Florian Cramer

Florian Cramer reflects on the new online movie genre of bokeh porn referring to the shallow depth of field cinema aesthetic now seen in “amateur” movies created with DSLR cameras. It comes from “the Japanese word boke (暈け or ボケ), which means “blur” or “haze”, or boke-aji (ボケ味), the “blur quality”.” (Wikipedia)

The bokeh is no longer an aesthetic quality of the image but in this new genre the bokeh becomes the central aspect of the whole film. The camera often appears in the film as its own image, a real Narcissus and can be interpreted as the perfect example of the medium is the message. In that sense it is even more radical than Vertov’s Kino Eye where the human eye and the video eye melt because in the bokeh it is purely the medium, the video eye is melted with the video’s medium eye.

The title of Cramer’s talk comes from a provocative blogpost titled ‘bokeh porn’ in which the author critically adresses the new owner of a DSLR camera with video function shooting nothing but shallow depth of test movies:

Let me ask you something. When was the last freakin’ time you watched a film at the cinema when every shot, and I mean EVERY SHOT had extremely shallow depth of field? Never, that’s when. In fact many 35mm filmmakers aim for DEEP depth of field.

In bokeh videos, the shots are the narrative. The bokeh film makers do not aim to be experimental filmmakers like Michael Snow, but instead they aim to create the new Departed. Bokeh is a form of visual fetishism, it is not avant-garde but porn.

Looking back at Andy Warhol’s screen-test we see that now the camera has become the superstar and gets its 15 minutes of fame. If the filmmaking becomes a demo, the process of production becomes central, with a focus on the sociality of technicality in the exchange of tips and trucs in online fora. In this sociality the main topic of discussion is the camera gear being used. The camera is the main actor of the film and is often visible in several frames. In the example shown by Cramer (see below) the name of the camera is mirrored back and by doing so putting even more focus on the camera as author. We could then argue that bokeh does have a narrative as it tells the process of the filmmaking in its most abstract form. The process is depicting itself.

The classic hollywood narrative style is continuity editing. Bokeh porn follows the same style but it is pure continuity, it does not connect things, it connects continuity with continuity with nothing in-between.

Bokeh is part of a revival of analog aesthetics which can also be seen in iPhone photo applications such as Hipstamatic. It is a living image that has an organic quality to it.

by pilpop… the bathroom / GH2 & Nokton f0.95 from pilpop on Vimeo.

Photos made for the Institute of Network Cultures for the Video Vortex event. View the whole Video Vortex photo set on Flickr.

Facebook Resistance Workshop

At Transmediale I attended the Facebook Resistance Artist Presentation which presented the outcomes of the Facebook Resistance Workshop from the day before.

Facebook Resistance Workshop with Tobias Leingruber

Tobias Leingruber describes how Facebook is just like an Ikea Billy; many people own one but they all look the same and must be compiled in a similar way. In the early web days Geocities encouraged you to learn HTML, out of which a whole web culture arose. MySpace also encouraged personalization and modification a little but Facebook is just a Billy shelf. It is a critique on the template culture of Web 2.0.

Facebook Resistance Workshop

There are several ways to ‘hack’ Facebook, for example by putting Javascript in the URL, or by using a browser add-on to adjust your Facebook profile. The downside of this form of resistance is that it happens on a local machine, it is only visible to you. It is resistance on an individual level.

The Facebook Resistance Artists group has come up with several ideas, for example the Facebook Dislike button. Disliking on Facebook is not an option, it is not provided by Facebook itself. However, by creating a dislike button disliking has become available for one million people who installed the plugin. The group asks themselves “What do I want Facebook to do?” and acts accordingly. Facebook blocks certain links, such as YouPorn.com. Why does Facebook get to decide which links I post? Another idea came out of reflecting on Facebook advertising practices where people can create and insert their own adds. Another idea was the gender slider, which gets rid of the static Male/Female divide and creates a more flexible understanding of gender on Facebook.

Facebook Resistance Workshop: Gender Slider

A final idea presented at the workshop was a more diverse palette of emoticons in order to have more variety in buttons showing my emotional status.

Facebook Resistance Workshop: New Facebook emoticons proposal

Read more about the workshop on Taina Bucher’s blog who participated in the workshop.

artistic director Stephen Kovats

Focus Discussion (Track 2)
Participants: Les liens invisible (it), Alessandro Ludovico (it), Paolo Cirio (it), Nathaniel Stern(us), Scott Kildall (us), Jens Best (de). This blogpost focusses on two of the projects presented: Seppukkoo and Face to Facebook and on the overall theme The Right to Exit.

Introduction

Moderator Daphne Dragona (gr) introduced the focus discussion on The Right to Exit by asking how do you configure yourself if you are outside of the exit? What are the contemporary forms of exit in the network paradigm we are living in? For Virno, exit is about changing the conditions and the context:

Nothing is less passive than the act of fleeing, of exiting. Defection modifies the conditions within which the struggle takes place, rather than presupposing those conditions to be an unalterable horizon; it modifies the context within which a problem has arisen, rather than facing this problem by opting for one or the other of the provided alternatives. In short, exit consists of unrestrained invention which alters the rules of the game and throws the adversary completely off balance.¹

A second important question is who is leaving and why? Who is leaving?

• 49.000 editors from Wikipedia
• 38.470 users from Facebook
• 250.000 Germans asked to have their houses blurred in Google Street View

Why are they leaving?
It is often in a direct response to changes or to an envisioned future web that is not being accomplished. The Quit Facebook Initiative states on their website that they “care deeply about the future of the web as an open, safe and human place. We just can’t see Facebook’s current direction being aligned with any positive future for the web, so we’re leaving.” Why are they leaving now after ten years of Wikipedia and over five years of Facebook? There are different expectations on the direction of the platform or the service, or in some cases people wonder what to do with all these followers they have gained after years.

Where to?
They are often moving to decentralised networks like Diaspora, Appleseed, Thimbl and Status.net.

This session also aims to address what changes an exit may, or may not, bring. For example when the Spanish editors left Wikipedia (known as The Spanish Fork), the Wikipedia organization decided not to have ads, changed to a .org domain name, upgraded their software and set up the Foundation.

Exit as… exodus, defection, engaged withdrawal, disobedience, dissolution. Related to: quitting, leaking, expelling, migrating.

Seppukoo by Les Liens Invisibles

Seppukoo is a service built on top of Facebook that helps you to commit a virtual identity suicide. This has been done by many artists in the past, for example by Cory Archangel who announced his Friendster suicide on his blog in December 2005.² This is a different idea as it does not concern an individual action in Friendster, but instead the idea is applied on a collective dimension. It is not based on an individual choice but on the premise that other suicides could follow the first one. This is enabled by the mass popular and friendship container.

The Right to Exit: Les liens invisible (it)

The project addresses three different dimensions:

1. The identity cage. Facebook can suspend fake accounts so there is a pressure to create a real identity which is identical to the one in real life. In the early internet age there was the idea that you can be anyone online but you are now pressured to represent exactly your offline identity.
2. Property and data. The user data is not owned by the user but by Facebook. In the beginning Facebook did not offer the ability to permanently delete an account. One could only disable an account. If I can’t have full access to my data then who owns my data? On a sidenote: Facebook now allows you to download your own data, but this does not mean that you can take your data with you when you decide to leave, it stays on Facebook’s servers. On top of that there is the mercifulness of Facebook itself: You can easily activate your disabled account simply by logging in again.
3. The economic value of our data body: each user has an individual profile filled with detailed information.

In 2009 Seppukoo received a cease and desist letter based on “violating Facebook’s service” but the logins were given voluntary. Within the theme of the right to exit Seppukoo depicts that a mass collective exit can make a difference, an individual exit goes unnoticed.

Face to Facebook by Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio

Ludovico and Cirio officially launched their new project Face to Facebook at Transmediale as the final part of The Hacking Monopolism Trilogy featuring Google, Amazon and Facebook. They scraped one million images of public Facebook profiles and put them on the custom-made dating site Lovely Faces. They wanted to address the economy of faces by showing how public your profile picture is. As they mentioned later in their artist statement the project is a “hommage” to Facemash, the hot or not website that was put together by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg by scraping images from colleges. The data is not used for personale financial gain, rather, the purpose is to use the stolen data against the company itself.

Paolo Cirio (it) and Alessandro Ludovico (it)

At the Transmediale festival they received a cease & desist letter from Facebook to which Paulo responded that “Facebook is a legal company that must be regulated, not us.” During the Right to Exit track several projects proudly showed a cease and desist letter which seems to function as a form of recognition, or the success measure of a project.

Face to Facebook at Transmediale

After the session there was the official artist statement by Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio on their project Face to Facebook:

Face to Facebook, artist statement from transmediale on Vimeo.

Thoughts

Q&A: The exit or exodus question is not so much about should we stay or should we go, but about the borders and the traps. It is about data control and data deletion. What is the economy of the game we are all playing?

To what extent can we talk about the right to exit if Facebook is turning every web user into a Facebook user through its plugins?³. It is no longer based on the premise of active participation and inclusion. How does one exit a space of which the boundaries are permeable and being constantly stretched by the platform? The right to exit also becomes the right to escape. If one is not being asked to be included then how does one resist? There are so-called anti-social plugins that block Facebook’s tentacles but then it becomes hard to browse the web. Of course one can delete Facebook’s cookies but one would have to do it every single day, or every single hour, considering the spread and reach of Facebook through it’s social buttons. It is an advanced resistance mechanism which not only requires that the user is aware but also technically capable of resisting.

1. Paolo Virno, Grammar of the Multitude. p.70[↩]
2. More on virtual suicides by Geoff Cox in Virtual Suicide as Decisive Political Act (PDF) [↩]
3. This is an issue I am currently addressing in a forthcoming paper with my colleague Carolin Gerlitz[↩]

This series of reports on the Software Fun (Funware) symposium held on November 27, 2010 at Baltan Laboratories were commissioned by Baltan and MU.

At the beginning of his talk Wilfried Hou Je Bek admits he is struggling with the idea of software and fun. He starts his talk with passages from William Burroughs, who was once in touch with a mysterious computer from Venus named Control:

[...] in Fulham Road Willy Deiches and Brenda Dunks, two would-be one-were computer operators with IBM who now function of their own (,) have perfected a scrapbook system from newspaper cuttings for predictions and assessments along the lines of Wm’s scrapbooks, but with a built-in 24-hour mathematics of their coordinate points for greater accuracy. They also claimed to be in touch with Control in Venus through IBM Seattle. Questions may be put to Control at 12 shillings a time (it used to be free) and the answers are interesting. Wm has sent in a whole lot and we are waiting for these answers … (Anthony Balch to BG, November 4 1968)…

Q: What is word ?

A: Word is ETC.

W: What does ETC mean ?

A: Electrical time control.

Q: what is virus ?

A: Virus is B.

Q: what is the relation between word and virus ?

A: Power….¹

We do not know much about Control but you could send questions to Control in London. The address belonged to two former employees of IBM, who would write neatly written answers for 12 shilling accompanied with an invoice. They were methodical people. Burroughs said Control was not a computer but a news snippet system. Hou Je Bek notes that if the computer is a social construction, why can’t it be from venus? He expands on his notion of the computer as a social construction with a metaphorical inquiry into software and fun.

Software is fun in the same way as exploring the Amazon rainforest is fun. It’s exciting, you hope to discover something and you take the bugs for granted. Bugs serve a purpose, for example mosquitoes keep us humans out. The bugs serve as a deforrest prevention. In the computer the bug is a good thing, if you would code and it would just work programmers would be able to do bad things.

The Amazonian mythology is about production (the processes of reproduction) and the shadow of the crash (the wrong action can bring down the entire world). It looks at the forest from within and distinctions between man and nature don’t exist. You are part of nature. The world exists of layers and the layers don’t mix. They do, however, interact. This interaction causes disturbences in the balances of the layers. The shaman can fix the illness by traveling the layers. Hou Je Bek states that the shaman should be replaced with the programmer. He describes how the shaman is a misunderstood concept, often associated with the new age softies. However, the power to heal is also the power to kill. If you can fix a computer, you can also kill it.

Monday at work by slworking2

When talking about software layers, we can see the rainforrest as a piece of software. Hou Je Bek observes: “who’s to say what’s a computer and laugh about it?” He coins The end of computationalism (based on the end of physics): We should not look at the computer as a fixed “in” but we have to take the programmer and the user into account when thinking about the computer. Software is a social construct and we get lost in the technicalities.

1. in: Terry Wilson and Brion Gysin, Brion Gysin: Here To Go (Creation Books, 2001). p. 218[↩]

Glitchy iPod

Conducting sound

Hardware Orchestra

So Fun It’s Not: "Break Glass in Case of Suicide"

Preparing notes at Funware

View over STRP area, Eindhoven

This series of reports on the Software Fun (Funware) symposium held on November 27, 2010 at Baltan Laboratories were commissioned by Baltan and MU.