----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Rob,
The posture survelliance piece is very provocative from a performance
perspective. Diana Taylor’s work on repertoire and archive as the respective
storehouses/langue for traditional oral and modern literary performance
cultures—to which databases are not just the analogue but the repository for
digitized repertoires and archives. Databases help produce the existential
Foam/Froth of worlds bubbling up today, and your work reveals how State
forms/walks capture-produce citizen forms/walks. Your note re: dystopia reveals
a topos of critique itself, the flipside of its utopian drive. My work with
civic storytelling supports the critical formation of citizens (eg GOTV) as
well as creative mutation of forms, topos upon topos.
In their Kafka book, DnG diagram two observational spaces, the ancient Chinese
Panoptic Tower and the modern Office Passageway, roughly discipline and control
(what I call performative power-knowledge). We live die in both, switching
between their trees and rhizomes, methods and language games, modernities and
postmodernities, Big Other and cops-in-the-heads, literacies and digitalities.
One unsettling thing is that observing the observer triggers mise-en-abyme
effects/affects whose mastery may be chance ’itself’ as it reverbs across (as?)
time and space, different worlds and cosmographies.
An other/observer (or several) is always-already “watching” and “calling”
us—the question is which/what O/other/s we respond with-to. Materialists (like
me) follow physis, world, eg: rock flints form a machinic phylum that enters a
double deterritorialization with hominoids that lasts centuries, millennia, in
which flints-hominoids co-evolve, each becoming sharper and sharper, rock size,
shape, and edges morphing as the complex interplay of eye gaze, hand gesture,
and mouth utterances slowly, suddenly transmits logos "from” graphe, life
“from” death, spirit “from” matter, triggering the history of organology, the
bundling of organic and environmental processes atop a machinic Artemis largely
unperturbed by our Actaeon complexes. She yawns at Anthropocene…. which doesn’t
mean we should, however. Rather, listen and respond differently, as this list
affirms.
To Be Done with the Judgment of God entails the death of the creation model
upon which art is based for the Greeks and moderns. There is no off-switch
because techne physis turns us on, much to Heidegger, Adorno, and Arendt’s
dismay. For me, Klossowski’s transmedia work on Diana and her bath forms both
the retrospeculative design and the living currency of poses and scenes that
drove Foucault to the bathhouses and beyond. How to “return” signs to
intensities not just for an evening or millennium but an eternity? How does one
observe the observer observing observation ‘itself’—and share the accursed
share with—?
Some thoughts on diagrammatic storytelling in algorithmic times of
Anthropocence:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/hokqfbzqgmj45xu/McKenzie-Diagrammatic-Storytelling.pdf?dl=0
Others on Artemis, art, and truth according to R’rose Selavy:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/hokqfbzqgmj45xu/McKenzie-Diagrammatic-Storytelling.pdf?dl=0
Jon
> On Feb 18, 2021, at 9:21 AM, <hims...@robbycollins.com>
> <hims...@robbycollins.com> wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hallo all,
>
> The mechanical surveillance that Alex describes strikes me as incredibly
> brutal and pervasive in its simplicity. It shows how the presence of cameras
> are so important.
>
> I often engage in a little retospeculative design when I hear of new
> applications of technology. Imagining how these systems might have been
> enacted in the past and how they would have been subverted or avoided:
>
> - A pile of books on an office chair that uses a switch to detect when
> someone is sitting in it, and apparently working.
>
> - The natural sense that workers develop for the presence of management on
> the ‘shop floor and perform for the duration.
>
> - Homer Simpson’s nodding bird pressing the big red button on his remote
> nuclear power station terminal...
>
> It’s a strange non-linear surveillance with cameras in the workplace. No one
> is watching you in real time. There’s no security guard looking at a screen.
> But, if you or anyone else does something that is deemed remarkable (for this
> AI), you are now being watched sometime now, in the past, or in the future. A
> Schrödinger's box of varying cats and radioactive sources that can be opened
> at any time.
>
> I wrote a little thought-piece, to myself, about a potential surveillance
> methodology called posture surveillance.
> <http://youarenotbeautiful.com/index.php/2021/01/24/walk-this-way-posture-surveillance/>
> It imagined something beyond facial recognition and emotion tracking, which
> used our whole body as a data source through our stance, gait and the general
> way we hold ourselves and move through our environment. It’s a clumsy thought
> experiment, but it made me think about how I have ‘performed’ (and still
> perform) in certain environments – my 15-year-old self confidently, but
> nonchalantly, walking up to the doorman of the nightclub I needed to get
> into, or the finely balanced confident/no-threat walk as I passed a gang of
> ‘youths’ on a dark street. Both unknown and unpredictable entities where I
> projected identities and desires and tried to be the thing that would get me
> through the gate.
>
> The more we know about the surveillance around us, the more we co-perform
> with it. In the posture tracking example, when we know that this aspect of
> ourselves is being monitored, how do we figure out the best “citizen
> posture”, and where is it applicable? We also need to be deferential and
> humble at times. Do we all adopt a neutral walk to normalise this for the AI?
> But what happens when an individual adopts a new posture that resonates with
> his success at being a good citizen! How can such a system be gamed?
>
> I’ll stop there before I go entirely overboard (I’ll do that on my own) and
> see if anyone has more thoughts about this co-performance/entanglement
> <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323869840_Co-performance_Conceptualizing_the_Role_of_Artificial_Agency_in_the_Design_of_Everyday_Life>
> that we enact with technology and how it could be observed and weighed as a
> source for exposing these voids where resistance can be applied.
>
>
> Rob
>
> www.robbycollins.com
>
>
>
> On 16/02/2021 22:28, Simon wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>
>> On 17/02/21 9:32 am, Renate Ferro wrote:
>>> if you all think we can go back to before Covid existance without webcams,
>>> zoom, and tracking surveillance.
>> at the same time as we have seen the overthrow of capitalism--governments
>> finding again that lever that was being hidden from them, that in large part
>> they hid from themselves, and switching off the economy--we see an explosion
>> of all sorts of data-gathering and surveillance. This is now seen as the
>> ally of governmentality. And, it follows, financialising data is regarded as
>> the basis for political economy. Newly, that is, paradigmatic.
>>
>> At my own place of work, a public library, where I am a part-time worker,
>> kiosks have been installed with finger-vein scanners, so that workers can
>> clock-in, and -out.
>>
>> The library is run by Auckland City Council and the new Time and Attendance
>> model, as it is called, is being rolled out by a private company,
>> HumanForce, who are charged with taking care of the biometric data gathered
>> by their machines.
>>
>> One detail is striking, considering the application of these kiosks at a
>> library: subcutaneous finger-vein scanning is the preferred mode of
>> identifying individuals because workers hands can be dirty making
>> fingerprinting difficult.
>>
>> It's all those dirty books!
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Simon
>>
>>
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