We Are Tectonic!

Out now @ Lagoonscapes Journal:
We Are Tectonic! A Queer Geophysics for Intra-Solidarities and Resisting the Cloud Regime

Img: The Underground Division / TITiPI

 

[abstract]

This paper analyses how Big Tech and global consultancy firms are asserting control over carbon removal certification and governance through infrastructure solutions and technical standards. We argue that defining gaps in the underground constitutes a global takeover of material sovereignty, encompassing both knowledge and geological formations. We unearth Big Tech’s strategies of infra-solutionism to demonstrate, drawing on the work of inhuman geographer Kathryn Yusoff, how this takeover reinforces geological grammars and essentialises racialised and sexualised categories that disconnect us from the Earth. Drawing on queer poetry together with work of Marxist agronomist Amílcal Cabral we advocate for resistance to dominant geopower and form transnational solidarities against the cloud regime.

Full article: https://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/media/pdf/article/the-venice-journal-of-environmental-humanities/2025/1/art-10.30687-LGSP-2785-2709-2025-01-008.pdf
 

Cascading animation: https://ddivision.xyz/rockrepo/crystals

Open access to full number, Cracking the Surface at Lagoonscapes Journal:  https://edizionicafoscari.it//it/edizioni/riviste/the-venice-journal-of-environmental-humanities/2025/1/

 

 

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

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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

Let's first get things done! at LibrePlanet 2015

The current distance between those who organize their activism to develop “technical infrastructures” and those who bring their struggles becomes especially evident in the pragmatic spirit of getting things done. "Radical" activists may turn to services provided by Fortune 500 companies, while alternative tech initiatives sustained by a select (visionary and male) few may remain insistent on crypto with 9-lives. Through a close study of digital self-defense campaign sites, we want to pause to explore other modes of collaboration.

The Darmstadt Delegation, 2015 

(present delegates: Seda Gürses & Jara Rocha; 

distant -but close- delegates: Femke Snelting, Miriyam Aouragh)

MIT Stata Center
Cambridge MA
Room 32-155
Saturday, march 21 
16.15h (Session Block 5A)

(for those not present, it will all be streamed from here:  https://libreplanet.org/2015)

sneaky temporalities

let's first get things done