Digital Discomfort Hauntologists Text
The Cell for Digital Discomfort (CfDD) emerged for and during the Fellowship for Situated Practice at BAK around the summer of 2021 and is currently composed of Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak and Jara Rocha, in exchange with many others. The cell operates as an agitator of disobedient, practice-based, para-academic, research on, across and despite the techno-colonial establishment. It undertakes mundane but attentive experiments to collectively study non-eurowhite calculation genealogies, trans*feminist infrastructural entanglements[1], anti-extractivist connecting cultures and intersectional notions of hosting and hostility. The urgency for the work of the CfDD is produced by the contemporary stage of rampant global digitisation based on the dominant logic of coercion, quantification and the massive capture of all aspects of more-than-human existence, from a material and spectral infrastructural perspective: cloud-computing, hyper-availability, agile flow-management, optimized planetary computing and so forth.
Digital discomfort, like physical discomfort, can come from a politicized re-arrangement of an environment: the agential pathing towards the abolition of inherited and imposed structures in order for other modes of existence to take place. Such re-arrangement needs to depart from a double move of, on the one hand, remembering and reactivating ways of doing that have stayed latent despite violent operations of techno-cultural erasure[2]; and on the other hand, taking responsibility for the degree of privileges implied in any attempt to let go of cis-hetero-able-western-antropocentric epistemic assumptions, oppressions, inertias and all sorts of impositions for what it means to be technologically engaged in the complex realities of the contemporary mundane[3]. As Romi Ron Morrison puts it: "is not a time of futility but of radical reimagining and visceral reconnection"[4].
Reimagining means placing a focus on the experiences, aesthetics and vernacular diversity for more exhuberant techniques. These involve problematizing the individualized rigidness of the emerged subjectivity of the user, crack-opening the fairy tales of telecom companies, adding categories of analysis to a big but simplistic quantify-all system, or reshuffling tactics of social movements to make them useful in relation to computational techno-ecologies that extend far beyond the actions of the CfDD, into a network of networks.
The CfDD offers an edited series of publications on the Prospections forum on BAK's website, providing in-depth reflections and suggestions in many literary forms (essays, interviews, poethic video experiments, collective annotations): https://www.bakonline.org/prospections/. These publications are meant to extend the conversations around digital discomfort to experts and voices in different yet intersecting fields of study and include Marloes de Valk's text 'A pluriverse of local worlds: A review of Computing within Limits related terminology and practices'; a conversation with meet.coop around the techno-geo-politics of Big Blue Button; an actualized version of the almost-canonical Feminist Server Manifesto; as well as a video piece by ORACLES using the Prospections as dialogic material for bibliomancy.
[1] Trans*feminist infrastructural entanglements (by The Underground Division) https://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/rendering/
[2] Digital Solidarity Networks (by Varia and accomplices) https://pad.vvvvvvaria.org/digital-solidarity-networks
[3] Counter-cloud Action Plan (by The institute for Technology in the Public Interest, aka titipi) https://titipi.org/pub/Counter_Cloud_Action_Plan.pdf
[4] Voluptuous Disintegration: A Future History of Black Computational Thought (by Romi Ron Morrison) http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/16/3/000634/000634.html#
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Cell for Digital Discomfort
On Digital Discomfort
Editorial thread. Soft launch: 20 October 2022
Undertaking quotidian but attentive experiments to collectively study the potential necessity for opacity, non-eurowhite calculation genealogies, trans*feminist infrastructural entanglements, anti-extractivist connecting cultures and intersectional notions of hosting and hostility, On Digital Discomfort provides in-depth reflections and suggestions in many literary forms —essays, interviews, poetic (material and re/decompositional) video experiments, collective annotations— that seek to extend the conversations to intersecting fields of study for an openended understanding of what it means to be technologically engaged in the complex realities of the mundane.
The urgency for digital discomfort is produced by the contemporary stage of rampant universalist monocultural digitisation based on the dominant logic of coercion, quantification and the massive capture-of-all aspects of more-than-human existence, from an ecosystemic and infrastructural perspective: cloud-computing, hyper-availability, agile flow-management, optimized planetary computing and so forth. Digital discomfort, like physical discomfort, can come from a politicized re-arrangement of an environment to allow for reimaginations of everyday technological engagements. Reimagining means focusing on the experiences, aesthetics, and vernacular diversity of techniques as a way to problematize the calcified subjectivity of the computer user or the fairy tales of telecom companies; and to add, twist or abolish worldviews while reshuffling activist tactics in relation to computational techno-ecologies. As Romi Ron Morrison puts it: "is not a time of futility but of radical reimagining and visceral reconnection"*.
* Voluptuous Disintegration: A Future History of Black Computational Thought (by Romi Ron Morrison) http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/16/3/000634/000634.html#
These include Marloes de Valk's text “A pluriverse of local worlds: A review of Computing within Limits related terminology and practices”; a conversation with meet.coop around the techno-geo-politics of Big Blue Button; an actualized version of the almost-canonical Feminist Server Manifesto; as well as a video piece by ORACLES using the Prospections as dialogic material for bibliomancy. (CfDD)