Pokémon Quo?

Nevermind Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality will bring a whole new WTF level to everything, and by WTF I mean that it will make many people aware of the different kinds of reality they live and question what even is ‘real’. Pokémon Go, an AR geocaching game turns the whole world into a playing field. You can catch Pokémon wherever you are, little and big (mostly) public spots become Pokestops or Gymns. In this way AR frees gaming of the geographical limits not only of where you can play (which is what mobile devices have done), no: AR adds a layer of gaming to your whole physical world, the gap between gamer and avatar becomes smaller.

Just like the fascination with snapchat filters with Pokémon Go it is the mix of the known and the unknown, the acquainted and the new, that’s part of making the fun so accessible for so many people. The geocaching element makes you experience your environment in a new way – everywhere could hide something to be discovered. You discover things in your environment you’ve never payed attention to before and things you know suddenly become charged with new meaning when you discover that they are Pokéstops or Gyms. Of course it also helps that Pokémon are part of pop culture mainstream: thus the new AR layer has something you are already acquainted to. So you can experience your neighbourhood streets as something new and because the AR layer has these cute creatures you already know it has a reassuring element, is not only a strange new techy thing.

This acquaintedness, an air of nostalgia even for the older ones, might be why even though it has only been released for a few days by now P-Go seems as the ice-breaker for the uncanny valley of AR tech. If Google Glass had been released after P-Go things would have gone better for it. Some might be interested in the Pokémon fever because it offers new ways of marketing stuff to you, and yes, Pokémon Go of course is about making money, and the ways in which it can be used for making money via marketing might be what we will hate about it soon. Just as with almost every new tech thing we let into our daily lives. Capitalism is why we can’t have nice things for long.

I find the side effects more fascinating than the possible ways of exploitation. As if by accident P-Go might be something that help a lot of people realize how deeply tech is interwoven in their daily life. So it might be one more step contributing to end digital dualist thinking: One more step towards an end of thinking online and offline as either/or. Weirdly, when I turned on P-Go while I was on a walk lately I not only cared for the AR creatures but somehow it also seemed to sharpen my eye for the birds and squirrels that crossed my way. For some people it has a similar side effect as the smoking ban brought in my experience: I have gotten to know so many new people thanks to the smoking ban because it made us leave the circle of friends we go out with and it makes us leave the loud clubbing area for a cigarette or two. This has created new small social spaces. A friend of mine said he doesn’t get P-Go because he games because/when he doesn’t want to go out (which I fully understand). P-Go players suddenly go and meet each other. As an Inverse article puts it: “Remember when you were told not to play with strangers? In 2016, everything has changed.” Or as Danah Boyd describes it “In New York City, they ran into their neighbors who, on similar hunts, laugh and joke as they show each other their phones and share a moment. This game invites people to wander around their physical environment and see their surroundings in a new way — even prompt a “see something, say something” response in our security-obsessed world.”

Taking gaming to the streets has another side effect though. I don’t know if the game makers are aware that our cities aren’t neutral places. My bet is that they don’t care. This geocaching AR game reminds us of limits in public space that are set by our place in society. Starting with having money for a mobile data rate to play it while walking through the city. If you follow #blacklivesmatter or #reclaimthenight you are very aware that public space as equal playing field that democratic states seem to guarantee is a very theoretical and fragile thing. Last week-end on my way home from a show I realized quickly that a woman walking the streets alone at night will not hunt down her Pokémon as carefree as a man. Omari Akil has written about how playing it as a black man actually could put his life in danger. That’s just two of hundreds of examples.

We agree on a societal consensus of how we talk about our realities and what is acceptable to talk about, I think in journalism it’s called the Overton Window. This middle ground is only the lived reality for some, for an imaginary middle. We often don’t talk about our different experiences because we are so used to them that we take as given that everyone knows. First blogs, then social media were a massive step in making these different realities visible, for breaking the Overton window. The more different people started voicing their opinions and experiences, the more confusing the world got for those who live closest to the imaginary middle ground. The further away your lived reality is from it, the less problems you might have with a society that suddenly realizes that there is not one single objective fixed reality but that there are many fluid ones instead. The closer you are to society’s middle ground reality the scarier the world has become. Which might be one of the reasons for the big right-wing movements growing: For them giving the realities of minorities more space and more justice feels like their safe narrow world gets taken away. In this way social media have tought us a lot about social tensions, about community forming, about power relationships and much more.

Many people though don’t realize that social media – just like AR – already are a new layer that augments our lives. Geographically seen, social media is an invisible layer – AR makes it a bit more visible. And humans are visible creatures. Pokémon Go is just a silly little game but with its step into using AR as a visual layer over an environment you know it helps understanding in a casual fun way how deeply digital technology is interwoven with our everyday lives. AR taking us outside, connecting us via actual public spaces, taking the digital networked experience to the level of collective experience on the streets seems to hit a nerve. When we discuss platform politics of Facebook, to most people it seems like a “take it or leave it” thing, a neglectable theoretical dispute. Leave Facebook if you like it. That this can mean being detached from an important part of social and work networking still is quite incomprehensible for many people. AR might take social justice discussions to urban space, join them with the discussions about online spaces. When a woman complains she can’t write something publicly on the web without getting a wave of abuse and thus feels restricted in her movement it seems theoretical, ‘virtual’ to many. When she says or shows by a video that she can’t walk along the street without getting harrassed it isn’t. If it takes a silly game to unite people in ways that make them realize their different experiences of the same space it’s a good thing. And if it makes gamers aware that games are real social spaces, I won’t complain. When this gamer is worried about P-Go because “we should absolutely expect everything that happened in MMOs to happen here, because AR is an MMO” I wish he would see that a) life is an MMO and b) MMOs are life (things that happen in the social spaces of games affect real people). But his text shows how deeply this little game already inspires some people to think about how digital tech and life are intertwined.

There’s rightful criticism, of course there is. Pokémon Go shows the power and disruptive carelessness of companies. If your house becomes a Pokémon Gym, it has consequences – P-Go is great alone for all the discussions about public space it sparked. Should there really be Pokémon in Auschwitz? Are Stolpersteine okay? Should Pokémon be allowed to funerals? Should cats or parrots or other cute pets be? And so on. On the other hand the usual conservative criticism that tries to police the careless fun of exploring new tech also has already set in. From calling it not real hence anti-social, and some new kind of narcissim, and writing things like “people don’t have time to go to protests but they wander the streets playing Pokemon”. Why compare these things? It’s not either/or. Play is not not caring. Protest is caring and caring is only the other side of careless fun. As Ted Leo has put it in a song about St. Feliu, “Costa Brava”: Take some time off, drink some wine, (play Pokémon Go!), and “we’ll forget the fright and remember why we want to be brave and that there’s something to save.” So let’s enjoy it, let’s embrace the fun AND the critical tensions of public spaces on&offline and privacy and commercial pressure this little game might make us aware of until all the capitalist leeches will kill it. And, to quote Danah Boyd yet again: “Rather than responding out of fear, let’s step back and start thinking about how we can create more opportunities for young people to be meaningfully connected in an augmented way.” Just as this article on Pokémon Go as the future of learning does.

Is the internet sad?

Does the internet know the pattern of my ups and downs? Does the internet know why I’m quiet, why I’m noisy? When my absence means I’m broken and paranoid and when it means retreat and peace? Does the internet know when I’m all retweets I might be too fragile too offer anything that might spark response? Does it know when I seek dialogue? Does the internet know why there are days on which no word makes it from my mind through my fingers to the screen alive? Does the internet measure the periods between that and my joyful and careless and loudmouthed content? Does the internet understand? Does the internet judge? Does the internet caress all my posts, my tweets, my searches, my geolocation info before it stores it away? Does it kiss them goodnight? Is the internet daddy? The internet is at its best when it stays vague. A liquid multitude being you can’t put a finger on. If the internet wasn’t that hazy *more* than the sum of all the voices with which you connect through/with it, it wouldn’t feel so intimate. The internet is a phantom limb you weren’t aware of having lost. A phantom limb with a sock puppet you hold up against yourself. Does the internet read between the tweets? Is the internet just as overwhelmed as me on the other side of all this content? Does the internet sometimes jump joyfully into puddles of what I have posted so that all the feels splash all out of their categories? Does the internet feel like the fifth wheel whenever I adress someone directly instead of posting to the internet? Is the internet a lurker? Would the internet hurt me? Is the internet a toughguy MPC that would at any time tear a lighthearted post from years ago out of its safe context into the brutal spotlight of so many eyes that it becomes so heavy that it will crush my life? Will it have been worth it? Does the internet understand the complex terms under which I interweave my life with it? Does the internet read the TOS? If no one else, can at least the internet read me? The internet knows that you are dead if everything you do is unsullied, is legal, stays within the lines. The internet knows that it’s not life if everything you do makes you feel dirty, feels like you overstep a line, feels illegal. A sacrifice: You should feed your life at least one daily act of disobedience to keep the world alive. You should feed the internet at least one daily act of irregularity to keep it alive.

VR and art: experience as creativity

Virtual reality and art

I had the pleasure of thinking about VR and art for a talk at re:publica TEN. Some of the first questions I have asked myself are: What’s special about virtual reality, what makes this medium so radically different, why is it considered as significant a moment as when perspective entered painting? I will blog some fragments of my thoughts split up into a few blog posts.

Immersion vs narration

A fascinating point about VR for a user is the disappearance of distance to the piece of art, to the world of experience. Pimentel and Texeira already have written about this anti-semiotic character in the 90s: In VR you don’t need signs that you have to translate – like letters in a book, or pictures on a screen. In VR you can immerse directly into the work of art. They wrote: “Simply, virtual reality, like writing and mathematics, is a way to represent and communicate what you can imagine with your mind. But it can be more powerful because it doesn’t require you to convert your ideas into abstract symbols with restrictive semantic and syntactic rules, and it can be shared by other people.”

To restrict thinking about VR art to only this point would do it no justice though. VR as mere anti-semiotic immersion into a virtual world would mean to only be fascinated by the perfection of the illusion, if not get high on your powers as creator. It would mean to only see the medium as an extension of things like 3D film effects. Something, that helps the audience feel even more like being inside of a fictional world. Yet this is how many makers think about the possibilities of virtual reality right now: as immersion into an experience or as identity tourism. If it’s a rollercoaster ride through cosmos or the stay in an isolation cell, both means thinking VR as possibility to make a user experience the author’s version of a story more intensely.

This already hits on problems when you consider storytelling: How do you lead a user along your plot when she is *in* the story? Classic storytelling doesn’t work when the user becomes an autonomous character in the story. How can a linear story be told if users can look and go whereever they want? Incentives and rewards, copying ideas from games? Well, possible but that means but applying other media’s means onto a new one.

What about forgetting about plot? Could a space to explore be enough? There already exists wellness VR with spheric sounds and meditative landscapes. Or take the Guardian’s VR experience about life in an isolation cell: It works this well because an isolation cell per definition is a small limited space. There is not much to explore and to interact with. Same goes for Notes of Blindness, in which the audio diary of John Hull – who slowly went blind – got made into an audio-visual VR experience. Sounds of the world that surrounds you, original voices telling you their story: both VR experiences mix narrator voices and an experience of a somehow restricted space. It works by setting limits to the user’s possibilities. That’s not really a satisfying solution for the storytelling problem though. It just means not exploring the great specific possibilities of the medium but instead limiting them. The user’s leash gets just a little bit longer. He or she is allowed to take a 360° look, do a few things they get led to do but the author wants the audience to stay passive and under their control. The user is thought as a character in the author’s play.

If VR stays limited like this it might be quite fascinating for a while but the novelty will wear off. Then this path might lead to VR fizzling out like 3D tech for ages, to not much more than a special effect.

VR experience as creative act

A more adequate approach is to see the audience as co-creators of this virtual world. Not placing them into a fixed plot but only creating an environment: a world of potential experiences in which the user forms their own experiences. No complete and linear story that the user plays through. Let the autoritarian narrator disappear. The experiencers (the users) bring their own wishes, ideas, their whole background and context into the VR world. They only create the virtual work of art by how they interact with this world.

So as a theory VR art could mean an ephemeral and personalized virtual experience as work of art: No second person will be looking around in the same way, no second person will interact with the virtual environment in the same way, no second person will create the same story in that virtual environment. Thinking the user as co-creator seems to be more appropriate for the medium. Unlike with books or films you have no finished product / object but it only comes into existence when the user puts on their VR gear and starts interacting with the artificial reality. And it no longer exists when they take it off.

Isn’t it a kind of nice and empowering thought that this way, somehow, about 50 years after Roland Barthes has declared him dead already, with the VR medium the author could die a second time? With Barthes it was about wether or not a work of art should be interpreted against the biographical background of its creator: He emancipated the individual approach. In VR the author dies the death as plot-crafting, storytelling hand. Virtual reality as empowerment of the audience, of the user: Experiencing becomes a creative act.

VR as erotics of art

Or even: In VR experiencing becomes a passionate creative act, a sensual creative experience. Immersed in a virtual world you can act more free of consequences. It is an ephemeral world: there’s no product, no archive. What happens in VR (could) stay in VR. Susan Sontag wrote – even a few years before Barthes (jouissance) – in Against Interpretation that art is not about one correct interpretation. Approaching art can not be restricted to assuming a fixed meaning that quasi was hidden by the creator. She denied that experiencing art correctly would mean to figure out that hidden meaning. Instead she called for an erotics of art and shifted the focus to the emotional sensual individual experience of a work of art.

If you transfer this to the creative experience of VR, you could say VR not just liquifies and personalizes interpretation but does that to the very form of the work of art. It makes for an erotics of art in which the user is audience of and creator of and character in the VR artpiece at the same time, by each user’s very own individual VR experience/creation. Like a wave of pleasure the VR art of work only exists in the moment of interaction with the individual user. Creating while VRly immersed as erotic exploration. It is a medium in which you no longer have a fixed work of art but a liquid plurality of a work of art: all the different threads of experience/creation that different user experience/create are equal ephemeral works of art. The autor who creates the VR environment is but a designer, an architect, is but the maker of tools.

It’s been a while!

It’s been a while since I have written here – about time for an update! Somehow blogging about things has led me to giving talks about things, and this has turned out as rather time consuming. I have done quite a few talks in the last months, and plan on publishing at least parts of it on this english blog of mine, too, starting with the VR and art one. There were:

“That’s why the lady is a fan” – On the power of fangirling – female fan culture and the internet. I wrote this for the fan culture exhbition “PASSION” and held it a second time last week at Katana, at the Salon der unerfüllten Wünsche. I will hold this one again at Ladyfest Mannheim in July. I haven’t been to a Ladyfest in years but the ones I visited or organized myself were a wonderful experience, so I’m really looking forward to it.

“Reclaim The Night” – About why sexual harassment in nightlife happens as regularly as it is invisible, and what can be done about it. One to encourage people to get loud about this still far too neglected topic. It was for a night that aimed at giving the audience that comes to our (musikverein, the promoter collective I work with) shows and club nights a possibility to talk about this and join together for solutions. I will hold this talk once more at Klangtherapie Festival – a 3 days open air electronic music festival. We’ll see how that goes. 😉

Virtual Reality and Art – I tried to give an overview about what I find special about the medium, e.g. the perspective and disappearance of a narrator, and why I wish more *independent* art would (be able to) explore it. I did this one for re:publica conference and it was a great experience to be there – I filled my head with as many talks I could visit in those three days in Berlin. I had offered them another talk but was asked if I could do one about this topic instead and it definitely is one that I enjoyed wrapping some thoughts around.

Soft Resistance – an older one (a few months) about how digitalisation is interwoven in our everyday lives and about how images led and lead to digital dualist misunderstandings. I had a really wonderful time holding this one in Hamburg and Bremen for data/city/explosion – great people!

Another new date: I have the pleasure to do an ORCHID floor (my queer underground club night) at Munich’s Pride at the venerable huge townhall, and I will bring my wonderful mate DOUBLE U CC of Trouble In Paradise, an all female underground hiphop night, with me as co dj. It’s the second time I spin at Pride Munich while there’s still no connection between my local Pride and me. For reasons. Even in 2015 it still labelled itself only as “lesbian gay”, as if visibility wouldn’t be one of the cores of Pride. What about trans/inter/bi folks? “LGBT” is the minimum you should go for if you claim to represent the whole of your bloody rainbow. If Pride is just about making friends with and about fitting nicely into a society that still is quite hostile to many queers instead of making the problems of the weakest amongst us more visible, it’s just a carnival for the oppressors. If I had a lot of time I would sooooooooo like to start a little alt Pride in Nuremberg, without sponsoring, religion and conservative party politics.

Anyways.

The main part of my time I have – as always – spent with plotting shows and club nights with my musikverein mates and we have such great shows coming up: Astronautalis + Ceschi, Mr. Heart + Chimney, and pleaaaaase don’t miss Downtown Boys! And Tommy Genesis. And Zu! And Le1f! My next night djing will be our fabulous 80s night: Dancing With Tears In My Eyes and then Orchid end of june. For that one I have decided to offer karaoke from 22-midnight and have yet to figure out how – this should be fun, the figuring as well as the night itself! Can’t wait. A girl has no shame.

That’s it for now as an update and first step back into blogging. Now that I have reclaimed my balcony from snow and rain, and now that I have finished rewatching all of Gilmore Girls and have caught up with all of Game of Thrones, there is no holding me back! \o/
Hope that there are some readers left after this long break.

“Anywhere that is safe” Mix

A mix that I made to channel my anger and sadness after the racist protests and police action against an arriving bus of refugees in Clausnitz in February 2016.
#refugeeswelcome #1213

Here’s a mixcloud link for streaming and below you’ll find a link to my reanimated my Heartthis.at account from which the mix can also be downloaded.

Shlomo – Apathy (feat. d33j)

Portishead – Machine gun

Chino Amobi – They don’t really care about us

M.I.A. – Borders

Nani Castle x Udachi – Lift the veil (feat. Nire)

Gr◯un土 – FR∞SHINE

Sexwitch – Ha Howa Ha Howa

DAVEM – Some day in the dark side

Gnarls Barkley – Crazy

Acid Arab – Amal

Ancient Methods – Guided by the force of compassion

Royal Family And The Poor – Art on 45

CRASHprez – Love the Police (feat. Lord of the Fly & Otis Franklin) (prod. Oliver Hunt)

Lunice – All clear

1127 – It never drops

Snow Tha Product – Play

Novelist – Street politician

Dullah Beatz – Time

Visionist – Victim

Warsan Shire – Home

Lakker – Mountain divide

Incl. samples from the police press conference after Clausnitz and of Varoufakis at BBCQuestionTime.

Solidarity with all victims everywhere and writing about not-writing

I see the need for all the hot takes and opinion status updates in order to find a stable position on grounds that feel frageile after having been shaken up by the horror of attacks – applies both to part of the media as to people posting on social media. Solidarity profile pictures, words about one’s own place in and one’s own view on the attacks, in the context of Paris, of other attacks, of Europe’s refugee situation, of the band’s and the venue’s jewish context, and so on. I understand it but I felt mute. I wondered about this while still lying in my bed, still numb from last night, the collision of the news of the attack on Twitter with being out on a club night, music, alcohol… this surreal feeling that almost has become a new normal. Anyways: For me, nothing seemed appropriate to post. Every sentence that took shape in my head seemed to be a shady appropriation of the attacks. Like the above line about my last night out: It is about me me me instead of the victims. This feels wrong. I rather felt like taking a step back, stand-by. Even retweeting – in all its semi-passive humbleness – seemed almost too much. Even posting my solidarity with victims seemed … stale, empty, formulaic.

Don’t get me wrong: I do see most postings about this as a social effort to reach out to each other, to share fears, connect, to reassure each other, which is all fine and good. Even if they are written in demanding tone. In the face of such attacks the need to reassure one another is simply human. But then human is not simple. I felt less human for reading many of those status updates as misappropriation. Made me feel cynical. As if I was doing human wrong, doing social wrong. I felt like standing back, making room instead of rubbing my point of view all over the attacks. Facebook asking to change avatars to the French national colours was a nauseating shallow peak. I was thankful when Sam Kriss (whom I often appreciate for what I’d call constructive provocation) posted his thoughts on his blog because they made me feel less lost: Sam Kriss – How to politicise a tragedy

“If it’s barbarism to write poetry after Auschwitz, then it’s also barbarism to write thinkpieces after Paris. Don’t politicise; don’t use mass murder to score rhetorical points against your enemies, don’t crow je te l’avais bien dit, don’t play tug-of-war with the bodies, don’t make this about yourself, don’t make this about politics. […]

When it’s deployed honestly, the command to not politicise means to not make someone’s death about something else: it’s not about the issue you’ve always cared about; it’s not about you. To do this is one type of politics. But there’s another. Insisting on the humanity of the victims is also a political act, and as tragedy is spun into civilisational conflict or an excuse to victimise those who are already victims, it’s a very necessary one. There is the politicisation that seizes on death for limited political aims, and then there is the politicisation that would refuse any predetermined script other than the call for liberation. It insists on the political nature of tragedy, not to shunt it towards one or another narrative pit, or to put a left-ish or right-ish filter over the images of bloodshed, but because politics is a way out of all this. Atrocity demands solidarity. Absolute sympathy for the victims; for all victims.”

Sam Kriss’ text also echoes with a reading we had at the Zentralcafé last night: Frank Apunkt Schneider talked about nazi symbolism in german post-punk in the 80s. There were bands in which for the first time after WW2 some young german punks talked/sang/wrote about being nazis in a “we” perspective, right into the face of the elder nazi or ex-nazi generation whose accounting of the past only happened safely at the sidelines of society while in the center people simply didn’t talk about it. Suddenly no one had been a nazi. That silence was deafening. Those punks made people painfully aware of the joy, if not even lust that the nazi generation indeed had taken in humiliating, violating and killing jewish and other people that didn’t fit their sick world view. With faux-affirmative lyrics like “Es war so nett, nett, nett im KZ” (“it was so nice, nice, nice in the concentration camp”) they tried to tear apart the comfy cushions of lies of an elder generation that rejected to face up to its past. Why I’m mentioning this? At the end of his talk Frank Apunkt Schneider made a very necessary dialectical twist: After he had argued for the apparent effectiveness of this back then, he ended with adding the view of the victims and their descendants, and by this showed how this faux-affirmative play with nazi symbolism in the end still is an instrumentalisation of the Shoah for german’s own good that only works if you exclude the point of view of those affected, in short: it only works if you only make it about you.

So… that once more:

Atrocity demands solidarity. Absolute sympathy for the victims; for all victims.

I am aware that my blog post’s point is against its own existence – writing about not-writing in the face of tragedy and confusion. Making it about me. Doing it wrong.

P.S. Wenn ihr Gelegenheit habt , diesen Vortrag, “My Future in the SS” zu besuchen – große Empfehlung. Wie alle Vorträge von Frank Apunkt Schneider. Außerdem hier noch ein Link zu der hervorragenden Filmkritik Georg Seeßlens zu Tarantinos “Inglorious Basterds“, auf die sich in dem Vortrag auch bezogen wurde.

the toxicity of difference – rough and a draft

if i had to consider one thing being my super power it’s that i’ve learned to embrace “not belonging”. not as a woman in a male-centric scene and society, not geographically, not as a queer in a straight world, not as being single in a world of couples, and so on – my list is long but not the longest. coming out with any of it makes every sentence you speak perceived as loaded, in good ways (passion! contagiously energetic! inspiring! helpful!) and bad ways (touchy… over-sensitive… taking the fun out of it… demanding…) oh, can’t she for once just be… yes, can’t i for once just be?!!!

difference is a very slow but steady current that makes your ice floe drift away again and again from friends who don’t have to live with it. if i didn’t want to let it break me, i had to find and cling to the good sides of not belonging. and it keeps me alive and buzzing and feeling good and empowered 90% of the time. but then, sometimes, something switches the light out and in the dark it turns against me and then there’s nothing i can do but fall.

opening up about it always seems to be most necessary in the worst moments. the weakest moments. when you can hardly move. when you can hardly talk and if you dare every word comes out wrong. chest feels torn open. tits aching, an unrelatable soft mess of flesh, clawed soft messy meat, twin tower strangers translating into the physical this thing, this wrong, the pure pain of being othered and you succumb, you hide.

you, trying desperately to laugh at your friends’ jokes just to feel less different. just to feel… less. you, silently howling at the mediocrity of every thing that makes you stand out as the ulcer that’s just not gotten cut out yet. you, in these moments: deep throated by life, choking, silenced. loss of language is the worst. every move, every look turns into balancing on the edge of the abyss that then has opened between you and other people, between you and that life from a few hours ago, that seemed to live itself, as if natural. swear to never take that for granted again.

in those moments there’s no help, there’s just loss. you long for a look, a word, a touch that reaches out to you. understands. sees. eases. but: you are ready to fight it nail and tooth just to show you don’t need it. accidental isolation. don’t bleed. just breathe. i really don’t envy those around me.

the toxicity of difference: ever tried fighting loss of control with loss of control?

oh, what a pathetic failing load of letters.

Mat Dryhurst’s Saga – make your embeddable videos fluid and context-relevant

“Saga however encourages artists to challenge the way their work is being ‘exploited’ online.

[… a self-hosted] video embed much like YouTube or Vimeo that can be changed if you don’t like the context in which your work is displayed. For example, if someone posts your work next to something you don’t like, you can obscure it with a slogan or graphic. If someone is hosting advertising alongside you work, you can even charge them to keep hosting it.” FACT Magazine
(Hier auch ein deutschsprachiger Artikel im Groove dazu)

I also love the Saga idea for other aspects: it opens possibilities for keeping digital art fluid instead of a finished fixed object, and: For playing with contexts. I still think context awareness – on the level of how it produces meaning and of how it is socially relevant – is disappointingly neglected by critical thinking and art. In the for-high-profit tech bubble context is well explored, or another examplet. news media build formally and technically different content for different platform contexts, optimizing it for what users of that special platform prefer and depending on distintictive technical features of a platform). Today profit industry and state, marketing companies, social media platforms like Facebook etc., the NSA – are the most sensitively and aware fields if it comes to considering the emotional, social and political effects of context. Just think of how each of us has a totally different view of Facebook, each of us enclosed in the perspective of their own unique timeline. Facebook though has a god-like view on all of our personalized time lines and it can gamble with that knowledge. Something like Saga shows how embed functions create a similar power imbalance and how to shift this balance. Me, personally, I’m less interested in the profit aspect of this (though it’s all good to aim at making things more fair) but I’m fascinated even more by the possibilities it opens for making critically and creatively challenging everchanging content that is different in different contexts. That opens so many possibilities. It could raise more context awareness. It could be like an inverse mirror/metaphor for our personalized spaces on social media. Less archive, more moment, more ephemerality also could be an aspect. Now once more I wish I was more of a geek so I could try Saga myself.

Go find more info >>> HERE <<< while I’ll stay here and keep F5-ing and suspiciously eyeing the video below and the picture above for changes. ??

Too many zombies – Orchid, The Walking Dead, Jauch, Varoufakis

I’d like to thank everyone involved in another splendid fabulous ORCHID night – I could have played another few hours, felt so good. Thanks to Dennis STORIES/OF/A/STONER for djing with me and to the glorious helpers for decoration, bar and door!
Late, as so often, here’s the artwork:

This time I picked a zombie theme but did not do a Romero and depict the zombies as the opressed. It reached its cynical peak in World War Z, which still echoed in a car ad by Audi that showed worker’s of independent car services as zombies in contrast to the safe large corporate-owned services. After that I don’t want to use this imagery this way round anymore. So for ORCHID I thought, what if we turn the perspective around and look at the cis-/heteronormative parts of society as the slow braindead beasts we have to struggle with every day. Even if it often seems sisyphos work and the rise of the far right right now is scary – we won’t be silent, we won’t hide, we won’t conform to appear straight, and: we will dance. You see, I like constructing my club nights as critical pop art. ^^

As I didn’t have the possibility to make little tamagotchi zombie homophobes – which I would have loooved! – I zombified some of my *favourite* german anti-queer propagandists and made collector cards:

zombiesammelkarten

The day after ORCHID I was appropriately binge-watching The Walking Dead while recovering. It’s a series I hate-love. The Michonne and Andrea storyline was great but got far too little room. The scene in which Michonne turns up with the two *slave* zombies on chains and saves Andrea is such a powerful image, and I wish they had made a whole season of those ladies’ adventures on the road. Instead of the Governor’s return. A whole episode dedicated to him? Please! Booooring. As if we needed any more stories about violent white psycho men depicted as troubled suffering souls… and not one, not two, no: three women following him and falling for him… zzzzzzzzz… More Michonne plz.

Anyways: That Gov’s return episode turned me off and I switched over to a recorded livestream of a Yanis Varoufakis talk at a Portuguese university I had bookmarked. I love watching his talks. For his ideas, his way with words and for the passion and charisma with which he delivers his message. In (economic) politics he is like what Michonne is in the battle against zombies, ever the outsider. And like what Guy Picciotto and Fugazi were for me as a woman in Hardcore/Punk back in the Nineties – not perfect, because I’d rather have seen more women on stage, but still helping to take so much of what held us down away. And being sexy, passionate and inclusive while doing so. Varoufakis is making politics a sexy threat again, he is trying to make political discussion everyone’s business again, taking down the expert myth that’s so dangerous for democracy, speaking up for solidarity, basically: trying to drag the European left out of its melancholy. We need more politicial non-politicians standing up to the zombie apocalypse. And it could become my favourite hungover late night pastime to transcribe at least parts of his talks, both to savour and to share them.

“I am tired of talk shows being used not to mediate but to put oil into the fire of public disputes and fears.”

höcke

Last night then, I experienced a real flash of fear turning my stomach when I saw Björn Höcke (AfD) given a platform to display his far right propaganda on Germany’s most-watched talk show, Jauch. The reach! Knowing how many of his followers out at the screens cheering him. Höcke even pulled out a little german flag as nationalist power gesture, bragging about his deep love for his country. Could only have been more dramatic/ridiculous if he had pulled it from his trouser fly. His speeches at rallies are quite something: Rants about protecting blond german women from refugees and about a 1000 year future of ~~the Reich~~ Germany. Some people have understandably compared his propaganda style to Goebbels. It is dangerous to give someone like him space on tv, especially with the political climate we have right now: Refugee homes burning, gallows for Angela Merkel and Sigmar Gabriel at PEGIDA rallies, a refugee-friendly politician in a coma from a knife-attack just this week-end. It is twice as dangerous if you don’t have a fierece zombie fighter – say, a competent host :eyeroll: – rebutting the nazi propaganda strongly. I am tired of talk shows being used not to mediate but to put oil into the fire of public disputes and *fears*. Höcke, especially in the first half of the show last night, definitely was a new peak in far right propaganda given place on public tv.

“Borders are an absurdity looked at from space”

Let me connect this back to Yanis Varoufakis: I loved how on BBC question time a few weeks ago (3:29min into the clip) he put the UKIP fearmonger into place with his rebuttal of anti-refugee propaganda (my transcription below):

Varoufakis: “Let me remind you, ladies that in general we’re all migrants and we’re all economical migrants. If I believe my anthropologist friends we’re all Africans actually who came to these parts of the world. A long time ago. But the notion that at a time when there are tens of thousands of desperate refugees being washed up at the shores of Greece and Italy, when there are 3.1 million refugees from that particular conflict in Jordan, in Turkey, in Libanon, and that these poor countries have opened their doors to these refugees and they welcomed them, they’ve sheltered them, they feed them, they make sure that they have water to drink – to have this discussion in Cambridge today of wether there’ll be ten- or twenty-thousand people were let in, to have this moral panic because a few wretched souls at the other side of the channel in Calais, this is not putting in good stead this country. This country deserves a lot better.”

Asked if he’d be for open door policy, letting everyone in:

“I have a tendency to say that I think that borders are an absurdity looked at from space. But we should have a robust debate on precisely the mechanics of dealing with this humanitarian crisis. To simply conjure up ridiculously pathetically low numbers – for a start we’re running a risk of running Mrs Merkel into the moral maiden.”

On the distinction between “humanitarian” and “economic” refugees:

“I make the distinction but at the same time I recognize that the distinction is rather blurred in many occasions because starving to death due to lack of economic opportunity…

Gets interrupted by Hartley-Brewer: “They’re not starving to death!”

V: “Well, some people are! With migrants from Africa who migrated to Greece under incredible circumstances because their kids were starving to death I can not easily say that these people are undeserving whereas others have deserved because they were shot at. You may make this distinction but I’m not going to follow you.”

“The problem with austerity is that it’s being used as a narrative in order to conduct a class war.”

And while I’m at it, here’s some more:

On austerity (at 20:45min):

“The problem with austerity is that it’s being used as a narrative in order to conduct a class war. And by that I mean … let me give you a very simple example: In Britain today, when you have the lowest percentage of public spending as a proportion of national income for the last 70 years, to be talking about reducing the state welfare when effectively what you’re doing is that you’re reducing taxes like inheritance tax and at the same time you’re cutting benefits: that’s class war. In the state in which Britain finds itself today.”

On cuts of National Health Service and education (at 56:17min):
“Allow me to look at this issue from the outside, being an outsider. This country has produced precious institutions, the NHS is one, the great universities another. Somewhere along the line you folks lost your nerve and you started questioning your own achievements, and this market fetishism entered realms in which it was never meant to be good at, like for instant the NHS or universities and you started to apply market solutions where they would never work. They resemble more like soviet planning with these market indicators, and trying to quantify the unquantifiable, the result of which of course is a loss of quality, both in the universities and in the hospitals. I think you should go back to the great tradition of public service. And public services provided by means of hierarchical institutions in which good people, dedicated to the task, do good stuff without having constantly to tot down and quantify everything they’re doing with the managers in the end taking a large part of the cut away from the doctors and the nurses.”

BTW: His appearance on BBC Question Time seems to have left quite an impression on some UK youth:

(After seeing one tweet like this popping up I did a Twitter search, that’s the result. ^^)

P.S.: Favourite album du jour:

BLUE DAISY – Darker Than Blue
It’s fully streamable (and purchasable) on bandcamp.

Journalism and the longing for authentic truth – German media scepticism

“To them each editorial choice means a bending of the truth”

In Germany since a few years journalism has been battling against a surprisingly big part of the public talking about how mainstream press can not be trusted. Coming from ‘the left’, I first did not take it too serious because we are a media-critical scene, too – comes with the anti-authoritarianism, I guess. So you take the news with a grain of salt, do not believe in a single truth anyways, you get interested in a bit of media and identity theory, and knowing from which paper an article comes you try to distract the bias to approach that wibbily wobbly timey wimey sexy little thing called truth. What I am talking about here is different though. This new wave of media criticism comes with a lack of interest in how journalism works. When these people think of press as lying they mistake ‘constructed’ for ‘lie’. Consequently to them each editorial choice means a bending of the truth, moving a step away from what ‘actually’ happened.

What makes things worse: It comes with an unhealthy dose of anti-intellectualism. The class and education gap between journalists and a big part of their audience might play into this dissonance. And it is hard bringing up even basic De Saussure to people who insist on common sense and gut feeling as weapons of choice to approach truth.

“tech people’s dreams and the anti-intellectual media scepticism both show a longing for objectivism and authentic truth to tame the scary fluidity of life.”

“Words are perceived as an obstacle to honesty, rather than a means of delivering it”, William Davies explains in an article on the rise of wearables, Facebook and Amazon. I think it is the same longing for authenticity and truth and the same (mis)understanding and disconnection from theory that leads to both: to this special kind of media scepticism and to what Zuckerberg is on about when he dreams of unfiltered telepathic communication as the future:

“We’ll have AR [augmented reality] and other devices that we can wear almost all the time to improve our experience and communication. One day, I believe we’ll be able to send full, rich thoughts to each other directly using technology. You’ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too if you’d like.This would be the ultimate communication technology.” (William Davies quoting Zuckerberg, The Atlantic)

It is quite telling that the man who is in charge of the social network that mediates communication most is dreaming of unfiltered communication. (If you need a quick entertaining counter stance, try ‘Greeks bearing gifts‘, an episode of Torchwood about a telepathic wearable. I wonder if it is more or less worrying to think these tech guys never seem to have thought of how heavily everyone would have to police their thoughts to make this work as acceptable everyday way of communication.) Those tech people’s dreams and the anti-intellectual media scepticism both sound a bit like “reduce us to biology, plz, theory and language is too slippery”. Biology to the one means the taming of the body with tech, to the other it’s the taming of knowledge about the world with common sense and gut feeling. Both show a longing for objectivism and authentic truth to tame the scary fluidity of life.

“The cultural shift from an openly controlled society like the GRD to a society in which you have a mix of more freedom but also lots of concealed control might make a bigger difference than we thought.”

But back to that german scepticism for journalism. Yesterday for my birthday I had a little coffee party with family and such. One guy started talking about how media pictures always show women and children refugees while he knows from someone working in a city council that in their city there are 90% male refugees. I said, ( regretting that I had no numbers at hand), that the logic might be: we had a rise of anti-refugee protests and crimes, and racist people perceive refugee men as much more of a threat than women or children, so the press might hope to rise empathy instead of fear. That’s what turned the talk to news being “made”, crafted. He said, he doesn’t get why the news does not just show what’s really there and let’s people do their own interpreting. I gave him a basic “news can never be objective, because you always pick something for a story and leave something else out”. A picture is always just showing a snippet of a scene, ripped out of context: it doesn’t show what’s outside of the frame, it doesn’t show what happens before and after, it doesn’t show why the editor picked that photo etc. He then told me about how a friend of his who works for the city council and was one of the emergency folks who were sent to help arriving refugees at some train station last week, when the german gov let all refugees in for two days. There she was ordered, as part of her job, to hold up or put up banners with a “refugee welcome” message. While not being anti-refugees, this reminded him too much of his youth in former East Germany, of how they were forced to wave flags at events staged for state-controlled media. Looking into his eyes when he told that for the first time I understood that there is a huge sensitivity about things like that which I guess West Germans can not really grasp. While I was aware of the distrust in journalism being stronger in the former Eastern German part of the population somehow for the first time this really clicked for me. The cultural shift from an openly controlled society like the GRD to a society in which you have a mix of more freedom but also lots of concealed control might make a bigger difference than we thought. That concealed kind of control is what of course many west germans also criticize but I don’t think we really get how different our cultural background makes us.

“The social web shattering the myth of impartial objectivity leads to a feeling of betrayal that spreads distrust, and this distrust leads to the erosion solidarity that we experience hate messages all over the web and on the streets.”

Add to this the cultural shift that came with the mainstream population entering the social web over the last few years and discovering that there is a multitude of perspectives to the same events out there. The social web shattering the myth of impartial objectivity is one of the big topics of our time and it echoes through so many parts of our lives. The dangerous rise of scepticism against journalism is just one of those ripples. I am no big fan of the gatekeeper mechanism of old media because it only amplified the perspective of a very narrow spectrum of people as status quo. Yet I think its loss without a new, more diverse mediating mechanism for the controversial voices that make up a society is dangerous. We need mediating tools, mechanisms, forums, etc. to get to a societal consensus but it needs to be more democratic, interactive and diverse than the old gatekeeper-journalism. Else this feeling of betrayal that so many seem to suffer from will keep spreading. And it will keep spreading distrust that leads to the erosion of solidarity that we experience in hate messages on the web and on the streets.

“This feeling of distrust is what a surge of new small viral media exploits: Jung&Naiv, Ken.FM, Ruplty – all on different levels”

This feeling of distrust is what a surge of new small viral media exploits: the common sense journalism of Jung&Naiv is not really that far away from Ken.FM’s conspiracy show. Or bloody Ruptly, acting as if it was unfiltered by any agenda. They all got this truther pose: We give you the real thing, we are authentic news, we unveil the secret agenda of the powerful. Of course they will never satisfy this hunger because there is not one big secret agenda just as there is not one objective truth. But people keep hanging on their lips, hoping of every layer that gets exposed that it could be the final one that exposes what really is behind it all. The one simple fix truth that heals them from the horrible everchanging complexity of the world. What those small viral media outlets do is basically an endless strip show, appealing to and profiting from constant arousal but not interested in solutions and giving people knowledge that doesn’t overwhelm them. They exploit the longing for authenticity and truth that is a mark of our times, from digital detox to organic food.

“It is a fine line between mediating different perspectives on an event and shaping opinions for what the government thinks is appropriate as societal perspective on an event.”

Then, of course, there are times when media indeed gets used to shape opinions. It is a fine line between mediating different perspectives on an event and shaping opinions for what the government thinks is appropriate as societal perspective on an event. (If in doubt, I’d apply the simplest satire rule: Top-down is a no-go.) Again, an example from the treatment of refugees: For a while german news were dominated by stories about aggressive anti-refugee protests and arson attacks on refugee shelters, and very disconnected from the perspective of refugees. Fear and hate thusly got perceived as the common german reaction to refugees. Racists celebrated it as display of their power, numbers and success. Then there was a huge press shift to counter this with news about solidarity, showing refugees’ stories, showing how many people in Germany welcome and help refugees. Thus displaying solidarity with refugees as societal consensus. When journalism still had its gatekeeper role it was the only window through which people could look onto events. Back then such a shift would have worked as “ah, german’s have changed, now they are in favour of refugees”. Today, such a shift also gets noticed as “erm, why this sudden new focus in all the papers while there still are arson attacks on refugee shelters?” Doing the “look over there, a solidarity squirrel!” doesn’t work that well anymore. Thanks / Blame to social media the public is more aware that this story only could be told this way because Merkel helped turning it into a reportable emergency situation. The weary long term help for refugees is too boring to report, no one would read it. To make it worth attention, we need crisis moments, pictures like those train stations.

“I’m still angry at those few days in which Merkel used human beings as tactical gaming pieces.”

I’m still angry at those few days in which Merkel used human beings as tactical gaming pieces. Human beings who already are in the worst situation, driven from their homes, ending up in inhuman camp situations, often for years, that get sold as big-hearted aid from saviours. If this use of people, their situation and emotions is what governing in social data/media times looks like we might have soe highly entertaining years ahead. Bread and games 3.0.

I’ll stop this blog post here because I got work to do and can’t think of a fancy end anyways but I won’t end without mentioning one of the tweets that kickstarted me into writing this up (and thusly without mentioning the fabulous #Hameron #piggate etc.) :

“So the newspapers are going to run with “top button undone” as news, but not “pig-fucker in chief”, and still claim not to be biased?” Huw Lemmy (who’s book Chubz I still haven’t reviewed here but trust me and just go get it – it’s great.)

(For non-Followers of #Hameron / #piggate: He contrasts the way Corbyn gets slammed by the UK press for nothings with the way Cameron can fuck a pig to get into a student club that basically helped him to get to the position he now is in and still gets treated with gloves.)

This and a few other UK tweets reminded me of how I have not yet heard about a similar anti-trust-in-journalism movement from other countries. I wonder if there is, and if so, what its specifics are (same longing for authentic truth? same anti-intellectualism? a north/south thing that might be similar to the east/west german difference in this? other things?)

eve massacre

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