Re: [-empyre-] July on empyre: Reclaiming creativity as agent of change
Hi Julian, I've enjoyed thinking about this post and reading about newstweek especially. There are some challenging possible directions! But right now, just a few questions: I wonder what, if anything, the Critical Engineer borrows from the pirate persona? How essential is the educational component in Critical Engineering? Apart from the 'shared learning' approach in the Lima workshop, I saw that for Newstweek there are instructions (a how-to) for building your own. Newstweek seems to realize several aspects of the discussion so far - about virality and produced relations, about exchanges that can occur on both sides of capital and creativity. What contexts do you see Critical Engineering operating most successfully in? I am thinking about mobility, autonomy. Where do you see the limits? Are there other archetypes, beyond that of the pirate, which are closer to Critical Engineering? I would also really like to read more on the connections with Baudrillard. Best wishes, Magnus Thanks for the introduction Simon! There's a great thread already well underway and I look forward to pulling ideas in from there over the next days. I really do enjoy the Evil Media Studies direction, a refreshing angle indeed. While a fan of many of Fuller's projects, I was entirely unaware of Evil Media Studies. I especially like Jussi's comment that it recognises the collapsing of the technical into the cultural, social and ecological, a direction close to my heart at present. In a related frame I'd like to introduce the term Critical Engineering, one my colleague Danja Vasiliev and I came up with last year in an effort to emphasise our own relation with technology in a critically and creatively transformative context. We firmly believe that the most transformative language of our time, one that defines whole economies, how we trade, how and what we eat, how we communicate, how we move around the world -and increasingly how we think- is that of Engineering. We feel art itself, as a frame, is increasingly diluted in transformative power; more a contemporary past-time of playful reflection where the strategic re-appropriation and displacement of cultural tropes are anticipated and coveted in turn (to follow Baudrillard's 'Conspiracy of Art'). As such, art has become safe: so bold in its crusade to cast aside boundaries there is little left to break.. Critical Engineering takes the language of engineering and lifts it out from a strictly utilitarian space, positioning it as a language for rich, creative and critical inquiry, away from this kind of black box reality of corporations making things for civilians and not explaining to us how they work, competing for our attention with an end to designed dependence. In a race condition between consumption and planned obsolescence (coupled with ever shrinking componentry, ubiquity and technical sophistication) a worrying ignorance sets in, one that writers of media studies, artists and public are equally vulnerable to in their effort to critically engage their cultural and political environment. The Critical Engineer takes this predicament as a challenge, working at the level of the very stuff of media; the hard stuff of circuitry, code and cables. The Critical Engineer positions the soldering iron, work of philosophy and code editor as equally critically capable tools. Here is an example of Critical Engineering at work. Four days ago Danja and I gave a 'Networkshop' in Lima, Peru, where we took artists and creators through the process of learning all about low level networking using only command line tools. The workshop was held at Fundación Telefonica, an important point, as you'll see shortly. Network routes (and thus topologies) were created and manipulated. Network packets were captured and examined. Strategies for surveilling other users of the network were explored, viewing the images they are viewing in their browsers, etc. In doing so we answered two questions few people can: What is a computer network?, What is the Internet? Where am I on the Internet?. Only by learning about packet tracing (a method for following the flow of network packets from source to destination) and network topologies, could students see that the entire Peruvian route to the internet passed through Madrid, Spain, by way of the Spanish telco monopolist Telefonica. Spain, one could see, can effectively turn off the Peruvian telecommunications infrastructure. While Peru is politically and geographically sovereign, the colonial imperial process has merely shifted into the corporate domain and Peruvians it seemed, were completely unaware of this. Much discussion followed.. Network topologies are, in themselves, political topologies. Only by understanding how networks actually work, on the level of their stuff and the routing of electrical events over them, can you understand your political and capital
Re: [-empyre-] pirates and clapping
Hi Davin, Thinking on this point of being products of the Google and their famously banal motto, Don't be evil, I wonder if some of what we are experiencing a flattening out of ethics. Don't be evil sounds like a fine corporate motto, but I think it really speaks to an absence of what it is that we should strive for: The Good. Nobody wants to bother defining it, and in the process we are left to the default system of value offered by capitalism. The only thing that matters is what end you are willing to serve in exchange for access to greater means (by which you can barter someone else into serving your ends). Piracy is attractive to me because it lays this bare. Like true Teenagers from Mars, We want, we need it, we take it. There's a raw honesty to this sort of existence that exposes the shame of capitalism. This speaks to me of scarcity and abundance, not only economic. That's a theme that must be close to the experience of any (historical) pirate. But this is precisely the concern of politics: to hammer out a notion of the good and to negotiate means within which we can pursue it. Maybe the best we can do is Don't be evil or Get what you can. But I think Michel is onto something when he speaks of getting beyond the avoidance strategies offered by resistance. at some point, people forget about what they are against and get into what they are This makes me think of a slogan from the demonstrations in Spain - I am not against the system, the system is against me. Best wishes, Magnus for. Davin On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 9:44 AM, mag...@ditch.org.uk wrote: At the inauguration ceremony, the Google representative said that the company is looking forward to the research outcomes, and that they are glad to anticipate the outcomes, which will help us to make better products. Yes, it's worth extending our piratic probe to institutions, newly created and pirated. Open Access is one response to constraints on knowledge sharing. we are the products of Google, not clients, nor pirates. An interesting point. Can you elaborate? Best wishes, Magnus ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Reclaiming creativity as agent of change
I was just reading about LulzSec's News International exploits and wondering which archetype they channel. That are not pirates. Their graphic image is suggestive of a dandy - which reminds me of Lovink's data dandy. But there is more to their identity than that. They also echo the jester character, a very different identity to the pirate but equally anarchic. The jester worked up close and dirty with authority, right by the monarch's side, but often in conflict with them. However, they refer to their Twitter channel as a boat. Perhaps they consider themselves pirates after all? Best Simon On 19/07/2011 10:35, mag...@ditch.org.uk mag...@ditch.org.uk wrote: Hi Julian, I've enjoyed thinking about this post and reading about newstweek especially. There are some challenging possible directions! But right now, just a few questions: I wonder what, if anything, the Critical Engineer borrows from the pirate persona? How essential is the educational component in Critical Engineering? Apart from the 'shared learning' approach in the Lima workshop, I saw that for Newstweek there are instructions (a how-to) for building your own. Newstweek seems to realize several aspects of the discussion so far - about virality and produced relations, about exchanges that can occur on both sides of capital and creativity. What contexts do you see Critical Engineering operating most successfully in? I am thinking about mobility, autonomy. Where do you see the limits? Are there other archetypes, beyond that of the pirate, which are closer to Critical Engineering? I would also really like to read more on the connections with Baudrillard. Best wishes, Magnus Thanks for the introduction Simon! There's a great thread already well underway and I look forward to pulling ideas in from there over the next days. I really do enjoy the Evil Media Studies direction, a refreshing angle indeed. While a fan of many of Fuller's projects, I was entirely unaware of Evil Media Studies. I especially like Jussi's comment that it recognises the collapsing of the technical into the cultural, social and ecological, a direction close to my heart at present. In a related frame I'd like to introduce the term Critical Engineering, one my colleague Danja Vasiliev and I came up with last year in an effort to emphasise our own relation with technology in a critically and creatively transformative context. We firmly believe that the most transformative language of our time, one that defines whole economies, how we trade, how and what we eat, how we communicate, how we move around the world -and increasingly how we think- is that of Engineering. We feel art itself, as a frame, is increasingly diluted in transformative power; more a contemporary past-time of playful reflection where the strategic re-appropriation and displacement of cultural tropes are anticipated and coveted in turn (to follow Baudrillard's 'Conspiracy of Art'). As such, art has become safe: so bold in its crusade to cast aside boundaries there is little left to break.. Critical Engineering takes the language of engineering and lifts it out from a strictly utilitarian space, positioning it as a language for rich, creative and critical inquiry, away from this kind of black box reality of corporations making things for civilians and not explaining to us how they work, competing for our attention with an end to designed dependence. In a race condition between consumption and planned obsolescence (coupled with ever shrinking componentry, ubiquity and technical sophistication) a worrying ignorance sets in, one that writers of media studies, artists and public are equally vulnerable to in their effort to critically engage their cultural and political environment. The Critical Engineer takes this predicament as a challenge, working at the level of the very stuff of media; the hard stuff of circuitry, code and cables. The Critical Engineer positions the soldering iron, work of philosophy and code editor as equally critically capable tools. Here is an example of Critical Engineering at work. Four days ago Danja and I gave a 'Networkshop' in Lima, Peru, where we took artists and creators through the process of learning all about low level networking using only command line tools. The workshop was held at Fundación Telefonica, an important point, as you'll see shortly. Network routes (and thus topologies) were created and manipulated. Network packets were captured and examined. Strategies for surveilling other users of the network were explored, viewing the images they are viewing in their browsers, etc. In doing so we answered two questions few people can: What is a computer network?, What is the Internet? Where am I on the Internet?. Only by learning about packet tracing (a method for following the flow of network packets from source to destination) and network
Re: [-empyre-] Reclaiming creativity as agent of change
On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 11:09:33AM +0100, Simon Biggs wrote: The jester worked up close and dirty with authority, right by the monarch's side, but often in conflict with them. Mongrel http://www.mongrel.org.uk/ used the word 'motley' to describe their social/technical cultural practice and group identity. It's a word derived from the mixed colours of the 16th C court jester's clothes, which was also used to describe colourful naval uniforms of the 'motley crew'. It has a literary heritage as the heroic or anti-heroic group, facing adversity using their varied skills and characteristics. This seems to be an integral part of the figure of the pirate: a heroic, oppositional posture, flagrantly adopting the ethos of nomadic pragmatism that Jussi brought up earlier via Rosi Braidotti. The discussion so far has outlined the ontology of the posture: kingdoms, republics, corporations and unions that adopt this ethos become 'vandals'. The moral archetype must remain embattled. 'Autonomous' practices may adopt similar strategies, but unopposed pirate practices have nothing to 'reclaim'. Infrastructure art may be very interesting, but only becomes sexy when it gets in trouble. Mongrel remained embattled by being embattled, not seeking opposition, but encountering it in language, technocracies, and the operations of the markets it was involved with, and its own motley subjectivity. This is not to say that dandy pirates are gentrifying the discourse. It's to say that Lulz did the right thing by melting away in the face of opposition. Not getting caught was a great strategy. So far at least. I was really disappointed to hear about the Danish government banning the operations of the Copenhagen Free University. http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1106/msg00079.html My disappointed wasn't because they were banned, I was disappointed that they came out of victorious retirement to announce their re-instatement in the face of opposition. The CFU had shown a thousand pirate universities how to take power simply through motley self-institution. http://copenhagenfreeuniversity.dk/sisuk.html The Free U Resistance Committee of June 18 2011 were the first to frame this as an intention. X Saul. -- mob: +44(0)7941255210 / @saul sip: +44(0)2071007915 / skype:saulalbert ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] July on empyre: Reclaiming creativity as agent of change
The Critical Engineer seems to be doing reverse engineering, a form of technical deconstruction. It's what most interesting artists who work with technology tend to do in their work, opening the black box to analysis. In that sense the term critical engineer seems to be a synonym for media artist ;) Mario Biagioli writes on black boxing rendering ideas and paradigms opaque and unto the apparatus of industrialised culture. The challenge is to reverse engineer such constructs so they become (again) problematic. Once deconstructed they are open to re-use. Best Simon On 19/07/2011 15:18, Julian Oliver jul...@julianoliver.com wrote: The Critical Engineer takes black-box technology and infrastructure as something that must be pared back, cracked open and or re-purposed before both the object and its engineering effects upon the user can be fully understood. Simon Biggs | si...@littlepig.org.uk | www.littlepig.org.uk s.bi...@eca.ac.uk | Edinburgh College of Art www.eca.ac.uk/circle | www.elmcip.net | www.movingtargets.co.uk Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] July on empyre: Reclaiming creativity as agent of change
..on Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 04:28:53PM +0100, Simon Biggs wrote: The Critical Engineer seems to be doing reverse engineering, a form of technical deconstruction. It's what most interesting artists who work with technology tend to do in their work, opening the black box to analysis. In that sense the term critical engineer seems to be a synonym for media artist ;) Media Artists need not reverse engineer at all to be artists working with 'media'. I know many that use Flash on a Mac and have been successful as media artists doing so. They couldn't tell you what a threaded process is, let alone a kernel. Many other Media Artists simply pay engineers to work on projects, not being able to solder or write a line of code themselves. This is the traditional 'Visionary and the Hired Hand' class-like separation endemic to Fine Art. I've been called a Media Artist for years and frankly am pretty happy to get away from the term. I've always thought the term Media Artist was so vague that Culture Jammer would be a better fit! Mario Biagioli writes on black boxing rendering ideas and paradigms opaque and unto the apparatus of industrialised culture. The challenge is to reverse engineer such constructs so they become (again) problematic. Once deconstructed they are open to re-use. Indeed. I really like this way of framing it, especially in that it expresses two forms of use, the un-boxed form being in knowledge through understanding the object of study as a field of interesting problems. Cheers, Julian On 19/07/2011 15:18, Julian Oliver jul...@julianoliver.com wrote: The Critical Engineer takes black-box technology and infrastructure as something that must be pared back, cracked open and or re-purposed before both the object and its engineering effects upon the user can be fully understood. Simon Biggs | si...@littlepig.org.uk | www.littlepig.org.uk s.bi...@eca.ac.uk | Edinburgh College of Art www.eca.ac.uk/circle | www.elmcip.net | www.movingtargets.co.uk Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- Julian Oliver http://julianoliver.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
