extra threads

threads adjacent to my Masters thesis that aren’t central to the initial shorter inquiry

this is a dump of stuff for me to unwind and i’m sorry if you try to read it

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intent-action

past-present-future

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• cataloguing and autism
• authorship and knowledge lineage
• citational justice on Tumblr vs Pinterest vs Are.na (maybe no room)
• why not Are.na/ what it is missing (in practise section?)
  • future work list not aligned?
  • paid.
  • not self-hostable
  • not interoperable
• tactical hypermedia (in context section)
• ‘micro-archives’ from ‘you press the button, we do the rest’ (Smolicki, 2018)
• problems with proprietary and problems with platform power
  • proprietary data export is shallow
• individuation and trans individuation

dogfooding is laborious and risky accumulative practises

relational/category theory/morphology of bookmark collections.

the mesopolitical and meso-organisational? shared/individual? superusers?

• ‘corporate systems are too heavyweight or hierarchical for such communities because their information needs sit between individual and organizational solutions. Within informal collaborative settings, access is often quite informal, with a small group of active curators and larger groups of largely passive users’ - from ‘The future of PIM: pragmatics and potential’

• wherever it said a few ‘superusers’ - this is what are.na is like too as shown in my work here

• with how i and many others painstakingly avoid unwilling tracking etc we “stubbornly evade capture by discipline and tenaciously hold on to aspects of life that are in many ways residual” (Smolicki, 2017), such as manually engaging with individual data sources

• “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” ⤴️

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

• traceability - cookies for tracking turned anonymous street-walking flaneury into being stalked/followed

• generally more explicitly political and more explicitly solutions oriented/actionable, more mention of specific movements and orgs, more sources linked, more advanced topics eg post-money economies. more likely to be cross-issue and intersectional

• from tactical invisibility to “parallel presence”

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

• “tactics take advantage of these forces by recomposing and reconfiguring their components to serve alternative ends, motivations, and purposes.” ⤴️

• “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” (Verbeek, 2011, p.73).” ⤴️

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

• “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.” ⤴️

• “tactics no longer appear to be concerned with the desire to disrupt strategies, 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.” ⤴️

• hedonic and eudaimonic as distinct but sometimes independent and sometimes co-occurring… Eudaimonic well-being for individual view and what model of social change for the collective view? quickref#^63f9f1 Journaling into the void - TikTok’s eudaimonic ‘web-weaving’ and its digital practises

• tactical hypermedia and semantics - tactics as “deliberate construction of a certain metaphor” (Smolicki, 2017)

temporality, impermanence of the feed, moments leaving traces, eternal and infinite present

• pluriversal temporality

• “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” ⤴️
• “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).” ⤴️
• (Snapchat) - “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 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.” ⤴️
• constant reference to ‘flow’, ‘current’ or ‘stream’ as represented in para-archival practise

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• “his definition asserted that technologies “weave themselves,” as opposed to being consciously invited into people’s everyday lives.” ⤴️ - but web-weaving as active, weaving as individually selective with the micro-decisions important tactical moments rather than imposed strategy or emergent tactics without human foresight and intent

threaded dialogues?

communication extension - Bringing back the disappearing message format from Snapchat - because it most mimics the real life experience of showing a picture to a friend when you don’t want them to keep it, ‘for your eyes only’ — but then what of the screenshot experience — like a ‘pls send me this one’ option, like if it’s cute of my friend.

• Are.na embeds sometimes do and sometimes don’t provide backups - pdfs are on their server but not eg instagram posts or website links
• needs more consistency on whether/what part of content will survive time and technical changes

context of screenshot and context of use eg screenshotting web design vs content

• individual context + individual action/insight = individual path through self-curation

auto-screenshots, auto-capture generally

• automatic capture leaves no room for attuning to context, only one structure of relations and data
  • “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.” [⤴️](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k2ytgxw0kee6pa94be5jq8hg
  • “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.” ⤴️
  • • “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.” ⤴️
  • applying the general to the specific
  • unexpected connections

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• indexes of indexes handle mass flood and need for organisation. but lists of lists are authored
  • “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.”” ⤴️

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• “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.” ⤴️

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

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from practise/findings/analysis

curation, curation, curation

The variety, cohesion and quality of ‘pins’ on the selected boards was mixed. It suggested that some people collected with much more conscious curatorial intent than others, who formed larger collections with less cohesion. Purposeful curation is difficult to determine based purely on the content as there can be value to both more and less specificity. I suspect that those with a wider range of sources and kinds of content are curating more actively but see value in both loosely and tightly cohesive collections provided there is a singular thread throughout. Where this veers into purposelessness is in auto-curated collections or those based purely on word association, as this can produce false equivalence of disparate goals. A clear example of this would be two boards titled ‘READ’ where one was made to store books that have been read and the other to store books the user wants to read.

simultanaeity

• ambient multi-modal use - eg music playlist or podcast to be listened to whilst browsing the channel - simultaneously experiencing multiple modes

auto-screenshot-bookmarks

• maybe due to - link rot takes more forms - broken links as on Pinterest, but also broken embeds or outdated frontpage screenshots, very slow-loading embeds, etc
• annotations baked in - screenshots of text used to add highlights/underlines/annotations along with content, or use of pdf embed highlights feature - might want or not want annotation
• still commonly includes Twitter threads, and these more often has provenance/exact date included in image or linked to thread itself. reposts common from Instagram

mycelium, tab bloom

• semantic web / schema / wikipedia / lo-fi

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• I’ve considered modelling situational trajectories as desirable and undesirable for certain goals and how to involve participatory design and existing archive.
• gamified versions, pathways and charted moral compasses

• ‘how to craft a mnemotechnique (or, blurring into mnemotechnology) that could enable existing para-archival tactics used by the post-tumblr crowd on Pinterest and Are.na?’

Moger (2024) discussing Marx’s (1844/1978) ‘species-being’ “in which individuals overcome alienation and authentically live to their fullest potential but cannot be attained under capitalism,” in relation to Maslow’s self-actualisation/self-transcendence

• “She has also described her project as a way of “rectifying” an otherwise ruthless everyday reality.” ⤴️ - counter-narrative, documenting the alternative reality, parallelising and non-hierarchising it.

‘desire primary and power secondary.’ where? what?

• datafied activity, surveillance

  “[their] involvement in documenting [their] life becomes a constituent module of this on-going, transactional feedback loop” ⤴️

  • anti~‘quantified self’ and sousveillance
    • “life-logging practices such as [quantified self] are manifestations of the extensive influence of neo-liberal strategies on people’s everyday lives (Andrejevic, 2014; Boyd and Crawford, 2012).” ⤴️

• unclear mechanisms of big tech

  • “become a mechanical component of a larger mnemotechnological mechanism “to which framing and underlying (filtering) mechanisms she or he is not privy” (Chun, 2011 in Emerson, 2013) ⤴️

direct source, full context, allowing multiplicitous interpretation

• “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).” ⤴️

  • Maslow, existentialism - the disparity and integration of one’s current and ideal selves, recognizing they’re “simultaneously defining characteristics of human nature. Neither can be repudiated; they can only be integrated” quoted in quickref#^63f9f1 - we are always both Being a person and Becoming a person

being searchable/retrievable makes it archived

• mass data harder to retrieve
• decontextualised data harder to retrieve
• “This insertion of the indexical information turns the captured into the archived” ⤴️

archival (or curational) methods can determine capture

• “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)”
• ““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” (Derrida, 1996, p.17)” ⤴️

capture not inherently for the long-term, not always archival

• “we might primarily intend to capture a moment without considering this act in terms of archiving” ⤴️
• neither capture nor record has any inherent promise of longevity, both can be temporal

you can archive captures just as records

• as both captures and records are retrievable, both can be archived (and in web 2.0’s technological landscape captures and records often live side-by-side, little distinction between data recorded and data captured due to manual and automatic creation of the same file types)
• “the captured image often becomes part of a larger collection, and since it is labeled and tagged with additional metadata (entered intentionally or inserted automatically)” ⤴️

integrating future and past Community Self or Interdependent Self as well as individual -

Journaling into the void - TikTok’s eudaimonic ‘web-weaving’ and its digital practises - this links to syncing, content moderation, backups/archives/versioning and change provenance

• its useful to use sci-fi in work talking about tech and future-building
• “The analytic threads that connect each of these sections are informed by longstanding questions in visual and cultural studies about the analytic foci or sites where the meanings of an image are made; the site of its production (and orientations of the producers, editors and subjects when they make images); the image itself (how an image is composed and its semiology); and its audiencing (how an image is read by audiences at different historical moments (Fink and Lomax, 2014; Rose, 2016)” from The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods
• Bringing back the disappearing message format from Snapchat - because it most mimics the real life experience of showing a picture to a friend when you don’t want them to keep it, ‘for your eyes only’ — but then what of the screenshot experience — like a ‘pls send me this one’ option, like if it’s a good photo of a friend.
• Culture as an “emergent property of the relationship between persons and things ” (Gravrs-Brown, 2007) RathJe 1979, 2001, 1992; Gould and Schiffer 1981, Holtorf 2004, Finn 2001, Ulin 2009.
• how data blocks are arbitrary, there is actually no singular atomic version because it can be atomic from different viewpoints, is the base just the word or the letter or the byte? different arrangements as per datatype and different even in the analogue world
• from the data assemblages paper on no beginning or end - could link to transition difficulty, intent-action, that writing on the Maori creation myths, ‘stop and go’, Takiwātanga, might not be relevant enough but i find interesting
• how about fabrics not papers
  • discussion of zines that incorporate fabric - fabric elements bringing attention to the labour of handcrafting - useful for explaining the desire for tangible evidence of curation efforts, the human touch over algorithmic non-curation
  • (Martin, 2023)
  • “The Use of Thread and Fabric in Feminist Zines”
• minor points to make about reverse image search - Google reverse image search unsuitable for tracking reuse by the general public + primary use of human-readable filenames - (Reilly, 2021) - “Enhancing practitioner discoverability of digital library reuse based on user file naming behavior”
• “Within transtextuality, a “hypertextual” work is one that derives its manner, plot, themes, or style from another work, the “hypotext” – a hypotext is a source used in a hypertext” - Parallel Posts - but everything is both now - what counts as an atomic fragment
• the paradigmatic shift of the digital image from a singularity to a multiplicity (Henning 2018; Joselit 2013; Jurgenson 2019)
• “Whipple (2006) views the transition to storing photographs online as a form of commonplacing
• ‘swimming through text’ we’re swimming through information - surfing the web. - where are you in context of your own personomies and other folksonomies. this one atomic fragment in mapped association with other fragments according to semantic connections, can view only ‘is a’ connections or ‘parent - child’ or only ‘critiques’ or only ‘practical solutions to’
• several fluid metaphors in the Are.na analysis, interface as per my own time perception.
• cybernetics as applied epistemology - systems and feedback from knowledge outside the system - https://www.pangaro.com/definition-cybernetics.html

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• ‘Hyperconnectivity in ASD may entail more and widespread resource utilization for accomplishing action-intention judgment’ - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393219303458?casa_token=FqU1srXCjS0AAAAA:qFwYJmDunFoFqEQ9eGjCI9NMPZKwd1T9qp4z3rcAK_wz8bbcpCVf7XY_MK4TDrkD558CtKVwgXk
• from the data assemblages paper on no beginning or end - could link to transition difficulty, intent-action, that writing on the Maori creation myths, ‘stop and go’, Takiwātanga, might not be relevant enough but i find interesting

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 visited - though I’d rather Even have more control over these kinds. Even media watching i prefer to track myself

• mass survey == mass surveillance??

on capture, - ““sediments of time itself” (Spieker, 2008, p.8)” ⤴️

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

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

physical/spatial memory in object

• “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

open source can be resilient in its modularity

• “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).” ⤴️
• but also impracticalities of using open source software

digital waste and data reuse, digital rag-picking - my data mulch concept reiterated here

• “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.” ⤴️
• “(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.” ⤴️

printed ephemera as decentralised archive of software changes

• “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.” ⤴️

communal craft

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

coding is assemblage

• “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” ⤴️

digital guilds

• “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)” ⤴️

affordances of physical media

• “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.” ⤴️
• “the book fell, I kept thinking, its content would not have been affected.” ⤴️

photographic resistance

• “the everyday practices of capturing life with cheap, portable cameras were seen as claiming zones of a relative autonomy” [⤴️](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0yavrc9yf2a4k2w61yjvrgq
• ““a contested ground” (Kember, 2014)” ⤴️

whilst war boosts innovation it also channels it in particular directions - positivist directions not funded

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

political/policy solutions to data privacy/sharing conundrums

• “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.” ⤴️

is the present real?

• “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.” ⤴️

woke-washing, legacy

• “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” ⤴️
• “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.” ⤴️

residue of digital crafts - digital sawdust

• “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” ⤴️

specific to smolicki

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

• “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.” ⤴️

• “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 material turn that endorses an empirical approach to studying media technologies,” ⤴️

• “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 practices 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?” ⤴️

• “the 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 reflective 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 towards 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.” ⤴️

• “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.” ⤴️

• “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 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.” ⤴️

• self-continuity and collective self-continuity - Sedikides et al., 2023

• • digital scrapbooking to combine past and future, heritage and future-building
    • (Mills, 2014)
    • “Cultural flows in an Aboriginal school: Deterritorializing textual production through a socially mediated Indigenous heritage” or “Reterritorializing multimodal design in the classroom through a socially mediated Indigenous heritage” unclear which is final title

• Pinterest digital scrapbooking, desires, why do people use Pinterest

  • “Crafty Bricolage: Pinterest as Digital Scrapbooking”

• self-actualisation is a privilege - “the facilitation of the personal growth process is at least somewhat contingent on privilege, as socioeconomic position shapes access to resources” ⤴️ ->

• self-actualisation, collecting for ourselves --- tiny history of personal archives, cabinet of curiosities

• what we DON’T capture - much can be freely archived elsewhere and be only linked to by you. What we are capturing for us and for everyone. - “the home as norm has been conflated with home as fact” - knowledge commons

• ““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.” ⤴️

---

• “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 data obfuscation

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

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

• tagging for ourselves, tagging for others

  • ‘altruistic’ vs ‘selfish’ tagging aims
  • maybe found this in “Social Bookmarking Tools (I) A General Review” - (Hammond et. al, 2005)

short-term vs long-term explicit discussion

• disconnect from archival purpose and reason for capture - eg the short-term and long-term purpose of ‘stories’ and similar
  • “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.” ⤴️

on semantics and temporality

• the digital archive “evades the confines of chronology and semantics as the primary criteria for organizing, mediating, and accessing information, producing “micro-temporary experiences of time that strongly defy any fixed order.” ⤴️. I’d argue that access to temporality and to semantics should be sliding-scale, as different data has different cadence, weight, etc in terms of meaning. semantics Should be held in digital form and some idea of content age can be useful. flat ontology doesn’t mean each individual in capturing or storing that data has an atemporal, meaning-ambivalent connection to it.

a model for temporal contextual information and its use, re-use, etc.

• logging as future-oriented but also contextual, specific and task-oriented
  • “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.” ⤴️ - temporal, fleeting notes
  • “representative and useful in relation to a particular journey” ⤴️
• contextualisation and decontextualization
  • 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
  • example, Nazi camp images
    • “A tall man points his small camera at an internal officer, probably unaware of being photographed (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 stratum 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 instrumentalized 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.” ⤴️

long-termed approach is what makes it para-archival

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

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

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

• “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 everyday 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” ⤴️

• “I was no longer able to maintain a cold distance” ⤴️

• a tactical media project allowed (Rydet, 1993), to develop “a subjective entry point” to relationships with others (Smolicki, 2017) ⤴️

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

• “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 disruptive 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 counterparts to the hegemonic forces inscribed in the working of dominant technical apparatuses.” ⤴️

• recommendation algorithms and search and discovery

  • on the Viking Jewellery one - on limitations of Pinterest - “the politics of curatorial agency becomes a delicate issue to locate as it morphs between human and machinic forms of intelligence.”
  • am I anti-(privacy-violating-cloud-services) but agree with metadata-based discovery?
  • am I anti-machine-learning-recommendation or just because they’re power-hungry and not local
  • I’m in favour of active discovery, search etc
  • would I be in favour of discoverability through lightweight local machine learning algorithms?
  • or is it more a case of only active, only relational-trust based
  • other sources and usage of are.na has me leaning towards active discovery only tbh
  • but this is also labour
  • but is also how ‘tastemakers’ nd ‘influencers’ are a thing
  • but better a human tastemaker than a machinic one?

alt-academia

• “(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” ⤴️

  • assemblage/live shared docs/hypertext is collective knowledge - quickref#^86a1c2

• “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.” ⤴️

public/personal value

• “Rydet suggested that the personal value of her long-term project never went away, but that the public and personal dimensions were always inextricably intertwined and equally relevant.” ⤴️
• does it have to inherently retain personal value to be para-archival? or to retain public value?

i’d argue the agency and interpretations makes it para-archival, not its potential legacy - archival legacy - legacy a common theme in are.na meta-blocks too

• “what makes an everyday recording practice a candidate for para-archiving is a certain awareness, vision, and anticipation that the record one deliberately produces parallel to one’s life and eventually leaves behind might hold special significance in the future.” ⤴️
• I think temporary and fleeting para-archives are possible, and actually common, just undiscovered by external forces who ‘raise’ it to the status of art/worthy of continued preservation/study/commentary
• “photograph as many local households and their owners as possible before they become eroded by the increasing industrialization taking place at the time.” ⤴️
  • they didn’t know this when they first started photographing
• “the certainty that I will leave something behind,” ⤴️
• ““The more my Record grows,” she said in the aforementioned interview, “the more I believe that it will be timeless.”” ⤴️ - if so, only because of the thougtful, active, principled choices and not just the mass - mass data we have now that is useless shows that

addressable data as multi-scalar archive

• “all digital content (digital image, video, sound file) is in itself a kind of (techno-)archive (Wolfgang Ernst, 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.” ⤴️

permanence

• impermanent memory isn’t inherently undesirable

• coding self-documents/leaves residue

  • “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

• “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

data obfuscation

• 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?

---

Tiffany 2023 accessed via Internet Archive https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/02/tumblr-internet-legacy-survival/621419/ (Stein, 2017) Stein, Louise E. (2017) ‘Tumblr Fan Aesthetics’, in M. A. Click & S. Scott (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom. Abingdon: Routledge: 86-97. Hinkel 2023 on rw Oakley and Dame-Griff 2020 in the Tumblr Book described as a ‘cultural incubator’ (cite?)

retro-tech resistance

• from intent to action

  • harder for autistics?

    • ‘Hyperconnectivity in ASD may entail more and widespread resource utilization for accomplishing action-intention judgment’ - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393219303458?casa_token=FqU1srXCjS0AAAAA:qFwYJmDunFoFqEQ9eGjCI9NMPZKwd1T9qp4z3rcAK_wz8bbcpCVf7XY_MK4TDrkD558CtKVwgXk

  • from physical to digital, good discussion of the medium and usage by marginalized people, ‘polyvocality, democratic availability, and hybridity’

    • (Moynihan and Putra, 2019)
    • “Prototyping the Archival Ephemeral: Experimental Interfaces for the Edwin Morgan Scrapbooks”

archival - museums

• self-categories, self-tags, always a singular perspective - make curator’s principles and position more clear, and make the collective commons more actively participatory
  • archival came first from personal practise - “Abt (2006) traces the lineage of museums back to the practice of maintaining a “cabinet of curiosities"" - “collection for personal use.” - “arranged according to the personal interests or directives of its owner” - quickref#^f00e8e
  • “traces of the individual nature of collections still remain within the official spaces of museums through the continued existence of esoteric and specialized sub-collections” - quickref#^f00e8e
  • “separation between public curation and private collections is porous —standardized ways of classifying and ordering always derive from particular perspectives and are continually negotiated through the ongoing maintenance” (Hobbs, 2010).” - quickref#^f00e8e

does mnemotechnology inevitably become mnemotechnique as time moves on without it? or is this just because of forced progressivism towards automation?

• “fixtures as instruments of power, privilege, and control (2011) recalled the concept of mnemotechnology. […] 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 […] superseded by the ubiquitous cloud […] 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?” ⤴️

turning the analog digital, what is lost

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

oral history as emergent narrative remix technology

• campfires as communicative technology “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).” ⤴️

other analog remix

• medieval practices of ars memoriae (Ernst, 2013, p.85)
• seventeenth-century combinatorial art facilitated by inventions like Kirchner’s Arca Musarithmica (an inventory of musical patterns for generating ever-new compositions)

about tech generally, resistive tech

• “recognizing the pharmacological nature of technology, which is to say, technology’s simultaneously poisonous and remedial potentials” ⤴️
• “he nature of technology is always inherently ambivalent 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 activated 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 examined 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 operating (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:” ⤴️
• always multiple “‘ways of operating’” ⤴️ eg ways of walking, talking, etc
• “styles of action intervene in a field which regulates them at a first level” ⤴️
• “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.” ⤴️
• “the pharmacological nature of technology” ⤴️

capture opposed to capital

• “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.” ⤴️
• “various modulations that recent technological transformations have instigated in terms of material, temporal, agential, performative and ethical aspects of everyday, personal memory practices. I” ⤴️
• “differentiate them from other, official archiving practices undertaken by for example memory institutions (such as state archives” ⤴️
• “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.” [⤴️](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0erj6nswgmveh5tf4h7fs0e
• “increasing entanglement in numerous domains of everyday life is presented as an inherently positive and empowering consequence of the digital revolution.” ⤴️
• “the ubiquity of capturing 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 network devices and capturing practices encountered on a daily basis better enables the control, discipline, and management of societies.” ⤴️
• “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.” ⤴️

dangerous metadata

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

automated metadata - automated capture of surroundings - automated scope

• “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).” ⤴️
• “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

art + technology

• “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).” ⤴️

luddism based on paranoia

• “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).” ⤴️

subjective media messaging

• “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.” ⤴️

media anarchaeology

capitalism

capitalism consumes resistance capitalism standardises

infinite access causes excess, doesn’t account for real fluctuations in supply and demand, links to encouragement of following seasonal fruits and veg or other ‘natural’ limits rather than paying to overcome them, links to slowness, allows for human error and sets reasonable expectations

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

general other seeds

• “People tend to project onto others the intentions that guide their own technological practises and habits.”
• change in tech means amateur photography is no longer bottom-up as is largely on phones and social media ⤴️
• “human and technological evolutions have to be seen as processes that are always intertwined.” ⤴️
• “the “Californian model of networking” (in Simanowski, 2016)” ⤴️
• “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.”⤴️
• “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.”” ⤴️
• “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” ⤴️
• “intriguing avenue for conducting an alternative history of surveillance in which the (pan-)acoustic takes precedence over the (pan-)optical” ⤴️
• “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’ it could result in a lot of actually very unhelpful things
• “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).” ⤴️

more automated, less control, more standardized

• “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 go further, makes us recognise technique/manual aspects of things currently more like technologies
• the will and intention to act in a specific way, (Verbeek, 2011, p.13).

writing an aid not to memory but to reminisce - subjective views, leaving a trace

• “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).” ⤴️

lack of data ownership problems

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

Snapchat as involuntary archive

• “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.” ⤴️

what is it you want to remember - only you can make that choice - use of Google or AI for the less important - is it worth the costs?

• “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).” ⤴️

devices/softwares never inherently technique or technology, this is how some people are actually using AI critically

• “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” ⤴️

oral memory, oral conversational technique

• “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.” ⤴️

presuming use cases can be problematic

see contextualised over decontextualised fragments

photographic capture + self

• “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” ⤴️

are faster processes always less understandable? on readable mechanisms

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.” ⤴️

amateur archival for institutional strategy

• “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” ⤴️
• ““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.” [⤴️](https://read.readwise.io/read/01k0y3vtjgh4qkghprgmzxa8eb
• “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. ” ⤴️
• “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),” ⤴️

time is subjective

• that Butcher’s crossing quote time you can ‘crumple up into a ball and throw away’
• “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” ⤴️
• abstraction is necessarily reductive
• “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” ⤴️ - supposed objectivity is just that, object-ivity
• “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.” ⤴️
• “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.” ⤴️
• “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.” ⤴️

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• anti-‘luddism’, pro-luddism — mnemotechnology not inherently worse than mnemotechnique, just needs to be adopted with enough purpose and foresight, integrate and resist appropriately ⤴️
• misquoting interesting for remix but also the active subversion implicit - remix can thwart original intent, knowledge lineage needs to include who opposes each other
• Experiential knowledge can be considered fragmented and multi-modal due to the constant input from multiple senses across time. It can also be considered as a mode of resistance for marginalised voices. Works in this area skew towards historical counter-memory, whilst I’m also highlighting more directly functional knowledge of process and advice, where the past can be instrumentalised for the present to build alternative futures. This research concerns fragmented experiences captured, stored and shared online. In referring to ‘fragments’ of arbitrary scale I emphasise their capacity for re- and de- composition over their specific form.
• Are.na roadmap - BTW ‘Search: intelligent image tagging’ is this AI or obj recog or something??
• individual complex setups with a million custom scripts and integrations, we are looking for a flexible base that interfaces the simplest setup well
• more participatory methods fit well with my goals but I didn’t have enough time to do it properly