CURRENTLY READING: NEW DARK AGE

‘Computation, at every scale, is a cognitive hack, offloading both the decision process and the responsibility onto the machine. As life accelerates, the machine steps in to handle more and more cognitive tasks, reinforcing its authority — regardless of consequences. We refashion our understanding of the world to better accommodate the constant alerts and cognitive short-cuts provided by automated systems. Computation replaces conscious thought. We think more and more like the machine, or we do not think at all’ (p. 43).

THIS WEEK: DISCUSSING ART ON THE WEB WITH LIZ ZITO

This week I’m joining artist and fellow faculty member Liz Zito of MFA Photography, Video and Related Media at SVA to discuss best practices for sharing, collaborating on, and presenting work in remote contexts: online, by mail, and more.

CURRENTLY READING: FLÂNEUSE

‘To suggest that there couldn’t be a female version of the flâneur is to limit the ways women have interacted with the city to the ways men have interacted with the city. We can talk about social mores and restrictions, but we cannot rule out the fact that women were there; we must try to understand what walking in the city meant to them. Perhaps the answer is not to attempt to make a woman fit a masculine concept, but to redefine the concept itself.

If we tunnel back, we find there always was a flâneuse passing Baudelaire in the street’ (p. 11).

ANNOUNCING: KEEP NYS CREATING PROJECT GRANT

I’m pleased to announce I’m receiving project support for Arcade Time Machine, a series of written texts, panel discussions, and interactions with the public on the art and history of video games through a one-time Keep NYS Creating Project Grant provided by New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) in partnership with New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA).

CURRENTLY READING: RACE AFTER TECHNOLOGY

‘By pulling back the curtain and drawing attention to forms of coded inequity, not only do we become more aware of the social dimensions of technology but we can work together against the emergence of a digital caste system that relies on our naivety when it comes to the neutrality of technology. This problem extends beyond obvious forms of criminalization and surveillance. It includes an elaborate social and technical apparatus that governs all areas of life’ (p. 11).

UPCOMING SOLO EXHIBITION: MIKE NUDELMAN'S 'AND YET'

I’m so honored that my book, Vanishing Points, was an inspiration for artist Mike Nudelman’s work, which is reflected in the press release for his upcoming solo exhibition, And Yet, at Fortnight Institute in New York City. The show opens later this month and runs through July 31.

Mike Nudelman, Time Suspended. ballpoint pen on paper, 11 x 8.5 inches, 2020.

CURRENTLY READING: THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TROUBLE AND SPACIOUSNESS

‘As nonfiction—that leftover term apotheosizing fiction—gets defined down as only memoir and essay, I’ve wanted to open it back up again, to claim it as virtually everything else.

Nonfiction is the whole realm from investigative journalism to prose poems, from manifestos to love letters, from dictionaries to packing lists. This territory to which I am, officially, consigned couldn’t be more spacious, and I couldn’t be more pleased to be free to roam its expanses’ (p. 4).

CURRENTLY READING: THE BOOK, A COVER-TO-COVER EXPLORATION OF THE MOST POWERFUL OBJECT OF OUR TIME

‘Five thousand years ago, give or take, the inhabitants of the fertile plains between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers were already one of the oldest settled civilizations in the world when they began to write — to convert spoken language into signs scratched on stone and impressed in clay. The wedge-shaped, or “cuneiform,” script of the Sumerian people of ancient Mesopotamia was thought given form — concepts and memories abstracted from fallible human brains and recorded for posterity’ (p. 79).

CURRENTLY READING: FUTURABILITY — THE AGE OF IMPOTENCE AND THE HORIZON OF POSSIBILITY

‘The history of modern politics and civilization intended as the imposition of a technological order is here sketched: the Machiavellian definition of power is based on the distinction between feminine (the chaotic and capricious proliferation of possible events, potentialities rushing out of the depths of nature), and masculine will that imposes order on the flow, subjecting the flow to the rule of discrimination’ (p. 72).

CURRENTLY WRITING: VIRTUALLY TANGIBLE: NEW MEDIA ART AS ENACTABLE RESISTANCE

This work is about the affordance of various new media as performative, enactable (political, social, individual) resistance through the creative use of sensing and presentation technologies, multiple simultaneous agency, and built environments that transgress physical and virtual boundaries. More soon!

JUST PUBLISHED: A Gaze of Cruelty, Deferred: Actualizing the Female Gaze in Cate Shortland’s Berlin Syndrome (2017)

In this essay, published in Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy (vol. 7, no. 1), I discuss the cinematic theater of cruelty and the possibility of a mechanically defined female gaze in the film Berlin Syndrome.

CURRENTLY READING: ON THE EXISTENCE OF DIGITAL OBJECTS

‘When the qualities of a digital object disappear — as when we delete them layer by layer within our computers — by the end we find there is no longer anything there. If we were to find something remaining, it would likely be some record or trace acknowledging that something did exist there previously or perhaps take the form of missing links and bugs generated during the course of its disappearance. Is the space of a digital object “thinkable”? This question also motivates us to investigate further the very concept of space itself’ (p. 110).

CURRENTLY READING: UNTHOUGHT

‘Traditionally, the humanities have been concerned with meanings relevant to humans in human-dominated contexts. The framework developed here challenges that orientation, insisting cognitive processes happen within a broad spectrum of possibilities that include nonhuman animals as well as technical systems. Moreover, the meanings generated within these contexts, deeply worthy of consideration in their own right, are also consequential for human outcomes as well, from the flourishing of trees in rain forests to the communication signals emanating from a control tower to aircraft within its purview. This framework emphasizes that these different kinds of meanings are entangled together in ways that transcend any single human viewpoint and that cannot be bounded by human interests alone. As our view of what counts as cognition expands, so too do the realms in which interpretations and meanings emerge and evolve. All of these, this framework implies, count as meaning making and consequently should be of potential interest to the humanities, as well as to the social and natural sciences’ (pp. 26-27).

CURRENTLY READING: IF... THEN: ALGORITHMIC POWER AND POLITICS

‘Algorithms are not given; they are not either mathematical expressions or expressions of human intent but emerge as situated, ongoing accomplishments. That is, they emerge as more or less technical/nonhuman or more or less social/human because of what else they are related to’ (p. 55).

CURRENTLY READING: UPDATING TO REMAIN THE SAME

‘Networks end postmodernism. They counter pastiche with the zoom and overview; they animate and locate “wherever” architecture; they resolve multiculturalism through neighborhood predictors that bypass yet reinforce categories such as race, gender, sexuality; they replace postmodern relativism with data analytics. They do so by moving away from subjects and narratives toward actors and captured actions that they knit into a monstrously connected chimera. They imagine connections that transform the basis of the collective imaginary from “we” to YOU: from community to an ever-still-resolvable grouping that erodes and sustains the distance between self and other’ (p. 40).

CURRENTLY THINKING ABOUT JENNY HOLZER'S VIGIL (2019)

For three nights (October 10-12), excerpts from written testimonies, responses, and poems by people directly affected by gun violence in America were projected onto three buildings surrounding The Rink at Rockefeller Center in Jenny Holzer’s latest work VIGIL. 

VIGIL comes as no surprise: text-based messages of blisteringly honest observations of society are a hallmark of Holzer’s work. But I’ve only ever read about or seen photographic documentation of her site-specific projections, which have taken place just about everywhere, including New York City while I was living here: in 2015, 2008, 2005, and 2004. 

I was pleased to finally catch her work in person on Saturday night, the final evening of its run at Rockefeller Center, but I wasn’t prepared for its intense effect on me. In an image-saturated world, one can hardly expect language to compete so dramatically at provocation and poignancy. But Holzer’s large-scale text is alluring and the selected stories tragic. Despite the distance implied by the format of their display, the delivery felt intimate. Everything seemed to fall into silence while one story after another spoke truth to power, surrendering honest, heartrending reflections on heinous dealings with gun violence. 

The work is a reminder that words can be moving and testimonies are always powerful. Public space should always have the possibility to transform an ordinary evening into an extraordinary one. And we should encourage more interventions like these, which are painful but necessary reminders that there are persistent, unresolved sociopolitical issues that require action on our part, even if it’s only paying attention. 

CURRENTLY READING: MARX AT THE ARCADE

‘Videogames are a terrain of cultural struggle, shaped by work, capitalism, and ideas about society’ (p. 8).

CURRENTLY READING: HUMAN ERROR

‘Where is the human indeed? Is it something that flares up during moments of compassion, only to disappear when self-interests are compromised? Is it an ontological property found nested within condominiums, or slums, or space stations, or caves? Or is it an unstable element that needs precise criteria and conditions to emerge? Does it in fact cut across current taxonomic species lines, as happens when we seem to communicate with dogs, horses, or elephants? Are we, as the philosophers might ask, merely simulating these conditions of emergence in a controlled experiment? Moreover, is that which we call “the human” really confined to the invisible souls of Homo sapiens? Is it projected onto the historical development of these souls, as relentlessly figured in speech, text, and (moving) image? And finally, if humans are the tool users par excellence, then has not our quintessential property been outsourced to objects (as Bruno Latour suggests)?’ (p. 42).

CURRENTLY READING: EVERYTHING AND MORE

‘Take the matter of points and lines. It’s a given that any line includes infinitely many points… But if a line is composed entirely of points, and points have no extension, how can a line have an extension? Which all lines by definition do. The answer seems to have to do with ∞, but how can even ∞ x 0 equal anything more than 0?’ (p. 36).

CURRENTLY READING: IN THE FLOW

On aesthetic self-consciousness: ‘Artistic, poetic, rhetorical practice is none other than self-presentation to the gaze of the other, which presupposes danger, conflict and risk of failure’ (p. 128).