report

Notes Day 2

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# Vladan Joler / video talk

*Can we create a truth infrastructure if any infrastructure is mediation? * Protect reality and reason.

In ‘this polycrisis’, ‘even traumatic things are being forgotten really fast’

Now working on defending databases, under pressure of government to try to frame as data collection or allow people to frame protests as terrorist act against the state

# Rosa Menkman / Resolution studies & more

Typology of images

  1. Digital image processing

  2. Networked image / platformed image

  3. Synthetic / model based / AI

(shares examples of types of images that fall into one of these categories, eg synthetic image (Paul Virilio), poor image (Hito Steyerl), metabolic images (Kate Crawford)

Fidelity – on how different image contexts privilege different fidelities

Resolution studies - resolution is usually understood as a measurable property of an image (pixels etc, precision), this description is too narrow. Resolution is a negotiated condition, produced via standards, constraints etc.

mage type charade.

Introduction to Lesia Kulchynska by Geert: lovely verspreking, ‘full-scale invasion of Russia’ (if only), thanks for local support, Marc Tuters, work Uva

Lesia Kulchynska / Visuality of war

This talk: notes for book on Kulchynska works, on visuality of violence and appeal of war. Preliminary title: Dream Manifesting War Machine

ondon Image Institute: stereotypes of colours.

ream Manifesting: main obstacle is doubt. Reality overwhelms. #boom Reality Management. No attempt or way to realise the dream, only to live in it.

elf-destruction as ultimate dream. Posession of reality in terms of image. But the pleasure principle actually serves the death drive… and reality has not the structure of images. We can only have more images through manifesting, not more reality.

Today, in age of platformized spectacle, a new pair of shoes is not enough. We crave for an entirely new life. Want to shift into completely different reality. Visualize in practice – striving to substitute given one with help of mental energy. Problem: lukt want because reality does not have the structure of an image. Zoeken more appealing image, instantly appealing images etc etc (cf all typologies that Rosa just introduced).

# Cade Diemh of New Design Congress – Para-real limited.

Starting video: Serial Experiment Lain: you mustnt confuse reality.

Computer is fun even if it is horrible.

Move out of institutions. <-> INC Exit.

Lain video dated already 1996 / all of the parts of the current condition have been available to us

oxie, anarchist hacker, private beach and rented house, already fixated on phone nunbers as IDs for Signal. After Chelsea Manning, etc. Near Honolulu. Many compromises for usability <–> privacy.

‘weaponisable design’ making the world a better place -> violence and reconstruction

arlow: we are building an empire of the mind.

ejection of cybernetics – para-real. A space that eludes the logic of cybernetics?

E-IDs: Contested study warns of major misconception <– article

E-flux: critique is over, morality is dead, and surreal utopias, are where it’s at (Luce deLire).

Post-institution = able to disappear.

Diehm & Lawrence: working on white paper, ‘Beyond Binary Opposition: introduction ANXIETY and EXILIC and Participatory Frameworks for Threat Modeling’

hris Rock How to overthrow the government DEFCON 24 (talk on Mr. Choppy) -> Systems are brittle, INC 2.0 could male Mr. Choppys.

# Mirian Rasch: What is it to be a “user”? = an experiential question

ook on listening coming out soon with Columbia University Press.

hat is a user? In need of a fix. Or goal oriented (working towards a goal)?

ow to become a non-user? A way to (re)become human. -> ‘Of course, you have to understand what it is to be a user to become a non-user’.

What is it like to be a ‘user’? -> experiential question on the post-digital condition that we are in

She is some kind of phenomenologist with a literary background.]

ook – Bogna Konior: Dark https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet–9781509569250

Zarte Empirie – ‘delicate empiricism’.

ook – Shadowbook: Writing through the digital.

Annoyance: that we equate ethics with clarity (maar is eigenlijk about ambiguity, cf Simone de Beauvoir hierover)

              Friction = ethics, ethics = friction

‘a quest for frictionless cannot co-exist with’ ethics

On being on the receiving end / Miriam Rasch, Luisteroefeningen: over aandacht en ontvankelijkheid, De Bezige Bij, 2024 > currently forthcoming translation with Columbia UP

Self-efficacy & ‘self-afficacy’ (Hartmut Rosa: self-efficacy – something happens to you and it generates self-efficacy – that is what we lose when we lose resonance). In addition to this self-efficacy. But in addition to that also need to think about ‘self-afficacy,’ your ability to affect yourself and others.

Friction, free indirect speech, how we are on the receiving end, not only thinking about the speaking but also about how we affect others – some elements of Rasch’s ‘delicate empiricism’ that has been working on since 2012

Silvio Lorusso

‘Thank you INC’ slide

Reminisces - On how the past is, on the timeline, a bit further than the present

Patrick Bateman, cover boy of the entrepecariat

«Separated from the fabric of the cosmos, the vast mystery of Time has been distilled into a tool of control. But what kind of Time listens and moves in tune with the Earth; travels not in a straight line, but in a circle? »

‘Rather than AI Art, it should be called Paid Subscription Art’ 27/12/24 (note)

Geert Lovink, Zero Comments > zero comments, likes, etc.: from curse to blessing (risk of going viral in the bad way) / retreat into private zone of internet space

Constant Dullaart, Accepting the job, 2023, steel/wood/silicone/resin/paint

Was already approaching AI, synthetic images not as something futuristic, but with a look from the past / a melancholic look (look, in a few years we will already experience this as something from the past)

https://curiousrituals.wordpress.com/

Normie weird: the weird is the new normie. The normie cloaks the weird.

Digital Public Infrastructure = digital ID × payment × data exchange between institutions.

Dependency theory -> good theory for digital sovereignty, starting from the notion that underdevelopemnt was a structural condition of the development of the centre (variagated and uneven development) -> we can make a similar move now about digital sovereignty. It is not about whether there is dependence, but how.it is structured. Example: China was poorest countryb1960s and then “factory of the world”, now moving to be the centre of the world (economy). Prohibiting international c9mpanies to operate on their territory, when they have already domestic platform alternatives. Those companies creqte the connection of possibility by datafication by the state. The “father of the Great Fireewall” developed the 4 principles of digital sovereignty that have been latwe implemented bybthe state. Dont let the private platforms grow too independent from the state. Jack Ma forced dissappears. Superapps: the internert in an app. The state becomes the platform. Close integration, revolving doors, between state and capital (Karp). The self-deport app of ICE where youncan get 1000 dollars.

ou dont want to be dependent on USA comanies because of, for example, the Cloud Act. The Europe there is *regulatory masturbation”, it is clearly a colony. Industrial policy is too little too late? Never taking the chance to have a fontest of different models: instead, they want to have the same thing as USA.

# Sebastian Giessmann: this was too long and unfair for other panelists

urocard was sold to MasterCard, and there was also EC.

eneral Idea: pasta paintings. -> book cover.

OOK: https://uni-siegen.sciebo.de/s/FgrE3iHcyJrM648?openfile=true

U central bank have been waiting for 3 years for the official deciaion on Wero / digital euro. Amazon was hired previously to make a prototype, and then EC felt never again.

oneyLab #6 Infrastructures of Money -> Infrastructural politics with money.

# Annalisa Pelizza: digital identity including citizens and refugees

verybody talks

I feel puzzled when it comes to understanding “digital sovereignty.” It is used by as much diverse actors as Merkel/Frederiksen/Marin writing a letter in 2021; von der Leyen in her 2025 address on the state of the Union; digital activists in the Global South. To what extent can we assume that they are referringto the same thing ? This is something I wonder, and I tried to address by looking at what has “sovereignty” been articulated in history.

Four definitions of sovereignty in history:

1 - the prioritized relationship between authority and law (as for Aristotle, for whom there was no distinction between sovereign and populace)

2 -the actors endowed with sovereignty

3 - the superiority of the sovereign over society. In this sense, “sovereignty” introduced the distinction between sovereign and subjects that didn’t exist in the ancient world

4 - Autonomy as self-determination , it is a reaction by subjects to sovereignty as understood in defintions 2 and 3 but not necessarily 1)

- Augustus introduced the notion of Princeps -> as do the distinction between sovereign and citizens.

So, “sovereignty” shows two opposite sides and their articulation can maybe explain my initial puzzlement with digital sovereignty: Who are the sovereigns in EU digital sovereignty?

- Do we need to reconceptualise the relationship between sovereign and subjects, are we are slowly moving beyond the order of authority that we have experiencenced over the last 4 centuries?

Case of the European Digital Wallet to illustrate these questions. intil December 2026 (for states). -> EU ID Wallet. -> What is wallet? A mobile phone app!!!

elying parties: like gym membership. Cross-sectorial. Together with taxes and school fees, etc.

hey did not want to go with Apple and Google. Sovereignty is autonomy from those actors. But now there is a chance that Google Wallet would be certified as EUID.

he pilots were only about self-sovereign projects (blockchain, etc.). -> Principle of individual responsibility.

# Klara Debeljak: Speculative Infrastructures – Outposts in Collapsing Realities

gainst the standardisation of identities and wallets. <-> Patchwork approach. Nonbinary. Geopolitics and hypercapitalism has no overarching solution. Only small partial multiple initiatives can be hopeful. They need to be linked to territorial networks. -> Interoperability needed [that works through standards tho…]!

hanks David Harvey: monopoly rent.

oopting speculation as a term.

rivatisation does

here is documentary (she made?).

ear of standardisation and wish for hope.

oday crisis of institutions

ots of different ways to fight for autonomy.

nergy water spatial autonomy.

uge marker: dissident publishing practices.

lite capture (book).

sland school of social autonomy. You can be institutionally employed and practice outsider autonomy.

omorrow selling her book.

nti-city from the amator archives.

elf-hosting.

uifinet, nyc mesh, freifunk, MAZI project.

*On the INC future. It is interesting that transition is also a part of the rise of para-academic organizations in the world. Exiled academic organizations, alternative EdTech, counter-cultural intellectual clubs. *

*On of the target audience for such projects - research and education for people who previously lost trust in Higher Education. *

Also, there are attempts to do associations of such para-academic organizations. Could they together become a visible alternative to traditional structures of research and education? (tricky_actant)