*35C3 preroll musik*
Herald: Hello everybody. A warm welcome to our friend Nicholas Maigret from
DISNOVATION.ORG. They are making contemporary art with research and hacking
to question the positive ideology for technology, to stimulate a post-growth
technology narrative. So I am quite interested and give him a warm welcome.
*Applause*
Nicholas Maigret: Hello Everyone. Ouh does it work? Can you hear me? Hey, Yeah.
Hello, so I'm Nicholas Maigret and together with Maria Roszkowska we
initiated the DISNOVATION.ORG collective and our collective intends to reveal and
challenge the dominant ideology of technological innovation and circulate
alternative narrative. So I will show you a selection of projects and mainly it's a
few projects selected to resonate with the CCC and the topics here. So we do
basically creations so we organize the festivals and we create the art species in
a different series of projects around basically the rhetoric of technological
innovation and the effect of this dominant ideology on society. We also
work on publications in books. I will get back to that in a minute. And we do
artworks and site specific projects that I will present in the second half of this
talk. So the first part will be focusing on our curatorial practices around this
idea of counter-narratives on technological innovation. So I will
introduce three works. The first one is a pirate book. So it's a book we started to
compile in 2014. It's a compilation of stories about sharing and distributing
cultural contents outside the boundaries of local economies, politics, laws, religions,
and so on. So with this work we tried to explore the notions such as the piracy of
necessity, the idea of new originals. And I think it's interesting to go back to
this project to come back to this project in the context of the Anthropocene and the
potential imminent collapse. Because I think there is a need for non-techno-
solutionist and non-techno-positivist stories at the moment and somehow a need
to develop post growth narratives. So we'll see what we can learn from the
following examples taken from the book around concerns like repair, care,
maintenance, and creative appropriation. So the first excerpt from the book I would
like to focus on, is an example from Mexico, given by our contributor Jota Izquierdo
and basically it focuses on the stories of a craftsman that works for improving the
practices of street CD vendors in Mexico. So I will I will play a quick excerpt of it.
*Video is playing with music*
Nicholas: So in the book we cover multiple
stories in this sort. We just focus on a couple of those.
*musik from video in the background* Nicholas: The second one is based in the
Sahel. It's a contribution by Christopher Kirkley and is presenting basically how a
big part of music distribution in Sahel is done through copies between dumb phones
using Bluetooth. So it's a way somehow to create a circulation of contents by
nearest neighbor dynamics, basically. And the third example I would like just to
introduce is el paquete semanal. Basically it's in the context of Cuban lack of fast
internet or internet at all. Basically el paquete semanal is a sort of substitute
to the internet in the form of a package. It's a hard drive, as you can see here and
this hard drive also circulates one copy at a time. And it's basically a
compilation of all the content that is considered to be missing for people so you
can see on this hard drive TV shows, books, movies, music, and all the sorts of
content you could expect from an internet browsing experience. So you can find the
book online for free. And we cover many of the stories but tonight I will just
present those and connect with this last contribution by Clément Renaud. He did a
long term six years of research in China and he shared with us this story about
Shanzhai technology production. It's basically something between piracy and
hybridization in Chinese manufacturing. And I will focus on this one a little bit
more so in his article Clément Renaud described specific local tech
innovation named Shanzhai. The Shanzhai culture is a mix of piracy, DIY, and anti-
establishment. It literally means "mountain fortress" and it comes from a
novel from the 13th century that tells a story of a group of outlaws that hides in
the mountain to be outside the system and outside the regulation of the state
basically. So in a more recent context Shanzhai refers basically to
manufacturing, it emerged in in the 50s for instance in Hong Kong to describe a
small scale factories that were producing cheap low quality items and mainly
counterfeit products of famous brands like Gucci or Nike and they sold those products
on markets that would not buy the fancy, expensive originals. And as electonic
manufacturing migrated to Shenzhen in the early 2000s this informal network of
Shanzhai production found the perfect product in the mobile phone. So our first
acquisition in this collection was basically the the Ghana phone and we've
been very intrigued by this device. So basically this device has not been
conceived for its superficial design but it's it's been conceived to fill a gap a
need, a niche market. So this phone is a power bank basically to fill the gap of
the frequent power cuts in Ghana. So it has a battery that can last for a week.
You can also charge other devices with it, recharge your computer, another phone. You
can also use it as a light. So that's why you have a hook to connect it on the on
the ceiling. And basically it's a whole package of functions and properties that
were designed specifically for local markets that nowhere any brands were
paying attention at. So we were very interested by this track of research and
we wanted to dig some more. So we started with a simple protocol. We started to
collect hybrid phones that were combining multiple functions and designed for those
niche markets all over the place, mainly in the global south but not only, you
will see. So you can find a lot of fancy and weird devices that I will show, and
those devices we've been collecting them in markets in Shenzhen like Huaqiangbei
and also online like on Taobao, Aliexpress, and so on. So one of the
reasons that we wanted to focus our research on mobile phones, because
Shanzhai production is not about mobiles, it's about every kind of technology I
would say. But we kind of wanted to stick to one sort of device to have this
continuity over 20 years. And also because somehow a huge contrast could be seen
through the mobile phone between sort of north hemisphere culture or this somehow
the standardized culture of the black rectangle we all have in our pockets here.
And this kind of non normalized technological imaginaries that were
emerging there and somehow it reminds us I think that although technological
possibilities always exist beyond the ultra normalized industry. So I will dig
into a few of those. *musik from video in the background*
Nicholas: So each of those examples I think a tell a specific story and reveal
specific uses and cultures. So here you can see a lighter phone. So it's basically
a phone that does cigarette lighter. This one is I would say a working cigarette
pack that also includes a mobile phone or perhaps the other way around.
*inaudible voice from video*
Nicholas: And this one is a razor phone.
So it's a phone that includes a working shaver.
*razor noise from video*
Nicholas: So since 2015 we've been
collecting about hundreds of those hybrid phones and I will zoom into a few of very
interesting specimens and stories. So here you can see the card phone, it's the size
of a credit card. It used to be the cheapest on the market. It cost about
twelve dollars and it's made of a single board. So basically it can be very easily
replicated and optimized, modified, and so on. So that's why it's been called the
Gongkai Phone which means open source and you can find this board in multiple
versions in the later generation of phones I will present in a minute.
*Video music in the background*
So this one is called the Buda phone. It's been designed as a digital alternative for Buddhist
prayers and related religious activities. So basically it replicates for instance
the ritual components like the burning of incense, purification rites, meditative
music, and more. So all of those features are included in basically the UX of the phone.
*musik from video*
Nicholas: So this is the sound system phone. It's been designed for mainly the
elderly people. So the favorite one of the favorite activities of the elderly in
China is group dancing on public squares in evenings. And this specific phone has been
designed for this purpose. And so it comes with a several gigabytes of old fashioned,
communist songs that Chinese pensioners are particularly keen on. It has huge
buttons. I mean it's really designed for the elderly. So the device is like that
size. And there is also support to stand in front of the dancers and the powerful
light torch to ensure a smooth return home after the dance.
Speaker on Video: Small. Nice and neat to put away up in the bums
Yeah, I'm a pro, I can do about 20 in 10 minutes
Speaker on Video: Why in Mars bars? Speaker on video: Because they are
available in most of the visit halls, you can't take something that might not be
there because if you do they're gonna notice it's different. I'd say that
there's probably 75 percent of prisoners have phones in jail. I take them in on the
person in places where you wouldn't get searched, the front of your trousers, in
your bra. Nicholas: So this one is the prisoner
phone or it's also called Beat The Buzz. The buzz is a device for scanning
prisoners. So actually, It started on the market as the smallest phone on the
market. But for some reason it became popular among prisoners, many in the UK
because of its small size. It's the size of a finger. And because of the fact also
it's composed of 99 percent of plastic, so it's barely detectable during the checks
in prisons and you can easily smuggle it. Inside food, inside the body obviously but
also in weird ways like inside drones, carrier pigeons, rats and so on. So we try
to exhibit all this collection of weird devices in their natural habitat, in a
way, so we built a reproduction of a street market kiosk where we basically
showcase this collection of hybrid phones and together with that we have a couple
of video documentaries like this one, that kind of tells the larger Shanzhai culture
and focus on the Chinese ecosystem of technological devices production and
distribution. So that's how it looks when it's shown. Yeah. That's it for this one.
And the last cultural project. I'd like to introduce is a work in progress. It's
called the Museum Of Failures and I will start with a quote by Paul Virilio.
*Quote read by a female voice*
Nicholas: So as you could guess with this
quote this project is about uncovering and compiling counter narratives about the
history of technological innovation and our project is basically to compile those
under represented stories, that can help us to disrupt the dominant positive discourse
on innovation and help us maybe to think about technology in post growth era. So
the project takes the shape of workshops, conferences, events, and we share it as a
database and exhibitions. So this symbolic museum is structured in two floors. They
go in negative numbers. They are somehow the underground counterparts of usual
technological museum. So each floor is a potential sort of entry, or perspective on
the museum sorted by topics. So you have like intentional failures, fiction and
dystopias, risk and disasters, unexpected outcomes, and so on. So the first part of
this future book is a collection of aborted projects: flops, errors,
malfunctions, business failures, ethical rejections, disasters, and somehow reflects
the outlines of our society from a historical, symbolic, poetic, and cultural
point of view. The second part of this book though will be based on interviews
and contributions and we are open to proposals. So if you have stories or
research on post growth technological imaginaries and counter narratives on
technological innovation, you're welcome to submit. Okay so the second part of this
talk will be about our artworks, specific selection to resonate with the CCC as
well. And we grouped it into this idea of psychoanalysis of the hyper connected era.
So the first artwork I will introduce, is the Pirate Cinema. So basically the copy culture got
mainstream with BitTorrent and the Pirate Bay in the early 2000s and it became an
essential part of culture for a whole generation. And at the same time as this
process since the early days of peer to peer it coexisted with an intense level of
surveillance. So this surveillance was conducted by universities, cooperations,
states. Some times for statistical purposes, just to know how much is
consumed from different types of content and so on, and most of the time for
copyright infringement. And we got very interested in how we could disrupt those
systems of network surveillance basically and use it to reveal the dynamics and the
materiality of peer to peer file sharing. So basically to expose the materiality of
this process and the geographical dynamics of the contents that were consumed and
shared. So I'll show a few excerpts of this project.
*inaudible sound snippets from video*
Nicholas: So we programed the server to
use BitTorrent and to synchronize every morning with the Top 100 videos of the
Pirate Bay. So it's a sort of a man in the middle attack where we see what people are
sharing through our server. So it's a way to view the global dynamics through one
node of the BitTorrent network. And as you can see on the video it also reveals the
user IP address and the countries. And somehow it's a way to depict the
geographical dynamics of media sharing in the consumptions. The next project I'd
like to introduce following this idea of counter narratives. It's a series about
illicit contents. It's called Blacklist. So we got interested in basically who
controls and decides what should be visible or not online or what should be
blocked or not. And how those least are built and used. And somehow how maybe it
can be something that reveals the value system we live in. So there are numerous
blacklists. You can subscribe to more or less efficient and up to date. Script
blacklists, Squid blacklists, Sheller list, Cisco and so on and somehow they
remind us literally of the index of forbidden books that used to exist in
libraries around the globe. It was a list basically of publication considered a
hereticall, immoral or anticlerical. And you know in an internet blacklist nowadays
you have pretty much the same. So addresses that can be blocked, they are
organized into categories as you can see here. And as a sysadmin you can decide
what type of content you want to block. So such lists are used by universities,
towns, airports, companies, individuals and so on. And then it helps you basically
to restrict the access to specific content on your network. So you have categories
like copyright, porn, pharmacy and so on and you can see weird stuff like feminist
for instance and I guess it reveals the for profit nature of this list and the
fact that anything can be requested, if enough clients are asking for it. So this
work took the shape of a sort of an encyclopedia in 13 volumes of 666 pages.
It's basically an encyclopedia of illicit and filtered sites. It is structured like
an old phone book. It's a sort of ready made, that reveals the moral sort of
portraits or framework of the web.
Video: Blacklists is a directory of the
prohibitions of the internet, deployed in the form of an encyclopedia in 13 volumes
of 666 pages each. It is an extensive collection of restricted websites used
for the automatic filtering of traffic considered ilicit or licentious. Just
like the intent of forbidding libraries the Blacklist project points out the
sidelining of online content that could be dangerous for the very survival of the
system. With around two million web sites extracted from commercial content control
softwares this collection reveals the cultural social and ideological model of
our society through what has been deemed unfit for consultation by specific groups
and institutions around the globe. Nicolas: So I guess you get the idea. All
right. So this next work is predictive art bot and I will need to contextualize a
bit. So basically we live in the era of hyper connectivity and the time we spend
on phone and social media is radically increase over the last ten years. This has
a strong effect on us. Online news and communication tends to monopolize a lot of
our attention and it does have a growing influence on our types of concerns and
priorities. So we know about effects like a filter bubble, media echo chambers and to
some extent the influence of social media and hyper connection tend towards a sort
of uniformization not only of our concerns but also somehow of our innovation and
creativity. And it tends towards a higher chance of predictability of our behaviors.
So stemming basically from the art field we started to notice somehow similar
patterns amongst the artists around us. So we spotted numerous similar imaginaries
similar trends in each interest groups. And we started to observe similar topics,
similar ideas and even similar ways of realizing artworks and answering to ideas
and concerns. So at some point we were like: Do we really need artists to simply
follow the trends? And do we need artists to just illustrate the latest technical
technological bells. Maybe no. So that's where the project started with the simple
question and we decided to automatize the process of mainstream creativity we could
say. And to push it toward sort of the absurd. So to do that, we created a bot.
And this bot basically is subscribed to hundreds of RSS feeds. That's the sort of
feeds we will get on our cell phone, our Twitter feed you know. So were basically
subscribing the bot to the same. And then the bot is using some python library to
try to identify the most significant keyword in the headlines and those
keywords are stored and then we organized using Tracery in a sort of generative
poetry to create potential concept for artworks and those concepts are reposted on
Twitter and different places to basically create a new weird inspiration machine.
That's what you will see now. Video: Predictive Art Bot is a bot that
turns the latest media headlines into artistic concepts. In the Age of Hyper
connectivity the perverse implications of media echo chambers are becoming more and
more obvious. Groups of similar behaviors are being partitioned into filter bubbles
while the few massively reposted topics tend to monopolize most of the available
attention. Search insular echo chambers strongly effect ways of thinking, resulting
in increasingly homogeneous imaginaries within groups of likeminded people.
Predictive art bar caricature is the predictability of media influenced
artistic concepts by automating and skirting the human creative process. But
beyond mere automation, it aims to stimulate unbridled, counter intuitive and
even disconcerting associations of ideas. To do so it continually monitors emerging
trends among the most influential news sources in fields as heterogeneous as
politics, environment, innovation, culture, activism, or health. On this
basis it identifies and combines keywords to generate concepts of artworks in a
fully automated way ranging from unreasonable to prophetic to absurd. Each
prediction becomes a thought experiment waiting to be incubated, misused, or
appropriated by a human host. Nicolas: Okay. And we also commissioned a
few artists to interpret and realize those projects a few times. Okay. The last
project for tonight. I see that it's almost time for me. So the last project is
a map and it's a work in progress for a future long-term project. And basically it
focuses on the fact, that the web has become one of the most impactful vehicles
for the propagation of ideas in culture. And hyper connectivity did intensify the
rise of online politics and made it way easier to manipulate public opinions. And,
I mean this happened at a sort of unprecedented scale. So you know we've
seen the emergence of political bots, fake accounts, troll farms and so on. But today
I will focus on the cultural aspect of this battleground. So one of the important
aspects of online culture wars that we were trying to map, is perhaps this notion
of transgression, so as one of the Trump supporters, Milo Yiannopoulos used to say
"Conservatism is the new punk". Milo Yiannopoulos: And think about how the
culture wars have changed, and changed very rapidly and in a very short space of
time. The dissident element in culture: punk, mischief, irreverence is now better
represented in politics by a "Make America Great Again" hat than by anything on the
left. If you want to annoy somebody, you want to piss your parents off, If you want
to be ejected from polite society as this poor angel has been. There is no better
way to do it than to cast a vote for Donald Trump. This is the new punk.
*Shouting* Milo Yiannopoulos: This is the new punk.
Republican is the new cool. Thank you for coming.
*Shouting* Nicolas: So in the context of the
political correctness and self-censorship, public shaming. That was occuring a lot
in the left. This obscure style of sort of iconic, cynical, mockery emerges as a sort
of counterforce. And transgression made the alt-right attractive in a way. And
this transgressive online culture is well presented in the book of Angela Nagel
called Kill All Normies. Audio: What seem to hold them all together
in their obscurity was a love of mocking the earnestness and moral self flattery of
what felt like a tired liberal intellectual conformity running right
through from establishment liberal politics to the more militant enforcers of
new sensitivities and from the wackiest corners of Tumblr to campus politics.
Nicolas: So basically this culture of transgression aligns pretty well with what
is called a weaponized meme so a weaponized meme is when the internet memes
become part of political and ideological propaganda. It can be done by the right
but as well by all the political spectrum like here to fight the homophobia in
Russia. And as a starting point for this new series of projects we wanted to create
a kind of mind map of the emerging online culture wars. So we use this classical
political compass as a framework. I mean it's a framework that has been criticized
a lot but nonetheless it became popular as a format to exchange content on online
forums and on the meme-osphere and it often integrates non-political characters
and pop-references and so on. So after studying numerous critical researches on
the topic, like the Computational Propaganda Project, Angela Nagel, Florian
Cramer and so on and also on investigations, we started to assemble a
sort of cartography of weaponized meme elements with the help of Baruch Gottlieb.
Audio: The Online Culture Wars Project offers a provisional cartography of
weaponized meme elements using a speculative political distribution. Taking
the political compass as a framework this cartography offers a symbolic
representation of online ideological and political debates in the context of the
growing polarization and radicalization. This ever evolving chart is the result of
a superposition of hundreds of politicized memes found online. In addition to
influential political symbols, actors and influencers. It is designed as a
discussion starter intended to expose and contextualize the present battlefield of
online culture wars. Nicolas: So we are currently continuing
this map as an interactive, contributive webpage. Well this was a quick selection
of our old and new works that somehow resonates with the CCC and thank you for
your attention. *Applause*
Herald: A big thanks Nicholas. Are there any questions to Nicholas. There is
microphone 1. Micophone 1: Hey congrats. Beautiful
presentation. Nikolas:Thanks.
Micophone 1: I'm curious what's what have you never dared doing, what's your next
step? I think it's correlated somehow. Nicolas: Yeah yeah yeah. So as I said this
last project is a sort of a starting point for a new series of investigation and
research. And at the moment we are accumulating a lot of documents on the
online propaganda and online influence. And we're starting a new series of online
performance using and basically challenging those strategies for the
manipulation of opinions. So we are trying to develop our own propaganda strategies
basically. Herald: Are there any questions from the
internet. No. Yeah. Then a big warm applause, thanks for Nicholas.
*Applause*
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