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Linked to 18 items

from: Small, Clumsy, and Intimate Devices for Awkward Hybrid Settings (report)
from: Conference Introduction by Geert Lovink and Lecture by Joana Moll (report)

In one of those occasions where entrepreneurial naivete somehow possesses an enlightening clarity, Moll quotes Bill Gates: quote'Power in the digital age is about making things easy'. Interfaces smoothen interactions, making them seem obvious or natural: quote'Some years ago we had to connect to the internet, today we have to disconnect from it', Moll stated. The places where interaction is streamlined are also sites of power struggles. This smoothening takes away agency from users and gives economic and informational power to big tech companies. Moll traces this back to the ideology embedded in the business model of these companies; what she calls, following other theorists, Cognitive Capitalism. reflectionThe wealth of technology companies is no longer produced by material goods, but through intangible actions, such as human communication, experience, and cognition, which are later translated into numbers - quantifiable terms that can be translated into electricity.
from: From Tactics to Strategies (report)

During the Covid years, Lurk had time to consolidate and deploy things. Aymeric tells us about this “eurika” moment of his, recently: “what we are going on is not a repeat of 10-15 years ago!”. This is the “Musk-Twitter” moment, which can be described as such: “Lurk is composed of people not so much engaging in sharing infrastructure and software, as it is of a community that wants to participate in an infrastructure of healthy, sensical discussion.”quote
from: From Tactics to Strategies (report)

quoteThere are “ethical considerations when using software: such as energy, exploitation of workers, government surveilance, …”. On the other hand, alternatives often remain hypothetical, are often not “production ready”.
from: From Tactics to Strategies (report)

So it is all too often tempting to go on “the cloud”. quote“The cloud is only present, dominates the internet, and people don’t know what to do about it. How to drop it back to the ground? The cloud is out of reach, or seemingly unreachable”. Lukas has just played a 2 minutes hilarious video of someone shouting at a cloud, trying to make it magically disappear in front of him – repeating frantically and in different tones (in case one of them has more effect on the cloud) “kleee disappear! Kleeee disappear! Kleee disappear!”mood
from: From Tactics to Strategies (report)

In answer to a question from the audience, Nick expresses the responsibility for more competent programmer to pre-make hacks and make them accessible to a less-knowledgeable public, that don’t have the time and energy to learn programming. And finishes with this opening: can we tactically misuse Chat-GPT? As he explains, through this kind of generative AI, “the entry barrier is getting lower and lower” to generate functional code and scripts, that we can just copy-paste for our own tactical ends. quote
from: From Tactics to Strategies (report)

“I fear for my life, I also fear for the life of these images”, Donatella recalls hearing. In this context, the “social web” was needed for archiving. “War became a mundane activity, routine labor, a source of income” she narrates. Yet, “pixelated, blurry videos of the aftermath of the uprising was no more enough for the international public”. Clips became no more representational but “performative utterances”, communiqués of soldiers in Syria.quote
from: From Tactics to Strategies (report)

This intersection between computation and images is of crucial political matter, she argues. We are feeding algorithms with data in how to identify places, faces, … to be reinjected as commodification into algorithm. “All things human automated, now independent from the human eye. Our tactics have to shift in this context: activism has to focus not so much on producing counter-narratives, but rather in targeting the images of computational capitalism.”quote
from: From Tactics to Strategies (report)

quote“Networked images are operational images: it does not matter if they are true or false, but rather, how they circulate and how sticky they remain.” With these words, the first day of the In-Between Media conference end, leaving the audience with a renewed sense of responsibility, well beyond the Syrian or Ukrainian battlefronts.
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Tina references the work of Ian Bogost who wrote the book Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/how-to-use-fun-to-find-meaning-in-life/499805/). She quotes him, saying: quote"Fun comes from the attention and care you bring to something, even stupid, seemingly boring activities. It’s a foolish attention, even. An infatuation." interesting-practice
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Agnieszka then introduces her main topic for the presentation: the trend #corecore, this is followed by laughs of recognition from the audience. quoteTo define corecore she quotes Kieran Press-Reynolds “an anti trend, loosely defined as similar and disparate visual and audio clips meant to evoke some form of emotion.” (https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxnmeq/corecore-tiktok-trend-explained)
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

She asks, questionis corecore going through the motions of aesthetical resistance without actually embodying it and making it its core? She explains that online subcultures are like zombie beings, they have skeletons that are recognizable to us, that share ideas between users and aesthetic interests. However, the meat of this body is from what she’s seen is kind of rotting and mutating to a point where it is hard to trance. Trends that are usually static and easy to trace have become more fluid and tricky with social media. This aesthetic ambiguity of online subculture, if we take time to think about it and its implication it could push is a direction of actual resistance and tacticality. quote“Corecore has the potential to be very activating for users.”
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Agnieszka concludes her presentation with the question: “Is corecore something that can break out of this zombification or will it just continue existing and just be animated by the sheer speed of social media? Will the platform absorb this public critique or will there be away for users to break out of this very unusual cycle?” quote question
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Jordi says: quote“we are scrolling machines, we are stuck there. Now what? What do we do with ourselves now that we’re trapped in this scrolling feedback loop?” He wants us to think of our relationship with these devices in different ways. To think of scrolling as a space of production. The audience laughs when he adds that that perhaps sounds capitalist in a way. He sees emancipation, joy, desire, emancipatory and positive passions coming from scrolling, basically Live Laugh Love. He concludes, quote“I’m too young to be too pessimistic.”
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Tina is the first to speak, she says that boredom is a bi-political issue, boredom is activating the scroll as a mindless gesture. She says that she likes the way Jordi approached scrolling as an affective source of pleasure. During the pandemic she says she was involved with a young creatives program which pivoted to a co-creative project getting young creators to use TikTok to document what boredom felt like during confinement. They were encouraged to use TikTok in a way that was antithetical to the way it’s meant to be used. This included tactics such as setting their videos to private to be used as a diary space, any use that was different from what we are used to seeing. quote“They were trying to break the typical link between boredom being only this automated gesture that you shouldn’t think about anyway.”
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Jordi responds that quote“scrolling in and of itself will not get us anywhere.” Scrolling can be described as a regressive gesture, a machinization of our movements and therefore dangerous politically. The novelty of it comes precisely out of when you do something different. opinion“All of our actions are mediated by technical systems, there is no difference between scrolling and joining a political party” like all the actions we do collectively in the world together. We must convert it into something that is more than machinic and make other actions around it. Not letting the scrolling define itself for us. There is a revolutionary potential of collage, while the collage had been co-opted by corporations for advertisements, scrolling can be considered like passive surfing channel consumption. The key is to use the gestures and affordances differently.
Geert adds that there is a subconscious production of power. Jordi agrees that the embedded automatism is very difficult to fight against, and jokingly says we should make our own psyops. Dunja responds that reconceptualization of scrolling is not subliminal, it is very conscious.