control

“And one should understand tact, not in the common sense of the tactile, but in the sense of knowing how to touch without touching, without touching too much, where touching is already too much.” Jacques Derrida

A “hasty conclusion”, perhaps, as stated by Derrida, yet, one that was (and still is) able to cause an intense discussion among philosophers. In his questioning of touch, Derrida draws on Jean Luc Nancy’s philosophy of touch, particularly on the latter’s paradox of intangible tangibility, as a way to explore a slightly different meaning of the verb haptein (to be able to touch, to grab, to attach, to fasten), but also meaning “to hold back, to stop” (Nancy [2003]: 2008, 15).

By contrast, the intensification of research media devices that summon tactile/haptic functions, along with efforts to increase tangibility in the Human-Machine Interface (Gallace & Spence: 2014, 162), are often attached to literalizations and instrumentalizations of touch and gesture that seem to obliviate a long tradition in philosophy dedicated to these aporias. First, by representing touch and gesture as a superficial contact; second, by making promises of presence, transparency and intimacy that often resemble a fetishised and ancestral need of direct access to knowledge by means of tactility.

Calling attention to the non-superficiality of touch and gesture, there is evidence of a branch of digital literary works particularly concerned with multisensory perception in digital multimodal environments. Making use of a contercultural and metamedial poetics largely influenced by early avantgarde artistic proposals, these works enable us to question the ways we read and write in digital interfaces by means of another paradox: an intended loss of grasp in order to raise awareness.

Concerning digital interfaces’ transparency and ubiquity, Lori Emerson states that “[a]ll of these interfaces share a common goal underlying their designs: to efface the interface altogether and so also efface our ability to read, let alone write, the interface, definitely turning us into consumers rather than producers of content.” (Emerson: 2014, 1) Still, for Emerson there is some light at the end of the tunnel, namely by means of this “growing body of digital literature” that courts “difficulty, defamiliarization, and glitch as antidotes (…) against what ubicomp has become” (id.: 2), the “nearly pervasive multi-touch interface” included. (id.: 4) Such “antidotes” can be resumed to the aforementioned loss of grasp (for instance, glitch as a visual loss of grasp), a necessary

condition in order to raise awareness. However, taking into account specific materialities of digital devices, in spite of a continuity of disruptive operations of estrangement, we may ask what are the differences between previous understandings of “loss of grasp” and the ones enabled by digitality.

Loss of Grasp is also the title of a digital literary work of art, created by Serge Bouchardon and Vincent Volckaert (2010). Briefly described by its authors as “an online digital creation about the notions of grasp and control”, Loss of Grasp is an interactive narrative featuring a character who paradoxically loses grasp as he tries to have a grip on his life. Serving as a metaphor for the ways we tend to see functionality and transparency (for instance in digital multimodal environments), the subject is led towards a gradual state of awareness that only becomes possible by a total loss of grasp.

I argue that close-readings of such works of digital literature may help us to better understand what are the consequences of touch and gesture in contact with digital interfaces.

This paper will explore subversive practices of electronic literature as contexts for the experience of agency within various systems of control. Through close readings of covert communication practices in prison narratives alongside the works like Rob Wittig’s Netprovs, Richard Holeton’s slideshow narratives, Nick Montfort’s !#, and Darius Kazemi’s “Tiny Subversions,” this essay will consider poetic interventions against media culture, professionalization, and cybernetic systems in relation to the codes, mnemonic devices, and flights of fancy used by political prisoners and POWs to maintain identity against isolation, torture, and manipulation. In particular, this paper will touch down on the question of “the ends of electronic literature” by exploring the interrelational aspect of writing as a process that is primarily concerned with the creator imagining an other (an “author” reaching out to a “reader,” in the conventional literary sense) and the user finding meaning in the text (the reader having an encounter with the work of literature).

In addition to the mediation of relationships via the text, this paper will also consider various boundaries constructed to restrict communication (imposed by social, technical, and penal systems that attempt to discipline subjects and restrict communication to official channels and approved topics). Further, this paper will consider the micro-practices of resistance, the absurd logics of creativity, eccentricity, and interpretation that generate pleasure for the individual reader while guarding subjective practices from what Lyotard has called “the inhuman.” The goal of this paper is to consider (via electronic literature) “the human” as that which is not only essentially without essence (to paraphrase Stiegler), but which actively strives to maintain individuation against control.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

This paper examines scopic and attentional regimes that are present in surveillance systems and practices in contemporary cities. I intend to show that such regimes involve not only control procedures, but also pleasure circuits, updating the interplay between surveillance and spectacle in contemporary culture. Three fields of research will be prioritized: the incorporation of video surveillance in public and semi-public spaces, the production and distribution of amateur images, and the cartographic information systems of visualization of urban space.

Under consumer culture, self-surveillance—the act of submitting your own data to corporate interests like Amazon, TiVo or Facebook—becomes a revolutionary gesture of participation (Andrejevic 15)…or so corporate interests would have us believe. With the advent of social media, we now log our own data in the service of multinationals as we
seemingly embrace the arrival of a technological Big Brother. Several digital media artists, however, have turned the tables or, more exactly, the camera on themselves by using digital media and self-surveillance as a means of creating new digital narratives.

Exploring the ubiquitous potential of surveillance technologies as a medium of self-expression, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Surveillance Camera Players, Manu Luksch, Jill Magid, Jordan Crandall, Elahi Hasan, and Paula Roush have all produced site-specific works that use guerrilla tactics to repossess all-seeing cameras for aesthetic ends. In addition, lifestreamers, webcammers and social activists use the potentialities of self-surveillance to reveal and to disguise, to network and to disconnect as a way of both communicating and avoiding detection. Tele_Trust by Karen Mancel and Hermen Maat, for example, is a veil-like object that receives and transmits messages about trust, connectivity and the dichotomy of private/public space from interactors who touch the wearer.

The OCCUPY Movement uses a blend of social media, self-surveillance and official+unofficial media footage to keep their politics in the public consciousness, but to keep themselves out of the public eye. To succeed, the OCCUPY Movement must
be present and situated, but anonymous and dynamic. Embracing the philosophy that the revolution will not be televised (because once it is it is subsumed within what Guy Debord called the Society of the Spectacle), #OCCUPY offers new strategies for networked organizing, collaborative creation and collective aesthetic acts.

This paper will explore how participation in public space challenges the installed public cameras and formal systems of control precisely by using the politics of location to speak against official discourses. Returning collective action and public narrative to town squares, these groups and artists are reinventing narrative for a digital culture generation. The spontaneous uprising of collective, multilinear narratives in global public space has rendered the Square the new center of participatory art and this action a roadmap to where future storytellers and technologies might take us.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)

A work-in-progress presentation of a performance project. Abraham's describes a scripted telematic performance in which constraints and interface limitations fme the performance. She describes her work as performance to do research, and research as a medium and playground. Always an exercise in self-organization--the performances are not directed. The performance is a multilingual one about communication, miscommunication, and translation.