Mitra Azar

This is a chapter part of a collective book titled "The Aesthetics And Politics Of The Online Self - A Savage Journey into the Heart of Digital Cultures" edited by Donatella Della Ratta, Geert Lovink, Teresa Numerico, Peter Sarram, published by Palgrave MacMillan.
                                           
The chapter approaches the face as one of the most relevant and controversial bio-techno-political battlefields. Specifically, it tries to unfold the implications of the evolving processes of ‘machinization’ of the face related to the development of a number of tracking technologies that are nowadays reaching the mainstream public – from iPhone X unlocking by recognizing the face of its owner, to Mastercard technology allowing payment by tracking users’ faces, to apps such as MSQRD and Face Stealer which allow users to modify their facial traits by assuming the ones of somebody else. If bio-tracking technologies are based on the idea that one’s face is unique and not replicable, the amount of entertaining face-tweaking apps available on the market seems to suggest exactly the opposite – face is trackable, its features tweakable, and its uniqueness hackable. Thus, the face turns into the site where contradictory regimes of truth coexist and feed each other in a form that keeps an appearance of immediacy while hiding layers of algorithmic complexity. This new regime of visibility related to the face brings along a paradoxical regime of truth. But how does this new regime of truth relate to processes of ‘datification’ and value extraction? The chapter argues that from a hermeneutic perspective the art of circulationism and data extraction seems to lie in this ambivalence: the more “real” (or better “gore”) and unfiltered an image/information looks the more its networking value grows, the more a number of extractive practices are implemented behind its surface – or right on it, such as in the case of face tracking technologies.

The chapter begins by investigating the nature of Deleuze‘s dividual. Besides the well-known understanding of Deleuze's dividual as the computational fragmentation of the subject into bits of information by a society of control based on surveillance capitalism, the dividual stands also as the intrinsic trait of affects (intensive, qualitative different), and constitutes the fabric of subjectivity itself.

The tension between these different understandings of the dividual is explored in relation to the simultaneously molar and molecular nature of contemporary regimes of visibility. Munster and MacKenzie's notion of "invisualities" - which refers to AI-generated image aggregates invisible to the user -, is analyzed in relation to van Vinkel’s notion of the drive to visibility. Van Vinkel believes that the demand for images far outstrips supply, and defines the drive to visibility as the pressure to make everything visible, or bring into visibility what van Vinkel calls “missing visual”.

In this context, I propose the figure of the POV-data-double, inspired by the notion of cinematic POV, to navigate the two dimensions of Deleuze’s dividual, and the passage from Munster and MacKenzie’s invisualities to van Vinkel’s missing visuals: POV-data-double is the dividual algorithmic ghost which organizes cloud-stored invisualities about a given user towards the generation of new missing visuals tailored around that very POV-data-double that previous missing visuals have been contributing to give form to.

Finally, these considerations are exemplified via the analysis of the algorithmic functioning of Tinder and the artistic project DoppelGANger.agency.

The Arab Archive. Mediated Memories and Digital Flows
Edited by Donatella Della Ratta, Kay Dickinson and Sune Haugbolle

Mitra Azar
The virtuous circuits between upload and download: digital and analog archives and the case of graffiti art in revolutionary Egypt
(pp.41-58)

"While studying philosophy and cinema, I came to realize how my need for expression was not fully satisfied by a rigorous philosophical approach, but that it needed something closer to where concepts had originally arisen from, something able to reduce the gap between thoughts and actions. Deleuze’s Nietzschean-rooted reflection on how “the anecdotes of a life [become] the aphorisms of thought” (Deleuze, 1962), suggested me the possibility of approaching that gap, while his way of looking at artists and filmmakers as philosophers did the rest.
Thus, I became a nomadic video-squatter and ARThropologist, haunted by images and by their relational-performative-philosophical fabric. The idea of border as a becoming-amorphous entity and the political role of art and digital technologies within the frame of an aesthetic of crisis and of mass events have been the framework of my practice based research. As a result, since almost ten years, I’ve been living as a nomad and I’ve been building an archive of site specific works in some of the most controversial areas of the planet, in the context of socio-political, cultural and ecological struggles, mainly through the lens of visual anthropology, art, and media philosophy".

Introduction to Special Issue of AI & Society by Springer. The journal includes contributes by  Paglen&Crawford, Pasquinellli&Joler, Mirzoeff, Parikka, Bratton, Parisi, Manovich, Maleve, and more.

The printed volume will come out in June 2020. On springer webpage it's possible to already access the articles selected for the issue. 

https://link.springer.com/journal/146/volumes-and-issues/36-4

How do machines, and, in particular, computational technologies, change the way we see the world? This special issue brings together researchers from a wide range of disciplines to explore the entanglement of machines and their ways of seeing from new critical perspectives. As the title makes clear, we take our point of departure in John Berger’s 1972 BBC documentary series Ways of Seeing, a four-part television series of 30-min films created by Berger and producer Mike Dibb, which had an enormous impact on both popular and academic perspectives on visual culture. Berger’s scripts were adapted into a book of the same name, published by Penguin also in 1972. The book consists of seven numbered essays: four using words and images; and three essays using only images. Seeing is evidently a political act, exemplified in the third episode-chapter, where images of women in early modern European painting (Pol de Limbourg, Cranach the Elder, Jan Gossaert, Tintoretto) and commercial magazines are juxtaposed to demonstrate the ways in which women are rendered as objects of the male gaze. More broadly, Berger emphasised that “the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled”. In this special issue, we explore how these ideas can be understood in the light of technical developments in machine vision and algorithmic learning, and how the relations between what we see and know are further unsettled.

This essay moves the first steps toward an understanding of the intricate intertwining between the notion of orientation and that of Point of View (POV) across the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (and in his work with psychotherapist Felix Guattari), and revendicates their crucial role in relation to the concept of the virtual.

https://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities/special_issues/posthumanism

Keywords: Panopticon, POV-opticon, games of truth, regime of truth, Algorithmic Facial Image (AFI)

The paper proposes a theoretical framework to understand the emergency of the post-truth⁠ era in the specific realm of Internet visual culture, and analyses the aesthetic and technological conditions that allow a new form of post-truth to emerge.
The paper argues that Internet post-truth could be addressed as the jeu de la vérité  (game of truth) emerging from the transformation of the Panopticon – the form of visual governamentality of modernity  – into the POV-opticon.
The POV-opticon is a regime of visibility outlined by the explosion of POV (Point of view) technologies of vision – mobile phones, VR and AR technologies – which are transforming POV from a cinematic aesthetic and technical format into one of the most controversial political-aesthetic battlefields of our time. The capability of cinematic POV to produce the seamless overlapping between body and technology  is re-invented in relation to new technological devices that re-defines human and machinic agency within new regimes of visibility and new games of truth.
The paper tries to understand the POV-opticon by looking at the development of a new type of selfie aesthetic and of a new imagery coming out of the ongoing machinization of the face operated by facial recognition technologies – what I’ve tried to define elsewhere as the Algorithmic Facial Image (AFI) .
Especially by defining POV-opticon and AFI, the paper expands the notion of regime of visibility proposed by Dutch art critic Camel van Winkel, and relates it to the notion of games of truth elaborated by Michel Foucault. If, according to Winkel, the regime of visibility is more about the drive to make visible rather than the visible itself , the drive presents a peculiar relation with truthfulness which seems to fit well with the games of truth generated by the POV-opticon. Games of truth is Foucault’s attempt to rethinking the concept of regime of truth  defining the Panopticon, in relation to distributed forms of governamentality  and emerging forms of subjectivity. The paper argues that POV-opticon provides the technological strata for explaining post-truth as the hermeneutical reality emerging from the proliferation of POV games of truth.

The paper theorizes the current shrinking of the distance between CCTV and POV regimes of visibility departing from the analysis of the tragic murdering of Alison Parker by Bryce Williams live on TV. From this example, the paper proposes a number of case studies that confirm  this trend and clarify its political implication.

POV-matter and machinic POV between affects and Umwelten
By Mitra Azar

The paper refers to affect theory as a conceptual toolbox to draw a genealogy of POV (Point of View) since the formation of the first “centers of indetermination” (Bergson, 1896) emerging from the pre-biotic soup forming after the inflation that follows the Big Bang (cern.com), up to the latest development in machine vision and AI.
By doing so, the paper aims at reflecting about the role of affects in relation to perception, POV and machine vision,  and it engages with the famous Bergson’s statement “there’s no perception without affection” (1896) and articulate it against a phenomenological, cinematic and machinic notion of POV.
In purely phenomenological terms, POV refers to the fact that since the formation of the first nuclei of protons and neutrons few millionth of a second after the Big Bang to the first electrons starting to spin around these nuclei, thus forming the first atoms 380,000 years later (cern.com), the fundamental blocks of matters organize themselves according to orientations - technically referred to as spins, which represent the angular moment or deflection of a certain particle passing through a magnetic field (cern.com). Matter is always oriented, despite the organic / inorganic divide - and can indeed be generalized as POV-matter. Furthermore, POV-matter develops into organic forms that beside orienteering themselves in the space according to different evolutionary survival criteria, manage to do so creating unique Umwelten (Uexküll, 1957) described by the affordances generated by the interaction between organisms - technology in certain forms of life, especially humans - and space.
The expression POV, though, is a technical acronym coming from the field of cinema, and refers to the capability of a certain cinematic technique to create the seamless overlapping between camera, actor’s body and spectator’s body. Nowadays, the seamless overlapping between human and technics is re-invented by a form of machine vision that re-articulate the relation between body and technology in ways that re-define both perception and affection. The paper proposes a notion of machinic POV that draws from a phenomenological and cinematic understanding of POV: in this context, it suggests to frame the notion of machinic POV in relation to the rupture between the couple eye / gaze (Lacan, 1964) and seeing / seen (Merleau-Ponty, 1968) that machine vision produces, and tries to define the meaning of POV in relation to a form of vision that bypasses the isomorphism between technical image and perceptual image (Bellour, 1996), and produces images in absence of light (and of bodies) - indeed as assemblage of information  (Shannon, 1948). In this scenario, the paper re-questions Bergson statement “there’s no perception without affection” and elaborates a machinic notion of POV that re-articulate the agential relation between organic and inorganic within a concept of POV-matter that modulates in relation to affects and Umwelten.

Note:
The researcher plans to test this theoretical framework specifically in relation to so called generative adversarial network (GAN) or “dueling neural network” for deep reinforcement learning.

References:
Azar, M. Drive to visibility and games of truth. After post-truth. Draft paper for Interface politics conference and publication. academia.edu.com.Web.
Azar, M. “Datafying the gaze, or Bubble-Glaz”. Datafied research workshop. Hong Kong, 2014. Web.
Bellour, R. "The Double Helix". Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation. Ed. T. Druckrey. New York: Aperture, 1996. 173-99. Print.
Bergson, H. Matter and memory, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1911 (1896). Print.
Cesares, A. B. The invention of Morel. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1940. Print.
Deleuze, G. Cinéma 1. L’image-mouvement. Paris: Minuit, 1983. Print.
Massumi, B. The autonomy of affect. Cultural Critique, No. 31, The Politics of Systems and Environments, Part II. (Autumn, 1995). Web.
Merleau-Ponty, M. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. Print.
Hansen, Mark B.N. “Affect as Medium, or the Digital Facial Image.” Journal of Visual Culture. August  (2003): 205-228. Print.
Hansen, M. B.N. New philosophy for new media. Boston: MIT, 2004. Print.
Herdesty, L. MIT News Office, “Computer system transcribes words users “speak silently”. news.mit.edu. Web.
Shennon, C., Weaver, W. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1949.
The early universe. Cern.com. Web.
Uexküll, J. von. A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds. In Schiller Claire H. Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept. New York: International Universities Press, 1957. Print.
Virilio, P. The vision machine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

In the following article, I argue that Stiegler’s cinematographic consciousness finds its formal expression in the cinematic figure of point of view [POV] – or otherwise said, that this type of consciousness is structured according to the aesthetic and formal feature of cinematographic POV. As a consequence, I propose the notion of archi-POV as the bridge between cinematographic consciousness and archi-cinema. From this point of departure, the paper suggests we look at the cinematic technic of POV both as the secret cinematic engine and as the figure of a cinematic apocalypse. Nowadays, POV is proliferating and has become one of the most common technoaesthetic interfaces across multiple networked platforms, and, as such, one of the most contested political-aesthetic battlefields of our time (POV-opticon). The paper proposes to understand the capability of cinema and new technologies of vision to short-circuit (Stiegler, 2011) archi-cinema, via the re-invention of the figure of cinematic POV which short-circuit the archi-POV. Furthermore, it frames Stiegler’s notion of stereotypes and traumatypes produced by cinematic and postcinematic technologies via Guattari’s notion of refrain. Finally, the interest of both Stiegler and Guattari towards the notion of transitional object by psychoanalyst Winnicott is introduced to articulate a schizoanalytic therapy with the forms of stereotypic refrains produced by cinematic and post-cinematic technologies, a therapy that can be activated by the truly transversal (Genosko 2014: 49-87) nature of the figure of the (archi-)POV.

This interview done December 31, 2018 approaches the theme of LaDeleuziana starting from the new book Bifo has just published, titled Breathing (Semiotexte, 2019), and proposes to wave the concept of breathing as a new radical political category together with the attempt of understanding it as a possible schizo-clinical tool to elaborate strategies of resistance to the current political crisis. From Eric Garner chocked to death by a police officier while screaming "I can't breath" to the history of social movements from '68 up to the Gilet Jeunes as the attempt of the general intellect to give itself a body-and as a consequence a breath-able to articulate the current necro-political spasm, the interview digs into the extremely original and visionary political theory of one of the most radical Italian philosopher and activist. Taking as an excuse the recent trip in Argentina and Uruguay Bifo has just returned from-where he's also visited the Felix Guattari's center in Montevideo-the interview aims at drawing the constellation that connects Breathing to the chaosmotic thought of the French schizo-analyst, as much as to the role of poetry and cinema in re-articulating the rhythms of a politics to come.

"Everything is oriented. Matter is POV (Point of view)-matter. Since the formation of the first nuclei of protons and neutrons few millionth of a second after the Big Bang, the fundamental blocks of matter produce orientations (or “spins” within an electromagnetic field).
In this phase matter is inorganic POV-matter. This is POV genealogy."

The paper unfolds the functioning of what I'm trying to define as POV-opticon, the most viral and invisible form of control ever seen in history, and to show how it interacts with new ways of thinking about civic and public space, both online and offline, while trying also to glimpse at the strategies to resist it.

The paper approaches the face as one of the most relevant and controversial bio-techno-political battlefield. Specifically, it tries to unfold the implications of the evolving processes of ‘machinization’ of the face related to the development of a number of tracking technologies that are nowadays reaching the mainstream public – from iPhone X unlocking by recognizing the face of its owner, to a new Mastercard technology allowing payment by tracking users’ faces , to apps such as MSQRD and Face Stealer which allow users to modify their facial traits by assuming the ones of somebody else . If bio-tracking technologies are based on the idea that one’s face is unique and not replicable, the amount of entertaining face-tweaking apps available on the market seems to suggest exactly the opposite – face is trackable, its features tweakable, and its uniqueness hackable. Thus, the face turns into the site where contradictory regimes of truth coexist and feed each other in a form which keeps an appearance of immediacy while hiding layers of algorithmic complexity. This new regime of visibility related to the face brings along a paradoxical regime of truth. But how does this new regime of truth relate to processes of ‘datification’ and value extraction? The paper argues that from a hermeneutic perspective the art of circulationism and data extraction seems to lie on this ambivalence: the more “real” (or better “gore”) and unfiltered an image / information looks the more its networking value grows, the more a number of extractive practices are implemented behind its surface – or right on it, such as in the case of face tracking technologies.

UN Memorandum Geneve 2020 /
Paper presented at the ENMI Préparatoires: Disruption, Massive Destruction and the Organization of an Internation (in the sense of Marcel Mauss), Paris.

The event was centered around the notion of locality and towards the compilation of a Memorandum for the UN to be presented in Geneva during the UN 100 years anniversary.

The project is run by Bernard Stiegler and the ideas exposed here are the elaboration of discussions and conversations which have happened within the group dedicated to the question of locality, and between this group and people from other groups developing other chapters for the Memorandum.

At the same time, the particular way in which a number of concepts coming from the groups have been assembled in this paper (together with a number of original concepts) represents solely the view of the author.

Draft abstract for a paper attempting at defining the principles of cosmo-phenomenology

The paper aims at opening a discussion around the possibility of establishing a philosophical framework defined as cosmo-phenomenology, founded on the concept of "orientation" (or POV-matter, or POV) intended as a phenomenological feature that cuts transversally the divide organic / inorganic and can help outlining the agential relation between diffused (e.g. environmental 1) and oriented agents.

Missing half second, affects, POV

POV is an expression coming from the field of cinema which refers to the capability of a certain cinematic technique to create a seamless overlapping between camera, actor’s body and spectator’s body, thus producing the seamless overlapping of the human with the technological. The paper  refers to affects theory as a way to draw a genealogy and an archeology of the POV since the formation of the first “centres of indetermination” (Bergson, 1896) emerging from the pre-biotic soup right after the inflation that follows the Big Bang up to the latest development in machine vision and AI -, and reflects about the role of affects in relation to perception, POV and new technologies of vision.
More precisely, the paper engages with different interpretations of the famous Bergson’s statement “there’s no perception without affection” (1896) by Mark Hansen and Gilles Deleuze, and proves them against the notion of POV. Furthermore, the paper aims at grounding the relation between affects and POV into Massoumi’s reflection about the missing half second experiment, consisting in measuring the gap between the stimulations produced by mild electrical pulses applied on the skin and on cortical electrodes on the brain as a way to understand the circulation of affects between brain and body. The paper connects these experiments to the missing half second occurring between the perception of an image and its neural registration, and put them in dialogue with a new MIT prototype that allow users to control basic functions of a computer through an ergonomic wearable interface able to record the micro-movements of the subject’s lower jar as a way to infere brain activity - the jar “move” slightly when the brain formulate a decision even without the production of a verbal utterance.

Podcast curated by Nathan Jones between Mitra Azar and Jennifer Gabris about the critically insightful Geocinema by Asia Bazdyrieva and Solveig Suess, a reflective aprés-coup of a fantastic show curated by Nathan Jones and co-organized by the New Networked Normal, promoted by The Influencers, Transmediale - Festival for Art and Digital Culture Berlin and Abandon Normal Devices.



https://soundcloud.com/abandonnormaldevices/distributed-critique-on-geocinemas-framing-territories



https://www.andfestival.org.uk/blog/nnnpodcasts/

Mitra Azar is not the real name of the artist known as Mitra Azar. It is a pseudonym he took refuge in after being arrested in Iran in 2009 in the middle of an artistic project, which became one of the few records of the Iranian grassroots movement and the violent repression by the Ahmadinejad government in the lead up to his re-election.

Azar is a self-proclaimed “eclectic-schizo-creative-nomadic-sponge”, a description that provides some clues as to his work. His practice moves between a range of very different formats including live cinema and documentary. He readily mixes activist protest with theory and philosophy, generating an infinite, networked (an)archive activated through live cinema.

Azar explores personal, aesthetic, and geopolitical boundaries as part of his practice-based mutant research. In his work, borders, censorship, geological eras, personal comfort zones and humanitarian crises interact with ideas based on the symbolic limits of images and the disembodiment of the gaze. His activism is based on field work in the most literal sense: a direct immersion in conflict zones that has led him into what he says are “some of the strangest places on the planet”. This fatal attraction for the aesthetics of crisis has taken him from Fukushima to the Gaza Strip and from Lebanon to China as a way of bringing the border – “a space that has had to forsake creativity” – back into the centre of artistic production.

SON[I]A talks to Mitra Azar about points of view and the disembodiment of the gaze, drones, borders, nomadism, never-ending archives, processes, the “artropocene”, and conflict zones as a breeding ground for creative practices.

Within the current technological context, the face sits at the threshold of the shrinking between molar and molecular – unique and singular (molecular), and yet evilly datafied by Big Data infrastructure (molar) towards the specific collection of biometric and affective data. On the one hand, the face stands as a synecdoche for an embodied notion of Point of View (POV). On the other hand, it turns into an algorithmic artefact generated via a specific form of AI called GANs: from a data-set of real human faces, GANs are capable of creating unique faces not belonging to any humans and yet looking extremely realistic. Do these algorithmic faces help enforcing a new form of POV-opticon arranged around algorithmic POV? How, instead, DoppelGANgers could possibly take advantage of the dividual (Deleuze, 1992) nature of algorithmic POVs by putting the dividual itself at work against technology for facial recognition?

Introduction to seminar /  
Facial machines and obfuscation in an age of biometrics and neural networks at Aarhus University       
By Mitra Azar

Hello, it’s really nice to see all of you here.
I’d like to briefly follow up on some of the ontological and epistemological paradoxes the computational facial machine is producing, because I think that these paradoxes are a good place to start for questioning the cracks of the computational facial machine and for digging into them to resurface with a possibly new understanding of how to re-invent the facial machine itself.

Ontology of the face /
If face-tracking technologies are based on the idea that one’s face is unique and not replicable (e.g. Iphone X locking/ unlocking by recognizing its user’s face), the amount of entertaining face-tweaking apps available on the market seems to suggest exactly the opposite. The face as a peculiar site of singularity turns into one of the privileged site for trackability and datafication, and its uniqueness gets challenged by the aggression of technologies which the more function as a new biometric security system based on the unicity of one’s face, the more transform the face into a replicable surface: face becomes trackable, its features tweakable, and its uniqueness hackable.

Ontology of the facial machine /
If the Deleuzian faciality machine overcodes the body onto the face (which is the capability of the facial machine to turn ”any-image whatever”, to paraphrase Deleuze. into a face), the biometric version of the Facial Machine decodes face into algorithms, exploiting the user’s affective-embodiment and thus producing the affective human it is interacting with. In the case of Face-swap apps, the user’s affective embodiment turns into a compulsive and repetitive ritual (we could call it Selfie performativity, and refer it to an aesthetic of the banal in the sense of Andersen and Pold), which opens to a series of algorithmic procedures that shows the truly surveillance-oriented non-human performativity of this new form of facial machine.

Epistemology of the computational facial machine and regimes of truth /
After the intervention of this new computational facial machine, the truth value held by the face becomes un-assessable, and the face turns into the site where contradictory regimes of truth coexist and feed each other into an aesthetic form which keeps an appearence of immediacy while hiding layers of algorithmic complexity.
The political relevance of this computational facial machine lays on the ambivalent regimes of truth that it belongs to, and on the related practices of circulationism and datification, these regimes produce. From an hermeneutic perspective, the art of circulationism and data extraction seems to lie on this ambivalence: the more immediate an image / information looks the more its newtworking value grows, the more a number of extractive practices are implemented behind its surface.
The computational facial machine’s value might derive from its circulation, its circulation from the look of immediacy it preserves during the algorithmic processing oriented towards first degree datification or biodata extraction (facial feature), and second-degree datification or info-data extraction (contacts, gps) – I’m here still referring to Face-swap apps as a good instantiation of the computational facial machine.
The shrinking of the distance between face and facial machine (or broadly between body and interface) is matched by the shrinking of the distance between fiction and reality, and by the shrinking between an embodied singularity (the face) and a surveillance-oriented disembodied algorithmic agency (facial machine). To a certain degree, and following Mieke Bal interpretation of Caravaggio’s painting, Narcissus – staring at his reflection in the water – is both staring at his face and at a prototypical facial machine which produces similar processes of shrinking: by not being aware of the medium – we would say by not realizing the presence of an interface because of its proximity – Narcissus confuses fiction with reality, with disastrous consequences. We really hope that this seminar will point at directions (both theoretical and practical) to avoid these consequences. 

For full paper please check /
https://www.academia.edu/37522968/The_Algorithmic_Facial_Image_and_the_Relation_between_Truth_Value_and_Money_Value.pdf
http://www.aprja.net/the-algorithmic-facial-image/