P O L I T I C S O F T H E P O S S I B L E
Performance As Pervasive Agency

The Cyborg ₁

Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Social-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” uses the cyborg as a metaphor for the postmodern subject, positioning humans and machines as mutually inclusive, yet still separate entities. Moving beyond binary logic, Haraway rejects theories of origins or wholeness and claims that the very being of the postmodern subject is constituted by its hybridity. Like many post-structural theorists, Haraway does not define a singular identity or truth for the cyborg subject: the cyborg exists in a perpetual state of indeterminacy.

In 1991, Haraway’s essay was a celebratory announcement of the cyborg subject as an empowering liberation from a singular identification. After nearly twenty years, the growth of media and technology makes Haraway’s cyborg subject even more relevant. The increase of human dependence on technology affects how one establishes reality and identity. Technology has given individuals the ability to define their reality, move fluidly through spaces, and break down boundaries. Technical media, such as social networking sites, television, and surveillance systems, dictate human interactions and, as a result, society has never been more “wired.” The explosion of alternate and global realities has enabled the extraordinary speed of reproduction as well as the social acceptance of voyeurism, making it difficult to distinguish between real and reproduced experiences.

As real events disappear and reappear in reproduced forms, reality becomes accessible and established through technology-driven interfaces and representations. A person’s identity and the very validation of his or her existence are based on recognition by technologically engineered systems that produce images, modes of perception, and human actions. More than ever, Haraway’s claim seems applicable: that the cyborg is a “creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” ³

In his seminal work, Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard hypothesizes that “simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.” ⁴ As one’s reality and place is dictated by recognition from technological systems, individual experiences are sacrificed for centrally collected and viewed images and information—for simulations of the real. In its move away from individuality and toward dependence on technological media, the cyborg subject is prone to feel a loss or lack of knowledge of its origins. The result is a cycle: identity becomes even more dependent on, and subservient to, a series of omnipresent technological systems. Haraway’s cyborg subject of empowerment still exists, but it is not untroubled in its terms and relationship with technological systems. In my work, I try to break the loop and examine the possibility for new contracts between the individual and the system.

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1  Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and                        Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, and London: Free Associations Books, 1991), 149.

2  Ibid., 160.

3  “Jean Baudrillard – Simulacra and Simulations – I. The Precession of Simulacra,” http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/simulacra-and-simulations-i-the-precession-of-simulacra/.

// Laura Alesci, 2010 //

Learningtoloveyoumore.com invites anyone who visits the website to complete assignments created by the artist Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. Started in 2002, learningtoloveyoumore.com began as a web-based project. Later, it evolved into a series of exhibitions and a book documenting the participants’ responses.

The site is a collaborative project based on responses to each assignment from ordinary individuals. The assignments’ themes range from the emotional therapy (#63 make an encouraging banner) to the meaningless (#41 document your bald spot). But all of the attempts to draw pubic participants have one thing in common: they suggest that the artist is commenting on the web’s epistemology.

Learningtoloveyoumore.com embodies the spirit of “informal media” that has exploded in the past two decades. The popularity of blogs pushed this type of media forward and expanded its prevalence in society. Blogs allow people to self-publish, giving anyone the right to make their personal reflections available to the public. As Nick Gall describes, “blogging is the voice of a person…it’s a new form of conversation and a new form of community.” 2  As a result more self-confessional and ordinary daily events are being mused over.

Similar to blog postings, the responses to each assignment organize the extraordinary archive of ordinary and often mundane experiences of life into a collective collage. Assignment #63 charges people to create encouraging banners with a phrase that they might repeat to themselves as self-affirmation. As part of the exercise, the artist instructs people to display the banner, take a picture of it and send it to the artist who later posts the picture on the site. Banners with statements like “everything is not broken” and “everybody loves you” are archived on the site. These mimic the personal comments people write in blog entries. 3

The site also invokes the web’s ability to democratize information and challenge formal hierarchies. Exchanging information without the need for an institutional “seal of approval” from the mainstream media has empowered social networks where amateurs and experts coexist, interact and inspire each other.

Assignment # 8 imitates the institutionalized practice of exhibitions by asking the participants to curate an artists’ retrospective in a public place. The assignment entails Xeroxing images created by an artist of your choice and displaying the collection in a public space. The photocopies, which should be black and white, must come from books and magazines that show the artist’s work. The self-made exhibit also must include a curatorial statement based on personal opinion. By giving people an opportunity to display homemade retrospectives on fences and bulletin boards Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher want to make art accessible to everyone, instead of only in the institutionalized spaces of galleries and museums.

The curatorial task in assignment # 8 emulates how information is gathered and accessed on the web. It comments on what the web knows, how it knows it, and the authenticity of sources. A search engine does not answer a query logically. Search engines cull data through a system that ranks sites by counting how many links it has to similar words in the query. 4

Search engines find and disseminate information based on the newness or freshness of the data. Links and page views allow search engines to gauge how to rank results. Original authorship and authenticity do not factor into this vetting process. Instead, a search engine places the most copied, manipulated and reprocessed information at the top of its search result list.

The actual source of the information is often buried or untraceable unless the majority of web users decide to refer and link back to it regularly. In the same way, Assignment #8 asks participants to make photocopies of pictures, which themselves are copies of original artworks. With each photocopy, the artwork migrates further away from its original source—just like information on the Internet. The photocopied reproductions allow the artwork to reach a wider and more diverse audience but sacrifice uniqueness in the process.

The assignment critiques a system that relies on circulation of images and redistribution of the images from their original source.

Miranda July and Harrell Fetcher employ the language that characterizes the web’s “informal media.” This type of web culture is used to rally participation and create a space that takes the private into the public.

Learningtoloveyoumore.com creates a unifying experience through playing on the nature of web culture. It takes participants outside of the insular involvement of using a computer through assignment-based activities involving the real everyday world.

Similar to the project based Situationalist of creating situations to restore authenticity in life, the purpose of the assignments in learningtoloveyoumore.com forms a community that uses a new forum (the web) of unification to experience everyday life free from alienation.

In their manifesto the Situationalists describe, “our society of spectacle is a nightmare with alienation, consumerism as opium, lack of authenticity. So what really is the situation? It’s the realization of a better game, which more exactly is provoked by the human presence.” 5

LearningtoLoveyoumore.com resembles a game in which there are players and assignment makers. LearningtoLoveyoumore.com is both a movement and a development in modernity, captured by Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher when they state:

“The best art and writing is almost like an assignment; it is so vibrant that you feel compelled to make something in response. Suddenly it is clear what you have to do. For a brief moment it seems wonderfully easy to live and love and create breathtaking things.” 6

A Brief History of Cyber Culture

A small anarchic community of wire heads and hackers made the mistake of giving fire to the masses. Nobody is going to give it back…this wonderful community is not a community anymore. It’s a society. – John Markoff

In 1993 the New York Time’s John Markoff confirmed that the global network was “the world’s most fashionable rendezvous” an “on-line gathering spot for millions of users.” In its infancy it was called the World Wide Web, a sterile space utilized mainly by government organizations. The advancements of social networks and technology, however, transformed it into what is commonly known today as the Internet.

Now more than every before, people are spending increasing amounts of time living in cyberspace, forming pockets of small closed groups that are separate from the greater gathering grounds. As a result communities have emerged, forming a virtual mini society within our world.

The roots of cyber culture can be traced to the technological hype of the 1990’s, which grew out of the countercultural ideologies of the 1960’s and 70’s. Timothy Leary proclaimed the PC as “the LSD of the 1990s.”

Like the temporary communities of shared consciousness of the 1960’s, cyberspace provided a venue to cull crowds and create a self –regulated society, whose goals were to destabilize, move away from the mainstream and build an egalitarian society.

In his article, “We owe it all to the Hippies”, Stewart Bard emphasized the influence of the 1960’s counterculture on the new revolutionaries in cyberspace. He argued that the counterculture’s scorn for centralized authority provided the philosophical foundations of the leaderless Internet and the entire personal- computer revolution.

The Internet became an open landscape free from physical constraints and geographical limitations, allowing large numbers of diverse people to congregate. The Net became a place of empowerment, connecting people with similar interests and ideologies, inspiring them to take collective action and provoke global change.

Hackers are considered the heroes of the computer revolution. Instead of an instrument that only a few select groups can wield to achieve their own goals, hackers turned the computer into a tool that was accessible to the masses.

Steve Wozniak was a key figure in developing “unlimited and total access to computers”. Before co-founding Apple, he and John Draper experimented with the telephone. Wozniak and Draper bypassed the mainstream telephone services by hacking phones with a pocket box attachment that provided free service. As the device grew in popularity, an underground social network called “phone phreaks” developed around its use.

Wozniak and Draper hosted social conferences similar to modern chat rooms, where people with similar interests connected anonymously on the network free of charge. As a sign of their dedication to anonymity, they distributed masks and touted the slogan “wear a mask, nobody ever caught the Lone Ranger”. The “phone phreaks” are like the Lone Ranger, riding on the speedy Silver lightning of the phone lines. These rangers roamed the channels that were supposed to be closed, and by opening them they righted injustices of the evil “System”. The “phone phreaks” de-stabilized the system by exerting control over the monopolized telephone industry.

Brain Harvey, a former Atari hacker, declares that hacking did not start out as technical pursuit but rather an approach to life. The initial agenda of the hacker was a committee to personal liberation.

With a similar intention of subversive play, sense of exploration, and general fascination as the phone phreaks, Steve Russell invented the first computer game, Spacewar!. The development of the game started when Digital Equipment Corporation’s new computer, the PDP-1, was sent to MIT to be used in hopes of “revolutionizing information processing for the greater glory of corporate America.”

Instead, Spacewar! was developed and it spread like a virus across campuses and research labs. Since it was an open-source program, it created a communal coding experience. Newer, more improved versions of Spacewar! started to emerge from different locations.

Steve Levy commented on Steve Russell’s developments at the 1984 Hackers Conference: “when Steve Russell wrote Spacewar! as a hack and some people in the room helped improve it, the improvements came because it was an open program…in some more “serious” things like assemblers and compilers and all sorts of utility programs, the same system benefited everyone there. I think things happened that wouldn’t have happened if programs were sequestered away and kept proprietary.”

Although the MIT hackers could care less about “revolutionizing information processing and sharing it with corporate American”, figures such as Steve Russell and David Rodman initiated the spread of interest in computing outside the hacker counterculture.

For some people, Spacewar! was their very first glimpse of a computer. “What happened,” says Russell, “was that most of the people who had access to the PDP-1 would show their family and friends what they were doing and they would demonstrate with Spacewar!, because it was more interesting than watching someone debug a program with DDT. Actually. I think the thing I take the most pride in about Spacewar! is that it got so many people hooked on computer programming.”

These prominent hackers initiated a computer-oriented society, fostering the developments of the Internet culture. Most modern software is based on programs developed by hackers that were freely distributed and open-source. The revolution of computers facilitated networking, open communication and collaboration. As the virtual world grew power moved away from traditional media such as the TV and radio, to the “people’s net.”

The hacker’s original intent changed in sync with new developments in computing. Their original “hippie” or rebel image slowly faded as their programming skills became popular and spread into the mainstream.

The rebel image of long hair and late-night prowling were no longer viewed as acts of defiance, but were now seen as marks of genius. Hackers became entrepreneurial hippies who wielded computers like LSD, transforming America into a turned-on, high-tech new economy.

The utopian vision of the cyberspace, and the initial functionality that it promoted, became a new venue for capitalist interest. The high-speed rate of information distribution attracted marketers. As Douglas Rushkoff states, the object of the game for business on-line, “was to get people’s hands off the keyboard and onto the mouse. Less collaboration, more consumption.” The concept of freely exchanging information, pioneered by the cyber culture’s “revolutionaries”, became available to a larger population of businesses and personal computer users.

Clive Thompson’s article, “If you Liked This, You’re Sure to Love That”, reveals how corporations use open- source hacker ideology for profitable interest. Thompson examines how Netflix wanted to improve upon the accuracy of its recommendation engine, Cinematch. Using the Internet’s power of collaboration and its ability to connect to a large group of people, Netflix held an open call competition. The prize of $1 million dollars was offered to the first programmer who could improve upon Cinematch’s predictions by 10 percent. According to Thompson, “30,000 hackers worldwide were hard at work on the problem.”

The media theorist Douglas Rushkoff declared, “most of those helpful hackers were now vested employees of dot-com companies.” Once the power of cyberspace was given to the masses, it became an avenue to control market interests, browsers and search engines were designed to keep users either buying products or consuming commercial content.

Although hackers did not achieve the utopian ideals that they originally dreamed of, they did succeed in creating a new world. Organizations were not flattened and control was not decentralized, but the hacker’s actions created the functional foundation of cyber culture. As Rushoff explains that the principal use of the Internet was for socializing, and the entrepreneurial spirit that developed within went against its very functionality. He states, “The Internet was not born to support the kind of global economic boom that venture capitalists envisioned. The inevitable collapse of the dot-com pyramid was not part of some regular business cycle. And it most certainly was not the collapse of anything having to do with the Internet. No, what we witnessed was the Internet fending off an attack. The Internet never does what it’s supposed to do. It has a mind, and life, of its own. That’s because we’re alive, too”.

As more businesses work side by side with programmers to gain knowledge of computing and tactics that facilitate personal consumption, the market of large businesses, such as Netflix, will continue to grow. Ultimately, these corporations coexist alongside self-structured communities that still thrive on the original structure of the Internet.

Smart mobs are one of the newest forms of a self–structured social action. Howard Rheingold, in his book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, first introduced the idea of smart mobs.

Smart mobs follow the “emergent behavior” system, which develops out of patterns that arise from a collection of relatively simple interactions. The original smart mobs were teenage “thumb tribes” in Tokyo and Helsinki who punched out short, cheap text messages on primitive cell phones to organize impromptu raves.

Smart mobs have developed into collective political action through the use of computer networks and mobile media. Through the advent of new technologies, this amplified version of human collaboration can be both advantageous and damaging depending on the mob’s goal. Smart mobs helped overthrow President Joseph Estrada of the Philippines in 2001. An hour after fresh news of corruption arose; a text message summoned a large group of black-clad protesters to a public plaza.

Self-structured social communities, such as smart mobs, are sprouting up across the Internet in higher frequency. These independent, self-organized grouping of people are the idealistic social structure that does not comply with the structure that venture capitalist envisioned for the Internet.

Much like the hippies, hacker’s originally believed that they would be able to avoid capitalism. The commune cultures of the hippy lifestyle saw a dramatic rise in numbers between the years 1967 and 1970. In 1967 there were about 7,000 communed and by 1970, 750,000 people lived in more then 10,000 communes. Their ultimate goal was to drop the chains of oppression forced upon them by the “system”. Hippies viewed the government as system of ladders that structured the mass population to the bottom rung and ultimately into oppression. Both hippies and hackers wanted to create another world where there could live without the constraints of hierarchical systems and structures. In both cases they dealt with social action through non-participation and subversion. Hippies believed they could exert control over the applied capitalist structure by not participating in commerce, refusing to pay taxes, and disregarding the draft.

No matter how far into the wild hippies tried to escape by joining communes, they would not be able to retreat from the constraints of a hierarchical structure. Ultimately, they worked against themselves. Obstacles like the need to purchase hallucinogenic narcotics would have them continue to participate in capitalism. More notably, routine campfire life became gender-orientated role-playing. As Fred Turner explains, “in commune life the men went off and talked about important things, while women tended to the children, and food.” The kind of hierarchy that they were struggling to escape was also beset upon themselves in the commune structure.

The true mode of progression is not in the non-participation approach of the hippies, nor is it the subversive behavior in exclusive cyber culture communities; the answer lies in turning the ladder of hierarchy on it’s side and viewing its rungs as interconnecting cultural vines that have no end. The greatest level of this new ladder becomes significant social action. As Robert Irwin states, “What I would like to do now is take our familiar structural hierarchy, remove it’s transcendental concepts (with the intent of replacing them with a single infinite subject) and to do in effect turn it on its side and begin to think of all our art world actions as part of our everyday process of social innovation…what were earlier hierarchically characterized as rungs on a ladder, in an upward progression should now be thought of as an interlocking – equal value – art actions that go to make the discipline of art into meaningful social action.”

What emerged from the progress of the Internet is a society like any other society, where capitalist’s ventures, grassroots ideals and rebels coexist. When two forces contradict each other, there are validated simply by their continually interactions. While the Internet is not the Utopian landscape that hackers originally envisioned it to be, it did succeed in creating an ever-expanding space for opposing, yet coexisting interactions to occur.

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John Markoff, “THING; The Internet,” The New York Times, 5 September 1993.
Mark Dery, Escape Velocity: Cyber culture at the End of the Century (Grove Press, 1997).
Stewart Brand, “We Owe It All To The Hippies,” Time Magazine 01 March 1995.
Stewart Brand and Matt Herron, “1984 Ad,” Whole Earth Review May 1985.
“Secret History of Hacking”, Discovery Channel Documentary, n.d.
Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyber culture: Stewart Brand the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
Douglas Rushkoff, “The People’s Net”, July 2001, November 2008 .
Clive Thompson, “If You Liked This, You’re Sure to Love That,” The New York Times Magazine 23 Nov 2008.

// Laura Alesci, 2009 //

The cyborg subject, a hybridization of “the human and the machine,” has the potential to create a new contract between two elements; like a cyborg subject, my project TLC involves the joining of two agents. One agent, a class of molecules known as capsaicinoids ⁷, is the active chemical agent of pepper spray. The parent compound in this group is capsaicin A, which chili peppers naturally produce. The second agent, CS, is a non-naturally occurring molecule, and the active component of tear gas. Ben Corson and Roger Stoughton first synthesized CS gas at Middlebury College in 1928; the title of the compound refers to the chemists’ surnames.

7   TLC, 2010
ISOLATED CAPSAICIN, 2010

For my research with TLC, I worked with a chemist at Brown University to study the chemical properties of the two agents. Soon after, I learned the basic process of using lab equipment to run reactions and test for products. The name TLC comes from the plates that are used for these tests. Thin layer chromatography (TLC) is used to monitor and visualize reactions. ⁸ The plates indicate if the reaction has occurred and if the product is useful.

In TLC, I continued to investigate the institutional ordering of protection and security to control crowds and individuals. I researched the chemical properties of tear gas and pepper spray because both are agents of security used to divide and control individuals.

 8   TLC, 2010 THIN LAYER CHROMATOGRAPHY, THE NEW PRODUCT AFTER THE COUPLING.

I first started the project thinking about how tear gas can be used in a softer way. The term “tear gas” has a poetic nature; a substance that elicits tears could be beautiful. Please Watch Over Me questions the meaning of surveillance and security, specifically the nature of observations. I used the policing system and the officer’s role of observing beyond the systems’ prescribed function, revealing the desire to be watched. When using agents such as tear gas and pepper spray, a boundary is established between one individual and another. This relationship is analogous to the acts of observing another and being observed.

Further, TLC examines how the chemical elements of security and protection are used; observing another and being observed are necessary for these agents to be used.

Exploring the function of riot control agents, I investigated how they can be used to formulate a new relationship. The joining of the two compounds, the natural capsaicin and the synthetic CS gas, is made possible by first deconstructing and then chemically fusing the two. The resulting hybrid contains half of each original, effectually sharing a portion of each other’s essence.

9 TLC, 2010.  THE RESULTING PRODUCTS WERE STIRRED OVERNIGHT, CHEMICALLY DANCING IN RESONANCE. IN THE MORNING OF THE NEXT DAY IT WAS CLEAR THAT A REACTION HAD TAKEN PLACE, AND A NEW BOND WAS FORMED.

As in losing oneself within the other or one’s lover, previous boundaries blur. The two active properties of tear gas and pepper spray are similar, but exist on opposite sides of nature’s spectrum. By deconstructing them, it becomes possible to merge them into each other, resulting in a new and ambiguous structure. The project literally doubles, both in its physical manifestation and in its meaning.

TLC deconstructs the function of security and protection, reveals its role, and simultaneously constructs a hybrid “molecule” that breaks down rigid boundaries and enables a new entity to exist within the control system’s framework. An ambiguous, non-natural natural product is produced, disrupting the binary relationship and dissolving boundaries

By deconstructing and coupling CS and pepper spray, a molecule with nonthreatening properties emerges. ⁹ After purification, the new molecule is dissolved in acetone and water, placed into a humidifier, and vaporized. The effect mimics a tear gas grenade being detonated in a room. In the final installation for TLC, I have constructed a contained room that holds the vaporous cloud; the room is lit to experience the pink cloud vapor.

My research and experiences, particularly in Please Watch Over Me and TLC, have revealed the nature of security. According to Weibel, “the more visibility is supported and produced as an agent of security the less security there is in reality.” ²⁵ In other words, security has come to mean being seen and seeing. In TLC, the pink vapor illustrates the function of security, the desire to see and be seen. It is an ornamentation of control.

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²⁵ Peter Weibel, “Pleasure and the Panoptic Principle,” in CTRL SPACE Rhetoric of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ed. Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel Thomas Y. Levin, 212 (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2002).