I want to suggest that there is also something at stake in the remake of new media as a quest for ‘total’ artwork or for an engagement with the artwork via total sensory immersion that is not merely Romanticist but belongs to a contemporary politics of digital proto-fascism. If new media, and especially new media art, does elicit a kind of synaesthetic re-organisation of sensory modalities, then how might this be understood as productive of new/different rather than given/existing sensory interrelations? How might new media open up and onto the immanent relation that sensation carries to something outside itself? I am clearly not interested, then, in understanding new media syn-aesthetics on the current ‘model’ of neurologically-based synaesthesia, especially if we understand synaesthesia here as an originary integrative state or process. And yet I am interested in invoking a transdisciplinary understanding that gets at a certain ‘stickiness’ between the digital and cognition and perception. In pulling out the threads of this ‘stick’, we might get at ways in which to understand distributive forces and relations as transformative within digital aesthetics and as fundamental modes of organising cognitive-perceptual systems. Having said as much, I am not offering any contributions to neurological knowledge here; instead I want to enact the slippage of neurosciences and digital aesthetics via other vectors than unitary ones.

There may be a different way of understanding both synaesthesia and data relationally rather than according to a totalising imperative. By taking this approach, the neurological and the digital might inhabit each other rather differently. But this necessitates first understanding synaesthesia via a rethinking of Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of the different processes and expressions of synthesising – connective, disjunctive and conjunctive and their interrelation (rearticulated with reference to Brian Massumi and Jose Gil’s work on synaesthesia). In particular, I am interested in understanding the ‘syn’ in synaesthesia as accumulation, operations of joining and of the transduction of sensory modalities and data formats rather than the presumption of an originary unity that organises either the sensory and/or informatic fields.

Data, too, needs to be seen equally as a relational field especially with respect to its immanent capacity for programmability.That is to say, there is no pure data – data exists only in a relation to software, or as Florian Cramer puts it:
‘There is, after all, no such thing as data without programs, and hence no digital arts without the software layers they either take for granted, or design themselves.’
To understand both the synaesthetic and new media aesthetics relationally, then, is to move away from the desire and economy for primary perceptual unity or total artwork and to seek instead another arena for understanding relationality – that of the difference engine.

We can proceed by looking at the extent to which an overlap exists between prominent neurological conceptions of the synaesthetic and dominant models of the movement and flows of data articulated within new media aesthetics. Contemporary research in the neurosciences generally accepts synaesthesia as a real and anatomically based phenomenon of human perception that is located in some form of neurobiological architecture. While there is variation in the ways in which synaesthesia manifests in perception – coloured-hearing, coloured-graphism, visual-smelling and so forth – most neuroscientists agree that synaesthesia involves the human involuntary and repeated invocation of one sensory modality by another in response to a perceptual stimulus. (See R. Cytowic). Recent neurological research into synaesthesia can be ‘sorted’ into two prevailing approaches: the idea that ordinary neural ‘pruning’ in human development fails to occur leaving in place an originary synaesthetic brain; the idea that different sensory modalities and their functions are located in separated areas or modules of the brain, which are ‘cross-activated’ in synaesthetes. (Hubbard and Ramachandran, 2005)

There are two major competing neurological hypotheses for synaesthesia: Cross-Modal Transfer (CMT) and Neonatal Synaesthesia (NS). In fact, one derives from the other but makes more radical neurological claims. The CMT hypothesis is slightly older, gaining ground during the late 1970s and 1980s and was developed by Meltzoff and Borton. and posits that infants have the ability to recognise objects in more than one sensory modality. So, for example, something that a baby has only touched can nonetheless be visually recognised by it. Although the process involved in this common infantile experience involves the transfer of sensory ‘data’ across modes – haptic to visual – the recognition has, at its basis, an ability to abstract representations of objects by infants (observed in as early as a 29-day old infant). And it is this capacity for abstraction that points to a potential arena for the joining – the ‘syn’ – of all the sensory modalities. The CMT hypothesis rests upon the proposition that synaesthesia is primarily a function of inherent cognitive capacities for abstraction and representation in the human brain.

The NS hypothesis – more recent and supported by neurologists such as Simon Baron-Cohen – asserts, instead, that synaesthesia is a primary and originary state of infantile perception rather than cognition. Up until about 4 months, the ‘state’ of sensory input is undifferentiated and cross-modal. It is neurological development from this period on that then begins the process of ‘normal’ sensory differentiation into separate modes. However, some human brains do not fully differentiate, leaving these originary ‘cross-modal’ pathways active. In these cases, adult synaesthesia will persist and a person may experience the typical ‘symptoms’ of involuntary call-up of colours in conjunction with hearing certain sounds. The NS hypothesis rests upon the notion that the originary totality of perception can be sought in the idea of neonatal sensory nondifferentiation.

In the CMT model, it is only abstraction which makes cross-modal between the senses possible; in the NS model it is totalisation that supports interrelations of sensory pathways. There is a fundamental symmetry, then, between the competing hypotheses even though they differ as to their developmental positioning and neuro-systemic location (cognition vs. perception) of synaesthesia. In other words, at the heart of both understandings of the synaesthetic lies the ‘ground’ of an originary unity of the individual brain – either fundamentally perceptual or cognitive. A number of neuroscientists have attempted to explain the basis for this unity – locating it in genetic factors or via an understanding of neural architecture as modular (See, Mark E.S. Bailey and Keith J. Johnson, ‘Synaesthesia: Is a genetic analysis Feasible?’ Synaesthesia: Classic and Contemporary Readings,John E. Harrison and Simon Baron-Cohen eds, Blackwell: Oxford, 1997,pp.182–207; Gabriel M.A. Segal, ‘Synaesthesia: Implications for Modularity of Mind” Synaesthesia: Classic and Contemporary Readings,pp211–23). Others stay put at the presumption of the originary infantile unity as a kind of precondition for synaesthesia. At any rate, whether explained by this unity or by some preceding unit – the gene, the module – unity is deemed sufficient cause. The problem I wish to return to here is that it is precisely the unity that requires explanation and explanation cannot be furnished by recourse to some smaller unit and its concerted interrelations with other units in either genetic or modular neural networks. For in fact what we are seeking is an understanding precisely of the sensory, perceptual or cognitive actions of unification (or rather of joining) by investigating synaesthesia in the first place…

This of course brings us to the problems posed by classical models of ontogenesis, which, as Gilbert Simondon pointed out, attempt to explain a process via the outcome of that process (‘The Genesis of the Individual’ Incorporations, Zone Books, MIT Press, 1992). Hence the ‘unity’ of synaesthesia (emergent outcome) becomes an explanation for how it is that the senses join or cross. The latter, I am suggesting by referring this problem to the question of individuation that Simonodon raises, are therefore processes not simply outcomes. I will return to this point later in this post when I attempt to understand current artistic experiments in cross-processing digital signal syn-aesthetically. What I want to suggest is that similarly we cannot approach the digital as exemplary of synaesthetic experience, if by this we mean that interfacing with digital art presents us with a totality of sensory engagement. If we are to deploy a digital syn-aesthetics, this must be sought in the extent to which artwork incorporates us into its unfolding as processual transformation(s). But this may also necessitate giving up the idea of the artwork as a totality to be had in the realm of experience, where it seems to have shifted since losing its objecthood. New subjectivations must follow from this – not only for ‘the artist’, ‘the viewer’ but also for ‘art’. It would seem obvious that if we are to take the idea of a network society seriously, then we must also take seriously the distributed forces and formations through which cultural and aesthetic experience and engagement are also making themselves. We need to look not for art in the net but the networks that inhabit art and that produce its deformations.
To be continued…

ACT – assemblage for collective thought – is an ongoing conceptual and aesthetic collaboration, an assemblage of technologies and techniques for collaboration. It enables participants to think collectively. By “think” here we do include thinking conceptually. However, following a century that has had to come to terms with thinking through aesthetic processes, we also mean thinking affectively, via images, texts and sounds. More than this, ACT asks what kind of thought is produced in the mix – in the middle of the very act of collaboration, when DJing, VJing, dancing in front of a camera perhaps, are all opened up to the mix. Is there a different quality of thought? A different experience of thinking? An especially collaborative thought?

So much new media composition and production still concerns itself with technological conduits and infrastructure. We wanted to fashion a kind of assemblage that explored new media to produce new concepts. The assemblage, then, had to be mediated via technologies and software such as wikis, distributed media sites and servers and video and audio editing and remixing packages. But none of these are the focus of or rationale for ACT. New media as various systems of technics (that is, the deployment of technologies as part of the constitution of ourselves as humans, sentient beings and subjectivities) are seen as some ‘collaborators’ among others in this project. Although not autonomous, the machines and technologies we deploy in making mediated concepts play a part in changing and shaping the collectivity of ACT’s thinking processes. We found ourselves following particular pathways in the process of collaboration and in remixing all the media material for ACT performances as a result of both the potentialities and constraints of the media assemblages we contrived and which contrived us.

Screenshot from ‘Task 4: Become empirical -
‘radically’ of the ACT wiki

[for video rough cuts without sound - re-assemble the assemblage,
radical empiricism]

ACT began in 2006, using rich and networked media, remix software and techniques. Its first manifestation involved a small group of invited participants who work with text, video, audio and software in and on collaboration: Dragana Antic, Michele Barker, Gillian Fuller, Mathew Fuller, Lisa Gye, Ross Harley, Brett Neilson, Anna Munster, Andrew Murphie, Kate Richards, Trebor Scholz and Mat Wall-Smith. For a two week period during June 2006, this group contributed to a structured wiki by responding to ‘tasks’ concerning collaborative thought, relations and partnerships. Material deposited in the wiki space and in external web publishing portals such as YouTube and Multiply was downloaded, reformatted (text was converted to audio, for example) and taken into VJing and DJing packages. It was then re-presented as two different remixes at the ISEA 2006 (International Symposium of Electronic Arts), ZeroOne San Jose Festival in San Jose on August 12 as the final performance/event of the ISEA Symposium. The mixes took place using the sound system of the large auditorium, along with its three large screens and many flat screen televisions distributed throughout the audience.

In the first mix, brain scans met low-res video of dogs fetching sticks from the water, animated graffiti and a morphed video looping between Immanual Kant and Robert Moog (both champions of synthesis). Carefully modulated computer vocalisations of texts about honey as the result of making collective thought ‘in the hive’ met transmissions caught from Messier74, “a spiral galaxy that makes up part of the Pisces constellation” (Mat Wall-Smith). The latter were caught, “using a satellite dish (mixing bowl) and some custom electronics”.

The second remix of the material followed directly afterwards and included the use of live feeds – camera and microphone available for use by the audience on the day.These were remixed into, and used to trigger different visual effects upon, the ACT material. The audience brought cut-out shapes and textures (such as scrunched plastic), objects (cigarette lighters), their faces, their dancing bodies, into the mix in real time. After the performance, one of the audience members commented on the visual effect of mixing pre-produced material with live audience participation. She noted that this gave a kind of layering effect to the mix, where ‘hi-tech’ met ‘lo-tech’ and that what was interesting about that kind of remixing was they way it visually revealed the material strata of media technologies.

This initial collaboration and performance comprise the first stage in an ongoing production of assemblages that thinks collectively – assemblages through which you think, which think through you, and which “evolve” along with shifts in thought. With this initial event we are dipping our toes into the technozoosemiotic “ether” within which diverse and rapidly mutating semiotic forms, along with diverse mediated and collective practices, have drawn breath. The aim for the future is for divergent forms of ACT to take on a life of their own. Maybe in a DVD-ROM that is infinitely remixable and which helps you take your thoughts places you never expected. Maybe in a shifting online database of media elements, codes, and evolving tags (thanks to Kate Richards for this idea..).

ACT also stages the inevitable tensions raised between “forced collaboration” and “free cooperation” in thought production with other humans and nonhumans. At the same time, in constantly returning the process of collaboration to the mix, it attempts to draw collaboration away from the temptation to freeze the process in one iteration of it. There is a sense in which ACT only occurs within the movement of the images and sounds, the bodies thinking through the encounters within this mix. Collaboration here is indeed forced, but in a very different sense to common network models of collaboration in infocapitalism; that is, where everyone profits by pooling their pre-existing institutional needs for funding and recognition. In ACT, collaborators are propelled into the mix, away from pre-existing stances, assumptions and forms of recognition. Cooperation is free – although here freedom is only the freedom to cooperate in forms of expression here and now. Cooperation is also premised on the project itself – commitment to its continuation, deformation and mutation rather than to obligation to other players. Freedom is also freedom to leave the project and the mix without remorse and regret, to take the project somewhere else, to let the project continue without an individual’s presence.

ACT responds to the stagnation of new media orthodoxies as these rapidly fall back into a sometimes high tech version of old media efficient communications bound up with new forms of property. It is also a response to the provocations of the like of Trebor Scholz, Geert Lovink and Christoph Spehr, concerning new forms of collaboration and the need to open up these within new media. Scholz, Spehr, Lovink and others held a conference on Free Cooperation where the idea of using networks and art to explore processual collaboration was worked through. In a similar way, we hope that ACT will remain responsive to change, to the fact that, as Brian Massumi puts it, “change changes” constantly (Parables for the Virtual: 10).

The processes of making and remaking ACT felt like thinking collectively. Not only ideas, but images evolved, mutated, merged, diverged. The mix was a constant surprise, especially when it involved the audience – there was a real sense that thinking was occurring collaboratively. One could never say – “that’s beautiful and I made it”, only “that’s beautiful” or even, “that’s awful but that’s what happened through the project and in the mix”.

There was some stringency needed to realise a colloborative working space, especially as we wanted to enact it remotely. We had to really think through the tasks in both rigorous and open term and provide formats and ‘rules’ for images, video, length of text and so on. The latter were, of course, ignored from the beginning, although not, we are pleased to say, the former. So whereas rules were transgressed, tasks were committed to – a nice balance. Each task had its own wiki page, with an extra page for an optional related task. Of course, ACT is infinitely open to other tasks, but the recent version had six:

1. Return to Nature

Task 1. Collaborate with the natural world
Find a relationship in nature which assists you to produce thought, image, video or sound. Produce the text, images, video or sound and leave them below.
Task 1.1 optional.
Become either cellular or marine in your mode of collaborating.

(for video go here – this is a rough cut without sound)

2. Be Passionate

Task 2. Be passionate with another
Give vent to any passion that was produced in relation to another living or nonliving thing. Leave your response below.
Task 2.1 optional.
Make it almost monochrome.

3. Work the Abstract

Task 3. Create an abstract collaborative relationship
By this we mean you could also do something very concrete, like using sound to feedback on itself and modify the original signal in order to embody the abstract process of modulation.
Task 3.1 optional
Modulate the modulation.

4. Become Empirical – Radically

Task 4. Work the real, experienced relations in a radical empiricism, as per William James
Only deal with the real relations and the transitional experience involved.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system. Elements may indeed be redistributed, the original placing of things getting corrected, but a real place must be found for every kind of thing experienced, whether term or relation, in the final philosophic arrangement. (William James, Essays in Radical Experience:42)

Task 4.1 optional
record the changes in your immediate relations.

5. Re-Assemble the Assemblage

Task 5. Re-assemble the assemblage
Create changes in the social and technical assemblages so that all the elements participate differently.
Task 5.1 optional
Make the assemblage cycle.

6. Conserve the Virtual

Task 6. Make a contribution to virtual ecology
Do your bit for conservation – make something that preserves or enriches our relations to the virtual. By the virtual we
mean the real reservoir of relations between all the different potentials in the assemblage.
Task 6.1 optional
…in 3 seconds

ACT is special not in its originality, but in its tendencies – its very own desire to keep changing, to diverge, to find new homes and turn them upside down, to try things out, to break down (the eternal accident of mix technologies as they stretch the assemblage), to reform differently. One of these tendencies is movement away from the proprietal, from funding regulation – towards the new emerging culture of constant co-creation which truly makes mass media redundant. Its politics is something like that of an open source, multi-mediated, cross-signal processing folk culture. But it does not value ‘openeness’ per se. Rather it wants to contribute to an ecology of media practices that respects the interrelations of open and closed systems and the elements that comprise and cut across all of these. ACT is desperate to break out of the academy with its specialisation and management of performance. We think it would work well in clubs where a space and time for thought might just add something to that mix.

… the mobile phone projects are far away from our traditional background. They are nomadic devices, and they make us think of different artistic interventions conceived to be experienced on the move, in between, while doing other things. They are not contemplative at all .. they point to new reading contexts, and as always, it is important to keep in mind that you do not talk about a world of reading without talking about a reading of the world. In this sense, they will probably force us to redefine our understanding of what is art. They demand new concepts and art experiences tuned with entropy and acceleration. (Meta/Data: 270)

New forms of “singularization” (that allow some room for play and invention, modes of living, that are not pre-determined by “outcomes” and so on) involve shifts in our “ethico-aesthetic” paradigm, as Guattari called it. This is more or less how ethics and embodied experience come together in specific contexts, as described in my previous post as the way in which love and work come together in an often networked experience. The ongoing task is to find singular alternatives within the new mobility that escape the “mobilization” of mobility in the direction of standardization and performativity or simplistic understandings of the social in terms of basic economic productivity. To do this within the context of mobility, we need new concepts and aesthetic paradigms that deal with the new forms of social “entropy and acceleration”. And as much as I like “contemplation” it is also true that, whether this is to survive or not, what we used to gain (and lose) from the contemplative needs perhaps to be reconfigured, precisely as networked embodied experience, subject to new entropies and accelerations.

In reality, mobility is today both poison and cure. Increased mobility, and new mobile techologies are given as the solution to the problem of mobility itself. In such a context, what are the new relations between social collectivity and new mobile media?

To what extent do mobile technologies (and concepts, techniques of mobility) allow us to become mobile in what might best be called an experimental way? To live, love and work in a better way?

On the other hand, to what extent is the proliferation of new technical and social practices of mobility swept up in something like the “mobilization” described by Isabelle Stengers (in The Invention of Science)? This is a mobilization now found in the arts and social sciences as much as the physical sciences, in art itself as much as science (even as the borders between the all these blur). For Stengers, “mobilization” accompanies the very real, experimental “proliferation of practices” [114] in science. In that these practices inevitably depart from the old, a “mobilizing model”, along with a series of rhetorics, is designed to recapture them. In “mobilization” a model (or series of models) is mobilized to maintain “order in the ranks of researchers” and “arm them against what would otherwise disperse their efforts” (something like mobilization might even be found in the “models” of social relations within the naming of the “Creative Industries” – that is of course the risk taken by the term and the discipline). These models re-affirm certain disciplines against that which escapes them. There is a price to pay. As Stengers asks, “what knowledges and practices will be destroyed, or prevented from being invented, in the name of what must be called a ‘mobilizing belief’ – namely, the faith in a future where the body will show that its rational representatives were indeed right”?.

Many questions follow this contest between invention, experiment, mobilization and capture. What modes of living survive? What are the forms of suffering found within the contested flows of the new mobilities. If, as Freud noted in Civilization and Its Discontents, “The communal life of human beings had … a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love…”, what are the precise conditions of work and love in the new mobilities? Are the intertwined fates of love and work the two key issues within the new mobilities?

First – work. Psychoanalyst of work, Christophe Dejours, has suggested that suffering is the very essence of working. This is a particular kind of suffering. Here “suffering” “means bridging the gap between prescriptive and concrete reality“. This definition of work perhaps allows us to rethink the relations between technics, the prescriptive reality of models or “mobilizations”, lived experience and the necessity of experiment. As Dejours puts it -

… there is no such thing as purely mechanical work.

This means that there is always a gap between the prescriptive and the concrete reality of the situation. This gap is found at all levels of analysis between task and activity, or between the formal and informal organisation of work. Working thus means bridging the gap between prescriptive and concrete reality. However, what is needed in order to do so cannot be determined in advance; the path to be navigated between the prescriptive and the real must constantly be invented or rediscovered by the subject who is working. Thus, for the clinician, work is defined as what the subjects must add to the orders so as to reach the objectives assigned to them, or alternately, what they must add of themselves in order to deal with what does not function when they limit themselves to a scrupulous execution of orders. (“Subjectivity, Work and Action,” Critical Horizons 7(1), 2006:45-62)

I love this definition because it rings so true of the experience of work, its mediation of model, demand and contingency – contingency in the sense not only of changing circumstances but in the sense of a changing change which evades models. The questions that arise? What are the gaps that must be bridged between prescriptive and concrete reality in a world immersed in the models, practices and concrete if fluid realities of mobilities? Who and what are put at risk in order to maintain social order in the new space of flows? And if the new mobilities for the first time begin to take note of the complexity of relations between virtuality and actuality, if only because they capitalise on them, does this only mean there is more work to be done? More bridging the gaps that keep opening up in the production of the real? In short, is “concrete reality” a lot less “concrete” these days (or … is concrete reality more fully revealed as a fraud by the new technics of mobility)? Does the new mobility demand a new materialism while drawing attention to the poverty of the old (one that still informs so much disciplinary work, so many models of mediation, so many demands in the workplace)? Or does the new mobility demand an ongoing reconciliation of prescription, model, and variation – a reconciliation that is at best partial and always unravelling?

If this sounds apocalyptic, the case is the opposite. Despite the new “mobilizations” that accompany contemporary mobility, there might be many aspects to the suffering or bridging gaps between prescription and concrete (if both virtual and actual) reality that are liberating. If so, in what sense would we mean “liberation” here? What would a genuine social or artistic innovation using mobile (or dynamic) media be? Is it just a question of creating forms of mobility escape mobilization? How are these to be nurtured? Is it time for the individual again, released by the new mobility, even for the collective individual? Does it depend totally on context?

Is this simply a question of practice (although of course questions of practice are never simple, especially in this context)? What are the concrete (a “concrete” taking account of both virtual and actual) alternatives within the new mobilities in terms of social organization, individuation and concrete modes of living?

One practical solution that is already underway: Let us list and share the new practices and principles. Databases should – more than they perhaps do – form nodes of replication of these practices – not just classification and conservation. Technical “life” and social life should support each other productively (while leaving behind the overcoding mobilization of “productivity”). Is that what mobile media are really for, even if such practices and principles are always also “mobilized” in the service of the new dot.coms?

Or are we so busy liberating ourselves with mobile media, or just “bridging so many gaps” that they open up – in short, overworking – that we are lost before we begin? Should we be refusing this work (even as, in sociable media, it masks itself as leisure)? Franco Berardi, in returning to an older refusal of work in Operaism, suggests that -

Virtual workers have less and less time for attention , they are involved in a growing number of intellectual tasks, and they have no more time to devote to their own life, to love, tenderness, and affection. They take Viagra because they have no time for sexual preliminaries.
The cellularisation has produced a kind of occupation of life. The effect is a psychopathologisation of social relationships. (“What is the Meaning of Autonomy Today?”)

Are we then, addressing the wrong questions in trying to pin down the nature of new media (as I asked at the beginning – “What exactly are the new technics of mobility?”)? Is there too much “work” being done on this kind of question. Is constantly going back to this question a misplaced suffering, even if the question itself is not intrinsically incompatible with the questions of work and love? Would it be better to ask clinical questions of mobility – that is, questions of diagnosing the health or available capacities in a situation. Would this diagnostic approach allow that mobility might well be the cure to its own problem, in the right circumstances?

Perhaps this is a question of therapy. In Sydney in 2004, Berardi finished a talk by remarking -

The problem of therapy is at the centre of the next phase of the movement .. the media (media activism) has to become a process of reactivation of social emotion, of social affection, of social ability to love.

This “therapy/activism” might engage – in a “clinical manner” – with the embodied individuation of network experience (here the value of the like of Gerard Goggin’s interest in disability and contemporary media). In simpler terms this might be to question the “relation” between mobility, the “compulsion to work” and the “power of love” described by Freud (of course, this is not a questioning that needs to take place in Freudian terms). Anna Munster frames such questions this way in Materializing New Media -

…”digital embodiment” is an unstable and uneven condition produced out of the differential impact of bodies and technologies as they globally impinge upon each other in widely varying circumstances. Material differences make themselves felt by being produced rather than inhering to substances .. it is the movements, modulations and transformations peculiar to global digital culture that make the political and ethical relations we form (or deny) with other bodies so important. [184-185].

So far much thinking about mobility has made much of this a secondary issue, if one at all (even if work and love are in fact, in everyday life, the “material differences” produced in a new way by mobile media). It has been more concerned with dealing with the situation as a to and fro between stasis and change, that is mobility. Social effects become a much measured (somewhat secondary) measure of this to and fro (“64% of those surveyed about their mobile phone use said …”). However, even if one is thinking – perhaps necessarily – in these terms, things are more complicated than is often allowed. Mobile media technologies – and the modes of life they are in symbiotic relationship with – are themselves constantly moving, evolving. As Brian Massumi puts it, “change changes”constantly (Parables for the Virtual:10). This is a difficult – if not impossible – fact for disciplinary forms of knowledge, models, rhetorics and other “mobilizations” to digest (not only in the academy, but in the workplace, even in relationships outside of work). This perhaps explains our rather torn – at best ambivalent – thinking about mobile media. No discipline, no model, no rhetoric can ever capture the mobility of mobility. Indeed, we inhabit this enhanced and increasingly self-reflexive “changing change” by working the gaps between theory and “concrete reality”. In this context we should perhaps be aware that our very thinking through of mobilities (whether in the serviced of social innovation or the established “Creative Industries”) is “cognitive labour” in Dejours’ sense. Although again, despite its demands, work does not inhabit this changing change alone. It does so in a series of tense relationships with the problems of “social affection”.

It is therefore perhaps through the questions – and practices – of love and work that we should locate mobile media, and the broader problematic of mobility. This will always be a question of ongoing experiment, whether in the reactive attempt to capture this change or in the attempt to find new ways of loving and working.

Moral problems are mere technological problems to be solved: this is the theology of Google. We should not doubt but just believe…
All social and cultural theory starts with theology – postmodern and post structuralist theory tries to resist the universal of theology

principle of Google is that it copies everything – this is what a search engine does in order to index. But what Google book search is doing is reaching outside the web into the ‘old world’ of copyright and saying the old world must become like the web.

Google surveillance in data-mining consumer profiling etc is completely different from the panopticon. Discipline comes from being aware of surveillance. Web surveillance is distributed and we are not aware of the level of activity…exact opposite of the panopticon…we are encouraged to do what we want online, to misbehave because the corporation wants the ‘real’ you in order to better profile you…

Tiziana Terranova Everything is everything: Network science, neo-liberalism and security
Foucault’s lectures on market and security as part of a society of control. Marxist perspectives, according to Foucault, tend to think about capitalism from the inside – ie how does it function. We need to get outside of this to get outside of capitalism. Rtaher its better to look at the sigularity of moments of organisation of capital.

Neoliberals – the market is not natural but a game, or rather a thing that needs to be produced and extended to as many fields of the social as possible.
The panopticon fades and this is replaced by the mechanism of security. Security is linked to the problem of the series – events keep happening, a series of users clicking, a series of blogs, a series of downloads. Security addresses itself to this.
perhaps many of the web maps we have are ways of spatially representing this series of events. (However, the series is uneven and discontinuous in actuality…)

Key to Web 2.0 -’harness’ users’ collective intelligence…for O’Reilly. (power of cumulative series of events, uploading, downloading, commenting etc).

What kind of market then is this? for Lazzarato – market is a dispositif for construction and capture of the customer. Net economy directly mobilises social relations for the market. What are these social relations – perpetual state of movement between multiplicities of passwords, ids etc.

Liberal versions of explaining network economies try to explain social relations in terms of economic rationale – e.g. we participate in the web because we invest time and we expect a return (Benchler Wealth of Networks)
Whereas for Lazzarato – participation is a social relationship a process of capturing and being captured.

Wendy Chun Imagined Networks
OED -network as diagram – network as representation goes to network as reality. These move backwards and forwards and hence the notion of the network as diagram is oxymoronic. Yes maybe, but what a powerful oxymoron…

Mapping is part of a web drive that tries to map the net into a more intimate space…this returns us to the ARPANET mapping techniques.

Best way to represent a network is to reject the global – we need to try to imagine how technologies and social interactions are engaged together.

temporality of networks is the ephemeral enduring – the undead of information. Blog entries are uninteresting because they are immobile – ie constant updating – empty homogeneous time.

I got rather carried away with that last post so I will try and stay somewhat concise…and root out the ‘somewhats’ and the meta-commentary and the meta-commentary and the meta-commentary…

My next example was perhaps the most over cited of its day so I’ll suffer the collective maon as I trot it out once again. If nothing else returning to this example demands a return to investigate exactly what Amy Franceschini et al. are up to. The links here have relevance to the Dynamic Media project on a number of levels; database design, network visuality, collaborative frameworks, institutions, dynamic media, and last but definitely not least the potential for collaborative workshopping and practice-led research.

For those that were living on the moon in the early part of this decade Amy Franceschini founded the Futurefarmers collective. The Futurefarmers moniker always promised more than simply a commercial Design Studio and although commercial design, particularly in the first half of the decade, underwrote the collaboration it by no-means defined it. The collective would eventually become celebrated in new media circles for their very effective melding of dynamic and open databases with a dynamic/creative interface that allowed the end-users to engage in a collaborative exploration of the network. The generative potential facilitated by a playful interaction is perhaps the most dominant schema of the work Futurefarmers work both now and in the past.

TheyRule.net (2001 ) is the most prominent of these experiments and was a very early example of the potential for a dynamic flash interface to visualize a network in a manner that let the user tease out relationships in the data, to tease out interesting vectors and relationships in the data-set, to link this vectors and relationships to information both submitted by the user and linked to as external search queries. All this investigation on behalf of the user and there particular interests and perhaps ‘affordances’ could then be save as part of an emerging map of the relationships between the directorships of large companies and there donations to major political organizations and lobbys.

The important leap that was made with theyrule.net was an understanding that all the data concerning these relationships was readily and publicly available and that the density of the material obfuscated the potential to actively and productively explore hi-corporate cultures and their political relationships. The next most important realization of Theyrule.net was that exploration of the data set depended on a visual simplicity/clarity. The visualization should precede the exploration and facilitate it. This is an effective inversion of the usual method of mapping the data-set. Interesting relationships are usually first identified and then made concrete (abstracted from the data-set) according to the representation. Here the visualization encourages a generative interaction and exploration with the data set that throws up all kinds of unexpected relations and vectors of investigation. By allowing the user to save the products of these explorations and their subsequent representation Theyrule.net also realizes a principal quality that would fold into the development and capitalization of the AJAX driven web. Theyrule.net feeds-back the products of a user’s navigation back into the site as a vector of potential further exploration. This facility sees the map and the network fold into each other as a kind of developing and dynamic memory or intelligence.

The other Futurefarmers project that is a useful antecedent to current developments is the Communiculture site that allowed users to easily customize an avatar. The users could then pose simple bipolar surveys represented by a continuum in which other users could place there Avatar and comment via a speech bubble. I’ll not develop an analysis here but there is much to be said with regard to the way in which Communiculture reduces and simplifies the level of engagement in order to focus and provide a momentum to a generative/social engagement. Its always about facilitating a playful engagement. The move towards a simple affective mode of interaction that has an immediate pay-off in terms of the relational definition of the user in relation to a wider ‘social-network’ is interesting and can be readily mapped to the most successful models of post 05 social networking and content management systems.

The Futurefarmers collaborators are now engaged with a number of really interesting projects that attempt to account for the ambivalence of techno-cultures to their ecological costs. In some cases the ‘account’ is settled very literally – a reclamation/regeneration of sites poisoned by the effects of silicon chip production in others the aim is clearly to explore means of making the costs of the cultures present to thought. See the site for more.

Of particular interest to this research space is the blog/link roll published by Amy Franceschini; Free Soil. There are a number of relevant links here in terms of institutions working in social, educational, and intermedia media more generally. All of these links tend to have a futurefarmer’s there is an emphasis of the matrix extant between participatory cultures, networks/technology, and ecology…..

Still to come CAIDA and  The Dimes Project

I know that everyone is well aware of the next two groups of projects that I will write about. They are by now very old examples in terms of the passage of web-time. That said, the much (over) hyped web2.0 phenomenon should perhaps be better understood in the light of some of the application and experiments that went on as Macromedia Flash achieved ubiquity and we all suddenly realized that the web was a zone of dynamic interaction rather than simply a plane of interlinked publications. These experiments were mostly called ‘toys’ and built in Flash before Asynchronous Java and XML became all the rage. If Flash illustrated the potential dynamism of the web then AJAX capitalized on it,. AJAX facilitated the development of tools that ‘rode the dynamic wave of interaction’ rather than simply (or not so simply) illustrating it. That said many of the traits of so-identified web2.0 networks might be seen as premised by the demonstration of end-user generativity and collaboration, the map as an emerging territory, customization, and playful production that was explored by these so-called toys. I’d argue that the examples below, in part due to there simplicity have a lot to say about the the relation between dynamic media and network visuality.

The first example of these ‘toys’ are Yugo Nakamura’s fingertracks series (I warned you they were simple – but joyfully so).

Yogop No.5 Finger Tracks Study A : This is really the point of departure, the representation of users interacting with a grid of buttons that do nothing except flash and signal the word ‘NOTHING’ when clicked. What we should note however is that an image of the network emerges out of an users recorded interactions. There is a lot to be said about the affective force of the ‘nothing’ sign and the behavior it evokes. You tend to click on all buttons in search of a ‘something’ – which remains virtual in the philosophical sense of the word. There is an open ended differential relation established between the ‘nothing’ and the ‘something’ it promises. I think this is an exciting and beautifully simple demonstration of virtuality, and maybe a good model for a networked conservation of virtuality.

The image that this interaction and ‘recollection’ produces is that of a network without any visual persistence and reminds us of the apparently chaotic flight paths of bees collecting pollen – the network ‘logic’ is there but only evident as network of intensities and movements without any persistant extensity of form . From a more practical point of view we can see here perhaps a nascent example of the recording and feeding back of the user’s interaction via a re-presentation of that data. The emerging ‘topology’ provides us of an image of the network produced by user’s interactions. There is much to say here about the relation between the intensities that give rise to the perception of an extensive impression of the network ‘in experience’ – between the intensive force of networked coalescence and what Delueze calls its manifest ‘extensity’ (Deleuze, D&R: 2004, p.281). We really don’t see this illustrated here but we do once we see this experiment modulated by different modes of persistence provided via the visualizations of subsequent examples.

Yogop No.6 Finger Tracks Study B:

Study B marks a dramatic difference in relation to the initial study by giving the paths recorded by the end-user a ‘tail’ and their interactions a ‘blip’ of temporal persistence. Here the emerging network constituted by users interactions becomes much more evident as the paths provided by the colourful tales trailing the recorded movements of user’s cross over or double each other. The addition of this visual persistence begins to provide and extensive manifestation of the otherwise momentary (momentous/eventful ?) interactions of the system’s use. This persistence is achieved by a flattening out of a temporal dimension into a planar representation. In recording the interactions you are a sole user given no indication of the movements of other users. When this is visualized via the ‘flattening’ or ‘spatialization’ and the addition of other forms of visual persistence the points of intersection and overlap become much more prevalent – we might suggest that these are zones of information density – at the very least they realize points of relationality and maybe in that respect mark collaborative lines of flight…. perhaps…

Yogop No.7 Finger Tracks Study C1 : This study leaves the grid behind and concentrates on reducing the potential for interaction to a horizontal track. This provides Nakamura with a spatial dimension with which ‘flatten’ another degree of temporal persistence into the visualization. The Study represents the user’s movements by drawing a vertical line at their location on a horizontal plane. The speed with which the user is moving determines the direction and degree of slant of the line. Here we are able to see not only the zones of intersection or overlap – indeed the design of the interface/interaction reduces any interest in the particular zones of intersection by reducing the navigational plane to one dimension so all paths interact all the time. Here though we see another layer of intensive relationality given an extensive quality via visualization – speed and acceleration. Here there are two related points of interest to be noted and perhaps expanded; 1) The reduction of the plane of interaction and 2) the extensity provided by the spatialization of intensive characteristics of interaction. It should perhaps also be noted that in all the examples up to this point the extensity provided by the visualization of the ‘fingertracks’ never folds/feeds back into the production of the network. The exercises that follow realize the potential of this extensity to feedback in an intensive modulation of network potential.

Yogop No.8 Finger Tracks Study C2 : This study simply gives the previous iteration an ‘infinite’ persistence – every vertical line is represented for each of the users. We can switch individual users interactions on and off at will. The dynamic of interaction has been effectively linearized given a kind of stasis via abstraction. Its an appealing image and perhaps that appeal lies in its beautiful fine-line capture of a complexity too dense, to intensive’ to otherwise grasp or contain – a classic reduction of movement to form.

Yogop No.9 Finger Tracks Study D1 : This study moves away form the previous ones in one important respect. Here the recording of the users movements is done as they interact with recorded interactions of previous users. The Study draws a single line between two users. On the ‘plane’ of that line is text that is dynamically tilted according to the angle of the line giving it a 3 dimensional effect as it swings and inverts ‘around’ the line. The text gives us pure geometric data; DY DX – the difference between the points on each access. The size of the font is determined by the values DX and DY. The text represents the relational becoming/definition of the users. At first its not entirely clear whether the users represented by the movements on the screen are there with you in real-time or whether their information is being played back. There is something interesting about network persistence in this non-difference between the present and the past and its relation to the generative potential – or emerging futurity of the network. Yugo may not have read the formulation of difference in Difference and Repititon but here it is nicely demonstrated – the content is always in between. This point also folds into a sense of non-difference between the binaries self-other and now-then; That could be me over ‘there’ at an earlier ‘time’ – what does that makes the line drawn between ‘us’?

Yugop No.10 Finger Tracks Study D2 : Another iteration of the above that extends example to multiple users. Here we really do begin to see the dynamism of a network of interactions. Note the differences between the first fingertracks iteration and this one. We started with a static grid with which an individual interacted and which gave provided an extensive representation of communality that was produced according to the (differential) force and flows generated between the realization of ‘Nothing’ and the virtual promise of ‘Something’. We end up here where there is almost a collaborative propulsion of users away from each other into a distributed formation according to the realization that it is the difference between them that is generative. This tells us a lot about network visuality…. I hope someone gets far enough through this epic to either agree or not…

The final 2 iterations are really just different ways of actually drawing the interactions between users. So I won’t go on any more.

Yogop No.22 Finger Tracks Study E1

Yogop No.23 Finger Tracks Study F1

In fact I might split this post in two or three…..the rest is on its way.

Has anyone seen this happening anywhere? I know Library Thing provides something of a beginning. I know the problem (to start with) is venture capital, or more basically, servers.

Insomnia again last night so hope this makes some sense occasionally … ignore at will!

Love the idea of moving ‘distributed aesthetics’ to the ‘aesthesia of networks’. For me this is a bold if still surprisingly difficult question. No wonder everyone reaches for the simplest – or prettiest – static diagram … and no wonder you intrepidly go in precisely the opposite direction!

The concept of network aesthesia directs things towards the old familiar problem of both the network and aesthetics, but in a very new way which has enormous consequences (not just for art, but for culture, politics etc). This is the problem of the in-between, the intensive (and its relation to representations, a question in which we are both interested). I was wondering whether this obvious intensive in-between wasn’t still the major characteristic of the aesthesia of networks, the one that still isn’t quite accounted for.

Of course, if so, it is important to ask about the breakdown (mashup) between logical and affective forms that you point to with regard to Venn diagrams etc. Or if you like, we need to pose, as you are beginning to do here, a kind of equivalence to synaesthesia within/between logical modes or categories (such as “customisation, homogenisation and atomisation … collective enunciation, production and distribution”). Or to qualify this, we need to pose something within a confusion of logical modes that is similar to synaesthesia because it is a derivative of it (in the light of our shared assumption that all reason and logical forms are derived from affect) .

Where does this lead us? The difficult, as you begin to point out here, is not so much in aesthetic experience qua experience, but in the way that descriptives (or models) both fail to fully account for that experience, and at the same time feed into aesthetic experience. More correctly, these representations/diagrams feed into a kind of pre/post mapping of aesthetic events and potentials. The whole mapping – a kind of metamap or ecologies of diagrams, diagrams – in the more dynamic, full immanent sense – the ecologies of aesthesia in situ. The status of the low level diagrams within this broader ecology might be something like Stiegler’s “pseudo a priori” in technics (look up “a priori” in the linked page).

On the other hand, as you point out, networks also “diagram” in precisely the more dynamic, immanent sense, and this is perhaps the other side of technics, one that runs counter to the pre/post mapping (though they form circuits together).

Does the real aesthesia of networks lies between these, or in these circuits or ecologies? In the light of your careful account of maps and models, perhaps the truth is indeed that aesthesia lies between these dynamic events of networking and the more static maps and models (between what Whitehead called presentational immediacy [sloppily put, events as they immediately occur in perception] and causal efficacy [just as sloppily, the given contexts in which sensations becomes perceptions]).

As we’ve discussed a few times now over lunch, it seems like you do have to take representation into account as aspects of dynamic media. The crucial qualifier is that you don’t do this within a representationalist metamodel (and it may be the metamodels that count here – although this is obviously going to be a question of level of description).

This seems to me to be a necessarily hierarchical qualification. That is, representation is only even a member of an assemblage of collective enunciation which is subject to/dominated by process. Dynamics, intensity and so are in charge, as per intensity over extension, the virtual over the actual?

There are, however, also what I might call non-hierarchical aspects to these ecologies – such as when the I and the we mutually co-emerge (Stiegler speaks of contemporary networked capital’s violence against this). More non-hierarchical relations might be found in the case of the net and the self (reading your notes here has made me realise that I think Castells maybe draws too harsh a line between these two, unlike perhaps Terranova). A more general case of non-hierarchical relations in found as presentational immediacy and causal efficacy co-shift (the very basis of dynamism in perception/aesthesia). All these seem to me to be non-hierarchical dynamics and of course there are dynamics between them all (a field of vectors, or as Bernard Cache has written of architecture which might apply to network architecture, of framings, inflexions and vectors in topological fields of relation.

So, with all this in mind, I look forward to reading more of your thinking about images and networks. The material on the way that models represent the aesthesia of networks while delimiting it seemed (at “to be continued”) about to go into this other side of network aesthesia. This is that which can’t be recuperated by the models .. I guess what you might call the real aesthesia as an event evading pre-post capture. And from there to the engagements between the two? And the opening out?

A simple way to sum all this up … how do you pose the question of the way in which images in networks are constitutive, powerful but ontologically subjugated factors in network processes, flows and their regulation?

The third step might be to ask – and one can only begin to ask this – how these really come together. This is not perhaps a question of how to map the whole network but how to even think it. There is no doubt that there is an aesthesia of networks – we can feel them alright, but whether we can really think this aesthesia – give it a concept which is appropriate – is an interesting question. This would have to be a concept beyond models or metamodels, perhaps one built in terms of the differentials or problematisation of existing relations involved. Maybe Russell’s purer maths (that of the calculus perhaps) might be more appropriate here. You could take this in the direction of one of those crazy Lacanian mathemes.

Well that’s what you do when you haven’t slept much … Maybe you need one of Guattari’s semiotic metamodelisations from Cartographies Schizoanalytique … Of course you’ve started this work already.

This is all of course, thinking more or less in terms of one person’s aesthesia in relation to the complex ‘aesthetics of the network’, even if the latter is thought in global terms (the problematic image here might still be Stelarc’s body wired up to internet in Ping Body).

And yet one could go beyond this to the truly collective and shared experiences – aesthesias – of networks those pose only a collectivity (or a baroque series of nested collectivities). This is another really interesting aspect of your work. What if there are events of aesthesia throughout the network, beside those that are reducible to the aesthesia of the individual against the universe (the sublime etc)? And what if these are not always as locatable as events of aesthesia experienced when standing in front of a painting, or even talking on the telephone?

Or, what sensations are conserved by the network, and how is this conservation different to those conserved in more static forms where representation appears at least to be less problematised? Or in more complete Deleuze-Guattari terms, how, in networks, are the percepts and affects conserved in blocs of sensation (actually this term works perfect for the circuits of networks) talking to the concepts (as assemblages not only of models and metamodels but of differentials, and as you put it, productive vagueness, in thinking as production), and both talking to functives (taken here as technical limits in the productive sense)?

… It seems to me that thinking in these terms allows us to differentiate questions of aesthesia (real sensation and experience) and aesthetics (how this experience has been metamodelled, at least since Kant).

As above, you can still take the models etc into account while differentiating them from the aesthesia in total.

You could even, for example, understand the classic Kantian question of taste in the terms posed here. Although, as I put it at the AGNSW paper in 2005 on Joyce Hinterding and David Haines, this is a Kantian aesthetic which is seriously “hacked” by the new configurations of aesthesia within networked technics. As hacked, the Kantian aesthetic formula needs to be inverted (its hierarchies turned upside down, its linearity short-circuited), so that the problem is not one of generating taste from the individual out to the imagined community, but of understanding a more direct experience – aesthesia – of community as never before. One that problematises the “I” and the “we” that Stiegler thinks was the basis for modernity.

This kind of inversion or short circuiting explains a lot of my networked experience I think, For example, there is perhaps not only a “repeated cycling through euphoria and boredom” but something that is both at the same time … and more (here I’m reminded in an insomniac associative way of Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, in which he talks of an ongoing re-arragement of the very nature and forms of the faculties – we don’t just have to have imagination, reason, understanding, in a particular arrangement, etc).

—

Some other quick responses ..

“For I want to suggest that this diagram’s status as a kind of meta-image of networking is literally anaesthetic – numbing and disengaging from the chaotic and experiential engagements in networks.”

right on! and then I started to wonder how much there is a co-emergent (Lone Bertelsen would call it, after Bracha Ettinger, “co-emergence in differentiation”) series of events here that can only be aesthetic.

“I wonder whether this might not be a useful comparison to import into what I have to say about the ways in which the diagrammatic (rather than Benjamin’s symbolic) and the allegorical differ in network visuality”

This is a great parallel …. and I was wondering how exactly the network aesthetic is like this allegory? Is there another hacking of the modern aesthetic needed (not only of Kant but of Benjamin, whose concept of the masses might need to be rethought in terms of network aesthesia – I don’t think any of the new “the work of art in the age of cyber” articles have quite done this yet). You know most about this (as your book attests)!

“both the role of network diagrams and the role of alternative imagings of networks that I want to unfold today”

The more I think this through in fact, the more I think that the relation of network aesthesia and the aesthetics of representing networks come together as a (somewhat unexplored if crucial) question of our times. Although I think that this is only a sub-question underlying the larger question of network aesthesia and modes of living/politics etc (beyond representations – straight or alternative) .. ?

“I’m also especially interested in a kind of emerging web visuality that develops through a mash-up of the diagrammatic and the allegorical by layering geodata and imaging in conjunction with personal and collective data and imaging”

Again I’m wondering about the synaesthetic qualities here – the in-between aesthesia that is so crucial to networks and the re-imagining (re-imaging of the visual in synaesthesia in a kind of basis for cross-signal process). Perhaps network aesthesia itself is the cause of the problem, it produces all diagrams, even those that attempts to pre/post map it.

“Hence we end up not with a history of the processes that are sampling but rather a history of samples (bits of trackable data).”

Absolutely, the potential in sensation (memory is crucial but only in so far as it feeds into potential, which after all is what directed movement/sensation at every turn) … an aesthesia of the future is perhaps accented all the more in networks. And of course it’s not always comfortable to feel the future in such intense, at times stark, terms. ..

“The circulation and repetition of this kind of diagram as a network map, mnemonic and actualisation now dominates the visual landscape of networking, informing social network analysis, network visualisation and net aesthetics”

Yes – and perhaps for a historical reason (one day I’ll finish reading that great Paul Edwards book on Computing and the Cold War). Maybe it occurs in the context of the failure of SAGE to really, as it was supposed to do, map out and control a grid. In the light of this failure, things perhaps slipped to meta-models of control, or control via constantly adaptive and often vague meta-models (thus the importance of considering the aesthesia of these models alongside the aesthesia networks). This makes the descriptives surrounding networks knit together into a processual semiotic of “seeming” to create stasis and control (which is of course a control in itself, especially if considered as a form of aesthesia plugged into the nervous system, as Brian Massumi writes concerning fear and coloured warning systems). This is even what we might call a drive (a powerful if delusory one)… and forms the main mode of engagement with networks by academics and bureaucrats (though not always artists or the military).

Perhaps one of the most interesting points you make here (for me, anyway) is along these lines, where you suggest that -

“Baran was not so much invested in the realisation of this diagram as a blueprint for the network but rather was focused upon network processes – the capacity of data to divide up, rearrange and reassemble itself as it moved around connections – in other words, packet-switching.”

In a sense, this acknowledges all the sides involved. I had been wondering a little where aesthesia went til this point -

“Baran’s memos network processes are entwined with a kind of implicit understanding of the aesthesia of networked inefficiency and breakdown.”

Do you mean that the system is aesthetic in relation to itself (as well as people etc)? A central question here you might go on to answer (if only to make me happy!) is what the aesthesia that worked through network processuality might feel like (especially to the network itself).

thanks, it’s been fun.

all the best, andrew

This paper emerges from a background project that I have been unsystematically pursuing for the last 3 years or so. Various bits of it appear throughout texts – ‘Theses on Distributed Aesthetics: Or What a Network is Not’ (with Geert Lovink) and a more recent piece ‘Welcome to Google Earth’. In these essays I realise that I have been trying to understand the interplay of two aesthetic forces or vectors in network cultures – the pole of customisation, homogenisation and atomisation and the pole of collective enunciation, production and distribution. Not that these are ever poles apart in contemporary network cultures.

For a while I have thought about this as a project concerned with ‘distributed aesthetics’ but I have more recently begun to conceptualise it as ‘an aesthesia of networks’. This working title gathers into it the ideas of Castells, Terranova and Rossiter who have all argued that networks are constituted in the very tensions between the singular and collective, net and self and intensive and extensive processes and flows. Hence there can be no coherent, global ‘aesthetics of the network’. And yet there are collective and shared experiences – aesthesias – of networks. The most common experience of contemporary networks perhaps being repeated cycling through euphoria and boredom.

There are also recurring patterns that regulate the aesthesias of networks such that their hetereogeneity or singularitiy ends up being siphoned into a neater ‘package’ of network functionality. One of these operates by packaging the network as image and takes the form of the vectoral diagram of networked connectivity. This has come to function as a dominant image of and for networks.

who owns the internet? by Ben Worthen, Bill Cheswick

Lufthansa IT infrastructure

The repetitive and ubiquitous circulation of these kinds of diagrams of connectivity is striking in itself. But it is the aesthetic implications of these in which I am most interested. For I want to suggest that this diagram’s status as a kind of meta-image of networking is literally anaesthetic – numbing and disengaging from the chaotic and experiential engagements in networks. The node-link schematic lulls us into a kind of comotose state about the socio-aesthetic-technical assemblages that ennervate network cultures. What I want to suggest is that the far-reaching distribution of this image of distributed networking operates as a homogenising force that attempts to erase disjunction, relationality and temporality from our perceptions of/in networks.

Luckily, however, network visuality is not such a flatline! There are many examples of how individuals, online groups and environments are providing different approaches to the image in the network. I want to provide some examples of these later in this talk and to revisit the nature of these alternative images. Rather than trying to classify these images through a visual taxonomy, I will instead focus upon their divergent nature. In so doing, I want to invoke Walter Benjamin’s analysis of allegory in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. For Benjamin, allegory was not so much something to be found contained within a particular text or image and systematically interpreted. Rather his approach to baroque allegory was to understand it as a mode of seeing or reading predominant throughout the European seventeenth century but also potentially resonating with later historical/cultural conjunctions. Baroque allegory inhabited the sphere of everyday visuality – the domestic, the familiar, the street scene – and unfolded via contingent associations between its metaphorical elements, often moving from one element to another in unexpected ways. He compared this twisting variability of baroque allegory with the function of the symbol in art and literature. The symbol’s function was to preserve representational homogeneity – to always mean the same eternally.

I wonder whether this might not be a useful comparison to import into what I have to say about the ways in which the diagrammatic (rather than Benjamin’s symbolic) and the allegorical differ in network visuality. I think this may be a useful way to think about both the role of network diagrams and the role of alternative imagings of networks that I want to unfold today. These latter imaginings evoke a mode of visuality operating via divergent, disparate, everyday and surprising associative pathways. I think we find this allegorical mode in direct images of the Internet and its cultures, for example:

An allegorical map of online communities

but also in the attempts to stretch the diagrammatic mode to unfold the shifts of connection and disconnection that comprise the political dimension of networks. I am thinking here of the work of the artist Mark Lombardi who famously portrayed the money that filtered from the Bush family oil investments in the US into the Middle East and eventually was redistributed to the Bin Laden familiy’s attempts to rearm and refinance sectors of Iraqi society for their own interests:

george w. bush, harken energy, and jackson stevens c.1979-90, 5th version, (detail)

More recent examples of a ‘stretch’ of the diagrammatic mode come through visualisation software such as Digg Swarm, which dynamically updates the clustering of users’ ‘interest’ in stories posted on the Digg social aggregation news site. I think what we have here is a kind of becoming-allegorical of the diagrammatic. Of course it’s also the case that the incorporation of both clustering and tag clouds as attempts to make the diagrammatic more expressive in Web 2.0 design re-asserts a kind of visual homogenisation where the ‘clustered’ and/or buffed-up tag comes to visually dominate and other variables in the image plane easily fade…

I’m also especially interested in a kind of emerging web visuality that develops through a mash-up of the diagrammatic and the allegorical by layering geodata and imaging in conjunction with personal and collective data and imaging:

where’s george? mash-up

It should be clear then that I am using a conception of the allegorical here that broadens Benjamin’s to examine engagements with image-making in network cultures that have an everyday (sometimes even banal), contingent and divergent nature to them. I am aware this may prove to be too broad but I think its better and, in fact, crucial to cast the net wider in the present moment given the kind of grip the purist articulations of the network diagram has on contemporary networked visuality.

What, then, do I see as the problems of the diagrammatic mode for the visual cultures of networks? And why, subsequently, do I think we need to reinscribe the importance of the work of allegory in the age of informatic supra-production? It is not so much that the image of diagrammatic connectivity represents networks in bad or good ways. Rather, I want to suggest that this form of diagram has come to function as a network meta-model, laying out the conditions of possibility for the experience, the aesthesia of networks. Its limits are those that C.S. Peirce noted about the diagram as a form of mathematical notation – that it says nothing about disjunctive information, existential statements (that is the conditions that are fundamental to its operation as a notational system), probability or relationality. In addition Mat (Wal-Smith) has pointed throughout this blog to a number of issues concerning the planar-linear-spatial problems of contemporary network visualisations. Namely that these occlude the folded histories of actual interaction in/of the network. As he suggests in his post on Jess Kriss’ History of Sampling visualisation, the visualisation channels our mode of interacting with the historical data inputted about sampling. The visualisation draws planar graphs of the use of a sample in a piece of music but not how a sample might act as a catalyst for our relationships with the histories of music or to further processes of musical sampling. Hence we end up not with a history of the processes that are sampling but rather a history of samples (bits of trackable data).

What I want to do is think about this kind of processual semiotics endemic to contemporary media work, especially electronic music, as a mode of understanding network imaging. Another way to put this would be to pose the question of how images in networks are constitutive factors in network processes, flows and their regulation. First, I want to look at the domination of the diagrammatic image of distributed communications first sketched out in Paul Baran’s 1964 RAND memo (image to come). The circulation and repetion of this kind of diagram as a network map, mnemonic and actualisation now dominates the visual landscape of networking, informing social network analysis, network visualisation and net aesthetics. And then second, I’ll look at the ways in which the diagrammatic gets redrawn and mashed via allegorical network visuality.

When I talk about the processual semiotics of networks I mean to invoke not so much the tradition of interpretative semiotics that we may be familiar with via Sassure, Barthes and psychoanalytic theory. Rather I want to understand the diagrammatic via, as I have already mentioned, Bertrand Russell and Pierce and the ideas of processual semiosis that appear in the work of Felix Guattari.

I’d like to proceed by looking at Baran’s diagram in the context of his memo to RAND. I then want to make some general comments about how these kind of diagrams function to manage and organise our perception and engagement with networks in the contemporary moment – ie as a way of regulating network aesthesias as ‘an aesthesia’

The mythology associated with this diagram is that it represents the genesis of the digital network as sustainable in the face of nuclear attack. As the story that accompanies ‘the origin of the Internet’ goes: it was this distributed diagram allowing and attack on one node without meaning the whole network would come down. This diagram is often historically associated with the early 4 node hook up that initialised ARPANET in ’68/’69 and in fact the period and research culture overlaps certainly justifies the association:

Paul Baran’s diagrams of communications systems

Hence the distributed communications system somehow acts as the ‘blueprint’ for the emerging connectivity of academc and military networking in Cold War USA.

However, in an interview between Baran and Stewart Brand in 2001, Baran himself comments on this myth of Internet origins, insisting that it was not the connectivity of network nodes as demonstrated in the distributed communications diagrams that was at stake in sustaining resilience to nuclear attack but rather the flow of information and data via packet switching that would be essential for deciding both sustainability and strikeback capabilities for the network. (See the interview in wired)

This is an important distinction because it indicates that Baran was not so much invested in the realisation of this diagram as a blueprint for the network but rather was focused upon network processes – the capacity of data to divide up, rearrange and reassemble itself as it moved around connections – in other words, packet-switching. There is some authorial revisionism going on here. If we look at Baran’s original 1964 memo, he clearly states 2 criteria for post-attack survivability: both the percentage of ‘stations’ (as he calls them) left after attack and their ‘electrical connectivity’. But perhaps what Baran has in mind in the later interview ‘revision’ is that networkability – what he calls ‘the synthesis of a communication network’ as distributed (and what I am understanding as the technical and social capacity of distributed communications to be constituitive elements in network formation) – is not reducible to the actual physical infrastructure that ‘joins’ the dots in a network.

As has been repeatedly the case in the history of the implementation of information theory – especially in the history of its military applications but also in its migration into other disciplines such as media and communications studies – nodes, senders and receivers have been hypostasised to the detriment of investigating the processual movements of data and peoples. As it turns out, we have to understand Baran’s diagram and memo through both the poles of the hypostatic and processual. On the one hand, he is clearly interested in accounting for the precise ‘level of redundancy’, as he calls it, required in a network for it to function after severe physical attack on actual communications stations. This necessitates pushing the diagram through a series of graphs to calculate what number and level of nodes are needed initially for it to survive a severe attack on its nodes. On the other hand, after a certain amount of reduplication or redundancy of nodes the distributed network survives even a heavy loss of its actual infrastructure because of its array formation:

Baran’s diagram for array formation – a ‘process’ diagram

Baran is, then, equally interested in how the processes of distribution continue in the post-attack scenario. For him, these processes are only possible if the network has already reached a level of production of redundancy allowing the duplicative array formation. And for him, the array formation is simply the precondition for maximum switching of packets of information to occur. The distributed diagram, then, is not a blueprint for how to build a network – although there’s no denying Baran was working to a military brief. Rather it is a set of vectoral preconditions necessary for the process of switching to occur; a process that is, for Baran, sustainable not only in the event of attack but also in the face of everyday network failures: ‘noise’, unreliable links, degradation and overload. It is little wonder that process is constantly overlooked in the visual depiction of networks as diagrams of connectivity. Again and again in Baran’s memos network processes are entwined with a kind of implicit understanding of the aesthesia of networked inefficiency and breakdown. These problems of defective connections and systemic failure are hardly a vision of imperial preparedness for the nuclear age!!

At least part of the problem with the overlooking of the processual in network visuality lies with how we understand the representational status of diagrams and the historico-discursive forces shaping that understanding. In particular, I am thinking of the legacy that diagrams inherit from mathematics and syllogistic logic. Both Euler and Venn diagrams were developed to visually demonstrate syllogistic logic (example). However, as the analytic philosopher Bertrand Russell pointed out in 1923, there is a ‘vagueness’ to the diagram which in endemic to the problem of representation (Russell, 1923). Rather than the diagram simply acting as a one-to-one form of representation (as other forms of representation in mathematics such as algebra might), its spatiality frequently means that it acts in one-to-many mode. Hence for Russell, its ‘vagueness’ or rather its potential to be representative of the multiple and the variable. So, for example, this vagueness means that the spatial relations between objects in a diagram can be used to represent relations between objects in some other domain. Baran’s distributed communications diagram could be a diagram of ARPANET connectivity but it could also be a diagram of Lufthansa IT networking.

The diagram is therefore not a set of instructions – a blueprint – for mapping or building relations between objects. It is instead a representational mode that hooks one class of objects – perhaps links and nodes – to another class, potentially peoples, cultures and their processual relations within networks. This, of course, is why the network diagram is so thrilling – its spatiality and vagueness harnesses the potential to make it work as a representation of something it is not. The problem is that while the potential to transpose from map to ‘territory’ is one of the diagram’s visual attractions, we would do well to remember that this transposition is only a product of representational vagueness rather than accurate correspondence. In other words, if we really believe that the network diagram provides us with an accurate depiction of networks, then we are forgetting the very relationality of both diagram and network.

It’s also important to remember that the history of diagrams within the 20thc development of logic is a contested one. In particular, the interventions of Peirce into diagrams as a mode of logical reasoning can be seen as both a contestation of their representational limits and an attempt to enhance their expressive capacities. He extended the classic Venn diagram

by introducing new symbolic notation that could account for the presence of disjunctive information within a set:

This diagram allows for either the syllogistic proposition ‘All A are B’ or the disjunctive information ‘some A is B’ to hold in the one representational space

I don’t have time here to do Peirce’s extensions which also included attempting to extend the diagram to deal with logical existential statements…in fact for contemporary logicians Peirce’s extensions ended up becoming too visually complex and, since the 1990s, work on the diagrammatic mode in logic has had a strong focus on returning to visual simplicity. That’s perhaps unsurprising in the context of the broader visual culture, which I have also been attempting to chart in this talk, and which is underwritten by the seduction of the clean diagram as meta-model.

But what I am also interested in is the possibility that the diagrammatic mode can be deformed and shaken by the processual – and here I mean two kinds of deformation that are never far apart from each other in network cultures. The first I’ll call a kind of intensive deformation, which is catalysed somewhat by the Peircean project but is taken up again in the work of Guattari. Here the diagram tries to unfold its vagueness or what we might also call its virtualities – its potential to become other, its potential to move to other rhythms. In this kind of deformation of the diagrammatic mode what is at stake is the diagram as dynamic, the diagram as process.

A diagram by Brian Holmes that attempts to work with the processual relations involved in the shaping of new subjectivities of collective enunciation

I think this attempt to stretch the diagrammatic in processual ways is a strong direction as network visualisation attempts to come to terms with the intensive dynamicism of Web 2.0. It’s what we see happening in the Digg Swarm visualisation. It’s also what we see happening as node/link diagrams are subjected to weighted/dynamic mapping tools (thanks again Mat for pointing me toward the Middle East Power maps and toward Fidgt).

A snapshot of the Fidgt visualiser, which works by aggregating tags from users’ web accounts such as Flickr and lastFM. Entering your account into the Fidgt visualiser then aggregates other users with the same tags into your map of ‘use’ visualisation once you deploy a tool called a ‘Tag magnet’

I don’t necessarily want to endorse the ‘social networking’ claims here nor the questionable ethics of popularity/wisdom of the crowd behaviourist psychology that accompany the topology of tagging and weighting in Web 2.0. But what I do find interesting about what has happened to the diagrammatic here is that there is a notable shift from diagram as notation and representation (with all its attendent problems of spatialisation and location) to diagram as activity and process. What kind of an aesthesia does this embody and generate? A networked aesthesia of plasticity – potentially collaborative, generative of new problems for thinking and engagement but also collapsing, deteriorating under the weight of the endless generation of its own redundancies.

Finally I want to think again of another possibility for network visuality, which I touched on briefly when referring to the idea of web mash-ups of the diagrammatic and the allegorical. In the where’s george? mash up I showed previously, the mash is produced by overlaying the connective diagram with Google Maps. And this is of course where much of the mashing in networked visuality currently occurs – using Google’s API capabilities to embed its maps into user-generated data. Here we have a mash-up of locative data with data flow…and in some ways this is reminiscent of earlier web projects (many of which are archived in the Atlas of Cyberspace site) that attempt to provide a geospatialisation of network generated exchange and interaction.

But these could also be understood as a mash between the everyday and associative relations produced or generated by the collective exchange of peoples in networks, on the one hand, and the vectoral packaging of relationality into the data template on the other. It is in this sense, that I speak about a mash-up of the diagram and the allegory in network visuality (recalling Benjamin’s comments about the incipient wandering and everydayness of the allegorical as well as his ideas about synthesis as the ongoing presence of tensions and of the baroque as amode which comprised extremes in aesthetics). What I think we need to do is work at the potential for both the disjunctive (diagrammatic expanded in the direction of its expressive capacities) and the temporal (allegorical as a mode of unfolding historicity, everyday network realities) to play a more overt and generative role in our images and imaginings in networks. This may help us to actually produce networks that are less templates for relations and more ongoing projects that explore new relational forms for social collectivities in network cultures.