Subject-making is profoundly aesthetic. In the current moment, of data-intensive cultures and identity wars, the subjects that are made stem from machine learning techniques that engage aesthetics differently, nonetheless profoundly. My talk will focus on subjects of data abstractions, poetics of idealisation and aesthetic recognition.
In this work, we propose to study a series of Argentine digital literature productions that problematize the idea of property in language. We refer to practices of appropriation and expropriation that –through copy-paste, plagiarism, remix, collage and work with “ready made”, among other operations that the digital medium facilitates - question the triad author-authority-property. We consider that, in this questioning of the traditional conception of authorship, these productions also allow us to read an “epochal slippage” within the category of subject (Bürger 2001), as they propose alternative forms of subjectivity.In the general process of virtualization of subjects and their signifying practices, we consider that appropriationist writing practices propose particular modes of subjectivation. In this sense, we are interested in asking ourselves if it is possible to think in terms of mediated subjectivities, “halfway” –between human agency and the machine–, turned into specters or turned into a “medium”, due to their various links with technology. That is to say multiplied subjectivities, as they "make others speak" and withdraw from the expression of their own, in a questioning of the notions of ownership and authorship. Productions that bring multiple voices into play, while giving place to them in a single modulation. Regarding these practices, we are interested in raising the question of whether or not they operate as resistance to the hegemonic meanings of digital culture. In other words, if they manage to escape the binary logics of the technolinguistic standardization systems and the segmentation of profiles, which tend to reduce the subjective to what is offered “to be captured as data” (Kozak).
This digital artwork by Amira Hanafi was commissioned by the Centre for Applied Human Rights at the University of York, as part of the Navigating Risk, Managing Security, and Receiving Support research project.
It was made in response to research conducted in five countries (Colombia, Egypt, Indonesia, Kenya, and Mexico), where researchers spoke with human rights defenders around issues of security, wellbeing, and perceptions of ‘human rights defenders’ in their countries.
Reading through these transcribed and anonymized interviews, I was struck by the range and depth of emotions expressed. The speakers’ experiences resonated with me in their resemblance to the emotions I feel as a practicing artist in Egypt. This website translates my reading of these interviews into visual patterns, through a system of classifying sentences by emotions expressed and evoked.
The title of this work (we are fragmented) is taken from the words of one of the human rights defenders who participated in the research.
After reading through the interviews that were shared with me, I created a classification system to coincide with the range of emotions I read in the text. I based my classification system on a few popular classification systems. It contains a set of 6 parent emotions, each with 6 subcategories, for a total of 36 classifications.
Reading the interviews again, I recorded my emotional experience by classifying sentences to which I had an emotional reaction, or in which the speaker explicitly expressed an emotion. It was a highly subjective exercise. Ultimately, this website offers personal maps of my reading of the research material, processed through language and emotion.
Alongside my visual interpretation of the research, you can directly access the source material for each classification on this site. Click on any colored circle, and you will see the direct quote from the individual defender on which that classification is based. I hope for this work to give an alternate way of reading through the research shared with me by Juliana Mensah and Alice Nah.
To the Lighthouse is a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf. The novel centres on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920.
Following and extending the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel Proust and James Joyce, the plot of To the Lighthouse is secondary to its philosophical introspection. Cited as a key example of the literary technique of multiple focalization, the novel includes little dialogue and almost no action; most of it is written as thoughts and observations. The novel recalls childhood emotions and highlights adult relationships. Among the book's many tropes and themes are those of loss, subjectivity, the nature of art and the problem of perception.
In 1998, the Modern Library named To the Lighthouse No. 15 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 2005, the novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels since 1923.
(Source: Wikipedia Entry on To the Lighthouse)
Poetracking is a work of digital literature created by three students respectively studying graphic design, digital technologies and journalism. It was developed during the Erasmus intensive program “Digital Literature” organised by Philippe Bootz and held in Madrid in 2014. Poetracking's homepage encourages you to draw a tree within the interface by using a simple drawing software, providing built-in tools such as colour and line width. Shortly after your drawing is finished, a poem appears on the screen. Then, after a while, the poem disappears and you are redirected to a database in which all previous drawings and poems are stored, including your newly generated poem. As innocent and simple as it may look, this project draws in fact from the Baum personality test (sometimes called tree test) created by psychoanalyst Charles Koch, which is meant to bring out a patient's main personality traits and emotions by analysing the way he or she represents a tree on a sheet of paper. By closely examining the drawing, its shape, its position on the white blank space, its colours and the thickness of its lines, as well as some characteristic elements of the tree itself, the psychologist is able to get information on the patient's behaviour and his/her relationship with others. For instance, small trunks symbolize introversion and low self-esteem, while large trunks imply strength, higher self-esteem and vitality. In several respects, however, Poetracking misappropriates the original Baum test. By not providing any context or explanation, it twists the actions of the user who unknowingly generates a poem based on the analysis of his/her personality. This result is generated by simultaneously comparing the three tools that have been used (colours, line width and position on the page), all of which are linked to keywords through a combinatory process. But the profiling process no longer is accurate, since the Baum test parameters are reduced to three only. Since the parameters are oversimplified, the Baum test ends up misappropriated and much more minimalistic in the way data is treated, since the drawing is no longer analysed and interpreted extensively. Therefore, the profile given to the patient is reduced to just a few keywords. By highlighting the weaknesses of the Baum test, Poetracking was designed to point out how subjective it can be. By keeping all previously generated profiles in a database and making them available to all users, Poetracking also aims at denouncing tracking systems which analyse our tastes and preferences and try profiling every aspect of our life while we're browsing the internet or using our smartphone. The software is unable to completely track the user's intentions, which gives it another dimension: he or she could decide to ignore the rules and draw anything but a tree, thus being free to experiment with the software and bring out all its poetic potential.
A Connected Room of One’s Own is an insightful essay about intimacy, about the spaces of privacy and the Internet; a book which sets out to ponder the challenges new online habits and customs pose to creativity, politics, and the management of our personal identities. It brings a broad range of disciplines to the discussion –from anthropology and sociology to philosophy and politics– certain to be of interest to researchers working in the fields of online culture, feminism and identity/cultural studies.
Advancements in social/participatory media and electronic networking technologies help bring to focus the complex interplay between aesthetics and politics common to all modern community interaction. Historically speaking, few other media formats have transformed social frameworks as acutely as contemporary online networks have. On one level, the diverse communities and social aggregates derived from such technologies seem to follow many of modernity’s more radical ideological critiques of what the philosopher Robert P. Pippen identifies specifically as “bourgeois subjectivity,” re-imagining voice and identity as collective formations to be culled from the cultural and political margins of the state. Distinct, however, from these prior revisionary challenges to cultural and social production, digital “network relations,” with their emphases on convergence over conflict, performance over practice, critically re-situate the traditional modern dialectic between individual and collective modes of agency that has dominated ideologico-political argument for the past century.
My paper aims to analyze how advances in new social media technologies continue to offer a poignant critique of the bourgeois subjectivity, while at the same time challenging traditional communal/collective modes of interaction as its primary ideologico-political alternative. Pippen, one of America’s pre-eminent writers on German idealism, reminds us that philosophical debates concerning the autonomy of the modern subject from Hegel onward have always approached the concept of individual consciousness through negation, often emphasizing its role as a kind of rationalising counter-structure to the more natural diversity of sensual experience. Even today, he notes, the prevailing “tone of post-Hegelian European thought and culture” remains one of “profound suspicion” concerning the one “notion central to the self-understanding and legitimation of the bourgeois form of life: the free, rational independent, reflective, self-determining subject.” The rise of social media technologies over the last decade, inaugurating what cultural historians and information theorists alike have labelled “Web 2.0”, can be usefully read within the broader context of western culture’s ongoing argument with subjectivity as a state of being perpetually on the edge of its own dissolution. Yet rather than merely augment earlier intellectual preferences for collective models of socio-political agency, the contemporary community as electronic network, as my paper will demonstrate, reveals strikingly new paradigms of subjectivity specific to informatic culture and its uniquely integrated re-designation of society’s public and private spheres. To help frame these paradigms, as well as relate them conceptually to contemporary examples of revisionary electronic literature/writing, my paper will recall one of screen culture’s more enduring – not to mention, playful – narratives, symptomatic, I argue, of the West’s consistently apprehensive, i.e., “suspicious,” approach to modern subjectivity: the “broken mirror” sketch-routine, popular in many early Hollywood comedies onward from the silent era. In this narrative, two participants dressed identically farcically mimic each other’s gestures face-to-face, while one of them is under the illusion that a mirror is in place, reflecting her image. As the sketch progresses, the deluded participant gradually comes to realise that no reflective surface is, in fact, present; either it was broken previously or it never existed in the first place. Of course, audience members watching the performance are never unaware that the framework in front of the protagonist is actually an open portal, revealing a completely separate subjectivity or identity across the way. The humour in the sketch, however, derives not from the performer’s realisation that the mirror is missing – in other words, not from the deluded subject’s gradual enlightenment, but rather just the opposite: once aware that the mirror is missing, the subject does everything she can do to maintain the illusion that the reflection is continuous, that the person on the other side of the portal is and always has been an image of one’s own self. Similarly, the viewer facing today’s networked screens cannot but realise that the images peering back at her are not her reflection – in fact, bear almost no expressive or existential relationship to her, and instead signify a very different social relationship to the external world. Yet, in order to maintain some semblance of continuity in both the self and its apprehension of the world, it seems necessary to consider (however erroneously) the growing number of networks surrounding us as a kind of reflective surface, revealing in the narratives to follow a uniquely porous sense of social environment, never fully visible, though always present.
(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)
I start from CAPTCHA, those distorted strings of letters set against colors and designs, which we all recognize and rewrite to gain access to web sites. CAPTCHA operate in a complex intersection between commercial and scientific institutions, on the one hand, and concepts of mind and being, on the other. The Turing test is the background supposition of CAPTCHA's claim that recognition and rewriting is the iterative presentation and production of a singular human self. It is iterative and weak, in that it must be repeated and rewritten, and in that it is open to failure and misrecognition. It is singular and productive in that each test ties to an event that can be leveraged commercially - as in the reCAPTCHA project or (I argue) in related "distributed work" programs such as the Amazon Mechanical Turk - and in that the "weak performativity" couples the test to a range of net activities on the part of a speaking subject. (I contrast this to the traditional linguistic "shifters," and instead approach the subject in terms of a Kleinian "psychoanalytic graphology.")
(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)
This study examines how themes, conventions and concepts in Gothic discourses are remediated or developed in selected works of contemporary interactive fiction. These works, which are wholly text-based and proceed via command line input from a player, include Nevermore, by Nate Cull (2000), Anchorhead, by Michael S. Gentry (1998), Madam Spider’s Web, by Sara Dee (2006) and Slouching Towards Bedlam, by Star C. Foster and Daniel Ravipinto (2003). The interactive fictions are examined using a media-specific, in-depth analytical approach.
Gothic fiction explores the threats which profoundly challenge narrative subjects, and so may be described as concerned with epistemological, ideological and ontological boundaries. In the interactive fictions these boundaries are explored dually through the player’s traversal (that is, progress through a work) and the narrative(s) produced as a result of that traversal. The first three works in this study explore the vulnerabilities related to conceptions of human subjectivity. As an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem “The Raven,” Nevermore, examined in chapter one, is a work in which self-reflexivity extends to the remediated use of the Gothic conventions of ‘the unspeakable’ and ‘live burial’ which function in Poe’s poem. In chapter two, postmodern indeterminacy, especially with regard to the tensions between spaces and subjective boundaries, is apparent in the means through which the trope of the labyrinth is redesigned in Anchorhead, a work loosely based on H. P. Lovecraft’s terror fiction. In the fragmented narratives produced via traversal of Madam Spider’s Web, considered in chapter three, the player character’s self-fragmentation, indicated by the poetics of the uncanny as well as of the Gothic-grotesque, illustrates a destabilized conception of the human subject which reveals a hidden monster within, both for the player character and the player. Finally, traversal of Slouching Towards Bedlam, analyzed in chapter four, produces a series of narratives which function in a postmodern, recursive fashion to implicate the player in the viral infection which threatens the decidedly posthuman player character. This viral entity is metaphorically linked to Bram Stoker’s vampire, Dracula. As it is the only work in the study to present a conception of posthuman subjectivity, Slouching Towards Bedlam more specifically aligns with the subgenre ‘cybergothic,’ and provides an illuminating contrast to the other three interactive fictions.
In the order in which I examine them, these works exemplify a postmodern development of the Gothic which increasingly marries fictional indeterminacy to explicit formal effects, both during interaction and in the narratives produced.
(Source: Author's dissertation abstract)
"In this hypertext, I interrogate the language, imagery, and ideologies of cosmetics advertisements and related texts. Hypertext as a form lends itself to unorthodox juxtapositions, particularly through linkages based on associative logic (e.g., metaphors, puns). I invoke the feminist understanding that "The Personal Is Political," combining autobiographical reflections with an analysis of the discourse and industry of cosmetics. The personal dimension includes elements from my unconscious (following in the Surrealist tradition of automatic writing).
"The political dimension includes an examination of the political economy of beauty. Both levels include many kinds of images, such as family photographs, cosmetics advertisements, images from cosmetics industry journals, and images from books on makeovers and modeling. These elements are juxtaposed, sometimes in conversation, sometimes in "collision," to borrow a term Sergei Eisenstein uses to describe his method of montage in film. I do not approach my investigation of subjectivity, media messages, and political economy directly through theoretical analysis, but indirectly, through associative connections (reasoning through dream logic). In this text, I use the analogy of the cosmetics "makeover" as the frame that holds together my information. I take the conventions of the beauty makeover and apply them to the face, to the self (identity, experience), and to society as a whole. For each "step" of the makeover, I address both the literal instructions for making over a woman's face, as well as more figurative applications that come through reading this makeover process metaphorically. The thematic focus of the work is rooted in my urge to rethink the social--I ask, through the construction of this polyvalent (hyper)text: can we begin to invent a materially grounded utopian vision through the lens of contemporary female beauty?"
(Source: 2002 State of the Arts gallery)
