So, Ulmer confronted me with what had been my great laziness so far. Because I'm interested mostly in the geopolitical and philosophical ramifications something like E-waste holds, I've found myself less curious about investigating the hard science behind the issue. So, here, I'd like to look at a few ways in which the problem actually, y'know, is a problem.
So, first, let's look at chemical and biological damage. This is kind of the first and foremost concern (we'll look at some of the geopolitical specifics in a moment).
So, the most drastic and attention-grabbing of the E-waste victims have been the children in an area of China called Guiyu where the hazardous disposal of plastics in computers and other parts (for example, workers there burn piles of wire to melt off the protective cover and to grab out the copper from inside) has resulted in something like 80% of their children having "dangerous levels of lead in their blood." The problem comes when these heavy metals are burnt down and put into the air that's then breathed in by workers involved in improper disposal (this article paints a pretty bleak, if somewhat sensationalized, picture of the situation). One finds the same problem when a CRT tube is smashed, which often sends Beryllium fumes into the air, which, of course, are carinogens and can cause, y'know, cancer.
So what can lead do? If inhaled, it can be diffused in one's blood or tissues where it can move, at the level of an enzyme, and, because of its similar appearance to other biologically-necessary metals, can change the shape of the development of blood and neurons, which obviously causes problems, y'know, with the other parts of the body that depend on these things. That's why some people suffering from lead poisoning report increased aggressivity or other psychological or social maladies.
So, finally, I guess we'll have to reckon with the geopolitical aspects of the accident. The story I reference above traces the dumped computers in Ghana to England's NHS (they left the stickers right on the things). I'll have to take some more time to dig into these cases, but it seems as though its general logic is similar to the accidents Ulmer's dealing with in which a group decides to dump products because it's cheaper than disposing of it properly. Here though, we have an extended issue in that we have a group of countries basically scuttling these hazardous materials off to developing nations in the hopes that their indigenous populations will take apart the machinery for the precious metals rather than reporting the damage to anyone else.
Ugh, that felt like a pretty half-assed attempt at science. Will have to get back to this another time...
I then put them into my digital camcorder (I like the scan lines) and then put them into Final Cut. Using dissolves, I produced crosses between Forest and Waste, Waste and Videodrome, and Videodrome and the binary. Then, in Photoshop, I layered the images, adjusting opacity and isolating a layer on the right for the hand and binary on the screen.
I then did another version with the E-waste stuff in the foreground and adjusted a bit to allow it more visibility.
Not sure which I prefer. The first one looks better, but the second one has more going on. I'd like to redo this using my own images. I obviously can't produce my own E-waste images, but the forest, a Videodrome-esque shot, and the binary can all be done very easily. So I guess let's consider this a prototype
"Side effects of cruising at the speed of light" - to be dealt with here "Side effects of living in temptation" - Fatal Strategies, coming soon both of these are lines from the Simple Minds song "Hunter and the Hunted" -- check out the live version if, y'know, you're into that kind of thing
I've been plucking around this idea of the accident as a sign since Wednesday but haven't come up with anything definitive. I figure I'll ramble here for awhile and see if, in the side effects of writing at the speed of...whatever, I'll get at something.
So, a sign represents first and foremost. So, what's the accident's signified? An essence? Something inherent to the essence of the accident's originary body?
It would seem so. So, let's say, Saussure style that, if we do this:
s/S where S is "signifier" and s "signified"
then a working form from the museum could be something like:
But what we immediately notice is that the signified isn't a complete sense of the accident but a single image, plucked out of a treasure trove of possible historical or aesthetic takes on this particular accident. What Virilio does exceedingly well is to aestheticize his museum entries in a way, that as I think Jake suggested last week, does, to a certain extent dehistoricize them. When we're cruising through culture, history, and life at the speed of light (or faster), an imploding building in Detroit can be a falling Trade Center tower. When we can't get our heads out of the water for a second, the individuality of the event becomes an aestheticized image of sorts.
At the risk of finishing at a spot of pseudo-structuralist intention, I think a way toward an understanding of the implications of accident-as-sign might be to move in a Wittgensteinian direction.
André Bazin, at the end of his extremely famous "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" essay, leaves us hanging with the closest thing writing on film has had to a cliffhanger endings: "On the other hand, of course, cinema is also a language."
If the accident is a sign, it, by default, belongs to a sign system. What is that system? How can we characterize it, and how can we intervene to press it toward our rhetoric's ends?
In rethinking my image, I've been thinking about how Dr. Ulmer characterized modernist painting last week. He said it has to do with kinds of fundamental motions. I'll take a stab at expanding that and say that it depends on the motion of the world. One of the things I find remarkable about cinema is how it can show us the play of the world on bodies. So, the majesty of Chaplin in The Pawn Shop is seeing a man absolutely master gravity (see, especially, the bit with him on the ladder, a moment emblematic of the cinema itself).
Anyway, what I'm trying to do with the image is to represent the natural world, its destruction via e-waste, and the simultaneous existence of memory in digital interfaces, themselves underlain by what seems like senseless computation.
I've come upon the idea of diffusion.
When I think of E-waste, I think of the burning of these material products and of the diffusion of their being into the air and finally into the lungs of nearby workers and flora/fauna.
When I think of the transition to electracy, I think of a subtle diffusion from one state to another (not a catastrophe but a slow but sure change...I think my generational positioning is rather unique because we got our first computer when I was an adolescent, so I have the memories of a computer-free childhood and kind of grew up into computing, I guess).
When I think of the process of these products being distributed to developing countries, I think of a diffusion of information. We catch mists of this insanity but only briefly feel it on our face, like a soft wind that, as it comes at us with thousands of winds, often feels like a maelstrom.
Oh God, I'm waxing poetic. Time to wrap this one up.
While I think that we might pursue the Contrast as something directed more toward Game Theory itself than Poundstone's book, I think a short take on the book's overall logic may yield some insights as to how exactly Game Theory functions in relationship to real-life situation.
That I'm even having to make this distinction points to Poundstone's fundamental take on Game Theory: as something that one can describe in mathematical terms but also as something that, as it relates to real-world and interpersonal situations, constantly bleeds over into personal conflicts which its requirements of pure reason cannot account for.
Poundstone makes it a point several times in the book to emphasize that criticisms of game theory as not accounting for an effect of a real world situation is problematic because game theory doesn't assume imperfect human players (see the discussion on guilt in the dilemma on 223 or the problem of measuring human investment on 171-172), but yet the entire logic of his book rests upon the indeterminacy within game theory between pure reason and human indeterminacy.
So, we frequently get two different kinds of chapters (the division more stated at the beginning of the book and merged a bit by the end): there are numerous chapters simply detailing the material premises and results of the games (chapters 1, 6, and 11 are good examples) while others detail von Neumann's personality and biography or historical accounts (see chapters 2, 7, and the rather heartbreaking 9).
This division in chapters and logic seem counterproductive. If we wanted a strict account of game theory or a straight biography of von Neumann, we might find ourselves disappointed by what seems like info that distracts from one or the other books' provisional main point.
But it seems as though the kind of logic we find here can also be seen abundantly in game theory. For example, one of the dilemmas the book opens with asks us to imagine that we are faced with a clock ticking down an hour, and at the end of the hour, both our mother and our spouse will be killed. We have the option of saving one of them by pressing a button. If we save one, the other dies. If we refuse to press a button, both die. (it just occurred to me that one could probably see a lot of these prisoners' dilemmas in the Saw series).
Poundstone says that one can only decide which of the two he/she likes better and choose accordingly, but the woman/man of reason this advice presumes simply does not exist. The decision is, in most cases I'd presume, impossible to make (a great film might be made with Norman Bates put in this situation...one would assume he'd choose Mother, I guess).
While Poundstone stone-faces it and pretends as though we should accept this precept without a second thought, it indicates what he will later call the ultimate failure of game theory or the prisoner's dilemma to dictate political or economic affairs because rationality has nothing to do with the way human beings actually live. The model is incredibly useful for providing certain explanations regarding biological evolution, but as Lacan tells us, human desirehas very little to do with our unthinking biology. To use an example, our body feels hunger, but what we ultimately eat has nothing to do with nutritional value (if it did, nobody would eat McDonald's).
Additionally, the widespread appeal and draw of game theory plays on irrational motivations in order to make decisions. One might map out reasons to save Mom or spouse, but the decision, in the end, would likely not be a rational one (if one's mom or spouse was continually abusive or otherwise unpleasant, that situation might be different). In the end, game theory can't explain these things. The chess example used in chapter 1 is a good one. Von Neumann held that chess isn't really a game to be played at if it were played rationally. One could mathematically produce strategies that would dictate every move, reaction, surprise move, etc. But no one can actually play the game in such a way, so it, like poker, does inevitably depend on intuition and the kinds of things that reason and quantification can't dictate. We can say the same with economics. Von Neumann initially assumed that game theory could dictate military strategy and economic decisions, but game theory remains unable to do simply because these systems have human motivations.
So, I guess if we're dealing with game theory as a contrast, perhaps that's the way we can approach it. Game theory is great at modeling certain relationships between humans, economic forces, etc. but ultimately fails to predict or provide models for human behavior because it's logic and ontology is based on a purely rational, quantifiable regime whereas the kinds of policy formations we seek are based in human irrationality, flesh, etc.
The dichotomy ultimately takes place in the von Neumann biography as well. Poundstone regularly depicts von Neumann as able to perform incredibly complex mathematical equations without effort, like a human calculator (34, 95, 179) but at the same time his quarrels with his wife, his personal affability, and his love of humor seem to play against it. We can also characterize our relationship to computing technologies in a similar fashion. I might produce a digital animation that makes you laugh. It relies on a series of manipulations of binary code but moves beyond it to work on the human register.
During my first semester, I did a Powerpoint presentation on the use of modernist and industrial architecture in Antonioni's Il Deserto Rosso (1964). I was taking screencaps using VLC Media Player and found that scanning back and forth through the .avi file (the film was not yet available on R1 DVD, so I pirated a Russian DVD rip) often produced these bizarre layerings of imagery and digital distortion. I started taking caps during these short instants of distortion (the program would quickly correct these layerings, so you had to be very quick to grab them before they disappeared), and this one really struck me as a nice exemplification of the film's take on the violence of industrial Ravenna on the films' protagonists' subjectivities.
Unfortunately, an update to VLC all but nixed this effect, and I haven't been able to control the glitch to grab more of these great images (that's what you get when you rely on contingency for effects). Anyway, I'd like my image to take on these kinds of qualities, for the layering of different regimes of images really works, I think, to produce abstractions of otherwise transparent imagery.
My current plan is to utilize video editing cross dissolves in order to produce some kind of image. If one takes a still in the midst of the cross dissolve, one gets an intermediate image, often with blurred contours and cross-bleeding.
But what will these elements be?
Right now, I'm thinking it through in these ways:
1) E-Waste as a concept thrives on a disconnect between our virtual experience of computer hardware/software and the organic natural world. So, the first condensation will be between virtual/real worlds (my master's thesis also concerns these topics, so they've been rattling around the brain for awhile).
2) Yet, the issue is that our experience...well, my experience involves the simulacrum rather than the tangible hardware. That's, of course, part of why the problem occurs. So, I guess the image would have to also deal with the disjunction between the material devices producing my experience (probably while they're poisoning organic beings) and experience of actually using these things.
So, what I'm trying to do is to produce an image that involves: the natural world, the decaying electronics, and their juxtaposition to the regime of memory and GUI's.
Using dissolving techniques, I could ostensibly produce a kind of blurred image, approaching abstraction. BUT I'm not sure I want to go into full abstraction...the question then is how to negotiate visual force without losing any semblance of the denotative power of images...
Another memory I have from that course was working with Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy (1907), a text that sets Eastern (abstract) art against Western (realist) art. It suggests that art turns to abstraction to express comfort with indeterminacy and that realism can be taken as a sign of a culture's needing to assert its control over reality. Perhaps in our project of taking on an incredibly indeterminate time, we need to turn to abstraction as a way to reflect a growing comfort with indeterminacy. Maybe my desire to maintain some recognized imagery of the world reflects a discomfort with embracing indeterminacy.
Maybe I can pursue something akin to Kristeva's notion of signifiance, a term used to indicate something that falls between the signifier and the signified. Maureen Turim uses this as a key structural principle in her first book, Abstraction in Avant-Garde Films, which is where I stumbled on it. She cites the North American avant-garde film movement of the 60's and 70's (often called "structural" film, I think Sitney came up with that term) as utilizing an indeterminacy between signification and nonsense as a key way of producing force in the image. Barthes uses the term too in Image, Music, Text but takes a different spin on it (basically saying that it's a way of understanding our reaction to photographs beyond any informational or discernible aesthetic applications). Anyway, the challenge would then be to harness the force of indeterminacy produced by an image that we can almost figure out.
I think I've maybe stated this out loud in class amidst other comments, but I find the typo on the "Unknown Quantity" homepage very compelling in and of itself. I'd like to take this first post on the accident to explore some of the implications of this typo.
First, though, I guess we should get a handle on what "Unknown Quantity" is. As Dr. Ulmer was saying last week, when we decide to pursue something theoretically, we're a bit like a group lost in the woods, but in the midst of something so desperately needing new solutions (like the accident, driven ahead by speed), we're a bit more like the protagonists of Frozen (2010, dir. Adam Green), a film I watched this morning. The set-up's pure pulp (I may be stealing that line from a blurb about The Naked Kiss): three friends get on a ski-lift at the end of the day without anyone's knowledge and get stranded up there, presumably for a week. Only those with extremely strong stomachs need apply. I have an incredibly strong stomach and was tempted to look away, not because of gore but because of the extended ways that Green looks at this accident. Doing theory's like taking the role of the characters. How the hell do we get off this ski-lift? Do we jump? Try our hands at climbing on the lift's wires? Either way will likely result in getting grievously injured. Luckily, the stakes for us aren't quite so high.
Anyway, in pursuing a Museum of the Accident and throwing seemingly incongruous elements together (what does the form Virilio offers have to do with the experimental films he includes? And, even in that restricted field, what does the found footage montage heaven of Bruce Conner have to do with the slow introspection of Jonas Mekas?) to attempt to find answers in the chaos.
Virilio characterizes modernity as something of confusion overall. I'll get into the implications of this "confusion" on game theory on a separate post, but his metaphor of a kaleidoscope, the tumbling of incongruous elements that produce impossible images, seems a proper one for a time in which technology (all manner of accidents), humanity (can't we all just be human!?!), and our own bodies (everything gives you cancer) intermix and produce these sublime landscapes of disaster.
When nothing's sure, our rhetoric needs to match it. When he released L'Avventura to boos at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, Antonioni wrote in his press release, "Eros is sick," reflecting what he saw at the time as a rapid shift in cultural and sexual mores. His minimalist style, refining de Chirico and the Rossellini-Ingrid Bergman movies into the finest of cinematic sheens, attempts to take on the confusion of the time. He gives his characters space not to talk, to be confused.
That was another time. Now we also have to reckon with a kaleidoscope of media and a neverending onslaught of information (the opening credits of Enter the Void and the first twenty-five minutes of Catfish visually depict this rather well). Could it be that Virilio hopes to produce a counter-kaleidoscope, a mash-up (if you will) of elements in the hopes of producing a counter to the general confusion of the accident? In that sense, the mass of hyperlinks one can find even in this paltry blog could serve that kind of purpose. I'll get into Virilio's specific aesthetic strategies in a future post, but let's settle that perhaps to meet the motion (in the Bergsonian sense) of the world at hyperentropy, we need a rhetoric capable of meeting hyperentropy but with an aim to be able to control, navigate, and plan for that entropy...
So, if that's the Unknown Quality, why is this guy leaving the typo up? Doesn't he have someone looking out for him?
What's an accident on the World Wide Web?
In a pair of conference papers I did last semester, I argued that the visual appearance of film grain allows us to rest easy even while we know that the specific celluloid apparatus is being subsumed by digital technologies. If we can view visible grain as a sort of accident in the production of a photographic image (an image made up of the shifting of those grains by light), I held that we could view pixelation and other decried digital artifacts (look up any DVDBeaver review to see the particular rhetoric associated with fidelity on home video) could be viewed as digital cinema's accident, a place where we see that apparatus laid bare.
If we assume that "Unknow Quantity" is a typo, it still manages to work because it begs us to consider the accidents in writing, the accidents that will allow rechainings in the string of signifiers (sorry for butchering your words, Jacques L.) through metaphor.
It becomes all the more pregnant if we consider it purposeful. To Unknow Quantity in Virilio's exhibit, we need to enter an altered state of consciousness: not necessarily one of unreflective absorption or aesthetic dreariness but one of hyper-reflexivity. As we peruse the website (which I assume we're all doing at length, a strategy perhaps at odds with the logic of internet space), the only way to perceive everything is to take everything at once. We need to open our mouths under the waterfall, regardless of its pressure (strange metaphor, I know, wrapping up). In the end, despite my wish that Virilio's copy-editor had taken greater care in preparing the header, I find that the header as it stands is much more interesting than it would be if it simply bore the name of the exhibit.
If the last post was a fairly lazy attempt at getting this thing started, let's view this post as an only moderately lazy start. SO, what I intend to do here is to lay down some preliminary research and ideas regarding this accident in an attempt to discern perhaps its technology's essence or its telos --
So, the accident itself is the waste.
What's the waste?
The problem aren't necessarily the materials themselves. A supercomputer or a Cathode-Ray television can be disposed of properly, the more volatile of metals can be removed and sold to procure a profit.
But I'm already getting ahead of myself.
The facts: Used electronics are being forwarded to developing countries without set standards for how to dispose of various chemically volatile materials. Workers paid very little forced to endure dangerous chemical intake because of "do it quick" procedures made to separate out the precious metals of technologies. So, rather than breaking the machinery down and separating out pieces to be properly disposed, you throw a load of old CPU's onto a fire to melt them down to the inflammable precious metals inside.
So, you end up with phosphor in the air (CRTs), or you're burning plastic to get at something inside of it, forced to huff the fumes.
Are you getting bored yet with facts presented baldly? Here are a couple stills to break it up, from director Tsai Ming-Liang's 2006 film I Don't Want to Sleep Alone:
These images are rather unremarkable, but the reason I include them is that the film, which takes place in Malaysia (the director is Taiwanese, I'm pretty sure), basically starts out as this strange slow piece about sub-poverty urban squatters who come to depend on each other. It's all fine and well-done, but the film takes on this sublime edge when a mysterious fog rolls in over the city about an hour into the movie. There's one hysterically funny and vaguely disturbing scene where two would-be lovers attempt to have sex but, upon trying to take off their masks, break into coughing fits. It probably doesn't sound funny, but, uh, see the movie.
The EPA has recommended that consumers simply recycle their goods, and the idea is largely that the solution to the problem lies in our being responsible consumers. One can see some similarities to prisoner's dilemmas. It's a pain if I have to take an old CRT to Tampa to get it recycled properly. I can just hope that others take the drive to do so, and I'll just toss my junk on the curb. Then again, I just saw two monitors and an old PC sitting on the curb outside my neighbor's place (luckily, several trucks run through my neighborhood every week looking for potentially valuable trash, so it didn't end up in a dump yet...maybe they'll properly dispose of it?). In the end, doesn't it end up being a matter of ethics?
What I'm wondering is if these methods can curb the tide. We can give all the financial incentives or legal prohibitions we want, but has that turned the tide in other extra-legal practices like the use of sweatshop labor?
It seems to me that the problem is two-fold: 1) It's part and parcel with the general exploitation of the developing world on the part of "1st world" corporate and governmental concerns. 2) It may be a catastrophe endemic to the speed of technological development.
If it's the first, well, man, good luck. We can attempt to develop methods by which to derail these trends (through rhetoric? What form would that take? Activism?).
If it's the second, well, man, good luck again. There's no reversing that tide.
And if we read the problem as being an accident of technology (in this case, let's restrict our focus to the development of computing technologies), then the problem seems even stranger. We might wish for a return to nature of sorts, a move back to the pre-industrial "pure earth." But then again, it also seems as though we're beyond that point. Short of an incredible catastrophe, these things aren't reversing and heading back into the sea. One of the assumptions of electracy is that we're dealing with communications in a post-literate situation...
So, I find that most of my ideas of solutions resemble science fiction for some reason:
Exhibit A) Ghost in the Shell The premise here is pretty simple. The main characters are government agents who volunteered to turn their bodies into hybrids between corporeality and digital products. As a result, they're hyper badasses. As to be expected, existential questions regarding identity's relation to technology ensues. Highly recommended: plays out like an action film. See it above on youtube links or by DVD from Lib West
Exhibit B: Tetsuo The Iron Man This one's for adventurous types only. At 60 minutes, this is the fastest paced feature I've ever seen. The concerns are similar to Ghost, but here, it's more involved with industrial products rather than computer-age stuff (so, the difference between hooking your body up to nanobots and hooking it up to industrial products like drills).
Note that both of these are Japanese. Tokyo definitely looks like the city of the future (it's caught up and surpassed the future LA of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner), but what I'm interested in in both of these films are the integration of technology into the human body.
As per the lecture from last week, we're dealing now with a technology that's, well, smarter than us, and if we're to oversee it as operators, the question is how, I guess, that role's to be facilitated. These films (and others like them) suggest that, y'know, we'll eventually integrate these things into our bodies. Of the two, Ghost in the Shell probably has the more interesting ideas about how our bodies interact and deal with technologies (see it, c'mon, it's only like 80 minutes long...)
So, what's the telos? Where do these things all end up? At its current clip, the telos of computing technologies are to move ever and ever further into human communication, determining new automatisms for interactions and relations ("automatisms" in the Cavellian sense, only extrapolated from cinematic codes to vague "communication" tendencies). If that's the essence (maybe), then the accident would be these human-driven poisonings of our natural ecosystem.
So, with this new apparatus, what's the future with this apparatus?
