Smart New World
05 Apr - 10 Aug 2014
SMART NEW WORLD
5 April – 10 August 2014
Allora & Calzadilla (USA/CU), Xavier Cha (US), Simon Denny (NZ), Aleksandra Domanović (SI), Omer Fast (IL), Christoph Faulhaber (D), Kenneth Goldsmith (USA), International Necronautical Society, Korpys/Löffler (D), Trevor Paglen (USA), Laura Poitras (US), Tabor Robak (US), Santiago Sierra (ES), Taryn Simon (US)
The truth is: Industrial capitalism is transforming itself into digital capitalism. That changes things. The world is ruled by the binary code. In this sense the exhibition becomes a revealing format for how predetermined futures are promoted from the perspective of the digital economy. The upheaval in the fields of information and communications technology revolutionised the business world and society. Professional self-development and economic self-renunciation of the “digital Bohème” are very close to each other. Computation and connectivity permeate matter and render it as raw material for algorithmic prediction, or potentially also as building blocks for alternate networks. Permanent reachability leads to a life in “real time”. What does it mean to be an individual in the information society? An information society is always also a surveillance society. It is not the information that yields the surveillance, the surveillance yields the information: As soon as human utterances and emotions become quantifiable, they are recorded in order to optimise somewhere something economic, bureaucratic or ideological. Since Edward Snowden uncovered the wide-spread surveillance carried out the American National Security Agency at the latest, the post-privacy thinker is certain of one thing: The private sphere is dead, the NSA solely made it official. The unimaginable amount of data strewn by all users of the Internet have long undermined the private sphere – even if many people still live under the illusion that they can keep their personal matters for themselves. An American woman found out that she was pregnant from a congratulatory E-mail sent by her supermarket. Calculation models had figured it out based on her changing buying behaviour – even before the woman noticed it herself. Powerful computers sometimes know more about us than we do. The storage capability of these systems increases every year, consistently, by orders of
magnitude. It's getting to the point where you don't have to have done anything wrong, you just eventually have to fall under suspicion from somebody, even if it's by a wrong call, and then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrong-doer. The most popular of all health apps, Moodscope, is a barometer measuring one’s mood in order to prevent depression. The users can evaluate themselves everyday in 20 “How do you feel today?” categories. The software then calculates one’s mood and sends the value to previously determined friends per E-mail. Ideally, they call if a potentially depressed friend is not feeling well. As a piece of business jargon, and even more so as an invocation of coming disruption, the term Big Data has quickly grown tiresome. But there is no denying the vast increase in the range and depth of information that’s routinely captured about how we behave, and the new kinds of analysis that this enables. By one estimate, more than 98 percent of the world’s information is now stored digitally, and the volume of that data has quadrupled since 2007. Ordinary people at work and at home generate much of this data, by sending e-mails, browsing the Internet, using social media, working on crowd-sourced projects, and more—and in doing so they have unwittingly helped launch a grand new societal project. We are in the midst of a great infrastructure project that in some ways rivals those of the past, from Roman aqueducts to the Enlightenment’s Encyclopédie. Knowledge on the Internet is dynamic. It is fleeting. It is volatile. It changes its shape every day. We know little about its sources, the interests standing behind it and its reliability. The user of the Internet looses the surety and the trust the stand of his knowledge. Our knowledge is valid only until the next click. The technology Blog TechHive has calculated that 4.73 billion sheets of paper would be necessary to print out the entire Internet – a pile that would be 492 kilometres high. Former Defence Department and intelligence agency experts on computer vulnerabilities are heading to Silicon Valley to create technology start-ups specializing in tools aimed at thwarting online threats; more than $1 billion in venture financing poured into security start-ups in 2012. The piece will explore the fragmented relationship between subjectivity and post-industrial society in a time when self-representation is increasingly mediated by the omnipresence of digital voyeurism. The digital reflection of today’s person is fragmented into hundreds of individual parts. The verification of your online identity helps us to confirm that you are a “real” person. Researchers construct a 3-dimensional taste matrix from the results of these evaluations, from which the optimal partners can be read. This approach, the researchers conclude, shows “good performances” with regards to the coupling of new and already existing contacts – and can also be employed in business networks, that function very similar to flirting services. Construction of an intellectual property regime of the information economy, one which is absolute in nature and tax based in its implementation, has begun in earnest behind our backs. The potential dangers mentioned are all apparent, albeit they may differ in extent. Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine – too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away.
Source: Internet Curated by Elodie Evers
Source: www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-14838490.html (13.12.2013);
5 April – 10 August 2014
Allora & Calzadilla (USA/CU), Xavier Cha (US), Simon Denny (NZ), Aleksandra Domanović (SI), Omer Fast (IL), Christoph Faulhaber (D), Kenneth Goldsmith (USA), International Necronautical Society, Korpys/Löffler (D), Trevor Paglen (USA), Laura Poitras (US), Tabor Robak (US), Santiago Sierra (ES), Taryn Simon (US)
The truth is: Industrial capitalism is transforming itself into digital capitalism. That changes things. The world is ruled by the binary code. In this sense the exhibition becomes a revealing format for how predetermined futures are promoted from the perspective of the digital economy. The upheaval in the fields of information and communications technology revolutionised the business world and society. Professional self-development and economic self-renunciation of the “digital Bohème” are very close to each other. Computation and connectivity permeate matter and render it as raw material for algorithmic prediction, or potentially also as building blocks for alternate networks. Permanent reachability leads to a life in “real time”. What does it mean to be an individual in the information society? An information society is always also a surveillance society. It is not the information that yields the surveillance, the surveillance yields the information: As soon as human utterances and emotions become quantifiable, they are recorded in order to optimise somewhere something economic, bureaucratic or ideological. Since Edward Snowden uncovered the wide-spread surveillance carried out the American National Security Agency at the latest, the post-privacy thinker is certain of one thing: The private sphere is dead, the NSA solely made it official. The unimaginable amount of data strewn by all users of the Internet have long undermined the private sphere – even if many people still live under the illusion that they can keep their personal matters for themselves. An American woman found out that she was pregnant from a congratulatory E-mail sent by her supermarket. Calculation models had figured it out based on her changing buying behaviour – even before the woman noticed it herself. Powerful computers sometimes know more about us than we do. The storage capability of these systems increases every year, consistently, by orders of
magnitude. It's getting to the point where you don't have to have done anything wrong, you just eventually have to fall under suspicion from somebody, even if it's by a wrong call, and then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrong-doer. The most popular of all health apps, Moodscope, is a barometer measuring one’s mood in order to prevent depression. The users can evaluate themselves everyday in 20 “How do you feel today?” categories. The software then calculates one’s mood and sends the value to previously determined friends per E-mail. Ideally, they call if a potentially depressed friend is not feeling well. As a piece of business jargon, and even more so as an invocation of coming disruption, the term Big Data has quickly grown tiresome. But there is no denying the vast increase in the range and depth of information that’s routinely captured about how we behave, and the new kinds of analysis that this enables. By one estimate, more than 98 percent of the world’s information is now stored digitally, and the volume of that data has quadrupled since 2007. Ordinary people at work and at home generate much of this data, by sending e-mails, browsing the Internet, using social media, working on crowd-sourced projects, and more—and in doing so they have unwittingly helped launch a grand new societal project. We are in the midst of a great infrastructure project that in some ways rivals those of the past, from Roman aqueducts to the Enlightenment’s Encyclopédie. Knowledge on the Internet is dynamic. It is fleeting. It is volatile. It changes its shape every day. We know little about its sources, the interests standing behind it and its reliability. The user of the Internet looses the surety and the trust the stand of his knowledge. Our knowledge is valid only until the next click. The technology Blog TechHive has calculated that 4.73 billion sheets of paper would be necessary to print out the entire Internet – a pile that would be 492 kilometres high. Former Defence Department and intelligence agency experts on computer vulnerabilities are heading to Silicon Valley to create technology start-ups specializing in tools aimed at thwarting online threats; more than $1 billion in venture financing poured into security start-ups in 2012. The piece will explore the fragmented relationship between subjectivity and post-industrial society in a time when self-representation is increasingly mediated by the omnipresence of digital voyeurism. The digital reflection of today’s person is fragmented into hundreds of individual parts. The verification of your online identity helps us to confirm that you are a “real” person. Researchers construct a 3-dimensional taste matrix from the results of these evaluations, from which the optimal partners can be read. This approach, the researchers conclude, shows “good performances” with regards to the coupling of new and already existing contacts – and can also be employed in business networks, that function very similar to flirting services. Construction of an intellectual property regime of the information economy, one which is absolute in nature and tax based in its implementation, has begun in earnest behind our backs. The potential dangers mentioned are all apparent, albeit they may differ in extent. Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine – too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away.
Source: Internet Curated by Elodie Evers
Source: www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-14838490.html (13.12.2013);