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1) Where does your work meet its audience? How do you navigate different formats and contexts?

2) What role does materiality take in your film-making?

3) Does your work have a relationship to cinema?

4) Historically, artist film has challenged popular media forms and utilised duration and repetition or affects like boredom. What is the relationship between artist moving image and other sites of moving image production today?

5) How do you see the future of artist moving image in terms of its production and archiving?

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Online symposium with presentations by Erika Balsom, Teresa Castro, Sophie Cavoulacos, Ali Cherri​, Greg de Cuir Jr, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Lars Henrik Gass, Leo Goldsmith, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige​, Olivier​​ Hadouchi, Louis Henderson, Chrissie Iles, Karrabing Film Collective, Toby Lee, Almudena Escobar López, Pedro Neves Marques, Alison Nguyen, Noncitizen, Bahar Noorizadeh, Christina Phoebe, Raqs Media Collective, Rojava Film Commune, Oleksiy Radynski, Julian Ross, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Su Yu Hsin, Malena Szlam, Anton Vidokle, and Yang Beichen

Curated by Lukas Brasiskis

“An other cinema” (Raymond Bellour), “othered cinema” (Erika Balsom), “artists’ films” (Maeve Connolly, among others), “cinema d’exposition” (Jean- Christophe Royoux), “le temps exposé” (Dominique Païni)—these are just a few of many terms commonly employed to define ubiquitous practices of artists making films and/or exhibiting them in galleries, museums, and cinemas.

This  symposium aims to address the current state of the moving image in relation to developing digital technologies and their infrastructures, the economies of contemporary art, the (post-)pandemic situation of curation, exposition, and distribution of artists’ films, the changing landscape for their perception and reception, and finally, the current sociopolitical and ecological concerns moving-image practitioners are addressing in their works situated between worlds of cinema and contemporary art. Instead of re-establishing or re-activating some grand theories, the symposium asks specific questions. Six panels comprised of artists, theorists, critics, and curators will explore topical concerns about moving images in/and alongside contemporary art.

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The State of the Moving Image
Friday-Sunday, September 17-19, 2021

Online symposium with presentations by Erika Balsom, Teresa Castro, Sophie Cavoulacos, Ali Cherri​, Greg de Cuir Jr, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Lars Henrik Gass, Leo Goldsmith, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige​, Olivier​​ Hadouchi, Louis Henderson, Chrissie Iles, Karrabing Film Collective, Toby Lee, Almudena Escobar López, Pedro Neves Marques, Alison Nguyen, Noncitizen, Bahar Noorizadeh, Christina Phoebe, Raqs Media Collective, Rojava Film Commune, Oleksiy Radynski, Julian Ross, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Su Yu Hsin, Malena Szlam, Anton Vidokle, and Yang Beichen

Curated by Lukas Brasiskis

"An other cinema" (Raymond Bellour), "othered cinema" (Erika Balsom), "artists' films" (Maeve Connolly, among others), "cinema d'exposition" (Jean- Christophe Royoux), "le temps exposé" (Dominique Païni)-these are just a few of many terms commonly employed to define ubiquitous practices of artists making films and/or exhibiting them in galleries, museums, and cinemas.

This symposium aims to address the current state of the moving image in relation to developing digital technologies and their infrastructures, the economies of contemporary art, the (post-)pandemic situation of curation, exposition, and distribution of artists' films, the changing landscape for their perception and reception, and finally, the current sociopolitical and ecological concerns moving-image practitioners are addressing in their works situated between worlds of cinema and contemporary art. Instead of re-establishing or re-activating some grand theories, the symposium asks specific questions. Six panels comprised of artists, theorists, critics, and curators will explore topical concerns about moving images in/and alongside contemporary art.

The symposium is organized in conjuction with the online screening program An Other Cinema: Apparatus and Histories, streaming September 6-20, 2021 on e-flux Video & Film.

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Symposium program
Livestream and chat on each panel's page and on e-flux.com/live
Stay tuned to this page for more details and updates
Friday, September 17, 2021 Saturday, September 18, 2021​ Sunday, September 19, 2021​
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For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

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The State of the Moving Image Friday-Sunday, September 17-19, 2021 Online symposium with presentations by Erika Balsom, Teresa Castro, Sophie Cavoulacos, Ali Cherri​, Greg de Cuir Jr, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Lars Henrik Gass, Leo Goldsmith, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige​, Olivier​​ Hadouchi, Louis Henderson, Chrissie Iles, Karrabing Film Collective, Toby Lee,

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Distributed Narratives is the 4th International Parallax Forum hosted by The Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Katowice. It brings together filmmakers, curators, artists, and educators to discuss established and emerging filmmaking approaches and the convergence of technical and critical processes used in the film industry and by artists. The forum aims to explore how film and moving image is made, received, and taught.

In 1967 Sony launched its first handheld video camera. Early advertising of the ‘Portapak’ show that Sony had no clear vision for its application. However, this portable video technology broke free from the male-dominated craft of cinematography and was embraced by conceptual performance artists like Shigeko Kubota, Dara Birnbaum, and Joan Jonas, as well as activists like the Black Panthers. Both groups swiftly recognised the potential for direct and powerful moving image production for galleries or television broadcast.

This forum raises questions about how recent technological developments may have a similarly profound impact on filmmaking and artists' moving image production. Developments like the prevalence of film and video on social media and the emergence of distributed intelligences, such as AI and machine learning, are examples of factors influencing how films are made and encountered. These changes offer both challenges and opportunities for artists and filmmakers. Distributed Narratives encourages critical analysis of these evolving processes.

Furthermore, the forum addresses how filmmaking responds to global challenges such as the climate emergency. Initiatives like ‘Green Filming’ promotes a more sustainable and efficient film industry. How might artists’ practices and approaches align with the ambitions of Green Filming and evolve to be shaped by the documentary and storytelling potential of cinema, to heighten awareness and engage action to counter climate breakdown? Film screenings and presentations exploring these issues, and others, are invited to explore how film and moving image production is adapting and responding to current global conditions and urgencies.

The Distributed Narratives Forum also aims to explore how film and moving image is taught. Through dialogue between Poland's esteemed Kieslowski Film School at SFKK and artists and educators from art academies in Poland, the UK, and beyond, different pedagogies and methods of engagement will be examined. Reflection on the role of craft, discipline and experimentation in the art academy and film school will highlight what can be learnt from their distinct approaches. Ultimately, the forum aims to propose a practical workshop in which students and academics from film schools and the art academy will collaborate to create moving image works. The resulting workshop will be piloted in 2024, inviting participants to engage in learning-through-doing to make short, experimental films which explore and expand on contemporary modes of film making for various contexts including galleries, the public realm, online platforms or cinema.

Presentations and short film screenings are welcomed from artists, filmmakers, curators, writers and educators. Submissions which cover one or more of the following topics are particularly encouraged:

Climate and Landscape

Technologies and apparatus of film making

Experimentation and risk in moving image education

Socially engaged and relational filmmaking

Production design. Ephemeral narratives

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Please submit a brief (250 word maximum) outline of your presentation, additional discussion topic and screening proposal to pawel.mendrek@aspkat.edu.pl by 15/09

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Artist moving image work has evolved as a medium in parallel with a rhetoric of increasing accessibility. From Walter Benjamin’s assumption that technical reproduction would enhance the exhibition value of the artwork to the promise of the internet as an infinite archive always to hand. In reality, however, much artist film and video exists primarily in the form of scant documentation, from short clips and production stills to brief descriptions and rumour. As a consequence, exhibitions of moving image work function more like performances than gallery objects, existing beyond the live experiences only is internet dark matter. With growing questions about the sustainability of the enormous server power required to maintain this edifice, it’s worth considering the materiality of artists’ film and video work, and the ways in which its archiving and distribution are implicated in its production and reproduction.

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Hito Steyerl_Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise

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Hito Steyerl_Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise

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A while ago I met an extremely interesting software developer who was working on smartphone camera technology. Photography is traditionally thought to represent what is out there by means of technology, ideally via an indexical link. But is this really true anymore? The developer explained to me that the technology for contemporary phone cameras is quite different from traditional cameras: the lenses are tiny and basically crap, which means that about half of the data being captured by the camera sensor is actually noise. The trick, then, is to write the algorithm to clean the noise, or rather to discern the picture from inside the noise.

But how can the camera know how to do this? Very simple: it scans all other pictures stored on the phone or on your social media networks and sifts through your contacts. It analyzes the pictures you already took, or those that are associated with you, and it tries to match faces and shapes to link them back to you. By comparing what you and your network already photographed, the algorithm guesses what you might have wanted to photograph now. It creates the present picture based on earlier pictures, on your/its memory. This new paradigm is being called computational photography.

The result might be a picture of something that never even existed, but that the algorithm thinks you might like to see. This type of photography is speculative and relational. It is a gamble with probabilities that bets on inertia. It makes seeing unforeseen things more difficult. It will increase the amount of noise just as it will increase the amount of random interpretation.

And that's not even to mention external interference into what your phone is recording. All sorts of systems are able to remotely shut your camera on or off: companies, governments, the military. It could be disabled in certain places-one could for instance block its recording function close to protests or conversely broadcast whatever it sees. Similarly, a device might be programmed to autopixelate, erase, or block secret, copyrighted, or sexual content. It might be fitted with a so-called dick algorithm to screen out NSFW (Not Suitable/Safe For Work) content, automodify pubic hair, stretch or omit bodies, exchange or collage context, or insert location-targeted advertising, pop-up windows, or live feeds. It might report you or someone from your network to the police, PR agencies, or spammers. It might flag your debt, play your games, broadcast your heartbeat. Computational photography has expanded to cover all of this.

It links control robotics, object recognition, and machine learning technologies. So if you take a picture on a smartphone, the results are not as premeditated as they are premediated. The picture might show something unexpected, because it might have cross-referenced many different databases: traffic control, medical databases, frenemy photo galleries on Facebook, credit card data, maps, and whatever else it wants.

Relational Photography

Computational photography is therefore inherently political-not in content but in form. It is not only relational but also truly social, with countless systems and people potentially interfering with pictures before they even emerge as visible. And of course this network is not neutral. It has rules and norms hardwired into its platforms, and they represent a mix of juridical, moral, aesthetic, technological, commercial, and bluntly hidden parameters and effects. You could end up airbrushed, wanted, redirected, taxed, deleted, remodeled, or replaced in your own picture. The camera turns into a social projector rather than a recorder. It shows a superposition of what it thinks you might want to look like plus what others think you should buy or be. But technology rarely does things on its own. Technology is programmed with conflicting goals and by many entities, and politics is a matter of defining how to separate its noise from its information.

So what are the policies already in place that define the separation of noise from information, or that even define noise and information as such in the first place? Who or what decides what the camera will "see"? How is it being done? By whom or what? And why is this even important?

The Penis Problem

Let's have a look at one example: drawing a line between face and butt, or between "acceptable" and "unacceptable" body parts. It is no coincidence that Facebook is called Facebook and not Buttbook, because you can't have any butts on Facebook. But then how does it weed out the butts? A list leaked by an angry freelancer shows precise instructions given on how to build and maintain Facebook's face, and it shows us what is well known: that nudity and sexual content are strictly off limits, except art nudity and male nipples, but also how its policies on violence are much more lax, with even decapitations and large amounts of blood acceptable.

"Crushed heads, limbs etc are OK as long as no insides are showing," reads one guideline. "Deep flesh wounds are ok to show; excessive blood is ok to show." Those rules are still policed by humans, or more precisely a global subcontracted workforce from Turkey, the Philippines, Morocco, Mexico, and India, working from home, earning around 4 USD per hour. These workers are hired to distinguish between acceptable body parts (face) and unacceptable ones (butts). In principle, there is nothing wrong with having rules for publicly available imagery. Some sort of filtering process has to be implemented on online platforms: no one wants to be spammed with revenge porn or atrocities, regardless of there being markets for such imagery. The question concerns where and how to draw the line, as well as who draws it, and on whose behalf. Who decides on signal vs. noise?

Let's go back to the elimination of sexual content. Is there an algorithm for this, like for face recognition? This question first arose publicly in the so-called Chatroulette conundrum. Chatroulette was a Russian online video service that allowed people to meet on the web. It quickly became famous for its "next" button, for which the term "unlike button" would be much too polite. The site's audience first exploded to 1.6 million users per month in 2010. But then a so-called "penis problem" emerged, referring to the many people who used the service to meet other people naked. The winner of a web contest called in to "solve" the issue ingeniously suggested to run a quick facial recognition or eye tracking scan on the video feeds-if no face was discernible, it would deduce that it must be a dick.

This exact workflow was also used by the British Secret Service when they secretly bulk extracted user webcam stills using their spy program, Optical Nerve. Video feeds of 1.8 million Yahoo users were intercepted in order to develop face and iris recognition technologies. But-maybe unsurprisingly-it turned out that around 7 percent of content did not show faces at all. So-as suggested for Chatroulette-they ran face recognition scans on everything and tried to exclude the dicks for not being faces. It didn't work so well: in a leaked document the GCHQ admits defeat: "there is no perfect ability to censor material which may be offensive."

Subsequent solutions became a bit more sophisticated. Probabilistic porn detection calculates the amount of skin-toned pixels in certain regions of the picture, producing complicated taxonomic formulas. But this method got ridiculed pretty quickly because it produced so many false positives, including, as in some examples, wrapped meatballs, tanks, or machine guns. More recent porn-detection applications use self-learning technology based on neural networks, computational verb theory, and cognitive computation. They do not try to statistically guess at the image, but rather try to understand it by identifying objects through their relations.

According to developer Tao Yang's description, there is a whole new field of cognitive vision studies based on quantifying cognition as such, on making it measurable and computable. Even though there are still considerable technological difficulties, this effort represents a whole new level of formalization; a new order of images, a grammar of images, an algorithmic system of sexuality, surveillance, productivity, reputation, and computation that links with the grammatization of social relations by corporations and governments.

So how does this work? Yang's porn-detection system must learn how to recognize objectionable parts by seeing a sizable mass of them in order to infer their relations. So basically you start by installing a lot of photos of the body parts you want eliminated on your computer. The database consists of folders full of body parts ready to enter formal relations. Not only pussy, nipple, asshole, and blowjob, but asshole, asshole/only and asshole/mixed_with_pussy. Based on this library, a whole range of detectors get ready to go to work: the breast detector, pussy detector, pubic hair detector, cunnilingus detector, blowjob detector, asshole detector, hand-touch-pussy detector. They identify fascinating sex-positions such as the Yawning and Octopus techniques, The Stopperage, Chambers Fuck, Fraser MacKenzie, Persuading of the Debtor, Playing of Cello, and Watching the Game (I am honestly terrified of even imagining Fraser MacKenzie).

This grammar as well as the library of partial objects are reminiscent of Roland Barthes' notion of a "porn grammar," where he describes the Marquis de Sade's writings as a system of positions and body parts ready to permutate into every possible combination. Yet this marginalized and openly persecuted system could be seen as a reflex of a more general grammar of knowledge deployed during the so-called Enlightenment.

Michel Foucault as well as Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer compared de Sade's sexual systems to mainstream systems of classification. Both were articulated by counting and sorting, by creating exhaustive, pedantic, and tedious taxonomies. And Mr. Yang's enthusiasm for formalizing body parts and their relations to one another similarly reflects the huge endeavor of rendering cognition, imaging, and behavior as such increasingly quantifiable and commensurable to a system of exchange value based in data.

Undesirable body parts thus become elements of a new machine-readable, image-based grammar that might usually operate in parallel to reputational and control networks, but that can also be linked to it at any time. Its structure might be a reflex of contemporary modes of harvesting, aggregating, and financializing data-based "knowledge" churned out by a cacophony of partly social algorithms embedded into technology.

Noise and Information

But let's come back to the question in the beginning: What are the social and political algorithms that clear noise from information? The emphasis, again, is on politics, not algorithm. Jacques Rancière has beautifully shown that this division corresponds to a much older social formula: to distinguish between noise and speech to divide a crowd between citizens and rabble. If someone didn't want to take someone else seriously, or to limit their rights and status, one pretends that their speech is just noise, garbled groaning, or crying, and that they themselves must be devoid of reason-and therefore exempt from being subjects, let alone holders of rights. In other words, this politics rests on an act of conscious decoding-separating "noise" from "information," "speech" from "groan," or "face" from "butt," and from there neatly stacks its results into vertical class hierarchies. The algorithms now being fed into smartphone camera technology to define the image prior to its emergence are similar to this.

In light of Rancière's proposition, we might still be dealing with a more traditional idea of politics as representation. If everyone is aurally (or visually) represented, and no one is discounted as noise, then equality might draw nearer. But the networks have changed so drastically that nearly every parameter of representative politics has shifted. By now, more people than ever are able to upload an almost unlimited number of self-representations. And the level of political participation by way of parliamentary democracy seems to have dwindled in the meantime. While pictures float in numbers, elites are shrinking and centralizing power.

And on top of this, your face is getting disconnected-not only from your butt, but also from your voice and body. Your face is now an element-a face/mixed_with_phone, ready to be combined with any other item in the library. Captions are added, or textures, if needs be. Face prints are taken. An image becomes less of a representation than a proxy, a mercenary of appearance, a floating texture-surface-commodity. Persons are montaged, dubbed, assembled, incorporated.

Humans and things intermingle in ever-newer constellations to become bots or cyborgs. As humans feed affect, thought, and sociality into algorithms, algorithms feeds back into what used to be called subjectivity. This shift is what has given way to a post-representational politics adrift within information space.

Proxy Armies

Let's look at one example of post-representational politics: political bot armies on Twitter. Twitter bots are bits of script that impersonate human activity on social media sites. In large synchronized numbers they have become formidable political armies. A Twitter chat bot is an algorithm wearing a person's face, a formula incorporated as animated spam. It is a scripted operation impersonating a human operation.

Bot armies distort discussions on Twitter hashtags by spamming them with advertisement, tourist pictures, or whatever. They basically add noise. Bot armies have been active in Mexico, Syria, Russia, and Turkey, where most political parties have been said to operate such bot armies. The ruling AKP alone was suspected of controlling 18,000 fake Twitter accounts using photos of Robbie Williams, Megan Fox, and other celebs: "In order to appear authentic, the accounts don't just tweet out AKP hashtags; they also quote philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and movies like PS: I Love You."

So who do bot armies represent, if anyone, and how do they do it? Let's have a look at the AKP bots. Robbie Williams, Meg Fox, and Hakan43020638 are all advertising "Flappy Tayyip," a cell phone game starring then AK prime minister (now president) Tayyip Recep Erdoğan. The objective is to hijack or spam the hashtag #twitterturkey to protest PM Erdoğan's banning of Twitter. Simultaneously, Erdoğan's own Twitter bots set out to detourn the hashtag.

Let's look at Hakan43020638 more closely: a bot consisting of a copy-pasted face plus product placement. It takes only a matter of minutes to connect his face to a body by way of a Google image search. On his business Twitter account it turns out he sells his underwear: he works online as an affective web service provider. Let's call this version Murat, to throw yet another alias into the fray. But who is the bot wearing Murat's face and who is a bot army representing? Why would Hakan43020638 be quoting Thomas Hobbes of all philosophers? And which book? Let's guess he's quoting from Hobbes's most important work, Leviathan. Leviathan is the name of a social contract enforced by an absolute sovereign in order to fend off the dangers presented by a "state of nature" in which humans prey upon one another. With Leviathan there are no more militias and there is no more molecular warfare of everyone against everyone.

But now we seem to be in a situation where state systems grounded in such social contracts seem to fall apart in many places and nothing is left but a set of policed relational metadata, emoji, and hijacked hashtags. A bot army is a contemporary vox populi, the voice of the people according to social networks. It can be a Facebook militia, your low-cost personalized mob, your digital mercenaries, or some sort of proxy porn. Imagine your photo being used for one of these bots. It is the moment when your picture becomes quite autonomous, active, even militant. Bot armies are celebrity militias, wildly jump-cutting between glamour, sectarianism, porn, corruption, and conservative religious ideologies. Post-representative politics are a war of bot armies against one another, of Hakan against Murat, of face against butt.

This may be why the AK pornstar bots desperately quote Hobbes: they are already sick of the war of Robbie Williams (IDF) against Robbie Williams (Electronic Syrian Army) against Robbie Williams (PRI/AAP), they are sick of retweeting spam for autocrats-and are hoping for just any entity organizing day care, gun control, and affordable dentistry, whether it's called Leviathan or Moby Dick or even Flappy Tayyip. They seem to say: we'd go for just about any social contract you've got!

Now let us go even one step further. Because a model for this might already be on the horizon. And unsurprisingly, it also involves algorithms.

Blockchain

Blockchain governance seems to fulfill hopes for a new social contract. "Decentralized Autonomous Organizations" would record and store transactions in blockchains akin to the one used to run and validate bitcoin. But those public digital ledgers could equally encode votes or laws. Take for instance bitcongress, which is in the process of developing a decentralized voting and legislation system. While this could be a model to restore accountability and circumvent power monopolies, it above all means that social rules hardwired with technology emerge as Leviathan 2.0:

When disassociated from the programmers who design them, trustless blockchains floating above human affairs contain the specter of rule by algorithms ... This is essentially the vision of the internet as techno-leviathan, a deified crypto-sovereign whose rules we can contract to.

Even though this is a decentralized process which no single entity at the top controls, it doesn't necessarily mean no one controls it. Just like smartphone photography, it needs to be told how to work: by a multitude of conflicting interests. More importantly, this would replace bots as proxy "people" with bots as governance. But then again, which bots are we talking about? Who programs them? Are they cyborgs? Do they have faces or butts? And who is drawing the line? Are they cheerleaders of social and informational entropy? Killing machines? Or a new crowd, which we are already part of?

Let's come back to the beginning: How to separate signal from noise? And how does the old political technology of using this distinction to rule change with algorithmic technology? In all examples, the definition of noise rested increasingly on scripted operations, on automating representation and/or decision-making. On the other hand, this process potentially introduces so much feedback that representation becomes a rather unpredictable operation that looks more like the weather than a Xerox machine. Likeliness becomes subject to likelihood-reality is just another factor in an extended calculation of probability. In this situation, proxies become crucial semi-autonomous actors.

Proxy politics

To better understand proxy politics, we could start by drawing up a checklist:

Does your camera decide what appears in your photographs?
Does it go off when you smile?
And will it fire in a next step if you don't?
Do underpaid outsourced IT workers in BRIC countries manage your pictures of breastfeeds and decapitations on your social media feeds?
Is Elizabeth Taylor tweeting your work?
Are some of your other fans bots who decided to classify your work as urinary mature porn?
Are some of these bots busily enumerating the names of nation states alongside bodily orifices?

Is your total result something like this?

Congratulations! Welcome to the age of proxy politics!

A proxy is "an agent or substitute authorized to act for another person or a document which authorizes the agent so to act." But a proxy could now also be a device with a bad hair day. A less than authorized agent. A scrap of script caught up in a dress code double bind. A "Persuading the debtor" detector throwing a tantrum over genital pixel probability. A drone gone rogue. Or a delegation of chat bots casually pasting pro-Putin hair lotion ads to your Instagram. It could also be something much more serious, wrecking your life in a similar way-sry life!

Proxies are devices or scripts tasked with getting rid of noise as well as the bot armies hell-bent on producing it. They are masks, persons, avatars, routers, nodes, templates, or generic placeholders. They share an element of unpredictability-which is all the more paradoxical considering that they arise as result of maxed out probabilities. But proxies are not only bots and avatars, nor are proxy politics restricted to datascapes. Proxy warfare is quite a standard model of warfare-one of the most important examples being the Spanish Civil War. Proxies add echo, subterfuge, distortion, and confusion to geopolitics. Armies posing as militias (or the other way around) reconfigure or explode territories and redistribute sovereignties. Companies pose as guerillas and legionnaires as suburban Tupperware clubs. A proxy army is made of guns for hire, with more or less ideological decoration. The border between private security, PMC's, freelance insurgents, armed stand-ins, state hackers, and people that just got in the way has become blurry. Remember that corporate armies were crucial in establishing colonial empires (East India Company among others) and that the word company itself is derived from the name for a military unit. Proxy warfare is a prime example of a post-Leviathan reality.

Now that this whole range of activities has long since gone online, it turns out that proxy warfare is partly the continuation of PR by different means. Besides marketing tools repurposed for counterinsurgency ops there is a whole range of government hacking (and counterhacking) campaigns that require slightly more advanced skills. But not always. As the leftist Turkish hacker group Redhack reported, the password of the Ankara police servers was 12345.

To state that online proxy politics are reorganizing geopolitics would be similar to stating that burgers tend to reorganize cows. Indeed, just as meatloaf arranges parts of cows with plastic, organic remnants, and elements formerly known as paper, proxy politics position companies, nation states, hacker detachments, FIFA, and the Duchess of Cambridge as equally relevant entities. Those proxies tear up territories by creating netscapes that are partly unlinked from geography and national jurisdiction.

But proxy politics also works the other way. A simple default example of proxy politics is the use of proxy servers to try to bypass local web censorship or communications restrictions. Whenever people use VPNs and other internet proxies to escape online restrictions or conceal their IP address, proxy politics are given a different twist. In countries like Iran and China, VPNs are very much in use. In practice though, in many countries, companies close to censor-happy governments also run the VPNs in a exemplary display of efficient inconsistency. In Turkey, people used even more rudimentary methods-changing their DNS settings to tunnel out of Turkish dataspace, virtually tweeting from Hong Kong and Venezuela during Erdoğan's short-lived Twitter ban.

In proxy politics the question is literally how to act or represent by using stand-ins (or being used by them)-and also how to use intermediaries to detourn the signals or noise of others. And proxy politics itself can also be turned around and redeployed. Proxy politics stacks surfaces, nodes, terrains, and textures-or disconnects them from one another. It disconnects body parts and switches them on and off to create often astonishing and unforeseen combinations-even faces with butts, so to speak. They can undermine the seemingly mandatory decision between face or butt or even the idea that both have got to belong to the same body. In the space of proxy politics, bodies could be Leviathans, hashtags, juridical persons, nation states, hair transplant devices, moody chat bots, or freelance SWAT teams. Body is added to bodies by proxy and by stand-in. But these combinations also subtract bodies (and their parts) and erase them from the realm of never-ending surface to face enduring invisibility.

Or maybe something much more simple? In an unprecedented self-experiment I pointed my cell phone at Twitter bot @leyzuzeelizan's (now deleted) profile picture. With as much authority as I could muster, and hoping it would not shoot me back, I ordered it to run a retina scan on her and send it through its network database. My phone identified her in a split second without a fraction of hesitation. @leyzuzeelizan turns out to be no one other than myself, turned from signal to noise, from face to butt and back again several times over, across the crumbling borders of several nation states and countless levels of towering stacks, erasing differences between bodies, nations, animals, and media containers to advertise the work of someone called Hito Steyerl #oral, #xhamster, #videos, #syria How Not To Be Seen.

In the end, however, a face without a butt cannot sit. It has to take a stand. And a butt without a face needs a stand-in for most kinds of communication. Proxy politics happens between taking a stand and using or being used as a stand-in. It is in the territory of displacement, stacking, subterfuge, and montage that both the worst and the best things happen.

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Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise - Journal #60

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Recent work , more info here: https://iplungeintothenegativeecstasyofradio.com/bootleg-vampire-home
produsage, web_folk and internet production

Regarding collaborative practices online. Narrative data, the remake, recognition. GIFs and cinematic memory.

Thinking about the role of fiction in online spaces and the idea of consipiracy. Audiovisual strategies in rendering reality and the slippage of fiction as a metaverse

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Fossils is an immersive video exhibition. It presents three short vignettes addressing the interlinked logics of extraction at work in ecological collapse and the exploitation of human capital. The monologue of a decaying skeleton attempting to unionise his undead comrades interrogates class (de)composition. Two decoy trees, echoing the arboreal observation posts of the first world war, reflect on the way humans project meaning onto their natural environment. A many-headed oil spill mediates these perspectives: it is legion, a multitude at once demonic and pathetic, declaiming market values and anticipating their apocalyptic end. Together, these scenes from the near future explore the ways in which value extraction is intensified as new sources of growth become scarce. Displayed on headsets but forgoing the aesthetics of gaming associated with such devices, these Brechtian performances stage a demand for collectivity and solidarity in a diminished public sphere.

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Introduction by Marie Lechner,

journalist & researcher

PREAMBLE

The Pirate Book by Nicolas Maigret and Maria Roszkowska is both a visual essay and anthology, written in the wake of the Jolly Roger's infamous skull and crossbones and compiled during its journey across the four corners of the world. In this book, the authors invite us to shift our perspective on piracy itself. This polyphonic work constitutes an attempt at probing the ambiguity inherent to piracy and at re-evaluating the issues related to it. The Pirate Book, moreover, signifies a departure from the one-sided approach adopted by the cultural industries which consists in designating the figure of the pirate as public enemy number 1. Intellectual property was, in fact, called into existence in order to ward off those that Cicero, in his time, called "the common enemy of all." At the outset, intellectual property's purpose was to protect authorship and promote innovation; however, it eventually hindered technological progress and encouraged cultural products, which had hitherto belonged to the public domain, to be snatched away from it.
This book arises from a previous installation-performance by Nicolas Maigret, The Pirate Cinema, where the artist visualizes the covert exchange of films in real time at dazzling speed under the cover of worldwide peer-to-peer networks. The advent of the Internet and its users' unbridled file sharing capability on peer-to-peer networks has resulted in an unprecedented proliferation of illegal downloading since the 1990s. This situation also very quickly led to online piracy being singled out as the primary cause of the crises affecting the music and film industries, whereas certain other voices deemed piracy to be the scapegoat of the cultural sector that had not managed to properly negotiate the transformations it underwent following the onset of the digital era.

PIRACY AS EXPERIMENTATION

The term piracy more generally designated the unauthorized usage or reproduction of copyright or patent-protected material. This is almost a far cry from the word's original etymology. "The word piracy derives from a distant Indo-European root meaning a trial or attempt, or (presumably by extension) an experience or experiment," writes Adrian Johns in Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates  in which he highlights the fact that "It is an irony of history that in the distant past it meant something so close to the creativity to which it is now reckoned antithetical." The Pirate Book endeavours to gain an insight into this very creativity. By calling on the contributions of artists, researchers, militants and bootleggers, this book brings together a large variety of anecdotes and accounts of local and specific experiences from Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, China, India, and Mali, all of which foreground the lived, personal and perceived aspects of such experiences. Despite the legal arsenal that has unfurled as well as the economic and political restrictions in place, The Pirate Book provides an illustration of the vitality of pirate (or peer-ate) culture. A culture that arose from necessity rather than convenience. A culture that has devised ingenious strategies to circumvent the armoury in place in order to share, distribute, and appropriate cultural content and thereby corroborate Adrian Johns' view that "piracy has been an engine of social, technological, and intellectual innovations as often as it has been their adversary." The author of Piracy believes that "the history of piracy is the history of modernity."

STEAL THIS BOOK

The concept of intellectual piracy is inherited from the English Revolution (1660 - 80) and, more specifically, from the book trade. The Pirate Book is, as its name suggests, a book. An e-book, to be precise; a format that at the time of publication is currently very popular due to the development of tablets and readers. The increase in illegally available content that is concomitant with the growth of the e-book sector has raised fears that this sector will be doomed to the same fate as the film and music industries. By way of example, Michel Houellebecq's latest blockbuster novel Soumission was pirated two weeks prior to its release. This marked the first incident of its kind in France. The arrival of the first printing press in England in the 1470s brought about the reinforcement of intellectual property rights regarding books. More specifically, this was achieved by way of monopolies granted by the Crown to the guild of printers and booksellers that was in charge of regulating and punishing those who illegally reprinted books. In 1710, the London guild obtained the Statute of Anne, the first law to recognize author's rights, but also to limit copyright (which until then had been unlimited under the guild) to 14 years, with a possible extension if the author was still alive. The Pirate Book places side by side the Statute of Anne with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the American copyright law of 1998 that aimed at curbing the new threats posed by the generalisation of the Internet. The Pirate Book revisits some of the milestones of this history of piracy, by juxtaposing and comparing an image from the past with its contemporary counterpart. Such is the case with the musical score of Stephen Adams' Victorian ballad, The Holy City, that became the most "pirated" song of its time towards the end of the 19th century and is presented opposite the album, Nothing Was the Same, by the Canadian rapper Drake that became the most pirated album of the 21st century (it was illegally downloaded more than ten millions times). Despite being the nation that ostensibly spearheads the war on piracy, the United States was at its inception a "pirate nation" given its refusal to observe the rights of foreign authors. In the absence of international copyright treaties, the first American governments actively encouraged the piracy of the classics of British literature in order to promote literacy. The grievances of authors such as Charles Dickens fell upon deaf ears, that is until American literature itself came into its own and authors such as Mark Twain convinced the government to reinforce copyright legislation.

PIRACY, ACCESS, AND PRODUCTION INFRASTRUCTURE

The article "Piracy, Creativity and Infrastructure: Rethinking Access to Culture," in which the Indian legal expert Lawrence Liang situates the issue of the piracy of cultural artefacts in emerging economies, also rejects the narrow view of piracy as a solely illicit activity and goes on to depict it as an infrastructure providing access to culture. The abundantly illustrated stories brought together in The Pirate Book all inform this notion by inviting the reader to shift perspective. As described by the researcher and legal expert Pedro Mizukami, the emergence of bootlegged video rentals and consoles in Brazil was directly linked to the country's industrial policies of the 1980s which aimed at closing the Brazilian market to imports in order to stimulate the growth of local productions, some of which were exorbitantly priced. Cuba's isolation by the US embargo since 1962 and its ensuing inability to procure basic resources provided a fertile ground for audio-visual piracy on the part, among others, of the government itself in order to supply its official television channels with content as well as to provide its universities with books, as highlighted by the designer and artist Ernesto Oroza. Despite being poorly equipped, Cubans are able to get their hands on the latest action films, TV series, or music video thanks to a weekly, underground compilation of digital content called El Paquete Semanal that is downloaded by the rare Cubans who own a computer ( around 5% of the population has Internet access) and sold on a hard drive that can be plugged directly into a TV. The downloaders of Fankélé Diarra Street in Bamako, who are the subject of Michaël Zumstein's photographs, employ the same system of streetwise savvy. They exchange the latest music releases on their cell phones via Bluetooth, thus forming an ad hoc "African iTunes" where you can pick up the files offline in the street. This small-timer operation is also a must for local musicians to raise their profile.

FROM COPY TO CREATION, THE SHANZHAI CULTURE

Liang claims that piracy makes cultural products otherwise inaccessible to most of the population available to the greatest number of users, but also offers the possibility of an "infrastructure for cultural production." The case of the parallel film industry based in Malegaon is literally a textbook case. The Indian researcher Ishita Tiwary tackles the case study of this small backwater of central India that has arisen thanks to an infrastructure created by media piracy and the proliferation of video rentals. Using the same mode of operation as Nollywood in Nigeria, people seize the opportunities provided by cheap technology in order to make "remakes of Bollywood successes" by adapting the content to the realities of the target audience's lives. Servile replication, one of the objections often levelled at piracy, then gives way to "creative transformation" according to Lawrence Liang's own terms. Another noteworthy example is the Chinese village of Dafen that is notorious for its painters who specialize in producing copies of well-known paintings. Dafen has now become home to a market for Chinese artists selling original works, which just goes to show how "A quasi-industrial process of copying masters has led to the emergence of a local scene." This same process is aptly described by Clément Renaud, a researcher and artist, who took an interest in Shanzhai culture (literally meaning "mountain stronghold"), the flourishing counterfeiting economy of China, a country whose non-observance of copyright law is decried worldwide. "When you have no resources, no proper education system and no mentors at your disposal, then you just learn from your surroundings: you copy, you paste, you reproduce, you modify, you struggle - and you eventually improve," resumes Clément Renaud by noting the rapid versatility and resourcefulness of these small-scale Chinese companies when faced with the demands of the global market. These "pirates [work] secretly (...) in remote factories, they have built a vast system for cooperation and competition. They shared plans, news, retro-engineering results and blueprints on instant messaging groups," observes the researcher for whom this form of collaboration is reminiscent of open-source systems.

WAREZ CULTURE & FREEWARE

Computer-based piracy was originally a means of distributing, testing, and getting to grips with technologies amongst a small group of users. It was indeed not too dissimilar from the type of group activity that brought into existence the free software movement. It was a commonplace occurrence to supply your friends and colleagues with a copy of software. Clubs formed and began to learn the basics of computer programming by decoding software programmes to the great displeasure of the then infant IT industry, as attested by Bill Gates' infamous letter of 1976 that The Pirate Book has exhumed and which denounces amateur IT practitioners for sharing the BASIC programme created by his fledgling company Altair. IT manufacturers made a concerted effort to shift the original meaning of the word hacker (which until that time had been associated with a positive form of DIY) that was then conflated with cracker which translates as "pirate." The view underpinning this semantic shift was later adopted by the cultural industries with regards to P2P users, and is analysed by Vincent Mabillot. This privatisation of the code and the creation of software protection mechanisms led users to rebel by cracking digital locks and by fostering anti-corporate ideas in the name of free access. At a time when commercial software and IT net-works gained momentum and complexity, a more or less independently instituted division of labour emerged among specialised pirates who belonged to what is termed The Scene. The Scene is the source of most pirated content that is made publicly available and then disseminated via IRC, P2P, and other file sharing services used by the general public. The Scene comprises, amongst others, small autonomous groups of pirates who compete to be the first to secure and release the pirated version of digital content. The Pirate Book sheds light on the modus operandi and iconography of this Warez culture (the term designates the illicit activities of disseminating copyright protected digital content) from which the content consumed online in the most well connected countries originates and which is subsequently resold at heavily discounted prices at stalls across the globe.

TORRENT POISONING:

WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING?

In the context of this continual game of hide and seek, the cultural industries have proven to be surprisingly creative in the strategies they employ to combat piracy as substantiated by the documents on display in this book: from educational flyers to intimidation, from hologram stickers to game alterations, from false TV signal detectors (mysterious vans equipped with weird and wonderful antenna that are supposed to strike fear in the hearts of those who have not paid their TV licence) to show trials such as the 2009 high-profile case of the Swedish founders of the emblematic peer-to-peer platform, The Pirate Bay. Pirate or "privateer" tactics are even employed by certain corporations. These tactics include torrent poisoning which consists in sharing data that has been corrupted or files with misleading names on purpose. In this particular case, the reader is at liberty to copy the texts of this book and do with them as he/she pleases. The book's authors (editors?) have opted for copyleft, a popular alternative to copyright. The term copyleft was brought into popular usage by Richard Stallman who founded the freeware movement and refers to an authorization to use, alter and share the work provided that the authorization itself remains untouched. Pirates' challenging and transgression of the conventions of intellectual property have become a form of resistance to the ever increasing surveillance of users of digital technologies by corporate and state interests. In doing so, pirates have opened the way to new "perspectives of counter-societies that work along different lines."

The Pirate Book makes its own particular contribution to this debate by painting a different picture, one embedded in the geographic realities of piracy, of these frequently scorned practices. In the same way that piracy itself is difficult to pinpoint, this book endeavours to capture the breadth of the phenomenon through images and accounts garnered online. It combines the global and the hyper local, states of being on and offline, anecdotes and immersion, poetic references, and technical decryption, thereby eschewing conventional categories used to classify publications. The Pirate Book is indeed neither an artist book, nor an academic dissertation, nor an archive, nor a forecast study. It is a blend of all of the latter and forms a prolific guide that can be read as much as it can be looked at. By focusing on situations, objects, documents, and individuals, this work enables us to envision the potential for future cross-purpose practices that could emerge in a networked society.

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Introduction by Marie Lechner, journalist & researcher PREAMBLE The Pirate Book by Nicolas Maigret and Maria Roszkowska is both a visual essay and anthology, written in the wake of the Jolly Roger's infamous skull and crossbones and compiled during its journey across the four corners of the world.

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Welcome to Produsage.org | Produsage.org

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Produsage, and Produsage.org, is an idea whose time has come.

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Doug Fishbone 'Please Gamble Responsibly' detail of installation (2021) Doug Fishbone. Courtesy of Crawford Art Gallery, Cork. Photos Jed Niezgoda. With thanks to Jay Cole.
Selected International Press
Crawford Art Gallery announces internationally renowned artist Doug Fishbone's first solo exhibition in Ireland entitled Please Gamble Responsibly from 21 May - 29 August 2021.

Fishbone creates projects and exhibitionsunearthing, questioning, and examining societal misconceptions through humour and manipulation of context. His film and performance works are heavily influenced by the rhythms of stand-up comedy.

In his first solo exhibition in Ireland, Please Gamble Responsibly, commissioned by Crawford Art Gallery, Fishbone creates an architectural spectacle-mirroring the housing and rental market-and invites visitors to wander around his "ghost estate."

Replete with broken windows, boarded up balconies and surrounded with shabby corrugated fencing, it offers those that enter through the break in the fence more than an abandoned half-built interior. Inside, Fishbone presents a free-wheeling video on the topics of money and real estate-forces that drive the global economy but expose home owners and investors to perpetual systemic risk of disaster.

"Ghost estates"-housing developments built during the speculative Celtic Tiger boom of the Irish property market, and left unfinished when the credit bubble fuelling it ground to a halt in 2008-were once Ireland's most visible signs of a financial system spinning out of control. Though most of the estates were wound down during the ensuing bail-outs and period of austerity, and discussion of them is now largely a footnote, the Castle Lake apartment complex in the suburban outskirts of Cork remains a lasting remnant of this dubious period in modern financial history.

A symbol of the dashed expectations of globalisation, where ill-advised business models collide with reality to devastating effect, it calls to mind Fordlandia, Henry Ford's doomed attempt to build a rubber plantation in the Brazilian Amazon in the mid-20th century. Like Fordlandia, which never produced anything despite a massive investment, Castle Lake now sits idle and overgrown in the countryside, an instant ruin that is yet to welcome tenants. How instability and collapse are coded into the very way modern money works, from the Nixon Shock in 1971 to the ongoing corporate bailouts of today, fuels a system far dodgier than it seems.

Please Gamble Responsibly at the Crawford Art Gallery presents the artist's largest and most challenging work to date. Resonating as a formal sculpture in its own right and capturing some the empty eeriness of the original Castle Lake complex-which serves as its inspiration-Fishbone's structure offers an unexpected stage-set for a meditation on wider issues of economy and folly.

Please Gamble Responsibly (2021), HD Video, 16 min
EXCERPT: FOR FULL FILM:
In Conversation with Dawn Williams, Curator, Crawford Art Gallery. Approximately 35 min.

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Doug Fishbone - Please Gamble Responsibly

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Doug Fishbone 'Please Gamble Responsibly' detail of installation (2021) Doug Fishbone. Courtesy of Crawford Art Gallery, Cork. Photos Jed Niezgoda. With thanks to Jay Cole. Selected International Press Crawford Art Gallery announces internationally renowned artist Doug Fishbone's first solo exhibition in Ireland entitled Please Gamble Responsibly from 21 May - 29 August 2021.

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Offering to Aldgate Fatberg (from work in progress)

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Offering to Aldgate Fatberg (from work in progress)

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AW, 2023

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Offering to Aldgate Fatberg (draft test, work in progress)

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Boris Groys, "From Image to Image File—and Back: Art in the Age of Digitalization"

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Boris Groys, "From Image to Image File—and Back: Art in the Age of Digitalization"

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Atari Excavation (Almagordo, New Mexico)

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Atari Excavation (Almagordo, New Mexico)

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1983 / 2014

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Excavating the Atari E.T. Video Game Burial Site-Game|Life-WIRED

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It's been dubbed The Great Video Game Burial of 1983, but did Atari really toss millions of cartridges of its biggest flop: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial? Chris Kohler is onsite to witness an excavation of the landfill to see if the joke's really on us, and to talk with those involved with the project, including original game designer Howard Scott Warshaw.

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Elizabeth Povinelli on the buried archive, 2016 

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Elizabeth Povinelli on the buried archive, 2016 

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'Relics' and 'Rats' in Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia, 2008

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'Relics' and 'Rats' in Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia, 2008

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from William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, 2003