{"id":2134,"date":"2020-01-07T11:42:28","date_gmt":"2020-01-07T08:42:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/maarav.org.il\/english\/?p=2134"},"modified":"2020-01-21T11:07:12","modified_gmt":"2020-01-21T08:07:12","slug":"single-swing-shovel-former-west-proxies-boaz-levin-vera-tollmann","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maarav.org.il\/english\/2020\/01\/07\/single-swing-shovel-former-west-proxies-boaz-levin-vera-tollmann\/","title":{"rendered":"A Single Swing of the Shovel: Former West Proxies | Boaz Levin and Vera Tollmann"},"content":{"rendered":"

On 28 March 2011, a 75-year-old Georgian woman named Haystam Shakardian set out into the forest near her home to scavenge for copper to sell as scrap. While digging, she accidentally severed an underground fiber-optic cable. In an emphatic reminder of the Internet\u2019s visceral vulnerability, she had cut off most of the Internet service to Georgia\u2014as well as 90 percent of the traffic of neighboring Armenia. Dubbed the Trans-Asia-Europe connection, this particular cable, stretching 21,000 kilometers and connecting Frankfurt with Shanghai, was first laid in 1998\u20147 years after Georgian independence and 9 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the introduction of the World Wide Web.1 The Internet has since become key to the acceleration of global capitalism, enabling the emergence and spread of industries operating under the premises of just-in-time delivery, start-up entrepreneurialism, and seemingly limitless growth in the computational power and storage of the cloud. Despite its reputation as immaterial, placeless, and irrefutably virtual, the digging incident has once again made it evident that the Internet has a body, and that a blunt spade could be as effective a tool of media critique as a line of code. Where the supposed victory narratives of post-1989 globalized capitalism have seemed, at points, to intersect with a belief in the Internet\u2019s inherent democratizing potential and resistance to control, Shakardian\u2019s inadvertent \u201chack\u201d quite literally undermines the prevalent portrayal of the net as a more or less invincible, decentralized, and ether-like medium 2 <\/sup><\/strong>This intervention and its effects are also echoed in a growing theoretical and artistic interest in the nature of global infrastructure and its\u2014often local\u2014discontents, as well as the fluid relation between the virtual and the real, online and offline. With a single swing of the shovel the cloud had burst, and, from behind it, one could barely discern the outline of a vast network of cables traversing the depth of the sea, crossing continents, and connecting nondescript networking hubs in strategic locations.<\/p>\n

The Internet\u2014by way of one of its many portable emissaries: phones, tablets, laptops, things<\/em>\u2014is nowadays often the first entity many people see when they wake up, and the last they squint toward before falling asleep. It is near omnipresent in most urban lives, and increasingly so in rural ones too, facilitating an unprecedented amount of communication between humans, as well as between things. The Internet cables that traverse and link these spaces are the veins of the globalized capitalist system, pumping capital as far as they reach, but they are also the descendants of the modern channel system\u2014distributing goods across the globe.3 <\/sup><\/strong>Still, despite the ever-growing role the Internet plays in modern society, it is becoming ever less visible. Cables gradually disappear, machines become lighter, storage facilities retreat out of sight, and thin client technologies to serve information back to computers without hard drives are gaining popularity. Yet,\u00a0 this\u00a0 increasing\u00a0 invisibility\u00a0 isn\u2019t only a product of its infrastructure or its popular portrayal as a misty cloud: the Internet\u2019s size and complexity render it\u00a0 essentially ungraspable\u2014a fitting technology for a world system that remains hidden in plain view,\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 too big to scale, as it were, beyond our cognitive mapping capabilities. Political theorist Fredric Jameson, writing in 1992 at the cusp of the age\u00a0 of the World Wide Web, is as pertinent as ever: \u201cSince the world system\u00a0 of late capitalism (or post-modernity) is however inconceivable without the computerized media technology which\u00a0 eclipses\u00a0 its\u00a0 former\u00a0 spaces and faxes an unheard of simultaneity across its branches, information technology will become virtually the representational solution as well as the representational problem of this world system\u2019s cognitive apping.\u201d4 <\/sup><\/strong>In other words, information technologies, and particularly the web, are both emblematic of, and foundational to, late capitalism. Giving\u00a0\u00a0 these technologies an aesthetic\u00a0 form\u2014despite\u00a0 their\u00a0 abstraction\u00a0 and even invisibility\u2014is a fundamental challenge for artistic and theoretical practices attempting to grapple with the antinomies of our present age.<\/p>\n


\nSovereignty by Proxy<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the western world, areas with no Internet connection are increasingly rare. The web\u2019s ubiquity lends it an elemental quality and, by becoming all-encompassing, it disappears into the background, like air or light or clouds 5 <\/sup><\/strong>This transformation to invisibility, as architect Keller Easterling\u00a0 and geographer Deborah Cowen have recently\u00a0 demonstrated,\u00a0 is\u00a0 not without political consequence. Infrastructure inscribes\u00a0 political\u00a0 power, often circumventing legislative processes and exploiting the murky waters of international jurisdiction, in order to police such fragmented space: \u201cIn a site of multiple, overlapping, or nested forms of sovereignty, where domestic and transnational jurisdictions collide, infrastructure space\u00a0 becomes a medium of what might be called extrastatecraft\u2014a portmanteau describing the often undisclosed activities outside of, in addition to, and sometimes even in partnership\u00a0 with\u00a0 statecraft.\u201d6\u00a0 <\/sup><\/strong>A most\u00a0 present\u00a0 example of this massive surveillance amalgam or \u201csystem of systems\u201d7 <\/sup><\/strong>is Eurosur, operated by Frontex (or the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders), which, when complete, aims to allow \u201cthe frictionless circulation of identity data within a single globalised market of information\u201d across \u201cthe entire European common border and beyond.\u201d8 <\/sup><\/strong>Likewise, Cowen describes how transnational corporations, nation-states, and supranational governing\u00a0 bodies\u00a0 have worked in concert to secure commodity flows via global maritime trade\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 and against the threat of piracy\u2014often rewriting international law to their advantage in the process.9\u00a0 <\/sup><\/strong>But the effects of digital security infrastructure\u00a0 are often far more visceral than we might imagine. In a desperate bid to escape the dragnet of this \u201cfrictionless\u201d circulation of biometric identity data, migrants have been driven not only to burn their passports, but also to erase any physical biometric markers by mutilating their fingertips: burning them, cutting them with a razor, or using acid\u2014giving a final, dreadful twist to the Latin etymology of \u201cdigital\u201d in digitus<\/em>: finger.<\/p>\n

Processes of globalization have thus led to the creation of \u201ctransversally bordered spaces that not only cut across national borders\u00a0 but also generate new types of formal and informal jurisdictions\u2026 deep inside the tissue of national sovereign territory.\u201d10 <\/sup><\/strong>And while\u00a0 national sovereignty is questioned from without by the increasing power of infrastructure and logistics, the relinquishing of power to business lobbies and nongovernmental organizations has\u00a0 hollowed\u00a0 any\u00a0 vestiges of representational democracy from within. As a corollary to the rise of neoliberalism, the vision of an autonomous, potent political subject\u00a0 is devastated by the growing power of privileged elites standing at the nexus of transnational corporations, extra-juridical zones, infrastructural authorities, nongovernmental organizations, and covert rule.<\/p>\n

In his book Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy <\/em>philosopher Jacques Ranci\u00e8re termes this condition \u201cpostdemocratic,\u201d which is exemplified by \u201cthe paradox that, in the name of democracy, emphasizes the consensual practice of effacing the forms of democratic action. Postdemocracy is\u2026 a democracy that has eliminated the appearance, miscount, and dispute of the people, and is thereby reducible to the sole interplay of state mechanisms and combinations of social energies and interests.\u201d1 <\/sup><\/strong>Similarly, political theorists have recently described the rise within the United States of a mode of \u201cdouble governance,\u201d according to which political power is split between elected government officials and a network of institutions constituting a \u201cdisguised republic.\u201d12 <\/sup><\/strong>At the same time, the notion of a \u201cdeep state\u201d has been evoked to describe forms of opaque sovereignty prevalent in Turkey, Egypt, Yemen,\u00a0 and Syria, in which\u00a0 a nexus of police, intelligence services, politicians, and organized crime are allegedly responsible for the exertion of violence and covert rule.13<\/sup><\/strong><\/p>\n

This postdemocratic condition, these opaque or disguised forms of governance, could also be termed \u201cproxy politics.\u201d14 <\/sup><\/strong>A proxy is a decoy or a surrogate. The word derives from the Latin procurator <\/em>meaning someone responsible for representing someone else in a court\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 of law. These days, the word proxy is often used to designate a computer server acting as an intermediary for client requests. These servers afford indirect connections to a network, thus providing users with anonymity. However, in this intermediary capacity, proxy servers can also be set\u00a0\u00a0 up for the opposite task: to monitor traffic. Proxy politics\u2013\u2013defined by artist, writer, and Research Center for Proxy Politics member Hito Steyerl as the \u201cpolitics of the stand-in\u201d\u2013\u2013is characterized by fraudulent contracts, chimerical sovereignties, and void authorities.15 <\/sup><\/strong>In place of \u201csmooth\u201d democratic functioning, proxy politics suggests instead diversion, mediation, subterfuge, and bifurcation.<\/p>\n

Where disembodiment, invisible politics, and the increasing subordination of politics to economic interests has become the norm, for individuals, on the contrary, the digital and the body become entangled, with fingerprints and face-recognition being the most literal reminders\u00a0 that bodies are identifiers. The science historian Lorraine Daston has recently asked whether the value of transparency has mutated before our eyes. Whereas it used to be a demand put forth by \u201cenlightened citizens\u201d\u00a0 to their governments, today it is secretive governments powered by new technologies that demand transparency of their citizens.16<\/sup><\/strong><\/p>\n

It is thus precisely within this ambiguous political framework that proxy politics can be understood as both a symptom of the crisis in representational politics, as well as a counter-strategy aiming to critically engage with, and challenge, the existing mechanisms of security and control.<\/p>\n


\n<\/em>Art Tales and Artistic Territory<\/strong><\/p>\n

How, then, should artists confront this technology? Like earlier generations, whose moniker \u201cnet art\u201d outlines a direct and\u00a0 often\u00a0 activist\u00a0 engagement with the mechanisms and materiality of the et<\/em>?17 <\/sup><\/strong>Should they cut cables? Map the web? Learn to code? In his video It\u2019s\u00a0 Just a Single Swing of a Shovel <\/em>2015, Berlin-based Georgian artist Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze relays the story of Shakardian as a parable of sorts: the Internet becomes conspicuous when it is unusable, its worldly character comes to the fore once it appears damaged. A visit to a network operations center gives digital media theorist Nicole Starosielski a similar impression: \u201cAt first glance, it seems to be a place of mere supervision, where the humans\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 sit around and watch machines do the work of international connection, waiting only for a moment of crisis.\u201d18 <\/sup><\/strong>Crisis is a key condition of networks, which are highly dependent on constant supervision. We, as users, only become aware of the infrastructure\u2019s existence in moments of breakdown, malfunction, or glitch.19 <\/sup><\/strong>During these rare moments, the web draws attention to its hardware, its materiality, its invisible visibility.<\/p>\n

In his short documentary animation, Gagoshidze carefully considers Shakardian\u2019s individual and social circumstances, while at the same time mapping, somewhat humorously, the grave effects such a local incident has had upon Georgia and Armenia. This disproportionate dimension describes our current technological condition. Gagoshidze appropriates Shakardian\u2019s story, while asking whether the energetic woman could be considered a contemporary Luddite, attacking cables rather than assembly lines. Did she hack the networks with the hope that people would briefly lift their heads from behind their screens, or give a second thought to the cloud that looms above them? Of course not. As Gagoshidze is clearly aware, it was nothing more than human error, an accident\u00a0 with\u00a0 unforeseeable\u00a0 repercussions. At the end of the day, what this parable seems to emphasize is the durability of these networks, but it also explicates their potential frailty.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Post<\/strong><\/p>\n

We live in an age, it has been said, which takes the ubiquitous presence \u00a0of the Internet for granted. It has been dubbed post-Internet (post-net), or post-digital,20 <\/sup><\/strong>and is concomitant with postcapitalism, postdemocracy, post-cinema, post-concept, and, of course, the ineffable postmodernism. All of these \u201cposts\u201d are attempts to grasp diffuse liminal states, new constellations, and media convergences, as well as the commercial permeation of the on- and offline universes. The so-called \u201cInternet of things,\u201d guided by purely practical and commercial interests, effaces this delineation even further. The Internet of things \u201cdescribes a world embedded with so many digital devices that the space between them consists not of dark circuitry but rather the space of the city itself.\u201d2<\/sup><\/strong><\/p>\n

A world where \u201cdata turn[s] into things and things into data,\u201d in which anybody could potentially build a proxy front-end with a Raspberry Pi,\u00a0\u00a0 a readily available single-board computer as small as a cash card.22<\/sup><\/strong><\/p>\n

However, the Internet of things\u2019 mastermind and Xerox PARC scientist Mark Weiser has advocated for the \u201ccalming\u201d effects of computers becoming invisible, receding into the background.23\u00a0 <\/sup><\/strong>\u201cJust as\u00a0\u00a0 a good, well-balanced hammer \u2018disappears\u2019 in the hand of a carpenter and allows him to concentrate on the big picture, we hope that computers can participate in a similar magic disappearing act.\u201d24 <\/sup><\/strong>As media historian Florian Sprenger notes, Weiser\u00a0 stops halfway in his earnest utilization\u00a0 of Heideggerian thinking.25 <\/sup><\/strong>It is the defiant failure of a tool that reveals<\/p>\n

the world, Sprenger argues. Weiser turns the philosopher\u2019s thoughts upside down. While things become invisible by using them, Weiser aims at making things invisible by design. Considering that both post-net artists and\u00a0 computer engineers work on breaking down boundaries between digital and physical worlds, post-net art might somehow be operating on the fringes of the Internet of things project\u2014both create a constant back-and-forth between objects and databases. Yet post-net art is about high visibility, it is full of surfaces and signs, prompting the viewer to encounter digital objects outside their digital habitat, namely in an art gallery.<\/p>\n

Postism<\/em>\u2013\u2013often introduced apologetically, parenthetically, \u201cfor lack of better word,\u201d within a dizzying realm of (post-conceptual) empty signifiers\u2013\u2013carries with it an air of self-congratulatory disenchantment. A blas\u00e9 pat on the back. Yet, however theoretically questionable and epistemologically limiting these terms may be, it is\u00a0 difficult\u00a0 to\u00a0 ignore their discursive lure. So-called post-net art filters the mainstream visual surface of the web, sometimes indistinguishably from start-up culture and its corporate aesthetics, sticking to the familiar and highly visible end of the Internet: stock-images, Google Earth glitches, Hollywood movie streams, memes, icons of prosumer culture, and so on. Whereas 1990s\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 net art introduced the studio into the virtual sphere or digital interface, further advancing both the movement toward the dematerialization of art and, by stressing the means of that virtuality, emphasizing the Internet as an object-category in itself, post-net art, in turn, comes to displace the work of art from the browser and puts it back into the gallery. In \u201can act of deterritorialization\u2014a violent reification, it forces a commodity value upon\u00a0\u00a0 a product with a use value confined to a particular context.\u201d26 <\/sup><\/strong>With post-net artists themselves acting as filters, as \u201cknowing participants in a system of circulating data in which the line between artist-made, user-generated, and commercial content is decidedly\u00a0 blurred,\u201d27\u00a0 <\/sup><\/strong>post-net\u00a0 art\u00a0 could\u00a0 essentially be considered a successor of Pop Art, working in line with the Pictures Generation. At its best, it successfully and knowingly intervenes into the modes of circulation and value production that derive from and spin out of\u00a0 the so-called platformification <\/em>of social interactions in web 2.0, subverting their meaning or short-circuiting their reception. At its worst, post-net art is\u00a0\u00a0 a display of a predominantly western, affluent, youth culture, with \u201cpost\u201d designating little more than everything goes<\/em>, a cultural coming-of-age.<\/p>\n

Within an age of algorithmic hegemony and data-driven proxy-governance, and backgrounding this\u00a0 twofold\u00a0 characterization of post-net art, visuality is increasingly reliant on this participation in code, and increasingly subjected to its logic. Belief in the agency of representation, in governance as in the aesthetic realm, is undermined, however, by the transferability of code\u00a0 and\u00a0 its\u00a0 propensity\u00a0 toward simulation and modeling rather than indexicality. Why is it that artistic data visualization mostly ends up as image disturbance, visual noise, colorful abstraction? The answer seems to hark back once again to the notion that tools reveal their worldliness when damaged or misplaced.28\u00a0 <\/sup><\/strong>In 2003, the artist Cory Arcangel discovered a bug in the video playback program QuickTime on Apple computers: the program could\u00a0 be\u00a0 tricked\u00a0 into playing all data from the RAM of the hard drive as \u201cvideo\u201d files. While current versions of QuickTime no longer allow this misinterpretation due\u00a0\u00a0 to software changes in the decoding process, Arcangel\u2019s resulting Data Diaries <\/em>look like versions of old TV test patterns and come with an 8-bit soundtrack 29 <\/sup><\/strong>Though it opens up this apparent failure in the computer\u2019s hermetic processing, does this aesthetic simply adhere to our expectation that data is abstract and mathematical, and therefore logically <\/em>corresponds\u00a0 to geometric color fields? Or has this notion of what data might look like become antiquated in the meantime? In the northern summer of 2015, Google offered a glimpse into how computers might \u201csee\u201d the world. The company launched an image recognition research project called Deep Dream, which has purported to teach \u201ccomputers how to see, understand, and appreciate our world\u201d30 <\/sup><\/strong>by way of a neural network, but seems rather to conjure some sort of technological unconscious. This creepy experiment\u00a0 in computer vision has been dubbed inceptionism <\/em>and is inspired by Mandelbrot sets,3 <\/sup><\/strong>whereby an image reveals \u201cprogressively ever-finer recursive detail at increasing magnifications\u201d so that fractal self-similarity applies to the entire set, rather than only parts.32 <\/sup><\/strong>Every image presented is first abstracted, and then becomes an entry point to a pluriverse of figures, which are, in turn, abstracted, only to reveal more figures. It is an infinite plunge into patterns becoming figures, becoming patterns, and so on and\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 so forth: \u201cEven a relatively simple neural network can be used to over- interpret an image, just like as children we enjoyed watching clouds and interpreting the random shapes.\u201d33\u00a0 <\/sup><\/strong>It is curious to see machines reverting\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 to interpreting clouds. As media historian and social theorist John Durham Peters has noted, humans have been searching for signs in clouds from time immemorial and the cloud can be seen as a form of elemental media 34 <\/sup><\/strong>Have machines now adopted the human tendency\u00a0 toward\u00a0 apophenia, actively seeking out patterns in \u201cmeaningless\u201d data? Or, thinking of it as an extension of our human point of view, as media theorist David M. Berry speculates, \u201capophenia would be the norm in a highly digital computational society, perhaps even a significant benefit to one\u2019s life chances and well-being if finding patterns become increasingly\u00a0 lucrative.\u00a0 Here\u00a0 we might consider the growth of computational high-frequency trading and financial systems that are trained\u00a0 and\u00a0 programmed\u00a0 to\u00a0 identify\u00a0 patterns very quickly.\u201d35 <\/sup><\/strong>A posthuman machine-vision that is simply all too human?<\/p>\n

In this context, artist C\u00e9cile B. Evans presents what she calls two \u201cartificial intelligences\u201d from previous artistic projects, which are now in stasis. The first, \u201cAGNES,\u201d is a spambot Evans has created in a digital commission,36 <\/sup><\/strong>the second, \u201cPHIL,\u201d is a CGI representation of the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. Evans states, \u201cthese two intelligences have gone into storage, or \u2018sleep mode\u2019 waiting for better times that can accommodate the knowledge and experiences (ultimately consciousness) they have acquired.\u201d37 <\/sup><\/strong>AGNES has two well-groomed hands, and her name might, or might not, refer to an episode of The Twilight Zone <\/em>TV series, in which a computer named Mark 502-741, \u201ccommonly known as Agnes,\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 is the world\u2019s most advanced electronic\u00a0 computer.\u00a0 Relatedly,\u00a0 throughout the 1940s, the first IBM-funded electronic computers developed at Harvard University were called Mark.38 <\/sup><\/strong>Physicist and computing pioneer Howard H. Aiken, who programmed four iterations of Mark, was married to a woman called Agnes Montgomery. This might lead us too far off, but following philosopher Sadie Plant\u2019s concern in her 1997 book Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture <\/em>to inscribe women into computer history, giving the bot a short, female name like Ada or Eliza might well be the artist\u2019s hidden intention. Or,\u00a0 perhaps, when a spambot\u00a0\u00a0 is presumably the messiest of all online agents, it is an ironic reference to the original Greek meaning of the name Agnes\u2014pure holy<\/em>. In any case, together with the homage to the recently\u00a0 deceased\u00a0 actor,\u00a0 Hoffman,\u00a0 the two characters are emphatic, if ambiguous, emblems for cybernetics and singularity.39 <\/sup><\/strong>Evans\u2019s installation Black Box (Server Sleep)<\/em>, 2015, which hosts the two avatars on disassembled tablet screens and microcomputers, offers a tongue-in-cheek comment on efforts in developing artificial intelligence research and striving for immortality of the sort inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil\u2019s \u201csingularity\u201d research at Google is dedicated toward. Where Kurzweil\u2019s aim is to elevate humans into god-like positions, literally invoking a Kurzweilian longue dur\u00e9e<\/em>, by being able to prolong life beyond its biological designation, Evans\u2019s creatures loiter absurdly in a sort of creen-limbo, running on DIY\/Internet of things\/Raspberry Pi technology, waiting for this promised future to happen. Within the installation, the tablet functions as a communication device, through which PHIL and AGNES interface with the outside world, sending text messages and status updates. Both \u201cblack boxes\u201d are peculiar substitutes, or doubles, framed by an empty screen-case containing a data circuit constructed from a tablet, a hard drive, and \u201cwet\u201d pictures that make reference to the previous life of the portrayed actor-cum-avatar. Looking at the hidden backside of the screen-cases of PHIL and AGNES, holding their digital surfaces in suspension, one can sneak a peek of an unorganized clutch\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 of printed photographs referring to the realness of a former life and an unfragmented body.<\/p>\n

Today, we know that skin is not skin deep. Offering a different answer to the question of how the relation between physical traces and imagery changes when it comes to identification, in 2015, artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg created a 3D portrait of incarcerated whistleblower Chelsea Manning from a DNA probe. As Manning has recently stated, \u201cour society\u2019s dependence on imagery says a lot about our values. Unfortunately, prisons try very hard to make us inhuman and unreal\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 by denying our image, and thus our existence, to the rest of the world. Imagery has become a kind of proof of existence.\u201d40 <\/sup><\/strong>Dewey-Hagborg\u2019s previous portraits in the series Stranger Visions\u00a0 <\/em>have\u00a0 stemmed\u00a0 from DNA analyses of chewing gum and hair found in the streets, which she arduously developed in her local Manhattan bio-hacking lab.4 <\/sup><\/strong>In another example, her research into DNA has resulted in a product called Invisible, where she spreads DNA-noise that can blur one\u2019s own traces, creating what she calls \u201cgenetic insecurities.\u201d42 <\/sup><\/strong>When biometric registry has enabled the codification of human skin so that it is legible to the powers that be, a medium of control, could the resulting 3D portraits of anonymous people perform as proxies, as doppelg\u00e4ngers of the biopolitical kind, waiting to show up in Frontex surveillance systems?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Territories<\/strong><\/p>\n

For Berry, \u201cthe postdigital can be said to constitute the pattern, the asterism, that is distinctive of our age.\u201d43 <\/sup><\/strong>He compares what he calls \u201cthe postdigital constellation\u201d with aerial photography, \u201cin that it does not emerge out of the interior of the given conditions, but, rather appears above them\u2014granting a distant reading of culture, society and everyday life.\u201dIn the context of Evans\u2019s work, does the postdigital constellation describe a mode of observation, a way to step out of the networked perspective and its structural settings? Is it really a perspective from above? Or is it rather one from below, the typical perspective for star-gazing, where searching\u00a0 for patterns and correlations in pools of data is like tracing shapes and finding meaning in celestial bodies? The artworks mentioned so far, such\u00a0 as Dewey-Hagborg\u2019s demonstration of the logic of biological surveillance and DNA databases in all their corporeal materiality, observe from within <\/em>that corporeality, shedding light on lesser-known technological conditions and histories from down among them.<\/p>\n

Aleksandra Domanovi\u0107, a Berlin-based artist born in former Yugoslavia, develops this shifted point of reference\u00a0 in\u00a0 her\u00a0 essayistic video documentary From yu to me<\/em>, 2014.44 <\/sup><\/strong>The video looks into the past\u00a0 of the artist\u2019s native country to explore how changes to domain name severs (DNS) have coincided with the new geopolitical constellation at\u00a0\u00a0 the end of the Soviet Union. A DNS is the part of an Internet address that indicates where the data the website refers to is located and registered; as media theorist Alexander R. Galloway writes, it is the only map that\u00a0\u00a0 has a 1:1 relationship with the territory it refers to. This linkage between where a website is \u201cfrom\u201d and what (or where) its representation addresses has not always been so stable. Domanovi\u0107\u2019s video describes how, if only for a short time before the socialist country collapsed, websites in Yugoslavia were indicated by the top domain name .yu, and how the domain was hosted by the University of California, Berkeley in a time when the Internet was\u2014at least outside the military\u2014still conceived as a transnational project without borders. From time to time during the video, a robotic hand intervenes, the hand as a medium in itself, in the front layer of the moving images. As well as possibly being a visualization of the invisible hand of the market, and of covert power relations, the hand\u2014which appears elsewhere in Domanovi\u0107\u2019s humanoid sculptures as a reference to mediating the technological history of former Yugoslavia\u2014 also refers to the \u201cBelgrade Hand,\u201d a robotic prosthetic, apparently the first\u00a0 of its kind with five fingers, developed in Novi Sad and Belgrade in 1964. Domanovi\u0107\u2019s video counts, in her use of these physical and figurative hybrids, as an instance of post-representational cognitive mapping, or what writer Michael Connor has called a kind of \u201cinternet realism: an approach\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 to the problem of representing the internet that foregrounds its status as a material infrastructure and a site of human labor, one that is best narrated from the eye-level, open-ended point of view of the artist-documentarian rather than the god\u2019s-eye view of the cartographer.\u201d45<\/sup><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Proxy Powers<\/strong><\/p>\n

The art projects we have discussed boil down to faces, hands, and clouds\u00a0\u00a0 as media; they dwell at the threshold of post-net\u00a0 art\u00a0 and\u00a0 mark\u00a0 where proxy politics, in part, begins. Following a process of dematerialization,\u00a0\u00a0 are these essential objects, which physically mediate the networked condition, not the more telling and significant media of our time? Is the understanding of a medium changing once again? As Easterling observes, \u201cinfrastructure space becomes a medium,\u201d and physical matter transforms into a medium for an abstract global constellation otherwise invisible and<\/p>\n

intangible. We\u00a0 argue that the proxy is also a new kind of medium, whether\u00a0\u00a0 in the disguise of a reverse-engineered DNA portrait, which manifests itself in 3D space, an avatar on a screen, or a robotic hand that intervenes in moving image space. The medium of proxy politics takes the detachment between material components and power relations to\u00a0 the\u00a0 next\u00a0 level, equaling out any kind of power play between old and new, large and small, public and private. \u201cThose proxies tear up territories by creating netscapes that are partly unlinked from geography and national jurisdiction,\u201d46\u00a0 <\/sup><\/strong>netscapes that are also unlinked from local infrastructures. Following philosopher Joseph Vogl, these particular proxy media should be conceived\u00a0 as a temporary constellation, like \u201cGalileo\u2019s telescope, which is no longer a simple object but a complex formation comprising material, discursive, practical, and theoretical elements.\u201d47 <\/sup><\/strong>Before becoming media, proxies presuppose a contextual analysis.<\/p>\n

Any proxy causes a mess: that is the rule. It destabilizes existing orders and dichotomies, if only to open a door for individuals to pass through. It creates its own temporary world of intervention\u2014how else are slices of a fractured reality to be visualized? How does one lend them an aesthetic form, and overcome their abstraction? Cognitive mapping points\u00a0 at the visible invisible, but where do we stand with regards to Jamesonian cognitive mapping in times of post-representation and postdemocracy? as jameson wisely realized in 1992, the dilemma of late capitalism and computer technologies lies in the fact that the two systems are inseparably tied together. Yet, as historian Frances Stonor Saunders suggests in her depiction of Europe\u2019s border technologies, if\u00a0 \u201c[c]ognitive mapping\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 is the way we mobilize a definition of who we are . . . borders are the\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 way we protect this definition.\u201d48 <\/sup><\/strong>Perhaps, then, a radical demand for cognitive mapping \u201chas become incorporated into the system of global capitalism,\u201d writes systems and language theorist Wendy Hui Kyong\u00a0 Chun, commenting on Jameson\u2019s idea, \u201ccould it be that rather than resort to maps, we need to immerse ourselves in networked flows?\u201d49 <\/sup><\/strong>To gear ourselves as proxies, one might add. Post-net art does not solve the problem of visualizing post-representational power structures. \u201cThe point\u00a0\u00a0 of unrepresentability is the point of power. And the point of power today\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 is not in the image. The point of power resides in networks, computers, algorithms.\u201d50\u00a0 <\/sup><\/strong>In this sense, freezing the virtual in materiality, as post-net\u00a0 art does, means taking digital objects out of context and out of circulation, so we can disidentify with familiar things, in order to reconsider and interrupt our habits.<\/p>\n

The cloud is just one manifestation of a growing opacity\u2014 epistemological, political, and aesthetic\u2014and the proxy is its ambivalent counterpart, its spearhead and nemesis. Where such images burst into the material realm is also where their wholeness is challenged. In the wake of 1989\u2014as both a geopolitical and technological watershed\u2014the rise of proxy politics offers a counter-narrative to that of the seamless global- capitalist triumphalism that perfumes the cloud. But while the rise of the proxy marks a shift in strategy away from representational politics, the supposed smoothness of digital circulation, the famed borderlessness of\u00a0 \u201cthe web,\u201d is brought to a grinding, emphatic halt by the stringent, though differential, rule of biometric borders that fix it in place.<\/p>\n

Certainly, it is hard to get a grip on this complex reality we live in, but go try a robotic hand, an avatar, or a DNA vaporizer for a change.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

    \n
  1. See World Wide Web Foundation, \u201cHistory of the Web,\u201d online at: http:\/\/webfoundation.org\/about\/vision\/history-of-the-web\/.<\/li>\n
  2. See Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, \u201cThe Californian Ideology,\u201d Mute, 1 September 1995, online at: http:\/\/www.metamute.org\/editorial\/articles\/californian-ideology. For discussion on the promotion of radical individualism, libertarianism, and neoliberal economics in 1990s Silicon Valley industries; or, on the other hand, see these ideas reflected in the supposed freedoms of networks, indicated by Geert Lovink\u2019s suggestion to the nettime mailing list in 2004 that it is \u201c[n]ot internet protocols that are ruling the world… [but] in the end, G. W. Bush,\u201d as cited in Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). The latter is a book that examines exactly the relationships of power between networks, their protocols, and sovereignty.<\/li>\n
  3. See Armand Mattelart, Networking the World, 1794\u20132000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). See also Roland Wenzlhuemer, Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World: The Telegraph and Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).<\/li>\n
  4. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), p.10.<\/li>\n
  5. John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 34.<\/li>\n
  6. Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London: Verso, 2014), p. 15.<\/li>\n
  7. Frances Stonor Saunders, \u201cWhere on Earth are you?,\u201d London Review of Books, vol. 38, no. 5, 3 March 2016, online at: http:\/\/www.lrb.co.uk\/v38\/n05\/frances-stonorsaunders\/where-on-earth-are-you.<\/li>\n
  8. <\/li>\n
  9. Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), p. 130.<\/li>\n
  10. Saskia Sassen, \u201cWhen Territory Deborders Territoriality,\u201d Territory, Politics, Governance, vol. 1, no. 1 (2013), p. 23.<\/li>\n
  11. Jacques Ranci\u00e8re, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), pp. 101\u2013102.<\/li>\n
  12. See Michael J. Glennon, National Security and Double Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).<\/li>\n
  13. Hugh Roberts, \u201cThe Hijackers,\u201d London Review of Books, vol. 37, no. 14, 16 July 2015, pp. 5\u201310.<\/li>\n
  14. Boaz Levin and Vera Tollmann, \u201cProxy-Politik,\u201d Springerin, no. 3 (July 2015), pp. 8\u20139.<\/li>\n
  15. See Hito Steyerl, \u201cProxy Politics: Signal and Noise,\u201d e-flux journal, no. 60 (December 2014), online at: http:\/\/www.e-flux.com\/journal\/proxy-politics\/.<\/li>\n
  16. As argued in Lorraine Daston\u2019s introduction to Peter Galison\u2019s lecture \u201cSecrecy, Surveillance, and the Self\u201d (Mosse Lectures program, Humboldt University, Berlin, 5 November 2015).<\/li>\n
  17. See Natalie Bookchin and Alexei Shulgin, \u201cIntroduction to net.art (1994\u20131999),\u201d Easylife.org (March\/April 1999), online at: http:\/\/www.easylife.org\/netart\/.<\/li>\n
  18. Nicole Starosielski, \u201cUndersea Cable Network Operates in a State of Alarm [Excerpt],\u201d Scientific American, 27 March 2015, online at: http:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/undersea-cable-network-operates-in-a-state-of-alarm-excerpt\/.<\/li>\n
  19. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008), p. 102.<\/li>\n
  20. Florian Cramer, \u201cWhat is \u2018Post-digital\u2019?\u201d ARPJA, vol. 3, issue 1 (2014), online at: http:\/\/www.aprja.net\/?p=1318.<\/li>\n
  21. Keller Easterling, \u201cAn Internet of Things,\u201d e-flux journal, no. 31 (January 2012), online at: http:\/\/www.e-flux.com\/journal\/an-internet-of-things\/.<\/li>\n
  22. Neil Gershenfeld, \u201cHow to Make Almost Anything: The Digital Fabrication Revolution,\u201d Foreign Affairs, vol. 91, no. 6 (Nov\/Dec 2012), p. 44.<\/li>\n
  23. See Mark Weiser, \u201cUbiquitous Computing,\u201d 17 March 1996, online at: http:\/\/www.ubiq.com\/hypertext\/weiser\/UbiHome.html<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  24. Mark Weiser, \u201cThe world is not a desktop,\u201d Interactions, vol. 1, no. 1 (January 1994), pp. 7\u20138.<\/li>\n
  25. See Florian Sprenger, \u201cDie Vergangenheit der Zukunft: Kommentar zu \u2018Das kommende Zeitalter der Calm Technology,\u2019\u201d in Internet der Dinge: \u00dcber smarte Objekte, intelligente Umgebungen und die technische Durchdringung der Welt, Christoph Engemann and Florian Sprenger, eds. (Bielefeld: transcript, 2015), p.84.<\/li>\n
  26. Jesse Darling, \u201cPost-Whatever: #usermilitia,\u201d in You Are Here: Art After the Internet, ed. Omar Kholeif (Manchester: Cornerhouse, 2014), p. 139.<\/li>\n
  27. Michael Connor, \u201cPost-Internet: What It Is and What It Was,\u201d in You are Here: Art After the Internet, ed. Omar Kholeif (Manchester: Cornerhouse, 2014), p. 61.<\/li>\n
  28. See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977).<\/li>\n
  29. Cory Arcangel, Data Diaries, 2003, online at: http:\/\/turbulence.org\/project\/data-diaries\/<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  30. See Deep Dream Generator, \u201cAbout Deep Dream Generator,\u201d online at: http:\/\/deepdreamgenerator.com<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  31. Named after Polish-born, French mathematician and pioneer of fractal geometry Benoit Mandelbrot, this is a particular set of complex numbers that has a highly convoluted fractal boundary when plotted. According to Oxford English Dictionary Online: \u201cWhen represented graphically on the complex plane, the Mandelbrot set has a distinctive, highly convoluted fractal boundary which can only be drawn accurately by a computer. Its basic shape (to the naked eye) is that of a cardioid with one large and two smaller circular shapes attached symmetrically to the boundary. Each of these shapes has more, smaller shapes attached, and so on, so that no matter how much a portion of the boundary is magnified, further magnification always reveals more detail,\u201d online at:\u00a0 https:\/\/en.oxforddictionaries. com\/definition\/mandelbrot_set.<\/li>\n
  32. Alexander Mordvintsev, Christopher Olah, and Mike Tyka, \u201cInceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks,\u201d Google Research Blog, 17 June 2015, online at: http:\/\/googleresearch.blogspot.de\/2015\/06\/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  33. <\/li>\n
  34. Peters, The Marvelous Clouds. See also Cory Arcangel, Super Mario Movie, 2005, which presents a video of the puffy clouds from the Super Mario video game, online at: http:\/\/www.coryarcangel.com\/things-i-made\/2005-001-super-mario-movie<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  35. David M. Berry, \u201cThe Postdigital Constellation,\u201d Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design, David M. Berry and Michael Dieter, eds. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 56.<\/li>\n
  36. Ada O\u2019Higgins, \u201cNot your average bot: DISmiss presents AGNES,\u201d DIS, 7 October 2014, online at: http:\/\/dismagazine.com\/blog\/66584\/not-your-average-bot-dismiss-presents-agnes.<\/li>\n
  37. C\u00e9cile B. Evans, \u201cSoftware, Hard Problem,\u201d exhibition press release, Cubitt, London, 8 October\u201315 November 2015.<\/li>\n
  38. \u201cMark I worked around the clock on military projects, calculating massive mathematical tables. Principally it helped the Navy by computing tables for the design of equipment such as torpedoes and underwater detection systems. Other branches of the military sought its help in calculating the design of surveillance camera lenses, radar, and implosion devices for the atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project [sic].\u201d See Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences: Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, \u201cUse,\u201d The Mark I at Harvard, online at http:\/\/sites.harvard. edu\/~chsi\/markone\/use.html.<\/li>\n
  39. Significantly, it has been reported after Hoffman\u2019s death in February 2014 that the actor (notably famed for his role in Synecdoche, New York, directed by Charlie Kaufman, 2008, in which he plays a theater director who creates a life-size replica of New York) would be digitally rendered for the completion of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay \u2013 Part 2, 2015. Its director, Francis Lawrence, would later call this proposal \u201ca horrible, horrible thing,\u201d as cited in Matthew McLean, \u201cC\u00e9cile B. Evans: Hyperactive links,\u201d frieze d\/e, issue 18 (March\/April 2015), online at: https:\/\/frieze.com\/article\/c\u00e9cile-b-evans.<\/li>\n
  40. Cory Doctorow, \u201cChelsea Manning interview: DNA, big data, official secrecy, and citizenship,\u201d Boing Boing, 25 January 2016, online at: https:\/\/boingboing<\/a>. net\/2016\/01\/25\/chelsea-manning-interview-dna.html.<\/li>\n
  41. Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Stranger Visions, 2012\u20132013, online at: http:\/\/deweyhagborg.com\/projects\/stranger-visions.<\/li>\n
  42. Heather Dewey-Hagborg, \u201cGenetic Insecurities\u201d (lecture, IAPP, Navigate, Toronto, 2013), online at: https:\/\/www. youtube.com\/watch?v=cSBGloXzzxw.<\/li>\n
  43. Berry, \u201cThe Postdigital Constellation,\u201d p.53.<\/li>\n
  44. Aleksandra Domanovic\u00b4, From yu to me, 2014, online at: http:\/\/rhizome.org\/editorial\/2014\/may\/22\/unfinished-business-yugoslav-internet<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  45. Michael Connor, \u201cAleksandra Domanovic\u00b4\u2019s Internet Realism,\u201d Rhizome, 21 May 2014, online at: https:\/\/rhizome.org\/editorial\/2014\/may\/21\/yu-me-aleksandra-domanovics-internet-realism\/.<\/li>\n
  46. Steyerl, \u201cProxy Politics.\u201d<\/li>\n
  47. Joseph Vogl, \u201cBecoming-media: Galileo\u2019s Telescope,\u201d Grey Room, no. 29 (Fall 2007), p.23.<\/li>\n
  48. Stonor Saunders, \u201cWhere on Earth are you?\u201d<\/li>\n
  49. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), p. 75.<\/li>\n
  50. Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), p.92. Though certainly there is power in the ownership of vast image databanks like Getty Images, which recently have started distributing Corbis images (previously owned by Bill Gates) via a Chinese proxy, Visual China Group, with whom they have a long-lasting partnership. Getty now holds a monopoly on image distribution. See \u201cGetty Images and Visual China Group Partner in Exclusive Global Distribution Partnership for Extensive Visual Content Collection of Corbis Images,\u201d Getty Images Press Room, 22 January 2016, online at: http:\/\/press.gettyimages.com\/getty-and-corbis\/<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

     <\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    This text has benefitted from conversations with our colleagues at the Research Center for Proxy Politics, Hito Steyerl and Maximilian Schmoetzer, as well as numerous guests at the center. We would like to thank Zach Blas, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Paul Feigelfeld, Brian Holmes, Oleksiy Radynski, and Tiziana Terranova.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    On 28 March 2011, a 75-year-old Georgian woman named Haystam Shakardian set out into the forest near her home to scavenge for copper to sell as scrap. While digging, she<\/p>\n

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