Of Mice Moths and Men Machines

In 1947, Grace Murray Hopper a pioneer in early computing made an unusual entry into her daily logbook: ‘Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being found.' Accompanying this entry is an actual celluloid tape encrusted bug, or more specifically a moth, fastened to the page of the logbook. According to Hopper, one of the technicians in her team solved a glitch in the Harvard Mark II computer by pulling an actual insect out from between the contacts of one of its relays. Word soon went out that they had ‘debugged the machine' and the phrase quickly entered our lexicon. After languishing for years this mythic moth was eventually transported to the Smithsonian where it now lies in archival state. The moth's dynamic vitality had introduced a kind of surplus or aberrant code into the machine, which in effect pushed the machine towards a state of chaos and breakdown. Its failure to act as desired, to perform the coding sequences of its programmed history suggests that even a seemingly inert or lifeless machine can become ‘more and other than its history'. (Elizabeth Grosz, 2005) Hopper's bug is thus a material witness to the creative co-evolution of the machine with the living matter of the moth. Moreover, as a cipher for machinic defect the bug reminds us that mutations are in fact necessary for systems to change and evolve. The crisis introduced into a biological system or machine through the virulence of the bug is terminal only to the extent that it becomes the source for another kind of order, another kind of interaction. This is used as a case study to argue that chaos is not only an animating force in the constitution of new systems but is necessary for the evolution of difference

Arguments: Should Videos of Trees have Standing? An Inquiry into the Legal Rites of Unnatural Objects at the ICTY

Arguments, or the rhetorical construction of truth about historical events, have always lain at the heart of legal trials. In this sense, it is not bare facts in themselves but how they can be assembled into a coherent and convincing narrative that provides the foundation for law’s findings on the truth. However, through the course of the twentieth century, the materials upon which arguments could be built have radically altered. This chapter sets out to explore mediated evidence, the role of scientific expertise, and the ways in which they combine to create new legal assemblages. More specifically, it considers how visual media, especially videos and photographs, are increasingly engaged in the construction of the arguments that legal practitioners deploy and that courts are called upon to adjudicate. As visual images proliferate in courts, visual rhetoric and visual argumentation unfold alongside the traditional rhetoric of words alone (Sherwin 2007). This broadening of the rhetorical spectrum within legal practice calls for new forms of expertise and eloquence based on an expanded capacity to decode, in order to meaningfully examine, visual evidence and visual advocacy

Entangled Matters: Analogue Futures & Political Pasts

Theorised as an "ontology of the output" my research project conceptually repurposes media machines in order to activate new or alternate entanglements between historical media artefacts and events. Although the particular circumstances that produced these materials may have changed, the project asks why these analogue media artefacts might still be a matter of concern. What is their relevance for problematizing debates within media philosophy today and by extension the politics that underscore the operations of the digital? Does the analogue as I intuit have the capacity to release history and propose alternate pathways through mediatic time? Case Studies: ARCHIVAL FUTURES considers the missing or 'silent' erasure of 18-'12 minutes in Watergate Tape No. 342 (1972). TELE-TRANSMISSIONS explores the 14-minute audio transmission produced by the Muirhead K220 Picture Transmitter to relay the image of napalm victim Kim Phuc from Saigon to Tokyo (June 8 1972). RADIOLOGICAL EVENTS examines thirty-three seconds of irradiated film shot at Chernobyl Reactor Unit 4 by the late Soviet filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko (April 26 1986). This research turns upon a reconsideration of the ontological temporalities of media matter; a concern both in and with time which acknowledges that each of the now historic machinic artefacts and related case studies have always-already been entangled with the present and coming events of the future. The thesis project as such performs itself as a kind of "tape cutup" that reorganises and consequently troubles the historical record by bringing ostensibly unrelated events into creative juxtaposition with one another. Recording asserts temporality; it is the formal means by which time is engineered, how it is both retroactively repotentialised and prospectively activated. Recording in effect produces a saturated ontology of time in which the reverberations of past, present, and future elide to become enfolded within the temporal vectors of the artefact

Singing Ice: Ladakhi folk songs about mountains, glaciers, rivers, and steams

This song book emerges out of an encounter with Morup Namgyal in Leh, Ladkah, a well-known folk singer whose music practice has contributed to the revival of Ladakhi and Tibetan cultural traditions. Also known as the “Song Collector” Morup Namgyal has been saving and singing traditional folk songs that reflect the changing environmental conditions of Himalayan mountains and its peoples. After listening to his many stories some of which were accompanied by his plaintive singing, he opened up his archive to us—a handwritten folio of songs now long forgotten that are stored on faded scraps of paper gathered while travelling throughout the region in the 1960s. These songs and their chronicles of environmental change are fated to disappear like the glaciers that Mr. Namgyal sings about in his soulful words of mourning and loss

Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence

In this book, Susan Schuppli introduces a new operative concept: material witness, an exploration of the evidential role of matter as both registering external events and exposing the practices and procedures that enable matter to bear witness. Organized in the format of a trial, Material Witness moves through a series of cases that provide insight into the ways in which materials become contested agents of dispute around which stake holders gather. These cases include an extraordinary videotape documenting the massacre at Izbica, Kosovo, used as war crimes evidence against Slobodan Milošević; the telephonic transmission of an iconic photograph of a South Vietnamese girl fleeing an accidental napalm attack; radioactive contamination discovered in Canada's coastal waters five years after the accident at Fukushima Daiichi; and the ecological media or “disaster film” produced by the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Each highlights the degree to which a rearrangement of matter exposes the contingency of witnessing, raising questions about what can be known in relationship to that which is seen or sensed, about who or what is able to bestow meaning onto things, and about whose stories will be heeded or dismissed. An artist-researcher, Schuppli offers an analysis that merges her creative sensibility with a forensic imagination rich in technical detail. Her goal is to relink the material world and its affordances with the aesthetic, the juridical, and the political

Computing the Law / Searching for Justice

What has become of the so-called West after the Cold War? Why hasn’t the West simply become “former,” as has its supposed counterpart, the “former East”? In this book, artists, thinkers, and activists explore the repercussions of the political, cultural, and economic events of 1989 on both art and the contemporary. The culmination of an eight-year curatorial research experiment, Former West imagines a world beyond our immediate condition. The writings, visual essays, and conversations in Former West—more than seventy diverse contributions with global scope—unfold a tangled cartography far more complex than the simplistic dichotomy of East vs. West. In fact, the Cold War was a contest not between two ideological blocs but between two variants of Western modernity. It is this conceptual “Westcentrism” that a “formering” of the West seeks to undo. The contributions revisit contemporary debates through the lens of a “former West.” They rethink conceptions of time and space dominating the legacy of the 1989–1990 revolutions in the former East, and critique historical periodization of the contemporary. The contributors map the political economy and social relations of the contemporary, consider the implications of algorithmic cultures and the posthuman condition, and discuss notions of solidarity—the difficulty in constructing a new “we” despite migration, the refugee crisis, and the global class recomposition. Can art institute the contemporary it envisions, and live as if it were possible

Le subterfuge des écrans / The Subterfuge of Screens

Excerpt from the catalogue essay: “The guy that was running forward, he’s missing his right leg. And I watch this guy bleed out and, I mean, the blood is hot. As the man died his body grew cold, and his thermal image changed until he became the same color as the ground. I can see every little pixel, if I just close my eyes.”[1] This literally chilling account of the chromatic transformation of a thermal image in the aftermath of a U.S. drone strike over Afghanistan was recounted by Brandon Bryant, a former Air Force drone pilot who has since become an outspoken critic of the U.S.-led war on terror. As the heat signature of Bryant’s target cooled, his victim’s body quickly becomes an indistinguishable field of monochromatic pixels that convert figure into ground. In this transition from hot data subject to cool data cache, the distinction between image and event fully merge. Different ontological realms are remediated, such that the on-screen dynamism of a wounded running man is converted into the pure electronic stasis of the screen. While the material violence of the event—a hellfire missile strike conducted via satellite link between Nevada and Afghanistan—was already subsumed into the visual economy of the image as a transaction conducted between sensors and screens, Bryant’s harrowing description of his remote but intimate televisual assassination emphasizes the degree to which the conflict zone has migrated almost entirely to the operations of the screen. Yet this is not the public interface of broadcast television that mediates and transmits conflict as nightly news and sound bites, but the informatic screen of conflict pixels and sonic weapons or sound bytes. A private screen event conducted between code and combatant. [1] Nick Wing, “Brandon Bryant, Former Drone Operator, Recalls What It’s Like To Watch Target ‘Bleed Out’ On Screen,” The Huffington Post, June 6, 2013

“Slick Images: The Photogenic Surface of Disaster.”

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Susan Schuppli, Tom Tlalim and Natasha Hoare In Conversation

Art In The Age Of… is published on the occasion of the eponymous yearlong cycle presented at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (23 January 2015 – 3 January 2016). This series articulated itself through three exhibitions; Art In The Age Of…Energy And Raw Material, Art In The Age Of…Planetary Computation, and Art In The Age Of…Asymmetrical Warfare, alongside a related discursive program and film screenings. Art In The Age Of… was staged to investigate future vectors of art production in the 21st century, highlighting the circulation of art and its underlying economies rather than its territorial location, its spread and infectious expanse rather than its arrest within narrowly defined genealogies and media. With a focus on topical areas of urgency within art’s creation and its dispersal, spanning energy and raw materials, planetary computation, and asymmetric warfare, the Art In The Age Of… publication both records and expands research feeding this year-long program through interviews and essays by key contributors, alongside specially commissioned artist interventions