] Peretti, “Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity Formation/Dissolution.” [39] Matthews, “BuzzFeed’s Founder Used to Write Marxist Theory and It Explains BuzzFeed Perfectly.” [40] Ibid. [41] Peretti, “Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity Formation/Dissolution.” [42] Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty (1933).” [43] Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar (1933).” [44] Vivian Carol Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 305. [45] R. L Rutsky, High Technē: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 15. [46] Mark Nunes, Error Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures (New York: Continuum, 2011), 5, http://public.eblib.com/EBLPublic/PublicView.do?ptiID=655513. [47] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 27. [48] Giampaolo Bianconi, “GIFABILITY,” Rhizome.org, November 20, 2012, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/nov/20/gifability/. [49] Hito Steyerl, “Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image / Journal / E-Flux,” E-Flux, no. 11 (November 2009), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/94. [50] A portmanteau of ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’, the prosumer, according to George Ritzer and Nathan Jurgenson, represents, “a trend toward unpaid rather than paid labor and toward offering products at no cost… [a] system marked by a new abundance where scarcity once predominated.” G. Ritzer and N. Jurgenson, “Production, Consumption, Prosumption: The Nature of Capitalism in the Age of the Digital ‘Prosumer,’” Journal of Consumer Culture 10, no. 1 (March 1, 2010): 14, doi:10.1177/1469540509354673. [51] Although Stiller concentrates on female microporn creators, it is perhaps more productive to suggest who the community is not made up of i.e. cis-males. This seems to be a much more inclusive take on a category of user created content aligned with resistance to heteronormative classification. This resonates more closely with the assessment of Hester, Jones, and Taylor-Harman in the paper referenced below. [52] Cleo Stiller, “Why Some Women Prefer Their Porn in GIFs,” Fusion, accessed June 16, 2015, http://fusion.net/story/165548/why-women-love-porn-gifs/. [53] Helen Hester, Bethan Jones, and Sarah Taylor-Harman, “Giffing a Fuck: Non-Narrative Pleasures in Participatory Porn Cultures and Female Fandom,” Porn Studies 2, no. 4 (October 2, 2015): 356–66, doi:10.1080/23268743.2015.1083883. [54] Ibid., 361. [55] Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Duke University Press, 2002), 26. [56] McKay, “The Affect of Animated GIFs (Tom Moody, Petra Cortright, Lorna Mills).”

UPDATE: My talk is also now available in The Noise of Being publication, published by Sonic Acts in September 2017 A talk I delivered at Sonic Acts Festival 2017: The Noise of Being, in which I refigure the sci-fi horror monster The Thing from John Carpenter’s 1982 film of the same name:

The Thing is a creature of endless mimetic transformations, capable of becoming the grizzly faced men who fail to defeat it. The most enduring quality of The Thing is its ability to perform self-effacement and subsequent renewal at every moment, a quality we must embrace and mimic ourselves if we are to outmanoeuvre the monsters that harangue us.

This talk was part of a panel featuring Laurie Penny and Ytasha Womack, entitled Speculative Fiction: Radical Figuration For Social Change. You can see their wonderful talks here:

Laurie Penny: Feminism Against Fascism Ytasha Womack: Afrofuturism: Imagination and Humanity

full text follows (+ references & slides) An Ontology of Every Thing on the Face of the Earth John Carpenter’s 1982 film, The Thing, is a claustrophobic science fiction thriller exhibiting many hallmarks of the horror genre. The film depicts a sinister turn for matter where the chaos of the replicating, cancerous cell is expanded to the human scale and beyond. We watch as an alien force terrorises an isolated Antarctic outpost. The creature exhibits an awesome ability to imitate; devouring any form of life it comes across, whilst simultaneously giving birth to an exact copy in a burst of bile and protoplasm. The Thing copies cell by cell in a process so perfect, that the resultant simulacrum speaks, acts, and even thinks like the original. The Thing is so relentless and its copies so perfect, that the outpost’s Doctor, Blair, is sent mad at the implications: If a cell gets out it could imitate everything on the face of the Earth… and it’s not gonna stop! [1] This text is also available in The Noise of Being publication (published September 2017) Based on John W. Campbell’s 1938 novella, Who Goes There?, Carpenter’s film revisits a gothic trope that is numerous in its incarnations. In Campbell’s novella, The Thing is condensed as much from the minds of the men as from its own horrific, defrosting bulk. A slowly surfacing nightmare that transforms alien matter into earthly biology also has the effect of transferring the inner, mental lives of the men into the resultant condensation. John W. Campbell knew that The Thing could become viscous human flesh, but in order to truly imitate its prey the creature must infect inner life separately, pulling kicking and screaming ghosts out of their biological – Cartesian – machines. As a gothic figure, Campbell’s Thing disrupts the stable and integral vision of human being: self-same bodies housing ‘unitary and securely bounded’ [2] subjectivities, identical and extensive through time. His characters confront their anguish at being embodied: their nightmares are literally made flesh. To emphasise the otherness of each human’s flesh, Campbell’s story is inhabited exclusively with male characters. The absence of women makes the conflict between each of the men feel more rudimentary, but it also centres the novel’s horror on the growing realisation that to be human is also to be alien to oneself. Differences between sexes within the single species homo sapiens are bypassed, allowing the alien entity to exhibit the features of human female ‘otherness’ alongside a gamut of horrific bodily permutations. Perhaps, as Barbara Creed, [3] Rosi Braidotti, [4] and others [5] have argued, The Thing signifies the intrinsic absence of the mother figure: the female body’s capacity to be differentiated from itself in the form of pregnancy; to open up and usher forth into the world a creature other to itself. This Thingly quality is given credence by Julia Kristeva in a passage that could equally refer to The Thing as to the development of a fetus during pregnancy: Cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and the body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. With the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is another. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on. [6] The Thing does exhibit demeanours of copulation and fertility, but also of disease, fragmentation, dismemberment, and asexual fission. In the novella, during a drug induced nightmare Dr. Copper sits bolt upright and blurts out ‘Garry – listen. Selfish – from hell they came, and hellish shellfish – I mean self – Do I? What do I mean?,’ McReady [7] turns to the other men in the cabin, ‘Selfish, and as Dr. Copper said – every part is a whole. Every piece is self-sufficient, and animal in itself.’ [8] The Thing is aberrant at a level more fundamental than allusions to pregnancy can convey. Dr. Copper’s inability to articulate what The Thing is, indicates a categorical nightmare he and the men are suffering. As in the work of Mary Douglas, [9] The Thing’s nightmarish transformation denies the very concept of physical and categorical purity. The Thing’s distributed biology calls to mind the Hardt and Negri’s vision of the early Internet (ARPANET), designed, according to them: …to withstand military attack. Since it has no center and almost any portion can operate as an autonomous whole, the network can continue to function even when part of it has been destroyed. The same design element that ensures survival, the decentralisation, is also what makes control of the network so difficult. [10] The image of mankind’s outright destruction, via totalising narratives such as nuclear war, viral pandemic, or meteor strike is undermined by the paradigm of a Thingly technological infrastructure designed to avoid ‘absolute’ assault. Decentralisation is a categorical horror in its capacity to highlight our self-same, constantly threatened and weak, embodied selves. But shift the lens away from the self-same human subject, and the image of a distributed, amorphous network of autonomous cells immediately becomes a very good description of how biological life has always been constituted. The metaphysical dualism of the sexes, as Kelly Hurley concludes, is an inadequate paradigm of such horrific embodiment, rather any and all ‘ontological security’ [11] is challenged through a ‘collapsing of multiple and incompatible morphic possibilities into one amorphous embodiment.’ [12] The Thing is neither male nor female, two nor one, inside nor outside, living nor dead. If it does settle into a form that can be exclaimed, screamed or defined in mutually incompatible words, it does so only for a moment and only in the mind of its onlooker as they scrabble to deduce its next amorphous conflation. The Thing is a figure performing ontogenesis (something coming to be) rather than ontology (something that already is). [13] ‘The very definition of the real,’ as Jean Baudrillard affirmed, has become ‘that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction.’ [14] Does The Thing ‘produce’ something other than human life, or ‘reproduce’ human life in its entirety, and what, if anything, would be the difference? In a text on bio and necropolitics, Eugene Thacker undertakes an examination of the ‘difference between “Life” as an ontological foundation, and “the living,” or the various specific instantiations of Life.’ [15] Thacker highlights a passage in Poetics where Aristotle speaks of mimesis giving rise to the art of poetry in human beings: We take delight in viewing the most accurate possible images of objects which in themselves cause distress when we see them (e.g. the shapes of the lowest species of animal, and corpses). Recognition of mimetic forms can instill a certain degree of displeasure if that form depicts a carcass or something considered equally abhorrent. But this is often tinged with what Aristotle calls the ‘extremely pleasurable’ dual capacities of recognising an imitation as such, whilst at the same time recognising what it is the form is imitative of. The horror of The Thing is bound to this endless ontogenetic re-forming, its limitless capacity to imitate and become without necessarily settling into a final, stable and agreeable categorical – that is, ontological – form. The men of the Antarctic encampment grasp in their minds at the forms ushering from The Thing but can never keep up with its propensity toward the next shapeless-shape, bodiless-limb, or ontogenetic-extrudence. The Thing is a phenomenon, to use Eugene Thacker’s words once more, that is ‘at once “above” and “below” the scale of the human being,’ [16] throwing, as Rosi Braidotti puts it, ‘a terminal challenge towards a human identity that is commonly predicated on the One.’ [17] The ‘other’ of The Thing never settles down, always falling outside the dialectical circle. As Helene Cixous remarks in The Newly Born Woman, with the ‘truly “other” there is nothing to say; it cannot be theorized. The “other” escapes me.’ [18] The figure of The Thing bursts into popular culture at the meeting point between dream and flesh, and has been pursued ever since by men whose individuality is considered inseparable from their self-same embodiment. By modifying the rules through which dominant norms such as gender binaries operate, The Thing can be conceived as an incarnation of détournement: an intervention that hijacks and continually modifies the rules of engagement. ‘The radical implication [being] that [all] meaning is connected to a relationship with power.’ [19] Considered through Michel Foucault’s definition of bio-power, or the bio-political, The Thing is the process of sex and sexuality severed from the humans who are forced to proliferate ‘through’ it. Above all, the men set against this propagation – this mobilisation of images of ‘other’ – scramble to protect the normative image of the human they hold most dear: the mirage of ‘man’. Becoming World The filmic Thing is a fictional device enabled by animatronic augmentations coated with fleshy stand-ins, KY Jelly, and occasionally, real animal offal. As John Carpenter described his rendition of the creature in a 2014 interview, ‘It’s just a bunch of rubber on the floor.’ [20] Bringing The Thing ‘to life’ is an activity that performs the collapse ‘between “Life” as an ontological foundation, and “the living,” or the various specific instantiations of Life.’ [21] The animatronic Thing exists in the space between stable forms; it is vibrant, expressive technology realised by dead matter; and human ingenuity made discernible by uncanny machinic novelty. Ontological uncertainty finds fluidity in language on a page, in the ability to poetically gesture towards interstitiality. But on-screen animatronics, rubber, and KY Jelly are less fluid, more mimetically rooted by the expectations of the audience reveling in, and reviled by, their recognition of The Thing’s many forms. Upon its release critical reactions to John Carpenter’s The Thing were at best muted and at worst downright vitriolic. The special effects used to depict the creature were the focus of an attack by Steve Jenkins’. Jenkins attacks the film essentially for its surrealist nature… he writes that: “with regard to the effects, they completely fail to ‘clarify the weirdness’ of the Thing”, and that “because one is ever sure exactly how it [the alien] functions, its eruptions from the shells of its victims seem as arbitrary as they are spectacular’.” [22] In short, the reviews lingered on two opposing readings of The Thing’s shock/gore evocations: that they go too far and thus tend towards sensational fetishism, or that they can’t go far enough, depicting kitsch sensibilities rather than alien otherness. Jenkins’ concern that the special effects do not ‘clarify’ The Thing’s ‘weirdness’ is contradictory, if not oxymoronic. The implication is that Things could never be so weird as to defy logical function, and that all expressions should, and eventually do, lend themselves to being read through some parochial mechanism or other, however surreal they may at first seem. That The Thing’s nature could actually defy comprehensibility is not considered, nor how impossible the cinematic depiction of that defiance might be. Rather, the critical view seems to be that every grisly eruption, bifurcation, and horrific permutation on screen must necessarily express an inner order temporarily hidden from, but not inaccessible to, its human onlookers. This critical desire for a ‘norm’ defies the same critical desire for ‘true’ horror. Our will to master matter and technology through imitative forms is the same will that balks at the idea that imitative forms could have ontologies incommensurable with our own. The Thing is ‘weird’: a term increasingly applied to those things defying categorisation. A conviction, so wrote the late Mark Fisher, ‘that this does not belong, is often a sign that we are in the presence of the new… that the concepts and frameworks which we have previously employed are now obsolete.’ [23] In reflecting on the origins of this slippery anti-category, Eugene Thacker reminds us that within horror, ‘The threat is not the monster, or that which threatens existing categories of knowledge. Rather, it is the “nameless thing,” or that which presents itself as a horizon for thought… the weird is the discovery of an unhuman limit to thought, that is nevertheless foundational for thought.’ [24] In The Thing the world rises up to meet its male inhabitants in a weird form and, by becoming them, throws into question the categorical foundations of the born and the made, of subject and object, natural and synthetic, whole and part, human and world, original and imitation. What remains is an ongoing process of animation rendered horrific by a bifurcation of ontologies: on one side the supposed human foundation of distinction, uniqueness and autonomy; on the other, a Thingly (alien and weird) propensity that dissolves differentiation, that coalesces and revels in an endless process of becoming.  As in Mikhail Bakhtin‘s study of the grotesque, the ‘human horizon’ in question is that of the ‘canon,’ [25] a norm to which all aberrations are to be compared: The grotesque body… is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body. Moreover, the body swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world. [26] The Thingly is neither self-same nor enclosed unto itself. It is a plethora of openings, conjoinings and eruptions that declare ‘the world as eternally unfinished: a world dying and being born at the same time.’ [27] The bodily horror performed by The Thing is an allegory of this greater interstitial violation: the conceptual boundary between the world-for-us and the world-without-us is breached not as destruction, or even invasion, but ultimately through our inability to separate ourselves from a world that is already inherently alien and weird. [28] ‘A monstrosity’ to hijack the words of Claire Colebrook, ‘that we do not feel, live, or determine, but rather witness partially and ex post facto.’ [29] How these processes are comprehended, or more precisely, how the perception of these processes is interpreted, is more important than the so called ‘difference’ between the world which existed before and the world which remains after. Eugene Thacker clarifies this point in his analysis of the etymology of the word ‘monster’: A monster is never just a monster, never just a physical or biological anomaly. It is always accompanied by an interpretive framework within which the monster is able to be monstrum, literally “to show” or “to warn.” Monsters are always a mat­ter of interpretation. [30] Becoming Weird In a 1982 New York Times movie section, critic Vincent Canby poured yet more scorn on John Carpenter’s ‘Thing’ remake: The Thing is a foolish, depressing, overproduced movie that mixes horror with science fiction to make something that is fun as neither one thing or the other… There may be a metaphor in all this, but I doubt it… The Thing… is too phony looking to be disgusting. It qualifies only as instant junk. [31] Chiming with his critic peers, Canby expresses his desire that the monster show its nature – be monstrum – only in respect of some ‘norm’; [32] some ‘interpretive framework’, [33] that the narrative will eventually uncover. By setting up ‘junk’ as a kitschy opposite to this supposedly palatable logic, Canby unwittingly generates a point from which to disrupt the very notion of the interpretive framework itself. The Thing is more than a metaphor. Canby’s appeal to ‘instant junk’ can be read as the monstrum, the revealing of that which constitutes the norm. The monster stands in for difference, for other, and in so doing normalises the subject position from which the difference is opposed: the canon. In the case of The Thing that canon is first and foremost the human male, standing astride the idea of a world-for-us. The ‘us’ is itself monopolised, as if all non-male ontogenetic permutations were cast out into the abject abyss of alien weirdness. In reclaiming ‘junk’ as a ‘register of the unrepresentable’ [34] a Thingly discourse may share many of the tenets of queer theory. As Rosi Braidotti makes clear, referring to the work of Camilla Griggers: ‘Queer’ is no longer the noun that marks an identity they taught us to despise, but it has become a verb that destabilizes any claim to identity, even and especially to a sex-specific identity. [35] The queer, the weird, the kitsch, are among the most powerful of orders because they are inherently un-representable and in flux. The rigid delineations of language and cultural heteronormativity are further joined in the figure of The Thing by a non-anthropic imaginary that exposes a whole range of human norms and sets into play a seemingly infinite variety of non-human modes of being and embodiment. Rosi Braidotti refers to the work of Georges Canguilhem in her further turn outwards towards the weird, ‘normality is, after all, the zero-degree of monstrosity,’ [36] signalling a post-human discourse as one which, by definition, must continually question – perhaps even threaten – the male, self-same, canonised, subject position: We need to learn to think of the anomalous, the monstrously different not as a sign of pejoration but as the unfolding of virtual possibilities that point to positive alternatives for us all… the human is now displaced in the direction of a glittering range of post-human variables. [37] In her book on The Death of The Posthuman (2014), Claire Colebrook looks to the otherwise, the un-representable, to destabilise the proposition of a world being for anyone. She begins by considering the proposed naming of the current geological era ‘The Anthropocene,’ [38] a term that designates a theoretical as well as scientific impasse for human beings and civilisation, in which human activity and technological development have begun to become indistinguishable, and/or exceed processes implicit within what is considered to be the ‘natural’ world. As if registering the inevitable extinction of humans isn’t enough, The Anthropocene, by being named in honour of humans, makes monsters of those times – past and present – which do not contain humans. Its naming therefore becomes a mechanism allowing the imagination of ‘a viewing or reading in the absence of viewers or readers, and we do this through images in the present that extinguish the dominance of the present.’ [39] The world ‘without bodies’ that is imaged in this move, Colebrook argues, is written upon by the current state of impending extinction. Humans are then able to look upon the future world-without-us in a state of nostalgia coloured by their inevitable absence. Here the tenets of the horror genre indicated by Eugene Thacker are realised as a feature of a present condition. The world-in-itself has already been subsumed by The Thingly horror that is the human species. For even the coming world-without-us, a planet made barren and utterly replaced by The Thingly junk of human civilisation, will have written within its geological record a mark of human activity that goes back well before the human species had considered itself as a Thing ‘in’ any world at all. In an analysis of the etymology of the Anthropocene, McKenzie Wark also turns to theory as a necessary condition of the age of extinction: All of the interesting and useful movements in the humanities since the late twentieth century have critiqued and dissented from the theologies of the human. The Anthropocene, by contrast, calls for thinking something that is not even defeat. [40] The Anthropocene, like ‘queer’ or ‘weird’, should be made into a verb, and relinquished as a noun. Once weirded in this way it becomes a productive proposition, Wark goes on, quoting Donna Haraway, ‘another figure, a thousand names of something else.’ [41] In the 2014 lecture quoted by Wark, Haraway called for other such worldings through the horrific figure of capitalism, through arachnids spinning their silk from the waste matter of the underworld, or from the terrible nightmares evoked in the fiction of the misogynist, racist mid 20th century author H.P. Lovecraft: The activation of the chthonic powers that is within our grasp to collect up the trash of the anthropocene, and the exterminism of the capitalocene, to something that might possibly have a chance of ongoing. [42] That weird, ongoing epoch is the Chthulucene, a monstrum ‘defined by the frightening weirdness of being impossibly bound up with other organisms,’ [43] of what Haraway calls, ‘multi-species muddles.’  [44] The horror of ‘the nameless thing’ is here finally brought to bear in Haraway’s Capitalocene and Chthulucene epochs. Haraway’s call for ‘a thousand names of something else’ is Thingly in its push towards the endlessly bifurcated naming, and theoretical subsuming. The anthro-normalisation casts out infinitely more possibilities than it brings into play. Although Donna Haraway makes it clear that her Chthulucene is not directly derivative of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, her intentional mis-naming and slippery non-identification exemplifies the kind of amorphous thinking and practice she is arguing for. Haraway’s Chthulucene counters Lovecraft’s Cthulhu with an array of chthonic, non-male, tentacular, rhizomatic, and web spinning figures that attest to the monstrum still exposed by Lovecraft’s three quarters of a century old work. The continued – renewed – fascination with Lovecraft’s weird ‘others’ thus has the capacity to expose a dread of these times. As writer Alan Moore has attested: [I]t is possible to perceive Howard Lovecraft as an almost unbearably sensitive barometer of American dread. Far from outlandish eccentricities, the fears that generated Lovecraft’s stories and opinions were precisely those of the white, middle-class, heterosexual, Protestant-descended males who were most threatened by the shifting power relationships and values of the modern world… Coded in an alphabet of monsters, Lovecraft’s writings offer a potential key to understanding our current dilemma, although crucial to this is that they are understood in the full context of the place and times from which they blossomed. [45] The dominant humanistic imagination may no longer posit white cis-males as the figure that ‘must’ endure, but other uncontested figures remain in the space apparently excavated of Lovecraft’s affinities. To abandon what Claire Colebrook calls ‘the fantasy of one’s endurance,’ may be to concede that the post-human is founded on ‘the contingent, fragile, insecure, and ephemeral.’ [46] But, as Drucilla Cornell and Stephen D. Seely suggest, it is dangerous to consider this a ‘new’ refined status for the beings that remain, since ‘this sounds not like the imagination of living beyond Man, but rather like a meticulous description of the lives of the majority of the world under the condition of advanced capitalism right now.’ [47] As Claire Colebrook warns, post-humanism often relinquishes its excluded others – women, the colonised, nonhuman animals, or ‘life itself’ [48] – by merely subtracting the previously dominant paradigm of white heteropatriarchy, whilst failing to confront the monster the that particular figure was indicative of: Humanism posits an elevated or exceptional ‘man’ to grant sense to existence, then when ‘man’ is negated or removed what is left is the human all too human tendency to see the world as one giant anthropomorphic self-organizing living body… When man is destroyed to yield a posthuman world it is the same world minus humans, a world of meaning, sociality and readability yet without any sense of the disjunction, gap or limits of the human. [49] As in Haraway and Wark’s call for not just ‘naming, but of doing, of making new kinds of labor for a new kind of nature,’ [50] contemporary criticism and theory must be allowed to take on the form of the monsters it pursues, moulding and transforming critical inquiries into composite, hybrid figures that never settle in one form lest they become stable, rigid, and normalised. In fact, this metaphor itself is conditioned too readily by the notion of a mastery ‘Man’ can wield. Rather, our inquiries must be encouraged ‘to monster’ separately, to blur and mutate beyond the human capacity to comprehend them, like the infinite variety of organisms Haraway insists the future opens into. The very image of a post-humanism must avoid normalising the monster, rendering it through analysis an expression of the world-for-us. For Eugene Thacker this is the power of the sci-fi-horror genre, to take ‘aim at the presuppositions of philosophical inquiry – that the world is always the world-for-us – and [make] of those blind spots its central concern, expressing them not in abstract concepts but in a whole bestiary of impossible life forms – mists, ooze, blobs, slime, clouds, and muck.’ [51] Reflecting on the work of Noël Carroll, [52] Rosi Braidotti argues that if science fiction horror ‘is based on the disturbance of cultural norms, it is then ideally placed to represent states of crisis and change and to express the widespread anxiety of our times. As such this genre is as unstoppable as the transformations it mirrors.’ [53]  

References [1] John Carpenter, The Thing, Film, Sci-Fi Horror (Universal Pictures, 1982). [2]  Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3. [3]  B. Creed, ‘Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection.’ Screen 27, no. 1 (1 January 1986): 44–71. [4]  Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Wiley, 2002), 192–94. [5]  Ian Conrich and David Woods, eds., The Cinema Of John Carpenter: The Technique Of Terror (Wallflower Press, 2004), 81. [6]  Julia Kristeva, quoted in Jackie Stacey, Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (Routledge, 2013), 89. [7]  The character McReady becomes MacReady in Carpenter’s 1982 retelling of the story. [8]  Campbell, Who Goes There?, 107. [9]  Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, Or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990). [10] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, New Ed (Harvard University Press, 2001), 299. [11] Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 195. [12] Kelly Hurley, ‘Reading like an Alien: Posthuman Identity in Ridley Scott’s Aliens and David Cronenberg’s Rabid,’ in Posthuman Bodies, ed. Judith M. Halberstam and Ira Livingston (Bloomington: John Wiley & Sons, 1996), 219. [13] This distinction was plucked, out of context, from Adrian MacKenzie, Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed (A&C Black, 2006), 17. MacKenzie is not talking about The Thing, but this distinction is, nonetheless, very useful in bridging the divide between stable being and endless becoming. [14] Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (Semiotext (e) New York, 1983), 146. [15] Eugene Thacker, ‘Nekros; Or, The Poetics Of Biopolitics,’ Incognitum Hactenus 3, no. Living On: Zombies (2012): 35. [16] Ibid., 29. [17] Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 195. [18] Hélène Cixous, The Newly Born Woman (University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 71. [19] Nato Thompson et al., eds., The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (North Adams, Mass. : Cambridge, Mass: MASS MoCA ; Distributed by the MIT Press, 2004), 151. [20] John Carpenter, BBC Web exclusive: Bringing The Thing to life, Invasion, Tomorrow’s Worlds: The Unearthly History of Science Fiction, 14 November 2014. [21] Thacker, ‘Nekros; Or, The Poetics Of Biopolitics,’ 35. [22] Ian Conrich and David Woods, eds., The Cinema Of John Carpenter: The Technique Of Terror (Wallflower Press, 2004), 96. [23] Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 2016, 13. [24] Eugene Thacker, After Life (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 23. [25] Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Indiana University Press, 1984), 321. [26] Ibid., 317. [27] Ibid., 166. [28] This sentence is a paraphrased, altered version of a similar line from Eugene Thacker, ‘Nine Disputations on Theology and Horror,’ Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development IV: 38. [29] Claire Colebrook, Sex After Life: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 2 (Open Humanities Press, 2014), 14. [30] Eugene Thacker, ‘The Sight of a Mangled Corpse—An Interview with’, Scapegoat Journal, no. 05: Excess (2013): 380. [31] Vincent Canby, ‘“The Thing” Is Phony and No Fun,’ The New York Times, 25 June 1982, sec. Movies. [32] Derrida, ‘Passages: From Traumatism to Promise,’ 385–86. [33] Thacker, ‘The Sight of a Mangled Corpse—An Interview with,’ 380. [34] Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 180. [35] Ibid. [36] Ibid., 174. [37] Rosi Braidotti, ‘Teratologies’, in Deleuze and Feminist Theory, ed. Claire Colebrook and Ian Buchanan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 172. [38] A term coined in the 1980s by ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer and widely popularized in the 2000s by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen. The Anthropocene is, according to Jan Zalasiewicz et al., ‘a distinctive phase of Earth’s evolution that satisfies geologist’s criteria for its recognition as a distinctive statigraphic unit.’ – Jan Zalasiewicz et al., ‘Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene,’ GSA Today 18, no. 2 (2008): 6. [39] Claire Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1 (Open Humanities Press, 2014), 28. [40] McKenzie Wark, ‘Anthropocene Futures’ Versobooks.com, 23 February 2015. [41] Ibid. [42] Donna Haraway, ‘Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble’ (University of California at Santa Cruz, 5 September 2014). [43] Leif Haven, ‘We’ve All Always Been Lichens: Donna Haraway, the Cthulhucene, and the Capitalocene,’ ENTROPY, 22 September 2014. [44] Donna Haraway, ‘SF: Sympoiesis, String Figures, Multispecies Muddles’ (University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, 24 March 2014). [45] H. P Lovecraft, The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, ed. Leslie S Klinger (Liveright, 2014), xiii. [46] Claire Colebrook, Sex After Life: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 2 (Open Humanities Press, 2014), 22. [47] Drucilla Cornell and Stephen D Seely, The Spirit of Revolution: Beyond the Dead Ends of Man (Polity press, 2016), 5. [48] Ibid., 3–4. [49] Claire Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1 (Open Humanities Press, 2014), 163–64. [50] Wark, ‘Anthropocene Futures.’ [51] Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, 9. [52]   Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, Or, Paradoxes of the Heart. [53]   Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 185 (my emphasis).

Barring some incredible new carbon capture technology, the window for limiting global warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius appears to have closed.

Suspicious emails: unclaimed insurance bonds, diamond-encrusted safe deposit boxes, close friends marooned in a foreign country. They pop up in our inboxes, and standard procedure is to delete on sight. But what happens when you reply? Follow along as writer and comedian James Veitch narrates a hilarious, months-long exchange with a spammer who offered to cut him in on a hot deal.

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I read a lot of content from articles/essays I save online. Sometimes I want to annotate these articles and organise them for research purposes. At the moment the best way to do this is Evernote, but I find the iPad / Android app clunky for reading and highlighting. The interface is designed for writing, and is a constant frustration. Are there any better solutions? Other 'solutions' I have tried:

Pocket: a fantastic service, I just wish they would add highlighting and notes!

Instapaper: offers a paid highlighting service. The app is great for reading, but for organising and extracting notes later it isn't good. Plus, the fee is too high.

Kindle: for a while I saved articles to Kindle for later highlighting. Is worked pretty well until I wanted to extract my notes, at which point I came up against the closed wall of the Amazon system.

Diigo: their online highlighting service is pretty fantastic, but the iPad app is just awful, and hardly works as it is supposed to.

Convert to pdf: I could convert everything I want to read/highlight to PDF and use an app like the fantastic PDF Expert to highlight and save. But this feels like too much hard work.

This is a question that has been asked before. But I am hoping that something new and extraordinary has come along!

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Charles Darwin and Alan Turing, in their different ways, both homed in on the same idea: the existence of competence without comprehension. Francis Crick and James Watson closed their epoch-making paper on the structure of DNA with a single deliciously diffident sentence.

For 3 years I have collaborated on a project with Kyoung Kim. Known as GLTI.CH Karaoke, or sometimes just GLTI.CH, we’ve plotted the course of accidents, of temporal lyrical disjoints and technical out-of-syncs through a wide variety of different mediums, spaces and social conditions. This week saw what feels like the climax of our experiments, a three day – 67 hour – installation at CRYSTALLIZE, an exhibition of new media art held alongside the 2013 Korea Brand & Entertainment Expo, at Old Billingsgate, London. GLTI.CH has played a significant part in my practice and thus my thinking over the last 3 years. Working with Kyoung has afforded me countless experiences and opportunities, and introduced me to the world of glitch, digital, net and new media arts and artists. The project is not over, but its Karaoke phase is drawing to a conclusion. I thought it would be a good time to republish this half-considered manifesto I wrote a while back. 15 Statements about Glti.ch Notworking What makes out today’s networking is the notworking. There would be no routing if there were no problems on the line. Spam, viruses and identity theft are not accidental mistakes, mishaps on the road to techno perfection. They are constitutional elements of yesterday’s network architectures. Lovink, Gert. (2005), “The Principle of Notworking Concepts in Critical Internet Culture,” p. 10 GLTI.CH Karaoke is not a hack or some fancy programming. It’s taking the front-end of things and trying to make something else. We’ve made the mishmashed world of GLTI.CH Karaoke through play and we hope you’ll sing with us. karaoke, glti.ch (2011), “WHAT IS GLTI.CH KARAOKE?”

Glti.ches are more than aesthetic revelations: as software crashes, or hardware halts to a stutter, the soft underbelly of the notwork is exposed. The trick is to see the glti.ch not as an abhorrence, but as a signal of noisy potential: error and noise are an implicit feature of digital materiality. What Gaston Bachelard called ‘Desire Paths’, physical etchings in our surroundings drawn by the thoughtless movement of (human) feet, also exist online. For those versed in the language of the glti.ch, desire equals subversion and the means of flight – a way to reverse the roles of power. The line of desire in these cases is often laid directly over the enclosed path. Being buffered along by the unruly torrents of technical failure, the true semblance of the glti.ch is impossible to pin down: notwork control mechanisms have desirable unintended effects. The kludge is a hands-on, makeshift solution, to an unpredictable technical or social problem: 100% of cargo cult coders, pirates, glti.ch artists and hackers started out as kludgers. Algorithms that churn your Google search, or offer you potential meta-data with which to imbricate your image collection into the logic of the database, have themselves become actors in the play of human relations. Digital formats as diverse as ePub, DivX, and GIF, and software platforms from the likes of Google, Microsoft or Apple, trace narrative arcs which are themselves transcodable relations. Interruption, stutters and breaks force us into encounters with the world, exposing the circuitry that we as consumers are expected to elude into the background. Digital copies, being copied, forever copying, exert an unruly behaviour that exposes the material world. The most astonishing thing about the notwork is how any order can be maintained in it at all. The more regulations imposed upon the notworks, the more interesting the resulting glti.ches will be in their variation/liberation. Human beings are material entities, buffered by the same stops and starts as the notwork. Participating in the glti.ch, in the artifact that exposes the failure, is to align oneself with material reality. The glti.ch is a social phenomenon.

Wow. It’s been a while since I updated my blog. I intend to get active again here soon, with regular updates on my research. For now, I thought it might be worth posting a text I’ve been mulling over for a while (!) Yesterday I came across this old TED presentation by Daniel Hillis, and it set off a bunch of bells tolling in my head. His book The Pattern on the Stone was one I leafed through a few months back whilst hunting for some analogies about (digital) materiality. The resulting brainstorm is what follows. (This blog post, from even longer ago, acts as a natural introduction: On (Text and) Exaptation) In the 1960s and 70s Roland Barthes named “The Text” as a network of production and exchange. Whereas “the work” was concrete, final – analogous to a material – “the text” was more like a flow, a field or event – open ended. Perhaps even infinite. In, From Work to Text, Barthes wrote: The metaphor of the Text is that of the network… (Barthes 1979) This semiotic approach to discourse, by initiating the move from print culture to “text” culture, also helped lay the ground for a contemporary politics of content-driven media. Skipping backwards through From Work to Text, we find this statement: The text must not be understood as a computable object. It would be futile to attempt a material separation of works from texts. I am struck here by Barthes” use of the phrase “computable object”, as well as his attention to the “material”. Katherine Hayles in her essay, Text is Flat, Code is Deep, (Hayles 2004) teases out the statement for us: ‘computable’ here mean[s] to be limited, finite, bound, able to be reckoned. Written twenty years before the advent of the microcomputer, his essay stands in the ironic position of anticipating what it cannot anticipate. It calls for a movement away from works to texts, a movement so successful that the ubiquitous ‘text’ has all but driven out the media-specific term book. Hayles notes that the “ubiquity” of Barthes” term “Text” allowed – in its wake – an erasure of media-specific terms, such as “book”. In moving from, The Work to The Text, we move not just between different politics of exchange and dissemination, we also move between different forms and materialities of mediation. (Manovich 2002)For Barthes the material work was computable, whereas the network of the text – its content – was not.

In 1936, the year that Alan Turing wrote his iconic paper ‘On Computable Numbers’, a German engineer by the name of Konrad Zuse built the first working digital computer. Like its industrial predecessors, Zuse’s computer was designed to function via a series of holes encoding its program. Born as much out of convenience as financial necessity, Zuse punched his programs directly into discarded reels of 35mm film-stock. Fused together by the technologies of weaving and cinema, Zuse’s computer announced the birth of an entirely new mode of textuality. The Z3, the world’s first working programmable, fully automatic computer, arrived in 1941. (Manovich 2002) A year earlier a young graduate by the name of Claude Shannon had published one of the most important Masters theses in history. In it he demonstrated that any logical expression of Boolean algebra could be programmed into a series of binary switches. Today computers still function with a logic impossible to distinguish from their mid-20th century ancestors. What has changed is the material environment within which Boolean expressions are implemented. Shannon’s work first found itself manifest in the fragile rows of vacuum tubes that drove much of the technical innovation of the 40s and 50s. In time, the very same Boolean expressions were firing, domino-like, through millions of transistors etched onto the surface of silicon chips. If we were to query the young Shannon today, he might well gawp in amazement at the material advances computer technology has gone through. But, if Shannon was to examine either your digital wrist watch or the world’s most advanced supercomputer in detail, he would once again feel at home in the simple binary – on/off – switches lining those silicon highways. Here the difference between how computers are implemented and what computers are made of digs the first of many potholes along our journey. We live in an era not only practically driven by the computer, but an era increasingly determined by the metaphors computers have injected into our language. Let us not make the mistake of presupposing that brains (or perhaps minds) are “like” computers. Tempting though it is to reduce the baffling complexities of the human being to the functions of the silicon chip, the parallel processor or Wide Area Network this reduction occurs most usefully at the level of metaphor and metonym. Again the mantra must be repeated that computers function through the application of Boolean logic and binary switches, something that can not be said about the human brain with any confidence a posteriori. Later I will explore the consequences on our own understanding of ourselves enabled by the processing paradigm, but for now, or at least the next few paragraphs, computers are to be considered in terms of their rigid implementation and flexible materiality alone. At the beginning of his popular science book, The Pattern on the Stone, (Hillis 1999) W.  Daniel Hillis narrates one of his many tales on the design and construction of a computer. Built from tinker-toys the computer in question was/is functionally complex enough to “play” tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses). The tinker-toy was chosen to indicate the apparent simplicity of computer design, but as Hillis argues himself, he may very well have used pipes and valves to create a hydraulic computer, driven by water pressure, or stripped the design back completely, using flowing sand, twigs and twine or any other recipe of switches and connectors. The important point is that the tinker-toy tic-tac-toe computer functions perfectly well for the task it is designed for, perfectly well, that is, until the tinker-toy material begins to fail. This failure is what Chapter 1 of this thesis is about: why it happens, why its happening is a material phenomenon and how the very idea of “failure” is suspect. Tinker-toys fail because the mechanical operation of the tic-tac-toe computer puts strain on the strings of the mechanism, eventually stretching them beyond practical use. In a perfect world, devoid of entropic behaviour, the tinker-toy computer may very well function forever, its users setting O or X conditions, and the computer responding according to its program in perfect, logical order. The design of the machine, at the level of the program, is completely closed; finished; perfect. Only materially does the computer fail (or flail), noise leaking into the system until inevitable chaos ensues and the tinker-toys crumble back into jumbles of featureless matter. This apparent closure is important to note at this stage because in a computer as simple as the tic-tac-toe machine, every variable can be accounted for and thus programmed for. Were we to build a chess playing computer from tinker-toys (pretending we could get our hands on the, no doubt, millions of tinker-toy sets we”d need) the closed condition of the computer may be less simple to qualify. Tinker-toys, hydraulic valves or whatever material you choose, could be manipulated into any computer system you can imagine, even the most brain numbingly complicated IBM supercomputer is technically possible to build from these fundamental materials. The reason we don”t do this, why we instead choose etched silicon as our material of choice for our supercomputers, exposes another aspect of computers we need to understand before their failure becomes a useful paradigm. A chess playing computer is probably impossible to build from tinker-toys, not because its program would be too complicated, but because tinker-toys are too prone to entropy to create a valid material environment. The program of any chess playing application could, theoretically, be translated into a tinker-toy equivalent, but after the 1,000th string had stretched, with millions more to go, no energy would be left in the system to trigger the next switch along the chain. Computer inputs and outputs are always at the mercy of this kind of entropy: whether in tinker-toys or miniature silicon highways. Noise and dissipation are inevitable at any material scale one cares to examine. The second law of thermo dynamics ensures this. Claude Shannon and his ilk knew this, even back when the most advanced computers they had at their command couldn”t yet play tic-tac-toe. They knew that they couldn”t rely on materiality to delimit noise, interference or distortion; that no matter how well constructed a computer is, no matter how incredible it was at materially stemming entropy (perhaps with stronger string connectors, or a built in de-stretching mechanism), entropy nonetheless was inevitable. But what Shannon and other computer innovators such as Alan Turing also knew, is that their saviour lay in how computers were implemented. Again, the split here is incredibly important to note:

Flexible materiality: How and of what a computer is constructed e.g. tinker-toys, silicon Rigid implementation: Boolean logic enacted through binary on/off switches (usually with some kind of input à storage à feedback/program function à output). Effectively, how a computer works

Boolean logic was not enough on its own. Computers, if they were to avoid entropy ruining their logical operations, needed to have built within them an error management protocol. This protocol is still in existence in EVERY computer in the world. Effectively it takes the form of a collection of parity bits delivered alongside each packet of data that computers, networks and software deal with. The bulk of data contains the binary bits encoding the intended quarry, but the receiving element in the system also checks the main bits alongside the parity bits to determine whether any noise has crept into the system. What is crucial to note here is the error-checking of computers happens at the level of their rigid implementation. It is also worth noting that for every eight 0s and 1s delivered by a computer system, at least one of those bits is an error checking function. W. Daniel Hillis puts the stretched strings of his tinker-toy mechanism into clear distinction and in doing so, re-introduces an umbrella term set to dominate this chapter: I constructed a later version of the Tinker Toy computer which fixed the problem, but I never forgot the lesson of the first machine: the implementation technology must produce perfect outputs from imperfect inputs, nipping small errors in the bud. This is the essence of digital technology, which restores signals to near perfection at every stage. It is the only way we know – at least, so far – for keeping a complicated system under control. (Hillis 1999, 18)   Bibliography  Barthes, Roland. 1979. ‘From Work to Text.’ In Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Poststructuralist Criticism, ed. Josue V. Harari, 73–81. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2004. ‘Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.’ Poetics Today 25 (1) (March): 67–90. doi:10.1215/03335372-25-1-67. Hillis, W. 1999. The Pattern on the Stone : the Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work. 1st paperback ed. New York: Basic Books. Manovich, Lev. 2002. The Language of New Media. 1st MIT Press pbk. ed. Cambridge  Mass.: MIT Press.      

http://www.ted.com From deep in the TED archive, Danny Hillis outlines an intriguing theory of how and why technological change seems to be accelerating, by linking it to the very evolution of life itself. The presentation techniques he uses may look dated, but the ideas are as relevant as ever.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate

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This mini-paper was given at the Escapologies symposium, at Goldsmiths University, on the 5th of December Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe centres on the shipwreck and isolation of its protagonist. The life Crusoe knew beyond this shore was fashioned by Ships sent to conquer New Worlds and political wills built on slavery and imperial demands. In writing about his experiences, Crusoe orders his journal, not by the passing of time, but by the objects produced in his labour. A microcosm of the market hierarchies his seclusion removes him from: a tame herd of goats, a musket and gunpowder, sheafs of wheat he fashions into bread, and a shelter carved from rock with all the trappings of a King’s castle. Crusoe structures the tedium of the island by gathering and designing these items that exist solely for their use-value: “In a Word, The Nature and Experience of Things dictated to me upon just Reflection, That all the good Things of this World, are no farther good to us, than they are for our Use…” [1] Although Crusoe’s Kingdom mirrors the imperial British order, its mirroring is more structural than anything else. The objects and social contrivances Crusoe creates have no outside with which to be exchanged. Without an ‘other’ to share your labour there can be no mutual assurance, no exchanges leading to financial agreements, no business partners, no friendships. But most importantly to the mirroring of any Kingdom, without an ‘other’ there can be no disagreements, no coveting of a neighbours ox, no domination, no war: in short, an Empire without an outside might be complete, total, final, but an Empire without an outside has also reached a state of complete inertia. Crusoe’s Empire of one subject, is what I understand as “a closed system”… The 2nd law of thermo dynamics maintains that without an external source of energy, all closed systems will tend towards a condition of inactivity. Eventually, the bacteria in the petri dish will multiply, eating up all the nutrients until a final state of equilibrium is reached, at which point the system will collapse in on itself: entropy cannot be avoided indefinitely. The term ‘negative entropy’ is often applied to living organisms because they seem to be able to ‘beat’ the process of entropy, but this is as much an illusion as the illusion of Crusoe’s Kingdom: negative entropy occurs at small scales, over small periods of time. Entropy is highly probable: the order of living beings is not. Umberto Eco: “Consider, for example, the chaotic effect… of a strong wind on the innumerable grains of sand that compose a beach: amid this confusion, the action of a human foot on the surface of the beach constitutes a complex interaction of events that leads to the statistically very improbable configuration of a footprint.” [2] The footprint in Eco’s example is a negative entropy event: the system of shifting sands is lent a temporary order by the cohesive action of the human foot. In physical terms, the footprint stands as a memory of the foot’s impression. The 2nd law of thermodynamics establishes a relationship between entropy and information: memory remains as long as its mark. Given time, the noisy wind and chaotic waves will cause even the strongest footprint to fade. A footprint is a highly improbable event. Before you read on, watch this scene from Luis Buñuel’s Robinson Crusoe (1954):

The footprint, when it first appears on the island, terrifies Crusoe as a mark of the outsider, but soon, realising what this outsider might mean for the totality of his Kingdom, Robinson begins the process of pulling the mark inside his conceptions: “Sometimes I fancied it must be the Devil; and reason joined in with me upon this supposition. For how should any other thing in human shape come into the place? Where was the vessel that brought them? What marks were there of any other footsteps? And how was it possible a man should come there?” [3] In the novel, it is only on the third day that Crusoe re-visits the site to compare his own foot with the print. The footprint is still there on the beach after all this time, a footprint Crusoe now admits is definitely not his own. This chain of events affords us several allegorical tools: firstly, that of the Devil, Crusoe believes to be the only rational explanation for the print. This land, which has been Crusoe’s own for almost 2 decades, is solid, unchanging and eternal. Nothing comes in nor goes beyond its shores, yet its abundance of riches have served Crusoe perfectly well: seemingly infinite riches for a Kingdom’s only inhabitant. Even the footprint, left for several days, remains upon Crusoe’s return. Like the novel of which it is a part, the reader of the mark may revisit the site of this unlikely incident again and again, each time drawing more meanings from its appearance. Before Crusoe entertains that the footprint might be that of “savages of the mainland” he eagerly believes it to be Satan’s, placed there deliberately to fool him. Crusoe revisits the footprint, in person and then, as it fades, in his own memory. He ‘reads’ the island, attributing meanings to marks he discovers that go far beyond what is apparent. As Susan Stewart has noted: “In allegory the vision of the reader is larger than the vision of the text; the reader dreams to an excess, to an overabundance.” [4] Simon O’Sullivan, following from Deleuze, takes this further, arguing that in his isolation, a world free from ‘others’, Crusoe has merged with, become the island. The footprint is a mark that must be recuperated if Crusoe’s identity, his “power of will”, is to be maintained. An outsider must have caused the footprint, but Crusoe is only capable of reading in the mark something about himself. The evocation of a Demon, then, is Crusoe’s way of re-totalising his Empire, of removing the ‘other’ from his self-subjective identification with the island. So, how does this relate to thermodynamics? To answer that I will need to tell the tale of a second Demon, more playful even than Crusoe’s. In his 1871 essay, Theory of Heat, James Clerk Maxwell designed a thought experiment to test the 2nd law of Thermodynamics. Maxwell imagines a microscopic being able to sort atoms bouncing around a closed system into two categories: fast and slow. If such a creature did exist, it was argued, no work would be required to decrease the entropy of a closed system. By sorting unlikely footprints from the chaotic arrangement of sand particles Maxwell’s Demon, as it would later become known, appeared to contradict the law Maxwell himself had helped to develop. One method of solving the apparent paradox was devised by Charles H. Bennet, who recognised that the Demon would have to remember where he placed the fast and slow particles. Here, once again, the balance between the order and disorder of a system comes down to the balance between memory and information. As the demon decreases the entropy of its environment, so it must increase the entropy of its memory. The information required by the Demon acts like a noise in the system. The laws of physics had stood up under scrutiny, resulting in a new branch of science we now know as ‘Information Theory’. Maxwell’s Demon comes from an old view of the universe, “fashioned by divine intervention, created for man and responsive to his will” [5]. Information Theory represents a threshold, a revelation that the “inhuman force of increasing entropy, [is] indifferent to man and uncontrollable by human will.” [6] Maxwell’s Demon shows that the law of entropy has only a statistical certainty, that nature orders only on small scales and, that despite any will to control, inertia will eventually be reached. Developed at the peak of the British Empire, thermodynamics was sometimes called “the science of imperialism”, as Katherine Hayles has noted: “…to thermodynamicists, entropy represented the tendency of the universe to run down, despite the best efforts of British rectitude to prevent it from doing so… The rhetoric of imperialism confronts the inevitability of failure. In this context, entropy represents an apparently inescapable limit on the human will to control.” [7] Like Maxwell, Crusoe posits a Demon, with faculties similar in kind to his own, to help him quash his “terror of mind”. Crusoe’s fear is not really about outsiders coming in, the terror he feels comes from the realisation that the outsiders may have been here all along, that in all the 20 years of his isolation those “savages of the mainland” may have visited his island time and again. It is not an outside ‘other’ that disturbs and reorganises Crusoe’s Kingdom. A more perverse logic is at work here, and once again Crusoe will have to restructure his imperial order from the inside out. Before you read on, watch another scene from Luis Buñuel’s Robinson Crusoe (1954):

Jacques Rancière prepares for us a parable. A student who is illiterate, after living a fulfilled life without text, one day decides to teach herself to read. Luckily she knows a single poem by heart and procures a copy of that poem, presumably from a trusted source, by which to work. By comparing her memory of the poem, sign by sign, word by word, with the text of the poem she can, Rancière believes, finally piece together a foundational understanding of her written language: “From this ignoramus, spelling out signs, to the scientist who constructs hypotheses, the same intelligence is always at work – an intelligence that translates signs into other signs and proceeds by comparisons and illustrations in order to communicate its intellectual adventures and understand what another intelligence is endeavouring to communicate to it… This poetic labour of translation is at the heart of all learning.” [8] What interests me in Rancière’s example is not so much the act of translation as the possibility of mis-translation. Taken in light of The Ignorant Schoolmaster we can assume that Rancière is aware of the wide gap that exists between knowing something and knowing enough about something for it to be valuable. How does one calculate the value of what is a mistake? The ignoramus has an autonomy, but it is effectively blind to the quality and make-up of the information she parses. If she makes a mistake in her translation of the poem, this mistake can be one of two things: it can be a blind error, or, it can be a mutation. In information theory, the two ways to understand change within a closed system are understood to be the product of ‘noise’. The amount of change contributed by noise is called ‘equivocation’. If noise contributes to the reorganisation of a system in a beneficial way, for instance if a genetic mutation in an organism results in the emergence of an adaptive trait, then the equivocation is said to be ‘autonomy-producing’. Too much noise is equivalent to too much information, a ‘destructive’ equivocation, leading to chaos. This balance is how evolution functions. An ‘autonomy-producing’ mutation will be blindly passed on to an organism’s offspring, catalysing the self-organisation of the larger system (in this case, the species). All complex, what are called ‘autopoietic’ systems, inhabit this fine divide between noise and inertia.  Given just the right balance of noise recuperated by the system, and noise filtered out by the system, a state of productive change can be maintained, and a state of inertia can be avoided, at least, for a limited time. According to Umberto Eco, in ‘The Open Work’: “To be sure, this word information in communication theory relates not so much to what you do say, as to what you could say… In the end… there is no real difference between noise and signal, except in intent.” [9] This rigid delineator of intent is the driving force of our contemporary, communication paradigm. Information networks underpin our economic, political and social interactions: the failure to communicate is to be avoided at all costs. All noise is therefore seen as a problem. These processes, according to W. Daniel Hillis, define, “the essence of digital technology, which restores signal to near perfection at every stage.” [10] To go back to Umberto Eco then, we appear to be living in a world of “do say” rather than “could say”. Maintenance of the network and the routines of error management are our primary economic and political concern: control the networks and the immaterial products will manage themselves. The modern network paradigm acts like a Maxwell Demon, categorising information as either pure signal or pure noise. As Mark Nunes has noted, following the work of Deleuze and Guattari: “This forced binary imposes a kind of violence, one that demands a rationalisation of all singularities of expressions within a totalising system… The violence of information is, then, the violence of silencing or making to speak that which cannot communicate.” [11] To understand the violence of this binary logic, we need go no further than Robinson Crusoe. Friday’s questions are plain spoken, but do not adhere to the “do say” logic of Crusoe’s conception. In the novel, Crusoe’s approach to Friday becomes increasingly one sided, until Friday utters little more than ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers, “reducing his language to a pure function of immediate context and perpetuating a much larger imperialist tradition of levelling the vox populi.”[12] Any chance in what Friday “could say” has been violently obliterated. The logic of Ranciere’s Ignoramous, and of Crusoe’s levelling of Friday’s speech, are logics of imperialism: reducing the possibility of noise and information to an either/or, inside/outside, relationship. Mark Nunes again: “This balance between total flow and total control parallels Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of a regime of signs in which anything that resists systematic incorporation is cast out as an asignifying scapegoat “condemned as that which exceeds the signifying regime’s power of deterritorialisation.” [13] In the system of communication these “asignifying” events are not errors, in the common sense of the word. Mutation names a randomness that redraws the territory of complex systems. The footprint is the mark that reorganised the Empire. In Ranciere’s parable, rather than note her intent to decode the poem, we should hail the moment when the Ignoramus fails, as her autonomous moment. In a world where actants “translate signs into other signs and proceed by comparison and illustration” [14] the figures of information and communication are made distinct not by the caprice of those who control the networks, nor the desires of those who send and receive the messages, but by mutation itself. Michel Foucault, remarking on the work of Georges Canguilhem, drew the conclusion that the very possibility of mutation, rather than existing in opposition to our will, was what human autonomy was predicated upon: “In this sense, life – and this is its radical feature – is that which is capable of error… Further, it must be questioned in regard to that singular but hereditary error which explains the fact that, with man, life has led to a living being that is never completely in the right place, that is destined to ‘err’ and to be ‘wrong’.” [15] In his writings on the history of Heredity, The Logic of Life, Francois Jacob lingers on another Demon in the details, fashioned by Rene Descartes in his infamous meditation on human knowledge. François Jacob positions Descartes’ meditation in a period of explosive critical thought focussed on the very ontology of ‘nature’: “For with the arrival of the 17th Century, the very nature of knowledge was transformed. Until then, knowledge had been grafted on God, the soul and the cosmos… What counted [now] was not so much the code used by God for creating nature as that sought by man for understanding it.” [16] The infinite power of God’s will was no longer able to bend nature to any whim. If man were to decipher nature, to reveal its order, Descartes surmised, it was with the assurance that “the grid will not change in the course of the operation”[17]. For Descartes, the evil Demon, is a metaphor for deception espoused on the understanding that underlying that deception, nature had a certainty. God may well have given the world its original impetus, have designed its original make-up, but that make-up could not be changed. The network economy has today become the grid of operations onto which we map the world. Its binary restrictions predicate a logic of minimal error and maximum performance: a regime of control that drives our economic, political and social interdependencies. Trapped within his imperial logic, Robinson Crusoe’s levelling of inside and outside, his ruthless tidying of Friday’s noisy speech into a binary dialectic, disguises a higher order of reorganisation. As readers navigating the narrative we are keen to recognise the social changes Defoe’s novel embodies in its short-sighted central character. Perhaps, though, the most productive way to read this fiction, is to allegorise it as an outside perspective on our own time? Gathering together the fruits of research, I am often struck by the serendipitous quality of so many discoveries. In writing this mini-paper I have found it useful to engage with these marks, that become like demonic footprints, mutations in my thinking. Comparing each side by side, I hope to find, in the words of Michel Foucault: “…a way from the visible mark to that which is being said by it and which, without that mark, would lie like unspoken speech, dormant within things.” [18]    

References & Bibliography [1] Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Penguin classics (London: Penguin Books, 2001).

[2] Umberto Eco, The open work (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, n.d.).

[3] Defoe, Robinson Crusoe.

[4] Susan Stewart, On longing: narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection (Duke University Press, 1993).

[5] N. Katherine Hayles, “Maxwell’s Demon and Shannon’s Choice,” in Chaos bound: orderly disorder in contemporary literature and science (Cornell University Press, 1990).

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Jacques Rancière, The emancipated spectator (London: Verso, 2009).

[9] Umberto Eco, The open work (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, n.d.). (My emphasis)

[10] W Hillis, The pattern on the stone?: the simple ideas that make computers work, 1st ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

[11] Mark Nunes, Error: glitch, noise, and jam in new media cultures (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010).

[12] Susan Stewart, On longing: narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection (Duke University Press, 1993).

[13] Nunes, Error.

[14] Rancière, The emancipated spectator.

[15] Michel Foucault, “Life: Experience and Science,” in Aesthetics, method, and epistemology (The New Press, 1999).

[16] François Jacob, The logic of life: a history of heredity?; the possible and the actual (Penguin, 1989).

[17] Ibid.

[18] Michel Foucault, The order of things?: an archaeology of the human sciences., 2003.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the very archetype of a “closed society.” It ranks dead last—196th out of 196 countries—in Freedom House’s Freedom of the Press index. Unlike the citizens of, say, Tunisia or Egypt, to name two countries whose populations recently tapped the power of social media to help upend the existing political order, few North Koreans have access to Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. In fact, except for a tiny elite, the DPRK’s 25 million inhabitants are not connected to the Internet. Televisions are set to receive only government stations. International radio signals are routinely jammed, and electricity is unreliable. Freestanding radios are illegal. But every North Korean household and business is outfitted with a government-controlled radio hardwired to a central station. The speaker comes with a volume control, but no off switch. In a new media age awash in universally shared information—an age of planet-wide instant messaging and texted manifestos

The concept of openness is often employed as part of a radical critique of the closed-off worlds of what might be called ‘traditional media’. It is variously used to urge for the right to transparency, the ethics of sharing, the value of re-use and the benefits of connecting.

This series of research seminars will explore various aspects of openness. Special attention will be given to the benefits and drawbacks of openness, and to the many possibilities openness offers for the future of media production, use and critique.

Language is not what it is because it has meaning… It is a fragmented nature, divided against itself and deprived of its original transparency by admixture; it is a secret that carries within itself, though near the surface, the decipherable signs of what it is trying to say. It is at the same time a buried revelation and a revelation that is gradually being restored to ever greater clarity. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

Every Thing has to end, but not so its fragments. Energy flows amongst systems. It constitutes as it destroys, but never does energy itself dissipate completely. All flow is transformation. Re-figuration is the enemy of entropy. Christian Marclay’s new work, The Clock, currently on show at The White Cube in London, constitutes a new system from old fragments. Comprised of 24 hours of film segments, Marclay’s work offers the viewer a real-time database of clock faces captured by Marclay and forced into the cinematic paradigm. What fascinates most about this work (and at this stage, I must admit, I have not seen it) is its explicit totality: Marclay’s film effectively closes the image of time within the loop of a 24 hour cinematic. The database of clock faces ebbs forever forwards, closed into itself as loop. This is not only our shared perception of time, it is also a perception without which the art of cinema may never have emerged. Put another way, Marclay’s work exposes the rigidity of not only the cinematic (a reel spins in only two directions) but also the conception of time (arguably a ‘Western’ one) that figures it. But – and this ‘but’ should be writ larger than my database of fonts allows me – Marclay’s work is a work made manageable in its making by a technology seemingly free of forward/backward limitations. For writer and theorist Lev Manovich the computer/digital database plays a fundamental role in transforming the hidden data set (thousands of individual film segments of clocks/time) and the material [removed]the 24 hour long film) into the each of its other: Literary and cinematic narratives work in the same way. Particular words, sentences, shots, scenes which make up a narrative have a material existence; other elements which form an imaginary world of an author or a particular literary or cinematic style and which could have appeared instead exist only virtually. Put differently, the database of choices from which narrative is constructed (the paradigm) is implicit; while the actual narrative (the syntagm) is explicit. New media reverses this relationship. Database (the paradigm) is given material existence, while narrative (the syntagm) is de-materialised. Paradigm is privileged, syntagm is downplayed. Paradigm is real, syntagm is virtual. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media

Marclay’s gathering of clock footage only ever had one, obsessively realised, end point. The point when every second of the Earthly day (morning/noon/night) was figured, classed and catalogued by the totalising database. Here we find a metaphor impossible to mistake: that of a digital present, forever engaged in the cataloging of its own archaeology. Cuttings, fragments. Old medias torn and compressed into digital instances and made to float between databases. This is the status of art today. It is not a new approach Marclay wields in his work, but in its totality (or its illusion of totality) The Clock must be one of the most successful attempts to figure the contemporary as ‘database’.

In 2004, Bob Stein founded the Institute for the Future of the Book, with the goal of finding new models for publishing as it moved from the page to the screen, from the enclosed world of the individual reader to the networked one of the Internet. While innovative for its own time, the Institute’s mission built on Stein’s decades of experience exploring the frontiers of electronic publishing, whether with Atari, the Criterion Collection, or Voyager. Long before the popularization of the Internet, the tools that Stein developed for publishing with floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and LaserDiscs laid the groundwork for dramatic shifts in how we interact with (formerly) printed media. Much of his work proposed hybrid formats, combining the referential nature of books with the visual appeal of films, using computers to turn texts into what Stein was already calling, in the mid-’80s, “user-driven media.” Today these hybrids seem natural, but the history of publishing and technology prior to the Web,

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to take part in a panel discussion on London based, arts radio station, Resonance FM. It was for The Thread, a lively show that aims to use speech and discussion as a tool for research, opening up new and unexpected angles through the unravelling of conversation.

The Thread's host, London Consortium researcher Seph Rodney, and I were lucky enough to share the discussion with Dr. Lane DeNicola, a lecturer and researcher in Digital Anthropology from University College London. We talked about encoding and decoding, about the politics of ownership and the implications for information technologies. We talked about inscriptions in stone, and the links we saw between the open-source software movement and genome sequencing.

Here is an edited transcript of the show, but I encourage you to visit The Thread's website, where you will shortly find a full audio recording of the conversation. The website also contains information about upcoming shows, as well as a rich archive of past conversations.

Inside Code: Encoding and decoding appear in contemporary context as a fundamental feature of technology, in our use of language and in our social interactions, from html to language coding and literary symbolism. How, and through what means, do people encode and decode?

This transcript is shared under a Creative Commons License

Seph Rodney: I wanted to start off the conversation by asking both my guests how it is that we get the kind of literacy that we have to decode writing. It seems to me that it’s everywhere, that we take it for granted. It seems that there’s a kind of decoding that happens in reading, isn’t there?

Lane DeNicola: Yes. I would say that one of the more interesting aspects of that are the material consequences. Whereas literacy before was largely a matter of human knowledge, understanding of a language, all the actual practices involved was a surface to mark on and an instrument to do the marking, whereas today, a great deal of the cultural content that is in circulation commonly involves technologies that are considerably more complex than a simple writing instrument. Things that individuals don’t really comprehend in the same way.

Seph: What are the technologies that are more complex? What’s coming to my mind is computer code.

Lane: Exactly. Apple’s Garage Band might be one example, these tools that many of us encounter as final products on YouTube. One of the things on the new program at UCL we have tried to give a broad exposure to is exactly how much communicating people are doing through these new forms, and how they take the place in some instances of more traditional modes of communication.

Seph: You’re calling it communication, and one of the things that occurred to me after talking to Daniel, and exchanging a few emails, was that he calls writing, at least, a system of exchange. I was thinking, wouldn’t that in other contexts be called communication, and maybe ten years ago we would have called it transmission? But why is it exchange for you?

Daniel Rourke: I just have a problem with the notion of communication because of this idea of passing on something which is mutual. I think to use the word exchange for me takes it down a notch almost, that I am passing something on, but I am not necessarily passing on what I intend to pass on. To take it back to the idea of a writing system, the history of writing wasn’t necessarily marks on a page. The technologies that emerged from say Babylonia of a little cone of clay that had markings on the outside, they said just as much about the body and about symbolic notions as they did about what it was the marks were meaning to say. So that’s why I use exchange I think. It opens up the meaning a bit.

Seph: Yeah. It doesn’t presume that there is a person transmitting and a person that’s receiving, necessarily? And it also says something about, what I thought was really fascinating, that there is so much more in the object than just the markings on a page. About how the materials tell us something about that particular age, that particular moment in history.

Lane: Yeah. Even in a contemporary context it may have been the case that the early days of the web were all about hypertext, but the great deal of what you call ‘exchange’ that is happening today, how are you going to qualify a group of people playing World of Warcraft simultaneously in this shared virtual space – calling that communication is a little bit limiting. In fact it is experienced much more as a joint space, or an exchange of things, more than simple information. It can be thought of as an exchange of experience, or of virtual artefacts for example.

Seph: That can happen certainly in simulated game play, but it also happens in the decoding of texts. Objects that come to us from antiquity. There is all this material to be decoded that’s wrapped up in the artefacts. It is also, how much we decode and what we decode has something to do with our moment in time.

Daniel: I think it might be worth picking an example out of the air, when we are talking about this.

Seph: OK

Daniel: I’ve become fascinated by the archive of Henry Folger, he was a collector who became obsessed with collecting everything about Shakespeare he could get his hands on. This was in the 1920s and 30s I think. At the time there was a lot of need for every library around the world to have the object, whereas today we can digitise it and distribute it, back then if you didn’t have access to the thing itself, then you didn’t have the thing at all. Henry Folger became known for collecting the same Folio, tens and tens of times. In fact he became a laughing stock because he had tens and tens of the same ‘Last Folio’ of Shakespeare. People of course asked him, why did he need to have these things? Surely it was better to distribute them, but actually after his death, having all of these Folios in the same place, when people came to study them they found that they gained more information by comparing the Folios that were apparently the same. Comparing the marks that differed across Folios; one printing press had made an error here; how this piece of paper had been re-used, and therefore turned over, to print on the other side. And by decoding across the many Folios that Folger had collected they managed to piece together information about Shakespeare’s works that you could never have gained if all the Folios had been in 40 research libraries around the world. They had to be together, they had to be next to each other.

Seph: And the fact that there were differences, even though ostensibly there was just repetition, there were differences amongst the repetitions? It brings to mind immediately the Rosetta Stone, an ancient traffic sign that says the same thing in one language and the same thing in another language. A repetition, but clearly a key difference.

Daniel: The thing about the Rosetta Stone is that there was already knowledge of one system, and then they could transfer it, but I suppose it becomes interesting, especially in things like digital anthropology, where similar comparisons need to be made. You sent around this link about an old satellite system that they had managed to get more information from, by comparing and contrasting data, than it was originally intended for?

Lane: Exactly. There’s almost a sub-genre of information technology today that I think you could call information archaeology. We’ve had several decades with computers and rapid changes in the kind of technology involved, and as a result we are losing the ability to access nearly as much data as we are collecting in some fields. The idea of people being able to retain older media, in the case you mentioned, there was only one two-inch tape drive left in the world that was capable of reading the media involved. So the project had garnered some kind of innovation research funding and they had done a proof of concept just to show that yes, we can use this one device successfully to retrieve the data from, what I believe was a 1960’s Nimbus Satellite. It has strange consequences in fields outside of paleography.

Seph: This obsolescence of objects is strange because it seems like, if the object is the height of technology at the moment, when it becomes obsolete the chances of us being able to decode what was encoded using that technology seemingly nosedive. But paper, stone, these most simple materials – it seems like those things we can continue to decode for ages.

Lane: There are questions here that are quite political in nature, but there are also questions that historians have about how something is going to work, when this proportion of our exchange, our communication and mutual experience, is happening in these forms that require opaque technologies in order to decode them.

Seph: When you say opaque, you mean?

Lane: Something that the average person couldn’t cobble together a simple instance of. Most digital technology, for example. Although there are counter-trends, like the open source software movement.

Seph: Where you create a platform, essentially, that allows anyone who uses it to add to it.

Lane: Exactly. They’ve kind of formalised it at this point. In the early days of open source it was very much about sustaining open exchange of things like source code. They realised fairly quickly that they needed something a little bit stronger, and that was where organisations like Creative Commons came into play. This is an organisation that provides a specific set of licences that legally preserve the right of users of a piece of code to re-mix it, re-modify and re-distribute it, as they wish. Some people refer to it semi-jokingly as a ‘copy-left’, whether it’s a piece of source code, or a piece or data like music and so on, essentially making it available for public re-mixing, whilst ensuring that attribution of the original author is ensured. It’s all built on this paradigm that exchange needs to happen and needs to be retained as a right for everyone.

Seph: Right. In essence exchange needs to be broadened out, so that the technology can actually stay viable.

Lane: Yes. Exactly.

Seph: I guess to suggest that for technologies to continue, to not become so obsolete that there is only one piece of equipment in the world that can decode, they need to have a lot of participants.

Daniel: And with open-source, the hierarchy also gets taken out to a degree. You don’t have the guy on the pulpit who can read the Bible and the people down in the church who are listening. With open-source it’s the people down in the church, basically, who control the code. As much as it lives, it evolves and is successfully passed on, rather than being decided by some authority. I don’t mean to build a figure-head here, but a lot of code is owned by corporations...

Lane: We won’t name any names.

Daniel: No.

Seph: Would we get in trouble for that? Of course this is the thing that has gotten Microsoft in a bit of trouble, right, with the EU? They made moves, allegedly, with their software that locks out certain people and locks in certain add-ons and software that must be used with Windows. It seems to be an effort at control, right? I’m not sure how this connects to literacy, but if you are controlling or trying to control how much your information disseminates you are making the opposite move from what we have been talking about.

Daniel: I think there is a comparison to be made. I’m thinking in terms of the difference between the French language and the English language. Every year the French authorities come together to decide what new words will be accepted into the French language, whereas English has always been allowed to bloom and blossom. Of course there’s benefits to both of those, like Microsoft controlling its source code means that when people buy a PC it’s going to work, because all the software or hardware has been designed by the same company. Anyone who has had to go into a lecture theatre and wait 20 minutes whilst the person at the front figures out how things plug in and why it’s not working. That’s one of the problems with open-source. So there’s benefits to both: to open-source because we can all partake in the code, but we have to forego some kind of standardisation.

Seph: It’s interesting that in writing, and I don’t know if this is true further afield from writing like computer code, that there’s this impetus to limit who has a certain kind of literacy or who has the power to decode and encode. It seems for writing that there doesn’t seem to be those kinds of limitations?

Lane: We haven’t brought up the term encryption; there are certainly situations where an individual wants to preserve a text, but only maintain a limited kind of access.

Seph: One of the complaints people make about ‘high-theory’, especially in literary studies, is that the language is so coded that the average person, if there is such a thing, has a hard time making heads or tails of it. There a gate is being set up where you say, well you have to know this much to come through.

Daniel: I think maybe looking at the system involved is important. With theory, do you want to argue that it’s a closed system? That universities foreground their own existence by perpetrating this coded language that we all exchange with each other, where we get funding opportunities and hold conferences.

Seph: I’m not sure I would go as far as to say it’s closed, it’s restricted.

Daniel: But it does open out at certain points. I do think it’s important for people in academia to see their work in its practical means, but whether that has anything to do with the authority of the page or the authority of speech, I am not sure.

Lane: This is making me recall some of the anthropological work that I have read on magical writing. Michael Taussig, for example, authored a book on the magic of the state. There is a whole genre on writing, writing practice and its association, in a number of cultures for millennia, with magic and magical power. It’s commonly acknowledged enough that it’s almost a joke that there’s a similar paradigm in the minds of a lot of programmers. That is, they have an esoteric, a kind of arcane knowledge, and that the literacy involved is sometimes associated with a specific language, but just as often with abstract programming principles. The exclusivity of that kind of writing is something that can bind them as a community. I have seen that many times first hand, but then there have been revealing things written on that too, mirroring tiny Melanesian communities that practice this kind of magical writing.

Seph: What does magical writing look like?

Lane: The term refers to a number of different phenomenon. There’s a colleague of mine in the states that wrote about a very small community that kept track of its dead by writing their names in a book. There were repercussions to not having a particular ancestor’s name written in the book, it had consequences that were woven into the culture. There was a specific person who was allotted the responsibility of writing the names in the book. You don’t even need to look that far afield. European traditions exist, for example, where spell casting abilities get traced in one form or another to the inscription of sigils.

Seph: Sigils?

Lane: Iconographic runes for example, proto-lettering. But it’s the whole process of representation that people see as a magical human capacity. This idea of transforming thought into a material form.

Seph: And that dovetails with your research Daniel?

Daniel: I’d like to think so. I’m thinking of Walter Benjamin and his short essay on Mimesis. He tries to go back and pick apart what reading was. That before we were reading letters we were reading the world, in a sense. When you sacrificed an animal you would ‘read’ the entrails and you could say whether it was going to be a good season. That’s the kind of magic capacity, to see patterns in the world, that at that point we would have thought had been coded by God or nature for us to find and pick apart. It’s only a small leap from that to saying, nature has given us the entrails to read, well what if I make this mark and I say this mark represents the rain or something. Then you’ve got the step towards the rune or the hieroglyph.

Seph: It’s a huge step that we make when we do that, when we take a mark and say this represents the animal, what do you think that allows us to do?

Daniel: What it forces us to do is to separate the world from ourselves, or ourselves from the world, to some extent. Perhaps when reading the entrails we don’t distinguish as much as we do when we read a mark on a page what meaning is and what world is, seeing them inherent in the same moment. To write something on a page and say it represents love or my name, suddenly our symbolic notions are pushed one step further, we are distinguishing ourselves from nature, from the world around us, from the language that we speak.

Seph: It sounds like the bad part of that is that we become more abstracted, that we begin the process of abstracting ourselves from ourselves. Saying, I can be represented by this stick figure, or this name in a ledger somewhere, or even represented by a statistic. But there’s got to be a good part as well.

Lane: In the field that I come from they often refer to writing as the original technology, and discuss Western civilisation as predicated in large part on writing and the written word. There’s a whole, in part false, but compelling dichotomy between cultures that privilege writing in some form and cultures that are primarily verbal, where stories are passed down verbally from one generation to the next. There are these clear advantages, depending on your stance. The ability to have texts preserved in a way that limits the latitude of the re-interpretations over time has very important consequences. Like you say, that disconnection that is happening, so that a given sequence of thoughts of articulations are taken away from their author, and persist in time and are looked at and forced into being interpreted in a new kind of way. That is the trade-off.

Seph: So encoding things and reading that code allows us to gain distance from things. It allows us to move away from them symbolically, and move away from them in time, and still in some ways preserve them. Daniel, in one of our emails to each other you had raised this question as to whether at any level of reality coding/decoding stopped working as a paradigm. Do you think there is a point where decoding/encoding doesn’t work anymore?

Daniel: To ask that question I have to contemporise myself, I have to locate myself in the present day. We’ve been talking about this separation, where the symbol starts to determine how we look at the world, the main paradigm of today perhaps would be the computer, or science, both of which have become very much combined in the science of genetics. In the news recently was the story of the entrepreneurial scientist Craig Venter, who announced to the world that they had created synthetic life from code on a computer. We could have spent the entire hour talking about the moral implications of this, and the political implications of him presenting this knowledge in the way he did, but underlying it is the very simple notion that life is able to be decoded. That to its very fundamental constituents we can pick it apart. Now, I’m not going state my opinion – whether I am a materialist, do I see something more ‘important’ in the world – I don’t know. But there are a lot of implications for free-will, especially people of religious inclination have been up in arms about this announcement. Embedded with it is the idea, from Craig Venter, that the world could be completely picked apart to its constituents, that we could rebuild things from the ground up.

Seph: The way we want to. Absolutely. Not talking about the moral implications, but it seems that one of the things we are risking in synthesising things, life, in this very commercialised, dead on the table sort of way, is we are risking despair.

Daniel: They tried to inject some kind of symbolic value back into this by encoding some words from James Joyce within the DNA of the organism.

Seph: Giving it a literary credibility?

Daniel: Yeah. I don’t know if that’s supposed to show that all scientists have got a literary heart deep within them.

Seph: A humanist side.

Daniel: A headline grabber.

Lane: I read an article on a geneticist in the states who procured some relatively cheap gene sequencing equipment off eBay.

Seph: Really? That’s an amazing sentence. Relatively inexpensive and off eBay!

Lane: Still in the thousands of US dollars, but comparatively pretty cheap. And, he had done this because he had previously been working for, I think, a large pharmaceutical company and he had access to the most advanced equipment, but as a result of him leaving the company he didn’t have access to it anymore and he was interested in a project of his own devising. He has a daughter who has a particular genetic malady and he wanted to sequence her genome with the idea that it could provide basic information for later therapy, potentially. So he, in effect, was initiated this do-it-yourself DNA community – if you could call it a community at this point. But in a sense, it’s like open-sourcing gene sequencing. It really muddles that whole question of, on the one hand, a trepidation built into the whole process of manipulating our own genes, but that’s a separate layer from the question of the commercialisation of the process. And the copyrighting of the ‘human text’, so the speak. I think primarily you’re talking about the pharmaceuticals industry as the leading industrial sector that has an interest in patenting specific sequences from a genome, for things like targeted drugs. An emerging and exploded new direction for the pharmaceuticals industry. Essentially, you’re talking about the copyrighting of a text.

Daniel: And the ability perhaps to put that online, to upload it to your website and let everybody see it.

Seph: To do what you will with it. The question that comes to my mind is well, then if you do create a kind of, let’s call it a ‘community’, like that, is it the kind of community – one of these I am more comfortable with – that’s like Wikipedia or is it a community like the comments page on YouTube. Do you know what I mean?

Lane: That you get the dregs along with it?

Seph: Yeah. Or an informed, scholarly position.

Daniel: I think in the long run it’s probably much more important that this information is shared around the right parties, but that’s where the question of morals comes up again. We are worried now about terrorists getting hold of radioactive material, and making a ‘dirty bomb’. It’s possible that if you can buy a genetic sequencing kit of eBay that in the next ten to twenty years people will be able to organise and design bacteria or viruses that could specifically attack certain ethnicities. These are some of the possibilities that the decoding of the genome allows us to do in the future.

Seph: Who gets access to the encoding scheme then, seems like a really important question?

Lane: Not just from the commercial angle. Usually the way the discussion of copyrighted texts begins is with the interest in motivating creative work. So the major content providers, whether it’s television production studios or what have you, their argument is if you don’t have incentives for people to produce creative work then you’re not going to have the same calibre of work being done. This is tantamount to an argument for some kind of mechanism being in place to preserve texts as property, in a kind of abstract way. That’s more at the commercial level, but there are other parallel concerns as well.

Seph: In other words, incentives like, the author gets some sort of payment or remuneration at some point for her work or efforts. Isn’t this the issue with Craig Venter. He was working with the major operation, a government funded project, that began looking to decode the genome, and then he broke off from it, saying that they were doing it too slow, that they he knew a faster way to do it. He got funding, and because he is obviously a very clever man, made it commercially viable.

Daniel: He didn’t quite beat them though. I think it was very close.

Seph: His model is, you need to make it commercially viable to get investors. For it to work you essentially need to make a profit. To go back to what we were talking about at the beginning, one of the things that earlier technologies in some ways avoid is precisely that paradigm of commercialism. Presumably when they made marks in rocks or on papyrus they weren’t doing it because that was their wage earning job?

Daniel: There is a huge hierarchy in text-technologies. I mean, every Egyptian Pharaoh had a scribe. The workers that built the pyramids wouldn’t have been able to read the hieroglyphs necessarily. So there have always been hierarchies within textual technologies. We think of text now as the freest system of communication that there is, but in pre-literate societies where education wasn’t available to everybody the text was just a mass of squiggles on a page that only the priest had access to. In that very move, the church could claim authority over the text, because only they could read it out. I don’t know if we should be mapping that directly onto Craig Venter and his commercial enterprise, but there has always been an attempt to gain control of information technologies from their outset. Always.

Seph: It seems that one of the things we have been saying is that that effort to gain control over technology, and to limit who gains access to literacy in that technology, is not necessarily a bad thing?

Lane: Right. I am kind of compelled to mention, as we are here, that copyright as it’s known began in London. Book publishing, and the right to reproduce a text, was granted by the crown and the whole idea that a text, in the abstract, could be property – rather than the copies of a text. The idea that that abstract entity could be property began here, when the major book publishers in London were beginning to suffer a drop in their profits because other printing presses were beginning to open up. The printing press was proliferating and as a result people were able to produce things much cheaper. They realised that this was going to cause them a problem, that the authors who they were compensating were not going to enjoy any of the money from their works. When copyright came around, I think around the early to mid 1800s, it was about preserving the creative incentives for the authors. There was a limit put on the amount of time the copyright could be enjoyed by the publishers. I believe it was originally 20 years, but that’s gone out of the window since then. Certainly in the States it has been extended, especially in the case of Walt Disney, to beyond 95 years.

Seph: Property – and by that we mean private property – is in itself not a thing, but a relation, a community. It is only private property because I recognise your right to have that pen next to you, to own it.

Lane: Right.

Daniel: I think the Walt Disney example is an important one. Not only do they extend the ownership of their icon Mickey Mouse every 20 years, or so, but isn’t it also the case that all the Disney films were borrowed off someone? Taking the stories of others and using them themselves. But as soon as any outsider wanted to use the image of Mickey Mouse in an art object, or in anyway, they slammed down on them as hard as they could. So there are different degrees of ownership, and community, depending on how important you see your own ownership as being.

Seph: It’s funny that in talking about encoding that we’ve gone from the text, to genetics, to moral implications, to commercialism and ownership. I suppose ownership is a good place to get to because of the political implications of encoding; of what it is to have the ability to encode something and then again decode it, to make it make sense, to share it; to allow it to proliferate. Maybe one of the great strengths about writing is that it is not under control. It really is everywhere, and in everything. Is that going too far?

Daniel: I wouldn’t want to claim that writing is any different from say a digital code. Not everybody can code in PERL for instance, but everybody can now get a YouTube video and convert it, using a program into another format, and add some titles on the bottom saying “this is my daughter, 1995” and then send that to someone else. I don’t understand the history of these marks on the page, why the letter ‘e’ is the shape it is, or what in Chinese, for example, is the history of this ideographic symbol. I don’t understand that, but I have the power to use it for my own means, to make it express. I think that is the same in all of these technologies, when they get to the public the public will use them at different levels of encoding, in a sense.

Seph: And that seems to somehow ensure that the technology will continue.

Daniel: Yes.

Lane: Yes.

This transcript is shared under a Creative Commons License

Using ‘The Beardy-Man’ as our initial recurrence relation we determined that 11 is the upper-most limit of any ‘Riding The Sexy-Fox’ function. Taking this into consideration our next project will attempt to express the potential of a Badger’s Under-Belly in Fibonacci numbers.* * (Care must be taken to avoid Beardy-Man self recursion, leading to an infinite nesting from an initial closed-set of only 23 Beardy co-ordinates.)

by Daniel Rourke

“Mimesis here is not the representation of one thing by another, the relation of resemblance or of identification between two beings, the reproduction of a product of nature by a product of art. It is not the relation of two products but of two productions. And of two freedoms... 'True' mimesis is between two producing subjects and not between two produced things.” Jacques Derrida, Economimesis As the day drew closer to its end so I strained my eyes to compensate. A milieu of symbols littered my computer screen, each connected to a staccato breach between breath and tongue. And in conjunction, fused one to another in a series, these symbols formed words and concepts, visions and ideas to which I felt an obligation. I was designing a book, turning a text into a form through the processes of a computer design interface. The semblance of a page confronted each turn of my wrist or tap of finger, until the virtual book lay splayed open, its central fissure dilating as the words grew bigger or shrank to barely perceptible pricks of black. By manipulating the interface I could expand letters until they inked out the screen, or, in turn, spiral to infinite distance, turning definite symbols into the pixels of a cloud. This process of making occurred at a virtual distance to me and yet, as the nights rolled onwards, this work was limiting my ability to see. The doctor examined my right eye. I had iritis, a strain of the pupil with no particular cause, except perhaps for its over-use: for one's over-reliance on its mechanical operation. Being that my right eye was the strongest of the two it had over-compensated at each dimming of the day, allowing my left eye to relax as the symbols of my book whirled on. The strain resulted in a blood-shot appearance accompanied by a searing, throbbing pain. It hurt to see, and even more so to look. It hurt because looking was its cause. Standing at the base of the Southern tower I arced my neck back as far as I dare. As the horizon descended into my stomach I could just about perceive the towers' tallest corners, pinching at sky. How many coins did it take to build these things? And how many steps was I expected to ascend in order to get to the 'observation deck'? In exchange for my tiny coin I fathomed a giant network called 'New York'. From up here everything was horizon: the imaginary boundary between earth and sky that moves in respect of one's position. In 2001 the two towers tumbled. How profane their figures seem now. How could it be that these prisms, designed and built in the 1960s, opened and occupied in the 1970s, witness of boom in the 80s and bust in the 90s, would come to stand for all the tumult and turmoil, striving and hope of our newest century? The precision of the prism – flat, grey surfaces observed in isometric space – will forever be bound to these charismatic towers built of steel, concrete and capital. That they now stand as symbols effaces their identity in time or in space. They will always be contemporary, so long as cities are built and planes soar the skies above them. Looking back at them it is now I that stand on the horizon. Yet, howsoever I alter my vision, the towers stay solid and fixed to their position, being at one and the same time the landscape, the illumination and the roving eye.

Idiopathic is an adjective used primarily in medicine meaning arising spontaneously or from an obscure or unknown cause. From Greek ἴδιος, idios (one's own) + πάθος, pathos (suffering), it means approximately "a disease of its own kind." extract from Wikipedia In 2006 Koizumi Meiro tore pages from pornographic magazines. Over images composed of two erotically entwined women he painted tones of grey. The resulting collages speak of capture, of closure and the banal. They are severely a-erotic, displaying none of the titillation that their originary magazines wished upon their audience. The women's heads have been disembodied, or more precisely, have been relocated onto the bodies of twin prisms. Does Meiro's objectification of these women mirror the objectification they suffer under the guise of the erotic gaze? Perhaps. What draws me into the images though, and what emerges most strikingly as I look upon them, is a haunting sense of recognition. This simplified, perfect horizon, these strutting prisms of grey mirror the defining twin icons of our era. Captured, closed off and made banal to my mind by the passing of time, by their over admittance into the symbolic syntax of the new century. My recognition is itself an imitation, such that seeing and looking are intertwined. A focal point rushes to meet me, like a pupil contracting as the first band of sun breaches an ever distant imaginary line. In the 1940s the Southwest Pacific Ocean became of fundamental strategic importance for both the Japanese and American forces. After establishing bases on a range of Melanesian and Micronesian islands the US Military settled into the routines of war. To the native peoples of these islands the military presence signified a complete over-turning of the natural order. Within a few months the beaches and grasslands were transformed into encampments and runways, and as the war effort ensued the skies above must have seemed filled with the buzz of alien craft. The native people came to know American society through the exchange of commodities and the gestures of an unknown tongue. As planes soared overhead and countless ships descended over the horizon the islands became saturated with cargo of all kinds, from cans of coca cola to livestock the likeness of which the islanders had never seen. Much has been written of the so called 'Cargo Cults' which later emerged on these islands. Strange rituals still carried out today seem to hark back to those informative years when Western civilisation first imposed itself on the native Micronesians. Islanders build imitation planes and runways from straw and dirt; act out military processions with bamboo guns slung over their shoulders. In order to bring back the abundance of cargo that used to land on their islands the native people appear to be imitating the conditions under which its arrival used to occur. Ritual obtains a value at the meeting point between the thing imitated and the imitation. Ritual is action, but it is also object. It is natural because it is always a copy; repeated whilst never attaining perfect resemblance; repeated to bring into order the miasma of our visions. With work there is always consequence, both intended and in excess. For the tribal communities of the cargo islands the dividing lines between nature and ritual, between alien technology and the routines of war must have seemed identical. A resemblance, a dividing line, that was worthy of imitation whether it brought cargo or not. We cannot know what they saw. We can only imitate an idea of their seeing by analogy with the kind of seeing we consider in ourselves. Upon the arrival of the American Military in the Southwestern Pacific there was a lot more to see than had been seen before. “Why should we be at all interested in perceiving the obscurity that emanates from the epoch? Is darkness not precisely an anonymous experience that is by definition impenetrable; something that is not directed at us and thus cannot concern us? On the contrary, the contemporary is the person who perceives the darkness of his time as something that concerns him. Darkness is something that – more than any light – turns directly and singularly toward him. The contemporary is the one whose eyes are struck by the beam of darkness that comes from his own time.” Giorgio Agamben, What is The Contemporary? The eye-drops soothed the burning pain, but they also gave me chronic photo-phobia, such that stepping out into daylight was excruciating. I needed to let my eye rest, and this meant shutting off its ability to work. Whether the light was dim or bright, whether the object of my attention was near or far, the muscles around my pupil lay dormant. I considered the world through a pupil locked at its fullest expanse. The light gushed in. In place of depth, of shade and colour, there now existed a miasma which my left eye alone could not navigate. The physical frames of everyday life were impossible to attenuate. It was as if upon being freed from the shallow glare of the computer screen I had stumbled into a space between signified and signifier. Everything was flattened to the status of an interface, but an interface that lead nowhere and manipulated nothing. My book had been printed and bound. I could hold it in my hands, flick through its pages. In real space I could consider it, scanning its lines and paragraphs with my working eye. Wearing a make-shift eye patch or a pair of sun glasses I was able to avoid headaches and spatial confusion. But upon holding the very object whose making had rendered my right eye useless I was overcome with a different kind of dislocation. Was this the book I had designed on my computer? It bore a resemblance, there was even a sense that my fingers had observed it before, the memory of its movements surfacing as I turned it over in my hands. But this sense did not transfer to the content of the book, to the meaning that emerged when words were read in conjunction, and pages, phrases, paragraphs and footnotes came to meet each other in endless variation. I recognised the words themselves, but I did not recognise from where they had come. I saw the book's space, time and content, yet I could not see its work. Between seeing and looking which paradigm was closest to this work: the roving eye or the mind engaged in making? by Daniel Rourke

“To go beyond is to communicate with ideas, to understand. Does not the function of art lie in not understanding?... Art does not know a particular type of reality; it contrasts with knowledge. It is the very event of obscuring, a descent of the night, an invasion of shadow.”

Emmanuel Levinas, Reality and Its Shadow

It seems significant, somehow, that Infinite Jest—the big buzzy signature meganovel of the nineties—was set at the end of the aughts. Most of the book’s action appears to take place in 2009, which means that we’ve all just survived the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. It also means that David Foster Wallace’s prophetic window has now (at least in the most literal sense) closed forever, in the same way Orwell’s did when we reached the actual 1984. And in fact Infinite Jest’s vision of the future does, these days, look slightly dated. One of the book’s nightmare scenarios is the existence of an entertainment so addictive that people watch it until they die—a film they access via a machine Wallace calls a “teleputer,” which turns out to be some kind of ungodly hybrid of HDTV, computer, telephone, and VCR; it crunches data on “3.6-MB diskettes” and plays films off actual physical cartridges. All of which carbon-dates the novel’s creation precisely back to the early-to-mid-nineties (i