Distibution and Intervention

[digitalstudiospring19]

  Drone 2000 is a performance criticizing the “western taste for drone technology”. The increased use of drones could be a problem in the future.  I like this performance because it’s cautionary on how drones can be a threat in society.  The companies manufacturing the drones should not be trusted because they will use the drones to collect information about their customers and sell it to other companies like Facebook. If drones become more common in society, it will be easier for the government and other people to continue to spy on us, which is an invasion of privacy. It would also be easier to be used for crimes. For example, according to an article on Business Insider, an 18-year-old in Connecticut was able to put a gun on his drone and he started shooting it. He did not get charged because he did not break any state laws (Alex Lockie). The government has to have laws in place, so drones cannot be used as weapons. The government should also, have laws in place so people who use the drones are evaluated to make sure that they are responsible enough to use it. Also as companies like Amazon are trying to use drones to make deliveries, this will increase air traffic which can increase the chance of crashes. However, people would argue that the pros outway the cons because people get their deliveries faster.

[digitalstudiospring19]

Conflict Kitchen

For my final reading response, I chose to write about Dawn Weleski's Conflict Kitchen.  Using food as a method of peace between nations is something i have never seen done before but the project does it perfectly.  By showing positives from countries like their cuisine, the attitude of people can change who once thought negatively about a certain country.  I immediately thought about how this could have been used before Dawn's project like post 9/11, during the revolution in Iran (I see there was one for Iran), or the Vietnam war.  The education component provides younger generations with cultural knowledge about other countries before they could be wrongly influenced by mainstream news articles about conflict between countries.  Another genius move from Dawn is that there is no real political opinion demonstrated by the kitchen.  This is important as the kitchen will attract all types of people regardless of their stance on the conflict.  

[digitalstudiospring19]

Juan Freire

This reading was interesting because it really related to a class I took while abroad called Urban Culture. Not only does Juan Freire’s work take place in Spain, which is where I went abroad, but it also directly relates to the content of the class. The reading explains:

“thoughts about public space, whether it is obsolescent or necessary, what is the meaning of the expression in the 21st century, and what could happen should public space as we know it disappear.”

My class on Urban Culture discussed the different uses of physical public space, but I’ve never thought about the digital public space as a part of that as well. In my class, we talked about how having different things and layouts in public spaces could affect what type of people come to them and what uses they use them for. Freire communicates the same points about the digital public spaces as well.

[digitalstudiospring19]

Gestures

Ricardo Dominguez’s “Gestures” piece gave me sort of a new perspective on the projects that we’ve been doing in Digital Studio. He explains that his performances serve as “disturbance spaces”. In a way, haven’t all of our project also served as “disturbance spaces”. There is not the material aspect that he discusses, but our projects could be considered a top of “prop-theatre”, just like his work. I would say it is very similar to how he describes “electronic civil disobedience”. Civil Disobedience is defined as purposefully breaking the rules in order to accomplish change. The more political projects that have come from this class could be described this way, especially because corps like twitter and facebook definitely don’t want us editing their formats for a political message.

Lastly, Dominguez’s recounting on shaking a stick to combat the Mexican Air Force could also be an analogy for our class. We don’t have much to work with, and very few people will see what we have created, but in a way it comforts us and does start us on a new direction of thinking critically and in terms of disruption. Just like Dominguez’s stick neutralized the threat of the Mexican Air Force, it seems that our small scale projects have also given us a feeling of control and protest against the powers in our society. 

[digitalstudiospring19]

MATERIAL SPECULATION: ISIS

This article reminds me of other art restitution/restoration efforts that I’ve heard/read about. In the past I have attended lectures and had readings about movements to return art to its rightful owners after essentially being stolen from a colonized nation by the conquering nations. 

This project reminds me of that because it is trying to restore culture through restoration of art, but it has an entirely different feel. Instead of, for example, Hawaiin art being returned to a Hawaiin museum and staying there exclusively, this project returns the art to the people. Now, we don't have to visit a certain museum to be able to find meaning in the art. Anyone is able to possess the art. In a way, this is also a bigger blow to Isis, who attempted to destroy these pieces of culture but instead inspired this project by doing so, which is now spreading the culture even farther than it would have before the pieces were destroyed. 

[digitalstudiospring19]

Astro Noise

“Humans are by nature pattern-recognition machines. We search for meaning, whether in the circumstances of our lives or on the surface of toast.”

I really liked this sentence because it clearly demonstrates the disconnect between us and computers. It communicates the main point of the article. I also like it because the beginning of the reading starts off with a series of pictures on the pages. Just like this quote predicted, before starting to read the text I viewed these images trying to decipher the meaning. However, not only are humans naturally always searching for meaning, we also naturally invent meaning. The 8 pictures in the beginning of the book are probably very random and really pixelated, but in my human brain I was desperate to find the connecting link between all of them. By having this quote on the first page right after the series of pictures it proves the quote to us. 

The reading then brings up the quote “KNOW THYSELF, NOTHING IN EXCESS, AND A PLEDGE, AND RUIN IS NEAR”. The author explains that the intended meaning of the quote has been lost over time. The quote now has an entirely new meaning because of the colloquial meaning society has placed on it. 

My question is: I found my own meaning in those 8 pictures, and society found its own meaning in the Delphi quote. Are these meanings any less valid or valuable than the meanings they were intended to have? I argue the meaning that gets externally attributed to them might be even more worth exploring and studying.

[digitalstudiospring19]

A dystopian performance for drones

“a dumb drone is even more dangerous than a smart drone.”

This reading really intrigued me. I think instead of being an article about human’s control over technology, to me it more communicated human’s fear of technology. I think we are all have a sort of weary excitement over technology’s possibilities. I, personally, am super excited about all new technological advancements. But in the back of my mind theres always a cautious feeling of fear over what the total potentials of technology are. 

I think this drone demonstration speaks to human’s silent desire to feel like they are still controlling the technology, like drones, instead of feeling like they are controlling us. Being able to laugh about a drone being “dumb” is oddly comforting.

[digitalstudiospring19]

I found Morehshin Allahyari’s work to be extremely interesting, as I would never have thought to use 3D modeling to express feminist thoughts. The concept of “Re-Figuring” was something that I had not heard of before. In She Who Sees the Unknown, Allahyari reimagines the past and uses queerness and monstrosity to show the role of gender in mythology. The 3D Additivist Cookbook and Manifesto allow for collaboration and prompt people to think about how we can change the world if we don’t change ourselves. Allahyari places a strong emphasis on storytelling, and through a lot of her works, she addresses the power hierarchy in society and strives to jar the reader and provoke thought.

[digitalstudiospring19]

A Dystopian Performance for Drones

The dystopian drone performance reminded me of the talk by N. Katherine Hayles and conscious beings. The article compared the drones to a roomba robot, programmed to be able to roam free but guided by coded algorithms. Yet, people generally don’t think of their roomba as “dangerous”. With the drones however, people felt a sense of fear and discomfort, uncertain of what the drones would do next. The drones have a sense of autonomy, which relates to the idea of cognition. In Hayle’s talk, she argues against the belief that computers cannot create meaning because they are not autonomous. However, these drones are autonomous, so in that case, are they able to create meaning? As the article mentioned, drones are becoming increasingly popular. They are used for everything from recreational purposes to aerial entertainment to package delivery. But there is always this thought that drones may take over and “rebel” against humans. Is it even possible for the drones to “go against” their code and have a mind of their own?

[digitalstudiospring19]

The idea of surveillance has been one that has been prevalent throughout the course. It directly relates to the notion or privacy. I think that in the digital age, nothing is every private. All of our information is online and we give it out willingly. We order clothing, post photos on social media, and pay our bills online. Snowden talks about Cryptology - the science of secrecy. We do a lot to try and protect our information. We encrypt files, password protect our accounts. But at the end of the day our information is still on a computer and still susceptible to hackers. There is still a way to decrypt any file if you have the key. Snowden talks about how computers are incapable of truly random behavior. In computer science, we talk about how we can never really generate a “random” number, it’s only pseudorandom. Snowden describes humans as “pattern-recognition machines”. I think this is an accurate description, as we tend to search for and perceive patterns even when none exist. Snowden then starts talking about using the stars and the universe as a form of cryptology. Using the pulse interval from a singular star could encrypt a file, and make it nearly impossible to decrypt unless you knew which star it was. The concept itself honestly sounds insane. But I don’t know anything about astronomy, so who knows.

[digitalstudiospring19]

The Pool

Upon first arriving at the Pool, I didn’t really know where to start. I watched the video intro and learned that it was a platform to share art, code and text. The video talks about how in today’s society, sharing is frowned upon in the educational system. Copyright and plagiarism laws, while important, prohibit the sharing of knowledge and information. The Pool attempts to combat this by encouraging the sharing of files as well as the process of making them. This relates to our discussion on open-source, copyright vs. copyleft, and allowing things to be edited, shared, and modified. The pool allows for creativity, collaboration and input/reviews from the community. You can also look at the pipeline to see ancestors and descendants of projects. This sort of “family tree” maps the lineage of projects and allows users to track the progress of a given post. You can also see the social networks of a user and who they have collaborated with. You can even expand to see who collaborators have worked with. This relates back to our networked pathways at the beginning of the semester, and how our metadata can tell us a lot about a person. I then explored the programming section of the Pool and found really cool tutorials for adding JavaScript and CSS to HTML pages. Overall I think this sort of open source sharing of knowledge is really critical to creative thought and exploration.

[digitalstudiospring19]

Astronoise

I loved how Snowden wrote it in a poem like style while writing about a very technological concept. Usually, stars are related to the dream-like ideas but Snowden tried to find an answer at the stars. Something that looked very far from each other was connected. I was curious about what would have been ancient cryptology like. Was it safer than modern cryptography? It was interesting that humans are by nature pattern-recognition machines and how Snowden showed it with our passwords. Pure random password might be more reliable than the password we usually set and nowadays, Chrome provides a function that can set a password like that. That password is encrypted and saved in the browser itself. Maybe in the future, all our passwords would tilt toward more random passwords. With the story of Delphi, I thought about how much access do we have to information compared to the ancient period. Unlike that time, anyone can ask a question and anyone can answer. Is information we are receiving better and meaningful than the information that was passed through the Oracle? Sharper sense toward the information that we receive is required. As there are so many sources and so many information, we should have the ability to distinguish them and question about it all the time. More information might have brought more convenient life but more tiring life.

[digitalstudiospring19]

How we're still doomed: Colonization of our information and lives

"...the problem with the Snowden archive is that you never find an easy answer. Documents lead to other documents, one NSA program will point to another. Code names obscure specific companies and technological capacities." -Crawford

This quote reveals a serious issue with archives, which is the question of their accessibility. The information that Edward Snowden leaked in 2013, was an effort to liberate and decolonize the information that the NSA was extracting from us. Although the idea sounds commendable, how much can we say what Snowden provided us with was worth it? Was it really effective in accomplishing a liberation of information, if we are not able to make sense of the information that was made available? After doing this reading, I believe that we are currently in a state where our information, our entire private lives, has been colonized by the NSA, corporations, etc. Furthermore, I believe that simply revealing this truth, is no longer enough. If we consider how massive the data that has been collected on us is, then we can start to realize how these corporations have been playing the long game. These corporations, have most likely been gathering this information for quite some time now, and as a result, it has had enough time, to prepare for things, such as Snowden in 2013. The ambiguous titles of projects, the massively intimidating amount of information, and other factors continue to leave us in a state of inaccessibility. As organizations continue to gather more information about us, they are able to develop more effective strategies of making us oblivious to it all.

[digitalstudiospring19]

A Dystopian Performance for Drones

The idea of drones intrigues and terrifies most people at this point. Quite a few people own one either to film or photograph shots from far away or above. Some bought one as an expensive toy. However, the use of drones in for business or the transfer of objects still is not fully supported. Nicolas Maigret purposefully removes the “intelligent” features of drones to evoke danger and fear, referencing the military origin and the potential use for surveillance and control.

I think this connection to warfare is important to be aware of. When I first heard the word drone, it was in the context of violence and murder. This word has changed so much as drone technology evolved and became more accessible, but its potential to be used for harm must be remembered. The fact that some drones are easily hackable also presents an immediate problem. I think Maigret’s method of using the intrigue of drones to draw an audience while also causing them to fear the drone was successful in achieving this concept.

[digitalstudiospring19]

/////Astronoise/////

"Humans are by nature pattern recognition machines" - Snowden

The two texts raised various questions for me. With regards to encrypting and encoding information, what are the frameworks through which we encode and encrypt? As in, if humans are by nature pattern recognition machines, does each human have its own pattern recognition & encrypting/encoding system, or are we all, by virtue of being humans, wired to encode and pattern in particular ways? I wonder if pattern recognition is something that is culture & community specific as well. Would the patterns I recognize in a data set be the same as someone from a different cultural, social and political context? Psychologists have shown that perception & interpretation is largely influenced by cognitive patterns we develop in the contexts that we develop in. Language in particular, greatly influences the ways in which we perceive and interpret the world. This must surely influence pattern recognition in some way-if the ways in which one perceives and makes sense of themselves & the world is influenced by the contexts that the individual developed in & continues to develop in, then the patterns recognized by that individual will most likely differ from someone from a different context. 

And if humans have variable modes of pattern recognition, then how does this influence the pattern recognition logics in the technologies we create? Is it possible that computers are designed to recognize patterns based off of how the designer recognizes patterns? If so, what sort of patterns are being missed, and what are the repercussions of these lost patterns? 

[digitalstudiospring19]

Astro Noise 

By:  Edward Snowden

The picture above is split into three parts: 1, 2, and 3.  In picture 1 it is a seemingly normal drawing.  In picture 2 is the encryption code.  In picture 3 it is the reveal of the photograph showing the hidden meaning of the picture which in encryption code is "ILGQ" which decodes to "FIND".

I decides to draw a computer because encryption the article says, "But modern cryptography depends on  computers, and computers are deterministic," (121).  I hide the encryption code in a photo of a science lab because the article says, "Cryptology is the science of secrecy," (121).  My encryption code was done so it wasn't super easy to crack.  This article talks about how the encryption must be strong otherwise it can reveal "what's been concealed," (121).  The article then states, "In the search for randomness, we too must rely on outside forces," (121).  Which is why I turned to my friends and Google to help create this code.  

[digitalstudiospring19]

Revolution OS

I found the documentary Revolution OS very interesting, though I was definitely a little confused by the technological terminology. A lot was covered, including a lot of history I was not aware of. The issues surrounding copyright and viewing ownership as restrictive in the realm of technology was not something I had thought much about. As someone who uses technology as had not had experience to contributing anything to it in the past, I focused on the consumer’s position and privacy. It was eye-opening to look at the programmer’s perspective and how the ability to have access to and build off of existing software could be a version of free speech.

As an artist, I understood the desire to copyright work and preserve credit. However in this situation, controlling access and use of software can prevent technological progress. Copyleft sounded like a good compromise to allowing progress and alterations, while maintaining the original intentions for the rights in each version. I loved the idea of this movement being labeled a “revolution,” suggesting perceptions of freedoms and rights need to keep up with the times and technology. Though this open source was proposed a while ago and a lot has changed since, this idea of accessibility to knowledge still resonates and continues to be valuable, as technology use continues to increase and more people become interested in programming.