1994 – The Computable and the Uncomputable: VLC Forum: Keynote Lecture by Alexander R. Galloway (2020)

I am very glad to be able to post something on Alexander R Galloway right here. He needs no introduction I am afraid, and I think he is unavoidable if one wants to dig a little deeper into how online-offline entanglements that affect more of us by the day intersect and interplay. Alexander continues to be one of the most important theoreticians of the digital, having published in the 2000s several key books on Internet protocols, algorithmic culture, unconventional computing, digital humanities and posthumanities, network theory and gaming : Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture,  The Exploit: A Theory of Networks(with Eugene Thacker) and recently (2021) – Uncomputable: Play and Digital Politics in the Digital Age from Verso.

As a starter, here are some of his free articles:

Warcraft and Utopia

Mathification

Radical Illusion (A Game Against)

This keynote lecture brings together research and books by other authors, be it cyber-feminist or digital culture – a different history of computing, biding carefully and imaginatively together old and new material practices that subtend computation (by XX women artists let’s say or adopted from specific work done by indigenous people) as a common weave of ‘uncomputable’ computer history.

In a sense he is just tying together several knots and threads, adding more to wider web of inclusive and non-reductionist histories of (unconventional) computing. There is an incredible visible and tangible built-up that made computing happen starting from down below. One that allows us to better feel and understand that it could not exist without this processual practices. An instantiated (and mostly underrated and unwaged) work specific to all sorts of weaving process – from childhood games such as Cat’s Cradle (Donna Haraway) to DNA molecular folding. Textile art and textile production for a long time considered ‘minor’ arts and ‘decorative’ (even inside men preserves such as Bauhaus) – are taken as better examples of parsing both industrial history and understanding mathification in various other ways than just visiting your local computer museum or technical museum. Here are a few rapid notes on it:

-on the way it discusses both the work of early industrial weavers, the worker’s own resistance and distraction of machines as boycott against automation and the ‘intellectual’ aesthetic critic against pieces (observations by Lord Byron) made in the new factories as opposed to the previous handicraft work. New lower quality work coming out of these early factories was disconsidered and called in the day’s cant: ‘spider work’.

-early employers preferring married women as workers since they would be more docile, and more ready to give everything in order to provide for their families (a quote from Marx that quotes an early social reformer.

-the way Ada Lovelace largely considered the first programmer – at the same time (as Sadie Plant has pointed out in 1997) the context of her ground braking mathematical work is as telling as the work itself (if not more for non-mathematical minds as mine), it is an addenda to a proto-vapourware, an annex written by a women to a footnote of a translated review from Italian about the first “computer” – a machine thought by Charles Babbage (the Analytical engine in his words), but that did not yet exist!

-a very nice example of fraying of margins, of falling apart. This is no smooth or continuous and unaltered history. It follows the same way carpets or woven products get most intense friction or use at the margins. There is I think a long-standing interest of AR Galloway in the role of error, of the glitch in programming and the way all these proto-computers were always incredibly noisy, clunky and prone to failure all the time and had to be always rebooted or debugged from early on.

-the way spiders interpret or percieve any improvement to their work (as in the work of the artist Nina Katchadourian was mending damaged spider webs) as something unwanted, an event that actually made them come and extract the ‘repaired part’ and continue with their own work

“Narrating a series of lesser-known historical episodes, Alexander R. Galloway’s keynote lecture addresses the computable and uncomputable. These stories are drawn from the archives of computation and digital media, broadly conceived. The goal is to show how computation emerges or fails to emerge, how the digital thrives but also atrophies, how networks interconnect while also fraying and falling apart. Such alternations–something done something undone, something computed, something uncomputed–constitute the real history of digital machines, from cybernetics and networks to cellular automata and beyond. And while computers have colonized the globe in recent years they also excel at various practices of exclusion. Since the 1970s “protocol” technologies have played a key role in this transformation. Galloway concludes with an interrogation of the concept of protocol in 2020, revisiting his groundbreaking 2004 book Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization.”(VLC Forum 2020 description)

1906 – Relaxer (movie 2018)

spacetime coordinates: Michigan 1999 just before the 2YK end of the world

Relaxer is a 2018 American comedy film written and directed by Joel Potrykus. Set in 1999, it tells the story of a man playing Pac-Man in a living room.

Have to thank Felix from Mabento for suggesting this one yr ago, which I ignored, and only now managed to watch. Potrykus also directed one of the all-time favorites – The Alchemist Cookbook (2015) based on David Henry Thoreau stint of living near Walden building around themes as slackness and loneliness. The cinematography of Potrykyus I find one of the most interesting developments of indie low-budget US cinema in recent years, that combines brash oddity, a certain perpetual quest element maybe even picaresque one (akin to 1975 Barry Lyndon) with a heavy dose of grossness, a new sincerity about meltdown and a freshly non-neurotypical candor dressed in black comedy garments. It endorses an unprepossessing (unstudied?) unpretentious braindead attitude about the world we leave in – maybe a jackass type of “critical stupidity” (Scott Richmond) that unites the avant-garde techniques of disturbance with online stunts & pranksterisms. I would also include Kajillionaire directed by Miranda July there. Altough completly stuck the main protagonist oozes forth some continuous fount of animal magnetism & obnoxious liquids.

Relaxer could well be the ode to the gamer martyr, a supernatural 1990s Midwestern take on Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel, it also pitilessly transforms and ridicules all stereotypes of survivalist preppers, or what it takes to pull trough various challenges, endless gamification challenges and severe isolation without directly decrying the situation or pointing fingers. Relaxer is a new Millennial species, he is not just a couch potato, or the staycation victim of the year of quarantine, he is almost a life long slacker that always strives to reclaim his time back (like C Mudede sugested in a recent article) instead of joining the labour force or finally starting to be able to pay his rent or move out of his mom’s flat. It is also a generation that did not join the startup Californian culture, and that also became its complete antithesis, a sort of ungainly anti- entrepreneurs of slackerdom. This typology is usually vilified in movies – starting with the serial killer stereotype till the white trash family in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993). Survival here is not preparing against the government trying to take my gun, it might mean (here) finishing playing the n (impossible) level of Pac- Man, riding the glitch or managing the infinitesimal reflexes thats sacred cheat sheet scrolls of others promise. Maybe this is also the living catacomb of hardcore music and postpunk mashup with gaming culture (see the numerous Black Flag and Butthole Surfers, grunge posters on the walls). Survivalist logic is decomposing into a bizarre Robinson Crusoe stuck in his home, the archetype self entrepreneur in his (or his bothers) primordial flat, setting up a weirdo freelance business of impossible prize money offered by Nintendo magazine challenges.

This is a mostly fixed camera movie, just with one character entering a progressive state of taped decrepitude and self-neglect, almost sliding into voluntary homelessness, while at the same time retaining some modicum of re-enchantment, of derisory acquired special jedi ‘powers’. These powers are unclear, if they are conveyed by pulp trash or commercial pop, or useless skills allowing you to actual survive the new austerity of a mechanical Turk, that we will never know. What I appreciate is the brake from the redemptive narrative of Matrix, of messianic Neo pulling himself up or making ‘poor’ sheeple understand that we are just an appendix to machines. There is nothing redemptive to this alternate history of the 2YK and why the dotcom world actually ended or why we are its children, always ready to pick up on the next senseless challenge. Stylistically very diverse, Relaxer also features one of these incredible moments – that could be picked out of the best noir memories, with marvelous actress (+singer) Adina Howard starring as nurse Arin, a rare friend and ex colleague that is able to transmit secret knowledge (the cheat sheet scrolls), offering the only rare moments of genuine care. There’s this sequence where Cortez (from the Alchemist Cookbook), her companion standing in the door tries to rush her adding a few homophobic slurs, while she calmly takes the guy apart, completly switching the whole movie into something else related to what’s more and more unacceptable & harder to ignore. Even the Darth Vader 3D glasses – Scanners like Cronenbergian mind tricks find a way to feel all right & appropriate to the dark comic & cloying situation.

Don’t want to give the false impression, this is both an incredibly funny and painful to watchmovie – nothing happens, yet at the same time, here we have a reality desert eremite, ignoring the outside apocalypse as he in more ways than one brings it about. We are never sure if this is just mental games, finding ways to deal with one’s own insignificance or inability to adapt, or just a paen to that have shown us that relaxation never comes easy, that being at home doing basically nothing is still an uphill battle toward relaxation.

imdb

1376 – Atari: Game Over (2014 documentary)

A crew digs up all of the old Atari 2600 game cartridges of “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” that were tossed into a landfill in the 1980s. (imdb)

Atari: Game Over is a 2014 documentary film directed by Zak Penn about the North American video game crash of 1983, using the Atari video game burial excavation as a starting point. Eurogamer called it “one of the best films about gaming this year and should be seen by anyone with an interest in the medium’s early wild west years.” (wiki)

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A Psychological Exploration of Engagement in Geek Culture

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