35C3 - DISNOVATION.ORG

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Herald: Hello everybody. A warm welcome
to our friend Nicholas Maigret from

DISNOVATION.ORG. They are making
contemporary art with research and hacking

to question the positive ideology for
technology, to stimulate a post-growth

technology narrative. So I am quite
interested and give him a warm welcome.

Applause

Nicholas Maigret: Hello Everyone. Ouh does
it work? Can you hear me? Hey, Yeah.

Hello, so I'm Nicholas Maigret and
together with Maria Roszkowska we

initiated the DISNOVATION.ORG collective
and our collective intends to reveal and

challenge the dominant ideology of
technological innovation and circulate

alternative narrative. So I will show you
a selection of projects and mainly it's a

few projects selected to resonate with the
CCC and the topics here. So we do

basically creations so we organize the
festivals and we create the art species in

a different series of projects around
basically the rhetoric of technological

innovation and the effect of this dominant
ideology on society. We also

work on publications in books. I will get
back to that in a minute. And we do

artworks and site specific projects that I
will present in the second half of this

talk. So the first part will be focusing
on our curatorial practices around this

idea of counter-narratives on
technological innovation. So I will

introduce three works. The first one is a
pirate book. So it's a book we started to

compile in 2014. It's a compilation of
stories about sharing and distributing

cultural contents outside the boundaries of
local economies, politics, laws, religions,

and so on. So with this work we tried to
explore the notions such as the piracy of

necessity, the idea of new originals. And
I think it's interesting to go back to

this project to come back to this project
in the context of the Anthropocene and the

potential imminent collapse. Because I
think there is a need for non-techno-

solutionist and non-techno-positivist
stories at the moment and somehow a need

to develop post growth narratives. So
we'll see what we can learn from the

following examples taken from the book
around concerns like repair, care,

maintenance, and creative appropriation.
So the first excerpt from the book I would

like to focus on, is an example from Mexico,
given by our contributor Jota Izquierdo

and basically it focuses on the stories of
a craftsman that works for improving the

practices of street CD vendors in Mexico. So
I will I will play a quick excerpt of it.

Video is playing with music

Nicholas: So in the book we cover multiple

stories in this sort. We just focus on a
couple of those.

musik from video in the background
Nicholas: The second one is based in the

Sahel. It's a contribution by Christopher
Kirkley and is presenting basically how a

big part of music distribution in Sahel is
done through copies between dumb phones

using Bluetooth. So it's a way somehow to
create a circulation of contents by

nearest neighbor dynamics, basically. And
the third example I would like just to

introduce is el paquete semanal. Basically
it's in the context of Cuban lack of fast

internet or internet at all. Basically el
paquete semanal is a sort of substitute

to the internet in the form of a package.
It's a hard drive, as you can see here and

this hard drive also circulates one copy
at a time. And it's basically a

compilation of all the content that is
considered to be missing for people so you

can see on this hard drive TV shows, books,
movies, music, and all the sorts of

content you could expect from an internet
browsing experience. So you can find the

book online for free. And we cover many of
the stories but tonight I will just

present those and connect with this last
contribution by Clément Renaud. He did a

long term six years of research in China
and he shared with us this story about

Shanzhai technology production. It's
basically something between piracy and

hybridization in Chinese manufacturing.
And I will focus on this one a little bit

more so in his article Clément Renaud
described specific local tech

innovation named Shanzhai. The Shanzhai
culture is a mix of piracy, DIY, and anti-

establishment. It literally means
"mountain fortress" and it comes from a

novel from the 13th century that tells a
story of a group of outlaws that hides in

the mountain to be outside the system and
outside the regulation of the state

basically. So in a more recent context
Shanzhai refers basically to

manufacturing, it emerged in in the 50s
for instance in Hong Kong to describe a

small scale factories that were producing
cheap low quality items and mainly

counterfeit products of famous brands like
Gucci or Nike and they sold those products

on markets that would not buy the fancy,
expensive originals. And as electonic

manufacturing migrated to Shenzhen in the
early 2000s this informal network of

Shanzhai production found the perfect
product in the mobile phone. So our first

acquisition in this collection was
basically the the Ghana phone and we've

been very intrigued by this device. So
basically this device has not been

conceived for its superficial design but
it's it's been conceived to fill a gap a

need, a niche market. So this phone is a
power bank basically to fill the gap of

the frequent power cuts in Ghana. So it
has a battery that can last for a week.

You can also charge other devices with it,
recharge your computer, another phone. You

can also use it as a light. So that's why
you have a hook to connect it on the on

the ceiling. And basically it's a whole
package of functions and properties that

were designed specifically for local
markets that nowhere any brands were

paying attention at. So we were very
interested by this track of research and

we wanted to dig some more. So we started
with a simple protocol. We started to

collect hybrid phones that were combining
multiple functions and designed for those

niche markets all over the place, mainly
in the global south but not only, you

will see. So you can find a lot of fancy
and weird devices that I will show, and

those devices we've been collecting them
in markets in Shenzhen like Huaqiangbei

and also online like on Taobao,
Aliexpress, and so on. So one of the

reasons that we wanted to focus our
research on mobile phones, because

Shanzhai production is not about mobiles,
it's about every kind of technology I

would say. But we kind of wanted to stick
to one sort of device to have this

continuity over 20 years. And also because
somehow a huge contrast could be seen

through the mobile phone between sort of
north hemisphere culture or this somehow

the standardized culture of the black
rectangle we all have in our pockets here.

And this kind of non normalized
technological imaginaries that were

emerging there and somehow it reminds us I
think that although technological

possibilities always exist beyond the
ultra normalized industry. So I will dig

into a few of those.
musik from video in the background

Nicholas: So each of those examples I think
a tell a specific story and reveal

specific uses and cultures. So here you
can see a lighter phone. So it's basically

a phone that does cigarette lighter. This
one is I would say a working cigarette

pack that also includes a mobile phone or
perhaps the other way around.

inaudible voice from video

Nicholas: And this one is a razor phone.

So it's a phone that includes a working
shaver.

razor noise from video

Nicholas: So since 2015 we've been

collecting about hundreds of those hybrid
phones and I will zoom into a few of very

interesting specimens and stories. So here
you can see the card phone, it's the size

of a credit card. It used to be the
cheapest on the market. It cost about

twelve dollars and it's made of a single
board. So basically it can be very easily

replicated and optimized, modified, and so
on. So that's why it's been called the

Gongkai Phone which means open source and
you can find this board in multiple

versions in the later generation of phones
I will present in a minute.

Video music in the background

So this one is called the Buda phone. It's
been designed as a digital alternative for Buddhist

prayers and related religious activities.
So basically it replicates for instance

the ritual components like the burning of
incense, purification rites, meditative

music, and more. So all of those features
are included in basically the UX of the phone.

musik from video

Nicholas: So this is the sound system
phone. It's been designed for mainly the

elderly people. So the favorite one of the
favorite activities of the elderly in

China is group dancing on public squares in
evenings. And this specific phone has been

designed for this purpose. And so it comes
with a several gigabytes of old fashioned,

communist songs that Chinese pensioners
are particularly keen on. It has huge

buttons. I mean it's really designed for
the elderly. So the device is like that

size. And there is also support to stand
in front of the dancers and the powerful

light torch to ensure a smooth return home
after the dance.

Speaker on Video: Small. Nice and neat to
put away up in the bums

Yeah, I'm a pro,
I can do about 20 in 10 minutes

Speaker on Video: Why in Mars bars?
Speaker on video: Because they are

available in most of the visit halls, you
can't take something that might not be

there because if you do they're gonna
notice it's different. I'd say that

there's probably 75 percent of prisoners
have phones in jail. I take them in on the

person in places where you wouldn't get
searched, the front of your trousers, in

your bra.
Nicholas: So this one is the prisoner

phone or it's also called Beat The Buzz.
The buzz is a device for scanning

prisoners. So actually, It started on the
market as the smallest phone on the

market. But for some reason it became
popular among prisoners, many in the UK

because of its small size. It's the size
of a finger. And because of the fact also

it's composed of 99 percent of plastic, so
it's barely detectable during the checks

in prisons and you can easily smuggle it.
Inside food, inside the body obviously but

also in weird ways like inside drones,
carrier pigeons, rats and so on. So we try

to exhibit all this collection of weird
devices in their natural habitat, in a

way, so we built a reproduction of a
street market kiosk where we basically

showcase this collection of hybrid phones
and together with that we have a couple

of video documentaries like this one, that
kind of tells the larger Shanzhai culture

and focus on the Chinese ecosystem of
technological devices production and

distribution. So that's how it looks when
it's shown. Yeah. That's it for this one.

And the last cultural project. I'd like to
introduce is a work in progress. It's

called the Museum Of Failures and I will
start with a quote by Paul Virilio.

Quote read by a female voice

Nicholas: So as you could guess with this

quote this project is about uncovering and
compiling counter narratives about the

history of technological innovation and
our project is basically to compile those

under represented stories, that can help us
to disrupt the dominant positive discourse

on innovation and help us maybe to think
about technology in post growth era. So

the project takes the shape of workshops,
conferences, events, and we share it as a

database and exhibitions. So this symbolic
museum is structured in two floors. They

go in negative numbers. They are somehow
the underground counterparts of usual

technological museum. So each floor is a
potential sort of entry, or perspective on

the museum sorted by topics. So you have
like intentional failures, fiction and

dystopias, risk and disasters, unexpected
outcomes, and so on. So the first part of

this future book is a collection of
aborted projects: flops, errors,

malfunctions, business failures, ethical
rejections, disasters, and somehow reflects

the outlines of our society from a
historical, symbolic, poetic, and cultural

point of view. The second part of this
book though will be based on interviews

and contributions and we are open to
proposals. So if you have stories or

research on post growth technological
imaginaries and counter narratives on

technological innovation, you're welcome to
submit. Okay so the second part of this

talk will be about our artworks, specific
selection to resonate with the CCC as

well. And we grouped it into this idea of
psychoanalysis of the hyper connected era.

So the first artwork I will introduce, is the Pirate
Cinema. So basically the copy culture got

mainstream with BitTorrent and the Pirate
Bay in the early 2000s and it became an

essential part of culture for a whole
generation. And at the same time as this

process since the early days of peer to
peer it coexisted with an intense level of

surveillance. So this surveillance was
conducted by universities, cooperations,

states. Some times for statistical
purposes, just to know how much is

consumed from different types of content
and so on, and most of the time for

copyright infringement. And we got very
interested in how we could disrupt those

systems of network surveillance basically
and use it to reveal the dynamics and the

materiality of peer to peer file sharing.
So basically to expose the materiality of

this process and the geographical dynamics
of the contents that were consumed and

shared. So I'll show a few excerpts of
this project.

inaudible sound snippets from video

Nicholas: So we programed the server to

use BitTorrent and to synchronize every
morning with the Top 100 videos of the

Pirate Bay. So it's a sort of a man in the
middle attack where we see what people are

sharing through our server. So it's a way
to view the global dynamics through one

node of the BitTorrent network. And as you
can see on the video it also reveals the

user IP address and the countries. And
somehow it's a way to depict the

geographical dynamics of media sharing in
the consumptions. The next project I'd

like to introduce following this idea of
counter narratives. It's a series about

illicit contents. It's called Blacklist.
So we got interested in basically who

controls and decides what should be
visible or not online or what should be

blocked or not. And how those least are
built and used. And somehow how maybe it

can be something that reveals the value
system we live in. So there are numerous

blacklists. You can subscribe to more or
less efficient and up to date. Script

blacklists, Squid blacklists, Sheller
list, Cisco and so on and somehow they

remind us literally of the index of
forbidden books that used to exist in

libraries around the globe. It was a list
basically of publication considered a

hereticall, immoral or anticlerical. And
you know in an internet blacklist nowadays

you have pretty much the same. So
addresses that can be blocked, they are

organized into categories as you can see
here. And as a sysadmin you can decide

what type of content you want to block. So
such lists are used by universities,

towns, airports, companies, individuals
and so on. And then it helps you basically

to restrict the access to specific content
on your network. So you have categories

like copyright, porn, pharmacy and so on
and you can see weird stuff like feminist

for instance and I guess it reveals the
for profit nature of this list and the

fact that anything can be requested, if
enough clients are asking for it. So this

work took the shape of a sort of an
encyclopedia in 13 volumes of 666 pages.

It's basically an encyclopedia of illicit
and filtered sites. It is structured like

an old phone book. It's a sort of ready
made, that reveals the moral sort of

portraits or framework of the web.

Video: Blacklists is a directory of the

prohibitions of the internet, deployed in
the form of an encyclopedia in 13 volumes

of 666 pages each. It is an extensive
collection of restricted websites used

for the automatic filtering of traffic
considered ilicit or licentious. Just

like the intent of forbidding libraries
the Blacklist project points out the

sidelining of online content that could be
dangerous for the very survival of the

system. With around two million web sites
extracted from commercial content control

softwares this collection reveals the
cultural social and ideological model of

our society through what has been deemed
unfit for consultation by specific groups

and institutions around the globe.
Nicolas: So I guess you get the idea. All

right. So this next work is predictive art
bot and I will need to contextualize a

bit. So basically we live in the era of
hyper connectivity and the time we spend

on phone and social media is radically
increase over the last ten years. This has

a strong effect on us. Online news and
communication tends to monopolize a lot of

our attention and it does have a growing
influence on our types of concerns and

priorities. So we know about effects like
a filter bubble, media echo chambers and to

some extent the influence of social media
and hyper connection tend towards a sort

of uniformization not only of our concerns
but also somehow of our innovation and

creativity. And it tends towards a higher
chance of predictability of our behaviors.

So stemming basically from the art field
we started to notice somehow similar

patterns amongst the artists around us. So
we spotted numerous similar imaginaries

similar trends in each interest groups.
And we started to observe similar topics,

similar ideas and even similar ways of
realizing artworks and answering to ideas

and concerns. So at some point we were
like: Do we really need artists to simply

follow the trends? And do we need artists
to just illustrate the latest technical

technological bells. Maybe no. So that's
where the project started with the simple

question and we decided to automatize the
process of mainstream creativity we could

say. And to push it toward sort of the
absurd. So to do that, we created a bot.

And this bot basically is subscribed to
hundreds of RSS feeds. That's the sort of

feeds we will get on our cell phone, our
Twitter feed you know. So were basically

subscribing the bot to the same. And then
the bot is using some python library to

try to identify the most significant
keyword in the headlines and those

keywords are stored and then we organized
using Tracery in a sort of generative

poetry to create potential concept for
artworks and those concepts are reposted on

Twitter and different places to basically
create a new weird inspiration machine.

That's what you will see now.
Video: Predictive Art Bot is a bot that

turns the latest media headlines into
artistic concepts. In the Age of Hyper

connectivity the perverse implications of
media echo chambers are becoming more and

more obvious. Groups of similar behaviors
are being partitioned into filter bubbles

while the few massively reposted topics
tend to monopolize most of the available

attention. Search insular echo chambers
strongly effect ways of thinking, resulting

in increasingly homogeneous imaginaries
within groups of likeminded people.

Predictive art bar caricature is the
predictability of media influenced

artistic concepts by automating and
skirting the human creative process. But

beyond mere automation, it aims to
stimulate unbridled, counter intuitive and

even disconcerting associations of ideas.
To do so it continually monitors emerging

trends among the most influential news
sources in fields as heterogeneous as

politics, environment, innovation,
culture, activism, or health. On this

basis it identifies and combines keywords
to generate concepts of artworks in a

fully automated way ranging from
unreasonable to prophetic to absurd. Each

prediction becomes a thought experiment
waiting to be incubated, misused, or

appropriated by a human host.
Nicolas: Okay. And we also commissioned a

few artists to interpret and realize those
projects a few times. Okay. The last

project for tonight. I see that it's
almost time for me. So the last project is

a map and it's a work in progress for a
future long-term project. And basically it

focuses on the fact, that the web has
become one of the most impactful vehicles

for the propagation of ideas in culture.
And hyper connectivity did intensify the

rise of online politics and made it way
easier to manipulate public opinions. And,

I mean this happened at a sort of
unprecedented scale. So you know we've

seen the emergence of political bots, fake
accounts, troll farms and so on. But today

I will focus on the cultural aspect of
this battleground. So one of the important

aspects of online culture wars that we
were trying to map, is perhaps this notion

of transgression, so as one of the Trump
supporters, Milo Yiannopoulos used to say

"Conservatism is the new punk".
Milo Yiannopoulos: And think about how the

culture wars have changed, and changed
very rapidly and in a very short space of

time. The dissident element in culture: punk,
mischief, irreverence is now better

represented in politics by a "Make America
Great Again" hat than by anything on the

left. If you want to annoy somebody, you
want to piss your parents off, If you want

to be ejected from polite society as this
poor angel has been. There is no better

way to do it than to cast a vote for
Donald Trump. This is the new punk.

Shouting
Milo Yiannopoulos: This is the new punk.

Republican is the new cool. Thank you for
coming.

Shouting
Nicolas: So in the context of the

political correctness and self-censorship,
public shaming. That was occuring a lot

in the left. This obscure style of sort of
iconic, cynical, mockery emerges as a sort

of counterforce. And transgression made
the alt-right attractive in a way. And

this transgressive online culture is well
presented in the book of Angela Nagel

called Kill All Normies.
Audio: What seem to hold them all together

in their obscurity was a love of mocking
the earnestness and moral self flattery of

what felt like a tired liberal
intellectual conformity running right

through from establishment liberal
politics to the more militant enforcers of

new sensitivities and from the wackiest
corners of Tumblr to campus politics.

Nicolas: So basically this culture of
transgression aligns pretty well with what

is called a weaponized meme so a
weaponized meme is when the internet memes

become part of political and ideological
propaganda. It can be done by the right

but as well by all the political spectrum
like here to fight the homophobia in

Russia. And as a starting point for this
new series of projects we wanted to create

a kind of mind map of the emerging online
culture wars. So we use this classical

political compass as a framework. I mean
it's a framework that has been criticized

a lot but nonetheless it became popular as
a format to exchange content on online

forums and on the meme-osphere and it
often integrates non-political characters

and pop-references and so on. So after
studying numerous critical researches on

the topic, like the Computational
Propaganda Project, Angela Nagel, Florian

Cramer and so on and also on
investigations, we started to assemble a

sort of cartography of weaponized meme
elements with the help of Baruch Gottlieb.

Audio: The Online Culture Wars Project
offers a provisional cartography of

weaponized meme elements using a
speculative political distribution. Taking

the political compass as a framework this
cartography offers a symbolic

representation of online ideological and
political debates in the context of the

growing polarization and radicalization.
This ever evolving chart is the result of

a superposition of hundreds of politicized
memes found online. In addition to

influential political symbols, actors and
influencers. It is designed as a

discussion starter intended to expose and
contextualize the present battlefield of

online culture wars.
Nicolas: So we are currently continuing

this map as an interactive, contributive
webpage. Well this was a quick selection

of our old and new works that somehow
resonates with the CCC and thank you for

your attention.
Applause

Herald: A big thanks Nicholas. Are there
any questions to Nicholas. There is

microphone 1.
Micophone 1: Hey congrats. Beautiful

presentation.
Nikolas:Thanks.

Micophone 1: I'm curious what's what have
you never dared doing, what's your next

step? I think it's correlated somehow.
Nicolas: Yeah yeah yeah. So as I said this

last project is a sort of a starting point
for a new series of investigation and

research. And at the moment we are
accumulating a lot of documents on the

online propaganda and online influence.
And we're starting a new series of online

performance using and basically
challenging those strategies for the

manipulation of opinions. So we are trying
to develop our own propaganda strategies

basically.
Herald: Are there any questions from the

internet. No. Yeah. Then a big warm
applause, thanks for Nicholas.

Applause

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