BSA Philosophy in the Gallery Lecture Series @philosophyinthegallery-blog - Tumblr Blog

ANDY WARHOL THING

In conjunction with the University of Liverpool and the British Society of Aesthetics, Tate Liverpool hosted a Philosophy in the Gallery event with PhD student Joanna Straczowski from the University of Liverpool, where she discussed work in the Summer 2014 Transmitting Andy Warhol exhibition. Through the use of mechanical reproduction techniques and mass media imagery, Warhol eradicated every trace of ‘the artist’s touch’ from his works, leaving us with mere ‘surfaces’. Thereby he radically changed the parameters of art and the way we think about the role of the artist in the process of artistic production. Warhol replaced the ‘traditional’ notion of an artist’s ‘turmoil’ being expressed through their intense engagement with artistic material, by cool, distanced, mechanical copying. Yet what happens to art when the artist is ‘not present’ in their work? In an age of mechanical reproduction, are artworks more than surfaces?

#joannastraczowski

Dr Lisa Jones: #TrendingStories

23 May 2014

‘Identity is not in the past to be found, but in the future to be constructed.’

— Stuart Hall (1996)

Stories form identities; identities form persons. Every story that we tell, as individuals and collectives, reflects the society that we live in. Personal broadcast is a seemingly unstoppable trend which is shaping contemporary life, but what does it mean for our identities? From selfies to hashtags, and with countless platforms such as Instagram and Twitter, whether you are active on social media or not, the way stories are told has changed.

#TrendingStories was an event hosted at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) that aimed to involve media creators and publishers who currently use ICT tools in their everyday creative practices, and to engage them in a collective dialogue with ICT researchers and developers. Inspired by provocations from leading philosophers, transmedia storytellers and artists, participants were invited to explore the technological impacts of personal broadcast, establishing the relationships between identity and storytelling, and question what the future is for media and publishing, both personal and professional.

#lisajones

Dr Danielle Sands hosted a talk in June 2014 at Tate Liverpool in conjunction with the Mondrian and his studios Summer exhibition.

#daniellesands

Paul Ennis: Big Data Lecture, Part 3

When read in isolation, out of context, the collections directly slide does look ominous. When read against an awareness of how an analyst actually operates it emerges as little more than shorthand gone wrong – a bad decision, but easy to make if you are assuming your audience is just fellow NSA analysts and not the wider public. We therefore find that the protestations of the major service providers after the leaks were sincere. Another issue worth highlighting is what kind of people are actually targeted. Here’s a slide concerning ‘A week in the life of PRISM reporting’ and it helps situate the kinds of issues that concern the NSA neatly and in particular to help us see them again in their militarised context.

Columbia, for instance, comes under the topics Trafficking and FARC. Japan is under Trade and Israel. Who are the targets? Anyone who can provide intelligence about these topics. And since the process of getting the go-ahead to watch such targets can take a little time, when we mean access to corporate servers, and granting that most analysts are assigned to quite specific topics such as we can see here, it is likely that pragmatic thinking kicks in concerning who to focus upon – valuable targets, not a generic sweep for everyone. Hence it is not having nothing to hide that protects you, as many claim. Rather it is having nothing of value to hide. Or in terms of incidental collection not associating, as best as one can ascertain, with those that do. One must also remember that as a foreigner there are few legal protections assigned to you once you come under the gaze of a foreign intelligence agency.

Here is the rub. The ability of the NSA to sweep up and access vast volumes of data is not one restricted to the hallways of Fort Meade. Less scrupulous foreign agencies do so as well. The list of potential adversaries online is extensive: corporate competitors, hackers, stalkers, data miners, sophisticated advertising companies and it goes on. They are all are incentivised to gather your data. It is for this reason I believe you should act as if the NSA was worth worrying about. The NSA represent the strongest possible adversary around which you should build your defences granting their status as the most advanced intelligence agency in existence. If this sounds like an ultra-paranoid strategy just keep in mind that the guiding principle that whilst all your data might be, for now, not pursued that it can be pursued is a fact. With this in mind here are some means to defend yourself and they all fall under the remit of cryptography.

(1) PGP encryption: used in email to scramble the contents of the message allowing for private communication (albeit not always anonymity due to metadata).

(2) Bitcoin: a form of virtual currency, specifically cryptocurrency, that allows for the possibility, albeit again not perfect, of relatively anonymous transactions (relative to PayPal, for instance).

(3) The Tor network or The Onion Router: a means of surfing the internet anonymously behind ‘three’ layers of encryption.

All three have a suspicious tag attached to them since they comprise the three means of purchasing narcotics on dark net marketplaces wherein one uses Tor to access the site, Bitcoin to purchase, and PGP to communicate with the vendor.

However none of these were developed for that purpose and the means of implementation, as with all technology, depends entirely on the human agent responsible for their use. As Big Data innovations escalate so too will the nature of its use in intelligence. Ever more comprehensive pattern-of-life analysis will occur, ever more detailed snapshots will be obtained, and volume-limits will be broken. Nothing will have changed in the fundamentals. The game remains exactly the same as the low-tech variations on it played out throughout history. In the particulars the game has changed. As it moves into the new era of Big Data the NSA will adapt. Nonetheless what will haunt it is precisely the fruits of its own heritage: the suite of cryptographic techniques that scramble the signal at the moment of inception such that what is intercepted is just noise. It is in the manner that you might hide in the cryptographic noise born of your highest possible adversary.

#paulennis

Paul Ennis: Big Data Lecture, Part 2

Using the Boundless Informant tool the foreign signals intelligence infrastructure can be viewed in ‘real time.’ The FAQ happily notes that there is no need for ‘human intervention.’ Keen eyes will note it is built upon MapReduce which is a model for creating, processing and handling large data sets. They’ll also know it allows for two types of views, one can zoom in and out between map and org views, and here we are actually dealing with the smaller view. Which is surprising because the numbers here are approximately 97 billion internet records and 124 billion telephony records for March 2013. (That’s 97 billion digital network intelligence (DNI) records and 124 billion dial number recognition (DNR) records in NSA-speak). You can find larger numbers with some digging, but these will suffice for our purposes.

Note this is metadata and not content. Think of the header of your email rather than the message itself. You would be surprised at just how much detail can be extracted using metadata alone: for instance, who you are talking to, how often, at what times, and so on. In the following slide we see an analyst using this kind of data in tandem with a Big Data tool, presumably and very likely actually IBM’s Analyst’s Handbook, to perform a pattern-of-life analysis on a selector - which can be a phone number, an email, an IP address and so on.

You can see here how useful metadata is in building a picture of a target’s activity and wider network. However, one should stress that our target has become a central node after some consideration. Their selection has likely been examined by other overseers to satisfy, at the very least, Executive Order 12333. Other forms of legislation are stricter, but 12333 is broadly, and somewhat casually applied, to foreign targets – sometimes, if they fit an exemption, Americans as well. However, innocent associates will in such cases be considered either as incidental collection or used in contact chaining, that is to help establish links to further possible targets. If the contacts are innocent Americans this means they must have their details minimized. Nonetheless I have found that what truly worries people is not this form of collection even though the media is very focused on metadata. In this format, as an outlying node, one is just a data point. It's intrusive, but this is not what elicits strong reactions in people when it comes to surveillance. Rather it is the possibility that the NSA might have direct access to the servers of major service providers such as Facebook, Google and Yahoo.

It is important to stress that PRISM produces the most serialised reports for the NSA meaning it is responsible for most of the good intelligence produced by the agency. It utterly outshines the bulk interception programs, known as non-corporate programs, and there is a good reason for this. Whilst metadata is useful it pales in comparison to the information that can be derived from content-rich and exceptionally popular resources such as Google who can, when compelled to do so, provide email exchanges, for example.

PRISM produces good intelligence because it allows for access to the stored communications hoarded by corporations. Better yet, the data is cleaner: it is simply less raw. Sometimes data is just unavailable through other means. Or there may be some gems in the backups held by these corporations that had been lost in the noise of the internet. This is what helps leverage the cases made by the intelligence agencies when presenting targets to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Under PRISM the NSA is not actually responsible for interacting with these corporations at all and we can see in the following slide that this is the job of the domestic intelligence outfit, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

We can get a glimpse here of just how many hoops an analyst must jump through to begin monitoring or accessing the data of their PRISM selector. It is important to keep this in mind because it provides the context that helps defuse the famous ‘collection directly’ slide. Perhaps no such clumsy PowerPoint presentation decision has led to such worldwide confusion. We already know from the tasking slide direct collection to ‘clean’ stored communications is not possible. In fact, in the next slide it states explicitly that there is no ‘direct relationship’ with Communications Providers.

[continued in part 3]

#paulennis

Prof Nigel Clark: The Anthropocene

Professor Nigel Clark spoke at the Bluecoat in conjunction with the Xavier Ribas: Nitrate exhibition as part of the BSA Philosophy in the Lecture Series in June, 2015. Exploring the politics and ethics of geology, Professor Clark discussed what kinds of material and social experimentation should be considered in times of rapid climate change.

#nigelclark

Professor Beverley Clack is set to talk as part of the British Society of Aesthetics Philosophy in the Gallery Lecture Series later this year. She will speak at Tate Liverpool, exploring themes of failure and death with reference to the work of Jackson Pollock to coincide with the Summer Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots exhibition at Tate Liverpool.

Beverley Clack is Professor in the Philosophy of Religion at Oxford Brookes University. Her publications include Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Critical Readings, co-edited with Pamela Sue Anderson (2004); Sex and Death: A Reappraisal of Human Mortality (2002); Misogyny in the Western Philosophical Tradition (1999); and The Philosophy of Religion, co-authored with Brian R. Clack in 1998 (a fully revised second edition of this book was published in 2008).

She was recently involved in the ESRC-funded Seminar Series ‘Changing Notions of the Human Subject: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Emotional Well-being and Social Justice in Education Policy and Practice’, and is currently working on two books which apply psychoanalytic theory to the philosophy of religion.

#beverleyclack

Professor Nigel Clark talks at the Bluecoat in conjunction with the Xavier Ribas: Nitrate exhibition. Exploring the politics and ethics of geology, Professor Clark discussed what kinds of material and social experimentation should be considered in times of rapid climate change.

#nigelclark

Dr Lisa Jones talks at the #TrendingStories event at FACT.

#lisajones

Dr Lisa Jones: #TrendingStories

23 May 2014

‘Identity is not in the past to be found, but in the future to be constructed.’

— Stuart Hall (1996)

Stories form identities; identities form persons. Every story that we tell, as individuals and collectives, reflects the society that we live in. Personal broadcast is a seemingly unstoppable trend which is shaping contemporary life, but what does it mean for our identities? From selfies to hashtags, and with countless platforms such as Instagram and Twitter, whether you are active on social media or not, the way stories are told has changed.

#TrendingStories was an event hosted at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) that aimed to involve media creators and publishers who currently use ICT tools in their everyday creative practices, and to engage them in a collective dialogue with ICT researchers and developers. Inspired by provocations from leading philosophers, transmedia storytellers and artists, participants were invited to explore the technological impacts of personal broadcast, establishing the relationships between identity and storytelling, and question what the future is for media and publishing, both personal and professional.

#lisajones

Dr Paul Ennis: Big Data

Big Data: 1.0 - 9 October 2014

Nowadays, we create as much information as we did from the beginning of time up to 2003 every two days. Everything we do online generates data that is collected and stored - and used by commercial corporations and governments for power and control as well as in cancer research and for fitness tracking. Regardless of how the data is used, the ownership of data has implications that are too significant to overlook.

Hosted by FACT and in collaboration with IFG at CASI, Hope University, The University of Liverpool and the British Society of Aesthetics, this event focused on the complex political and cultural issues that big data bring about. In presentations and group discussions, issues regarding privacy, sustainability, the commercialisation of information and democracy were explored from different perspectives.

Dr Paul J. Ennis was supported by the British Society of Aesthetics to speak at the event. Dr Ennis earned his PhD in Philosophy at University College Dublin and is currently researching trends in contemporary online culture including the dark web, cryptocurrency, whistleblowing and hacktivism. A core feature of his approach is the manner in which intelligence agencies, specifically the National Security Agency (NSA), are engaging these trends. Ennis points out that the most pressing concern for many such agencies is how to deal with the sheer volume of data that they must analyse, and how they intend to store that data in the future.

From an ethical point of view, the possibility to generate relatively coherent snapshots of an individual’s online footprint doesn’t have to be problematic according to Ennis, but it does bring about a clear potential for abuse. The possible use of Big Data by non-democratic societies, either currently or in the future, has to be weighed against the fact that these same tools are often the best means to address terrorist threats, forcing us to face difficult choices between security and privacy in the future. Ennis’ position is broadly neutral and aims to both dispel certain myths about mass surveillance as they have appeared recently in the media and nonetheless stress how specific laws relating to mass surveillance require more stringent application and oversight.

#paulennis

Joanna Straczowski: Transmitting Andy Warhol

In conjunction with the University of Liverpool and the British Society of Aesthetics, Tate Liverpool hosted a Philosophy in the Gallery event with PhD student Joanna Straczowski from the University of Liverpool, where she discussed work in the Summer 2014 Transmitting Andy Warhol exhibition. Through the use of mechanical reproduction techniques and mass media imagery, Warhol eradicated every trace of ‘the artist’s touch’ from his works, leaving us with mere ‘surfaces’. Thereby he radically changed the parameters of art and the way we think about the role of the artist in the process of artistic production. Warhol replaced the ‘traditional’ notion of an artist’s ‘turmoil’ being expressed through their intense engagement with artistic material, by cool, distanced, mechanical copying. Yet what happens to art when the artist is ‘not present’ in their work? In an age of mechanical reproduction, are artworks more than surfaces?

Joanna Straczowski’s PhD research focuses on the problematic nature of the concept of aestheticization and more specifically on Jean Baudrillard’s theory of transaesthetics as a criticism of traditional notions of the artworld, aesthetic value and cultural institutions. She focuses on his theories to re-evaluate the concept of aestheticization for the ‘Digital Age’ and to examine how the new developments brought about by new technologies and digital media change our understanding of aesthetics and our overall aesthetic experiences. Key questions to her project are: Do cultural institutions gain more impact with regard to social and political developments, given the wider dissemination and democratization of the arts by means of new technologies? Does an aestheticization of society potentially have beneficial effects (such as enhancing creativity, creative thinking and political awareness)?

#joannastraczowski

#TrendingStories

23 May 2014

‘Identity is not in the past to be found, but in the future to be constructed.’

— Stuart Hall (1996)

Stories form identities; identities form persons. Every story that we tell, as individuals and collectives, reflects the society that we live in. Personal broadcast is a seemingly unstoppable trend which is shaping contemporary life, but what does it mean for our identities? From selfies to hashtags, and with countless platforms such as Instagram and Twitter, whether you are active on social media or not, the way stories are told has changed.

#TrendingStories was an event hosted at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) that aimed to involve media creators and publishers who currently use ICT tools in their everyday creative practices, and to engage them in a collective dialogue with ICT researchers and developers. Inspired by provocations from leading philosophers, transmedia storytellers and artists, participants were invited to explore the technological impacts of personal broadcast, establishing the relationships between identity and storytelling, and question what the future is for media and publishing, both personal and professional.

Lisa Jones is Principal Teaching Fellow in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, and is an alumnus of the University of Liverpool where she earned her doctoral degree. She works in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, with a particular interest in literary aesthetics, fiction, imagination, and narrative. She has published articles on the cognitive value of literary art, on the value of narrative, and the notion of narrative identity.

#lisajones

Big Data: 1.0 - 9 October 2014

Nowadays, we create as much information as we did from the beginning of time up to 2003 every two days. Everything we do online generates data that is collected and stored - and used by commercial corporations and governments for power and control as well as in cancer research and for fitness tracking. Regardless of how the data is used, the ownership of data has implications that are too significant to overlook.

Hosted by FACT and in collaboration with IFG at CASI, Hope University, The University of Liverpool and the British Society of Aesthetics, this event focused on the complex political and cultural issues that big data bring about. In presentations and group discussions, issues regarding privacy, sustainability, the commercialisation of information and democracy were explored from different perspectives.

Dr Paul J. Ennis was supported by the British Society of Aesthetics to speak at the event. Dr Ennis earned his PhD in Philosophy at University College Dublin and is currently researching trends in contemporary online culture including the dark web, cryptocurrency, whistleblowing and hacktivism. A core feature of his approach is the manner in which intelligence agencies, specifically the National Security Agency (NSA), are engaging these trends. Ennis points out that the most pressing concern for many such agencies is how to deal with the sheer volume of data that they must analyse, and how they intend to store that data in the future.

From an ethical point of view, the possibility to generate relatively coherent snapshots of an individual’s online footprint doesn’t have to be problematic according to Ennis, but it does bring about a clear potential for abuse. The possible use of Big Data by non-democratic societies, either currently or in the future, has to be weighed against the fact that these same tools are often the best means to address terrorist threats, forcing us to face difficult choices between security and privacy in the future. Ennis’ position is broadly neutral and aims to both dispel certain myths about mass surveillance as they have appeared recently in the media and nonetheless stress how specific laws relating to mass surveillance require more stringent application and oversight.

#paulennis

Paul Ennis: Big Data Lecture, Part 1

Big Data is one of those terms that comes along every few years that academics are invited to reflect upon. The problem with reflection, like the good come-back, is that it always comes too late. By the time it becomes real to us that this technology is proliferating it has already been disseminated, put into use, and its virtues memetically spread by corporate innovators. Understanding Big Data is even more pressing when considered in light of government entities and especially so when we consider the role of intelligence agencies. Since the National Security Agency sits at the top of the Western intelligence community it will be my focus, but you can translate much of what follows to its partners – especially the Five Eyes network of which the United Kingdom is a member.

The roots of the NSA are in the science of cryptography, of encryption and decryption, and its traditional role in serving the national interest was to develop military-grade encryption standards for secure communication and to decrypt that of their adversaries. Of course, to find communications to decrypt you have to intercept them and this part of the NSA’s mission, known as signals intelligence, has become central to its contemporary identity. Signals intelligence is more commonly known in the media as mass surveillance and fears about it have contributed to the agency’s post-Snowden reputation as a kind of ghostly Orwellian institution. Even to a sympathetic observer such as myself one must admit there is some truth to this caricature.

The NSA is, no doubt about it, a powerful deep-state entity with the ability to sway the direction of the highest office of its country through intelligence reports. In this capacity the NSA can clearly be seen, as they sometimes are not, in their militarised colours. It can be startling when one first comes across footage of their home, Fort Meade, expecting racks of servers and busy nerds only to see uniformed men and women – a reminder that the NSA is constantly on a quasi-war footing, engaged in an endless information-collection battle. Even when one thinks of the days of cloistered mathematicians engaged in cryptography we must remember that this was once a field so militarily delicate that the exporting of specific encryption ciphers was a criminal offence because that cipher was a munition, a weapon.

Things have changed since those days. Now variations on these munitions live in your browser address bar as when that little lock secures your data when you use, for example, online banking. Behind that lock lies complex cryptographic processes operating on the principle that it is harder to decrypt than it is to encrypt – sort of like how it’s easy to smash an egg, but try putting it back together again. Filling in the gaps you can pre-empt that at some point the NSA had to loosen their grip on encryption and in some cases it was loosened for them.

The spread of encryption certainly altered the nature of the organisation, but more important than this is the simple fact that the internet and the spread of mobile phones necessitated a change in attitude and a renewed focus from encryption to that of interception. They were no longer going to be just plucking Soviet ciphers from the sky. Rather the bulk collection of data in its own right took on more precedence and access to ever larger volumes a new priority. In fact the NSA became so good at this that the sheer amount of data has become a problem. We can see a conflicted attitude to volume at work in a leaked NSA internal message-board discussion.

In it an analyst makes reference to the ‘Big Data Problem,’ but he is nonetheless impressed by their ‘ability to pull bits’ off ‘the internet and bring them back to the mother-base to evaluate and build intelligence off of,' which he considers ‘just plain awesome!’ He adds, ‘One of the coolest things about it is how much data we have at our fingertips.’ So how much data? Well let’s take a quick look at Boundless Informant which a Big Data tool allowing us to see the metadata produced by 504 signal activity designators (SIGADs).

[continued in part 2]

#paulennis

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