DADA DATA DADA essay

Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag DADA DATA DADA I Random is the occurrence of events in a manner of such complexity that human cognition cannot find either a cause or a pattern between the events. They meant to induce collective delirium, joy, hopefully, but rage if there was no choice, and to drive the maddened collective to either an orgy or arbitrary destruction, “arbitrary” being the operative word. The Mechanics of Chance by Michaële Cutaya Following a strange figure of discourse, one first must ask whether the word or signifier “communication” communicates a determined content, an identifiable meaning, a describable value. And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar To make a dadaist poem Instead, one finds various attempts to introduce breaks or ruptures into the deterministic order of the machine. Dada, wished to destroy the hoaxes of reason and to discover an unreasoned order. I am writing a manifesto and there’s nothing I want, and yet I’m saying certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am against principles … Yet there is little in Dada machine art to recall the mechanistic worldview of earlier writers and thinkers. I’m writing this manifesto to show that you can perform contrary actions at the same tine, in one single, fresh breath; I am against action; as for continual contradiction, and affirmation too, I am neither for them 8 9 nor against them, and I won’t explain myself because I hate common sense. Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag Consider chance as an attempt to achieve something natural. Still, neither mystics nor philosophers could correct the great misunderstanding beginning to take root in Europe after the Enlightenment: scientists were beginning to, literally, mistake their mountains of description for the world, to substitute descriptive virtuality for reality. Take a newspaper Cut out the article Chance, by helping to avoid habitual modes of thinking, could in fact produce something fresher and more vital than that which the composer might have invented alone. But in order to articulate and to propose this question, I already had to anticipate the meaning of the word communication: I have had to predetermine communication as the vehicle, transport, or site of passage of a meaning, and of a meaning that is one. Take a pair of scissors Almost immediately upon coming to America it flashed on me that the genius of the modern world is in machinery, and that through machinery art ought to find a most vivid expression. Does chance = random? In the avant-garde production of images and texts, one finds a set of aesthetic and cultural practices heavily invested in the metaphorical system of the machine. It is not the description of the world as mechanism, but a production of imaginary worlds driven by the 10 11 force of the virtual and revolving around a singularity (an element of chance or ‘straying cause’) that always exceeds the structural relations put forwards by mechanical laws. nonsense: what sensical people find unacceptable, illogical, ridiculous, useless; an insult; a creature from the unconscious that surrounds, underlies, and fills all that isn’t commonly understood. Copy conscientiously If communication had several meanings, and if this plurality could not be reduced, then from the outset it would not be justified to define communication itself as the transmission of a meaning, assuming that we are capable of understanding one another as concerns each of these words (transmission, meaning, etc.). It occurred to a few people that the vast and quickly accumulating quantity of what is still called “knowledge” in some circles was only a mountain (or sea) of storage devices for the description of the world by people: tablets, books, mathematical and chemical formulas. Serious nonsense comes from great depth like clear springs. Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem This was the hubris at the start of the “communication” revolution. On the upper layers of blah-blah everything makes sense, unfortunately, and the din sucks all the oxygen. Consider chance operations as a means of making a decision and how relinquishing control changes the outcome. Shake it gently Is it certain that there corresponds to the word communication a unique, univocal concept, a concept that can be rigorously grasped and transmitted: a communicable concept? I would like ... to show how the central preoccupation of New York Dada is not the production of art as such, but the possibility for a deterministic order to produce ruptures or breaks – breaks from the past, but also cuts and interruptions in the flow of language, ruptures in human reason, etc – that have the effect of redistributing and recombining the deterministic order itself. This poem will be like you Peter D. Gaffney, Demiurgic Machines: The mechanics of New York Dada, Francis Picabia: de.phaidon. com/agenda/art/ articles/2015/ january/22/themechanised-world of-francis-picabia/ Hans Harp Quoted in: Anna Moszynska, Abstract 12 13 Art, Thames and Hudson, London, 1990, p. 66. Tristan Tzara, To Make a Dadaist Poem, Dada Manifesto (1918) Jacques Derrida, Signature, Event, Context, (1971) A communication to the Congrès international des Sociétés de philosophie de langue française, Montreal, August 1971. John Cage www. toddholoubek. com/classes/ livingart/?page_ id=26 Andrei Codrescu: The Posthuman Dada Guide, Tzara and Lenin Play Chess, Princeton University Press, 2009. Andrew Stiller, Cage, John, Chance, The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online ed. L. Macy, Accessed [Feb. 3, 2003], www. grovemusic.com DADA DATA DADA II The Reign of Reason following tasks: At the end of the first year of its formation it will present a project for public works to be undertaken in order to increase France’s wealth and improve the condition of its inhabitants in every useful and pleasing respect. Then, each year it will give its advice on addition to be made to its original project and on ways in which it thinks it might be improved. Drainage, land clearance, road building, the opening up of canals will be considered the most important part of this project. This Chamber will present another report providing a project for public festivals... In the festivals of hope the orators will explain to the people the plans for public works approved by parliament, and they will encourage the citizens to work with energy, by showing them how their condition will improve once the plans are executed. by Michaële Cutaya A first Chamber will be formed and called the Chamber of Invention. This Chamber will consist of three hundred members, and will be divided into three sections… The first section will consist of two hundred civil engineers; the second of fifty poets and other literary inventors; and the third of twenty-five painters, fifteen sculptors and architects, and ten musicians. This chamber will apply itself to the — Saint-Simon, Sketch of a New Political System, 1819 18 19 In From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner merged together two emblematic figures of the Bay Area, the hippie and the geek, into the one persona of Stewart Brand, the editor of the Whole Earth Catalogue. He argues that “For all the utopian claims surrounding the emergence of the Internet, there is nothing about a computer or a computer network that necessarily requires that it level organizational structures, render the individual more psychologically whole, or drive the establishment of intimate, though geographically distributed, communities.” [1] It was Brand and his Whole Earth colleagues that “helped reverse the political valence of information and information technology and turn computers into emblems of countercultural revolution.”[2] In World Without Mind, Franklin Foer further expands upon how deeply Silicon Valley is steeped in the values of the 1960s: “The big tech companies present themselves as platforms for personal liberation. Everyone has the right to speak their mind on social media, to fulfill their intellectual Denis Diderot declared – an ambition mirrored by Google’s mission statement to “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” and democratic potential, to express their individuality.”[3] The civil rights activists of Berkeley and the engineers of Stanford share values that actually go much further back than the 1960s as both are heirs to the eighteenth century’s faith in reason, progress and the rights of the individual. The Encyclopédistes, for instance, believed that a larger access to knowledge will inevitably lead to progress. In the Encyclopedie which expanded upon Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopedia or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, they aimed to incorporate all of the world’s knowledge: “An encyclopedia … should encompass not only the fields already covered by the academies, but each and every branch of human knowledge” as his most fervent editor and contributor, 20 Knowledge and science were to make the world a better place and statesmen should be replaced by engineers and scientists; the dream of the Engineer King flourished throughout the following centuries from Henri de SaintSimon’s ‘cult of reason’ and his industrial utopia (1819) to the ‘efficiency’ of president-engineer Herbert Hoover (19291933) passing by Stalin qualifying artists as “the engineers of the human soul”, as Foer sums up: “Engineers would strip the old order of its power, while governing in the spirit of science. They would impose rationality and order.”[4] The engineer’s way of thinking has penetrated society just as machines and automation have come to replace human labour: “During the industrial revolution, machinery replaced manual workers. At first, machines required 21 human operators. Over time, machines came to function with hardly any human intervention. For centuries, engineers automated physical labour; our new engineering elite has automated thought. They have perfected technologies that take over intellectual processes, that render the brain redundant. Or, as the former Google and Yahoo executive Marissa Mayer once argued, ‘You have to make words less human and more a piece of the machine.’”[5] In Age of Anger, Pankaj Mishra compares how resentment greeted the industrial age in the nineteenth century with our own moment of anger as expressed by voters throughout the world: “Over the past decades [elites] came to uphold an ideal of cosmopolitan liberalism: the universal commercial society of self-interested rational individuals that was originally advocated in the eighteenth century by such Enlightenment Google Chrome Stained Glass at Google HQ MOuntain View, CA thinkers as Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Voltaire and Kant.” [6] In New Dark Age, James Bridle for his part observes: “The greatest carrier wave of progress for the last few centuries has been the central idea of the Enlightenment itself: that more knowledge – more information – leads to better decisions...And so we find ourselves today connected to vast repositories of knowledge, and yet we have not learned to think. In fact, the opposite is true: that which was intended to enlighten the world in practice darkens it. The abundance of information and the plurality of worldviews now accessible to us through the internet are not producing a coherent consensus reality, but one riven by 22 fundamentalist insistence on simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. It is on this contradiction that the idea of a new dark age turns: an age in which the value we have placed upon knowledge is destroyed by the abundance of that profitable commodity, and in which we look about ourselves in search of new ways to understand the world.” [7] Bridle believes that to understand how complex technologies function we need more than a functional understanding, we need new metaphors: “a metalanguage for describing the world that complex systems have wrought” or to remake current metaphors used by technology “in the service of other ways of [1] Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006, 23 thinking”, beginning with the most ubiquitous of them: the cloud. First, he claims, it is a very bad metaphor: “The cloud is not weightless; it is not amorphous, or even invisible, if you were to look for it. The cloud is not some magical faraway place, made of water vapour and radio waves, where everything just works… the cloud doesn’t just have a shadow; it has a footprint.” Bridle is not interested in simply re-earthing the cloud, but to turn it into a new metaphor: “Can the cloud absorb not only our failure to understand, but our understanding of that lack of understanding? Can we supplant base computational thinking with cloudy thinking, which acknowledges an unknowing and makes of it productive rain?” [8] we supplant base computational thinking with cloudy thinking, which acknowledges an unknowing and makes of it productive rain?” [8] p.3. [2] ibid. p.238. [3] Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential threat of Big Tech, Penguin, 2017, p.56. [4] ibid. p.62. [5] ibid. pp.62-63. [6] Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger, a History of the Present, Allen Lane, 2017, p.7. [7] James Bridle, New Dark Age, Technology and the End of the Future, Verso, 2018. Pp. 10-11. [8] ibid. pp.5-9 DADA DATA DADA III N i t M o a i c h h s i n e n e e by Michaële Cutaya But there is a core idea running through all historical doctrines of determinism that shows why they are all a threat to free will. All doctrines of determinism – whether they are fatalistic, theological, physical, biological, psychological or social – imply that, given the past and the laws of nature at any given time, there is only one possible future. Whatever happens is therefore inevitable or necessary (it cannot but occur), given the past and the laws.[1] In a 2016 leaked Google internal video The Selfish Ledger – in reference to Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book The Selfish Gene – Nick Foster, head of design at X – formerly Google X – opens a line of questioning: “Usercentered design principles have dominated the world of computing for many decades, but what if we looked at things a little differently? What if the ledger could be given a volition or purpose rather than simply acting as a historical reference? What if we focused on creating a richer ledger by introducing more sources of information? What if we thought of ourselves not as the owners of this information, but as custodians, transient carriers, or caretakers?”[2] Doctrines of determinism have taken many historical forms. People have wondered at various times whether their actions might be determined by Fate or by God, by the laws of physics or the laws of logic, by heredity or environment, by unconscious motives or hidden controllers, psychological or social conditioning, and so on. 26 27 As outlandish as the project of data as DNA still sounds, it fits squarely within what the founder of Google imagines, as Franklin Foer writes: “When Page describes Google reshaping the future of humanity, this isn’t simply a description of the convenience it provides; what it aims to redirect is the course of evolution, in the Darwinian sense of the word. It’s not too grandiose to claim that they are attempting to create a superior species, a species that transcends our natural form,”[3] p.38 Foer further writes that what has already been achieved by the exponential accumulation of data by the likes of Facebook and Google is a complete upending of the scientific method: “For the entirety of human existence, the creation of knowledge was a slog of trial and error. Humans would dream up theories of how the world worked, then would examine the evidence to see whether their hypotheses survived or crashed upon their exposure to reality.”[4] With algorithms mining the data, hypothesis and theories are no longer needed, the patterns emerge directly from the data. For instance, what scientific would have thought of looking for a correlation between the sale of strawberry Pop-Tarts and incoming storms as Wal-Mart executives found out in looking through the store’s shopper history using predictive technology?[5] A new form of determinism is emerging, one that dispenses altogether with laws or theories and simply predicts and shapes our future based on the extensive collected data of our past. Foer however adds a twist in this tale: “Computer scientists have an aphorism that describes how algorithms relentlessly hunt for patterns: they talk about torturing 28 the data until it confesses. Yet this metaphor contains unexamined implications. Data, like victims of torture, tells its interrogator what it wants to hear.”[6] That data and algorithms are not a neutral recording and shaper of our lives is the subject of James Bridle’s latest book, New Dark Age, Technology and the End of the Future: “Across the sciences and society, in politics and education, in warfare and commerce, new technologies do not merely augment our abilities, but actively shape and direct them, for better and for worse.”[7] Upon which Bridle adds that “There is a concrete and causal relationship between the complexity of the systems we encounter every day; the opacity with which most of those systems are constructed or described; and fundamental, global issues of inequality, violence, populism and fundamentalism.”[8] * * * Against the encroaching determinism of scientific advancements, defenders of free will found an unlikely ally in quantum physics, and more generally in the micro realm and chaos theory: “There is growing evidence that chaos plays a role in the information processing of the brain, providing some of the flexibility that the nervous system needs to adapt creatively – rather than in predictable or rigid ways – to an ever-changing environment … If the processing of the brain does ‘make chaos in order to make sense of the world’, then the resulting chaos might magnify quantum indeterminacies in the firings of individual neurons so that they would have largescale indeterministic effects on the activity of neural networks in the brain as a whole.” [9] 29 On the Information Philosopher Website, one finds at the entry on ‘Chance’ that “there is also no problem imagining a role for chance in the brain in the form of quantum level noise (as well as pre-quantal thermal noise). Noise can introduce random errors into stored memories. Noise could create random associations of ideas during memory recall. Many scientists have speculated that this randomness may be driven by microscopic fluctuations that are amplified to the macroscopic level. This would not happen in some specific location in the brain. It is most likely a general property of all neurons.”[10] If chance in the form of noise in the brain is the guardian of our freedom and creativity, we might need to find its algorithmic equivalent. [1] Robert Kane, ‘Libertarianism’ in Four Views on Free Will, Blackwell Publishing, 2007, p.5 [2] Vlad Savov, ‘Google’s Selfish Ledger is an unsettling vision of Silicon Valley social engineering: This internal video from 2016 shows a Google concept for how total data collection could reshape society’, The Verge, 17 May 2018. www.theverge. com/2018/5-/17/17344250/google-x-selfish-ledger-video-data-privacy [3] Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential threat of Big Tech, Penguin, 2017, p.38. [4] ibid. pp. 69-70 [5] Constance L. Hays ‘What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers’ Habits’, the New York Times, 14, November 2004. www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/ business/yourmoney/ what-walmart-knowsabout-customers-habits. html [6] Foer op.cit. pp. 70-71. [7] James Bridle, New Dark Age, Technology and the End of the Future, Verso, 2018, p. 2. [8] ibid. p.5 [9] Robert Kane, ‘Libertarianism’ in Four Views on Free Will, Blackwell Publishing, 2007, pp. 28-29. [10] Chance, from Information Philosopher Website [accessed 4 May, 2018] www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/ chance.html Google Doodle for Hannah Hoch 30 31 The Redwoods, an allegory — Andrei Codrescu, The Posthuman Dada Guide DADA DATA DADA IV by Michaële Cutaya Dada is against communication. Words are part of the substance out of which Dada makes worlds, not in order to communicate, but to discommunicate, to disrupt, to make time where the communication was interrupted. Giant California redwoods make their own weather: they catch a cloud, seed it, and then it rains on the one tree that captured the cloud. A tree like that is no metaphor. Neither is a poem that captures the cloud of your attention and draws it unto itself. 34 By a bright Saturday morning in late February, we passed the Golden Gate Bridge and headed for the hills. We drove along the crest before winding our way down into a valley, down where the millenarian redwoods are. It is early yet, and the Muir Woods car park is quiet. At the gate, the attendant informs us that since January it is Now Required to first make an online reservation at gomuirwoods.com to use the car park. Then adds that since there is no cell phone service or WiFi reception at Muir Woods, we have to drive back to the top of the hill to make the booking. We plead – some common sense platitudes – to no avail. Back up the hill we go. Parked along the road where cell phone service resumes, we go about making our reservation. All is well as there are still plenty of places available at this time – as a quick look at the car park had informed us – and we are about to pay but we first have to confirm our humanity through a CAPTCHA test and the system fails to validate our answer – or we fail the test. After several attempts, the time allowed to complete a reservation expires and we have to start again. By then, the car park is booked up and the next available slot is not before early afternoon. On the Muir Woods National Monument website, the would-bevisitor is greeted with the zen-like instruction “Reserve, Relax, Plan Ahead and Enjoy the Woods!” We did go to Muir Woods and we did see the redwoods. We parked – rather illegally – along the road and found our way down the hill through trails whose names reflected the various stages our progress rather presciently: we strolled down the Redwood trail, the Sun trail and the Dipsea trail, and made our way back up the Creek trail, the Lost trail and the Panoramic trail. Sold as facilitators, new technologies all too often obstruct and exclude. But perhaps it is through its lapses we can make our own weather. 35