fabric | rblg

Three years ago we published a post by Nicolas Nova about Salvator Allende's project Cybersyn. A trial to build a cybernetic society (including feedbacks from the chilean population) back in the early 70ies.

Here is another article and picture piece about this amazing projetc on Frieze. You'll need to buy the magazione to see the pictures, though!

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Via Frieze

Phograph of Cybersyn, Salvador Allende's attempt to create a 'socialist internet, decades ahead of its time'

This is a tantalizing glimpse of a world that could have been our world. What we are looking at is the heart of the Cybersyn system, created for Salvador Allende’s socialist Chilean government by the British cybernetician Stafford Beer. Beer’s ambition was to ‘implant an electronic nervous system’ into Chile. With its network of telex machines and other communication devices, Cybersyn was to be – in the words of Andy Beckett, author of Pinochet in Piccadilly (2003) – a ‘socialist internet, decades ahead of its time’.

Capitalist propagandists claimed that this was a Big Brother-style surveillance system, but the aim was exactly the opposite: Beer and Allende wanted a network that would allow workers unprecedented levels of control over their own lives. Instead of commanding from on high, the government would be able to respond to up-to-the-minute information coming from factories. Yet Cybersyn was envisaged as much more than a system for relaying economic data: it was also hoped that it would eventually allow the pop­u­la­tion to instantaneously communicate its feelings about decisions the government had taken.

In 1973, General Pinochet’s cia-backed military coup brutally overthrew Allende’s government. The stakes couldn’t have been higher. It wasn’t only that a new model of socialism was defeated in Chile; the defeat immediately cleared the ground for Chile to become the testing-ground for the neoliberal version of capitalism. The military takeover was swiftly followed by the widespread torture and terrorization of Allende’s supporters, alongside a massive programme of privatization and de-regulation. One world was destroyed before it could really be born; another world – the world in which there is no alternative to capitalism, our world, the world of capitalist realism – started to emerge.

There’s an aching poignancy in this image of Cybersyn now, when the pathological effects of communicative capitalism’s always-on cyberblitz are becoming increasingly apparent. Cloaked in a rhetoric of inclusion and participation, semio-capitalism keeps us in a state of permanent anxiety. But Cybersyn reminds us that this is not an inherent feature of communications technology. A whole other use of cybernetic sytems is possible. Perhaps, rather than being some fragment of a lost world, Cybersyn is a glimpse of a future that can still happen.

Via Frieze

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Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland

In his video California Bloodlines (GPS Dozen) (all works 2013), California artist Jesse Sugarmann drives through a bright desert expanse in search of somewhere elusive. The camera is trained on the car’s dashboard and windshield, which are festooned with 12 GPS devices that relegate the dramatic landscape of sand and scrub, distant mountains and azure sky to a removed presence. As he drives, a chorus of robotic voices talk over one another, blurting out contradictory directions (‘Turn left!’, ‘Turn right!’, ‘Re-calculating!’). Sugarmann’s intended destination is California City, from which the artist’s exhibition at Fourteen30 Contemporary took its name: a place real enough to have assigned geo-positioning coordinates, yet not real enough for the dozen devices to reach consensus.

Geographically, California City is the third-largest city in the Golden State. Its 40- square-mile grid in the Mojave Desert was developed in the 1960s in tandem with the California Aqueduct, which would transform the arid terrain into a lush, cosmopolitan oasis, a two-hour drive north of Los Angeles. But when the aqueduct was rerouted to the west, development was abandoned. In the ensuing half-century, a population of 15,000 made California City home, leaving the unfinished infrastructure of sidewalks and roads to be slowly reclaimed by the desert. Today, the outskirts of this unrealized city play host to Air Force weapons testing and off-road motor sports.

Symbolically, the site evidences a kind of regional amnesia, in which the glitz and glamour of Southern California’s main cultural centre allows this also-ran destination to fade from collective memory. But Sugarmann leverages its metaphoric impact for more personal ends, using California City as a stage to contemplate his mother’s worsening Alzheimer’s. This place, which bears the fundamental shape of a city but conspicuously lacks the city itself, becomes an analogue for his mother’s frustrated attempts to recall and organize a past she knows exists, but can’t seem to access.

In a second video, California Bloodlines (Parts 1 and 2), the artist has arrived in California City, or at least one of its desolate cul-de-sacs. Joined by an assistant, Sugarmann performs a series of actions addressing the site’s past, present and the irreconcilable divide between them. Initially, they appear as stewards, attempting to restore the road to working condition. They patch a makeshift bonfire pit left by an off-road after-party, sweep sand off the weather-beaten pavement (as desert winds violently undo their efforts), and spread a new layer of asphalt. But with the appearance of a sand dragster, a vehicle equally at home on sand or tarmac, the site’s present-day activities creep in, creating a confused connection to its past: the duo spreads asphalt on the exterior of the dragster and sets it ablaze.

In California Bloodlines (Parts 1 and 2), Sugarmann interpolates scenes of his own ‘weapons testing’ in California City, drawing square-mile development tracts onto Perspex in liquid napalm and burning them into the surface. These works were displayed in the gallery like production stills or outtakes from the film, each image executed in thick black burn marks and feathery yellow flickers. It’s not hard to connect the geometric patterns of the tract with the mapping of the human brain in neuro-imaging techniques.

Sugarmann’s previous body of work focused almost exclusively on cars – as figurative bodies, ‘vehicles’ for projecting human desire and as ubiquitous monuments to the fact of obsolescence and mortality. With the California City videos, this connection between subjects and their automotive stand-ins is made more powerful by the artist’s equation of the landscape with memory. Here, the internal stage of mental function – or in the case of his mother, dysfunction – is depicted in physical, spatial terms. And, tragically, in the enacted folly of restoring unused roads, he illustrates how that which is forgotten can never be recovered.

John Motley 

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Via #algopop

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By Plummer Fernandez

Love in the time of algorithms by Dan Slater. A book about the online dating industry. I think the title of this book alone makes this relevant to #algopop. 

Also researchers at the University of Iowa are developing an algorithm that much like Netflix, will recommend partners for dating based on data-mining rather than user input. The concept is based on the assumptions that a user’s self-curated profile is not entirely truthful, and that he or she 'may not know themselves well enough to know their own tastes in the opposite sex',  so algorithms could potentially get to know the real you, and your potential partner, through your dating-site browsing habits.

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Via Creative Applications

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Feel Me is a project by Marco Triverio that explores the gap between synchronous and asynchronous communication using our mobile device in attempt to “connect differently” and enrich digital communications. Whereas we draw lines between phone conversations and sms messages, Feel Me looks for space in between that would allow you to be intimate in realtime, non-verbally using touch.

Based on the finding for which communications with a special person are not about content going back and forth but rather about perceiving the presence of the other person on the other side, Feel Me opens a real-time interactive channel.

 

Feel Me first appears to be a text messaging application. When two people are both looking at the conversation they are having, touches on the screen of one side are shown on the other side as small dots. Touching the same spot triggers a small reaction, such as a vibration or a sound, acknowledging that both parts are there at the same time. Feel Me creates a playful link with the person on the other side, opening a channel for a non-verbal and interactive connection.

“Feel Me” was awarded honors at CIID. Marco is currently working as an interaction designer at IDEO.

See also concept development videos below.

Project Page

By fabric | ch

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Last week I published a post about Paranoid Shelter, a recent architectural installation by fabric | ch that deals with "smartness", sensing and surveillance. As explained then, this new work can be displayed on its own, as a study on the "contemporary shelter" that articulates the notions of (the nearly fantasized) shelter and the one of surveillance. But this installation or "architectural device" was also created with a collaborative context in mind.

This collaboration, or at lest the first one, was for a theatrical: Globale Surveillance, for which we worked on the scenography and co-initiated the project. This is a project and performance-like theatrical staged by Eric Sadin, a french essayist and writer, based on the books Globale Paranoïa (Éditions Les Petits Matins, 2009) --fiction-- & Surveillance Globale (Climats/Flammarion, 2009) --theory--, both written by him. NOhista (sound and video design) as well as Abigail Fowler (light design) joined the team to finalize the project as well, of course, as the two comedians, Laure Wolf and Gurshad Shaeman.

Rehearsals and opening of Globale Surveillance were last February and March in Caen (France), at the Comédie de Caen-Centre Dramatique National de Normandie (CDN). The play should travel to Paris for the new theater season (12-13) and then hopefully to other cities in France and Switzerland, before, eventually to travel further away and in english.

GLOBALE SURVEILLANCE

About the play (notice from the Comédie de Caen):

We live in a world under surveillance, no one would dispute that point anymore. But what configurations do the new devices of control take, in what forms and in which way are they different from the practices of the last century? How do they alter our relationship to the world and to the others? Do they reach the point of threatening the right to privacy? Globale Surveillance sets up an hyper-monitored zone, within which actors and spectators are subject to quantities of traceability procedures, in this case made visible, conversely many scary mechanisms at work daily that are affected by the phenomenon of invisibility.

Text & staging : Éric Sadin

Scenic architecture, responsive spatial device : fabric | ch

Sound & video design : Nohista

Light design : Abigail Fowler

Comedians : Laure Wolf & Gurshad Shaheman

Paranoid Shelter on stage during the play with the two comedians (Laure Wolf, Gurshad Shaeman), CDN (Centre Dramatique National) / ESAM of Caen in France.

GLOBALE SURVEILLANCE from Bruno Ribeiro on Vimeo.

A compressed preview and short of the play by NOhista.

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Pictures: Nicolas Besson, Patrick Keller, Alban Van Wassenhove

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Co-production: Comédie de Caen-Centre Dramatique National de Normandie (CDN), France; Ecole supérieure d'arts et médias de Caen (ESAM), France.

With the support of: DICRéAM, France; Office Fédérale de la Culture, Swirtzerland; Pro Helvetia, Switzerland; Ville de Lausanne, Switzerland and Etat de Vaud (Switzerland).

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Personal comment:

To my knowledge, Dunne & Raby are among the first who brought (back --as communication was a quite proheminent theme in the architecture of the late 60ies and early 70ies--) this theme of electromagnetism into design and architecture during the late 90ies and early 00oes and study the effect of these invisible landscapes. A lot of work has been done since around this theme then.
More recently, the research of Timo Arnall about elastic space can be mentioned (he just recently published this video about wifi territories, that has been rebloged a lot since).

Via fabric | ch

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Via Rhizome

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By Joshua Noble on Wednesday Feb 16th, 2011

 ”Between the ubiquity of Internet access and the fact that data has no objective tangible form, internet users have long been plagued with the problem of determining the value of the content they are ingesting.” - Zach Gage

Seen in a certain light, the core of technological mediation has always been presence, absence, and distance. Writing established the possibility of presence during absence, arrows and gunpowder created force at a distance, the telephone created presence at distance, and network computing fundamentally altered the nature of being “absent” or “present” to an almost unrecognizable degree. No small surprise then that contemporary “media art” practice seems to return to these questions as being fundamental investigations. The question of what “presence” could be was explored and expanded throughout the dawn of the internet age: Ken Goldberg’s TeleGarden, Eduardo Kac’s concept of Telepresence, Sven Bauer, Heath Bunting, to grab but a few names. Each possibility of a new field of entry, a new method of retaining, mapping, signifying, and storing, opened a rich possibility. Now fast forward fifteen years and ever-presence is exhausting, a nuisance that forever asks and returns only the vague rewards of a slot-machine and seems to fray our sense of privacy, meaningfulness, boundary, and perhaps even self. So how then to artistically respond to this? Exhibit: Zach Gage.

His works are at once sophisticated and remarkably simple, both in presentation and concept in a way that might be recognizable to Joseph Kosuth or Lawrence Weiner, rather than the Baroque conceptual complexity on display in much media art in the 90’s. Computational art or interactive art has generally taken two tacks in dealing with the complexities of technology itself -- unabashed celebration and dystopian anxiety. At either extreme is the grandiose challenge of prediction: this possible or actual relationship to technology will lead to this consequence or benefit. The reality of living with technology is not only simpler but is often much more banal. The most refreshing element of Gage’s work is how it asks us to do nothing more than consider what is. Working with the instantly familiar data sources, Twitter, Google, chat servers, at their simplest, his work often resembles a refreshingly sharp Occam’s Razor taken to notions of the richness of data and networked experience.

His thesis show, “Data”, is an extremely visually and thematically understated installation comprised of several pieces. Small wooden boxes, wires, and simple placards: none of the forced estrangement, hand-waving interactivity, or spectacle that one associates with computer arts. In particular, one of the pieces in the show, Hit Counter stands out as particularly poignant: a simple measurement of the number of times someone has stood in front of the work. Face recognition software is used to keep track of the actual viewers and the number is displayed on an old-fashioned mechanical counter. Gage states “with no other means to judge it, Hit Counter demands to be assigned a worth based solely on its popularity.” But then, Hit Counter is not merely asking to be judged on popularity. It, like so many things in our media culture, is popularity. It’s nothing else, and it’s not any kind of popularity other than actual physical presence; a sharp reminder of the relationship between presence and popularity. No matter how many people hear about it online, what is written about it, what buzz is generated, it’s a simple box that generates a number based on how many unique people have stood in front of it. I’m not sure whether I’m more struck by the concept itself or that I am so struck by the concept as an ontological exercise: something that simply is actual physical presence. It’s odd that it is odd and, in that oddness, it is a stance closer to Sol Lewitt “Sentences on Conceptual Art” than many other re-interpretations of his legacy and ideas. Reformulating the simplest data object imaginable in the simplest terms has a markedly clarifying effect and in clarification is a rare kind of beauty. I spoke with Zach Gage about Hit Counter, as well as his larger practice.

More about it HERE.