#bratton

[proustiansleep]

"Art may be preoccupied with the repetitive expression of the artist’s subjectivity, but are the crowds of people who rotate the turnstiles any different? Just like the artist, what they most crave is to see themselves in the work. Or, at least that is what curators and museum boards suppose. How we ended up with selfie museums is not mysterious. It is partially the result of a shift of all art into selfie art, as perceived by those MFA students nervous about going off-brand. After a couple of decades of the mind-numbing narcissism of The Artist Is Present (2010), the twee collective infantilisation of relational aesthetics, the preening condescension of socially-engaged art, garish trauma reenactments, various blinky-blink interactive contraptions, paperweight versions of giant metal cartoon characters, and so on: you get what you ask for."

—Benjamin Bratton, Not Right Now

[philoursmars]

L'Année du Cheval s'annonce et avec elle, une très longue série équine de photos (sur plusieurs jours) !

Ici des chevaux de l'Âge du Bronze ou Celtes.

Bratton (Angleterre) - Westbury Horse

Marseille, Musée d'Histoire - linteau de l'oppidum celto-ligure de Roquepertuse, IIIe s. av. J-C.

Jublains (Pays de la Loire) - monnaies gauloises du temple de Juvigné

voir 1

[grandpasessions]

For design, theory and computation have been intertwined for decades. One might even suspect a direct correlation between the end of theory and the rise of software (software being a form of technology that is linguistic as well as a form of language that is technological). Sometime from 1995 to 1997 or so, especially in academic design programs, software seemed to displace theory as a tool for thought. Many students interested in asking essential questions about how things work turned to software, not just to describe those things but also to make them, and not just to make them, but also to think through them. This shift came with trade-offs. Thinking with tools, and in this case, working with the fixed capital of advanced technologies, is a good thing. It is part of the genesis of our species. It is how we mediate the world and are mediated by it; we become what we are by making that which in turn makes us. This is no less true (or less complex) as software becomes a more ubiquitous feature of the whole world: in your hand, in the building, part of every supply chain, every image, every archive, every query. I am of the opinion, however, that as we quickly learn more precise and higher-resolution processes, it becomes correspondingly harder to see the whole at once. Accomplishments of analysis are paid for with a dissipation of synthesis. As such, software may need theory at least as much as theory needs software

The Stack // B. Bratton

[stacktivism]

Into the Red Stack

Gabriele de Seta on China’s digital entrepreneurs, infrastructures and platforms.

A vast majority of current discussions about digital platforms and their infrastructural ambitions focuses on the “Big Four” that are often earmarked under the acronym GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon). In his Platform Capitalism, Nick Srnicek describes how these companies share the common trait of having transformed a single product (a search engine, a smartphone, a social networking service, an e-commerce website) into a platform offering free services and capable of generating revenue through the exploitation of network effects and the extraction of user data. In the Chinese context, the GAFA companies are commonly mirrored by the BAT (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent) trio of local platform companies that currently dominates the national Internet market. Similarly developed into platforms from pre-existing web search, e-commerce or entertainment services, the BAT companies have consolidated their dominance through acquisitions and investments in domains ranging from big data and AI to logistics and finance.

Benjamin H. Bratton has extensively theorized “the Stack” as a model useful to navigate the vertical overlaying of infrastructures and platforms with the geopolitics of informational and national sovereignty. For Bratton, the Stack is the result of various sorts of planetary-scale computation, coming together to form an “accidental megastructure” that is also a new architecture of sovereignty. While Bratton rubrics the future configurations of this accidental megastructure under the looming image of a “Black Stack,” Tiziana Terranova proposes to reimagine a new nomos of the post-capitalist commons as a “Red Stack,” composed by the three transversal and nonlinear levels of virtual money, social networks, and bio-hypermedia.

The Stack model, along with its speculative mutations that attempt to prototype planetary-scale computation through color gradations (the opaque black of cybernetic black boxes, the sanguine red of post-autonomist politics), offers glimpses of sociotechnical assemblages to come and design futures that might never be. And yet, by grounding their claims in a largely Euro-American experience of infrastructural imperialism and platform capitalism, these formulations overlook a geopolitical site where a different sort of Stack is already consolidating its interlocking layers: China.

(via Into the Red Stack | Hong Kong Review of Books)

Extremely interesting stuff // JAY 

[proustiansleep]

"Fortunately or unfortunately, most people don’t read books of theory. Statistically speaking the majority of those who do are college students, college professors, editors at academic presses, some artists and curators, or the occasional curious civilian intrigued by a provocative title or a glimpse of Žižek on YouTube. One serious but mostly unspoken problem is that the slice of the general population that buys the most philosophy books, college students – in limbo between childhood and adulthood – are preoccupied by the construction of their emerging personal identity. The injustices wrought by their parents’ generation, authority figures who are unamused by their perfectly healthy explorations of selfhood and uninpressed with by how the accumulated weight of history conjures their, say, “overflowing body full of infinite traces”. All this invites interpretation and praxis. The ultimate result, however, is the “audience capture” of philosophy by the special concerns of its readers and their particular neuroses. Audience capture is the feedback loop by which someone is rewarded for telling an audience what they want to hear and comes to believe this increasingly narrow range of ideas, ultimately offering little else, to the audience and themselves. By selection pressure, the kind of philosophy that animates the arts and humanities (far less so academic Philosophy departments to be sure) contains messages that meet the psychological needs of their consumers. There are reasons why every kid knows Foucault, Butler, Debord and Cornel West but not Sellars, Frege, Churchland and Carnap. The distortion by audience capture of philosophy as an intellectual initiative contributes to a severe loss of societal self-comprehension.

Historically, this has caused uncomfortable confrontations. Recall the correspondence between Adorno and Herbert Marcuse about the stupidity vs. genius of the collegiate New Left in the late 1960s. Marcuse basked in the kids’ adoration and the San Diego sun, whereas Adorno told his German students that they were an anti-intellectual mob of hedonists with no grasp of social history. For this, the dour wool-suited Marxist was accosted by his students during his lecture. Gerhard Richter (not that one) writes that “three female sociology students wearing long leather jackets invaded the lecturer’s podium, sprinkled rose and tulip petals over Adorno’s head, attempted to plant lipstick kisses on his cheeks, ex­posed their naked breasts to him, and provoked him with erotic pantomimes. Adorno, attempting to protect himself with his briefcase, proceeded to exit.” This stunt was very “immediate” – and admittedly kind of funny. Other philosophers, going back at least to Socrates, leverage the audience capture dynamic into a decent career by dependably congratulating assemblies of young people, affirming that their post-adolescent alienation is a sign they are agents of radical change, that the world of the authority figures is about to collapse, that the revolution is going to be different this time and that they are all very special indeed. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, for example, has this down pat. It’s an evergreen grift." —Benjamin Bratton, Not Right Now

[proustiansleep]

"Why do so many exhibitions speak of the artist’s special obligation to speak truth to power and to mobilise their special sensitivity to bear witness to injustice, as if society as a whole depends on them to say what must be said? Climate change? Let’s ask an artist. Gaza? I wonder what the MFAs at Yale think. No one is sure who really believes this, but there is a surfeit of half-hearted commitment, so regularly is it used as heraldry around new work. But art is not for these presumed duties. Art is a precious capacity for creative aesthetic abstraction available to all humans, honed since the Neolithic era. Art exists but “the artist” is a myth, a vestigial position from a more theological time, when the link between aesthetics and mysticism was firmer and when the professional outsider had a more credible claim on deeper truth. That residue is persistent, however, because it confers economic and social value.

The premise of “artwashing”, for example, is based on a conceit that art occupies a moral high ground, confers honour by proximity, and must be vigilant against others coercing association by inappropriately extracting its ethical prestige. Arguably, the real dynamic is the inverse. Art regularly employs “politics washing” by wrapping itself in serious issues to give gravitas to superficial gestures, and “institution washing” by constructing awards, ribbon cutting ceremonies, named dedications, board seats and annual selections, etcetera, so as to pool and earn interest on its cultural capital. The two dovetail as art constructs institutions out of nothing, then celebrates the critique of these institutions, using them as the platform for their own deconstruction, and enjoying preferential tax status for these good deeds."

—Benjamin Bratton, Not Right Now

[proustiansleep]

"In his essay “Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction” (and his book Google: Words Beyond Grammar), Boris Groys laments the eclipse of anamnesis by software regimes that do the work of memory and memorialization on the User’s behalf. We, the Users of Google, need not exercise our faculties of memory in order to remember anything, it seems, and so the mind is free to wander through a vast flat moment, presented as an endless archive. As Groys tells it, the devout need not consciously perform the work of memorialization, or even really comprehend the work that is done for them, when it is sufficient, for example, to download a portfolio of important texts and carry them along on one’s hard drive. He shakes his head in pity at his wannabe-extremist students for whom it’s enough to possess copies of incendiary, uncompromising (unread) PDFs on their laptops in order for the act of identification to stick, or so they think; radicals not even radicalized, merely fanboy collectors. Groys laments that without the necessary and difficult investment of interpretation and an exacting self-transformation into the position of faith through the physical training of repetition and memorialization, however arbitrary it may be, then the rebinding (and the religion itself) is empty. By this view, today’s Cloud theology without anamnesis is actually a self-dispossession of commitment by which the experience of faith, now without opinion or interpretation, is outsourced to cognitive prostheses. Devout Apps can have devout opinions for you. For Groys, this subcontracting is not just an externalized memorialization of belief into digital artifacts, a sacralization of interfaces with theological distinction; it is, rather, religion evacuated of religio."

— Benjamin Bratton, The Stack

[proustiansleep]

"Keeping the image of that reality in mind, all the while looking askance at the idiot predicaments of today, we can well wonder if our current faculties of analysis and making, our hideous languages, are capable of authoring any lasting alternatives. Perhaps ours is not a world of information but a wall of noise, a screeching mélange of incompatible equations into which we have no real choice but to enter into directly: scrambled territories, institutions, constitutions, sovereignties, citizenships, hardwares, softwares, protocols, interfaces, databases, patterns, platforms, cities, muscles, skins, organs, failing presumptions, exotic refrains, domains, settlements, penultimate boundaries —" — Benjamin Bratton, The Stack