Fellowship | for Situated Practice | on Spectral Infrastructures | for Digital Discomfort

Happy to announce that this week I'm starting a 10-month fellowship at BAK, with a cohort of 18 amazing artist-researchers, joining the Cell for Digital Discomfort with dear companions Cristina Cochior and Karl Moubarak.

A CELL FOR DIGITAL DISCOMFORT

'Digital Discomfort' is a mode of dealing with, resisting, attending to and intervening into the sneaky moments of techno-capitalist innovation, linear solutionism and seamless operation. The Cell For Digital Discomfort (CFDD) wants to stay with this unease for all too comfortable modes of infrastructural becoming as a starting point for collectively exploring and experimenting ways to refuse compliance with the informatics of domination. We want to provide ourselves with spacetimes for a praxis of ongoing transdisciplinary critique of technical infrastructurations and the entangled ways they world worlds.

The urgency for the work of the CFDD is produced by the contemporary stage of global digitisation, from an infrastructural perspective: cloud-computing, hyper-connectivity, flow-management, planetary computing (which touches both material and spectral aspects of infrastructure). This results in an increase and intensification of economized forms of accounting responsibilities and their impact (eg.: carbon trade, immunity certificate, platform capitalism) which also causes a delegation of labour, of care, of response-abilites, of imagination, of damage.

The tensions that are produced necessitate a scale leap of problematics: the meso scales of the subject -- or even the municipality -- is often not accountable for the massive/turbo scale of the planetary computing of financial capitalism, the geological damage of climate change, etc. Also on the micro scale: quantum computing, molecular affection of organisms that get exposed to environmental transformations derived from ecocidal practices, turbo speed of high-speed trading and so forth, and the slow violence of an emergent point of no return.

In order to work on this, we have decided to focus the research on a cut through the technopolitical complexity of 'discomfort'. We would like to use the opportunity of the Fellowship to bring that framework in a more explicit conversation with crip techno-science, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, queer struggles and environmental justice. We are interested in developing practices that would go towards something like 'solidary discomfort'.

This means to exchange with agents that might have radically different sensibilities for what digital comfort and discomfort might mean (and to do so by means of conversations, collective practice, experiments of displacement, remediation, etc); to study the particular discomfort that haunts digital infrastructures (reading tools and texts through one another, to identify mutual affections); to extend the Catalog of Formats for Digital Discomfort with additional vectors, and anti-solutionist technologies and techniques (documenting, collecting, testing and trying, remixing, developing digital/conceptual prototypes, disseminating, partially repairing).

The tensors we identify and through whose inbetweens we would like to orient ourselves include (but are not limited to):

• Comfort-Discomfort

• Hostipital-Hospitable

• Parasite-Host

• Dependent-Independent-Interdependent

• Inclusive-Exclusive

• Unpleasant-Pleasant

• Desirable-Needed

• Welcoming-Hostile

• Awkward-Confident

• Antagonistic-Affirmative

• Seamless-Broken

• Accessible-Inaccessible

• Open-Closed

• Repair-Abolish

• Non-extractive-Extractive

• Solidary-Walled

• Caretaking/Maintenance-Stabilising/Fixing

• Continuing-Forking/Derivating

• Free-Open

• Macro-Meso-Micro

• Infra-Supra

• Turbo-Chronic-Slow

• Welfare-Goodliving

• Present-Latent-Absent

• Damaging-Damaged

• Situated-Planetary

• Foreground-Backround

• Fungible-Durable

• Inheritance/Legacy-Invention/Innovation

• Horizontal-Hierarchical

• Mundane-Universal

The work of CFDD would involve a thickening analysis of radical interdependencies (mutual constitutions of practices and tools, solidary networks, technical self-defence) and the articulation of a shift on accountability (what counts, what matters, what is read as a matter of fact/concern/care). Such analytics implies practically and conceptually engaging in the ontoepistemological shift of what has been termed as the "crisis of presence".

 

+ info about the BAK Felloship for Situated Practice and Spectral Infrastructures: https://www.bakonline.org/fellowship/2021-2022/

+ info about my work on/from the Cell: https://www.bakonline.org/person/jara-rocha/