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Hacking the Global Ways to think about design, ethics and geopolitics Ed Keller Global Issues lecture revision

Sept 18 6.00PM

Hacking the Global: What is hacking? What can be hacked? Some notes from Timo, Anne and Joel's talks Two key sensibilities to work with: Skepticism [Rajchman/Foucault] Wonder [Weber] Some familiar models of hacking Some less familiar ideas about hacking The texts- some key extracts Shockwave Rider, Brunner Accelerando, Stross Rainbows End, Vinge The Geopolitical Aesthetic, Jameson The films Man with Movie Camera, Vertov film as reflective practice and celebration Blow Out, DePalma film as skepticism, criticism, and reflective practice Code 46: a cautionary tale, along with Rainbows End Conclusion: the danger and the potential What kind of human are we designing for, are we becoming? Will we recognize them? How to balance skepticism, pessimism, optimism and wonder in our work...

>>TITLE SLIDE : Hacking the Global This talk asks a number of questions: What can be hacked? What is 'Media'? What is 'Transformation'? What are ethics at a geopolitical scale? Just what's at stake for us as designers?

>>OUTLINE of Lecture
You can see a Brief overview of the talk in this outline [EK recap- 1 min]. So, to begin, I want to revisit the three previous lectures, and recap some key concepts from them In Timo's lecture, as Joel pointed out, there were strong links between ideas of feedback, models drawn from Steven Johnson's book, and the process and agenda which strove to identify feedback loops in fashion- both in culture, and in material production>>JORDAN FILM IMAGE One image that Timo showed, of the wounded and dying birds on Midway island-part of a documentary project by filmmaker/photog Chris Jordan- highlights the different scales
Hacking the Global- Ways to think about design, ethics and geopolitics Ed Keller : lecture Sept 2012 for Global Issues, Parsons School wide course run by Joel Towers

of feedback that we have to be aware of as designers.Timo stated that his intention was to somehow 'make the act of making visible'- and this on both a personal and a global scale is exactly what we need. He quoted a key concept from Tony Fry, the design philosopher: 'Designed things keep on Designing'. I want to draw your attention to the temporality in this idea, that things keep doing what they can regardless of whether that is what we thought they should when we designed them. They keep on determining other futures. Design is an act that we are often only partly responsible for. >>AIDS quilt Anne Balsamo spoke about the ethics and politics of representation using technologypolitics determined by PERCEPTION- both in our subjective experience of the world, and also through the mediascapes which set up the conditions for us to perceive things in the world. She unpacked the relationship between the cultural and technological in the interface design to the AIDS quilt project. I was reminded of the sociopolitical function of memorials of all types; I thought of different models of memory and forgiveness, which we can see played out not only in the AIDS quilt, but also in war memorials or political rallies>>Thiepval, Vietnam, Nuremberg Thiepval, a WW1 memorial; or the Vietnam Memorial; or more sinister in implication, the German Nuremberg rallies from the late 30s, choreographed and designed in part by the architect Speer, all function in a way as interfaces and catalysts; and I was also reminded of the question of how one designs an interface to a vast reservoir of data, whether personal experience or collective. The designer of that interface has to consider carefully how they can make that information database available to an audience, and what the emotional, intellectual and pragmatic consequences of the interface will be. >>Hiroshima The film Hiroshima Mon Amour, by Resnais and Duras came to mind, also: as a great example of a memorial that asks something more from the viewer. Brief Extemp on what the film is about while clip plays. And pragmatically, Anne offered the example of products that are designed in one country- but assembled in another >>Designed by APPLE 'Designed by Apple in California, assembled in China' asks us to think about the material, political aspects of design, the economies and agencies it creates. This was all part of a general call to think critically about what design is, what tech is, what culture is, and what the relationship between them is. Joel spoke about design as an act of 'FUTURING'. Design is a temporal act. This resonates with Timo's quote from Tony Fry: "Designed objects keep on designing." This addresses the dual function of design as reflective practice- both on a personal level in
Hacking the Global- Ways to think about design, ethics and geopolitics Ed Keller : lecture Sept 2012 for Global Issues, Parsons School wide course run by Joel Towers

our everyday work, and also on a global level as an ongoing act of political, ethical, aesthetic participation. At that scale, design often has a will of its own. >>EARTHRISE The way that certain images- images of earth from space, for example- can change the way that an entire world comprehends itself- ethically, industrially, poetically- is crucial. This resonates with my reading of Anne Balsamo's talk and the ethics of representation and technology. Of course Joel was interested in looking for ways that these representations become actionable. The re-insurance RISK map was one example which showed us exactly how a mode of drawing turns into a mode of seeing, which then becomes a mode of thinking, which then links a geological reality to an economic model. The Buckminster FUller World Dymaxion map which was my starting slide is another map like that. The ways that we can articulate sustainabilty in this context refer to systems theory and cybernetics, to the 'Ability to adapt to change without system collapse'. Joel suggests that sustainability is a core question, even the key question- of design in the 21st century. There is a constant balance between the ethical and the poetic in this project. We have to learn to juxtapose and balance wonder and criticality. Joel quoted a passage from Roberto Unger. I was delighted to hear this since I had first started reading bits and pieces of Unger in 1987 or so, and my engagement with his work will certainly be a lifelong project of study. The passage from Unger claims that our role as designers and thinkers is "...to redraw the map of possible desireable forms of human association." This is very much linked to both Anne and Timo's argument that we need to constantly rethink what is possible. The underlying message in all three of their talks was to urge an imaginative REINVENTION of possibility in the world. Such a practice is harder than it might seem. How can we think about something that we're not equipped to think about? This brings me to TWO KEY SENSIBILITIES DRIVING my talk, SENSIBILITIES THAT I'd like to propose could at least in part answer the question I've just asked, and might even be able to drive a hacker ethic. These are two experiences or feelings that we've all had. >>SKEPTICISM, and criticality.... and pure wonder >>SKEPTICISM, CRITICALITY Rajchman on Foucault John Rajchman, in this text he wrote about Michel Foucault, introduces the idea of a kind of pragmatic skeptical turn in thinking and practice, and the concept of self invention obviously, in relation to a personal and global 'reflective practice':
Hacking the Global- Ways to think about design, ethics and geopolitics Ed Keller : lecture Sept 2012 for Global Issues, Parsons School wide course run by Joel Towers

"For, as a thinker and seer, Foucault was concerned with a situation, prior to the possibility of deductive normative reasoning, where one sees something must be done without yet knowing what. A space not of deduction but of questioning and analysis is thus opened up between the choice one makes and what one does, in which one tries to conceive what the danger is which one does not yet fully see, but in relation to which one must take action. It is one's responsibility to this thing that troubles, but which one can't yet describe or name, that requires one to work to change oneself. One's work is the attempt to change one's way of seeing and living in relation to those specific dangers one does not yet know what to do about. " RED DESERT How can we imagine the state of bewilderment that this intuition puts us in? I'd like to show a clip from Antonioni's 1964 film Red Desert. The main character, Giuliana, played by Monica Vitti, is a living index of collapsing social and ecological orders; she's a complex system moving across and through a landscape which is an impure composite of technological systems, emotions, social arrangements, materials, flows and forcesall of which she is in a heightened state of awareness of. Red Desert, and her situation in the film, seem to me to be crucial illustrations underlining what's at stake when we redefine ecological concerns, and try to imagine bodies that can be both aware of and navigate these complex landscapes. What does Antonioni have to say about her situation? "...[she] must confront her social environment. It's too simplistic to say - as many people have done - that I am condemning the inhuman industrial world which oppresses the individuals and leads them to neurosis. My intention... was to translate the poetry of the world, in which even factories can be beautiful. The line and curves of factories and their chimneys can be more beautiful than the outline of trees, which we are already too accustomed to seeing. It is a rich world, alive and serviceable... The neurosis I sought to describe in Red Desert is above all a matter of adjusting. There are people who do adapt, and others who can't manage, perhaps because they are too tied to ways of life that are by now out-of-date." There are two key concepts articulated here. One would be the degree to which a body can adapt to unfamiliar- alien- circumstances. The other would be the cognizance that that body has of the field condition within which it is embedded. Giuliana is acutely aware of a range of fields that she's increasingly part of- at both local and internal, psychic scales, such as the reconstruction of family structure and social structure- but also planetary scale energy and matter systems. This is what's at stake in a redefinition of systems. Giuliana doesn't completely realize her agency in the face of these alien systems, but she is conscious of the necessity to reinvent herself. >>SLIDE: ethos, reflective practice There is an ethos built out of this kind of thinking and work, and Rajchman reminds us that Foucault's work and life was a constant project of reflection on external history, and also himself as a subject, as a human undergoing constant transformation. >>Weber text introduction - WONDER
Hacking the Global- Ways to think about design, ethics and geopolitics Ed Keller : lecture Sept 2012 for Global Issues, Parsons School wide course run by Joel Towers

In support of the experience of wonder, I offer this passage from Samuel Weber. He notes Aristotle's claim for wonder as the catalyst for philosophical thinking. Weber then develops his entire text as a profound argument for rethinking what democracy could be- given today's technological advances- but I want to focus on this idea of wonder and surprise. >>Ghost in the Shell 2- parade >>Matrix STILL HACKING This talk is about hacking and the global field of operations. I am giving you my personal take on 'hacking'- and I'm more concerned today in describing work that THINKS at all scales, and then strengthens agency- and a bit less concerned with the technical specifics of hacking. Of course with that said, you will be familiar with these images and models of the hacker... >>Matrix You'll also be familiar with this kind of scenario... >>Ghost in the Shell But I want to envision a different kind of hacker, and define the theater of operations for hacking according to a somewhat different set of criteria. I'd like to position hacking as a practice that can manifest in film, architecture, literature, and design in general. There's a kind of longstanding problem: postmodernism as a practice of skepticism, and the challenge of reclaiming ethics and poetry after that. The film examples I look at in a few minutes will unpack this a bit. Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera articulates this in one way; and Brian DePalma's film Blow Out is a perfect example making the point in a very different, but importantly related manner. Let's say that I chose my examples to discuss the philosophy and ethics of hacking. There are so many exceptional investigations- the New School's own McKenzie Wark, for example >>Wark I can only hope to give you all some useful provocations and tools, and footnote trails to follow. Each of the texts I asked you to read- Shockwave Rider, Accelerando, Rainbows End, and Geopolitical Aesthetic- is populated by hackers and hacking. And going beyond the obvious examples, I'd like to extend the hack across many disciplines, design and art practices. PJ Harvey is a hacker. Trent Reznor. The Sex Pistols were incredible hackers. Filmmakers, architects, medical researchers, philosophers. All fall under this umbrella definition of hacker which i'm exploring. So let's start with the texts
Hacking the Global- Ways to think about design, ethics and geopolitics Ed Keller : lecture Sept 2012 for Global Issues, Parsons School wide course run by Joel Towers

>>SLIDE: SHOCKWAVE COVER John Brunner wrote Shockwave Rider in the early 70s. In it he predicted many aspects of early 21st century life, including the internet, the emergence of worms on the net, the idea of an ambient global information ecology, the evolution of microcultures, the rapid and total emergence of crowdsourcing, and perhaps most importantly, the appearance of future shock in the everyday life of all people as a consequence of their ever expanding connections to a global network. As we ourselves participate more and more in a globalizing, modernizing world, what kinds of realworld future shock are we experiencing? What role does network technology and social networking on a GLOBAL scale play in these kinds of clashes? How can we measure, predict, and design for the role that technology plays in this accelerated form of globalization? We face a host of profound problems: The politics of data retrieval, a name for torture based interrogation; surveillance, privacy undergoing radical transformations; the technology of interrogation, of mapping, of communication, all converging on each other. The leaking of data. >>ASSANGE IMAGE Wikileaks could be a project invented by Brunner- in fact, it's exactly what the main character, Nick, does at the end of the book- he releases vast amounts of government data. Fundamentally, he's a hacker. >>SLIDE: HOW TO GROW DELPHINIUMS A delphinium is what you get when you combine Nielsen ratings with Twitter and Facebook, and a betting pool. What Brunner imagines from the 1970s is the world we live in today. He's interested in what happens when we plug into the Twitter Firehose, and do data analysis on who's talking to whom, about what: New forms of sociocultural landscape emerge; a kind of fragmented, archipelagized globalism; society monitored by an international betting pool and lottery [twitter, facebook, tumblr and more] which allows governments and companies to adjust to the shifting consensus of large swaths of the population; crowdsourced consultation linked to both business, but also religion; reality television and hacked satellite networks; the emergence of paid avoidance areas after a huge natural disaster in the US; and many more situations which more or less parallel where we're at today. This is the landscape we navigate as designers. It's hard to distinguish between The Shockwave Rider's world, and ours. >>ACCELERANDO: COVER As in Shockwave Rider- the main characters in Accelerando are also hackers. Amber, Manfred, Annette: They're living in a near future that seems possible, but still a few years away- unlike Shockwave's Nick, who's living in almost exactly our reality. But the speculation that Stross makes in Accelerando is completely viable and the possible futures he maps out are rigorously connected to our current technological, social, economic, and political realities. His writing is an avalanche of great ideas- but see in this quote how he is connecting very old issues to very new ones:
Hacking the Global- Ways to think about design, ethics and geopolitics Ed Keller : lecture Sept 2012 for Global Issues, Parsons School wide course run by Joel Towers

>>SLIDE: 'The windmill is a machine for lifting water,... Stross imagines a near future where reputation economies can support a person; where young, first generation AIs contact humans to seek asylum; where the problems of resource allocation have not been solved by free market economics OR by socialist and post communist governments; where the acceleration of technology might make it possible to eliminate any and all forms of scarcity- whether material or informational- A chaotic world where previous definitions of class structure and labor force are completely obsolete. Accelerando is hyper paced hard scifi, based in utterly practical [if sometimes bleeding edge] science and technology, and seems to me to be awfully close to the way we're heading. At least for the next few decades as computational power, population, automation work as indexes of the acceleration we are facing. >>SLIDE: 'It's night in Amsterdam, morning in Silicon Valley.... Ultimately he suggests that, like Vernor Vinge, there will be a technological spike as artificial intelligence parallels and then quickly passes human capacity. >>RAINBOWS END: cover Rainbows End is another masterpiece, a work of hard scifi scenario thinking and futurology by Vernor Vinge, the author widely credited with first exploring our current technology based idea of the singularity in his novel True Names. >>Vinge in front of Geisel Library In Rainbows End Vinge imagines a world resonant with the one that Brunner and Stross envision. But the section he cuts through that world examines a different set of themesbiotech, biosecurity, military security, and governance in relation to the way that the wisdom of the crowd- crowdsourcing- might be harnessed for both great good and great evil. Most of the characters in Rainbows End are hackers- whether they work towards a subversion of the system, or try to literally save the world. >>SLIDE: Viral outbreaks map One of my favorite images from Rainbows End appears on the very first page: 'The first bit of dumb luck came disguised as a public embarrassment for the European Center for Defense against Disease. On July 23, schoolchildren in Algiers claimed that a respiratory epidemic was spreading across the Mediterranean. The claim was based on clever analysis of antibody data from the mass transit systems of Algiers and Naples. ' >>SLIDE: Google Flu Map The image Vinge presents us with here is a near future where global biosecurity discoveries are as likely to be made by ten year old kids analyzing open source city data, as they are to be made by governmental biosecurity teams. This future seems all to plausible to me, and spans all the scales that we are thinking about in this course. What could be more compelling for a Global Issues discussion than the idea that our kid sisters and brothers could have real agency in participating in what seem to be difficult data problems to us today! >>SLIDE of Leif's projectHacking the Global- Ways to think about design, ethics and geopolitics Ed Keller : lecture Sept 2012 for Global Issues, Parsons School wide course run by Joel Towers

Projects like Don't Flush Me, by Parsons faculty [and recent grad] Leif Percifield are taking advantage of the increasingly cheap tech, and increasingly open data available to everyone. Leif's proposal is to deploy a sensor network in city sewers to prevent overflow during storms. And, indeed, what could cut more sharply both ways: it's terrifying to imagine a world with the kind of ubiquity of technoogy that Vinge describesand yet one filled with great potential- in such a world even single individuals could have global agency. This is the upside and the downside. >>SLIDE: Human Microbiome In fact, each of us is an exceptionally complex ecosystem, with trillions of organisms riding as passengers on and in our bodies. This is not science fiction, but reality- this slide is from a fairly recent NY Times articleeverywhere we look popular culture has begun to acknowledge the incredible interconnectedness and layering across scales of our ecosystem. The future of hacking is not just external and electronic, but internal and biological. Vernor Vinge's anticipation of this puts any future global ethics precisely in the design space that has opened up to us in the past decade. >>VIDEO: interactive kitchen Of course Vinge shows us an incredibly detailed world of augmented and immersive virtual reality, too, with next next next generation locative media underpinning a completely monetized interactive world which is both amazing and chilling. This vision of where we might be- and what kinds of privacy and agency we might lose- is perhaps like Keiichi Matsuda's phenomenal and satirical animation done as a Masters student in architecture. >>SLIDE: Jameson TITLE PAGE As you know from reading Jameson's Geopolitical Aesthetic- the text is exceptionally rich, dense, and complex. Even this excerpt is dense enough to return to many times. But there are only a few points that I want to draw out of it for the purpose of today's talk. The first is the point that Jameson makes when he argues that ALL thinking today is ' also, whatever else it is, an attempt to think the world system as such.'. Essentially he's making the point that - ethically, politically- thinking HAS to be about world making today. In fact, that it not just should- but can't ESCAPE being global in scope. This is our challenge. But what supports that project, or opposes it? He searches for models in various cultural forms- he sees many features in the industrial/economic/cultural landscape of late capital that resist this broadening of the project of thought. So what exactly supports a broader modality of thought? For Jameson films work exceptionally well. He studies films the way a doctor studies an MRI: they index symptoms of a condition that someone has. It could be the director, the writer, the actors, the scene, the set, and/or even the audience. In fact, more than anything, the indexical nature of films [fiction or documentary, it doesn't matter] is a register of the state of the audience. >>SLIDE: IF EVERYTHING MEANS SOMETHING ELSE He's as interested as the science fiction writers I've mentioned above in the way that our current world is actively transforming our rights, our political agencies, our identity: Witness this quote from the text: 'If everything means something else, then so does technologyIt is as though we
Hacking the Global- Ways to think about design, ethics and geopolitics Ed Keller : lecture Sept 2012 for Global Issues, Parsons School wide course run by Joel Towers

were training ourselves, in advance, for the stereotypical dystopian rigors of overpopulation in a world in which no one has a room of her own any more, or secrets anybody else cares about in the first place.' This is a damning critique of the emerging information transparency we are experiencing today. But he's also got a vested interest in the way that films SHOW us characters undergoing that kind of transformation. Jameson finds examples of characters who experience a broadening of experience at the same time their power of thought grows. Sometimes we see characters developing their reflective practice- a kind of hacking of themselvesand sometimes we understand that the director or writer is evolving through the use of the film making itself as a reflective practice. Great writers like Thomas Pynchon and Philip K Dick are important here, also- writers who work this landscape through the situations the characters they write are trapped inside. It's worth noting that in Jameson, the idea of a pure narrative- a film or novel, say- and the 'narrative' of everyday life- get mixed together. Finding the threshold between an imagined world and the 'real' world becomes part of the challenge Jameson offers us when he says we need to build new cognitive maps of our world. His critique of late capitalism is precisely sited in the complaints he has against it as it stands in relation to- and as producer of- global narratives. >>LOT 49 EXCERPT This passage from Thomas Pynchon's novel 'The Crying of Lot 49' is used by Jameson as an example of the opportunity and difficulty in mapping our contemporary landscape. While traveling across southern California, the main character has a kind of epiphany about the organizing principles that she realizes apply to housing projects AND printed circuit boards, in fact the order of things in general. 'She looked down a slope onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well tended crop...and she thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had' This order seems to reveal a hidden pattern, an implicit order- and only through scale shifting and a kind of critical intuition can she attempt to respond to this landscape. In our contemporary post-capital/post-national society, the task of creating 'cognitive maps' of urban space and cultural landscapes has become substantially more complex. And Pynchon wrote that decades ago today, geotagging, locative media systems and the like are symptomatic of a developing genre of representation and communication that are radically transforming our world. So how can we cope with this? >>Man with a Movie Camera, Dziga Vertov, 1929 I want to return to a concept that Timo brought up in his talk, 'MAKING the act of MAKING visible', and look at a few films which explore this idea through the act of filmmaking, combined with everyday life. I'll start with Vertov's 1929 Man with a Movie Camera. This film is, fundamentally, a 'day in the life' across several soviet cities- and if you think back to the time it was made, must have been a revelatory window onto reality for the audience that saw it.
Hacking the Global- Ways to think about design, ethics and geopolitics Ed Keller : lecture Sept 2012 for Global Issues, Parsons School wide course run by Joel Towers

>>Opening which shows us arriving at the theater- READ and EXTEMP OVER This film was crafted to show us how it was crafted, and position us in a more critical spot in relationship to the world and the film itself as an interface to the world--- it is a reflective practice, but what scale did Vertov expect this to operate at? At the Mobility Shifts conference, which was organized last year at The New School by Trebor Scholz, Matt Gold used the term recursive publics as a way of arguing for urgent new forms of academic commons. Christopher Kelty, who coined the term, defines it as follows: "...a recursive public, [is] a particular form of social imaginary through which [a] group imagines in common the means of their own association, the material forms this imagination takes, and what place it has in the contemporary development of the Internet... Social imaginaries are neither strictly ideas nor strictly institutions but ways in which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations. The question then is: how can a system be constructed which affords and instills in us the skills necessary to learn how to learn in these newly technologized political scapes? Our post-spectacular culture challenges hope for such increased agency, as emerging forms of surveillance/tracking/collectivity establish new frames which by their very nature remain invisible or opaque to us. Vertov's work took this on- developing a set of techniques at the dawn of cinema, which presciently anticipate some of the paradigm shifts we are going through today; later in the sixties Enzensberger's notion of two-way communicative media as a tool for revolutionary dialog also did, and as mentioned above, Vernor Vinge's very recent scenario work in Rainbows End. Out in the field, the on-the-ground pragmatics of ThePublicLaboratory, a real world grassroots citizen mapping project oriented towards environmental justice, is doing the same. Vertov's work explicitly manifested the possibility of this recursive public through cinema, and offered a model for a parity between industry, information management, and culture, within which all citizens could operate as producers. Vertov's idea of the superstructural relevance of a form of recursive mind is especially urgent now. The Man With a Movie Camera was essentially an instruction manual for the creation of an internationally scaled, mediated, recursive public. You can see how this works in the next clip. >>Editing sequence which shows how the film is assembled EXTEMP on structure Vertov's work draws a parallel between the act of consciousness, and a set of formal operations that allow human systems- infrastructure, manufacturing, the myriad apparati of everyday life- to become activated by montage. The film operates on two levels: first,
Hacking the Global- Ways to think about design, ethics and geopolitics Ed Keller : lecture Sept 2012 for Global Issues, Parsons School wide course run by Joel Towers

it is a manual for teaching people how to see, and how to make films; and second, the act of montage is the literal vector that allows perception and this reflective practice to descend into matter, into labor relations, into ideology, and into time and substance itself. >>Deleuze on Vertov Cinema 1/2 slides, extemp on SLIDES film as a philosophical and political practice >>Blowout, Brian DePalma, 1981 De Palma's 1981 film Blow Out is a recapitulation of the techniques that Vertov developed, but deployed in a more conventional narrative film. It's also a remake of two remarkable previous films, Blowup by Antonioni, and Conversation by Coppola but De Palma adds several skillful layers of postmodern cynicism, and also a biting political angle. The film itself is set during an American political campaign and includes some very shady events, including an assasination that the main character, Jack, played by John Travolta, witnesses and records. Blow Out is a complex and problematic film- it's part of a moment in American filmmaking that used irony and a kind of postmodern virtuosity to attempt to accomplish the provocation that Vertov was unable to realize half a century earlier. Other films roughly contemporary with Blow Out that I feel use a similar approach include Romero's Dawn of the Dead, and Cronenberg's VideoDrome. These films share certain attributes: they are very, very B movie- if not worse- but they're constructed with deep knowledge, respect, and use of film and media historyand they resist any simple reading. [Personally I don't like the Romero zombie films, but that doesn't make them any less critical and intelligent]. Perhaps current films that fit all these criteria could include Southland Tales- or Drag me to Hell. That last is a great allegory about subprime mortgage crisis, set in southern california, as a kind of supernatural thriller. Very funny, very smart, and amazingly- very mainstream. But back to Blow Out. Let's watch this first clip. Jack is out at night recording sounds for film- that's his job, he is a sound designer/foley artist on movies- and he records something by accident that ultimately puts him in the center of a conspiracy. Please pay attention to the incredible balance that the filmmaker achieves in expressing on many, many levels the wonder and surprise, combined with the skepticism, which I mentioned earlier. >>CLIP: Sound recording and EVENT Later, Jack revisits the event, by constructing a 'movie' of it taken from another witness' chance photographs... >>CLIP: RECONSTRUCTION of EVENT via media And even later, he revisits the event virtually, YET AGAIN, and remixes the sound he recorded back into the movie he made with the photos. You can see how De Palma was paralleling the editor in Man With A Movie Camera- and extending the consequences even further, as this moment in the film is both an act of philosophy, a piece of evidence, and a catalyst for us as viewers. DePalma gives a more explicit focus on the way that
Hacking the Global- Ways to think about design, ethics and geopolitics Ed Keller : lecture Sept 2012 for Global Issues, Parsons School wide course run by Joel Towers

the mediascape can work in a political context- the process of reconstruction of the event, for Travolta's character, is loaded with ethical implications, and this is exactly what the filmmaker wants us to get inside of. Essentially, the filmmakers are working to create a document which implicates US as VIEWERS in the process of the making of the film, on many levels. >>CLIP: Final Chase And in the final chase, Jack is listening through a surveillance wire to the last moments in the life of a woman who's been implicated in the assasination. Watch every second of this clip- it's raw in its imagery of a huge political celebration which is underpinned by a darker narrative. De Palma pays great attention to every detail, color, prop, movement, and image. The coda to Jack's story is that the scream he records at the very end of Sally's life is subsequently used as part of the sound design for a terrible B movie he's working on So the levels of 'Truth' and 'Fiction' that DePalma is playing with get accentuated with a terrible kind of resignation. Jack realizes he can't really do anything to save anyone. The conclusion the film arrives at is bleak. But for us as the audience, a more complex thing has taken place- because we know the ENTIRE story- and the mechanism has been revealed in so many ways- I'd argue that our own agency is able to go beyond the systems that the characters are trapped within. This is what De Palma, and Vertov, were trying to achieve. >>DNA Synthesizer To conclude I want to return to some of the science fiction ideas that Vinge touched upon in Rainbows End and consider what the figure of the hacker can accomplish if they manipulate not only films, but other systems This quote about biosafety from nearly a decade ago illustrates the negative aspects of the scalability of grey or black hacks at a global level, and grounds it in reality-The danger here is tremendous, as Vinge explores. Indeed, it's possible that in the next decade, a global surveillance mechanism that tracks each individuals DNA and actions is all too likely, and indeed, such a disciplinary/prophylactic healthcare regime may be the only way we will survive. I'm thinking here of Winterbottom's film CODE46, which is an investigation of the techno-geopolitics of a surveillance state. >>CLIP : CODE46 positive and negative aspects: This clip looks less futuristic than it did when the film came out in 2003- in fact, it seems positively contemporary. Tim Robbins' character is an investigator for a global security company, and in this scene he does some research on a woman he's recently gotten entangled with in Shanghai, and learns of the subsequent death of one of her contacts. [play clip] "For the first time in history, the media are making possible mass participation in a social and socialized productive process, the practical means of which are in the hands of the
Hacking the Global- Ways to think about design, ethics and geopolitics Ed Keller : lecture Sept 2012 for Global Issues, Parsons School wide course run by Joel Towers

masses themselves. Such a use of them would bring the communications media, which up to now have not deserved the name, into their own." So wrote Hans Enzensberger, in 'Constituents of a Theory of the Media', 1970 Today, crowdsourcing, microblogging, Twitter, Tumblr, & other totally new and capillary forms of exchange of and metricizing of human data are all catalysts for an unprecedented global constituency. The texts and films we've looked at show where we might go as per biotech, and the overlaps between biotech, crowdsourcing, new forms of computational security, and a nearly complete loss of certain forms of privacy that we've been familiar with for the last century or so. CODE 46 plays this scenario out as well- what will our world be like, when covered by a total surveillance net? I don't want us to sacrifice either the ethical or aesthetic opportunities in our work. CONCLUSION >>SLIDE: Superstudio So, I've shown a range of ideas of what hacking is; and tried to articulate that one of the most important issues at stake in design is thinking at a system-wide level. This is not simple- as the examples I've shown have illustrated. But the basic proposition I've made is, that with this kind of approach, one might be able to maintain both the ethically necessary skepticism and criticality- but also keep something like hope alive- something like wonder, which then gets linked to that mode of critical thinking and acting. This project is certainly what all the directors, writers and thinkers I've shown tonight were trying to accomplish. This image produced by the speculative architectural designers Superstudio, part of their work in the early 1970s, was simultaneously an incredibly optimistic vision of a post scarcity world- and a critique of the emerging total global landscape. As the architect and former Dean at Columbia's GSAP, Bernard Tschumi, has noted- they were not predicting where we'd go, they were verifying their present... >>SLIDE: 15k Human One wonders what kind of human would wander through Superstudio's postmodern, post human desert- one we'd recognize, or one that, like this 15k year old cave painting, barely fits within the horizon of what we know to be human? For better or worse, this is a question that design will have no choice but to take on in the next few decades. It is an amazing challenge; the only way I can think of facing it is by spending time with the work of the artists, writers, designers and thinkers that I have shown today, whose work I think proves that one can be utterly skeptical and also utterly astounded by the beauty in the world at one and the same moment. I'd like to close with a few words from a legendary pessimist, Guy Debord, who was one of the founding members of the Situationist International. A kind of optimism drove him as well, against great odds. [READ DEBORD QUOTE] >>Guy Debord closing image.
Hacking the Global- Ways to think about design, ethics and geopolitics Ed Keller : lecture Sept 2012 for Global Issues, Parsons School wide course run by Joel Towers

Assignment Global Issues in Design and Visuality in the 21st Century Week 4 September 18, 2012 Hacking the Global: Ways to think about design, ethics and geopolitics, Ed Keller Assigned readings [pdfs]: Shockwave Rider, John Brunner, 1975, excerpt Accelerando, Charles Stross, 2005, excerpt The Geopolitical Aesthetic, Jameson, 1995, excerpt Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge, 2006, excerpt Assigned viewing: Man with a Movie Camera, Dziga Vertov, 1929 first 15 minutes, and minutes 20-25 http://youtu.be/op2sOtF113M alternate link: http://archive.org/details/ChelovekskinoapparatomManWithAMovieCamera Recommended viewing: Blow Out, Brian DePalma, 1981 Additional readings: Foucault's Art of Seeing, John Rajchman, October, 1988 Zone: The Spatial Softwares of Extrastatecraft, Keller Easterling, 2012 ~ places.designobserver.com > Feature > Zone-the-spatial-softwares-of-extrastatecraft > 34528 Rule 34, Charles Stross, 2011 ~ antipope.org > Charlie > Blog-static > 2012 > 05 > Spoilers Modernity At Large, Arjun Appadurai, 1996 Pattern Recognition, William Gibson, 2003 Samuel Weber, Toward digital democracy Additional films: Matrix, Wachowski Brothers, 1999** Ghost in the Shell, Oshii, 1995** Red Desert, Antonioni, 1964** Polygraph, LePage, 1996** Code 46, Winterbottom, 2003** Medium Cool, Wexler, 1969 ** clips shown in lecture

Hacking the Global- Ways to think about design, ethics and geopolitics Ed Keller : lecture Sept 2012 for Global Issues, Parsons School wide course run by Joel Towers

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