As the country’s population ages and shrinks, there’s increasing demand for services that clean out and dispose of the property of the dead.

How an extreme libertarian tract predicting the collapse of liberal democracies – written by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father – inspired the likes of Peter Thiel to buy up property across the Pacific by If you’re interested in the end of the world, you’re interested in New Zealand.

Daniel Rourke: At Furtherfield on November 22nd 2014 you launched a Beta version of a networked project, 6PM Your Local Time, in collaboration with Fabio Paris, Abandon Normal Devices and Gummy Industries. #6PMYLT uses twitter hashtags as a nexus for distributed art happenings. Could you tell us more about the impetus behind the project? Domenico Quaranta: In September 2012, the Link Art Center launched the Link Point in Brescia: a small project space where, for almost two years, we presented installation projects by local and international artists. The Link Point was, since the beginning, a “dual site”: a space where to invite our local audience, but also a set for photographic documentation meant to be distributed online to a global audience. Fabio Paris’ long experience with his commercial gallery – that used the same space for more than 10 years, persuaded us that this was what we had to offer to the artists invited. So, the space was reduced to a small cube, white from floor to ceiling, with neon lights and a big logo (a kind of analogue watermark) on the back door. Thinking about this project, and the strong presence of the Link Point logo in all the documentation, we realized that the Link Point was actually not bound to that space: as an abstract, highly formalized space, it could actually be everywhere. Take a white cube and place the Link Point logo in it, and that’s the Link Point.

This realization brought us, on the one hand, to close the space in Brescia and to turn the Link Point into a nomad, erratic project, that can resurrect from time to time in other places; and, on the other hand, to conceive 6PM Your Local Time. The idea was simple: if exhibition spaces are all more or less similar; if online documentation has become so important to communicate art events to a wider audience, and if people started perceiving it as not different from primary experience, why not set up an exhibition that takes place in different locations, kept together only by documentation and by the use of the same logo? All the rest came right after, as a natural development from this starting point (and as an adaptation of this idea to reality). Of course, this is a statement as well as a provocation: watching the documentation of the UK Beta Test you can easily realize that exhibition spaces are NOT more or less the same; that attending or participating in an event is different from watching pictures on a screen; that some artworks work well in pictures but many need to be experiences. We want to stress the value of networking and of giving prominence to your network rather than to your individual identity; but if the project would work as a reminder that reality is still different from media representation, it would be successful anyway. Daniel Rourke: There is something of Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zones in your proposal. The idea that geographic, economic and/or political boundaries need no longer define the limits of social collective action. We can criticise Bey’s 1991 text now, because in retrospect the Internet and its constitutive protocols have themselves become a breeding ground for corporate and political concerns, even as technology has allowed ever more distributed methods of connectivity. You foreground network identity over individual identity in the 6PM YLT vision, yet the distinction between the individuals that create a network and the corporate hierarchies that make that networkingpossible are less clear. I am of course gesturing towards the use of Twitter as the principal platform of the project, a question that Ruth Catlow brought up at the launch. Do you still believe that TAZs are possible in our hyper-connected, hyper-corporate world? Domenico Quaranta: In its first, raw conceptualization, 6PM YLT had to come with its own smartphone app, that had to be used both to participate in the project and to access the gallery. The decision to aggregate content published on different social platforms came from the realization that people already had the production and distribution tools required to participate in the action, and were already familiar with some gestures: take a photo, apply a filter, add an hashtag, etc. Of course, we could invite participants and audiences to use some specific, open source social network of our choice, but we prefer to tell them: just use the fucking platform of your choice. We want to facilitate and expand participation, not to reduce it; and we are not interested in adding another layer to the project. 6PM YLT is not a TAZ, it’s just a social game that wants to raise some awareness about the importance of documentation, the power of networks, the public availability of what we do with our phones. And it’s a parasitic tool that, as anything else happening online, implies an entire set of corporate frameworks in order to exist: social networks, browsers, operative systems, internet providers, server farms etc. That said, yes, I think TAZs are still possible. The model of TAZ has been designed for an hyper-connected, hyper-corporate world; they are temporary and nomadic; they exist in interstices for a short time. But I agree that believing in them is mostly an act of faith.

Daniel Rourke: The beta-tested, final iteration of 6pm YLT will be launched in the summer of 2015. How will you be rolling out the project in the forthcoming months? How can people get involved? Domenico Quaranta: 6PM Your Local Time has been conceived as an opportunity, for the organizing subject, to bring to visibility its network of relationships and to improve it. It’s not an exhibition with a topic, but a social network turned visible. To put it simply: our identity is defined not just by what we do, but also by the people we hang out with. After organizing 6PM Your Local Time Europe, the Link Art Center would like to take a step back and to offer the platform to other organizing subjects, to allow them to show off their network as well. So, what we are doing now is preparing a long list of institutions, galleries and artists we made love with in the past or we’d like to make love with in the future, and inviting them to participate in the project. We won’t launch an open call, but we already made the event public saying that if anyone is interested to participate, they are allowed to submit a proposal. We won’t accept anybody, but we would be happy to get in touch with people we didn’t know. After finalizing the list of participants, we will work on all the organizational stuff, basically informing them about the basic rules of the game, gathering information about the events, answering questions, etc. On the other hand, we have of course to work on the presentation. While every participant presents an event of her choice, the organizer of a 6PM Your Local Time event has to present to its local audience the platform event, as an ongoing installation / performance. We are from Brescia, Italy, and that’s where we will make our presentation. We made an agreement with MusicalZOO, a local festival of art and electronic music, in order to co-produce the presentation and have access to their audience. This is what determined the date of the event in the first place. Since the festival takes place outdoor during the summer, we are working with them on designing a temporary office where we can coordinate the event, stay in touch with the participants, discuss with the audience, and a video installation in which the live stream of pics and videos will be displayed. Since we are expecting participants from Portugal to the Russian Federation, the event will start around 5 PM, and will follow the various opening events up to late night. One potential reference for this kind of presentation may be those (amazing) telecommunication projects that took place in the Eighties: Robert Adrian’s The World in 24 Hours, organized at Ars Electronica in 1982; the Planetary Network set up in 1986 at the Venice Biennale; and even Nam June Paik’s satellite communication project Good Morning Mr Orwell (1984). Left to Right – Enrico Boccioletti, Kim Asendorf, Ryder Ripps, Kristal South, Evan Roth Daniel Rourke: Your exhibition Unoriginal Genius, featuring the work of 17 leading net and new media artists, was the last project to be hosted in the Carroll/Fletcher Project Space (closing November 22nd, 2014). Could you tell us more about the role you consider ‘genius’ plays in framing contemporary art practice? Domenico Quaranta: The idea of genius still plays an important role in Western culture, and not just in the field of art. Whether we are talking about the Macintosh, Infinite Jest, a space trip or Nymphomaniac, we are always celebrating an individual genius, even if we perfectly know that there is a team and a concerted action behind each of these things. Every art world is grounded in the idea that there are gifted people who, provided specific conditions, can produce special things that are potentially relevant for anybody. This is not a problem in itself – what’s problematic are some corollaries to our traditional idea of genius – namely “originality” and “intellectual property”. The first claims that a good work of creation is new and doesn’t depend on previous work by others; the second claims that an original work belongs to the author. In my opinion, creation never worked this way, and I’m totally unoriginal in saying this: hundreds of people, before and along to me, say that creating consists in taking chunks of available material and assembling them in ways that, in the best situation, allow us to take a small step forward from what came before. But in the meantime, entire legal systems have been built upon such bad beliefs; and what’s happening now is that, while on the one hand the digitalization of the means of production and dissemination allow us to look at this process with unprecedented clarity; on the other hand these regulations have evolved in such a way that they may eventually slow down or stop the regular evolution of culture, which is based on the exchange of ideas. We – and creators in particular – have to fight against this situation. But Unoriginal Genius shouldn’t be read in such an activist way. It is just a small attempt to show how the process of creation works today, in the shared environment of a networked computer, and to bring this in front of a gallery audience. Left to Right – Kim Asendorf, Ryder Ripps, Kristal South, Evan Roth Daniel Rourke: So much online material ‘created’ today is free-flowing and impossible to trace back to an original author, yet the tendency to attribute images, ideas or ‘works’ to an individual still persists – as it does in Unoriginal Genius. I wonder whether you consider some of the works in the show as more liberated from authorial constraints than others? That is, what are the works that appear to make themselves; floating and mutating regardless of particular human (artist) intentions? Domenico Quaranta: Probably Museum of the Internet is the one that fits best to your description. Everybody can contribute anonymously to it by just dropping images on the webpage; the authors’ names are not available on the website, and there’s no link to their homepage. It’s so simple, so necessary and so pure that one may think that it always existed out there in some way or another. And in a way it did, because the history of the internet is full of projects that invite people to do more or less the same. Left to Right – Brout & Marion, Gervais & Magal, Sara Ludy Daniel Rourke: 2014 was an exciting year for the recognition of digital art cultures, with the appointment of Dragan Espenschied as lead Digital Conservator at Rhizome, the second Paddles On! auction of digital works in London, with names like Hito Steyerl and Ryan Trecartin moving up ArtReview’s power list, and projects like Kenneth Goldsmith’s ‘Printing out the Internet’ highlighting the increasing ubiquity – and therefore arguable fragility – of web-based cultural aggregation. I wondered what you were looking forward to in 2015 – apart from 6PM YLT of course. Where would you like to see the digital/net/new media arts 12 months from now? Domenico Quaranta: On the moon, of course! Out of joke: I agree that 2014 has been a good year for the media arts community, as part of a general positive trend along the last few years. Other highlighs may include, in various order: the September 2013 issue of Artforum, on “Art and Media”, and the discussion sparked by Claire Bishop’s essay; Cory Arcangel discovering and restoring lost Andy Warhol’s digital files from floppy disks; Ben Fino-Radin becoming digital conservator at MoMA, New York; JODI winning the Prix Net Art; the Barbican doing a show on the Digital Revolution with Google. Memes like post internet, post digital and the New Aesthetic had negative side effects, but they helped establishing digital culture in the mainstream contemporary art discourse, and bringing to prominence some artists formerly known as net artists. In 2015, the New Museum Triennial will be curated by Lauren Cornell and Ryan Trecartin, and DIS has been announced to be curator of the 9th Berlin Biennial in 2016. All this looks promising, but one thing that I learned from the past is to be careful with optimistic judgements. The XXI century started with a show called 010101. Art in Technological Times, organized by SFMoMA. The same year, net art entered the Venice Biennale, the Whitney organizedBitstreams and Data Dynamics, the Tate Art and Money Online. Later on, the internet was announced dead, and it took years for the media art community to get some prominence in the art discourse again. The situation now is very different, a lot has been done at all levels (art market, institutions, criticism), and the interest in digital culture and technologies is not (only) the result of the hype and of big money flushed by corporations unto museums. But still, where we really are? The first Paddles On! Auction belongs to history because it helped selling the first website ever on auction; the second one mainly sold digital and analogue paintings. Digital Revolution was welcomed by sentences like: “No one could fault the advances in technology on display, but the art that has emerged out of that technology? Well, on this showing, too much of it seems gimmicky, weak and overly concerned with spectacle rather than meaning, or making a comment on our culture.” (The Telegraph) The upcoming New Museum Triennial will include artists like Ed Atkins, Aleksandra Domanovic, Oliver Laric, K-HOLE, Steve Roggenbuck, but Lauren and Ryan did their best to avoid partisanship. There’s no criticism in this statement, actually I would have done exactly the same, and I’m sure it will be an amazing show that I can’t wait to see. Just, we don’t have to expect too much from this show in terms of “digital art recognition”. So, to put it short: I’m sure digital art and culture is slowly changing the arts, and that this revolution will be dramatic; but it won’t take place in 2015

http://www.6pmyourlocaltime.com/

Part of an ongoing series of interviews with artists who have developed a significant body of work but may not (yet) be well known to our readers. Nick Briz is an artist/educator/organizer living in Chicago, and co-founder of the conference and festival GLI.TC/H. This interview took place via Google Drive.

Nick Briz, The Glitch Codec Tutorial (2010-2011). Screenshot from YouTube video. Daniel Rourke: You are involved in an “improvisational realtime/performance media art event” at the moment called “No Media,” where participants are explicitly discouraged from preparing before they take part, or from creating documentation of any kind. I was lucky enough to see the first iteration of No-Media at GLI.TC/H 2112. I think my favourite performance involved a collaboration between Evan Kühl (of Vaudeo Signal), Curt Cloninger and yourself, scrambling to get something, anything, to work. The mania of this performance stood out because of its simplicity. At base I was watching a blindfolded anarchic poet stammering over ambient noise, but it really felt as if something important had happened. I wanted to start from this stripped-back position. Before we talk about media, why no media? Nick Briz: NO-MEDIA was initially a performance experiment proposed by Jason Soliday for GLI.TC/H 2112 >> && Jason + Jeff + I have continued organizing ’em since. The premise is this: artists w/any kind of performative discipline (realtime A/V, jazz, dance, expanded cinema, noise, comedy, spoken word, etc) sign up. They get randomly paired w/two other performers at a random point in the evening (no one knows when or who until their names show up on the screen). They perform for 10mins. You’re not allowed to prepare any material (bring what tools/gear/props you want but there’s NO time set aside for preparation) and there’s NO documentation.  So far they’ve been a lot of fun, very messy + very inspiring. Re:my performance with Curt and Evan at the first NO-MEDIA, I’m not totally sure if this is the “something” you refer too… but for me there was a point a few mins into the performance where I realized what I was trying to do (some google chrome live coding) wasn’t going to work… and I stopped… and I looked over at Evan and Curt… and totally changed my game plan… I don’t want to go into detail re:what I started to project on a blindfolded Curt Cloninger… cause I don’t want to break the second rule of NO-MEDIA (no documentation DR: Your recent video essay, an open letter to Apple Computers, garnered a lot of support from glitch art / (new) media art communities. Can you talk about the politics of this work, and how it relates to glitch art methodologies? NB: My personal relationship w/Apple is as complicated as it is b/c of glitch >> intentionally invoking glitches is usually a kind of misuse… and when you misuse Apple technology the (often invisible) politix embedded in their systems become very clear + am forced to reconcile ’em. The video is about that impossible reconciliation between my tech dependencies && my politix. I made the video for a screening organized by jonCates of remixes of work from the Phil Morton Memorial Archive + is a [re]mix/make of his 1976 video tape General Motors, where Phil, an artist and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago at the time, addresses similar issues re:his + his community’s relationship to && dependence on technology && tech-industries. As a professor at the same school + artist w/in the same community (nearly 40yrs later) dealing w/very similar problems w/similar industries… it seemed an appropriate issue to tackle && appropriate format to tackle it in. 

DR: Many of your projects tap into the “democratizing” potential of digital art, from your work to crack open codecs, through to your recent New Media One-Liner on The New Aesthetic, where you programmed and openly distributed a heap of scripts and libraries for anyone and everyone to mess around with. NB: Yea, one thing those two pieces have in common is my interest in the “tutorial” as a form (+  pedagogy in general). theNewAesthetic.js is an executable-essay / open-source javascript artware-library for quick [re]production of “New Aesthetic” compositions and related new-media art tropes. So by that I mean it’s literally a functional tool/utility with thorough documentation, examples and video tutorial, but it’s also an essay + my comment/critique on the whole NA conversation. The source code to the library can be read as a kind of code-essay. Similarly, the Glitch Codec Tutorial is a lesson in hacking video codecs to make glitch art, but also a video essay on the assumptions/influence digital systems make/have on us + their embedded politix + glitch’s potential (as a practice) to make us aware of these assumptions/influence.

Nick Briz, theNewAesthetic.Js (2012). Screenshot from online tutorial. DR: Now that “the glitch” has broken through into mainstream culture as a technical, aesthetic trope, does the glitch still have this political potential? Or is it merely a visual style? NB: As far as glitch’s political/social potential specifically, sometimes folks have a hard time understanding the obvious political ramifications b/c they conflate glitch (as a concept, a moment, a break) with the aesthetic its more commonly associated with; it’s becoming more important to separate these two things: glitch art && glitch aesthetics (or better: the aesthetics of digital artifacts). There’s obviously a venn-diagram overlap going on here, but not everything that loox “glitchy” is actually a “glitch” (or break in a system). For example, a datamoshing filter in a title sequence of a hollywood film might render the text with digital artifacts, but nothing’s actually “glitching” (technically or conceptually). Likewise, not all glitch art loox ‘glitchy.’ A great example is Glitchr, the online [ facebook, tumblr && twitter ] handle of artist + social media Interventionist, Laimonas Zakas. Glitchr has made it his mission to find + exploit bugs + holes w/in social media systems. His work is often formally “glitchy” but not in the compression artifact sense, but in the “zalgo” (overlapping/spilling unicode characters) sense. Though, my favorite glitchr posts aren’t formally “glitchy” at all. A couple of times he’s managed to post animated images on a facebook post && folks go crazy; a barrage of comments quickly follow below along the lines of “OMG how did you do that? show me show me show me” …and shortly after facebook will “fix” the bug/work. This leaves a frozen image the comments below now functioning as testimonials, and in that moment these [often] invisible politix embedded w/in the system are brought to the fore.   Glitchr (aka Laimonas Zakas), Twitter account (ongoing). Screenshot. This is the kind of perspective/approach many of us involved in the GLI.TC/H (as in the confernece/festival/gathering, not to be confused w/ your project glti.ch karaoke) are interested in. While most of us are also interested in the aesthetics of artifacts, this is different from (though it overlaps w/) our interest in the glitch as a break, a tactic, a slippage, an intervention—this is where it can become political. DR: I can read your work as a network of attempts to intervene in the course of things (for better or worse; with aesthetic, technical and/or social results). But the role of human intent in that disruption is trickier to determine. You motivate subjects to empower themselves through instigated complexities or stumbled upon accidents” [1] that are by definition beyond their control. How do you deal with this contradiction? Is there a “glitch politics”? And if so, is it more about human intervention or the intervention of the glitches themselves? NB: [ the perceived contradiction ]: can encouraging a digital practice like glitch art which compromises control still grant folks digital agency? Absolutely (we’re only compromising partial control afterall). Databending101 (a la stAllio!) for example: pick the pic you wanna hack (choice) + where && by which means (choice), then see what happens (chance); while the details w/in the composition of artifacts are usually beyond our control, it’s in peaking under the hood + the realizations/perspective that comes w/it that as practitioners/users/netizens we gain agency… not in the production of objects/artifacts. I like this “network of attempts to intervene,” I think definitely the majority of my better projects are nodes in an “intervention network” >> I’m thinking my artwarez, tutorialz, installations (virtual+physical), courses && organizational efforts >> worx/efforts which require participation. Personally, I’m less interested in aesthetic functionalism—in producing an object/artifact which is itself an end meant to be “experienced” or contemplated for its own sake. I’m interested in adding nodes to a larger network >> participating in specific conversations [ internet culture, digital rights, intellectual property, media && digital literacy, human>computer interface/relationships, etc ]; I do this by contributing projects that are often literally meant to be “used,” usually as a way to introduce/enable others to a convo + share my point/poke on/in/at a convo. Again, this is why I’m so interested in tutorials as a form, it can be a utility and an essay simultaneously. in re:to “glitch politi[x]” + human/glitch: I think glitches are human artifacts more so than digital ones. Computers don’t make mistakes, People do; programmers leave memory leaks, users input bad data… the computer will “bug” out in the same predictable way given the same bad data, we only call that moment a “glitch” when it catches us off guard. That moment can then become political when we leverage it as a tactic for political use: to call out the influence of predominantly invisible systems.  Second-Half Questionnaire: Age: 27 Location:Chicago, IL ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒   ✶  ✶  ✶  ✶ ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ How long have you been working creatively with technology? How did you start? + Describe your experience with the tools you use. How did you start using them? + Where did you go to school? What did you study? I’m lucky to have a mom who as early as I was born (I was 0yrs she was 21yrs) gave me a sketch pad + pencils but also sat me down in front of her computer, which she built (she was an amatuer painter getting her BA in computer science). My mom taught me how to use Office95 when it came out (I was 9yrs) and I started making “games” with PowerPoint’s presentation mode. In middle-school/high-school I got way more into traditional media (illustration, photography and video) + went to film school (at the University of Central Florida) convinced I wanted to be a filmmaker. Even though I had been working commercially in wwweb dev since high school (with my cousin Paul Briz who taught me HTML in NotePad! O__O), it wasn’t till later in college that I realized… “oh shit! this is what I should be making wurk with && about” and quickly abandoned all the romantic-notions/fetishes I had for analog materials (like film). In college I found my way to Rhizome && UbuWeb + came across rad wurk folks were making in Chicago &&thus decided that’s where I needed to be >> applied to SAIC for grad-school >> moved to Chi + am wurking/living here now.   What traditional media do you use, if any? Do you think your work with traditional media relates to your work with technology? I call myself a ‘new-media artist’ because I use predominantly digital technologies to make wurk about digital culture. But I guess I could just as well call myself a conceptual +/or political +/or contemporary artist. I use the media which most appro[pirate]ly gets the job done… it’s 2013, so these tend to be wwweb/digital media.  Are you involved in other creative or social activities (i.e. music, writing, activism, community organizing)? yea definitely, I usually refer to myself as an artist/educator/organizer, the lines between these are blurry (ex: I’m really interested in the ‘web video tutorial’ as a kinda essay-video form + makewurk in this form, but thesevideos I make are also simultaneously/literally tutorialz + I also simultaneously teach the same material atactualinstitutions). I mentioned before I make wurk with but also about digital culture + a major focus the last few years for me has been digital rights && digital literacy >> I make wurk about this + I teach courses on these subjects + I organize lots of events (shows/festivals/conferences) around these themes …these are blurry distinctions. Who are your key artistic influences? …should I list ’em? I’ve stolen ideas from a lot of folks >> some of them are dead: Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Stan Brakhage, some of them are alive + I follow ’em online: Joshua Davis, Cory Doctorow, jodi, Evan Roth, Squarepusher, Elisa Kreisinger, Cornelius, Mary Flanagan, Olia Lialina, Alexei Shulgin + many of them are my friends/collaborators/students: jonCates, jon.satrom, Rosa Menkman, Evan Meaney… actually imma stop there and let that list feed into the next question… Have you collaborated with anyone in the art community on a project? With whom, and on what? Mos definitely yes!!! + my most valuable xperiences stem from these collaborations + revolve around community + this is why I moved to Chicago: to partake in these communities. For me these collaborations usually take the form of project/event-organizational ventures, the largest of which is probably the GLI.TC/H festival/conference/gathering, which I’ve been co-organizing (with lots of people, namely jon.satrom +Rosa Menkman) for over 3yrs now. I mentioned before the lines between artist/educator/organizer are pretty blurry >> what I mean by this is nuanced [save detailz] this is a mode of operating familiar to lots of Chicago [dirty] new-media folks which I’ve adopted + learned predominantly from wurking with jonCates (whose practice is much more nuanced/complex than I can get into + whose had an undeniable && guileful influence on me + many others here in Chi). I also wurk a lot w/jon.satrom [undoubtedly one of my biggest influences + one of the most brilliant artists on the planet] + currently working w/other local artists/educators/organizers like Christy LeMaster (on splitbeam) +Jason Soliday && Jeff Kolar (on NO-MEDIA) +Joseph (yyolk) Chiocchi (on 0p3nr3p0.net) + am constantly inspired by + partaking in new-media adventures w/other presently chicago-based folks: Aaron Zarzutzki, Adam Trowbridge, Alex Halbert, Alex Inglizian, Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Andrew Rosinski, Ben Baker-Smith, Ben Syverson, Beth Capper, Bryan Peterson, Dave Musgrave, Ei Jane Janet Lin, Emily Kuehn, Entro MC,  Eric Fleischauer, Evan Kühl, Grayson Bagwell, Harvey Moon, Jake Elliott, James Connolly, Jessica Westbrook, Josh Billions, Kevin Carey, Lisa Slodki, Lori Felker, Mark Beasley, Monica Panzarino, Nick Kegeyan, Patrick Lichty, Paul Hertz, Ryan T Dunn, Sam Goldstein, Shawne Holloway, Tamas Kemenczy, Theodore Darst, William Robertson… …ok, imma stop there >> I realize this may read as an obnoxiously long list, but these are all folks w/out whom my wurk/reality would be very different, these are the folks I chat w/on a regular basis +/or collaborate w/ +/or participate w/ +/or am inspired by. I like to think the wurk I do is about larger digital issues (digital rights, digital literacy, networked culture, intellectual property, etc) accessible/applicable to a global village/community well beyond my local one… but these are folks I regularly steal all my ideas from… and happen to be local. What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously? Do you think this work relates to your art practice in a significant way? yea I think this is always a great question, my students always want to know how new-media artists (at least in the States) make their monie$ >> for me it’s pretty modular: I teach new-media && digital art/literacy courses at a couple institutions here (the Marwen Foundation && the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) + I develop miscellaneous digital projects (apps, wwweb, installations) for different clients w/ Branger_Briz (my cousin’s agency, the same one who taught me HTML in high-school). I’d say it definitely relates to my practice… or rather that it is my practice in that I’d probably be doing something else entirely if I wasn’t a ‘new-media artist/educator/organizer’ …again, these are blurry distinctions. [imma combine these]: Do you actively study art history? + Do you read art criticism, philosophy, or critical theory? If so, which authors inspire you? yes && yes. I’m xtreamly interested in the parallel/perpendicular + complementing/contradicting + fringe && mainstream narratives that make up the histories of the conversations I’m invested in: media art histories, computer science histories, digital folk histories, Chicago histories, activist histories, piracy histories, etc. I read lots of criticism/philosophy/theory… I’m inspired by lots of folks: lots of contemporary/mainstream digital culture folks (Lessig, Shirky, Jenkins, Benkler, Stallman) + netstream new media art folks (Lialina, Galloway, the “software studies” crowd) + academix/bloggers/podcasters I follow closely (Katie Salen, Larisa Mann, Yoani Sánchez, Anita Sarkeesian) + the writings of many of my collaborators like Rosa Menkman && jonCates. And then of course the theoretical giants that influence most of us, in particular ideas like Martin Heidegger’s notion of ‘enframing’, that rather than looking at technologies simply as tools, we’re better served by considering how they are symptomatic of our particular world view. This has been key to my understanding of technologies as indicative of prevailing ideologies >> McLuhan’s perspectives too, specifically the medium-is-the-message angle, rather than getting lost in the content the media carries (and similarly the utility a technology provides) we should consider how the technology itself changes (often completely turns on its head) our relationship to each other and the world. Are there any issues around the production of, or the display/exhibition of new media art that you are concerned about? christ… that’s a can’o’worms. I’ve got lots of vibez here, but I’ll keep it short… one thing I think a lot about (for ex) is new-media art archives. I’m a fan of bittorrent as a technology: it’s distributed/redundant && (especially for small institutions/projects) xtreamly efficient. Why don’t we have more new-media art archives leveraging this technology? Where can I get the ArtBase torrent? There’s precedence for it (thinking Jason Scott && the Archive Team‘s GeoCities torrent) but it’s also been stigmatized + somehow branded as anti-artist-interest. Similarly, for as much as the new-media art wurldz likes to talk about “Open Source” conceptually, we’ve got a lot to learn (especially structurally) from that community. Why aren’t more new-media art archives versioned like open-source projects? this would solve all kinds of exhibition headaches that arise when attempting to display new-media pieces that are 3+ yrs old (and thus require ‘antiquated’ technology)… again, this is a much larger convo, I’m being a little flippant… but I’m happy to have nuanced convos w/interested parties at more length elsewhere   cool! thnx for the chat Daniel ^__^ ../n!ck

[1] Briz, Nick. Glitch Art Historie[s]:  contextualising glitch art – a perpetual beta, in “READER[R0R], GLI.TC/H 20111”. pg. 55. https://gli.tc/h/readerror, 2011. 

Part of an ongoing series of interviews with artists who have developed a significant body of work but may not (yet) be well known to our readers. Nick Briz is an artist/educator/organizer living in Chicago, and co-founder of the conference and festival GLI.TC/H. This interview took place via Google Drive.

Nick Briz, The Glitch Codec Tutorial (2010-2011). Screenshot from YouTube video. Daniel Rourke: You are involved in an "improvisational realtime/performance media art event" at the moment called "No Media," where participants are explicitly discouraged from preparing before they take part, or from creating documentation of any kind. I was lucky enough to see the first iteration of No-Media at GLI.TC/H 2112. I think my favourite performance involved a collaboration between Evan Kühl (of Vaudeo Signal), Curt Cloninger and yourself, scrambling to get something, anything, to work. The mania of this performance stood out because of its simplicity. At base I was watching a blindfolded anarchic poet stammering over ambient noise, but it really felt as if something important had happened. I wanted to start from this stripped-back position. Before we talk about media, why no media? Nick Briz: NO-MEDIA was initially a performance experiment proposed by Jason Soliday for GLI.TC/H 2112 >> && Jason + Jeff + I have continued organizing 'em since. The premise is this: artists w/any kind of performative discipline (realtime A/V, jazz, dance, expanded cinema, noise, comedy, spoken word, etc) sign up. They get randomly paired w/two other performers at a random point in the evening (no one knows when or who until their names show up on the screen). They perform for 10mins. You’re not allowed to prepare any material (bring what tools/gear/props you want but there's NO time set aside for preparation) and there's NO documentation.  So far they've been a lot of fun, very messy + very inspiring. Re:my performance with Curt and Evan at the first NO-MEDIA, I'm not totally sure if this is the "something" you refer too... but for me there was a point a few mins into the performance where I realized what I was trying to do (some google chrome live coding) wasn't going to work... and I stopped... and I looked over at Evan and Curt... and totally changed my game plan... I don't want to go into detail re:what I started to project on a blindfolded Curt Cloninger... cause I don’t want to break the second rule of NO-MEDIA (no documentation ;) DR: Your recent video essay, an open letter to Apple Computers, garnered a lot of support from glitch art / (new) media art communities. Can you talk about the politics of this work, and how it relates to glitch art methodologies?

Nick Briz, Apple Computers (2013). Single-channel video with sound. NB: My personal relationship w/Apple is as complicated as it is b/c of glitch >> intentionally invoking glitches is usually a kind of misuse... and when you misuse Apple technology the (often invisible) politix embedded in their systems become very clear + am forced to reconcile 'em. The video is about that impossible reconciliation between my tech dependencies && my politix. I made the video for a screening organized by jonCates of remixes of work from the Phil Morton Memorial Archive + is a [re]mix/make of his 1976 video tape General Motors, where Phil, an artist and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago at the time, addresses similar issues re:his + his community's relationship to && dependence on technology && tech-industries. As a professor at the same school + artist w/in the same community (nearly 40yrs later) dealing w/very similar problems w/similar industries... it seemed an appropriate issue to tackle && appropriate format to tackle it in. 

Extract from Phil Morton, General Motors (1976). Single-channel video with sound. DR: Many of your projects tap into the “democratizing” potential of digital art, from your work to crack open codecs, through to your recent New Media One-Liner on The New Aesthetic, where you programmed and openly distributed a heap of scripts and libraries for anyone and everyone to mess around with. NB: Yea, one thing those two pieces have in common is my interest in the "tutorial" as a form (+  pedagogy in general). theNewAesthetic.js is an executable-essay / open-source javascript artware-library for quick [re]production of "New Aesthetic" compositions and related new-media art tropes. So by that I mean it's literally a functional tool/utility with thorough documentation, examples and video tutorial, but it's also an essay + my comment/critique on the whole NA conversation. The source code to the library can be read as a kind of code-essay. Similarly, the Glitch Codec Tutorial is a lesson in hacking video codecs to make glitch art, but also a video essay on the assumptions/influence digital systems make/have on us + their embedded politix + glitch's potential (as a practice) to make us aware of these assumptions/influence.

Nick Briz, theNewAesthetic.Js (2012). Screenshot from online tutorial. DR: Now that "the glitch" has broken through into mainstream culture as a technical, aesthetic trope, does the glitch still have this political potential? Or is it merely a visual style? NB: As far as glitch's political/social potential specifically, sometimes folks have a hard time understanding the obvious political ramifications b/c they conflate glitch (as a concept, a moment, a break) with the aesthetic its more commonly associated with; it's becoming more important to separate these two things: glitch art && glitch aesthetics (or better: the aesthetics of digital artifacts). There's obviously a venn-diagram overlap going on here, but not everything that loox "glitchy" is actually a "glitch" (or break in a system). For example, a datamoshing filter in a title sequence of a hollywood film might render the text with digital artifacts, but nothing's actually "glitching" (technically or conceptually). Likewise, not all glitch art loox 'glitchy.' A great example is Glitchr, the online [ facebook, tumblr && twitter ] handle of artist + social media Interventionist, Laimonas Zakas. Glitchr has made it his mission to find + exploit bugs + holes w/in social media systems. His work is often formally "glitchy" but not in the compression artifact sense, but in the "zalgo" (overlapping/spilling unicode characters) sense. Though, my favorite glitchr posts aren't formally "glitchy" at all. A couple of times he's managed to post animated images on a facebook post && folks go crazy; a barrage of comments quickly follow below along the lines of "OMG how did you do that? show me show me show me" ...and shortly after facebook will "fix" the bug/work. This leaves a frozen image the comments below now functioning as testimonials, and in that moment these [often] invisible politix embedded w/in the system are brought to the fore.   Glitchr (aka Laimonas Zakas), Twitter account (ongoing). Screenshot. This is the kind of perspective/approach many of us involved in the GLI.TC/H (as in the confernece/festival/gathering, not to be confused w/ your project glti.ch karaoke) are interested in. While most of us are also interested in the aesthetics of artifacts, this is different from (though it overlaps w/) our interest in the glitch as a break, a tactic, a slippage, an intervention—this is where it can become political. DR: I can read your work as a network of attempts to intervene in the course of things (for better or worse; with aesthetic, technical and/or social results). But the role of human intent in that disruption is trickier to determine. You motivate subjects to empower themselves through instigated complexities or stumbled upon accidents” [1] that are by definition beyond their control. How do you deal with this contradiction? Is there a "glitch politics"? And if so, is it more about human intervention or the intervention of the glitches themselves? NB: [ the perceived contradiction ]: can encouraging a digital practice like glitch art which compromises control still grant folks digital agency? Absolutely (we're only compromising partial control afterall). Databending101 (a la stAllio!) for example: pick the pic you wanna hack (choice) + where && by which means (choice), then see what happens (chance); while the details w/in the composition of artifacts are usually beyond our control, it's in peaking under the hood + the realizations/perspective that comes w/it that as practitioners/users/netizens we gain agency... not in the production of objects/artifacts. I like this "network of attempts to intervene," I think definitely the majority of my better projects are nodes in an "intervention network" >> I'm thinking my artwarez, tutorialz, installations (virtual+physical), courses && organizational efforts >> worx/efforts which require participation. Personally, I'm less interested in aesthetic functionalism—in producing an object/artifact which is itself an end meant to be "experienced" or contemplated for its own sake. I'm interested in adding nodes to a larger network >> participating in specific conversations [ internet culture, digital rights, intellectual property, media && digital literacy, human>computer interface/relationships, etc ]; I do this by contributing projects that are often literally meant to be "used," usually as a way to introduce/enable others to a convo + share my point/poke on/in/at a convo. Again, this is why I'm so interested in tutorials as a form, it can be a utility and an essay simultaneously. in re:to "glitch politi[x]" + human/glitch: I think glitches are human artifacts more so than digital ones. Computers don't make mistakes, People do; programmers leave memory leaks, users input bad data... the computer will "bug" out in the same predictable way given the same bad data, we only call that moment a "glitch" when it catches us off guard. That moment can then become political when we leverage it as a tactic for political use: to call out the influence of predominantly invisible systems.  Second-Half Questionnaire: Age: 27 Location:Chicago, IL ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒   ✶  ✶  ✶  ✶ ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ How long have you been working creatively with technology? How did you start? + Describe your experience with the tools you use. How did you start using them? + Where did you go to school? What did you study? I’m lucky to have a mom who as early as I was born (I was 0yrs she was 21yrs) gave me a sketch pad + pencils but also sat me down in front of her computer, which she built (she was an amatuer painter getting her BA in computer science). My mom taught me how to use Office95 when it came out (I was 9yrs) and I started making "games" with PowerPoint's presentation mode. In middle-school/high-school I got way more into traditional media (illustration, photography and video) + went to film school (at the University of Central Florida) convinced I wanted to be a filmmaker. Even though I had been working commercially in wwweb dev since high school (with my cousin Paul Briz who taught me HTML in NotePad! O__O), it wasn't till later in college that I realized... "oh shit! this is what I should be making wurk with && about" and quickly abandoned all the romantic-notions/fetishes I had for analog materials (like film). In college I found my way to Rhizome && UbuWeb + came across rad wurk folks were making in Chicago &&thus decided that's where I needed to be >> applied to SAIC for grad-school >> moved to Chi + am wurking/living here now.   What traditional media do you use, if any? Do you think your work with traditional media relates to your work with technology? I call myself a 'new-media artist' because I use predominantly digital technologies to make wurk about digital culture. But I guess I could just as well call myself a conceptual +/or political +/or contemporary artist. I use the media which most appro[pirate]ly gets the job done... it's 2013, so these tend to be wwweb/digital media.  Are you involved in other creative or social activities (i.e. music, writing, activism, community organizing)? yea definitely, I usually refer to myself as an artist/educator/organizer, the lines between these are blurry (ex: I'm really interested in the 'web video tutorial' as a kinda essay-video form + makewurk in this form, but thesevideos I make are also simultaneously/literally tutorialz + I also simultaneously teach the same material atactualinstitutions). I mentioned before I make wurk with but also about digital culture + a major focus the last few years for me has been digital rights && digital literacy >> I make wurk about this + I teach courses on these subjects + I organize lots of events (shows/festivals/conferences) around these themes ...these are blurry distinctions. Who are your key artistic influences? ...should I list 'em? I've stolen ideas from a lot of folks >> some of them are dead: Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Stan Brakhage, some of them are alive + I follow 'em online: Joshua Davis, Cory Doctorow, jodi, Evan Roth, Squarepusher, Elisa Kreisinger, Cornelius, Mary Flanagan, Olia Lialina, Alexei Shulgin + many of them are my friends/collaborators/students: jonCates, jon.satrom, Rosa Menkman, Evan Meaney... actually imma stop there and let that list feed into the next question... Have you collaborated with anyone in the art community on a project? With whom, and on what? Mos definitely yes!!! + my most valuable xperiences stem from these collaborations + revolve around community + this is why I moved to Chicago: to partake in these communities. For me these collaborations usually take the form of project/event-organizational ventures, the largest of which is probably the GLI.TC/H festival/conference/gathering, which I've been co-organizing (with lots of people, namely jon.satrom +Rosa Menkman) for over 3yrs now. I mentioned before the lines between artist/educator/organizer are pretty blurry >> what I mean by this is nuanced [save detailz] this is a mode of operating familiar to lots of Chicago [dirty] new-media folks which I've adopted + learned predominantly from wurking with jonCates (whose practice is much more nuanced/complex than I can get into + whose had an undeniable && guileful influence on me + many others here in Chi). I also wurk a lot w/jon.satrom [undoubtedly one of my biggest influences + one of the most brilliant artists on the planet] + currently working w/other local artists/educators/organizers like Christy LeMaster (on splitbeam) +Jason Soliday && Jeff Kolar (on NO-MEDIA) +Joseph (yyolk) Chiocchi (on 0p3nr3p0.net) + am constantly inspired by + partaking in new-media adventures w/other presently chicago-based folks: Aaron Zarzutzki, Adam Trowbridge, Alex Halbert, Alex Inglizian, Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Andrew Rosinski, Ben Baker-Smith, Ben Syverson, Beth Capper, Bryan Peterson, Dave Musgrave, Ei Jane Janet Lin, Emily Kuehn, Entro MC,  Eric Fleischauer, Evan Kühl, Grayson Bagwell, Harvey Moon, Jake Elliott, James Connolly, Jessica Westbrook, Josh Billions, Kevin Carey, Lisa Slodki, Lori Felker, Mark Beasley, Monica Panzarino, Nick Kegeyan, Patrick Lichty, Paul Hertz, Ryan T Dunn, Sam Goldstein, Shawne Holloway, Tamas Kemenczy, Theodore Darst, William Robertson... ...ok, imma stop there >> I realize this may read as an obnoxiously long list, but these are all folks w/out whom my wurk/reality would be very different, these are the folks I chat w/on a regular basis +/or collaborate w/ +/or participate w/ +/or am inspired by. I like to think the wurk I do is about larger digital issues (digital rights, digital literacy, networked culture, intellectual property, etc) accessible/applicable to a global village/community well beyond my local one... but these are folks I regularly steal all my ideas from... and happen to be local. What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously? Do you think this work relates to your art practice in a significant way? yea I think this is always a great question, my students always want to know how new-media artists (at least in the States) make their monie$ >> for me it's pretty modular: I teach new-media && digital art/literacy courses at a couple institutions here (the Marwen Foundation && the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) + I develop miscellaneous digital projects (apps, wwweb, installations) for different clients w/ Branger_Briz (my cousin's agency, the same one who taught me HTML in high-school). I'd say it definitely relates to my practice... or rather that it is my practice in that I'd probably be doing something else entirely if I wasn't a 'new-media artist/educator/organizer' ...again, these are blurry distinctions. [imma combine these]: Do you actively study art history? + Do you read art criticism, philosophy, or critical theory? If so, which authors inspire you? yes && yes. I'm xtreamly interested in the parallel/perpendicular + complementing/contradicting + fringe && mainstream narratives that make up the histories of the conversations I'm invested in: media art histories, computer science histories, digital folk histories, Chicago histories, activist histories, piracy histories, etc. I read lots of criticism/philosophy/theory... I'm inspired by lots of folks: lots of contemporary/mainstream digital culture folks (Lessig, Shirky, Jenkins, Benkler, Stallman) + netstream new media art folks (Lialina, Galloway, the "software studies" crowd) + academix/bloggers/podcasters I follow closely (Katie Salen, Larisa Mann, Yoani Sánchez, Anita Sarkeesian) + the writings of many of my collaborators like Rosa Menkman && jonCates. And then of course the theoretical giants that influence most of us, in particular ideas like Martin Heidegger's notion of 'enframing', that rather than looking at technologies simply as tools, we're better served by considering how they are symptomatic of our particular world view. This has been key to my understanding of technologies as indicative of prevailing ideologies >> McLuhan's perspectives too, specifically the medium-is-the-message angle, rather than getting lost in the content the media carries (and similarly the utility a technology provides) we should consider how the technology itself changes (often completely turns on its head) our relationship to each other and the world. Are there any issues around the production of, or the display/exhibition of new media art that you are concerned about? christ... that's a can'o'worms. I've got lots of vibez here, but I'll keep it short... one thing I think a lot about (for ex) is new-media art archives. I'm a fan of bittorrent as a technology: it's distributed/redundant && (especially for small institutions/projects) xtreamly efficient. Why don't we have more new-media art archives leveraging this technology? Where can I get the ArtBase torrent? There's precedence for it (thinking Jason Scott && the Archive Team's GeoCities torrent) but it’s also been stigmatized + somehow branded as anti-artist-interest. Similarly, for as much as the new-media art wurldz likes to talk about "Open Source" conceptually, we've got a lot to learn (especially structurally) from that community. Why aren't more new-media art archives versioned like open-source projects? this would solve all kinds of exhibition headaches that arise when attempting to display new-media pieces that are 3+ yrs old (and thus require 'antiquated' technology)... again, this is a much larger convo, I’m being a little flippant... but I'm happy to have nuanced convos w/interested parties at more length elsewhere :)  cool! thnx for the chat Daniel ^__^ ../n!ck

[1] Briz, Nick. Glitch Art Historie[s]:  contextualising glitch art - a perpetual beta, in “READER[R0R], GLI.TC/H 20111”. pg. 55. http://gli.tc/h/readerror, 2011. 

Why look at animated GIFs now? They are one of the first forms of image native to computer networks making them charmingly passé, a characteristic that gives them contradictory longevity. Animated GIFs crystallise a form of the combination of computing and the camera. As photography moves almost entirely into digital modes, the fascination with such quirky formats increases. The story of photography will be, in no small part, that of its file formats, the kinds of compression and storage it undergoes, as they in turn produce what is conjurable as an image. The Graphics Interchange Format was first developed through the computer network firm Compuserve. As an eight-bit file format it introduced the amazing spectacle of 256 colour images to be won over the thin lines of dial-up connections. Due to this, when a picture is converted to GIF, it’s likely that posterization occurs – where gradations of tone turn to patches of reduced numbers of colours. Such aliasing introduces a key part of their aesthetic, something described by the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) compression that lies at the format’s core. Characteristic of images in the present era its history is entangled with the imaginings and instruments of “intellectual property”. The LZW format was itself the site for a protracted and infamous attempt at patent enforcement in the USA that dragged on from 1994 until 2003 prompting the rapid development of the alternative PNG format.

Prometheus contains such a huge amount of mythic resonance that it effectively obscures a more conventional plot. I'd like to draw your attention to the use of motifs and callbacks in the film that not only enrich it, but offer possible hints as to what was going on in otherwise confusing scenes.

Let's begin with the eponymous titan himself, Prometheus. He was a wise and benevolent entity who created mankind in the first place, forming the first humans from clay. The Gods were more or less okay with that, until Prometheus gave them fire. This was a big no-no, as fire was supposed to be the exclusive property of the Gods. As punishment, Prometheus was chained to a rock and condemned to have his liver ripped out and eaten every day by an eagle. (His liver magically grew back, in case you were wondering.)

Fix that image in your mind, please: the giver of life, with his abdomen torn open. We'll be co

Prometheus contains such a huge amount of mythic resonance that it effectively obscures a more conventional plot. I'd like to draw your attention to the use of motifs and callbacks in the film that not only enrich it, but offer possible hints as to what was going on in otherwise confusing scenes.

Let's begin with the eponymous titan himself, Prometheus. He was a wise and benevolent entity who created mankind in the first place, forming the first humans from clay. The Gods were more or less okay with that, until Prometheus gave them fire. This was a big no-no, as fire was supposed to be the exclusive property of the Gods. As punishment, Prometheus was chained to a rock and condemned to have his liver ripped out and eaten every day by an eagle. (His liver magically grew back, in case you were wondering.)

Fix that image in your mind, please: the giver of life, with his abdomen torn open. We'll be coming back to it many times in the course of this article.

The ethos of the titan Prometh

...according to Akasegawa's definition. A publisher's blurb states that this includes the "doorknob in a wall without a door, that driveway leading into an unbroken fence, that strange concrete... thing sprouting out of your sidewalk with no discernible purpose." Learn more about what makes a Thomasson in the video below, which includes quixotic footage of real-life examples like a stairway ending in a window.

The artist, who's birth name is Katsuhiko Akasegawa, picked the word in tribute to Gary Thomasson, an American baseball player who whiffed on so many balls during his 1980s stint with the Yomiuri Giants that the Japanese media took to calling him the "Electric Fan" or "Giant Human Fan." Akasegawa was wowed by the innate conundrum of Gary Thomasson, who (according to the video) "had a fully formed body and yet served no purpose to the world." Interestingly enough, the term has been repurposed by author William Gibson in the sci-fi tome Virtual Light to denote a "useless and inexplicable monument."

It turns out that Kant didn't think that an author could mount a strong legal case against piracy based on property rights in words. After all, even after pirates copied an author's words, the author himself still had them. It was better for an author to argue that his book was not an object but an exercise of his powers, which "he can concede, it is true, to others, but never alienate". In other words, ... a pirated book was not to be understood as property that had been stolen; it was rather a speech act that had been compromised. The business arrangement that an author made with an editor might make it look as if words could be traded like watches or pork bellies, but it just wasn't so.

A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point." So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger (PDF), in a passage that might have been referring to climate change denial—the persistent rejection, on the part of so many Americans today, of what we know about global warming and its human causes. But it was too early for that—this was the 1950s—and Festinger was actually describing a famous case study in psychology.

Festinger and several of his colleagues had infiltrated the Seekers, a small Chicago-area cult whose members thought they were communicating with aliens—including one, "Sananda," who they believed was the astral incarnation of Jesus Christ. The group was led by Dorothy Martin, a Dianetics devotee who transcribed the interstellar messages through automatic writing.

Through her, the aliens had given the precise date of an Earth-rending cataclysm: December 21, 1954. Some of Martin's followers quit their jobs and sold their property, expecting to be rescued by a flying saucer when the continent split asunder and a new sea swallowed much of the United States. The disciples even went so far as to remove brassieres and rip zippers out of their trousers—the metal, they believed, would pose a danger on the spacecraft.

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 12, 2010

“Content for all, revenues for some.” For this session we explore the theory behind terms and terminologies. What do the terms ‘free’ and ‘open’ mean in their current contexts? How are they used and in what new political condition do they gain resonance? What is open, how open is it, and for whom? Can anything be learned by reconsidering the work of the grand master of openness as a political concept, Karl Popper? Or are there historical examples of open societies and the commons we can draw from to answer these questions? How do we situate unpaid, crowd-sourced content made profitable by companies such as Google in relation to freedom and openness? We should nuance the definition of data or information, asking whether it comes from open archives versus audiovisual material from emerging artists, established reporters or other cultural producers. Is a resource still open if a user’s attention to it is then sold to advertisers? Indeed, is openness an absolute (either/or) concept, is does it make sense to think of openness as a scale? Alternatively, is it possible to develop an ethics of closure? There is no way back to the old intellectual property rights regimes. But how then are cultural producers going to make a living? How can we create sustainable sources of income for the ‘digital natives’? How can we reconcile the now diverging interests of professionals and amateurs?

Speakers Yann Moulier Boutang, University of Technology of Compiègne, editor of Quarterly French Review MULTITUDES Sustainablility of Free and Open: from Terra Nullius to the new Commons A comparison can be made between the former commons before the application of the terra nullius principle of european colonization and enclosures of primitive accumulation in Western countries and the new commons of the digital era. Like the public sector, the open source and free movement are yielding for free positive externalities to market economy without the ressources granted by state. Unless you tackle with the revenu issue, like the copyleft movement or the Creatives commons licences, the model has to be highly funded through private sponsorship or public subvention with all the disadvantages in terms of freedom. Economic sustainability of the new commons is a crucial political issue.

Dymitri Kleiner, author of Telekommunist Manifesto telekommunisten.net/​ The Telekommunist Manifesto The Telekommunist Manifesto is an exploration of class conflict and property, born in the realization of the primacy of economic capacity in social struggles. Emphasis is placed on the distribution of productive assets and their output. The interpretation here is always tethered to the understanding that wealth and power are intrinsically linked, and only through the former can the later be achieved. As a collective of intellectual workers, the work of Telekommunisten is very much rooted in the free software and free culture communities. However, a central premise of this Manifesto is that engaging in software development and the production of immaterial cultural works is not enough. The communization of immaterial property alone cannot change the distribution of material productive assets, and therefore cannot eliminate exploitation, only workers self-organization of production can.

Simona Levi is a multidisciplinary artist born in Italy and established in Barcelona since 1990. She is the Director of Conservas, a cultural activity centre. Since 2000, she has directed the arts festival INn MOTION which takes place at the Centre of Contemporary Culture of the city of Barcelona. She is an outstanding activist in European social movements in the area of free circulation of knowledge and the right to housing. She is also involved in several artistic and activist platforms. She is co-founder of EXGAE, a civil organization that defends from the abuses of the cultural industry trade groups. fcforum.net/​

Nate Tkacz, Melbourne University Death Knell for Open Politics Openness has become the master category of politics in network cultures. Whereas recent instantiations of the open cannot be understood without reference to 80s software cultures, the idea of openness extends beyond this specific context: Openness has a history. Most famously, it was mobilised by Karl Popper as a critique of totalitarian knowledge and to justify market organisation and the related (neo)liberal disposition. In this presentation I make some critical observations regarding the function of openness both in contemporary network cultures and in the writings of Popper. By placing these distinct but related iterations in dialogue, I hope to point out that there is much more at stake in the battle for openness than its mere realisation. nathanieltkacz.net/​

Moderator: Geert Lovink, founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, is a Dutch-Australian media theorist and critic. He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and in 2003 was at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. In 2004 Lovink was appointed as Research Professor at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and Associate Professor at University of Amsterdam. He is the founder of Internet projects such as nettime and fibreculture. His recent book titles are Dark Fiber (2002), Uncanny Networks (2002) and My First Recession (2003). In 2005-06 he was a fellow at the WissenschaftskollegBerlin Institute for Advanced Study where he finished his third volume on critical Internet culture, Zero Comments (2007). networkcultures.org/​Cast: network cultures

by Sven Lütticken

In a text written in response to the upheavals of the Russian Revolution and the early Soviet avant-garde, Carl Einstein claimed that tradition “piles up in the object”; that the object is a “medium for passive thinking,” bound to tradition and bourgeois property relations; and that in order to “assert the human person, objects, which are preserve jars, must be destroyed.” Going so far as to state that “every destruction of objects is justified,” Einstein proclaimed a “dictatorship of the thingless.”

In a Latourian manner, one might present the recent turn to the thing as a break with the project of modernity: after all, isn’t modernity in theory and in praxis the desperate attempt to (re)form the world in accordance with the will of an autonomous, imperious subject that turns things into ordered and emaciated objects?

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

A face to face encounter, devoid of the warm appeal of flesh. The eyes are glass, a cold blue crystal reflects the light in a way real eyes never would. A muzzle of hair, perhaps taken from a barbershop floor or the hind quarters of an animal. The painted scalp peeks through the sparse strands: there is nothing here one might caress with fumbling fingers, or, a millennia ago, pick between to lovingly tease out a louse or mite. The figure balances uneasily on stumps for legs. Its waxen surface bears no resemblance to skin. It is a shade saturated of living colour. In another shortened limb the figure holds a wooden spear, with a plastic point designed to take the place of the authentic stone tip. Under its beaten brow this creature forever stands. He is a spectacle, a museum attraction. He is not human, he is 'other'. He is not man, he is Neanderthal.

Encounters like this, hashed together from memories that span my childhood and adult years, represent the closest many of us will come to meeting a Neanderthal. Encounters built upon out-dated science and the desire of museums to authenticate experiences which, in reality, are as far away from 'true' anthropology as those glass eyes are from windows on the soul. In a recent Archaeology.org article a question was put forward that made me think again about these encounters:

Should we Clone Neanderthals? : I could not help but probe the proposition further.

In my own lifetime our understanding of these absolute 'others' has gone through several revolutions. What once were lumbering apes, incapable of rational thought, speech or the rituals of religious reverence, have become our long lost evolutionary cousins. Research from various quarters has shown that not only were Neanderthals quite capable of vocal expression, but in all likelihood they lived a rich, symbolic life. They had bigger brains than we did, or do, and were probably burying their dead with appeal to an afterlife 50,000 years before our ancestors left Africa. They cared for their young, lived in well established social groups and apart from their prominent brow and less mobile, stocky build, resembled humans in most other aspects. More recent evidence seems to show that far from being a completely separate species, it is quite possible that ancient humans interbred with Neanderthals. This astounding revelation, if it were ever verified, would mean that many of us – if not every one of us – carry within our genetic make-up a living memory of Neanderthal heritage.

But Neanderthals are more than scientific curiosities. They are the embodiment of the 'other', a reflective surface via which the human race may peer upon themselves. Human myth is filled with lumbering creatures, not quite human but every bit an echo of our deepest fears, our vanities, our failings, our memories prone to fade in time. With Shakespeare's Caliban, the feral beast of Prospero's burden, and William Blake's depiction of Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king who myth says was reduced to animal madness, being only two in a long list of sub-human characters. Along with these mythic creatures the Neanderthal has achieved the status of a linguistic archetype, carrying the weight of our inhumanity when admitting our limitations is too much to bear. For a very long time after their discovery Neanderthals were named as the very embodiment of our ineptitudes. To be violent, or brutally instinctive was to be Neanderthal Neanderthals stood as a fiendish remnant of the days before language, fire or social grace, before the borders between man and nature had been breached by the gift of free-will – a gift bequeathed to us, and not to them.

This vague notion of a 'gift' came to me after reading the article about the possibility of cloning Neanderthals At first I read with a certain distance, the same reading I might have given to an article about cloning dodos, mammoths or dinosaurs. Soon though, it was clear that "bringing Neanderthals back from the dead" was a far more metaphysically slippy statement than similar ones about long extinct birds or mammals.

Although concise and engaging the article bounds between two wildly opposed positions when it comes to representing Neanderthals On the one hand the scientists interviewed seem to understand Neanderthals as entities worthy of 'human' rights and freedoms:

"We are not Frankenstein doctors who use human genes to create creatures just to see how they work." Noonan agrees, "If your experiment succeeds and you generate a Neanderthal who talks, you have violated every ethical rule we have," he says, "and if your experiment fails...well. It's a lose-lose." Other scientists think there may be circumstances that could justify Neanderthal cloning.

"If we could really do it and we know we are doing it right, I'm actually for it," says Lahn. "Not to understate the problem of that person living in an environment where they might not fit in. So, if we could also create their habitat and create a bunch of them, that would be a different story."

Extract from article: Should We Clone Neanderthals?

On the other hand, much of the article is made up of insights into piecing together ancient – and therefore fragmented – DNA sequences, and the benefits a Neanderthal clone might be to human medicine:

“Neanderthal cells could be important for discovering treatments to diseases that are largely human-specific, such as HIV, polio, and smallpox, he says. If Neanderthals are sufficiently different from modern humans, they may have a genetic immunity to these diseases. There may also be differences in their biology that lead to new drugs or gene therapy treatments.”

Extract from article: Should We Clone Neanderthals?

The article does a very good job of considering the moral implications of these outcomes, and on many levels I agree with them. But when it came to the metaphysical significance of cloning a Neanderthal the article, like so many other articles about science, stayed largely silent.

Before I come back to the notion of the 'gift' I mentioned before, I'd like to reconsider the article with a few simple questions:

1. What would it mean to give life to an extinct creature, let alone one whose mental capacities are as varied and dexterous as our own?

The likelihood is that early human groups had a part to play in the extinction of our closest cousins, as we still do in the demise of many other, less human, creatures. Our propensity to distinguish ourselves from the natural world that supports us is one intimately bound to our notions of identity, of cause and effect and – perhaps most fundamentally – of spiritual presence. Where the Neanderthal differs from other extinct species is at the status of 'other'. By being so similar in kind to us the Neanderthal cannot help but become a mirror for the human race. Of course it is impossible to know how early humans and Neanderthals reacted to each other all those centuries ago. But the outcome would suggest that humans did not run to help their evolutionary neighbours as their life slipped away. To us they must have seemed both alien and kin. Something to fear, not because of their absolute difference, but because deep down we knew how they viewed the world. And if it was anything like the way we did, we were better rid of them.

Further more, to bring Neanderthals into the world as scientific curiosities – which they would be by necessity – is to deny them the status of 'human' from the beginning. Not only would a Neanderthal grown in a test-tube be the embodiment of 'other', they would also be a walking, talking genetic tool-kit, replete with the needs of a person, but the status of a slave.

2. How much of what we decode and reconstruct is just DNA?

Genetics is an impressively successful science, giving us insights into the living, breathing world at a range of detail unknown to previous generations. But I don't think it is too cynical of me to throw caution upon its 'truth' value. Genetics is not a truth about the world. Instead, it is a highly paradigmatic model that scientists use to understand abstractions of reality far removed from the every day. Of course this gross generalisation is worthy of a long discussion in itself, and one better balanced by whole swathes of research designed to outline the weak points of the genetic paradigm, as well as advance our understanding of it. When the issue at hand is better medical care, or the development of advanced crops for the third world, we should keep these issues in mind, moving forwards cautiously as long as the benefits outweigh our reservations. When it comes to bringing to life an entire species, and one in whose original demise we probably played a part, a blind trust in scientific models is much more likely to lead us into a moral cul de sac we may never escape from. Although the article talks at length on the problems associated with cloning (such as birth defects and multiple infant deaths) it fails outright to consider what genetics, and thus 'cloning', actually represents.

Any creature that we did 'raise from the dead' would be as much a result of contemporary scientific models as it was of mother nature.

...and with both those questions in mind, a third:

3. What happens to our vision of ourselves once the deed has been done?

This final point, leaking naturally from the other two, is founded on what seem on the surface overtly metaphysical concerns. But I hasten to show that through applying the rhetoric of 'human rights' onto creatures that were born in a laboratory, nothing but confusion can arise.

It pays here to visit two theorists for whom the questions of the 'gift' and of the 'tool' are highly significant to their philosophies.

From the writings of Georges Bataille we learn that nothing humans make in utility may be given a status above a tool:

“The tool has no value in itself – like the subject, or the world, or the elements that are of the same nature as the subject or the world – but only in relation to an anticipated result. The time spent in making it directly establishes its utility, its subordination to the one who uses it with an end in view, and its subordination to this end; at the same time it establishes the clear distinction between the end and the means and it does so in the very terms that its appearance has defined. Unfortunately the end is thus given in terms of the means, in terms of utility. This is one of the most remarkable and most fateful aberrations of language. The purpose of a tool's use always has the same meaning as the tool's use: a utility is assigned to it in turn and so on...”

Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion

For Jean-Joseph Goux the act of 'giving' is always a statement of otherness:

“The impossibility of return reveals the truth of the gift in separating it from the return and, most of all, in showing it as an act carried out for others. This service toward others must be the only reason for the kind deed.... It is only as a superior level in the gradation of the regimes of giving that the gift without return can be thought. This mode of giving imitates the Gods. We have two extreme positions on the moral scale, “The one who brings kind deeds imitates the Gods; the one who claims a payments imitates the usurers.””

Jean-Joseph Goux, Seneca Against Derrida

To consider the cloning of Neanderthals as an act of utility (i.e. for the benefits their genome would be to human medicine) is to, by definition, subordinate them to their 'use-value' - denying them outright the status of human and the rights to which that status is associated. On the other hand, to consider the act of cloning as a true 'gift' to the Neanderthals is to push our own status as the 'givers' towards the divine. Either the cloned Neanderthals are tools for us to use as we wish or their life is their very own and one instantly removed from any right we claim to administer it.

Of course it is impossible to imagine the cloned Neanderthals' 'gift' as being one we would honour unto them without any claim of return. In the modern world such creatures, born in our laboratories, would at least be the legal property of the institution that bore them. At the very worst the cloned Neanderthal would grow up under the lights of a thousand television cameras, only to be cut open and dissected in front of the very same zooming lenses when it came of age.

There is a much deeper problem at play here, one that I believe science has no possibility of solving. Once our technologies are capable of bringing sentient life into existence, whether that be a Neanderthal or a cognitive computer, that very same technology becomes instantly incapable of representing the life it has created. Simply put, it is at this point that scientific rhetoric collapses as a field of enterprise, and only the patterns and considerations of philosophy and religion become relevant. As Bataille and Goux show, the only entity capable of truly giving – asking not for return, the only metaphysical concept capable of acting upon the world without utility is a divine being, neither of this world nor capable of being represented in it. Not for one moment does this philosophical enquiry suggest that such a being exists, what it does do is draw firmly into the sand a metaphysical line beyond which 'we' cannot cross. It is not that humans won't be technically able to bring such living entities into the world, it is more that, at the very moment we do so 'we' – as a concept – cease to be. In religious terminology the relationship we might have with such beings is similar to that between the shepherd and his flock. At the moment we bring Neanderthals into our world they become our most significant responsibility, exploding to infinity any notions we may have carried before about our own place in the cosmos.

I have no idea whether I would like to see Neanderthals walking the planet alongside us, or whether their memory should stay that way, long into our future. What I do know is that this philosophical parable is one that science, and the modern humanity it supports, would do well to become more aware of. So often it seems that our scientific rhetoric is incapable of providing us with solid enough foundations for the acts we commit in its name. Perhaps in a world of continued, man-made extinctions, of climate change and ever increasing human populations, perhaps in this world science needs a Neanderthal-cloning moment to awaken it to the implications of its continued existence.

“...philosophy seeks to establish, or rather restore, an other relationship to things, and therefore an other knowledge, a knowledge and a relationship that precisely science hides from us, of which it deprives us, because it allows us only to conclude and to infer without ever presenting, giving to us the thing in itself.”

Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands

Speed is the elegance of thought, which mocks stupidity, heavy and slow. Intelligence thinks and says the unexpected; it moves with the fly, with its flight. A fool is defined by predictability… But if life is brief, luckily, thought travels as fast as the speed of light. In earlier times philosophers used the metaphor of light to express the clarity of thought; I would like to use it to express not only brilliance and purity but also speed. In this sense we are inventing right now a new Age of Enlightenment… A lot of… incomprehension… comes simply from this speed. I am fairly glad to be living in the information age, since in it speed becomes once again a fundamental category of intelligence. Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time

(Originally published at 3quarksdaily · Link to Part One) Human beings are often described as the great imitators: We perceive the ant and the termite as part of nature. Their nests and mounds grow out of the Earth. Their actions are indicative of a hidden pattern being woven by natural forces from which we are separated. The termite mound is natural, and we, the eternal outsiders, sitting in our cottages, our apartments and our skyscrapers, are somehow not. Through religion, poetry, or the swift skill of the craftsman smearing pigment onto canvas, humans aim to encapsulate that quality of existence that defies simple description. The best art, or so it is said, brings us closer to attaining a higher truth about the world that remains elusive from language, that perhaps the termite itself embodies as part of its nature. Termite mounds are beautiful, but were built without a concept of beauty. Termite mounds are mathematically precise, yet crawling through their intricate catacombs cannot be found one termite in comprehension of even the simplest mathematical constituent. In short, humans imitate and termites merely are. This extraordinary idea is partly responsible for what I referred to in Part One of this article as The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. It leads us to consider not only the human organism as distinct from its surroundings, but it also forces us to separate human nature from its material artefacts. We understand the termite mound as integral to termite nature, but are quick to distinguish the axe, the wheel, the book, the skyscraper and the computer network from the human nature that bore them. When we act, through art, religion or with the rational structures of science, to interface with the world our imitative (mimetic) capacity has both subjective and objective consequence. Our revelations, our ideas, stories and models have life only insofar as they have a material to become invested through. The religion of the dance, the stone circle and the summer solstice is mimetically different to the religion of the sermon and the scripture because the way it interfaces with the world is different. Likewise, it is only with the consistency of written and printed language that the technical arts could become science, and through which our ‘modern’ era could be built. Dances and stone circles relayed mythic thinking structures, singular, imminent and ethereal in their explanatory capacities. The truth revealed by the stone circle was present at the interface between participant, ceremony and summer solstice: a synchronic truth of absolute presence in the moment. Anyone reading this will find truth and meaning through grapholectic interface. Our thinking is linear, reductive and bound to the page. It is reliant on a diachronic temporality that the pen, the page and the book hold in stasis for us. Imitation alters the material world, which in turn affects the texture of further imitation. If we remove the process from its material interface we lose our objectivity. In doing so we isolate the single termite from its mound and, after much careful study, announce that we have reduced termite nature to its simplest constituent. The reason for the tantalizing involutions here is obviously that intelligence is relentlessly reflexive, so that even the external tools that it uses to implement its workings become ‘internalized’, that is, part of its own reflexive process… To say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it. Like other artificial creations and indeed more than any other, it is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realisation of fuller, interior, human potentials. Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy

Anyone reading this article cannot fail but be aware of the changing interface between eye and text that has taken place over the past two decades or so. New Media – everything from the internet database to the Blackberry – has fundamentally changed the way we connect with each other, but it has also altered the way we connect with information itself. The linear, diachronic substance of the page and the book have given way to a dynamic textuality blurring the divide between authorship and readership, expert testament and the simple accumulation of experience. The main difference between traditional text-based systems and newer, data-driven ones is quite simple: it is the interface. Eyes and fingers manipulate the book, turning over pages in a linear sequence in order to access the information stored in its printed figures. For New Media, for the digital archive and the computer storage network, the same information is stored sequentially in databases which are themselves hidden to the eye. To access them one must commit a search or otherwise run an algorithm that mediates the stored data for us. The most important distinction should be made at the level of the interface, because, although the database as a form has changed little over the past 50 years of computing, the Human Control Interfaces (HCI) we access and manipulate that data through are always passing from one iteration to another. Stone circles interfacing the seasons stayed the same, perhaps being used in similar rituals over the course of a thousand years of human cultural accumulation. Books, interfacing text, language and thought, stay the same in themselves from one print edition to the next, but as a format, books have changed very little in the few hundred years since the printing press. The computer HCI is most different from the book in that change is integral to it structure. To touch a database through a computer terminal, through a Blackberry or iPhone, is to play with data at incredible speed: Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition… Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies. At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics… This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves. Wired Magazine, The End of Theory, June 2008

And as the amount of data has expanded exponentially, so have the interfaces we use to access that data and the models we build to understand that data. On the day that Senator John McCain announced his Vice Presidential Candidate the best place to go for an accurate profile of Sarah Palin was not the traditional media: it was Wikipedia. In an age of instant, global news, no newspaper could keep up with the knowledge of the cloud. The Wikipedia interface allowed knowledge about Sarah Palin from all levels of society to be filtered quickly and efficiently in real-time. Wikipedia acted as if it was encyclopaedia, as newspaper as discussion group and expert all at the same time and it did so completely democratically and at the absence of a traditional management pyramid. The interface itself became the thinking mechanism of the day, as if the notes every reader scribbled in the margins had been instantly cross-checked and added to the content. In only a handful of years the human has gone from merely dipping into the database to becoming an active component in a human-cloud of data. The interface has begun to reflect back upon us, turning each of us into a node in a vast database bigger than any previous material object. Gone are the days when clusters of galaxies had to a catalogued by an expert and entered into a linear taxonomy. Now, the same job is done by the crowd and the interface, allowing a million galaxies to be catalogued by amateurs in the same time it would have taken a team of experts to classify a tiny percentage of the same amount. This method of data mining is called ‘crowdsourcing’ and it represents one of the dominant ways in which raw data will be turned into information (and then knowledge) over the coming decades. Here the cloud serves as more than a metaphor for the group-driven interface, becoming a telling analogy for the trans-grapholectic culture we now find ourselves in. To grasp the topological shift in our thought patterns it pays to move beyond the interface and look at a few of the linear, grapholectic models that have undergone change as a consequence of the information age. One of these models is evolution, a biological theory the significance of which we are still in the process of discerning:

If anyone now thinks that biology is sorted, they are going to be proved wrong too. The more that genomics, bioinformatics and many other newer disciplines reveal about life, the more obvious it becomes that our present understanding is not up to the job. We now gaze on a biological world of mind-boggling complexity that exposes the shortcomings of familiar, tidy concepts such as species, gene and organism. A particularly pertinent example [was recently provided in New Scientist] - the uprooting of the tree of life which Darwin used as an organising principle and which has been a central tenet of biology ever since. Most biologists now accept that the tree is not a fact of nature - it is something we impose on nature in an attempt to make the task of understanding it more tractable. Other important bits of biology - notably development, ageing and sex - are similarly turning out to be much more involved than we ever imagined. As evolutionary biologist Michael Rose at the University of California, Irvine, told us: “The complexity of biology is comparable to quantum mechanics.” New Scientist, Editorial, January 2009

As our technologies became capable of gathering more data than we were capable of comprehending, a new topology of thought, reminiscent of the computer network, began to emerge. For the mindset of the page and the book science could afford to be linear and diachronic. In the era of The Data Deluge science has become more cloud-like, as theories for everything from genetics to neuroscience, particle physics to cosmology have shed their linear constraints. Instead of seeing life as a branching tree, biologists are now speaking of webs of life, where lineages can intersect and interact, where entire species are ecological systems in themselves. As well as seeing the mind as an emergent property of the material brain, neuroscience and philosophy have started to consider the mind as manifest in our extended, material environment. Science has exploded, and picking up the pieces will do no good. Through the topology of the network we have begun to perceive what Michel Serres calls ‘The World Object’, an ecology of interconnections and interactions that transcends and subsumes the causal links propounded by grapholectic culture. At the limits of science a new methodology is emerging at the level of the interface, where masses of data are mined and modelled by systems and/or crowds which themselves require no individual understanding to function efficiently. Where once we studied events and ideas in isolation we now devise ever more complex, multi-dimensional ways for those events and ideas to interconnect; for data sources to swap inputs and output; for outsiders to become insiders. Our interfaces are in constant motion, on trajectories that curve around to meet themselves, diverge and cross-pollinate. Thought has finally been freed from temporal constraint, allowing us to see the physical world, life, language and culture as multi-dimensional, fractal patterns, winding the great yarn of (human) reality: The advantage that results from it is a new organisation of knowledge; the whole landscape is changed. In philosophy, in which elements are even more distanced from one another, this method at first appears strange, for it brings together the most disparate things. People quickly crit[cize] me for this… But these critics and I no longer have the same landscape in view, the same overview of proximities and distances. With each profound transformation of knowledge come these upheavals in perception. Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time