Written for an intervention in a workshop on archives in Lüneburg, can also be read on Mute: http://www.metamute.org/editorial/lab/archivist-manifesto

A new archivist has been appointed. But has anyone actually appointed him? Is he not rather acting on his own instructions?… He will not concern himself with what previous archivists have treated in a thousand different ways: propositions and phrases. He will ignore both the vertical hierarchy of propositions which are stacked on top of one another, and the horizontal relationship established between phrases in which each seems to respond to another.

– New Archivist, Gilles Deleuze

§1. Archive

We are archivists, since we have to be. We don’t have choice. This decision is already made, or determined by the contemporary technological condition. The ubiquity of information in digital, calculable forms has created a new situation of work and exploitation, we entered an endless process of data production, and then we also enter an endless black hole of data navigation. The internet of data is a huge archive of data and at the same time a enormous black hole that sucks all productivities. Google is the best exemplification of this double: on the one hand, we are contributing data by using the Google tools, emails, blogs, Google+, Hangout, etc; on the other hand, Google gives us searching and managing tools to survive in this milieu. Worse still, Facebook shows another face, a huge archive of data without navigability, the only navigation one can do is to search for your friend, otherwise you need to stroll down the page to find out what you have written years ago.

Under such situation, we must recognize that one of the main economical and political questions concerning the digital is the one of archives. What has happened to the concept of archive after the digital turn? What kind of power structure is present to us in this new setting? Archives for Foucault are traces of enunciations by which one can reconstruct the game of rules (le jeu des régles), that in turn reveal the power structure of its milieu. Archives in this sense are reservoirs of discourses that make possible an archeology of knowledge. In order word, archives are sources of deduction for archeologists. The will of archive further makes archives as a manifestation of power. This will expands in the modern time and set up a direct relation between institutes and archives. Each institution has its archive, has its history of discourses. In order to maintain its status quo of discourses, it needs to give its archive a proper name. As Foucault observes the expansion of museums and libraries in modern time, that attempts “to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes”¹. An archive is also a symbol of authenticity and authority. This project of the moderns confronts the biggest challenge in the digital age. On the one hand, public institutions adopting digital strategies also have to develop new form of interaction between archive and audiences, so to speak they are forced to open their archives; on the other hand, within an institutional framework, they continue keeping their archive in a centralized way (even the Michel Foucault Archive) in order to consolidate the status of these institution. Though today when these institutions implement “open polices” or alas crowdsourcing, it is still a strategy of crowd sourcing under the name of humanities or digital humanities to serve its central archives.

In this respect, Google is technically moving far ahead of these organisations, Google book, Goolge Museums are efforts to re-appropriate humanities through digitisation and crowd sourcing. Google doesn’t only provide services with higher qualities and higher speed, but also goes beyond the relation between archives and human subjects. Google’s archives exhibit an important distinction from that of Foucault’s. It is that power is posing its forces directly on archives to achieve control, that is to say archives become a mechanism of control and social actions, instead of being traces of power². Now we have to face a new game of rules that operates on more and more automatic and algorithmic level. Metadata produced by users become materials of induction, to generate patterns for prediction, rules, protocols of control. Archive stretches from discourses to gestures. It seems to me very clear, today in order to response to this political and economical dimensions of the web, we have to politicize the question of archive. The key seems to be personal archives. It is not simply from a technical consideration that we can then mitigate controls from the service providers or to keep privacy, but rather to rethink our relation with archives and to create another technological/digital culture. In order to do so, I propose to reflect on the following questions: What are we archiving and for what are we archiving? what does it mean to be an archivist? Read the rest of this entry »

Deduktion, Induktion und Transduktion. Über Medienästhetik und digitale Objekte

in Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft/Heft 8 ed. E. Hörl & M. Hansen

Dieser Aufsatz beschäftigt sich mit der Medienästhetik digitaler Objekte und regt in diesem Zusammenhang zu einem Rückgriff auf die Kant’sche transzendentale Ästhetik an. Den Beginn bildet eine grundlegende Reflexion zur Definition von Daten und Objekten und es wird die Frage aufgeworfen, was der neue Status und damit auch die neue Ästhetik von Objekten in der Folge ihrer Digitalisierung sein könnten. Das rasche Anwachsen strukturierter Datenmengen und die Objektwerdung digitaler Entitäten in Folge der Entwicklungen in der KI-Forschung und zuletzt in den jüngeren Ansätzen zu einem semantischen Netz führen uns auf alte philosophische Fragestellungen zu den Existenzweisen von Objekten zurück. Der Aufsatz unternimmt den Versuch, die vorgeschlagene Ästhetik digitaler Objekte mithilfe dreier Verfahren zu analysieren: Induktion, Deduktion und Transduktion, und er tut dies mit Bezugnahme auf die Theorien Humes, Kants und Simondons sowie auf die Theorien der erweiterten Kognition und des exteriorisierten Gedächtnisses. Den Abschluss bildet die Darstellung eines transzendentalen Empirismus als Synthese, die zu einem Verständnis der Ästhetik digitaler Objekte beitragen kann.

This article looks at the media aesthetics of digital objects by proposing to go back to Kant’s transcendental aesthetics. It starts with reflecting on the definition of data and objects and asks what would be the new status of objects after digitisation, and hence their aesthetics. The proliferation of structured data and objectification of digital entities, following the movement in AI and more recently the Semantic Web, brings us back to the old philosophical questions concerning the modes of existence of objects. This article attempts to analyse the proposed aesthetics by three processes: induction, deduction and transduction, in correspondence with the theories of Hume, Kant and Simondon and the theories of extended cognitions and external memories. The article concludes by identifying a transcendental empiricism as synthesis to understand the aesthetics of digital objects.

Download article | Link to journal

In Sein und Zeit, Heidegger attempted to reduce space to time, this reduction was carried out in two steps, firstly Hediegger reduces space to spatiality; secondly he analysed spatiality according to temporal structures, which he calls care, or Sorge. The Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurô came to Germany in 1927, when Heidegger just published Sein und Zeit and took over Husserl’s position in Freiburg. Tetsurô, was recently appointed as professor of ethics in Kyoto university, like most of his Japanese contemporaries, such as Keiji Nishitani, were shocked by the through analysis of existence in this work. Tetsurô spent the following year in Europe, studying and travelling. The next year, when he went back to Japan, he started planning his most well known book Fūdo, which has been translated into different european languages: Climate and Culture: A Philosophical Study (1961), Fūdo – Wind und Erde. Der Zusammenhang zwischen Klima und Kultur (1992, German), and Fūdo, le milieu humain (2011, French). The Kanji of Fūdo(風土) literally means wind and earth as we see in the German translation, but it wouldn’t mean too much. The german subtitle, as the english one, emphasizes the relation between climate and culture. But Fūdo doesn’t only mean climate, it carries something more subtle, it could also means sentiment of belongingness, and material-social conditions. The french translation, le milieu humain seems to me closer to what Tetsurô really means. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone is a Hacker ! 

- Hackers and the Avant Garde

Following Hito Steyerl‘s excellent satire performance “I Dreamed a Dream: Politics in the Age of Mass Art Production” in the Former West Project at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, she drew a beginning also an end to what she called Mass Art Production. It seems everyone must be making a work, or some sorts of art, either using iPhone or a professional cameras, or even Facebook, Twitters. The secrete pleasure of precarity, though already became a torture that makes everyday a meditation of life and death, also produces means to go beyond the pleasure principle. But “mass art production” is also a phase that comes a bit too late, or we can say otherwise, it is witnessing the end of this everyone is an artist movement after the provocation of Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys and other avant garde artists. Warhol is nevertheless a shaper observer of this proliferation of artistic culture, in comparison Beuys remains a political prophet who always aims for a political project, and Duchamp’s adoption of industrial aesthetics is reversed in this movement of mass art production.

“Everyone is an artist” is without doubts already at the core of the current cultural form. Yet Steyerl also drew an end to it, or pointed out that it is coming to its end. Now, it is probably “cooler” to say that “everyone is a hacker”. In the second day, an interview with Arianna Bove named “An author without translator is not an author”, the translator of numerous italian theorists such as Lazzarato, Negir said at the very beginning “but I am a hacker”. This is probably the puctum of the whole section on art production under the direction of Boris Groys. Without any disrespect or discredit of Aeianna – and indeed in the past I benefited a lot from her translations in the Generation Online – the interview is very sincere despite the title of the talk is quite “neoliberal”. This punctum shows that artist is no longer a cool title to have, since though we have many new media artists, but many of them are still skeptical of technologies, keeping a 9096 Nokia is an identity not of old-fashioned, but also of a “i don’t give it a shit” attitude to new technologies. But probably by the end both Luddite and Geek will have to claim: I am a hacker. Read the rest of this entry »

A co-authored article with Harry Halpin (W3C) is now available in UnLikeUs Reader – Social Network Monopolies and Their Alternatives, edited by Geert Lovink and Miriam Rasche. You can download our chapter here: Collective Individuation: The Future of The Social Web. This chapter comes out from our research in IRI/Paris.

We are in the epoch of networks. The world is now rapidly being perceived as a vast space of interlocking networks of seemingly infinite variety: biological, productive, cy- bernetic, and – most important of all – social. The image of the network, with its obvi- ous bias towards vision, has become the paradigmatic representation of understand- ing our present technological society as a holistic entity that would otherwise escape our cognitive grasp. Yet no image is ideologically neutral, for the image of the network is also a mediation between the subject and object that inscribes – or pre-programs – a certain conceptual apparatus onto the world, namely that of nodes and links (or in graph-theoretic terms, vertices and edges). This is not without consequences: due to its grasp over our imagination, the network constitutes the horizon of possible inven- tion, as Simondon showed in Imagination et Invention.1 Yet where did the concept of the network itself come from? Despite the hyperbole over the dominance of digital social networks like Facebook, the concept of the quantified social network pre-dates digital social networks, originating from the work of the psychologist Moreno in the late 1930s, and we argue that what the advent of the digital computer has done has primar- ily been the acceleration of the pre-digital conceptual apparatus of networks. Although no one can deny its now global influence, the fundamentally ontological presumptions of the social network have yet to be explored despite its present preponderance. To borrow some terms from Bernard Stiegler, how does the what of Facebook constitute our who?2

1. Gilbert Simondon, Imagination et Invention, Chatou: Editions de la Transparence, 2008.

2. Bernard Stiegler, ‘Who? What? The Invention of the Human’, in Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998, pp. 134-180.

Read more…

You can download the whole book from Lovink’s Institute of Network Culture: UnLikeUs Reader.

On Latour and Simondon’s Mode of Existence

       - fragments of a fictional dialogue yet to come 

Yuk Hui, intervention given in a Workshop on Latour@ Denkerei, 28 Jan,2013

This intervention from its outset searches a dialogue between Simondon and Latour, a fictional dialogue, that nevertheless exists though it hasn’t happened. It hasn’t happened, or should I say it was once about to happen, when Latour praised Simondon’s Du Mode d’existence des objets techniques, and commented that it is a work that didn’t yet find its successor. But it does exist, this fictional dialogue, or at least we can talk about its mode of existence if you prefer since being fictional is also a mode of existence. We cannot draw a squared circle but we can think of a squared circle, it has meanings, this was an example given by Husserl as a critique of Frege’s logism. The secrete philosopher of Bruno Latour, Étienne Souriau hold a similar idea in his Les différents Modes d’existence. A fictional object or character doesn’t occur in time and space as a physical object, or a historical event, but it does exists in works, in the socio-psychological life and the imagination of their readers and witness. Modes of existence is always plural, it doesn’t follow the rule of contradiction, it is rather key to what Latour calls ontological pluralism.

The question of the mode of existence departs from the question of Dasein, and the meaning of Sein, eliminates the Ontologische Differenz between Sein and Seienden in order to de-prioritize certain mode of existence, with a kind of ontological politeness. Modes of existence is a new organon to the analysis of modern life, and also one that revolt against the 20th century philosophy aiming a unified theory of existence. Now to enter the modes of existence, according to Latour one must employ a new dispostif called diplomatic, meaning one should be aware of oneself, resisting esoteric temptations, while being polite and try to negotiate different terms. Hence Latour proposed to go back to an anthropology that starts with reflection on European modernity instead of starting with dialogues with others. 

It is also this word “Mode of existence” on the one hand brings us together Latour and Simondon since Simondon is a philosopher of the mode of existence instead of existence; on the other hand, allows us to go beyond the question of network in actor-network theory, as Latour himself said in an interview with la vie des idées “what is complicated to understand, maybe, for those who know the rest of my work, it is that network is no longer the principle mode of driving, of vehicle. The world became a bit populated: there is more vehicles moving in different forms”¹. That is to say, network is only one mode of existence out of 15 different modes, among which we also find Reproduction, Metamorphose, Habit, Technics, Fiction, Reference, Politics, Right, Religion, Attachment, Organization, Morality, Preposition and Double Click. Network can no longer alone monopolize the academic social research. Instead it is necessary to re-articulate this specific mode of existence with other modes of existence. For Latour, new position or preposition on the mode of existence allows us to open up the new field of philosophical investigation of the Moderns. The task is no longer how “we have never been modern”, a project done 20 years ago, but rather according to Latour it is an effort to complete the uniquely negative title – we have never been modern – “with a positive version this time of the same affirmation”².  Read the rest of this entry »

A great honor to be invited by Erich Hörl to talk in Bochum, and thank labkultur.tv for the recording, Sebastian Drumfish Fischer for the images, the original report can be found here

Die Kollektivität von sozialen Netzwerken

Einer für Alle und Alle für Einen? Oder nur eine One-Man Show?

originally posted at Hybrid Publishing Lab

This summer, the popular french journal Philosophy Magazine published an special issue titled “Why do we no longer learn as before?”. This issue covers essays by Nicolas Carr, Marianne Wolf and others working on the same field, and what is most interesting is a dialogue between two philosophers Bernard Stiegler and Michel Serres. Stiegler has been working on the question of digital publication for many years, back to the 90s he worked on a project with the BnF(Bibliothèque nationale de France) on digital books and softwares to assist reading. Based on his own theory of tertiary retention, and inspired by Carr and Wolf, Stiegler proposed to re-visit the condition of reading and writing today in order to bring forth an industrial program. We remind that we talked about two kinds of memory proposes by Carr, working memory and long term memory, Stiegler showed in his previous books especially the three volumes of La Technique et le temps, how these two memories (equivalent to Husserl’s primary and secondary retentions) are in turn conditioned by the tertiary retentions, that is to say technics. For Stiegler the problem today is the one of amnesis, that is also one of the first questions in occidental philosophy. For Plato, amnesis, losing memory, is the possibility of acquiring knowledge. Since it is at this moment of searching, we have to recollect what was forgotten, then fragments can become coherent. Or all simply, facts gain their power in the process of re-organization (which is at the same time re-cognition) and become the foundation of truth. Amnesis in this sense, is alsoaskisis whichpossess the transformation power of the individual. Read the rest of this entry »

WIKITOPIA: Keynote & Panel Discussion
-Topics on Open City, Materializing Information, Civic Startups

In January 2013, Wikitopia brings presents 3 compelling Keynotes, and 3 insightful Panel Discussion to share their insights and knowledge on themes related to the current and future use of open source, information technology, materializing information. The discussions will touch upon how collaborating across different platforms and creative realms will enable revolutionize the way we think, work and live.

Date and Time:
19 Jan 2013 (Sat) 2 pm – 5:30 pm
20 Jan 2013 (Sun) 10 am-5:30 pm
Venue:
The Goodlab, L1, The Sparkle, 500 Tung Chau Street, Cheung Sha Wan, Kowloon

Keynotes:

Robert Ree: Making Things (19 Jan 14:15-15:30)

Stephen Kovats: Open Sourcing a New Country (20 Jan 10:15-11:30)

Yuk Hui: Individuation after Social Networks (20 Jan 14:15-15:30)

Panel Discussion Topics
Topic 1: Open City

Topic 2: Open source and Materializing Information

Topic 3: Civic Startup

From Hayle’s website/UCLA

Originally posted at the Hybrid Publishing Lab Notepad

Publications expect readers, unless the author ignores the publicin his publication. Understanding reading is one of the major conditions for imagining new ways of publishing. The condition of reading also depends on means of writing, writing means publishing, then we enter a circle of reading-writing, that constitutes without exaggeration the social, political, economical condition for acting and thinking. Jack Goody has explored in The Domestication of the Savage Mind, how the emergence of writing, in its most primitive form, transform these conditions in human history. The use of tablets in the Sumerian culture in Mesopotamian as writing system become today we may call the first system of metadata, that record stocks of potteries, cattle, etc. And David Graeber further in his Debt- The First 5,000 Years, showed that such a writing system is actually a book-keeping system, usually a new conquerer destroyed this annotation-writing system to resettle all debts, and restarts a new economic, social and political regime (And it is from this example, Graeber proposed a destruction of the current global accounting system to start anew). It is also true when writing spread out in ancient Greece, it made laws accessible to citizens in the polis, that is also to say the concept of democracy.

These technics of writing are in constant progress, from pictogram, phonogram, to stamp making, to printing, and now we arrive at digital publication at the mid of last century. We have to bear in mind that technical innovation always underlines displacement, displacement doesn’t mean replacement, displacing something means rendering something before it obsolete, but it doesn’t mean it could replace it, including all its values and functions. The emergence of the web brought us a new perspective of publication which is no longer linear, but one that allows one jumps from one reading to another. This vision of hypertext was already imagined by Ted Nelson before the invention of the web. In order words the web realized some of the visions of Nelson, particularly on the aspect that the web is a hypertext system that links all relevant literatures together. Then came the war of reference-searching (or an economy of links), this is what we know today as search engines, and then we have the history of Yahoo, Archie, Veronica, Altavista, Google, etc. Searching is an experience which cannot be separated from online reading today, it can be searching the definition of a word, searching theory of an person not well explained in the reading, etc. The new possibilities, not only those of business and innovation but also new way of acquiring knowledge – reading – open a new terrain to reconsidering the condition of reading-writing and the social-political transformation corresponding to these conditions. And these questions are are the core of digital humanities, if we still want to keep this name. Read the rest of this entry »