Mitra Azar
Short bio:
Mitra Azar is a nomadic video-squatter, ARThropologist and philosopher. For the past fifteen years, Mitra has been investigating crisis areas around the globe, building an archive of site-specific works through the lens of visual art, filmmaking and performance. He’s currently a Ph.D. candidate at Aarhus University (DK), and visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. His work has been presented at Cambridge University, New York University, the Museum of the Moving Image NYC (MOMI), Spectacle Cinema NYC, Uniondocs NYC, the Hong Kong School of Creative Media, Goldsmiths University London, I.R.I Centre Pompidou Paris, the Havana Biennial, The Influencers (Barcelona), Fotomuseum Wintertur, The Venice Biennial (IT), Transmediale Festival (DE), Macba [Sonia] Podcast, Berlinale Film Festival, and more.
Practice based:
My practice based research has aimed at building a virtuous circuit between an aesthetic and political philosophy, a nomadic life style, and a creative practice.
The idea of border as fluid, flexible, amorphous entity and the political role of especially cinematic and post-cinematic art and digital technologies in the frame of an aesthetic of crisis and of mass event have been the focus of my practice based research. Since almost ten years I've been building an archive of site-specific works in some of the most controversial areas of the planet - usually at the very border between confining countries - or in the context of socio-political, cultural and ecological struggles, mainly through the lens of visual anthropology, art, and media philosophy. It is especially during the field work done in the Middle East during the so called ‘Arab Spring’ - where protesters combined the use of a new type of POV 'poor image' with social media - that the core ideas of my Ph.D. research started to take shape.
Research based:
(DIS)ORIENTATION AND POV GENESIS, PROLIFERATION AND APOCALYPSE
A meta-cinematic inquiry on the edge of philosophy and cybernetics
My Ph.D. investigates the role of the notions of orientation, disorientation and POV (Point of View) within the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler and Gilles Deleuze. This is developed by focusing especially on Stiegler’s concept of (originary) technicity, and its relevance in the understanding of algorithmic culture and new technologies of vision. This endeavor seems urgent because the notions of orientation, disorientation and POV appear rather implicit within both philosophical architectures, and yet function as hidden and powerful philosophical engines, practically unacknowledged in years of secondary literature.
The overall inquiry is addressed as “meta-cinematic”, and takes the figure of cinema as a philosophical form capable to address orientation, disorientation, and POV at the limits of Western philosophy itself - limits that both Stiegler and Deleuze have tested and tried to reconfigure in their own way. In fact, the research claims that if these limits are marked by the emergence of cybernetics - understood as the completion of Western metaphysics and the end of philosophy -, one of the ways to reopen philosophy to its outsides might be to challenge cybernetics’ operationality (control and communication) via the implicit conceptual grounding of cybernetics itself. The research argues that this grounding can be rethought by means of the concepts of orientation, disorientation and POV. These concepts are either implied in the etymology of the word cybernetics, invoked by the relevance of the notion of the observer (which is to say, of POV, especially when it comes to second order cybernetics), as well as addressed by the specific recursive form cybernetic orientation takes in terms of feedback loops.
At its core, the overall project wants to build a notion of orientation capable of bridging the divide between the organic and the inorganic, while providing a material ontogenesis of the notion of orientation: from the emergence of orientation in the form of spins (an intrinsic property of elementary particles, rendered mathematically via vectors defined by magnitude and direction), in the realm of physics; to the formation of ecological niches (Umwelten) as oriented fragments of space-time in relation to the organism’s Point of View (POV), in the realm of the biological; to the intricate relation between human and (originary) technicity, triggered by bipedism and the changing of the horizon’s line as a result of upright orientation, in the realm of evolutionary anthropology; to technologies capable to bridle organic orientation and POVs, in the realm of technics, especially in cinema and computational technology. Thus, eventually, the notion of orientation and POV investigated in philosophical terms will be proposed as conceptual tools to understand computational media, on the basis of concepts such as POV-opticon, Algorithmic Facial image, Algorithmic POV.
Mitra Azar is a nomadic video-squatter, ARThropologist and philosopher. For the past fifteen years, Mitra has been investigating crisis areas around the globe, building an archive of site-specific works through the lens of visual art, filmmaking and performance. He’s currently a Ph.D. candidate at Aarhus University (DK), and visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. His work has been presented at Cambridge University, New York University, the Museum of the Moving Image NYC (MOMI), Spectacle Cinema NYC, Uniondocs NYC, the Hong Kong School of Creative Media, Goldsmiths University London, I.R.I Centre Pompidou Paris, the Havana Biennial, The Influencers (Barcelona), Fotomuseum Wintertur, The Venice Biennial (IT), Transmediale Festival (DE), Macba [Sonia] Podcast, Berlinale Film Festival, and more.
Practice based:
My practice based research has aimed at building a virtuous circuit between an aesthetic and political philosophy, a nomadic life style, and a creative practice.
The idea of border as fluid, flexible, amorphous entity and the political role of especially cinematic and post-cinematic art and digital technologies in the frame of an aesthetic of crisis and of mass event have been the focus of my practice based research. Since almost ten years I've been building an archive of site-specific works in some of the most controversial areas of the planet - usually at the very border between confining countries - or in the context of socio-political, cultural and ecological struggles, mainly through the lens of visual anthropology, art, and media philosophy. It is especially during the field work done in the Middle East during the so called ‘Arab Spring’ - where protesters combined the use of a new type of POV 'poor image' with social media - that the core ideas of my Ph.D. research started to take shape.
Research based:
(DIS)ORIENTATION AND POV GENESIS, PROLIFERATION AND APOCALYPSE
A meta-cinematic inquiry on the edge of philosophy and cybernetics
My Ph.D. investigates the role of the notions of orientation, disorientation and POV (Point of View) within the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler and Gilles Deleuze. This is developed by focusing especially on Stiegler’s concept of (originary) technicity, and its relevance in the understanding of algorithmic culture and new technologies of vision. This endeavor seems urgent because the notions of orientation, disorientation and POV appear rather implicit within both philosophical architectures, and yet function as hidden and powerful philosophical engines, practically unacknowledged in years of secondary literature.
The overall inquiry is addressed as “meta-cinematic”, and takes the figure of cinema as a philosophical form capable to address orientation, disorientation, and POV at the limits of Western philosophy itself - limits that both Stiegler and Deleuze have tested and tried to reconfigure in their own way. In fact, the research claims that if these limits are marked by the emergence of cybernetics - understood as the completion of Western metaphysics and the end of philosophy -, one of the ways to reopen philosophy to its outsides might be to challenge cybernetics’ operationality (control and communication) via the implicit conceptual grounding of cybernetics itself. The research argues that this grounding can be rethought by means of the concepts of orientation, disorientation and POV. These concepts are either implied in the etymology of the word cybernetics, invoked by the relevance of the notion of the observer (which is to say, of POV, especially when it comes to second order cybernetics), as well as addressed by the specific recursive form cybernetic orientation takes in terms of feedback loops.
At its core, the overall project wants to build a notion of orientation capable of bridging the divide between the organic and the inorganic, while providing a material ontogenesis of the notion of orientation: from the emergence of orientation in the form of spins (an intrinsic property of elementary particles, rendered mathematically via vectors defined by magnitude and direction), in the realm of physics; to the formation of ecological niches (Umwelten) as oriented fragments of space-time in relation to the organism’s Point of View (POV), in the realm of the biological; to the intricate relation between human and (originary) technicity, triggered by bipedism and the changing of the horizon’s line as a result of upright orientation, in the realm of evolutionary anthropology; to technologies capable to bridle organic orientation and POVs, in the realm of technics, especially in cinema and computational technology. Thus, eventually, the notion of orientation and POV investigated in philosophical terms will be proposed as conceptual tools to understand computational media, on the basis of concepts such as POV-opticon, Algorithmic Facial image, Algorithmic POV.
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PHD/DRAFTS by Mitra Azar
Activities Digest by Mitra Azar
Books by Mitra Azar
Volume 36, Issue 4, 2021, pp. 1093–1312.
Contributors:
Paglen&Crawford, Pasquinellli&Joler, Mirzoeff, Parikka, Bratton, Parisi, Manovich, Gil-Fournier&Parikka, Maleve, Chávez Heras&Blanke, Offert&Bell, Treccani, Celis BuenoMaría&Schultz Abarca, van der Veen, Emsley, Uliasz, Møhl.
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.
Book Chapters by Mitra Azar
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 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.
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)
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".
Journal Papers by Mitra Azar
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.
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities/special_issues/posthumanism
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.
Volume 36, Issue 4, 2021, pp. 1093–1312.
Contributors:
Paglen&Crawford, Pasquinellli&Joler, Mirzoeff, Parikka, Bratton, Parisi, Manovich, Gil-Fournier&Parikka, Maleve, Chávez Heras&Blanke, Offert&Bell, Treccani, Celis BuenoMaría&Schultz Abarca, van der Veen, Emsley, Uliasz, Møhl.
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.
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 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.
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)
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".
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.
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities/special_issues/posthumanism
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.
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 this phase matter is inorganic POV-matter. This is POV genealogy."
please DM or drop an email at lavaletter@protonmail.com if you feel you got something about this - see the link to the call in the pdf.
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.
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.
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.
https://soundcloud.com/abandonnormaldevices/distributed-critique-on-geocinemas-framing-territories
https://www.andfestival.org.uk/blog/nnnpodcasts/
http://www.thinking-head.net
http://www.thinking-head.net/talks/algorithm
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.
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/
by Mitra Azar & Hugo Sir
LAVA – Letters from the Volcano is an experimental zine conceived by Franco “Bifo” Berardi and developed by Mitra Azar, Hugo Sir, and a small group of agitators from the four corners of the world. LAVA emerged from a desire to understand the recent wave of social movements starting in autumn of 2019. These movements involved a number of people from countries with very different sociopolitical and cultural conditions who nevertheless displayed certain common dispositions: the desire to break free from the psychic and economic impoverishment engrained into surveillance-oriented computational neoliberalism, and strategies developed both offline and online towards the achievement of this goal.
LAVA believes that the inevitable is always superseded by the unpredictable.
Issue #1 of LAVA – Letters from the Volcano, entitled “Be Water,” can be read here .
Until the beginning of 2020 it seemed that the volcanic explosion in the form of the unpredictable and simultaneous appearance of radical and direct forms of resistance was taking over the global political scene. Then, all of a sudden, this human-unpredictable was replaced by a nonhuman-unpredictable: the virus COVID-19. The human lava was swept away by a nonhuman lava, and the explosion of the volcano turned inward, imploding.
The virus COVID-19 has taken over the stage of human unrest and has opened the door for a meltdown of the global capitalist economy. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic opens space for rethinking politics from scratch: on the one hand, it allows a profound questioning of the structural dysfunction of global capitalism; on the other, it risks turning the cadaver of capitalism into a zombified techno-fascist limbo of total surveillance, ultimately killing civil society. This political conundrum will be the center of issue #2 of LAVA – Letters from the Volcano, entitled “Be Earth.” The forthcoming issue will deal with nonhuman agents such as COVID-19, melting ice, pollution, and the nonhuman forces that more and more turn into political vectors in ways that, paradoxically, go beyond politics.
https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/lava-from-global-insurrection-to-covid-19/9692