With Great Knowledge Comes Great Responsibility!

Artfully opening the black box and finding only black magic

Table of Contents
Introduction 1. Approaching the black box: knowledge versus design 2. Three examples of artistically opening the black box 2.1 Julian Oliver - The Transparency Grenade 2.2 Herman Asselberghs - Dear Steve 2.3 Graham Harwood - Coal Fired Computers 3. Invested with (ir)responsibility: black boxes, interpassivity and cynicism Bibliography

This is the age of conspiracy . . .the age of connections, links, secret relationships. Don DeLillo, Running Dog We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.52

There is a close connection between art and media technologies. Both operate in the 'objective' domain. Both work on perception and action, both mediate processes of visibility and invisibility, or what Ranciere (2006) calls 'the distribution of the sensible.'

In the second half of the 20th century, both come together in a 'politics of aesthetics'. Media artists increasingly take on the role of critically investigating media technologies, as the latter becomes more pervasive in everyday life. Within this domain, questions surrounding the transparancy, ownership and 'rights of use' of these technologies become important topics for artists to reflect on and experiment with. Different strategies are employed: some attempt to defetishize technology by turning towards the past, to investigate and trace the historical origins of technologies that always tend to disappear into an axiomatic background that is meant to remained unquestioned: "The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it." (Weiser, 1991: 65).

This tendency of new technologies to disappear, is related to the notion of a 'black box', which shouldn't be taken too literally as the hidden 'inside' of a technological artefact. Rather, it should be understood to refer to a range of diffuse effects that are distributed through a networked topology of human-machine interaction (where even the latter distinction is increasingly fading). In the past couple of years, a lot has been written on this concept, from distinct angles. Von Hilgers (2011) for example states that together with the feedback loop, the notion of a black box is one of the central concepts of cybernetics - the scientific model that lies at the basis of today's computerized world - taking an historical approach. Others take it as a 'working metaphor' to describe the lack of transparancy of technologically mediated networks, describing it in terms of means of production, appropriation and ownership. The open source movement is an example of such an approach.

In this paper I will first give a short introduction to the problematics surrounding the blackboxing of technology in critical media art and theory. Secondly, I will discuss three art projects that construct themselves vis--vis the pervasive blackboxing of technology. For each artist, the black box has a

specific meaning, and their strategies of dealing with the black box differ accordingly. In the last part I will discuss some of the problems that arise from their shared understanding of what the black box is all about, how it functions, and how it should be dealt with. I will do this by connecting this debate to the theme's of 'interpassivity' and 'cynicism', developed by iek, Pfaller, and van Oenen.

1. Approaching the black box: knowledge versus design 'Artists and intellectuals are much needed to open the black boxes of technology in order to reveal the underlying power logics secretly at work there'. Some version of the above statement you often encounter in critical media art's self-legitimations. One day, scientists were convinced that cracking open a brain could well reveal the essence of the human mind. If we know all the neurons and their interrelations, we will know what it means to think. Crack open the beautiful outer case of an iPad, and underneath lies the raw stuff that does the dirty trick. But then again it's like those Matryoshka dolls. Or like scientists looking for the ultimate singular element, but ever only finding new composite constellations.

Of course all of the above is really exagerated and no one (especially the artists I discuss in the following) is that nave to pronounce the former in such fashion. But although nobody really believes it's that straightforward, one version of it can be discerned in more disguised and eloquent forms in some substreams of critical theory and media art. Let's say that the above functions more as an 'imaginary postulate', a diffuse, regulative idea that would be denied by everyone if straightforwardly asked.

Not so weird, for an age obsessed with questions of transparency. The source shall be opened, be it via hacks or leaks. The black box shall reveal itself to be...perhaps not the scariest thing in the world we secretly hoped it could be! But lets leave the psychoanalytic angle out of it for now. They have their own black boxes to deal with.

Ironically, cybernetics triumphs by its relative modesty: here, knowledge is possible only by a circumscription of a definite opacity: the black box - considering only inputs and outputs. A very Kantian move indeed. Hence the relevance of the question, put forward by von Hilgers: "what sort of theory is it that, when faced with a closed box, does not immediately indulge the reflex to enlighten itself?" (von Hilgers, 2011: 42).

But in cybernetics, knowledge and technical construction are always intertwined. Thus, we should be careful not to reduce the quesion of the black box to a question of knowledge. The type of knowledge at work in both cybernetics and media art is a practical knowledge; a knowledge in making; an attempt to know in order to use and make differently. Here, we leave the domain of knowledge and enter the

spheres of design. The great humanist projects of liberation aimed at transforming subjectivity, saving it from alienation. But in the twentieth century, mans environment became the object of emancipatory projects. Art in this context is defined as something like 'critical design': both part of design, but also outside of it, as its critical conscience, or its experimental avant-garde. And I understand 'design' not to refer exclusively to the aesthetics of the 'outside', but as applying to all parts of human-machine interaction.

Thus, there is a difference in wanting to know in order to critically adjust belief, and a wanting to know in order to modify and to use differently. The latter is where a lot of artists thinks they can contribute. Since ideology is no longer mainly invested in belief systems, but in the objective parameters of existence; and since these are also the traditional domains of art, a 'critical object' might as well replace the outworn 'critical subject.' As Hertz and Parikka (2010) mention in the context of media archaeological art practices, "its not only a mode of analysis, but a mode of creation as well. This extends the idea of criticism from a second-order reflection on things into a mode of creation [...] Media archaeology talks not only of the media, but in the media" (6). Hence the importance of adding to a purely theoretical understanding of technology a technical and practical understanding.

2. Three examples of artistically opening the black box In the following paragraphs I will discuss three art projects that deal with depunctionalizing technological black boxes, i.e. moving towards a practical understanding in the media. The first discloses - through a very direct intervention - the 'opaque transparency' of wireless networks, and proposes a project of critical engineering in order to deal with these new forms of semi-transparency of data. The second dissects a laptop in the hopes of finding the historical and material traces that make up this perfectly designed 'cipher' (Galloway, 2012). The last art project shows the interdependencies of industrial and informational technology and the ecological impacts that these interdependencies involve. In order to achieve this all these invisible connections - geographically and temporally scattered - are placed in direct proximity. All art projects could be classified as 'awareness art' but this sounds too passive and thus wouldn't do justice to the active component with which they intervene in the technological landscapes of today.

2.1 Julian Oliver's Transparancy Grenade1 deals not so much with black boxed technological objects, but with the information and communication networks that connect them, as well as the users emply them. The artist designed a small, grenade-shaped computer with a wireless antenna that - when set off connects to any public wireless network and starts harvesting the data that is transferred over that

http://julianoliver.com/

network. But not only does it collect the data, it also immediately streams this data to a server, where it is mined for information. The resulting data is then published at an online, public map (together with the audio that is recorded at the place where the grenade is set off). Oliver is currently developing an application for android deviced with the same functionality to 'sniff' wireless networks.

Alongside this project, Julian Oliver, G. Savii and D. Vasiliev published the Critical Engineering Manifesto.2 In this manifesto they contend that codes (engineering languages) have become a huge factor in shaping social and psychic life. Based on this insight they state that: "the greater the dependence on a technology the greater the need to study and expose its inner workings, regardless of ownership or legal provision."

http://criticalengineering.org/

An important step in their reasoning is to conceptualize the machine not as some isolated object that opposes a human user withint a neutral 'void', but as that which encompasses both, that which takes the place of the void: an apparatus that distributes the possible interrelations between heterogenous elements, be they human or nonhuman (see introduction). The notion of the machine is expanded to include (the relations between) devices, bodies, agents, forces and networks. This media-ontological effort, to go beyond the ontology of context in which subjects and objects co-exist (that what Heidegger would call an 'ontic' notion of Being, as Vorhandenheit), is reflected in Deleuze and Guattari's notion of assemblage, itself based on Foucaults notion of a dispositif: an ever changing dynamic of relations, where the distinction between technology and subjectivity is not as clear cut anymore. In this fashion, Guattari asks (and immediately provides his answer):

"Should we keep the semiotic productions of the mass media, informatics, telematics and robotics separate from psychological subjectivity? I don't think so. Just as social machines can be grouped under the general title of Collective Equipment, technological machines of information and communication operate al the heart of human subjectivity. not only within its memory and intelligence, but within its sensibility, affects and unconscious fantasms." (Guattari, 1995: 4)

The critical engineer works on all these intersections of strata. It calls for collaboration and despecialization of artists, programmers and theorists. In this project, the sudden and unexpected exposure of personal materials such as emails and images shows the vulnerabilities of pushing so much of our lives and our dependencies into these networks, using what can be called a 'shock tactics'. It challenges our unfounded trust in these networks that we do not control, do not understand, and must thus be left in the hands of who knows what kind of specialists. The difference between the Transparency Grenade and the 'normal' capturing of network traffic lies not in its method but in the way it transparently accounts for its procedures, constantly re-opening its self-made black box.

2.2 Peter Sloterdijk describes the enlightened, modern man as someone whowants to know everything there is to know about what exists in the background, what is folded up, what hasnt come to light yet, what until now has been hidden from view" (Sloterdijk: 2009, 61. My translation). Herman Asselbergh's Dear Steve and P.S.3 seems to take this dymanic literally, by taking apart his Apple laptop and spreading out all the parts. Where Marx's project consists of breaking the commodity's 'mystical shell' and reaching the 'rational kernel,' Asselbergh does the same for his computer. But what does he find?

http://www.v2.nl/archive/works/dear-steve

Apple products are notorious for being black boxes. Opening the back of an Apple product voids any warranties you may have on the product. All peripherals are soldered to the motherboard, preventing any 'modding' or updating. It's all part of the philosophy of Integration (between software and hardware). Steve Jobs decides what user experience is optimal. That's why, besides showing all the parts, the work Dear Steve contains a video letter actually send to Steve Jobs, addressing all these issues. The installation work P.S. is presented as an archive in progress: besides the laptop parts, letters from people working in the factories where Apple products are made are displayed. The hardware thus becomes but a moment in a huge cycle of production and is reinscribed in a very concrete materiality. The undead labour invested in it is given a voice, reenacting the original feedback loops that make up the processes of its production and circulation.

This work comes close to the methods of depunctionalization as proposed by Bruno Latour's ActorNetwork-Theory and described in Hertz and Parikka's (2010) text on media archaeology: an endless tracing of black boxes inside black boxes, revealing - this time - the mystical kernel of modern technology. By breaking the functionality of the laptop, it becomes visible as such, in the same way as Heidegger states that the hammer appears as such only after it has broken down, pulling it from its immediate 'context of utility'. Thus, this work fits perfectly in the modernist, avant-garde tradition of defamiliarizing and deconstructing every day use-objects, often by destroying them: "By breaking open the semi-transparent box of consumer technology, the avantgarde breaks the spell of overmystified technologies." (Kluitenberg, 2000)

2.3 Graham Harwood's Coal Fired Computers4 was exhibited in 2011 at the Artefact festival in STUK, Leuven. It consists of a bank of computers that are powered by a coal-fired boiler located right next to it. The machine must be continually fed with coal in order for the computers to run.

http://www.artefact-festival.be/programma/detail/58360

This work attempts to trace and draw the linkages that connect the industrial and technological revolutions that lead to the current computers, highlighting their ecological impact. It brings into spatial proximity two nodes of the production process that are normally separated by an indeterminate amount of intermediate links, obstructing any effort at epistemically relating the use of our computers to for example some coal mine in India. It deconstructs the fetish of immateriality inherent to new media technologies, that often seem to imply that you can have your cake and eat it too, i.e. that you can get something for nothing. Due to the general public awareness of the ecological impact of industry, computer and software companies have an interest in downplaying and disassociating their activities from the social imaginary of the smoke-filled skies of industrialism. But even more so, new technologies tend to completely blackbox the older ones: new inventions are build upon the working hypotheses of the old:

"When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become." (Latour, 1999: 304)

By turning to the historical background that links ICT to its industrial origin and by bringing into direct proximity geographically scattered processes of production, the work counters the tendency of new technologies to blackbox older technologies, thereby automatically obscuring and mystifying the underlying operational models that - due to their implicitness - play no part in processes of deliberation and negotiation of our common environments:

"The inner workings of consumer electronics and information technologies are increasingly

concealed as a result of the development of newer generations of technologies. Devices are built out of existing technologies, and in the process the components fade from being contemplated objects into the background of infrastructure." (Hertz and Parikka, 2010: 6)

Coal fired computers also radically rejects the autonomy or specificity of the media-technological sphere, and point to the necessity of involving the extra-medial, political-economic spheres into the consideration of the effects of new technologies. Artists are in a position to trace and preserve the different 'concrete situations' and linkages through which technologies develop, connecting the old to the new and thereby preventing their disappearance into the implicit background of these situations.

3. Invested with (ir)responsibility: black boxes, interpassivity and cynicism

"I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad." Howard Beale in Network, Lumet 1976

In this last section I would like to reflect on the former not from the perspective of the black box constructor or its artistic deconstructor, but from the perspective of the black box consumer, of our everyday living with, and understanding of, black boxed technologies, i.e. how we normally interact with them. I hope that this added perspective is able to hint towards some of the psycho-social obstacles to be dealt with by critical-artistic unboxers, and question whether such unboxing is desirable per se. The latter involves the question of in what way this desirability is dependent on how one evaluates transparency and its political and practical effects.

In Little Gestures of Disappearance: Interpassivity and the Theory of Ritual, Robert Pfaller discusses the psycho-social dynamic of what he calls 'interpassivity'. Originally this term was used to critique dominant notions of interactivity in art, where the artwork delegates a part of its 'performance' to the viewer, which then becomes a participant, a part of the production of the artwork (van Oenen, 2011). An interpassive artwork on the other hand, takes over some of the (possible) actions of the subject. Non-artistic examples of such interpassive dynamics are: 'canned laughter' in TV comedy shows (the tape laughs for and instead of us), or for example a speed bump (also known as a 'sleeping policeman'), that takes over the attendendance of a human representative and implementor of the law.

In Little Gestures... Pfaller however presents this concept as a 'theoretical tool for understanding the ritual'. The ritual, according to Pfaller, is not some ancient activity eradicated with the dawn of enlightenment, but represents a magical dimension that is present in every kind of human interaction with (technological) objects and environments, up until the present context. On the contrary, he

contends, whereas primitive man is still semi-conscious of this magical dimension of his interactions, modern man is not:

"The only difference between the "savage" and our "civilized" intellectual consists in the fact that only the savage is aware of the fact that he is practising magic. The civilized, on the contrary, is not." (Pfaller, 2003)

An example of such a religious ritual with an interpassive dimension is the Tibetan praying wheel. A Tibetan monk can delegate his praying to a spinning wheel, which is then doing the praying for and instead of him, making the monk himself free to do or think whatever he wants. He is freed from the responsibility and conscious attentiveness of praying. Another example Pfaller gives is of the Christian ritual of lighting a candle in a church, the candle being attentive to the Divine in place of the one who lid the candle. Pfaller points to the imaginary and liberatory nature of these kinds of interpassive conduct: "By acting "as if" praying would take place, the Tibetan and the Christian actually keep a distance from their religion."

Thus, the imaginary plane is made up of 'as if' pseudo-beliefs transferred to 'objective illusions'. Similarly, Wendy Chun, in her reflections on the user-software dynamic and its similarities with the functioning of ideology, notices the same 'as if' structure embedded in software, and connects it to dynamics of (in)visibility and transparency (or: indexicality):

Software perpetuates certain notions of seeing as knowing, of reading and readability that were supposed to have faded with the waning of indexicality. It does so by mimicking both ideology and ideology critique, by conflating executable with execution, program with process, order with action. (Chun, 2004: 27)

By being able to use a graphical interface correctly and succesfully, we do not have to really believe that a 'desktop' is a desklike space where 'files' are stored.5 To believe 'as if' this were the case, is enough to make the transition to acting. This shows the inherent connection between interpassivity and cynicism. Cynicism is the mode of agency where a strict belief in a rule is absent, or is recognized as not applying to a concrete situation, but which nevertheless does not prevent acting 'as if' the rule were valid, or applicable. According to Sloterdijk, Marxs famous statement about the false consciousness of his time: 'Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es,' must me adjusted for contemporary (Western) consciousness, as:

Similarly, iek's notion of ideology assumes that ideology functions best whenever the subject 'does not really believe' in the system of ideas he apparantly adheres to. This pseudo-belief creates a distance in which a state of exception to the official rules can be implemented quite easily.

'they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it'. If this has even the slightest validity, it weakens the idea of transparency as an emancipatory force, which is at the center of the some of the artistic projects described above. Despite the knowledge we already possess, still we live on, uncertain and unable to co-ordinate our position or our practical relation to this knowledge: Cynical reason is no longer nave, but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it. (iek, 1989)

Like ideology, user-software interaction operates without regard to the belief of the user. Whether he believes or disbelieves is irrelevant. What is relevant is that he acts. Software enacts in the user a temporary suspension of belief in favour not of disbelief but of a cynical in-between belief and nonbelief. Again, like software, ideologys dominant mode of functioning is cynical . . . they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it (Chun, 2006: 21). This corresponds to what Chun calls the fetishistic logic of software (Chun, 2004: 43), i.e. that it is able to integrate and make productive a cynicism normally counterproductive to the perpetuation of softwares magical spell with regard to its own semi-transparent procedures.

Similarly, in Pfaller's description of Christian ritual, this 'as' if' transference of agency and responsibility to the (technological) object has a positive and even 'liberatory' dimension of enabling the subject to revalidate his individuality and autonomy vis--vis the (moral, political) institutions of his religion:

The Tibetan's and the Christian's ritual practices thus turn out to be defensive moves against their proper religions. They allow the Tibetan and the Christian to indulge in a psychic or spatial "disappearance."" (Pfaller, 2003)

This disappearance and relative autonomy that opens up in this cynical transfering the subject's agency to an object is possible only by blackboxing this object, that is then made to operate as if it were now responsible and acting for the subject. Black boxing in this sense is the making-autonomous of the interpassive object and - in the procedure of cutting all epistemic links that trace back this responsibility to me, - is able to resubjectivate the subject:

When objective belief is there (thanks to a ritual medium), the religious subject can go away. Due to its interpassive dimension, the ritual frees the individuals from subjectivation" (Pfaller, 2003)

But Pfaller also describes the methods by which - in Christian religion - these interpassive, playful

distances are countered and dissolved by transferring the religious responsibility back to the original carrier. The protestant ethic was a form of such countering of the catholic's fondness for interpassive freedom:

"The use of ritual machinery and of specialists (priests) becomes more and more reduced in religious ideology (as opposed to economy where the use of machinery and division of labor increase in history). An increasing imperative of "Do it yourself" characterizes the history of religion. The exteriority of ritual is thus being transformed into the interiority of religious consciousness, as it can be seen for example in the "leap" that led, in Christian religion, from Catholicism to Protestantism. Clearly this hostility of religions toward their own rituals expresses an acknowledgement of the fact that the rituals allow the believers to avoid conscious attention to the religious meaning. When religions abandon a good part of their own rituals, they try to destroy the interpassivity inherent in these rituals." (Pfaller, 2003)

Hertz and Parikka (2010) propose "a depunctionalization of media and the opening, understanding and hacking of concealed or blackboxed systems" (15). This project shows a lot of similarities with the protestand ethic of closing the interpassive dimension, referred to in the above quote. The dealing with technology should be torn away from specialists (priests, engineers) and a non-specialist, DIY mentality is promoted, as implemented by practices of 'circuitbending': "an electronic DIY movement focused on manipulating circuits and changing the taken for granted function of the technology without formal training or approval" (Hertz and Parikka, 2010: 4)

The project of opening or hacking the black box, as a tactical extension of the contemporary politics of transparency, bypasses the 'liberating' potential inherent to interpassive rituals, towards a destruction of our 'as if' relation to technology. It promotes the restoration of a 'conscious attention' to the inner workings and power effects of the black boxes of technology. Because this positive, interpassive dimension remains unacknowledged in an undialectical understanding of our 'magical' relations to technology, the effects of opening the black box could well run counter to the original intentions of its supposed 'enlighteners'. Because by promoting a 'dense' epistemic relation of responsibility to our technology, the subject in question could well become even more 'entangled' in its procedural logics, instead of liberating him from it though an intimate knowledge of its inner workings.

The black boxes of technology can be described as today's medium of interpassive ritual. Thus, by proposing the reinstitution of the epistemic linkages that run from the human agents to their black boxes, this ironic, distancing play of interpassive transference of responsibility that enables the subject to disappear, is also destroyed. As in protestantism, "anonymous, objective belief is being erased in order to establish subjective faith" (Pfaller, 2003)

This points to another important issue. The 'fit' and overlap of moral and political institutions and technology is often made to appear very extensive and intimate (technology as the material extension of disciplinary control, the long arm of the Law). But the above also shows a space of conflict between moral-political and media-technological regimes: technology enables the subject-object of religious or political power to put his media in the place where the subject-object of power should be. This opens up a line of escape from those former regimes, whilst of course inciting another.

With all of the above I am of course not trying to wholly delegitimate critical art practices that hack into the black boxes of modern technology. The ideal of transparency - on a technical and political level - is as much needed as ever, to expose the secret injustices that animate the contemporary corporatized world. The open source movement is a prime example of a force countering the monopolizations and privatizations of the commons. Topics like the ecological impact of information and communication infrastructures can never be enough on the agenda. Furthermore, the dynamics of interpassivity has its own obvious pitfalls (Andrejevic 2001). Nevertheless, the result of all this critical probing and making-transparent could well turn out to be a mixed blessing, replacing the rituals of disappearance with a new ritual: a joy in the obscene transparency and control of our technological environments, freed from all the ironic and playful lack of responsibility ('playing dead') that open up lines of flight that immediately dissolve when exposed to the harsh light of transparency. With great knowledge comes great responsibility...

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