Vera Tollmann, Boaz Levin: Plunge into Proxy Politics

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Herald: And now, a warm welcome
for Vera Tollmann.

She is from the research center
for proxy politics.

For those ones from Berlin,
as far as I know,

there is still a very exciting exhibition

in the Museum of Photography.

So a warm welcome for Vera Tollmann.

(Vera) Thanks.

applause

Thank you very much for inviting me.

First of all, it's just me.
Boaz Levin, my colleague,

who is also the co-author of this text
that I'm going to present today,

didn't make it in the end.

It was also very kind of last minute
invitation, that we received a week ago.

I am going to present a text,
which is entitled:

“The Body of the Web” or
“Proud to relay flesh”

It's a text where we want to
install the proxy as a figure of thought.

And continue an argument,
that Hito Steyerl, the artist,

started in her text
“Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise”

which you can find online.

In this co-authored text
we are going to pick up

her trope of the proxy and test it in
relation to different cases of protest.

So, from our understanding the
notion of proxy politics can be understood

as both a symptom of crisis in current
representational political structures

as well as a counter strategy aiming to
critically engage and challenge

the existing mechanisms of
security and control,

which leads to a series of questions.

What forms of resistance might fit this vague
technopolitical economic condition?

Mass protesters become image makers.

Do resistance movements
need to employ PR consultants?

How does one protest
in public space,

if there is no public space left?

And in what way does this

virtuality and duplicity challenge
both public space and human bodies?

Actually the latter is
the most important

that we are trying to answer
or follow through with this text.

Can you hear me well?
Yeah? Good!

Ah, there’s … yes?

No … okay …
I just thought there is a comment.

Since July 2015,

protesting in public space in Spain
has become an expensive affair.

I don't know, if you remember from media
reports in July, there was a huge protest

where they used the hologram as a medium.

So protesters are now threatened
by hefty fines

and authoritarian reaction to

the anti-austerity protests
three years earlier.

The citizen safety law,
otherwise known as the gag law,

criminalises protests,
that interfere with public infrastructure.

Under the new law which was passed by the
governing People’s Party in December 2014

protesters are liable
to fines up to 600.000 EUR,

for marching in front of congress,
blocking road, or occupying a square.

The law, criticised as a severe attack
on Spaniards’ right of assembly and speech,

is the most recent attempt by the government
to curb a wave of popular protests,

that has swept the country since 2011.

With the unemployment rate exceeding 25%
and one half of Spaniards under 25 jobless,

hundreds of thousands of
outraged citizens took the streets,

occupying squares and universities.

In response to a discredited political class,
tarnished by years of political scandal

and corruption, the Indigñados,
Spanish for “The outraged”,

sought to mobilise citizens in a series of
grassroots demonstrations across the city

by reclaiming their right to public space.

Another flashback to 2011,
where protests using

similar occupation strategies
were taking place across the world:

in Tunesia, Egypt, Greece, Israel,
and the United States.

Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, home to
the headquarters of Israel's largest banks,

became a kilometre-long encampment,
dubbed “the Tent Republic”.

I have some pictures here.

Lasting for almost three months,
this protest called the tent republic.

Syntagma Square in Athens too was filled
with tents and make shift dwelling places

and became a site of
lasting popular assemblies

and daily clashes with the local authorities.

In Zuccotti Park, New York, activists
tapped into the electricity grid

via lantern posts and set up

semi-autonomous mesh networks
for the benefit of the protesters.

Though numerous commentators pointed out
the role played by new technologies such as

social networks and smart phones,

in facilitating the protests it was
the city's square

as old as political thought,
which was the true common denominator.

Our understanding of the rights of free speech
and assembly as well as the concept of

participatory democracy are deeply indebted
to the development of the Greek city state,

the Polis, and later
the Roman public square.

In nearly every protest occurring
around this time,

the spatial dimension of political action
was once again affirmed.

Might this significance be altered by the
emergence of new technologies of control

and new modes of resistance?

As Hannah Arendt pointed out,
the idea of Polis,

which for her denoted the public realm
of a political community,

does not necessarily designate
the physical location of the Greek city state,

rather this form of public realm
as the organisation of the people, quote:

"as it raises out of acting and
speaking together", end of quote.

Thus it's all the more fitting that when

the People’s Party of Spain passed
its draconic law,

demonstrators were quick to

seek an alternative to bodily presence
and physical space.

Their solution was a hologram protest,
the first ever.

The first ever, as media outlets
were quick to point out,

skillfully choreographed and artfully projected
in front of the gates of congress in Madrid.

The Independent, the newspaper reported:

“Spanish activists have staged the world's
first ever virtual political demonstration.”

The Daily Mails headline read:
“The world's first hologram protest.”

And News India asked and answered:

“Ghosts on Spain's street?
No it's world's first virtual protest.”

In an interview, Cristina Flesher Fominaya,
spokeperson for the activist group,

that organised the hologram intervention,

"No somos delito" –
in English "We are not a crime"

explained how it all came together.

A group of creative professionals,
who decided to remain anonymous,

provided the needed technical support
prior to the outdoor projection,

which lasted for the course of an hour.

The campaign was developed online.

A webpage with the slightly lofty title
"Holograms for Freedom",

in which anyone can leave their hologram,
a written message, or a shoutout,

was where it started.

Finally these composite images were screened
across a transparent screen and looped.

By representing people as holograms,
which appear in a particular cool blueish tone

reminiscent of surveillance camera footage,

the protest organiser seem to elude to the
popular depiction of a dystopian totalitarian state.

Spectors, for once quite literally,
haunted the sterile streets

voicing the grievance
of those barred from assembling there

The event had been rehearsed, performed, and
recorded in a nearby city and the equipment

had been installed in Madrid by a
PR company in a clandestine operation.

A tech savvy, [unwittingly] absurd way
to demonstrate without violating the new law.

Instead of public space,
the demonstrators inhabited a new medium.

After all, bodies in public space
pose a problem in contemporary politics.

The natural corporal vulnerability of protesting
was now intensified by the threat

of disproportionate financial penalisation.

This was a proxy protest fit
for the age of proxy politics.

So, what is a proxy then,
like the way we understand it?

A proxy is a decoy or a surrogate.

The word derives from the Latin procurator
(Prokurator), meaning someone responsible

for representing someone else
in a court of law.

These days, the word proxy is often used
to designate a computer server

acting as an intermediary
for request from clients.

These servers afford
indirect connections to a network,

thus providing users with anonymity.

However, proxy servers
are not distinct technology

to hide users but can also be set up
for the opposite task: to monitor traffic.

Proxy politics, as defined by Hito Steyerl,
as the politics of the stand-in and the decoy,

is characterised by fraudulent contracts,
calmarical sovereignties, and void authorities.

The concept of the proxy is emblematic
of our post representational,

post democratic political age.

Disembodyment and invisibility of politics
and its increasing subordination

to economic interests.

So, this political age is one
increasingly populated by bot militias,

puppet states, ghostwriters,
and communication relays.

So now one paragraph on post democracy,
or the post representational,

what it actually means.

There is a book by Colin Crouch.
It's entitled “Post Democracy”.

And there he describes the
current political condition

as one in which power is
increasingly relinquish to business lobbies

and non-governmental organisations.

As a result, he argues, quote:

"There is little hope for an agenda
of strong egalitarian policies

for the redistribution of power and wealth
or for the restraint of powerful interests."

As a corollary to the rise of neo-liberalism,

the vision of an autonomous potent
political subject is devastated

by the growing power of privileged elites,
standing at the nexus of transnational

corporations, extra juridical zones,
infrastructural authorities,

non governmental organisations,
and covert rule.

Similarly, Jacques Rancière,
in his book entitled "Post Democracy",

he refers to democratic action,
post-democracy in the government practice,

and conceptual legitimisation
of a democracy after the demos,

a democracy that has eliminated
the appearance, miscount,

and dispute of the energies and interests.

At the heart of this condition
lies an ontology of deception,

where the public realm is conceived
as a series of smoke screens,

false flags, and simulations.

The democratic appearance of the people
is strictly opposed by its simulated reality.

One, which is set up by the conjunction
of media proliferation of whatever is visible

and the endless count of opinions polled
and votes simulated.

With this concept of double government,
policital scientist Michael Glennen

has introduced a vision of US political power,
split between elected government officials,

and a network of institutions constituting a disguised republic.

Glennan traces this phenomenon back to

World War II and president Truman's signing
of the national security act of 1947,

which established, among others,
the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA.

Since then, he argues, the United Staates
has moved toward a double government,

wherein even the president exercises

little substantive over the overall direction
of US national security policy.

Similarly, in Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, and Syria,

political commentators have used
the notion of the deep state

to describe the nexus of police,
intelligence services, politicians,

and organised crime.

Surely, secrecy, or discretion,
to use its diplomatic euphemism,

is as old as politics itself.

But its recent resurgence
under the guise of democratic rule

reveals “arcana imperii”,
the secrets of governance,

to be all but arcane.

So the age of proxy politics is thus one
in which power is displaced

into the hands of
extra juridical unchecked authorities.

Whether by way of covered institutions
that it builds in classified budgets,

organised crimes, and grey markets,
or no less disturbingly

through gross privatisation
and the rise of transnational corporations.

According to Sheldon Wallin,
the paradox of our current regime

is that the more open to the
pressures of organised interests,

the more opaque even
mysterious politics becomes.

Consequently, responsibility becomes
virtually untraceable.

In her “Lying in politics”,
a text published in 1972,

written in response to the revelation
of the Pentagon Papers,

Hannah Arendt lamented the beginning
of an age, in which image making has become

the core value of American global policy.

When image makers govern,

the institutions of representational democracy
are destined to become a mere semblance.

The recent example came as the house of
representatives voted in May 2015

to end bulk surveillance by the NSA.

Rather than bringing
all bulk surveillance to an end,

the vote merely took the government
out of the collection business.

It would not deny its access to the information,
it would be in the hands of the private sector.

Almost certainly telecommunications companies
like ATT, Verizon, and Sprint.

In other words, even after
seemingly successful governmental reform,

it was revealed that the corridors of power
lay elsewhere between politics

and the private sector.

So popular protests in one country

are often convicts for the
expansion of power in another.

In the aftermath of a successful,
non violent-regime change in Belgrade,

activits behind the Otpor movement
relayed their experiences into

tutorials and training camps,

teaching activists in numerous countries
how to ignite and lead a revolution.

What's more,

Srđa Popović and Slobodan Đinović,
both former Otpor activists,

founded CANVAS, which is the Center for
Applied Non-Violent Actions and Strategies.

With the aim of educating
pro-democracy activists around the world

in what they regard as the “universal principles
for success in non violent struggle”.

CANVAS has trained activists
in more than 50 countries,

including Iran, Ukraine, Palestine, and recently
Tunisia and Egypt, to name but a few.

By late November 2000, an article in the
New York Times had revealed

that prior to the revolution,
Otpor had received funds

from US government affiliated organisations,
such as the National Endowment for Democracy.

In addition, their ties to the private
global intelligence company “Stratfor”,

also know as the “shadow CIA”,
prompted questions concerning

activists’ involvement in
global American covert foreign policy.

So how might proxy politics be more
than just a condition,

the name of a political regime that thrives
an obscurity, opaqueness, and decoys?

How might it also designate
a corresponding mode of resistance?

Ideally, proxy politics would encompass
myriad modes of withdrawal,

both technical and metaphorical.

Its tools could be a VPN, a holographic
surrogate, a stock image, or a double.

Its outcome is always concealment,
evasion, subterfuge.

The hope is that strategies
such as these

might be effective during our
current interim phase,

the period in which the difference between
real virtuality and virtual reality,

the tangible and the digital is
increasingly difficult to discern.

At the same time, it is becoming

increasingly evident, how severely
controlled both spheres are.

The world wide web, by
way of its architecture and protocols,

and public space by
increasing privatisations.

As Alexander Galloway has observed,
instead of a [politicisation] of time or space,

we are witnessing a rise in the

[politicisation] of absence- and presence-oriented
themes, such as invisibility, opacity, and anonymity.

Or the relationship between
identification and legibility,

or the tactics of
non-existence and disappearance.

New struggles around prevention,
therapeutics of the body, piracy on contagion,

information capture and the
making present of data via data mining.

According to Galloway,
recent protest movements' refusal

to make clear demands is
a form of black boxing.

A conscious withdrawal from political
representation and collective bargaining.

The choice is for relations, relays and links,
in the words of Édouard Glissant.

All qualities associated with the proxy.

This politicisation upholds the right to opacity,
also a quote from Glissant.

Rather than reverting once again
to the age-old demand for transparency.

For Glissant, opacity is the force
that drives every community,

the thing that would bring us together forever
and makes us permanently distinctive.

Recently in Paris,

where the state of emergency, declared in
the wake of recent terror attacks,

prevented climate change activists from
assembling in public spaces

during the climate change summit,
protesters installed over 10.000 pairs of shoes

at Place de la République,

theatrically standing in place
of the absent bodies.

Images of the square circulated
widely in the media,

emphasising the inherent mediatisation
of contemporary protest

and the need for effective images,
not necessarily real bodies.

Holograms and shoes function as
placeholders, making it all the more possible

for images of absent bodies to
communicate large scale discontent.

So in reference to the
wave of protest in 2011,

Judith Butler has suggested that
protest in public space has, quote:

"become politically potent only
when and if we have a visual and audible

version of the scene communicated in
live time, so that the media

does not merely report the scene,
but is part of the scene and the action;

indeed, the media is the scene or the space
in its extended and replicable

visual and audible dimension."

In Madrid, the shadow-like figures
in the hologram embodied a double movement,

a process of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation.

Slogans and shouts were
crowdsourced online

and synced with holographic images
filmed in a nearby city.

Then, the resulting image was meticulously
reworked to match the

distances and angles of the scene
in front of congress.

So in recent years, there has been a
growing interest in the reterritorialisation

of the internet.

The artist Trevor Paglen and theoreticians,
such as Tung Hui Hu and Keller Easterling,

have drawn attention to the
materiality of the Internet,

data centres, undersea cables,
and routers, which in turn

rely on hydro-electric power stations
and dams for electricity, as well as

railway tracks and telegraph lines
for communication routes.

The web, until recently associated with
immateriality, virtually and spacelessness

as exemplified by the
popularity of the term “cyberspace”,

clearly has a body,
a sprawling physical infrastructure

and ever-growing ecological footprint.

The benign-sounding “cloud” is nothing less
than a publicity ploy for a vast campaign

to centralise digital data, and to turn
software and hardware into a black box.

As our computers have become thinner and sleeker,
the weight of the cloud has only grown greater.

So the body politic is now
intertwined with the body of the web,

and the web, the world wide,
is constrained by

national policies and geographical realities.

In October 2015,

citizens in Thailand protested against
their military government's plan to

channel Internet traffic to international
servers through a single network gateway,

with the intention of perfecting
state surveillance and censorship.

This political move was dubbed
“The Great Firewall of Thailand”.

As in Madrid, the choice of protest space
corresponded with the space,

the new law was tailored for.

The military government's websites were
targeted and downed for several hours by

denial of service attacks.

The online action was reported beyond
activist platforms and international media,

however, it lacked images that could
represent the bodies of those who would

literally be barred from leaving Thailand

where the government was
following through on its plans

for greater surveillance and censorship.

In the meantime, the
hacker collective “Anonymous”

declared cyberwar on the Thai government.

Operation “Single Gateway” targeted
Thai police servers in an effort to

demonstrate the actual vulnerability
of virtual state institutions.

So, how can one possibly grasp the current
relation between the digital and its outside,

back when the Internet was still thought of
as synonymous with cyberspace?

Both were clearly defined as separate.

A quote from Wendy Chun:

"Cyberspace as a virtual non-place made
the Internet so much more

than a network of networks:

It became a place in which things happened,
in which users’ actions separated from their bodies,

and in which local standards became
impossible to determine.

It thus freed users from their locations."

So in the 1990s, the Internet was
imagined to be a perfect frontier

science fiction dream come true,

where users could navigate as powerful agents,
invisible and free of physical constraints.

Yet, as Wendy Chun in her book
“Control and Freedom”, published in 2006,

as she has demonstrated,
the world wide web was designed

as a technology of control from the start,

geographically rooted and constantly
monitoring its users via protocols such as TCP/IP.

So in what way does virtuality challenge
our conception of public space

and the mobilisation of human bodies?

As we have seen, the digital and the real
coalesce in ever new forms and devices.

And despite the gaming industry's
recent success in

bringing early visions of virtual reality
to technical perfection,

think of Oculus Rift, or something
like the body snap app,

prior myth of virtual reality are slowly,
but certainly eroding.

The old demarcations between
the human body in physical space

and the so called “immateriality of the
digital sphere” are superseded.

Attempts to conceptualise the
effect of the synthetic face-to-screen situation

either one that this is downfall
of the sovereign subject or

extricate emancipatory potential from
the entanglement of humans and technology.

How then might a proxy give way to
different bodily modes and morphologies

a body both present and absent?

Whereas Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti
have attempted to destabilise the subject

as it was conceived during the 20th century,
exploring notions as the cyborg

in conceptualising a feminist post humanism.

Might the proxy antagonistically restabilise
a very concrete subject in a synthetic situation,

is a proxy a techno body,
does it have flesh after all?

Might it serve as the object other of the
high tech clean and efficient bodies

endorsed by contemporary culture
as Haraway envisions?

Or rather as a nomadic device
that enables people to become

post human subjects in Braidotti's
line of thought?

Braidotti warns of a fatal nostalgia for
either, humanist past or the cold war cyborg.

And instead proposes that we embraced
vulnerability, take pride in being flesh.

Her post-human theory aims at
shaping and shifting new subjectivities

against modern humanism,
a school of thought she criticises

for its wide male supremacy,
eurocentric normativity, imperial past,

and inhuman consequences.

So proxies permit human bodies
to step out of the line of fire

to evade forensics,
the lack of a human silhouette,

face, or fixed physiognomy
and can be associated with numerous

individuals wherever they are.

Rather than the avatar, a creatively designed
porn in the network gaming environment,

they assume either a transformative
shape and form, or none at all.

Last two sentences. chuckles

Proxies are necessary in
contemporary political struggle,

they're counter figures to
capitalist self improvement

or a [???] opaque other.

So proxies provide an escape route
from a schizophrenic situation,

which denies or limits bodies to being
mere vessels of biotechnological information.

Proxies offer a path toward a new,
a fleeting relation as sovereign bodies.

Thank you.

applause

Herald: Thank you very much for the
spontaneity and the talk

and I think there might be time
for questions outside.

Thank you.

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