reSync @ Deckspace

Deckspace.tv have arranged a series of themed public events @ Deckspace for October and November 2013, each recognising key interests of its subscribers during the last decade.

reSync – Wilderness | Transmissions | Rights | Objectives | Origins | Screens | Futures

Review existing SPC and subscriber projects to collect fresh insights and inspiration from the originators and work together to republish using a range of flexible, efficient and playful technologies and techniques.

Check out the Workshops tab…

Mozfest

One of our workshops will take place during/at the Mozfest. Meeting up with the Flossmanuals people, joining the School of Open (Creative Commons & P2PU) and  the Open Knowledge Foundation for a fun evening to connect with peers in the open education space. Mick Fuzz writes: “So many efforts exist to “open” up  education around the world. How can we help connect these efforts? We’d  like to start by collaboratively building a human timeline of open education — Do you remember when and where you first became aware of open education?  When did you first become passionate about “open” or  participate in an “open” event or job? Where and what was it? What else in this area has most inspired you? We will share experiences and manually place ourselves along a real world  timeline (think rolls of butcher paper, markers, glitter is optional). Then we’ll start fleshing out  the timeline with key events and persons that we think brought the open education and knowledge movement to where it is today. We’ll stop whenever we get tired, make merry with refreshments and snacks, and  digitize whatever we have by the end of the evening for further contributions from everyone and anyone on the web. We’ll make the resulting timeline available openly (either via CC0, CC BY, or CC  BY-SA), and feature it in a chapter of the Open Education Handbook!

Organizer descriptions: (for School of Open, Creative Commons, P2PU, Open Knowledge Foundation and FLOSS Manuals Foundation)
The School of Open  is a community of volunteers focused on providing free education  opportunities on the meaning, application, and impact of “openness” in  the digital age and its benefit to creative endeavors, education,  research, and more. Volunteers develop and run online courses, real  world workshops, and training programs on topics such as Creative  Commons licenses, open educational resources, and sharing creative  works. 
The School of Open is coordinated by Creative Commons, a  globally focused nonprofit dedicated to making it easier for people to  share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of  copyright, and P2PU, an active peer learning platform and community for developing and running free online courses.
The Open Knowledge Foundation  (OKF) is a non-profit organisation founded in 2004 and dedicated to  promoting open data and open content in all their forms – including  government data, publicly funded research and public domain cultural  content.

The FLOSS Manuals Foundation is a collection of different language communities that produce educational materials about Free Software using innovative collaborative tools and processes. http://www.flossmanuals.org/”

reSource 006

The Transmediale resource006 event runs under the title: Overflow. Transmediale therefore manifests on their website that “In the current development of digital culture we are experiencing an “overflow condition”, where more information is being transmitted than machines can process, and humans can handle. This need for accumulation make us part of a constant flow of data, so big and complex that it becomes impossible to analyse and to filter. The urgent pressure of issues such as ownership and privacy related to data overflow makes us wonder if producing more data instead means generating more control.”

deadSwap

Recruiting performance of the Telekommunisten for deadSwap, “Agents Recruiting for deadSwap // Numbers Station by the Telekommunisten network activists. Whistleblowers. Spies. Covert action requires clandestine networks. Data hidden in public space. Seemingly random numbers spoken on the radio. What does it mean? There must be a system! How do you join the network? Can you be counted on? Are you committed? Do you have what it takes to join the network?”

Dead Drop ness

Danya Vassilev had similar system (proposal) for transport (buses, trams)
Aram Barthold  had something similar too -> Dead Drops

Work of previous PML fellows was discussed in the Mining the Image session.

cbase

A short c-base visit in order to sync up between the open wireless network OWN in London, and the open wireless network FREIFUNK in Berlin.

James Stevens will visit the international summit for community wireless networks next month meeting technology experts, policy analysts, on-the-ground specialists, university research, discussing state-of-the-art community wireless projects, and their futures.

Quote from the agenda:

How to Avoid Tragedy of The Commons in Wi-Fi Networks:
The performance of a Wi-Fi link (in meshes and in access point settings) is subject to sometimes uncontrollable interference and channel congestion. But until now it was very hard to troubleshoot and find out what really causes a link to perform poorly without investing heavily in special measurement equipment and time. This has changed now. We present a heavily modified and enhanced version the already existing software tool called “horst” (lightweight IEEE802.11 wireless LAN analyzer similar to tcpdump, Wireshark or Kismet). This can be used to implement mechanisms/protocols to cooperatively conserve channel airtime–to avoid depletion of the resources shared—in order to avoid the tragedy of the commons.

start of fellowship

We started the PML fellowship with meeting sessions during the Transmediale resource006 event: Overflow.

Talked about theories, praxis, & administration (media utopianism of the 90s being trashed by web 2.0 / political, collective, social).

Jonathan Kempp and Martin Howse discussed christal worlds, drill corez, segmentation of the mind, stack/frame/heap, bio leaching…

Fabian Giraud presented several projects, burning the chip of a camera in the focus point of a particle accelerator underneath the louvre.

We also discussed the January 2014 event titled ‘Taking care of Things’

some more notes:
Howard Slater on Post Media
Claus Pias on Cybernetics
Mark B Hensen on human agency & social life
Forian Cramer on Anti-Media
Graswurzel.TV  Susa Neubronner
Conrad Atkinson on Dreams of Permanence: Dreams of Transience
Fassbinder’s film Welt am Draht
Kate Rich on bureau of inverse technology
Friedrich Kittler on time based media
Wolfgang Welsch on Ästhetisches Denken
Robin Mackay editor collapse journal

Anti-political Aesthetics

The Anti-political Aesthetics of Objects and Worlds Beyond (Svenja Bromberg)

quotes:
“Since dOCUMENTA there has been a real explosion in art exhibitions that explicitly centre around objects and articulate a relation to the philosophical strand of Object-Oriented Ontolgy (OOO)
“…”
As Diedrich Diederichsen outlines in a recent e-flux article, it is precisely what was still antithetical to the Fordist assembly line – different modes of dreaming ‘dangerously’ or living authentic or alternative lives – that seems to have become part of the post-Fordist ‘imperative to produce a perfect self as a perfect thing’.
“…”
Harman’s ‘Object-Oriented Aesthetics’
“…”
Interaction, relationship, causation, linkage are finally the names for a complex process that can be initiated between two real objects or two sensual objects only by a third intentional agent of the opposite type (in the first case sensual, in the second case real). Because, while real objects cannot touch each other, ‘sensual objects always touch real ones’, as they only exist for real objects.
“…”
There is no way in which Harman could account for the accumulation of powers and forces within specific objects or object constellations that violate certain relations or even deny access to them; there is no way in which objects might be distributed unequally in different networks of relations or in which relations might bind objects to conditions of extreme suffering, of suffocation, of death – and we could here speak of relations between people and their means of subsistence as much as of the relation between a company that emits toxic fumes and its surrounding biosphere.
“…”
Philosophy and simultaneously aesthetics have thus become extremely impoverished, as they have lost any concepts that could allow judgements that go beyond the question if a ‘new’ relation has been forged or not. With respect to the spectator, Harman seems to remain extremely Kantian, in the sense that for him art is fundamentally about the encounter between the artwork and the spectator and the emerging aesthetic reaction or ‘judgement’.
“…”
Meillassoux’s ‘Inaesthetics’
“…”
[P]hilosophy is concerned with a real and dense possible which I call the ‘may-be’ [peut-être]. This peut-être […] is very close to the final peut-être of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés…
“…”
Against his master Alain Badiou, Meillassoux sees these questions not resolved in Coup de dès in relation to an evental configuration of the poem towards a newly emerging truth, but as precisely eternalised in a hypothetical ‘perhaps’, by means of a metre that simultaneously exists and in-exists: the activity of ‘fixer l’infini’. Meillassoux argues this on the grounds of the ‘unique Number’ that we can find alluded to but finally suspended in the line of the poem ‘it was the number – were it to have existed’, but that nevertheless has an, albeit questionable, hidden existence via a code within the poem.
“…”
At the same time the aesthetics of hope Meillassoux’s philosophy offers us is not a Blochian ‘not-yet-being’ that, in its utopian sense, is nevertheless directed in a very concrete way against the oppressive material conditions of existence under capitalism, and which is itself only generated by the participation in that very same struggle. Meillassoux’s real of superchaos, which art might help us to access is, whilst radically contingent, also absolute, containing in itself ‘the equal contingency of order and disorder, of becoming and sempiternity’.

 

Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing

Reading: Boris Arvatov, Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing (1925)

The relation of the individual and the collective to the Thing is the most fundamental and important, the most defining of social relations. […] If the significance of the human relation to the Thing has not been understood, or has only been partially understood as a relation to the means of production, this is because until now Marxists have known only the bourgeois word of things. This world is disorganized and divided into two sharply delimited domains, those of technical and everyday things. The latter fell completely outside of scientific consideration, as static and secondary forms. […] The present notes try to shed light on several questions of everyday life in relation to questions of the culture of the Thing, from the perspective of precisely these urgent needs of proletarian cultural construction.

Brainstorming notes:
– Every day life [byt]
– [byt] = bit (play of words)
– bytie =  “existence”
– Style-ism & fashion
– Technological intelligensia “…” becoming an integral organiser of the world of things
– Today the thing becomes a mobile phone
– See also translaters essay  (christina kiaer)

Research Questions

  • How might radical social perspectives interpret these convolutions of thought and action which re conceive human and object relations?
  • How do current models of politics contend with the question ‘do artefacts have politics?
  • ’ How do we relate digital aesthetics – in which abstract computational actors like algorithms give rise to new forms and morphologies – to the social and sensual conditions in which they arise and take effect?
  • What happens to our understanding of politics and culture when the satisfaction of ‘human needs’, however problematic these are to define, ceases to be a key aim of knowledge systems?
  • What, indeed, is ‘thought’ when the notion of the human, let alone the cogito, is recursively destabilised by the same man-made tools developed to defend our ontological centrality and certainty?
  • What can we make of ‘cognition in the wild’, when ‘the wild’ is seen not as threatening or dystopian, but as a social utopia?

Post Media Sync

Adnan Hadzi travelled to Berlin with James Stevens in September to meet with fellows of Post Media Lab to exchange current ideas and prepare the research programme leading up to Taking care of Things session as part of Transmediale 2014.

IMG_0451SPC are setting out to revisit subscriber materials including image bank of still and moving image recordings on media and servers in Deckspace with a view to re-presentation. Surprisingly little formal documentary material exists to account for the reeling years at SPC, such that we have is on video tape or in html and email.  IMG_0450In October and November will offer Friday workshops at Deckspace for groups to review some of their preferred moments and bring them into focus again utilising some contemporary publishing and distribution methods. With the public appetite for news and media concentrators migrating to touch screen readers and smart phones we will formulate our workshop output to offer secure syncronisation options as well as more traditional web publishing and RSS.

In December we will travel to Germany again this time to Luneburg to host similar workshops with local groups there.

Expect BitMessageBit torrent Sync and Stream and NFC/RFID interactions.