Constant Vitrine
Install ? 21 Jan 2016
Opening 27 January 2016

Text for constant newsletter:
-------------------------

SICV (Scandinavian Institute of Computational Vandalism)

The Scandinavian Institute of Computational Vandalism is inspired by the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism founded by Asger Jorn shortly after leaving the Situationist International in 1961. It was the name of an association combining the practices of collage, the forces of photography, image archives and political experiments. Using these methods, computational Vandalism challenges the assumptions at the basis of computer vision, the discipline that ties together programmatically the visual and the mnemonic.
In every operation of computer vision, there is this expectation that the gap between human perception and computer perception will be filled. But what if it isn’t? What if it reveals that there is a zone of intersection between human perception and computer vision, and that the contours of this zone are problematic, fluctuating? The process of computer vision is often narrated like a crime investigation where a story has to be reconstructed from various traces. Computational vandalism is what introduces us to a world with a proliferation of powerfully meaningless little clues that do not point towards any murderer. Nobody is punished in the world of computational vandalists, but its visual structure is denser. Computational vandalism is Agatha Christie smoking Asger Jorn’s cigar.

-------------------------
FINAL TEXTS POSTER

The archive activists Michael Murtaugh, Nicolas
Malevé and Ellef Prestsæter present the installation
The Scandinavian Institute of Computational Vandalism in
the vitrine of Constant. During the opening on
Wednesday, January 27 at 18:00, you will have the
opportunity to discover the treasures hidden behind its
virtual scenes.

The project is inspired by the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism (SICV) founded by Asger Jorn shortly after leaving the
Situationist International in 1961. The SICV was an art and research
association experimenting with the practice of collage, the forces of
photography, image archives, and political imaginaries.
Today Computational Vandalism challenges the assumptions at the basis of
computer vision, the discipline that programmatically ties together the
visual and the mnemonic.

## FR

Les activistes des archives Michael Murtaugh, Nicolas
Malevé et Ellef Prestsæter présentent dans la vitrine
de Constant l’installation l’Institut Scandinave de
Vandalisme Computationnel . Pendant le vernissage, le
mercredi 27 janvier à 18h00, vous aurez l’occasion de
découvrir les trésors qui se cachent dans ses coulisses
virtuelles.

Ce projet est inspiré par l’Institut Scandinave de
Vandalisme Comparé (SICV) fondé par Asger Jorn peu
après avoir quitté l’Internationale Situationniste en
1961. C’était le nom d’une association combinant les
pratiques du collage, le potentiel de la photographie, les
archives d’images et les expériences politiques. En
utilisant ces méthodes, le Vandalisme Computationnel
remet en question les hypothèses à la base de la vision
par ordinateur, une discipline qui utilise le code
informatique pour relier la vision et la mémoire.

## NL

Programmeur en mediakunstenaars Michael
Murtaugh, Nicolas Malevé en Ellef Prestsæter
presenteren in de vitrine van Constant de installatie
Scandinavisch Instituut voor Computer Vandalisme . Tijdens
de opening op woensdag 27 januari om 18:00 kan je
enkele schatten ontdekken die anders in de coulissen
verborgen blijven.

Dit project is geïnspireerd op het Scandinavian Institute
for Comparative Vandalism (SICV), opgericht door Asger
Jorn kort na zijn afscheid van de Situationisten in
1961. Het was de naam van een vereniging die collage
combineerde met het potentieel van fotografie,
beeldarchieven en politieke ervaringen. Het
Scandinavisch Instituut voor Computer Vandalisme gebruikt
dezelfde methoden om de stellingnames die aan de
basis liggen van computer vision te bevragen, een
discipline die visuele en mnemonische gereedschappen
in software verenigt.

---------
Could we create a sense of moving through someone's desktop... performing the different kinds of materials in the blog (including those maybe less suited to the "cinematic" presentation).
* Selenium? (as a way to drive different browsers)
* Or an extension of videowiki / bash script -- have a way to translate a list of links (or actually sets of links) to automatically playout across (multiple) displays.

Eames "Glimpses of the U.S.A."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob0aSyDUK4A
Could we riff of this language... and talk about contemporary computer vision / surveillance?

Orit Halpern
https://www.dukeupress.edu/Beautiful-Data/

---------------------------

As part of a workshop at the KHiO in Oslo, we presented a 1 hour presentation of the work of the SICV. Rather than a traditional lecture, we "performed" the following, a mix of images, sketch interfaces, video and audio clips. On top of this visual/audio layer, we read quotations from (related) blog posts and other collected snippets (the credits/sources of which are listed at the end).

Event link:
    http://www.khio.no/Norsk/Nyheter/Arkiv/Design/Forelesning+15.10.15%3A+%E2%80%8BEnemies+of+the+Archive.d25-SwljU1K.ips (SCREEN 1)

http://sicv.activearchives.org/mw/images/1/1a/Poctracingforprint.png

The Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism (SICV) was founded by Asger Jorn shortly after leaving the Situationist International in 1961. It was the name of an association combining the forces of certain artistic and political ideas, the French museum photographer Gerard Franceschi and his Danish assistant Ulrik Ross, book printers and publishing houses, a Citroën, archeologists and art historians, a board consisting of well-respected citizens from Jorn’s hometown Silkeborg, a darkroom and an archival apparatus. For a brief period (1961-1965), this unlikely assembly was held together and in motion by the sales of Jorn’s paintings, which by then had started to fare well on the international market. The output of the institute was paginated rather than painted: for Jorn the codex was a site for the analysis, sequencing and presentation of large quantities of heterogeneous visual materials.

Comparative contours http://sicv.activearchives.org/contours-view/test-plur-black-01.html

Through his “continuous collages” (the phrase belongs to Jorn’s friend and collaborator, the archeologist P.V. Glob) Jorn wanted to trace image migrations across space and time, including, most notably, what he perceived as a specifically Nordic tradition going back to pre-Christian times and significantly influencing European art writ large. Most ambitiously, he planned the production of some thirty volumes of coffee table books devoted to 10,000 Years of Nordic Folk Art under the auspices of the SICV

Matthew Fuller: Computational Vandalism (Contour tracing)
http://sicv.activearchives.org/audio/computationalvandalism.webm

VIDEO: Scanners Part 1 07:30-08:30 (voices)

Praat Annotations: http://activearchives.org/mw/images/9/93/Praat-annotations.png
Spectrum sort (Kurenniemi) http://activearchives.org/wiki/Spectrum_sort 131:50-ish

(VIDEO: Scanners (ephemerol) FIND TIMECODE)

Image pyramid (GG)
http://guttormsgaard.activearchives.org/ephemerol/scanners.html

This movement into the image is, for me, precisely the same as travelling out into the world. Zooming and travelling are two sides of the same coin. It’s a question of seeing through the conventions, of seeing one’s own culture from the outside – or trying to go as far as possible into it.

*A man goes to see his optician and asks for a pair of reading glasses.
*The optician: I already gave you a new pair last week.
*The man: I have already read them.
*
VIDEO: Out of Focus
http://sicv.activearchives.org/logbook/out-of-focus/

CABINET: http://sicv.activearchives.org/cabinet
Wolfgang: http://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/wolfgang_ernst/capsula   TIMECODE 01:43

*
Scanscapes (SICV)
http://sicv.activearchives.org/scanscape/README.html

*Like the blind, software sees while touching. And its vision is inseparable from movement. Considering its rhythmic dimension, scanning means more than digital conversion. Scanning has everything to do with slowness and speed, waiting and moving. The meaning of the word itself is   paradoxical: to scan   means to examine minutely and also means to look over quickly. Scanning is a redistribution of attention. What then if we look at the scanner not only as a practical digital photocopier but as a tool that can be extended to look at the entire archive, something that can (make us) scan and skim, minutely observe and look over rapidly. A scanner gone back to its etymological root from the Late Latin scandere   "to scan verse". As we know from poetry, verses are structures aimed at creating an aesthetic effect, but also to create a mnemonic one. What then is the scanner marking off? What are those mnemonic structures sensed by the comb of light-emitting fingers?

Blind Annotation: http://activearchives.org/wiki/Blind_annotation
for example.... http://kurenniemi.activearchives.org/aa/annotate/407/
*
*With privacy law, copyright, one can only look at an archive blindfolded. Before tedious negotiations take place, images, sounds, videos of the archive cannot be published. They still can remain in the archive though.
*
*Can we therefore access the archive blindfolded?
*
*Being blindfolded implies the suppression of sight, but also implies a concentration on other senses. Or implies a remapping of sight. Our eyes are delegated to our hands, nose, to the epiderm and all these informations combined produce a global image, a mental image.
*Using computer vision algorithms, we are seeing without eyes, computer vision hides and reveals, hides and concentrates. A Braille for the legal blind spots.

DATA GALLERY http://www.kurenniemi.constantvzw.org/db/records/images/view/3148

*Imagine a picture.
*An horizontal picture of 2592 pixels wide and of 1944 pixels height.
*Its print size is 36×27 inches.
*The picture was taken on the 06th of November 2004 at 21h56:37. The document set contains 45732 pictures by Erkki Kurenniemi for the year 2004. Erkki took 223 pictures in 2004 between the hours of 9 and 10pm. Of the 45732 pictures present in the dataset, Erkki took 33712 at night.

*In the folder where this file is located, there are 28 other pictures. They have been taken between 21h56:32 and the next day at 19h21:18. The folder Harrin bileet can be seen as a sequence of 21 hours 24 minutes 46 seconds of the life of a man of 63 years and 4 months at the date the picture was taken.
*It took 10 of a 400th second for the camera to take the picture.
*The blink of an eye.
*
*[...]
*The level of skin colors is low, there is probably no nudity in the image. Or at least, nudity is not the main subject of the picture. In opposition to 63 percent of the pictures that contain a significant amount of skin colors. Two photographs in the same folder contain a large percentage of skin colors in their center. They are taken at 23h41 and 23h42, one hour and 45 minutes after the picture.
*There are 172 corners present. This level indicates that the picture may have been taken in a built environment. There are 3 faces positioned at (xx,xx), (xx,xx) and (xx,xx). They occupy a portion of xx% of the image. One at the lower left corner and two in the upper half of the image. The distance between the tree rectangles is in average xxx. The people are close without touching each other. The proximity of the photographer and the position of the face in other pictures prove that the photographer moves easily among the circle of people photographed.
*It is dark now. It is the end of an evening of November 2004. And the face in the center of the image receives more light than the one next to it at the right side. Two hands are close to the second face poorly lit. An image begins to form in the back of your mind, and we have only started counting.

*http://kurenniemi.activearchives.org/logbook/?page_id=521

(LATER: ?? Kurenniemi diary... )

GG: Orderings walk http://guttormsgaard.activearchives.org/orderings/walk.html

An interest in dispersed attention, such as the one modern art has shown throughout this century, may contribute to the deterioration of culture’s authoritarian patent makers, and surely it is this practice you would call comparative vandalism.
Détournement is a game born out of the capacity for devalorization. Only he who is able to devalorize can create new values. And only there where there is something to devalorize, that is, an already established value, can one engage in devalorization. It is up to us to devalorize or to be devalorized according to our ability to reinvest in our own culture.

Consider what happens when you run an image analysis procedure such as an edge detection or a (SIFT*) feature extractor, and then use a conventional means of visualizing the results drawnon top of the original. The result is an image dense with markings, edges of figures traced with the brutal pixelized edge of a computed curve or dotted with swarms of circular markers of various sizes and positions throughout the image at various points of (algorithmically determined) interest. The marks typically number from tens to hundreds. Visually, the language of the algorithmically annotated image resonates with the vandalized image, the political poster with sprayed-on beard or mustache, the marketing billboard covered with elements crossed out or covered by graffiti tags. There is an essential difference however: where the billboard vandal challenges the authority of the image (both of those depicted and the forces that arrange to place them in public), the marks of the algorithm carry themselves an authority borne from the often impenetrable layers of technique and software employed. On top of this, such techniques may well be further allied to authority by patents, software licenses, and other aspects of law. Furthermore, the images most frequently subjected to the algorithmic processes of analysis are typically banal ones, themselves collected by agents of authority and typically recorded with their subjects (relatively) unaware of their being taken. For instance, the closed circuit surveillance system in a shopping center or laundromat, or the passport control agent’s webcam.

Computational vandalism aims to challenge the authority of the algorithm and uses computation both as a means and a subject of critical investigation. It aims to expose the values enshrined in algorithms, to consider alternatives, and to feed them back upon themselves to make these processes more apparent in their operation, as well as to activate them as tools to investigate other kinds of images and contexts from their conventional uses.

Histograms: http://sicv.activearchives.org/histograms/ratios-colored.php
(showing histograms --- select an interval and click SWITCH)
*
* You are right to underline the authority of the algorithm. It is nevertheless interesting to see that this authority is granted under a very specific condition. The algorithm must in the end confirm human perception. I always see a visual algorithm as a sort of Hercule Poirot on a crime scene. Where his assistant Captain Hastings will immediately decode the semantic layer, the obvious clues, the motives, Poirot always seems concerned with absurdly pointless details: a slight change of color in a carpet, the position of a finger, etc.
*
Feature browser (SICV)
http://sicv.activearchives.org/features/04_sift_features.html

*Poirot seems to embody the coolness of media archeology, indifferent to content. Let’s think of the SIFT algorithm, how it looks into extremely narrow fragments of an image to find patterns that could identify an image even when it is rotated. When we look at the regions of the images selected by the algorithm, they seem completely secondary to the human observer. But, in the end, if we make a search for similar images, the results returned by this algorithm seem to match very well what a human would have picked up. In every Hercule Poirot ending, the tour de force is to make a match between all these apparently absurd little clues and a narrative where the murderer is punished and the social order is confirmed.

http://sicv.activearchives.org/features/05_collage.html

*In every operation of computer vision, there is this expectation that the gap between human perception and computer perception will be filled. But what if it isn’t? What if it reveals that there is a zone of intersection between human perception and computer vision, and that the contours of this zone are problematic, fluctuating? Computational vandalism is what introduces us to a world with a proliferation of powerfully meaningless little clues that do not point towards any murderer. Nobody is punished in the world of computational vandalists, but its visual structure is denser. Computational vandalism is Agatha Christie smoking Asger Jorn’s cigar.

Video: UCF Bag of words "We don't have a vocabulary for visual images" TIMECODE

http://sicv.activearchives.org/logbook/the-past-is-woven-into-it/
http://kurenniemi.activearchives.org/video/thumbs.webm

“A photograph is a frozen moment, outside time. As Wittgenstein says it is ‘a probability’, not ‘all probabilities’, what one sees in the blink of an eye. But if you keep your eyes open you will see things move and change, nature as a dynamic event, and it is this constant changing that creates fuzziness on one hand but clarity on the other, because if you only glimpse then you exclude all other aspects, you have no greater clarity, you are blinkered.”
http://sicv.activearchives.org/logbook/francis-galtons-composite-portraiture-meets-wittgensteins-camera/

[…] A while ago I met an extremely interesting developer in Holland. He was working on smart phone camera technology. A representational mode of thinking photography is: there is something out there and it will be represented by means of optical technology ideally via indexical link. But the technology for the phone camera is quite different. As the lenses are tiny and basically crap, about half of the data captured by the sensor are noise. The trick is to create the algorithm to clean the picture from the noise, or rather to define the picture from within noise. But how does the camera know this? Very simple. It scans all other pictures stored on the phone or on your social media networks and sifts through your contacts. It looks through the pictures you already made, or those that are networked to you and tries to match faces and shapes. In short: it creates the picture based on earlier pictures, on your/its memory. It does not only know what you saw but also what you might like to see based on your previous choices. In other words, it speculates on your preferences and offers an interpretation of data based on affinities to other data. The link to the thing in front of the lens is still there, but there are also links to past pictures that help create the picture. You don’t really photograph the present, as the past is woven into it.

The result might be a picture that never existed in reality, but that the phone thinks you might like to see. It is a bet, a gamble, some combination between repeating those things you have already seen and coming up with new versions of these, a mixture of conservatism and fabulation. The paradigm of representation stands to the present condition as traditional lens-based photography does to an algorithmic, networked photography that works with probabilities and bets on inertia. Consequently, it makes seeing unforeseen things more difficult. The noise will increase and random interpretation too. We might think that the phone sees what we want, but actually we will see what the phone thinks it knows about us. A complicated relationship — like a very neurotic marriage.

end credtis
Matthew Fuller
Asger Jorn
David Cronenberg
Hito Steyerl
Guttorm Guttormsgaard
Woody Allen
Robin Williams
Wolfgang Ernst
and other members of the SICV
All reproduction, deformation, modification, derivation and transformation is permitted.

outtakes
Associative Memory http://kurenniemi.activearchives.org/logbook/?p=90

--------------------------

Search engine as curiosity cabinet

---------------------------

Planning
Need a "etherpad player" to play the page using iframes / give some preview of what a multiscreen installation would look like.

Desire to connect to bookmarking moments of the Guttorm / Orderings interface.
TODO: how to link to specific moments in the Orderings interface (need way to link)

WORMS as potential walks through the interface (like an active tag)

? Wormy paper books from Guttorm on display

Include the report?
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/sicv_gg_report
==> http://sicv.activearchives.org/w/GG_Report

Play with the vitrine as a lab space, gradually augmenting it...

We have the first two reports, and the:
* Orderings
* Features & Affinities

How can this platform be used to preview spreads (PDF generation)...
or also multi screen output (vitrine)
(sifting blog post in a sense is about linking by image)

THOUGHTS WHILE TAGGING (...)

Is capturing and making a video loop of a figure opening their front door invasive, YES IT CERTAINLY IS.
Have we broken the law by placing a camera mounted facing outward onto the street, MOST LIKELY.
However, we make the mechanics of the machine also visible, also outward facing.

How is what we're doing not itself as invasive of privacy and alarming as the practices of mass CCTV surveillance, etc?
The image often came to my mind in returning each morning to the interface to tag collected faces of the fisherman considering the "daily catch" of faces caught by the net of haar cascades. In trawling the streets of St. Gilles in search of faces, much debris is collected along the way, headlights and hubcaps of cars, folds of jackets, the odd bit of plastic shopping bag, the fleeting visual interactions of a passersby and the street, and the endless plays of light on the architecture of a wall.

Is the law we break in creating an installation with computer vision simply one of not labelling the installation with the increasingly present (and thus ignored) iconography of public surveillance?

GIVING THE FINGER BACK TO THE DIGITAL!!!
http://sicv.activearchives.org/vitrine/20160227/collage20160227_004714.webm

The difference (if there is to be one) is in creating a (hopefully) more open loop -- as in the closed circuit of the public surveillance camera, our loop critically inverts the viewing screen to be outward facing, inviting participants to consider the implications of such a circuit, and to provide a platform for explicitly performing for it. Our position is to say that by activiating engagement with the materials of this sort of detection, seeing it's particular capabilities, but also limitations and peculiarities, is a means of taking a position of strength in critically opposing them or considering what means of legal limitation are important (for instance) or more to the point consider the limitations of legal measures given the proliferation of smartphones and mechanisms of surveillance built into our so called social networks. This in contrast to a popular approach that often in the supposed name of critique, often seems to assert the authority of "big data" and (worse) to further unsubtantiated / undeserved reputation for being altogether more powerful, more accurate, more "human-like" (more black box) than these systems in fact really are or need to be.

FOR FINNISSAGE:
    I think it can really be a statement to have the screens then PLAY recorded snippets ... the source documents from Wenesday to Saturday, to complete the gesture of reversal to play the recordings back into the street. BUT rather than being a kind of vague thankyou to "the people" for helping make "our artwork"... it seems important to figure out how to frame the gesture as one to encourage taking a critical position. Maybe playing up the (possibly) sinister aspect of it is in fact a part of the statement -- rather than only being purely pleasurable.

Connect to criticism of this imal lecture http://imal.org/en/artssciences/jonasdegrave
* Statements of how "pretty good" the tech is...
* <!> the interface comparing "human" vs "bot" art making, the impovershment of what it means to be "human"... together with the overstatement/oversimplification of what it means to be "machine"

connections: Apple making an iPhone that "even they can't hack" ... as they ultimate embodiment of techno-determinism, and a transfer of responsibility / political agency into the "body" of technology / a device. ref: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/Apple-working-on-an-iPhone-even-its-engineers-cant-hack/articleshow/51133749.cms

TODO:
    * Prepare video of recordings
    * DOCUMENT / photograph the installation and possibly a "demo" of it working from outside.

(blah blah.... thinking about how these tools don't "THEMSELVES" write (as in the example of generating 1000s of pages of "shakespeare"... but rather if possible create a situation for the maybe writer to READ text again, intensely, in repetition, and perhaps eventually to write something of value enriched by the reading.

... cf here also Barthes in Plaisir du texte --- about the limits of syntax ... for simply reading a text, and the movement to writing.

ON THE (non)UNIVERSALITY of the FEATURE

In viewing Guttormsgaard's archive through the lens of the haar detector, you gain a new appreciation for the material in the collection. Whether in form of wire, wood, or typography, Guttorm has collected forms that tend toward a certain optical malleability, promiscuously inviting human forms to be cast on to them.

( language is theft
http://www.graffiti.org/ups/heal/part1b.html )

INSTALLATION NOTES (continued)
sudo apt-get install openbox rxvt-unicode feh figlet
mkdir ~/.config/openbox
cp /etc/xdg/openbox/rc.xml ~/.config/openbox

new openbox based server... (addendum)

Openbox setup for pi...
actually openbox is already installed...
just need to add a .xinitrc with:
    exec openbox

Installed xscreensaver to disable screen blanking!

.Xdefaults

URxvt*transparent:true
URxvt*scrollBar:false
URxvt*foreground:Black
URxvt*font: 9x15bold
URxvt*geometry:110x50
URxvt*borderLess:true

~/.config/openbox/rc.xml
<application name="urxvt">
<decor>no</decor>
<focus>yes</focus>
<position>
    <x>center</x>
    <y>200</y>
</position>
<layer>below</layer>
<desktop>all</desktop>

<skip_taskbar>yes</skip_taskbar>
</application>

~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh
# Programs that will run after Openbox has started
sh ~/.fehbg & # set background image
(sleep 1 && tint2) &                             # start panel
(sleep 1 && wbar -pos right -vbar) &          # start menu bar
(sleep 1 && urxvt) &                    # start urxvt terminal
# disable screen blanking
xset -dpms &
xset s off &

Installing node
    ------------------------------
    Node for arm-pi, Last version built is 0.10.28?
           https://nodejs.org/dist/v0.10.28/
    Version of node in apt (nodejs) seems quite out of date (v 0.6.19)

    SO to install, following the wonderfully compact instructions given here (            https://github.com/tvl83/RaspPaycoin)          :

MAGIC 2 line node on pi install:
wget https://nodejs.org/dist/v0.10.28/node-v0.10.28-linux-arm-pi.tar.gz
cd /usr/local && sudo tar --strip-components 1 -xzf ~/node-v0.10.28-linux-arm-pi.tar.gz

Selecting the simpler OPENBOX-SESSION as default
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*sudo update-alternatives --config x-session-manager

select openbox-session (no 2 for me) then use

*sudo raspi-config

to configure boot to desktop env