Re: Locating ArtScience

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Dear Gary,

> On 14 Dec 2017, at 17:06, Gary Hall  wrote:
> The only thing I might add would be that, for me, any such subjectivity would 
> not assume that the boundaries between the human and nonhuman are drawn 
> arbitrarily. Nor that they are largely meaningless. Rather, the drawing of 
> such boundaries would be where the political comes into play.
> 
That is a good / important point. So, while these boundaries might in 
themselves be rather arbitrary, the act of drawing them and the choice how and 
where to draw is deeply political.   
> One way of developing that line of thought would be to build on Chantal 
> Mouffe's definition of the political as a decision taken precisely in an 
> arbitrary terrain. Another would be by adding the concept of the 'cut' to 
> those of diffraction and intra-action that Annie pointed us toward in the 
> work of Karen Barad.
> 
Ah, interesting to link back to Mouffe’s work, will re-read some of her work 
with this in mind!

And yes, the ‘cut’ belongs to this exploration, as well as other figures, such 
as ‘rupture’, ‘negation’, ‘erasure’ - for someone who comes from the field of 
the arts such figures feel familiar - the only thing to be careful about is not 
to think exclusively in ‘negative’ categories since we are also looking for 
more ‘generative’ approaches.

Many thanks for your feedback!

bests,
Eric

—— 
> Thanks, too, for the kind words about Reinventing the Humanities and 
> Posthumanities etc. Actually, a nicely packaged version of that material 
> (with pictures and everything) has just been published in the Techne: 
> Art+Research series as The Inhumanist Manifesto: Extended Play. If you're 
> interested, you can download it for free here:
> 
> http://art.colorado.edu/research/Hall_Inhumanist-Manifesto.pdf 
> 
> 
> Best, Gary
> 
> On 11/12/2017 01:44, Eric Kluitenberg wrote:
>> Dear Gary,
>> 
>> Thank you for your highly articulate and critical questions, which deserve a 
>> far more thorough answer than I can provide here with limited time 
>> available. Still I want to respond in brief to some of the issues  / 
>> problems you raised.
>> 
>>> On 10 Dec 2017, at 19:58, Gary Hall >> > wrote:
>>>  
>>> The mention of Latour in the context of the Anthropocene and its 
>>> undermining of the human’s ‘natural’ boundaries with the nonhuman brings to 
>>> mind Graham Harman’s presentation of his work in Prince of Networks. Here 
>>> Latour is portrayed as having given us ‘the first object-oriented 
>>> philosophy’, on the grounds there’s ‘no privilege for a unique human 
>>> subject’ in his thought. We cannot split ‘actants into zones of animate and 
>>> inanimate, human and nonhuman, or subject and object. Every entity is 
>>> something in its own right…. This holds equally true for neutrinos, fungus, 
>>> blue whales and Hezbullah militants’. ‘With this single step,’ Harman 
>>> writes, ‘a total democracy of objects replaces the long tyranny of human 
>>> beings in philosophy’. He proceeds to quote from Latour’s The 
>>> Pasteurization of France: ‘But if you missed the galloping freedom of the 
>>> zebras in the savannah this morning, then so much the worse for you; the 
>>> zebras will not be sorry you were not there... Things in themselves lack 
>>> nothing.’
>>>  
>>> Yet, for all this, the work of both Latour and Harman is shot through with 
>>> humanism, the consequences of which they do not think through rigorously. 
>>> After all, the zebras don’t care whether Latour writes about them or not. 
>>> In themselves they lack nothing - including books by Bruno Latour 
>>> presumably. So what - or rather who - is Latour writing these books for, 
>>> containing as they do original philosophical ideas and ontologies that are 
>>> attributed to him as unique, individual, named, human author or 
>>> personality, to the exclusion of all other human and nonhuman actors, and 
>>> published (in the case of Facing Gaia [Polity, 2017]) on a ‘copyright, all 
>>> rights reserved’ basis with a for-profit press?
>> 
>> Well, I cannot say too much on the inconsistencies of Latour’s publishing 
>> politics, quite obviously part of the global reputation machine. Nor do I 
>> have to or feel the need to defend him on this point, and for that matter 
>> also have my own disagreements with some of his arguments proper (aside from 
>> the issue of collusion with copyright / for profit publishing - in the past 
>> I have attempted to reach a subtle, balanced, reasonable public position on 
>> copyright by uttering the phrase: “Copyright? Fuck it!”).
>>   
>> I wanted to get a better sense of your position as I am not (yet) overly 
>> familiar with your work, and I think on your website the last part of the 
>> biography does a good job at summarising what is obviously a thoroughly 
>> developed position. I’m thinking here particularly of the section 
>> Reinventing the Humanities and P

Re: Locating ArtScience

[Gary Hall]

Dear Eric,

Thanks for this.

I like the idea of singular nonhuman personalities and systems producing 
moments of when something transformative comes into being. And that of 
using a perverse subjectivity to escape the perversion of subjectivity.


The only thing I might add would be that, for me, any such subjectivity 
would not assume that the boundaries between the human and nonhuman are 
drawn arbitrarily. Nor that they are largely meaningless. Rather, the 
drawing of such boundaries would be where the political comes into play.


One way of developing that line of thought would be to build on Chantal 
Mouffe's definition of the political as a decision taken precisely in an 
arbitrary terrain. Another would be by adding the concept of the 'cut' 
to those of diffraction and intra-action that Annie pointed us toward in 
the work of Karen Barad.


Thanks, too, for the kind words about Reinventing the Humanities and 
Posthumanities etc. Actually, a nicely packaged version of that material 
(with pictures and everything) has just been published in the Techne: 
Art+Research series as The Inhumanist Manifesto: Extended Play. If 
you're interested, you can download it for free here:


http://art.colorado.edu/research/Hall_Inhumanist-Manifesto.pdf

Best, Gary


On 11/12/2017 01:44, Eric Kluitenberg wrote:

Dear Gary,

Thank you for your highly articulate and critical questions, which 
deserve a far more thorough answer than I can provide here with 
limited time available. Still I want to respond in brief to some of 
the issues  / problems you raised.


On 10 Dec 2017, at 19:58, Gary Hall > wrote:
The mention of Latour in the context of theAnthropocene and its 
undermining of thehuman’s ‘natural’ boundaries with the 
nonhumanbrings to mind Graham Harman’s presentation of his work 
in/Prince of Networks/. Here Latour is portrayed as having given us 
‘the first object-oriented philosophy’, on the grounds there’s ‘no 
privilege for a unique human subject’ in his thought.We cannot split 
‘actants into zones of animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman, or 
subject and object. Every entity is something in its own right…. This 
holds equally true for neutrinos, fungus, blue whales and Hezbullah 
militants’. ‘With this single step,’ Harman writes, ‘a total 
democracy of objects replaces the long tyranny of human beings in 
philosophy’. He proceeds to quote from Latour’s/The Pasteurization of 
France/: ‘But if you missed the galloping freedom of the zebras in 
the savannah this morning, then so much the worse for you; the zebras 
will not be sorry you were not there.../Things in themselves lack 
nothing/.’


Yet, for all this,the work of both Latour and Harman is shot through 
with humanism, the consequences of which they do not think through 
rigorously.After all, the zebras don’t care whether Latour writes 
about them or not./In themselves they lack nothing/- including books 
by Bruno Latour presumably. So what - or rather who - is Latour 
writing these books for, containing as they do/original/philosophical 
ideas and ontologies that are attributed to/him/as unique, 
individual,/named/, human author or personality, to the exclusion of 
all other human and nonhuman actors, and published (in the case 
of/Facing Gaia/[Polity, 2017]) on a ‘copyright, all rights reserved’ 
basis with a for-profit press?


Well, I cannot say too much on the inconsistencies of Latour’s 
publishing politics, quite obviously part of the global reputation 
machine. Nor do I have to or feel the need to defend him on this 
point, and for that matter also have my own disagreements with some of 
his arguments proper (aside from the issue of collusion with copyright 
/ for profit publishing - in the past I have attempted to reach a 
subtle, balanced, reasonable public position on copyright by uttering 
the phrase: “Copyright? Fuck it!”).
I wanted to get a better sense of your position as I am not (yet) 
overly familiar with your work, and I think on your website the last 
part of the biography does a good job at summarising what is obviously 
a thoroughly developed position. I’m thinking here particularly of the 
section Reinventing the Humanities and Posthumanities” Let me quote 
you from there:


"/To decenter the human according to an understanding of subjectivity 
that perceives the latter as produced by complex meshworks of other 
humans, nonhumans, non-objects and non-anthropomorphic elements and 
energies (some of which may be beyond our knowledge), requires us 
to act differently as theorists from the way in which the majority of 
those associated with the posthuman, the nonhuman and the 
Anthropocene, act. We need to displace the humanist concepts that 
underpin our ideas of the author, the book and copyright, together 
with their accompanying practices of reading, writing, analysis and 
critique./”

http://www.garyhall.info (biography - bottom of the page)

So, in this view then we cannot continue copyrighted 

Re: Never Mind the Bitcoin?

[Molly Hankwitz]

Thank you for this post. The analogy to space and property values in
Dubai...perfectly clear. A city surely growing on overinflated speculative
wealth —and the fantasies of power that go with it—-not to mention other
cities, maybe Shanghai, that attract foreign, western capital.

Operative word: Accumulation—from data—living data —-aesthetically in the
arts we lean in post-global directions and scope, visualized by wide-angle
drone shots, GIS, and data visualizations that “take in the whole picture” —

 Accumulation and organization of data to take in the whole -
 -thievery of fractional parts of someone’s bank interest x 1 kabillion
tent thefts = tidy sum;
-ubiquitous delivery systems for payment, scooping up dollars
-The decentralization of accounts - capacity to hide ones money off shore,
etc.
-an excess of fees
-“mining”, “data mining” as paradigm, perceptual shift —imagined as a
vastness from which one takes (nature)



-
-


On Thu, Dec 14, 2017 at 1:21 AM Felix Stalder  wrote:

>
> Bitcoin seems, to me, to indicate how much criminal, speculative money
> there is out there, seeking risk worth taking, rather than "investing"
> in a traditional sense. There is simply too much money held by too few
> people who now trade it among themselves, rather than seeking to extract
> surplus value from labor. There are only so many apartments one can buy
> in Dubai and all that money needs to go somewhere.
>
> Take the bitcoin exchange rate of the last three years as a fractal
> image of the income/wealth distribution of the last thirty years.
> Exponential acceleration within exponential acceleration.
>
> That vehicle that this money latched onto is about the utopia of machine
> peerage, tells us something about the state of the world, in which
> technical thinking dominates and people simply don't count and, as long
> as they remain necessary, most of them are forcefully written out of the
> story. For a micro-account how invisibility is created/enforced, see
> Andrew Wilson's great work "Workers Leaving the Googleplex"
>
> https://vimeo.com/15852288
>
> Machines, as Morlock pointed out, are simply more efficient at
> everything (often in practice, but particularly in theory), in part
> because we defined the world -- and ourselves -- in machine terms, by
> accepting information theory as communication theory.
>
> Back to the excess money. The sane option would be to tax that money,
> but doesn't look likely in the US/EU, so the other option to break that
> extremely unstable distribution of income and wealth become more likely:
> war. Historically, this is how I understand Piketty, there have only
> been these two options.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 2017-12-13 20:41, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> > Bitcoin successfully hijacked a sizable amount of public belief, which
> > underwrites any fiat currency, and it doesn't get more fiat than Bitcoin.
>
> <...>
>
>
>
> --
>
>  | http://felix.openflows.com
>  |OPEN PGP:  https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0C9FF2AC
>
> #  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
> #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> #  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
> #  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
> #  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

'La Casemate', Grenoble FabLab burned down by anti-digital activists

[Patrice Riemens]

bwo Tetalab List

Original to:
https://hackernoon.com/in-france-cyber-criticism-turns-violent-as-activists-burn-a-fablab-to-protest-the-diffusion-of-4ad378251c5b


In France, cyber criticism turns violent as “activists” burn a fablab to 
protest the diffusion of digital culture


What will be the consequences of big tech growing moral failures?
The fablab “La Casemate” after it was destroyed by the group of Grenoble

People don’t throw rocks on the Google buses anymore. Those were the 
good old times.


On Tuesday, La Casemate, a fablab based in Grenoble was vandalized and 
burned because it was described as “a notoriously harmful institution by 
its diffusion of digital culture”.


The public policy of supporting the digital transition was also 
criticized as “City Managers satisfy money-hungry start-ups and geeky 
geeks by opening Fablabs in trendy neighborhoods These seemingly 
extremely heterogeneous devices all aim to accelerate the acceptance and 
social use of the technologies of our disastrous time”.


It’s not the first time people turn to violent protests against 
automation and computers.


From 1979 to 1983, in France, the Committee for Liquidation or 
Subversion of Computers (CLODO) was active in the region of Toulouse, 
where they posed bombs and burned buildings (CII-Honeybull in 1980, 
International Computers Limited in 1980, Sperry-Univac in 1983, etc.) At 
the time, they explained to the French Media that they were “workers in 
the field of data processing and consequently well placed to know the 
current and future dangers of data processing and telecommunications.” 
And that in their view, “ The computer is the favorite tool of the 
dominant. It is used to exploit, to put on file, to control, and to 
repress.”


And there were others. In 1983, in West Germany, a computer center 
designing software used in Pershing missiles was destroyed by a group 
called Rotte Zellen. In 1984, a Belgium group called the Communist 
Combattant Cells (CCC) bombed and destroyed the headquarters of several 
companies in Belgium and Germany. In London, a group called the Angry 
Brigade tried to do the same. And there were similar actions in Asia, in 
South America and of course in the US.


It’s easy to dismiss the actions of these digital “protesters” as mere 
luddites fantasies. But their point was not that the computing industry 
would take jobs from people.


In August 1983, the CLODO gave a rare interview in English to Processed 
World, where they explain : “It’s neither retrograde nor novel. Looking 
at the past, we see only slavery and dehumanization, unless we go back 
to certain so-called primitive societies. And though we may not all 
share the same “social project,’’ we know that it’s stupid to try and 
turn back the clock.” It’s rather that these tools are “perverted at 
their very origin”, pointing for example “that the most computerized 
sector is the army, and that 94% of civilian computer-time is used for 
management and accounting”. To be clear, in their 1983 view, “if 
microprocessors create unemployment, instead of reducing everyone’s 
working-time, it’s because we live in a brutal society, and this is by 
no means a reason to destroy microprocessors.”


Since the 1983 movie “Wargames”, people have dissociated 
computer-related terrorism and violence. By insisting on hacking and 
hackers, it looks like digital politics, protests and violence only take 
place in some sort of virtual world, and that they belong to a grey zone 
where moral values are distant and fuzzy. Indeed, their vocabulary of 
“White Hat”- a good hacker, and “Black Hat”- a bad hacker, seems more 
related to the Lords of the Ring than to the Communist Manifesto. And 
since the seminal 1984 book of Steven Levy, “Hackers: Heroes of the 
Computer Revolution”,the digital world has been fascinated by this new 
storytelling, the claim to be able to break the rules of society. Its 
leaders always want to present themselves as revolutionaries. They 
always begun in a garage. They were always former hackers. They all 
wanted to change the world.


But it seems that this storytelling has come to an end.
The text posted by the group of Grenoble on Indymedia

In their text posted on Friday, the group of Grenoble share the same 
disappointment as the CLODO. They call the digital promises “a blatant 
lie”.


Echoing recent digital critics such as Douglas Rushkoff or even myself, 
they ask themselves what’s revolutionary or prophetic in an industry 
that relies on old-school capitalism, monopolies, micro-work, state 
regulations and money as a cardinal value. And as they reject the hacker 
myth, they end up calling a revered place such as the MIT… a “temple of 
technocracy”. But people surprised, offended or shocked by this 
qualification should remember the way Aaron Swartz has been driven to 
suicide after being mistreated by this institution.


Violence is to be condemned. I feel sad for the people of La Casemate. 
They are the victi

Re: Never Mind the Bitcoin?

[uno]

uno:
> Kenneth Fields:
> > Priestbots would serve as the voice of the never seen/heard/manifest OneBot.
> 
> that LOVE started with a touch(screen). by siris, alexas etc. we get used to.
> but, would probably be the first god who actually answers. will be a success 
> I guess.
> https://www.wired.com/story/god-is-a-bot-and-anthony-levandowski-is-his-messenger/
sorry, it was that one:
https://www.wired.com/story/anthony-levandowski-artificial-intelligence-religion/

> /u
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Never Mind the Bitcoin?

[uno]

Kenneth Fields:
> Priestbots would serve as the voice of the never seen/heard/manifest OneBot.

that LOVE started with a touch(screen). by siris, alexas etc. we get used to.
but, would probably be the first god who actually answers. will be a success I 
guess.
https://www.wired.com/story/god-is-a-bot-and-anthony-levandowski-is-his-messenger/
/u
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Never Mind the Bitcoin?

[Kenneth Fields]

I want to LIKE this one.
Where’s the like button on this nettime thing?
If there’s anything ripe for disruption, it’s religion.
What IS religion without the middle man/institution, but a contradiction in 
terms.
So not p2p, but p2g-od?  God is replaced by Bot - that never manifests… 
Now that would certainly be easy to implement (not a bug, but a feature).

Priestbots would serve as the voice of the never seen/heard/manifest OneBot.
Here we use AW algorithms (artificial wisdom).

Looks like another all nighter. I should have it up and running by morning.
Created token GODBOT/GBT, 10,000,000.00.
Recommended Spirit  (gas) = 0.01 Gweist
Consensus algorithm: POP (Proof of Presence).

Ken


> 
> --
> 
> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2017 11:41:53 -0800
> From: Morlock Elloi 
> To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
> Subject: Re:  Never Mind the Bitcoin?
> Message-ID: <5a318281.1080...@gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
> 
> Bitcoin successfully hijacked a sizable amount of public belief, which 
> underwrites any fiat currency, and it doesn't get more fiat than Bitcoin.
> 
> This is continuation of the phenomena of machine amplification of human 
> activities; machines do it better and faster. Socializing, sex, 
> education, transport. It's just that now they are getting into more 
> esoteric class of activities ... beliefs. The next is probably love, and 
> I'd be surprised if in few years we don't get new machine-mediated 
> religion which will engulf the current manual ones. Now, that's the 
> startup worth funding!
> 
> This is not necessarily 'bad'. We are finding out what our primitives 
> are, uncluttered by inefficient rituals.
> 
> 
> 

#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Never Mind the Bitcoin?

[Felix Stalder]

Bitcoin seems, to me, to indicate how much criminal, speculative money
there is out there, seeking risk worth taking, rather than "investing"
in a traditional sense. There is simply too much money held by too few
people who now trade it among themselves, rather than seeking to extract
surplus value from labor. There are only so many apartments one can buy
in Dubai and all that money needs to go somewhere.

Take the bitcoin exchange rate of the last three years as a fractal
image of the income/wealth distribution of the last thirty years.
Exponential acceleration within exponential acceleration.

That vehicle that this money latched onto is about the utopia of machine
peerage, tells us something about the state of the world, in which
technical thinking dominates and people simply don't count and, as long
as they remain necessary, most of them are forcefully written out of the
story. For a micro-account how invisibility is created/enforced, see
Andrew Wilson's great work "Workers Leaving the Googleplex"

https://vimeo.com/15852288

Machines, as Morlock pointed out, are simply more efficient at
everything (often in practice, but particularly in theory), in part
because we defined the world -- and ourselves -- in machine terms, by
accepting information theory as communication theory.

Back to the excess money. The sane option would be to tax that money,
but doesn't look likely in the US/EU, so the other option to break that
extremely unstable distribution of income and wealth become more likely:
war. Historically, this is how I understand Piketty, there have only
been these two options.







On 2017-12-13 20:41, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> Bitcoin successfully hijacked a sizable amount of public belief, which
> underwrites any fiat currency, and it doesn't get more fiat than Bitcoin.

<...>



-- 

 | http://felix.openflows.com
 |OPEN PGP:  https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0C9FF2AC



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: Never Mind the Bitcoin?

[Patrice Riemens]

On 2017-12-13 20:41, Morlock Elloi wrote:

Bitcoin successfully hijacked a sizable amount of public belief, which
underwrites any fiat currency, and it doesn't get more fiat than
Bitcoin.

This is continuation of the phenomena of machine amplification of
human activities; machines do it better and faster. Socializing, sex,
education, transport. It's just that now they are getting into more
esoteric class of activities ... beliefs. The next is probably love,
and I'd be surprised if in few years we don't get new machine-mediated
religion which will engulf the current manual ones. Now, that's the
startup worth funding!

This is not necessarily 'bad'. We are finding out what our primitives
are, uncluttered by inefficient rituals.




Just after 'shipping' I read a very good article about Zygmunt Bauman in 
the French monthly 'La Decroissance' (highly recommended!), and 
realised, of course, Bitcoin is all about 'liquid modernity'. Which may 
also explain why the hype lasts so long and flies so high. And may be 
last forever, forever being taken as till the next switch, which should 
not be long coming.


Our critique of Bitcoin then probaly looks like being solidly grounded 
in ... solid modernity.


Cheerio, p+7D!

In the Dutch weekly De Groene Amsterdammer, economist Dirk Bezemer 
identified the Bitcoin craze with another form of liquidity: 'liquidity 
preference', a concept I always found a bit hazy - but hey, I'm not 
Keynes ...



#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: