Para-Archives - Rethinking Personal Archiving Practices in the Times of Capture Culture

  • this paper is like a whole long paper v similar to my Masters thesis topic but from a Media and Communications Studies perspective, uses much more in the way of examples of individual creative practises than in enabling generalised resistive practise over the web as I’m looking at
  • personal memory assembled and disassembled - formalised and destroyed in the process - we are looking in contrast to preserve the subjective context
  • ars memoraie - the art of memory, mind palace etc
  • memory assistant -> forgetting assistant , similar to chatbot shift of thinking assistant, deciding assistant
  • recording > capturing
  • ‘capture your imagination’ - holding it in detention, grasping hold but limiting it - how when I get a spark of inspiration I save it for later but it is held there suspended because I can’t make progress on my thinking about it until later. Orchestration of attention rather than contemplating and organising as is implied by recording
  • my work is from the perspective of someone who avoids automatic capture of information wherever possible. The only auto-captures without explicit consent I appreciate are eg evidence of appointments stored for medical/legal/financial reasons, and auto browser history/recently visite- though I’d rather Even have more control over these kinds. Even media watching i prefer to track myself
  • captured image on phone equally for memory as for instant communication - preferring now immediacy over selectivity
  • institutional archivists forced to embraced multiplicity to remain relevant within mass new medium
  • early snapshots as tactical appropriation of the media, questioning standardisation and platforming subjectivity !
  • encouraging snapshots with a subjective ‘spiritual center’ - that is, an individual’s thematic framing of their snapshots !!
  • mentions of trans individuation which is a v useful concept here
  • subversive quality to image capture only if used ‘attentively’
  • mass survey == mass surveillance??
  • a para-archival mindset - capturing with internal framework and beliefs - like capturing along themes and within your own guidelines ?

  • “PARA-ARCHIVES” ⤴️

  • “to build on the reflection and critique of these prevailing forms, so as to speculate on and develop other inventive modes of living with capturing and archiving technologies” ⤴️

  • “creative use of today’s affordable or license-free technologies. These include small size, easily portable cameras, audio recording devices as well as software products and services enabling a record and processing of various fragments of the surrounding world as it unfolds from the perspective of my everyday life.” ⤴️

  • “Part II also comprises a set of short case studies: a collection of different instances and manifestations of dominant practices, mechanisms and technologies concerned with capturing, mediating and archiving memories in everyday life.” ⤴️

  • “various modulations that recent technological transformations have instigated in terms of material, temporal, agential, performative and ethical aspects of everyday, personal memory practices.” ⤴️

  • “pervasively operating mechanisms of capture and archiving and that the boundary between voluntary and involuntary forms of those has become ever more questionable today.” ⤴️

  • “more specifically: soundtracking, minuting (focused on sound recording) misquoting, mapping (concerned with re-purposing the excess of visual, printed matter), self-tracking (utilizing GPS technology) as well as the process of digitally crafting a framework that organizes their outcomes.” ⤴️

  • “fragmentarium, a physical, hybrid-media cabinet to house the analog and digital outcomes of my on-going practices.” ⤴️

  • “para-archiving, seen simultaneously as both a conceptual tool helping to problematize the dynamics and aesthetics of living with technologies and a creative media practice through which the individual’s position in relation to the inescapable context of capturing and archiving technologies, can be negotiated and inventively reconfigured, from within.” ⤴️

  • “the parallel nature of my practices in relation to other streams of my everyday life” ⤴️

  • “differentiate them from other, official archiving practices undertaken by for example memory institutions (such as state archives” ⤴️

  • “taking into consideration its concern with manual, performative and material aspects, can be seen as one that occurs parallel to other kinds of both voluntary and non-voluntary, automated, imperceptible capturing and micro-archiving practices and mechanisms taking place on daily basis, and which, as it will be argued, are inscribed deeply in the workings of today’s computational technologies.” ⤴️

  • “to my mind this dream/nightmare constitutes quite a strong mne- monic trace” ⤴️

  • “it sends me back to a particular moment in my research trajectory.” ⤴️

  • “I started noticing a strong polarization of attitudes towards the growing abundance of various personal, capturing, and archiving technologies. I have perceived this split in terms of a dream versus a nightmare scenario.” ⤴️

  • “increasing entanglement in numerous domains of everyday life is presented as an inherently positive and empowering consequence of the digital revolution.” ⤴️

  • “he ubiquity of cap- turing technologies is presented as a prerequisite for data-based economies, neo-liberal markets and their alliances with national security agencies. Personal data acquired via passively operating net- work devices and capturing practices en- countered on a daily basis better enables the control, discipline, and management of societies.” ⤴️

  • “substantial impoverishment of the modes through which individuals and collectives access and experience the world and effectively construct their account of it on a micro- scale.” ⤴️

  • “o “higher productivity, more vitality and longer lifespans, deeper and wider knowledge of our world and ways to accomplish things in it” (Bell and Gemmell, 2009, p.8). On a macro-level, the more personal data is captured and shared, the more precisely and effectively we might address such issues as crime- prevention, terrorism-counteraction, and general security.” ⤴️

  • “impedes and gradually obliterates chances for “a sin- gular access to the world” (Berardi, 2014) turning us into mere passive witnesses of the ultimate “colonization of real time” (Lovink, 2011, p.11).” ⤴️

  • “recognizing the pharmacological nature of technology, which is to say, technology’s simultaneously poisonous and remedial potentials” ⤴️

  • “he nature of technology is always inherently am- bivalent which means that the poisonous and remedial qualities of technologies are never given. (Stiegler, 2010, 2012). The poisonous dimension of a given technical system, which, as he claims, is often recognized first, might become curative “through the process of appropriation by society and the development of new modes of psychic and collective individuation based on this technical system.”(in Lemmens, 2011)” ⤴️

  • “contrasting functions of technologies, such as empowering/disempowering, liberating/ disciplining, constructive/destructive, attentive/disruptive” ⤴️

  • “never predefined, fixed, and mutually exclusive. Instead, their functions are ac- tivated and disabled depending on circumstances, contexts, and ways in which people orient themselves toward, appropriate, and entangle the technological into their lives.” ⤴️

  • “it is never the machine itself that should be exam- ined and condemned (or praised) as the cause of a given state of affairs, but the way that humanity has understood or misunderstood its role within “the world of meanings,” which is to say, culture (Simondon, 1980, p.2). T” ⤴️

  • “historically persistent habit of abstracting a technical device from its entanglement in cultural and social relations instead of recognizing the originary technicity of human culture (Stiegler, 1998)” ⤴️

  • “establish a bridge with the field of cultural studies, and more specifically, Michel de Certeau,” ⤴️

  • “What Stiegler describes as a pharmacological potential of technology becomes the subject of negotiation in what de Certeau calls ways of oper- ating (from French arts de faire, which in direct translation means the art of doing). This term can be defined as the “internal manipulations of a system” (1984, p.25). If, as said before, every cultural epoch can be characterized by the dominance of technical systems that establish particular regimes, limitations, and norms defining the status of the individual and collective (ibid, p.XXIII), it can also be characterized by various practices that use the ever-existing possibility to shift and re-combine the elements of this system for another, alternative purpose:” ⤴️

  • “‘ways of operating’—” ⤴️

  • “styles of action intervene in a field which regulates them at a first level” ⤴️

  • “but they introduce into it a way of turning it to their advantage that obeys other rules and constitutes something like a second level interwoven into the first (de Certeau, 1984, p.31).” ⤴️

  • “the way of operating in relation to the technology and technological possibilities of a given moment could be understood as the deployment of a proprietary technical device (information system, service, technical infrastructure) in adherence to some disparate motivation. If the technical device is always inherently constrained by a certain horizon of limitations (or a preference of a default use) that regulates its use (and thus its user) at the first level, the deliberate insertion of a specific intention, alternative horizon and set of rules might be seen as constituting an auxiliary, parallel layer that does not change the system, but enables users to benefit from it in another way, and on another level.” ⤴️

  • “cataloguing various aspects of everyday life with recording technologies. The kind of durational aesthetic strategies embedded in everyday life I have also followed with regard to other practitioners whose works evolve through the patterns of daily life, utilize recording technologies in everyday life, or take the quotidian as their subject.” ⤴️

  • “McLuhan stated: When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result […]. I believe that artists, in all media, respond soonest to the challenge of new pressures. I would like to suggest that they also show us ways of living with new technology without destroying earlier forms and achievements (1997, p.125).” ⤴️

  • “respond to technological changes with the ability to situate the present moment in a broader historical and cultural context” ⤴️

  • “McLuhan seems to designate them as a distinctive group of people who are skilled and privileged to show “us” (by which, presumably, he means non-artists and regular consumers) how to live with new technologies and deal with their implications.” ⤴️

  • “changes in arts even “lag behind the changes of the mode of life” (Bauman, 2008, p.138).” ⤴️

  • “McLuhan’s definition of amateurism might be more productive here. He believes amateurism is about “the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society” (McLuhan, 2001, p.92” ⤴️

  • “The amateur (Barthes, 1977, p.52), in contrast to the professional, does not operate in an environment demarcated by the ground rules of a given specialization” ⤴️

  • “I seek to blur the boundary between the amateur and professional, and consequently, artistic practice and practice of everyday life” ⤴️

  • “invention is less about inaugurating the new, novel and original than re-thinking relations between existing elements of the world to conceive of a new, innovative constellation” ⤴️

  • “moves beyond their constraints or recombines these constraints so they become productive towards some other directions, aims and motivations.” ⤴️

  • “a reconfiguration of the way one attends to capturing technologies addresses alternative, individuated purposes such as constructing a subjective record of the time.” ⤴️

  • “I have had the privilege of working on a doc- toral thesis which, from the beginning, I intended to correspond with my on-going, creative work. I often pondered how to bring it into the research context. This is partly due the fact that, in the field of media and communications, basing a study on one’s own art and aesthetic work has not been established as a mode of (doctoral) research” ⤴️

  • “to bring research (and research thinking) into creative practices that have already been part of my everyday life.” ⤴️

    • “People tend to project onto others the intentions that guide their own technological practises and habits.”
    • para-archival — as a media practise where the capture and cataloguing is deliberately besides or parallel to the inbuilt logs and the standard habitual uses of the device. The device relies on its own mechanisms and motivations that differ from yours
    • Toby Miller 2009 rundown of media tech through history seen as dangerous by conservatives due to the elitist leanings of cultured/uncultured, expert/inexpert
    • cultural studies of the everyday took off in the UK in the 60s
    • prior to this ‘uses and gratification’ studies showed ‘selective orientation’ to media, somewhat of an alternative to the pessismism of the times’ critical theory. Questions the allegedly hegemonic role of media and highlights voluntary meaning making from media, from the 40s even

  • “several perspectives united in the interest in media practice (and media as practice), as discussed historically within the field of media and communication studies, and outside, with the recent mate- rial turn that endorses an empirical approach to studying media technologies,” ⤴️

  • “Social Technology Studies (STS) balances this human-centric perspective on agency by pointing that for instance organizations, institutions, technologies, designed objects all constitute various material affordances and constraints (Gibson, 1977) that subsequently turn them into equally valid agents in influencing shaping and affecting networks of relations and dependencies in the world (Latour, 1999; Law, 2004; Majchrzak and Markus, 2013).” ⤴️

  • “for media archaeology the archive is first and foremost a configuration of technical and material elements that condition the way that things can be said. Thus the digital, multimedia archive organizes the said (or yet-to- be-said) unlike the analog.” ⤴️

  • “The former evades the confines of chronology and semantics as the primary criteria for organizing, mediating, and ac- cessing information, instead producing discrete, particular, and micro- temporary experiences of time that strongly defy any fixed order.” ⤴️

  • “In Wolfgang Ernst’s words, the contemporary archive “transforms into a mathematically defined space” where “narrative is replaced by calculation” (2013, pp.134-135). ”

  • “Opposing the stability, fixed order, and permanence characterizing the nineteenth-century positivist archives (Spieker, 2008), the digital archive foregrounds contingency, performativity, recon- figurability, modularity. The same qualities, adopted as research methods, enable a plurality of avenues for rewiring history of media technological inventions for memory and storage, for instance, by relating digital reconfigurability to rhetorical mechanisms of medieval practices of ars memoriae (Ernst, 2013, p.85), tracing topological resemblances between digital storage and seventeenth-century combinatorial art facilitated by inventions like Kirchner’s Arca Musarithmica (an inventory of musical patterns for generating ever-new compositions), or even by comparing digital databases to campfires “used (like command-line middle-ware) by the younger members of the community to access the information stored in the minds of the elders” (Sol, 1998, no pagination).” ⤴️

  • “the goal is to indicate technology’s (and by implication, digital archives’) increasing intensity and inseparability from the very fabric of the culture (the way we produce, consume, represent and participate in it), and secondly, to remind us of the irreducible material dimension of technologies and its persisting presence in contemporary network technologies, despite their seemingly ephemeral and invisible nature.” ⤴️

  • “While the term can be seen as a construct, to a large extent inspired by a blend of Stiegler’s philosophy of technology and de Certeau’s interest in the evasiveness of the everyday as a terrain rich in what Ben Highmore call “para-archives” (de Certeau, 1984; Highmore, 2006), it also draws on a sister term, counter-archive, coined by film and media scholar Paula Amad (2012).” ⤴️

  • ““sediments of time itself” (Spieker, 2008, p.8)” ⤴️

  • “redefining archiving as not past- but future-oriented practice; not passive, but generative, or even immoderately excessive” ⤴️

  • “appropriating the media of the time for single-mindedly ”constructing and manipulating history” (ibid., p.158), assembling, what she calls “archives volontaire,” which is to say, voluntary, subjective accounts from the perspective of daily life” ⤴️

  • “In the hands of an individual, the camera denounced the “positivist utopia of order, synthesis, and totality,” replacing these categories with “disorder, fragmentation, and con- tingency” (Amad, 2010, p.21).” ⤴️

  • “I propose to see the empowering quality of para-archiving in it happening despite, aside from or in a soft insubordination to dominant norms, measures, and patterns. Nevertheless, what I intend to retain from Amad’s concept (and carry on while discussing para-archiving) is mostly a plurality of ways for apprehending the notion of archive and archiving, where, besides seeing them as a burden of the past, techno-political apparatuses that closely regulate what and how we say and remember (Foucault, 1972; Derrida, 1998) can, at the same time, be seen as vital, empowering practices initiated and performed single-mindedly through a creative, insub- ordinate, amateur and disparate use of available technologies, technical components and mechanisms of said apparatuses.” ⤴️

  • “s a broader sense and meaning of the term “personal,” b” ⤴️

  • “t in relation with the broader notion of subjectivity and the formation of subjecthood through a particular way of “folding” and “internalizing” outside forces (Deleuze, 1991) as well as exteriorizing them into para-archival expressions that are at the same time personal and public.” ⤴️

  • “n invitation to apprehend the notion of the personal differently, not as implying a move inward (protection from the outside and the public), but also (and in today’s media technological landscape, perhaps inevitably) an attentive, reflective, and critical exteriorization of one’s subjecthood into para-archival traces.” ⤴️

  • “capture culture is a contemporary techno-cultural context where tech- nologies through which people voluntarily capture and archive various aspects of their life also capture and archive these lives involuntarily, against or despite their will.” ⤴️

  • “mnemotechnologies or memory technologies, as I will join Bernard Stiegler in calling them (2010)” ⤴️

  • “he questions that will be addressed, especially in this part of the thesis devoted to the context, are: To what degree do these mnemotechnologies affect the dynamics and aesthetics of experiencing and recording everyday life? How do mnemotechnologies reconfigure the role and meaning of personal capturing and archiving practices?” ⤴️

  • “What insights can historical and contemporary aesthetic prac- tices involving technologies of capture provide to inspire other modes of personal archiving than those offered by the mnemo- technologies currently prevailing in capture culture? What observations can be acquired by committing to personal archiving practices that might address and challenge modes of living with technologies prevalent in capture culture? In the context of capture culture, what tactics or strategies might be conceptualized and implemented into the everyday use of technologies to enable the emergence of inventive modes of personal archiving beyond the ones offered by dominant mnemo- technologies?” ⤴️

  • “een the voluntary and involuntary capture are contested. Consequently, “mnemotechnique,” which describes more individuated, small-scale, manual, and attentive modes of working with externalized memory, is a notion in question in the context of today’s media-technological landscape.” ⤴️

  • “It sends us to the beginning of the last century, when serious concerns arose in response to the proliferation of the first consumer-oriented cameras. Those concerns were raised by the excess of visual images that came from amateur snapshooting, by exten- sion questioning their historical, archival, and personal significance. Th” ⤴️

  • “he process of constructing of a hybrid media archival cabinet, fragmentarium” ⤴️

  • “The first part of this auto-ethnographic analysis concentrates on such aspects of personal archiving as materiality, performativity, and ambiguity” ⤴️

  • “he third part of this practice-based study follows the process of making the fragmentarium, a hybrid media cabinet, comprised of digital and non-digital traces from my recording practices. This part of practical work is inspired by a method of reverse-remediation which creates a ground for speculating on possibilities for more autonomous and reflec- tive approach to crafting and organizing one’s mnemonic legacy in light of the accelerating digitization and technical management of every detail of personal and social life. This exploration begins with another turn to- wards the past, this time to some pre-digital forms and material practices involved in the organization of personal archives. While producing this hybrid-media cabinet and its digital substructure, I explore the material, temporal and performative aspects with a particular focus on the notion of hybridity. This exploration allows me to establish a closer link between para-archiving and the concept of the post-digital, and subsequently, to problematize this hybrid media approach to personal memory and archiving as a critical and productive mode for establishing a parallel zone for operating in capture culture. I” ⤴️

  • “Here the fragmentarium shifts from a personal mnemotechnique and solitary, archival working station into a kind of a mobile provotype; a cultural probe (Gaver et al., 1999) provoking reflection on alternate modes of personal archives, and post-digital memory practices.” ⤴️

  • “The second mode of opening and communicating the fragmentarium is through the establishment of an informal platform called fragmentarium club. This collective initiative builds more precisely on one of my sound- scape recording practices which fragmentarium hosts. In this section I discuss fragmentarium club as a collective mode of para-archiving that, while invoking the spirit of amateur recording clubs is also debated as a potential, experiential mode of constructively re-articulating relation- ships with capturing technologies and approaching the record of every- day life in the context of capture culture.” ⤴️

  • “While taking and cataloguing the note I was attending to my phone as a para-archival device. What I mean is that my use of the device at the moment was conditioned by the principles of my project in which I have been regularly reflecting on and documenting various aspects of the contemporary techno-culture and a condition of living in a computerized society. The para-archiving mode means that recording and archiving functionalities of the device become deliberately brought to the fore at the cost of all the other, more commonly known and habitual functions (tele-communicating, checking email, news, verifying geographical accuracy and interacting on social media). Para-archiving is hence a media practice in which capturing and cataloging the captured happens deliberately besides, parallel or next to other habitual uses as well as other modalities of automated tracking and capture inherently embedded in today’s network technologies.” ⤴️

  • “the operating system of the smart-phone and the application imperceptibly capture and potentially circulate the information according to archival mechanisms, motivations and procedures that differ from the ones motivating my own practice. One could say that inscribed in the working of network technologies as the ones described above are certain ontological principles of which capturing and archiving mechanism constitute today their irremovable dimension (Ernst, 2013; Chun, 2016).” ⤴️

  • “Although there is a certain implicit recognition of a performative side to media, it does not have to do much with the agency of the media as objects, technologies or technical infrastructures, but rather agency of people who happen to control media institutions and distribution of media texts.” ⤴️

  • “a certain divide between those who get to produce and control the distribution and reception of media texts and the rest who is left to only consume them and among whom these effects can be subsequently monitored and measured.” ⤴️

  • “Even if people would actively attempt to resist the mainstream mental state” ⤴️

  • “that they are being lured into on every single dimension of their life, this very act of resistance would be immediately swallowed by and become a legitimate part of the system. As the authors had it: “[a]nyone who resists can only survive by fitting in. Once his [sic] particular brand of deviation from the norm has been noted by the industry, he belongs to it as does the land-reformer to capitalism”(ibid., p.133).” ⤴️

  • “cultural critics of media continuously take for granted that all media are hegemonic: “they look for examples of new media forms that can be characterized as mass media, because they feel comfortable with the broadcast model in which the control of the media form is centralized” (2003, p.22). The “old” mass media is replaced with the new, “digital mass media” which following this tenet somewhat artificially extends and expands the validity and applicability of old models for media analysis and what it implies, the relevance of the media effect as a determining concern of media research at large.” ⤴️

  • “As opposed to being seen as effects of the working of media, attitudes to media are formed in relation to an interplay of numerous circumstances, symbolic realities, presence of others.” ⤴️

  • “reception and perception of media is a result of a dialogical, multi-directional process.” ⤴️

  • “these constellation of material and symbolic realities that media messages enter as well as the presence of others who influence the way that these messages are read” ⤴️

  • “from such an orientation, the mass is no longer any amalgam of “statistical elements” (Horkherimer and Adorno 2002, p.21), but an assemblage of individuals with diverse aspirations and orientations shaped by a variety of motivations and contexts.” ⤴️

  • “Hall’s proposed three distinctive positions that individuals can obtain in relation to media. The first option is a dominant hegemonic position. It is a situation in which the viewer takes the connoted meaning “full and straight and decodes the message in term of reference code in which it has been encoded” (ibid. 1993, p.101). In such a case, the viewer is “operating inside the dominant code” (ibid., p.101). The second option is a negotiated position. Decoding the message in this modality is based on a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements which is to say that it acknowledges the dominant meaning, but adopts it to a particular situatedness, or as Hall puts it, “situated logics” (ibid., p.102). The third position is an oppositional stance. In this, one “detotalizes the message in the preferred code in order to retotalize the message within some alternative framework of reference” (ibid., p.103). This means that the receiver of the message is fully aware of the content (which could be for instance a recognition of its manipulative or persuasive underlying, in the context of social media one could think of it being its economic and commercial underlying) and so either rejects it altogether or accepts it but with a deliberate subversion of the meaning that the arriving media text is inscribed with. Hall’s pluralization of the modes of interacting with media content questions the view on media as an entirely hegemonic apparatus that instigates only one kind of subordinate reactions.” (here pp. 41) ⤴️

  • “this plurality of positions towards such a broader understanding of the term media will be of particular interest in the discussion on para-archiving at the end of the second part of this thesis. There I will draw on Michel de Certeau whose scholarship, especially in relation to the question of a position of individual in relation to dominant power structure seems to reflect quite strongly Hall’s diffraction of the earlier, monolithic approach to studying life with media. Especially Hall’s third position seems to be much in synchrony with de Certeau’s attendance to everyday life as an arena of cultural inventiveness in attending to various social, technical and cultural frameworks that one voluntarily and involuntary traverses on a daily basis. Departing from the act of reading, de Certeau describes seemingly manipulated by the logic of capitalism and consumption activities of everyday life (such as navigating through the city, cooking, etc.) as always particularly motivated sites themselves potential of establishing frameworks that can subsequently yield conditions for silent production that resists subordination to the mainstream (1984).” ⤴️

  • “with de Certeau’s already brought up notion of “a second layer” where space for tactics emerges that complements (or provides means to temporarily suspend and reconfigure the effects of) one’s irremovable embeddedness in a larger net of socio-material relations.” ⤴️

  • “(Couldry, 2012,” ⤴️

  • “media (e.g. social media services and affordances they engender) are constructively woven into a generation of new types of social practices (e.g. presencing, tracking, searching [ibid. p.50]) or particular reconfiguration of existing cultural practices such as personal archiving [ibid., p.51]).” ⤴️

  • “However, a strong social constructionist perspective that transpires in Couldry’s discussion on mediation makes him remain relatively distant to questions regarding the material, technological and generative side of media practices taking place outside of proprietary services and frameworks, and which will be of interest here. For instance, while discussing archiving practices, he does that in relation to major social platforms such as Facebook, YouTube or Flickr. As Couldry writes, “archiving, a practice once concerned with accumulation of physical objects, in the era of social platforms engenders a number of other practices such as accessing, searching, or in terms of personal archiving – life-caching and managing one’s own data” (ibid., p.52). Even though Couldry attempts to recognize a range of different, minor practices and attitudes to these new, increasingly prevailing forms of personal archiving, he tends to acknowledge them as somewhat stable, one could even say, determining elements of today’s media landscape in accordance to which people arrange their daily life practices.” ⤴️

  • “Couldry implicitly seems to replace these missing institutions with dominant social media infrastructures,” ⤴️

  • “even though Couldry advocates to seek alternative practices that can further contest the idea of power concentrated in media institutions (and hence ideas of hegemony and media effect), he limits this search to the scope of dominant infrastructures (social media), and effectively, by doing so he establishes a gravitational force within which the discussion on media practices (and so digital archiving) is bound to.” ⤴️

  • “Couldry’s social constructionist perspective makes him overlook other types of archiving practices in which individuals might be intervening not only into the processual (e.g. software), but also material (e.g. hardware) underpinnings of media technologies.” ⤴️

  • “(Kember and Zylinska, 2012). Their critique concludes in a proposition to perceive media in terms of active and vital processes of mediation that break out from the trajectories and grids established by social structures, institutions and media infrastructures” ⤴️

  • “elaborate on the term mediation pointing at a set of differences that their understanding is characterized by if compared to former definitions. As they mention, mediation has been typically understood in a Marxist tradition as a reconciliation of two opposing forces within society (e.g. the cultural and material or the superstructure and base) by a mediating object. In this light it appears as an insertion of an element, an agency filling the space between two competing forces, or differently put, two elements of some hierarchical arrangement. Thus, medium is merely a mediating component in a wider process of communication or transmission.” ⤴️

  • “a construct of the “structuralist thinking” in which some fixed organization of society is recognized and within which some elements of this organization are subsequently discussed as forces of dominance that establish and determine entirety of relations” ⤴️

  • “mediation transpires as merely ”a product” of pre-existing dynamics prompted by these relationships. In other words, the process of mediation is trapped between firmly grounded elements of a bigger structure; it can not take place but as a direct response to these elements. This structure and the hierarchy it brings along, is a prerequisite to an emergence of mediation; it conditions its very occurrence. Consequently, as the authors argue, in that view, “mediation lends itself to the study of ‘effects’ because it is premised on a set of determining assumptions around subjects, objects and relations between them” (ibid., p.20).” ⤴️

  • “to Kember and Zylinska, mediation is “the originary process of media emergence with media being seen as (ongoing) stabilizations of the media flow” (ibid., p.21). This means that media do not necessarily establish some large scale fixed relationships, but can as such become subject to temporary and micro-level alterations and stabilizations. Mediation can be seen as an active creation and recombination of relations between always already entangled human and non-human, media technological entities. Mediation is where a sustenance and negotiation of the relationship between them happens. It can become stabilized and form always particular, temporal milieux that are exemplary to these enactments. It is evident that in such a reading the terms media and mediation are long departed from their connotations to institutions, objects and texts, and subsequently lend themselves to be read and articulated better as sites, temporalities, processes and performances.” ⤴️

  • “approach media as something that happens or is enacted through a particularly situated practice” ⤴️

  • “Rather than looking at mediation as an “implied conversation” constrained by existing media infrastructures, he suggested that “it may be more productive to see mediation as capturing a variety of dynamics within media flows” (Couldry, 2008, p.380). In other words, Couldry proposed to step away from considering the subtleties of mediation as a being strictly compelled to stabilities of a larger media world and its institutions operating above the layer of everyday life.” ⤴️

  • “individuals continuously intervene into its dynamics, introduce “non-linearity”, “discontinuity” and “asymmetry” into its flow (Couldry, 2008, p.381). Though while by saying that, his proposition paradoxically protracts the validity of these fixed realms, as they are continuously prerequisite to these said interventions to occur. In other words, Couldry’s understanding of mediation while letting us move from directly addressing media effects they produce toward dynamics of media flows across various practices emerging between these stabilities, at the same time, implicitly adheres to their continuous working.” ⤴️

  • “invites us (media scholars and practitioners) to move beyond the constructionist perspective and see mediation as productive of other kinds of relationships with media technologies or radically alternating, modulating and vitalizing existing stabilities, differentiating them and reconfiguring as to make them serve diverse and situated purposes and motivations.” ⤴️

  • “open discontent with the dominant modes of inquiring into the subject as well as alliance with the latest material turn.” ⤴️

  • “call for an interventionist mode on reflecting on and critiquing media.” ⤴️

  • “Referring to it as a bundle of approaches, variantology or ars combinatoria (Zielinski, 2006)” ⤴️

  • “one certain imperative that unites media archaeologist is their “discontent with the supremacy of the “canonized” narratives of media culture and history’ (Parikka & Huhtamo, 2011, p.3, Ernst, 2011, p.240).” ⤴️

  • “Zielinski describes this ambition in terms of setting forth a “new cartography for media anarchaeology” (2006, p.261). Zielinski’s (an)archaeological cartography aspires to contest the idea of a linear progression towards always a more perfected media technological actuality. Such an approach does not only complicate the old/new, analog/digital polarities but also disrupts the dominance of certain media centres” ⤴️

  • “As Zielinski argues, a constructive disruption is possible by the means of “establishing effective connections with the peripheries”yet without attempting to integrate these into the centres. This might eventually lead to help “maintain the worlds of media in a state that is open and transformable” (ibid., p.261).” ⤴️

  • “alternative, non-centric conceptual zones, fluid individual practices and imaginations remaining beyond the centralized and formalized concepts, theories and views.”

  • “In a similar manner Parikka and Huhtamo maintain that even “dead ends, losers, and inventions that never made it into a material product have important stories to tell” (Parikka & Huhtamo, 2011, p.7).” ⤴️

  • “media archaeology “moves fluidly between disciplines, although it does not have a permanent home” (2011, p.3). It avoids stabilization and formalization into an easily applicable set of analytical tools, which as the authors argue allows it to become something of an interdisciplinary perspective on technologies, a “travelling discipline” that “roams across the landscape of the humanities and social sciences and occasionally leaps into the arts” (ibid., p.3).” ⤴️

  • “such an approach also brings in some risks of atomization, unrigorousness and too broad dispersion of points of interests.” ⤴️

  • “While the approach focused on effects of media (though understood not only as institutions and texts but primarily as technologies, networks of devices, services, mobile applications, mechanisms and practices), appears to be more suitable to studying capture culture, a large-scale phenomenon with implications (or effects) on the fabric of everyday social and personal life, the practice-oriented perspective as understood here, allows to bring attention to the minuscule ways in which these effects and implications become deliberately negotiated, reconfigured or/and resisted. In other words, practice oriented approach as proposed allows to install a particular entry point to understanding media technologies, both historically and contemporarily. Upon crossing it, one encounters a different view, one in which large-scale media effects could be seen as only some among many others. In other words, the media practice perspective enables to see media technologies beyond their capacity to instigate merely large-scale, macro-societal effects. At their cost, or to put it better, in parallel to these macro-effects, the practice-oriented view foregrounds people’s motivations, aspirations and goals that operationalize media technologies in a way that these might in return instigate more controllable and intended micro-effects. This sensitivity towards the singular, micro-scale practice, can be said to enable a better chance for identifying historical, amplifying existing and conceptualizing new alternatives to dominant practices pervading capture culture, which are some of the goals of this thesis.” ⤴️

  • “inquiring into the history of media technological developments,” ⤴️

  • “reverse-remediation, a creative practice and one component of a larger practice-based methodology to be elaborated in the later part of this thesis.” ⤴️

  • “will critically discuss and iterate the perspective known as tactical media, which borrowing from de Certeau (1984) positions tactical inventiveness and insubordination at the heart of media technological praxis.” ⤴️

  • “The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company having the show of wisdom without the reality (in Deuze, 2012, p.115).” ⤴️

  • “a technical force being imposed upon a relationship between two types of memory: internal and external.” ⤴️

  • “hypomnesis, technologically rendered and materially externalized thought.” ⤴️

  • “The contradistinction between the internal, human mnemonic capacity to record and retain knowledge, and hypomnemata, external supplements for capturing, storing, organizing, and distributing memory, has laid the foundation for a general bias toward technology. Stiegler argues that these two memory practices are in fact inseparable, and one cannot exist without the other.” ⤴️

  • “Hypomnesis facilitates evolution, individuation, and trans-individuation. This last term was coined by Gilbert Simondon (1989) to describe the human” ⤴️

  • “ability to form enduring communities that actively share common values, beliefs, and symbols. Aggregation, transmission, and development of these qualities occur precisely through processes of externalizing and materializing anamnesis into hypomnemata (Stiegler, 2010, p.67).” ⤴️

  • ““the human evolves through externalizing itself in tools, artifacts, language and technical memory banks” (Stiegler, 2010, p.65).” ⤴️

  • “human and technological evolutions have to be seen as processes that are always intertwined.” ⤴️

  • “Individual and collective practices of constructing knowledge and memory are always technological; they do not exist outside of technology, but are always, to some degree, entangled with it and its history. Stiegler calls this condition “originary technicity” or alternately “originary prostheticity” (1998), where prosthesis does not mean an extension of the human body (a synthetic addition, or replacement of what has been lost) but “the constitution of this body qua ‘human’,… not a means for the human but its end” (ibid., p.153).” ⤴️

  • “Every act of externalizing one’s thought and memory instigates a certain milieu characterized by power relations, which in return affect and shape the lives of those implicated in these milieux.” (pp. 54) ⤴️

  • “the pharmacological nature of technology” ⤴️

  • “among the various modes of living and becoming with technologies we can set apart two in particular, mnemotechniques and mnemotechnologies. It has to be underlined that through conceiving of these concepts, Stiegler does not intend to establish an irreconcilable dichotomy. Rather,” ⤴️

  • “these two notions describe different kinds of complexity characterizing relationships between human mnemonic and cognitive capacities (mneme) and technological prostheses (hypomnemata).” ⤴️

  • “mnemotechniques as intentional practices of externalizing memory and knowledge, where intentionality (connected to the notion of agency and a degree of freedom) signifies the will and intention to act in a specific way, (Verbeek, 2011, p.13). The processual dynamics of mnemotechnical practices are comprehensible and controllable by an individual (or community) directly and voluntarily engaged in these practices. Mnemotechniques evolve in line with specific motivations which guide the creation and organization of the resulting mnemonic traces. Thus, mnemotechniques can be described in terms of craft, which, by Tim Ingold’s definition, is a manual practice comprising “observational engagement and perceptual acuity that allow the practitioner to follow what is going on, and in turn to respond to it” (2013, p.4). Mnemotechnique involves a binding connection between one’s memory and its externalized form. It results in “an associated mnemonic milieu,” where the bond between human subjects (their consciousness), the technologies through which they experience and register the world, and the material records of their experiences tend to hold strong over time. In Stiegler’s words, mnemotechniques can be seen as a specific combination of logos and techne, which is to say, thinking and doing (2011). It is an art of actively (and practically) shaping one’s philosophy of life in relation to its always pre-existing technical dimension. This resonates strongly with de Certeau’s aforementioned aesthetics of everyday life as ways of operating which, in Stiegler’s terms, can be translated into a vital configuration of one’s way of technical being, thinking, and doing. Mnemotechniques can be seen as ways of operationalizing selected technology (language, text, imagery, sound, etc.) to produce a material trace which remains in an integral relationship with the subject (or community), his/her awareness, and beliefs. A simple example of a mnemotechnique on a personal level could be note-taking by hand, or a drawing that results in an artifact, a material trace marked by a distinctive style (simultaneously a signifier of a close link between the technological and the human). Although the primary intention of mnemotechniques is to record and transmit the memory of a given experience, every activity that results in the externalization of knowledge into a (technical) artifact can potentially become a vector of memory, and hence, a non-intentional type of mnemotechnique. The” ⤴️

  • “production of a wheel, flint, or pottery is both a materialization of a person’s memory and knowledge and an encapsulation of this knowledge and experience into a physical trace or artifact. Consequently, close examination of and reflection upon these material results might reveal the knowledge invested in them, thus enabling their” ⤴️

  • “meaningful adoption and further transmission over time.” ⤴️

  • “media infrastructures historically identified as sharply divided into phases of production and consumption, and subsequently, a sharp divide of media practitioners into producers and consumers. In his opinion, these mass media and technologies give receivers a series of fabricated and pre-established, mass-scale audio-visual experiences and narratives, effectively paralyzing all opportunity to construct and express individuality within collectives. Stiegler describes the impact of mnemotechnologies in terms of the proletarianization of individual and collective mental power, attention, and sensibility (2016). Much as how industrial capitalism proletarianized labor and blocked people’s capacity to draw meaning and satisfaction from what they make, consumerist capitalism proletarianized people’s ability to care about and pay attention to what is meaningful in their lives.” ⤴️

  • “the behavior of the contemporary consumer has been “standardised through the formatting and artificial manufacturing of his desires” (Stiegler, 2011a” ⤴️

  • “Deleuze’s concept of the control society, in which, through the pervasiveness of electronic technologies, “[i]ndividuals have become ‘dividuals’, and masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’” (1992. p.5)” ⤴️

  • “replacing “access to consistencies” with the “access to infinities”(Stiegler, 2016, p.70)” ⤴️

  • “n illusory sensation of living in a constant presence without beginning and end” ⤴️

  • “Mnemotechnologies make people adapt, somewhat passively, to their internal rules, programs, and” ⤴️

  • “the sense of temporality they impose as opposed to making themselves adoptable to the needs, priorities, temporalities, and rhythms of the everyday lives they enter, which is what mnemotechniques facilitate.” ⤴️

  • “means rehabilitating and reclaiming mnemotechnical qualities in our coexistence with technologies,” ⤴️

  • “Stiegler perceives democratization of power and opening of participation in media production (which were absent from such previous media milieux as TV and radio) as crucial forces to restore a chance to liberate “hypomnesic memory from its industrial function” (2010, p.85).” ⤴️

  • “Originally objectified and exteriorized, memory constantly expands technically as it extends the knowledge of mankind; its power simultaneously escapes our grasp and surpasses us, calling into question our psychical as well as our social organization. This is particularly apparent in the transition from mnemotechniques to mnemotechnologies from individual exteriorizations of memory functions to large-scale technological systems or networks that organize memories (2010, p.67).” ⤴️

  • Steigler

  • “the “Californian model of networking” (in Simanowski, 2016)” ⤴️

  • Steigler’s critique of

  • “contemporary techno-cultural condition in the following chapter, I use the term mnemotechnology as a critical term, relating it to mainstream network technologies and devices, smartphones, data-aggregation and social media platforms, and in connection with other critical voices emerging in the digital and network culture.9 Mnemotechnologies are those that dissociate the mediated memory and know-how skills from an individual. One’s memory and knowledge becomes disassembled and subsequently re-assembled in accordance with externally developed mechanisms of “distantly operating service industries” that “network people’s personal memories … control them, formalize them, model them, and perhaps destroy them” (Stiegler ,2010, p.68).” ⤴️

  • “mnemotechnologies are conducive to dissociated mnemonic milieux in which memories become increasingly displaced and disjointed, forming imperceptible realms, “black-boxed” enclosures inscribed with terms and conditions, often non-amendable by the subject on whose memory they scavenge.” ⤴️

  • “mnemotechnologies release their users from the effort of actively recording, recalling and putting knowledge into action, effectively turning them into the operators of ready-made systems that input and output, process and deliver knowledge in an increasingly passive way (Lovink, 2011, p.25). As a result of such mnemotechnological procedures, one’s selfgoverned transformation and (trans-)individuation is impeded in favour of transformation conducted in accordance with the principles, expectations, and goals of the market, and” ⤴️

  • “Approaching the history of memory and personal archiving technologies in terms of shifts and “mutations” (Terranova, 2000) of mnemotechniques into mnemotechnologies” ⤴️

  • “Before mechanized voice-recording capabilities were introduced, poetic devices such as rhymes, rhythms, and, more generally, the craft and organization speech in time were deliberately used as techniques to facilitate memorizing and transmitting knowledge;” ⤴️

  • “The transformation of memory practices from techniques of poetry, invention, and creativity into mechanized and then industrialized production of knowledge can be identified by moving back to the Renaissance, when techniques known literally as the art of memory (from Latin ars memoriae) were overshadowed by a mechanical means of processing memory, such as the printing press. Historically, the ancient practice of ars memoriae involved training one’s memory, recall, and creative thinking by assigning particular symbols, vivid images (Carruthers, 2008, p.186), imaginary architectural structures, and monuments to one’s thoughts11. The highly inventive and performative practices of ars memoriae were based on actively tending to memory, spatializing it, and constructing its inventory by breaking it down into discrete expressions and projecting them onto either imagined or real parts of the environment. In medieval times, the principles of the ancient ars memoriae were adopted to monastic traditions of meditation and mindfulness. With the revival of interest in Aristotle’s writings, such mnemotechniques re-emerged in the Renaissance as a kind of art of designing idiosyncratic, visual systems, illustrations, or arrangements combining numbers, letters, and astrological symbols, for establishing different relationships to produce new thoughts and meanings.” ⤴️

  • “Mary Carruthers argued (1998, 2008), such an idiosyncratic externalization not only helped one better summon one’s memories and impressions” ⤴️

  • “but also invent and generate new ideas based on recombining and rewiring these memorized impressions.” ⤴️

  • “Camillo was the author of a never-completed, life-long endeavour to construct a memory theater, a complex system of symbolic references “representing all that the mind can conceive and all that is hidden in the soul – all of which could be perceived at one glance by the inspection of images” (Yates, 1966, p.158).” ⤴️

  • “Complex mental operations characterizing mnemotechniques like the emblematic theatre of Camillo, were replaced by complex, yet undeniably more efficient mechanisms of printing technology. The complexity of the printing press was disguised by a set of mechanical operations; the effort once required of a human mind mutated into a much faster, but much less reflective mechanical procedure.” ⤴️

  • “As Kittler proposed, primarily devised as a “memory assistant,” printing press subsequently acquired a role of a “forgetting assistant” (Kittler, 1999) and “the more complicated technology, the simpler, that is the more forgetful we can live” (ibid, p.80).” ⤴️

  • “would like to suggest that problematizing technological development in term of shifts from mnemotechniques to mnemotechnologies does not have to entail a radical regression of the aesthetic dimension of life or its unsustainable and irreversible toxification, as might be assumed from the above passages, and certainly from a number of Stiegler’s writings. Such a depiction of technological transformations would offer no more than a simplistic reversal of the techno-utopian idea that technologies always progress for the better. Thus, I suggest that mnemotechnologies ought not to be seen as inherently negative and mnemotechniques as always already positive by nature. Both are capable of generating beneficial and poisonous milieux, depending on how their presence is negotiated, mediated, adopted, integrated, and/or resisted in the individual and collective currents and contexts of a day-to-day life.” ⤴️

  • “the increasing automation of recording devices, as well as proliferating compartmentalization of the web into standardized and thus easily monitorable mnemotechnological enclosures, are making the state of technological development within this domain seem far more compatible with the concept of the mnemotechnique (consider numerous recollections of the early phase of the internet celebrated, in retrospect, as a territory for unrestrained creativity and expression, compared to the following era of the web 2.0)” ⤴️

  • “Similarly, the manual ability to operate a camera, or the ability to write and comprehend a code (where both can be seen as more attentive techniques, or, as Stiegler puts it, the “know-how” of living with technologies) have gradually made way for more automated, sometimes over-simplified technological habits (e.g. effortlessly applicable visual filters imitating the results of manual photography, standardized, readymade templates for organizing one’s personal data without the need to engage in programming and coding).” ⤴️

  • “could it be that by envisioning the potential steps that technological developments might take (such as the ultimate remediation of a camera into an electronic contact lens, automatically capturing and archiving what the biological eye registers), we can already begin to recognize mnemotechnical qualities within our current mnemotechnologies?12” ⤴️

  • “Consequently, would this mean that a technological device and its use are never inherently mnemotechnical or mnemotechnological, but that these are qualities that arise through a practice situated in a particular historical context? Can it be said that even the most automatic, passive mnemotechnologies, if approached with a certain sensitivity, attention, and motivation can acquire mnemotechnical qualities” ⤴️

  • “thesis, and which almost directly aligns with the main research question, is: How can one conceive of contemporary forms of mnemotechniques for constructing personal” ⤴️

  • “archives that take into consideration an inevitable embeddedness in the highly (mnemo-)technologized contemporary world?” ⤴️

    • ie how can we think of new mnemotechniques when we’re stuck in mnemotechnologies - an answer is para-archival

  • “hints at a demand for alternative strategies for experiencing and accounting for one’s life, conducted in an ever-closer relationship with capturing technologies.” ⤴️

  • “Parts of our lives migrate, resettle and are exposed in media, where they form realities or identities that can be accessed, shaped, and continuously re-edited” ⤴️

  • “Joke Brower and Arjen Mulder provocatively confront us with a vision where “in an information society there is no position outside of the (storing, linking, reprocessing, transforming and complexification of data) flows, an external position from which you can criticize or transcend the flows” (in Deuze ,2012, p.94). As” ⤴️

  • “we live in an information society that is a digital archive” ⤴️

  • “Deuze advocates the need to critically embrace this condition by developing what might be called “survival strategies” (ibid., p.220). These strategies call for certain skills, as well as a critical sensitivity toward present-day digital media technologies. In our day, he states, “the only way to live a richly empowered and meaningful life is to embrace (and add to) the inherent multiplicity of the world through the availability of an excess of information about it” (p.202)” ⤴️

  • “Somewhat mirroring Heidegger’s critique of the growing instrumentalization of technologies toward “calculative thinking” at the cost of “meditative thinking” (Heidegger, 1966), Stiegler calls for the inauguration of “a new attitude” toward life and technology through an inventive detachment of techne from its connotations of the dominant commercial, economic, utilitarian and instrumental ends.1” ⤴️

  • “engage in “philosophy through acting,” which is to say, a practical commitment to working with, not against, contemporary technologies. He” ⤴️

  • “Stiegler suggests merging philosophy (the act of philosophizing) with practical engagement with technologies.” ⤴️

  • “Of high importance in this renewed attitude is a restoration of attributes found in amateur practices: passion and commitment, attributes not easily reducible to “calculative thinking” and utilitarian use of technologies dominant today.” ⤴️

  • “When you shoot with your Bolex, you hold it somewhere, not exactly where your brain is, a little bit lower, and not exactly where your heart is-it is slightly higher… And then you wind the spring up, you give it an artificial life – Jonas Mekas” ⤴️

  • “Besides manual control, Mekas’ relationship with the device involves a reflective negotiation between, on the one hand, one’s passion and conviction, and on the other, rational (and relational) thinking and understanding the technology one works with” ⤴️

  • “In ancient times it was commonly believed that the heart, not the mind, was the seat of memory. Aristotle, for example, considered the heart to be the base of intelligence and the brain a “cooling” device, an instrument that controlled and rationalized the processes of the heart (Gross, 1995). The phrase “learning by heart” is a significant remnant of this belief.” ⤴️

  • “According to this etymological perspective, recording stands for active and thoughtful processes of internalizing, ordering thoughts, remembering, calling them to mind, rethinking and being attentive. Recording is thus a deliberate construction of a mnemonic trace in which one’s agency and intention are the determining forces; the dynamics of recording occurs in integral relation to one’s mental and corporeal capacities.” ⤴️

  • “I suggest that the shift from mnemotechniques to mnemotechnologies can alternatively be presented as a mutation from recording to capturing, and hence from recording or record culture to capture culture.” ⤴️

  • “An increasing number of automated services dedicated to a storage, organization, and sharing of personal memory draw on the term in their advertising schemes. Evernote: “capture what’s on your mind”; life-logging wearable camera and app Narrative Clip: “capture authentic photos and videos effortlessly.” Some incorporate the term into the very name of the service, such as Capture-app, a photo storage service automating personal photography and video collections, or Kapture, an audio recording wristband enabling the effortless capture of audio snippets from everyday life. As we can clearly see, the term is often followed by an indication of its effortless, automated character, simple use, and general user-friendliness which all make the term mean something much different from recording.” ⤴️

  • “They mean precisely “to take’”or “to seize.”” ⤴️

  • “imposition of some force” ⤴️

  • “to capture one’s imagination – typically, to inspire and stimulate someone’s ability to imagine – also evokes a contradiction in this thesis. Understood in this light, one’s imagination is no longer subject to inspiration alone, but also to detention. Capturing not only inspires, but also detains attention and imagination, orchestrates it, and delimits the possibility to imagine differently.” ⤴️

  • “Culture has typically been defined as a dynamic constellation of conduct, social behavior, practices of everyday life, values, and beliefs that represent a collective (Clifford, 1988, p.12). Media technologies can be seen as important cultural players, in that they actively participate in negotiating and mediating the dynamics within and between these cultural dimensions.” ⤴️

  • “one aspect of culture, dominance of one kind of medium over others at a given moment in history” ⤴️

  • “shift from one mode and regime of communicating to anothe” ⤴️

  • “Less mediumspecific concepts pointing at a complex interplay between different media, such as convergence culture (Jenkins, 2006), have also been discussed recently.” ⤴️

  • “Jose van Dijck (2013) brings less media than phenomena to the foreground as her major subject of interrogation in today’s technologized “culture of connectivity.”” ⤴️

  • “everyday practices, and rituals, both collective and personal, have been affected by this phenomenon.” ⤴️

  • “the relation between capturing and personal archiving. In the most basic sense, the process of capturing precedes archiving. It is an act of conceiving of a representation of a given moment, event, or situation. At once it internalizes the moment, figuratively speaking, by extracting it from a flow of events not worth capturing, and externalizing it by stabilizing it onto an external, material trace, such as image or numeric data set. This trace might be then categorized, labeled and possibly set in relation to other externalized traces in a database. Today, I argue, capturing and archiving practices happen in an increasingly automated and extemporary fashion. The acts of capturing and archiving are often inseparable (and in some cases, the capturing, and hence, the captured, are predetermined by the mechanisms of archiving)” ⤴️

  • “we might primarily intend to capture a moment without considering this act in terms of archivin” ⤴️

  • “he captured image often becomes part of a larger collection, and since it is labeled and tagged with additional metadata (entered intentionally or inserted automatically” ⤴️

  • “This insertion of the indexical information turns the captured into the archived” ⤴️

  • “all digital content (digital image, video, sound file) is in itself a kind of (techno-)archive (2013). Since a single digital file consists of a set of alphanumeric characters, every such character, frame or even a pixel can be discretely addressed and recalled, just like a properly indexed document stored in a traditional archive.” ⤴️

  • Wolfgang Ernst

  • “the focus will be on unlocking the said attention and imagination while practically exploring alternative modes of living with technologies in capture culture.” ⤴️

  • “If, arguably, a few decades ago people would reach for recording technologies such as personal cameras mostly to document moments of special situations, unusual events, or exceptional times in their everyday lives, such as family events, ceremonies, holiday, and so on (van Dijck, 2007), today we increasingly use cameras less in exceptional circumstances than in moments of boredom, in other words – whenever we want.” ⤴️

  • “the function of an image changed from a carrier of memory to a unit of communication. The” ⤴️

  • “indiscernibly caused us to swap selectivity for excessiveness and reflectiveness for immediacy in how we document our everyday lives.” ⤴️

  • “a text entitled “The Camera as Historian,” and is one of the earliest articulations of these growing concerns: One of the outstanding characteristics of our time – as contrasted with the past – is its tendency towards the elimination of waste of power – the economical direction of human activities so as to increase their productivity and effectiveness – the utilization of what have heretofore been regarded as ‘waste products.’ To the engineer it is abhorrent that any energy be allowed to run to waste. But in the domain of photography the amount of horse power running to waste is appalling – and all for lack of a little system and co-ordination. Shall this be allowed to continue? Shall the product of countless cameras be in the future, as in the past (and in large measure today) a mass of comparative lumber, losing its interest even for its owners, and of no public usefulness whatever? This is a question of urgency. Every year of inaction means an increase of this wastage (Gower, et al., 1916, p.6).” ⤴️

  • “amateur photographers, so that their random snapshooting of everyday reality, considered by historians of the time as haphazard and undisciplined, could potentially gain greater, symbolic, and archival value. This” ⤴️

  • ““The Camera as Historian” suggests that the tendrils of belief in scientific management at the time also extended to the realms of archiving, cultural production, heritage, and historical imagination. This Taylorism-inspired way of thinking provided a vantage from which the “wasteful” and unrestrained practices of everyday, amateur photography could be turned into an efficiently executed, collective archival project.” ⤴️

  • “growing number of amateur photographers became coordinated and synchronized in response to standardized surveys developed by archival and heritage institutions. These surveys would typically indicate what to pay attention to and how to photograph it. This would ultimately make the analysis and cataloging of the material easier for the institution. One subject of such surveys discussed in “The Camera as a Historian” is the decomposition of nineteenth-century lifestyles, landscapes, and practices affected by industrialization and modernization. There is, however, something paradoxical in the utilization of mass-produced cameras to such ends. While it can be seen as a nostalgic attempt to freeze and catalog specific aspects of the disappearing reality of the nineteenth century, one can also look at this systematic deployment of portable, mass-produced cameras – themselves products of modernization, industrialization and scientific management – as a critical apprehension of the consequences of these very processes. Thus, despite being influenced by the objectives of a superior authority, such focused practices of amateur archiving also emerge as a site for the potential development and alteration of historical awareness and subjectivity. T” ⤴️

  • “In order to maintain the status of the archive as a legitimate source of historical knowledge, archivists and historians had no choice but to embrace the multiplicity of viewpoints from which new kinds of visual records could be constructed. The amateur photographer, seen as an untrained witness to the “non-eventness of the everyday”(Highmore, 2002, p.34) was problematized as a new agent entering the archive, and a potential source for rethinking historical imagination and representation.” ⤴️

  • “the term snapshot (previously used solely in relation to firing guns and hunting) was first introduced to describe a photographic style and aesthetics involving spontaneous and quick responses to the moment. This” ⤴️

  • Emerged with the box Kodak

  • “Sharpening the attention toward details, ephemeral and momentary, portable cameras in the hands of amateur photographers were capable of productively tackling the dominance of static, “higher vision,” “generalized views,” and “naturalistic” depictions, a problematic inheritance from realist painting that, as Lux asserted, made professional photographers act like “bad mirrors” failing “to do justice to the object” (ibid., p.86). In amateur practices, Lux saw the potential for an emergence of a new modern aesthetics, freeing photography from rigid conventions established by professional photographers (who were typically bound to state institutions that scientifically recorded historically significant events, buildings, archaeological sites, and projects, [ibid., p.81]), but also an indication of how to creatively address “the inescapable dilemma of an age in which the technological for better and worse had become inextricably embroiled with the sociological”(ibid., p.85).” ⤴️

  • “Jarzombek interprets this as a tactical act of appropriating the device, since the user “steals the enemy’s invention for his own purposes,” the enemy being the modernist rationalization and standardization of everyday life, and the user’s purpose being a set of subjective, spiritual, philosophical values according to which one put the device into use and which effectively contradict these processes” ⤴️

  • ““so too, the user of the camera needs to have a single “spiritual center” on which to focus critical reflection” (Jarzombek, 2001, p.57). By this spiritual center, Lux meant a larger concept, a long-term project that, if consistently performed, could give rise to a more common, historically significant account of everyday life, besides being one’s own instant mode of storytelling.23 This adoption of technology in adherence to one’s spiritual center can be simultaneously understood in terms of a responsible construction of subjecthood and trans-individuation, an act which Verbeek would have us see as a “moral” way of allowing technology “to help to shape the subject” (2011, p.68).” ⤴️

  • “a device equipped with an empowering or even subversive quality” ⤴️

  • “These qualities might be activated if one resists using the device inattentively or in full conformity with the technical instructions and mainstream aesthetic styles,” ⤴️

  • “While historians and archivists advocated the incorporation of amateur photography into the (mass-)production of cultural heritage through a kind of distributed mass surveyance (note the connotation between surveying and surveilling),” ⤴️

  • “advocated developing one’s own, internal framework built on one’s subjective beliefs and values, what I would call a long-term para-archival mindset” ⤴️

  • “what the authors of the “The Camera as Historian” would call the “mass of comparative lumber,” and we today perhaps denote in terms of Big Data if not “data exhaust” or “data sweat.”24 A” ⤴️

  • “24 By the term “data sweat” I mean the refuse and by product of mundane digital interactions; the term has been discussed much more thoroughly by Melissa Gregg (Gregg, 2015). Data sweat is a byproduct of a digitally augmented body, always seen as a somewhat porous entity unable to fully control the streams of data it produces.” ⤴️

  • “Kessel conjures up the material dimension of the allegedly immaterial practice of digital data production. The project reminds us that, despite a serious reconfiguration of its material substrate (from a paper coated with a light-sensitive formula of chemicals, to time-sensitive, imperceptibly operating networks of transistors and capacitors of “microtemporalities,” as Wolfgang Ernst describes the new units that constitute the dynamics of digital culture and memory [2013, p.70]), digital photography, like any other data collection practice, remains a material practice. In a most direct sense, 24 Hours in Photos visualizes what survives in various forms, whether or not it is so easily perceptible” ⤴️

  • “Marc Weiser, the declared father of ubiquitous computing” ⤴️

  • ““The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life” (1999” ⤴️

  • “he also asserted that computational ubiquity will help us “overcome the problem of information overload,”” ⤴️

  • “his definition asserted that technologies “weave themselves,” as opposed to being consciously invited into people’s everyday lives.” ⤴️

  • “technologies’ function to serve, but also to be served” ⤴️

  • “the past, vernacular photography practices might have been discussed in terms of ideas like bottom-up culture, usercentrism, and autonomy from institutional frameworks, aesthetics, and ideologies (Kember, 2014, p.15), today this picture is contested. To a large extent, amateur photography that takes place via network technologies is bound to and orchestrated by mechanisms of ubiquitous computing,” ⤴️

  • “everyday practices of photographic documentation have become an intrinsic layer of an apparatus of “ambient intelligence” constituted by a network of technological infrastructures” ⤴️

  • “in order to capture data and subsequently gain access to its display (and analysis), the user must accept the possibility of disclosing this data to an unknown gaze” ⤴️

  • “its surroundings, which is to say, its meta-data (location, time, information on people viewing the content, liking it, or being tagged in it).” ⤴️

  • “Quoted by Schneier in his book Data and Goliath, the former NSA general counsel says: “Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata you do not really need content.”” ⤴️

  • “and the words of CIA director Michael Hayden that they “kill people based on meta-data”” ⤴️

  • “the everyday practices of capturing life with cheap, portable cameras were seen as claiming zones of a relative autonomy” ⤴️

  • ““a contested ground” (Kember, 2014)” ⤴️

  • “A “feudal land” is web security expert Bruce Schneier’s way of framing these new dynamics of capturing personal data in the context of the web 2.0 (Schneier, 2015).” ⤴️

  • “As Andrejevic argued (2013), today, in the context of big data economy there is “no category or amount of data that is ruled out a priori from the perspective of those who seek to mine it for unknowable and unpredictable patterns” (ibid., p.96).” ⤴️

  • “become a mechanical component of a larger mnemotechnological mechanism “to which framing and underlying (filtering) mechanisms she or he is not privy” (ibid.). In this sense, the transactional character of media is executed in terms of data acquisition (which is to say, the outcome of one’s activity), but also in the very life of an individual, his/her involvement in documenting his/her life becomes a constituent module of this on-going, transactional feedback loop” ⤴️

  • “the web becomes clustered and compartmentalized into enclosures by big corporations that facilitate the traffic between them, and often not much outwards. Anne Helmond has called this phenomenon the “platformization of the web” (Helmond, 2015)” ⤴️

  • “ince the introduction of timeline, one might see Facebook as a passport to participating in the most prevalent form of capturing, mediating, and archiving personal life accounts.” ⤴️

  • “It is not a neutral interface.” ⤴️

  • “Facebook locks the subject into a specific techno-economic regime of navigation through mediated memories. There is a contract and transaction written into every passport. In return for the right to freely cross borders, the authority has right to control this mobility, while acquiring insight into the subject’s personal information. From this perspective, every passport may be seen as a physical interface or an extension of a larger digital database accessible only to immigration officers and state authorities. In this database, the passport expands into a deeper history of departures and arrivals.” ⤴️

  • “inaccessible archival depth that remains beyond individual control.” ⤴️

  • “the timeline structure encouraged users to post pictures from “the pre-Facebook days of their youth –” ⤴️

  • “From then on, all content uploaded on the timeline was, by default, set as public with optional privacy. Only a month after the timeline was introduced, Facebook began extensive collaboration with external companies, whose advertisements started cluttering users’ profiles.” ⤴️

  • “While the timeline offered the user a chance to neatly organize his/her flow of data and decide on its openness and disclosure, it simultaneously established a more efficient infrastructure for covert data aggregation and storage.” ⤴️

  • “They could now more efficiently extract content from the users’ data sets, which” ⤴️

  • “also started offering its users the chance to copy the profile by downloading a zipped file that would seemingly include all the archived information in one’s Facebook profile. As Austrian law student Max Schrems has proved, however, this zipped file is only a fraction of what Facebook really archives. After submitting a request under the European “right to access” law, he made Facebook disclose all the information that the corporation had collected on him. Facebook sent him a CD with a 1,200-page PDF document containing far more substantial data than the generic archive offered for download (which, according to Schrem, amounts to only about 29 percent of the aggregated data).” ⤴️

  • “Developed in 1994 by Netscape programmers, cookies introduced what I would call a mnemotechnological layer to online surfing which, until then, had been characterized by a lack of pervasive capture and traceability as we know it today (Shah and Kesan, 2004). Cookies fundamentally altered the nature of surfing the Web from being a relatively anonymous activity, like wandering the streets of a large city, to the kind of environment where records of one’s transactions, movements and even desires could be stored, sorted, mined and sold. (Schwartz, 2001, no pagination).” ⤴️

  • “Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska describe Facebook as “a modulation of life itself.” It is simultaneously “a process and an entity” (2012, p.158),” ⤴️

  • “two different, yet enmeshed relations between data and temporality: their simultaneous flux and sedimentation. Despite features of the timeline which make interaction on Facebook appear as a construction of a durable personal archive, the overriding feeling upon visiting the platform is that of being captivated (and taken captive) by a continuous “flow through the present” (Bogost, 2010, p.28) or an atmosphere of “rapid change and forgetfulness rather than of remembrance and preservation” (Kaun and Stiernstedt, 2014).” ⤴️

  • “Consider the constant reminders to capture and share “what is on your mind” along with your “feelings” and “activities” at the moment. If responded to, every such impulse turned into a trace (image, text, or emoticon), while serving as evidence of one’s presence, a particular mark in time, calls for another affective response to ensure one’s sustained presence on top of the flow. However, as argued above, the bedrock of this flow of impulses is where simultaneous, steady accumulation, cataloging, archiving, and distribution of the extracted technovalue take place. As Kember and Zylinska assert, in the context of social media, “‘life itself’ becomes a product, that is constantly remodelled and repackaged via” ⤴️

  • “Media technologies that existed once to document and archive the world around us, providing external and physical counterparts to memory, are now designed for different purposes that implicitly recognize the existence of what I refer to as Surf Life. Their intention is to grasp the momentary and immersive, and for reasons that seem to have less to do with posterity – with the archival impulse – than with living in the now (Scanlan, 2013, p.142).” ⤴️

  • “in Snapchat, another popular mnemotechnology recently mutating from primarily communication toward increasingly quasi-archival apparatus.” ⤴️

  • “leaving no trace and thus avoiding privacy and data surveillance implications. The person who took and shared the picture could decide on the longevity of the image by changing the settings so it would last between one and ten seconds before fading out. Other” ⤴️

  • “As co-founder Evan Spiegel explains, “Snapchat isn’t about capturing the traditional Kodak moment. It’s about communicating with the full range of human emotion” ⤴️

  • “a unit of communication in a spontaneous and unscripted dialog (or chat), which, after being externalized, vanishes from the field of perception, remaining only in the memory of those in the conversation (cf. anemnesis in Plato’s dialogs). This ephemerality of snapshots intensified the production of snapshots to an unprecedented scale, incomparable with any other social platform.” ⤴️

  • “Even though users believed their photos on Snapchat were not being stored and archived, it was relatively easy to save them, using photo capturing technology, third party applications, or simple screen-shots, for example; from there they were circulated again either within or outside the Snapchat framework. With a few simple manipulations by the user, the non-archival incentive of the service could be practically defeated. It has also been proven that even on a technical level Snapchat images do not fully disappear; instead, they might constitute involuntary archives.” ⤴️

  • “what we and our senses construe as deletion and erasure, the operating system might perceive as a specific mode of archiving, or as Ernst would have it, dynarchiving, in which a collapse of erasing and storing procedures is a prerequisite to any operation concerned with the registration and mediation of digital memory (Ernst, 2013, pp.90-94), and, as seen here, its destruction.” ⤴️

  • “today one can save snapshots as “memories” or “stories” that can be retained for longer periods of time. As the promotional materials for these new features demonstrate, the service is no longer about snapping “ugly,” uninhabited images or engaging in spontaneous communication,” ⤴️

  • “The assemblage he was proposed as a summary of his mediated memories was, to a large extent, the result of a randomized procedure incapable of making moral and ethical judgments. Where the human aspect fell short, he argued “was in not providing a way to opt out.” The Year in Review kept appearing on his Facebook wall with, at times, a swapped background image, yet always retaining the same, celebratory aura. Meyer pointed out that the year in review revealed Facebook’s bias toward success stories” ⤴️

  • “Meyer’s mediated memory became captured in two senses: firstly, through the algorithmic procedure mechanically scavenging on the image of his daughter, while extracting all emotional residue it carried. Secondly, he was captured in an inescapable feedback loop, mechanically re-posting this traumatic moment without his consent. This entrapment in a loop was avoidable only to a certain degree – if Meyer opted out from Facebook” ⤴️

  • “in order to participate in the production, sharing, and circulation of memories via increasingly standardized and automated mnemotechnologies, one has to consider not only the above-discussed implications of their transactional character (seemingly free space for allegedly unrestrained expression and mediation of personal memories, but in fact at the cost of infiltration and capitalization on this data by third parties), but also the possibility for having these memories (and their emotional aura) occasionally abused, misrepresented, and their meaning significantly and irreversibly twisted. In other words, one’s specific motivation for mediating and archiving a particular moment via such mnemotechnological services as Facebook might become completely obliterated, the mediated memory might enter completely unexpected and undesired contexts.” ⤴️

  • “about an instance where Facebook’s algorithm suggested he befriend his ex-wife’s lover.” ⤴️

  • “When it comes to third party services for capturing memories, alterations of terms of use can be very rapid.” ⤴️

  • “while signing up for Evernote, a “freemium” service facilitating a multi-modal record and organization of personal digital notes (including pictures, snippets of audio and video), I believed I was signing up for a small-scale service. It soon grew into a large corporation” ⤴️

  • “on-going platformization of the web which van Dijck alternatively calls an “ecosystem of connective media” (2013, p.21).” ⤴️

  • “The slogan “Remember everything” displayed on the welcoming page is followed by a brief explanation of the service’s function, expressing the ideas of instance and ubiquity, important characteristics of capture culture: “Capture a note once, and it’s instantly available on all your devices.” ⤴️

  • “a typical trend, wherein initially free services evolve after gaining wider popularity,” ⤴️

  • “In December 2016, Evernote announced a change to its policy which allowed their workers be privy to people’s notes in order to further improve the service. Eventually, after receiving many complaints, they withdrew the proposal, assuring the public that only the users would have access to their notes. Out” ⤴️

  • “offered to subscribe to the more advanced, paid plan, which would give me direct communication with a human customer service agent.” ⤴️

  • “Users can capture their memories on the go, with no special regard for space, conditions, time, and social circumstances. But while the software is “everywhere,” constituting a spatio-material hybrid described by Greenfield as “everyware” (Greenfield, 2006), where is the human behind it? As we have just seen, the captured memories might become inserted into the layers of a larger automated technological infrastructure, in which indi-” ⤴️

  • “vidual control over accessibility can become quite tenuous. Alongside the perpetual changes that a software and its terms of use undergo, the value (both the personal and the techno-value orchestrating today’s data economies) becomes subject to modulation. How is the personal value modulated” ⤴️

  • “as embodying the larger phenomenon of the convenience-surveillance trade-off,” ⤴️

  • “he transactional character of mnemotechnologies in capture culture.” ⤴️

  • “once connected to the network, all these devices that previously had no, what for lack of a better term I would call mnemonic and archival agency, or in other words, of which mnemonic and archival agency could not have been easily intercepted and manipulated from outside, all of a sudden became vulnerable and porous enough for such manipulations to occur.” ⤴️

  • “intriguing avenue for conducting an alternative history of surveillance in which the (pan-)acoustic takes precedence over the (pan-)optical, the” ⤴️

  • “the ambient nature of the contemporary capturing and archiving of our everyday lives.” ⤴️

  • “We are headed toward a world where it will require a conscious decision (or a legal requirement) not to record [emphasis added] a certain kind of information in a certain time or place – the exact reverse of how things are now (Bell and Gemmell, 2009, p.8).” ⤴️

  • “in 1998 Bell decided to begin the digital capture and archiving of as much information about his everyday life as technologically possible.33 He saw advancements in digital technologies, storage capacities, and pervasive computing as enablers of a total memory, or as he called it, “e-memory.” E-memory was not only a technological supplement, but potentially an evolutionary advancement, and the ultimate replacement of bio-memory. While describing the latter as “subjective, patchy, emotion-tinged, ego-filtered, impressionistic and mutable,” in a highly techno-enthusiastic spirit, Bell emphasized the superiority of digital, automated memory as being “objective, dispassionate, prosaic and unforgivingly accurate” (Bell and Gemmell, 2013, p.51). In order to capture one’s life accurately, Bell believed that human agency should be” ⤴️

  • “entirely written out of the process, and replaced by passively operating sensors and monitoring devices.” ⤴️

  • “What distinguishes lifelogging from earlier practices of systematic recording and archiving of everyday life (e.g. writing memoirs, annals, journaling) is its increasingly automated, seemingly immaterial, and non-eroding nature, as well as its wide scope, which ambitiously aspires to cover “a totality of an individual’s experiences” (Gurrin et al., 2014, p.3). As opposed to more energy consuming, selective, and voluntary forms of personal archiving, such as journaling, life-logging deliberately “operates in a passive manner” (ibid., p.5). Thus, initiating or stopping the capture process are seemingly the only active moments in life-logging. What happens in between is a “passive” and “unobtrusive” recording of “facts” around the episodes in our lives, “but not their emotional and qualitative interpretation” (ibid., p.7).” ⤴️

  • “people no longer only write, but increasingly log their multi-media life-bits, they do not remember (which is to say actively recall and reflect), but employ quantifying procedures and algorithms to retrieve these life-bits, set them in relation and extract meanings out of them. It is in this automated processing of captured memory that Bell’s project takes its inspiration from Memex, a proto-hypertextual system (e.g. Nyce and Kahn, 1991; Ellis, 1991; Groza, 2012) designed in 1945 by American inventor and researcher Vannevar Bush Memex (a portmanteau of memory and index) was a hypothetical, electro-mechanized remediation of previous systems for organizing personal archives, such as filing cabinets (Boyd Rayward, 1992, p.99), built with the aim to “turn an information explosion into a knowledge explosion”(Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort, 2003, p.35).34 Although Bush acknowledged that replicating the skill of selective and creative associations that people establish between various pieces of information might be beyond the capacity of a machine (“For mature thought there is no” ⤴️

  • “mechanical substitute” and “the creative thought and essentially repetitive thought are very different things”[Bush, 1945, p.116]), he nevertheless believed that, overall, the complexities of memory processes can be artificially simulated, mechanized, and perfected through the application of increasingly affordable technologies of the time. Bell’s MyLifebits project, which the author also refers to as “Real Memex” (Bell and Gemmell 2009), adopts the same assumption as a starting point. What Bush was unable to fully achieve due to the technological constraints at the time, Bell thought could finally be executed on an unprecedented scale thanks to digital technologies of automated record, ready to “capture everything,” while “discarding nothing” (ibid., p.46).” ⤴️

  • “What was officially presented as an outcome of the project was a set of data for a production of the Artificial Intelligence systems as well as Intelligent Robotic Assistants enhancing decision-making capacities and memory of military commanders. Due to the project’s vague handling of privacy issues and adverse publicity, DARPA’s work on Lifelog, the all-encompassing cyber diary, was eventually discontinued in 2004.35” ⤴️

  • “mutated into other, more carefully confined mass-surveilling initiatives, such as PRISM.” ⤴️

  • “Quantified Self (QS) movement. The members of this community, established in 2007 in San Francisco (attracting to a large degree tech-developers, programmers, and life-hackers), promote the use of wearable, self-surveilling technologies for self-optimization purposes. The driving force among QS’ers is a belief that, through closely monitoring one’s life activities via sensors and wearable computing, breaking these activities down into sequences of numbers, and subsequently performing a range of algorithmic procedures, one can acquire unique self-knowledge not accessible by any other means.” ⤴️

  • “digital grammatization and quantification of everyday life certainly works in some particular cases (such as chronic diseases whose trajectories require constant monitoring and analysis). But the risk that the rise of QS brings about is an uncritical belief that, to be truly understood, one’s life processes need to be technologically quantified. In other words, what evades technological capture and cannot be digitally stored and measured (and consequently optimized and advanced) is at risk of becoming considered irrelevant” ⤴️

  • “In practices such as QS, the agency of sensors, numbers, and numeric calculation take the role of decisive entities in regulating how people perceive and assign value to their lives and the world around them” ⤴️

  • “Coming primarily from surveillance studies, memory studies, and media and communication studies, these” ⤴️

  • “diverse criticisms already point at the multiplicity of spheres that the total capture practices affect.” ⤴️

  • “the process of the gradual de-autonomization of technologies of capture, and their close incorporation into data economies (and what I have been calling mainstream mnemotechnological systems). Often linked to Foucault’s concept of governmentality and discipline, these critiques posit that life-logging practices such as QS are manifestations of the extensive influence of neo-liberal strategies on people’s everyday lives (Andrejevic, 2014; Boyd and Crawford, 2012).” ⤴️

  • “a form of discipline which is no longer performed by state institutions, but gets outsourced directly to citizens” ⤴️

  • “the rise and widespread normalization of “data fetishism” (Dormehl, 2014; Morozov, 2013; Sharon and Zandbergen, 2016).” ⤴️

  • “many life-loggers themselves do not subscribe to the belief that knowledge can derive from the streams of quantified data. Rather, data tracking is only one component of a more complex practice that involves reflexivity and mindfulness (Sharon and Zandbergen, 2016). Meaning does not arrive automatically with the data, but through a processual and reflective engagement with it: “alongside the figure of the quantified self, as the perfected, optimized, calculable and controlling subject and object of self-tracking, emerges a quantifying self [original emphasis]. The quantifying self ascribes meaning to self-tracking and the data it generates through a process of continuous negotiation with self-tracking methods and tools” (ibid., p.12).” ⤴️

  • “Dawn Nafus and Jamie Sherman (2014, pp.1784-” ⤴️

  • “1794)” ⤴️

  • “of a “soft resistance” to Big Data practices” ⤴️

  • “Coming from Intel Labs (a sponsor of the QS movement), Nafus and Sherman” ⤴️

  • “soft resistance happens when participants assume multiple roles as project designers, data collectors, and critical sensemakers, rapidly assessing and often changing what data they collect and why in response to idiosyncratically shifting sets of priorities and objectives. Such plasticity fragments data sets and disrupts current algorithmic logics, and thus creates both material and social resistance to traditional modes of data aggregation (ibid., p.1784).” ⤴️

  • “technological media developments, including self-surveillance technologies, reproduce the logic of progressivism as a guiding principle in problematizing digital memory and personal archiving. According to Wendy Chun (2008), Memex has become a disproportionally “canonized” model not only for an automated memory supplement, but for digital technology, personal archiving, and the internet in general. Consequently, it has long been contaminating currents of media scholarship in relation to digital computing and memory, both in terms of determining the genealogy of historical media discourse, as well as the development of practical inventions. The perpetual invocation of Memex as a material and conceptual foundation for our contemporary personal computers and digital memory practices not only conserves the progressivist reading of the history of media technologies (by projecting media as continuously transforming toward more seamless, immediate, automated, and invisible aids for the general improvement of our everyday lives), but also tends to conflate the dynamics of (human) memory with that of (technological) storage.36 Opposing this problematic confluence, Chun regards both media and memory as contingent, ephemeral, degenerative, forgetful, and erasable, never entirely stable or fully reliable (Chun, 2008, p.159).” ⤴️

  • second brains are faulty just as first brains, but maybe differently so

  • “Tracing the evolution of personal archives from proverbial, “analog,” patchy and selective shoe-boxes to mnemotechnological total environments such as Gordon Bell’s remediation of Memex, van Dijck ac-” ⤴️

  • “earlier critique of the tendency to perceive the human mind and archival storage as founded upon the same kinds of operations (see Bergson, 1896 [1991] as well as the discussion in Paula Amad’s Counter Archive (2010, p.117).” ⤴️

  • “cuses the latter of a cold reduction of memory practices to merely passive accumulation and recall. In Bell’s conceptual model, which she describes as a result of the “googlization” of everyday life, memories are seen as “fixed entities patiently awaiting their retrieval from the shelves of the mental library”(van Dijck, 2005, p.327).” ⤴️

  • memories are not fixed but data is semi-fixed — is it desirable to have memory fade at a human rate? is any rate we attempt to choose just arbitrary

  • “the impermanent qualities of media increasingly rendered as mere deficiencies, and hence targets to be combated.” ⤴️

  • ““questions of forgetting and degradation are turned into problems for media to solve”(Chun, 2008, p.155).” ⤴️

  • desirability of remembering and forgetting are different for different people and different memories. where/should we enforce complete deletion and where is ‘resurfacing’ valuable?

  • ““I hate to lose my memories. I want Total Recall,” asserts Bell in the introductory lines to his book, warning the reader that, in the near future, “those who shun recording will be less empowered than those who embrace it” (Bell and Gemmell, 2009, p.21).” ⤴️

  • “log-books served as a navigational technique for sailors.” ⤴️

  • “The consistent logging of data allowed for a better assessment of a journey’s progress towards its destination.” ⤴️

  • “In this light, the very term “log” in life-logging points toward this practice’s inherent orientation toward progress, and hence the future, making it radically unlike how one traditionally perceives personal archiving.” ⤴️

  • it is inherently capturing data in order to make changes - but is also inherently missing too much data when ignoring any qualitative insight

  • “log-books used to have time-limited value.” ⤴️

  • fleeting notes

  • “representative and useful in relation to a particular journey” ⤴️

  • but some is relevant to that journey at that time, and some relevant to that journey as may be repeated/replicated

  • “once that journey was completed, the log-book would lose its significance and function” ⤴️

  • “Maury studied a vast collection of abandoned, seemingly useless old ships’ logs. He developed a method for retrieving the most important information from each log-book, for example, the speed and weather conditions. Compiled and unified, these different streams of information were then used for making highly informative maps for navy and merchant ships” ⤴️

  • someone’s trash is someone else’s treasure - data recycling, resummarising, etc. hard to do in one shot as each summary has a different focus, but raw data might be overly contextual and not still useful as a whole or too personal

  • “This practice of offering a product or service, maps in his case, in exchange for sailing logs, like today’s browsing histories, is a fundamental part of the main business model of contemporary information technology giants such as Google or Facebook 150 years later.37” ⤴️

  • “Abigail Sellen and Steve Whittaker (2010)” ⤴️

  • “techno-enthusiasts, computer scientists, and HCI experts, whose futuristic visions, as already demonstrated via Chun, persistently render technologies as forms of substitution and replacement, and not assistants to human mnemonic capacities and imaginations” ⤴️

  • “selectivity as opposed to totality, cues, not capture, synergy versus substitution, and respect for the multifaceted complexity of memory as opposed to one technical grid applied to all types of memories and observations.” ⤴️

  • “skepticism toward the growing automation of memory capture, which risks foregrounding quantitative aspects at the expense of qualitative ones. I” ⤴️

  • “recognizing the value of “fallible organic memory” (ibid., p.8).” ⤴️

  • “The camera takes snapshots automatically, every thirty seconds, without any effort by the user (one can additionally tap the surface of the device in order to deliberately take a snapshot).” ⤴️

  • “Instead of armoring myself with consent documents, however, I decided to accept this possibility. In fact, one of my goals was to temporarily become a life-logger of the natural flow of daily events (including natural reactions to my wearing a lifelogging device)” ⤴️

  • “After wearing the camera for three months, for about 6-8 hour per day, I ended up with a massive repository of about 80,000 images. All my pictures together required approximately 65GB of space.” ⤴️

  • “the arbitrariness and incompatibility of the automated capture with my personal impressions and memory, and the second to ethical concerns around the infringement of privacy and power dynamics in everyday life.” ⤴️

  • “static position shots stand a better chance of being captured than brief, dynamic movements and spontaneous, passing gestures. While my memory would usually retain the latter type of a situation (for instance, rushing to school on a bicycle in the rain, or my body doubling over in laughter) the automated sequence-based method of capturing and structuring the archive privileges and saturates the visibility of static situations. Consequently, the archive presents them as seemingly more important events, at the expense of passing, sudden situations.” ⤴️

  • “automatically organized by the software that comes with the wearable camera makes me feel as if I were looking not at or into the events of my life as I have experienced them, but into a parallel life happening right alongside” ⤴️

  • “represents not the life of its owner, but the life of the device” ⤴️

  • “the archive aggregated by this life-logging device promises to be objective, accurate, and, as the website suggests, “authentic,”” ⤴️

  • not every 30 seconds is equally important and we don’t experience time this way

  • “It does not secure the ephemerality and value of “moments that matter,” but instead constructs traces of these moments.” ⤴️

  • ““the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archiveable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event” (1996, p.17)” ⤴️

  • Derrida

  • “a sense of dissociation between myself and the captured memory” ⤴️

  • “The camera’s mnemonic trace occasionally coincides with my memories, though it feels like most of the time, while occupying the same space, my memory and the device’s seem asynchronous.” ⤴️

  • “the images could function as triggers for imaginative, speculative, playful thinking and acting, as opposed to being seen (as the company would have it) as evidence of the actual and “authentic”, simply because it happens passively.” ⤴️

  • “of the age of transparency or post-privacy.38” ⤴️

  • “a talk by Christian Heller at Geneva Lift Conference (Heller, 2010).” ⤴️

  • “The term coveillance was initially coined by Steve Mann as an extension of sousveillance, an act of counter-surveillance which I will discuss in a later part of this thesis. Mann understood coveillance as a positive effect of the democratization of consumer-dedicated photo-capturing technologies. In a coveillant society “actions of all may, in theory, be observable and accountable to all,” rendering the authorities behind surveillance mechanisms eventually disempowered (Mann et al., 2003, p.347).” ⤴️

  • also just B4 this discussing a relevant sci-fi, useful for this kind of work to talk about sci-fi

  • “experiment I encountered no strong objections to my wearing of the device (except on one occasion, to which I will return shortly), especially not in public spaces.” ⤴️

  • “(e.g. Shipp et al., 2014, see also: the “right to be forgotten,”” ⤴️

  • “The simplest lesson from this experiment was that what was supposedly accumulating into my “private life-log” was only superficially private. By” ⤴️

  • “that the camera, always pointing outwards, covered other people and thus, their lives, inevitably, became the subject of my archive.” ⤴️

  • “an inherently imbalanced field of power dynamics. My presence within this field was privileged at the cost of all the others not aware of constituting the subject of capture.” ⤴️

  • “we are far from a scenario in which everyone passively captures one’s life (and others’) for the greater benefit of society.” ⤴️

  • Different considerations for different capture too, me capturing text in public is still private but an image outwards might be public

  • “a variety of ways that the term privacy is comprehended (and performed) by individuals which stems from, for example, their diverse cultural backgrounds (cf. discussion on culture-specific meaning of privacy in Ess, 2013, p.109).” ⤴️

  • “risk of disrespecting such individual opinions (cultural) differences and attitudes in relation to this concern.” ⤴️

  • “For the potential subject of capture, its automation leaves no room for negotiation and possibility of rejecting (or actively agreeing with) it. For the subject who incorporates the device, this automation, its passive character (and hence a decreased awareness of its working) leave no room for attuning to the specificity of a given social situation. In other words the automated character of the device replaces this specificity with an imposed, pre-defined configuration of relations.” ⤴️

  • automation of capture forms then only one structure of relations and of data

  • “Foucault describes the formation of an ethical and moral approach to life in terms of a generative absorption and assimilation of other, diverse opinions, observations, and thoughts, as opposed to an uncritical compliance with some universal set of rules: [W]hatever we have absorbed should not be allowed to remain unchanged, or it will be no part of us. We must digest it; otherwise it will merely enter the memory and not the reasoning power (Foucault, 1997, p.213).” ⤴️

  • reassembling curated collections is primary to their instrumentalisation

  • “Aristotle described practical wisdom. Phronesis is based on a recognition of one’s ability to read individual situations correctly by drawing on previous experience and enhancing this reading in light of each particular situation that one confronts in day-to-day life (Hughes, 2001,” ⤴️

  • applying generalised knowledge in your particular context - often is why AI is useless also

  • “the art of attending to “particulars” as opposed to “universals” (ibid., p.100).” ⤴️

  • “Verbeek (2011) argues that, if technologies are externalizations of the human conscience, then certain norms and principles of behavior are always implicitly or explicitly materialized in them. That means that technology exerts a certain moral influence on human beings, which is to say, it adjusts their behavior according to pre-programmed guidelines” ⤴️

  • in the case of AI this is often tweaking to an original goal, which, even if it is ‘to help the human using it’s could result in a lot of actually very unhelpful things..

  • “n order to allow for a conscious shaping of one’s moral agency a technological device needs to be equipped with a degree of plasticity, inviting the user to consciously make decisions, appropriate and experiment with it and its impact on the self and others (Verbeek, 2011, p.135)” ⤴️

  • “instability and uncertainty that characterizes network technologies and mnemotechnological services in capture culture. What is advertised as a permanent memory aid, a digital journal that can be resorted to at any time, from one day to the next is suspended and at risk of total obsolescence or subject to unforeseen regulations.” ⤴️

  • this shows need for decentralisation and permacomputing

  • “cannot be easily disentangled from computational procedures and mechanisms which, I have argued, are inherently based on digital capture and archiving” ⤴️

  • practises +

  • “today they have to some extent become contaminated and instrumentalized by economic, commercial, and political agendas, as well as a doctrine of nowness, efficiency, and immediacy that drives the development of major tech-industries.” ⤴️

  • personal archiving practises have been

  • “If today, as Wendy Chun argued, the user of a given digital service or software is produced and programmed through the very act of using this software (Chun, 2011), the same can be said of an individual media practitioner committed to the use of a mnemotechnological platform such as Facebook, which, consciously or not, turns him/her into a micro-archiving subject and object of another kind of micro-archiving. What this further means is that mnemotechnologies, such as Facebook and the like, have an inherently transactional nature, not” ⤴️

  • “subject to modulation in accordance with the principles inscribed in these mainstream mnemotechnologies.” ⤴️

  • “living “through” the events of the everyday, erlebnis, which replaced a mode of experiencing everyday life that can be attentively accumulated, critically reflected upon, and transposed into knowledge: erfahrung (Benjamin, 1969). In other words, aided by the growing abundance of mechanized technologies, modernity seemed to have shrunk the sensation of time and space, radically contesting the possibility for long-term knowledge accumulation and replacing it with the necessity to deal with and manage a continuous exposition to shocks, or as Claire Colebrook would call it, a glut of instantaneous affects (Colebrook, 2014, p.86) that promises nothing more than a sense of temporary satisfaction, followed by exhaustion. The amplification of this transformation from erfahrung to erlebnis, from caring for and cultivating one’s observational skills and opinions toward mechanically managing a multitude of shortterm shocks and affects, echoes in the trajectory of contemporary technological developments programmed toward quantity instead of quality.” ⤴️

  • “Facebook and Snapchat might be seen as an example of an instant archive with no long-term, cultural, and historical significance beyond the very moment of their production and consumption” ⤴️

  • “On the surface, they appear to contain pulses of the now, more than impulses for reflection that could be retained and extended over time.” ⤴️

  • “even this sense of ephemerality and flow through the present is technologically constructed and, in fact, relies on the underlying mechanisms of capture and archiving.” ⤴️

  • is the present real?

  • “inevitably and imperceptibly amassing into a more stable archive in its technical substratum.” ⤴️

  • “convenience and immediacy, and its flip side, ambient, techno-surveillance” ⤴️

  • “The pervasive presence of and constant accessibility to the network enables technologies to remain active continuously without the user actively paying attention to them. While people make use of their devices and services at will, these very devices can make use of them for purposes they do not intend.” ⤴️

  • ‘always on’ and background data processing

  • “being captured in a constantly reproduced state of technological anxiety and uncertainty” ⤴️

  • “subscribing to and opting out of network services, social platforms, and their capturing mechanisms is no longer an option in capture culture. Consequently, as Kember has argued, paranoia “is an understandable but ultimately unhelpful response to our increasingly naturalized, insidious (because user-friendly) technologies of everyday control” (Kember, 2014, p.17).” ⤴️

  • “life-logging can be seen as another instance of remediations that memory and personal archiving practices” ⤴️

  • “The proponents of automated, go-alldigital memory capture perceive human, organic memory as inherently flawed and deficient, and hence in need for being supported and ultimately replaced by more advanced, stable technological solutions.” ⤴️

  • Xenofeminism accepts our cyborg condition without determining human biologies as inherently flawed (fascism)

  • “like any other digital technologies, life-logging devices are subject to technical obsolescence and fallibility that might unintentionally and unexpectedly put one’s digitally externalized and mediated memory at risk.” ⤴️

  • “If, for the life-logger, a wearable, mnemotechnological device is perceived as a fully domesticated companion (to paraphrase Donna Haraway’s term), with regard to others whose everyday trajectories this device inevitably enters this same companion turns into a predator.” ⤴️

  • “How can, for instance, involuntary capture and archiving be impeded and the agential dependencies in human-technology relationship more constructively re-negotiated ?” ⤴️

  • “create a backdrop for developing other, parallel, attentive modes of conceptualizing and performing personal archiving within the context of capture culture, in other words, a backdrop not to be counter-acted, but simply acted with, in parallel.” ⤴️

  • “creative media practices.” ⤴️

  • “there are activist organizations that address involuntary exposure to capture and archiving by attempting to develop various kinds of technical solutions. A tool such as Tor – volunteer-operated servers” ⤴️

  • “Schneier (2015), who advocates a political mobilization to clarify the distinction between the right to retain private data and an incentive to share and archive data externally to help improve collective challenges, such as health care” ⤴️

  • “Schrems opened the Europe vs Facebook foundation, which helps Facebook users issue legal suits. Through class actions the organization demands access to Facebook’s deep archives and requests financial retribution for feeding these archives without user awareness.” ⤴️

  • “While some channel their efforts into either developing large-scale technical solutions for safer and untraceable navigation through the web, or enforcing changes to rules and terms of use of the dominant personal data aggregating services and platforms, others go deeper.” ⤴️

  • “disguise more important concerns about the ontological principles of these same services. According to Srinivasan, while distributed across the globe, such mnemotechnological services originate in specific contexts (the Western World, Silicon Valley), and are never neutral. They always reproduce and confirm specific ways of accessing knowledge, creating and structuring accounts of the world and one’s everyday life. Consequently, he argues, despite claims to the contrary, the growing access to globally unified technologies does not necessarily empower individuals or increase their sense of agency. In fact, quite the opposite effect might be occurring: the eradication of other, diverse, smaller, local “poetics, aesthetics, and cognition in the creation of devices, databases, and infrastructures” (ibid., p.206).” ⤴️

  • “reinforces the dominance and reproduction of specific ontological, political, and economical motivations that these mnemotechnologies are always inherently inscribed with.” ⤴️

  • in me crafting this tool in my context and from my sources I am inherently giving space and time and focus to those choices, for better and worse — reminds me of how I want to center fabric and material technologies but don’t have the skill yet or the time yet but that often people interested in wearable tech are interested in lifelogging, quantifying, digitising the analogue rather than working with it, obscuring its capacity rather than bringing it to the forefront

  • “Joseph August Lux proposed a different point of view. In his opinion, the effects of this new technologies could be overcome through developing a “spiritual center” along with a long-term vision by which these technologies could be attentively adopted in the currents of one’s everyday life. This long-term vision and historical consciousness were not a large-scale solutions for the problem; they indicated one way through which an individual could address the omnipresence of technologies and their effects ever-more deeply woven into the fabric of life.” ⤴️

  • “inventing and actively re-configuring one’s relationship with technologies” ⤴️

  • “aims to move beyond seeing personal archiving practices as entirely infected by the workings of mainstream capture-culture mnemotechnologies.” ⤴️

  • “called an archival agency, which is to say a possibility to negotiate one’s position within the techno-cultural condition of a given moment” ⤴️

  • “to present and articulate some existing creative media practices that critically address our exposure to the capturing and archiving mechanisms of capture culture.” ⤴️

  • “critical modes of operationalizing technologies of capture as sousveillance and obfuscation, instances of tactical media practices explicitly oriented against the strategic proliferation of technical systems of surveillance, capture, and control (Mann et al., 2003, Brunton and Nissenbaum, 2015).” ⤴️

  • “articulation of para-archiving, a mode of living with technologies of capture that can move us beyond the dichotomy of the tactical versus strategic” ⤴️

  • “Ben Highmore’s return to de Certeau’s seminal discussion on the concepts of tactics and strategies in the practice” ⤴️

  • “of everyday life (de Certeau, 1984, Highmore, 2002)” ⤴️

  • “proposing a step beyond the polarized way of problematizing media and cultural practices as either set against the hegemonic forces or compliant with them” ⤴️

  • “ift in perception toward those practices that do not explicitly counteract, but evolve alongside or parallel to the proprietary power (and capture) while engaging in inventive, performative and material appropriation and reconfiguration of capture and archiving technologies. To” ⤴️

  • alternative futures, alternative systems

  • “Unhinging God’s Eye” ⤴️

  • “The novelty in this device was” ⤴️

  • “its portability” ⤴️

  • “the Picture Box prototype eliminated the need to rely on static, physical infrastructures for constructing visual representations of the world” ⤴️

  • “to encourage individuals to establish closer relationships with their local surroundings” ⤴️

  • “the chance to create more subjective representations of the world,” ⤴️

  • “second-hand images, as the author argued in the text, “misguide our imagination and lead us into Error by obtruding upon us the Imaginations of a Person, possibly, more ignorant than our selves” (original capitalization, Hooke and Derham, 1726, p.294).” ⤴️

  • “I see this act of misquoting as a mode of re-capturing and re-assembling the image of reality that the fragmented representations were initially intended to communicate.” ⤴️

  • “Mapping can be seen as aesthetically coded records of my presence in time and space” ⤴️

  • “Respecting the capacity and fallibility of organic memory, the records require an active input of my internal memory in order to be more precisely deciphered.” ⤴️

  • “The potentially historical value of these maps (again, taking into account regular, accumulative character of this practice) might be recognized in their capturing of stylistic mutations also influenced (perhaps even put at risk) by web-based mapping services such as Google maps and locative apps.” ⤴️

  • “the very technique of collage rather than what is being collated takes precedence in the way that this mnemonic trace is interacted with.” ⤴️

  • reminds me of how a piece of art you make can trace memories of the time and space you were making it in, how drawing a conversation or ttrpg can remind you of entire worlds inside your head

  • “around the fragmentation of everyday life experience, reduction of space to key representative sites (as in the case of tourists maps) and acceleration of time (and lifestyle) expressed in maps picked up at train and bus terminals on which distances between locations are often synthesized and shrunk” ⤴️

  • “One early project that addressed this issue was a mobile phone application openpaths. It allows smatphone users to decide how they want their data to be used. It protects the locative data, but one can also decide to share it with specific research initiatives, art projects, or educational programs of choice (House, 2011).” ⤴️

  • “But what needs to be mentioned is that in the case of discontinuance of some, there is always a variety of alternatives and replacements available. The field of open-source, freeware and shareware software is wide and one can find often very closely resembling tools that borrow from each other. This is provided that one knows what and where to look for. Thus, this compositional mode of working requires attention to technological developments, and a sustained curiosity, which in return provides a feeling of excitement, vitality and sense of satisfaction contrasting, quite vastly, with a somewhat “programmed” sense of tranquillity or “calmness” that mass-produced, ubiquitous systems are set to provide their users with (Fuller and Matos, 2017, p.181).” ⤴️

  • “Never entirely utilizing the full capacity offered by one single tool, on each step of this multi-phase process I instead engage with a selected function.” ⤴️

  • “a dynamic transfer of the exteriorized memory across these deliberately chosen software products. Each step leaves a particular imprint, but the ultimate mark is a result of the working of the composition of several tools” ⤴️

  • “While each step modulates the file in a specific way, it also produces particular residue, a kind of digital sawdust that can be retained and possibly re-purposed further on. This production of the sawdust can be seen as a manifestation of a certain (perhaps continuously minimal, yet detectable) degree of technical transparency (understood in-line with the meaning rooted in the pre-web 2.0), gradually disappearing today in favour of user friendly technological systems promising seamless and clean experiences. The digital sawdust is hence an evidence that accounts for a process that takes place. In contrast to meta-data or other contextual data scraped by imperceptible algorithms that process memories as in the case of large scale mnemotechnological systems, this sawdust does not become completely disclosed or instantly hidden. For instance, since much of the process takes place locally, on my computer, I can keep the numeric data from the first phase of the process” ⤴️

  • “In that sense the work further acquires characteristics of a responsible craftsmanship, in a way that it attempts to make qualitative use of the refuse and side products accumulated along different phases of the project.” ⤴️

  • “The structure has been envisaged as a kind of a hub where the diverse types of outcomes could be accommodated over time, in their own terms. In other words, I perceived the idea of a self-contained structure accommodative to multitude of formats and media” ⤴️

  • “downsides characterizing self-designed frameworks. Precisely such issues as incompatibility with the newest versions of browsers, operating systems, problems with responsiveness on mobile devices can be seen as some vast disadvantages. Personally developed structure, especially if one’s programming skills are not continuously exercised and regularly updated, can get quickly sidetracked and outdated in the context of popular, mainstream technological developments. This is obviously a disadvantage if one looks from a perspective of someone willing to be in constant touch with the rest of the online realm and sees value in a constant refashioning of technologies and thus the modes of living with them. For me, the state of lagging behind, partly non-intended yet sustained somewhat deliberately helps evade getting unnecessarily captive to and distracted by the ever-accelerating chain of mainstream developments and updates” ⤴️

  • “primarily resistivity resulting from the confrontation with the horizon of my capabilities.” ⤴️

  • “resorting to such techniques as collating, recycling, bricollaging or what I would call digital rag-picking, in other words an appropriation of elements of code from diverse range of sources” ⤴️

  • “slow digital crafting seems to be more conducive to encountering others and thus can be seen to be equipped with a certain communal aspect” ⤴️

  • “relying on experiences of other developers, online communities and members of open-source forums. Open-source communities and online groups, or remaining adjacent to the nomenclature revolving around craft, ”digital guilds”, (such as stackoverflow.com or w3schools.com)” ⤴️

  • “In blackboxed, user-friendly frameworks, concerns related to the compatibility in regard to formats, extensions and size, resolution of the uploaded material (e.g. image, video) are preemptively eliminated. Conversion and adjustment of one’s mediated memory happens automatically.” ⤴️

  • “for a retention of not only the successful and functional command lines but also elements of left-over code, dysfunctional remnants such as symbols, sequences, annotations to oneself “commented out”, which is to say put on hold in terms of their effectiveness for the time being. The programmed artifact hence becomes simultaneously a residue, or a record of steps taken along the way, while obviously acquiring its intended function of a repository and structuring device for organization and display of digitized content.” ⤴️

  • not only self-documenting and self-exemplifying but also self-archiving in a way, self-reflecting

  • “mechani- cally copied into books by contracted drawers who often had no relation- ship to the subject:” ⤴️

  • “Picture Box as as a de- vice that critiqued dominant forms of documenting and representing the world, and more broadly speaking, the ways that knowledge of the world was visually (re-)produced, distributed, and imposed upon people at the time.” ⤴️

  • “In his study of the camera obscura, Jonathan Crary emphasized the de- vice’s historical association with ideas of perfect, disembodied, objective vision. The camera obscura was believed to give the viewer “a vantage point onto the world analogous to the eye of God” (Crary, 1990, p.48) and thus as “a metaphor for the most rational possibilities of a perceiver within the increasingly dynamic disorder of the world” (ibid., p.53). D” ⤴️

  • “the camera obscura re-purposed by Hooke challenged this logic, or even ventured to reverse it. It did so not least by making the very optical mechanism portable (and in doing so, opening the possibility to develop an array of dynamic, subjective perspectives on a given object) but also by widening access to the observing technol- ogy, and thus enabling the individual to become a more attentive witness, observer, and recordist of the surrounding world, as opposed to merely a consumer of ready-made representations d” ⤴️

  • “The patent was rejected by the authorities and the church (Crary, 1990, p.296); one can only speculate if this was because of the device’s autonomous nature, not connected, as we would say today, to any unify- ing network or technical system, and hence independent of any central- ized control. A” ⤴️

  • “n embodied or performative critique of the dominant technology of capture. A” ⤴️

  • ”, the fixed gaze of camera obscura, among other optical devices, should always be perceived as a site of knowledge and power production, and thus an instrument that operates “directly on the body of the individual” (ibid., p.7)” ⤴️

  • “The wear- able camera obscura complicates the attributes of its static forerunner by reversing the power relationship, or, at least, by granting considerable agency to the individual user and his/her corporeal capacity to operate on the peripheries of the authoritarian gaze.” ⤴️

  • “s act of unhinging and destabilizing “God’s eye,” reducing it to an individual level a” ⤴️

  • “a tactical media practice known as sousveillance – a form of technological disobedi- ence that emerged three hundred years later.” ⤴️

  • “Sousveillance, literally meaning observation from below (” ⤴️

  • “coined by Steve Mann, Jason Nolan, and Barry Wellman (2003, p.332), media art practitioners and scholars a” ⤴️

  • “inverse surveillance, a subversive response to the growing proliferation and ubiquity of surveillance technologies and practices authorities use to monitor, track, capture and store data on ordinary citizens. I” ⤴️

  • “a radical, political gesture of taking down a surveillance camera, appropriating it as a wearable device and thus drastically reconfiguring the power relation- ships between the observed and observing.” ⤴️

  • “Mann po- sitioned it in relation to neo-panopticism, a notion derived from Michel Foucault’s seminal discussion on panopticon and Gilles Deleuze concept of control society.” ⤴️

  • “a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.” ⤴️

  • “the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers (Foucault, 1977, p.201).” ⤴️

  • “What makes panopticon effective and powerful is its automation.” ⤴️

  • “Within the panopticon, the subjugated citizens never know when exactly they are being monitored, which one of them draws the special at- tention of the authoritarian gaze at a given time, or even if they are being monitored at all.” ⤴️

  • “Foucault’s concept of the disciplinary society implies that it consists in a number of such panopticon-like enclosures,” ⤴️

  • “Each of these closures, understood in both a spatial and temporal sense, is inscribed with a set of inherent norms and regulations. But each enclosure has also its clear boundaries, and the subject confined within remains aware of this enclosure’s finitude. T” ⤴️

  • “there was still space and time between these enclosures that enabled the generation of more autonomous every-” ⤴️

  • “day practices that could elude capture.” ⤴️

  • “In contrast, Deleuze argued that in a control society: [O]ne is never finished with anything – the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal sys- tem of deformation (Deleuze, 1992. p.5).” ⤴️

  • “e contested the idea of the individual as much as it reconfig- ured the understanding of the masses: “we no longer find ourselves deal- ing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become ’dividuals’, and masses, samples, data, markets, or ’banks’” (ibid., p.5).” ⤴️

  • “In a network society the key social structures and activities were organized around electronically processed information networks.42 Mobile network advancements that expanded the impact of network tech- nologies beyond key social structures (the job market, administrative sys- tems, banking) and into multiple other social and private domains were to come in the next several years. Thus, Mann believed that mobilizing computers and constructing wearable data recording and storing instru- ments autonomous from centralized network systems would facilitate, at least to some degree, the emergence of alternative zones for more autono- mous and controllable modes of living with recording technologies.” ⤴️

  • “Sousveillance was, as Mann suggests, “an act of liberation,” combining aspects of civil-rights activism, performance art, and subversive tactics (Mann et al., 2003, p.347):” ⤴️

  • “It is a model, with its root in previous emancipatory movements, with the goal of social engagement and dialogue (ibid. p.347).” ⤴️

  • “an increase of a reflective awareness of one’s position in relation to power structures that the distribution of technical systems of surveillance constitutes.” ⤴️

  • “a situation in which the two would blend irreversibly leading to what Mann described as “equiveillance” or a “cov- eillance society.”” ⤴️

  • “A certain lack of critical awareness in Mann’s scenario to the concept of coveillance (which was touched upon in the chapter on capture culture) can be explained in that the market for commercial wearable capturing technologies and cloud services as we know them did not exist at the time, and thus their consequences could not have been anticipated. What I mean here is that today sousveillance is an intrinsic element of everyday media-technological landscape and strategies of tech-corporations bene- fiting from the content from sousveillance practices. In speaking of wear- able technologies, Mann made reference to tools constructed independent of large scale tech-corporations and operational on their own terms and at their own sites, outside of the web, access to which, at the time, was high- ly limited ( in this sense this semi-autonomous relation between self-con- structed wearable cameras (or re-purposed CCTV cameras) and the net- work of monitoring devices in public spaces can be compared to the relation between the mobile Picture Box and the static system of camera obscuras)” ⤴️

  • “the tacti- cal, disobedient and empowering quality of sousveillance was enabled precisely by the independence from the mechanisms of the dominant frameworks” ⤴️

  • “the practice of sousveillance might now be said to have irreversibly saturated the ev- eryday life of societies, at least those with a high degree of technological pervasiveness.” ⤴️

  • “life-logging services) can be seen as modes of such a com- modified sousveillance, in which the subversive and disobedient qualities are significantly tamed.” ⤴️

  • “Jensen, for exam- ple, writes about distributed surveillance in terms of omnopticon (2007, p.380). Lilian Mitrou uses a similar term, omniopticon, interchangeably with “participatory panopticon” to describe the overall effect of interac-” ⤴️

  • “The practice of life-logging is commonly discussed as stemming from sousveillance (see for in- stance Sonvilla-Weiss, 2008)” ⤴️

  • “tion in the realm of the web 2.0, where the many watch the many (Mitrou et al., 2014). E” ⤴️

  • “Mathiensen’s notion of synopticon (1997), Roy Boyne (2000) writes of a situation where power dynamics is some- what symmetrically inverted a” ⤴️

  • “With the emergence of live broadcast technologies and the internet, today it is actually the many who watch the few.” ⤴️

  • ”. The synopticon particularly applies in relation to reality shows, celebrity, and blogging/ vlogging cultures.” ⤴️

  • “John Gilliom and Torin Monahan have lately argued that: Rather than being a prison-like panopticon where trapped pe- ople follow the rules because they are afraid someone is wat- ching, with Facebook and similar sites people are probably more afraid that no one is watching, t” ⤴️

  • “(2012, p.49, cited in Browne, 2015, p.39).” ⤴️

  • “Certeau’s concept of tactics and strategies h” ⤴️

  • “people attend to media technologies to negotiate, reconfigure, and manipulate their power.” ⤴️

  • “Emerging in the 1990s and the early 2000s, the literature on Tactical Media, a form of media activism and scholarship centering on media practices, media art, and activism, has extensively drawn on how de Certeau (1984) problematized everyday life as a space where individuals develop and deploy tactics as their way of disaligning with various structurally enforced or embedded strategic forces, whether institutional, technical, societal, or political.” ⤴️

  • “De Certeau himself described tactics as “clever tricks, the hunter’s cun- ning, manoeuvres, polymorphic situations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike” (1984, p.xii).” ⤴️

  • “are formed and hence to be sought not (only) in excep- tional, critical situations, but primarily in everyday life.” ⤴️

  • “can be expressed in how one approaches such quotidian activities as navigating an urban space, cooking, or speaking. L” ⤴️

  • “tactics as special ways of manip- ulating the system of representations (language) so it no longer appears to be merely a normative and hegemonic framework (ibid., p.21).” ⤴️

  • “t just as dialects and styles of speaking do not emerge in isolation from the normative forces of the language, so the concept of tactics at large always remains in some relation to strategies.” ⤴️

  • “defined as “a calculus” ⤴️

  • “of force relationships when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an environ- ment” (ibid. p.xix)” ⤴️

  • “operate above a given milieu, suspended yet pervasive in their regulatory and governing impact.” ⤴️

  • “If the strategy is to be described in terms of a mode of organizing space and everyday life top-down, from a macro-level perspective, tactics might be seen as emerging on a micro- or even molecular-level of everyday life, to re-configure or negotiate the impact of the strategy.” ⤴️

  • ““tactical media” being coined around 1997 by David Garcia and Geert Lovink: Tactical media are what happens when the cheap ‘do it yourself’ media, made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and expanded forms of distribution (from public access cable to the Internet) are exploited by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded from the wider culture (Garcia and Lovink,1997, no pagination).” ⤴️

  • “the authors point at de Certeau as a crucial impulse for their understanding of the tactical use of media technologies. Addressing what makes media tactical, the authors argue that it is a spe- cial approach to the use of technologies of representation that are at once “creative” and “rebellious”, in that they allow for the development of an aesthetics of everyday life, “an existential aesthetic” that is highly dis- tinctive and disruptive compared to mainstream uses of consumer media technologies.” ⤴️

  • “the notion of tactical media was increasingly contested even by early proponents of the concept (in Kluitenberg, 2011). Similarly, given that, in the context of ubiquitous me- dia, individual practices of observing, accounting for, and archiving one’s life have gradually diluted into mnemotechnological mechanisms of cap- ture culture, it might be said that the clear division between tactics and strategies (a prerequisite for tactical media theory and practice) no longer holds as it once did. Garcia, for instance, demonstrated that tactics and strategies are at present inextricably linked as components of the same software architecture (after Felix Stalder’s definitions [2012] in Garcia, 2013).” ⤴️

  • “the assertion here is that what takes place on a popular media platform’s front-end (typically “decentralized, ad hoc, cheap, easy to use, community oriented and transparent” [Stalder, 2012, p.248]) might be technically considered in terms of tactical practices. In contrast, the back-end is “centralized, based on long-term planning, very expensive, difficult-to-run, corporate, and opaque.” Therefore, the back end has a strategically devised architecture; it is a digital manifesta-” ⤴️

  • “tion of de Certeau’s understanding of strategy.” ⤴️

  • “Manovich (2009) also demonstrated that the fact that dominant social media frameworks tend to prioritize flexibility might let us speak of a drastic reconfiguration of the tactic-strategy relationship and our un- derstanding of these terms. A” ⤴️

  • “in the context of the web 2.0 services “people’s cultural tactics were turned into strategies now sold to them” (Manovich, 2009, p.324).” ⤴️

  • “Strategies used by social media companies often look more like tactics in the original formulation” ⤴️

  • “[Rita Raley (2009)] defined [tactical media] in terms of acts of a “virtuosic performance” that emerged as a response to postindustrial society and neoliberal globalisation (ibid., p.2).” ⤴️

  • “(Benjamin, 2003, p.48).” ⤴️

  • “To Benjamin, rag-picker constituted an opposite to a bourgeois collector, historian and archivist typically bound to the confines and rules of their professions and institutions. Ignoring the most valuable and historically exceptional, the amateur archivist, or a para-archivist as we might figuratively call a rag-picker, orients himself/herself instead towards the margins of modernity and by-products of its processes. In parallel to his precarious condition, away from any attention, he/she creates a prodigious account of consumerist society’s continual demand for the new (Highmore, 2002, p.61). Certainly, what motivates the rag-picker’s taking to the streets and “botanizing on the asphalt” (Benjamin, 1973) differs radically from the motivation of a conventional collector, historian and archivist.” ⤴️

  • “refuse the lure of celebrating the new and progressive, and on the other, prevents from sentimentalizing the long gone broken promise which this debris is evidence of (2002, p.65)” ⤴️

  • “The transposition of rag-picking into a technique of inquiry into material culture is explored (yet not quite completely) in Benjamin’s Arcades Project: Like a poor and burdened man cleverly picking through the rubbish of the previous day, the materialist historian selects from amongst all that is disregarded and from the residues of history. At the library he is unconcerned with what has been accredited as precious and valuable, but rather is drawn towards historical refuse. Waste materials are to enter into significant connections and fragments are used to gain a new perspective on history (in Marx et al., 2007, p.252).” ⤴️

  • “seemingly polarized realms, taking place within different societal, cultural and political milieux, trash and what it connotes - the marginal, peripheral, left-over, liminal, circumferential – establish a unifying vector. Concerned with reassembling and potentially preserving the fugitive ecologies of everyday experiences founded upon the very debris that they yield, each of these figures - avant-guard artist, historian and rag-picker - in his/her own terms becomes a para-archivist of the time.” ⤴️

  • “endorsement of resistivity, a notion discussed earlier in relation to manual notebook, here entailing more specifically a productive acknowledgement of the limitations of one’s skills against the horizon of today’s technological possibilities.” ⤴️

  • “Self-constitution can be read as an act of mixing different temporalities, degrees of focus, procedural operations. This composition is collective as well as individuating , since such procedures are drawn and imposed by numerous resources, and contexts that operate across persons, organizations, economic regimes and conditions of information (Fuller, 2017, p.202).” ⤴️

  • “personal archiving, if we see it as a form of exteriorizing this subjecthhood into material traces. Thus, regardless their subject’s will to be sovereign and autonomous, in capture culture, personal archives are always to some degree determined and contaminated by numerous agendas. But as demonstrated in this chapter, this degree of conditioning can be intervened into, reconfigured or as Fuller suggests, re-mixed. While the quote above points at this twofold architecture of subjecthood, at once subjected to the complex mesh of technological relations and yet capable of turning them into a subject of volitional reconfiguration, it also entails various moral considerations that inevitably accompany this negotiation” ⤴️

  • “active decisions as for how to live with techne, whether individually or collectively” ⤴️

  • “The breaking of the process into phases and introducing, slower, compositional approach to crafting one’s relationship with capturing technologies and accounting for one’s life at least to some degree seems to be opening some room for reflections, attention and hence moral consideration.” ⤴️

  • “Thus, the deceleration, partial de-automatization of the process of personal capture and archiving, breaking it into diversified phases, sites and rhythms, might allow for a more conscious and considerate way of negotiating the web of relations between its constituent nodes.” ⤴️

  • “deceleration through re-manualization of memory practices seem to enable conditions for a more direct and careful configuration of the web of relations, or differently put, a constitution of web of such relations that evolves and can be cultivated in parallel to the involuntarily and imperceptibly operating web that we are inherently immersed in” ⤴️

  • “I kept thinking of the heavy, and much less vulnerable, slow and bulky paper book still occupying the same spot on the little table in front of me, almost completely resistant to the annoyingly irregular micro-turbulence of the train. Even if the book fell, I kept thinking, its content would not have been affected. I cursed the “fast train,” our dependence on speed, efficiency, and comfort that this train embodied to me.” ⤴️

  • “an article on early filing cabinets written by John Tagg. Tagg’s description of these fixtures as instruments of power, privilege, and control (2011) recalled the concept of mnemotechnology. Even though Tagg did not use this term, his description portrayed the cabinet as a constituent part of a larger economy of remembering (or industria memoriae, as I would call it today) – a predecessor of what we now call a digital database. Yet, I thought, the twentieth century’s advancements in information management and technology seemed to have deprived this manual cabinet of any such attributes. I asked myself whether, superseded by the ubiquitous cloud, a bulky, wooden and disconnected cabinet such as this one was not, paradoxically, the safest, most stable, and reliable technology for organizing memory today? A space for regaining autonomy and control over a vulnerable digital legacy in capture culture? Mnemotechnology turned mnemotechnique, as an inevitable consequence of technological transformations?” ⤴️

  • “The growing role of printing press and movable type in the sixteenth century accelerated the proliferation of textual media, quickly raising a lot of concerns and worries, but also posing challenges to their organization and dissemination. This “book flood” was addressed as a serious problem, calling for new methods to access, organize, and navigate ever more rapidly accumulating written information (Krajewski, 2011, p.9). One early way of tackling this situation was compiling special books that contained meticulously crafted lists of all the volumes in a collection, house, institution or state.” ⤴️

  • “Bibliotheca Universalis was a single-minded archive of all texts available at the time, or, as Markus Krajewski had it, “an index of indexes,” yielding access to a concrete piece of information through a simple, manual “algorithm.”” ⤴️

  • im all for transparent, simple, manual algorithms.

  • “a wide array of radical practices at the interection of activism and art” ⤴️

  • “She sees tactical use of media as interventions into media and technical infrastructures (web- sites, datasets, databases, servers, etc.) which aim less to change the status quo than to temporarily disrupt it, to highlight and call attention to some controversial mechanisms and practices deliberately withheld from the general public by authorities and financial corporation” ⤴️

  • “artistic collectives like Critical Art Ensemble, Carbon Defense League, Bureau of Inverse Technology, or Yes Man, the last of which is known for hi-jacking press conferences” ⤴️

  • “major characteristic of tactical media, as Raley asserts, is their “ephemerality” and “distinct temporality” (ibid., p.7). T” ⤴️

  • “the intervention and disruption of a dominant semiotic regime,” ⤴️

  • “temporary creation of a situation in which signs, messages, and narratives are set into play and critical thinking becomes possible (2009, p.6).” ⤴️

  • “the tactical use of media technologies is inherently positioned against power structures previously identified as” ⤴️

  • “superior and hegemonic.” ⤴️

  • “taking a position inferior to the strategi- cally produced power structures, tactical media practices are performed in short temporary and circumstantial gaps.” ⤴️

  • “This performative, transient, and momentary nature of tactical media practices benefits tactical media practitioners as they themselves have no intention of engaging in systemic change or in leaving a permanent, archival trace of their actions. “” ⤴️

  • “suggest a concept of tac- tical media’s integral focus against stability, duration, and permanence, and thus, against the archive.” ⤴️

  • “If, arguably, sousveillance has originally been conceived as a practice aiming to make oneself visible to the surveilling gaze of the system, but on one’s own terms and from the perspective of a singular position” ⤴️

  • “in the context of ubiquitous cap- ture, being tactical might mean doing the opposite, which is to say mak- ing oneself invisible?” ⤴️

  • “if the principle of tactical media practice as originally problematized by Lovink and Garcia was to forcibly insert oneself into a wider culture from which one had felt excluded, could it be that today the principle is to deliberately exclude oneself from the domi- nant frameworks of digital culture through technical manipulations of its very components?” ⤴️

  • “data obfuscation might be approached as an example of such a revised tactical response. These practices aim to regain control over one’s personal data,” ⤴️

  • “Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum (2015) describe the goal of obfuscation practices as “mitigating and defeating present-day digital surveil- lance.” The goal of obfuscation is to disable or, at least, temporarily deny involuntary observation and capture of personal data. It is performed through “creating many plausible, ambiguous, and misleading signals within which the information we want to conceal can be lost” (ibid., p.7).” ⤴️

  • “proponents of obfuscation suggest that instead of limiting, one should deliberately add to existing signals. Generating a bundle of random signals amasses a dense and noisy pleth- ora of misleading patterns, among which one’s real presence might be temporarily concealed and unidentifiable.” ⤴️

  • “intensely engaging in digital data flow.” ⤴️

  • “Krajewski defined the art of excerpting as “a private” and “discreet” practice of scholarship and memory (Krajewski, 2011, p.16).” ⤴️

  • “The illustration at the head of this section, originally published in the aforementioned book by Placcius, depicts an anonymous example of a device for the art of excerpting (Fig. 9.1). When the doors are opened, this simple wooden piece displays a complex array of hooks for hanging little paper snippets with handwritten thoughts, observations, and references to other texts, to be organized according to principles devised by its owner. The device had two major functions. First, to facilitate the organization of discrete notes into a constellation configured according to a set of independent, overriding principles. Second, it was an inventory of singular nodes, modular fragments that could be easily assembled into ever-new configurations, potentially yielding new meanings and inspiring the generation of new modules for the collection. In other words, unlike a book – an earlier form of organizing personal notes, such as the Bibliotheca Universalis – excerpting devices as this anonymous cabinet provide both fixity and mobility, two modes of working with memory: one that facilitates storage according to a set of pre-established coordinates, and one that provides the possibility of continuous reconfiguration, re-edition, and augmentation, to trigger new thoughts, impressions, and meanings. In more contemporary terms, the excerpting practice was comprised of two main elements: software, or a set of principles choreographing how one goes about gathering and ordering knowledge, and hardware, or the material storage, the physical medium, such as a book of paper excerpts or a paper card cabinet (Krajewski, 2011, p.20). In this light, this “recombinant poetics” (Seaman, 2007) of the art of excerpting, can be said to predate the logic of the digital database, where digital data sets are at once stored and open to continuous reshuffling, reorganization, and reordering (Manovich, 2001).” ⤴️

  • “Krajewski reminds us that chance and random encounters with books, strolling through the aisles of libraries, were also common modes of browsing and gaining knowledge, before they were organized in accordance with complex classification systems (Krajewski, 2011, p.32). The eighteenth century marks the time when the organization of knowledge migrated from bound pages of books and catalogs to loosely compiled, individual index cards, enabling multiple ways of navigating a collection of books. Simultaneously, however, this moment can be seen as initiating a more rigorous management of knowledge and collective memory, a more disciplined control over their production, rationalization, systematization, and dissemination. It was also around that time that, as Krajewski argues, “the library becomes a bearer of capital, a data bank, lending information as if it were credit” (ibid., p.24).” ⤴️

  • “Among the projects aiming at capturing the totality of knowledge and creating a “gigantic,” “universal,” and “complete” record of the world’s knowledge” ⤴️

  • fruitless, pointless, impossible, undesirable to go form ‘completion’ — however having a LOT of information is useful ESPECIALLY with proper provenance

  • “tactically utilizing and playing with its inevitable mechanisms (ibid., p.55).” ⤴️

  • “steganography, known for more than two thousand years as a method of masking and protecting information by inserting it into another unit of information or another medium (Gupta et al., 2016). A” ⤴️

  • “As Jussi Parikka suggests, a stegano- graphic message occupies a liminal space, it is “neither a depth nor the plain surface but somewhere in between” (2017, no pagination).” ⤴️

  • similar to how a single mode of subversive text amongst garbage metadata might be obfuscating the message as a subversive act - ie should we make Pinterest MORE messy to singularly direct to other methods? but is this necessarily exclusive and environment damaging and brain overloading?

  • “While initially the copies of index cards from the central repertory were sent directly via hard mail to those who had submitted a query, the inventors’ ultimate dream was to establish a network of these devices to span the major cities around the world, making the circulation of knowledge much more efficient. These regularly updated hubs were envisioned as egalitarian, freely accessible centers of knowledge, open to all” ⤴️

  • “globally unified ecology of knowledge.” ⤴️

  • “hypothetical, hybrid media archive” ⤴️

  • “Disturbed by WWII, this vision could not be turned into material realit” ⤴️

  • “following the war, the positivist thinking that certainly lay behind this technological endeavor was contested, inevitably leading to a gradual decrease in funding opportunities and its ultimate discontinuation.60” ⤴️

  • “Google has pointed out parallels not only between the pre-digital mechanisms of indexing and their own advanced browsing algorithms, but perhaps more importantly (and controversially), the universalist and democratic motivations driving the two enterprises.” ⤴️

  • “Through a purchase of rights to his vulnerable heritage, Otlet, known for his pacifist mindset, became somewhat artificially inserted into the history of Google, and subsequently used in a campaign to promote the image of the corporation as the greatest proponent of democratic access to knowledge.61” ⤴️

  • “Parikka builds a connection between seventeenth-century instruments for secret writing (such as Athanasius Kirchner’s Arca Steganographica) and contemporary forms of inscribing digital files with content beyond one’s percep- tion. Not only hidden messages, personal data, but also malicious bits of code can be steganographically inscribed into a digital file, o” ⤴️

  • find that paper on viruses in Pins

  • “obfuscation, often described as “the weapons of the weak”(Brunton and Nissenbaum, 2015, p.55)” ⤴️

  • “plug-in or an extension” ⤴️ as signal-disruptors

  • “obfuscation tactics provide no long-term and sustainable solutions against data surveillance and in- voluntary capture. They do not lead to complete erasure of mediated life patterns or a complete protection of voluntarily constructed archival trac- es. Rather, obfuscation inserts “sand in the gears” of surveilling mechanisms, “buying time” to enjoy a temporary sense of non-identity, a partial autonomy that might be used to devise further tactics for circumventing the capture.” ⤴️

  • still better not to be captured at all

  • “expenditure of time and energy on the constant renewal of obfuscating tactics a” ⤴️

  • “counter-surveillance art (Remes and Skelton, 2010).” ⤴️

  • “feeding his Facebook profile with false information about himself” ⤴️

  • “As Brunton and Nissenbaum argue, “Bayesian Flooding is not meant to counteract and corrupt the vast scope of data collection and analysis; instead its purpose is to keep data about oneself both within the system and inaccessible” (Brunton and Nissenbaum, 2015, p.39). T” ⤴️

  • if this is the only tool you’re forced to use this is a valid tactic but many SNS are really not mandatory to post on and the kind of signals this would disrupt can be switched off - not perfectly, but adequately. better to invest energy into building better alternative where you can than in circumventing it

  • “double status of being in the system, but on one’s own terms, might be seen as characteristic of tactical media, and more generally, a performance of the tactical as proposed by de Certeau (1984).” ⤴️

  • “disrupting the face-tracking software embedded in CCTV surveillance monitoring of urban areas.” ⤴️

  • “making identification of the target difficult, if at all possible.47” ⤴️

  • “media art interventions attempt to balance the picture by offering what might be described as anti-track- ing wearables, However, such artistic quasi-camouflage systems are still more likely to be encountered in art galleries and media festivals than on the street.” ⤴️

  • ““Bayes rule” is a mathematical formula used for perfecting the estimation of probability of some event to happen given that some additional information has been acquired which helps yield more refined and precise results.” ⤴️

  • “Selvaggio’s artifact can be seen as an example of a recent trend prevailing among media art practitioners who aspire to be political- ly and socially active, without moving much beyond the realm of merely theoretical artistic (or technological) speculation.” ⤴️

  • “What is perhaps paradoxical in such counter-surveillance art that deals with themes of obfuscation and identity protection is that, while promot-” ⤴️

  • “ing the erasure of visibility and identity, they simultaneously work to- ward constructing and solidifying their creators’ strong artistic, scholarly, and media image. Instead of becoming anonymous, their media visibility and presence in the discourse only become more vivid.” ⤴️

  • “for media-art practitioners who work with techniques of counter-capture, the incentive is to become invisible to the state, the opposite – becoming documented and recognized – is an in- centive for a number of migrants and asylum seekers.” ⤴️

  • “Often media-art practitioners committed to such practices come from or are settled in economically, geographically, politically, and technologically privileged environments (West-European countries, tech-labs, academia).” ⤴️

  • “might unwillingly subscribe to the paranoid aura around contemporary debates on network and digital media. Were this the case, the propaga- tion of such practices as an antidote to the ubiquitous surveillance would paradoxically perpetuate a state of fear and uncertainty which might, in fact, be in the interest of the authorities.” ⤴️

  • “practices seeking to evade the capture and erasure of visibility might be seen as energy-draining.” ⤴️

  • “this thesis is however interested in redirecting energy and attention from such a tactical “struggle” for becoming absent (and with- out a trace of one’s itinerary left), to strategically composing modes of what I would call a parallel presence and consequently a parallel record.” ⤴️

  • alternative systems

  • “radical openness.” ⤴️

  • “a form of an over- compliance to the rules and demands of the techno-political system or overidentification with the task that was imposed upon him.” ⤴️

  • following their rules to the extreme that their rules stretch their resources - mallicious compliance

  • “applying the dominant ideology “even more consistently and scrupulously than the rest of society” (Dragona, 2016).” ⤴️

  • “Elahi subversively puts under a question mark the very logic and efficacy of extensive data collection and mass surveillance. As he mentions in one of his lectures, in basic economic terms his project can be seen as an unheralded intensification of supply over demand, which drastically deregulates the value of what’s demanded (Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, [RMCAD], 2014).” ⤴️

  • “this thorough and compulsively constructed display of Elahi’s life does not seem to truly account for it.” ⤴️

  • “It does not let the viewer in, quite the opposite—it seems to constitute an unbreakable wall.” ⤴️

  • this is also what i do sometimes as a personal defense mechanism socially - offer bountiful normal everyday problems to take the space of the gaping uncomfortable problems

  • “it invites the gaze yet does not satisfy it.” ⤴️

  • “Elahi’s use of mnemotechnologies certainly does not aim to serve his own interest in the details of his life. His goal is to satisfy the authority’s preoccupation with them.” ⤴️

  • “an inventive response to the power distribution in capture culture” ⤴️

  • “simultaneously serious and sarcastic a commentary on the military-entertainment complex that un- derlies today’s network technologies (Lovink, 2011)” ⤴️

  • “inevitable collision of the empowering and disempowering sides of present-day mnemotechnologies.” ⤴️

  • “one indication for how to inventively reconfigure one’s atti- tude to dominant technologies and subvert, or to some degree counter- balance the unequally distributed power.” ⤴️

  • ”, creative strategy for “living with Big Brother” (Elahi’s phrase, emphasis mine)” ⤴️

  • “para- doxically merges the principles of obfuscation (which is to say, rendering one’s presence opaque) with conventional life-logging (being as accurate as possible” ⤴️

  • “willful subversion of the elements of technical systems (e.g. flow of data, online trackers, surveillance cameras, facial detection systems) to impede the construction of involuntary archives or deliberately construct what we might call counter-archives, which, while technically rich in “personal” data, yield little or no significance through their tendentiously obfuscated nature.” ⤴️

  • ”. By “added meaning” or benefits I mean, on the one hand, a stronger, more confident and autonomous po- sition in relation to the forces that attempt to control his life, and on the other hand, more control of the flow of his personal data and mediated memories which, framed and re-articulated in terms of art, also benefits him in his artistic and conceptual line of work.” ⤴️

  • “Elahi’s project hints at another way of approaching and articulating “tactics” and “the tactical.” In Elahi’s work, the tactical emerges not through an impulsive response, but a conceptual shift and attitude to the forces and power dynamics that coordinate his daily itineraries. Instead of attempting to openly counter- act them, to elude their effects, through a conscious shift in perception and the introduction of self-developed coordinates and objectives he in- corporates them into his life, regaining a degree of control over their im- pact on his daily life.” ⤴️

  • “This shift of perception in one’s attitude towards forces attempting to strategically configure and capture one’s life is precisely how Claire Colebrook (2001) suggests apprehending the notion of the tactical.” ⤴️

  • “Colebrook writes that “a tactical economy is generated not by moving to a different place but generating a different point of view, a different way of seeing, a figuration or poiesis” (ibid., p.557). Colebrook explains such a “tactical economy” as a deliberate construction of a certain metaphor or “another register” (de Certeau, 1984, p.32) which “generates space within a logic of ordered and proper places,” simultaneously deploying “the proper for other ends” (Colebrook, 2001, p.556). This realization will be crucial here in terms of the concept of para-archiving.” ⤴️

  • alternative systems, parallel infrastructure

  • “Highmore critiques the persisting divide be- tween strategies and tactics, which he sees as leading to interpretations of everyday life practices as mere effects of clashes between superior power holders and inferior, subjugated individuals (2002, 2006).” ⤴️

  • “If read not as an opponent to strategy, but as” ⤴️

  • “something that emerged in tandem, the concept of tactic and the tactical can serve as “an antidote to those kinds of accounts that would reduce experience to machinations of power and discipline” (2006, p.112),” ⤴️

  • “A society is thus composed of certain foregrounded practices organizing its normative institutions and of innumerable other practices that remain ‘minor,’ always there but not organizing discourses” ⤴️

  • “It is in this multifarious and silent ‘reverse’ of proce- dures that we should look for ‘consumer’ practices having the double characteristic, pointed out by Foucault, of being able to organize both spaces and languages,” ⤴️

  • “(de Certeau, 1984, p.48).50” ⤴️

  • “Strategies and tactics ought not to be seen as forces at two opposite ends of an axis. Tactics are not always about a direct and rapid response to a strategic force, but might also evolve silently as the result of an “inventive employment of possibilities within strategic circumstances” (Highmore, 2002, p.159). They do not operate outside the strategy that they seemingly confront: “to do this would require a counter-strategy, they are in an am- biguous position of being inside but ‘other’: they escape it without leav- ing it”(ibid., p.159).” ⤴️

  • “the experience of the everyday is always particular and singular, evolving alongside “proprietary power” (ibid., p.159),” ⤴️

  • “it is never autonomous, as it is never entirely dependent.” ⤴️

  • “Flows of everyday life are seldom entirely conditioned by a pervasive disciplinary strategy; they are unique projects emerging from particular ways of operating” ⤴️

  • “in” ⤴️

  • “50 This excerpt from de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life could easily stand as a main declara- tion media archaeology” ⤴️

  • “relation to different forces that explicitly or implicitly attempt to shape them (de Certeau, 1984, p.ix).” ⤴️

  • “It refuses to be associated with “lib- eratory,” “progressive,” or “heroic” actions against the strategic. Nor is it an attempt to completely withdraw and stay allegedly unaffected by it.” ⤴️

  • “the tactical might be aligned with the notion of resistance, understood not as an intensification of an effort to counteract, but as a voluntary limitation of commitment to directly combat the hegemonic force, and a subsequent redirection of effort, energy, and passion toward something else, such as one’s own deliberate and consistently maintained everyday (media) practices.” ⤴️

  • “tactical resistance” ⤴️

  • “relation to technical/material/electrical procedures, or as a conscious act of mindfully lowering, balancing, and re-orienting the intensity of the (electric) current, consciously stabilizing the relationship between the (electrical) input and the output, and thus, to some extent, taking control of this current.” ⤴️

  • “Uncoupling the concepts of tactics (and resistance) from their earlier articulation as counter-practices performed against strategies makes room for developing: [N]ot a counter-narrative, but a para-narrative” ⤴️

  • “a para-narrative (and a para- archive) where everyday life can be seen to move at multiple speeds with varied rhythms, where the daily articulates mo- ments of cunning and stubborn resistance […]. Here the activities of everyday life stubbornly evade capture by discipline and tenaciously hold on to aspects of life that are in many ways residual and excessive to the revolutionary force of modernisation (Highmore, 2006, p.109).” ⤴️

  • resistances within, top-down and bottom-up meeting

  • “para- narratives and para-archives, one might consider reading these concepts (especially the latter) in relation to de Certeau’s general concern with the notion of the archive as a hegemonic construct and the “abstraction” that operates above yet essentially affects the everyday (in Highmore, 2006, p.85), as Foucault would have it.” ⤴️

  • “the move toward para-archives could be seen as a way of opening up and pluralizing our perspective on the archive, to foreground the accounts of the everyday that are formed singularly and silently from within” ⤴️

  • “parallel to (and thus not explicitly against) official, formal archival “abstractions” concerned with the production and management of qualified knowledge, scrutinized to serve scientific, exploitative, anthropological, or medical ends (Highmore, 2002, p.89).” ⤴️

  • “What also appears to be of crucial importance in the para- archive is the singular perspective and specific standpoint from which it is formed.” ⤴️

  • “If official archival institutions can be seen as preoccupied with assimilating individual voices into unified, formalized, coherent, logical collective narratives, para-archives might be seen as concerned with” ⤴️

  • “acknowledging the heterogeneity and plurality of micro-perspectives, forms of alterity that might be incompatible with the mainstream, strate- gic, and regulatory.” ⤴️

  • “categories used by de Certeau to describe practices of everyday life, such as “silent”, “invisible”, “elusive”,“opaque”,“clandestine”,“disguised”,“pers istent” or “stubborn” (in Highmore, 2002, p.108).” ⤴️

  • “used simple recording devices (cameras) to bring into action their subjective embed- dedness in particular contexts as to perform and construct records that can be seen as having para-archival qualities” ⤴️

  • “successively and obstinately evolving and ac- cumulating parallel to these individuals’ everyday lives” ⤴️

  • “step from counter- to para-,” ⤴️

  • “unhinge the notion of the tactical from its opposition to the strategic.” ⤴️

  • “A tall man points his small camera at an internal officer, probably unaware of being photo- graphed (Fig. 5.4). At the first glance this strong depiction seems to quite literally express the dynamics of souveillance: a subjugated individual confronting one of the agents of the oppressive force. But beyond the stra- tum established by this first association there lies a thicker, contextual texture. The man with a camera on the picture was Mendel Grossman, an amateur photographer appointed by the ghetto’s Judenrat (the Jewish Administration Office) to work in its statistics department.51 Grossman’s official job, acquired due to his photographic skills, was to photograph ghetto inhabitants for official archival and statistical purposes.” ⤴️

  • “Quickly realizing that his abilities were being in- strumentalized to the occupiers’ benefit, resulting in a one-sided account” ⤴️

  • “shaped entirely in line with the oppressor’s vision, Grossman subverted the technologies he was given to create a different kind of account.” ⤴️

  • “(Smith, 2003). I” ⤴️

  • “Grossman systematically preserved an extraordinarily rich account of atrocities German Nazis performed upon the ghetto inhabitants, but also, or even primarily, the “rough texture” of the everyday life practices of the community; religious, cultural and family events conducted despite the pervasive fear and awareness of being held in inescapable confines (Sierakowiak et al., 1998, p.269).” ⤴️

  • “Today the images constitute an important part of the archive at the Ghetto Fighters House in Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta’ot in Israel.” ⤴️

  • “recording practice diligently and silently performed from within the currents of one’s daily life,” ⤴️

  • “photograph as many local households and their owners as possible before they become eroded by the increasing industrialization taking place at the time.” ⤴️

  • “the move from documenting her personal life and concerns toward re- directing attention towards a documentary project of a broader cultural significance:” ⤴️

  • “the certainty that I will leave something be- hind,” ⤴️

  • “parallel to her other daily activities, within time somewhat inevitably began to re- flect numerous cultural, political and socio-material transformations that” ⤴️

  • “These patchworks of traditional and modern representations, increas- ingly eclectic over the course of the project, evoke the political, cultural and ideological transformations that Poland experienced during last de- cades of Rydet’s life.” ⤴️

  • “s the question of how such a consistent practice could be conducted in our day, in the age of distraction and “great acceleration” (Colvile, 2016), times that systematically deny us time for reflection.” ⤴️

  • ”. “The more my Record grows,” she said in the aforementioned interview, “the more I believe that it will be timeless.” A” ⤴️

  • “The use of photographic image, as she maintained, was primarily “a language” through which she wanted to speak to ordinary people, not artists. The greatest value of documentary photography, she insisted, was as a source of information, its content, and not the artistic statement, “which is only transitory” (in Łyczywek, 1990, pp.33-37).” ⤴️

  • “what makes one’s everyday, capturing practices para- archival, and how is a para-archival quality constructed and manifested?” ⤴️

  • “might be perceived as special auxiliary lay- ers deliberately conceptualized and woven by these individuals into the fabric of their everyday lives.” ⤴️

  • “technological capturing device (a camera) with particular motivations, which are then adhered to for a longer span of time (” ⤴️

  • “an obvious sense of intentionality in how these practitioners at- tend to, motivate, and incorporate technologies of capture into their ev- eryday life. Both projects are motivated by a desire to secure a record of a given moment in time.52 This motivation, deeply entangled in their every- day lives (or even, to some extent, choreographing its flow) is, arguably, what gives their very existences a para-archival dimension.” ⤴️

  • “what makes an everyday recording practice a candidate for para-archiving is a certain awareness, vision, and anticipation that the record one deliberate- ly produces parallel to one’s life and eventually leaves behind might hold special significance in the future.” ⤴️

  • “a pro-active attitude to producing, collecting, and organizing mediated traces and memories, in other words, by embedding an awareness of and preparation for the future in one’s everyday recording practices.” ⤴️

  • “para-archiving can be said to operate through deliberate, material and performative interventions into the spa- tio-temporal conditions one occupies.” ⤴️

  • “the appropriation and use of a recording device to serve a specific, indi- viduated purpose, besides (and thus, parallel to) the one it was initially ascribed.” ⤴️

  • “She has also described her project as a way of “rectifying” an otherwise ruthless everyday reality.” ⤴️

  • “While this simple practice allowed him to endure his unstable condition, it simultaneously generated a special record of times characterized by powerful communist indoctrination and strict censorship.” ⤴️

  • “create a parallel, alternate account of everyday life from the perspective of a person in its stream.” ⤴️

  • “A physically re-purposed and manipulated camera is operationalized in a highly performative manner.” ⤴️

  • “What is crucial here, and what makes this practice much different from sousveillance (which Grossman’s work might resemble at first glance) is that this performatively reconfigured function of a recording device is not explicitly motivated against the hegemonic power, but by a will to construct a particular, singular, and disparate account of a given time and space (potentially productive and informative beyond the here and now, and only then, perhaps, capable of serving as evidence to balance the he- gemonic archive).” ⤴️

  • “seeing the long-term motivation and approach to recording technologies that characterizes these practices as another important qual- ity of the para-archive” ⤴️

  • “the enduring and dili- gent nature of these works, also points to a different way of reading the notion of tactics” ⤴️

  • “founded on an antagonistic relationship between strategies and tactics, discourses on tactical media practices tended to portray tactics (and resistance) as built upon a “hit-and-run” logic. In other words, tactics meant a sudden, spontaneous, disruptive, and unexpected intervention into a hegemonic structure (e.g. an institution or a technical system) from a supposedly autonomous and untraceable outside place, to temporarily paralyze its mechanisms and gain short-term benefits” ⤴️

  • “Here, tactics and resistance seem to emerge slowly, stubbornly, and persistently, over longer periods of time. Characterized by persistence, endurance, and discipline, these rethought tactics seem to acquire characteristics previously reserved for strategies.” ⤴️

  • “tactics no longer appear to be concerned with the desire to disrupt strate- gies, to temporarily regain or balance power; they themselves take on the role of alternative strategies or para-strategies that operate alongside (and benefit from) what they might have been earlier intended to combat.” ⤴️

  • “This observation might be productive in the context of contempo- rary techno-cultural context in which a distinction between tactics and strategies becomes confused and blurred (cf. the conflation of sousveil- lance and surveillance),” ⤴️

  • “accelerating techno- logical obsolescence seemed to have pronounced tactical mobility as a default, perhaps a mainstream mode of living with technologies today.” ⤴️

  • “A long-term commitment to a parallel record of selected subsets of ev-” ⤴️

  • “eryday life,” ⤴️

  • “material to give posterity a par- ticular, singular perspective onto a given moment” ⤴️

  • “powerful personal significance.” ⤴️

  • “this auxiliary layer of everyday life (or “second layer,” as de Certeau had it) where para- archiving takes place might also be seen as a space where subjecthood is constructed.” ⤴️

  • “a liminal zone where the public and private values of a practice inextricably blend.” ⤴️

  • “in terms of reflec- tionism (ibid., p.333), a tactical use of technology to confront authorities, purposefully recording their actions (and misconduct) to reveal their mechanics, motivations, or violence, and, in so doing, to balance the dis- tribution of power. In this reading of sousveillance, technologies are in- corporated into one’s existence to counteract the their hegemonic use by authorities who aim to control and discipline the society. On the other hand, however, he approached sousveillance as a practice incorporat- ing recording devices into life as existential technologies, techniques of “self-determination and mastery over our own destiny” (Mann, 2003).” ⤴️

  • “exploring the relationship between the reflective and long-term use of technology and the shaping of personality, and hence, subjecthood. These are found in August Lux’s discussion of the spiritual center of the amateur photography, as a way of counteracting the disrup- tive effects of modernity, in Stiegler’s concept of mnemotechnique which can be seen as a form of techne tou biou, (the craft of one’s aesthetics of existence in relationship to the technical) jeopardized by large-scale mne- motechnological systems, or in Foucault’s technologies of the self as coun- terparts to the hegemonic forces inscribed in the working of dominant technical apparatuses.” ⤴️

  • “Rydet suggested that the personal value of her long-term project never went away, but that the public and personal dimensions were al- ways inextricably intertwined and equally relevant.” ⤴️

  • “the regular exposure to a variety of personalities, their unique life stories and situations, enriched her own personality” ⤴️

  • “Close, direct contact with people and their everyday situations enabled her to construct her own integral world-view and special sensitivity toward the surrounding world. Besides the material archive to be passed down for the benefit of others, the project provided her with a framework for experiencing ev- eryday life, accumulating these experiences, finding her role in society, and developing a subjective entry point for a more profound and vital relationship with the others and what she called human fate:” ⤴️

  • “I was no longer able to maintain a cold distance. On the contrary, over time the project consumed me more than anything else I had done.” ⤴️

  • “(Rydet, 1993, my translation).” ⤴️

  • “overcompliance to stra- tegic forces and overidentification with its demands” ⤴️

  • “discussed how various individuals position themselves in these creative practices, and thus negotiate the notion of agency in relation to the current techno-cultural condition of involuntary capture and archiving.” ⤴️

  • “their effort is to counteract strategic surveil- lance and the production of involuntary archives through different tech- niques, tactical appropriations, and critical interventions into technolo- gies, technical and power structures.” ⤴️

  • “tactics are acts that do not emerge to merely oppose the strategic forces” ⤴️

  • “tactics take advantage of these forces by recom-” ⤴️

  • “posing and reconfiguring their components to serve alternative ends, motivations, and purposes.” ⤴️

  • “tactical media practices, as not merely short-term, unsustainable interventions into power structures (technical, political, economical) from a suppos- edly autonomous and untraceable outside position, but also as semi-per- manent, long-term engagements in inventing, composing and (re-)con- figuring life with technologies, devices and media systems, from within, alongside, or parallel to hegemonic, regulatory, and mainstream forces.” ⤴️

  • “Verbeek” ⤴️

  • “One becomes a subject not by securing a place outside the reach of power but by shaping one’s subjectivity in critical relation to it” (2011, p.73).” ⤴️

  • “practical engagement in forging new and regenerating ob- solete ones as to inspire reflection on the contemporary techno-culture and possibly a critical and creative reconfiguration of one’s position” ⤴️

  • “hrough description and analysis of some of my on- going personal archiving practices as well as through composition of new modes of living with technologies in capture culture” ⤴️

  • “to inspire other modes of personal archiving than those offered by the mnemo- technologies currently prevailing in capture culture?” ⤴️

  • “committing to personal archiving practices” ⤴️

  • “what tactics or strategies might be conceptualized and implemented into the everyday use of technologies to enable the emergence of inventive modes of per- sonal archiving beyond the ones offered by dominant mnemo- technologies?” ⤴️

  • “Stiegler’s articulation of technological transformations as a series of tran- sitions from mnemotechniques to mnemotechnologies” ⤴️

  • “personal archiving practices in capture culture are subject to significant mutations taking place on several plains including material, agential, temporal, performative and ethical/moral. Here, when describing and analysing my personal para-archiving practices, I will be doing it in rela- tion to these different dimensions” ⤴️

  • “I will attempt to demonstrate how these dimensions, arguably jeopardized and eroded, and certainly modified by mainstream mne- motechnologies, can be actively intervened in, negotiated and re-gener- ated provided that one takes care for, motivates and pays attention to choices when engaging with technologies on a day-to-day basis.” ⤴️

  • “actively configuring relationships with and between them” ⤴️

  • “In the case of the fragmentarium, a hybrid media practice of materializing and manually organizing outcomes of my personal archiving practices in a physical cabinet, expanding on material, temporal and performative aspects, I will bring to the fore observations related to the issues of media- material hybridity as well as forms of performatively opening the per- sonal onto other media practitioners.” ⤴️

  • “para-archiving is a practice (or differently put, a quality characterizing a practice) of deliberately constructing a record of some aspect of everyday life from within its currents,” ⤴️

  • “durational character, long-term orientation or the fact that they are tightly integrated into the fabric of my everyday life” ⤴️

  • “deliberately ambivalent situatedness in between the digital and non-digital media” ⤴️

  • “to pre-network, network and post-network phases as to highlight the inevitable impact of network computing on this trajectory which will become apparent in my discussion). The graph is hence a reconstruction of the process,” ⤴️

  • “(Law, 2004, p.45). If methods are typically aids for analyzing an aspect of the world, as Law asserts, they might also work against such a belief. Methods might even block the researcher from being open to the world, limiting his/her ability to note and reflect upon pre-established norms. In Law’s words: If ‘research methods’ are allowed to claim methodological hegemony or (even worse) monopoly, and I think that there are locations where they try to do this, then when we are put into relation with such methods we are being placed, however rebelliously, in a set of constraining normative blinkers. We are being told how we must see and what we must do when we investigate (ibid., p.4).” ⤴️

  • “method as “not a more or less successful set of procedures for reporting on a given reality,” but always a “performative” act, and consequently, a support that helps not to reveal, but “to produce realities” (ibid., p.143). Thus, the shift he proposes can be seen as a move from a method as a reporting procedure (or device) toward a generative, productive and performative act.” ⤴️

  • “consciously enacted, aesthetic (and political) shift within ideas, practices, and values” ⤴️

  • “method assemblage is “the enactment of a bundle of ramifying relations that shapes, mediates, and separates representations in-here, represented realities out-there, and invisible out-there relations, processes, and contexts necessary to in-here” (ibid., p.84). Method assemblage sees the field of study as subject to constant flux, a never stable, and fully accountable field of relations. A grasp of this field is always only partial and subjective.” ⤴️

  • “his belief that methods should have no prescriptive nature” ⤴️

  • “alternative approaches would favor uncertainty, slowness, reflexivity, generosity, multiplicity of attitudes, open-endedness, and process-orientation (ibid., p.151).” ⤴️

  • “Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social (2012). The authors propose an assemblage, or what they call “a perpetual inventory” (ibid., p.2) of various attitudes to invigorate established methods,” ⤴️

  • “knowledge can be produced in multiple ways and sites, taking into account diverse, unconventional, experimental, and aesthetic approaches.” ⤴️

  • “are not concerned with a description of the present as such, but with how the present is negotiated through incorporating a particular device, prototype, performance, technology, etc. In this sense, methods deliberately act on the situation into which they are brought, but with no clear anticipation of what the result might be.” ⤴️

  • “to study technologies, media-technological practices, their transformations and effects on everyday life, one needs to recognize one’s embeddedness in this condition” ⤴️

  • “for a scholarship that opens up to see media land-” ⤴️

  • “scape as a “theatre-as-it-could-be.” This concept cuts into the here and now of the media technology landscape; it is an intentional, performative diversion from the prevailing norms and patterns of the mainstream media landscape. It is a risk taken to recombine and rewire established modes of living with media technologies, to demonstrate and test alternative possibilities. While the Kember and Zylinska’s intent is primarily to raise the significance of the performative in knowledge-making and media scholarship, it can also be seen as an inspiration to recognize the performative, and thus the inventive side of everyday living with technologies.” ⤴️

  • “One of the main objectives of creative media manifesto is to establish a stronger correspondence between distanced, analytic approaches to studying media and an “inside-out perspective,” by which we can also understand an engaged, hands-on, material approach to analyzing media technologies while actively composing relationships with them.” ⤴️

  • “Auto-ethnographers do not protect the readers from becoming emotionally involved in the case at hand (Muncey, 2005), but expose them to a “patchwork of feelings, experiences, emotions, and behaviors that portray a more complete view of life” (Wall 2008, p.10).” ⤴️

  • “ability “to connect the personal to the cultural”(Ellis and Bochner, 2000, p.739).” ⤴️

  • “reflection written from the perspective of an isolated entity, but rather from the perspective of a conscious subject who recognizes its complex links to and an entanglement in wider social and cultural contexts of which the auto-ethnographer’s reader is also a participant. Moreover, in autoethnography the researcher’s personal experiences can or even should be explored parallel to the experiences of the other subjects (Ellis and Bochner, 2000; Maso, 2001). In this sense, the method acquires a dialogical dimension, and therefore does not risk being taken for a detached introspective monologue – a recurrent point of critique it receives (Coffey, 1999).” ⤴️

  • “how much the narrative expresses the reality.” ⤴️

  • “I propose to attend to (and possibly approach the evaluation of) my auto-ethnographically informed study of the modes of personal archiving a process of shaping, constructing and accounting for one, particular view on techno-cultural reality from within.” ⤴️

  • “plug the reader into the trajectory of my life with technologies, as well as a series of decisions and responses made in relation to the proliferation of capturing technologies. I do it, for example, through highlighting transitory moments from one technology or technique to another.” ⤴️

  • “It is easy to fall into traps set by one’s beliefs and opinions. This is why I find it extremely important not to reduce research to the auto-ethnographic method alone. I find it necessary to complement auto-ethnography with other methods and other voices, to juxtapose” ⤴️

  • “my personal accounts might be seen as a kind of a micro-layer of capture culture that I have attempted to weave together. While giving priority to the currents of a singular everyday life, this micro-layer, I believe, simultaneously opens a perspective onto a macro-perspective, and hence meets a condition of the auto-ethnographic account: connecting the personal with a broader cultural state of a given moment.” ⤴️

  • “Tim Ingold” ⤴️

  • “Criticizing the tradition of ethnography for its excessive focus on describing the results and not the process of study, Ingold suggested a shift from an anthropology of to an anthropology with a given object or process.” ⤴️

  • “the process of reading, flipping through the pages of the notebooks and physically interacting with various life accounts they comprise can be seen as following the idea of doing (auto-)ethnography, or in this case, taken into consideration the interest in the material aspects of this practice, an auto-archaeology with, rather than merely about, or perhaps both, simultaneously.” ⤴️

  • “media archaeology seems to center and stabilize the focus on the materiality of media objects and machines.” ⤴️

  • “The media practice approach, in turn, might help shift media archaeology’s predominant interest in the medium, understood as a mechanical artifact, toward how this artifact and its mechanisms have been historically incorporated into practices of everyday life. In other words, we might call what potentially emerges from the collision of these two perspectives an archaeology of mediation.” ⤴️

  • “practical artistic and amateur forms of engagement with technologies, in the lab, art studio as much as on the rough terrain of everyday life.” ⤴️

  • “reconstructing old technologies in the light of the current developments, opposes a traditional, description-based kind of scholarship, progressively building on historical media canons. As Parikka asserts, “you can critique media by doing media and even doing media histories differently” (ibid., 2011, p.137), also in a non-linear “recursive way” (Huhtamo, 1997; Parikka & Huhtamo, 2011).” ⤴️

  • “Parikka describes aesthetic practices that engage with obsolete, or soon-to-be-obsolete technologies in terms of alternative narratives or temporalities, to provide critical insights into “assumed-natural state of digitality, whether technological and social” (ibid., 2011, p.139).” ⤴️

  • “Jan Baetens has suggested that remediation implies a sense of an underlying programmatic and linear evolution toward more advanced state of affairs, toward what might be called a premeditated condition, where the old is always succeeded by its more advanced iteration. Questioning this articulation, Baetens suggests a more pessimistic approach that draws on Foucault’s and Adorno’s readings of technological transformations. Processes of remediation, thus, have never been at peace, but are continuously torn, regulated, and manipulated by external forces, such as marketing strategies, trends, economic, political interests or cultural industries. This assertion becomes coherent with Stiegler’s concept of the pharmacological nature of technological transformations, which, while introducing progress into some spheres of life, might simultaneously instigate regress and disruption in others.” ⤴️

  • “different practices of remediation might also simultaneously be occurring on a micro-level, through individual, communal, and aesthetic appropriations.” ⤴️

  • but also the meso level is important - where inds are caught up in the ‘progress’ of orgs

  • “reverse-remediation, as opposed to remediation, is not driven by the intent to make the medium less visible and obtrusive, but quite the opposite. Reverse-remediation resists this logic; it makes the medium more visible to facilitate its sharper comprehension and examination. As a practical instance of media archaeology, reverse-remediation can be seen as a particular material and performative critique of contemporary media; a deliberate turn to older technologies and technological practices, so as to prompt critical reflection, not on the practices themselves, but on the current techno-cultural condition, which “does not necessarily represent the best possible state” (Zielinski, 2007, p.7).” ⤴️

  • “what insights would a revisiting of and thus learning from the selected aspects of past, pre-digital technologies (their uses, and discourses around them) provide in the current technocultural context?” ⤴️

  • “With the term provotype I want to highlight a certain singularity and distinctiveness of the archival artifact which by no means is intended to be perceived as a model, blueprint or direct indication for how to go about constructing an archival device of such kind.” ⤴️

  • “instead of an end product, it is the experience that a given designer intervention enables (or disables) that is regarded as the subject of prototyping (Buchenau and Suri, 2000).” ⤴️

  • ““cultural probes” (Gaver et al., 1999). Cultural probes are assemblages of various objects, such as maps, recorders, postcards, and booklets, which invite the user to participate in an experiment by providing opportunities for reflection and response (ibid., p.22). The authors argue that, unlike quantitative scientific methods, cultural probing is not intended to yield specific data for close analysis. Instead, cultural probes are thought of as means for triggering new understandings, visions, and insights (e.g. into technology) that can reach far beyond the initial intention (ibid. p.25).54 Thus, the value I find in cultural probing as a specific form of prototyping offered by these authors lies in its ambiguity, modularity, and intentional lack of precision in executing the prototype, as well as its lack of precision in setting forth the aim to be achieved.” ⤴️

  • “Critical design, for instance, an attitude and perspective on design practice and research (Raby, 2001), focuses on interrogating, highlighting, delving into, and staying with problems, as opposed to solving them.” ⤴️

  • “prototypes ought not to be seen as any early versions of products or services yet to be produced and distributed on the market, but rather never fully completed artifacts, establishing what McLuhan would perhaps call anti-environments (1997), which are spatio-temporal conditions that help articulate existing, often imperceptible problems, concerns, and networks of relations.” ⤴️

  • “a “provotypical” device which is with an intention to trigger thoughts and insights, both from within my on-going work with it as well as from encounters with others” ⤴️

  • I’ve been working provotypically my whole life - making initial prototypes to learn skill and gain insight with no real intention of iterating to make improvements - the process and it’s insights are the gain rather than the artifact but the artifact must exist and be shared to understand the insights. this is why I’ve felt like I’ve learnt a lot and had nothing to show for it. If I better indicate the process and learnings from provotypes I can better show my progression in designing/building/inventing/questioning etc.

  • “this little notebook soon became my first mnemonic device used in a truly conscientious manner. It served not only for thoughts, dreams, or sketches, but also, and sometimes even primarily, as a scrapbook holding pieces of newspapers, receipts, tickets, and other ephemeral objects that many of us, at least at some points of our lives, tend to collect, in an attempt to capture special moments.” ⤴️

  • “Not being rigidly structured or evenly compartmentalized by months and days, the inside of the notebook leaves room for flexibility, making it possible for events to attain various degrees of presence and visibility, respective to their significance at the time. For example, some events are expressed through textual entries or drawings stretched across several pages, while others are reduced to a snippet of a receipt or a business card pasted in a corner of a page. This flexibility and diversity of forms of interacting with the notebook are facilitated by the notebook’s blank pages” ⤴️

  • “While, on the one hand, the structuring of a page might help keep order and maintain a consistent logic, one can argue that, on the other, it can implicitly steer, determine, and linearize how one records events and interacts with the notebook.” ⤴️

  • “The majority of the first entries were chaotic drawings, sketches, fragments of texts, quotes, and collages made of excerpts from newspapers, tickets, leaflets, and other mundane paper objects.” ⤴️

  • “three major kinds of observations or groups of qualities can be highlighted among the numerous observations and reflections: material, performative and temporal.” ⤴️

  • “My attention is drawn to pages where receipts, bus, and flight tickets are scotch-taped at times intentionally, at other moments quite haphazardly. They function as bookmarks of a sort, or gateways to specific moments in time, a journey or purchase. These mundane material traces, typically intended for quick use, validation, and subsequent disposal, here constitute more or less effective triggers for memory recall, occasionally contrasted by completely different, much more visceral and striking records.” ⤴️

  • “a somewhat surreal assemblage, where an extremely private, intimate medium, blood (and the life story it signifies), is veiled, or, one could say, poetically ciphered through an absurd collage of newspaper headlines, a medium typically intended for the widest possible public. These juxtapositions of highly private and public are a recurring motif in several other notebooks.” ⤴️

  • “There are numerous such random artifacts and keepsakes, or at least, they seem to me random today. My memory is fallible and not always capable of identifying the original meaning and intention with which these ephemera were collected. Price tags, receipts, short notes and spontaneous observations penned down on public transport: concrete meanings with which all these markings were probably charged at the moment have, over time, been lost, or considerably remodelled.” ⤴️

  • “The other notes, ones without contextual meta-information, pose an extra challenge to my memory and thus require more time and focus. However, the lack of a clear context does not discourage me; it propels me on to make up interpretations and generate associations between other parts and entries that precede and follow the ones I am trying to decipher. Hence, it is not always a single entry but often an odd, eclectic combination of notes and markings, and the relations between these various traces characterized by different material and tactile qualities that eventually help me recall and mentally reconstruct specific moments in life.” ⤴️

  • “while attending to these and other marks as indirect cues, I can gradually reconstruct the meaning of the diagram” ⤴️

  • “This interplay and juxtaposition of different kinds of accounts enhances the fluid, performative, and sometimes playful character of interacting with the notebooks, and establishes relations between the multiple categories of notes in their pages.” ⤴️

  • “snippets of information that are now completely useless” ⤴️

  • “the versatile roles of the notebooks, which at times worked as supports for short-term memory, and at other times as logbooks for information intended to be retained over a longer time.” ⤴️

  • “snippets, rough sketches, collages, receipts, and other ephemera seem to represent life-time as an entity, built of short, punctuated situations and vivid moments squeezed between more stable and arranged chunks of time dedicated to, for example, work or study (these are reflected in much more organized traces, sketches, and lengthy notes).” ⤴️

  • “these more elaborate depictions (in some instances spanning several pages) were afforded by holidays, breaks from work, or a surplus of time in waiting rooms, departure halls, or train terminals.” ⤴️

  • “With standardized and simplified digitally constructed memories, hand gestures leave no such individuated marks. Manual gestures are strictly conditioned by the technical specifications of the device, and thus limited to a preset range. In other words, digital devices tend to orchestrate hands to a set of scripted operations, so the anticipated procedure can be smoothly executed and the result achieved. This reduction of the performative and compositional role of a hand to the trigger of a preprogrammed procedure makes the connection between the subject and the externalized trace generic and devoid of singular attributes” ⤴️

  • “the production of personal data for the benefit of tech-corporations, jeopardizing individual and local “know-how” (practical knowledge).” ⤴️

  • “how the restoration of this regressed role of hands, and more broadly, the restoration of the manual side of working with one’s personal memory might be enacted within the context of the mnemotechnologies of capture culture?” ⤴️

  • “he notions of resistance and resistivity as they unfold here in relation to manual, hands-on practice. In manual practices, one’s hands constantly encounter material and temporal difficulties, tensions, counter-forces, and pressures. A manual practice involving one’s body is an enduring encounter with the resistance of the material one interacts with. This sense of resistivity – the capacity of a material or body to resist the flow or impact of another force – arguably comes organically in any practice concerned with material, manual intervention.” ⤴️

  • “Hands have to stay with, negotiate, or following Ingold’s thought, come into dialog and establish a degree of correspondence (2007, p.122) with the resisting qualities of a material for a longer period, whereas automated, passive technologies can often ignore them. In this sense, hands and the body occupy a vulnerable position compared to automated technologies. But with a shift of perception, hands’ vulnerable position and the sense of deceleration they offer can be seen as an advantage. Hands appear to be vulnerable if one approaches them from a standpoint that privileges automation (and by implication, efficiency, seamlessness, immediacy). Sennett advises learning from vulnerability, material resistance, and arduousness, as opposed to seeking immediate solutions for overcoming them. Similarly, drawing on de Certeau, Highmore sees the body (and thus the hand) as a force that always inherently resists automation: “we see the resistance of the everyday as extending from subversive ‘poaching’ to a brute facticity of a body that is not a machine” (Highmore, 2002, p.161).” ⤴️

  • “one might wonder whether a (re-)turn to manual practices of constructing and working with personal memory and archives, or restoring some of the aspects that incorporate manual gestures and physical engagement with matter might help address what seems to be an unrestrained generation of life-bits in capture culture, and consequently foreground the qualitative aspects against the predominant quantitative trend?” ⤴️

  • “whether a deliberate reinstatement of manual aspects, a conscious (re-) endorsement of material resistivity and the restoration of attributes like difficulty and effort in personal memory practices might be conducive to a generation of para-archival modes alternative (and resistant) to the dominant mnemotechnologies?” ⤴️

  • “was the organization of records, and particularly the way this organization reflects the duration of the events themselves.” ⤴️

  • “spaces that flatten the depth and specificity of the temporal dimensions of experiences, which manual techniques seem to record in a more compound manner” ⤴️

  • “Each picture or video receives the same amount of predefined and automatically assigned space.” ⤴️

  • “Effectively it seems that each represents an event not only of the same personal value, but also of the same duration. Thus, in relation to the manual notebook, where a mark of a life event can be individually negotiated, crafted over time, and intentionally inscribed with a depth corresponding to the significance of the experience it stands for, Facebook and the like present themselves as mechanically engineered devices for a maximally streamlined, even, and immediate display, leading to a homogenization of events they capture and mediate.” ⤴️

  • “aims to attract and serve the broadest possible audience (establishing vectors for comparison, reaction, response, and cross-reference), the cost is a limited possibility for substantial manipulation of the framework, or its re-composition according to one’s individual needs, intentions, and motivations” ⤴️

  • “technical systems (like Facebook) reveal their lack of “bricollaging” potential, which is how, borrowing from Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962), Sherry Turkle (1995) describes tinkering and coding with no imposed specifications” ⤴️

  • “the direction in which this stylistic and structural streamlining evolves is closely linked to economic factors and the rules of data markets” ⤴️

  • “the control over openness and disclosure of their content. It goes without saying that these manual notebooks were strictly personal.” ⤴️

  • “they have never been intended to be easily communicable beyond the orbit of my everyday life” ⤴️

  • “semantically inaccessible, perhaps, to any third parties, and even if deciphered, probably yielding no special value” ⤴️

  • “a deliberate absence of clear indications of a common thematic or structural denominator to allow them to be easily compared and cross-referred makes these journals seem rather heretical, presumptuously incompatible, solipsistic, and at odds with the increasingly normalized features of today’s digital culture: constant connectivity, unrestrained sharing, openness, self-disclosure, and a certain intrusiveness with which accounts of others’ lives enter and disrupt our own.” ⤴️

  • “For Lévi-Strauss, the concept of bricollage meant taking apart a given set of events or objects (psychological, socio-historical, and technical) and reassembling them in new ways, to serve alternative ends (1962, p.33).” ⤴️

  • “the balance between reclusiveness and openness (or directedness and equivocalness) in today’s memory practices” ⤴️

  • “a state of deliberate reservation and closeness (Hög Hansen, 2017). If personal notebooks often used to play the role of enabling a reclusive state” ⤴️

  • “mainstream forms of capturing and archiving everyday life can be challenged by, for instance, developing and implementing techniques of ambiguity and idiosyncrasy in how one goes about constructing representations of personal events (cf. the earlier discussion on obfuscation).” ⤴️

  • “the move from physically constructing recording devices to composing assemblages of existing technologies and their use in my everyday life.” ⤴️

  • “inward-orientation, self-centeredness and “presencing,” which means using media technologies to keep others constantly aware of one’s presence and concerns (Couldry, 2012)” ⤴️

  • “question the dominant role of visual means of relating to our everyday surroundings” ⤴️

  • “re-thinking personal capturing technologies as devices for creatively restoring a sense of attachment to a space and a given moment, as opposed to enhancing a feeling of alienation,” ⤴️

  • “a hybrid inventory, combining two distinct modes of experiencing everyday soundscapes. One mode was enabled through the direct experience in situ, and the other hosted online” ⤴️

  • “stickers in the places where the sounds were originally experienced and recorded functioned as interfaces, hinting at and raising awareness of the surrounding sounds. They” ⤴️

  • “Oliveros claims that hearing is a momentary response to an audible signal, while listening extends the act of hearing through time and space. Thus, the dynamics of (deep) listening, unlike hearing, might stretch from a millisecond (or minute) to several years.” ⤴️

  • “On a personal level, these sound bites operate as entry points or markers signifying particular days, moments in life, or experiences of public spaces and events I found myself in” ⤴️

  • “while some recordings have strongly impressed themselves onto my memory, others tend to work on an affective level, less signifying a particular experience than pointing to generic qualities of the spaces, events and daily situations in which they were taken” ⤴️

  • how often are you in uniquely-audible places? conversation and snippets of music are often the most unique parts of the soundscape. familiar or comforting sounds are common and new or unexpected less so (and unpleasant? I don’t really want to subject myself to the intensely new audibly a lot of the time?)

  • “been a construction of a repository of manifestations of everyday life in the sonic sphere of public spaces” ⤴️

  • “while some minutes have highly personal meaning (and thus questionable significance on a broader scale), others involve phenomena that might be seen to be characteristic or symptomatic of our times, and thus more easily identifiable by others (for example local cultural events and rituals found in certain neighborhoods, in some cases jeopardized by socioeconomic transformations, industrial sounds colliding with sounds of nature or temporary, elusive soundscapes coming from demonstrations or acts of political unrest I stumbled upon and witnessed).” ⤴️

  • this is also true to written experience eg ‘uniqueness’ isn’t necessarily relevant so much as acknowledging the shared experience, forming patterns etc, this kind of everyday is more useful when shared ?

  • “encountering a situation which, after reflection, intuitive judgment and discernment, appears to hold a broader significance, I often record an extra commentary to help me later differentiate that minute from the others, and make a short contextual annotation” ⤴️

  • “Sontag (2001) describes street photographers as “an armed version” of flâneurie (ibid., p.55). In other words, the camera equips the sensuous and aimless wanderer in urban spaces (the essence of flâneurie) with the chance to leave a material trace. Likewise, minuting can be perceived as a street audiography, or sonically armored flâneurie” ⤴️

  • ‘scrolling’ as web-flâneurie - scrolling is strolling

  • “One aspect partly retained from flâneurie is that the sonic situations I encounter and record are never intentionally sought; I find myself within them, incidentally, with no anticipation and planning.” ⤴️

  • “intertwined with the vignettes of quotidian life” ⤴️

  • “over time I have also developed other multi-modal techniques for sampling and excerpting from the experience of everyday life.” ⤴️

  • “appropriating existing visual representations, or, more precisely, their excess in the public sphere. By the excess of visual representations I mean found objects and trash, such as snippets of freely distributed newspapers, business cards, and fragments of maps I pick up while walking in public spaces on a day-to-day basis, then assemble into collages and digitize by scanning them.” ⤴️

  • “in misquoting, which is an iteration of the older practice of scrapbooking, I use snippets of free local newspapers to compose evocative collages, once a week” ⤴️

  • “s” ⤴️