Fudge the Facts

After a lot of hard work KOLABO is over. It was a very intense but fantastic week. Some documentation of the workshop can be seen here.

To view the collaborative project made during the workshop go to My Third Life.

Last but not least, a big thanks to the following KOLABOrators ;-)

Annemarie van den Berg
Erik Kroes
Noortje van Eekelen
Vera Verberne
Nadine Roestenburg
Michelle Sipers
Michiel van Heeswijk
Bruno Setola

Freud’s handwriting

my desktop (click to enlarge)

As a part of the Ada Lovelace pledge, I’ve decided to feature some of the women in technology that have influenced my thinking in one way or another. I will be adding to this post throughout the week.

Laurie Anderson, jack of all trades, hacker, pioneer and techno-shaman: “Big Science. Yodellayheehoo. Hey Professor! Could you turn out the lights? Let’s roll the film.” In 1984, I saw her United States Live tour, and was humbled to witness it. Thank you Laurie Anderson for being an unconventional storyteller.

An early pioneer of the electronic arts, Steina, often in collaboration with her partner Woody Vasulka, pushed the aesthetics of technology and video to its outer limits. In 1974, she taught at the Center for Media Study at the State University of New York, where she was the only female faculty member at that time. Through the years her work has played with the limits of technology while simultaneously embracing those restraints for their visual qualities. One particular example of this kind of approach is Machine Vision. Dating from 1978, the work can be found here. Thank you Steina Vasulka for being a pioneer on so many fronts.

Many years ago I was fortunate to study with her, and later I performed in one of her works. She is funky storyteller who has the capacity to weave together the rinky dink and the technological. She is a cross between a magician, a medicine man and a one-woman dog and pony show.
View a snippet of Vertical Roll with its wonderful glitch aesthetics. here. Thank you Joan Jonas for making fantastically quirky and insightful work.

Author of A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, she has a way of situating technologies within history, science, bodies and everyday life. Thank you Donna Haraway for envisioning the future of technology while embedding it firmly the human soup of the now.

(This talk is on stupidity. I couldn’t find a video of her discussing The Telephone Book.)

Ronell, the author of The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, is a mental broad surfer par excellence. Not only has she theorized about technology, but also stupidity, addiction and literature. Thank you Avital Ronell for making rogue connections and radical assertions.

test image, broadcaster view (2008)

Postcards from my desktop

“I would like to write you so simply, so simply, so simply.”
Jacques Derrida, The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond

Postcards from my desktop is a performance mixing RSS news feeds and simultaneous transcription. Sending snippets of communiqués across the ether, the work plays with interpretation, point of view and the imperfections of streaming technology.
Seeing the desktop as an exotic place where the world converges through RSS, the performance explores the limits of translation, immediacy and communication.

Access to the performances is open to all. You only have to connect to http://2008.panoplie.org/DoubleBind on Monday the 15th at 8.30 pm GMT+1 (Paris local time). Please follow this URL (http://www.worldtimeserver.com/convert_time_in_FR.aspx?y=2008&mo=12&d=15&h=20&mn=30) to find your local hour.

However, you will have to subscribe to panoplie to obtain a password in order to participate in the chat. (Top left of the screen)

*The “Double Bind” series of panoplie.org is initiated and curated by Annie Abrahams

More information about the Double Bind series: http://2008.panoplie.org/files/doublebind/PC_DB_PL_eng.pdf

In the morning, when I turn on my laptop, my screen is a barrier. Then, I begin the routine. First, I open my mail…and a tiny fissure appears in the liquid crystal. *SPAM*, shit-loads of it, oozes forth… stock investments, penis enlargers and viagra misspelled in an infinite amount of ways. DELETE, DELETE, DELETE….I am that little boy with his finger in the dike trying to hold back the flood.

There are also messages of relevance; those are the worst. Here is where the guilt sets in. “Oh yes, I forgot to answer that…..” “what an interesting point, why didn’t I follow-up?…” “he always posts such excellent stuff, it’s a pity I didn’t have time to read it…” “Later, yes later”, that’s what I tell myself with the best of intentions. I download attachments to my folder thinking I’ll have time to read that paper soon. Embarrassingly, there are things in that folder dating from the mid-nineties. It’s the legacy of never doing clean installs. I’ve discovered you can digitally import guilt. And I wonder, does a “to-do” have an expiration date? Doesn’t it start to mold or eventually just get itself done! There’s got to be a shelf life on all that stuff? Folders, folders and more folders! (not to mention the folders within folders) The ever-expanding fissure grows, oozing all those things that should have been dealt with and tidied. But I haven’t emptied the trash, there’s no space in there anymore. You never know, there might be something I need.

Attempting flood management, I shoot out replies…. “I’m sorry for being so late in responding, but …[fill in the blank with about every excuse you can imagine]” These words should be the permanent default setting of all of my outgoing mail. Sometimes, I am so sorry, I practically suck! Piles and piles of unfinished business, and more just keeps pouring in. Over time, the flood has gathered its own tidal force. I’m not surfing; I’m drowning!

In search of distraction from the endless data deluge, I seek contact …yes, a little IRC… I yell, “I’m here and in need of a lifeboat!” Like those seventies soap ads I utter “Calgon take me away, take me away from all this guilt!” But no one is there, just a line of grey icons and small sleeping half moons.

While going through some old files today, I found this drawing. What on earth made me save it? It’s a laptop sketched on the back of an old telephone bill!

While just a scribble, it was used in this work. In other words, the drawing had found its place, so why cling to the hardcopy? Did I keep it because it was something “touchable” and not digital? Or cringe of all cringes, did I think of it as an “original”? Or maybe I just couldn’t make a decision about the object’s status. Storage reveals so much about ourselves, not just the things we keep, but also the things we “neglect” to throw away.