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Being able to choose not to interact can lead to fearing the possibility of rejection rather than coming to terms with it in life.

(not sure if that makes any sense. I'm trying to summarize my thoughts in a way I thought might be helpful for the others wishing to discuss this topic)

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An understanding of linguistics as a building block for understanding.

How can we create or repurpose language to come closer to what we actually mean.

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Teaching and encouraging tolerance as a way to sus out differing opinions.

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can any experience be truly shared? How can the individual empathize?

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We translate into pixels that transform and recompose our image – as it happens on Zoom right now.

Seeing through machines.

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We are becoming > we are already part of it.

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Notes Breakout room & collective discussion

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Notes Breakout room & collective discussion

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Visibility – Invisibility

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Weak/strong interpersonal relation (in digital campus)

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With Work and live guest talk, I can't remove my eyes from one of the background of the guest. And it's probably one of Julian Odie's work out there.

I just can't help myself but staring at it.

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I actually feel more connected to others during the Zoom teaching, people remain to be shown are constantly shown on almost every public digital realm in RCA.
I can remember them very clearly, and behind cameras I'll be able to talk with more new classmates. The uneasiness decrease everytime I force myself to communicate with others.

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Another acquaintance asks him if God and the soul exist. Having probably indicated his atheism in chats while he was alive, he says no. “Only sadness.”

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How do we think about this idea of opacity (and what is and should remain unknowable) in relation to what is often seen as our responsibility as visual communication practitioners to make things clear, transparent and communicable (to an audience).   

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How do we think about this idea of opacity (and what is and should remain unknowable) in relation to what is often seen as our responsibility as visual communication practitioners to make things clear, transparent and communicable (to an audience).   

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In giving voice to the digital ghosts of the deceased, chatbots are trying to succeed where photography and dreams fail.

Source images: replika.ai

On November 28, 2015, a young Belarusian man died when he was run down by a car in Moscow. His name was Roman Mazurenko and, barely into his 30s, he was already a tech entrepreneur and a legendary figure in the city's cultural and artistic circles.

In the days following his death, Roman's friend Eugenia Kuyda reread thousands of text messages that she had exchanged with him starting in 2008, the year they met. Her friend hadn't been very interested in social media; these messages, written in a characteristically distinctive way - he had mild dyslexia and used idiosyncratic phrases - were among her remaining connections to Roman.

Eugenia, who was herself an entrepreneur and software developer, had been working on a messenger app called Luka that used AI to emulate human dialogue. Inspired by an episode of the show "Black Mirror" in which a young woman, Martha, shattered by the loss of her boyfriend Ash, installs an app that allows her to keep communicating with him, Eugenia decided to modify Luka. The app would become a functional version of the software imagined by the creators of "Black Mirror": a tool that would allow her to communicate with Roman's digital ghost.

Eugenia asked Roman's friends and relatives to send her the written messages they had received from him. She ended up with several thousands of messages from which she excluded content that was too personal. With the help of some friends who were computer scientists, she created a bot that could mimic human language and make it possible to communicate with "Roman."

The exchanges, many of which can be viewed online, closely resemble the written dialogues between Martha and Ash. "How are you there?" asks a friend. "I'm OK. A little down. I hope you aren't doing anything interesting without me," Roman responds. His friend replies that they all miss him. Another acquaintance asks him if God and the soul exist. Having probably indicated his atheism in chats while he was alive, he says no. "Only sadness."

Another acquaintance asks him if God and the soul exist. Having probably indicated his atheism in chats while he was alive, he says no. "Only sadness."

Not content with Luka, Eugenia also designed a chatbot called Replika. A cross between a diary and a personal assistant, Replika asks users a series of questions, eventually learning to mimic their personalities. The goal is to get closer to creating a digital avatar that would be able to reproduce us and replace us once we're dead, but also one that is able to create "friendships" with humans. Since the second half of 2017, over two million people have downloaded Replika onto their mobile devices.

Eugenia continues to develop the bot's emotional responsiveness so that it will become even more of a "virtual friend" that users can confide in. In other words, Replika is the real-life version of Samantha from the movie "Her": a chatbot that can empathize with a human by using a type of deep learning, called sequence-to-sequence, which learns to think and speak like a human by processing transcripts of conversations they've had during their lifetimes.

Luka and Replika are not the only inventions designed to give a voice to the digital ghosts of the deceased. A few years ago, James Vlahos, an American journalist who has been an AI enthusiast since childhood, created what he calls a "Dadbot." It all started on April 24, 2016, when his father John was diagnosed with lung cancer. Upon learning of his father's illness, James began recording all of their conversations with the idea of writing a commemorative book after his father's death.

After 12 sessions, each an hour and a half, he found himself with 91,970 words. The printed transcripts filled around 203 pages. They contained a number of memories, songs, and anecdotes and touched on John's marriage, the high points of his career, and all of his passionate interests. All of this material, in addition to being transcribed, was also archived in MP3 files on James's computer.

"As a bot I suppose I exist somewhere on a computer server in San Francisco. And also, I suppose, in the minds of people who chat with me."

One day, James came across an article describing a project carried out by two Google researchers. It involved entering around 26 million lines of movie dialogue into a neural network in order to build a chatbot that could interact with humans. Having achieved their objective, the two researchers started asking their chatbot a series of philosophical questions including one about the purpose of life. (The bot's response: "To live forever.")

A lightbulb went off in James's head. He decided to use the recordings of his father to create something other than a commemorative book. He remembered writing an article that discussed PullString (previously known as ToyTalk), a program designed to create conversations with fictional characters. PullString helped design, among others, the Hello Barbie Hologram, a box that makes it possible to project a three-dimensional animation of the famous doll, Barbie. Like Apple's Siri, the Hello Barbie Hologram responds to users' voice commands and her narrative potential grows through constant interaction.

James used PullString to reorganize the MP3 recordings of his father. He also used it to create his Dadbot, software that works on his smartphone and simulates a written conversation with John, based on the processing of almost 100,000 recorded words. Since John's death, James still chats with him, softening the blow of his loss. During public presentations of the Dadbot, he has said that his son also writes messages to his grandfather's digital ghost sometimes and receives replies. The tone of the conversations reflects the personality of the deceased: "Where are you now?" asks James. "As a bot I suppose I exist somewhere on a computer server in San Francisco. And also, I suppose, in the minds of people who chat with me." Just like Ash, who is living in the cloud, and Samantha, inside a computer.

The chatbots invented by Eugenia Kuyda and James Vlahos are attempts to save the living from the end of every possible world, hanging on to the bond that death has dissolved. They are trying to succeed where photography and dreams fail.

In keeping up an active interaction with the dead, chatbots appear to keep us concentrated on "our" death, which is the death of our ties to the other as we have experienced them, from our exclusive point of view, up to the point of separation. The chatbots want to make it possible for us to still receive replies during that moment of suspension in which we are waiting for an answer, or at least when we feel the need, softening the pain brought on by the irreversibility of time and filling the space in between "before" and "after."

As technologist Martine Rothblatt points out in her book " Virtually Human," what amazes us about the current technological possibilities, and the sophisticated forms of artificial intelligence that are emerging, is that they give us hope that we can continue relationships that are objectively over. Reminiscing with those who are no longer with us, talking to them about our hopes and dreams, sharing the joys of special celebrations: All of this happens after that person's physical body has turned to dust.

The digital ghosts of loved ones put us in the position of feigning possession of that which we no longer possess, relying as much on our full awareness of the loss as on our simultaneous desire to deny it. These beings pretend to hold open the door to a world that death has closed by effectively utilizing the continued existence of digital objects.

Their fictional narrative is consistent with our own experience of a digital existence that is dissociated from our biological one, with our habit of delegating our stories and memories to artificial agents, with our fear of dead bodies, and thus with the informational nature that is the defining characteristic of our current relationship with the internet. All of this allows today's digital ghosts to be more alive than ever.
Davide Sisto, a philosopher and authority on thanatechnology, is a Researcher in Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Turin and the author of "Online Afterlives," from which this article is adapted.

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In giving voice to the digital ghosts of the deceased, chatbots are trying to succeed where photography and dreams fail. On November 28, 2015, a young Belarusian man died when he was run down by a car in Moscow.

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The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.

The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution. The poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction. The image is liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance. The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming.

The poor image is an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image. Its genealogy is dubious. Its filenames are deliberately misspelled. It often defies patrimony, national culture, or indeed copyright. It is passed on as a lure, a decoy, an index, or as a reminder of its former visual self. It mocks the promises of digital technology. Not only is it often degraded to the point of being just a hurried blur, one even doubts whether it could be called an image at all. Only digital technology could produce such a dilapidated image in the first place.

Poor images are the contemporary Wretched of the Screen, the debris of audiovisual production, the trash that washes up on the digital economies' shores. They testify to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images-their acceleration and circulation within the vicious cycles of audiovisual capitalism. Poor images are dragged around the globe as commodities or their effigies, as gifts or as bounty. They spread pleasure or death threats, conspiracy theories or bootlegs, resistance or stultification. Poor images show the rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable-that is, if we can still manage to decipher it.

1. Low Resolutions

In one of Woody Allen's films the main character is out of focus. It's not a technical problem but some sort of disease that has befallen him: his image is consistently blurred. Since Allen's character is an actor, this becomes a major problem: he is unable to find work. His lack of definition turns into a material problem. Focus is identified as a class position, a position of ease and privilege, while being out of focus lowers one's value as an image.

The contemporary hierarchy of images, however, is not only based on sharpness, but also and primarily on resolution. Just look at any electronics store and this system, described by Harun Farocki in a notable 2007 interview, becomes immediately apparent.In the class society of images, cinema takes on the role of a flagship store. In flagship stores high-end products are marketed in an upscale environment. More affordable derivatives of the same images circulate as DVDs, on broadcast television or online, as poor images.

Obviously, a high-resolution image looks more brilliant and impressive, more mimetic and magic, more scary and seductive than a poor one. It is more rich, so to speak. Now, even consumer formats are increasingly adapting to the tastes of cineastes and esthetes, who insisted on 35 mm film as a guarantee of pristine visuality. The insistence upon analog film as the sole medium of visual importance resounded throughout discourses on cinema, almost regardless of their ideological inflection. It never mattered that these high-end economies of film production were (and still are) firmly anchored in systems of national culture, capitalist studio production, the cult of mostly male genius, and the original version, and thus are often conservative in their very structure. Resolution was fetishized as if its lack amounted to castration of the author. The cult of film gauge dominated even independent film production. The rich image established its own set of hierarchies, with new technologies offering more and more possibilities to creatively degrade it.

2. Resurrection (as Poor Images)

But insisting on rich images also had more serious consequences. A speaker at a recent conference on the film essay refused to show clips from a piece by Humphrey Jennings because no proper film projection was available. Although there was at the speaker's disposal a perfectly standard DVD player and video projector, the audience was left to imagine what those images might have looked like.

In this case the invisibility of the image was more or less voluntary and based on aesthetic premises. But it has a much more general equivalent based on the consequences of neoliberal policies. Twenty or even thirty years ago, the neoliberal restructuring of media production began slowly obscuring non-commercial imagery, to the point where experimental and essayistic cinema became almost invisible. As it became prohibitively expensive to keep these works circulating in cinemas, so were they also deemed too marginal to be broadcast on television. Thus they slowly disappeared not just from cinemas, but from the public sphere as well. Video essays and experimental films remained for the most part unseen save for some rare screenings in metropolitan film museums or film clubs, projected in their original resolution before disappearing again into the darkness of the archive.

This development was of course connected to the neoliberal radicalization of the concept of culture as commodity, to the commercialization of cinema, its dispersion into multiplexes, and the marginalization of independent filmmaking. It was also connected to the restructuring of global media industries and the establishment of monopolies over the audiovisual in certain countries or territories. In this way, resistant or non-conformist visual matter disappeared from the surface into an underground of alternative archives and collections, kept alive only by a network of committed organizations and individuals, who would circulate bootlegged VHS copies amongst themselves. Sources for these were extremely rare-tapes moved from hand to hand, depending on word of mouth, within circles of friends and colleagues. With the possibility to stream video online, this condition started to dramatically change. An increasing number of rare materials reappeared on publicly accessible platforms, some of them carefully curated (Ubuweb) and some just a pile of stuff (YouTube).

At present, there are at least twenty torrents of Chris Marker's film essays available online. If you want a retrospective, you can have it. But the economy of poor images is about more than just downloads: you can keep the files, watch them again, even reedit or improve them if you think it necessary. And the results circulate. Blurred AVI files of half-forgotten masterpieces are exchanged on semi-secret P2P platforms. Clandestine cell-phone videos smuggled out of museums are broadcast on YouTube. DVDs of artists' viewing copies are bartered. Many works of avant-garde, essayistic, and non-commercial cinema have been resurrected as poor images. Whether they like it or not.

3. Privatization and Piracy

That rare prints of militant, experimental, and classical works of cinema as well as video art reappear as poor images is significant on another level. Their situation reveals much more than the content or appearance of the images themselves: it also reveals the conditions of their marginalization, the constellation of social forces leading to their online circulation as poor images. Poor images are poor because they are not assigned any value within the class society of images-their status as illicit or degraded grants them exemption from its criteria. Their lack of resolution attests to their appropriation and displacement.

Obviously, this condition is not only connected to the neoliberal restructuring of media production and digital technology; it also has to do with the post-socialist and postcolonial restructuring of nation states, their cultures, and their archives. While some nation states are dismantled or fall apart, new cultures and traditions are invented and new histories created. This obviously also affects film archives-in many cases, a whole heritage of film prints is left without its supporting framework of national culture. As I once observed in the case of a film museum in Sarajevo, the national archive can find its next life in the form of a video-rental store. Pirate copies seep out of such archives through disorganized privatization. On the other hand, even the British Library sells off its contents online at astronomical prices.

As Kodwo Eshun has noted, poor images circulate partly in the void left by state-cinema organizations who find it too difficult to operate as a 16/35-mm archive or to maintain any kind of distribution infrastructure in the contemporary era. From this perspective, the poor image reveals the decline and degradation of the film essay, or indeed any experimental and non-commercial cinema, which in many places was made possible because the production of culture was considered a task of the state. Privatization of media production gradually grew more important than state controlled/sponsored media production. But, on the other hand, the rampant privatization of intellectual content, along with online marketing and commodification, also enable piracy and appropriation; it gives rise to the circulation of poor images.

4. Imperfect Cinema

The emergence of poor images reminds one of a classic Third Cinema manifesto, For an Imperfect Cinema, by Juan García Espinosa, written in Cuba in the late 1960s. Espinosa argues for an imperfect cinema because, in his words, "perfect cinema-technically and artistically masterful-is almost always reactionary cinema." The imperfect cinema is one that strives to overcome the divisions of labor within class society. It merges art with life and science, blurring the distinction between consumer and producer, audience and author. It insists upon its own imperfection, is popular but not consumerist, committed without becoming bureaucratic.

In his manifesto, Espinosa also reflects on the promises of new media. He clearly predicts that the development of video technology will jeopardize the elitist position of traditional filmmakers and enable some sort of mass film production: an art of the people. Like the economy of poor images, imperfect cinema diminishes the distinctions between author and audience and merges life and art. Most of all, its visuality is resolutely compromised: blurred, amateurish, and full of artifacts.

In some way, the economy of poor images corresponds to the description of imperfect cinema, while the description of perfect cinema represents rather the concept of cinema as a flagship store. But the real and contemporary imperfect cinema is also much more ambivalent and affective than Espinosa had anticipated. On the one hand, the economy of poor images, with its immediate possibility of worldwide distribution and its ethics of remix and appropriation, enables the participation of a much larger group of producers than ever before. But this does not mean that these opportunities are only used for progressive ends. Hate speech, spam, and other rubbish make their way through digital connections as well. Digital communication has also become one of the most contested markets-a zone that has long been subjected to an ongoing original accumulation and to massive (and, to a certain extent, successful) attempts at privatization.

The networks in which poor images circulate thus constitute both a platform for a fragile new common interest and a battleground for commercial and national agendas. They contain experimental and artistic material, but also incredible amounts of porn and paranoia. While the territory of poor images allows access to excluded imagery, it is also permeated by the most advanced commodification techniques. While it enables the users' active participation in the creation and distribution of content, it also drafts them into production. Users become the editors, critics, translators, and (co-)authors of poor images.

Poor images are thus popular images-images that can be made and seen by the many. They express all the contradictions of the contemporary crowd: its opportunism, narcissism, desire for autonomy and creation, its inability to focus or make up its mind, its constant readiness for transgression and simultaneous submission. Altogether, poor images present a snapshot of the affective condition of the crowd, its neurosis, paranoia, and fear, as well as its craving for intensity, fun, and distraction. The condition of the images speaks not only of countless transfers and reformattings, but also of the countless people who cared enough about them to convert them over and over again, to add subtitles, reedit, or upload them.

In this light, perhaps one has to redefine the value of the image, or, more precisely, to create a new perspective for it. Apart from resolution and exchange value, one might imagine another form of value defined by velocity, intensity, and spread. Poor images are poor because they are heavily compressed and travel quickly. They lose matter and gain speed. But they also express a condition of dematerialization, shared not only with the legacy of conceptual art but above all with contemporary modes of semiotic production. Capital's semiotic turn, as described by Felix Guattari, plays in favor of the creation and dissemination of compressed and flexible data packages that can be integrated into ever-newer combinations and sequences.

This flattening-out of visual content-the concept-in-becoming of the images-positions them within a general informational turn, within economies of knowledge that tear images and their captions out of context into the swirl of permanent capitalist deterritorialization. The history of conceptual art describes this dematerialization of the art object first as a resistant move against the fetish value of visibility. Then, however, the dematerialized art object turns out to be perfectly adapted to the semioticization of capital, and thus to the conceptual turn of capitalism. In a way, the poor image is subject to a similar tension. On the one hand, it operates against the fetish value of high resolution. On the other hand, this is precisely why it also ends up being perfectly integrated into an information capitalism thriving on compressed attention spans, on impression rather than immersion, on intensity rather than contemplation, on previews rather than screenings.

5. Comrade, what is your visual bond today?

But, simultaneously, a paradoxical reversal happens. The circulation of poor images creates a circuit, which fulfills the original ambitions of militant and (some) essayistic and experimental cinema-to create an alternative economy of images, an imperfect cinema existing inside as well as beyond and under commercial media streams. In the age of file-sharing, even marginalized content circulates again and reconnects dispersed worldwide audiences.

The poor image thus constructs anonymous global networks just as it creates a shared history. It builds alliances as it travels, provokes translation or mistranslation, and creates new publics and debates. By losing its visual substance it recovers some of its political punch and creates a new aura around it. This aura is no longer based on the permanence of the "original," but on the transience of the copy. It is no longer anchored within a classical public sphere mediated and supported by the frame of the nation state or corporation, but floats on the surface of temporary and dubious data pools. By drifting away from the vaults of cinema, it is propelled onto new and ephemeral screens stitched together by the desires of dispersed spectators.

The circulation of poor images thus creates "visual bonds," as Dziga Vertov once called them. This "visual bond" was, according to Vertov, supposed to link the workers of the world with each other. He imagined a sort of communist, visual, Adamic language that could not only inform or entertain, but also organize its viewers. In a sense, his dream has come true, if mostly under the rule of a global information capitalism whose audiences are linked almost in a physical sense by mutual excitement, affective attunement, and anxiety.

But there is also the circulation and production of poor images based on cell phone cameras, home computers, and unconventional forms of distribution. Its optical connections-collective editing, file sharing, or grassroots distribution circuits-reveal erratic and coincidental links between producers everywhere, which simultaneously constitute dispersed audiences.

The circulation of poor images feeds into both capitalist media assembly lines and alternative audiovisual economies. In addition to a lot of confusion and stupefaction, it also possibly creates disruptive movements of thought and affect. The circulation of poor images thus initiates another chapter in the historical genealogy of nonconformist information circuits: Vertov's "visual bonds," the internationalist workers pedagogies that Peter Weiss described in The Aesthetics of Resistance, the circuits of Third Cinema and Tricontinentalism, of non-aligned filmmaking and thinking. The poor image-ambivalent as its status may be-thus takes its place in the genealogy of carbon-copied pamphlets, cine-train agit-prop films, underground video magazines and other nonconformist materials, which aesthetically often used poor materials. Moreover, it reactualizes many of the historical ideas associated with these circuits, among others Vertov's idea of the visual bond.

Imagine somebody from the past with a beret asking you, "Comrade, what is your visual bond today?"

You might answer: it is this link to the present.

6. Now!

The poor image embodies the afterlife of many former masterpieces of cinema and video art. It has been expelled from the sheltered paradise that cinema seems to have once been. After being kicked out of the protected and often protectionist arena of national culture, discarded from commercial circulation, these works have become travelers in a digital no-man's land, constantly shifting their resolution and format, speed and media, sometimes even losing names and credits along the way.

Now many of these works are back-as poor images, I admit. One could of course argue that this is not the real thing, but then-please, anybody-show me this real thing.

The poor image is no longer about the real thing-the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities. It is about defiance and appropriation just as it is about conformism and exploitation.

In short: it is about reality.

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In Defense of the Poor Image - Journal #10

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"Only by understanding that it is impossible to reduce anyone, no matter who, to a truth he would not have generated on his own "

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In In Practice: Opacities, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, Volume 31, Number 2 92, ed. Zach Blas, Duke University Press.

In Poetics of Relation, the Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant insists that we must "clamor for the right to opacity for everyone." For Glissant, the demand for the right to opacity functions as an ethical stance against imperial conquest and domination. While Glissant theorizes opacity specifically through postcolonial conditions in Martinique, the concept is increasingly deployed in political thought, media studies, queer theory, and art criticism today. Opacity is an unknowability-and, hence, a poetics, for Glissant-that makes up the world, and it must be defended in order for any radically democratic project to succeed. Glissant defines opacity as an alterity that is unquantifiable, a diversity that exceeds categories of identifiable difference. Opacity, therefore, exposes the limits of schemas of visibility, representation, and identity that prevent sufficient understanding of multiple perspectives of the world and its peoples. These limitations are a form of barbarism according to Glissant. Thus, while Glissant's opacity is an ethical proposition, it also can be understood as an ontological condition and a form of political legitimacy, as well as being fundamentally aesthetic. The texts in this "In Practice" collection emerge from the potential that Glissant's opacity creates for contemporary feminist and queer politics. In contrast with identity politics' claim to visibility as a political platform, these writings explore opacity as both a tactic and a material condition in order to address two intertwined concerns of our time: technological control and embodied materiality.
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Opacities: An Introduction + Biometrics and Opacity: A Conversation - Zach Blas

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In In Practice: Opacities, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, Volume 31, Number 2 92, ed. Zach Blas, Duke University Press. In Poetics of Relation, the Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant insists that we must "clamor for the right to opacity for everyone."

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p.19-20, Writing by Drawing/ When Language Seeks Its Other. Edited by Andrea Bellini and Sarah Lombardi

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p.19-20, Writing by Drawing/ When Language Seeks Its Other. Edited by Andrea Bellini and Sarah Lombardi

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"The question of pure nothingness is indissolubly linked to the problem of the unspeakable, and humans experience this above all in language. In the Eleusinian Mysteries, the unspeakable cannot be spoken because there are no words for it, because language is incapable of conveying it. It is aphasia, the need for silence in the response to mystery, that is the true reason for the secrecy surrounding the Eleusinian rite. Faced with the ineffable, to the initiate speech seems a sin, and "though still alive, he closes his mouth". Still according to Agamben's account of Hegel, the unspeakable is better preserved in language that in silence, since language experiences the impossibility of saying what it would like to say; every act of speech contains the experience of the unspoken.'

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EarthCam is the leading network of live streaming webcams for tourism and entertainment. Explore unique and interesting locations around the world with 4K streaming technology. EarthCam provides complete infrastructure services to manage, host and maintain live streaming video solutions for its consumers and corporate clients.

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On or Off
Peopele choose to be behind the camera.

With camera on, more focus on the self expression.

Off, more likely to be dirft away.

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The census

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Earlier this month, the House Oversight Committee held a hearing on Capitol Hill to consider whether to hold Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt for refusing to release documents related to the Trump Administration's addition of a citizenship question to the census. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat, said that the recent release of documents written by a deceased Republican operative revealed that the true motivation behind the change was to undercount minorities in the census and shift power to Republicans. "I want to know why this question was magically added after we have seen that a political operative knew and detailed an intent to intimidate racial and immigrant communities for a partisan purpose, saying, 'This will hurt Democrats and help Republicans,' " she said in remarks that quickly went viral. "I want to know about the racism and the very disturbing history that we're seeing here. That's what I want to know."

The Supreme Court, which is set to rule any day now on the legality of Ross's decision to contradict Census Bureau experts and push ahead with a citizenship question, wasn't asked to address whether racism played a role in the Trump Administration's desire for a question in the 2020 count. At its heart, the legal dispute is one about federal administrative law-that is, whether Ross's work with Trump appointees in the Justice Department to create a legal justification for adding a citizenship question was arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act. Three federal judges so far, including the one whose ruling the Supreme Court is reviewing, have said that Ross acted improperly under federal law. But lower-court judges declined to rule against the government on the issue of willful discrimination against minorities, which requires proof that Ross intended to disfavor people of color on the basis of race.

Few claims in constitutional law are as charged as the accusation that the government took actions designed to discriminate against minorities. But that's precisely what advocates in New York and Maryland did in legal challenges they filed last year to the Administration's decision to include a citizenship question in the census questionnaire that will be sent to households next year. "The inclusion of a citizenship question in the decennial Census violates the equal protection guarantee of the Fifth Amendment because it is motivated by racial animus towards Latinos, Asian Americans, and animus towards non-U.S. citizens and foreign-born persons," the plaintiffs alleged in a lawsuit seeking, among other things, a declaration that the question is unconstitutional. New York plaintiffs, in their own complaint, filed last year in federal court, contended that Trump Administration officials "maintain animus toward these groups and intend, inter alia, to diminish the political power and influence of these groups and to reduce the levels of federal and state funding, benefits, and other resources that these groups receive."

This past October, the Supreme Court delivered an early victory to the Administration. It blocked attempts to put Ross under oath, which could have helped challengers probe the secretary's true motives for adding the citizenship question. Lower courts subsequently ruled that the challengers lacked adequate evidence to prove their claims of discriminatory intent by Ross. In an extensive ruling otherwise striking down the citizenship question, U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman wrote, in January, that the New York challengers "did not carry their burden of proving" that Ross "was motivated by invidious discrimination and thus that he violated the equal protection component" found in the Constitution.

Similarly, in Maryland, U.S. District Judge George Hazel called Ross's actual rationale for adding the question "a mystery," while ruling against the secretary under the Administrative Procedure Act and the Constitution's enumeration clause, which imposes the census requirement every ten years. Not surprisingly, the issue of discrimination didn't come up when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the census case in April.

But the recent discovery of a trove of files from the deceased Republican operative and redistricting expert Thomas Hofeller may force the Court to address the issue. The documents that Hofeller's estranged daughter found on backups of the noted Republican mapmaker's laptop have since been brought to the attention of both the New York and Maryland judges, and the Supreme Court is also aware of it. Hofeller, the documents show, conducted a private study in 2015 which concluded that a citizenship question would decrease the political power of Latinos and "be advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites" in the redistricting process; he also wrote that employing citizenship data derived from the census "can be expected to provoke a high degree of resistance from Democrats and the major minority groups in the nation." Hofeller later urged the Trump Administration to adopt a citizenship question and helped craft its public legal argument that the Census Bureau needed citizenship data to better enforce the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In constitutional litigation, that's as close to a smoking gun of discriminatory motive as a plaintiff could hope for in court. In a ruling on Monday, Hazel opened the door to revisiting his earlier ruling in the Maryland case and allowing for an examination of whether a desire to target Latinos was a motivating factor for adding the citizenship question. The "new evidence," Hazel wrote, "potentially connects the dots between a discriminatory purpose-diluting Hispanics' political power-and Secretary Ross's decision. The evidence suggests that Dr. Hofeller was motivated to recommend the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 Census to advantage Republicans by diminishing Hispanics' political power." Hazel added that "as more puzzle pieces are placed on the mat, a disturbing picture of the decisionmakers' motives takes shape."

The Trump Administration, for its part, has argued that relitigating this part of the case is " unwarranted " in light of the looming deadline to print census forms and the Supreme Court's imminent ruling.

Now a mini-skirmish over whether discrimination infected the process of adding a citizenship question has landed in the Supreme Court. On Monday, in yet another eleventh-hour filing, the Justices were notified of Hazel's ruling, which the New York plaintiffs said were "changed circumstances" worthy of the Court's attention. And on Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit gave Hazel yet another boost, giving him the go-ahead to examine the new evidence-plus some guidance on how to weigh it. "In addressing and resolving those matters," U.S. Circuit Judge James Wynn wrote, "the district court should keep in mind that discriminatory intent need not be proved by direct evidence." Wynn has experience with cases alleging similar discrimination; in 2016, he was a member of a three-judge panel that found that Republicans in North Carolina enacted a voting law that targeted "African Americans with almost surgical precision."

In a surprise filing late on Tuesday, the Trump Administration invited the Supreme Court to consider the question of racial discrimination. Noel Francisco, the Department of Justice's Solicitor General, fired off his own letter to the Court, urging a final resolution of the claim that the expert's files are evidence of racist motives in Ross's decision-making process. According to Francisco, the Justices should "make clear that the administrative record, the extra-record evidence, and the Hofeller files do not, individually or together, provide any basis for setting aside the Secretary's decision on the grounds that it violates principles of equal protection."

The Supreme Court now faces the choice of taking the Justice Department up on this latest offer, which the Maryland plaintiffs, whose case isn't formally before the Justices, have decried as "an utter disregard for due process." The Court, which is expected to rule in the case on Thursday, can decide that it lacks the benefit of full briefing and arguments from both sides on a critical issue and let the lower courts hash it out. Or it can simply look the other way and rule however it planned to before the spectre of racism reached its doorstep. The choice is stark. And with the next decade of congressional apportionment and funding for various states with rich immigrant communities on the line, how the Justices choose will affect Americans' views of whether the country's highest court remains a nonpartisan arbiter of justice.

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Is There Racist Intent Behind the Census Citizenship Question?

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Earlier this month, the House Oversight Committee held a hearing on Capitol Hill to consider whether to hold Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt for refusing to release documents related to the Trump Administration's addition of a citizenship question to the census.

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Wanting to be invisible or  being made invisible 

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Wanting to be invisible or  being made invisible 

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machine vision as the only type of vision

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machine vision as the only type of vision

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Fragmentation of self through pixels

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-zoom cameras on/off
-gestures
-virtual backgrounds

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off grid

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Nine Eyes of Google Street View, Jon Rafman, 2008 - ongoing home / insta / twitt / insta / fb

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to be a shadow

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to be eliminated is to be automated, to be automated is to be eliminated

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Minorities as invisible groups in the age of visibility
("being female over 50s")

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Potential of the screen as transformative medium

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The Drawing Center's Drawing Papers, Volume 138, features contributions by Elijah Burgher, Claire Gilman, Édouard Glissant, Toyin Ojih Oduto... See More

The Drawing Center's Drawing Papers, Volume 138, features contributions by Elijah Burgher, Claire Gilman, Édouard Glissant, Toyin Ojih Oduto... See More

Connecting content to people.

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For Opacity: Elijah Burgher, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Nathaniel Mary Quinn

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The Drawing Center's Drawing Papers, Volume 138, features contributions by Elijah Burgher, Claire Gilman, Édouard Glissant, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Nathaniel Mary Quinn.

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HITO STEYERL, HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A FUCKING DIDACTIC EDUCATIONAL .MOV FILE, 2013

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Hito Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, (2013). #embeddedtext# Hito Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File_, 2013.