Final Project (Dalia Hatalova)

I was deciding between two topics for my final paper and decided to extend the work I had done for my presentation. However, I had some initial struggles in centering my analysis so that it would form a coherent research paper. Eventually, focusing on Inside Out through the lens of digital studies became the core of my work, as I explored the concept of technologization that I find to be the reverse of anthropomorphism. As interlocutors, Wendy Chun's and Jonathan Beller's respective research were the most useful, as my work discusses the changing of human self-perception with contemporary technology. Below is my project summary in the form of an abstract. 

In the information economy, garnering data from users requires discrete forms of information that are computable, leading to the abstraction of human processes to be algorithmically readable. Artificial intelligence technology is developed to resemble and be responsive to humans, but simultaneously contemporary media attempts to reconstitute human emotions and cognition. Disney Pixar's Inside Out visually technologizes internal human functioning through the medium of animation as highly discrete and industrialized. The quotidian world of Inside Out's protagonist, Riley, is intercut with the representation of her cognition. As these images simplify the complex neurological functioning of the brain into personable characters, they simultaneously require interrogation in view of the proliferation of digital technology in the twenty-first century. This article examines Inside Out's internal world construction by utilizing research on artificial intelligence, algorithms, digital infrastructures, and information capitalism. 

Final Project - Maggie Roberts

For this project I am expanding on my class presentation about creative coding, looking at expressive programming through Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s installation “Can’t Help Myself” (2016). Commissioned for the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the pair of artists built an industrial robot, armed with plastic brush strokes, emulating both a shovel and a paintbrush, at the end of the artificial limb. Secured at the center of a tank, the machine is surrounded by censors and blood-like liquid fills the space. As the red goo oozes closer to the censors, the robot is programmed to contain the substance, frantically pushing it back into place. The whole process is messy and ineffective leaving violent streaks of red across the room and splattering it on the walls, staining the once untainted surface. The robot’s movements are dramatic and overemphasized, being coded with thirty-two unique motions, all with different names, including “scratch an itch,” “bow and shake,” and “ass shake” (Weng, 2016). The digital performance walks the line between choreography and function, absurd and mundane, creative and industrial. By existing in all of these realms and never entirely committing to one, “Can’t Help Myself” mobilizes theories of “the digital” to comment on the reductive view of technology as a purely functional tool and, I would also argue, critiques labor practices within these same technology-based industrial fields.

Some theoretical texts and authors that I will be drawing upon to ground my close reading of this artwork are Wendy Chun, Lisa Nakamura, Alexander R. Galloway and Kara Keeling, among others. I am interested in the way Yuan and Yu’s piece stakes a claim for humanities scholarship within the digital through affect theory specifically. Creative coding is both a practical tool and ephemeral exercise which oscillates between functional, social and cultural paradigms. It is this interdisciplinary quality of the multimedia artform which opens-up new generative avenues for contemporary and experimental art, film and video which I feel deserves serious critical study.

Here is a video clip of the exhibit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX6C6xY86-c 

Final Project - Julia Rose Camus

AI Photography - Visual Poetry (Synthesis and Translation)

For this project, I was inspired by the ways in which artists are able to interact with code and machinery as a means of producing new multimodal and collaborative forms of art. As a photographer, there is a strange sense of marvel and also resentment when it comes to considering the ability of AI's to digitally generate the kinds of images it takes artists hours to produce. My way of dealing with this tension has been through a kind of collaborative effort with AI. I will often provide it with an image I have shot, see what the AI has produced, and then digitally paint over that result. Other times, I will feed one same image through the same AI multiple times, and then paint the result onto a physical canvas. I find this kind of artistic collaboration to be innovative and exciting, while also still feeling like I am rooted in my craft as an artist. We are working together to produce something new, without any limitations. 

This kind of dialectical exchange with AI has helped me contemplate new theoretical inquiries into computation, notably through the ideas of visual translation and semiotics. I have been curious to consider all the ways in which I can creatively challenge an AI in order to push the boundaries of "visual translation." In this sample of my project, I used the poem "The Fire" from Louise Glück's collection The House on Marshland (1975). I gave the AI each stanza to interpret, and made variations until the poetic sentiment of each image felt write, and digitally wrote each stanza on its corresponding image. 

This project has felt exhilarating in many ways, and I hope to be able to visually translate many poems in this way, whether in the work of a single author, or by following a variety of poetic themes across the works of multiple authors.

You can find bigger versions of these images here:

https://www.juliarosecamus.com/photography-portfolio#/pageai/

Final Project - Hyejoo

From top to bottom, the videos below: Japanese YouTuber "Nao" and South Korean YouTuber "sueddu."

These videos are all examples of what I call "domesticity vlogs," which you may find quite unique in comparison to the more celebrity-style vlogs of North American contexts. Domesticity vlogs are incredibly aestheticized treatments of the women's homes, domestic labor, and household objects, all alongside a sense of anonymity and visual obscurity of the YouTuber herself. I've written about this YouTube genre before, positing that these videos generate a new definition of home as an affective experience over a material asset, especially more so in our contemporary milieu of housing affordability crises.

Through this class, however, I've been wanting to further consider what the digital affords for these women vloggers. The domesticity vlog has become such a big phenomenon especially through YouTube in Korea and Japan, having become a recognizable aesthetic traceable in feature films as well such as Little Forest (2014 original in Japan; 2019 remake in Korea). Occupying a niche but popular segment of the Web, it is undeniable that YouTube, and the Internet more generally, offers something to this genre.

It's an aesthetic reminiscent of Jeanne Dielman (1975) and other 1970s feminist films that often portrayed women's interiorities through the home in vérité style, but how domesticity vlogs differ is that for all their quotidian events, veracity or authenticity are not the point. Domesticity vlogs are inherently aestheticized and idealized portrayals of a woman's interior life––a performance, if you will.

So, in my project I aim to tackle two main lines of inquiry: how contemporary female subjectivity is conditioned by performance, and how this performance on a digital platform like YouTube and in our digital age more broadly challenges how we navigate the digital. Here's one tentative conclusion: in "Liveness, Presence, and Performance in Contemporary Digital Media" (2012), Bolter et al. suggest that the genre of machinima is a misappropriation of the "narcissistic play" of video games, a "closed loop" much in the same way self-filming was for Rosalind Krauss ("Video, the Aesthetics of Narcissism"). In short, games and self-filming are like a mirror function for the player/performer. But machinima, by being an "overtly performative genre... breaks the digital loop... because it is made with the assumption of an audience rather than the split subject [split into viewer and object]" (Bolter et al., 332). Breaking this narcissistic loop to include an audience is what makes machinima an instance of highly-mediated liveness, of performance in a digital age, of something more critical than narcissistic play. 

I see something similar in the performative nature of domesticity vlogs, where the women vloggers 1. fully embrace mediation while evoking authenticity (as if domesticity is a game they are now "misappropriating"), thereby 2. arresting into view not herself (as she is mediated, performing, teasing the line between authentic vs. fake, unstable and illegible), but the spectator (who is assumed in the performance, whose presence is arrested and made live amidst their digital perusals).

Max Berwald – Final Project

I have been torn between a difficult paper topic and an easier paper topic and I am leaning towards the more difficult paper topic. As I mentioned very briefly in a previous blog post, I’ve been getting very interested in the CHIPS Act, US policy with regards to semiconductors, and the role of semiconductors in the US-Taiwan relationship.

Recently, the US has identified Taiwan’s dominant role in the production of advanced microchips (something like 90% of global supply for certain kinds of advanced chips) as a major national security problem. In Taiwan, this “problem” had previously been described as a “silicone shield,” the idea being that Taiwan’s indispensability in global supply chains because of its contribution in this difficult area would protect it (welding US national security every more tightly to Taiwan’s own national security via digital infrastructure). The CHIPS Act appropriates 52 billion USD for the onshoring of advanced semiconductor manufacture to the US. At the same time, the Biden administration is beginning to experiment with using intellectual property rights to prevent companies all over the world involved in the processes of advanced semiconductor manufacture from doing business with PRC companies. This is driving bifurcation in a highly globalized industry: the PRC cannot abandon advanced computing (long term economic development and national security both depend on it) so it will have to pursue its own independent development of advanced semiconductors. (This is tremendously wasteful from a global perspective.) Everyone goes on and on about how difficult this process will be, but no one denies that it’s pretty much the only course (if the US government is set on preventing Chinese access to these technologies). 

These developments fascinate me for a number of reasons. For my final paper, I want to think about how to integrate this new chapter into the military history of computing. On the one hand, much of the technology behind computing, semiconductor manufacture, and microchip design was done in US military labs. In this sense, the implementation of conspicuous industrial policy related to the long term future of this technology is a continuity. Semiconductors are the perfect example of a technology that it is difficult for the market to afford to innovate and develop on its own. On the other hand, consumerism and market forces have also played a decisive role in the development of this technology between the 1950s and the present. In his recent book on the history of the semiconductor and its current foreign policy dimensions, Chip War, Chris Miller argues that it was the emergence of mass consumer culture in the postwar US that allowed corporations to make enormous advances in miniaturization. (The USSR, he argues, was unable to do this for the same reason, despite a concerted, long term period of state investment.) That is, while a socialized, government-subsidy model was required to make the initial breakthroughs, the gift of these breakthroughs to private corporate actors, and their repackaging of them for a variety of consumer applications, is what allowed these technologies to develop into their present forms. I want to integrate this back and forth motion into both the history of computing as a military technology and into a contemporary understanding of what militarism is. My thinking here is that this trajectory could shed light on the relationship between consumer culture and militarism, and I’m not sure that this has been written about before. If consumerism and consumer electronics were essential to the process of developing technologies that are now so essential to the US military that they have to be re-securitized, made secret, and even onshored at tremendous cost, does that mean that the US species of militarism also has a deeply consumerist quality to it? Reading recommendations are welcome, because I may only think this is interesting because I haven’t read the right articles.

I can’t emphasize enough that, prior to the last three weeks, I really knew nothing about semiconductors, so I’m entering at the ground floor. Recommendations and condemnations both welcome.

[Ray Kyooyung Ra, Final Project] "Digits"

For my final project, I took a creative direction to choreograph a concept art video titled: "Digits." The dance genre you see in the above video is called "waacking," (alternatively spelled "whacking," originally called "punking" in the 1970s Los Angeles gay disco scene) which is a strand of old school street dance subculture that I perform and research. The dance form is inherently dramatic and expressive, which makes it a good medium to visualize vastly comprehensive concepts such as 'the digital,' I think.

"Digits" represents the amorphousness of the digital. The dancer's face is covered with a dark veil, his body silhouetted against low-key back/side lights. While the performer's form is barely visible, his LED-lit fingers stand out against the dark. 'Fingers,' 'digits,' 'digital' -- it's a play on words. Much of the visuality and movement was inspired by oceanic waves as well as the line-node patterns of semiconductor circuits. And while the performer's luminous digits caress and outline his shadows in the aforementioned motifs, visibility and legibility of form is still very much compromised.

While planning out this performance piece, lyrics like "I've traveled the world and the seven seas" or the pre-chorus ("Some of them want to abuse you/ Some of them want to be abused") from Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" stood out to me when looking for a song to encompass our semester's understanding of the digital. The most difficult part of the process was making the choreography as dynamic as possible while being stationary and having my vision compromised. Hopefully, the editing and post-production did the piece justice.

Final Project - Hamsini

 

My final paper will build on my presentation in class a couple of weeks ago thinking through the materiality of the cloud. Specifically, I want to explore the environmental imaginaries (Peet & Watts, 2004) of digital infrastructures through a reading of the aesthetics and discourses of sustainability that permeate three facets of Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure. How is this imaginary of sustainability (as a response to a particular problematization of environment) shaping and reshaping layered infrastructures of energy, data, and knowledge?

Powering Data Centers: The first project I want to look at is Microsoft’s efforts to increase the sustainability of its data center infrastructure through renewable energy goals and increased efficiency of computational processes, as refracted through the lens of its Story Labs “We Live in the Cloud” virtual datacenter microsite and related materials.

Cloud for Sustainability: Next, I will turn to how Microsoft markets its “Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability” tools, which allow clients to deploy Azure to standardize environmental monitoring data about their activities, increase the efficiency of IT infrastructures, and reduce environmental impact. (This includes reporting on the environmental impact of the Microsoft services these companies use.)

Planetary Computer: Finally, I want to probe the Microsoft AI for Earth “Planetary Computer,” which seeks to provide data infrastructure for conservation purposes, hosting “petabytes of environmental monitoring data” made accessible through APIs, a development environment, and partners’ applications. (Which, of course, makes no reference to the environmental impact of Azure.)

Literatures: This paper will draw on infrastructure studies (Edwards, Parks, Ensmenger, Hogan), looking at the ways in which digital data infrastructures are layered on non-digital infrastructures, such as power and water systems, emphasizing the materiality of these infrastructures even as Microsoft’s imaginary of sustainability abstracts from that materiality. I want to read closely the discourses and aesthetics of sustainability in these projects as a particular kind of “environmental imaginary” composed of an economic and efficiency-based model of environmental datafication and accounting; “nature” images of clouds, greenery, and Earth as the pale blue dot; and a kind of speculative, projected futurity to sustainability “goals.” To understand this imaginary, I will delve into work unpacking the cloud metaphor (Mosco, 2014; Hu, 2015; Peters, 2015), images of the planetary (Halpern, 2021), and the speculative elements of data and algorithms (Hong, 2020). In this, my paper builds on recent work by Pasek (2019) and Lukacz (2022) that respectively tackle Microsoft’s “fungible mediation” of cloud and carbon in its data centers and the infrastructuring of environmental data used in environmental research by Microsoft’s corporate logics.