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Herald: And now, a warm welcome for Vera Tollmann.
She is from the research center for proxy politics.
For those ones from Berlin, as far as I know,
there is still a very exciting exhibition
in the Museum of Photography.
So a warm welcome for Vera Tollmann.
(Vera) Thanks.
*applause*
Thank you very much for inviting me.
First of all, it's just me. Boaz Levin, my colleague,
who is also the co-author of this text that I'm going to present today,
didn't make it in the end.
It was also very kind of last minute invitation, that we received a week ago.
I am going to present a text, which is entitled:
“The Body of the Web” or “Proud to relay flesh”
It's a text where we want to install the proxy as a figure of thought.
And continue an argument, that Hito Steyerl, the artist,
started in her text “Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise”
which you can find online.
In this co-authored text we are going to pick up
her trope of the proxy and test it in relation to different cases of protest.
So, from our understanding the notion of proxy politics can be understood
as both a symptom of crisis in current representational political structures
as well as a counter strategy aiming to critically engage and challenge
the existing mechanisms of security and control,
which leads to a series of questions.
What forms of resistance might fit this vague technopolitical economic condition?
Mass protesters become image makers.
Do resistance movements need to employ PR consultants?
How does one protest in public space,
if there is no public space left?
And in what way does this
virtuality and duplicity challenge both public space and human bodies?
Actually the latter is the most important
that we are trying to answer or follow through with this text.
Can you hear me well? Yeah? Good!
Ah, there’s … yes?
No … okay … I just thought there is a comment.
Since July 2015,
protesting in public space in Spain has become an expensive affair.
I don't know, if you remember from media reports in July, there was a huge protest
where they used the hologram as a medium.
So protesters are now threatened by hefty fines
and authoritarian reaction to
the anti-austerity protests three years earlier.
The citizen safety law, otherwise known as the gag law,
criminalises protests, that interfere with public infrastructure.
Under the new law which was passed by the governing People’s Party in December 2014
protesters are liable to fines up to 600.000 EUR,
for marching in front of congress, blocking road, or occupying a square.
The law, criticised as a severe attack on Spaniards’ right of assembly and speech,
is the most recent attempt by the government to curb a wave of popular protests,
that has swept the country since 2011.
With the unemployment rate exceeding 25% and one half of Spaniards under 25 jobless,
hundreds of thousands of outraged citizens took the streets,
occupying squares and universities.
In response to a discredited political class, tarnished by years of political scandal
and corruption, the Indigñados, Spanish for “The outraged”,
sought to mobilise citizens in a series of grassroots demonstrations across the city
by reclaiming their right to public space.
Another flashback to 2011, where protests using
similar occupation strategies were taking place across the world:
in Tunesia, Egypt, Greece, Israel, and the United States.
Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, home to the headquarters of Israel's largest banks,
became a kilometre-long encampment, dubbed “the Tent Republic”.
I have some pictures here.
Lasting for almost three months, this protest called the tent republic.
Syntagma Square in Athens too was filled with tents and make shift dwelling places
and became a site of lasting popular assemblies
and daily clashes with the local authorities.
In Zuccotti Park, New York, activists tapped into the electricity grid
via lantern posts and set up
semi-autonomous mesh networks for the benefit of the protesters.
Though numerous commentators pointed out the role played by new technologies such as
social networks and smart phones,
in facilitating the protests it was the city's square
as old as political thought, which was the true common denominator.
Our understanding of the rights of free speech and assembly as well as the concept of
participatory democracy are deeply indebted to the development of the Greek city state,
the Polis, and later the Roman public square.
In nearly every protest occurring around this time,
the spatial dimension of political action was once again affirmed.
Might this significance be altered by the emergence of new technologies of control
and new modes of resistance?
As Hannah Arendt pointed out, the idea of Polis,
which for her denoted the public realm of a political community,
does not necessarily designate the physical location of the Greek city state,
rather this form of public realm as the organisation of the people, quote:
"as it raises out of acting and speaking together", end of quote.
Thus it's all the more fitting that when
the People’s Party of Spain passed its draconic law,
demonstrators were quick to
seek an alternative to bodily presence and physical space.
Their solution was a hologram protest, the first ever.
The first ever, as media outlets were quick to point out,
skillfully choreographed and artfully projected in front of the gates of congress in Madrid.
The Independent, the newspaper reported:
“Spanish activists have staged the world's first ever virtual political demonstration.”
The Daily Mails headline read: “The world's first hologram protest.”
And News India asked and answered:
“Ghosts on Spain's street? No it's world's first virtual protest.”
In an interview, Cristina Flesher Fominaya, spokeperson for the activist group,
that organised the hologram intervention,
"No somos delito" – in English "We are not a crime"
explained how it all came together.
A group of creative professionals, who decided to remain anonymous,
provided the needed technical support prior to the outdoor projection,
which lasted for the course of an hour.
The campaign was developed online.
A webpage with the slightly lofty title "Holograms for Freedom",
in which anyone can leave their hologram, a written message, or a shoutout,
was where it started.
Finally these composite images were screened across a transparent screen and looped.
By representing people as holograms, which appear in a particular cool blueish tone
reminiscent of surveillance camera footage,
the protest organiser seem to elude to the popular depiction of a dystopian totalitarian state.
Spectors, for once quite literally, haunted the sterile streets
voicing the grievance of those barred from assembling there
The event had been rehearsed, performed, and recorded in a nearby city and the equipment
had been installed in Madrid by a PR company in a clandestine operation.
A tech savvy, [unwittingly] absurd way to demonstrate without violating the new law.
Instead of public space, the demonstrators inhabited a new medium.
After all, bodies in public space pose a problem in contemporary politics.
The natural corporal vulnerability of protesting was now intensified by the threat
of disproportionate financial penalisation.
This was a proxy protest fit for the age of proxy politics.
So, what is a proxy then, like the way we understand it?
A proxy is a decoy or a surrogate.
The word derives from the Latin procurator (Prokurator), meaning someone responsible
for representing someone else in a court of law.
These days, the word proxy is often used to designate a computer server
acting as an intermediary for request from clients.
These servers afford indirect connections to a network,
thus providing users with anonymity.
However, proxy servers are not distinct technology
to hide users but can also be set up for the opposite task: to monitor traffic.
Proxy politics, as defined by Hito Steyerl, as the politics of the stand-in and the decoy,
is characterised by fraudulent contracts, calmarical sovereignties, and void authorities.
The concept of the proxy is emblematic of our post representational,
post democratic political age.
Disembodyment and invisibility of politics and its increasing subordination
to economic interests.
So, this political age is one increasingly populated by bot militias,
puppet states, ghostwriters, and communication relays.
So now one paragraph on post democracy, or the post representational,
what it actually means.
There is a book by Colin Crouch. It's entitled “Post Democracy”.
And there he describes the current political condition
as one in which power is increasingly relinquish to business lobbies
and non-governmental organisations.
As a result, he argues, quote:
"There is little hope for an agenda of strong egalitarian policies
for the redistribution of power and wealth or for the restraint of powerful interests."
As a corollary to the rise of neo-liberalism,
the vision of an autonomous potent political subject is devastated
by the growing power of privileged elites, standing at the nexus of transnational
corporations, extra juridical zones, infrastructural authorities,
non governmental organisations, and covert rule.
Similarly, Jacques Rancière, in his book entitled "Post Democracy",
he refers to democratic action, post-democracy in the government practice,
and conceptual legitimisation of a democracy after the demos,
a democracy that has eliminated the appearance, miscount,
and dispute of the energies and interests.
At the heart of this condition lies an ontology of deception,
where the public realm is conceived as a series of smoke screens,
false flags, and simulations.
The democratic appearance of the people is strictly opposed by its simulated reality.
One, which is set up by the conjunction of media proliferation of whatever is visible
and the endless count of opinions polled and votes simulated.
With this concept of double government, policital scientist Michael Glennen
has introduced a vision of US political power, split between elected government officials,
and a network of institutions constituting a disguised republic.
Glennan traces this phenomenon back to
World War II and president Truman's signing of the national security act of 1947,
which established, among others, the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA.
Since then, he argues, the United Staates has moved toward a double government,
wherein even the president exercises
little substantive over the overall direction of US national security policy.
Similarly, in Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, and Syria,
political commentators have used the notion of the deep state
to describe the nexus of police, intelligence services, politicians,
and organised crime.
Surely, secrecy, or discretion, to use its diplomatic euphemism,
is as old as politics itself.
But its recent resurgence under the guise of democratic rule
reveals “arcana imperii”, the secrets of governance,
to be all but arcane.
So the age of proxy politics is thus one in which power is displaced
into the hands of extra juridical unchecked authorities.
Whether by way of covered institutions that it builds in classified budgets,
organised crimes, and grey markets, or no less disturbingly
through gross privatisation and the rise of transnational corporations.
According to Sheldon Wallin, the paradox of our current regime
is that the more open to the pressures of organised interests,
the more opaque even mysterious politics becomes.
Consequently, responsibility becomes virtually untraceable.
In her “Lying in politics”, a text published in 1972,
written in response to the revelation of the Pentagon Papers,
Hannah Arendt lamented the beginning of an age, in which image making has become
the core value of American global policy.
When image makers govern,
the institutions of representational democracy are destined to become a mere semblance.
The recent example came as the house of representatives voted in May 2015
to end bulk surveillance by the NSA.
Rather than bringing all bulk surveillance to an end,
the vote merely took the government out of the collection business.
It would not deny its access to the information, it would be in the hands of the private sector.
Almost certainly telecommunications companies like ATT, Verizon, and Sprint.
In other words, even after seemingly successful governmental reform,
it was revealed that the corridors of power lay elsewhere between politics
and the private sector.
So popular protests in one country
are often convicts for the expansion of power in another.
In the aftermath of a successful, non violent-regime change in Belgrade,
activits behind the Otpor movement relayed their experiences into
tutorials and training camps,
teaching activists in numerous countries how to ignite and lead a revolution.
What's more,
Srđa Popović and Slobodan Đinović, both former Otpor activists,
founded CANVAS, which is the Center for Applied Non-Violent Actions and Strategies.
With the aim of educating pro-democracy activists around the world
in what they regard as the “universal principles for success in non violent struggle”.
CANVAS has trained activists in more than 50 countries,
including Iran, Ukraine, Palestine, and recently Tunisia and Egypt, to name but a few.
By late November 2000, an article in the New York Times had revealed
that prior to the revolution, Otpor had received funds
from US government affiliated organisations, such as the National Endowment for Democracy.
In addition, their ties to the private global intelligence company “Stratfor”,
also know as the “shadow CIA”, prompted questions concerning
activists’ involvement in global American covert foreign policy.
So how might proxy politics be more than just a condition,
the name of a political regime that thrives an obscurity, opaqueness, and decoys?
How might it also designate a corresponding mode of resistance?
Ideally, proxy politics would encompass myriad modes of withdrawal,
both technical and metaphorical.
Its tools could be a VPN, a holographic surrogate, a stock image, or a double.
Its outcome is always concealment, evasion, subterfuge.
The hope is that strategies such as these
might be effective during our current interim phase,
the period in which the difference between real virtuality and virtual reality,
the tangible and the digital is increasingly difficult to discern.
At the same time, it is becoming
increasingly evident, how severely controlled both spheres are.
The world wide web, by way of its architecture and protocols,
and public space by increasing privatisations.
As Alexander Galloway has observed, instead of a [politicisation] of time or space,
we are witnessing a rise in the
[politicisation] of absence- and presence-oriented themes, such as invisibility, opacity, and anonymity.
Or the relationship between identification and legibility,
or the tactics of non-existence and disappearance.
New struggles around prevention, therapeutics of the body, piracy on contagion,
information capture and the making present of data via data mining.
According to Galloway, recent protest movements' refusal
to make clear demands is a form of black boxing.
A conscious withdrawal from political representation and collective bargaining.
The choice is for relations, relays and links, in the words of Édouard Glissant.
All qualities associated with the proxy.
This politicisation upholds the right to opacity, also a quote from Glissant.
Rather than reverting once again to the age-old demand for transparency.
For Glissant, opacity is the force that drives every community,
the thing that would bring us together forever and makes us permanently distinctive.
Recently in Paris,
where the state of emergency, declared in the wake of recent terror attacks,
prevented climate change activists from assembling in public spaces
during the climate change summit, protesters installed over 10.000 pairs of shoes
at Place de la République,
theatrically standing in place of the absent bodies.
Images of the square circulated widely in the media,
emphasising the inherent mediatisation of contemporary protest
and the need for effective images, not necessarily real bodies.
Holograms and shoes function as placeholders, making it all the more possible
for images of absent bodies to communicate large scale discontent.
So in reference to the wave of protest in 2011,
Judith Butler has suggested that protest in public space has, quote:
"become politically potent only when and if we have a visual and audible
version of the scene communicated in live time, so that the media
does not merely report the scene, but is part of the scene and the action;
indeed, the media is the scene or the space in its extended and replicable
visual and audible dimension."
In Madrid, the shadow-like figures in the hologram embodied a double movement,
a process of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation.
Slogans and shouts were crowdsourced online
and synced with holographic images filmed in a nearby city.
Then, the resulting image was meticulously reworked to match the
distances and angles of the scene in front of congress.
So in recent years, there has been a growing interest in the reterritorialisation
of the internet.
The artist Trevor Paglen and theoreticians, such as Tung Hui Hu and Keller Easterling,
have drawn attention to the materiality of the Internet,
data centres, undersea cables, and routers, which in turn
rely on hydro-electric power stations and dams for electricity, as well as
railway tracks and telegraph lines for communication routes.
The web, until recently associated with immateriality, virtually and spacelessness
as exemplified by the popularity of the term “cyberspace”,
clearly has a body, a sprawling physical infrastructure
and ever-growing ecological footprint.
The benign-sounding “cloud” is nothing less than a publicity ploy for a vast campaign
to centralise digital data, and to turn software and hardware into a black box.
As our computers have become thinner and sleeker, the weight of the cloud has only grown greater.
So the body politic is now intertwined with the body of the web,
and the web, the world wide, is constrained by
national policies and geographical realities.
In October 2015,
citizens in Thailand protested against their military government's plan to
channel Internet traffic to international servers through a single network gateway,
with the intention of perfecting state surveillance and censorship.
This political move was dubbed “The Great Firewall of Thailand”.
As in Madrid, the choice of protest space corresponded with the space,
the new law was tailored for.
The military government's websites were targeted and downed for several hours by
denial of service attacks.
The online action was reported beyond activist platforms and international media,
however, it lacked images that could represent the bodies of those who would
literally be barred from leaving Thailand
where the government was following through on its plans
for greater surveillance and censorship.
In the meantime, the hacker collective “Anonymous”
declared cyberwar on the Thai government.
Operation “Single Gateway” targeted Thai police servers in an effort to
demonstrate the actual vulnerability of virtual state institutions.
So, how can one possibly grasp the current relation between the digital and its outside,
back when the Internet was still thought of as synonymous with cyberspace?
Both were clearly defined as separate.
A quote from Wendy Chun:
"Cyberspace as a virtual non-place made the Internet so much more
than a network of networks:
It became a place in which things happened, in which users’ actions separated from their bodies,
and in which local standards became impossible to determine.
It thus freed users from their locations."
So in the 1990s, the Internet was imagined to be a perfect frontier
science fiction dream come true,
where users could navigate as powerful agents, invisible and free of physical constraints.
Yet, as Wendy Chun in her book “Control and Freedom”, published in 2006,
as she has demonstrated, the world wide web was designed
as a technology of control from the start,
geographically rooted and constantly monitoring its users via protocols such as TCP/IP.
So in what way does virtuality challenge our conception of public space
and the mobilisation of human bodies?
As we have seen, the digital and the real coalesce in ever new forms and devices.
And despite the gaming industry's recent success in
bringing early visions of virtual reality to technical perfection,
think of Oculus Rift, or something like the body snap app,
prior myth of virtual reality are slowly, but certainly eroding.
The old demarcations between the human body in physical space
and the so called “immateriality of the digital sphere” are superseded.
Attempts to conceptualise the effect of the synthetic face-to-screen situation
either one that this is downfall of the sovereign subject or
extricate emancipatory potential from the entanglement of humans and technology.
How then might a proxy give way to different bodily modes and morphologies
a body both present and absent?
Whereas Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti have attempted to destabilise the subject
as it was conceived during the 20th century, exploring notions as the cyborg
in conceptualising a feminist post humanism.
Might the proxy antagonistically restabilise a very concrete subject in a synthetic situation,
is a proxy a techno body, does it have flesh after all?
Might it serve as the object other of the high tech clean and efficient bodies
endorsed by contemporary culture as Haraway envisions?
Or rather as a nomadic device that enables people to become
post human subjects in Braidotti's line of thought?
Braidotti warns of a fatal nostalgia for either, humanist past or the cold war cyborg.
And instead proposes that we embraced vulnerability, take pride in being flesh.
Her post-human theory aims at shaping and shifting new subjectivities
against modern humanism, a school of thought she criticises
for its wide male supremacy, eurocentric normativity, imperial past,
and inhuman consequences.
So proxies permit human bodies to step out of the line of fire
to evade forensics, the lack of a human silhouette,
face, or fixed physiognomy and can be associated with numerous
individuals wherever they are.
Rather than the avatar, a creatively designed porn in the network gaming environment,
they assume either a transformative shape and form, or none at all.
Last two sentences. *chuckles*
Proxies are necessary in contemporary political struggle,
they're counter figures to capitalist self improvement
or a [???] opaque other.
So proxies provide an escape route from a schizophrenic situation,
which denies or limits bodies to being mere vessels of biotechnological information.
Proxies offer a path toward a new, a fleeting relation as sovereign bodies.
Thank you.
*applause*
Herald: Thank you very much for the spontaneity and the talk
and I think there might be time for questions outside.
Thank you.
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