process space, memory space, instruction space

While the most of the Nazca geo- glyphs have been long visible from surrounding mountains, or thanks to aerial flights, the case of the recent additions to the corpus of these monumental drawings embodies not just an augmentation, but an automation of vision – the labour of identifying the pattern is delegated to a machine.nn

Contrary to the preced- ing example, these accidental geoglyphs are not revealed by AI, but by another more-than-human agency – an overheating planetary ecosystem responding to an increase in CO2 emissions with the rise of temperatures and previously unseen weather patterns. It is the medium of the changing climate itself that suddenly makes these archaeological traces visible.

A diagram might be a systematic visualisation of some process, such as thinking, digestion, atmospheric phenomenon or geological change. However, as Ryan Bishop reminded me recently, the diagram might also be a plan, a sort of normative gesture – it can format, prescribe, direct attention or produce a habit.

MEMORY SPACE – The dyschronia of human history and geological time is irreversibly erased, privileging the exterior temporal scales of the geological over the interior temporalities of the cultural.

PROCESS SPACE – have a position within some process rather than simply representing it. For this reason, we might say they function as process-spaces. Every geoglyph on Nazca plane is an imprint of cultural activity of a past human community, and its purpose is not to depict something, but to do something. We can interpret them as sites of religious rituals or of astronomic observation, or we can leave the interpretation of their cultural purpose open, but in any case, they are primarily tools used to mediate some relation to spiritual entities or to enable a knowledge of celestial bodies (to give a few examples).

The cropmarks are also imprints of an activity, in this case, the one of changing climate; human architectural traces are mobilised as a diagram of climate emergency.

The planet narrates the climate change as it is unfolding, leaving traces around us and in us – a cropmark on a field, a swarm of medusas in an ocean, a bleached coral reef, an agricultural land turning to desert: each of them being an index of global heating. Even our lungs become – metaphorically speaking – photographic imprints of the polluted cities in which we live.

INSTRUCTION SPACE – ‘In other words, these visual traits of climate emergency might be capable of inducing or of instituting a cultural habit.’

Crucially, identifying instructions that these geoglyphs yield is condi- tioned by our ability to read them not as simple representations of climate emergency, i.e. as some surrogates or proxies of the process, but as spaces where this process itself unfolds. The message is very banal: Climate change is never out there; it is always right before our eyes. The cloud of smoke over the Australian bush is not a representation of the catastrophe – it is the catastrophe.

Following the Peircean
triad of icon-index-symbol, these are indices produced by the planet itself. Some pictures are disastrous; some pictures are disasters.

Thus, it seems that climate emergency is putting a pressure on our current understand- ing of visual cultures as the realm of indirect representations. When it comes to visible traces of ecological disasters, these traces are their direct imprints, and they are encodings of the process into the medium of planet Earth. They announce an aesthetic regime of the surface, claiming an immediate authority to inform our ways of plotting the escape from the Anthropocene.

Here comes also an urgency to reassess the role of humans as privileged observers, when the traces of the ecological emergency remain hidden: there might be artificial, technical agencies better suited to detect traces of the distributed climate disaster, as well as to translate these traces into an adequate prescription, thus somehow extend- ing the scope of machine-readable geoglyphs outside of the Nazca Plate.

• example of phantom images?

Understanding the geoglyphic nature of climate emergency’s visual regime might finally help us to understand how the planet invites us to reconsider our relation to the assumed duality between the global and the local. So far, we have mainly treated the local as an opposite to the global, resulting in a (geo)political impasse when these scales are treated as hardly translatable (in the better case) or mutually exclusive (in the worst case). However, in the coming framework of the Planetary – as elaborated by scholars such as Jennifer Gabrys, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, William Connolly or Benjamin Bratton – the hope is that the local becomes just a clumsy term to express how our immediate surround- ings can be treated as an index of the Planetary. No place on Earth has a privileged position here. As a fractal image, every place hides the micro- cosm of the planetary relations; each locality is a garden within a garden, indexing the violence done to the planet.

• really good end bit on how to see all traces through OOO, the local being the same as the global!!!!

Guy Debord predicted our distracted society | Society | The Guardian

Could the ideas of Guy Debords spectacle be equatable to the structures of neoliberalism.

‘everything that we consume – and, if we’re not careful, most of what we do – embodies a mixture of distraction and reinforcement that serves to reproduce the mode of society and economy that has taken the idea of the spectacle to an almost surreal extreme. Not that Debord ever used the word, but his ideas were essentially pointing to the basis of what we now know as neoliberalism.‘

‘The words point up something very important: that the spectacle is much more than something at which we passively gaze, and it increasingly defines our perception of life itself, and the way we relate to others. As the book puts it: “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”

How we confront the spectacle is a subject for another piece: in essence, the Situationists’ contention was that its colonisation of life was not quite complete, and resistance has to begin with finding islands of the authentic, and building on them (though as what some people call late capitalism has developed, such opportunities have inevitably shrunk, a fact captured in the bleak tone of Debord’s 1989 text Comments on the Society of Spectacle, published five years before he killed himself). In truth, the spectacular dominion Debord described is too all-encompassing to suggest any obvious means of overturning it: it’s very easy to succumb to the idea that the spectacle just is, and to suggest any way out of it is absurd

can i begin my analysis of issues and suggestions for communicating the climate crisis with rhetorically statements about how guy debords text on alienated societies feel relevant to the western world inability to react to the obvious catastrophe of the 6th mass extinction. How this is in fact equatable with neolibersism – an economic informing ‘social relation among people’. Despite the depressing fact of the spectacles un-penetratable membrane, could

If the spectacle is a social relation among people, mediated by images, humans relationship to the environment is also medaited by these images. we are eternally disconnected from everyone and everything (in its most drastic of summarisation). Although it is understood that it is absurd to think we can break the spectacle, for the context of this report I wonder whether a speculative realist approach to concepts of ‘truthfeel’ and the ‘theatricality of identifying with aesthetics’ could be polemically stated as a a little crack in the society of the spectacle?

If a symptom of living in the society of the spectacle is a disconnect from each other and more general the world around us; are moments of engagement therefore an opposition to this? There is, apparently, little to no way of overthrowing the spectacle (or neo-liberalism for that matter) but are moments of thruthfeel moments of clarity? of vision beyond the mystification caused by commodity capitalims?

the spectacle as ‘mystifying’. (a sense of mystification of modern means of production through screen imager -Stephanie LeMenager)

Perhaps what Morton calls ‘truthiness’ is similar to the symptom of alienation caused by our society of the spectacle. A sincere alienation from information (not just the means of productions but spreading like a virus to mystify all interaction) and therefore a non-engagement with it. Information in Alexander Galloways use of the term; a process of in-forming, distinguishing it from data, which designates all that is given. ‘So, in contrast to data, information stresses less a sense of presence and giving forth, and more a plastic adaption of shape. Information exists wherever world things are ‘in-formed’, or ‘put into form’. (Susan Schippli’s Material Witnesses )

When I speak of a breaking through the spectacle, I am not speaking of the structures of neoliberalism and commodity capitalism actually breaking down at all, but am using it to exemplify a moment of consciously ‘feeling’ the information. A moment of ‘truthfeel’.

The way in which a person reacts to a feeling of urgency about the climate crisis is a ‘wicked problem’ complicated further by the concepts the spectacle. A clear articulation of how a person can be an ally or asset in a movement of change is constantly hindered by the fundamental mechanics of mass media or the so called ‘language of separation’. The ways in which to put change into action are as mystified as the reason we need to change in the first place. What routes a person can take to attempt to react to the urgency of climate change (ie; putting a lid on the stove pot or joining an XR protest) is seemingly a discussion for another report and therefore I am focusing my discussion on the macro / specifics of anthropocentric engagement. What forms of communicating the climate crisis have the potential to create a reactive interaction with an observer and what hinder it.

BY NOW, IT’S A TRUISM to say that there are more images than ever before, a digital flood of pictures that shows no signs of slowing. But what about all the images that are blocked, elided, or destroyed? What about the resurgence of a kind of iconoclasm—the annihilation of the image? Such an assault on the visual was apparent when stark video footage of Eric Garner being arrested and put in a choke hold in Staten Island, New York, seemingly made no difference in the case against the police who killed him; and it was all too clear when, just before this issue went to press, the artists and journalists of Charlie Hebdo in Paris were the victims of horrifying violence.

• the spectacle has gone so far as visual evidence of murder / ‘the video footage’ is equitable to the ‘thruthy factoid’ in its inability to not only engage but ability to prosecute and ‘prove’ accountability (in this case of murder in cold blood).
• this is relevant to my investigation of autographic visualisations because the it disproves the use of ‘image’ and ‘fact’ as evidence.

Here, art historian DAVID JOSELIT takes up the case of Garner and its challenge to the very concept of visual evidence or representation—and its denial of images and objects as evidence of fact. Joselit considers the possibility of critical and artistic practices that may counter such failures of representation, instead staging a refusal of representation—a refusal perhaps nowhere more potent than in the performances of WILLIAM POPE.L, whether the artist is literally ingesting and expelling information, in Eating the Wall Street Journal, 1991–2000, or, in Foraging (Asphyxia Version), 1993–95/2008, covering his head with a white plastic bag that he clutches tightly below his chin. Is this act of self-erasure a gesture of annihilation, as the word asphyxia suggests, or is it a strategic subtraction of the body from a sphere in which that body cannot be represented anyway—cannot be visible or evident, or is subject to censure and repression?

• aesthetic experience and the gallery as forum for accountability

As thought is inherently anthropocentric, we ‘think’ about de-anthropocentrising in order to influence anthropogenic actions. An object oriented approach is a way to understand and influence objects differently, de-antrhopocentrising merely being the ontological perspective.

Article on how the relational aesthetics have attempted and are attempting to break away from the capitalocene temporality of attention deprived society of the spectacle….

If products demand to be produced and consumed in ever-expanding contexts, they may also be adapted to durations more suitable to electronics than to what our bodies can endure. And without a doubt, the accelerated pace of disembodied consumer desire ultimately alters the basic structure of our bodies. “The consequence of being hooked into the entertainment matrix is a twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or focus.”2 We are plugged in. We are in the matrix. We are atrophied hunger machines.

And in left-leaning art culture, pointing the finger at capitalism is no more novel a diagnosis. Certainly, the dominant social order is responsible for the present social order—the system perpetuates itself and we are its subjects. And the self- help industry would be much more compelling if its balm for depression and spazzed-out children included a radical redistribution of wealth, but that goes without saying.

Any cultural formation that comes into being now necessarily does so according to the terms of a general cultural shift toward the twitchy, the disinterested, the agitated, the dyslexic, and the bipolar.

The return of the body and of prolonged time resists the dematerialized, agitated nature of the current era. Abramovićʼs performance brought the world of spectacle into the two forms of experience many considered beyond its purview: the body, and time. If spectacle is meant to be consumed rapidly, and from a distance, then Abramovićʼs performance rendered the spectral character of fame human flesh, placing it front and center for the long term.

the phrase “The Artist is Present” captures a heightened sense of engagement—as though,

• how does he know it captured a heightened sense of engagement

Operating against the grain of contemporary temporality may not only be a hallmark of the arts, but also the delineation of their discursive boundary. How do we know it is art? Because it takes so long to appreciate, it couldnʼt be aimed at a typical consumer. Because it is so annoyingly long it must be interesting.

At times in tension, at times in collusion with capitalist scarcity, the scarcity of experience encourages forms of art that are not as easily distributed as—and thus more distinguishable from—the mass produced goods of the broader market. Massive installations, sculptures, performance, civic institutions (the museum), time-based relational aesthetics all find value in their experiential distinction from larger markets. Museums offer special opportunities to experience the body in space. In this spasmodic era, we find the arts recalibrated as a temporal, spatial, and bodily escape.

• place. spacial opportunities to expeierence the body in space. We need to experience these things against the body? seems to boil down to scale – temporality structure is just a translation of or allusion to another temporal metabolism.

At Creative Time, Paul Ramirez Jonasʼs project titled Key to the City allowed the general public in Times Square to briefly participate in a ceremony that provided them with a key to the city of New York. This object, to all appearances an ordinary house key, awarded to the public in a brief but intimate moment at the heart of NYC spectacle, is not only symbolic, but also functional, in that it opens a myriad of locks across the five boroughs. These unmediated interpersonal projects take as their starting point a specific experience, a poetic moment, that is registered, digested, appreciated, and completed.

But what else can a museum or public art organization do? Without question, certain temporal limits are necessary for artistic projects to be brought to a general audience. Were the discreet embodied moments of Abramovićʼs retrospective limited simply by the duration of a conventional museum visit? Is there really any value in a critique that calls for a duration so extensive that no public institution can actually host it?

• surely concepts of outdoor, autographic interventions are an answer to this?

Can it really be the case that market-friendly forms are simultaneously, and conveniently, the highest form of political content? Now that information has become a

commodity and advertising codes have penetrated the very essence of what it means to communicate, we can no longer pretend that art remains magically outside this logic. While it would be wonderful if the gesture could somehow escape this trap of cultural production, the museum and gallery are not safe-zones immune from capital and power. As a result, we must continue to view artistic gestures with the special skepticism reserved for all cultural production. Reflexivity alone wonʼt save it. An advertisement that tells you itʼs an advertisement is no less edifying, just more contemporary.

• very nice quote explaining the skeptisms necessary of all ‘products of culture’… even those with intention to inform and engage an audience with something like the 6th mass extinction

So while there are certainly merits to discussing the limits of the gesture, the commodification of the present nevertheless plays out across the body and time.

Slowness has emerged as a strategy for resisting the consumable flow of information and developing a form of social cohesion that withstands the frenetic needs of capital

The artist Tania Bruguera has said that it is time to put Duchampʼs urinal back in the bathroom. That is to say that bringing life into art can no longer be considered an important gesture. Rather, life should be viewed from the epistemological vantage point found in some contemporary art. If one is interested in a more ambitious and meaningful project, perhaps it isnʼt enough to depend on the niche market that is art. As accelerated time comes to characterize not only survival in the arts, but also the default condition of the public, we find forms of meaning that resist the tide of capital and gravitate toward not only the long term, but also the profoundly civic.

Jakob Jakobsen and Henrietta Heiseʼs Copenhagen Free University, which closed its doors in 2007, used a long- term approach to emancipatory public education; the Chicago-based artist collective Incubate works as “radical arts administrators” on alternative funding models for cultural production; the artist Caroline Woolardʼs skill-share trade site OurGoods offers a Craigslist approach to swapping services in order to escape the logic of capital. In all of these approaches, we find a civic form of participation whose goals are infrastructural in scope. They all propose a means of connecting people over an extended period, and offer a response to the problem of shrinking time. In the long run, these works may find their resistance to consumable capitalism to have worked all too well. The production of cultural meaning that resists the flow of capital will need to ultimately produce forms that contribute to radically altering culture. If the civic is a space of long-term engagement with subjectivity, then perhaps the cultural producer interested in producing meaning must find a way to overcome the economic and temporal logic of the attention-deprived.

Rob Nixon refers to the “slow violence” of neoliberalism as the occluded referent of “disaster,” which in a modern risk society is often a misnomer.4 From the Greek astron, or star, “disaster” suggests an unforeseen calamity arising from the unfavorable position of a planet. The BP blowout confirms disaster criticism’s focus on the expectedness of the so-called unexpected while pointing to a different aspect of how ecological collapse can obscure human social and technological histories. Here the prob- lem is proximity. The petroleum infrastructure has become embodied memory and habitus for modern humans, insofar as everyday events such as driving or feeling the summer heat of asphalt on the soles of one’s feet are incorporating practices, in Paul Connerton’s term for the repeated performances that become encoded in the body.5 Decoupling human corporeal memory from the infrastructures that have sustained it may be the primary challenge for eco- logical narrative in the service of human species survival beyond the twenty-first century. 

• must look up ‘incorporating practices’ Paul Connerton. sounds quite like Judith Butlers performativety
• also decoupling human corporeal memory (from the coded understanding of nature as separate and oil as engrained and distant etc) is probably the term idea I was looking for when subverting Debords ‘spacial alienation’ or spacial amnesia… (i used spacial memory)
• (what better way to re-encode/incorporate practice/perform than to literally embody. WEARABLE. Companion. Interactive. Autographic.

The BP blowout poses a unique representational challenge be- cause it follows an unusual episode of de-reification, a failure of the commodity form’s abstraction. This “disaster” did not work as spectacle, in Guy Debord’s sense of the mystification of modern means of production through screen imagery.6 The continuous vid- eo feed available on the Internet of oil shooting out of the damaged well—however that might have been manipulated by BP—read as a humiliation of modernity as it was understood in the twentieth century, which is largely in terms of the human capacity to harness cheap energy. Unlike anthropogenic climate change, which resists narrative because of its global scale and its as-yet-limited visibil- ity, the Deepwater Horizon rig localized a plethora of visible data, more than could be disappeared by the hundreds of thousands of pounds of Corexit that BP poured into the Gulf. The BP blowout resembles Hurricane Katrina in its manifestation of “events” that support predictions of environmental catastrophe (e.g., peak oil, global climate change) that otherwise might be dismissed as effects of scientific modeling or Left fear-mongering. Yet, just as Katrina did not result in a changed national affect toward black, urban pov- erty, the BP explosion has not, it seems, spurred Americans to re- consider loving oil. 

• despite the spectacle in this instant technically not holding up in the typical way – the means of production and infrastructure that fuel the colonial capitalistene lying unseen behind the ‘appearances’ of mass media culture and its blurriness/confusion/automoisation – the fact we are totally and entirely desensitised to imagery of this sort and receiving it on this medium meant we took no serious notice or action (despite it manifesting an “event” that support predictions of environmental catastrophe.
• Also aligns itself with susan schoppi and ‘nature represents itself’. Interested in the sincere ways we can anthropomorphise in order to reduce this inherited gap between humans and their technology and nature and it’s resources. 

Poem – Someone will lay a plaster vault for me to ride, like long boxes children pull down flooded roads. In my plaster boat I’ll ride Gulf shores
till I vanish like a rig in the sun.22 

The poem suggests the Leeville cemetery, one of many Cajun burial sites that have floated out to sea due to subsidence. Serpas’s poetry invites an openness to personal extinction (“If only I could give the land my body— / . . . I would lie against the marsh grass and sink, / . . . and welcome the eroding Gulf—”), as if humans count primar- ily as matter, our corpses sandbagging the wetlands (79). To live in such a world is to be sculpted by subsidence, with that geological artist linked tenuously to the rigs, whose silhouettes against the sun make them appear as symptoms of distant intelligence. Serpas and the MMS interviewees offer a vernacular poetry of human species collapse: heroic, Catholic, melancholic. Feeling ecological means the discomfort of surrendering historical thinking, with its linear- ity that honors the perceived arc of human lives, and welcoming breakdown of the human into “marsh grass and sink.” This or- ganicist vision is not unfamiliar in environmental discourse, yet it takes on force, and threat, in a place where human bodies literally fight back the ocean because of the technologies meant to extend human energy and comfort. Feeling at home in a petrol “world” creates an affective drag on thinking through human survival. 

• I think she is stating some interesting points about a ‘vernacular poetry of anthropocentric manifestations of the effects of the slow violence of oil extraction

Instances of slow violence considered here include climate change, soil erosion and deforestation, bioaccumulation of industrial toxins (including the long aftermaths of spectacular disasters at Bhopal and Chernobyl), marginalization of local communities in the name of resource extraction or infrastructural development, and ‘‘precision’’ or ‘‘smart’’ weapons like cluster bombs and depleted uranium that keep killing indiscriminately long after the cessation of hostilities. In addition to the physical damage done to people and ecosystems, Nixon consistently draws attention to the discursive aspects of slow violence: the representational regimes of invisibility, ‘‘spatial amnesia,’ 

• links between spacial amnesia and studio practice experiments that use the senses to engage with spacial memory…
• also almost direct link the ‘the spectacle’ as Debord calls it ‘spacial Alienation’

Slow violence, Nixon writes memorably, is violence ‘‘in the passive voice’’ (131). Its dilated temporalities demand that we rethink, in yet another way, the post in post-conflict, post-Cold War, postcolonial, postapartheid. 

What most distinguishes Nixon from other postcolonial ecocritics in the US and the UK is his unapologetic anthropocentrism. This stance reflects not an antipathy to nature an sich but rather a strategic rejection of the ‘‘antihuman environmentalism . . . (under the banner of universalism)’’ (5) that has characterized some Western environmental thought and policy, from colonial conservation to deep ecology. 

• inline in an indirect way with morton and defo inline with peter frame (must eventually read communism chapter) (oh and maybe how to b anti capitalist)
• being unapologetically anthropocentric is what autographic, human centred design is. harnessing the world of affecticious objects via anthropocentric frames … routes to get us nearer to making change

Even if the seconds-long attention spans of the digital era pose an additional, urgent challenge to apprehending the dilated temporalities of slow violence, new media’s potential for instant connectivity promises the emergence of a new generation of ‘‘writer–hacktivists. 

‘‘the multiple temporal orders that we inhabit’’ 

Like Edward Said, Nixon writes as a public intellectual with a ‘‘belief in the value of multiple publics’’ and ‘‘varied public registers’’ for creating ‘‘imaginative coalitions that may help redress environmental injustice’’

Nixon helpfully identifies several literary modes and genres salient to this kind of activist work—the postcolonial pastoral, the environmental picaresque, the movement memoir. 

• (and I’m proposing an autographic approach via wearable, interactive design…?)