Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “Crisis, crisis, crisis; or, the temporality of networks.” The nonhuman turn (2015): 139-166.

Wendy argues that crises are new media’s critical difference: its exception and its norm. Crises are central to making information valuable and to constructions of new media as empowering. This logic of crisis also links computers–understood as software and hardware machines. Software codes have not only reduced crises, they have also proliferated them. From Financial crises linked to complex software programs to supercomputer-dependent diagnoses and predictions of global climate change, from undetected computer viruses to bombings at securitized airports, we are increasingly called on both to trust coded systems and to be weary of them.

Crises and codes are complementary because they are both central to the emergence of what appears to be the antithesis of both automation and codes: user agency. (Notions that the internet places our freedom and security at risk are at the side of people saying it spawned new found democracy’s in that equals the political weight of people having their voices heard.)

“In new media, crisis has found its medium, and in crisis, new media has found its value”

Crises have been central to making the Internet a mass medium to end mass media: a mass personalized device. It does excel at the spreading of the good and the bad, its changed habits of enquiry and discussion to be online. It has both the good, the bad and the ugly all present with it. It offers participation, immediacy, sometimes the disgusting, uncensorship, bullying, humanitarian relief. It contains both the merits and demerits of us.

Executing Practices This collection brings together artists, curators, programmers, theorists and heavy internet browsers whose practices make critical intervention into the broad concept of execution.

Some of the ideas and thoughts were very interesting and I found other not to be. Different views on what happens when we execute code or a program and all the different ways the code can and has been used in practise and in art. Some of favourite arts of the paper were Radiokomputer that broadcast different programs over radio and what happened as a result of that. Also In Diff in June (2013), artist Martin Howse published his day in the life of his computer. Over a 1000 page book about all the commands processed by the computer in a day. Unsual look at the meaning of the word executuion. A multiplicity of relations are highlighted in such executions, which, as well as including hardware and software, are also dependent on laws, cables, the electromagnetic spectrum, minerals, histories, gender relations, economies and so on.

It seemed to connect with Lucy Suchman’s Plans and Situated Actions. Where she was highlighting the fact that we have embedded details within our thought processes but that we hide or suppress those details in order not to be overloaded. It seems the same on computer whereby the system hides the machine code day to day line executions from us and we get left with only the “top level” information. Quite interesting.

Lucy’s book Plans and Situated Actions.  “A critique of the dominant assumptions regarding human action and communication which underlie recent research in machine intelligence.”

Also  referred to as  “The problem of human-machine communication”, this book debunked the prevailing philosophy in artificial intelligence at the time it was written in 1987, which was the belief that people worked by making a plan, and then executing it. Humans don’t make plans as a computer; giving every intricate detail in order to carry out a process (like making a journey to work) instead we have that detail built within us. Suchman pointed out several of the flawed assumptions associated with it. In particular, she notes that we never fully specify a plan, because to do so would involve an excruciating level of detail. 

Suchman contrasts this sense of embedded detail with how people were trying to program robots at the time. 

She uses the example of a robot designed to “navigate autonomously through a series of rooms”, where the robot would first observe the rooms, plot a course through them, and then follow that course. Of course, if obstacles were moved after it had plotted its course, it didn’t take that into account. 

As humans, we take for granted our ability to continually evolve our plans in response to our situation, but computers illustrate how difficult such situation awareness is to describe. 

She points out that plans, rather than being a blueprint of action, make more sense as a resource for action. The idea is that we make plans before entering a situation, and we draw upon those plans while in the situation, but if circumstances change, we obviously do not continue blindly following the plan.

Instructions serve as a resource for describing what was done not only because they guide the course of action, but also because they filter out of the retrospective account of the action, or treat as “noise,” everything that was actually done that the instructions fail to mention. (p. 102)

She also discussed the difficulty in understanding a conversation between 2 people. What is said is only the smallest part of the conversation. The listener must actively try to construct meaning from what the speaker is saying. The listener constructs a model in their head, using cues from the conversation to build that model. Computers do not have the same capability for mental model repair,

Great ideas and constructs something I take for granted and never really considered. I often listen to someone talking and think to myself  ” what are they talking about”. Good conversation experiences I think are quite rare. We don’t engage at that level. We just want a “alright” response and not much else. Very hard to find people we can properly speak with. Clever work.

Computational Aesthetics in The Practices of Art as Politics 

The practices of art as politics are perhaps most challenged today by the interrelated expansion of digital technologies and the intensified commodification of human processes. In what follows I want to address this challenge by focusing on the recent turn to ontology by philosophers who are reevaluating the potentiality of objects.  I want to propose that the ontological turn—whether it be elaborated in object-oriented ontologies or in process-oriented ontologies, is registering the trauma of the development of the capacities of digital technology and the ongoing commodification of human processes: that is, the trauma of realizing that potentiality is not, or not only, a matter of human consciousness, human cognition or human agency. The philosophical assumption that there is a primordial rapport between human and world, or that there is a correlation between knowing and being, has been unsettled with traumatic effects. Patricia Clough

So the undercurrent is that digital technologies, the internet, tweets, and an increasing use of non-human interrelated technologies that we are educated into using are changing both the traditional aspect of art in politics and introducing new ways to express oneself politically in using these technologies in art. 

Awareness of affect as a technical artifact, commodities now are designed as objects that can stir affect; as most social media fits into this area. The world is changing where by non-human agencies have just a big political effect on us as human agencies do. There is both a registering of this in contemporary generative art that is political using data mining from social media and websites and in our own experiences of everyday life activities becoming more digital in nature (from health, love, shopping etc). The world we traverse is becoming so intertwined and interwoven with the digital so much now that we sometimes place more political weight on the digital than in the physical world.