Via: David Garcia
Conference for the Project LIMINAL SPACES 10/ 11/ 12 March 2006.
The conference will include the inauguration of a new art space 200 m away from
the largest checkpoint of the West Bank, separating Jerusalem and Ramallah. The
space will serve as a centre for an art programme and the production of new works
by regional and international artists throughout 2006 and beyond. LIMINAL SPACES
is the first initiative in the Middle Eastern region of this kind which has
evolved despite a climate of ever growing hardship and alienation in the context
of the occupation and the construction of the Separation Fence/ Wall.
speakers list:
friday:
speakers - Khalil Nizm, Khaled Horani, Ilan Pappe
Saturday :
Erden Kosova, Azra Aksamija, Simona Nastac, Francis Mckee
sunday:
Charles Esche, Reem Fadde, David Garcia
artists participants : Sameh Abboushi (PAL), Azra Aksamija (BO/ US),
Ayreen Anastas (PAL/ US) and Rene Gabri (IRN/ US) , Rana Bshara
(PAL), Inas Hamad (PAL), Sandi Hilal (PAL/ I) and Alessandro Petti
(ITA), Khaled Horani (PAL), Sabine Horlitz/ Oliver Clemens of
AnArchitektur (D), Yochai Avrahami (IL), Yael Bartana (IL), Jumana
Emil Abboud (PAL), Peter Friedl (AU/ D), Hagar Goren (IL), Irit Hemmo
(IL), Ligna (D), Suleiman Mansour (PAL), Anna Meyer (AU), Dan
Perjovschi (RO), Doron Rabina (IL), Lars Ramberg (NOR), Oren Sagiv
(IL), Sala-Manca Group (IL), Miri Segal (IL), Sean Snyder (D),
Superflex (DK), Simon Wachsmuth (D/ AU)
Curated by:
Galit Eilat
Reem Fadda
Philipp Misselwitz
Liminal Spaces is aimed at examining the possibility of a Palestinian-
Israel-German cooperation in light of the ever-growing hardship endured by
Palestinians under Israeli occupation; deprivation of freedom of mobility; and
basic civil rights.
Liminal Spaces will develop new art projects by artists and architects exploring
the formation of urban frontiers in an everyday context and aspiring to generate
psychological and social change.
1 CONTEXT
Fortification
The conflict over territorial and demographic control has been deeply inscribed
into the physical and social fabric of the intersecting regions of Israel and
Palestine. Urban frontier zones like Jerusalem have become laboratories of an
urbanism of ethnic segregation that is unique in its extreme: a spatial matrix of
ethnically-homogeneous insular realities, contained within spatial and mental
frontiers. Since 2000, and the outburst of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, previously
invisible divisions have been replaced with physical barriers, walls or fences.
Everyday contact zones between the 'Israeli' and 'Palestinian' city have
eroded to the bare minimum. Physical frontiers are reinforced with generic
architectural vocabulary of aggressive seclusion, mirroring global trends of
socioeconomic, ethnic and political segregation. Domestic and public spaces in the
Israeli city have become increasingly militarised as preventative measures are
adopted against the omnipresent fear of real, imagined or constructed terror and
internal threats. Security, control and ambient fear transform everyday urban
spaces into frontier zones, suburbs into gated enclaves, suburban shopping centres
into fortresses. An equally strong impact is exercised by mass communication tools
and media technologies that foreground radicalised images and condition the
everyday perception of the other. For Palestinians, Jerusalem has become a closed
city, open only to those holding an Israeli ID card and able to afford living in
the city's ever more congested neighbourhoods. In the context of increasing
political and economic hardship, Palestinians are preoccupied with everyday
survival and have withdrawn to the private sphere, relying on traditional family
support networks.
Everyday Frontiers
Palestinians and Israelis live in separate worlds, in which the space of the
'other' disappears from the cognitive map of everyday life. Systems of codes,
sometimes imperceptible to the outsider, clearly demarcate trusted and feared
territories. But the obvious and dominant polarity between the Israeli and the
Palestinian Jerusalem, as the most evident example, does not convey the full
complexity of societal transformations. Indeed, this polarity obscures and
deflects from the inner conflicts faced by two cultures, both tragically forced to
define their own identities towards the perceived enemy. This polarised
perception overshadows and paralyses the ability to acknowledge internal conflicts
that reach deep into the social and psychological texture of both cultures.
Retreat and withdrawal from the enemy equally affects other social relations and
modes of interaction in the local, communal or domestic context=97with the family,
the neighbour, the stranger, the community. Although everyday reality in Israel
and Palestine is fundamentally asymmetrical, both cultures share increasing inner
destabilisation due to economic polarisations, militarisation of civic life, and
religious and social tensions. Inner frontiers have emerged due to conflicting
processes of traditionalism vs. westernisation, persisting family law/custom vs.
modern lifestyles, social and gender inequalities, etc.
Destruction/ Innovation It is not surprising that much of the creative production
in the region is deeply conditioned by this increasingly gruelling reality.
Artists operate in seclusion and isolation. Contacts outside the region are more
easily established, while the creative production within the region is almost
unknown to both communities. The dominant climate of mutual boycott between
Palestinian and Israeli institutions is also supported or de facto accepted by
many individual artists, architects and other creative disciplines. The difficulty
of crossing borders due to tight closure and travel restriction regimes make
casual daily encounters almost impossible. But despite (and sometimes in specific
response to) these difficulties, many initiatives have begun to explore political
and social agendas guided by the belief that art is not only a mirror to society,
but also a tool for political and social change. This impulse has given rise to
projects and works that lie in between representation and action, blurring
boundaries between disciplines, artistic production and political activism,
generating diverse formats such as street spectacles (like the projection project
at the separation wall in Abu Dis, Jerusalem, jointly organised by the
Palestinian-Israeli artists/ activists group 'Artists Without Wall'); one-day
events (such as the exhibition series '[H]earat Shulaym' curated by the
Jerusalem-based Sala-Manca group); or more explicit protest actions. At times,
such projects have successfully created umbrellas for joint Israeli and
Palestinian cooperation due to their informal, ad hoc nature and mode of operation
(initiatives 'Artists Without Wall' or the group 'Anarchists Without the Wall'),
or = their use of new media (e.g. initiative 'The right to flash'). The
initiatives share a desire to expose and undermine existing boundaries,
(temporarily) dissolve hierarchies, or subvert existing physical (e.g. separation
wall) or media-related (e.g. internet, mass media) infrastructures. In the
exhibition/events series 'Hilchot Shchenim' ('Regulations for Neighbours') the
Israeli Centre for Digital Art - Holon has attempted to stage a dialogue between
local projects and similar international projects.
Other creative and academic disciplines have developed equally specific formats
and platforms that attempted to undermine the overwhelming separation of discourse
and production. The trilateral German/Israeli/Palestinian research project
'Grenzgeografien - geographies of conflict' brought together architects, urbanists
and students in investigating everyday spatial and cultural productions at
specific frontier sites in Jerusalem. The project led to the international
conference 'Cities of Collision' (November 2004). For the first time, a trilateral
working process considered the urban reality of Jerusalem from multiple
viewpoints, thus generating new readings of daily life within the city's contested
spaces, tying local debates into an international discourse.
2 PROPOSAL
Idea and Process
First and foremost, this project aims to establish a missing and much- needed
platform for cooperation and dialogue within the regional creative community=97a
platform which will outlive the project. The proposal is for a pilot project to
draw on the prior experience and existing combined resources of the Israeli,
Palestinian and German partners in order to establish a cultural network for new
intercultural/artistic cooperation projects.
Eight Israeli and eight Palestinian artists will be invited to participate in the
programme as permanent members. German/ European artists are invited to
participate as residents. During the process, artists will meet and present work
to each other. The participants will engage in guided field trips and a lecture
and discussion series with local and international experts on relevant issues from
the fields of architecture, urban studies, ethnographic research, sociology or
law. All activities will take place at a new art space/ project office, which will
be opened at the site of the Qalandia Checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah.
The area is included within the Israeli municipal boundaries of Jerusalem, yet
situated just north of the Separation Wall, hence remaining accessible to both
Israeli and Palestinian participants. As a kick-off event, an international
conference will be staged in February 2006.
Strategies and Tactics
Over a process of six months, participating artists will be asked to develop
specific tactics and strategies to address the physiognomy of specific sites and
their everyday operations. Individual or teams will research new methodologies
that question the perception of the frontiers and challenge their accessibility,
permeability and potential to serve as contact and communication zones. Artists/
or collaborative teams of artists and others will be asked to develop strategies
that explore, make visible, comment on, obscure, confront or interact with
physical and mental frontier spaces. The programme will encourage an emphasis on
new forms of creative practice which adopts, investigates and subverts
contemporary technology and systems of media communication, underlining the
central role played taken by technology in the shaping of the physical and mental
borders.
After completion, works will be made accessible to the public. Works can be
displayed at the Qalandia project office or in-situ in the area of Qalandia/ Road
1. In parallel, an internet site will accompany the process, which can be used by
the participating artists for exchange of ideas and materials and serve as an
interface to the public. The final stage of the project will be a major exhibition
at the GfZK (Gallery for Contemporary Arts Leipzig) followed by exhibitions in
Ramallah and Holon. In addition, the working process will be documented in an
extensive catalogue.
Via: "Armin Medosch"
[This text has been written for Media Mutandis -
the Node.London Reader, edited by Maria Vishmidt
et al. The reader is available online and as a
Print on Demand publication:
http://publication.nodel.org/Publication. The
research about and writing of text has been
supported by media art laboratory Graz which also
runs http://theoriebild.ung.at/ (theory under
construction) where you can find more of my
writing in English and German.]
Meshing in the Future - The free configuration of
everything and everyone with Hive Networks
Text by: Armin Medosch, London/Vienna July - Dec
2005
Table of Content
1. Introduction
2. From OpenEmbedded to HiveWares
3. Hivewares: The Self-Managed People's Net
4. Conclusions
References
Glossary
[Note: Words or acronyms marked with an * are
explained in a glossary appended to this text.]
1.Introduction
One day in spring 2005 I popped over to my friend
Adam's. In his tiny living room, which also
serves as the headquarters for free2air
(www.free2air.org), I found another friend,
Alexei, hunched over a small technical device.
Its case had been removed and the circuitry of
the board and the chips could be seen. It had a
small hard drive strapped to the back of the main
board. Alexei and Adam were trying to make the
thing boot from the hard drive. They were so
focussed that I barely managed to get noticed
when I said hello. Slightly daunting technical
buzzwords such as 'cross compilation', and
'zeroconf' where flying through the room. Not all
of this meant something to me at the time but
what I could figure out was that they were on to
something special. This little thing on the table
represented the seed of an idea much larger than
its petite techno-crab like self.
Over the last two decades free/libre and open
source software (FLOSS)* has provided accessible
means for people to write their own software,
encompassing creative, educational and
professional uses. In the meantime, IP
(Intellectual Property)* regulations have become
a battleground. While the proprietary monopolies
marshal an army of lawyers and policymakers to
fight their 'battle', the FLOSS communities have
responded by creating realities on the ground. In
a quite distinct manner, ever more areas of
computing have become 'free'. The FLOSS universe
is an expansionary one.
It has been very interesting to watch how the
free software and open source software
communities have creatively made their
'investment'. While some FLOSS projects are
supported by companies and universities, many
projects remain outside such institutional
context. There is no formal structure to decide
which projects are taken on. Many free software
projects exist only because developers make a
personal commitment to them. Thus, the investment
is a highly personal one. The communities have
nevertheless been able to make wise decisions
expanding on existing building blocks. First, the
tools to build tools were released from the
corporate lockers. Then, the PC was liberated by
being given a range of free operating systems. On
top of that the internet boom of the nineties has
been built, with most of the services and
applications such as email and web servers
powered by FLOSS. What is happening now is that
the same versatility of the universally
programmable machine is needed in smaller
devices, in those digital technologies which
pervade our environments anyway, from the car to
the mobile phone, palm computer or home
entertainment system. In industry terms this is
called ubiquitous or pervasive computing.
Salesmen-gurus like Nicolas Negroponte have been
telling us about the merits of 'being digital'
(Negroponte 1995) for two decades now, which
implies that computer chips need to be 'embedded'
in the environment. What usually usually gets
left out of the marketing is that the world of
embedded computing* is also the world of embedded
capitalism, where everything is done by large
corporations whose systems are by default more
secretive than the mafia. The chips which are
used in embedded systems are different from the
chips used in PCs. For developers to be able to
make use of those chips it was necessary to buy
very expensive licences or to engage in time
consuming and difficult reverse engineering. This
provided huge obstacles for 'free' developments
in this area. Assuming there was once a well
meaning vision by computer engineers of
'augmenting' reality with smart devices, this
dream may long have been highjacked by corporate
ambitions to sell more hardware. At best it
promised 'intelligent' homes where fridges and
toasters would all communicate with each other;
at worst clouds of smart dust* would conduct the
remote controlled warfare of the 21st century.
Technology, in those 'visions', is meant to strap
people into a regime of consumption and control.
Embedded Capitalism also means that those
developments are driven by an industrial logic of
higher volumes of cheaper goods sold at lower
margins. In the digital world this is often
euphemistically referred to as Moore's Law*. The
mundane economic aspect behind the spectacular
growth of processor speed and memory capacity is
the need of producing and selling chips in very
large numbers to make a profit, because the
initial investment costs are very high. This
logic has - maybe oddly enough - benefited the
FLOSS community by giving it cheaper toys to play
with. What is happening now is that embedded
computing gets 'liberated'. The name of the game
is to replace the firmware* of small devices -
from wireless routers to palms to practically
anything that beeps - with trimmed down Linux*
distributions*. Once the operating systems of
those devices have been replaced with free ones,
their functionality can be rewritten to perform
other types of services. Embedded computing
becomes transparent and may, eventually, reflect
the needs of ordinary people instead of
shareholders.
Enter the HIVE Networks (www.hivenetworks.net/)
project. Devised by Raylab (www.raylab.com) and
affiliates, I had witnessed the development of
this project in its very early days during that
first magic afternoon. Hive Networks was
initiated by Alexei Blinov, Vladimir Grafov and
Ciron Edwards of Raylab, supported by other
developers such as Bruce Simpson, Adam Burns and
a growing network of non-techie supporters such
as Ilze Black, James Stevens, myself and others.
Raylab brings a particular experience to the
project. Blinov and Grafov, both originally from
Russia, have been working as artist/engineers (or
engineer/artists) for many years now, often
technically supporting the work of artists such
as Eric Hobijn and Atau Tanaka. After his move to
London Blinov worked with the group Audiorom.
Their interactive sound art works won the BAFTA
Interactive Award, and Blinov's electronics
skills played no small part. More recently, with
Take2030, Blinov helped to create the Lunchboxes.
Those boxes, whose cases consist of typical
Japanese Bento boxes, contain a fully functional
miniature computer running Meshlinux as an
operating system. They are capable of connecting
to each other and other computers via WLAN* on
the fly by using the OSLR* (www.olsr.org/)
dynamic routing protocol. In many ways the
Take2030 lunchboxes have been an important step
towards Hive Networks.
Finding solutions for those art projects usually
involved a lot of tinkering and risky actions
with the soldering iron. Another important
background influence was the involvement with
London's nascent free network* movement which -
under the banner of Consume (http://consume.net) -
in the early 2000s highlighted the possibility
that people can create their own networking
infrastructure by using WLAN technology of the
802.11 standard family and in the 2.4 GHz
spectrum (cf. Medosch 2004). In those early days,
old computers were often fitted with Linux, then
used and repurposed as wireless access points
(AP)* and routers*. But an old computer is still
an old computer, which implies that it has many
ways of breaking down. As Blinov pointed out in
conversation, with Hive Networks the days of the
soldering iron and of crappy old computers are
over.
For Raylab and affiliates the goal is now to work
with state of the art hardware which is produced
in industrial quantities and whose design follows
widely established industry standards. Usually
these devices use solid state computing, that
have no moving parts which could mechanically
break and fail. Liberating or repurposing such
devices signals nothing less than a paradigm
change in creative computing. This time it is not
the artists asking technicians for a creative
solution, it is the engineer/artists who are
proposing a framework for which artists and other
media practitioners are asked to come up with
project ideas. Hive Networks transcends the
boundaries between engineering and art. It is a
work of art as well as a platform for other
artists to create works. Most importantly, it
combines the element of content with the element
of networking.
Each Hive device is capable of gathering content
(through webcams, microphones, sensors) and
disseminating it (web server, audio/video live
streams, bluetooth*, WLAN). At the same time each
Hive device also acts as a node in the network,
which means that it is capable of storing and
forwarding data. The conjunction of those two
elements means that the perception of the network
as such changes. The network is no longer only a
connectivity structure through which access to
the global internet is facilitated, but it
becomes a content structure, a hiving network of
desires and cultural creations. An additional
motivation is the urgency to open up the world of
embedded computing and make it available to the
highest possible number of people. So much for
the concept, now to the realization.
2. From OpenEmbedded to HiveWares
FLOSS developers have found ways of replacing
company firmware with custom Linux firmware on a
number of devices now, specifically product
families by Linksys, Netgear, Asus and others.
The meta-tool Open Embedded and distributions
like OpenWrt make it easier to open those gadgets
and install applications customized to individual
needs. With Hivewares Raylab adds a particular
flavour to the orchestra of voices. What is now
only possible for serious geeks should become
part of everyone's lifeworld.
One of the first items to draw the attention of
the community was the Linksys WRT 54G, a
broadband router and wireless access point.
Harald Welte is a Linux kernel developer from
Berlin who is deeply involved with the
Iptables/Netfilter project which adds security
features. Welte had discovered that a number of
companies who sold WLAN equipment had based their
firmware on Linux. As Linux is protected by the
GPL*, the terms of this licence make it mandatory
to release the source code* of any software based
on it. Companies such as Linksys, Sitecom and
Fujitsu-Siemens who sold their Linux-based WLAN
devices had for one reason or another 'forgotten'
to make the source code accessible. The Free
Software Foundation (FSF), who is actually
safeguarding the GPL, had traditionally been
reluctant to take violators to court. But Welte
sought the help of lawyers and started GPL-
violations.org, a project which sent legally
backed warning letters to GPL violators. Welte's
initiative succeeded also in court, in a landmark
case in Germany against the company Sitecom.
Subsequently it became clear that the GPL was
more than a well meaning declaration of intent
and that it really was a legally binding licence
agreement. Industry giants such as Fujitsu-
Siemens settled out of court and complied with
their obligation to release the source code.
Linksys, confronted with similar allegations,
slowly and reluctantly released the source code
of the WRT 54G. This opened the floodgate for a
range of firmware hacking projects.
Replacing the firmware of a device such as the
WRT 54G with Linux-based firmware is of great
advantage. Not only does the way of working of
the device become transparent, it also unleashes
the full spectrum of its capabilities. Usually
manufacturers restrict the functionality of
devices to what they think that consumers need.
And specifically in the low cost or 'consumer'
market there seems to be an assumption that
people would not want to or should not have the
ability to tinker. By replacing the firmware a
device which was meant to be a relatively stupid
AP only could become a web-server or a hub for
internet telephony (Voice over IP* or VOIP) - in
other words, anything that anyone might possibly
imagine it to become within the limits of
existing technological development.
The legal hacking of the WRT 54G brought the
OpenWrt project (http://openwrt.org/) to life and
aimed at facilitating the making of custom
firmware. OpenWrt is a Linux distribution for a
range of wireless routers. It provides only a
minimal firmware - just what is necessary to boot
the device and provide its most basic
functionalities. Its key feature is that it
allows users to add and manage packages*. Users
can custom tune their AP, they can remove
unwanted packages and add packages they like.
Developers don't have to deal with the
intricacies of the hardware to create a whole
firmware of their own but can focus on developing
useful packages instead.
Highly skilled developers from the free network
community have put OpenWrt to good use. For most
ordinary humans OpenWrt is still quite a scary
bit of software which can only be controlled via
the command line interface. Sven Ola Tuecke from
the c-base and Freifunk (www.freifunk.de)
community in Berlin has put together the Freifunk
Firmware. It is based on OpenWrt but offers a web-
like interface for customization and
administration so that less skilled users can
also make a proper free network node. Elektra,
another Berlin based network wizard, has worked
on improvements of OLSR and its inclusion in the
Freifunk Firmware. Now dozens of nodes and hubs
on the roofs of Berlin create an elegant mesh
network which largely maintains itself and
shovels around bits and bytes outside the
networks of corporate greed and state
surveillance.
Naturally, the WRT 54G did not stay the only
liberated hardware device. Under the banner of
OpenEmbedded (http://oe.handhelds.org/) there is
a development under way to make it easier to
"bake" custom Linux kernels for potentially a
very large number of devices. A hairy issue on
any PC under Linux is the compilation of source
code to make it work with a specific hardware.
With embedded devices the added difficulty is
that the source code needs to be compiled on
another platform first and then installed on the
device. This is called cross-compilation and is
one of the most difficult areas in contemporary
computing. OpenEmbedded has created a tool named
BitBake to make cross-compilation work. The
project is in its early stages and follows an
almost utopian meta-level strategy, but some
branches already show signs of success. Out of
the original OpenEmbedded effort came the
OpenSlug (www.nslu2
linux.org/wiki/OpenSlug/HomePage) development
which tries to make a truly open source custom
kernel (kernel 2.6) for the NSLU2 (Netgear
Network Storage Link Usb 2). The NSLU2 is
particularly interesting because it works with an
external HD and it can be made to run on
batteries. You can have a web-server on a
wireless battery driven device. People could make
mesh mobile networks and do VOIP - internet
telephony - completely for free on their own
community network.
3. Hivewares: The Self-Managed People's Net
Blinov and Grafov watched those developments
carefully and decided to work with another
product family, the WL series by Asus. Custom
firmware development for those devices is
supported by a lively community called the WL500g
Forum (http://wl500g.info/) which basically
thrives around "Oleg's firmware".
Oleg is a Russian guy who rewrote Asus firmware
for the WL-series of products (WL500g, WL300G, WL-
HDD) and added lots of useful stuff to it,
including the possibility to use the root
filesystem from an external drive (either USB
flash or IDE, in case of WL-HDD). (Grafov 2005)
Blinov and Grafov have put Oleg's Firmware on the
WL-HDD2.5. This little box which I had seen first
during that magic afternoon is now available for
around 50GBP. Like the WRT 54G it supports both
WLAN and ethernet connections on top of which it
also offers an IDE connection and USB 1.1. Both
IDE and USB allow the connection of an external
HD which is crucial for expanding the capacity
and adding features. Raylab spent quite a few
afternoons making the WL-HDD boot from an
external drive and adding a few other essential
functions.
What we did is that we used his [Oleg's] firmware
with its built-in possibility of adding packages
as basis and added some features that make it
possible to run Hivewares. Hivewares are self-
contained "product personalities" that make sense
to a non-geek person. Without Hivewares, a non-
techie could probably still get the same
functionality from his/her box, but only after a
lot of painful seeking through many different
sources of information and forum postings.
(Grafov 2005)
After an initial project presentation at the
media art lab in Graz, at WSFII prepconf 05
Raylab were able to show such Hivewares in
action, by presenting a WL HDD and a number of
different pre-packaged configurations on Compact
Flash drives. By replacing the Compact Flash card
the primary function of the device is changed, it
could either be a web server or a web cam, a net
radio player/receiver or a wireless media
jukebox. They have also been conducting
experiments with the WL 500Gx which is very
similar to WL-HDD but even better equipped with
plugs connecting it to the outside world. With
Hiveware the little Asus boxes become freely
configurable devices. A number of Hivewares are
already downloadable from the Wiki.
The Hiveware developers put particular attention
to a concept known as Zeroconf, called Bonjour in
the Apple world.
Addition of Bonjour and linking of Hivewares
personality to service advertisement supported by
it, made it possible to have hassle-free
discovery of Hive devices in the neighbourhood of
supported clients (Windows and Mac running
Zeroconf client software). (Grafov 2005)
By including Zeroconf/Howl, Raylab hope to
overcome the carrier/content dichotomy. The
network becomes more than just a carrier medium,
it also identifies and advertises 'services' in
the vicinity or network-neighbourhood of a node.
People are no longer getting access to an
anonymous world wide web but connect to content
and services which reflect their (local)
interests. Last not least Raylab are
experimenting with further interfaces such as
bluetooth, FM radio and a break-out box, which
has analogue-digital switches, so that sensors,
for instance, can be connected to a box.
Participants in the Hive Network could
potentially have their own meteorological
environmental station.
In summary, what Raylab have been trying to do is
to make the process they were going through last
year over a period of several months as hassle-
free as possible for other users. Alexei Blinov
wants to make "information processing truly
accessible without usurping human space." "Just
like bees and ants and other social insects,"
Blinov says, "those devices are living in
symbiosis with people rather than presenting
problems that demand a lot of dedication to find
solutions." (Blinov 2005)
Ideally they would like to offer the
customization of devices on a web platform. Users
first need to buy the hardware, a common device
available through many stores such as the WL-HDD.
Then they come to the web-site, where they can
choose how to configure their Hive device by
clicking radio buttons on a web form. Once
finished with this, a specific version of the
software is compiled. Users download the compiled
software and install it and are ready to fire up
their Hive device and join the network. For
accomplished Linux users this is already
possible.
In the interests of minimising the obstacles for
users at every level of expertise, Bruce Simpson,
BSD developer and friend of Raylab, has
experimented with OpenEmbedded and BitBaking. As
OpenEmbedded is still in an experimental stage,
there is some way to go. Currently it is only
advisable for people with some knowledge of
Linux/Unix to get hands-on involved. For those a
Hiveware compilation is envisioned which consists
of a Linux image with a built-in packaging system
(ipkg), Zeroconf (Rendevouz/Bonjour) service
advertisement and discovery protocol, the
standard Linux command line toolkit (Busybox) and
a PHP-based web interface. Thus, more
accomplished users who know some PHP and
Javascript are able of developing application
interfaces without having to go into hardware
hacking. As an example, Blinov recently strung
together a nice interface which turns a WL-HDD
into a net radio receiver, but any sort of other
web application development is possible.
Because, after all, the chipsets inside the WL-
HDD are not that powerful, what Raylab have in
mind is that each device can do one thing very
well, but one only. So for instance a WL-HDD can
be turned either into a video streaming server,
or an Internet radio tuner, or a music jukebox
and Internet radio tuner in one, or an audio
streaming server which converts audio input
(line/mic in) to a live-stream on the net. It can
not perform all those tasks at the same time but
it can do it each at a time. Because the
individual devices are quite cheap, large numbers
could be spread out over the cityscape to work
together. What makes the Hive really buzz is not
just the price but also the added network
capacity. Raylab intend to make each device
capable of joining ad-hoc networks*. Each device
creates a wireless cloud of potential network
connectivity around itself and seeks to link up
automatically with other devices. The point is to
make this really work automatically. If
successful, a sort of Trojan Horse strategy could
be played out. If a technophobe - an aged parent,
for instance - can be persuaded to use a Hive
device, which is as easy to use as a radio
receiver or CD player, it will also potentially
become part of a free network. If adoption of
such devices is widespread, local free networks
can connect together and large scale community
owned wireless free networks finally become
reality. What remains to be resolved is how
exactly this is going to be made to work with
Hivewares. As mentioned above, free network
developers in Berlin and elsewhere have
experimented very actively with ad-hoc mesh
networking* protocols such as OLSR. Those have
been tried and tested now with 90 clients and
more forming a mobile mesh network. It looks like
Raylab is aiming at something similar and will
include OLSR into its Hivewares. But the
scalability of mesh networking up to areas of
1000 nodes and more remains to be proven.
There is a host of other potential points of
criticism, and not just technical ones. The
development of the free network community has
shown that those projects make only slow progress
in areas which are covered by affordable ADSL
broadband offers from commercial Internet Service
Providers (ISPs). The finer points of the
political difference between commercial centrally
controlled networks and community networks just
do not seem to matter for the majority of people.
The thrill of becoming a content provider on the
community network is felt most strongly by the
younger and more net savvy ones. The free network
community has also focussed so far mainly on
making the networks work and cared little for the
content. There remains a pronounced gender gap in
the demography of such groups. Those issues are
known to be difficult to overcome. Even if Hive
developers solve all the technical problems we
will have to wait and see if Hive devices will be
adopted by large numbers and a diverse range of
people.
4. Conclusions
There remains the potential criticism that Hive
devices add only to the flood of digital gadgets
which already threaten to become an environmental
hazard, as SF author Bruce Sterling pointed out
at his Siggraph key note speech in 2004. This
could be countered by the claim that Hive devices
will be the last gadget that anyone will ever
need because one and the same piece of hardware
can serve different purposes. Ideally, new
functions can easily be downloaded and installed
with a one-click process. But isn't this the same
sort of techno-utopianism which is a generic part
of the marketing blurb of the ICT industry? Is
there really a connection between the intrinsic
properties of this or that technology and
desirable forms of social change? Those are big
questions which cannot be answered within the
limits of this text. They are also real questions
in that sense that they do not offer themselves
to be answered by simple or reductive statements.
However, it is significant that the Hive Networks
project poses those questions in a new and
intriguing way. Hive Networks may well fail as a
techno-utopian project if it formulates its
objectives on a generic and universal level. It
has a much better chance to make any impact if
the technological development gets embedded into
the community and gets driven by the situated
knowledge of people to whose needs the project
responds.
In ubiquitous computing it is usually the devices
which get smarter and the people who remain
stupid. So far the concept of 'pervasive'
computing sounds like a threat to ordinary
people: another layer of technology which remains
unseen, little understood but potentially
influences and controls the life of many. By
merging the concepts of FLOSS, DIY and embedded
computing, Raylab threaten to turn that trend
around.
There can be no real conclusions with regard of
Hive Networks at this point. The project has made
some achievements but is still in its early
stages. After initial good responses from
different sides - artists, developers,
institutions - it appears that the developer
community needs to grow to take it to the next
level. It would be good to see some exemplary
projects get off the ground to illustrate the
concept. To this end, Hive developers are about
to launch a number of collaborations with artists
and media art institutions in Britain and abroad.
The public needs to see what happens if swarms of
Hive devices are set free. Otherwise the concept
remains too abstract for most people.
Acknowledgements: This text benefited
substantially from comments by Alexei Blinov,
Vladimir Grafov, Adam Burns and Elektra.
'I work here, but I am cool.'
Interview with Alan Liu
By Geert Lovink
Good books not just tell, they create history. In my case this happened to Alan
Liu's The Laws of Cool, subtitled Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information.
Ever since I found it in a New York bookstore, late 2004, I carried it with me on
planes, trains, on the bike--and remained puzzled about its analytic density. The
Law of Cool is a so-far unnoticed classic of new media theory that is not a hurry
to show off its relevance. The Laws of Cool proved hard to finish, and even harder
to put aside. I got the feeling that I might have had enough of it, yet the book
wasn't ready with me. What fascinates me is its unusually quiet, untimely style.
The Laws of Cool is a thick and comprehensive University of Chicago Press
humanities study by a Wordsworth scholar who digs deep into the contemporary
conditions of knowledge production. As Liu writes, the Cool has always bordered to
the Cold. The writer did not get carried away by the Latest or the Obvious. Liu,
an Californian UC Santa Barbara professor and web editor of Voice of the Shuttle
(http://vos.ucsb.edu/), writes theory from a broad range of perspectives. The Law
of Cool is hard to compare with the Deleuzian MIT Press titles and is light years
away from the ordinary cyberculture readers. It studies business management
bestsellers as serious literature, takes further elements of hypertext theory,
explains the attraction to uselessness and the arbitrary, interpretes HLML
language,??analyses the cyberlitertarian ideology and maps the shift from 'power
to the people' to 'power to the individual'.??Like it or not, cool is the
antipolitics of information and 'bad attitude' is the constitutional gesture.
What makes Liu's study so unique is his redefinition of the contemporary time
scale. Liu discusses 1920s typography, quotes from Processed World and the
Hackers' Dictionary and writes about Jodi as if it is 1996. This study of the
'cultural life of information' focusses on life at the US campus. It investigates
the corporatization and computerization of academia and its impact on the
humanities. Liu: 'It might be said, with Kafkaesque irony: I went to sleep one day
a cultural critic and woke up the next metamorphosed into a data processor.' Liu
calls for an update of Stephen Greenblatt's study on Renaissance self-fashioning,
and produces a number of useful elements for such undertaken. But, before we
re-awake in a New Age, we have to reconcile with destruction in the name of
innovation and creative arts. Are you ready to slough off yesterday?
??
Liu's motto is 'I work here, but I am cool.' In an Ascribe press release he
explains the cool attitude like this: 'I am not so cool as to actively rebel or
quit, but I am just cool enough to be slightly kinky in the web pages I browse at
work, I'm not quite subversive, but my behavior asserts that I'm me and not just
part of this corporation or that team.' Liu doesn't get excited about this or that
future scenario, nor is he interested in a deconstruction of the hype and spin
that so characterizes the computer and Internet industry. Instead, he observes the
behavioral patterns of 'head work' that perform a subtle play around the ethos of
refusal and resistance. A glimpse at Slashdot will tell you what this often
misunderstood attitude is about. Cool starts to rise when unproductive elements
come into play, 'destructive creativity' plays up and counter-systems of 'style'
develop. 'What is really cool, after all,' Liu asks. 'At the moment of truth on
the coolest Web sites'when such sites are most seriously, deeply cool'no
information is forthcoming. Cool is the aporia of information. In whatever form
and on whatever scale (excessive graphics, egregious animation, precious slang,
surplus hypertext, and so on), cool is information designed to resist information,
a paradoxical 'gesture' by which an ethos of the unknown struggles to arise in the
midst of knowledge work.' Cool is an ethos of information. It is the moment of
awareness of the information interface. It is the wellknown moment of revelation
when you no longer look through a window and instead look at the window frame.
Cool, so Liu, gives the knowledge worker the hope of 'personality'.
??
GL: What makes your book so special is the somewhat different time frame that you
use. The Laws of Cool is neither historical in it is approach, in the sense that
it spans centuries, like media archeology does, nor does it stick to the
ever'present now, as new media theory often does. These days we hardly find
references to 1980s computer culture, but for you that seems like yesterday. How
come? Do you practice a hermeneutics of the digital everyday?
??
AL: "Hermeneutics of the digital everyday" is a nice phrase. My book is in part
about the digital everyday. Every day we go into the cubicle (or office, or
classroom, or Starbucks) and log in to work on our identity, which increasingly
gets swallowed up in some institutional identity or "corporate culture." The kind
of hermeneutics or interpretation I bring to bear on that kind of everyday is
historical. I try to bring meaning to the digital everyday by breaking down the
hyper-compressed sense of "now" that is its prison (or cubicle) to compare it to
past days. I make a narrative of the genealogy of "knowledge work" and, more
specifically, of the information work that is a kind of carrier wave for knowledge
work. And I use that narrative to make a historical critique. In this critical
narrative, the intermediate "time frame" of the 1980s you point to is pivotal. The
"now" and the far past, I believe, are necessary to each other, but can only be
brought into meaningful engagement if their encounter is staged in a transitional
zone of generational history--the history, that is, of the most recent change
between generations that made us what we are today. Recently, after all,
generational changes (between baby boomers, X's, and now Y's) have been the great
scenes of critique, revision, and sometimes rapprochement. The 1980s witnessed a
generation change simultaneously in society, business culture, intellectual
approaches, and information technology (from the epoch of mainframes to that of
the personal computer and the network). So that becomes the pivot point in my
historical critique of the digital everyday.
??
GL: You write: "Cultural criticism is fundamentally historical." At the same time
History as we know is declared obsolescent.??The history that unfolds is now
partitioned in files and stored in a database. You call for cultural criticism to
become 'ethical hackers' of knowledge work.
??
AL: Your question is interesting to me partly because of the way it is asked.
There is actually no question in your question. No insult intended, but it's as if
you were yourself a database outputting information (a fragment from my book,
sound bites from the culture of obsolescence, etc.). More frightening, you (and I,
too!) are like many professionals today, whether they are information workers,
economists, journalists, bloggers, or professors: we're good at outputting data
without any query (SQL or otherwise) actually having been made by anyone. We call
that knowledge work, which produces a kind of "information overload" from which
corporate culture harvests all its surplus value. (They don't even need to query;
we output!) I play upon the database-like aspects of your question because it's a
way of getting at what my book is about. A long time ago (and, of course, still in
many parts of society today), people had another name for massive information
dumps that occurred spontaneously without any query having been made. They called
it God. It was God, or the gods, who spoke out of the burning bush to tell you
what you didn't even know you needed to ask. Before Oracle, Inc., in other words,
there were oracles. But since the Enlightenment, secularization, and the many
modern revolutions, that role of the oracle has been renamed History. We know we
are in the presence of history when it preemptively tells us, and enforces upon
us, something we didn't even want to ask about. Gods and history: before we even
know to query or pray, they have their root kit in place. So that accounts for the
perhaps too romantic notion of the "ethical hacker" in my book.
??
It's now unfashionable to summon up prophets who can preempt even the preemptive
force of the gods or history to query, in essence: what have we done that has
called down upon us such a fatal information dump (the Biblical "handwriting on
the wall")? What was the query that we have forgotten? So ethical hackers must
serve in the place of prophets. Ethical hackers are not just programmers or
engineers, but also humanists, artists, social scientists, scientists, and
occasionally economists, politicians, and media workers, too. Their calling is not
just to query the database of cultural history, but to bring to view the
conditions of critique, speculation, and downright curiosity that allow that
database to speak unannounced, unbeknownst. The risk, of course, is that hackers
of any sort--white or black hat--are just another priesthood, vanguard, or
avant-garde. (So trust only hackers who--on principle, when needed for a greater
good--are willing to turn off their own firewalls and open themselves to being
hacked. Everyone else is just in the techno- or avant-garde priesthood.)
??
GL: Lately I had a short but interesting dispute on the phone. In the midst of a
conversation the lady I talked to used the phrase "knowledge society" and I
objected. I told her that I preferred "information society," despite all its
troubles. She said: "but that term is only used by technocrats." Yes, I answered,
but I like it more, compared to the hyped'up term "knowledge" that, for me, stands
for well'meant, soft exclusion combined with ugly intellectual property right
clauses. Why should others define what knowledge is, and is not? Information is a
much broader term. It's cold and technical, perhaps even anti'human, and leaves
the possibilities. Your book circles around "knowledge work" in the age of
computerization. How do you judge the current knowledge society craze?
??
AL: I think that you were exactly right in your phone conversation with the person
who preferred "knowledge society" to "information society." "Knowledge" is
supposed to mean a deeper, cohesive, integral, and more spiritually real
apprehension--less a way of knowing, really, than a way of being. Even some
business books (for example, Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline: The Art and
Practice of the Learning Organization) treat it that way. The problem, of course
(paceBourdieu) is that knowledge is also a way of life or lifestyle. I call it in
my book "work style" (lifestyle = work). As such, it is dominated by institutions
that know better than you how to work at knowledge. Such institutions shape
knowledge at the level of workaday protocols ("this is the document format you
will use") and also at the level of overall social protocol ("corporate culture").
Indeed, the power of contemporary institutions is that they enforce a seamless fit
between workaday and cultural protocols. It is all one protocol, which substitutes
for what we used to call culture. In this situation, the apparently reductive,
purely "technical" notion of "information society" is preferable to "knowledge
society." "Information workers" are peons of the knowledge-work regime who don't
always need to conform to the knowledge ideology. Some good engineers and
sysadmins I know are like that. They do their thing without needing to pretend
that they are integral parts of the whole corporate culture of knowledge. On the
one hand, they can be perceived reductively ("just a sysadmin"). But, on the other
hand, they have powers and capabilities that spread out in decentralized ways
beyond the institutional knowledge construct. The so-called "professions" used to
function in that capacity (with their own professional associations and guilds
spreading out beyond any particular company). Now that professionalism has been
increasingly subordinated to corporatism (as in the corporate attorney or
accountant), the techno-people are stepping into the role. They do biz; but, for
example, they also do open source.
??
GL: I don't know of any literary scholars that reads, let alone analyzes business
books and quotes management gurus. Should students of English read Tom Peters, in
much the same way as cultural studies professors require a discourse South Park
analysis? Business magazines were around everywhere in the 90s, but no one seemed
to know how to read them. A 'French' reading perhaps would have failed, but wasn't
even tried. The global social movements at the time focused on foreign policy, WTO
and IMF, not on the techno'libertarian ideology. We're still waiting for Marxian
critiques of the 'creative' knowledge industries. Is your literary criticism
taking the lead?
??
AL: Some of us in literature departments are beginning to "read" business books
closely--my colleague here at UCSB, for example, Christopher Newfield ("Corporate
Culture Wars," Ivy and Industry). Chris has actually interviewed Tom Peters and
his group. In general, I think that a serious literature department today should
be able to offer a course titled "Contemporary Fiction" in which novels are read
alongside selected works from business, economics, politics, city planning, and
journalism (including medical, scientific, and technological journalism). In a
sense, the search for the "great American novel" is over. The winner is business
literature. I can't easily think of another genre of blended realism and fantasy,
gritty concreteness (case studies, character studies) and sweeping vision,
objective description and moral designs upon our soul that has such wide cultural
impact.
??
It would be facile, however, for literature professors to read business literature
as if it were exactly like a good work of fiction. Similarly, it would be facile
for cultural studies professors to read such works as if they were just another
kind of popular or consumer media. Seriously to engage with business literature
will require rigorous attention to financial structure, accounting numbers, the
graphic design of annual reports, and--goodness--even the prose of Alan Greenspan.
We are dealing here with producer, rather, than consumer culture. Like many
humanities scholars, I myself can only scratch the surface because I do not have
the numeracy skills, for example, to understand such fictions behind contemporary
corporate maneuvers as the "derivative" and the "leveraged buyout." The dollar (or
Euro), after all, is the most powerful vehicle of imagination or speculation ever
invented. (It's amazing how many things people of even the most pedestrian
imagination can "see" in a hundred-dollar bill!) But humanities scholars tend not
to have the skills to follow the manipulations of dollars beyond the scale of
their own vanishingly small publishing royalties.
??
GL: Five years after you completed most of the manuscript (early 2001), the book
still has a freshness, density and untimely character that fascinates me. Still
you remark in a footnote that it has a definite pre'9/11 quality. The dotcom crash
unfolded when you wrapped it up. Would you now write it in such a different way?
So many of your topics gained further importance. The 'cool' hasn't cooled off.
Creative industries are still on the rise... then what did change?
??
AL: On the one hand, even while my book is very attuned to our hyper-compressed
"now," as I put it earlier, it is relatively insensitive to what Fernand Braudel
called the short-term l'histoire ??v??nementielle, which, to adapt his metaphor,
is just white crests of waves on top of the deep seas of information history that
we "surf." But neither do I go back to the millennia-spanninglongue dur??e.
(Albert Borgmann'sHolding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of
the Millenniumis better at that, since he imagines for us the prehistorical,
ancestral state of information.) My book instead goes back to the intervening time
frame that Braudel called "conjunctural" or "cyclical" history (in between the
scales of short-term andlongue dur??ehistory)--which, by the way, coincides with
the "long-cycle" innovation history that economists such as Joseph Schumpeter,
theorist of "creative destruction," specialized in. In that time frame, 2001 does
not make an epochal difference. It only builds on what came before. (When I was
still trying to make a publication deadline of 2000, which I failed to do, I wrote
often in the present tense. Then, when it became clear that the book could not be
finished and published until a few years later, I went back and revised what I had
written about the 2000-2001 moment in the past tense. To tell truth, the book felt
more true to me then. The present tense had imposed an artificial strain, when my
real intent was the continuity of the present with the past.) But, on the other
hand, I cannot deny that the book would have been different if it had been written
mostly after the events of 2001. As you know, one of the larger chapters in my
book (Chap. 11, "Destructive Creativity: The Arts in the Information Age") inverts
Schumpeter's idea of "creative destruction" to focus on contemporary
"destructivity." I have already begun work on a new book tentatively
titledThinking Destruction(though it is being slowed because I am first trying to
get to the publisher myLocal Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and
the Database, which bundles together my essays on historical critique). InThinking
Destruction, I am re-exploring the theory and history of "creativity" from the
perspective of destruction, which has its own structures, processes, and
complex/emergent agendas. So, in answer to your question, myLaws of Coolwould have
been different if written after 2001 because I would have emphasized even more
strongly the need to look at the dark side of the force. Knowledge workers today
say "cool" in the way that a Jedi might say "May the force be with you." But we
need to remember the dark side of the force. Who is Darth Vader, after all, but
the ultimate worker in a cubicle--a cubicle so tight that it is an armored suit?
??
GL: What, except for Microsoft, needs to be destroyed? Macht kaputt was euch
kaputt macht is a famous German punk slogan (destroy what destroys you). However,
the destruction that you talk about can hardly be labeled as punk. At best it's
tinkering, uncovering the dark, but it can also be the kind of adolescent troll
behavior that attracts attention, and aims at the destruction of online social
structures. Can we still make a distinction between us and them, between those
that need to be defeated and others who are the revolutionaries? Isn't the problem
of destructive creativity not also that everything (digital) can and will be
saved, stored and archived? And talking about creative destruction, what do you
see as obsolescent these days? We know what management gurus in the late nineties
want to blow up in terms of old corporate structures but what is there really to
do if want to apply destructive creativity? I often see not much more than
self-destruction or predictable critiques of mainstream media.
??
AL: "Destructivity," as I call it, is a much larger and more interesting
phenomenon than adolescents, artists, intellectuals, and hacktivists performing,
as you suggest, the now predictable acts of mischievous critique and petty kink.
It is a way of participating in a civilization of destruction. As you know, the
great theories of "civilization" in modern times have been dark ones--whether we
think of Weber's vision of bureaucratization, Freud's of repression and
sublimation, Foucault's of discipline, Habermas' of the decoupling of the
"lifeworld," or even Elias Norbert's works on the"civilizing process" and the rise
of "manners. The process of civilization is not the bright, Enlightenment vision
of ever-upward "progress" in which all the main domains of life--intellectual,
social, economic, and cultural--improve together but instead a kind of hostile
take-over of life at large by the rational-economic subsectors of life. That's
what we call corporatization today. Corporatization attempts to sell its own
vision of civilization, which it calls "globalization," on the basis of a kind of
neo-Enlightenment vision of progress, which it calls innovation.
??
It is astounding, for example, how many business books and articles there are with
such titles as "Continuous Innovation," "Radical Innovation," "The Innovative
Enterprise," "The Rise of the Creative Class," "Creativity Under the Gun," and so
on. But a dark interpretation of such civilization would ask: what needs to be
destroyed to make creation possible? Even more interesting, what logics,
structures, and technologies of destruction are embedded so deeply in the process
of creativity itself that they're not just viral; they are part of the DNA of
"creative destruction"? What I call "destructivity" is a way of asking such
questions and, on that basis, proposing ethical as well as tactical "best
practices" for participating in the civilization of creative destruction. So, to
come back to adolescents (we call them "students"), artists, intellectuals, and
hacktivists: such people are often like the old Processed Worldcollective I write
about at one point in my book, who wrote critiques and played merry, situationist
pranks against institutionalized knowledge work while simultaneously eking out a
living in office cubicles. Such people--who can easily be mocked, but can just as
easily be cherished as the carriers of our collective best hopes and dreams--stake
out their identity at the margins of the major power institutions, neither fully
in nor fully out. Under the title of "destructivity," I want to provide a more
useful rationale for how and why such people can best participate in the major
institutions of knowledge work that, in one way or another, they have to engage
with anyway. In this regard, the old post-May-1968 choice between staying true to
the revolution and "selling out" seems to me terrifically unuseful in giving
people a reason to situate themselves in the world of life and action.
??
A better rationale might be framed by the question: "If you see that corporate
life is destructive when it tries to 'civilize' the globe, can you do a better job
of managing that destruction?" That is, the corporations may advertise for
innovation managers (called "designers"), but what the civilized world really
needs are destruction managers. How can the great processes of destructive
creation driving globalization today with all its myriad social, economic,
political, religious, environmental, and cultural effects best be managed so as to
blunt its worst tendencies and, despite itself, to evolve emergent, new ways of
sustaining what the classical philosophers once called the "good life"? So my
message to the adolescents doing the whole net, hack, and porn thing in their
bedroom is: instead of staging trick acts of destruction from the outside, can you
find a way to manage destruction from the inside for a larger social good? The
role of artists, intellectuals, and educators, it seems, to me is to educate those
adolescents to the point where they can see that there are larger, and
socially-good, ways in which they can contribute to our civilization of
destruction. That's what education today means. Let's face it, educators today are
training the cadres of those destined to work inside the knowledge work machine
(this isn't the 1960's when some educators fantasized that they were training
people to "drop out" of the system). I want to place students inside the system
who can better manage our civilization of destruction.
??
GL: Much of your book is devoted to the corporatization of the university. You
must have seen a fair bit of decline, or "change" as the business rhetoric calls
it. You call scholars "middle managers". Academy has lost its "supreme
jurisdiction over knowledge". Can it reclaim such position? What can we teach
students or then how to best do their "knowledge work". They do not need to be
told how to surf the Net.
??
AL: You touch here on the vexed issue of the role of the university in the age of
knowledge work, which, as you see, I have impatiently already started talking
about. My short answer to your question is that students do"need to be told how to
surf the Net." Otherwise they will end up serving just the particular versions of
the net that the great institutions and nations of our day have in mind. I don't
mean that students should be counter-indoctrinated in any left- or
cultural-critical understanding of information technology, knowledge-work society,
and the university's role in all that (as if that would work!). I mean that
training in critical and ethical action for networked society (what I theorized as
the "best practices" management of destruction) can only be built on top of what
students really need to learn: knowledge not just "of" the tools/skills needed to
succeed in contemporary society but also "about" those tools/skills. They can
make up their own minds about how best to use their tools and skills if we can
only teach such tools fully enough that the technical, social, cultural,
aesthetic, ethical, and historical context surrounding their invention and
implementation (as in the recent controversies about the trustworthiness of
Wikipedia) come into view.
??
Currently, for example, I am leading a collaborative project in the University of
California system called "Transliteracies," whose goal is to "improve" online
reading practices with an awareness (historical, social, aesthetic, and
computational) of what "improvement" might mean. This project involves
understanding what actually happens when students "surf the Net" and what kinds of
new, untapped intelligences lurk in what might otherwise be called shallow, broad,
casual, quick, or lateral browsing/searching. If we can understand better what
happens when we surf the net (specifically, when we read online text in adaptive
relation to new media and networked environments), then perhaps we can build tools
and skills that give users, including students, a better chance of surfing the net
to gain knowledge, as opposed to just doing knowledge work. Knowledge involves a
self-reflexive circuit in which what we know is mediated by what we know about
howwe know. Today, universities should not only teach such recursive knowledge at
a high, intellectual level ("no data without exposing the metadata" is my slogan)
but also intervene at the level of the tools and source code that make knowledge
possible.
??
Companies like Google, Amazon, and Adobe are innovating wonderfully in online
reading, for example; but there is also a necessary role for the fully
multi-disciplinary, historical, and social-good perspective that is only possible
(among today's major social institutions) in the university. Keep in mind that the
distance between research and end-user in the university is extremely short. The
divide between research and teaching in the university is a clich?? that is not
really true. Everyday, researchers in the university have to face that lecture
hall of uncomprehending, bored, or suspicious students--end-users, in other words,
at the most formative, vulnerable, yet (paradoxically) also shielded point in
their lives. And so, ethically and pragmatically, the researcher-teachers of the
university need to collaborate to create the tools that allow knowledge actually
to work, which is to say, to be shared. (True knowledge work = knowledge sharing).
I've been thinking about the issue of the university and society for a long time,
and you pressed the hot button.
??
GL: Do you find it justified to talk about a Web 2.0 wave? What could be the
theoretical tools, for humanity scholars, to analyse blogs and social networks
such as Orkut, Flickr and MySpace? Most net artists and activists that I know,
can't deal with the subject formation that's happening inside those networks. They
don't want to write a personal diary and don't feel going to a dating site after
work.
??
AL: Our Transliteracies project is beginning to collect for study in its Research
Clearinghouse some of the tools that people have invented to analyze online social
networking (http://transliteracies.english.ucsb.edu/category/
online'social'networks'tools'for'analyzing/). The social and collective dimension
of online reading is one of the project's main concerns. In general, though, I am
highly skeptical of the "Web 2.0" hype. There are two reasons for this. One goes
back to the issue of history on which our interview started. "Web 2.0" is all
about a generation-change in the history of the Web, but from a perspective that
is looking at what is happening right now, as opposed to what was happening during
the previous generational change (the "1980s" we discussed earlier). It's not
clear that we can really describe a generation change of this magnitude and
complexity while we are in the midst of the change itself, except to say that
"something" is happening that a future generation may decide is qualitatively
different. After all, when people speak of Web 2.0, they are actually referring to
a swarm of many kinds of new technologies and developments that are not all
necessarily proceeding in the same direction (for example, toward
decentralization, open content creation and editing, Web-as-service, AJAX, etc.).
??
It's not at all certain, for example, that open content platforms in the style of
blogs, wikis, and content management systems align with a philosophy of
decentralized or distributed control, since many such database- or XML-driven
technologies require a priesthood of backend and middleware coders to create the
underlying systems and templates for the new "open" communications. Just how many
people in the world, for example, can make one of the current generation of
open-source content-management systems (which often start out as blog engines) do
anything that isn't on the model of "post"-and-"category" or chronological
posting? Even the more trivial exercise of re-skinning such systems (with a fresh
template) requires a level of CSS knowledge that is not natural to the user base.
So saying that we are making the change from Web 1.0 to 2.0 is like saying that a
swarm behavior is definitely moving in a single direction, when in fact it may be
moving in several contradictory directions at once. (It's not accidental, by the
way, that many of the best known statements or conferences about Web 2.0 have
relied on examples rather than generalizations. For example, Web 2.0 is "Flickr or
MySpace.")
??
My second reason for being skeptical about 'Web. 2.0"--at least the hype about
it--is more important. I think that people who make a big deal out of Web 2.0 are
trying to take a shortcut to get out of needing to understand the real generation
changes that are happening in the background and that underlie any change in the
Web. Those changes occur in social, economic, political, and cultural
institutions. Let's take the example of Facebook or MySpace, which (like other
social networking systems) are often spoken of as exemplars of Web 2.0. These
systems, of course, are deeply rooted in particular social scenes--especially at
different levels of the educational system (even if MySpace started out in the
music scene). There was recently a mini-scandal at my daughter's school (she's 13)
when it was discovered that many in her class had lied about their age to set up
MySpace pages, where they revealed unguarded details and characterizations about
themselves without full awareness of what it meant to be online. What is happening
in such social scenes as the generations change?
??
Web 2.0 is just a high-tech set of waldo gloves or remote-manipulators that tries
to tap into the underlying social and cultural changes but really requires the
complement of disciplined sociological, communicational, cognitive, visual,
textual, and other kinds of study that can get us closer to the actual phenomena.
That is, thinking that Web 2.0 is cool is just a shortcut because the real scene
of cool lies underneath; and I don't think there are many developers of Web 2.0
technologies who have done the hard social and cultural studies to help them think
about what they are developing. They make a neat system or interface that only
taps into some aspects of the social scene. Then, if there are a lot of hits or
users, their system is said to be a paradigm. But it's hit or miss. There is no
assurance that such technologies are the real, best, coolest, or even most useful
"face," "book," or "space" of people--only that they are the face, book, or space
allowed to surface through a particular lash-up of technologies. What is
happening underneath is history, in other words, and it is stupid to think that
"Web 2.0" is any better as a formula for that than, for example, the even more
stupid formula, "Generation Y." Ultimately, I guess, I don't believe in such
concepts as Web 2.0 because I don't believe in People 2.0. (Go to the
transhumanists for that). People live and change in relation to all that gave them
their history as people; and that history is swarming, overlapping, conflicted,
and multidimensional.
??
GL: When I first read about the Transliteracies project I was surprised to see
that was focussing on online reading. That seems so passive, as if the computer is
a mere extension, or hybrid, of the television and the book. There is this widely
shared assumption that the computer is there to produce texts, images and sounds.
A high-quality consumption of the produced content will likely happen elsewhere,
in the cinema, a magazine, the lounge, through your i-pod when you=re on the road.
And then there is the cultural factor that US-citizens spend a lot of time in
front of PCs, whereas other cultures rather do something more social, with family
and friends, out on the street. What are the preassumptions and outcomes of
Transliteracies so far in this respect?
??
AL: I disagree with you here, Geert, though usually we are--as they say--on the
same page. The recent, explosive research in the related fields of "history of the
book," "history of print culture," and "history of reading" shows that reading has
never been a passive task--if by passive we mean the rote usage of information
distributed through well-understood, regulated channels. Consider, for example,
William St Claire's recent Reading Nation in the Romantic Period(2004), which is
an astonishing work of archival recovery and methodological innovation that, for
instance, demonstrates the tremendous variety and inventiveness in the relations
between, on the one hand, publication systems and, on the other, what can only be
called reading systems (including the many kinds of collective reading societies,
book clubs, lending libraries, etc., of the time). Nor is it only the scene of
collective reading that teemed with inventive activity in the past. The individual
reader was inventive as well. Much of the recent research on the transition from
the ages of orality to that of manuscripts and then of print has been about the
way reading changed as a psychological or cognitive activity. And this is not even
to mention the tremendous ferment of "writerly" activity that readers have always
undertaken, including the medieval culture of copying and glossing, the Early
Modern culture of the "commonplace book" (the precursor of today's sampling,
aggregating, etc.), the long history of annotation practices, and so on. It's a
hoax that reading has ever been a passive activity. And this is even more the
case now in our current moment when we are changing our collective print-reading
practices to adapt to online reading practices, and vice versa.
??
There is no "producer" today in any realm (scholarship, the film industry, the
technology industry, journalism, you name it) who is not first of all a prolific
and creative "reader." Granted that much of this reading occurs in ways that are
quick, distracted, and superficial--that is, not through "deep" or "close" reading
but through scanning, browsing, searching, aggregating, etc. And granted that an
increasing proportion of the works that are read belong to such genres as the
memo, report, spreadsheet, email, Web page, blog post, text message, podcast
audio, and so on. But the premise of Transliteracies is that there are hidden
intelligences and social agendas within such contemporary "superficial"
reading--especially in its network effects--that can be formulated and improved,
both for private and social good. I don't see any reason why corporations like
Google, Amazon, Adobe, and so on should have an oligopoly over developing the
activities (not the passivities) of online reading practices. They do what they do
well. But what are the under-researched and under-developed areas in online
reading technologies, tools, and systems that need to be explored by non-profit
and other social sectors to make the overall framework of online reading more
robust and diverse? I'd like to see universities, governments, NGOs, and others
contribute to that research before everything is graven in stone by the big
business of online reading. So, the short answer to your question is: perhaps only
the corporations want you to believe that reading is passive. Take what they give
you (their systems, their innovations, their file formats and protocols, etc.).
But it ain't so.
??
And as regards "high-quality consumption": I don't actually think it is a done
deal that high-quality consumption always means high-sensory consumption of the
sort you suggest (cinema, glossy mags, iPod, etc.). For a significant part of the
world, including people who are producers in the knowledge-work economy, it
continues to mean low-sensory text. We don't even need to go to the old-school
Unix folks for witnesses (all those old postings in the comp.unix.user-friendly or
comp.human-factors newsgroups, for example, about why the Unix command line is
actually more friendly because it gives control instead of illusory ease-of-use).
We just need to consult the "new media" crowd who I think is the immediate
audience of our present interview. Real high-quality consumption for this crowd
means source-code or script view, which is plain-text. And that is not even to
mention the whole new plenum of machine readers (that is, RSS, adaptive
aggregators, "Web services" of different kinds, etc.), which sip the fine wine of
XML directly. These are also paradigms of activetext-reading. Reading
practices--individual, social, and machinic--are where the action is. Okay, so
you can tell that I am an English professor who grew up reading (to the point
where in childhood my parents had to make rules about how many hours I had to play
outdoors instead of curling up with a book). If Marshall McLuhan was an English
professor who betrayed reading (the "Gutenberg galaxy") to prophesy the new
mediaverse, then I am an English professor who sees a whole new, online textverse
within the mediaverse.
Via: Patrice Riemens
TLAXCALA'S MANIFESTO
by the Translators of Tlaxcala
Las lenguas de Tlaxcala, por Juan Kalvellido
Tlaxcala, the network for linguistic diversity, was founded on December 2005 by a
small group of cyberactivists who knew one another through Internet and discovered
that they shared common interests, common dreams and common problems. The network
quickly grew, has today [...] members, and translates into [...] languages. This
Manifesto, approved by them all, expresses their common philosophy:
All languages of the world must, and do contribute to the brotherhood of mankind.
Contrary to what many people used to believe, a language is not only a grammatical
structure, a set of interconnected words, in agreementwith a syntactic code, but
also, and especially, a creation of meaning based upon our senses. Thus we observe,
interpret and express our world from a specific personal, geographical and political
context. Because of this, no language is neutral, and they all carry the 'genetic
code', the imprint of the cultures to which they belong. Latin, the first imperial
language, reached its high point by trampling on the remains of the languages it
destroyed as the Roman legions extended their presence to the south of Europe, the
north of Africa and the Middle East. It is not strange if at the beginning of the
Renaissance it was the Spanish language, a genetic daughter of Latin, which brought
about new devastation, this time among the conquered peoples of the American
continent.
An empire and its language always go together and are predators by definition. They
reject otherness. Any imperial language constitutes itself as the subject of History,
narrates it from its point of view and annihilates (or tries to do so) the points of
view of languages it considers inferior. The official History of any empire is never
innocent,but motivated by the zeal to justify yesterday.s acts today in order to
project its own version upon tomorrow.
Nobody knows what suffering the peoples conquered by the Roman Empire endured, since
there is no written record of their defeat, which meant the disappearance of their
cultures. Conversely, the languages of the American continent conquered by the
Spanish Empire left their testimony. Towards the second half of the 16th Century,
shortly after the conquest of Mexico, Brother Bernardino de Sahag=FAn assembled what
it is known today as The Florentine Codex, a mixture of N=E1hua tales (N=E1huatl is
the language of the most ancient Aztecs, still spoken in Mexico) and pictorial
illustrations that describe pre-Hispanic society and culture. The second testimony,
which contradicts the first one, is The Lienzo de Tlaxcala, also transcribed during
the 16th Century by the mixed race Diego Mu=F1oz de Camargo, who based his story upon
the fresco paintings by his ancestors .the Tlaxcaltecan nobility . who described in
images both Hern=E1n Cort=E9s.s arrival and the fall of Tenochtitlan, the capital of
the Aztec Empire, destroyed by the Conquistadors who replaced it with the city of
Mexico. Tlaxcala was at the time the Tenochtitlan Aztec empire.s rival city-stateand
aided Cort=E9s in destroying it, an attitude that was akin to drawingup its own
death sentence, since the new Spanish Empire which was born of that defeat subjugated
all the native, so-called pre-Columbian peoples . whether they were allies or enemies
of the Spanish Crown, resulting in analmost complete loss of their cultures and
languages.
In our days, the imperial power is based in the United States of America,whose
official language is English. Faithful to the behavioural characteristics of any
empire, the English language now imposes its law. Under the influence of English,
entire countries or territories have lost- or are in the process of losing - their
communicational languages. The Philippines or Puerto Rico are only two examples among
many. In sub-Saharan Africa the false prestige accorded to English, French, Portuguese
or majority vernacular languages is killing one local mother tongue every two weeks
according to UNESCO.
It is true that in these times of global communication there is nothing negative in
having a lingua franca to facilitate mutual knowledge, but itbecomes quite negative
if it either consciously or unconsciously transmits the ideology of superiority that
characterizes it, and does so by exhibiting its scorn for the 'subordinate' languages,
i.e., all the others. The superiority complex which always accompanies an imperial or
imperially-dependent language is so consubstantial to its essence that today it even
happens among Anglophone activists engaged in the struggle for a better world: their
media is a tangible proof that the writings they publish translated from the
'subordinate' languages constitute only an insignificant percentage of their contents.
It is not only the fact that translations from English into other languages are so
appallingly numerous in comparison, but a problem lies in that the same cannot be
said in the opposite direction. We all are culprits of having accepted until now such=
inequality.
Tlaxcala, the network of translators for linguistic diversity, is born asa
post-modern homage to the unfortunate city-state of the same name whichcommitted the
tragic mistake of trusting an empire - the Spanish one - inorder to fight against
another less powerful one - the N=E1hua - just to find out only too late that nobody
should trust empires - none of them - because they use their subordinates only as a
lever for their own purposes. The global translators of Tlaxcala seek to redress the
ancient Tlaxcaltecan.s lost destiny.
The translators of Tlaxcala believe in otherness, in the goodness of approaching
others. points of view, and for that reason they take the stand to de-imperialise the
English language by publishing in all possible languages (including English) the
voices of writers, thinkers, cartoonists and activists who nowadays write their
original texts in languages that the domineering empire's influence do not permit to
be heard. As well, the translators of Tlaxcala will allow non-English speakers to be
exposed to ideas from English language writers who now are on the fringe, or who wer=
e published in really small, really hard to find places.
The English language in its position of institutional apparatus of knowledge functions
as a global structure of power that presents the world.s languages and cultures in its
image and likeness without bothering to seek the permission of the world it purports
to represent. The translators of Tlaxcala are convinced that the masters of discourse
can be defeated and hope to blur such an apparatus in the faith that the world
becomes both multipolar and multilingual, as diverse as life itself.
The basis that Tlaxcala uses for text selection is that it reflects the core values of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, aiming for fullrespect for the rights and
dignity of the human person. The translators of Tlaxcala are anti-militarists,
anti-imperialists and stand against 'neoliberal' corporate globalisation. They yearn
for peace and equality among all languages and cultures. They believe neither in a
clash of civilisations nor in the current imperial crusade against terrorism. They=
oppose racism and the building of walls or electrical fences - either physical or
linguistic - that prevent the natural free movement and sharing between people and
languages on the planet. They seek to promote esteem, recognition and respect for the
Other, as well as to express the desire that she/he ceases to be an object of History
and becomes a subject of it with full equality. This effort is voluntary and free.
All the translations carried out by Tlaxcala are on Copyleft, i.e. free for
reproduction for non-commercial purposes, as long as the source is cited.
Translators and interpreters of all languages, connect yourselves and unite!
Webmasters and bloggers of all colours in the rainbow who share our concerns,
contact us!
* * *
It is not a coincidence that we have chosen the date of 21 Februry to make our
Manifesto public. During the years of the 50's, 60's and 70's, 21 February was
celebrated as the world anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism day.
On that day in 1944, Paris awoke with its walls covered with big red posters that
announced the execution at Mount Val=E9rien of 23 .terrorist. members of the Snipers
and Partisans-immigrant workers, the first organization of resistance to Nazism in the
French territory. The leader of the group, Missak Manouchian, a 36-year-old Armenian,
was a survivor of the Armenian genocide, an immigrant. To the French collaborators
who attended his summary trial before the Nazi military court, and who labelled him a
'm=E9t=E8que', Manouchian answered: "You inherited French citizenship, I earned it".
"The time of martyrs has come, and if I am one of them, it will be for the cause of
brotherhood, the only thing that can save this country". These were Malcolm X's last
words before being murdered during a meeting in Harlem on 21st February 1965 by three
members of the Nation of Islam, which Malcolm had left in 1963 in order to create the
Organization of theAfro-American Unity. In April 1966, his assassins were condemned
to life imprisonment, but those who plotted his murder - the Masters of the Empire -
remained, as in most cases, unpunished.
Malcolm X, alias El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, whose original name was Malcolm Little,
was 39. He had returned from a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he discovered universality
after meeting pilgrims of all origins. One of thereasons of his breaking with the
Nation of Islam was that it had had contacts with the Ku Klux Klan to discuss the
establishment of a black independent State in Southern USA, just as the founder of
Zionism, Theodor Herzl, had done in requesting the support of the worst anti-Semites
for his project of a Jewish State. For Malcolm, whose father had been a victim of
the Ku Klux Klan, such collaboration was unthinkable.
On this day of remembrance we put Tlaxcala under the patronage of those two fighters
for the struggle of peoples, Missak Manouchian and Malcolm X.
Cyberespace, 21 February, 2006
Signataries:
AIENA Caterina
ALMENDRAS Nancy Harb
ANGUIANO Roc=EDo
BOCCHI Davide
BOULOS Zaki
BUEMI Valerio
CILLA Antonia
D=CDEZ LERMA Jos=E9 Luis
GIUDICE Fausto
HADDAD Ramez
HAUN Agatha
HIRSCHMUGL Eva
INDA Elaine
JU=C1REZ POLANCO Ulises
KALVELLIDO Juan
LECRIQUE Yves
MANAI Ahmed
MANNO Mauro
MART=CDNEZ, Miguel
P=C1RAMO Ernesto
POUMIER Maria
RIZZO Mary
SANCHIS Carlos
TALENS Manuel
TARRADELLAS =C0lex
VITTORELLI Manuela
http://www.tlaxcala.es
tlaxcala AT tlaxcala.es
----- End forwarded message -----
