I’m ill, so today was pretty slow going. I did spend some time looking through WordPress plugins and themes to try and bring my website up to date, a task that’s becoming increasingly urgent. I also collected the final print run of books and posters from the Print Unit.

Emails and admin this morning, before heading in for the C3RI seminar. Ben Light’s reshceduled talk on disconnecting with social media was a lot more interesting than I had expected. It outlined the main points in his forthcoming book, which seeks to establish a theoretical framework for thinking about ‘disconnective practices’. These extend from the obvious and blunt turning off of the router, and include a range of negotiations with software limitations, physical and location based limitations, and limiting behaviours that result in smaller, incremental disconnections: “shades of non-use”.

Starting from Steven Lukes’s model of 3D power relations, he described a range of ways that users exert this power, through for eg non-use, friend culling, balkanising social media services, and limiting use in particular physical spaces. I was most interested in the incremental strategies such as ‘half-viewing’: reading the message in the notifications bar but not in the app, so that the sender isn’t aware that it’s been received. This is the kind of tentative, ambiguous connection/disconnection edge that gets me excited about social media. Is it about managing information glut? Is it about partial retreat from compulsive connectivity? I am really interested in the paradoxical pull to connect and desire to avoid overload.

Broadly, he’s using actor network theory to describe all of this, and typically, this plays out like a report rather than an analysis of the implications or motivations of disconnective practices. There were some interesting questions about where the edges of online disconnective practices clash with offline ones: eg, meeting someone you unfriended in the corridor at work. How do disconnective practices operate across the blended spectrum of communicative acts? What happens when they fall off the edge of the digital into actual social interaction? Where’s this being theorised? (Ben thinks: maybe nowhere.)

Can these shades of non-use be seen as active resistance or passive negotiation of a pre-defined interface/territory? They’re not proscribed actions, although social media services often shut down over-use (overfriending) etc.

The talk mentioned a paper called Disciplines of Listening by Kate Crawford [pdf] that I spent the afternoon reading. It’s right in my area – I’m generally sold on anything that opens with Crary. The metaphor of listening that it proposes for social media (Twitter in particular) connects interestingly with much later work about how digital culture is oral culture written down. It’s about lurking, but it also talks about attention in ways that make sense to me. The ‘ambient awareness’ that social media bring sounds persuasive. The listening metaphor brings in lots of new(ish) ways of thinking about the flow of  information: eavesdropping, overhearing, whispering, shouting, etc.

I also spent some time reading this article by Jacob Silverman, that was being discussed on Twitter a lot today. There are a few bits I disagree with but it reads surprisingly like a summary of my current thinking. I also read this interview with Seth Kim-Cohen about his book Against Ambient. Interesting that a lot of sound-based theory is finding its way to me at the moment.

Today there was a method conference steering group meeting in the morning that was productive but a bit overwhelming. It seems like quite a big thing, and it looks like I’ll be chairing a panel as well as presenting a full paper. This all feels a bit much, considering the abstract I sent through was quite rushed and fairly unfocused.

The ADRC seminar was for Amal do a final run through of her RF2. It was very interesting to see some work that’s very different to my own practice. The main feedback points are relevant to us all as practice based researchers: the method, the things you actually do to produce the research, needs to be made visible. I realise I have work to do in this regard with my own research.

I spent the rest of the day working on more LED lettering, completing the OFF part of the ON/OFF signs. I watched the following Caltech lectures while I was doing it:

Reduction/Revelation, Jer Thorp – May 23, 2013

This was interesting but not altogether revelatory. His take on data representation is a little imprecise, in that he foregrounds aesthetic considerations and is reluctant to account for them. “I consider myself an artist” is not a useful way of deflecting critique. Particularly with the projection on the outside of the building, there was a sense that the material being visualised is not actually data – it’s mediated content. Revealing relationships in mediated content is fine but it’s already pre-structured and formed along ideological lines. The best the representation can hope to do is reveal those ideological lines.

Visualizing Natural and Cultural Phenomena – Fernanda Viégas & Martin Wattenberg – May 23, 2013

Very interesting representations, and the complexity of the data really shines through. In the Wikipedia examples, it demonstrates how mass surveillance might be put to work: it’s visually obvious in their visualisation when a editing pattern deviates from the norm. Mass surveillance establishes the norm from which unusual behaviours can be inferred and spotted through visualisation techniques like this. Ethically tricky when you’re talking about behaviours that are about the control and management of information. In the wind example, beautiful though it is, there isn’t quite enough discussion of method. I’d love to see more of how those ‘back to the drawing board’ moments worked for them as producers.

It’s encouraging that both of the lectures talk up Processing and Java as environments for this. This gives me some hope that complex work might be doable without the step up to oF.

Today I had a productive meeting with Lise, and attempted to make some other meetings with other supervisors. The book project is still rumbling along, with Sharon requiring a contribution to awareness-raising. I have also been working on developing the method conference work, by tweaking the code for the mouse movement drawing piece.

I visited a few galleries in London today:

James Bridle, Seamless Transitions at The Photographers’ Gallery

Kim Asendorf & Ole Fach, Computer’s World, at Carroll/Fletcher

Helen Benigson, Anxious, Stressful, Insomnia, Fat at Carroll/Fletcher

Jesse Hlebo, In Pieces at Edel Assanti

Christopher Hanlon at Edel Assanti

Virginia Overton at White Cube Mason’s Yard

John Gerrard, Farm, at Thomas Dane

Peder Balke at the National Gallery

I wrote a lot of notes that I’m still going through, but I have some initial thoughts about the use of the ‘fly-through’ in the James Bridle and John Gerrard pieces. There’s a difference between the fly-through as an architectural visualisation technique and the same thing in a computer game. The first is a controlled point of view, designed to offer an idealised authoritative image of an unbuilt (or in this case an imagined) place, whereas the second is offered as an overview of territory that will soon be navigated by the user in an interactive, first-hand way. One shows, the other previews. Bridle’s piece reminded me of Escape from Woomera in terms of its content, although clearly not as gamified as this. There is probably a useful comparative study to be done of these two works.

Gerrard had more in common with Craig Kalpakjian‘s work, in that it seemed to situate itself within the genre of monumental photography (a la Gursky) rather than gaming or architectural visualisation. Why is Gerrard’s simulation shown in this very gallery-friendly, high-art way? Why isn’t it a downloadable software application? Or a screensaver? Does the critique it claims for itself function in the rarefied confines of the gallery?

The proofs for the book project were returned today, so a large proportion of the first half of the day was spent responding to this and making necessary changes. There was a meeting before the lecture during which I helped bring several people’s books to completion.

The lecture was by Andrew Conio, and was quite a frustrating experience. His delivery was very quiet and measured, but there were a few points in his argument that irked me. Involved in the Occupy movement, he offered no explanation or critique of why it ended, remaining upbeat and rose-tinted about its successes. Was it an artwork?, he asked, seemingly unconcerned about how the instrumentalisation that this would imply might change the art or the activism. The crux of his argument seemed uncritically utopian, and his analysis of the problems that Occupy was demonstrating against seemed unfocused. “Because capitalism, okay?” seems fine until you begin to question it in more detail. I’m still not quite able to pin down what it was that vexed me so much about this lecture.

The evening was spent working on the data visualisation piece for the method conference. I managed to program a thread to accurately read the data and now it plays back accurately in time  rather than at the fastest possible frame rate. This clears the way to move forward with this piece of work in Processing rather than having to fight it out with oF.

Today’s main event was the Co-Dreaming meeting at Bloc Projects. A few interesting presentations and some discussions around the idea of collective ideas of how best to act progressively within the city. My main worry about it was how little class and cultural capital came into the conversation. There was also an emphasis on personal transformation as a motivation for making art interventions. Novel though that is, set against the prevalence of today’s professionalised artist, it doesn’t fulfil it’s declared transformational function this way. Transforming the individual doesn’t seem like enough.

Also, the acceptance of the idea that it’s somehow not the activist’s job to come up with new solutions, and merely to be accepting of and responsive to the unknown future, feels like a capitulation to the idea of the neoliberal precarious entrepreneur. What happens when resistance and compliance have the same hallmarks, and are indistinguishable from each other?