Vladan Joler and Kate Crawford, “Calculating Empires A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500–2025”, 2023.

DATA AESTHETICS IN THE AGE OF SEMIOCAPITALISM:

STRATEGIES AND TACTICS OF INTERRUPTION

New media works of data aesthetics demonstrate a critique of informational, or rather, financial capitalism, although they are the products of that same logic. It can be said that one of the leading features of the new media artistic practices of data aesthetics can be found precisely in strategic and tactical temporary disruptions or interruptions of the power network of global capital.

In 1971, the German conceptual artist Hans Haacke performed the work entitled Shapolsky et. al. al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time System, as of May 1. (Shapolsky et. al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time System, as of May 1). The work included 142 photographs of New York apartment buildings, two maps of New York’s Lower East Side and Harlem (with all properties marked), and six diagrammes documenting the business connections between 1951 and 1971 of a group of real estate landlords, who had been suspected of being engaged in illegal enterprises. Two years later, the American conceptual artist Gordon Matta-Clark bought fifteen plots of land in New York, fourteen in Queens and one on Staten Island. The specificity of these plots was that they did not meet the requirement of being of interest to traders in real estate. These ‘useless’ spaces were auctioned off by the City of New York for approximately twenty-five to seventy-five dollars per lot. In his research, Reality Position – Fake Estates: Block 3398, Lot 116 of 1973, Gordon Matta-Clark had begun to create a collection of ‘unsustainable’ properties, and supported it with photo collages, certificates and maps[1]. Through this documenting process, he had tried, similarly to Haacke, to make the state of grey or invisible zones in given processes visible in practice – that is to say, the anomalies and contradictions of the meaning and monetary value of urban land ownership. On the trail of this perspective of conceptual works, Mark Lombardi had since 1994 been producing drawings-maps entitled Narrative Structures, which documented the mechanisms of the use and abuse of power in the global political economy, i.e., the transaction networks of corporate policies, banks and the financial sector.[2] Lombardi took on the role of ‘architect of knowledge’, although not with the aim of simply listing facts, but of redirecting, confronting and reshaping information as a means of political, i.e., activist action. In 2000, Laura Kurgan created a temporary interface which was intended to monitor and present the changes in the exchange rates of the US dollar, euro and yen, in her work entitled Global Clock No. 1. By using the Reuters data feed, the clock visualised the changes in market value during the busiest five-minute periods of trading activity, from the last working day of 1999 to the first working day of 2000.[3] Vladan Joler uses network topologies and research methods, as well as numerous techniques, strategies and tactics of data visualisation from various aspects of Internet privacy and (non)transparency. In his work Facebook Algorithmic Factory of 2016, Joler carried out the mapping and visualisation of the complex and invisible exploitation processes which operate behind one of the most dominant social networks.[4] In 2006, Trevor Paglen published a map of secret CIA flights that took place between 2001 and 2006 . He used visualisation techniques for the secret programme of international transfers of prisoners to foreign countries, where they were interrogated and-or tortured. He then, had the map installed on a large billboard by a busy highway in Los Angeles prompting an immediate response from the FBI, which quickly had the map removed. However, the FBI had reacted too late, because in the meantime the content had already been broadcast on television…

What all these tendencies in the art world have in common are: (1) working with data – data aesthetics, and (2) the intersection of (new media) activism, new technologies, science, art, critical theory and art theory, social participation and critical pedagogies. In such practices, the artist’s activity approaches the modalities of the work of militant researchers. However, the tendencies of data aesthetics[5] had been announced even before the emergence of conceptual art. The Large Glass by Marcel Duchamp, from the years 1915–1923, as well as many other works by Duchamp at that period, which set painting, i.e., the fine arts at the service of the mind, contain an abundance of notes and data. The set of information accompanies the glass, with the implication it is an integral and equally important part of the work, alongside the visual material itself. With his work Network of Obstacles (Réseaux des stoppages) of 1914, whose composition evokes the rhizomatic representation of electric lines, Duchamp had anticipated the aesthetics of the diagrammatic image – the aesthetics of data. That paradigm shift has become more and more visible with the overcoming of the modernist meta-language, which was based on the opposition between art and research.[6]

Data Aesthetics as the Cultural Logic of Semiocapitalism

The usage of data in contemporary art is inseparable from any understanding of the consolidation of the regime’s biopower, i.e., of the techniques and mechanisms of bio- and necropolitical control, and, thus of societies of control.[7] The function of documents – data, maps, cartographic practices, and of photography in data aesthetics, is politically subversive and diversional, because it is a question of mapping the invisible regimes of the flow and distribution of informational power, most often with the tactical implementation of the technologies and media of social surveillance and control. The contemporary surveillance and control technologies of the information society[8] , such as workstation monitors, badges for radio tracking and GPS devices, have begun to expand and intensify since the 1990s. Following September 11, 2001, DARPA (the Defence Advances Research Projects Agency) has developed Total Information Awareness, a programme which exploits the functions of surveillance, from evidence extraction and connection detection technologies, to remote human identification codes and translingual information[9] detection.

Marcel Duchamp, “Réseaux des stoppages”, 1914.

The emergence of data aesthetics goes hand in hand with the development of global capitalism in the West. From the 17th century onwards, cartography and various mapping techniques were closely associated to military practice, trade development and territorial planning. Mastering territories was feasible only with the discovery of geographical latitudes and longitudes. With the emergence of the rational state, various graphic methods were contrived as components among the array of tools of biotechnological control. The 19th century saw the appearance of death curves (1828), age pyramids (1874), cartograms (1882), and graph statistics of social control. Since the mid-20th century, with the development of numerical machines, data processing programmes have been developed, and become a tool for the normalisation and standardisation of economic policy.[10] With the transition from a disciplinary society to a society of control, the physiognomy of data aesthetics has also changed. The outline of this new network culture can be defined if it is perceived as the cultural logic of semiocapitalism.

Since the 1990s, data sharing and the creation of open coding has emerged as an effect of the victory of semiocapitalism. Franco Bifo Berardi has defined semiocapital as capital which is shaped in the form of semiotic artifacts without materialisation.[11] According to Guattari, the semio-goods consist of the material aspects of the semiotic, affective and productive. Information technologies are a-signifying parts of signs whose production and passage through digital networks are similar to signals, which are adapted to the quasi-material flows of their environments. They generate, activate and act in parallel with the automated processes of information exchange and, therefore, they do not need a representational dimension. Guattari and Berardi defend a similar thesis about communicational assemblages which summarise cognitive work, and the capitalist exploitation of its content. . Materials that are being transformed are simulated by digital sequences. Productive work, i.e., work that produces value, consists in triggering simulations which are later transformed into actual matter via computerised machines. In the temporal qualification of such processes, work does not possess residue-materiality; it is rather a mental work on abstract codes and signs – work with knowledge. The actual prerogatives of semiocapitalism are flexibility, fluidity and creativity. In the net economy, flexibility manifests itself as a form of fractalisation of work. The process of fractalisation implies a modular and recombinant fragmentation of time and activities. In such processes, the worker, i.e., the artist appears as an exchangeable producer of micro-fragments of recombinant semiosis, which is then integrated into the continuous flux of the Internet. The worker is paid only for occasional, instant services. Work time is fragmented and cellularised.[12] According to Bifo, work in semiocapitalism becomes a cellular activity: production is semiotic, and the precariously employed cognitive workers must have certain abilities and qualifications which can potentially bring a specific semiotic segment into relation with an infinite number of other semiotic fragments in order to accumulate semiocapital.[13] The ringing of the mobile phone reminds the worker to reconnect her/his abstract time and the reticular flux. Semiocapital is partial, combined and recombined, and, therefore, dependent on digital networks. According to Guattari, post-industrial capitalism tends to increasingly decentralise places and networks of power, moving away from structures that produce goods and services (immaterial work) towards structures that produce signs, syntaxes, codes and subjectivity. The production process in semiocapitalism is dematerialised. Maurizio Lazzarato writes about immaterial work as work that produces the informational content of goods – that is, of activities which, on the surface, cannot be recognised as ‘work’, because work includes the definition and fixing of cultural and artistic standards, tastes, consumerist norms, and public opinion.[14]

Cartography as a Form of Molecular Resistance

There is no autonomous space that modern global capitalism has not subsumed. And yet, within the given fetishised world, the same mechanisms of semiocapital serve to articulate the new media artist activist strategies and tactics for the disruption of the horizontal participatory multitudes, which provide molecular resistances to the contemporary materialisation of life. An oppressive mass media modernity is being replaced by the contemporary post-media era, in which subjective assemblages become self-referential. Molecular resistances are possible with the aid of cartographic multiplicities ,[15] which represent a contrast with psychoanalytical (Freudian or Lacanian) treatment.[16] The process of ‘healing’, that is, change, cannot be understood as a reduction of the deviant psyche to the behavioural, linguistic and psychic norms recognised by society. On the contrary, that process is possible only to the extent to which the schizoanalysis succeeds in following the delirium in order to make it coherent and divisible, and open it to friendship.

The usage of data in the artistic practices of the new media comprises various cartographic procedures with the aim of critically visualising imaginary and material geographies, territories, and invisible grey zones of contemporary power distribution. Such an approach belongs to the logic of knowledge production and research in the world of art, since cartography in contemporary new media art practices is intended for a wider audience in a specific context, in such a way as to reflect social interests, cultural practices and political strategies of social inequalities, as well as different types of exploitation. Cartography operates as a critical system of information, and so it contains in its referential field of meaning the following closely linked terms: ‘critical cartography’, ‘radical cartography’ and ‘tactical cartography’. Tactical cartography, according to the New York-based collective of anonymous artists at the Institute of Applied Autonomy (IAA), involves the creation and distribution of spatial data which intervene within systems of control by influencing meanings and practices. In this way, tactical cartography (1) opposes the distribution of power; (2) promotes social justice; and (3) has an operational value characteristic of military planners. According to the IAA actors, cartographic, critical, radical and tactical projects can serve strategic plans regarding the possibility of reaching logistical goals. Accordingly, the map is a fundamentally political entity, which enables public display and exposure of the (geo)political, social and economic mechanisms that remain invisible to those who participate in a given world. The map does not produce ‘truths’ (although it starts from the idea of visualising the factual state of some conjuncture), but often free interpretations of the actor, and this transforms it into a permanent dialogue that takes place between reality and the imaginary. The cartographic image tends to have a propaganda function, which from the point of view of the new media art is used for activist purposes.[17] Map production is based on a fusion between the disciplines of science, theory, politics, new technologies and arts, thus encouraging debate and further research. Since 2010, this perspective in the new media art has become even more powerful with the use of new software and applications such as Cartography 2.0.

Gattari repeatedly advocated the thesis that scientific validity, as a prerequisite for undermining social functionality, is not the only place for theoretical research. Working on the transferalisation of knowledge, i.e., theory, practice and numerous other regimes, he proposed the procedures of schizoanalytic cartography and an ethical-aesthetic paradigm. Schizoanalytic cartography is a practice of collective research which incorporates forms of militancy and activism as conditions and techniques of subjectivation. From a schizoanalytical perspective, cartography appears as militant research, which includes analysis, the mapping and visualisation of flows of power and capital, but also the possibility of escape, creating multiple processes of singularisation, resistance and defence. Schizoanalytic maps ignore any essentialised support and concentrate on their own performance and openness to the unknown. The map is a rhizome, which means that it is about the dimension of experimentation, and not a trace, i.e., mere representation.

Today, many actors in the world of art and theory see in the post-socialist, that is, post-communist memory, the potentiality of articulating resistance to contemporary capitalism. However, the concepts of progress and modernity experienced collapse some time ago, as epitomised by postmodernism even, which compromised the very idea of emancipatory social practice. As Guattari argued, the communist left is stuck between sclerosis and dogmatism.[18] The memory of the communist and socialist past contains no real mechanisms to fight against the empire. Therefore, schizoanalytic cartography can potentially open a space for the emergence of new practices of subjectivation in the post-media era, supported by the reappropriation of information and communication technologies: (1) with the promotion of innovative forms of collective interaction and the reinvention of democracy; (2) the resingularisation of mediatised means of expression; and (3) the multiplication of the ‘existential transmitters’ to infinity, allowing access to the new.[19]

In contrast to a disengaged, pluralistic, postmodernist, decentralised subjectivity, the multicentric, subjective autonomisation of postmedia operators, present in minority activist-theoretical-artistic collectives and groups (IAA, CAE, SHARElab, EDT, etc.), is militant and transformational, because it generates urgent issues, which are the subject of schizoanalytic cartography, according to Guattari: (1) nuclear weapons; (2) hunger; (3) irreversible ecological disaster; and (4) mass media pollution of subjectivity.[20]

Mark Lombardi, George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens, ca 1979–90, 1999.

Conclusion

In their book Imperij (Empire), Hardt and Negri suggested that there is no such thing as life plain and simple, some external standpoint that can be positioned outside the field authorised by money – nothing escapes money.[21] The new media works of data aesthetics present a critique of informational, or rather, financial capitalism, although they are the product of that same logic. It can be said that one of the leading features of the new media artistic practices of data aesthetics lies precisely in strategic and tactical temporary disruptions or interruptions of the power network of global capital. For Deleuze, capital can be either inventive, fluid and adaptable, or inherently reactive, as Hardt and Negri have suggested. At the level of representation, such works are not reflective, but rather critical-didactic. Actors in this field operate with data, maps of the real, contradictory, exploitative movements of capital, and not with their aestheticised representations. So one possible subversive and/or diversionary gesture of data aesthetics lies in disrupting the progress of capital, and in further militant explorations of possible disruptions and resistances. Actors dealing with the visualisation of financial data obstruct its seemingly legal and naturalised flows through procedures of visualisation and documentation.[22] Olav Velthuis has formulated the name for this tendency in contemporary art. It concerns imaginary economics,[23] which implies communication of alternative economic knowledge through the visual arts. Imaginary economics is the term that describes not only techniques, processes and procedures of observing, monitoring and describing the grey zones in the distribution of power, but also techniques of imitation, simulation, enlargement and parody.[24] Data aesthetics, therefore, belongs to the logic of speculative practices, which include not only methods of visualisation but also compositions of computer-based and algorithmic works that condition the control of the forms of the artist’s work in terms of its outcome. What distinguishes this form of artistic speculation, or intellectual investigation, from capitalist speculation is that it is both a generative and intellectual response to the unlimited circulation of capital.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Reality Properties: Fake Estates, Little Alley Block 2497, Lot 42, 1974

[1] Robert Hobbs, Mark Lombardi. Global Networks. New York, Independent Curator International, 2003, 19.

[2] Ibid., 19.

[3] Rita Raley, Tactical Media, London–Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2009, 109.

[4] Cf. https://labs.rs/en/facebook-algorithmic-factory-immaterial-labour-and-data-harvesting/ (accessed on 13. 01. 2023. 5:53 PM)

[5] Stephen Wright, Dataesthetics. How to do things with data, Zagreb, Arkzin, 2006, 97.

[6] Ibid., 100.

[7] Cf. Gilles Deleuze, „Postscript on the Societies of Control“, October, Vol. 59. 1992, 3–7.

[8] Lev Manovich, „How to Represent Information Society?“, in: Miltos Manetas, Paintings from Contemporary Life, Milan: Johan & Levi Editore, 2009. Lev Manovich, „The Shape of Information“ http://manovich.net/content/04-projects/045-the-shape-of-information/42_article_2005.pdf (pristupljeno: 15. 01. 2023. 15:10 PM) Cf. Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, London – New York, Verso, 2005.

[9] Stephen Wright, Dataesthetics. How to do things with data… op. cit.,107.

[10] Bure D´ètudes, „Administration aesthetics“, u: Stephen Wright, Dataesthetics. How to do things with data… op. cit., 168.

[11] Gary Genosko, Félix Guattari in the Age of Samiocapitalism, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2012, 150.

[12] Franco Bifo Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody. Semiocapitalism & the Pathologies of Post-Alpha Generation, London, Minor Compositions, 2009, 38.

[13] Gary Genosko, Félix Guattari in the Age of Samiocapitalism… op.cit., 151.

[14] Maurizio Lazzarato, Immaterial Labour, https://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR2/Lazzarato.pdf (accessed on: 15. 01. 2023. 3: 45 PM)

[15] Franco B. Berardi, Giuseppina Mecchia, Charles J. Stivale (eds.), Félix Guattari. Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 126.

[16] Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, Bloomingtom & Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1995, 62.

[17] Cf. Philippe Rekacewicz, Radical Cartographies: Between Science and Politics, the art of making visible what the world hides from us. file:///Users/bojanamatejic/Downloads/10.1515_9783839460412-012.pdf (pristupljeno 15. 01. 2023. 12: 54 PM) 216.

[18] Félix Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, London­–New Delhi–New York–Sidney, Bloomsbury, 2013, 36.

[19] Ibid, 42.

[20] Ibidem.

[21] Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Imperij, Cambridge–London, 2000, 305.

[22] Rita Raley, Tactical Media… op.cit., 116.

[23] Olav Velthuis, Imaginary Economics, Contemporary Artist and the World of Big Money, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005.

[24] Rita Raley, Tactical Media… op.cit., 117.

Literature:

Berardi, Bifo Franco, Giuseppina Mecchia, Charles J. Stivale (eds.), Félix Guattari. Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Berardi, Bifo Franco, Precarious Rhapsody. Semiocapitalism & the Pathologies of Post-Alpha Generation, London, Minor Compositions, 2009.

Deleuze, Gilles, „Postscript on the Societies of Control“, October, Vol. 59. 1992, 3–7.

Genosko, Gary, Félix Guattari in the Age of Samiocapitalism, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2012.

Guattari, Félix, Chaosmosis: an Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, Bloomingtom & Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1995.

Guattari, Félix, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, London­–New Delhi–New York–Sidnej, Bloomsbury, 2013.

Hardt, Michael, Antonio Negri, Imperij, Zagreb, Arkzin, 2003.

Hobbs, Robert, Mark Lombardi. Global Networks. New York, Independent Curator International, 2003.

Manovich, Lev, „How to Represent Information Society?“, in: Miltos Manetas, Paintings from Contemporary Life, Milan: Johan & Levi Editore, 2009.

Raley, Rita, Tactical Media, London–Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Velthuis, Olav, Imaginary Economics, Contemporary Artist and the World of Big Money, Rotterdam, NAi Publishers, 2005.

Virilio, Paul, The Information Bomb, London–New York, Verso, 2005.

Wright, Stephen, Dataesthetics. How to do things with data, Zagreb, Arkzin, 2006.

Internet izvori:

https://labs.rs/en/facebook-algorithmic-factory-immaterial-labour-and-data-harvesting/ (accessed on 13. 01. 2023. 5:53 PM)

Manovich, Lev ,„The Shape of Information“ http://manovich.net/content/04-projects/045-the-shape-of-information/42_article_2005.pdf (accessed on: 15. 01. 2023. 15:10 PM)

Lazzarato, Maurizio, Immaterial Labour, https://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR2/Lazzarato.pdf (accessed on: 15. 01. 2023. 3: 45 PM)

Rekacewicz, Philippe, Radical Cartographies: Between Science and Politics, the art of making visible what the world hides from us. file:///Users/bojanamatejic/Downloads/10.1515_9783839460412-012.pdf (accessed on 29. 01. 2023. 12: 54 PM)