Response to Gillespie & Hayles

Hayles, N. (n.d.). Traumas of Code. Critical Inquiry, 33(1 (Autumn 2006), 136-157. Retrieved from http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/traumas_of_code_by_n._katherine_hayles

This article discusses how prevalent code is within our everyday lives.

A note I have from discussion says, "Just because there are more images doesn't mean it's more objective."

We also talked about glitch art in reference to this article and I played around with a few Marilyn Monroe images, a la Andy Warhol.

The Relevance of Algorithms by Tarleton Gillespie forthcoming, in Media Technologies, ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo Boczkowski, and Kirsten Foot. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

This article discusses how prevalent algorithms are in todays society. 

Key Terms-

Algorithms - encoded procedures for transforming input data into a desired output, based on specified calculations. 

Quotes-

"We live in a historical moment in which, more than ever before, nearly all public activity includes keeping copious records, cataloging activity, and archiving documents -- and we do more and more of it on a communication network designed such that every login, every page view, and every click leaves a digital trace." - 4

In class we talked about other things that are algorithms, in particularly knitting, which I'm familiar with. So here is a sample of a pattern for a hat.

Round 1: *[P2, k3]  4 times, p3, k6, p1, repeat from * to end of round.

Round 2: *[P2, LC, RC] 2 times,  p3, C6F, p1, repeat from * to end of round.

Round 3: *P3, [k6, p4] 2 times, k6, p1, repeat from * to end of round.

Round 4: *P3, [C6F, p4] 2 times, k6, p1, repeat from * to end of round.

For someone who has no experience knitting this would just look like jumbled letters and numbers. 

Another thing we said was that people who are familiar with algorithms see the world in equations, which is an interesting thing to think about. 


* This response if far less detailed because it was the class following Installation weekend for 614

Response to Gonzalez

Gonzalez, J. (2009). The Face and the Public: Race, Secrecy, and Digital Art Practice. Camera Obscura, 70(1), 36-65. doi:10.1215/02705346-2008-014

People like to think of the internet as a race-less space, but Gonzalez argues that race relations and tensions are present throughout online media. She references artists who do work based on this concept.

Quotes-

"...then might it be possible to undo the power of race discourse as an oppressive regime by decoupling it from vision or the visible? Or, alternately, might it be that visual culture is the very place where contemporary race discourse might be most powerfully critiqued and transformed?" - 38

"Race is always an embodied discourse that cars on and through living human beings at the level of corporeal practices, movements, features, and gases, ultimately constructing and deconstructing the psychological states of individual subjects." - 41

"Online passing is never free from the social, historical, linguistic, and psychological constraints and conditions that also shape racial discourse offline. The invisibility of 'real' bodies cannot, alone, Produce a racially neutral space or even racially neutral subjects." - 42

"Racial schemas work to hide or mask not only individuals as individuals but also their real and imagined historical conditions." - 59

A few of my notes from the reading-

- She talked about the internet freeing up our encounters between each other, because we are invisible, and while there can be good from this there is also bad. Cyberbullying is a real problem on the internet because people don't have to own what they say. In another class we also talked about the "Yik Yak" app that lets you make anonymous comments and the content you see is based on your radius. This is causing problems because people are also being hatful on platforms like this as well.

- I wonder how the #blacklivesmatter fits into this discussion. I'm not exactly sure, but I think it's work mentioning. 

Response to Hawkins & Thacker

Hawkins, J. (n.d.). When Taste Politics Meet Terror. CTheory.

This article is about the recent harassment of the Critical Art Ensemble 

Quotes-

"This episode, then, seemed to signal that art and theory both are reduced, in times of crisis, 'to an academic parlor game' -- something we do when there's nothing really on anyone's radar screen. Something we do only when it's 'appropriate'." - 2

"This case is really about the battle for and over the political unconscious of the U.S., and the ways in which art can tap into (or at least temporarily intersect with) that unconscious." - 10

Thacker, E. (2003). Data Made Flesh: Biotechnology and the Discourse of the Posthuman. Cultrual Critique, 53 (Winter), 72-97.

This article discusses the merging of the medical industry with the technology industry.

Terms –

Posthumanism -

a. Extropianism – “includes theoretical-technical inquiries into the next phase of the human condition through advances in science and technology.” - 73

b. Critical posthumanism – “includes key texts by contemporary cultural theorist brignging together the implications of postmodern theories of the subject and the politics of new technologies.” – 73

Uploading – “the parallels between neural pattern activity in the uman mind and the capacity of advanced neural networking computing will enable humans to transger their minds into more durable (read: immortal) hardware systems.” - 74

Quotes –

"Extroianism can be characterized along three main lines: (1) as a technologically biased revision of European humanism, (2) as an approach to technology as both self and not-self, and (3) as a tendency to apply life science concepts toward social and political problematics." - 75

"One of the crucial requirements for the postman is that technology be approached first and foremost as a tool. This technology-as-tool motif-an investment in enabling technology-operates in several ways." - 77

1.     “It presupposes and requires a boundary management between human and machine, biology and technology, nature and culture”- 77

2.     “Provides the assurance of the neutrality of technology” – 77

3.     “The ontological separation of human and machine is also the establishment of a certain distance between the natural and technical domains, and this distance provides a source of security for the ongoing development of the human as a product of evolution” - 77

On page 74 he discusses the singularity which makes me think of two films that include this concept, Avatar and Chappie.

Response to Dixon and Smith-Windsor

Smith-Windsor, J. (n.d.). The Cyborg Mother. Politics, Gender and Religion: Gender and Sexuality, 348-356.

This article is about her experience having a premature baby and watching as machines raised her daughter for the first month of her life.

Terms-
Cyborg - "part human, part machine, never completely either."- 349
Panopticism - "Being a cyborg reifies the repressive technologies of the pan optical illusion. To reify the panopticon inherently denies the possibility that there are ways of being, beyond the cyborg experience" -353

Quotes-
"14 February 2003 - I hold my child for the first time. She is naked, against my chest. Her ventilator curls around my neck, taped to my shoulder, disappears inside her. There are other tubes , too, taped to my other limbs by peach-colored surgical tape." -352

This gives me the visual of an umbilical cord. And that instead of being connected to her the first time the mother holds her daughter she is connected to the machines.

"The mother-child symbiosis provides the necessary relationship for infantile language to be communicated. The infant is incapable of distinguishing between 'sameness' and otherness', between 'subject' and 'object', between itself and the Mother. ... But what if this symbiotic relationship between mother and child were interrupted? What happens when technology begins to work itself into the infantile discourse severing the symbiosis between mother and child? What happens when the infant, instead, becomes incapable of distinguishing between itself and - the machine?" - 350

When she talks about the baby recognizing the machine as mother, that is so interesting. I know they call the first three months of a baby's life the 4th trimester, so I wonder what implications it has to have the baby be so close and connected to machines during that time. Does her daughter feel at home in a cold sterile hospital environment?

Dixon, S. (n.d.). Metal Performance: Humanizing Robots, Returning to Nature, and Camping About. Culture, Art, and Communication: Perception, 485-518.

Dixon argues that all art with robots (and sometimes humans) is either obviously camp or has camp overtones. (I wonder if this isn't more to do with the time frame that all of his art works are from.)

Terms-
metallic camp - "the word 'metallic' denotes not only the physical substance that the artists employ, but also its contemporary connotations within popular music and culture as signifying loud, aggressive, and resistant expression. This is juxtaposed with the knowing irony and pleasure of camp, which Susan Sontag defines as 'love of the unnatural:of artifice and exaggeration'." - 486

Quotes-
"Robots become more homelike through developments in artificial intelligence, and humans become more rootlike as they grow more alienated and remove from their own and others' humanity through their increasing reliance on technology." - 490-491

"The Czech word robot, variously translated as 'work', 'serf,' or 'forced labour', was adopted in the English-speaking world as 'robot' directly through the title of Karel Capek's 1921 expressionist play R.U.R. (Rose's Universal Robots). The play concerns the supplanting of humans by robots, and it has been widely discussed both as a warning against Frankensteinian scientific hubris and as an allegory of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, with the oppressed masses 'recast' as robots." - 492

"Metal Performance frequently highlights a postmodern concern to return to nature and the animal, and it often celebrates an eroticized sexuality of metal, with 'them fuckin' robots' both fucking (signaling the humanization of machines) and being fucked (signifying the mechanization of humans). Metal performances exalt in the conjunction of the hard and the soft, the natural and the technological, the metal and the meat." - 513

Response to Crary

 Crary, J. (2013). 24/7. Brooklyn, New York: Verso.

This article discusses the 24/7 attitude of our current US culture, while referencing it's historical connotations as well as social, political, and capitalist roots.

Terms-
"sleep mode" - "the notion of an apparatus in a state of low-power readiness remakes the larger sense of sleep into simply a deferred or diminished condition of operationally and access." - 13

Key Quotes -
"A 24/7 environment has the semblance of a social world, but it is actually a non-social model of mechanic performance and a suspension of living that does not disclose the human cost required to sustain effectiveness." - 9

"Clearly, sleep needs to be understood in relation to distinctions between private and public, between the individual and the collective, but always in recognition of their permeability and proximity" - 24-25

"My argument may seem to contain two inconsistent threads. On on hand I am affirming, along with some other writers, that the shape of contemporary technological culture still corresponds to the logic of modernization as it unfolded in the later nineteenth century. ... On the other hand sometime in the late twentieth century it is possible to identify a constellation of forces and entities distinct from those of the nineteenth century and its sequential phases of modernization. "- 41-42

"Even among the plural voices affirming that 'another world is possible,' there is often the expedient misconception that economic justice, mitigation of climate change, and egalitarian social relations can somehow occur alongside the continued existence of corporations like Google, Apple, and General Electric." - 49

"The fluctuating textures of human affect and emotion that are only imprecisely suggested by the notions of shyness, anxiety, variable sexual desire, distraction, or sadness have been falsely converted into medical disorders to be targeted by hugely profitable drugs." - 55

"Because of the infinity of content accessible 24/7 there will always be something online more informative, surprising, funny, diverting, impressive than anything in one's immediate actual circumstances." - 59

When referencing Inception (and I think Minority Report) - "The manifest unlikelihood, or absurdity, of such possibilities ever being realized is less important than how they are shaping and regulating contemporary imaginaries." - 97


Thoughts -

On 7 he references solitary prison cells, the main character on Orange is the New Black is in solitary for a portion of the show and her mental state is greatly affected.

On 12 he talks about different sleep cycles and I've read before about segmented sleep, where people used to wake in the night to take care of various activities.

On page 31 he talks about how "in-use devices and apparatuses have an impact on small-scale forms of sociality". This makes me think of a photographer (not super great work, but relevant) who removes the phones/tablets from peoples hands in photographs.

On page 52 and 53 he discusses watching a large event on television and also looking at social media to see others opinions of what's happening at the same time. I totally do this during things like presidential debates, and awards shows. 

On 85 he argues that television is the cause for large increases in childhood autism. I would have to disagree and say that prepackaged synthetic food is a larger cause for this rise (particularly "low fat" diets and food dyes).

Response to 5 Obstructions

In the film Jorgen Leth is challenged by Lars von Trier to make 5 new versions of his iconic film, "The Perfect Human". With each new version Leth must follow a set of obstructions from von Trier. The film is interesting, but there were some key things I noticed. Like I said during our discussion its clear that this film is from the male perspective. The female is nude many times in the film, and is even sexually suggestive when she has on her clothing, while the male isn't nude until there is an animated version. The main thing that bothered me during the film is just how out of touch both of these men seem to be. Von Trier is just on another level of rich out of touch artists, so much that he seems like a jerk. I sort of liked Leth until they went to the red light district and filmed the scene in the car, where he didn’t have any money to give the woman. It’s not that he didn’t have money to give her it’s just that he seemed so out of touch with what their real situation is. I’ve been to Thailand and during our trip we went to the golden triangle, where Burma, Thailand, China, and Laos meet. It has one of the highest drug and sex trafficking rates in the whole world. I know what it feels like to see people in that situation. I had 5-year-old girls carrying their baby siblings asking me for money. I know what it feels like to have your heart broken by those sights. He seemed barely affected by what he saw. It made me judge the rest of his work, with a different view of him. Any type of documentary work always makes me view the artist and their work in a different light.