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CYBORG SUBJECTS Discourses on Digital Culture Edited by Bonni Rambatan & Jacob Johanssen ISBN: 978-149-12715-1-3 C S yborg ubjects All articles are published under CC BY 3.0 unported 2010 and belong to their DISCOURSES ON DIGITAL CULTURE respective writers. Some rights reserved. Except research material, all images used are CC-licensed and belong to their respective owners. Some rights reserved. Cover art contains portions of The Wi-Fi Cyborg by Jung-Hua Liu Design by Bonni Rambatan Please duplicate and share this book with as many people as you please. information wants to be free. Editor ’ s Preface I n 2010, we set out to create a platform for two things we love and value: freedom of critical thought and digital culture. We wanted to create something that would testify of something major of our contemporary age. Having grown up with the Internet, we, the unknown digital kids, hoped to create a website that would be different from traditional academia: Cyborg Subjects was born. The major idea behind it was not only to freely publish articles that dealt with a broad range of themes and debates of the zeitgeist but to create a transparent and lively debate. We wanted to have an open review system where everything would be published and everyone could add their 2 virtual cents to an essay or artwork. This was an attack on the monopoly publishers in academia. This anthology is a compilation of essays published in the online journal “Cyborg Subjects: Discourses on Digital Culture” circa 2010-2012. The journal started out as an experiment: curated works—artistic or essay—submitted to us via e-mail were posted online, free for anyone to review (with comments) and/or adapt (by creating new posts linking back to the original article). A common thread that links all papers and ideas in this volume is that of the digital. The digital and with it the idea that something intangible and virtual has v Cyborg Subjects Discourses on Digital Culture actual and radical impacts on our contemporary world. We wanted to explore this humanity, and can be read as a warning to proceed with caution as we venture further and decided to focus on three major developments: digital subjectivity, or further into the realm of digital subjectivity. what we call the posthuman; how this subjectivity creates new political discourses, Part Two, Sharing, takes on this venture and proceeds to the second as exemplified in the Wikileaks polemic; and finally, how those discourses enable moment: when digital subjectivity turns into global resistance, specifically in digital subjects to have strong, direct, real-world impacts, as exemplified in the the Wikileaks polemic. Indeed, our second call for papers was made to garner 2011 revolutions. response from intellectuals in those fields. The opening article, Some General Due to lack of interest, however, our open review system was quick to lose ideas on P2P Relationality, a guest article by Michel Bauwens, links the notion its mass. Although initial traction seemed to be good—many, like ourselves, hailed of new subjectivities with ethics of sharing and potentials of spirituality in P2P the Cyborg Subjects platform as a novel discourse-generating system in which movements. Afterwards, Wikileaks: Signs and Seeds of Future Utopias by Aliki “theoretical production will be able to keep up with the pace of technology”*— Tzatha discusses how Wikileaks sheds light to contemporary political culture and interaction was little, and kept decreasing (along with the number of quality the taste for transhumanism it reflects. A ‘Turning of the Tables’ by Zakary Paget submissions) through each subsequent call for papers. examines Wikileaks as an exemplary tool of counter-surveillance against authority. This anthology gathers the top three articles submitted to our platform from In A New Style of News Reporting by Stefan Baack, we explore the idea of data- each of our three calls of papers, additional articles from editors and guest writers, driven journalism, or really the new trend of news discourse production. and one experimental article submission as a closing note. In addition, the cover of The talk of shared discourses shifts our discussion from Part Two to Part this book, submitted by Chinese artist Jung-Hua Liu, also serves a textual purpose, Three, Streets, marking the third moment: when people with a shared global the statement of which can be read in this book’s appendix. consciousness, enabled by digital networks, begin taking to the streets. Already The organization of this book—which follows the organization of topics of present in protests against the prosecution of Julian Assange, this movement evolves our calls for papers—is as follows: into a stronger form in the 2011 revolutions. From the Arab Springs, Spain’s 15M, Part One, Subjects, is an exploration on the question “What is the Cyborg to the global Occupy movement, one finds a similar thesis: technological networks Subject?” Submitted by intellectuals from various fields—from music to film to are today’s main catalyst for global revolutions. From Networks to the Streets psychoanalysis—this section represents the first moment: the conception of digital by Aline Carvalho explores how such shared narratives in digital networks allow subjectivity. Robert Barry’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Violins? speaks of global movements. In The Occupy Movement as a Politics for All, Alessandro transcending humanist aesthetics, specifically in the field of music. Finding the Zagato examines the shift in politics from conventional representation to something Local by Siri Driessen and Roos van Haaften questions spatial notions in our virtually available to everybody. Peter Nikolaus Funke takes the examination one digitized world. Bonni Rambatan’s essay Are Trees the New Proletariat? explores step further with The Current Logic of Resistance, proposing a set of logic for posthumanity not through digitized networks, but instead through its obverse, digital subjectivities. i.e. ecology. The final two essays, “Know Thyself” ... Again by Dustin Cohen and Included in the appendices of this book are some experimental notes by Glenn We Shall Overcome! by Jacob Johanssen, observe posthumanity under critical Muschert, Experimental and Extracurricular Notes on the Network Environment, psychoanalytic lenses, questioning what exactly is lost when we claim to transcend questioning the very notion of networks and networked discourses itself, and Jung- vi vii Cyborg Subjects Contents Hua Liu’s artist statement for his Wi-Fi Cyborg project, a part of which is this book’s cover artwork. The two essays, although developed independently of one another, can be read perfectly complimentarily, the latter developing for the former Editor’s Preface v a highly contextual example for the scope of discussion in this book. Contents ix We would like to thank everyone who believed in us and supported us, Writers’ Biographies x in particularly our board members Claes Thorén, Lucille Holmes, Isaac Leung, André Nusselder, Dinu Munteanu, Aziz Douai, Matthew Flisfeder, Alison Harvey, Subjects 1 Panayiota Tsatsou, C.S.H.N. Murthy, Dustin Cohen, Alvis Choi, Jon Epstein and Do Androids Dream of Electric Violins? 3 Heather Kelley. Finding the Local 13 We hope that this anthology will result in further debate, which you too can Are Trees the New Proletariat? 23 join at www.cyborgsubjects.org. “Know Thyself”… Again 34 Stay posthuman! We Shall Overcome! 42 Sharing 53 The Internet, March 2013 Bonni Rambatan Some General Ideas on P2P Relationality 54 Jacob Johanssen Wikileaks: Signs and Seeds of Future Utopias 85 A Turning of the Tables 101 A New Style of News Reporting 113 Streets 123 From Networks to the Streets 125 The Occupy Movement as a Politics for All 142 The Current Logic of Resistance 159 Appendices 165 Experimental Notes on the Network Environment 167 The Wi-Fi Cyborg 183 viii CCyybboooooooooooooooooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggggggggggggggggg SSSSSSSuuuuuuuuubbbbbbbbbjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeccccccccccccttss Discourses on Digital Culture Dustin Cohen is Executive Assistant at the Legislative Assembly of Ontario. He also holds an MA in Media Studies from the University of Western Ontario, and has a long standing interest in the philosophy of science and technology, humanism and critiques of trans/posthumanism. Blog: Cybject.com. Siri Driessen studied history and cultural analysis at the University of Writers’ Biographies Amsterdam. Her research considers philosophy of history and science, photography and new media. Roos van Haaften works as visual artist and is based in Amsterdam. Her Stefan Baack acquired his Bachelor’s degree in German Language and research concerns the usage of space within an urban context, especially the Literature Studies and in Cultural Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany. overlap of nature and culture within the cityscape. Currently he is completing his Master’s degree in Media Culture. His main focus is on journalism, democracy and new media. Peter Nikolaus Funke is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and International Affairs at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Michel Bauwens is the founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer His research focuses on social movements, new media, and class formation under Alternatives and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the globalizing capitalism. Peter also just launched a project on progressive groups and exploration of peer production, governance, and property. He currently lives in movements in the Tampa Bay area. Chiang Mai, Thailand. Learn more at http://p2pfoundation.net/Bio Jacob Johanssen studied Communication Studies, Sociology and Classical Robert Barry is a freelance writer and composer, based in Paris. His music Philology at the University of Salzburg (AT) and completed his MA in Media can be heard at littleother.blogspot.com. He is currently at work on a book about and Communicatons at Goldsmiths (UK). He is currently a PhD student at the the history of futurism in opera. University of East London (UK). His work is broadly situated within psychosocial studies, media studies and cultural studies. Jacob’s research interests include Aline Carvalho graduated in Media Studies from Fluminense Federal (object-relations) psychoanalysis and the media, media ethics, psychosocial studies, University, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and took her Masters from the Paris 8 University critical theory, as well as digital culture. in France. Her book, ‘Cultural production in Brazil: From Tropicalia to Cultural Hotspots’, was published in 2009. An activist and researcher on digital culture, she Jung-Hua Liu is an artist and her main media is web technology, including is currently developing an investigation on collective action on digital networks. HTML5, CSS, Javascript and PHP&MySQL. She has an M.A. degree in Archaeology Web: www.tropicaline.wordpress.com x xi Cyborg Subjects Discourses on Digital Culture from the National Taiwan University and will graduate as a fine art PhD from the Europe and Asia. A graduate of English Literature, he now studies Management University of Leeds in UK. Her concern is the change of the perception of human in Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurships at Bandung Institute of Technology, beings under the effect of popular network facilities. Her artwork focused on Indonesia. He also actively writes novels and makes films. uncertainties caused by the cross-boundary of human beings and machines. Cloud Tarot is her latest work, and she simulated Cloud Computing to tell a fortune via Aliki Tzatha currently lives in Athens, Greece and works in planning and Tarot reading. The combination of the tradition of human’s fortune telling and a implementing educational programs for adults. Her academic background is in buzz word in technology contributes to the infinite complication of our future, no Communication and Media Studies, in which she received her first degree from matter as a human or cyborg. the University of Athens, and in Conflict Studies and Human Rights, along with her master’s degree from the University of Utrecht. After a short but valuable Glenn Muschert is Associate Professor in the Sociology, Criminology, and academic experience in Bergamo and Perpignan, where she initiated an Erasmus Social Justice Studies Programs at Miami University. He received his B.S. in Mundus PhD in new media and political culture, she has worked as a journalist, International Area Studies from Drexel University in 1992 and Ph.D. in Sociology researcher, secretary, baby-sitter and waiter. Her research interests stretch from from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2002. Glenn’s areas of scholarly critical engagements with the dominant theories of mobilization and collective interest lie in the sociological study of crime and social problems, including the action, to ethnographical approaches to virtual communities and digital culture. mass media framing of high profile crimes, school shootings, missing persons, and social control through surveillance technologies. He has published over two dozen Alessandro Zagato was born in Italy and received a PhD in Sociology articles and chapters in media studies, sociology, and criminology books/journals. in 2012 at the National University of Ireland, where he has also been teaching Recently, he has edited the following volumes: School Shootings: Mediatized social movements. Currently, he works as a research associate at the Benemerita Violence in the Global Age (Emerald, 2012); Responding to School Violence: Universidad Autonoma de Puebla (BUAP), Mexico. Under the supervision of Prof. Confronting the Columbine Effect (Lynne Rienner, 2013); The Digital Divide in John Holloway he is developing a project on rebel indigenous communities in the International Context (Routledge, 2013). state of Michoacan, West Mexico. Zachary Paget is a Consultant in FleishmanHillard’s Corporate Practice Group. Throughout his MA in Carleton University, he analysed and wrote extensively about contemporary communications topics, from digital media’s impact on shaping public policy to the use of social media to engage young voters in electoral politics. Bonni Rambatan is an independent critical theorist and cultural researcher with a main focus in digital culture, psychoanalysis, and Left-wing political theory. He has given talks and published writings in various seminars and anthologies in xii xiii CCyybboorrgg SSuubbjjeeccttss Discourses on Digital Culture Part one Subjects b xxiivv 1 http://www.flickr.com/photos/chiaralily/5008136726/ SSuubbjjeeccttss Do Androids Dream of Electric Violins? Robert Barry Do Androids Dream of Electric Violins? Music and the Posthuman F rom Gattaca‘s twelve fingered pianist to The Fifth Element‘s extra- terrestrial opera diva, science fiction has offered us numerous examples of post-human musicians, but considerably fewer post-human composers. And yet the concert music of the twentieth century, the century if not of science fiction’s origin then of its efflorescence, may be characterised by a burgeoning desire to transcend the humanist aesthetics of the romantic era, to go beyond the expression of emotional feeling, and the limitations of entrenched ‘good’ taste, in order to explode the formal boundaries of music. As models of artificial intelligence attained sufficient complexity towards the century’s end to give us the first fully computerised, truly ‘inhuman’, composers (in science fact and not fiction), what could be more disappointing than that such mechanoid melodists should finally prove themselves human, all too human. As HAL’s logic and memory circuits are removed, one by one, towards the end of Stanley Kubrick’s (1968) film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, its disembodied voice compulsively repeats, “I can feel it” as if answering in advance the insistent demand of Larry Heard’s Chicago House classic, ‘Can You Feel It?’ Finally, his voice distorts, slows down, drops in pitch, beginning a slurred, almost ‘drunken’ b 22 33 http://www.flickr.com/photos/mitch98000/3320576686/ Subjects Do Androids Dream of Electric Violins? rendition of Harry Dacre’s music hall hit, ‘Daisy Bell: A Bicycle Built for Two’. The he composed extensively for in the 1790s, and the subsequent influence of this scene is an homage to the first ever ‘singing’ computer (and its first ever song), an experience on the lively popular works of his London period – most obviously the IBM 7094, programmed by John Kelly and Carol Lockbaum (with accompaniment “Clock” Symphony No. 101 in D Major. Equally, the career and playing style of by Max Matthews) at Bell Labs, in 1961. Visiting the telecom company’s electronic Frederic Chopin was inseparable from his commercial involvement with the piano music studios and hearing the computer perform ‘Daisy Bell’, Arthur C. Clarke was manufacturers, Pleyel, and the technical advances made in piano construction so impressed he decided to incorporate the scene into his story. It is as though the during this period. trauma of this intrusive, undesired shutdown had sent HAL atavistically back to a The increasing sophistication of the piano offered musicians the promise kind of species memory, singing the songs of its distant relative, just as stranded of an “orchestra of the drawing-room,” (Brinsmead, 1879: 107) in like fashion to mountaineers might find themselves singing their native folk songs. the computerised sequencers of the late twentieth century. But whilst Chopin was Although the automatic sequencing of the IBM 7094 (not to mention the receiving the patronage of Pleyel, across the channel, a certain Charles Babbage vacuum tube-powered RCA Synthesizer, installed at Columbia University a little was busily developing a more universally recognised precedent to today’s PCs. under five years earlier), count as important firsts in the development of electronic Few can be said to have understood better or felt greater sympathy for Babbage’s music, looking forward to the 303s and 505s, the Synclaviers and Fairlights, which ambitions than Lord Byron’s estranged daughter, Ada Lovelace. Lady Lovelace would dominate virtually all popular music by the century’s end. They represented appended an in-depth prolegomenon to Italian mathematician, Luigi Menabrea’s just as much the culmination of a long history of musical automata which goes exposition of Babbage’s ‘Analytical Engine’ – longer, indeed, than the report itself back as far as 850 AD, when the Banu Musa brothers of Baghdad published their – in which she proposed its use for the composition of “elaborate and scientific Book of Ingenious Devices (Kitab al-Hiyal). Commissioned by the Caliph, Abu pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.” (Lovelace, 1842) But Ja’far Al-Mamun ibn Harun, and intended to be a compendium of engineering though she regarded his Engine as “a friend” (Plant, 1998: 5), Lovelace remained knowledge from Hellenic Greece, the Banu Musa brothers added an interest in skeptical, as cognitive scientist, Douglas Hofstadter (1979: 25) is keen to stress, automation and control engineering that was all their own, most ingeniously in the of any possibility that the machine might develop thought – or indeed music – of form of a mechanical flautist, driven by a water wheel (Koetsier 2001: 590) and a its own. hydropowered organ. The latter of these two provided the basic model – “a cylinder One hundred and fifty years later, Hofstadter’s friend, David Cope would have with raised pins on the surface” – for mechanised music up until the nineteenth no such qualms. In 1979, the former published his seminal, Gödel, Escher, Bach: century (Fowler 1967). An Eternal Golden Braid, in which he argued, apropos an algorithmic composition Much as later musical automata may have been intended, as Tallis (1971: by Max Matthews using ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’ as source, that it 10) puts it, “to bring the pop music of the nineteenth century into the drawing would take a computer sufficiently human-like in its internal structure that we room,” their contents was far from limited to popular songs like ‘The Last Rose of would “feel comfortable in identifying with it” (Hofstadter 1979: 609), before he Summer’ and ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’. No doubt Manuel DeLanda’s could comfortably say a piece was “composed by a computer.” The following year, (1991: 3) “robot historian” would have been interested in the way Joseph Haydn beset by composer’s block, Cope began working on a system that would eventually adapted his style to suit the distinctive timbre and capabilities of the musical clocks make Hofstadter want to eat his words. That system was called Experiments in 4 5 Subjects Do Androids Dream of Electric Violins? Musical Intelligence (or ‘Emmy’ – after its initials), and created what Cope dubbed as source material Mozart’s Musikalisches Würfelspiel, along with extracts from ‘Virtual Music’ – a category of “machine-created composition which attempts to works by Chopin, Schoenberg, Cage and Hiller, amongst others. Not just the music, replicate the style but not the actual notes of existing music” (Cope 2001: 3) but “all aspects of the work were meticulously randomized” (ibid.) up to and through a process of recombination. including instructions, issued with the Nonesuch records release, for altering the Keen to establish an honourable precedent for his work, Cope (2001: 5) volume, treble and bass on your home stereo. compares his system to the Musikalisches Würfelspiel – the musical dice games For Cage, the purpose of such experiments was precisely to “let sounds be popular in the late eighteenth century, most famously Mozart’s minuet K 516f themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human (though the attribution of this work to Mozart has not been authenticated), and sentiments.” (Cage 1961: 10) Cage’s intention was precisely to transcend the Haydn’s Philarmonic Joke of 1790. But Emmy’s protocol’s are both more elaborate human, and human-centred aesthetics, towards something closer to the working and more automatic. Cope would feed vast swathes of the work of a given composer of the natural environment. And he is far from alone amongst modern composers. – most frequently and most successfully, Chopin – into his computer, which would When Philip Glass (in Scott Hicks’s 2007 film, Glass: A Portrait of Philip in then recombine fragments of the given works into new pieces based on forms of Twelve Parts) says that “writing music is listening to music” and compares his both syntactic and semantic ‘meshing’ – i.e. the notes of a given fragment may be compositional process to tapping into an underground river, he could be parroting transformed in various ways but must link up smoothly with their predecessors Cage. Throughout the twentieth century, all manner of composers, from Charles Ives and successors; and the fragment must maintain the same grammatical relation to to Witold Lutoslavski, employed some form of open form or aleatoric procedures the overall work, in terms of its role as either statement, preparation, extension, in their work, frequently leaving aspects of the piece undecided until the moment antecedent, or consequent (Hofstadter 2001: 45-6). Emmy works by identifying of the performance. signatures and templates in the style of the input pieces then spewing out virtually Pierre Boulez remained skeptical of such efforts, claiming that in his limitless swathes of imitations that have proved remarkably successful at fooling experience, whenever you give performers vague instructions or undetermined the experts into believing they are hearing ‘the real thing’. elements, “you can be quite sure that they will always produce clichés… what can David Cope is not the only twentieth century composer to find fellow feeling he do? He can only turn to information that he been given on some earlier occasion, in the dice games of late classicism. In 1951, John Cage was given a copy of the in fact to what he has already played.” (Boulez 1986a: 461) But Boulez himself, ancient Chinese text, the I Ching, a system of divination based on chance selection in the works Structures I and II, used a form of integral serialism, extending the amongst sixty-four different hexagrams, each representing a different oracular principles of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method to every aspect of the composition. statement. The I Ching seemed to open up a whole new phase in Cage’s composition His stated intention being to “eradicate from my vocabulary absolutely every trace in which elements of chance and indeterminacy dominated aspects of form and of the conventional,” (Boulez 1986b: 61) with “the conventional” understood as an construction. The apogee of this new phase may be his (1967) collaboration with almost inevitable pitfall of “the human”. LeJaren Hiller, HPSCHD, “an enormous theatre-piece with fifty-two channel Both Boulez and LeJaren Hiller have at various times experimented with tape-orchestra, seven performing harpsichordists, and equally impressive visual the use of computers in composing musical works. Most notoriously perhaps in resources and unique audience circumstances.” (Husarik 1983: 1) The piece used Hiller’s (1957) collaboration with Leonard Isaacson, Illiac Suite, an algorithmic 6 7