I just came back from two jam packed weeks at Transmediale festival, 2017. Morehshin Allahyari and I were involved in a wealth of events, mostly in relation to our #Additivism project. Including: On the Far Side of the Marchlands: an exhibition at Schering Stiftung gallery, featuring work by Catherine Disney, Keeley Haftner, Brittany Ransom, Morehshin and myself.

Photos from the event are gathered here.

The 3D Additivist Cookbook european launch: held at Transmediale on Saturday 4th Feb.

Audio of the event is available here.

Singularities: a panel and discussion conceived and introduced by Morehshin and myself. Featuring Luiza Prado & Pedro Oliveira (A parede), Rasheedah Phillips, and Dorothy R. Santos.

Audio of the entire panel is available here. The introduction to the panel – written by Morehshin and myself – can be found below. Photos from the panel are here.

Alien Matter exhibition: curated by Inke Arns as part of Transmediale 2017. Featuring The 3D Additivist Cookbook and works by Joey Holder, Dov Ganchrow, and Kuang-Yi Ku.

Photos from the exhibition can be found here.

Singularities Panel delivered at Transmediale, Sunday 5th February 2017 Introduction by Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke   Morehshin: In 1979, the Iranian Islamic revolution resulted in the overthrowing of the Pahlavi deen-as-ty and led to the establishment of an Islamic republic. Many different organizations, parties and guerrilla groups were involved in the Iranian Revolution. Some groups were created after the fall of Pahlavi and still survive in Iran; others helped overthrow the Shah but no longer exist. Much of Iranian society was hopeful about the coming revolution. Secular and leftist politicians participated in the movement to gain power in the aftermath, believing that Khomeini would support their voice and allow multiple positions and parties to be active and involved in the shaping of the post-revolution Iran. Like my mother – a Marxist at the time – would always say: The Iranian revolution brought sudden change, death, violence in unforeseen ways. It was a point, a very fast point of collapse and rise. The revolution spun out of control and the country was taken over by Islamists so fast that people weren’t able to react to it; to slow it; or even to understand it. The future was now in the hands of a single party with a single vision that would change the lives of generations of Iranians, including myself, in the years that followed. We were forced and expected to live in one singular reality. A mono authoritarian singularity. In physics, a singularity is a point in space and time of such incredible density that the very nature of reality is brought into question. Associated with elusive black holes and the alien particles that bubble out of the quantum foam at their event horizon, the term ‘singularity’ has also been co-opted by cultural theorists and techno-utopianists to describe moments of profound social, political, ontological or material transformation. The coming-into-being of new worlds that redefine their own origins. For mathematicians and physicists, singularities are often considered as ‘bad behaviour’ in the numbers and calculations. Infinite points may signal weird behaviours existing ‘in’ the physical world: things outside or beyond our ability to comprehend. Or perhaps, more interestingly, a singularity may expose the need for an entirely new physics. Some anomalies can only be made sense of by drafting a radically new model of the physical world to include them. For this panel we consider ‘bad behaviours’ in social, technological and ontological singularities. Moments of profound change triggered by a combination of technological shifts, cultural mutations, or unforeseen political dramas and events. Like the physicists who comprehend singularities in the physical world, we do not know whether the singularities our panelists highlight today tell us something profound about the world itself, or force us to question the model we have of the world or worlds. Daniel: As well as technological or socio-political singularities, this panel will question the ever narcissistic singularities of ‘I’, ‘here’ and ‘now’ – confounding the principles of human universality upon which these suppositions are based. We propose ‘singularities’ as eccentric and elusive figures in need of collective attention. It is no coincidence that ‘Singularity’ is often used as a term to indicate human finitude. Self-same subjects existing at particular points in time, embedded within particular contexts, told through a singular history or single potential future. The metaphor of the transformative Singularity signals not one reality ‘to come’, nor even two realities – one moved from and one towards – but of many, all dependant on who the subject of the singularity is and how much autonomy they are ascribed. The ‘Technological’ Singularity is a myth of the ‘transhumanists’, a group of mainly Western, commonly white, male enthusiasts, who ascribe to the collective belief that technology will help them to become ‘more than human’… ‘possessed of drastically augmented intellects, memories, and physical powers.’ As technological change accelerates, according to prominent Transhumanist Ray Kurzweil, so it pulls us upwards in its wake. Kurzweil argues that as the curve of change reaches an infinite gradient reality itself will be brought into question: like a Black Hole in space-time subjects travelling toward this spike will find it impossible to turn around, to escape its pull. A transformed post-human reality awaits us on the other side of the Technological Singularity. A reality Kurzweil and his ilk believe ‘we’ will inevitably pass into in the coming decades. In a 2007 paper entitled ‘Droppin’ Science Fiction’, Darryl A. Smith explores the metaphor of the singularity through Afro-American and Afrofuturist science fiction. He notes that the metaphor of runaway change positions those subject to it in the place of Sisyphus, the figure of Greek myth condemned to push a stone up a hill forever. For Sisyphus to progress he has to fight gravity as it conspires with the stone to pull him back to the bottom of the slope. The singularity in much science fiction from black and afro-american authors focusses on this potential fall, rather than the ascent:

“Here, in the geometrics of spacetime, the Spike lies not at the highest point on an infinite curve but at the lowest… Far from being the shift into a posthumanity, the Negative Spike is understood… as an infinite collapsing and, thus, negation of reality. Escape from such a region thus requires an opposing infinite movement.”

The image of a collective ‘push’ of the stone of progress up the slope necessarily posits a universal human subject, resisting the pull of gravity back down the slope. A universal human subject who passes victorious to the other side of the event horizon. But as history has shown us, technological, social and political singularities – arriving with little warning – often split the world into those inside and those outside their event horizons. Singularities like the 1979 Iranian revolution left many more on the outside of the Negative Spike, than the inside. Singularities such as the Industrial Revolution, which is retrospectively told in the West as a tale of imperial and technological triumph, rather than as a story of those who were violently abducted from their homelands, and made to toil and die in fields of cotton and sugarcane. The acceleration toward and away from that singularity brought about a Negative Spike so dense, that many millions of people alive today still find their identities subject to its social and ontological mass. In their recent definition of The Anthropocene, the International Commission on Stratigraphy named the Golden Spike after World War II as the official signal of the human-centric geological epoch. A series of converging events marked in the geological record around the same time: the detonation of the first nuclear warhead; the proliferation of synthetic plastic from crude oil constituents; and the introduction of large scale, industrialised farming practices, noted by the appearance of trillions of discarded chicken bones in the geological record. Will the early 21st century be remembered for the 9/11 terrorist event? The introduction of the iPhone, and Twitter? Or for the presidency of Donald J Trump? Or will each of these extraordinary events be considered as part of a single, larger shift in global power and techno-mediated autonomy? If ‘we’ are to rebuild ourselves through stronger unities, and collective actions in the wake of recent political upheavals, will ‘we’ also forego the need to recognise the different subjectivities and distinct realities that bubble out of each singularity’s wake? As the iPhone event sent shockwaves through the socio-technical cultures of the West, so the rare earth minerals required to power those iPhones were pushed skywards in value, forcing more bodies into pits in the ground to mine them. As we gather at Transmediale to consider ai, infrastructural, data, robotic, or cyborgian revolutions, what truly remains ‘elusive’ is a definition of ‘the human’ that does justice to the complex array of subjectivities destined to be impacted – and even crafted anew – by each of these advances. In his recent text on the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster Jean-Luc Nancy proposes instilling “the condition of an ever-renewed present” into the urgent design and creation of new, mobile futures. In this proposition Nancy recognises that each singularity is equal to all others in its finitude; an equivalence he defines as “the essence of community.” To contend with the idea of singularities – plural – of ruptures as such, we must share together that which will forever remain unimaginable alone. Morehshin: This appeal to a plurality of singularities is easily mistaken for the kinds of large scale collective action we have seen in recent years around the world. From the Arab Springs, and Occupy Movement through to the recent Women’s March, which took place not 24 hours after the inauguration of Donald Trump. These events in particular spoke of a universal drive, a collective of people’s united against a single cause. Much has been written about the ‘human microphone’ technique utilized by Occupy protesters to amplify the voice of a speaker when megaphones and loud speakers were banned or unavailable. We wonder whether rather than speak as a single voice we should seek to emphasise the different singularities enabled by different voices, different minds; distinct votes and protestations. We wonder whether black and brown protestors gathered in similar numbers, with similar appeals to their collective unity and identity would have been portrayed very differently by the media. Whether the radical white women and population that united for the march would also show up to the next black lives matter or Muslim ban protests. These are not just some academic questions but an actual personal concern… what is collectivism and for who does the collective function? When we talk about futures and worlds and singularities, whose realities are we talking about? Who is going to go to Mars with Elon Musk? And who will be left? As we put this panel together, in the last weeks, our Manifesto’s apocalyptic vision of a world accelerated to breaking point by technological progress began to seem strangely comforting compared to the delirious political landscape we saw emerging before us. Whether you believe political mele-ee-ze, media delirium, or the inevitable implosion of the neo-liberal project is to blame for the rise of figures like Farage, Trump or – in the Philippines – the outspoken President Rodrigo Duterte, the promises these figures make of an absolute shift in the conditions of power, appear grand precisely because they choose to demonize the discrete differences of minority groups, or attempt to overturn truths that might fragment and disturb their all-encompassing narratives. Daniel: The appeal to inclusivity – in virtue of a shared political identity – often instates those of ‘normal’ body, race, sex, or genome as exclusive harbingers of the-change-which-should – or so we are told, will – come. A process that theorist Rosi Braidotti refers to as a ‘dialectics of otherness’ which subtly disguises difference, in celebration of a collective voice of will or governance. Morehshin: Last week on January 27, as part of a plan to keep out “Islamic terrorists” outside of the United States Trump signed an order, that suspended entry for citizens of seven countries for 90 days. This includes Iran, the country I am a citizen of. I have lived in the U.S. for 9 years and hold a green-card which was included in Trump’s ban and now is being reviewed case by case for each person who enters the U.S.. When the news came out, I was already in Berlin for Transmediale and wasn’t sure whether I had a home to go back to. Although the chaos of Trump’s announcement has now settled, and my own status as a resident of America appears a bit more clear for now, the ripples of emotion and uncertainty from last week have coloured my experience at this festival. As I have sat through panels and talks in the last 3 days, and as I stand here introducing this panel about elusive events, potential futures and the in betweenness of all profound technological singularities… the realities that feel most significant to me are yet to take place in the lives of so many Middle-Easterners and Muslims affected by Trump’s ban. How does one imagine/re-imagine/figure/re-figure the future when there are still so many ‘presents’ existing in conflict? I grew up in Iran for 23 years, where science fiction didn’t really exist as a genre in popular culture. I always think we were discouraged to imagine the future other than how it was ‘imagined’ for us. Science-fiction as a genre flourishes in the West… But I still struggle with the kinds of futures we seem most comfortable imagining. THANKS   We now want to hand over to our fantastic panelists, to highlight their voices, and build harmonies and dissonances with our own. We are extremely honoured to introduce them: Dorothy Santos is a Filipina-American writer, editor, curator, and educator. She has written and spoken on a wide variety of subjects, including art, activism, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology. She is managing editor of Hyphen Magazine, and a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts fellow, where she is researching the concept of citizenship. Her talk today is entitled Machines and Materiality: Speculations of Future Biology and the Human Body. Luiza Prado and Pedro Oliveira are Brazilian design researchers, who very recently wrapped up their PhDs at the University of the Arts Berlin. Under the ‘A Parede’ alias, the duo researches new design methodologies, processes, and pedagogies for an onto-epistemological decolonization of the field. In their joint talk and performance, Luiza and Pedro will explore the tensions around hyperdense gravitational pulls and acts of resistance. With particular focus on the so-called “non-lethal” bombs – teargas and stun grenades – manufactured in Brazil, and exported and deployed all around the world. Rasheedah Phillips is creative director of Afrofuturist Affair: a community formed to celebrate, strengthen, and promote Afrofuturistic and Sci-Fi concepts and culture. In her work with ‘Black Quantum Futurism’, Rasheedah derives facets, tenets, and qualities from quantum physics, futurist traditions, and Black/African cultural traditions to celebrate the ability of African-descended people to see “into,” choose, or create the impending future. In her talk today, Rasheedah will explore the history of linear time constructs, notions of the future, and alternative theories of temporal-spatial consciousness.      

I will deliver this 4-week public series at The Tate Modern throughout July 2016. Sign up! Thanks to Viktoria Ivanova for working with me to achieve this.

Data is the lifeblood of today’s economic and social systems. Drones, satellites and CCTV cameras capture digital images covertly, while smartphones we carry feed data packets into the cloud, fought over by corporations and governments. How are we to make sense of all this information? Who is to police and distribute it? And what kind of new uses can art put it to? This four-week series led by writer/artist Daniel Rourke will explore the politics and potential of big data through the lens of contemporary art and the social sciences. Participants will assess the impact the digital revolution has had on notions of value attached to the invisible, the territorial and the tangible. We will look at artists and art activists who tackle the conditions of resolution, algorithmic governance, digital colonialism and world-making in their work, with a focus on key news events yet to unfold in 2016. Session 1 Hito Steyerl: Poor Image Politics In this first session we will examine the politics of image and data resolution, with special attention to the work of artist Hito Steyerl represented in the Tate Collection. How do poor images influence the significance and value of the events they depict? What can online cultures that fetishise poor quality teach us about the economics and autonomy of information? Is being a low resolution event in a field of high resolutions an empowering proposition? Session 2 Morehshin Allahyari: Decolonising the Digital Archive 3D scanning and printing technologies are becoming common tools for archaeologists, archivists and historians. We will examine the work of art activists who question these technologies, connecting the dots from terroristic networks, through the price of crude oil, to artefacts being digitally colonised by Western institutions. Artist Morehshin Allahyari will join us via skype to talk about Material Speculation: ISIS – a series of artifacts destroyed by ISIS in 2015, which Allahyari then ‘recreated’ using digital tools and techniques. Session 3 Mishka Henner: Big Data and World Making In this session we will explore the work of artists who channel surveillance and big data into the poetic re-making of worlds. We will compare and contrast nefarious ‘deep web’ marketplaces with ‘real world’ auction houses selling artworks to a global elite. Artist Mishka Henner will join us via skype to talk about artistic appropriation, subversion and the importance of provocation. Session 4 Forensic Architecture: Blurring the Borders between Forensics, Law and Art The Forensic Architecture project uses analytical methods for reconstructing scenes of war and violence inscribed within spatial artefacts and environments. In this session we will look at their work to read and mobilise ‘ambient’ information gathered from satellites, mobile phones and CCTV/news footage. How are technical thresholds implicated in acts of war, terrorism and atrocity, and how can they be mobilised for resist and deter systemic violence?

The 3D Additivist Manifesto was created in collaboration with Morehshin Allahyari, with sound design by Andrea Young

The 3D Additivist Manifesto + Cookbook blur the boundaries between art, engineering, science fiction, and digital aesthetics. We call for you – artists, activists, designers, and critical engineers – to accelerate the 3D printer and other Additivist technologies to their absolute limits and beyond into the realm of the speculative, the provocative and the weird. Answer the call: 3d.additivism.org

Additivism is essential for accelerating the emergence and encounter with The Radical Outside.

I am privileged to be involved in Ways of Something: an incredible collaboration between artist Lorna Mills and (currently) 85 artists. Episode 3 will have its World Premiere at The Photographer’s Gallery, London, on February 12th 2015. 85 web-based artists remake John Berger’s historic documentary ‘Ways of Seeing’ (1972) one minute at a time. Originally commissioned by The One Minutes, at Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam and compiled by Lorna Mills, the episodes present a sequence of 3D renderings, filmic remixes, videos and webcam performances which subvert the tropes of art history in an entertaining and overwhelming way. Followed by a Q&A between Julia van Mourik, director of The One Minutes and Lorna Mills via Skype.

Artists in Episode 1 1: Daniel Temkin, 2: Rollin Leonard, 3: Sara Ludy, 4: Rhett Jones, 5: Jaakko Pallasvuo, 6: Dafna Ganani, 7: Jennifer Chan, 8: Rea McNamara, 9: Theodore Darst, 10: Matthew Williamson, 11: Hector Llanquin, 12: Christina Entcheva, 13: V5MT, 14: Marisa Olson, 15: Joe McKay, 16: Carla Gannis, 17: Nicholas O’Brien, 18: Eva Papamargariti, 19: Rosa Menkman, 20: Kristin Lucas, 21: Jeremy Bailey & Kristen D. Schaffer, 22: Giselle Zatonyl, 23: Paul Wong, 24: Alfredo Salazar-Caro, 25: Sally McKay, 26: RM Vaughan & Keith Cole, 27: Andrew Benson, 28: Christian Petersen, 29: Faith Holland, 30: Jennifer McMackon Artists in Episode 2 1: Kevin Heckart, 2: Geraldine Juarez, 3: Gaby Cepeda, 4: Angela Washko, 5: Emilie Gervais, 6: LaTurbo Avedon, 7: Lyla Rye, 8: Mattie Hillock, 9: Antonio Roberts, 10: Georges Jacotey, 11: Daniel Rourke, 12: Sandra Rechico & Annie Onyi Cheung, 13: Yoshi Sodeoka, 14: Alma Alloro, 15: LoVid, 16: Andrea Crespo, 17: Ad Minoliti, 18: Arjun Ram Srivatsa, 19: Carrie Gates, 20: Isabella Streffen, 21: Esteban Ottaso, 22: ZIL & ZOY, 23: Hyo Myoung Kim, 24: Jesse Darling, 25: Tristan Stevens, 26: Erica Lapadat-Janzen, 27: Claudia Hart, 28: Anthony Antonellis Artists in Episode 3 1: Carine Santi-Weil, 2: Nicolas Sassoon, 3: Tom Sherman, 4: Kim Asendorf and Ole Fach, 5: Rafaela Kino, 6: Alex McLeod, 7: Kate Wilson and Lynne Slater, 8: Aleksandra Domanović, 9: Systaime, 10: Erik Zepka, 11: Adam Ferriss, 12: Rodell Warner and Arnaldo James, 13: Debora Delmar, 14: Brenna Murphy, 15: Nick Briz, 16: Carlos Sáez, 17: Jenn E Norton, 18: Juliette Bonneviot, 19: Luis Nava, 20: Vince McKelvie; 21: Claudia Maté 22: Evan Roth, 23: Shana Moulton, 24: Sabrina Ratté, 25: Jordan Tannahill, 26: Vasily Zaitsev feat.MON3Y.us, 27: Ann Hirsch REVIEWS - Read an interview with Lorna Mills about Ways Of Something on The Creators Project. Read here. - Ben Davis wrote an essay looking at the first two episodes on artnet. Read here. - The project was also featured by Animal New York here.

Julia van Mourik is an independent curator and editor, based in Amsterdam. Since 1999, she has produced visual arts projects and has composed programmes and publications, exploring new possibilities for presenting the moving image. She is Director of The One Minutes, a place for artists to experiment, to produce and to present within the inexorable limit of 60 seconds, hosted by Sandberg Instituut, Masters of Art and Design in Amsterdam (NL). She is also director of the Lost & Found programme, where artists show material that doesn’t fit comfortably into regular gallery contexts, that seems out of place. And she is Adviser to the to the Dutch Cultural Media Fund, promoting the development and production of high-quality artistic programmes by the national public broadcasting corporations. Lorna Mills has actively exhibited her work internationally in both solo and group exhibitions since the early 1990’s. Her practice has included obsessive Ilfochrome printing, obsessive painting, obsessive super 8 film & video, and obsessive on-line animated GIFs incorporated into restrained off-line installation work. She has also co-curated monthly group animated GIF projections with Rea McNamara for the Sheroes performance series in Toronto, a group GIF projection event When Analog Was Periodical in Berlin co-curated with Anthony Antonellis, and a touring four person GIF installation, :::Zip The Bright:::, that originated at Trinity Square Video in Toronto. In June 2013, Mills opened a solo exhibition ‘The Axis of Something’ at TRANSFER, her work was exhibited by the gallery at the Moving Image Art Fair NYC in March 2014, and her second solo show for TRANSFER is currently in development for 2015.  Her most recent solo project was Ungentrified a large GIF projection installation at OCADU in Toronto for Nuit Blanche. £7 / £4 concs Episodes 1 and 2 are produced by The One Minutes at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. Episode 3 is produced by Lorna Mills.        

Shiraz Art House • Daralhokoomeh Project • May/June 2014 As part of Bitrates - an exhibition curated by Morehshin Allahyari and Mani Nilchiani at the Dar-ol-Hokoomeh Project, Shiraz, Iran – I asked 50 artists to create or curate an animated GIF with a short snippet of audio, to be looped together ad infinitum at GIFbites.com. For the opening of Bitrates on May 23rd a select version of this project will be displayed in the gallery, followed by a complete showcase of all the GIFs for the GIFbites exhibition, opening on May 30th in Shiraz Art House (Daralhokoomeh Project). GIFbites In an era of ubiquitous internet access and the extensive post-production of HD and 3D images, the animated GIF has an ironic status. Small in dimension and able to be squeezed through the slenderest of bandwidths, GIFs hark back to a World Wide Web designed for 640×480 pixel screens; a web of scrolling text, and not much else. Brought on – ironically – by their obsolescence the animated GIF has become a primary medium of communication on the contemporary net. The simplicity, freedom and openness of the medium allows even the most amateur web enthusiast to recuperate images plucked from TV, cinema, YouTube, CCTV footage, cartoons, videogames and elsewhere in their desire to communicate an idea or exclamation to the world. GIFbites is a mesmerising homage to brevity and the potential of poor, degraded images to speak beyond the apparent means of their bitrates. The results will hopefully navigate the web for many years to come, stimulating cut-and-paste conversations undefinable by Google’s search algorithms. GIFbites Project Page • بیت بر ثانیه / Bitrates Facebook Event Coming Soon: Bitrates/GIFbites Lp! Featuring the work of 50 artists

Morehshin Allahyari Mizaru/Kikazaru/Kyoungzaru Kim Asendorf & Ole Fach

Eltons Kuns Anthony Antonellis Lawrence Lek

LaTurbo Avedon Gretta Louw Jeremy Bailey

Sam Meech Alison Bennett Rosa Menkman

Emma Bennett A Bill Miller Benjamin Berg

Lorna Mills Hannah Black Shay Moradi

Andrew Blanton Nora O Murchú Nicolas Boillot

Alex Myers Tim Booth Peggy Nelson

Sid Branca David Panos Nick Briz

Eva Papamargariti elixirix Holly Pester

Jennifer Chan Antonio Roberts Theodore Darst

Daniel Rourke Angelina Fernandez Alfredo Salazar-Caro

Annabel Frearson Rafia Santana Carla Gannis

Jon Satrom Emilie Gervais Erica Scourti

Shawné Michaelain Holloway Krystal South Nathan Jones

Arjun Ram Srivatsa Nick Kegeyan Linda Stupart

Jimmy Kipple Sound Daniel Temkin

I was commissioned to write the essay for Mishka Henner‘s solo show, Black Diamond, at Carroll/Fletcher Gallery, London. The exhibition will run until 31st May, 2014. Excerpt from the essay : If linear perspective centred the World on the Earthly beholder – rendering the artist, viewer or owner of a painting as master of all they purveyed – then its replacement, a tumbling or “dynamic viewing space” imposes a kind of vertigo on the subject, causing us to misjudge the social and political ground of our perceptions. Henner’s 51 US Military Outposts places viewers in the position of Gods above a toy-like World, the fidelity of which is wholly reliant on the resolution of the sourced images. In line with his Feedlots and Oil Fields series, the resolution of the images – appropriated from Google Earth, and painstakingly stitched together – gives us a clue as to where their socio-political ground is located. Just as a pixel attains significance only within the context of the image grid, so the relatively plain surface of Earth is politically meaningless, is without form and void, until its geometries and textures, its biological traces and material densities, are caught and defined in the vast, inconceivable, territories of the database. Download as PDF More info : mishkahenner.com and carrollfletcher.com

I wrote an essay for the publication accompanying Alma Alloro‘s solo exhibition, Apophenia, held at Transfer Gallery, New York – January 4th through 25th, 2014. Excerpt from my essay : Alma Alloro’s machines reel and spin in homage to the kinds of correspondences and affects images can make. In the tradition of Oskar Fischinger’s An Optical Poem (1938), or Hans Richter’s Rhythmus series (1920s) Apophenia is ‘about’ the preponderance of images: about what takes place when images move, but also about the very substance of the static image — a thing we had no need to conceive of until motion had been thrust upon it. Her works are concerned with performing a net aesthetic apart from the rigidity of digital codes and databases, linking her machines through animated GIFs back to… the principal technologies of animation… The machines, devices and contrivances of Apophenia celebrate similar instances when the coming into being of an image traces a noticeable and long-lasting mark in physical space. To be truly confronted with an image is to become aware of one’s own construction as a thing — ‘Here where the world touches’ — something that high-bandwidth, high-resolution and optical speeds tends to camouflage in the clarity of simulation. Download as PDF More info : almaalloro.com and TransferGallery.com

I wrote an essay released in tandem with GLITCHOMETRY: Daniel Temkin‘s solo exhibition, held at Transfer Gallery, New York – November 16 through December 14, 2013. The publication also features an interview with the artist by Curt Cloninger. Excerpt from my essay : Glitchometry turns away from the ‘new earth’; the milieu of cyphers that constitute our contemporary audio-visual cognizance. By foregoing the simulations relied on when Photoshopping an image Temkin assumes an almost meditative patience with the will of the digital. As with Duchamp’s infra-thin – ‘the warmth of a seat which has just been left, reflection from a mirror or glass… velvet trousers, their whistling sound, is an infra-thin separation signalled’ – the one of the image and the other of the raw data is treated as a signal of meagre difference. Data is carefully bent in a sequence of sonifications that always risk falling back into the totalising violence of failure. Download as PDF More info : danieltemkin.com and TransferGallery.com

My homage to iTunes 10 has been transcoded and extruded into another iteration! A collaboration with Alex Myers. You can hear, see and 3D print it at your own great expense in the forthcoming Run Computer, Run exhibition, Rua Red, Dublin.

DANIEL ROURKE + ALEX MYERS Daniel Rourke is a writer and artist. His work explores error, noise and kippleisation through words, sounds, performance and whatever ideas are to hand. He is one half of GLTI.CH Karaoke, an experimental performance platform exposing the course of accidents, temporary lyrical disjoints & technical out-of-syncs. Daniel writes regularly forRhizome.org and Furtherfield.org. He is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD in Art and Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. machinemachine.net / twitter @therourke Alex Myers makes artgames to explore how accidental meaning/anomalous discourse emerges by breaking rule-based game spaces to disrupt player expectations and concepts. He is an Assistant Professor and Director of Game Studies at Bellevue University. Alex has exhibited at NP3 in Groningen,Nikolaj Kunsthallen in Copenhagen, Lab for Electronic Art and Performance, Berlin, Interaccess in Toronto, FACT in Liverpool, and LACDA in Los Angeles. www.alexmyers.info / twitter @aandnota

I took a trip to Chicago for GLI.TC/H 2112! – A conference/festival/carnival/movement in honour (and despite) of hardware/software/wetware errors, databends and feedback blackholes. I took a ton of photographs, you can view them on Flickr (better quality) or Facebook (dotted with comments, insights and exultations from the GLI.TC/H community). I intend to write more about the event, but for now I will post my talk here, which I gave on Saturday 8th December. It’s title is Glitches in Things and the “Friendly Medium”, a talk expanding on an idea I have been carting around for a couple of years now. Updated with Object Oriented insights I hope it acts as a mental toolkit for artists looking to dance with objects, in all their glitchy splendour. As usual, I completely ignored my notes whilst talking, for this reason it’s worth listening to the question and answer bit afterwards. Infinite thanks must go to Rosa Menkman, Jon Satrom and Nick Briz – the GLI.TC/H Bots at the heart of the fest. Thank you for inviting me to participate. More on OOO, glitches, kipple and Things to come reeeeal soon… (the talky bit starts a few minutes in)

I have some work in A Shot to the Arse, an exhibition coming August 14th at Michaelis Galleries, Cape Town. Many thanks to Belinda Blignaut!

Last year I released a music single through iTunes. Entitled RAWTunes.exe 10.4.2, it was my first forray into sound-art/noise-art. I AM a popstar. I am proud to announce the release of my 8 track album RAWTunes.exe 10! You can listen to a selection of tracks below (making sure that all small children and dogs are at a safe distance), or buy the whole lot for £7.99: RAWTunes.exe 10 by machinemachine It took me about 20 minutes to make this album. Here’s how you can do it yourself:

Using a program like Audacity, open ANY file as RAW data Choose your conversion method The file you send to iTunes and release to the world MUST be in this format: 16 bit (sample size), 44.1 kHz (sample rate), 1411 kbps (bit rate) stereo wav So, after playing with your file (or not doing anything in particular) export it with these options Using a service like TuneCore, release your album to the world Become a famous Noise artist like me

I chose to convert a series of iTunes executable files, each one plucked from a long list of releases under the iTunes 10 label, but you can choose anything. Have a look on Souncloud for a bunch of people who have done just this. This is ‘art’, so of course my work has to be critically engaged, and self aware. Thankfully, iTunes regulations make this really easy: Content that is not produced by Apple Inc. must not include the word “iTunes” anywhere in the metadata or cover art. I would argue that the content of my album is 100% ‘produced by Apple Inc.’ but they wouldn’t let me call it ‘iTunes.exe 10′. It was only after several iterations of cover art that the album was allowed into the Apple store. These are just some of the woes that a true Noise artist must suffer in the pursuit of their art.

I’ve released a single. Yes me, a music single. It’s 79p / 99c on iTunes: RAWTunes.exe 10.4.2 RAWTunes.exe 10.4.2 by therourke But is it noise-art or just digital sinister?

“Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.” - Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

What are artists to gain from taking a PhD? How does the mantle of ‘artistic research’ enable art objects and those invested in them? And where does art’s autonomy reside when its criticality comes from within an academic institution? Over the last 20 years art has eased its way into academia. Past the door of the artist’s studio and up the back stairs it tiptoed until, in a very bold move, it seated itself in the commissioner’s chair. Where once art reacted against academies from the outside, art, and the artists who make it, now work from within the institution. Artists interested in pursuing a doctoral degree will have heard time and again about ‘the critical function of art’. Indeed, many theorists would insist on art being defined from this state of opposition (the ‘avant-garde’). But to understand the potential of art today it becomes impossible to separate it from the academic institutions that use its name to label their distinctive, often daring, new departments. Goldsmith’s Art Writing MFA and the RCA’s Critical Writing in Art & Design being two of the freshest – some might say hippest – examples.

To begin producing ‘new knowledge’, PhD researchers often need to pursue contradictory goals. A strong research question poses not the trajectory to a definitive answer, but a principle by which the researcher may begin to generate knowledge. This becomes especially slippery when that ‘knowledge’ is woven into an artistic practice, or when the art objects created by that practice are assumed to qualify the research. How does one invest research in projects that have yet to be realised? Practice-based PhDs hide another stumbling block, usually one based on the expectations of the artist: the belief that time invested in a research degree should improve the quality of practice, as well as strengthen one’s grasp of theory. The distinction between the practice and theoretical components of a PhD can vary wildly, and although on paper they each glean 50% of the final mark severing them into definite halves can be an unwieldy, often impossible, task. In the RCA’s Department of Communication Art & Design for instance, projects regularly emerge that blur the line between the written and ‘practical’ components of research. A recent edition of critical journal Texte Zur Kunst focused on artistic research declared, “Philosophy and art share the conviction that cognition requires a material form.” A practice-based PhD may have a smaller word count than its non-practical equivalent, but as final exhibitions are documented and literature reviews are spell checked, the boundary between art object and critical reflection will have hopefully elided into a single, successful, conglomeration. As a practice-based researcher myself, with two years of the academy under my belt, I’ve found that the primary method of answering these concerns is to reflect them back at the institution. Research does not take place in isolation. As with any treasured job it is the people that make a PhD worth undertaking. If you are lucky – and let’s admit it, fewer things are harder to predict than luck – the artists and academics that make up your department will be driven by similar desires as you are. Of course, I could spend the rest of this short article on the restrictions of labelling yourself a graduate of the RCA, Goldsmiths or the Slade. But reflecting back the conditions of research at the institutions that produce them comes closer to addressing what really makes academies function: exchange. To paraphrase the words of John F. Kennedy: ‘Ask not what academia can do for you—ask what you can do for your academia.’ Productive exchange begins by giving your all, whilst always expecting those around you to do the same. In terms of the market, artistic practice often inhabits an obscure space, cut off from the concerns of art galleries, of buyers, sellers and the aesthetically motivated public. The main benefit of taking up a practice-based research position is exposing one’s practice to the eyes of others. But this exposure always focuses both ways. Jean-Francois Lyotard writes, in The Postmodern Condition, “Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.” Criticality – the enactment of research – begins in the process of exchange, a goal which, if Lyotard is to be believed, should be held in higher esteem than the art market. Taking a practice-based PhD means investing time and knowledge with other practitioners, often other artists who, having undertaken their research years before, now enact their modes of exchange as tutors, professors and PhD supervisors. Research degrees are not always the best way to fortify the foundations of an artist’s practice. Indeed, many would argue that the very principle of artistic practice within the academy is to rock those foundations, even raze certain principles of practice to the ground. But when PhD researchers are supported to develop and sustain their thought from within their art it can often be the supervisor or established academic artist who has to rethink their assumptions, rather than the other way around. Personal exploration, issuing from practice, becomes valid as PhD research when its significance is a significance shared. A significance exchanged is a significance enhanced.

In two short essays – written in 1933 – Walter Benjamin argues that primitive language emerged in magical correspondence with the world. The faculty we all exhibit in childhood play, to impersonate and imitate people and things loses its determining power as language gradually takes over from our “non-sensuous” connection with reality. In a break from Saussurian linguistics, Benjamin decries the loss of this “mimetic faculty”, as it becomes further replaced by the “archive of non-sensuous correspondences” we know as writing. To put it in simpler terms… Where once we read the world, the stars or the entrails of a sacrificed animal, now we read the signs enabled and captured by written language. From Benjamin’s The Doctrine of the Similar: “So speed, the swiftness in reading or writing which can scarcely be separated from this process, would then become… the effort or gift of letting the mind participate in that measure of time in which similarities flash up fleetingly out of the stream of things only in order to become immediately engulfed again.” The GIF – standing for Graphical Interchange Format – has been around since 1987. Their early popularity was based, in part, on their ability to load in time with a web-page. In the days of poor bandwidth and dial-up connections this meant that at least part of a GIF image would appear before the user’s connection broke, or – more significantly – the user could see enough of the image for it to make sense. In the mid 90s avid web hackers managed to crack the code of GIFs and use this ‘partial loading’ mechanism to encode animations within a single GIF file. Thus the era of personal web pages saturated with looping animations of spinning hamsters was born. Brought on – ironically – by their obsolescence the GIF has become the medium of choice for web artists, propagating their particular net-aesthetic through this free, open and kitschy medium. GIFs inhabit the space between convenience and abundance, where an apparent breakdown in communication can stimulate new modes of expressing non-sensuous similarities in the internet world. Sites like dump.fm, 4chan and ytmnd revel in the GIF’s ability to quickly correspond to the world. GIFs can be broken into their constituent frames, compressed and corrupted on purpose and made to act as archives for viral events travelling the web. A playground of correspondences that at first reflected language and the wider world, in time has looked increasingly inward. As language and writing find themselves pulled through and energised by the semiotic sludge of the broken, corrupted and iconic animated GIF Benjamin’s sensitivity to similitude continues to echo its magical significance. GIFs take a variety of forms, some of which I will try to classify for you: GIF Type I: Classic

Small in size and made up of few frames, this is where animated GIFs began. Corresponding to single words or concepts such as ‘smile’, ‘alien’ or ‘flying pink unicorn’ GIF Type II: Frame Capture

Frame grab or video capture GIFs pay homage to well known scenes in pop culture. But as the ‘art’ of animated GIFs grew the frame capture began to stand for something isolated from context. This leap is, for me, the first point at which GIFs begin to co-ordinate their own realm of correspondence. An ocean of viral videos turned into a self-serving visual language, looping back on itself ad infinitum. GIF Type III: Art

Leaking then directly into the third category, we have the Art GIF. Much larger in resolution and aware of their heritage in cinema, these GIFs are acutely refined in their choice of framing. GIF Type IV: Glitch

A badly encoded or compressed GIF can result in odd, strangely beautiful phenomena, and with a little skill and coding ability these glitches can be enhanced to enormous proportions. Glitch GIFs break the boundaries of another non-sensuous realm: that of computer code. A significant magical order Benjamin was little capable of predicting. GIF Type V: Mash-Up

Lastly, and perhaps most prolific, is the mash-up GIF. These GIFs are comprised of a combination of all the previous forms. The mash-up is THE most inner-looking species of GIF. It is possible to track the cultural development of some of these. Often though, the source of any original correspondence becomes completely lost in the play of images. Here again, I think Benjamin’s essay can help us: “Language is the highest application of the mimetic faculty: a medium into which the earlier perceptive capabilities for recognising the similar had entered without residue, so that it is now language which represents the medium in which objects meet and enter into relationship with each other…” In other words, what these images MEAN I can’t tell you in words. But perhaps by showing you other GIFs I might go some way to helping you understand them.

What is it about a particular media that makes it successful? Drawing a mini history from printing-press smudges to digital compression artefacts this lecture considers the value of error, chance and adaptation in contemporary media. Biological evolution unfolds through error, noise and mistake. Perhaps if we want to maximise the potential of media, of digital text and compressed file formats, we first need to determine their inherent redundancy. Or, more profoundly, to devise ways to maximise or even increase that redundancy. This presentation was designed and delivered as part of Coventry University, Media and Communication Department’s ‘Open Media‘ lecture series. Please browse the Open-Media /stream and related tags (in left column) for more material

(Audio recording of talk coming very soon)

Many thanks to Janneke Adema for inviting me to present this talk and for all her hard work with the series and podcast.

(This post was written as a kind of ‘prequel’ to a previous essay, Rancière’s Ignoramus) ‘Text’ originates from the Latin word texere, to weave. A material craft enabled by a human ingenuity for loops, knots and pattern. Whereas a single thread may collapse under its own weight, looped and intertwined threads originate their strength and texture as a network. The textile speaks of repetition and multiplicity, yet it is only once we back away from the tapestry that the larger picture comes into focus. At an industrial scale textile looms expanded beyond the frame of their human operators. Reducing a textile design to a system of coded instructions, the complex web of a decorative rug could be fixed into the gears and pulleys that drove the clattering apparatus. In later machines long reels of card, punched through with holes, told a machine how, or what, to weave. Not only could carpets and textiles themselves be repeated, with less chance of error, but the punch-cards that ordered them were now equally capable of being mass-produced for a homogenous market. From one industrial loom an infinite number of textile variations could be derived. All one needed to do was feed more punch-card into the greedy, demanding reels of the automated system. The material origins of film may also have been inspired by weaving. Transparent reels of celluloid were pulled through mechanisms resembling the steam-driven contraptions of the industrial revolution. The holes running down its edges delimit a reel’s flow. Just as the circular motion of a mechanical loom is translated into a network of threads, so the material specificity of the film-stock and projector weave the illusion of cinematic time. Some of the more archaic, out-moded types of film are known to shrink slightly as they decay, affording us – the viewer – a juddering, inconsistent vision of the world captured in the early 20th century. In 1936, the year that Alan Turing wrote his iconic paper “On Computable Numbers”, a German engineer by the name of Konrad Zuse built the first working digital computer. Like its industrial predecessors, Zuse’s computer was designed to function via a series of holes encoding its program. Born as much out of convenience as financial necessity, Zuse punched his programs directly into discarded reels of 35mm film-stock. Fused together by the technologies of weaving and cinema, Zuse’s digital computer announced the birth of an entirely new mode of textuality. As Lev Manovich suggests: “The pretence of modern media to create simulations of sensible reality is… cancelled; media are reduced to their original condition as information carrier, nothing less, nothing more… The iconic code of cinema is discarded in favour of the more efficient binary one. Cinema becomes a slave to the computer.” Rather than Manovich’s ‘slave’ / ‘master’ relationship, I want to suggest a kind of lateral pollination of media traits. As technologies develop, specificities from one media are co-opted by another. Reverting to biological metaphor, we see genetic traits jumping between media species. From a recent essay by Svetlana Boym, The Off-Modern Mirror: “Exaptation is described in biology as an example of “lateral adaptation,” which consists in a cooption of a feature for its present role from some other origin… Exaptation is not the opposite of adaptation; neither is it merely an accident, a human error or lack of scientific data that would in the end support the concept of adaptation. Exaptation questions the very process of assigning meaning and function in hindsight, the process of assigning the prefix “post” and thus containing a complex phenomenon within the grid of familiar interpretation.” Media history is littered with exaptations. Features specific to certain media are exapted – co-opted – as matters of convenience, technical necessity or even aesthetics. Fashion has a role to play also, for instance, many of the early models of mobile phone sported huge, extendible aerials which the manufacturers now admit had no impact whatsoever on the workings of the technology. Lev Manovich’s suggestion is that as the computer has grown in its capacities, able to re-present all other forms of media on a single computer apparatus, the material traits that define a media have been co-opted by the computer at the level of software and interface. A strip of celluloid has a definite weight, chemistry and shelf-life – a material history with origins in the mechanisms of the loom. Once we encode the movie into the binary workings of a digital computer, each media-specific – material – trait can be reduced to an informational equivalent. If I want to increase the frames per second of a celluloid film I have to physically wind the reel faster. For the computer encoded, digital equivalent, a code that re-presents each frame can be introduced via my desktop video editing software. Computer code determines the content as king. In the 1960s and 70s Roland Barthes named ‘The Text’ as a network of production and exchange. Whereas ‘the work’ was concrete, final – analogous to a material – ‘the text’ was more like a flow, a field or event – open ended. Perhaps even infinite. In, From Work to Text, Barthes wrote: “The metaphor of the Text is that of the network…” This semiotic approach to discourse, by initiating the move from print culture to ‘text’ culture, also helped lay the ground for a contemporary politics of content-driven media. Skipping backwards through From Work to Text, we find this statement: “The text must not be understood as a computable object. It would be futile to attempt a material separation of works from texts.” I am struck here by Barthes’ use of the phrase ‘computable object’, as well as his attention to the ‘material’. Katherine Hayles in her essay, Text is Flat, Code is Deep, teases out the statement for us: “computable” here mean[s] to be limited, finite, bound, able to be reckoned. Written twenty years before the advent of the microcomputer, his essay stands in the ironic position of anticipating what it cannot anticipate. It calls for a movement away from works to texts, a movement so successful that the ubiquitous “text” has all but driven out the media-specific term book. Hayles notes that the ‘ubiquity’ of Barthes’ term ‘Text’ allowed – in its wake – an erasure of media-specific terms, such as ‘book’. In moving from, The Work to The Text, we move not just between different politics of exchange and dissemination, we also move between different forms and materialities of mediation. To echo (and subvert) the words of Marshall Mcluhan, not only is The Medium the Message, The Message is also the Medium. …media are only a subspecies of communications which includes all forms of communication. For example, at first people did not call the internet a medium, but now it has clearly become one… We can no longer understand any medium without language and interaction – without multimodal processing… We are now clearly moving towards an integration of all kinds of media and communications, which are deeply interconnected. Extract from a 2005 interview with Manuel Castells, Global Media and Communication Journal

(This post was written as a kind of ‘prequel’ to a previous essay, Rancière’s Ignoramus)

Jacques Rancière prepares for us a parable. A student who is illiterate, after living a fulfilled life without text, one day decides to teach herself to read. Luckily she knows a single poem by heart and procures a copy of that poem, presumably from a trusted source, by which to work. By comparing her knowledge, sign by sign, word by word, with the poem she can, Rancière believes, finally piece together a foundational understanding of her language: “From this ignoramus, spelling out signs, to the scientist who constructs hypotheses, the same intelligence is always at work – an intelligence that translates signs into other signs and proceeds by comparisons and illustrations in order to communicate its intellectual adventures and understand what another intelligence is endeavoring to communicate to it. This poetic labour of translation is at the heart of all learning.” The Emancipated Spectator (2008)

What interests me in Rancière’s example is not so much the act of translation as the possibility of mis-translation. Taken in light of The Ignorant Schoolmaster we can assume that Rancière is aware of the wide gap that exists between knowing something and knowing enough about something for it to be valuable. But what distinction can we uncover between the ‘true’ and the ‘false’, hell, even between the ‘true’ and ‘almost true’? How does one calculate the value of what is effectively a mistake? Error appears to be a crucial component of Rancière’s position. In a sense, Rancière is positing a world that has from first principles always uncovered itself through a kind of decoding. A world in which subjects “translate signs into other signs and proceed by comparison and illustration”. Now forgive me for side-stepping a little here, but doesn’t that sound an awful lot like biological development? Here’s a paragraph from Richard Dawkins (worth his salt as long as he is talking about biology): “Think about the two qualities that a virus, or any sort of parasitic replicator, demands of a friendly medium, the two qualities that make cellular machinery so friendly towards parasitic DNA, and that make computers so friendly towards computer viruses. These qualities are, firstly, a readiness to replicate information accurately, perhaps with some mistakes that are subsequently reproduced accurately; and, secondly, a readiness to obey instructions encoded in the information so replicated.” Viruses of the Mind (1993)

Hidden amongst Dawkins’ words, I believe, we find an interesting answer to the problem of mis-translation I pose above. A mistake is useless if accuracy is your aim, but what if your aim is merely to learn something? To enrich and expand the connections that exist between your systems of knowledge. As Dawkins alludes to above, it is beneficial for life that errors do exist and are propagated by biological systems. Too many copying errors and all biological processes would be cancerous, mutating towards oblivion. Too much error management (what in information theory would be metered by a coded ‘redundancy‘) and biological change, and thus evolution, could never occur. Simply put, exchange within and between systems is almost valueless unless change, and thus error, is possible within the system. At the scale Rancière exposes for us there are two types of value: firstly, the value of repeating the message (the poem) and secondly, the value of making an error and thus producing entirely new knowledge. In information theory the value of a message is calculated by the amount of work saved on the part of the receiver. That is, if the receiver were to attempt to create that exact message, entirely from scratch. In his influential essay, Encoding, Decoding (1980), Stuart Hall maps a four-stage theory of “linked but distinctive moments” in the circuit of communication:

production circulation use (consumption) reproduction

John Corner further elaborates on these definitions:

the moment of encoding: ‘the institutional practices and organizational conditions and practices of production’; the moment of the text: ‘the… symbolic construction, arrangement and perhaps performance… The form and content of what is published or broadcast’; and the moment of decoding: ‘the moment of reception [or] consumption… by… the reader/hearer/viewer’ which is regarded by most theorists as ‘closer to a form of “construction”‘ than to ‘the passivity… suggested by the term “reception”‘

(source) At each ‘moment’ a new set of limits and possibilities arises. This means that the way a message is coded/decoded is not the only controlling factor in its reception. The intended message I produce, for instance, could be circulated against those intentions, or consumed in a way I never imagined it would be. What’s more, at each stage there emerges the possibility for the message to be replicated incorrectly, or, even more profoundly, for a completely different component of the message to be taken as its defining principle. Let’s say I write a letter, intending to send it to my newly literate, ignoramus friend. The letter contains a recipe for a cake I have recently baked. For some reason my letter is intercepted by the CIA,who are convinced that the recipe is a cleverly coded message for building a bomb. At this stage in the communication cycle the possibility for mis-translation to occur is high. Stuart Hall would claim is that this shows how messages are determined by the social and institutional power-relations via which they are encoded and then made to circulate. Any cake recipe can be a bomb recipe if pushed into the ‘correct’ relationships. Every ignoramus, if they have the right teacher, can develop knowledge that effectively lies beyond the teacher’s. What it is crucial to understand is that work is done at each “moment” of the message. As John Corner states, decoding is constructive: the CIA make the message just as readily as I did when I wrote and sent it. These examples are crude, no doubt, but they set up a way to think about exchange (communication and information) through its relationships, rather than through its mediums and methods. The problem here that requires further examination is thus: What is ‘value’ and how does one define it within a relational model of exchange? Like biological evolution, information theory is devoid of intentionality. Life prospers in error, in noise and mistakes. Perhaps, as I am coming to believe, if we want to maximise the potential of art, of writing and other systems of exchange, we first need to determine their inherent redundancy. Or, more profoundly, to devise ways to maximise or even increase that redundancy. To determine art’s redundancy, and then, like Rancière’s ignoramus, for new knowledge to emerge through mis-translation and mis-relation.