post-luddite
Segunda parte (de três) em que o luddite em nós tem oportunidade de apontar suspeitas com os seus dígitos. O zeitgeist dá o mote e usamos uma peça recente no The Guardian 18 set 2019 para flavor, antes de retrocedermos vários anos no passado para encontrar intro sumarenta ao post-digital (*). Do vosso recap servido às nossas intenções nunca é demais lembrar: somos tendenciosos, queres isento / imparcial, estás no sítio errado e não nos referimos especificamente aos P+, pensamos media e internet: desliga o computador ou verifica as fontes, ficar pela metade não te serve...
Postdigital, in artistic practice, is an attitude that is more concerned with being human, than with being digital.
in Wikipedia, (visitado em 3 out 2019)
*) Mas não aquela que os nossos artsys quererão :) A seleção cumpre dois propósitos: 1) o ponto anterior :) :) e 2) segway à terceira e última parte, onde provavelmente anunciamos em primeira mão um próximo livro a mercantilizar pelas Chilli Com Carne deste mundo — mesmo se ainda não o saibam, porque, u know, apesar do bias ao digital que empesta o meio, artsy fala sempre mais alto: tão perto, mas tão longe…
I
Porque precisamos de uma revolução lúdica. Perdão, luddita. No original ocupa-se do contributo em alterações climatéricas mas abstratizamos para responder em capitalismo de vigilância e frentes popu-cultu-rais igual — mashup para brevidade:
Computation encircles us as a layer, dense and interconnected. If our parents and our grandparents lived with computers, we live inside them. A growing chorus of activists, journalists and scholars are calling attention to the dangers of digital enclosure and there is no shortage of dystopian possibilities on the horizon.
As we go about our daily lives, data is made, stored, analyzed and used to make algorithmic inferences about us that in turn structure our experience of the world. Corporations and governments now have an incentive to acquire as much data as possible, because that data might yield valuable patterns. It might tell them who to fire, who to arrest, when to perform maintenance on a machine or how to promote a new product.
We should erect barriers against the spread of “smartness” into all of the spaces of our lives. Decomputerization doesn’t mean no computers. It means that not all spheres of life should be rendered into data and computed upon. Ubiquitous “smartness” largely serves to enrich and empower the few at the expense of the many,
This proposal will no doubt be met with charges of Luddism. Good: Luddism is a label to embrace. The Luddites were heroic figures and acute technological thinkers. They smashed textile machinery in 19th-century England because they had the capacity to perceive technology “in the present tense”. They didn’t wait patiently for the glorious future promised by the gospel of progress. They saw what certain machines were doing to them in the present tense – endangering their livelihoods – and dismantled them. We are often sold a similar bill of goods: big tech companies talk incessantly about how “AI” and digitization will bring a better future. In the present tense, however, putting computers everywhere is bad for most people. Fortunately, there are latter-day Luddites working to stem the tide.
For such a struggle to be successful, however, resistance is not enough. We also need a vision of the future we want. Again, the history of the Luddites can be helpful. Following their example, we might derive a simple Luddite principle for democratizing technology: we should destroy machinery hurtful to the common good and build machinery helpful to it. Luddism urges us to consider: progress towards what and progress for whom? Sometimes a technology shouldn’t exist. Sometimes the best thing to do with a machine is to break it.
in "To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution" 18 set 2019
II
"What is ‘Post-digital’?" 2014 por Florian Cramer e como chegámos aqui é toda uma outra história a que voltaremos.
incompleto mas é a ironia que contaRetirado do "Postdigital Aesthetics" 2015, titulo que nega com um "technically, there is no such thing as ‘digital media’ or ‘digital aesthetics’": este humor tem a nossa atenção. O artigo começa e acaba de um episódio tornado meme para ilustrar a relação artsy (palavra nossa — ele escolhe hipster) ao pós-digital.
In 2013, using a mechanical typewriter is a deliberate choice of renouncing electronic technology. Other examples include vinyl records, and more recently also audio cassettes, as well as analog photography and artists’ printmaking.
in "What is ‘Post-digital’?" 2014
De arranque nesse tópico somos presenteados com uma pérola aos comics mesmo que estes não pudessem estar mais longe das intenções do autor:
The meme: unlike earlier popular forms of visual culture such as comic strips, they are anonymous creations. Important characteristics of imageboard memes are: creation by users, disregard of intellectual property, viral dissemination among users, and potentially infinite repurposing and variation (through collage or by changing the text). As low-resolution images with small file sizes, they can be created and disseminated almost instantly, in contrast with the much slower creation, editing and distribution processes characteristic of traditional publishing media.
in "What is ‘Post-digital’?" 2014
De volta ao analógico vs digital e o revival of ‘old’ media, o autor não esconde que desconfia do conceito como este é várias vezes subentendido e adianta uma concepção mais precisa. Pelo meio, os nossos cómicos locais poderão sentir-se reconhecidos aqui.
The term ‘post-digital’ [is] irrelevant in an age of cultural, social and economic upheavals, as either a sign of ignorance of our contemporary reality or else of some deliberate Thoreauvian-Luddite withdrawal from this reality. More pragmatically, the term ‘post-digital’ [is] used to describe either a contemporary disenchantment with digital information systems and media gadgets, or a period in which our fascination with these systems and gadgets has become historical.
While a Thoreauvian-Luddite digital withdrawal may seem a tempting option for many, it is fundamentally a naïve position. In the context of the arts, such a withdrawal seems little more than a rerun of the 19th-century Arts and Crafts movement, with its programme of handmade production as a means of resistance to encroaching industrialisation. Such (romanticist) attitudes undeniably play an important role in today’s renaissance of artists’ printmaking, handmade film labs, limited vinyl editions, the rebirth of the audio cassette, mechanical typewriters, analog cameras and analog synthesisers.
in "What is ‘Post-digital’?" 2014
Caso-em-ponto, no país da Holanda onde à data —
Education programmes for digital communication design have almost completely shifted from art academies to engineering schools, while digital media are often dismissed as commercial and mainstream by art students.
in "What is ‘Post-digital’?" 2014
No país de Portugal, igual. Ie, ‘digital’ = low-quality trash? Saltamos, mas notamos, o "peculiar overlap" entre a "rejection of digital high tech" dos artesanais, e, movimento simultaneo mas oposto, "post-digital rejection of digital low quality", com exemplos:
in "What is ‘Post-digital’?" 2014
- LPs sound better than CDs (let alone MP3s);
- film photography looks better than digital photography (let alone smartphone snapshots);
- 35mm film projection looks better than digital cinema projection (let alone BitTorrent video downloads or YouTube);
- paper books are a richer medium than websites and e-books;
- something typed on a mechanical typewriter has more value than a throwaway digital text file (let alone e-mail spam).
Complicando, adequando, completando, uma descrição sobre a qual poderemos desenvolver. Post-digital = postcolonial; post-digital ≠ post-histoire.
On closer inspection however, the dichotomy between digital big data and neo-analog do-it-yourself (DIY) is really not so clear-cut. ‘Post-digital’ is more than just a sloppy descriptor for a contemporary (and possibly nostalgic) cultural trend. The age in which we now live is_not_ a post-digital age with no end in sight to the trend towards further digitisation and computerisation. The prefix ‘post’ should not be understood here in the same sense as postmodernism and post-histoire, but rather in the sense of post-punk (a continuation of punk culture in ways which are somehow still punk, yet also beyond punk); post-communism (as the ongoing social-political reality in former Eastern Bloc countries); post-feminism (as a critically revised continuation of feminism, with blurry boundaries with ‘traditional’, unprefixed feminism); postcolonialism and post-apocalyptic (a world in which the apocalypse is not over, but has progressed from a discrete breaking point to an ongoing condition). These terms describe more subtle cultural shifts and ongoing mutations. Postcolonialism does not in any way mean an end of colonialism but rather its mutation into new power structures, less obvious but no less pervasive. In this sense, the post-digital condition is a post-apocalyptic one: the state of affairs after the initial upheaval caused by the computerisation and global digital networking of communication, technical infrastructures, markets and geopolitics.
‘Post-digital’ thus refers to a state in which the disruption brought upon by digital information technology has already occurred. Technology is no longer perceived as disruptive. Returning to post-punk, postcolonialism and Mad Max, the term ‘post-digital’ in its simplest sense describes the messy state of media, arts and design after their digitisation.
in "What is ‘Post-digital’?" 2014
Exemplo-em-ponto, arte.
Contemporary visual art, for example, is only slowly starting to accept practitioners of net art as regular contemporary artists. Yet its discourse and networking practices have been profoundly transformed by digital media such as the e-flux mailing list, art blogs and the electronic e-flux journal. In terms of circulation, power and influence, these media have largely superseded printed art periodicals, at least as far as the art system’s in-crowd of artists and curators is concerned. Likewise, when printed newspapers shift their emphasis from daily news to investigative journalism and commentary they effectively transform themselves into post-digital or post-digitisation media.
in "What is ‘Post-digital’?" 2014
DIY vs. corporate media, rather than ‘new’ vs. ‘old’ media. Ou, where-we-at enquanto os energúmenos ainda se debatem com tempos mais simples.
When hacker-style and community-centric working methods are no longer specific to ‘digital’ culture then the established dichotomy of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media – as synonymous in practice with ‘analog’ and ‘digital’ – becomes obsolete, making way for a new differentiation: one between shrink-wrapped culture and do-it-yourself culture. The 1990s / early 2000s assumption [are] no longer true now that user-generated content has been co-opted into corporate social media and mobile apps. The Internet as a self-run alternative space is no longer taken for granted by anyone born after 1990: for younger generations, the Internet is associated mainly with corporate, registration-only services.
The ‘maker movement’ – as manifested at zine fairs – represents a shift from text to context. 1980s post-punk zines resembled the art manifestos of the 1920s Berlin Dadaists, 1980s Super 8 films proposed underground narratives as an alternative to mainstream cinema. The majority of today’s zines and experimental Super 8 films, however, tend to focus less on content and more on pure materiality, so that the medium, such as paper or celluloid, is indeed the message.
in "What is ‘Post-digital’?" 2014
Ie, arsty! Como sempre, tão perto e tão longe, tanto nos aproxima mas nos afasta também. Post-digital = hybrids of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media. Caso-e-pontes:
Students “mix oil paint while Photoshopping and scour flea markets for vintage vinyl while listening to their iPods”. Young artists and designers choose media for their own particular material aesthetic qualities (including artefacts), regardless of whether these are a result of analog material properties or of digital processing. A post-digital hacker attitude of taking systems apart and using them in ways which subvert the original intention of the design. Such practices can only be meaningfully called ‘post-digital’ when they do not merely revive older media technologies, but functionally repurpose them in relation to digital media technologies: zines that become anti-blogs or non-blogs, vinyl as anti-CD, cassette tapes as anti-MP3, analog film as anti-video.
in "What is ‘Post-digital’?" 2014
De zines voltaremos com exemplo recente no TCJ 30 set 2019 — ou já se esqueceram que estamos nisto pelos comics? — mas entretanto o teaser:
New ethical and cultural conventions which became mainstream with Internet communities and Open Source culture are being retroactively applied to the making of non-digital and post-digital media products. A good example of this are collaborative zine — the exact opposite of the ‘golden age’ zine cultures of the post-punk 1980s and 1990s, when most zines were the hyper-individualistic product and personality platforms of one single maker.
in "'I Took It Very Serious': An Interview With Johanna Maierski" 30 set 2019
E finalmente chegados às conclusões: the desire for agency.
The main reason why art students prefer designing posters to designing websites is due to a fiction of agency – in this case, an illusion of more control over the medium. Likewise, ‘digital’ cultures are driven by similar illusions of free will and individual empowerment. Each of these fictions of agency represents one extreme in how individuals relate to the techno-political and economic realities of our time: either over-identification with systems, or rejection of these same systems.
in "What is ‘Post-digital’?" 2014
OS POSITIVOS et luddites: na estranha condição de identificados com um sistema que rejeitamos.
