The intervention will undertake the attempt to conceptualize the image as a navigational landscap... more The intervention will undertake the attempt to conceptualize the image as a navigational landscape whose horizon continuously escapes the eye’s sight, because that kind of image does not represent but is part of an operation causing disorientation in tandem with routine actions. GPS-system. Computer screen with layered windows/frames. Desktop-documentary. Datalogical turn. The image of navigational vision operates through that endless frame which re-generates itself constantly with the purpose to balance / regulate / compensate / correlate the slowness of human immersion and the speed of distance: a techno-mode of production that ‘excludes me and shuts me out’ as Harun Farocki analysed the ‘industrialization of thought’ in 1993. The image as navigational landscape seems to generate a new spatiality that is defined by the sprawling paradox of slowness and speed, once the movement-temporality has began. The intervention is informed by the discussions during a joint work-session with t...
Biometric technology is on the rise. Its applications are wide-ranging: facial scanning to replac... more Biometric technology is on the rise. Its applications are wide-ranging: facial scanning to replace passwords; iris recognition to replace debit cards; fingerprints to replace passports. Value is increasingly tied to faces, and faces have increasing value. Boaz Levin and Vera Tollmann, theorists and cofounders of the Research Center For Proxy Politics, explore the “token value” of identity resulting from such software and hardware, where one’s “digital identity and physical body become closely entangled” and one’s virtual proxy enters the political realm. Can the one-to-one relationship between self and proxy be skewed through forms of obfuscation? What will happen when the face on the screen looks back?
Video as an artifact always has been assembled, a montage on many levels. At this – yet again – c... more Video as an artifact always has been assembled, a montage on many levels. At this – yet again – critical moment in the development of digital video culture is reassembled on a new level – between new affordances, complexities, productive disturbances and the threat of over-regulation and -customization, a.k.a. ‘walling’ and ‘gardening’.
An assemblage always has been a cultural form, itself consisting of other assemblages, or what can be viewed as such. Online video vortices such as Youtube, in this perspective, are assemblages of assemblages: Databases, softwares, hardwares, screens, interfaces, protocols, server farms and infrastructures; Videos, titles, different forms of comments, tags, User IDs, hyperlinks, lists and channels; cameras, video producers, filmed objects, frames, uploaders, users and audiences; capital, money flows, corporations, employees, advertisers, property rights, eyeballs and statistics... Youtube as one such agglutination is changing along with cultural formations of video as it is itself, possibly still more than many other acteur, partaking in its reconfigurations. But powerful alternatives, such as Tudou and Youku in China, or Nico Nico Douga in Japan, have developed significantly different properties. More alternatives are constantly added, even more can be envisioned – within, alongside or beyond Youtube – by corporations and entrepreneurs, just as much as by artists and (h)activists, and indeed by the users and audiences around the world.
VideoVortex 13 proposes that now is a time to re-engage with a ‘structural’ analysis of online-video culture. By calling for this re-engagement with structural questions and an analysis of ‘assemblages’, we point to the often loose forms of influence between elements, and processes of change at all levels, each not fully determined by the other. However, using this lens we neither aim to confine the analysis to particular theory brands (such as STS/ANT, Post-Marxist or Deleuzian approaches), nor exclude alternative frames of description, cause and effect. Object-oriented approaches are as welcome as relational ones, micro- as welcome as macro-analyses, cultural and aesthetic programs as much as socio-political criticism, critics as well as networkers theorists and practitioners. The notion of assemblage is merely used to open up structural questions, not tied to (over-) structuralist analysis, rather a filter to summon up a certain slicing and engage in common dialogue.
So: How can we analyze and compare assemblages of online video? What new constellations are to be found around the video frame, be it on a social, aesthetical or technical level? How can we describe and understand recent shifts, such as commissioned channels on Youtube or the advent of amateur video in the news sphere? Do specific interfaces, for example, privilege specific forms of content and practices? How can we understand assemblages from different perspectives? Users, for example, still encounter video hosting services in an assemblage with conventional television, bit torrent, websites, and so on – what does this mean? What role do protocols or cultures of use play here? What happens, if we extend the focus of the analysis, for example to the integration into Google or Facebook, or narrow it down, to particular assemblages of one video and its comments, for example?
To ask such questions means to look and think beyond YouTube, as we know it. YouTube itself overhauls its interface and syntax of use, with deeper integration into the Google-Verse, and a shift from user-generated to channel-commissioned content. New software, such as easy to use HTML5-based frameworks, open up new possibilites. At the same time ’TV has overflowed its boundaries’ (FlowTV). The building block of the network-TV-era morphs further into lists, channels, apps and what-have-you, driven by recommendation
engines and personalized profiles. Big players, such as Apple, Google, NetFlix, Hulu, Amazon and Samsung, aim to define the future of a medium once known as television, still unsure whether it knocks at the window from inside the computer, the old living-room-screen, or from within any other gadget nesting in our hands and attention spaces, exploring its way between multimodal split screens and something still worth being called a channel.
The global video-scape, part of a re-assembled media-scape, is negotiated and reconfigured within the spaces opened up by ‘Online-Video ́, ’Web 2.0’, DIY-culture and ‚Post-Network-TV‘. Situated in this dynamic field are: TV-Networks still struggling with their online-strategies but rolling out their content, trying to keep control of TV-tradition; internet-giants trying to translate ‚2.0‘-culture into immediate domination of the field of online-video; some initiatives – carried on by civil-society, open-source culture or endowments – which want to keep the ‚vision‘ in tele-vision; all the rest of society which now – in a similar manner as with the advent of the internet itself – now realize in different ways, that there is no future socializing without a video-component of sorts; micro-social counter- or DIY-cultures producing ‚alternative content‘ – either within their own infrastructures or within pre-existing frames of distribution, sometimes re- floating to the surface of the global media-scape, most notably in large event-driven eruptions such as the Arab Spring or the Occupy-movement, forming assemblies in their own right. These global event-streams also remind us of the ‘real virtuality’ video can have, the close assembly of networked media content with the social spaces of what was once regarded as ‘the public’.
When we look for new methodologies and epistemologies for the unfolding video-grammars, one thing seems to be sure: The online-videosphere in the global videodrome is extensive, socially pervasive and diverse. While we still need to engage in overall mapping of moving-image culture, we also need scenarios for floating-islands of the online-video archipelago of formats, structures, platforms, practices. On the other hand, we have to deepen our understanding of how the grammar of video is shaped by other social, cultural and technological dynamics, formats and protocols, not the least because online video is immersed deeply into techno-capitalism which some qualify as ruled by a ‘cinematic mode of production’. Online-video may ask of us more than ever to look under or beyond the hood of the video-display. Also video assemblages across media-spheres and in time – video-biographies – need our attention: Egyptian or Syrian protestors are seen on CNN or Al Jazeera, set-top boxes stream Democracy Now along Fox-News, and videos get re- embedded and re-annotated in teaching platforms such as Sophie, Scalar and MediaThread, or in sub-curated diaries such as Facebook Timelines.
What has become of the so-called West after the Cold War? Why hasn’t the West simply become “form... more What has become of the so-called West after the Cold War? Why hasn’t the West simply become “former,” as has its supposed counterpart, the “former East”? In this book, artists, thinkers, and activists explore the repercussions of the political, cultural, and economic events of 1989 on both art and the contemporary. The culmination of an eight-year curatorial research experiment, Former West imagines a world beyond our immediate condition.
The writings, visual essays, and conversations in Former West—more than seventy diverse contributions with global scope—unfold a tangled cartography far more complex than the simplistic dichotomy of East vs. West. In fact, the Cold War was a contest not between two ideological blocs but between two variants of Western modernity. It is this conceptual “Westcentrism” that a “formering” of the West seeks to undo.
The contributions revisit contemporary debates through the lens of a “former West.” They rethink conceptions of time and space dominating the legacy of the 1989–1990 revolutions in the former East, and critique historical periodization of the contemporary. The contributors map the political economy and social relations of the contemporary, consider the implications of algorithmic cultures and the posthuman condition, and discuss notions of solidarity—the difficulty in constructing a new “we” despite migration, the refugee crisis, and the global class recomposition. Can art institute the contemporary it envisions, and live as if it were possible?
Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989 is edited by curator Maria Hlavajova and writer and curator Simon Sheikh. Visual introductions to book chapters are curated by Maria Hlavajova and Kathrin Rhomberg.
Contributors include: Nancy Adajania, Edit András, Athena Athanasiou, Zygmunt Bauman, Dave Beech, Brett Bloom, Rosi Braidotti, Susan Buck-Morss, Campus in Camps, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Chto Delat?/What is to be done?, Jodi Dean, Angela Dimitrakaki, Dilar Dirik, Marlene Dumas, Keller Easterling, Okwui Enwezor, Charles Esche, Silvia Federici, Mark Fisher, Federica Giardini and Anna Simone, Boris Groys, Gulf Labor Coalition, Stefano Harney, Sharon Hayes, Brian Holmes, Tung-Hui Hu, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Sami Khatib, Delaine Le Bas, Boaz Levin and Vera Tollmann, Isabell Lorey, Sven Lütticken, Ewa Majewska, Artemy Magun, Suhail Malik, Teresa Margolles, Achille Mbembe, Laura McLean, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Sandro Mezzadra, Walter D. Mignolo, Aernout Mik, Angela Mitropoulos, Rastko Močnik, Nástio Mosquito, Rabih Mroué, Pedro Neves Marques, Peter Osborne, Matteo Pasquinelli, Andrea Phillips, Nina Power, Vijay Prashad, Gerald Raunig, Irit Rogoff, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Naoki Sakai, Rasha Salti, Francesco Salvini, Christoph Schlingensief, Georg Schöllhammer, Susan Schuppli, Andreas Siekmann, Jonas Staal, Hito Steyerl, Mladen Stilinović, Paulo Tavares, Trịnh T. Minh-Hà, Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor, Marina Vishmidt, Marion von Osten, McKenzie Wark, and Eyal Weizman.
Published by BAK, basis actuele kunst and MIT Press, 2016 | Design by Mevis & Van Deursen, Amsterdam | English language | 748 pages | Paperback | ISBN: 9780262533836
Die Planung / A Terv is a magazine for the utilization of the future, now. Die Planung / A Terv p... more Die Planung / A Terv is a magazine for the utilization of the future, now. Die Planung / A Terv partially adopts the role of an utopian operation in the format of a print magazine. Each one of the three issues of the magazine carries a date from the future, 2011, 2036 and 2048, and was pre-released in 2007. These issues are in fact an advance from the future. All contributions are conceived from a future perspective encouraging the emergence of a different reality based on the present circumstances.
2011
No. 25
Trend-oriented, ridiculous, catastrophic, hyper-future (sleek, shiny, flamboyant), camp, out of control, imminence (warfare, fossil energy), delayed (reaction), green at loss, cataclysmic.
Chapters: Life, Sex, Death
(ISBN: 978-963-06-2501-2), 183 Pages
Aspassia Kouzoupi: Perpetual Entelechy; Roland Nolte: How Sustainable is our Energy System?; János Sugár: If We’re So Good, Why Aren’t We Better?; J.A. Tillmann: The Forgetters; Deane Simpson & Jörg Stollmann: The future is now the future is Old; Ferda Kolatan: Instant Bodies (IBs); Peter Kerites: Cyber-Medical Applications Rock Japanese Voice Market on 2011 First Quarter; László Garaczi: 1 brain; Ulrich Gutmair: umma means communism; Martin Burckhardt; Open Letter; Ulrike Feser: expectance crisis; Beatriz Colomina: A House of Ill Repute; Daniela Comani: Beautiful Girl’s; Michaela Melián: A trip to 433 Eros; Rachel Baker: Witness Testimonial by Zabdiel Levi. Google VS The Unplugged Re-enactors Society; Zsófia Bán: Love Is All You Need?; Jason Danziger: Sing Sing; Aaron Mo: Artists and gentrification in London; Balázs Irimiás: Sutra of the Earth Goddess; Vera Tollmann: Again in Berlin; Kathrin Röggla: the right people to talk to; Intercultural Orientation and the RandomRoutines: Save your past in the future!
Editors: Sandra Bartoli, Martin Conrads, Silvan Linden, Katharina Sevic, Polyák Levente
Logo Design & Basic Typographical Concept: Anna Mándoki
Cover & Layout: Silvan Linden
The project is funded by Bipolar German-Hungarian Cultural Projects (an initiative of the German Federal Cultural Foundation) and supported by the Secretariat for Futures Studies (Berlin and Bonn) and nextlab (Budapest).
Die Planung / A Terv is published in Berlin and Budapest.
The proxy, a decoy or surrogate, is today often used to designate a computer server acting as an ... more The proxy, a decoy or surrogate, is today often used to designate a computer server acting as an intermediary for requests from clients. Originating in the Latin procurator, an agent representing others in a court of law, proxies are now emblematic of a post-democratic political age, one increasingly populated by bot militias, puppet states, and communication relays. Thus, the proxy works as a dialectical figure that is woven into the fabric of networks, where action and stance seem to be masked, calculated and remote-controlled. The proxy thrives within a habitat defined by sameness, characterized by constant monitoring of human and non-human actors. This homogeneity comes as a technological precondition for effectively blending in, the proxy emerges as a symptom of our prevalent condition. Considering the current political situation, are proxies needed more than ever, or do proxies rather confirm the status quo?
The publication looks at proxy-politics on both a micro and a macro level, exploring proxies as objects, as well as networks as objects. What is the relation between the molecular and the planetary? How to fathom the computational regime? Yet, whilst being a manifestation of the networked age, thinking like a proxy offers loopholes and strategies for survival within it.
The intervention will undertake the attempt to conceptualize the image as a navigational landscap... more The intervention will undertake the attempt to conceptualize the image as a navigational landscape whose horizon continuously escapes the eye’s sight, because that kind of image does not represent but is part of an operation causing disorientation in tandem with routine actions. GPS-system. Computer screen with layered windows/frames. Desktop-documentary. Datalogical turn. The image of navigational vision operates through that endless frame which re-generates itself constantly with the purpose to balance / regulate / compensate / correlate the slowness of human immersion and the speed of distance: a techno-mode of production that ‘excludes me and shuts me out’ as Harun Farocki analysed the ‘industrialization of thought’ in 1993. The image as navigational landscape seems to generate a new spatiality that is defined by the sprawling paradox of slowness and speed, once the movement-temporality has began. The intervention is informed by the discussions during a joint work-session with t...
Biometric technology is on the rise. Its applications are wide-ranging: facial scanning to replac... more Biometric technology is on the rise. Its applications are wide-ranging: facial scanning to replace passwords; iris recognition to replace debit cards; fingerprints to replace passports. Value is increasingly tied to faces, and faces have increasing value. Boaz Levin and Vera Tollmann, theorists and cofounders of the Research Center For Proxy Politics, explore the “token value” of identity resulting from such software and hardware, where one’s “digital identity and physical body become closely entangled” and one’s virtual proxy enters the political realm. Can the one-to-one relationship between self and proxy be skewed through forms of obfuscation? What will happen when the face on the screen looks back?
Video as an artifact always has been assembled, a montage on many levels. At this – yet again – c... more Video as an artifact always has been assembled, a montage on many levels. At this – yet again – critical moment in the development of digital video culture is reassembled on a new level – between new affordances, complexities, productive disturbances and the threat of over-regulation and -customization, a.k.a. ‘walling’ and ‘gardening’.
An assemblage always has been a cultural form, itself consisting of other assemblages, or what can be viewed as such. Online video vortices such as Youtube, in this perspective, are assemblages of assemblages: Databases, softwares, hardwares, screens, interfaces, protocols, server farms and infrastructures; Videos, titles, different forms of comments, tags, User IDs, hyperlinks, lists and channels; cameras, video producers, filmed objects, frames, uploaders, users and audiences; capital, money flows, corporations, employees, advertisers, property rights, eyeballs and statistics... Youtube as one such agglutination is changing along with cultural formations of video as it is itself, possibly still more than many other acteur, partaking in its reconfigurations. But powerful alternatives, such as Tudou and Youku in China, or Nico Nico Douga in Japan, have developed significantly different properties. More alternatives are constantly added, even more can be envisioned – within, alongside or beyond Youtube – by corporations and entrepreneurs, just as much as by artists and (h)activists, and indeed by the users and audiences around the world.
VideoVortex 13 proposes that now is a time to re-engage with a ‘structural’ analysis of online-video culture. By calling for this re-engagement with structural questions and an analysis of ‘assemblages’, we point to the often loose forms of influence between elements, and processes of change at all levels, each not fully determined by the other. However, using this lens we neither aim to confine the analysis to particular theory brands (such as STS/ANT, Post-Marxist or Deleuzian approaches), nor exclude alternative frames of description, cause and effect. Object-oriented approaches are as welcome as relational ones, micro- as welcome as macro-analyses, cultural and aesthetic programs as much as socio-political criticism, critics as well as networkers theorists and practitioners. The notion of assemblage is merely used to open up structural questions, not tied to (over-) structuralist analysis, rather a filter to summon up a certain slicing and engage in common dialogue.
So: How can we analyze and compare assemblages of online video? What new constellations are to be found around the video frame, be it on a social, aesthetical or technical level? How can we describe and understand recent shifts, such as commissioned channels on Youtube or the advent of amateur video in the news sphere? Do specific interfaces, for example, privilege specific forms of content and practices? How can we understand assemblages from different perspectives? Users, for example, still encounter video hosting services in an assemblage with conventional television, bit torrent, websites, and so on – what does this mean? What role do protocols or cultures of use play here? What happens, if we extend the focus of the analysis, for example to the integration into Google or Facebook, or narrow it down, to particular assemblages of one video and its comments, for example?
To ask such questions means to look and think beyond YouTube, as we know it. YouTube itself overhauls its interface and syntax of use, with deeper integration into the Google-Verse, and a shift from user-generated to channel-commissioned content. New software, such as easy to use HTML5-based frameworks, open up new possibilites. At the same time ’TV has overflowed its boundaries’ (FlowTV). The building block of the network-TV-era morphs further into lists, channels, apps and what-have-you, driven by recommendation
engines and personalized profiles. Big players, such as Apple, Google, NetFlix, Hulu, Amazon and Samsung, aim to define the future of a medium once known as television, still unsure whether it knocks at the window from inside the computer, the old living-room-screen, or from within any other gadget nesting in our hands and attention spaces, exploring its way between multimodal split screens and something still worth being called a channel.
The global video-scape, part of a re-assembled media-scape, is negotiated and reconfigured within the spaces opened up by ‘Online-Video ́, ’Web 2.0’, DIY-culture and ‚Post-Network-TV‘. Situated in this dynamic field are: TV-Networks still struggling with their online-strategies but rolling out their content, trying to keep control of TV-tradition; internet-giants trying to translate ‚2.0‘-culture into immediate domination of the field of online-video; some initiatives – carried on by civil-society, open-source culture or endowments – which want to keep the ‚vision‘ in tele-vision; all the rest of society which now – in a similar manner as with the advent of the internet itself – now realize in different ways, that there is no future socializing without a video-component of sorts; micro-social counter- or DIY-cultures producing ‚alternative content‘ – either within their own infrastructures or within pre-existing frames of distribution, sometimes re- floating to the surface of the global media-scape, most notably in large event-driven eruptions such as the Arab Spring or the Occupy-movement, forming assemblies in their own right. These global event-streams also remind us of the ‘real virtuality’ video can have, the close assembly of networked media content with the social spaces of what was once regarded as ‘the public’.
When we look for new methodologies and epistemologies for the unfolding video-grammars, one thing seems to be sure: The online-videosphere in the global videodrome is extensive, socially pervasive and diverse. While we still need to engage in overall mapping of moving-image culture, we also need scenarios for floating-islands of the online-video archipelago of formats, structures, platforms, practices. On the other hand, we have to deepen our understanding of how the grammar of video is shaped by other social, cultural and technological dynamics, formats and protocols, not the least because online video is immersed deeply into techno-capitalism which some qualify as ruled by a ‘cinematic mode of production’. Online-video may ask of us more than ever to look under or beyond the hood of the video-display. Also video assemblages across media-spheres and in time – video-biographies – need our attention: Egyptian or Syrian protestors are seen on CNN or Al Jazeera, set-top boxes stream Democracy Now along Fox-News, and videos get re- embedded and re-annotated in teaching platforms such as Sophie, Scalar and MediaThread, or in sub-curated diaries such as Facebook Timelines.
What has become of the so-called West after the Cold War? Why hasn’t the West simply become “form... more What has become of the so-called West after the Cold War? Why hasn’t the West simply become “former,” as has its supposed counterpart, the “former East”? In this book, artists, thinkers, and activists explore the repercussions of the political, cultural, and economic events of 1989 on both art and the contemporary. The culmination of an eight-year curatorial research experiment, Former West imagines a world beyond our immediate condition.
The writings, visual essays, and conversations in Former West—more than seventy diverse contributions with global scope—unfold a tangled cartography far more complex than the simplistic dichotomy of East vs. West. In fact, the Cold War was a contest not between two ideological blocs but between two variants of Western modernity. It is this conceptual “Westcentrism” that a “formering” of the West seeks to undo.
The contributions revisit contemporary debates through the lens of a “former West.” They rethink conceptions of time and space dominating the legacy of the 1989–1990 revolutions in the former East, and critique historical periodization of the contemporary. The contributors map the political economy and social relations of the contemporary, consider the implications of algorithmic cultures and the posthuman condition, and discuss notions of solidarity—the difficulty in constructing a new “we” despite migration, the refugee crisis, and the global class recomposition. Can art institute the contemporary it envisions, and live as if it were possible?
Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989 is edited by curator Maria Hlavajova and writer and curator Simon Sheikh. Visual introductions to book chapters are curated by Maria Hlavajova and Kathrin Rhomberg.
Contributors include: Nancy Adajania, Edit András, Athena Athanasiou, Zygmunt Bauman, Dave Beech, Brett Bloom, Rosi Braidotti, Susan Buck-Morss, Campus in Camps, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Chto Delat?/What is to be done?, Jodi Dean, Angela Dimitrakaki, Dilar Dirik, Marlene Dumas, Keller Easterling, Okwui Enwezor, Charles Esche, Silvia Federici, Mark Fisher, Federica Giardini and Anna Simone, Boris Groys, Gulf Labor Coalition, Stefano Harney, Sharon Hayes, Brian Holmes, Tung-Hui Hu, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Sami Khatib, Delaine Le Bas, Boaz Levin and Vera Tollmann, Isabell Lorey, Sven Lütticken, Ewa Majewska, Artemy Magun, Suhail Malik, Teresa Margolles, Achille Mbembe, Laura McLean, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Sandro Mezzadra, Walter D. Mignolo, Aernout Mik, Angela Mitropoulos, Rastko Močnik, Nástio Mosquito, Rabih Mroué, Pedro Neves Marques, Peter Osborne, Matteo Pasquinelli, Andrea Phillips, Nina Power, Vijay Prashad, Gerald Raunig, Irit Rogoff, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Naoki Sakai, Rasha Salti, Francesco Salvini, Christoph Schlingensief, Georg Schöllhammer, Susan Schuppli, Andreas Siekmann, Jonas Staal, Hito Steyerl, Mladen Stilinović, Paulo Tavares, Trịnh T. Minh-Hà, Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor, Marina Vishmidt, Marion von Osten, McKenzie Wark, and Eyal Weizman.
Published by BAK, basis actuele kunst and MIT Press, 2016 | Design by Mevis & Van Deursen, Amsterdam | English language | 748 pages | Paperback | ISBN: 9780262533836
Die Planung / A Terv is a magazine for the utilization of the future, now. Die Planung / A Terv p... more Die Planung / A Terv is a magazine for the utilization of the future, now. Die Planung / A Terv partially adopts the role of an utopian operation in the format of a print magazine. Each one of the three issues of the magazine carries a date from the future, 2011, 2036 and 2048, and was pre-released in 2007. These issues are in fact an advance from the future. All contributions are conceived from a future perspective encouraging the emergence of a different reality based on the present circumstances.
2011
No. 25
Trend-oriented, ridiculous, catastrophic, hyper-future (sleek, shiny, flamboyant), camp, out of control, imminence (warfare, fossil energy), delayed (reaction), green at loss, cataclysmic.
Chapters: Life, Sex, Death
(ISBN: 978-963-06-2501-2), 183 Pages
Aspassia Kouzoupi: Perpetual Entelechy; Roland Nolte: How Sustainable is our Energy System?; János Sugár: If We’re So Good, Why Aren’t We Better?; J.A. Tillmann: The Forgetters; Deane Simpson & Jörg Stollmann: The future is now the future is Old; Ferda Kolatan: Instant Bodies (IBs); Peter Kerites: Cyber-Medical Applications Rock Japanese Voice Market on 2011 First Quarter; László Garaczi: 1 brain; Ulrich Gutmair: umma means communism; Martin Burckhardt; Open Letter; Ulrike Feser: expectance crisis; Beatriz Colomina: A House of Ill Repute; Daniela Comani: Beautiful Girl’s; Michaela Melián: A trip to 433 Eros; Rachel Baker: Witness Testimonial by Zabdiel Levi. Google VS The Unplugged Re-enactors Society; Zsófia Bán: Love Is All You Need?; Jason Danziger: Sing Sing; Aaron Mo: Artists and gentrification in London; Balázs Irimiás: Sutra of the Earth Goddess; Vera Tollmann: Again in Berlin; Kathrin Röggla: the right people to talk to; Intercultural Orientation and the RandomRoutines: Save your past in the future!
Editors: Sandra Bartoli, Martin Conrads, Silvan Linden, Katharina Sevic, Polyák Levente
Logo Design & Basic Typographical Concept: Anna Mándoki
Cover & Layout: Silvan Linden
The project is funded by Bipolar German-Hungarian Cultural Projects (an initiative of the German Federal Cultural Foundation) and supported by the Secretariat for Futures Studies (Berlin and Bonn) and nextlab (Budapest).
Die Planung / A Terv is published in Berlin and Budapest.
The proxy, a decoy or surrogate, is today often used to designate a computer server acting as an ... more The proxy, a decoy or surrogate, is today often used to designate a computer server acting as an intermediary for requests from clients. Originating in the Latin procurator, an agent representing others in a court of law, proxies are now emblematic of a post-democratic political age, one increasingly populated by bot militias, puppet states, and communication relays. Thus, the proxy works as a dialectical figure that is woven into the fabric of networks, where action and stance seem to be masked, calculated and remote-controlled. The proxy thrives within a habitat defined by sameness, characterized by constant monitoring of human and non-human actors. This homogeneity comes as a technological precondition for effectively blending in, the proxy emerges as a symptom of our prevalent condition. Considering the current political situation, are proxies needed more than ever, or do proxies rather confirm the status quo?
The publication looks at proxy-politics on both a micro and a macro level, exploring proxies as objects, as well as networks as objects. What is the relation between the molecular and the planetary? How to fathom the computational regime? Yet, whilst being a manifestation of the networked age, thinking like a proxy offers loopholes and strategies for survival within it.
Uploads
An assemblage always has been a cultural form, itself consisting of other assemblages, or what can be viewed as such. Online video vortices such as Youtube, in this perspective, are assemblages of assemblages: Databases, softwares, hardwares, screens, interfaces, protocols, server farms and infrastructures; Videos, titles, different forms of comments, tags, User IDs, hyperlinks, lists and channels; cameras, video producers, filmed objects, frames, uploaders, users and audiences; capital, money flows, corporations, employees, advertisers, property rights, eyeballs and statistics... Youtube as one such agglutination is changing along with cultural formations of video as it is itself, possibly still more than many other acteur, partaking in its reconfigurations. But powerful alternatives, such as Tudou and Youku in China, or Nico Nico Douga in Japan, have developed significantly different properties. More alternatives are constantly added, even more can be envisioned – within, alongside or beyond Youtube – by corporations and entrepreneurs, just as much as by artists and (h)activists, and indeed by the users and audiences around the world.
VideoVortex 13 proposes that now is a time to re-engage with a ‘structural’ analysis of online-video culture. By calling for this re-engagement with structural questions and an analysis of ‘assemblages’, we point to the often loose forms of influence between elements, and processes of change at all levels, each not fully determined by the other. However, using this lens we neither aim to confine the analysis to particular theory brands (such as STS/ANT, Post-Marxist or Deleuzian approaches), nor exclude alternative frames of description, cause and effect. Object-oriented approaches are as welcome as relational ones, micro- as welcome as macro-analyses, cultural and aesthetic programs as much as socio-political criticism, critics as well as networkers theorists and practitioners. The notion of assemblage is merely used to open up structural questions, not tied to (over-) structuralist analysis, rather a filter to summon up a certain slicing and engage in common dialogue.
So: How can we analyze and compare assemblages of online video? What new constellations are to be found around the video frame, be it on a social, aesthetical or technical level? How can we describe and understand recent shifts, such as commissioned channels on Youtube or the advent of amateur video in the news sphere? Do specific interfaces, for example, privilege specific forms of content and practices? How can we understand assemblages from different perspectives? Users, for example, still encounter video hosting services in an assemblage with conventional television, bit torrent, websites, and so on – what does this mean? What role do protocols or cultures of use play here? What happens, if we extend the focus of the analysis, for example to the integration into Google or Facebook, or narrow it down, to particular assemblages of one video and its comments, for example?
To ask such questions means to look and think beyond YouTube, as we know it. YouTube itself overhauls its interface and syntax of use, with deeper integration into the Google-Verse, and a shift from user-generated to channel-commissioned content. New software, such as easy to use HTML5-based frameworks, open up new possibilites. At the same time ’TV has overflowed its boundaries’ (FlowTV). The building block of the network-TV-era morphs further into lists, channels, apps and what-have-you, driven by recommendation
engines and personalized profiles. Big players, such as Apple, Google, NetFlix, Hulu, Amazon and Samsung, aim to define the future of a medium once known as television, still unsure whether it knocks at the window from inside the computer, the old living-room-screen, or from within any other gadget nesting in our hands and attention spaces, exploring its way between multimodal split screens and something still worth being called a channel.
The global video-scape, part of a re-assembled media-scape, is negotiated and reconfigured within the spaces opened up by ‘Online-Video ́, ’Web 2.0’, DIY-culture and ‚Post-Network-TV‘. Situated in this dynamic field are: TV-Networks still struggling with their online-strategies but rolling out their content, trying to keep control of TV-tradition; internet-giants trying to translate ‚2.0‘-culture into immediate domination of the field of online-video; some initiatives – carried on by civil-society, open-source culture or endowments – which want to keep the ‚vision‘ in tele-vision; all the rest of society which now – in a similar manner as with the advent of the internet itself – now realize in different ways, that there is no future socializing without a video-component of sorts; micro-social counter- or DIY-cultures producing ‚alternative content‘ – either within their own infrastructures or within pre-existing frames of distribution, sometimes re- floating to the surface of the global media-scape, most notably in large event-driven eruptions such as the Arab Spring or the Occupy-movement, forming assemblies in their own right. These global event-streams also remind us of the ‘real virtuality’ video can have, the close assembly of networked media content with the social spaces of what was once regarded as ‘the public’.
When we look for new methodologies and epistemologies for the unfolding video-grammars, one thing seems to be sure: The online-videosphere in the global videodrome is extensive, socially pervasive and diverse. While we still need to engage in overall mapping of moving-image culture, we also need scenarios for floating-islands of the online-video archipelago of formats, structures, platforms, practices. On the other hand, we have to deepen our understanding of how the grammar of video is shaped by other social, cultural and technological dynamics, formats and protocols, not the least because online video is immersed deeply into techno-capitalism which some qualify as ruled by a ‘cinematic mode of production’. Online-video may ask of us more than ever to look under or beyond the hood of the video-display. Also video assemblages across media-spheres and in time – video-biographies – need our attention: Egyptian or Syrian protestors are seen on CNN or Al Jazeera, set-top boxes stream Democracy Now along Fox-News, and videos get re- embedded and re-annotated in teaching platforms such as Sophie, Scalar and MediaThread, or in sub-curated diaries such as Facebook Timelines.
The writings, visual essays, and conversations in Former West—more than seventy diverse contributions with global scope—unfold a tangled cartography far more complex than the simplistic dichotomy of East vs. West. In fact, the Cold War was a contest not between two ideological blocs but between two variants of Western modernity. It is this conceptual “Westcentrism” that a “formering” of the West seeks to undo.
The contributions revisit contemporary debates through the lens of a “former West.” They rethink conceptions of time and space dominating the legacy of the 1989–1990 revolutions in the former East, and critique historical periodization of the contemporary. The contributors map the political economy and social relations of the contemporary, consider the implications of algorithmic cultures and the posthuman condition, and discuss notions of solidarity—the difficulty in constructing a new “we” despite migration, the refugee crisis, and the global class recomposition. Can art institute the contemporary it envisions, and live as if it were possible?
Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989 is edited by curator Maria Hlavajova and writer and curator Simon Sheikh. Visual introductions to book chapters are curated by Maria Hlavajova and Kathrin Rhomberg.
Contributors include: Nancy Adajania, Edit András, Athena Athanasiou, Zygmunt Bauman, Dave Beech, Brett Bloom, Rosi Braidotti, Susan Buck-Morss, Campus in Camps, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Chto Delat?/What is to be done?, Jodi Dean, Angela Dimitrakaki, Dilar Dirik, Marlene Dumas, Keller Easterling, Okwui Enwezor, Charles Esche, Silvia Federici, Mark Fisher, Federica Giardini and Anna Simone, Boris Groys, Gulf Labor Coalition, Stefano Harney, Sharon Hayes, Brian Holmes, Tung-Hui Hu, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Sami Khatib, Delaine Le Bas, Boaz Levin and Vera Tollmann, Isabell Lorey, Sven Lütticken, Ewa Majewska, Artemy Magun, Suhail Malik, Teresa Margolles, Achille Mbembe, Laura McLean, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Sandro Mezzadra, Walter D. Mignolo, Aernout Mik, Angela Mitropoulos, Rastko Močnik, Nástio Mosquito, Rabih Mroué, Pedro Neves Marques, Peter Osborne, Matteo Pasquinelli, Andrea Phillips, Nina Power, Vijay Prashad, Gerald Raunig, Irit Rogoff, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Naoki Sakai, Rasha Salti, Francesco Salvini, Christoph Schlingensief, Georg Schöllhammer, Susan Schuppli, Andreas Siekmann, Jonas Staal, Hito Steyerl, Mladen Stilinović, Paulo Tavares, Trịnh T. Minh-Hà, Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor, Marina Vishmidt, Marion von Osten, McKenzie Wark, and Eyal Weizman.
Published by BAK, basis actuele kunst and MIT Press, 2016 | Design by Mevis & Van Deursen, Amsterdam | English language | 748 pages | Paperback | ISBN: 9780262533836
2011
No. 25
Trend-oriented, ridiculous, catastrophic, hyper-future (sleek, shiny, flamboyant), camp, out of control, imminence (warfare, fossil energy), delayed (reaction), green at loss, cataclysmic.
Chapters: Life, Sex, Death
(ISBN: 978-963-06-2501-2), 183 Pages
Aspassia Kouzoupi: Perpetual Entelechy; Roland Nolte: How Sustainable is our Energy System?; János Sugár: If We’re So Good, Why Aren’t We Better?; J.A. Tillmann: The Forgetters; Deane Simpson & Jörg Stollmann: The future is now the future is Old; Ferda Kolatan: Instant Bodies (IBs); Peter Kerites: Cyber-Medical Applications Rock Japanese Voice Market on 2011 First Quarter; László Garaczi: 1 brain; Ulrich Gutmair: umma means communism; Martin Burckhardt; Open Letter; Ulrike Feser: expectance crisis; Beatriz Colomina: A House of Ill Repute; Daniela Comani: Beautiful Girl’s; Michaela Melián: A trip to 433 Eros; Rachel Baker: Witness Testimonial by Zabdiel Levi. Google VS The Unplugged Re-enactors Society; Zsófia Bán: Love Is All You Need?; Jason Danziger: Sing Sing; Aaron Mo: Artists and gentrification in London; Balázs Irimiás: Sutra of the Earth Goddess; Vera Tollmann: Again in Berlin; Kathrin Röggla: the right people to talk to; Intercultural Orientation and the RandomRoutines: Save your past in the future!
Editors: Sandra Bartoli, Martin Conrads, Silvan Linden, Katharina Sevic, Polyák Levente
Logo Design & Basic Typographical Concept: Anna Mándoki
Cover & Layout: Silvan Linden
The project is funded by Bipolar German-Hungarian Cultural Projects (an initiative of the German Federal Cultural Foundation) and supported by the Secretariat for Futures Studies (Berlin and Bonn) and nextlab (Budapest).
Die Planung / A Terv is published in Berlin and Budapest.
The publication looks at proxy-politics on both a micro and a macro level, exploring proxies as objects, as well as networks as objects. What is the relation between the molecular and the planetary? How to fathom the computational regime? Yet, whilst being a manifestation of the networked age, thinking like a proxy offers loopholes and strategies for survival within it.
An assemblage always has been a cultural form, itself consisting of other assemblages, or what can be viewed as such. Online video vortices such as Youtube, in this perspective, are assemblages of assemblages: Databases, softwares, hardwares, screens, interfaces, protocols, server farms and infrastructures; Videos, titles, different forms of comments, tags, User IDs, hyperlinks, lists and channels; cameras, video producers, filmed objects, frames, uploaders, users and audiences; capital, money flows, corporations, employees, advertisers, property rights, eyeballs and statistics... Youtube as one such agglutination is changing along with cultural formations of video as it is itself, possibly still more than many other acteur, partaking in its reconfigurations. But powerful alternatives, such as Tudou and Youku in China, or Nico Nico Douga in Japan, have developed significantly different properties. More alternatives are constantly added, even more can be envisioned – within, alongside or beyond Youtube – by corporations and entrepreneurs, just as much as by artists and (h)activists, and indeed by the users and audiences around the world.
VideoVortex 13 proposes that now is a time to re-engage with a ‘structural’ analysis of online-video culture. By calling for this re-engagement with structural questions and an analysis of ‘assemblages’, we point to the often loose forms of influence between elements, and processes of change at all levels, each not fully determined by the other. However, using this lens we neither aim to confine the analysis to particular theory brands (such as STS/ANT, Post-Marxist or Deleuzian approaches), nor exclude alternative frames of description, cause and effect. Object-oriented approaches are as welcome as relational ones, micro- as welcome as macro-analyses, cultural and aesthetic programs as much as socio-political criticism, critics as well as networkers theorists and practitioners. The notion of assemblage is merely used to open up structural questions, not tied to (over-) structuralist analysis, rather a filter to summon up a certain slicing and engage in common dialogue.
So: How can we analyze and compare assemblages of online video? What new constellations are to be found around the video frame, be it on a social, aesthetical or technical level? How can we describe and understand recent shifts, such as commissioned channels on Youtube or the advent of amateur video in the news sphere? Do specific interfaces, for example, privilege specific forms of content and practices? How can we understand assemblages from different perspectives? Users, for example, still encounter video hosting services in an assemblage with conventional television, bit torrent, websites, and so on – what does this mean? What role do protocols or cultures of use play here? What happens, if we extend the focus of the analysis, for example to the integration into Google or Facebook, or narrow it down, to particular assemblages of one video and its comments, for example?
To ask such questions means to look and think beyond YouTube, as we know it. YouTube itself overhauls its interface and syntax of use, with deeper integration into the Google-Verse, and a shift from user-generated to channel-commissioned content. New software, such as easy to use HTML5-based frameworks, open up new possibilites. At the same time ’TV has overflowed its boundaries’ (FlowTV). The building block of the network-TV-era morphs further into lists, channels, apps and what-have-you, driven by recommendation
engines and personalized profiles. Big players, such as Apple, Google, NetFlix, Hulu, Amazon and Samsung, aim to define the future of a medium once known as television, still unsure whether it knocks at the window from inside the computer, the old living-room-screen, or from within any other gadget nesting in our hands and attention spaces, exploring its way between multimodal split screens and something still worth being called a channel.
The global video-scape, part of a re-assembled media-scape, is negotiated and reconfigured within the spaces opened up by ‘Online-Video ́, ’Web 2.0’, DIY-culture and ‚Post-Network-TV‘. Situated in this dynamic field are: TV-Networks still struggling with their online-strategies but rolling out their content, trying to keep control of TV-tradition; internet-giants trying to translate ‚2.0‘-culture into immediate domination of the field of online-video; some initiatives – carried on by civil-society, open-source culture or endowments – which want to keep the ‚vision‘ in tele-vision; all the rest of society which now – in a similar manner as with the advent of the internet itself – now realize in different ways, that there is no future socializing without a video-component of sorts; micro-social counter- or DIY-cultures producing ‚alternative content‘ – either within their own infrastructures or within pre-existing frames of distribution, sometimes re- floating to the surface of the global media-scape, most notably in large event-driven eruptions such as the Arab Spring or the Occupy-movement, forming assemblies in their own right. These global event-streams also remind us of the ‘real virtuality’ video can have, the close assembly of networked media content with the social spaces of what was once regarded as ‘the public’.
When we look for new methodologies and epistemologies for the unfolding video-grammars, one thing seems to be sure: The online-videosphere in the global videodrome is extensive, socially pervasive and diverse. While we still need to engage in overall mapping of moving-image culture, we also need scenarios for floating-islands of the online-video archipelago of formats, structures, platforms, practices. On the other hand, we have to deepen our understanding of how the grammar of video is shaped by other social, cultural and technological dynamics, formats and protocols, not the least because online video is immersed deeply into techno-capitalism which some qualify as ruled by a ‘cinematic mode of production’. Online-video may ask of us more than ever to look under or beyond the hood of the video-display. Also video assemblages across media-spheres and in time – video-biographies – need our attention: Egyptian or Syrian protestors are seen on CNN or Al Jazeera, set-top boxes stream Democracy Now along Fox-News, and videos get re- embedded and re-annotated in teaching platforms such as Sophie, Scalar and MediaThread, or in sub-curated diaries such as Facebook Timelines.
The writings, visual essays, and conversations in Former West—more than seventy diverse contributions with global scope—unfold a tangled cartography far more complex than the simplistic dichotomy of East vs. West. In fact, the Cold War was a contest not between two ideological blocs but between two variants of Western modernity. It is this conceptual “Westcentrism” that a “formering” of the West seeks to undo.
The contributions revisit contemporary debates through the lens of a “former West.” They rethink conceptions of time and space dominating the legacy of the 1989–1990 revolutions in the former East, and critique historical periodization of the contemporary. The contributors map the political economy and social relations of the contemporary, consider the implications of algorithmic cultures and the posthuman condition, and discuss notions of solidarity—the difficulty in constructing a new “we” despite migration, the refugee crisis, and the global class recomposition. Can art institute the contemporary it envisions, and live as if it were possible?
Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989 is edited by curator Maria Hlavajova and writer and curator Simon Sheikh. Visual introductions to book chapters are curated by Maria Hlavajova and Kathrin Rhomberg.
Contributors include: Nancy Adajania, Edit András, Athena Athanasiou, Zygmunt Bauman, Dave Beech, Brett Bloom, Rosi Braidotti, Susan Buck-Morss, Campus in Camps, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Chto Delat?/What is to be done?, Jodi Dean, Angela Dimitrakaki, Dilar Dirik, Marlene Dumas, Keller Easterling, Okwui Enwezor, Charles Esche, Silvia Federici, Mark Fisher, Federica Giardini and Anna Simone, Boris Groys, Gulf Labor Coalition, Stefano Harney, Sharon Hayes, Brian Holmes, Tung-Hui Hu, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Sami Khatib, Delaine Le Bas, Boaz Levin and Vera Tollmann, Isabell Lorey, Sven Lütticken, Ewa Majewska, Artemy Magun, Suhail Malik, Teresa Margolles, Achille Mbembe, Laura McLean, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Sandro Mezzadra, Walter D. Mignolo, Aernout Mik, Angela Mitropoulos, Rastko Močnik, Nástio Mosquito, Rabih Mroué, Pedro Neves Marques, Peter Osborne, Matteo Pasquinelli, Andrea Phillips, Nina Power, Vijay Prashad, Gerald Raunig, Irit Rogoff, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Naoki Sakai, Rasha Salti, Francesco Salvini, Christoph Schlingensief, Georg Schöllhammer, Susan Schuppli, Andreas Siekmann, Jonas Staal, Hito Steyerl, Mladen Stilinović, Paulo Tavares, Trịnh T. Minh-Hà, Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor, Marina Vishmidt, Marion von Osten, McKenzie Wark, and Eyal Weizman.
Published by BAK, basis actuele kunst and MIT Press, 2016 | Design by Mevis & Van Deursen, Amsterdam | English language | 748 pages | Paperback | ISBN: 9780262533836
2011
No. 25
Trend-oriented, ridiculous, catastrophic, hyper-future (sleek, shiny, flamboyant), camp, out of control, imminence (warfare, fossil energy), delayed (reaction), green at loss, cataclysmic.
Chapters: Life, Sex, Death
(ISBN: 978-963-06-2501-2), 183 Pages
Aspassia Kouzoupi: Perpetual Entelechy; Roland Nolte: How Sustainable is our Energy System?; János Sugár: If We’re So Good, Why Aren’t We Better?; J.A. Tillmann: The Forgetters; Deane Simpson & Jörg Stollmann: The future is now the future is Old; Ferda Kolatan: Instant Bodies (IBs); Peter Kerites: Cyber-Medical Applications Rock Japanese Voice Market on 2011 First Quarter; László Garaczi: 1 brain; Ulrich Gutmair: umma means communism; Martin Burckhardt; Open Letter; Ulrike Feser: expectance crisis; Beatriz Colomina: A House of Ill Repute; Daniela Comani: Beautiful Girl’s; Michaela Melián: A trip to 433 Eros; Rachel Baker: Witness Testimonial by Zabdiel Levi. Google VS The Unplugged Re-enactors Society; Zsófia Bán: Love Is All You Need?; Jason Danziger: Sing Sing; Aaron Mo: Artists and gentrification in London; Balázs Irimiás: Sutra of the Earth Goddess; Vera Tollmann: Again in Berlin; Kathrin Röggla: the right people to talk to; Intercultural Orientation and the RandomRoutines: Save your past in the future!
Editors: Sandra Bartoli, Martin Conrads, Silvan Linden, Katharina Sevic, Polyák Levente
Logo Design & Basic Typographical Concept: Anna Mándoki
Cover & Layout: Silvan Linden
The project is funded by Bipolar German-Hungarian Cultural Projects (an initiative of the German Federal Cultural Foundation) and supported by the Secretariat for Futures Studies (Berlin and Bonn) and nextlab (Budapest).
Die Planung / A Terv is published in Berlin and Budapest.
The publication looks at proxy-politics on both a micro and a macro level, exploring proxies as objects, as well as networks as objects. What is the relation between the molecular and the planetary? How to fathom the computational regime? Yet, whilst being a manifestation of the networked age, thinking like a proxy offers loopholes and strategies for survival within it.