Index: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/AffectiveInfrastructures
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[the day starts with a personalised injection (as in, actually, a plastic syringe) prepared by the artist/cook Daniel Salomon, 'based on your on-line presence'. The formula remains blackboxed.]
Round of intros
Lou: The concept of worldbuilding. Re-imagining Utopia - ref. Berlant and the commons
For Worldbuilding - can highly suggest Nelson Goodman's book on the topic, written in 78' before the 'affect' craze
Lorenzo and Ben introduce The Institute for Endotic research. Endotic (the antonym of the exotic) as a mode of institution-making. Interventions, encounters, workshops. Open format: screenings, readings, performance ... Building infrastructures, sharing processes in workshops.
5 threads:
- Cultivation: to think about processes and the time they need to emerge so we work a lot with peope working with plants and gardening; so this is also about supporting artists over time, starting with an encounter in Berlin and then over time
- Building Strength: infrastructure: body, critical yoga, ...LARP-ing, physical/material
- Making public: the space as a text, challenging exhibiting
- Percenting - a play on words - the city as a pedagogical device, thinking about art and public space, thinking through the context of the welfare state now not necessarily in a nostalgic way
- Technics: Technology, techniue, institution making as a technique. (other) geneologies of technologies.Thinking through timelines of computation
The (amazing hot pink) table is an artwork! (by Luis Berríos-Negrón) It is a social pedestal. It has two kinds of plants on them planted in a ceremony.
Rosemary from the anarchive.
Rosemary associated with memory retention
(waiting to see it sprout) Datura - is a plant associated with forgetting. Commenting the colonial past of the greenhouse - two pathways to the Anthropocene: remembering and forgetting.
The fountain (by Ana Alenso): an oil barrel is both destruction and growth.
tier.space: get the newsletter!!!
Inga: Context of the collaboration between Tier.Space and Transmediale
Spartenoffene Förderung
Bringing local perspectives to the development of Transmediale. Also: Spektrum + Import Projects
These other spaces will also host other Transmediale workshops / study circles
Daphne: The study circle format
This new format is a way to open up the curatorial process
Inviting a working group to develop ideas together. Different working teams connect.
Kristoffer: On the Study Circle - TM as a learning/knowledge exchange. Open-ended and formalised at the same time.
'study circle' comes from the social democratic context of sweden in the 1960s and 1970s - even outside the university you can enter it and get money to buy books and take classes, there are no exams or tests, but you can just be part of conversations - so this workshop adn the new curatorla approach is inspired by this approach; discuss without instrumental outcome.
Modes of self-learning.
Daphne: This is first working meeting, then an an on-line meeting, then during TM: a workshop, then a public session, then a closing session.
There are 2 SCs - one on Affective Infrastructures and the other on Uneasy Alliances
With Florian Wuest. Moderation Eva Majewska and Wojciech Kosma. How to bring people from different sectors. Differences between tech-activism and gentrification activism.
We are looking at care, affect and empathy and how they are affected by todays technologies -
Continuation of work done last year
(maybe gather some explicit links to these events/discussions?)
https://2018.transmediale.de/program/event/transversal-values-on-new-forms-of-coalition
https://2018.transmediale.de/program/event/the-many-faces-of-fascism
https://2018.transmediale.de/program/event/reimagine-the-internet-affect-velocity-excess
https://2018.transmediale.de/program/event/derivative-living
https://2018.transmediale.de/program/event/call-out-protest-speak-back
https://2018.transmediale.de/content/built-in-values-on-the-politicization-of-media-platforms
https://2018.transmediale.de/program/exhibition
we were interested in the poles of 'emotionalised politics' 'sentimentalism' and 'disengaged politics' -
what brings people together, what binds them. 'new' forms of care and being together. All of this links to the general programme being
Femke: Looking at the descritions of the 2 Study circles, they seem very connected so how are they different,what goes where and how are they different?
Kristoffer: They do overlap but how we put an accent on them is the difference; the emphasis on infrastrucutre may be more specific here;
Daphne: We will flesh out some of these ideas today - if we look at infrastrucutres as something that binds us - then we come to the issue of solidarity adn alliances and connections but there is also a nice play on words when it comes to the relation of affect to infrastructures
This focus for TM was inspired by the older text by Raymond Williams ' Structures of Feeling' -which is about the styles, languages, moods etc that always differ from one generation to the next.
The text by Berlant as well looking at affect as a kind of infrastructure - linking back to Williams
But affective infrastructures nowadays can also point towards AI, social media, VR, sensing
Question is what kinds of radical transformations emerge from these notions of infrastructure?
(both Study Circles think about structure in a different way/from a different perspective?)
Maya: curious about and struggling with Berlant text. Doing work for doctoral studies through infrastructures - Michael Fish. Ethics and intelligence (ref. driverless cars). Between automation and autonomy. Is anything actually autonomous? is the human really autonomous?
Combining Affect + Infrastructure is interesting - Haraway: thinking and making together.
what does it mean to write story of technology differently?
AI (artificial intelligence ;-), not Affective Infrastructure) is often discussed without politics.
Shows https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ_B7oHjkLo - Stephanie Dinkins; working with Robot: Binary Intelligent Neural A(?) 48. Future intelligence. Bina based on material gleaned from the files on an interracial, non-gender binary couple living and loving in the 1970s.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BINA48
Terasem Movement Foundation, transhumanist. Bina talked a class at Westpoint. Cadets felt there was a lot of intelligence. How do we push back to this idea? http://www.stephaniedinkins.com/conversations-with-bina48.html
Looking at people without mobile devices. https://www.boredpanda.com/portraits-holding-devices-removed-eric-pickersgill/?utm_source=duckduckgo&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=organic
Femke: text of Berlant fell into place in many different ways /
time to study and need to study together
looking at actual technologies, stuff we use and dont use , remember and forget
Exercise that could open up the toolbox for affective infrastructures
The Berlant text as a core, an entry point, to think about how to study and approach affective infrastructures - as an index -
The combination fo the words affect and infrastrcuture -
Maya: Make readings part of process / see how they can be accessed and used freely
Important to find other ways to access infrastructures. to make them our own
Femke: Exercise for today is to make infrastructures between different things we brought
Maya: What do we mean by moderating. It is weaving threads. The stagemanager (do you men scenographer, actually? - hmm, not really. I understand scenography to relate to practices of design and stage-setting, and production, visualisation; I consider a stage manager or sutradhar to be a character in the play) moderating as service-with-an-attitude.
Sutradhar - in the South Asian subcontinental tradition of dramaturgy - like a stage manager -
Sutr - thread also sounds like 'suture'
Femke: original invitation for observer. how can this be the most useful
Discussion with Seda Guerses on optmization.
work with Jara RochaFederated infrastrucutres- at Rotterdam
thinking together social and technological
work with constant - "networks with an attitude " - thining about always available infrastructure - what does feminist server look like? "she tries very hard to not apologise for not being avaiilable"
Jara's work on this makes the connection to language and how things that do not look or are materally "like" infrastructure actually are infrastructure - Jara is not here but is receiving letters from Femke about what she is working on, and willl somehow be involved in the process and maybe become part of the propcess of the Festival in the future.
Daphne: Talking about Femke's question to the overview of the Ciricle - what is to be done? How is the potential in these ideas provoke change? Not just to analyze and study but also what comes next
Two perspectives: what's there, what's to be done
exercise: how the collection of material can build its own infrastructure
It could be a glosssary, an archive, an altar, an inventory, a collection, a map, ... (all with their own problems and potentials) but the main idea is to keep it open and messy - did not want to classify and organize the materials immediately
maybe an altar?
Altars as 'just' bringing precious things together. But what about the not-so-precious things?
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Lou: Did bring an object/experience. Interested in mushrooms as a foraging practice in NYC; and also inspired by Anna Tsing's Mushroom At the End of the World
The Future is Fungal: http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-masculine-issue/struggle/the-future-is-fungal
'mushroomy feelings confirmed' (a large mushroom is brought to the table). 2 memories about mushrooms. Foraging in Prospect Park in Brooklyn.
There is a look that foragers have - focused on the ground - we made a glance and second glance - recognition between foragers - he approahced me and asked if i was looking for mushrooms
A few months later I was again looking for mushrooms and I came across two men having sex so i looked away adn moved on. Was approached by another forager who asked me:
'are you good?'. I dont know what he was looking for - i don't think he was looking for mushrooms, possibly for sex, or some kind of public connection.
Foraging and cruising overlapping. Cruising as a social practice. Looking for mushrooms/looking for sex (not mushrooms). Trying to expand cruising beyond sxual acts. Is forgaging like cruising, is cruising like foraging? Not wanting to sanitize cruising and its queerness but asking what does public sex do beyond the sex. What other kinds of sociality emerge from this? Cruising is seen as associated with the city and foraging is not. How do we bring nature and the urban together, or disrupt the separation between the two?
(Samuel Delaney?) Times Square Red TImes Square Blue: The difference between Network and contact: network = institutional; contact = coming together (cross-racial, cross class) - not exclusive but overlapping -
Expanding the practice of cruising. The queerness of public sex; different ways of being in public. Nature-urban separations.
Femke:asks Lou - what is the place of technology in this?
Lou - Mycelial network of mushrooms which are the fruit bodythat people have compared to the WWW. Mycelial networks transmit information.
Mushroom as a technology. Skeptical to use it as a metaphor for human-made technology. Relation between
Cruising has been transformed by technology different Social Media tech does not exclude/make impossible contact in excess.
I didnt know that cruising still happens in Prospect Park - seems like an older idea, made nostalgic, and as if we need tech to recreate this. I came across it without tech though.
Cruising is romanticized in a way similar to the commons; loss of cruising is like loss of queer commons
foraging with an ipad.not just the rugged back to nature backpacker image of the forager.
Sex in Public: text by Lauren Berlant.
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Hui Hui: shares video: Wrote a book on the cloud, but everyone said it was on infrastructures. Now working on negative affect.
Link: https://umich.box.com/s/if6tdh95738krbbxabt5vdtm5ug1rbm0
Now writing about negaitve affect, lethargy
Less interested in the linking and lights as infrastructure
Lisa Parks: Engineers tell me that infrastrcture is the stuff you can kick. What happens when humans become part of our infrastrucutre? Like call center agents. They are treated like objects. They are paid to take abuse, be yelled at.
Structures of unfeeling (Berlant) sexworkes on a script. Who is on the receiving end of robotic systems?
Ref: The film mysterious skin -
Google Duplex: who is on the other (receiving) end of the phone? How certain kinds of humans are being reshaped in this. What is the affect of passivity, recessive-ness. I
What is the affect of lethargy. Not being able to express. Achille Mbembe: Wanting to be an object (you'll be treated better)
Care is not always a good thing. Why does it have to be a good thing? Policing affect, comportment, esp as a person of colour
'to be animated, to care, to smile ...' all of it can be oppressive. Different politics?
Antisocial media- a difficult book to read and don't recommend it but we have a liberal idea of attachment to sociality that is under attack by social media; maybe we need to rethink sociality ;
rethinking sociality.
Film: Sleeping Beauty (2011) About a sex worker who is asleep/unconscious when men do things to her.
Consent to being not-conscious. She does not even claim it as her right to pleasure or work - therefore also a problem for feminism
How to talk about affect in this scene? How do talk about affect in the contex of someone who has Partial access to subjectivity. To be asleep = only having partial access. Agency is not/cannot be about autonomy.
References: Saba Mahmoud : the politics of piety.
Why are women veiling themselves. Agency not just as pushing back; resistance. Want to think about these negative affect-
Proximity and how sociality is fucked up by algorithms. Other ways of being together. Anna Tsing is awesome! She has this bit about the matsutake and the pine tree being in love and love as moving toward each other (and transformation!). so in the clip he showed we see the human and object interchanged positions)
consider the vitality of.in non-human worlds -- not only agency but what in animism
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Pedro:
Temporary image link>>> https://1drv.ms/u/s!AmMQdH1UvD07hJ8c_aUV2Oqm_YfsbQ
(Pedro: please do not circulate this image outside the study; I got it from a source who has not yet published it online so I'd wait until it's "officially" out)
Wanted to bring something related to current project on software for accent recognition being used in Germany. But it isn't just about researching the tech itself but starting to think about how the conditions that allow for the emergence of technologies like these can be understood as infrastrucutre
Accent testing. Messy technologies
(Pedro: I was talking with Femke that perhaps "messy" is not the most appropriate of terms to refer to these spaces of conflict and "critical fabulation" I am referring to [e.g. Anzaldúa's Borderlands], because it might be easily confused/associated with emergent systems which is not much my focus and/or intention. I am thinking a lot also of what Glissant has referred to as "open totality", as well as Muñoz's "performances of disidentification" in here. So not something that comes -with- technological infrastructures but the set of affective relations which actively work against and with/in it.)
Mechanisms of controlled subjectivity. Stabilising messyness into classifiable
into something "taxonomizable"
(shows formula and forms)
Materialisation of infrastructure translates into
You speak on the phone and the tech rates your accent as being accurate. This creates an identity for you based on this.
'accuracy' and probability. BUt there is no one single accent, accents are messy and changing. Migration, movement etc. are not quantifiable. ref. Borderlands and different accents. How does this translate back into everyday practice. Biometrics and everyday practice. Creation of suspectness.
Context of Belgium : do you see/listen/perceive something suspect? Something suspicious
Brazilian military police. A set of objects, a "criminal kit" (Kit Bandido), usually consists of a gun and a pack of cocaine - something to place at the scene of a crime. The crime is stablised and so is the body associated with the crime
The kit besides a brown. black or white bodies and also produces/reinforces the body in the context of a crime
Swedish guide 'what to do in case of crisis'. How to respond to sirens. Disciplining the body and attuning yorself to listen in a certain way
Kristoffer: people in Sweden did not notice it, but it traveled more widely internationally.
Places from which 'critical fabulations' (Saidiya Hartman) can emerge. Not reject, but think about how to work with them for new narratives.
Franco A. a neo-nazi German soldier with a killlist that managed to pass as a Syrian refugee, then would blame the kills on refugee. He was never tested for language - passing as a white syrian. This vouched for the launch of accent recognition tech. Whiteness as the signification for violence.
Maya: Machine learning 'should become more granular' as an aspiration and target but it is not really possible is it? Real consequences. ML is not robust. Robustness is based on stability, it cannot and should not. Remaining in the messy space. Conflict and difference in our favour.
The discussion now is about erasing bias out of algorithms -engineer it out - but without questioning the logic of it.
Book by JOhn Cheney Lipold
[need to reformulate this --] Probability scores 60% foreign. Categories are bullshit, and consequential. Identity is never stabilized. It does not matter, as long as there are other people just like this.
It is not about stablizing, or that instability and messiness being a place of resistance, because it isnt and we cannot work with this-
Contradiction as a place of emergence.
Impersonal intimacies
Affective Infrastructure away from romantic ideas of togetherness. Contingent pleasure.
[LUNCH]
Marija: Preparation done during a dj set 'casa delirium' :-) Based in London. Working with/around commodification of emotions. Looking into how Self-hood is defined nowadays. How is it encompassed in the context of technocapitalism. Quantified self-movement. How is the self promoted on social media. Corporisation, gender. Circulation of data, self-knowledge through numbers. Yoga, meditation, mindfullness and their re-appropriation as consumer goods.
Encapsulation of the affective - voice. Personal assistants. Exploitation of care. Machine learning to mimic life performance. Mimicking synthetic and live voice in a space. Mimicry of biological / natural systems by human-made systems. Feedback-loop of data. Predicting contingencies. Potential: in constant search.
Patricia: distinction between self-hood and individuality. Convinced otherwise of the importance of self-hood by Peter (Wolfendale). A mode of coherency to understand all the different aspects/ expressions, a schizoid self that was celebrated in the 1990s esp through the internet; whereas individuality or individualism is a social construction.
Discovering new modes of knowledge production by doing less than more; employing the cognitive through the affective thus moving closer to the experiential, to what is felt as it is and what exceedes language constraints.
Buddhism proposes a death of the self and Hinduism ‘anatta' or non-self. David Hume?
Marija plays an excerpt from Pema Chodron - an American Buddhist nun - giving instructions for meditation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmthYcJ2FCA
Tracking breathing patterns. Quantifying the breath and therefore life itself. 'best way forward is by doing less' and feeling more rather than just being stuck in the factual and analyical thinking, which you can do by decelerating and working with the self in order to serve others.
Nanda: Thinking of situations on the Internet. Too much attention for identity. Techno-capitalist economies. Vedetas a practice about sharing knowledge sharing and privacy. Triying to be on the internet in a safer way. How do hegemonic infrastructures and identity formation go together. Lots of identities on- and offline. 'real identity' 'unique' 'exceptional'. Related to ableism. Discussing technology as a way for accesibility but what access? Dis-appropriation of technology. Does it bring the 'best' out of our abilities. It makes people distant from their inner-selves. Obliges the performance of the same identity. Techno-capitalism is about performance. Breaking boundaries. Perceptive sensorial way. Talking more about perception and less about technology as performance. But there is a risk. Is related to tecnology as a bunch of concepts bundled into a single term. Like NLP - natural language processing - is just one kind of machine learning technology.
Risk is about the bias ... it is transformative, but maybe not the way we want. Prescripting better ways of expressing ourselves through technology.
femke: what is "better" about differnet ways of experssing ourselves through tech?
Nanda: is about ableism and ability- and access
Recycling. Not a surface for performing identity.
Communicating myself face to face has always been difficult for me, but since 2006 when i started using the internet has really helped me find myself in groups and collectives that gace me a sense of behaving and belonging.
[late user, did not have a computer]. Tools to express/communicate myself.
when internet /online activism was discussed as 'laziness' or 'slacktivism' (?) it made me angry. Crossing boundaries.
it has been three years since i was in a personal crisis (depression). Started to work in a feminist hackerspace MariaLab in which we started Vedetas. It felt better to find other GNC people and women
Meeting other non-gender confirmed women. Other strategies to combat on-line harassment. Did not know how to start this. Technologies are very much appropriated, improvements for the market. Using Open Source standards/tools instead. Tech was not designed for vulnerable people. Rememeber: it is a military/academic tool.
Vedetas is a feminist server - they offer private and encrypted spaces, notepads, it also becomes a space for vulnerable communities, offering services that have low thresholds to entry so the create spaces for complex discussions.
Nadege: Joining in. Digital infrastructure project.
Kefir = trans*feminist server that is a home to dfferent collectives and organizations
We give reliable services as you would expect of a server! for feminist project. But it is falling apart. Broken voice.
is part of a working group(s) on internet infrastructure - a global working group with feminist groups - there is very little time to talkabout what it means to fall apart in these projects
Shifting the model. Expectation of people for services.
If we want the internet to work there are things that need to be in place.
'Infrastructure should just work'. But what if things did/do not? They are quickly precarious when there are not enough people/resources. It creates a lot of stress. Even if you want different dynamics.
When you want to engage in different dynamics and rhythms then how can you do this through these delicate infrastructures
THe tension between creating Delirious infrastructure that is imagainative, but whihc also are effective and available. This is delicate. How do you hold those different expectations and desires. There is a lot of academic language (on this pad?). 'I have to read everything three times'.
Would be interested in opening up the ways we are render our thoughts and communicate otuside of academic language and convention. Not simplifiying the language, but finding connections - the diversity of composting heaps to bring different practices together. More oxygen.
Femke: use the study circle also as a cricle for activation
can you think about where this language or communication is happening?
Indicator: conversations I can have with my mother. She did her own website. That is important.
Maya: How can we have different scales of organisation. Working on access and activism. Berlant encourages us to do this, this Study Circle trying to do this? It would be great if everything would be intelligible as-I-type :-P
Do we also need to be legible? Activism requires solid solidarity, but also important to have discussions in different spaces. [ref. other Study Circle]
Commitment to meaningful complexities. You need patience!
The metaphor of streaming and direct downloads, that we are immediately legible and clear to each other
So many different levels to engage with people, to solve things. Other angles of understanding/observing cross-generational spaces.I am part of a permaculture group in which we exchange seeds and tthe anthropologist 'expert' wh took an hour to explain what the old ladies were doing, and the ladies were 'blinking' and unaware of what the expert was actually saying.
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Lorenzo: Infratektur. Something that has been resonating: notion of state, how technologies depend on a conciousness of welfare state. What if the state has access to all levels.
Which kind of tech is possible, what state is able to govern (??) this type data. Governance. How taxation (in the term of providing resources, and porcesses of extraction form the citizens)relates to infrastructure, and might change when it depends on a few companies.
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui Bolivian theorist talking about internal colonialisms that could be applied to thinking about how we synthesize and metabolize existing internet and digital infrastuctures - how we become part of these infrastructures.
How do we socialize? What information do we put on-line? A project on archives - Culturas de Archivo. Franco archive had the uber archive. How do we become concscious with the internalisation / co-exist with of technologies.
Femke asks how do you see this coexistence possible if it all ?
Haraway: 'composting' staying with the trouble -- sympoesis
Rethinking grand narratives. thinking together about what a state could be - or rather, systems of governance, not just the state. how do we risk what we know in relation to democracy? what lies beyond representative democracy?
Patricia: But How do we think about care at scale? we cannot really scale caring for neighbours, community, in terms of proximal relations- because there are 7 billion of us. this is why infrastucture is interesting
"why do people from the south do not pay for metro in Berlin?" Germans think it is a universal duty of everyne contributing to the whoel and thats what makes it work. Perceptions are different in other places. how can we produce a consciousness to rethink that the commons is? Marina Garces (???) talk about "the world in common" v "one world"
Femke: troubing the idea of commons as sameness but between the personal and interpersonal that is not about a shared consciousness - but can we thikn differently about what it means to share. sharing can be a well meant oppressiveness about being the same.
Marija: referring back to the idea she raised of The hyper individual society v a need for connection and belonging.
Patricia: 'Community' as an idea, of something universal and shared can be violent in its homogeneity.
Lorenzo: The commons needs internal reguation, needs to be a closed community in order to work.Once something that is hidden - whic most commons are - becomes public then it falls apart or is not common any more. And what does it mean 'it works'?
The tension between the idea of closing/limiting and approaching the universalisation
Femke: the idea of 'closing' is also problematic. A colonial move?
Benjamin: interested in te idea of the state, and self management - Paris COmmune of 1871. Also theorized in
Socialist Yugoslavia and France. Serbo-Croatian: samoupravljanje The French word Autogestion which is about gesturing rather than management. This word is more to do with process. End goal of self-management is the dissolution of the state. It is the means and the goal of the struggle. Post-capitalism as an endless struggle. Questions related to infrastructure -- often related to property and privacy.
Self-ownership to take things out of the hands of the market and the state. A sense of autonomy. Smart contracts fall back on the ntion of the state as the 'puzzle piece' - the smartness promised in contracts actually necessitates more practices of regulation and management from the top down. Self-management is what brings people together. Including reproductive labour.
Lorenzo: interdependency? Autonomy as a collective process. Autonomy needs to be respected.
The paradox that autonomy as coming from dependency
COming back to Berlant as a spine (not glue) who talks about non sovereignty, how does this come back to autonomy? If we thik about tech through sovereignty and independence but start instead from a place of dependence and contingencies that are not chosen but are still active in how we operate. Autonomy is not an end-goal- and esp in the context of tech
It is possibly about constantly reconfiguring relations ?
How does infrastructure itself autonomous?
Non-ownership technology. Non-owned technology.
Pedro: "commonality-in-difference" and how it works often against plurality ("we are all different, therefore equal"). Pluralism vs plurality.
Indigenous struggles as in the Zapatista context. Becoming autonomous through relating to the land not in terms of ownership but as infrastructure. Modes of Decolonisation . Land as infrastructure. Affective infrastructure.
Patricia: Paradox -- autonomy through accepting dependency. Increasing the sphere of decidability.
Pedro: sovereignty without becoming a state. It is dependent on land, but no borders. Look at the Zapatistas ("mundos donde quepan muchos mundos" – world where many worlds fit).
Lorenzo: Zapatismo can exist because of its shared enemy. Conceptually violent.
Harsha Walia - Journeys towards decolonising (Pedro suggests reading and could contribute the text too?)
Lorenzo: talking about different systems of notation, writing, glyphs, codification and language - Peru for ex, which is also through textile and weaving -
Daphne: Commons, important that Berlant understands commons not through Kant as 'sensus communis' (?) .
What tools to use then? Referring Munoz, Audre Lorde and the role of affective differences
Differences can act as connecting points. Reminds us of thinking commons as a verb "how can we reinhabit" To act transversally. The most inspiring question is about how to desire these infrastructures. Lisa parks talks about the awe and fascination users have for infrastructures. Can this desire / awe be reingeneered/
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Femke: showing some slides from an exhibition called Robot Love - a project to "take palantir" down
image of 'colourful sameness' - sold back to us as difference being a service -
another example why the unicode consortium came up with ways to brownify the emojis - emoji modifiers coming from a pantone card to make emojis diverse -
shows ginger coon's new proposed alternate logic gates in addition to "and", "or" also But(t)
Queer analytics - text from Pritchard, Rocha, Benitez - Femke to paste text here.
How to bring together thingsthat canot be brought together easily - how to propose other logics?
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Maya: #metoo as the context for the emergence of "the list" as an infrastructure that has enabled women to speak about violence. This started in late 2017. A list as an infrastructure. The list is a spreadsheet of abusive men in academia. From 50 it went to 70 names on the list and at first there was no informatin except their names and institutions, later people had to add informatin about the abuse they were responsible for. I have 3 acquaintances on the list. Older feminists responded with a Discussion became about how ideas develop in academia, the need for closeness, interaction, intimacy, sexuality and esp in the humanities; they did not talk about the reality of abuse in academia. Feminist academics came out in defense of their male colleagues. Publishers of the list: 'we need the list to work now'. Became a q of generations, not about the problem of these list. It isa struggle over generations of feminists as well.
Now there has been a second and very high profile wave of MeToo focused on the media industries. Recently , a senior editor lost his job after more than 30 women came out and spoke about his abusive and tyrannical behaviour.
THere are these Poles of articulation in the wake of MeToo: promises of the internet is to be heard/seen. My dad now is able to say 'my daughter was doing #metoo work before it existed'. THis phrase gives Articulation through this term. The other pole: falling out ... how to have relationships. how do we organise with sexuality still being in the room? 3 Indian came to me with their stories, hesitating/nervous about masculinity. Different scales that are being brought together. How to rethink intimicy within power structures. Apologetic humor. Confidence + hesitations.
Hesitation is reshaping infrastructure (and gender-roles). Hesistant infrastructures? And related to what Nadege was saying about infrastrucutres that don't always work.
Patricia: Re-enforcing norms. Angela Davis and the (sudden) awkwardness of pronouns. Potential of uncertainty, hesitant.
Maya: WAS Paid to trash masculinity. Through #metoo interested in destabilisation.
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16:46 BACK TO THE CIRCLE
1. What gaps, what is missing. What kinds of connections exist between what we've been talking about - the themes, as well as the objects, the contexts. We can/could/want to work on
2. What questions do we want to pose to the q of 'affective infrastructures'
- Writing systems
Maintenance is often talked about.
Because our objects shifted from person to person in what we mean by Affective Infrastrctures - we covered a lot of ground - but we could bridge these positions. eg:
Sovereignty and quickly to non-sovereignty. Work on what happens in the move in-between. How do we make the connective tissue between these words and the moves, and work on the productive thing that happens when you work on these words together?
Who was in conversation with each other? CLusters of topics: drew a diagram of the clusters of terms and conversations
- personality and sociality
- selfhood and its performance : how it is produced, performed. pedro, nanda, marija -
- building autonomous/flimsy infrastructures, for the non-sovereign: nadege lorezno benjamin talking about insfrastrcures literally whether servers or blockchain and autonomy within this context
- Difference and its instrumentalisation. Daphne, Femke, Maya
non-soverieng and sovereing on one side / self the personhood on the other side
Pedro:
- access to/agency over subjectivity/selfhood as an interesting topic esp wrt the sleeping beauty film - how subjectivity is produced or dormant at other times - but at the same time inquiring how this access to subjectivity is produced and negotiated/denied by infrastructural systems – how infrastructural technologies prevent certain bodies their "access" (or agency) to their own subjectivity.
- worldbuilding as a practice (for? towards?) delirious, hesistant infrastructures
Maya:
- How to engage with AI.
Older ideas: maintenance, experience. 'Context is the enemy of scale'. How to make someone else experience these conversations about affect? Bridging between nonscalable and scalable structures. A fetishization of scale
Tsing on Frictions as well as Mushrooms - to think about scale
Through looking at Foundation for public code. The problem of smart-cities and limit of scale. European context of languages that do not bridge across the idea of scale in smartness/city-ness
- Affect (a working definition)
Lorenzo looking at the etymology of affect - affect as the management of distance (Pedro: for some reason this reminds me of Karen Barad on touching)
Prediction, prehension. Approximation + presence. External management of the distance.
- Infrastructure (a working definition)
Daphne: how do we locate our starting point? Like governance, or the politics of infrastructure
Looking at the text again: Living infrastructure + messyness/ is it a possible response or not?
Problematics of care and love. Re-addressing the potential, after/while looking at the problems
TO address the notion of infrastructure itself; or can we talk about affective infrastructures only together and in relation to each other?
How does this discussion come back to our own practices.esp in the contxt of TM we want to focus on tools, methods, practices. We could look at reflections on affect and infrastructure as part of our online discussion. How it talks back to your processs?
3. [after this: what modus operandi/structure/infrastructure can we work with]
How to structure this conversation? : diagrams, glossary, keywords list, altars -
How to address the reading list? How to focus the reading so it works as a toolbox?
October issue: an artist questionnaire about a theme e.g obsolescence.
Great if we could work through personal interventions - practice - that people bring in -
What is your relationship to affect + infrastructure.
Not a list of words - a super annotated glossary.
Curating an on-line/physical experience
Making sure we are explicit about the reliance of this work on shadowlibraries.
4. Next steps
1. On-line conversation in November. Estafette? A combination of different styles of conversation. Mid November ideally. Maya and Femke to work with TM in bringing in something written / live. Work through a new proposal
Different understandings of access as availability -- indigenous.
Specific issues with academic publishing. Mayas friend in Harvard. Could Transmediale buy books?
A public library in the festival. Source from libraries. Prints of article.
2. 31 January workingsession. Open to the public: 20 people. Prepare the agenda for this 3 hour public event. Maybe work through keywords/definitions/questions/show practice/ terms / presentations/ screenings -need to know what this is by the end of November.
3. 2 February public session. 3hr event. How would this work? Maya + Femke + TM will propose a mode.
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"We all share this problem, and we all have very different ideas about what to do about it. That’s already hard enough. That does not mean the science is not settled on climate change, or that relativism reigns; it does mean learning to compose possible ongoingness inside relentlessly diffracting worlds. And we need resolutely to keep cosmopolitical practices going here, focusing on those practices that can build a common-enough world. Bruno says this, too. Common is not capital C. "Common.” How can we build —compose— a better water policy in the state of California and its various, many parts? How can we truly learn to compose rather than decry or impose?"
[Donna Haraway in discussion with Cary Wolfe]
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[agenda as a path]
10.30 Arrival of participants
11:00 Welcome by Benjamin Busch & Lorenzo Sandoval (Tier Space)
11:15 Introducing the Study Circle as a format, the specific theme (affective infrastructures) and its relation to the theme and structure of transmediale 2019 by Daphne Dragona, Inga Seidler and Kristoffer Gansing.
11.30 'Affective Infrastructures': Situation + invitation by Maya Ganesh & Femke Snelting. General tour through readings, programme of the day, rhythm of the study circle + first observations. Tools + platforms we will use in our time together.
12:00 Group exercise. Everyone is invited to bring one immaterial or material object, word, experience, event, or practice that will allow you to share what 'affective infrastructures' means to you and your practice. Continuing with the notion of the 'Circle', we want to sit together and share these contributions as an introduction to ourselves, our reflections on the theme and the readings (and all this in ten-fifteen minutes per person!). We do not rush in immediately to organize or categorize these contributions; this may come later. [Agile Yoga!]
Part A - Responses by: Tung Hui Hu Lou Cornum (online), Pedro Oliveira
13:00 Lunch conceptualised and prepared by Daniel Salomon
14:00 Part B - Responses by: Marija Bozinovska Jones, Nadege & Fernanda (online), Lorenzo, Daphne, Femke, Maya,
and (tbc): Benjamin,
15:30 Discussion: How can we organise these ensembles responsibly, allowing for messiness and awkwardness? How could we bring the items we brought into an imaginary glossary/cabinet/inventory/altar/collection for/of Affective Infrastructures that map out its domain of knowledge, and discuss its mode of organisation?
16:30 Coffee Break
17:00 Filter: Parsing conversations from the day to focus on specific questions, methods and objects of study. What is missing, what are the gaps? How will we take this to the next level as a process among ourselves as a Study Circle, and to the festival?
18:00 Next Steps by Inga Seidler and Daphne Dragona
19:00 Gettogether
Encounter with Daniel Solomon & Introduction of Infratekture Project by Tier.Space