Pdf:Toward a Minor Tech

Contributors

Christian Ulrik Andersen, Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, is attempting to bring the knowledge and practices of digital culture and art to the fore.

Geoff Cox is Professor of Art and Computational Culture at London South Bank University, and co-director of Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI), working across software studies and contemporary aesthetics.

Camille Crichlow is a PhD Researcher at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation (University College London). Her research interrogates how the historical and socio-cultural narrative of race manifests in contemporary algorithmic technologies.

Mateus Domingos is an artist and MRes researcher at CSNI, London South Bank University.

From a network of Feminist Servers the following authors contributed: mara karagianni - artist, software developer, sysadmin, ooooo - Transuniversal constellation, nate wessalowski - PhD student at Münster University, vo ezn - sound && infrastructure artist.

Teodora Sinziana Fartan is an artist and PhD researcher at CSNI, London South Bank University.

Susanne Förster is a PhD candidate and research associate at the University of Siegen. Her work deals with imaginaries and infrastructures of conversational artificial agents.

Inte Gloerich (Utrecht University & Institute of Network Cultures) researches sociotechnical imaginaries around blockchain technology as they appear in for instance memes, startup culture, and art.

Daniel Chávez Heras is Lecturer in Digital Culture and Creative Computing at King's College London. He studies the computational production and analysis of visual culture.

Macon Holt is a a Post-Doctoral researcher at Copenhagen Business School. He is author of 'Pop Muisc and Hip Ennui. A Sonic Fiction of Capitalist Realism' (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Jung-Ah Kim is a PhD researcher in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University. She studies the relationship between weaving and computing and traditional Korean textiles.

Edoardo Lomi is a PhD Fellow at Copenhagen Business School. His project focuses on the palliative care of digital infrastructures. 

Inga Luchs is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen. In her research, she deals with questions of data classification and discrimination from a cultural and technical perspective.

Gabriel Menotti is Associate Professor in Film & Media at Queen's University and an independent curator, and co-cordinates the Besides the Screen network.

Alasdair Milne is a PhD researcher with Serpentine Galleries’ Creative AI Lab and King’s College London. His work focuses on the collaborative systems that emerge around new technologies.

Anna Mladentseva is a PhD researcher at University College London whose project focuses on the conservation of software-based works of art and design from the Victoria & Albert museum.

Shusha Niederberger is a PhD researcher based at Zurich University of the Arts and working on user subject positions in datafied environments and aesthetic strategies of using otherwise.

Søren Bro Pold Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, works with the arts of the interface and interface criticism.

Roel Roscam Abbing is a PhD researcher in Interaction Design at Malmö University's School of Arts and Communication. There he studies alternative and federated social media systems.

Winnie Soon is a Hong Kong-born artist coder and researcher, engaging with themes such as Free and Open Source Culture, Coding Otherwise, artistic/technical manuals and digital censorship.

Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver ferments data and investigates Critical Data and related practices through curating. She is Associate Professor in Digital Design and Information Studies at Aarhus University.

Varia is a space for developing collective approaches to everyday technology. https://varia.zone

Jack Wilson is a PhD researcher at the University of Warwick’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies. He is not a conspiracy theorist.

xenodata co-operative investigates image politics, algorithmic culture and technological conditions of knowledge production and governance through art and media practices. The collective is run by curator Yasemin Keskintepe and artist-researcher Alexandra (Sasha) Anikina.

Sandy Di Yu is a PhD researcher at the University of Sussex and co-managing editor of DiSCo Journal (www.discojournal.com), using digital artist critique to examine shifting experiences of time.

Freja Kir is researching across intersections of artistic methods, spatial publishing and digital media environments. Creatively directing fanfare – collective for visual communication. Contributing to stanza – studio for critical publishing. PhD researcher, University of West London.

Writing a Book As If Writing a Piece of Software

Writing an Article as if Writing a Piece of Software

Winnie Soon

To generate the graph on the left, execute the following code in the terminal with Graphviz installed : dot -Tsvg tm_article.dot -o tm_article.svg

tm_article.dot:

digraph G {
graph[overlap=false, splines = true];
node[fontname="Hershey-Noailles-help-me"]
layout=neato;

The->term->"'computational publishing'"->has->emerged->in->recent->scholarship->"(Adema 2021; Bowie 2022; Soon 2022)"->and->is->used->specifically->to->describe->books->as->dynamic->and->computational->objects->that->are->open->to->"re-versioning"->In->contrast->to->more->conventional->or->mainstream->forms->of->book->production->and->distribution->computational->publishing->challenges->the->way->in->which->we->understand->books->and->archives->as->more->than->"'discrete objects'"-> "(Batchen 1998:47)"->Books->are->regarded->not->as->a->final->format->or->concluding->result->as->finished->artefacts->ready->for->consumption->but->as->"'a continuous stream of data without temporal restriction'"->"(ibid)"->According->to->"Adema (2021)"->a->computational->book->is->an->ongoing->iterative->process->More->importantly->people->can->fork->download->study->modify->and->republish->a->book->as->if->it->were->a->piece->of->software->producing->multiple->versions->through->computational->techniques->and->under->free->and->"open-source"->licences->In->other->words->modifying->and->executing->programmable->scripts->can->generate->different->versions->of->a->book->thereby->disrupting->the->fixed->linear->nature->of->print

Considering->minor->technology->as->something->experimental->and->contingent->that->seeks->for->new->relations->and->challenges->normative->forms->of->practices->what->potential->have->opened->up->if->we->start->thinking->of->writing->an->article->as->if->writing->a->piece->of->software->Beyond->the->focus->on->digitisation->how->might->institutional->libraries->and->academic->publishing->collect->and->archive->these->new->and->experimental->forms->publication->in->multiplicities->which->are->more->process->and->"computationally-oriented?"

}

Blockchains otherwise

Blockchains otherwise

Inte Gloerich

Is resistance to blockchain-based marketisation possible? Activist and artistic engagements with blockchain technology point to (at least) four different, partially overlapping, tactics towards this aim. The first is part of an accelerationist logic: riding the waves of capital until capitalism finally crashes, funding alternative values with whatever profit was accrued while it lasted. As Jaya Klara Brekke puts it: “tap the end of capitalism for those funds you will need in order to build new worlds” (2022, 104). The artwork Terra0 could be an example of this logic. Connecting a forest to a blockchain, the project gives the forest agency to sell its logs and buy more land to expand itself (Seidler, Hampshire, and Kolling 2016). Economic growth logic inverted for a more bountiful nature.

The second tactic is part of prefigurative politics, which David Graeber describes as “the idea that the organizational form that an activist group takes should embody the kind of society we wish to create” (2013, 23). Building alternative blockchain systems that perform a different kind of politics and social organization could be an example of this. DisCO, a distributed cooperative organisation inspired by feminist economics, thinks about ways of making visible the value of care work in blockchain-inspired governance systems. DisCo does not settle for blockchain ‘as is’, but bends it to fit their values (Troncoso and Utratel 2019).

Then, there are those that explore how blockchain’s logics can be subverted to make space – however minor – for different ways of relating in non-financialised ways. To explore what this might mean, I've been inspired by Patricia de Vries’ take on “plot work as an artistic praxis” (2022) that builds on decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter’s description of plots: small, imperfect corners of relative self-determination within the larger context of colonial plantations (1971). De Vries asks how artistic work, implicated as it is in institutional and capitalist logics, can perform plot work to create space for relating outside of those logics. A possible answer to this question comes from artist Sarah Friend, who programmed her Lifeforms NFTs in such a way that they ‘die’ if they are not cared for. The NFT has to be given away for free to someone else, who then takes over the caring responsibilities (2021). Lifeforms represent little plots of care relationships, not only to the NFT, but also to those around you, calling on others to ‘care for’ instead of ‘capitalize on’.

However, these tactics hinge on the assumption that blockchain is here to stay. Perhaps another tactic should also be explored: how to protect fragile life-sustaining elements against capture by blockchain’s market logics? A tentative example could be Ben Grosser’s Tokenize This, that creates “unique digital objects” in the form of a url that is only accessible once, and is deleted straight afterwards (2021). This project doesn’t protect anything against tokenisation necessarily, but it does create slippery objects difficult to grasp through tokens. Perhaps ephemerality in the context of purported immutability can be a fruitful lens for more work in this direction.

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Colophon

A Peer-reviewed Newspaper

Volume 12, Issue 1, 2023.

Edited by all authors

Published by Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University

Organised in collaboration with Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, London South Bank University; King's College, London; transmediale, Berlin; Film & Media/FAS, Queen's University; and Varia, Rotterdam.

The publication was generated with wiki-to-print hosted on Creative Crowd, by Varia.

Publishing licence: CC4r - https://constantvzw.org/wefts/cc4r.en.html

Printing: Drukkerij Tripiti, Rotterdam. Printed in an edition of 2000 copies.

Design: Manetta Berends & Simon Browne (Varia) https://varia.zone

Fonts: All fonts used in this newspaper are published freely under the SIL Open Font License: https://scripts.sil.org/OFL, apart from Authentic Sans, which is published under the WTFPL: http://www.wtfpl.net/

• Authentic Sans
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ISSN: 2245-7593 (Print)

ISSN: 2245-7607 (PDF)