#NOTHINGISSPECIAL #SOCIALMEDIA #WEARETECHNOLOGY

The world we live in is determined by the social media platforms we are a member of. The use of #'s is one way for many people in many different areas of the world to connect. I produced this artwork by appropriating three images from the social media site Instagram.  I purposely chose three #'s that were innocent by nature: #sleeping, #hotshower, and #relationship.  Out of the thousands plus images with these #'s, the majority of these images were not innocent.  The society we live in today is evidently alright with posting intimate images, that should be personal for the whole world to see.  When producing the art, I used 4 shadow boxes layered together.  The first shadow box features the image turned black and white with high contrast, the second shadow box features the binary code for the # and the hashtag and number of posts, the third shadow box features a glitches image of the original image, and the fourth shadow is necessary for lighting.  I chose to appropriate images, to emphasize that anyone can access online images and alter them as they please. The use of the binary code and # is to show that there is something behind everything that is posted on the internet, it can never be fully removed.  Layering the images visually shows viewers how layered the internet goes.  

When producing this work I was denied printing one of the images at Office Depot, because it was deemed unfit to print.  The same image that is posted online for everyone to see.  They did however print the glitched image of the photo, therefore they did in fact print the image.  

                                              

Finished #sleeping

      

                                         Original Image                      Black and White Original

Code, #, and Post Number                  Glitched Original 

Finished #relationship

Original Instagram

                    Black and White Original (not fit to print)           Replacement text

    

                              Code, #, and Post Number                       Glitched Original

Finished #hotshower

 

                                         Original Image                            Black and White Original

 

                                   Code, #, Post Number                           Glitched Original

WEEK 14

Jussi Parikka- Introduction: The Materiality of Media and Waste

Medianatures- the topological continuum between nature and culture, the material entwining and enfolding of various agencies, meanings, and interactions. 

What are we doing to our universe with the creation of all of our new media devices? What are they made of, what resources are we having to use? The bigger question is how are we discarding of these devices? Everyone has a junk drawer, I want you to go to that junk drawer and see how many devices you have that you are not using and will never use again. Now ask yourself how you will discard of them, in a humane way.  I don't know the answer, do you? Where does all the internet trash go? Form our computers, cell phones, tablets? How does that get discarded? 

"The materiality of media is to be taken literally. Our media devices are the products of various processes of mining, processing, and standardizing minerals and other rare earth materials into finished mass-consumer products. After their use-value is exhausted, the become things of a different sort… it's about where you dump your shit you do not want on your doorstep."

In a media driven world that we are in, we need to think about what it is doing to our environment, society, culture, and us as individuals. We should be standing out among the masses not going with the flow.  

WEEK 13

Jonathan Crary- 24/7

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Hector Postigo- From Pong to Planet Quake

Jonathan Crary starts his writing talking about the white crowned sparrow and its ability to go days without sleep and can still function. The US Defense Department has been studying these birds to help with militant efforts for sleepless soldiers. "Non-sleep products, when aggressively promoted by pharmaceutical companies, would become first a lifestyle option, and eventually, for many, a necessity" This is scary, I love my sleep. I do, like many, contemplate what I could get done if I didn't have to take time to eat or sleep. This is not human, this is machine. I can only think that these medicines would cause you to become super focused and machine militant. Have you ever taken Adderall? If you have, you know you become focused and not tired, and forget to eat, these medicines would be like that but way worse. We have to ask ourselves, do we want this? I say no. I want our military to have a time to sleep, calm down, chill out, from their demanding duties. Not everything is about the bottom line.  Other key phrases from this reading are "Sleep Mode." This is where people wake up in the middle of the night and use their electronic devices, because they can't sleep without checking them. They are in a state of sleep mode technology driven lives. There has been talks about lighting up certain areas of the world by reflecting the sun on the earth from space while it is suppose to be night time. "Daylight all night long." This would allow workers in these areas to work all day and all night. We need our sleep people, a time to ourselves, not for society and technology.  

Key phrases from Hecto Postigo's writing is unwaged work, mods, modders, modifications, hackers.  You would think that people that understand computer code/ language would take offense to those who change their code for their advantage or pleasure.  Apparently game makers look at modders' versions of their game and use it to make better games or new games.  Modders create mods or modifications of games or codes of any kinds and transform them into other products.  When game makers use these mods the modders become unwaged workers. They do not get paid, they do it for pleasure.  Hackers log into unauthorized areas and change the code to either gain information or take down a website, etc. All of these people play a key role in the world of code and technology.  The question here is who has the power? The Game maker, the Modders, or the Hackers? In the world of technology, none had the upper hand.  Some other forms of mods can be seen with items such as nerd guns- changing them to air-soft guns, Holga cameras- they can be changed with format and film (with these mods, they have packaged them for sale and profit), Fan fiction- The 50 Shades of Grey Series is a mod on the popular Twilight Series.  

Nerf Gun

Holga Camera

Twilight/ Fifty Shades of Grey

WEEK 12

Tarleton Gillespie- The Relevance of Algorithms

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Katherine Hayles- Critical Inquiry

Algorithm- a precise way of explaining how to do something.  Non-computer algorithms are knitting, tying your shoes, the traditionally 5 paragraph essay.  Algorithms are used with technology for search engines. They are the precise ways to look up information.  The way you utilize these algorithms gives you the "trending" site for the topic you wish to search. "Trending" refers to the most visited sites.  "power to enable and assign meaningfulness, managing how information is perceived by users, the 'distribution of the sensible.'" (Langlois) The way algorithms work properly is by 6 rules or guidelines.  1) Patterns of inclusion, 2) Cycles of anticipation, 3) The evaluation of relevance, 4) The promise of algorithmic objectivity, 5) Entanglement with practice, and 6) The production of calculated publics.  

Code is an algorithm written in a computer language.  There are 2 different types of language, 1) natural or human language, 2) computer code or computer language.  Code is all involved in technology.  As I type these words, a code is being encrypted in the background, creating the letters that create the words. 

(alll I Wannnt for chrismas is yuu. /All I want for Christmas is you.)

A code is written in the program of this blog page to correct incorrect words with auto correct, example is above. 

We have all be so used to using these programs and devices that we don't even realize or understand how deep code is intertwined in our daily lives.  Everyone uses a computer, phone, tv, car, radio, etc at least one of these once a day.  Code can be destroyed or altered and that causes glitches or mods of the original code.  This is a sequence, usually of 0's and 1's and it is how you alter the sequence of the numbers that creates and alters the code for everything technological.  

Original Image                                    Glitched (Altered Code) Image

WEEK 9

Eugene Thacker- Data Made Flesh: Biotechnology and the Discourse of the Posthuman

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Joan Hawkins- When Taste Politics Meet Terror

Posthumanism according to Thacker has 2 threads: 1) extropianism- theorizing the human condition through science and technology, 2) more critical post humanism- human and machine, flesh and data, genetic and computer "codes." Thacker questions how far a human can be integrated with machine, before he or she is no longer considered human. It somewhat reminds me of the Cyborg Manifesto mentioned in Week 7. He states that human nature is what keeps us all from becoming machines. That in order for us to remain human, was must at all times keep reason, intelligence, etc a constant in our human behavior.  He also states that the posthuman should use technology as a tool, that we have to create boundaries if we are to remain human.  I believe that regardless of technological advance, humans are technology and technology is human. We created the technology, therefore we should be able to keep our humanity.  Our history as humans can not be erased, ask yourself "What makes you, you?"

How far can you take art without getting in trouble?? Joan Hawkins writes about Steve Kurtz and his art dubbing him a "bio-terrorist." He was arrested for this the same day he called the cops to tell them his wife had died, while asleep in their bed.  He was transporting Serratia marcescens and Bacillus atrophaeus over state lines for his art work.  Both are not on the biological terrorism list.  

"It's really going to have a chilling effect on the type of work people are going to do in this arena and other arenas as well… clear case of artistic and academic freedom."

So what can you produce, what can you not? Its in the name of art, right!?

Eduardo Kac- GFP (Green Fluorescent Protein) Bunny

(a new art form based on the use of genetic engineering to transfer natural or synthetic genes to an organism, to create unique living beings)

WEEK 7

Jaime Smith-Windsor- The Cyborg Mother: A Breached Boundary

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Steve Dixon- Humanizing Robots, Returning to Nature, and Camping About

The Cyborg Mother, was the first time in this class that I had that moment of "Wow, technology supports everything that we do and live with every day." Jamie Smith-Windsor's writing is inspire and insightful. She delicately writes about how the machine helping her child grow has now become its mother. Her child is a cyborg, living from a machine rather than a human, and how her child will always be part human, part machine.  Her child, like many children, would have died without the help of an incubator.  

"26 February 2003-… I look to the machines and they tell me how my daughter is doing today. How easy it is to look at the monitor that tells me… what Quinn cannot yet tell me… Quinn is having a 'terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day."

"The cyborg does not die because it is unplugged. The cyborg continues to exist beyond all locations of space and time, the consciousness irreversibly fused with technology." 

Steve Dixon, writes about the "the humanization of machines and the dehumanization of humans," and the artists that maker this happen, in a "camp" or deliberately exaggerated and theatrical in style, typically for humorous effect way.  

Stelarc Exoskeleton

(machine controls the body and the body controls the machine)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kM2wbdh4eTU 

Laura Kikauka and Norman White Them Fuckin Robots

(a very camp way of showing the attempted reproduction of robots)

WEEK 5

Jennifer Gonzalez- The Face and the Public: Race, Secrecy, and Digital Art Practice

"On the one hand, there is a recurring desire to see online digital spaces as sites of universal subjectivity that can escape the limitations of race… On the other hand, a proliferation of racially marked avatars and experimental hybrids (human and nonhuman) increasingly populate artificial worlds and online chat spaces."

It is believed that anyone can be anything they want to be online, in chat rooms, game forums, emails, social media.  Yet it still all revolves around a name or a face. If it is not directly an image of a human being it is still a classification system. "Community beyond identity," this means that people still group with people they identify with, it just happens to be not about race, or is it. There are many communities online, some about hate, and some about community. Regardless, the internet world can be just as vicious as the real world.  Hansen is mentioned quite a bit in this writing.  "Hansen equates online self-invention, blackface, and racial passing as forms of 'imitation of an imitation; a purely disembodied simulacrum.'" It is all of our desires "to pass" judgement by anyone, that is why the need for different identities is present on the internet.  Although "the invisibility of 'real' bodies cannot, alone, produce a racially neutral space or even racially neutral subjects." It is impossible to get away from the way humanity itself works, unfortunately. We all wish that people could live happy, free of judgement, and together in peace.  Humanity as a whole, is incapable of doing this in the real world, and on the internet. We can't escape who we are, it is impossible, even if we all try to. 

WEEK 4
Kelly Gates- The Past Perfect Promise of Facial Recognition Technology

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Mark Shepard- Minor Urbanism: Everyday Entanglements of Technology and Urban Life (not mentioned)

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Zach Blas

"Biometrics are not the first technical effort to connect bodies to identities"- Kelly Gates

Gates brings up a good point that biometrics have been being developed since the 19th century through the use of photography, anthropometry, and dactyloscopy (fingerprinting). When were these considered "not enough"? Why must we now have facial recognition software? The answer is that the world is trying to avoid random acts of terrorism, like 9/11.  It is stated that photography is "a medium uniquely suited to truth production." Although photographs of peoples faces limits that ability to give them an identity. Anthropometry is used to categorize people into standardized bodily measurements and fingerprinting is used to classify people at the seen of a crime, to give everyone "in the system" a number of reference, so we all can be found at any given moment.  It has been a hot topic discussion that technology is a problem, and they are trying to correct this problem with technology.  Pat Gil is quoted "technostalgia"- the desire to revise the past to re-determine the present, while at the same time admitting the impossibility of this endeavor. Biometrics is the new wave of classifying people: facial recognition, digital fingerprints, hand geometry, voice recognition, iris and retina scanning, and DNA scanning.  Facial recognition is still not as developed as they wish it to be, it gives you general features, in a process called feature extraction. The point is that a computer is not yet capable of remember faces like humans do. I believe at some point they will, but is this a breach of our privacy. Look around you the next time you are walking the streets, and take note on whether or not there are cameras pointed at you at that moment.  Soon we will be living in a real world 1984.

Zach Blas has made a career of creating thought provoking designs that skew the way video surveillance can see the person it is recording. Blas quotes Kelly Gates ideas about the dual gain of facial recognition in his article "automate the mediated process of connecting faces to identities, and to enable the distribution of those identities access computer networks." He has found a way combine multiple faces into one mask so that the surveillance camera is capturing "the face of many." 

WEEK 3

Mark B. N. Hansen- Ubiquitous Sensation: Toward an Atmospheric, Collective, and Microtemporal Model of Media

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Kristin Veel- Calm Imaging: The Conquest of Overload and the Conditions of Attention

"Machines that fit the human environment, instead of forcing humans to enter theirs, will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods."- Mark Weiser, "The Computer for the 21st Century"

"Sensorium" and "Calm Imaging" are the key words of the readings for this week. Hansen plays on the idea of technology focusing on the sensorium to expand further than ever expected.  The way that Hansen explains evoking this sensorium is by Neidich's vision of visual and cognitive "ergonomics." This is the difference between the static and haptic.  Visual ergonomics is connected with painting, sculpture, and drawing and later is transferred to photography and cinema = representation of static space.  Cognitive ergonomics is more for the modern digital and internet art= has to take into the account of the whole brain and conceptual system.  Cognitive ergonomics is directly linked to ubiquitous computing= the idea of using microprocessors in every day objects, with the intent of computing information.  The best way to do this is by "calm technology"= technology that is so imbedded in everyday life that you don't even realize it is technology.  

So ultimately by channelling the sensorium (taste, smell, touch, sight, hearing) through ubiquitous computing in the form of calm technology, technology itself has become a necessary part of life as we know it. The question is, should we stop now? In the past years calm technology moved from our home base to on our persons in a big way.  Fit bit has become such a popular item to monitor your health and change your lifestyle.  This seems like a great product to help monitor your health but is this where it will stop? After in class discussion it was brought up that sooner rather than later we will be able to swallow a calm technology device that can monitor when we get cancer or contract and STD or tell you when you are at risk for a heart attack! This sounds phenomenal but is that what we really want! This makes me think of the Black Mirror episode that Shannon McMullen showed us in class. If we had this technology would it be calm? I know as the person I am that I would obsess over the fact that I could know and can know everything about me.  I wouldn't be able to enjoy my life, because I want to know! It is like when you post a new picture on Facebook and can't stop checking to see if anyone likes it or not! Not that it matters, but it does! With this calm technology, would you really be calm? I mean yes let me know in advance if I have cancer, but will it be enough to help reduce the deaths due to cancer, or will it make people know they are sick for longer and shorten their "living life." These are the questions we have to ask ourselves.  This technology will come about and we need to be informed on what we want so we are ready for it.  

Hansen's essay made me think of the movie "Timer." This movie is based around a 30ish year old woman obsessed with knowing if she has found her "soul mate." There are "timers" you can get placed in your wrist and when your soul mate gets it implanted your timers will link and you will know the exact time you will meet the person you are meant to be with forever. After getting her timer, it never links to anyone else, so she becomes obsessed with dating men without timers and taking them in to get them implanted. Every time the men's timers link to someone, and it is not her timer.  The whole movie is about self realization and the idea that every moment counts and can't be spent obsessed over anything, especially what you can not really control. So is calm technology really calm? 

Kristin Veel touches on the fact that calm technology could be too calm and in turn could end up being controlling.  She quotes Stafford "We are so caught up in the alternate reality spun by mass media- not multi, but individually tailored media designed to interlock with specific brain function- that the question becomes what impels us to resist insinuations sources that shape how we think?" Efforts are being made to create a smart refrigerator that tells you what your shopping list is, what you should eat, what you shouldn't, and even locks you out from late night eating.  Do we really want our refrigerator telling you what to do? Yes and No, if it works properly obesity levels could go down, or people could just add to the profits of take out restaurants.  

There is no way to know if we are doing it right! We just need to be aware. Kristin Veel-" Not only are we saved a great deal of unimaginative, effortful work, but we also risk loosing touch with the deliberative aspects of thinking because technology makes the decisions about what should be thematic and what should be at the margin of our attention for us." 

WEEK 2

Leo Marx- Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept

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Edward Shanken- Art and Electronic Media (Survey Essay)

The beginning of the Leo Marx Essay is a quote
"… the essence of technology is by no means anything technological."- Martin Heidegger

This pretty much sums up the entire essay in one quote. This essay was very dense and full of lots of information about how Marx views technology.  I feel that this essay is the perfect start to this course. It makes you question from the beginning of modern technology to the advanced technology of today, if it is what we want? Do we want technology to evolve more? Do we like where technology is going? What happened to the way we used to view technology and the advancements that have been made?

One of Marx's major themes is the "word technology." The word technology started out as a "mechanical word" or the act of creating what we now refer to as technology.  Marx- "The word technology, which joined the Greek root, techie(an art or craft) with the suffix ology (a branch of learning), first entered the English language in site seventeenth center. At that time, in keeping with the etymology, a technology was a branch of learning, or discourse, or treatise concerned with the mechanic arts. As Eric Schatzberg has demonstrated in a seminal essay, the word then referred to a field of study, not an object of study."

Marx is suffering from the fact that phones are glued to hands, GPS has replaced maps, TVs are now in  every room of the house, and there is no realization for the mechanic arts or act of technology. Now everything is technology and all of it is incorporated into our day to day lives and as a society we would all be completely lost without it.  Marx quotes Walden in his defense: "There is an illusion about… [modern improvements]; there is not always a positive advance… Our inventions all want to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end."

In class we discussed about how technology is about the device rather than the relationships. I completely agree, when phones are present, people interactions become the second or third or fourth or fifth attempt at trying to reach someone. First, you contact someone with your phone, or through email, Facebook possibly? What happened to, lets meet for coffee, or sending a letter in the mail? Everything is directly at our fingertips, yet we don't even realize how good it is to have it.

I have recently moved to Indiana to go to Purdue and I can personally tell you that I wish I did not have a smart phone before I came here. I think about all the time I wasted on my phone before I got here, instead of spending time with the people that I miss so much right now! On the opposite side, I am now too incredibly thankful for my smart phone because it keeps me connected to the people I have at home.   It is a double edge sword that everyone is taking part in.

Do you sometimes wish it was like the days before big screens and cellphone watches? My family didn't have a TV until I was 13 and then when we got that TV we had weekly movie nights. We couldn't watch TV until those times or we got it as a reward. It was special and something we aspired to want! Now it is just a TV with all my shows that I watch all the time. I miss the illusive nature of technology, do you?

To view a lot of the ways technological arts are advancing in the field of Art, you can look over the Edward Shanken: Art and Electronic Media (Survey Essay.) This survey gives great reference from the beginning to now on past and present technological arts in the fashion of art.
http://www.artelectronicmedia.com/