Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
*By the way, I have left Belgrade and have now arrived in Torino.  

*Soon the Turinese aspects of my personality will take over, and I'll
start being alert, mystical and subversive, rather than the way I
commonly am in Belgrade:  soulful, woozy and sarcastic.
  

    
*In Europe there seems to be this mostly-electronic habit of people
appending their nations to their names.  Usually they use a two-letter
net abbreviation, in parentheses:  for instance "Iliya Trojnanow
Germany" from that writerly petition up there would read "Iliya
Trojanow (DE)."

*However, there are so many people in Europe now with two national
residences (and I'm guessing that Herr Trojanow there might be one of
them) that even this new, and kind-of-helpful convention seems to be
strained:  nowadays, you get these polyglot self-identifications in
modern Europe, stuff along the line of "Deirdre Gorbachov (RU) (GB),"
or maybe "Dottoressa Paola Josipovic-Haakon" (IT) (HR) (NO).

*Nobody is ever just (EU) in Europe, either.  I'm not really (EU)
myself, but I'm thinking maybe I should be one of the first to try that
out, just to stir the pot a little.
  

    

Isn't this the ten year anniversary of the Viridian design movement's
death or something?  I seem to recall seeing something circulating to
that effect.  

There was a huge chemical spill in southern West Virginia yesterday. 
Fracking is a daily reality.  It's pretty grim.  Is there any way to
design our way out of this mess at this point?
  

    
The Viridian Design movement didn't so much die as declare victory and
move on. Bruce may have a different take - it was his project - but as
an active member of the Viridian "curia" I saw the project as a great
success. Designers and futurists started thinking, talking, and working
around climate change, and the issue found its way into mainstream
conversation, partly because it had been dropped into the formulary of
those professionals who prescribe the zeitgeist.
  

    
Re <79>: I've always argued that "democracy" is difficult, because
there are diverse assumptions around the meaning and the practice that
term suggests. It's often subjective, about protecting MY freedoms,
whereas any real sense of democracy requires a balance... my freedoms
may be constrained by my neighbor's, and how can I say that my liberty
trumps theirs? This is a weakness of the libertarian perspective, I
think: at least based on my observations of libertarians I've known,
they seem to be very focused on their personal exercise of freedom, and
less concerned about the broader social contract.

I'm pondering the idea expressed in that "stand for democracy," that
"surveillance violates the private sphere and compromises freedom of
thought and opinion." I can imagine an NSA wonk responding to this,
saying "...but we're trying to PROTECT your freedom of thought and
opinion." NSA people I've talked to truly don't seem to care about the
content of communication beyond perceived patterns suggesting potential
threats. They don't see themselves as bad guys in the J. Edgar Hoover
sense - gathering intelligence to enhance and preserve power, using it
in ways that are harmful and abusive.

Could there ever be an argument that surveillance is necessary to
protect democracy?

I'm asking the question sincerely, I don't know the answer. The
problem I see with surveillance vs democracy is the lack of
transparency. If our system of governance is truly democratic, then
people have a right to know that they're being watched, and they have a
right to approve that surveillance and, if approved, constrain it as
needed to ensure that it doesn't violate that social contract I
mentioned earlier, which in a truly democratic context should say that
any one of us can have conditional freedom, where the condition is that
my freedom doesn't unreasonably constrain my neighbor's. (This makes
me think about Lenny Bruce's bit on "how the law got started":
http://cellar.org/showthread.php?t=24181)

Given what I just said, I think this is reasonable:

"WE DEMAND THE RIGHT for all people to determine, as democratic
citizens, to what extent their personal data may be legally collected,
stored and processed, and by whom; to obtain information on where their
data is stored and how it is being used; to obtain the deletion of
their data if it has been illegally collected and stored."

Bruce, I'm trying to get behind your sense of dread. Do you think this
is too idealistic?
  

    
*Hey look WELLbeings, it's your place in computer art history.  As
seen from Germany, but in terms of computer art, Germany's a great
place to be seen from.

http://iasl.uni-muenchen.de/links/GCA-VI.1e.html

"During the eighties and the early nineties the participants of
Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) developed an awareness of "virtual
communities" 20 communicating with each other in writing from remote
places without time delay. The free and open software of networks
constantly developed further as well as the abolished division between
readers and authors (see chap. VI.1.2) are cornerstones of the demand
for a free, unrestricted data exchange initiating the start of net
activism. 

"In the nineties activists rejected efforts to restrict web accesses
through censorship, copyright, charges and other barriers. 21

"In 1985 the network The WELL (the Whole Earth ´Lectronic Link)
started in Sausalito/California. Its system was based on a BBS
programme for video conferences (PicoSpan für Unix) offering all
participants access to a database. 22 The WELL was an online proceeding
of the information exchange constituting the core of the "Whole Earth
Catalog". After its first print in autumn 1968 Stewart Brand edited
updates until 1994. This `catalogue in progress´ featured books and
technologies inspiring people living in the Bay Area´ s surroundings of
the commune keepers and the grassroots activism. Buckminster Fuller´s
all-encompassing world view was the main inspiration:

T"he insights of Buckminster Fuller are what initiated this catalog.
23


"Brand, Stewart (ed.): Whole Earth Catalog. Fall 1968: Buckminster
Fuller
(Brand: Earth 1968, p.3).

"The transformation of the print version into The WELL included fora
being open for the readers´ propositions and contributions. The
"network forum" for the communication between the authors of the prints
version was developed further into public conferences and newsgroups.
24

"Following Fred Turner the counterculture of the sixties ´ New
Communalist movement with estimated between two and six thousand
communes in the U.S.A., many of them located in the Bay Area, was
converted in the eighties in "virtual communities" by The WELL. 25

"One of the public conferences on The WELL was the Art Com Electronic
Network (ACEN, see chap. VI.1.2). 26"
  

    
*Here in MEDIUM some worthy souls were scratching their heads over
Viridian.  I don't think any of them believe Viridian was victorious. 
If it was victorious, then carbon dioxide levels would be dropping now.


https://medium.com/5-viridian-years

*Instead of, for instance, fried bats literally falling dead out of
the sky in Australia.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/140108/100000-bat
s-dead-after-heatwave-australia

*I think some of these MEDIUM people are quite right in their
assessment that Viridian ideas seem quite dated now.  There was a
window of cultural opportunity in which that approach might have gone
mainstream, but that time is behind us.  The era after 2008 is very
different, and Viridian doesn't speak to our lived condition any more.

*Vaclav Havel said, "Hope is not the conviction that something will
turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless
of how it turns out."  The World Wide Web didn't turn out the way the
WELL might have imagined in 1985, either, but it was still a good idea
to try it.  It would have been a good idea to try it, even if the WELL
had lasted six weeks.
  

    
> I don't think any of them believe Viridian was victorious.

You can win the battle and lose the war, and vice versa. If the "war"
was against the anthropogenic elements of climate change, Viridian was
a loss... but that war was unwinnable, we were too far along at that
point. If the war was for acknowledgement and visibility, it was a win
somewhat offset by the later success of the propaganda campaign of
denial. By now it's hard to plausibly deny the fact of climate change,
though we're still slow to respond. We'll have to adapt, to promote
resilience. There's already a society of adaptation professionals:
http://adaptationprofessionals.org/
  

    
[Our friend and colleague Pat Lichty wondered why we hadn't brought
art into the discussion so far. I asked him to fire the first shot.
//@jonl]

Jon, Bruce, in reading this year’s State of the World, except for the
mention of 3D printing, which is only a medium/technology, there wasn’t
much mention of art beyond the fading ability of fiction to transcend
the everyday.  There are three musings that I would like to reflect on,
while not definitive signposts, maybe they are breadcrumbs to where
art has situated itself in the world.

I recently read a piece by Julian Stallabrass about the abjection of
the art fair. The art world itself is changing radically, with brick
and mortar eroding to online commerce, with Amazon even becoming an art
dealer.  Stallabrass’ article talks of the vapidity, sexual predation,
and sheer greed evident in today’s exploding art fair environment.  My
favorite incident this year was regarding former enfant terrible Jeff
Deitch, who went from NYC to that LACMA, to be urged back to NYC.  The
incident I refer to was that at Art Basel Miami, he overheard that
Kanye West was in his booth, and seeing a black man in his booth, he
strode up to him and said, “Hi, Kanye!,”only to be surprised that it
was Sean “Diddy” Combs.  The fact that this was one of the biggest
stories of ABM was telling in itself.

The Warholian legends of the super-famous in music and art came to a
head, not with Lady Gaga’s disastrous ArtRave with Jeff Koons, but with
the 6 hour performance at Pace by Jay-Z of “Picasso, Baby” with
performance art doyenne Marina Abramovic.  Don’t get me wrong, I have
worked with organizer Roselee Goldberg myself, and a number of other
figures in this movement of super-constellating.  However, I feel like
Abramovic’ acts of remediation, starting in 2005 with her “Seven Easy
Pieces” at the Guggenheim, have almost turned into artisanal sausage
making for the 1% shoved through a Warhol sausage grinder.  It isn’t
that it’s necessarily bad; but then I feel like the risk that has been
the hallmark of performance artists like Abramovic are being converted
to things like the Abramovic Institute, where she “teaches” others her
processes of endurance.  This puzzles me; let’s leave it at that.

So, what of the activism I was raving about at SxSW last year?  It’s
still there, as groups like The Overpass Light Brigade are organizing
fantastic events of luminous words of dissent at a highway near you.
But art as a form of social agency is in a period of transition, with
my own group/collaborators (depending on the day or who you talk to)
have all but ceased to be effective on their own, due to their fame,
and are resurrecting the RTMark “mutual Fund Portfolio” in the form of
the Yes Men “Action Switchboard” through their Yes Lab – the equivalent
of the activist’s Abramovic Institute.  In addition, Occupy seems to
be visible in name only, and even Creative Time (Nato Thompson being a
person who I venerate) allowed the publication of an abominable project
by Andres Serrano in which he paid homeless people $20 for their signs
for a video project.  I was gobsmacked.

So, you may ask, what do I feel is the art of the Zeitgeist?  I think
that came from Oxford when they termed the word of the year as
“Selfie”.  As I organize a photography exhibition on the subject for
release later this year, I am simultaneously fascinated and horrified
by the contexts under which the narcissistic gaze manifests itself.
Selfies at funerals, selfies while driving, selfies while just about to
be hit by a baseball, selfies the moment before suicide.   I feel like
Western culture has gone from the Kubrick/Roddenberry/Sagan idealism
of reaching for the starsto making sure you look good or get a good lol
before the rising water cancels Jersey Shore or the drone overhead
gets your picture on the Net first.  

Elsewhere in media art, the unprecedented use of the word “post” is
unprecedented to the point where culture is so over itself to the point
that what remains is a “super-hybrid” mélange of unicorns, kittens,
animated GIFs of lactation, and the truckload of memes.  Augmented
Reality is dying as an avant medium, and according to Rhizome, the
Oculus Rift will be 2014’s “medium of the year”, along with the scad of
3D scxanners, completing the fabrication ecosystem.

Perhaps I am being too dystopic, as there are some interesting things
being done with 3D printing, the new art/academic-meme of “social
practice” has a lot of redeeming qualities.  And don’t get me wrong,
there are a lot of good people out there, like the online art
communities (especially London’s Furtherfield), Honor Harger, who Bruce
lamented her leaving Lighthouse UK (and for whom I nearly applied to
be art director), and Creative Time (I know, but everyone plays a
clinker once in a while).

And my final note is sort of a tag cloud: I agree about the Turks, but
Istanbul is still a hot art town, the Chinese (enough said). The new
“Love is Lost” Bowie video, and the Internet Cat Video Festival, which
I’m writing about this year.

Thanks to Jon for asking me to chime in, and we’ll see you at our
panel at SxSW!
  

    
> is due to some level of understanding that electronic communication
> just is not secure.

I worked in the privacy field for roughly a decade and I would say
exactly the opposite.  True, people probably post on Facebook with
some vague understanding that their post is visible to the world, but
what about their shopping habits and medical records?

In the US we have some vague protection of our medical information via
HIPAA, but does that apply to your general shopping at pharmacies or
Target?  The latter can track purchases so closely that they can
predict when certain customers have become pregnant, simply on their
purchase logistics.

How about all the purchases made with your credit card?  How many
people know that their credit card transactions can be reliably used
to predict not just marraige, but divorce?

You're going to buy a car, and you fill out a loan application at the
dealer.  What else do they know about you -- based on buying marketing
information -- that they can use against you when deciding where they
will draw the line on a purchase price?

It's not really a secret, companies like Experian even provide online
services:

<http://www.experian.com/dataselect/dataselect.html>

"[...] draws from the most complete demographic, firmographic,
transactional and behavioral information available to provide powerful
data from one resource."

Where does all that data come from?  Did you give anything to
Experian?  Did you even know they existed?
  

    
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140107-how-i-became-a-cyborg/all

*Have a look at this, if you'd like a glimpse at what the future
politics of implanted devices will look like.  Hint: they'll be almost
as legally messy as the biological function of genuine internal organs.
  

    <scribbled>
  

    
Hmm.  There was a time when a coup in private company was more likely
and probably less visible than one in a government entity wold be, at
least in the US, but that may not be true any more.

The article about Gates' remark in the Atlantic raises the question of
a coup or gradual drift of values in the shadow government that we
might never hear about.  There may simply be no way to know how much
one should trust the Deep State, or how it might be evolving.  


So far as cyborgs go, reading that got me thinking that we are cyborgs
when we drive, right? And the car may be ours, but the ability to
modify it at will and use the modifications in any way we wish is not. 
 However, we haven't even decided why Tommy Johns surgery "incidental"
arm strength augmentation is ok in baseball but steroids are not. 
Getting to semi-consensus about what is allowable is awfully slow, it
seems.
  

    
*Patrick Lichty, I totally get where you're coming from (because I'm
on some of your favorite mailing lists), but dissing Marina Abramovic
is, like, verboten in my household.  Marina can come over and get naked
and lie in my doorway anytime she wants.
  

    
*It's easy to romanticize the Deep State, but once you're inside the
Deep State, it just looks like a bunch of unprincipled, secretive,
armed hoodlums eager to kill you.  Some other player is gonna put a
foot wrong because nobody knows where the boundaries are.  Then it's
gonna be purgeville.

*This guy was such an awesome Turkish Deep State figure that I wrote a
novel about him once.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_Çatlı

*A NATO anti-terror guy by trade, our Mr Catli there.  Like the
daughter  said, after his doings came to light through a literal
accident:  "My father had his own understanding of justice. He was
trying to achieve this justice with his group on behalf of his nation."
  

    
*Whoops, it turns out that Mr Catli's Turkish character-set on
Wikipedia is un-linkable within our Anglophone internet.  How
Deep-State of him.  Try Googling "Abdullah Catli."

*Oh wait!  They'll *know* if you use Google.  Try Binging "Abdullah
Catli," then let us know how that works out for you.
  

    
*Catli's daughter used to have a commemorative website, "catli.com,"
where she publicly idolized her dad's doings, but it's gone 404 now. 
Man, that's the modern condition all over.
  

    
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_%C3%87atl%C4%B1 actually does
work to link the Wikipedia article.
  

    
Not found:
<http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/an-awkward-question-for-ro
bert-gates-has-the-deep-state-taken-over/>

Should be:
<http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/an-awkward-question-for-ro
bert-gates-has-the-deep-state-taken-over/282934/>
  

    
West Virginia's getting a taste of the unfortunately probable future:
http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-west-virginia-chemical-spill-
20140111,0,6604147.story#axzz2qCc0zmDW

http://www.wunderground.com/news/chemical-spill-leaves-thousands-without-water
-20140109

Quality potable water is becoming an increasingly scarce commodity.
We're literally poisoning the well:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/some-states-confirm-water-pollution-from-oil-and-g
as-drilling/

Water privatization - threat, or menace?
http://www.newsweek.com/race-buy-worlds-water-73893

http://www.utne.com/politics/water-privatization-zm0z14jfzros.aspx

Here's a solution - we'll just dump toxins in the ocean. What could go
wrong? http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2014/01/11/18749056.php

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jan/02/plastic-waste-thames-marine
-life-report
  

    
[Here's great input from my pal David Swedlow...]

Okay, so Snowden held a mirror up to the US that should be met with
outrage, but instead is greeted locally by an "oh well" shrug and a
mumble of, "wow, bummer dude." Not to mention the fresh hard-ons
springing up as intel-crazed dictators around the world unfurl the
centerfold of that glossy catalog. Still, the focus on dystopian rants
this year seems a bit one-sided. I admit, this last year I really
looked closely at my unrelenting desire for a techno-utopia and I
finally realized that this fantasy is more of a hinderence than
inspiration. Reading Zoltan Istvan's savior-AI piece
(http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4496550), I realized how this santa
claus vision of all powerful AI wizard sweeping in and solving all the
worlds problems is just a childish wish for a never-land that never has
and never will exist. Istvan wrote "The Transhumanist Wager" which I
haven't read, but suppose I ought to. I am, after all, finally reading
Atlas Shrugged to round out my reading list.

My favorite reads of 2013 have been "AntiFragile" by Nicholas Nassim
Taleb (who beautifully captures our capacity for over-optimism and
self-delusion, while noting that all is not lost if we'll dive headlong
into the harder questions) and "Nexus" and "Crux" by Ramez Naam (who
brings a very welcome fresh breath of air to singularity fiction).

I'm currently reading "Turing's Cathedral" by George Dyson, and I'm
struck by how excited and productive Johnny von Neumann  and crew got
with punchcards, no OS and a whopping 357 multiplications per second.
Even more amazing is just how clearly Johnny realized that the future
problems and questions that we would tackle were unfathomable from his
vantage point. That was nearly 70 years ago, and has already been
pointed out, our inexhaustable capacity to turn technologies of
miraculous connectivity into implements of mass distraction is
gob-smacking.

But time to turn the mirror to a true perpendicular to my line of
sight, taking a hard look at what "you-know-who" is doing about it.

I am somewhat inspired by the "hour of code" project, though, really,
in this day and age, that is woefully inadequate to the task at hand.

The problem with my utopaphilia has always been the "lottery" version
of salvation, in which all my "problems" magically evaporate. I'd like
to stoke the imagination of others, a-la Jason Silva, to envision a
globe-spanning collective of peer-to-peer cooperatives, re-imagining
the self and what it means to "save the world," thankful for the
freedom to drop the top-down solutions from on high and taking up the
challenge closer to home.

How about we re-read Bucky Fuller again, and the idea of the World
Game (now that we actually have the necessary infrastructure) and
challenge each other to filter those ideas through McGonigal's "Reality
is Broken" and Diamandis' "Abundance". I'd like bootstrap some a
mash-up of gaming engines and feedback loops and quantized self and
free education and maker culture get busy obsoleting this stagnant
status-quo distractionism.
  

    
#87 I share that view <rowemorris>.

Not sure if the references to B. Fuller in this discussion are meant
as anything more than references to a certain time, but his notions
deserve to be dusted off even if he is a little quaint.
  

    
teabags with your water?
<http://money.cnn.com/2013/12/19/leadership/koch-
brothers.pr.fortune/index.html>
full story is behind the paywall.
  

    

Bruce wrote:

> And why is this news about science even "reporting" -- why aren't
you a blogger, or an activist, or an industry booster; why is this a
"science news story," why isn't it an app, or a Kickstarter?  Why is this
"journalism"?  Isn't journalism a weirdly old-fashioned, visibly decaying
thing to do nowadays, with businesses that can't support themselves,
with methods of production and methods of distribution that are clearly
dwindling away?  How can it be "news" when everything supporting it is
old and rotten?  Reading self-conscious contemporary "journalism" is like
listening to Woodie Guthrie singing to the Wobblies off the caboose of
a train.

Being a freelance journalist myself, I have skin in the game and can't
respond to this in a way that isn't self-interest to some essential degree.
But I will ask: Are you really suggesting that unpaid enthusiasts,
political operatives, and PR flacks can *replace* people like me, who have
some facility with asking pertinent questions and sorting the responses
for relevance and truthfulness?

Do you think there's less need, now, for journalists? It was a journalist
who broke Snowden's story and made it comprehensible for the largest
audience.

As for the support structure underneath journalists and journalism,
I'm sure you know as well as I do that this ebbing period of news as a
profitable business was not the norm, just like the 1980s art market in
NYC was a wildly lucrative abberation in the history of a profession that
is marginal for almost everyone who take it up.

For much longer, the news has been underwritten by millionaires with
a yen for the newspaper trade, or the TV network's sports programming,
or the magazine's annual swimsuit issue.

Now we're progressing into Buzzfeed's business of supporting hard news
reporting with "25 Cats Who Look Just Like Hollywood Celebrities."
  

    

With Jeff Bezos and Pierre Omidyar as our 21st century William Randolph
Hearst, between the two of them.