Optimization and Its Miscontents: Counterpolitics of Surveillance Capitalism | + the case of Panoramic Unknowns

Workshop

Sun, 03.02.2019
10:30–18:30

K1

HKW, Berlin

Taking as its starting point a framing of optimization and its miscontents, this one day-long workshop takes a deep dive into the technologies and applications underlying optimization logic. Participants examine artworks and scholarly projects that attempt to gauge and broaden our conception and understanding of optimization systems, and offer techniques to expand our political agency under these circumstances. Through these counter-political strategies, participants situate our relationship with these systems and explore the means at our disposal—be they subversion, queering, resistance, or militancy—for engagement within and outside of the optimization regime.

With: 

Zeljko Blace

Baruch Gottlieb

Seda Gürses

Participating contributors: Ramon Amaro, Dia Kayyali, Dmytri Kleiner, Ben Miller, Phoebe V. Moore, Conrad Moriarty-Cole, Rebekah Overdorf, Martin Pasek, Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Clemens Schöll, Femke Snelting

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Case: Panoramic Unknowns

Proposed by: Possible Bodies (Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting)

Unknown Object Tracking [1] is being applied on an industrial scale in robotics, car traffic control and 'intelligent' surveillance systems; think Amazon warehouses and Google street view. This technique employs panoramic cameras, which provide 360-degree views that are processed by specialised software in order to locate volumes in space. But when surveying areas like factories, big halls, streets or even a single room, there are always many 'blind spots' and 'unknown objects'. Machine Learning is currently being employed to optimize such known unknowns.

Possible Bodies [2] is a collaborative research on the very concrete and at the same time complex and fictional entities that "bodies" are, asking what matter-cultural conditions of possibility render them volumetrically present. For Optimization and its miscontents we invite participants to use their political/aesthetic/technical sensibilities towards the computation of volumetrics. We invite you to attend to Unknown Object Tracking [UOT] as a spacetime mattering that is not necessarily organized from the outside to the inside (as the optimised god-like sight) but from the inside-out, somehow both adjusting to and reversing a 3D paradigm of convergence into a "point of origin". 

The seamlessness that a 360 capture demands is based on the analysis of tiny 'features' that are sophisticatedly attended to by Computer Vision agencies. Features are differences, anomalies, visual anchors, identifiers that are considered to be specific for a single capture.

UOT depends on processing past data and simulations that are kept, learned and trained before being projected into the future, while real time data from the camera is used to adapt to changes. Their predictive claim is based on past measurements that make optimization systems vulnerable to unexpected change and/or wild surprises, as the unknown can only be detected if it falls within the boundaries of the probable. Where is the possible in considering panoramic unknowns? What if we consider the unknown not only as risky but fundamental to an orchestation of spacetime that is not necessarily harmonic and predictable, but also dissonant and accidented?

[1] https://vision.unipv.it/CV/materiale2016-17/4th%20Choice/0293.pdf

[2] http://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org

+ info: https://2019.transmediale.de/content/optimization-and-its-miscontents-counterpolitics-of-surveillance-capitalism