sam – Page 61 – Sam Kinsley

3 December, 20153 December, 2015

Reblog> Screens – Waking a presence in Bristol’s concrete underbelly

An interesting blogpost by MSc Society & Space student Jethro Brice on the blog for the course concerning the installation art of Dani Landau, gentrification and nonrepresentational interventions in the city…

I couldn’t make it into Bristol in time to see this but wanted to, sadly teaching kept me in Exeter…

Screens – Waking a presence in Bristol’s concrete underbelly

By Jethro Brice

Screens, by artist Dani Landau, is a pop-up installation which recently featured in a contested public space in Bristol. The work explores themes of urban renewal through the affective, material dimensions of processes of construction and deconstruction. The installation mobilises tensions between the virtual and the actual, and speaks to an interest in the more-than-human aspects of geographical processes of spatial distribution and bodily encounter. My particular interest in Screens arises with my own research (see profile) which explores the use of art methods to elicit affective registers in geographical research, and more specifically, in processes of change that operate in landscapes at different scales. I met with Landau for a post-exhibition ‘crit’; while this review reflects my own impressions, it is also informed by a lively discussion with the artist.

Jethro image one — *Figure 1: Screens (detail), Dani Landau, 2015, mixed media installation (photo: J Brice)*

Something is doing in the city. That much is hardly news – nor has it gone unremarked (Turner, 2015; Clement, 2012). Notwithstanding the UK’s experiences of economic and political stagnation in recent years, Bristol pulsates with the insistent, percussive buzz of demolition and construction, renovation and displacement. It is a transformation that has become so ordinary it hardly bears comment – hidden in stark visibility behind ephemeral screens of chipboard and scaffolding, the perpetual drone of activity recedes and is filtered out as white noise. On the daily commute (for those of us who have a job to go to), our transitory attention is confined to the felt effects of inconvenient bottlenecks and ambient road rage, and (for those of us who don’t drive) the prolonged ‘temporary’ disappearances of walkways and cycle tracks. Yet in all its ordinariness, this is a pulse that disrupts and displaces lives, alters flows and redistributes relations of power across the city. Back home, in rapidly changing residential neighbourhoods, the felt effects are more personal and sustained – heightening an awareness, that in among the busy-ness of the city centre, other intimately lived spaces and social relations persist or are obstructed and obliterated by the grind of the urban renewal machine.

One such space is the open cavity beneath a block of brick-and-concrete office blocks overlooking the juncture of Quay Street and Nelson Street, in central Bristol. Like more recent urban developments, such as Cabot Circus, the office block straddles and effectively encloses a public space. Imagined initially as a lively hub, with shops and adjacent pub, the blank module became (for a while) a social commons – a meeting point and sheltered “hang-out” for young people post work or school. Now, public right of passage through the space is curtailed by heavy steel gates that, while they do not lock, open only outwards. Office workers still use it as a place to smoke, but after hours this is a space where it is only possible to leave.

When I arrived there, however, on a dark evening towards the end of October, the space had been subtly transformed. Not a makeover – the walls were still laced with exhaust dust, and the hard, uninviting floor remained littered with a carpet of cigarette stubs – but something new inhabited the space. A tangle of gutted wires, broken bricks and disarticulated laptops lay strewn across the concrete terrace. On stripped-down, translucent screens perched precariously among the debris, something moved with the ponderous, deliberate grace of prehistoric reptiles. Light from recumbent spotlights caught in soft, drifting billows of dust. The shift of scale was at once immense and intimate. Drawn down on hands and knees to the gritty floor, I found myself perched knee-to-knee with strangers, straining to watch the delicate dance of high-reach excavators as they picked away at the towering carcass of an old tower block. Across the road, visible through the railings, bright slabs of new concrete rose tier on tier where a block of high-end student accommodation was under construction.

Jethro image two — *Figure 2: Screens (detail), Dani Landau, 2025, mixed media installation (photo: J Brice)*

There is something decidedly animal about Screens – a temporary pop-up installation by Bristol artist Dani Landau (danilandau.com) that recasts footage of recent demolition work as an ephemeral but momentous presence in the now-disused space. The sense of liveliness is not merely figurative. ‘Life’ here is in the tensions made tangible: between enormity and intimacy; between the heavy materiality of buildings and machines, and fragility of translucent screens; between the virtual (of digital media; of possibility and change) and the actual (of concrete; of felt effects); between fixity and movement; growth and decay. Overwhelmingly the tendency is to situate politics in the world of cerebral thought, in rational decision-making – here was an immense and immediate reminder that politics is also, and always, both spatial and tactile. Politics plays out at the level of visceral, shocking encounters between moving bodies in space.

Conclusion

The city writhes in an ecstasy of perpetual becoming, yet it is a transformation so ordinary that it effects nothing new. Gentrification, urban renewal, studentisation – the words are effectively sapped of their power by that very same process of enforced novelty which they attempt to call into question. Familiarity, it is said, breeds contempt. The something, however, is still doing. Bodies and lives are relocated and social assemblages unravel; flows are truncated, overextended or subsumed. People and other beings (that heterogeneous majority who in different ways are quietly displaced by urban renewal) struggle to reinvent familiar lives and orientations in unfamiliar situations.

Structures, and the structural critique bound to them, become fatigued; they erode and crumble. We are left to hone our attention to distributed processes, a fine tuning of affective relations that elide categorical thought. This is the stuff of our world as we are coming to understand it (Roberts, 2014, p.974). Yet, distributed relations and affective encounters are effects of power accumulating and unearthing expression in emergent differential structures (Massumi, 2015, p. 92–3). How, then, is it possible to reinvigorate worn channels, to reawaken us to the micropolitical affects and effects of urban processes that iterate and endure? Where words fail us, might other modes of enquiry open up a space within which changing material ecologies can be re-encountered (Brice, 2015, p. 61)? Art’s relationship to gentrification is of course neither simple nor unproblematic – artists have been key actors in processes of “detoxifying” neighbourhoods, even as they themselves are eventually displaced by rising property prices. Entangled as it is within relations of class and culture, art can equally work to challenge or normalise trajectories of change. Indeed, it is not always possible to distinguish these two functions – a tension provocatively mobilised in Bristol by the Facebook group Get the Easton Look (n.d.), and in the ambivalent role of the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft (n.d.)

Landau’s Screens woke a presence in the concrete underbelly of the Nelson Street towers. It made, for a brief episode, something newly alive in a space generally closed off: a space in which to confront the very material affects and elusive political ecologies of the relentlessly “regenerating” city. For me, this was a welcome disruption to the processes of sensory and political attrition that accompany and effectively obscure familiar trajectories of urban renewal – and a promising experiment with the possibilities of art methods to elicit new modes of attunement when researching society and space.

About the Artist:

Dani Landau is an artist doing practice based research through working with images in relation to public spaces. A graduate of Glasgow School of Art currently based at Spike Island Studios in Bristol, he is engaged in AHRC funded doctoral research at the University of the West of England.

For more information: http://www.danilandau.com

Video URL for documentation – https://vimeo.com/145854904

3 December, 2015

Imogen Heap on inventing new [blockchain] contracts for publishing/selling music digitally

This interview/article in Forbes with Imogen Heap offers an interesting insight into what some artists are beginning to think about in relation to how on earth one creates a ‘fair’ mechanism of reward/recognition of work as an artist in a world where one’s work is subject to near infinite digital reproducibility.

This, to me (in my naivety), seems to represent one of the more compelling and believable implementations of what the blockchain can enable. It’s worth checking out Heap’s articulation of Mycelia (the blockchain powered music publishing system she hopes to help create).

For years I’ve been so frustrated with the deep opacity of the music industry stopping me from really making the most out of my career and connecting the dots. The ‘black boxes,’ the NDAs, the endless contracts and statements. In the last few years, auditing labels and publishers seems to have become the norm, as it’s apparent how consistently the books don’t match up. You can pretty much guarantee you’ll find something, but it’s not always intentional; it’s just the deals, trigger points, and percentages are so complex – even more when mergers and acquisitions occur – that it’s hard to get it right every time, if you’re human!

[Mycelia…]

Its success will come from the adoption of millions of music lovers. A grand scale ongoing, collective project like no-other. To document, protect and share that which we love and build a place for it to grow, enabling future generations of artists to blossom as well as honouring those of the past.

Open source, a living, breathing, smart, decentralised, transparent, adaptable, useful, shining home for our love of music. A home which allows creativity to flow, connect and facilitate collaboration on so many levels, many of which just haven’t been possible. With this grand library of all music forming the basis upon which all music businesses from digital radio to tour bookings can then grow and thrive from. Empowering the artists, turning and landing the industry finally on its feet.

Inspired by the largest living organisms on earth, ancient, unseen, core to life itself, Mycelium (plural Mycelia) can stretch for miles, beneath the surface.

Each artist acting like its own Mycelium, in full animated dialogue with others on the global network.

Mycelia is huge, as it holds all music related information ever recorded anywhere ever ever ever but this organism stretches across our planet between hundreds of thousands of personal computers. It is the world’s greatest and most treasured library and it belongs to the two collective parties who solely make music complete. The music makers and their audience.

Read the whole piece here.

3 December, 2015

Reblog> New Book – Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn

Interesting new book highlighted by Colin McFarlane, including contributions by Rob Kitchin (and team) and Jennifer Gabrys…

New Book – Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn

Andrés Luque-Ayala, Simon Marvin and myself have just published a new edited book on the ‘smart city’ debate. The book, Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn? (Routledge), is a critical examination of the claims, drivers, imaginaries and consequences of smart city discourses.

As we all know, there is an incredible amount of hype and noise made about smart cities, much of it by multinational corporations like IBM and Cisco in their effort to sell expensive ‘urban solutions’. In this book, we sought to take this debate on by bringing together a group of critical, international and interdisciplinary researchers. Smart urbanism

The book examines how smart city initiatives are being rolled out, and makes a series of arguments that seeks to advance a critical research agenda. It finds, for example, that the discourse is often in reality a justification for the latest round of neoliberal development and displacement. It finds a common tendency to place far too much faith in technology, with far too little attention to the actual urban context. It also finds that most of the time, and despite high profile cases such as Rio’s control room, the smart city discourse is little more than discourse, bolstered by pervasive imagery that globally circulates and effectively constitutes a powerful form of marketing.

But the book also finds openings in the smart city discourse, including in the actions of social movements, civil society groups, and critical researchers to use or promote digital technologies in more socially and ecologically relevant ways. In these efforts, it is urbanism and social justice that inform whether or not digital technologies are useful, as opposed to the positivist view that technology can be added to cities awaiting ‘enhancement’ through sensors, dashboards and real-time data management. But as the book shows, it would be far too simple to argue that there is an ‘alternative’ smart city discourse that opposes a ‘mainstream’ discourse, partly because the various overlaps between what may initially appear mainstream and alternative, and partly because many critical initiatives with digital technology reject the entire smart city discourse altogether while others seeks to reframe it.

Here’s the list of contributors and chapter titles:

IntroductionAndrés Luque-Ayala, Colin McFarlane and Simon Marvin
Smart cities and the politics of urban dataRob Kitchin, Tracey Lauriault and Gavin McArdle
IBM and the visual formation of smart citiesDonald McNeill
The smart entrepreneurial city: Dholera and a 100 other utopias in IndiaAyona Datta
Getting smart about smart cities in Cape Town: Beyond the rhetoricNancy Odendaal
Programming environments: Environmentality and citizen sensing in the smart cityJennifer Gabrys
Smart-city initiatives and the Foucauldian logics of governing through codeFrancisco Klauser and Ola Söderström
Geographies of smart urban powerGareth Powells, Harriet Bulkeley and Anthony McLean
Test-Bed as urban epistemologyNerea Calvillo, Orit Halpern, Jesse LeCavalier and Wolfgang Pietsch
Beyond the corporate smart city?: Glimpses of other possibilities of smartnessRobert G. Hollands
ConclusionsColin McFarlane Andrés Luque-Ayala and Simon Marvin

3 December, 2015

Reblog> Space, Power and the Commons: new book in Place, Space and Politics series

Clive Barnett on a new book out edited by Samuel Kirwan, Leila Dawney & Julian Brigstocke… all smart people so well worth a look!

Space, Power and the Commons: new book in Place, Space and Politics series

9781138841680 The latest book in the Routledge Research in Place, Space and Politics series is now published (technically it is a 2016 book) – Space, Power and the Commons: The struggle for alternative futures is edited by Sam Kirwan, Leila Dawney and Julian Brigstocke, and is associated with the Authority Research Network. It’s an important addition to the literature on the theme of ‘the commons’, not least because it draws together discussions of high theory on this topic (Hardt, Nancy, Ranciere, etc) with empirical analyses of practices of ‘commoning’.

This is the second title to appear in the Place, Space and Politics series, after the collection on Urban Refugees. There are more titles in the pipeline. More details on the series, including guidelines for submitting proposals, can be found here and here.

1 December, 2015

Reblog> 10 bitcoin myths

This is worth a read, from The Institute of Network Cultures:

10 Bitcoin Myths

By Eduard de Jong, Geert Lovink and Patrice Riemens

“Pigs will fly, but not in the next 100 million years.” Johan Sjerpstra

1. “Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer system.”

In order to transfer value from one Bitcoin account to another, the owner of bitcoins uses the services of a collective of operators known as ‘miners’ who validate the transaction on the Bitcoin distributed database also known as “the ledger.” The relationship between these operators and an individual user, i.e. owner of bitcoins, is hence one between merchants and customer and not one of equals. Only miners are, and then only operationally speaking, peers, since they all perform the same software program. However, they are also, and mostly, in competition which each other because they need revenue to pay for the equipment they operate. Also, any time an update to the database is made, only a single miner is actually adding the transaction records with bitcoin value transfers to the ledger, and gets the financial rewards for doing this. In this way, the incentive for miners to support each other is limited, and one cannot speak of a peer-to-peer relationship in the traditional sense.

Over the time Bitcoin has been operational the inherent hierarchical relation between miners and users has become more pronounced by an ever rising technical and financial barrier to becoming a miner. Investments and operating costs of the necessary equipment rise in tandem with the continuously increasing difficulty of adding a new record to the database that is built into the bitcoin protocol.

Conclusion: Bitcoin is not a peer-to-peer system, but an on-line merchant-customer transaction market place.

2. “Bitcoin does away with intermediaries and fees.”

To make a payment using bitcoins a Bitcoin user needs a “Bitcoin exchange” and these exchanges charge a fee. The sole exception is if the user is a data base operator (a.k.a miner), having aggregated some bitcoins by mining and exclusively pays other users that have decided to keep bitcoins.

There is an other intermediary in Bitcoin, the operators of the distributed data base, the Bitcoin miners. A miner also needs to charge for its labor and expenses. For the time being, a miner is rewarded with newly created bitcoins–that is why updating the database is called ‘mining’. By design, the available amount of bitcoins that can be mined is restricted, and it is expected to be exhausted somewhere around 2040. After exhausting the lode miners can only earn money by explicitly charging a fee.

Conclusion: De-facto, Bitcoin users need to engage services of intermediaries and do pay fees for their transactions.

3. “Bitcoin is an alternative currency.”

An alternative currency, by definition, is designed to _entirely_ displace and replace existing currencies. Complementary currencies intend to _partially_ displace and replace existing currencies, usually in a local setting.

By design, Bitcoin is an alternative currency. Real world observation however, shows that most transactions in bitcoins translate, either at the point of purchase, or at the point of sale, in transactions in existing currencies. Only miners can create bitcoins, non-miners need to acquire them, usually by way of purchase.

In practices Bitcoin transactions are often intended to avoid high transfer fees or bypass local restrictions in making international payments. In such cases, bitcoins are purchased, swiftly change hands, and are just as fast converted again in another currency. In this cash-in Cash-out scheme Bitcoin operates then as a facilitator in the circulation of existing currencies and not as a replacement of these. Cash-in cash-out has been shown the most common mode of operation in bitcoins. A Bitcoin transaction can also be speculative in purpose, to hoard bitcoins expecting a raise in their value. In this case bitcoin can be considered an alternative to other currencies, comparable to an speculative investment in dollars or in commodities, like iron ore, gold or grain.

Conclusion: Bitcoin does not actually operate as an alternative currency.

4. “Bitcoin is not a fiat currency.”

In practice, acceptance of Bitcoin payments takes place before the (irrevocable) recording of the transaction in the distributed database. That is, without formal confirmation of its validity. Apparently, the parties involved in payments in bitcoins _believe_ in their eventual recording. The payee therefore trusts the _eventual_ availability of received funds.

This looks distinctly similar to the way traditional instruments of payments, such as coins, banknotes and bank transfers, operate. The users trust, based on experience and social convention, the correct operation of the system such that received funds are available for further spending. This ‘systemic trust’ in traditional, fiat, currency is underpinned by a mix of technical features such as hard to copy bank notes, fraud detection software in financial institutions and government imposed and enforced regulations.

Conclusion: Where in practice the ‘systemic trust’ in Bitcoin is no different from that of traditional currencies, Bitcoin operates _de facto_ as a fiat currency.

5. “Bitcoin is anonymous.”

The central database with transactions in bitcoins is publicly accessible. This is an essential Bitcoin design property to, at least in theory, allow any party to participate as processing node (miner) in order to get involved in updating the distributed database. The parties in a transaction are identified by unique numbers, and a payment transaction is linked through this number to the transaction wherein the spend value was received.

But as most Bitcoin transactions effectively constitute a payment in traditional currency at one end or the other, or both, they involve well known parties that exchange bitcoins for and against these currencies, the Bitcoin exchanges. Hence, payments in bitcoins can be traced as the value flows between these exchanges. Identification to the humans involved in a payment, e.g. by law enforcement, are therefore _potentially_ possible.

Conclusion: Bitcoin is not an electronic form of cash and does not protect privacy.

6. “Bitcoin is secure and cannot be hacked.”

Security for electronic payments has several parts: first to make sure that only the rightful owner can make a payment, secondly to make sure that the intended recipient actually receives the moneys paid and finally that only money can be paid that is actually owned by the payer and hence can not be spend twice.

In the Bitcoin sphere a payer uses a password to initiate a payment from her computer. The password unlocks a private cryptographic key stored on the computer to send cryptographically protected messages to be recorded in the Bitcoin database to make the payment. Yet, computers can be hacked, and a hacker can gain control of the private key and hence initiate a fraudulent payment. A loss of the private key, for instance by a crashed hard disk, does not just lose access to the money, it actually loses all the moneys controlled. Indeed one of the design features of Bitcoin is that payments, once made, cannot be reversed or recalled.

For the ordinary user, this represents a much higher level of risk than in traditional banking, where losing the bank card or PIN does usually not result in losing the whole balance held in the bank account.

On the functional side, the operators of the processing nodes in the distributed implementation of the shared Bitcoin database use an protocol, to agree on the next version of the database. This is required to correctly incorporate the payment transactions made since the last update. The software in each of the processing nodes must verify the correctness of the transactions by inspecting previous transactions where the payer has received the value to be spend. Yet, servers can be hacked (e.g. with a virus) and the continued operations can therefor not be guaranteed.

By design, the blockchain protocol does not guarantee that all past transactions remain stored for ever or can be available to each of the processing nodes (miners) for inspection in a fail-safe way. The protocol does also not guarantee that a processing node actually verifies the transactions it records. The blockchain protocol cannot prevent that fraudulent transactions get recorded, and does not provide a way to remove or correct fraudulent transactions.

Conclusion: using Bitcoin is more risky than the traditional payment infrastructure.

7. “Bitcoin operates without trust.”

Bitcoin literature is adamant that the Bitcoin set-up successfully substitutes ‘objective’ ‘algorithmic’ trust for less reliable, because human error and trickery-prone, ‘subjective’ institutional or political trust.

As described previously, the blockchain protocol used to synchronize updates to the Bitcoin central database (or ledger) does not guarantee the correctness of the updates made. Most processing nodes that update the database, use the same open source implementation, the Bitcoin ‘miner’ program. This program includes verification of transactions, but transaction verification by the miner program might be compromised either accidentally, by a software bug, or maliciously, e.g. by a virus, or by a miner intent on undue gains. Users engaging in Bitcoin transactions implicitly trust that the miner programs continues to operate correctly, that the equipment is protected against virus attacks and that the miners will not subvert it.

Also, protection of the stored value at the level of the individual owner is not very strong in the Bitcoin set-up. As a consequence, Bitcoin service providers have emerged offering enhanced payment security, in the form of managing their clients’ wallets. This service can be provided both online and with physical tokens like smart cards. Making use of ‘wallet providers’ evidently entails trust in the continued correct and honest operations of the online service or of the physical device.

Conclusion: Bitcoin substitutes one form of ‘subjective’ trust in traditional institutions for another in new organizational forms.

8. “Bitcoin is politically neutral.”

British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, in a famous ‘last words’ speech against the Euro, affirmed that decisions about money and currency are all essentially political in nature. In this context politics must be understood as more than what politicians do, essential politics is about the citizens and the state they live in. The decision that is embodied in Bitcoin’s design to limit the issuable volume of bitcoins to 21 million units can only be seen as political.

Other characteristic Bitcoin features, such as it rewards for early adopters and big operators, its essentially deflationary and hoarding-inducing nature (also due to the designed scarcity of bitcoins), its rejection of regulatory oversight and consumer protection and of state intervention generally, all resonate with political beliefs of “techno-libertarians”. Conversely, it is difficult to imagine how Bitcoin could effectively function in a capitalism-unfriendly political dispensation.

Conclusion: like any other monetary system, Bitcoin, in its technical design reflects explicit or implicit political choices.

9. “Bitcoin is a sustainable system.”

The whole Bitcoin set-up is, and especially the functioning of the distributed implementation of its central database with the compute-intensive blockchain protocol, is dependent on increasingly sophisticated and trouble-free network infrastructure resulting in an ever increasing consumption of resources. This clearly is at variance with the ever more forceful, and inescapable calls for less consumption, foremost in the energy sector.

Conclusion: Bitcoin does not fit well in the required transition to sustainability. This contrasts with traditional financial institutions that can reduce energy consumption a pace with improvements in IT technology.

10. “Bitcoin can scale to world size.”

Both the limited number of possible units of bitcoins and inherently severe technical limits to the operational speed of the blockchain protocol pose such insurmountable obstacles to a global economy that would run exclusively with bitcoins. In the absence of governance of bitcoin, even a technical modification to increase transaction capacity are very hard to implement.

For consumer payment transactions, for instance, it is hard to conceive how the blockchain protocol in Bitcoin can be made to operate effectively at the same speed and volume as systems maintained by, e.g., VISA, Mastercard, AmEx, JCB and such.

As shown in Argentina or Greece Bitcoin can be useful in some specific situations. In these cases it has been a mediator between traditional monetary systems. For Bitcoin to ‘scale up’ to a true global scale, while maintaining (a semblance of) stability and security would for quite some time to come require such large amount of resources as to defeat any short or medium term perspective of attainability.

Conclusion: As Yanis Varoufakis, the economist and former finance minister in Greece, formulated it: “Bitcoin is not capable of ‘powering’ an advanced, industrial society.”

Amsterdam, November 30, 2015

(The authors thank Boudewijn de Kerf for a quick review, while keeping
full responsibility for the substance of the argument.)

1 December, 2015

‘Britain’s got behaviour’ – Will Davies on the rise of ‘behaviour shows’

Will Davies (author of The Limits of Neoliberalism and The Happiness Industry) has written a nice piece on his blog deconstructing two common trend in British TV programmes: a dynamic of competition and elimination; and an appeal to behaviourism. For Davies, this loosely equates to a kind of Hayek-ian ‘discovery procedure’ ~ no suffering, no discovery. What this constitutes, in the shape of programmes such as Dragons’ Den and Location, Location, Location is a ‘transparent mis-representation of what’s going on in the economy’. On contrast, Davies suggests that an alternative (regressive) move to behaviourism – exemplified by Married at First Sight and The Secret Life of [x] year olds.

The post is well worth a read – find it here.

30 November, 2015

*.exe ~ Executions: conversations on code, power & death (version 0.1)

This event in Aarhus, this week, with Wendy Chun and Geoff Cox as ‘keynotes’ looks really good!

Executions: conversations on code, power & death (version 0.1)

Keynote presenters: Wendy Chun and Geoff Cox

Venue: Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS) | HÃ¸egh-Guldbergs Gade 6b, bygning 1630, Aarhus

When: December 3rd and 4th, 2015

This event investigates the cultural, material and political implications of execution. Software permeates our environment. We co-exist in an increasingly datafied present in which algorithms and abstract coded processes execute across different scales, materialising and operating at the micro and macro levels of our actions.

The aim of this event is to open up the concept of execution, both from a particular perspective of code and its execution, and more generally towards a wider discussion in relation to datafied culture and everyday life. How can we understand the affective, embodied, performative, programmed processes of execution in the world today? By gathering together researchers working with diverse artistic practices, we hope to encourage a critical curiosity and engagement with the theme of execution.
Topics will include:

execution as power / execution as decision / execution as performed instruction set / execution as enunciation / execution as critique / execution as temporal performance / execution as participation / execution as cruelty / indigestion/incorporation as execution / tuning as execution
In autumn 2015 and spring 2016, two-day events will take place (in Aarhus, Denmark and Malmö, Sweden respectively) that include keynote talks by Wendy Chun (Brown University) and Geoff Cox (Aarhus University), as well as workshops on the theme of execution.

These events are instantiations of an on-going discussion by the critical software thing group, a collection of researchers with a common interest in exploring, reflecting on and working with code.

See the dedicated wiki for more…

27 November, 201527 November, 2015

Projecting a genuine future for the living? On Latour & Stiegler comments after the Paris attacks

I was quite surprised at how quickly the translation of the short interview with Bernard Stiegler in le Monde spread on twitter, which is not usual for my posts…

Anyway, I have been struck by a similarity in ethos between the comments made by Bernard Stiegler in his interview and the commentary provided by Bruno Latour in an op-ed (translated by Jane Kuntz) for Reporterre, entitled “The Other State of Urgency” [via Installing (Social) Order].

It is an ethos of calling for the casting-off of a short-termism or ‘death-wish’ (pace Latour) focussed on (inadequately mitigating) destruction–destruction of states, of peoples and of our planet–towards affirming what Stiegler calls a ‘genuine’ future and what Latour sees as a taking of fate into our our hands. One might see it as a loosely vitalist ethos: an affirmation of life and its pluri-potency.

It seems to me significant that both Latour and Stiegler frame the issue in relation to the anthropocene and the COP21 talks being held in Paris. For both of them, the affirmation of a ‘genuine’ future entails combining stances towards ecological, economic, political and scientific atmospheres. Such an affirmation of a sustainable path towards a future of the living is set in contra-distinction to a rhetoric of war, which both thinkers reject in their own ways. To submit to war, in the manner of the French government, is to submit to a short-term imperative to (re)act, but to act for whom and to what ends is a question both Latour and Stiegler find troubling. It is analogous to government via catastrophism – such forms of reaction are already presumed in the mode of ‘normal’ operation: the ‘everywhere war’ and ‘state of exception’ is the new ‘normal’.

Who could argue against an affirmation of hope? I certainly would not. Yet, while there is plenty of diagnosis of the ‘state of urgency’, we are left to ponder: what is to be done?

I don’t think I buy Stiegler’s eurocentric call for policy, it is too easy to see how–even with the best of intentions–this would slip into the kind of technocratic malaise that has buggered up the Mediterranean EU countries. Yet, at least Stiegler attempts to offer strategies – and I think the wider outlining of a political-economics of contribution and of a kind of ‘neganthropy‘, while somewhat grandiloquent, remain inspiring. I would be very curious to see what Latour would suggest in order to “invent demonstrations more innovative than yet another march from Place de la République to Place de la Nation.”

It is, of course, excruciatingly hard to offer strategies for action – as Zizek likes to quip: we can see why it has been suggested that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than an end to the ideological milieu of capitalism. Working for a ‘genuine’ future hurts, but as both Latour and Stiegler demonstrate: it remains the task at hand.

26 November, 201526 November, 2015

Stiegler on Daesh and ‘the age of disruption”

I offer a here a quick translation of an interview for Le Monde published past week with Bernard Stiegler, following the attacks in Paris in which he addresses Daesh/ISIS within the context of his conceptualisation of ‘disruption’, which is the context of his forthcoming book [Dans la Dusruption ~ “In the Age of Disruption”].

Only by planning a genuine future can we fight Daesh

The philosopher Bernard Stiegler develops this thesis in his forthcoming book: “In the Age of Disruption”.

Interview by Margherita Nasi.

For the philosopher Bernard Stiegler “war is economic”. The collapose of employment egenders a dispair that in turn leads to violence. “There is no future without a fundamental reversal of economic value”, he explains.

Since the attacks of the 13th of November the President of the Republic insists” “We are at war”, do you recognise yourself in such a war?

No. What is this “we”? They are at war, not me. War is economic, it is theirs and it creates casualties, including me, who cannot sleep at night, not because of terrorists but because of a lack of future for my children. This is not a war against Daesh, as they suggest, but a global economic war, which takes us into civil war if we do not combat it.

Employment will collapse, especially amongst young people, and dispair breeds violence. We no longer produce reasons for hope today. The attacks of the 13th of November were suicide attacks, which is not insignificant – suicide is developing around the world, especially amongst those young people who know they will not work for a long time.

Both Sarkozy and Hollande failed to provide any kind of prospects for these young people. It is against this stupidity, this madness, that I am at war. A war within myself as well: we are all subject to this tendency to find scapegoats, not to think and not to care. This is barbarism, and that is exactly what Daesh wants: to create civil war. There will be more attacks if we do not change our politics. This is the context of my next book ” In the Age of Disruption”.

What do you mean by disruption?

Disruption is a phenomenon of accelerating inovation which is the foundation of a strategy developed in Silicon Valley: it is a drive to go faster than societies in order to impose upon them models for the destruction of social structures, rendering public powers powerless It is a strategy that tetanises the opponent. In my book, I analyse a text signed by Abu Bakr Al-Naji, as summarised by Ignance Leverrier [former diplomat and journalist], that defines a collective, including former officers of Saddam Hussein that became Islamists. It is a sort of Daesh manual, in the image of corporate bibles that detail the rules to set up a franchise. This book explains how Daesh actors should seize power. One must create chaos and thus exploit the need for some kind of authority.

I compare this strategy with that of the website “Les Barbares attaquent” [The barbarians are coming], founded by Nicolas Colin, a former tax inspector known for his report on the tax system and the digital economy, in which hie highlighted the inadequacy of the tax system for dealing with digital companies, which he describes as the ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse’, in this case GAFA [acronym for: Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple]. He has since moved to the other side, from public service into the economy which he described as so damaging, to create an investment fund that raises money to practice disruption on the French. Yet, repeating the strategy of GAFA, he can only extend their ecosystem and intensify the colonisation of Europe, wrecking transport, housing, education–all sectors–through new models such as Uber. However, such disruptive practices destroy the social balance, what [German Philosopher] Theodor W. Adorno anticipated by speaking in 1944 of a “new form of barbarism” in relation to the cultural industries.

It is not by declaring war on Daesh that this takes place. This declaration is one way of absolving oneself of one’s own responsibilities by scapegoating people that have become extremely dangerous and who we have co-produced with Daesh.

This radicalisation is thus built on the ruins of ultraliberalism?

Yes. We turn radicalism into a question of religion, and this is outrageous, Most recruits of radical Islam have no religious culture. It is not religion in question but despair. Richard Dur, the murderer of eight members of the Nanterre Council in March 2002, prefigures his actions by speaking about his feelings not existing: he wanted to become somebody by these actions.

In 2012 you launched a call for a global economic peace treaty, is this still a possible contemporary solution for eradicating barbarism?

We need to open out a debate in Europe, take things head-on, since the birth of the web we have all been losing. Exploited by the kinds of disruption practised by GAFA, digital technologies have accentuated the environmental toxicity that has been growing since the beginning of the anthropocene – an era in which humans have become the major geological factor – in terms of the climate, the atmosphere and in mental terms.

There is no future without a fundamental reversal of economic value: only the transition to an economy producing sustainable forms of value will overcome the challenges that are the subject of the COP21 next week.

We must launch a new European policy rather than aligning ourselves with the American model that is disruptive and suicidal/ We must invent a new Web in the service of viable marcoeconomic model, rather than developing a completely ruinous economy of data. These are the themes of the “Conversations about a new industrial world”, orgainsed at the Pompidou Centre on the 14th and 15th of December. Only by planning [projetant] a genuine [véritable] future for the planet can we combat Daesh, in other words to combat despair.

24 November, 2015

Reblog> Diverse Economies and Livable Worlds

This looks interesting, via Nicholas Crane :

Diverse Economies and Livable Worlds

As part of an infrastructure for the construction of what Mark Purcell recently called ‘Joyful Geography,’ the editors of the Diverse Economies and Livable Worlds Book Series (with University of Minnesota Press) are soliciting book proposals. The recent Making Other Worlds Possible (2015) indicates a direction for the series. I cut and paste Kevin St. Martin’s announcement of the series below.

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Diverse Economies and Liveable Worlds Book Series

University of Minnesota Press

The Diverse Economies and Liveable Worlds Book Series offers a space where the theoretical and political conversations opened up by an anti-capitalocentric vision of economy can take place. The core concerns of this series are diverse economies as both a mode of inquiry and as actually existing, potential, and transformative economies. The series is explicitly focused on undoing our understanding of capitalism as a conceptual container. Thinking outside this container is what allows us to veer from the singularity, inequities, and degradations associated with ‘capitalism’. The Diverse Economies research program initiated by J.K. Gibson-Graham has carved out a new intellectual territory for interrogating and performing ‘more than capitalist’ worlds that is attracting many scholars. At the same time, on the ground, a plethora of movements are forging forms of post-capitalist politics that imagine and enact liveable worlds in which economies are refocused on meeting the needs of people and the planet. The series will attract established and emerging scholars who are pushing at the boundaries of thinking about how we represent and enact ‘the economy’, how we recognize and theorize economic diversity, and what a post-capitalist politics here and now might be.

The editors of this Book Series are J.K. Gibson-Graham k.gibson[at]westernsydney.edu.au, Maliha Safri msafri[at]drew.edu , Kevin St. Martin kstmarti[at]rci.rutgers.edu, and Stephen Healy stephen.healy[at]gmail.com.

We welcome book proposals from a wide range of fields including Architecture and Design, Anthropology, Assemblage and More than Human Studies, Business and Organization Management, Communications and Media, Economics:, Environmental Humanities, Geography, Philosophy, Political Science, Regional Planning, Sociology and Women’s Studies.

For more information please contact the Series Editors.