dinsdag 31 augustus 2010
----#######§§§$$$$$$$ and this is the art project from saarbrücken, ja. they left everywhere in town bikes so that people could take them to drive around and keep them after,ja.each bike has a sticker with a special name on it ja. like this one is labeled "hummelmann", ja. i don't how to translate this ja. and the places where the bikes where put you didn't know ja. so i got myself luckyly one, ja! here is the webpage of the local art-academie, ja. like the rietveld one, ja.maybe you want one day to visit this school, ja! $$$$$$$$)))))&&&&&------ah, i forgot the dynamo makes a huge sound when you driving it with lights,ja.there is some modification here, ja. but, i dont know how they did it, ja.
maandag 30 augustus 2010
zondag 29 augustus 2010
zaterdag 28 augustus 2010
vrijdag 27 augustus 2010
Cyprien Gaillard/Koudlam
(from Cyprien Gaillard-Beton Belvedere,Den Haag,2009)
summer's gone, i think:
(directed by Cyprien Gaillard)
Brutality in Stone
donderdag 26 augustus 2010
Little Big Berlin - Pilpop
Little Big Berlin from pilpop on Vimeo.
Full screen is a must!"I dedicate this film to Berlin where I have been living for 19 years now. While the architecture of Berlin is stunningly beautiful, only its inhabitants make Berlin the unique city that it is. In every corner there is something new to discover. And the best thing to do is to film it.
Filmed with my beloved Sony HC9. Edited with Sony Vegas Pro 9.The miniature effect is called tilt-shift, which originates from a particular lens that was used to photograph architecture. The miniature effect is a by-product of that. It can also be achieved by digital postprocessing.
Music: “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2” by Franz Liszt " - pilpop.
woensdag 25 augustus 2010
maandag 23 augustus 2010
zondag 22 augustus 2010
zaterdag 21 augustus 2010
Christoph Schlingensief died today Saturday 21.August 2010
He's dead.Christoph Schlingensief died today.He was like a good friend to me.I followed his life & work for a long time now.His openess and honesty always impressed me deeply. his works always touched my soul. I was very lucky to see him last year on the holland festival in amsterdam. Oh my god this is so incredibly sad! I am so sorry now...Schlingensief's lung cancer could not be cured.In two months he would have become 50 years old. CRAP!!
:-(
above pic. taken from one of his latest plays "Eine Kirche der Angst vor dem Fremden in mir":
INTERCESSIONS
I WANT TO BE ALL BY MYSELF ONE DAY.
ALONE ON THIS EARTH.
I WANT TO STAND BY MYSELF AND SAY BY MYSELF,
THIS IS MY LIFE.
THEN I'LL CRY
AND BE SHATTERED.
BUT AT LEAST,I'LL HAVE BEEN ALL BY MYSELF THIS ONCE.
exerpts from the MTV project U-3000:
vrijdag 20 augustus 2010
woensdag 18 augustus 2010
dinsdag 17 augustus 2010
maandag 16 augustus 2010
zondag 15 augustus 2010
zaterdag 14 augustus 2010
43 Dodgy Statements on Computer Art - Brian Reffin Smith
1. The sadness of most art is that it does not know its future. The sadness of computer art is that it does not know its past.
2. Constraint is liberty; reduce to the maximum.
3. If it looks just like, you know, ‘art’…it probably isn’t.
4. Using state-of-the-art technology merely produces state-of-the-technology art.
5. Those who use computers to make art need to understand art as well as computers.
6. Most participative art is deeply authoritarian.
7. The computer is best characterised not as an information processor but as a general-purpose representation processor.
8. Marshall McLuhan, at least as filtered through his sound-bites, was often wrong. The medium is not the message, which is more often determined socially and psychologically by the recipient.
9. If your system costs 10 000 € and mine 30 000 €, it does not follow that my art is thrice as good as yours.
10. In an ideal world, New Media institutions would employ at least one non-technological artist.
11. Are you pushing the frontiers of computational representation, or of contemporary art? Confusion rarely leads to success.
12. 99% of computer art is meretricious nonsense. But then 99% of everything is meretricious nonsense.
13. Self-imposed formal requirements are not inhibitive of expression.
14. Post Modernism has never said that everything is of equal value, just that the contexts in which we identify or attribute value should be open to analysis.
15. You know your amazing new computer art, rich in metaphors and analogies? It’s been done. Years ago. Without a computer.
16. We lose dimensions and scale. The computer in art is immediate and almost always, however “global”, local. Just as no well-found art school would be complete without computers, so every such institution should have a telescope and a microscope, connected to the computer or not.
17. Making computer art too dangerous to sponsor would be a good way to go.
18. Just as everyone has a novel inside them, many believe they have an artwork. The purpose of a good art school is to seek out these people and stop them.
19. Using a computer merely to access the web is like using a Bugatti Veyron to deliver the papers.
20. Many people think that graphic design is art. Art is undertaken for art-like reasons, graphic design for graphic design-like reasons. There may of course be overlap. There should never be confusion.
21. Making the (arts) information revolution consists not only in enabling the control of the means of computer art production by art workers, but also in being kind, non-gouging and relatively honest. Without the latter, one may doubt commitment to the former.
22. The best interactive art always makes you look at the participants.
23. There is only one thing worse than studying art for the budding computer artist, and that is to study computers. Or vice versa.
24. Art is not craft.
25. What would be pretentious or nonsensical if one said it oneself does not become more worthy when spoken by a computer-generated avatar.
26. Seen in the light of Guy Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle”, computer art is very spectacular indeed.
27. Beware of computer art as farce repeating itself as history.
28. There is no “normal” computer art, in the Kuhnian sense. It is in constant revolution, hence constantly evading scrutiny.
29. When the first solitary Metro station was built in Paris, where could people travel to? They just admired the station.
30. Bugs are good; as with fireflies, the fertile ones shed light.
31. The Prix Pierre Gutzman, 100 000 Francs, was offered by the Institut de France in 1906 to the first person who could establish contact with extra-terrestrials; except with Martians, which would be too easy.
32. ‘All that is solid floats into air’ is not a celebration of virtuality, but Marx ‘n’ Engels’ prediction for late capitalism.
33. A half developed Polaroid photo is different to half a digital photo. A half-finished pen-plotter drawing is different to a half-finished inkjet print.
34. When art processes happen near-instantaneously, doing art becomes synonymous with correction and selection, later with celebration; rarely with creativity.
35. Art is visual philosophy. But computer art is not visual computer philosophy.
36. Revolutionary modes of interaction between humans and normative structures do not a revolution make.
37. ‘i’, the imaginary square root of minus 1, is to the real numbers as the computer is — or should be — to art.
38. The purpose of the computer in art is to render it difficult and problematic, not easy.
39. We do not admire Picasso’s Guernica or Goya’s The Third of May 1808 solely because of the techniques used, yet we are often invited to admire computer art for just that reason. Art that is deliberately content-free is one thing. Art that is accidentally, lumpenly content-free is another.
40. Computer artist: the unemployable producing the unsaleable for the uninterested.
41. Of course computers and other devices will never fully understand flowing, allusive conversation. But they won’t care.
42. Many of the ‘objects’ of computer art are instances, illustrations, of some less tangible, invisible process. But it may be that the waveform should remain uncollapsed, the artwork staying undecideable, problematic, unobjectified. Lucy R. Lippard described the ‘dematerialization of the art object’ nearly 40 years ago.
43. Never throw away any computer or peripheral equipment that is more than 15 years old. You may well come to need it.
Via
2. Constraint is liberty; reduce to the maximum.
3. If it looks just like, you know, ‘art’…it probably isn’t.
4. Using state-of-the-art technology merely produces state-of-the-technology art.
5. Those who use computers to make art need to understand art as well as computers.
6. Most participative art is deeply authoritarian.
7. The computer is best characterised not as an information processor but as a general-purpose representation processor.
8. Marshall McLuhan, at least as filtered through his sound-bites, was often wrong. The medium is not the message, which is more often determined socially and psychologically by the recipient.
9. If your system costs 10 000 € and mine 30 000 €, it does not follow that my art is thrice as good as yours.
10. In an ideal world, New Media institutions would employ at least one non-technological artist.
11. Are you pushing the frontiers of computational representation, or of contemporary art? Confusion rarely leads to success.
12. 99% of computer art is meretricious nonsense. But then 99% of everything is meretricious nonsense.
13. Self-imposed formal requirements are not inhibitive of expression.
14. Post Modernism has never said that everything is of equal value, just that the contexts in which we identify or attribute value should be open to analysis.
15. You know your amazing new computer art, rich in metaphors and analogies? It’s been done. Years ago. Without a computer.
16. We lose dimensions and scale. The computer in art is immediate and almost always, however “global”, local. Just as no well-found art school would be complete without computers, so every such institution should have a telescope and a microscope, connected to the computer or not.
17. Making computer art too dangerous to sponsor would be a good way to go.
18. Just as everyone has a novel inside them, many believe they have an artwork. The purpose of a good art school is to seek out these people and stop them.
19. Using a computer merely to access the web is like using a Bugatti Veyron to deliver the papers.
20. Many people think that graphic design is art. Art is undertaken for art-like reasons, graphic design for graphic design-like reasons. There may of course be overlap. There should never be confusion.
21. Making the (arts) information revolution consists not only in enabling the control of the means of computer art production by art workers, but also in being kind, non-gouging and relatively honest. Without the latter, one may doubt commitment to the former.
22. The best interactive art always makes you look at the participants.
23. There is only one thing worse than studying art for the budding computer artist, and that is to study computers. Or vice versa.
24. Art is not craft.
25. What would be pretentious or nonsensical if one said it oneself does not become more worthy when spoken by a computer-generated avatar.
26. Seen in the light of Guy Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle”, computer art is very spectacular indeed.
27. Beware of computer art as farce repeating itself as history.
28. There is no “normal” computer art, in the Kuhnian sense. It is in constant revolution, hence constantly evading scrutiny.
29. When the first solitary Metro station was built in Paris, where could people travel to? They just admired the station.
30. Bugs are good; as with fireflies, the fertile ones shed light.
31. The Prix Pierre Gutzman, 100 000 Francs, was offered by the Institut de France in 1906 to the first person who could establish contact with extra-terrestrials; except with Martians, which would be too easy.
32. ‘All that is solid floats into air’ is not a celebration of virtuality, but Marx ‘n’ Engels’ prediction for late capitalism.
33. A half developed Polaroid photo is different to half a digital photo. A half-finished pen-plotter drawing is different to a half-finished inkjet print.
34. When art processes happen near-instantaneously, doing art becomes synonymous with correction and selection, later with celebration; rarely with creativity.
35. Art is visual philosophy. But computer art is not visual computer philosophy.
36. Revolutionary modes of interaction between humans and normative structures do not a revolution make.
37. ‘i’, the imaginary square root of minus 1, is to the real numbers as the computer is — or should be — to art.
38. The purpose of the computer in art is to render it difficult and problematic, not easy.
39. We do not admire Picasso’s Guernica or Goya’s The Third of May 1808 solely because of the techniques used, yet we are often invited to admire computer art for just that reason. Art that is deliberately content-free is one thing. Art that is accidentally, lumpenly content-free is another.
40. Computer artist: the unemployable producing the unsaleable for the uninterested.
41. Of course computers and other devices will never fully understand flowing, allusive conversation. But they won’t care.
42. Many of the ‘objects’ of computer art are instances, illustrations, of some less tangible, invisible process. But it may be that the waveform should remain uncollapsed, the artwork staying undecideable, problematic, unobjectified. Lucy R. Lippard described the ‘dematerialization of the art object’ nearly 40 years ago.
43. Never throw away any computer or peripheral equipment that is more than 15 years old. You may well come to need it.
Via
vrijdag 13 augustus 2010
donderdag 12 augustus 2010
dinsdag 3 augustus 2010
maandag 2 augustus 2010
Pits to Bits, Interview with Graham Harwood
LONG BUT INTERESTING:
This interview follows on from a project called “Coal Fired Computers
(300,000,000 Computers - 318,000 Black Lungs)” carried out in Newcastle
in spring 2010 for the AV Festival.
The project, by Graham Harwood, Matsuko
Yokokoji with Jean Denmars involved a means of producing a physical diagram
between components in production as they undergo transformations across
different kinds of time, politics, matter, knowledge, and vitality. The
project found a way of working with such things that was particularly
powerful.
The interview begins with a discussion of CFC but also moves off
into databases and a certain understanding of their material force.
One thing we don’t cover in the interview is the detail of the Coal Fired
Computers project’s work with miner activists, including the
inspirational Dave Douglass. (See information on his memoirs here ). More
of this can be found in a booklet about the project here, including links
to all the groups involved.
The interview was carried out by email in May and June 2010.
Matthew Fuller: If we are to list the visible components of the project it
would go something like this: pile of coal -> fair ground steam engine ->
power transformer -> computer / software -> air compressor -> blackened
lungs. But there are a lot of things missing from that set of components
that are integral to the project, what are they and how do you see them?
Graham Harwood: This list should really start with Jean Demars who set up
the collaboration with the miners, being French and youngish gave him
little knowledge of the UK class struggle of the miners strike in the
1980’s. He use his political enthusiasm, critical analysis to re-examine
the strike in the context of globalisation with the people who struggles
against it back then. If they had not been defeated they would have
picketed every port to stop the everyday atrocity that powers our world.
Matsuko on the other hand is always the leader of all things organised,
productive, efficient. I’m much too lost in my own space to ever
accomplish much on my own. Matsuko takes this raw material of todays
obsession and forms it into graphics, budgets and how the exhibition will
look and act. She does not like to talk in public she just likes getting on
with things.
MF: So perhaps you have some considerations about how the kinds of work we
are speaking about involve collaboration, within this ‘list of
components’, about yourself, about Jean and Matsuko and the kinds of
collaboration you have been developing with them and others, with Richard
Wright and earlier, as part of the group Mongrel
GH: Collaboration is a necessary minefield, if you’re interested in the
place where media systems and the social clash, unfold and get really dirty
then they are mandatory. It would be far too easy to claim everything under
my own authorship but anyone with an ounce of nous would see that all
imaginings are dependent on the context in which they arise or are seen,
I’m just a bit more explicit about that.
MF: So to return back to the list of components…
GH: Then the place, Newcastle Upon Tyne a former mining and industrial
district in England’s North East with a geographical propensity for coal,
then - people maybe – firstly the miners who displayed their literature
and spoke about their lungs, then the Discovery Museum, with it’s
cleaners who were also Miners, it’s exhibits, Charles Parson’s 1884
steam turbines the descendants of which produce the worlds electricity.
Then there is the 3000 visitors who had some familial relationship with
Coal mines, lung disease.
It could be said that coal dust gets into everything. Sealed into the lungs
of miners it forms visible blue streaks, like veins of coal. According to
the World Health Organisation, 318,000 deaths occur annually from chronic
bronchitis and emphysema caused by exposure to coal dust. The common
perception is that wealthy countries have put this all behind them,
displacing coal dust into the lungs of unrecorded, unknown miners in
distant lands, however coal returns into our lives in the form of the cheap
and apparently clean goods we consume.
Coal fired energy not only powers our computers here in the UK, but is
integral to the production of the 300,000,000 computers made each year. 81%
of the energy used in a computer’s life cycle is expended in the
manufacturing process, now taking place in countries with high levels of
coal consumption. The UK currently produces less that one third of the coal
it uses, importing the majority of it and therefore displacing 150,000 tons
of coal dust into unknown lungs.
Then there’s the recent histories of media and my preoccupation with
it’s interrelation to death. But more about that later.
MF: Part of the interest of the work it seems to me is that in a context in
which ‘the world is too complicated to describe or to understand’, it
provides something like a diagram, or a formula which shows how a series of
things are joined together, how certain kinds of momentary connections are
made, but does not renounce the difficulty of such work of abstraction, and
really gets into the very different kinds of qualities, materialities,
knowledges, histories and powers of the things that are nevertheless
joined. The work doesn’t make it’s argument through affirming a set of
categories but by drawing out these formulae in uncannily clear ways
through this process of conjunction. What kind of process of searching and
sifting goes into making this diagram of formula?
GH: It’s probably best if it starts as a joke, a completely unrealisable
funny fantasy that will not go away. Yet every time you tell someone new,
you can see it connects and they recount stories or expressions that affix
to the initial idea. Next you formulate a contraption who’s structural
operations can leak out into the domains you want to contest, play with and
the areas people have spoken to you about. I leave as much work undone as
possible, so as it unfolds it can contest the space in which it’s showing
and the space/geography can contest the contraption. As the physical/code
machine begins to take shape it creates complex negotiations, apprehensions
and upsets as the speculation grows.
Then there is fear, violence and the dead. I need to be scared of what I
make. It needs to put me in embarrassing, difficult, hurtful and
potentially violent situations or it’s just not interesting.
MF: A number of projects you have been involved in over recent years work
with ‘primary’ raw materials, stuff dug out of the ground and refined,
such as the metals aluminium – in the film ‘Aluminium’ presented at
Manifesta7 - and coltan – which is explored in the various iterations of
the Tantalum Memorial and Phone Wars projects. What are the stakes in this
coupling of elementary or primal materials with computational systems?
GH: What interests me is the material’s ability to recursively unfold
possibilities, transforming the flesh, the social, political and economic.
Essentially what a material makes possible and what it shuts down when
it’s ripped from the earth and it’s context and contaminates human
ecologies.
Simultaneous with the material properties, they are contagious concepts
that move around technical cultures growing on the jelly of science
embedded with it’s own philosophical speculations about the nature of the
world.
The materials also come into to existence as a force when the political,
geographical and economic situations are right for them to do so. Aluminium
‘needs’ Italian Fascism to ‘need’ a national metal. It ‘needs’
Italy to lack coal, iron and have bauxite instead. Coal for a long time in
the UK was dug from deep cast mines and the shafts required pumping out
which creates the steam engine which in turn requires more coal and more
labour. Tantalum ‘requires’ political unrest in the Congo, kids playing
Sony games.
Then there is the flesh and death, the material bends the flesh to suit
itself, miners lungs, bones shattering, light, fast munitions ripping into
countless bodies, rapes and murders.
MF: And the place of mines in our clean modern world?
GH: Mines are everywhere in everything once you start looking, you cannot
have humans without them, we seem to be preprogrammed to burrowing blindly
underground like worms. The main difference from us and worms is that we
have a compulsion to burn or explode whatever we find.
For the CFC project I wanted to look at the steam engine as a physical and
conceptual machine simultaneously in a popular setting like the Discovery
Museum.
In the 19th century the great engines of change at that time were built
around coal-fed steam. This was a society that rested on its mines; its
products dominated life and determined its inventions and transport
infrastructure and its politics. In this way, the coal mines of England
recursively transformed the bodies of those who touched them and redirected
large parts of its society to feed its machines.
This is still the case, but the mines and production are displaced to India
and China. It’s like contemporary media tries to obscure it’s origins.
When we use an Ethernet cable we rarely think of the poor bastard who had
to mine the copper or think about the effect of early copper mines on our
cultural, social evolution.
I like to imagine the matter of contemporary media crawling out from the
satanic pits of the early 19th Century, struggling to evolve in the winding
towers. Then laying rails for itself to feed, spreading out creating denser
and denser webs of interconnection for itself.
One you suspend seeing transport and communication in contemporary terms
and think about them as the same thing, as they once were, then different
histories of media emerge. Like in the 1840’s, physical machines, steam
engines force the compression of landscapes into manageable chunks of
aligned time-tables, co-ordinating the bodies on to trains and into mass
labour.
Submarine telegraph cables start to criss-cross the Atlantic,
re-compressing the ocean’s trade routes into global markets realigning it
into the rows and columns of the ledger, birthing scientific management and
unifying markets. The mines transformed the body as the body transformed
the mine, feeding lungs into the hungry boilers of empires.
MF: Coal Fired Computers doesn’t attempt to resolve the problem of
energy, but using a wonderful but rather inefficient engine turns coal into
heat, into movement, into electricity, this in turn transmuted into a
machine that handles data, and drives a compressed air machine feeding a
pair of blackened lungs. The machine is a diagram, but also composed of an
enormous different kinds of things, timescales and eras, of sorts of stuff,
and of different kinds of expertise and ‘states of nature’ things that
are worked and transformed in various ways. The project is also, as you
say, very much about transformation, of matter, time, knowledge, media
systems, communities, flesh.
GH: Yes it’s a dark futurist contraption – a strange, unnecessarily
intricate, improvised machine, dreamed up to bring power, media, histories
and flesh into proximity with each other. When I plugged the electricity
from a hundred year old steam engine into the computer, I was elated to
feel the symbolic power of that, I did not care what anyone else thought
– I needed that fix.
Then bringing the miners who dug the coal that was shovelled into the
boiler to watch the diseased lungs inflate with every database record made
it orgasmic. The miners have a fantastic vision of class power that I
recall from when I was a child and they bought down two Governments in the
1970’s. The melancholy of all those lungs, death, disease, power,
electricity - we just don’t have a vision of power like that anymore.
I deliberately wanted to burn as much coal as possible, pollute a massive
area for no purpose other then to feed my contraption, I needed to see what
it felt like to be completely wasteful. Originally we wanted to gather the
coal from child labour in India but this proved too difficult, but it led
ultimately to our discovery of the nameless labour… the lack of datasets
that fuel our wealth and power.
MF: And the connections run on?
GH: I suppose the other fix was the lack of separation between flesh and
the machine. The lungs hanging on the front of the steam engine with wires
poking out and pulsating. For me, this reflects my own reality of having
big bits of steal screwed into my body with nylon screws that I have
carried for the last 35 years, and having endless cameras and other bits of
medical technology inserted into my flesh, or conversations with kidney
dialysis patients about where their life ends and the machine begins, and
the simple reality of those bodies that feed the machine of our power.
MF: You have also worked with databases that provide statistics on the
conditions of work, (such as the Lungs: Slave Labour project of 2005). Work
records, health records, the registrations of populations in figures
becomes something that you see both as means to tell some kind of truth or
story about the conditions of life, but also to make them physically
palpable, through breaths, but also tender, bodily and ephemeral. These are
two different means of registering peoples’ lives, two ways of knowing
the world but here they are brought together in a way that is both very
sad, mournful, but also somehow irrefutable. What are your thoughts on the
relation between statistics, record keeping, the infrastructural cruelty of
the systems you record, and the kinds of expression that they yield in the
systems you assemble at a tangent to them?
GH: Death and media excite me, it’s one of my kinks. In what might be an
unhelpful nutshell, Memorial is where the database combined with death
changes conduct.
MF: Could you explain that a little more?
GH: Record keeping is still seen by many as being separate from lived
experience, a model, a trace, residue if you like. But we are transformed
by the use of indirection, modeling, creation and implementation of our
record keeping or by not keeping records at all.
Simply put… the database, the need to create a conceptual-view for our
records, necessitates the implementation of sets of formal rules that are
contained within the database. These theoretical machines are used to
dissect an enterprise into sets of discrete normalised fields from which
comparisons can be made which, in turn influences the conduct of the
records input.
You can see the raw power of the database at The Tower Hill Memorial,
Trinity Square to the Merchant Navy’s 28,000 War dead in London’s East
End. The ordering of names, ships, dates forces you to iterate over the
data in specific physical ways. The enlistment system records its victims
by inserting a date in the death column. The collection of the data, to
include commonwealth dead, but not those of the USA, echoes empire and the
order of international relations at the time.
MF: Yes, this is a neo-classical monument that conflates masses of dead
with architectural masses, columns covered in metal plates bearing the
names and details of dead sailors, which in turn support a roof structure.
The allegory is there for the turning.
GH: Or to put it another way, the normalisation and categorisation of the
experience of an enterprise distilled into the conceptual-view creates an
encoded expertise of the enterprise which reproduces its power in new and
unexpected ways.
In Coal Fired Computers we tried to unpack this materialist view of
software, its histories and engines. Open it up to a live experiment, see
with others how the conceptual machines of the 19th Century have unfolded
in to the everyday conditions that are now defined by perpetual crisis
management, in the economy, ecology, security and financial systems.
MF: How important then has the key requirement in statistics and database
design for data normalization to be maintained had an effect on other kinds
of normative process, such as social normalization?
GH: There is almost no separation. If we think again about the Tower Hill
Memorial as a physical manifestation of a database laid out in space. The
body of the visitor is moved to access information, by ship, name, date. We
order ourselves to read the fields as the ships, crews were ordered by the
records kept on them.
The space between data and the management systems that processes the data
points to a history of conceptual machines at least going back as far as
Samuel Pepys’ days at the admiralty where he introduced examinations
rather then class privilege as a means of evaluating officers,
standardising ship types across the country, the provision for officers’
pensions and payments for sailors’ widows; amongst other things. His
great innovation in all this was a distinct separation of information from
the methods of its own representation… scrupulous, absolute record
keeping as a machine to produce Empire. In contemporary terms we would see
this as a form of standardisation. In turn building the ability to
reference something using a name, reference, or container instead of the
value itself.
MF: One aspect of a number of the projects you have produced in recent
years is that of the incorporation of pseudo-code, bringing instructional
sequences, written in an idiom that is close to Perl, sometimes with a
degree of functionality, sometimes not: what are the stakes in working with
this material?
GH: Hmm, there is no great difference between pseudo-code and functional
code. There is just one level of abstraction or another. Maybe I’m too
old but all my early experience of coding was with algorithms written in
pseudo-code to get over the problems of language specificity. I have
produced pseudo-code that has done much more processing then the more
functional stuff. Maybe another way to see this is that I build software
contraptions that enable me or whoever I’m working with to speculate
about the world.
I’m completely uninterested in software that’s useful or works too
well. I have no desire for a seamless integration in to my desktop and the
systems it implies.
MF: To return to CFC then, the question of seamlessness is one that often
occurs in the rational discourse on sustainable energy, in terms of
creating energy systems that don’t loose power, that don’t leak. You
are saying that in computational terms, another kind of consideration
arises, that leakiness creates the possibility for excrescences, for
imagination, the expressivity of data in relation to slightly mismatched
algorithms or visualization schemes?
GH: Code leaks all the time, that’s what’s worrying, hopeful about it
when it’s received uncritically. You create it with intention, a
technical fix, but in implementation it leaks into the social enabling,
disabling as it iterates over the social, cultural, economic and political
conditions that formed it.
In my own work I exploit this by creating assemblages of code, hardware,
histories, people and materials. Particular datasets have particular
resonance in certain geographical, social and political situations. In CFC
we used a UK database of over 164,000 records containing the details of
coal mining accidents and deaths in the UK from 1600 to the present day.
This was created and/or paid for by Raleys Solicitors - specialists in
workplace accident and disease compensation - a way of accruing knowledge.
During 2003 and 2005 when the scheme was at its peak, Raleys’ annual
profit rose from £2.5 million to £15.7million. During this period two
Raleys partners, Ian Firth and David Barber, made personal profits of £9.9
million and £7.2 million respectively. To reuse this dataset in other ways
allowed us to play with Raleys as part of our contraption.
With the Lungs project in ZKM, the original dataset of records of slave
workers was conceived within a Hollerith/IBM paradigm of punch cards, a
mechanism of census taking that unfolded into racial hygiene. To take a
Nazi dataset of the number of slaves used in the armaments factory in the
building that now houses ZKM, to calculate the air that was in each set of
lungs at the point of death, and re-breathe it into that factory was a way
of unleashing new knowledge from fascist systems.
MF: One of the underlying arguments I think in CFC, but also in Lungs:
Slave Labour is about the power that vast accruals of data can have.
Databases are no longer called Data Banks, but there is something about the
agglomeration of large amounts of data that gives it an affinity, if not
quite to capital, to something common in a power of amassment to create
distortions of power and understanding around it. In which ways might we
need to reshape our understandings of data?
GH: Yes, I have never quite got to the bottom of the name change from data
banks to databases – Codd who produced the first relational database
still refers to data-banks in the late 1960’s. I suppose it’s something
like there was no separation between the data and the code that produced it
in the data-bank, leading to a repository of information and the methods of
accessing that data. After Codd’s idea of relational database management
systems, data sets and the code that process them are separate. So, the
DBMS becomes an engine for the production of knowledge and power, changing
conduct from processing the sets of information.
I’m working on health records at the moment in Liverpool and trying to
think about the aggregation of 60,000,000 health records in the UK…
forget about the privacy issues for a moment.
The aggregation and structure of this information will produce new
knowledge with a measurable power to change conduct as I described earlier.
This will disrupt older forms of health authority like the British Medical
Association, based upon professional knowledge, with a new kind of power
formed from a software-mediated return of the masses in the form of health
records. This is where the leaks get interesting, potentially on the road
to new tyrannies.
An example from Liverpool, is the “Joint Strategic Needs Assessment”
document developed by the Liverpool NHS Primary Care Trust (PCT) dated
2008. The PCT had found that it had a strong indication that 10,000 people
were out there somewhere with Hypertension. They had no direct knowledge of
this, but it was indicated by comparing their records with other records
around the country. If those people could be found, then morbidity rates
throughout the city could be reduced. The argument for this interpretation
was created by comparative analyses involving many datasets. These datasets
coalesced as new forms of authority that in turn could direct PCT
priorities. A further convolution in the reading of the data was that
Public Health advisors also thought that if you put the same money as it
would cost to take the measures against hypertension into promoting the
health of 16-25 year olds, this would have greater long term benefits –
unfortunately however the evidence for this would take longer to gather
then the lifetime of a parliament and so had to be discounted.
MF: This sounds like a story with many possible turning points in it, many
moments when decisions were made, resources were joined, work was done, in
one way or another. What kinds of connection and combination can you
imagine for such datasets to yield new figures of truth and potentially a
new politics of this new kind of mass?
GH: I remain hopeful that vast datasets will ooze new forms of power from
the aggregation of mass records which have the potential to dislodge
established forms of professional knowledge before they unfold into new
modes of tyranny further down the road. The problem with this optimistic
model of transformation is that it depends on datasets being
‘rationally’ built by people who understand the flows of information.
Recently when I was working with a Health Trust I noticed that the fields
within the five competing datasets were politicly driven and the system was
undesigned to protect the competing political/financial interests of the
Hospitals, Health Trusts, Government and General Practitioners. The system
was not live in that records were at least two months old, had to be
requested over night and arrived in a flat file with one table of more then
a 1000 fields in a table. This would be shocking to any elementary computer
science undergraduate.
I find myself becoming a data puritan, well designed, ruthless information,
using open systems will allow for much better regulation of data privacy
then any sloppy, propriety and politically determined system.
MF: I like this term ‘contraption’ that you have started using
recently. It seems to couple a kind of intentionality with a bit of the
looseness required to keep things going. What is a contraption?
GH: In French, Jean says, contraption is pronounced “Machin, truc,
bidule”: something that one cannot or refuses to name. Its quality as
“passe-partout” (passe-partout is a device that opens all doors) is to
be unqualified, thus connecting elements and revealing sets of relations
that are not evident or sometimes hidden. Its in-between states allows for
a practical exploration and/or understanding of power and media ecologies
that surround it.
A contraption in English is were the domain of the technical overlaps the
imaginary, an experiment with nothing to prove. Usually strange,
unnecessarily intricate, unfinished, inherently unstable, improvised
machine.
‘Strangeness’ enables it to become a place of experimentation and fun.
‘Inherently unstable’ refuses easy utility, normalisation and emphasis
the forces at play in the machine that break it. ‘Unfinished’ is about
provoking thought, emotion rather than wanting to show it how it is/should
be. ‘Improvised machine’ implies a playful assemblage of pre-exiting
parts. ‘Unnecessarily intricate’ allows for a geeky self-expression or
the elegance, aesthetics we find in complex code.
I suppose what I’m hinting at is the unstable state of invention before
the ‘machin’ becomes normalised.
Via
This interview follows on from a project called “Coal Fired Computers
(300,000,000 Computers - 318,000 Black Lungs)” carried out in Newcastle
in spring 2010 for the AV Festival.
The project, by Graham Harwood, Matsuko
Yokokoji with Jean Denmars involved a means of producing a physical diagram
between components in production as they undergo transformations across
different kinds of time, politics, matter, knowledge, and vitality. The
project found a way of working with such things that was particularly
powerful.
The interview begins with a discussion of CFC but also moves off
into databases and a certain understanding of their material force.
One thing we don’t cover in the interview is the detail of the Coal Fired
Computers project’s work with miner activists, including the
inspirational Dave Douglass. (See information on his memoirs here ). More
of this can be found in a booklet about the project here, including links
to all the groups involved.
The interview was carried out by email in May and June 2010.
Matthew Fuller: If we are to list the visible components of the project it
would go something like this: pile of coal -> fair ground steam engine ->
power transformer -> computer / software -> air compressor -> blackened
lungs. But there are a lot of things missing from that set of components
that are integral to the project, what are they and how do you see them?
Graham Harwood: This list should really start with Jean Demars who set up
the collaboration with the miners, being French and youngish gave him
little knowledge of the UK class struggle of the miners strike in the
1980’s. He use his political enthusiasm, critical analysis to re-examine
the strike in the context of globalisation with the people who struggles
against it back then. If they had not been defeated they would have
picketed every port to stop the everyday atrocity that powers our world.
Matsuko on the other hand is always the leader of all things organised,
productive, efficient. I’m much too lost in my own space to ever
accomplish much on my own. Matsuko takes this raw material of todays
obsession and forms it into graphics, budgets and how the exhibition will
look and act. She does not like to talk in public she just likes getting on
with things.
MF: So perhaps you have some considerations about how the kinds of work we
are speaking about involve collaboration, within this ‘list of
components’, about yourself, about Jean and Matsuko and the kinds of
collaboration you have been developing with them and others, with Richard
Wright and earlier, as part of the group Mongrel
GH: Collaboration is a necessary minefield, if you’re interested in the
place where media systems and the social clash, unfold and get really dirty
then they are mandatory. It would be far too easy to claim everything under
my own authorship but anyone with an ounce of nous would see that all
imaginings are dependent on the context in which they arise or are seen,
I’m just a bit more explicit about that.
MF: So to return back to the list of components…
GH: Then the place, Newcastle Upon Tyne a former mining and industrial
district in England’s North East with a geographical propensity for coal,
then - people maybe – firstly the miners who displayed their literature
and spoke about their lungs, then the Discovery Museum, with it’s
cleaners who were also Miners, it’s exhibits, Charles Parson’s 1884
steam turbines the descendants of which produce the worlds electricity.
Then there is the 3000 visitors who had some familial relationship with
Coal mines, lung disease.
It could be said that coal dust gets into everything. Sealed into the lungs
of miners it forms visible blue streaks, like veins of coal. According to
the World Health Organisation, 318,000 deaths occur annually from chronic
bronchitis and emphysema caused by exposure to coal dust. The common
perception is that wealthy countries have put this all behind them,
displacing coal dust into the lungs of unrecorded, unknown miners in
distant lands, however coal returns into our lives in the form of the cheap
and apparently clean goods we consume.
Coal fired energy not only powers our computers here in the UK, but is
integral to the production of the 300,000,000 computers made each year. 81%
of the energy used in a computer’s life cycle is expended in the
manufacturing process, now taking place in countries with high levels of
coal consumption. The UK currently produces less that one third of the coal
it uses, importing the majority of it and therefore displacing 150,000 tons
of coal dust into unknown lungs.
Then there’s the recent histories of media and my preoccupation with
it’s interrelation to death. But more about that later.
MF: Part of the interest of the work it seems to me is that in a context in
which ‘the world is too complicated to describe or to understand’, it
provides something like a diagram, or a formula which shows how a series of
things are joined together, how certain kinds of momentary connections are
made, but does not renounce the difficulty of such work of abstraction, and
really gets into the very different kinds of qualities, materialities,
knowledges, histories and powers of the things that are nevertheless
joined. The work doesn’t make it’s argument through affirming a set of
categories but by drawing out these formulae in uncannily clear ways
through this process of conjunction. What kind of process of searching and
sifting goes into making this diagram of formula?
GH: It’s probably best if it starts as a joke, a completely unrealisable
funny fantasy that will not go away. Yet every time you tell someone new,
you can see it connects and they recount stories or expressions that affix
to the initial idea. Next you formulate a contraption who’s structural
operations can leak out into the domains you want to contest, play with and
the areas people have spoken to you about. I leave as much work undone as
possible, so as it unfolds it can contest the space in which it’s showing
and the space/geography can contest the contraption. As the physical/code
machine begins to take shape it creates complex negotiations, apprehensions
and upsets as the speculation grows.
Then there is fear, violence and the dead. I need to be scared of what I
make. It needs to put me in embarrassing, difficult, hurtful and
potentially violent situations or it’s just not interesting.
MF: A number of projects you have been involved in over recent years work
with ‘primary’ raw materials, stuff dug out of the ground and refined,
such as the metals aluminium – in the film ‘Aluminium’ presented at
Manifesta7 - and coltan – which is explored in the various iterations of
the Tantalum Memorial and Phone Wars projects. What are the stakes in this
coupling of elementary or primal materials with computational systems?
GH: What interests me is the material’s ability to recursively unfold
possibilities, transforming the flesh, the social, political and economic.
Essentially what a material makes possible and what it shuts down when
it’s ripped from the earth and it’s context and contaminates human
ecologies.
Simultaneous with the material properties, they are contagious concepts
that move around technical cultures growing on the jelly of science
embedded with it’s own philosophical speculations about the nature of the
world.
The materials also come into to existence as a force when the political,
geographical and economic situations are right for them to do so. Aluminium
‘needs’ Italian Fascism to ‘need’ a national metal. It ‘needs’
Italy to lack coal, iron and have bauxite instead. Coal for a long time in
the UK was dug from deep cast mines and the shafts required pumping out
which creates the steam engine which in turn requires more coal and more
labour. Tantalum ‘requires’ political unrest in the Congo, kids playing
Sony games.
Then there is the flesh and death, the material bends the flesh to suit
itself, miners lungs, bones shattering, light, fast munitions ripping into
countless bodies, rapes and murders.
MF: And the place of mines in our clean modern world?
GH: Mines are everywhere in everything once you start looking, you cannot
have humans without them, we seem to be preprogrammed to burrowing blindly
underground like worms. The main difference from us and worms is that we
have a compulsion to burn or explode whatever we find.
For the CFC project I wanted to look at the steam engine as a physical and
conceptual machine simultaneously in a popular setting like the Discovery
Museum.
In the 19th century the great engines of change at that time were built
around coal-fed steam. This was a society that rested on its mines; its
products dominated life and determined its inventions and transport
infrastructure and its politics. In this way, the coal mines of England
recursively transformed the bodies of those who touched them and redirected
large parts of its society to feed its machines.
This is still the case, but the mines and production are displaced to India
and China. It’s like contemporary media tries to obscure it’s origins.
When we use an Ethernet cable we rarely think of the poor bastard who had
to mine the copper or think about the effect of early copper mines on our
cultural, social evolution.
I like to imagine the matter of contemporary media crawling out from the
satanic pits of the early 19th Century, struggling to evolve in the winding
towers. Then laying rails for itself to feed, spreading out creating denser
and denser webs of interconnection for itself.
One you suspend seeing transport and communication in contemporary terms
and think about them as the same thing, as they once were, then different
histories of media emerge. Like in the 1840’s, physical machines, steam
engines force the compression of landscapes into manageable chunks of
aligned time-tables, co-ordinating the bodies on to trains and into mass
labour.
Submarine telegraph cables start to criss-cross the Atlantic,
re-compressing the ocean’s trade routes into global markets realigning it
into the rows and columns of the ledger, birthing scientific management and
unifying markets. The mines transformed the body as the body transformed
the mine, feeding lungs into the hungry boilers of empires.
MF: Coal Fired Computers doesn’t attempt to resolve the problem of
energy, but using a wonderful but rather inefficient engine turns coal into
heat, into movement, into electricity, this in turn transmuted into a
machine that handles data, and drives a compressed air machine feeding a
pair of blackened lungs. The machine is a diagram, but also composed of an
enormous different kinds of things, timescales and eras, of sorts of stuff,
and of different kinds of expertise and ‘states of nature’ things that
are worked and transformed in various ways. The project is also, as you
say, very much about transformation, of matter, time, knowledge, media
systems, communities, flesh.
GH: Yes it’s a dark futurist contraption – a strange, unnecessarily
intricate, improvised machine, dreamed up to bring power, media, histories
and flesh into proximity with each other. When I plugged the electricity
from a hundred year old steam engine into the computer, I was elated to
feel the symbolic power of that, I did not care what anyone else thought
– I needed that fix.
Then bringing the miners who dug the coal that was shovelled into the
boiler to watch the diseased lungs inflate with every database record made
it orgasmic. The miners have a fantastic vision of class power that I
recall from when I was a child and they bought down two Governments in the
1970’s. The melancholy of all those lungs, death, disease, power,
electricity - we just don’t have a vision of power like that anymore.
I deliberately wanted to burn as much coal as possible, pollute a massive
area for no purpose other then to feed my contraption, I needed to see what
it felt like to be completely wasteful. Originally we wanted to gather the
coal from child labour in India but this proved too difficult, but it led
ultimately to our discovery of the nameless labour… the lack of datasets
that fuel our wealth and power.
MF: And the connections run on?
GH: I suppose the other fix was the lack of separation between flesh and
the machine. The lungs hanging on the front of the steam engine with wires
poking out and pulsating. For me, this reflects my own reality of having
big bits of steal screwed into my body with nylon screws that I have
carried for the last 35 years, and having endless cameras and other bits of
medical technology inserted into my flesh, or conversations with kidney
dialysis patients about where their life ends and the machine begins, and
the simple reality of those bodies that feed the machine of our power.
MF: You have also worked with databases that provide statistics on the
conditions of work, (such as the Lungs: Slave Labour project of 2005). Work
records, health records, the registrations of populations in figures
becomes something that you see both as means to tell some kind of truth or
story about the conditions of life, but also to make them physically
palpable, through breaths, but also tender, bodily and ephemeral. These are
two different means of registering peoples’ lives, two ways of knowing
the world but here they are brought together in a way that is both very
sad, mournful, but also somehow irrefutable. What are your thoughts on the
relation between statistics, record keeping, the infrastructural cruelty of
the systems you record, and the kinds of expression that they yield in the
systems you assemble at a tangent to them?
GH: Death and media excite me, it’s one of my kinks. In what might be an
unhelpful nutshell, Memorial is where the database combined with death
changes conduct.
MF: Could you explain that a little more?
GH: Record keeping is still seen by many as being separate from lived
experience, a model, a trace, residue if you like. But we are transformed
by the use of indirection, modeling, creation and implementation of our
record keeping or by not keeping records at all.
Simply put… the database, the need to create a conceptual-view for our
records, necessitates the implementation of sets of formal rules that are
contained within the database. These theoretical machines are used to
dissect an enterprise into sets of discrete normalised fields from which
comparisons can be made which, in turn influences the conduct of the
records input.
You can see the raw power of the database at The Tower Hill Memorial,
Trinity Square to the Merchant Navy’s 28,000 War dead in London’s East
End. The ordering of names, ships, dates forces you to iterate over the
data in specific physical ways. The enlistment system records its victims
by inserting a date in the death column. The collection of the data, to
include commonwealth dead, but not those of the USA, echoes empire and the
order of international relations at the time.
MF: Yes, this is a neo-classical monument that conflates masses of dead
with architectural masses, columns covered in metal plates bearing the
names and details of dead sailors, which in turn support a roof structure.
The allegory is there for the turning.
GH: Or to put it another way, the normalisation and categorisation of the
experience of an enterprise distilled into the conceptual-view creates an
encoded expertise of the enterprise which reproduces its power in new and
unexpected ways.
In Coal Fired Computers we tried to unpack this materialist view of
software, its histories and engines. Open it up to a live experiment, see
with others how the conceptual machines of the 19th Century have unfolded
in to the everyday conditions that are now defined by perpetual crisis
management, in the economy, ecology, security and financial systems.
MF: How important then has the key requirement in statistics and database
design for data normalization to be maintained had an effect on other kinds
of normative process, such as social normalization?
GH: There is almost no separation. If we think again about the Tower Hill
Memorial as a physical manifestation of a database laid out in space. The
body of the visitor is moved to access information, by ship, name, date. We
order ourselves to read the fields as the ships, crews were ordered by the
records kept on them.
The space between data and the management systems that processes the data
points to a history of conceptual machines at least going back as far as
Samuel Pepys’ days at the admiralty where he introduced examinations
rather then class privilege as a means of evaluating officers,
standardising ship types across the country, the provision for officers’
pensions and payments for sailors’ widows; amongst other things. His
great innovation in all this was a distinct separation of information from
the methods of its own representation… scrupulous, absolute record
keeping as a machine to produce Empire. In contemporary terms we would see
this as a form of standardisation. In turn building the ability to
reference something using a name, reference, or container instead of the
value itself.
MF: One aspect of a number of the projects you have produced in recent
years is that of the incorporation of pseudo-code, bringing instructional
sequences, written in an idiom that is close to Perl, sometimes with a
degree of functionality, sometimes not: what are the stakes in working with
this material?
GH: Hmm, there is no great difference between pseudo-code and functional
code. There is just one level of abstraction or another. Maybe I’m too
old but all my early experience of coding was with algorithms written in
pseudo-code to get over the problems of language specificity. I have
produced pseudo-code that has done much more processing then the more
functional stuff. Maybe another way to see this is that I build software
contraptions that enable me or whoever I’m working with to speculate
about the world.
I’m completely uninterested in software that’s useful or works too
well. I have no desire for a seamless integration in to my desktop and the
systems it implies.
MF: To return to CFC then, the question of seamlessness is one that often
occurs in the rational discourse on sustainable energy, in terms of
creating energy systems that don’t loose power, that don’t leak. You
are saying that in computational terms, another kind of consideration
arises, that leakiness creates the possibility for excrescences, for
imagination, the expressivity of data in relation to slightly mismatched
algorithms or visualization schemes?
GH: Code leaks all the time, that’s what’s worrying, hopeful about it
when it’s received uncritically. You create it with intention, a
technical fix, but in implementation it leaks into the social enabling,
disabling as it iterates over the social, cultural, economic and political
conditions that formed it.
In my own work I exploit this by creating assemblages of code, hardware,
histories, people and materials. Particular datasets have particular
resonance in certain geographical, social and political situations. In CFC
we used a UK database of over 164,000 records containing the details of
coal mining accidents and deaths in the UK from 1600 to the present day.
This was created and/or paid for by Raleys Solicitors - specialists in
workplace accident and disease compensation - a way of accruing knowledge.
During 2003 and 2005 when the scheme was at its peak, Raleys’ annual
profit rose from £2.5 million to £15.7million. During this period two
Raleys partners, Ian Firth and David Barber, made personal profits of £9.9
million and £7.2 million respectively. To reuse this dataset in other ways
allowed us to play with Raleys as part of our contraption.
With the Lungs project in ZKM, the original dataset of records of slave
workers was conceived within a Hollerith/IBM paradigm of punch cards, a
mechanism of census taking that unfolded into racial hygiene. To take a
Nazi dataset of the number of slaves used in the armaments factory in the
building that now houses ZKM, to calculate the air that was in each set of
lungs at the point of death, and re-breathe it into that factory was a way
of unleashing new knowledge from fascist systems.
MF: One of the underlying arguments I think in CFC, but also in Lungs:
Slave Labour is about the power that vast accruals of data can have.
Databases are no longer called Data Banks, but there is something about the
agglomeration of large amounts of data that gives it an affinity, if not
quite to capital, to something common in a power of amassment to create
distortions of power and understanding around it. In which ways might we
need to reshape our understandings of data?
GH: Yes, I have never quite got to the bottom of the name change from data
banks to databases – Codd who produced the first relational database
still refers to data-banks in the late 1960’s. I suppose it’s something
like there was no separation between the data and the code that produced it
in the data-bank, leading to a repository of information and the methods of
accessing that data. After Codd’s idea of relational database management
systems, data sets and the code that process them are separate. So, the
DBMS becomes an engine for the production of knowledge and power, changing
conduct from processing the sets of information.
I’m working on health records at the moment in Liverpool and trying to
think about the aggregation of 60,000,000 health records in the UK…
forget about the privacy issues for a moment.
The aggregation and structure of this information will produce new
knowledge with a measurable power to change conduct as I described earlier.
This will disrupt older forms of health authority like the British Medical
Association, based upon professional knowledge, with a new kind of power
formed from a software-mediated return of the masses in the form of health
records. This is where the leaks get interesting, potentially on the road
to new tyrannies.
An example from Liverpool, is the “Joint Strategic Needs Assessment”
document developed by the Liverpool NHS Primary Care Trust (PCT) dated
2008. The PCT had found that it had a strong indication that 10,000 people
were out there somewhere with Hypertension. They had no direct knowledge of
this, but it was indicated by comparing their records with other records
around the country. If those people could be found, then morbidity rates
throughout the city could be reduced. The argument for this interpretation
was created by comparative analyses involving many datasets. These datasets
coalesced as new forms of authority that in turn could direct PCT
priorities. A further convolution in the reading of the data was that
Public Health advisors also thought that if you put the same money as it
would cost to take the measures against hypertension into promoting the
health of 16-25 year olds, this would have greater long term benefits –
unfortunately however the evidence for this would take longer to gather
then the lifetime of a parliament and so had to be discounted.
MF: This sounds like a story with many possible turning points in it, many
moments when decisions were made, resources were joined, work was done, in
one way or another. What kinds of connection and combination can you
imagine for such datasets to yield new figures of truth and potentially a
new politics of this new kind of mass?
GH: I remain hopeful that vast datasets will ooze new forms of power from
the aggregation of mass records which have the potential to dislodge
established forms of professional knowledge before they unfold into new
modes of tyranny further down the road. The problem with this optimistic
model of transformation is that it depends on datasets being
‘rationally’ built by people who understand the flows of information.
Recently when I was working with a Health Trust I noticed that the fields
within the five competing datasets were politicly driven and the system was
undesigned to protect the competing political/financial interests of the
Hospitals, Health Trusts, Government and General Practitioners. The system
was not live in that records were at least two months old, had to be
requested over night and arrived in a flat file with one table of more then
a 1000 fields in a table. This would be shocking to any elementary computer
science undergraduate.
I find myself becoming a data puritan, well designed, ruthless information,
using open systems will allow for much better regulation of data privacy
then any sloppy, propriety and politically determined system.
MF: I like this term ‘contraption’ that you have started using
recently. It seems to couple a kind of intentionality with a bit of the
looseness required to keep things going. What is a contraption?
GH: In French, Jean says, contraption is pronounced “Machin, truc,
bidule”: something that one cannot or refuses to name. Its quality as
“passe-partout” (passe-partout is a device that opens all doors) is to
be unqualified, thus connecting elements and revealing sets of relations
that are not evident or sometimes hidden. Its in-between states allows for
a practical exploration and/or understanding of power and media ecologies
that surround it.
A contraption in English is were the domain of the technical overlaps the
imaginary, an experiment with nothing to prove. Usually strange,
unnecessarily intricate, unfinished, inherently unstable, improvised
machine.
‘Strangeness’ enables it to become a place of experimentation and fun.
‘Inherently unstable’ refuses easy utility, normalisation and emphasis
the forces at play in the machine that break it. ‘Unfinished’ is about
provoking thought, emotion rather than wanting to show it how it is/should
be. ‘Improvised machine’ implies a playful assemblage of pre-exiting
parts. ‘Unnecessarily intricate’ allows for a geeky self-expression or
the elegance, aesthetics we find in complex code.
I suppose what I’m hinting at is the unstable state of invention before
the ‘machin’ becomes normalised.
Via
zondag 1 augustus 2010
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