High Latencies #1
Nicolás Malevé and Jara Rocha
Imagining antifascist infrastructures
The invitation of [contra]panorama. An intuition and the CRM understood as an event
A rider gets off the bike to join a picket line
The CRM as a pace marker in the museum's ecology of practices: the paradigm of computationally service-based world forms
Ways of making presence: the problem of coordination
El CRM com un marcaje de ritmo en la ecología de prácticas del museo: el paradigma de las formas de mundo computacionalmente basadas en los servicios
A sensor detects surprising levels of humidity in a warehouse
The museum remotely: the virtual visit
A curatorial team is perplexed by inherited audience categories
How is separation organized?
Regenerative abolition and backdoors: making rigid structures unthinkable
Naturalized gestures
Non-participated and involuntary dependencies
A software package is updated by a marketing team
Methodologies: conversation inspired by Science and Technology Studies (STS) and socio-technical networks
Diagrammatic reading
A petri dish with certain substances monitors pathogens in a public space
The Department of Presence Studies: infrastructural interdependencies
Palliative care in the structural
Since they first were first brought together by the Constant project in Brussels, the practice of visual artist and programmer Nicolás Malevé and that of activist researcher Jara Rocha have intersected in various ways. With a shared passion for sociotechnical controversies, Nicolás and Jara put their minds to thinking about how—in the current technopolitical regime—digital tools can be reimagined and used to support radically different modes of organisation and to help us inhabit complexity in a more just and sensitive way. These coordinates locate this conversation that tries to understand (and attend to) the consequences of the “crisis of presence”, that is, the crisis affecting ways of being and behaving in relation to the generalised context of data capture, the compartmentalisation of existence, and the infrastructure-based management of our lives.
These ideas frame their research for issue 23 of the magazine Concreta, as well as their contribution to the [contra]panorama project, for which Nicolás and Jara have instituted themselves as an ephemeral department of the museum—the Presence Studies Department (or Programme of Interdependent Studies)—in order to establish a horizontal dialogue with other departments. In this same spirit, they have activated three case studies through which to analyse and revise the museum’s infrastructures and its technical units. The case studies are based on updating the museum’s CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software, the 3D virtual tours of exhibitions on the museum website, and the atmosphere monitoring system. These three areas of interest allow us to think about how the different approaches to manufacture and care of the museum produce forms of presence, absences, and, therefore latencies.
In this podcast, we talk with Nicolás Malevé and Jara Rocha about infrastructures, software programmes and museums. We turn our attention to changes of scale, algorithms, black boxes, epistemicides and cybercides, and we explore the notions of service, access, and air as controversies: what is triggered by changes in temperature, in marketing strategies, and in web render formats? What materialities are suspended in response to these changes? We also consider palliative care and abolition as possible strategies for dismantling world-forms that should cease to exist, and think about how new forms—which we may not yet have managed to imagine—may be generated in this process.
This podcast is part of the contribution to the research project High Latencies by Nicolás Malevé and Jara Rocha for [contra]panorama.
CONVERSATION: VERÓNICA LAHITTE, ALBERT TARRATS, AND ANNA RAMOS. SCRIPT: VERÓNICA LAHITTE. SOUND PRODUCTION: ALBERT TARRATS. SOUNDS: ALBERT TARRATS SOUND LIBRARY. VOICES: VALENTINA AGUILERA, Valeria Brugnoli, GUIM CAMPS, Paloma Gueilburt, LORENA MARTÍN, SÒNIA MONEGAL, INMA PALOMAR, GEMMA PLANELL, ISAAC SANJUAN, ALBERT TARRATS, ZAIDA TRALLERO, ANNA RAMOS, MYRIAM RUBIO, AND Ivonne Villamil.
ATRIBUCIÓN/RECONOCIMIENTO-NOCOMERCIAL-COMPARTIRIGUAL 4.0 INTERNACIONAL (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Jara Rocha
Researcher and activist Jara Rocha’s practice is concerned with mediating and mobilising the conditions of meaning production and materials for possibility. Fond of complexity and grounded in a trans*feminist sensibility, they explore the inequalities and stark contrasts in the distribution of the technological. They draw attention to the politics and aesthetics embedded in infrastructures and to how power organises itself, becoming simultaneously visible and inaccessible. A pure exercise in political imagination and situated dissidence that takes us from reproductive technologies to critical pedagogies in formal, non-formal, and informal structures, by way of technocolonialism and turbocapitalism. Without ever taking our eye off the global perspective and our immediate environment: from global care chains to the precarisation, invisibilisation, and offshoring of labour.
Femke Snelting
Possible Bodies questions and problematises the formulation, conception, and rendering of bodies across different 3D technologies such as modelling, tracking and scanning. Their affirmative critical research draws attention to the ways in which these techniques end up implementing and even amplifying a host of prejudices based on race, gender, class, age and ability which, far from being circumstantial, are woven into the actual source code of all sorts of applications. We talk to Femke Snelting about embodiments, optimisation, and 3D disasters, about the possible and the probable, parametric interfaces, and open standards, and about disobedient action research.
Ramon Amaro
The researcher and lecturer Ramon Amaro introduces the basics of machine learning, its criteria for assigning value, the collision between blackness and the artificial, its flaws, and the problem of impunity that all too often accompanies them. He also calls for a techno-resistance that would require us to sacrifice our current view of the world and of ourselves.