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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
The speed of technology is actually beyond beyond our own neurology.
EL Putnam:Art enables multiple feelings and positions to exist at the same time. And in many ways, current social media content doesn't allow for that.
Noel Fitzpatrick:So it's kind of that form of speculative inquiry that can take place through the artistic activity itself.
EL Putnam:Hello. I'm doctor Elle Putnam, and I am the author of the new book from University of Minnesota Press forerunner series, live streaming and aesthetics and ethics of technical encounter. And I'm here today with professor Noel Fitzpatrick of Technological University Dublin, who's here to talk with me a bit about the book and really what has come to inspire it and the significance that it has.
Noel Fitzpatrick:It might be good if we just told people how we met. I suppose we met initially part of a seminar series that I'd organized. We were looking at questions of digital studies. So digital studies was a initiative with the philosopher Bernard Stiegler and a number of people in the in Paris. And then when I came back to Dublin, we decided to kinda convene a group to see if we could have a kind of Dublin node of the network on digital studies, and we started to read a number of texts together.
Noel Fitzpatrick:One of them was Stegler's, Techniques of Time, but also then we moved through to, Jean Bertsimondel. So that's it. That's how we know each other.
EL Putnam:And that was, ten years ago now. So in some ways, this group had planted the seeds of working with Stigler in Simondon in my own philosophical and artistic practice. And it was a very interesting way because Stiegler, he works with Simondon as a major interlocutor in many ways with his own slant on the text. So it was very interesting to go from there and then back to Simondon and really understand, the distinctions between these philosophers. And I think as I've come to think more about Simone Dan's work, especially as an artistic practitioner, I do like to emphasize that I'm both a philosopher and practitioner.
EL Putnam:I found that Simone D'On's work engages with technology and, the materiality of technical objects in a way that really appealed to me as a maker and a practitioner. And I I haven't found that with many philosophers of technology.
Noel Fitzpatrick:And also at the time, I think it's like a lot of Simone Doan's texts weren't available in English. I mean, I was looking at one that translated his, techno aesthetics. That's that's 2012 when that was first translated in California into English. And it's only then in 2016 that we get multi existence of this object technique is translated into English. So as there's a growing interest in Simone.
Noel Fitzpatrick:This is also thanks to these different translations which have appeared. And that was part of our initial struggle was to find English versions of the text. And then we had one, and that's how we started out together. Then just in terms of Simone's understanding of aesthetics and technical objects, as you point out, there is a kind of very material aspect to it. And we know I think I told you that anecdote.
Noel Fitzpatrick:We know that in the Lycee in Tours, in the center of France, he had a little laboratory at the bottom of the Lycee where he really looked at the materiality of technical objects, took them apart with the class. As part of a philosophy class, he was taking these technical objects asunder.
EL Putnam:And and that really comes through in his writing. And I think one thing about this digital studies group is I think almost all of us were practitioners and really interested not just in the philosophical implications of technology, but what it means to, you know, get in there and modify things and the impact that that physical engagement can have and how knowledge can be transferred through that process of handling. And in the ways Simone Dont has structured his literature that that comes through very much, the the descriptions of the various technical objects. I don't address that within this book so much, but as an artist, it was that kind of philosophical framing that really appealed to me and thinking about the importance of aesthetics in his work. Now I'll just do a little overview of the context.
EL Putnam:This book was very much a product of COVID nineteen. When social distancing had come into place and, really, we had to turn to digital technologies with live streaming being the primary means of synchronous engagement. I was really struck by the phenomenological differences of what it means to engage with each other. I talk about in the book and I start with an anecdote how even as an artist, I was really interested in how to engage with this in my practice and the failures that I experienced, because of lack of broadband service. The Internet at my house was the equivalent of DSL.
EL Putnam:The challenges with trying to stream actions over Instagram that just didn't pick up effectively because of that engagement with, you know, the platforms. It it's not this kind of direct translation. It's it's a different kind of experience there. It's something that that intrigued me. And as the pandemic progressed, it's something I really wanted to unpack more and think about.
Noel Fitzpatrick:Maybe there's an aspect to that that that's what really struck me. I think it's kind of very personal anecdote at the beginning of the book. Where you talk about when your when your father passed away. It's kind of it's really striking that there is a particular form of what Simone would say. There's a particular form of experience, particular form of techno aesthetic experience, which happens with these technologies.
Noel Fitzpatrick:And I think in that personal anecdote, you're pointing to this, what you call a context collapse, when these things actually do enable us to have particular forms of experience, but at the same time, there was something maybe missing in that experience too.
EL Putnam:Yes. And it was interesting to, you know, go back and having the experience where I really did have to say, my final goodbye to my father over a glitched WhatsApp call. And then only months later, that became the norm for a lot of people where even funerals were being live streamed. And a lot of these rituals where normally we would come together, we now had to use video calls or live streaming. I realized even in my own personal experience of having to say that goodbye and even going to The States only a few days later and realizing that I was in a different point of the grief cycle than my family who had been present there, There was something about my experience of that loss that differed from those who could be present.
EL Putnam:And I didn't want to come to this as a condemnation of live streaming technologies because it's I don't think it's a matter of thinking of one as being superior to another, but there was something different. I do think in a lot of our discourses around these technologies, we're not always attuned to these nuanced differences. And it was really through grief and that, the breakdown in my personal life, the breakdown of the machine through the glitch video, and then even the more global breakdown that came with COVID nineteen, that a lot of these qualities became apparent.
Noel Fitzpatrick:Maybe that's one of the reasons why this particular philosophical framework that we're referring to is, I think, is is really important because it enables us to think through questions of technology as questions of coevolution. So it's not that this technology is something which is outside of me, but it's how this technology influences me and how I influence it. I think that's part of this, what we're calling digital studies, this group or this way of thinking about digital technologies is to see them as coevolution processes. So when we have a a glitched WhatsApp call, which is a final moment, when we're saying goodbye to somebody, that's an affordance of the technology itself. But there's also something very distinct happening in that experience, which is through the co evolution of it with the human.
Noel Fitzpatrick:You see what I mean?
EL Putnam:And I think that does connect a lot to some things we've discussed in the group, and it does go beyond the scope of this current book, but influences it is, Bernard Stiegler's, idea of the pharmacon, which is technology having the capacity of being both a poison and a cure, where it's not just, it gets away from that kind of techno solutionism that we tend to think of. And even in my own personal experience, I had to end up switching from the WhatsApp call to using the landline, reverting to an earlier form of technology to make this call. And, going to your point there, Noel, about the coevolution, it's also we're constantly engaging with these objects, these technical objects, and adapting them, using them, modifying them as needs be in order to relate to each other in the world. It's not just a matter of just using an object, but it's engaging with it. That's important.
Noel Fitzpatrick:I think that's one of the key things which sometimes has gone through or skipped through a little bit too quickly is the understanding of technology as a pharmacology through Stegler's work. This is not about simply saying that we can use technologies in a good way or we can use them in a bad way. What Bernard Stegler is pointing to is that the actual nature of these objects is to be pharmacological. It's not about usage. So as you say, it's like, you know, it's not about how I use the technology.
Noel Fitzpatrick:It's about how this technology uses me, and I can manipulate it if I wish. And that's part of the difficulty is that sometimes this is behind black boxes and things that we don't actually have access to. So part of your art what I really appreciate about your artistic practice, Al, is that sometimes what you do is actually enable us to open up that black box a little bit, whether that be through wearable technologies or hacking technologies. But in a way, what you're trying to do is kind of reveal this part of the process itself through your practice.
EL Putnam:And I think in ways this is coming from an influence from Simone Don, because he does talk about how one of the most striking alienations we experience in our society, and he was writing this in the mid twentieth century, is that alienation from technologies and knowing how they function and knowing what they do and even not valuing them as constituting culture. But again, just simply thinking them as tools to get the job done and how that alienates us from what technologies can do.
Noel Fitzpatrick:Yeah. I think that's kinda a key thing. That's part you know, that's part of what I'm doing at the moment is we have a European culture and technology laboratory. We're asking this question about the relationship between technology and culture. And as you say, it's kinda see through.
Noel Fitzpatrick:If we move beyond technology as a simple instrument or tool and understand it as something which is part of becoming human, part of what we are that enables us to reposition these questions much more fruitfully, I think, and much more radically.
EL Putnam:And I think here this to go back to that idea of coevolution, that's something that goes back to when humanity first used fire, first used flint. It's not just thinking about digital technologies either, but taking that broader definition of technology and thinking of disengagement with technology as part of what it means to become human. But it's also that way of engaging with the world, engaging with the geographic environment, engaging with each other. It's these kind of entangled milieu of relations that take place as opposed to just individual atomic subjects objects.
Noel Fitzpatrick:Yeah. Because for Simonon, it's always that process of what we're calling coevolution or individuation. He always has a process of individuation and coindividuation at the same time. That these things happen together. As you say, they're not kinda they're not kinda atomic separate entities.
Noel Fitzpatrick:These things are actually part and parcel of the same thing. So how I become who I am in the world through technologies is also part of a collective process. It's not just individual.
EL Putnam:Exactly. Even if we were to talk about then trans individuation, it's not even just individuating together. It's individuation. It's that I mean, Simon Donne brings together the psychological and the social with the technical. And, you know, it's through our engagement with technical objects that we may modify and build, but then in turn, they modify and build us.
EL Putnam:It's us related together. It's us relating over time and generations. And so it's taking a much broader view of what it means to be human. And I think the appeal for Simone D'On, especially at this time, is I see this as a way to counter the thinking that we see with a lot of neoliberalism that emphasizes hyper individualism. And a lot of this individualism being exacerbated through our engagement with technologies, just the way they're structured and set up.
EL Putnam:To think a lot of technologies are designed so you can personalize, customize, have everything, all services dedicated around you, and then reliant on economic systems, platform economies that really focus on the individual hiding all those relations. It's not that they disappear, but it hides them beneath the interface.
Noel Fitzpatrick:And I also think there's gonna even the term hyper now has the connotation of speed. Yeah. You know, the it's it's become so vast that it's beyond our own neurological synoptic firing speeds. The speed of technology is actually beyond beyond our own neurology. So when we're looking at these, algorithms, which are nudging us and indicating what we should do next, these are kind of beyond our capacity as individuals to process it too.
Noel Fitzpatrick:So hyper individual, I suppose hyper now has this kind of connotation of of speed with the two.
EL Putnam:And then that was also one of Stiegler's, critiques of Simon Don because Simon Don was writing before this current era and our current information technologies and all these infrastructures. There are others like Hyak Hui, who are also turning to Simon Don and finding ways to work with his philosophy in terms of digital objects.
Noel Fitzpatrick:And I suppose within Yook's Yook Hui's work, it's that exploration of the context of what we're calling milieu. It's not simply just your geographical environment, your cultural environment for York. It's also a kind of a form of cosmology. So how I conceive of what the world is is part of that context within which technology evolves. So we have a particular cosmology, and within that, according to York, that's where we have to have a repositioning of what he calls cosmo techniques.
Noel Fitzpatrick:We have to understand the relationship between technology, culture, and cosmology.
EL Putnam:And I think just to go back with the structure of the book, I mean, the first part, it's kind of giving this very short general overview of, Simondon's concepts as they relate to, my analysis and then discussing some of his more well known interlocutors like, Yapwe and Bernard Stegler. But as Noel noted in the beginning, it's only recently that we're seeing more translations into English. So for a long time, it was really restricted to, Francophone audiences.
Noel Fitzpatrick:And even in the French context, it was very much, what we could say, a minority sport. It's not actually even in mainstream philosophy in France. It's still a little bit on the margin even though there's an annual Symantone conference now in French. It's very much on the margin. So can I ask you a specific question, though, in terms of when we come to Symantone's understanding of the aesthetic?
Noel Fitzpatrick:What intrigues me is that and you crocheted actually on page 34 in the book. It's that aesthetics is for Simon Don, it's not a kind of contemplation of some aesthetic object in itself. For Simon Don, it's particularly a form of action. At the aesthetic, in fact, as you put in the subtitle of the book, is a form of ethical and aesthetic encounter with the object. I was wondering if you could just expand on that a little bit, because it's not just the aesthetic object.
Noel Fitzpatrick:It's something which is outside of me that I contemplate. What he's calling for is a form of, I suppose, interaction or encounter with the with the technical object.
EL Putnam:Yes. And you can see here where he differentiates between philosophers like Immanuel Kant, whose philosophy of aesthetics was greatly influential over modernism, especially, but even more dialectical thinkers like Hegel, where that emphasis on how you engage with it and how you experience it, the phenomenon of experiencing it. And I think to go to the quote on page 34, it's a form of action. But what he also emphasizes is an action not just for the consumer, not just for the viewer, but also for the artist. So even in the process of making, it's really important because it's about a certain contact with matter.
EL Putnam:You know, Simon Don emphasizes how art and our aesthetics is not restricted to art objects either. It's not just a painting. It's not just a sculpture that can evoke an aesthetic experience, but a technical object can. But it's a technical object when it's in use. So it's when you see the airplane, you know, flying in the sky in full flight.
EL Putnam:He has a description on the mode of existence of technical objects. He has this description of a call center. And in this call center, there's gonna be a lot of noise. There's gonna be a lot of chaos going on, but also noise and breakdown from the signals. But there's an aesthetic beauty to it because it's that technology in use, and it's people trying to connect.
EL Putnam:So it's not just the stylistic qualities of it, but it's the action. It's how objects are engaged with and the relations and the potential for relations that come through it.
Noel Fitzpatrick:Mhmm. Because you you could argue, and I have argued elsewhere, that one of the issues with Simone's understanding of the aesthetic artistic object in one way is that it is this material process. And the, you know, the risk is a return to some type of fetish of the artistic gesture, if you see what I mean. So I was kinda thinking through forms of contemporary postconceptual immaterial practices, which seem, although, might kinda struggle to see, if you see what I mean. But I think the way you put it there is really good because for him, he also gives examples of electricity, of other forms of aesthetic objects, which are also ephemeral, and we can't really perceive them.
Noel Fitzpatrick:So for him, it is that process of sensation and action, which could include participation, which could include performance, which could include other things, which he hadn't thought of himself, if you see what I mean.
EL Putnam:Yeah. Yeah. No. And I I think it's an important thing because it's not an intention here to privilege the artistic gesture as inevitably evoking the aesthetic encounter because even Simon Nantes had set these sorts of parameters around it. But it is a way of thinking about art that, I guess, in some ways, you could say was a bit ahead of the time of what art was at that time.
EL Putnam:It's not just looking at the resulting drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, but the videos how Wim in action using the sticks of paint as he's moving through it, how he puts the canvas on the ground, how does he set up his objects and engages with his different tools to create particular marks. And that is why when writing this book, I did also come from a perspective of performance because performance and particularly performance art in, the visual arts, there's a great deal of emphasis on gesture, on engaging with objects that may not be considered art objects and working them in ways that enable different a different meaning to come through it. And so even my analyses of looking at the the cam girls from the 1990s, even looking at the Zoom bombing, the the activism of Black Lives Matter, and the performance art of Ayanna Evans, even ones that aren't considered performance art, I come with a theoretical framework that treats them like performances. It considers the different actions, the different materials, the different restraints that were present there. So with the cam girls, for instance, it's not just the images that were being presented on the screen minutes apart, but it's thinking about the act of being at home, having the cameras present there.
EL Putnam:The narratives that come from these kind of fragmented images, but then also the need to build and modify and hack tools to make this possible. So, you know, working with webcams, HTML, CSS, like, building up websites, dealing with breakdown, having images that breakdown, and having that all be part of the process of camming. A lot of which is, now set up through proprietary platforms, so we no longer have to have that knowledge of web design.
Noel Fitzpatrick:But I was thinking as you're talking, because I know we've we've spoken about this elsewhere. But this is kind there is a kind of particular moment within that, though, where, you know, when the technology breaks down, that's when I become aware of what that technology is. If you see what I mean, I don't wanna get overly philosophical, but that's a key concept which comes through, Heidegger. And maybe that's something that you point to in those example of the camp girls is that it is kinda through that thing which breaks down that I become aware of it as the thing that enables me to have that camera experience, excuse me?
EL Putnam:Yeah. Before, actually, I began engaging with Simone Dorn's philosophy, I I was very much working with the philosophy of Heidegger. And breakdown itself, it's it's something that I I do write about in quite a lot of my research, and even I try to invite breakdown into my performances. I I look for those moments where technologies rub up against each other, you know, work them to the limit until you get to that point of breakdown and then try to resolve that as part of a performance action. You know, Heidegger describing that you're not aware of these structures and the influence they have until they stop working.
EL Putnam:And what intrigued me, especially with the webcam feeds of Anna Vu is you can see shots of her trying to fix the site within the feed, and you can see how the images like, you'll get some glitched images, and then sometimes she'll put up an image and there'll be a text being trying to fix the site. It's all happening and being, you know, shown, like, every few minutes in these still shots. So it's not the kind of video stream that we're used to now. It's in these kinds of fragmented snippets of time, which itself is a breakdown in image. It's it's image presented with these gaps, like what happened in that time between the shots.
EL Putnam:Even with with COVID-nineteen and streaming becoming so prominent, I wanted to go back to this earlier example of the 1990s webcams, because I think in many ways, it shows us things about live streaming as an aesthetic and ethical encounter that, we can't perceive you with our current technologies because they're too slick.
Noel Fitzpatrick:And even, you know, I think I told you David Carpenter is a really good example of the glitch netcode technologies, which are now used to overcome that glitch even though it's like an AI algorithm, which says what would have taken place if the glitch hadn't happened. Do you see what I mean? So it's like a technology which gets over the glitch, which in itself is a glitch.
EL Putnam:Yeah. Yeah. It's glitches all the way down. One thing I wanna emphasize with how I talk about ethics in the book, I emphasize that it is an ethics of care. It's a relational ethics of care, very much influenced by feminism and black studies.
EL Putnam:So, not thinking of it just in terms of morals or fixed virtues, but it comes from that engagement. So, for instance, when I talk about the CAM girls, I talk about the maintenance of the sites as a kind of ethics of care, repair as an ethics of care. I do extend on these questions of ethics throughout, but it's also thinking about again, another example prior to COVID nineteen was thinking about, especially with live streaming used during Black Lives Matters protest before 2020. So even some of the earlier years, because as a movement that was coming from social media, livestreaming played a significant role in, the sharing of events. It became a means of not just documenting, but being part of events.
EL Putnam:And I know with my analyses there, I really wanted to shift from that question of thinking of participation, and I wanted to get away from the question of, well, is live streaming really a form of participation? What really struck me about activism, and in some ways, it was parallel to the cam girls, but with different technologies. With activism, you have an ongoing shoot. But now instead of a webcam at home with still shots, you have a mobile phone that you need to carry, which is very difficult to do for long periods of time. You have to worry about battery life, your data plan.
EL Putnam:You have to worry about gaps in service. But you're really you're you're shooting to see if something will happen. You know, sometimes it might be bringing up a camera if an event happens or something in particular, but a lot of times, it's just showing a march or showing a rally. Also, being careful not to reveal too much information that could, for instance, give police insight into where an action is happening.
Noel Fitzpatrick:Is that the line sorry. It's good cross. But is that the line between kind of witness and participation then? Can we open out that question a little bit and say, well, what distinctions do we make between the notion of participation and witness?
EL Putnam:And I think that is an important question. If you're present streaming, you're on the ground, you're part of it, and even having a camera there is going to influence how actions unfold. You could argue that there really is no objective witness when you're live streaming. You're part of it. The question then comes, though, for the person watching the stream.
EL Putnam:And here, I think there's been a lot more criticism around people who witness activism online as opposed to going on the ground. But, again, I didn't wanna get caught in that trap of condemning one over the other because in other ways, this online action can lead to on the ground action. It can lead to change. And as I discussed in a later chapter, it can change the conversation, which can have an ongoing change. But I hear the difference I wanted to bring between witness and participant, it's another kind of difference is the kind of participation, and that comes through time, where if the person's streaming on the ground, they're just streaming as time unfolds.
EL Putnam:But the person who is engaging with it on a computer can have that window open in a corner and then be engaging with other activities, flipping back and forth, going to different sections. And I do think that difference in time and the experience of time is really important.
Noel Fitzpatrick:Going back to Steger's work, that's part of his initial thesis, actually, part of his PhD initially was that question of techniques and time. So there's a particular form of time which is produced thanks to or because of that particular technique, if you see what I mean. So the kind of the understanding of time that comes through live streaming is actually also part of what that technology is.
EL Putnam:Exactly. And, again, I thought it was interesting here to draw that comparison back to the cam girls where you had those gaps in images. So you wouldn't be expected to just sit there and watch a still image until it changed. But even with video streams, there's affordances within the technology, so you don't have to sit there and focus on one task. It's in the design of the platform to go through different tabs.
Noel Fitzpatrick:Yeah. I suppose the other thing I was thinking of is a question of attention. Yes. You know? So my attention is being taken in a specific way.
Noel Fitzpatrick:And even now, as I look at you on screen, I've got other things open in the background. So Catron Hales would argue that cognitively unaware of them. I can see my email coming through even though I haven't opened it up. In one way, I'm constantly being called upon to attend in a particular way because of the of the technology. She would call it a form or you see it's on a form of inbuilt distraction.
Noel Fitzpatrick:So rather than attention, what I've been asked to do is to give my attention to so many different things at once that I'm no longer really attending. We could argue that that process of live streaming for the person who's watching it on screen has those inbuilt processes of inattention built into it, basically.
EL Putnam:Yeah. And I think it's also important to think about that even if, you know, you have so many views or clicks or shares or likes, it doesn't necessarily mean that the person is engaging with it. You can even have the video playing and be somewhere else. I think here, again, I don't wanna get caught in this kind of moralizing of seeing now that we're using live streaming or online or this hyper attention. It's therefore ineffective or worse than being present on the ground.
EL Putnam:But I want to think about that phenomenological experience of what it means to have that switch tasking, that that hyper attention. I don't think we think enough about the experience of self of doing that and how it differs from that experience of being on the ground. And I do think in some ways we had become aware of it with COVID nineteen. There's an anxiety that arises from switching so much. There's different, physical sensations, a kind of exhaustion.
EL Putnam:The the trap we fall into is we get too caught up into comparing the outcomes when we need to think about the process of experiencing these different kinds of attention.
Noel Fitzpatrick:I think, you know, the parallel is with the digital text. You know? So if you go back to Marianne Wolf and Skuid and, you know, to the the text is something on screen, which is different to the printed text. And what you get is this argument that we have a form of surface reading that takes place because I have all these PDFs open. I'm just skipping through them.
Noel Fitzpatrick:I'm not actually having any deep reading whatsoever. But what she argues really well is that it's a necessary thing. You know, it's not that hyper attention is bad and deep attention is good. What she argues is that these two things are actually in dialogue with each other constantly. So neurologically, we are I suppose we allow ourselves to have moments of hypertension and then enables the deep attention.
Noel Fitzpatrick:So it's not that one is good and the other is bad. It's just that if we have too much of one, that's not necessarily enabling deep reading. If we take that as a parallel analysis, then we could say the same thing at the screen.
EL Putnam:Yeah. And I I do think it's that's a nice way of, again, getting out of this trap. And it is coming a lot, I find, being in an education context, teaching at university. It's thinking about how students are engaging with materials. Their techniques may differ than ours, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're not engaging in meaningful ways.
EL Putnam:I guess from there, I do shift from thinking about time and duration, and then shift into thinking about more explicitly the ethical implications because of sharing of content. And I focus on here, Diane Reynolds, sharing live streaming of the murder, her boyfriend Philando Castile and how that was a stream that then became a digital object that was shared and led to action on the ground. I brought this up because with that particular video, I think it was an important moment because after that, I was seeing a lot more of these videos of black death and violence on black bodies that I didn't feel like I could talk about live streaming without acknowledging that this this was happening. And I know some of the literature, and I I do talk about it in the book, you know, thinking of, for instance, the work by Sophia Noble. And, you know, it's being shared a proprietary platform, so who's profiting off the sharing of these videos?
EL Putnam:Yeah. Sophia Noble was one, but also Christina Sharpe talking about, the repetition of imagery and, you know, does reexposing ourselves to this imagery lead to a cessation of violence? Talking about, Hartman and her work connecting it back to slavery, talking about how we're in this afterlife of slavery. And there was one more, Tanya Sutherland, who recently came out with the book, I think it was last year, who more explicitly talks about the capacity of these images to and these videos to retraumatize and uphold white supremacy through these acts of sharing without acknowledging the impact that they have. But here I do also talk about, with Ron Sierre, thinking about, the aesthetics in politics and their connected on who can be heard, but But in many instances, especially connecting to black individuals, it's a matter of to be seen can also mean to be trackable, to be traced, to be surveyed.
EL Putnam:And, Simone Brown connects that back to slavery with lantern laws in The United States.
Noel Fitzpatrick:Maybe also think of a divide to opacity also.
EL Putnam:Yes. Exactly. The right to opacity.
Noel Fitzpatrick:Then not everything has to be transparent all the time, twenty four seven.
EL Putnam:Exactly. Edward Glissant in The Right to Opacity, his work coming from kind of post colonial Caribbean. But also when I see these videos online, I think about Susan Sontag's book regarding the pain of others, which came out right around the time of the Abu Ghraib photographs. And I do remember reading that when it came out and being very struck by her critique of the capacity of violent imagery to really instigate change. I mean, she was focusing on photography and photojournalism.
EL Putnam:But even with the early twentieth century, there was a belief that this photography could bring an end to the violence of war, but it didn't. And she talks about how images that seem more authentic, seem to be caught in the moment tend to carry greater authority as being there, as having that person had witnessed that moment and made it more real. But, the question that's always struck me is who has the right to witness these videos and images? Are we really capable of bringing change, or are we voyeurs? And it's a it's a question that I've always found to be quite important because, the way I analyze it in the book is I then think about the sharing of this content as a way to perform a kind of allyship.
EL Putnam:And especially when I saw it being shared by white individuals online to say, I watched this video all the way through. You need to see this. You need to know this is happening. But is it that only through watching this video are we going to acknowledge that such violence is happening?
Noel Fitzpatrick:The other way, maybe slightly different way of thinking about it is that if we go back to kinda put in recur, we're gonna probably recurs philosophy is that movement from the individual witness to the collective witness. And what he would argue is that that's a process that has to take place. So to move from the individual trauma to a collective understanding is something that takes place through a narrative. So we have to build that collective narrative in order for that trauma to be recognized collectively. So he would take examples, historical examples, where we don't move from the individual witness to the collective.
Noel Fitzpatrick:And the one that's often mentioned is the Armenian genocide. So the problem with the Armenian genocide sometimes is that we haven't enabled that collective narrative to take place. Maybe if we were to think about more, maybe a little bit more positively is to say that through these collective acknowledgments of the streaming, in one way, that's enabling a collective narrative to take place.
EL Putnam:And I think that's no. That is an important point, but I do wonder if this can happen on our social media platforms that are designed in a way that really emphasizes sort of impression management? That's where I wonder. I think about these as proprietary platforms. And, the question did arise during the peer review process of is there an ethical way of sharing these videos?
EL Putnam:And I don't necessarily think with our current technological platforms there is.
Noel Fitzpatrick:Yeah. I suppose that's part of you know, there's a kinda there's a legacy with Stigler at the moment where what we're trying to do is have forms of collective individuation through technologies which are being developed, which are experimental technologies. But that's exactly this question. It's moving in a way from how we have a particular form of, I suppose, monetizing social media to another form of social media, which is gives upon more social than monetized.
EL Putnam:I mean and then there is a risk, though, of using other channels. And I know it's like for instance, with the, changes that we've seen with Twitter, you had a lot of other kind of microblogging sites come up, but, they don't necessarily have the same traction and reach as Twitter had at least before it became x. And I think this is still that's still to be deter determined of where that's going. But I guess here, the important thing to think about is it's not just the content that we need to consider, but the technologies that are making it available. And that's going back to the milieu.
Noel Fitzpatrick:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, also, you know and also the thing that I've been working on is an ocean of deliberation, interpretation, how you enable forms of hermeneutics to take place with digital technologies. So that's a whole process of annotation, asking people to do something, which is to reflect on the object as they are perceiving it.
EL Putnam:And at least with our current platforms, they don't necessarily have that space for that to occur. You're shaking your head now.
Noel Fitzpatrick:Don't ask me about my social media profile.
EL Putnam:I I guess, like, here and this is the way I was thinking about it with the book too is I thought a lot about this idea of the performative. Because you hear a lot the term performative allyship, where here performative seems to be more, theatrical or a kind of show. But I was really intrigued by Sarah Ahmed's interpretation of JL Austin and how she wrote about how educational institutions would consider diversity. And so this again, this was before 2020 when we started seeing a lot more universities coming forward with diversity policies. This is this is back.
EL Putnam:She was writing this in 2012, where a lot of times the university would write a diversity statement that just says we are diverse, and then that would be it. And so thinking of if we were to think of Austin where it's about the speech act that does something, where it's actually the statement of it, that it's a nonperformative. Nothing much comes of it. But she does talk about how even having those statements, it can change the parameters of the conversation.
Noel Fitzpatrick:I think there's also within that, I'll go back before Austin to HP Grice, and Grice has these really short texts. But one of the things that's really fascinating about Grice is that we need a form of diversity. The challenge is that to have a, an understanding of something like chat GPT or contemporary technologies of language, which are kinda closed systems, for Austin and Cyril, that performativity comes from the idea that it's constantly open ended. It can't be closed. And the problem that we're having, I would argue, at the moment is a misunderstanding of what these large generative language models are.
Noel Fitzpatrick:They are, in fact, closed systems. They're not open. So the the notion of the aesthetic or the artistic gesture takes place through that possibility of diversity, which is a form of openness.
EL Putnam:And I think that also goes back to, you know, Simon Don and what he talked about, the alienation of not knowing, not even knowing how technology functions. But even here with these proprietary systems, we're not even able to access the workings of it, not like with the cam girls where it was building the sites, building the setup. So I then end the book with a discussion of a performance artist who engaged with live streaming over Instagram during the pandemic, you know, wanting to end with an example of a performance artist who is aware of the camera and live streaming as a performance space. And who, over time, Ayanna Evans had developed this series because as as an artist, she's very much interested in participation and collective engagement. A lot of times, she'll ask people to pick her up during a performance.
EL Putnam:She'll do exercises with people together. It's a very kind of collective physical experience. She had to engage with technologies in a way and how to kind of cultivate those relations through these platforms that, differed from it. But through this process, she would modify her actions and practice because of what the technology afforded and what it could do. I was also struck though by she's presenting performances that differed from other kinds of social media.
EL Putnam:So for instance, I do a comparison to her performances to a a video that had gone viral at the time. It was, Todrick Hall's song, masks, gloves, soap scrubs. And I say this because she starts one of her performances kind of lip syncing to this song and doing gestures. This is a highly polished edited video of people dancing, recording themselves in smartphones, and edited to go to the beat of the music. And this video was intended to go viral.
EL Putnam:It's catchy. It's highly polished. All the labor that went in to make that the to make that video is, like, hidden behind its slickness. And, Evans, on the other hand, she presents these unedited sequences where she's setting up, she's breaking down, things are failing, things are she's working through it as it's happening. That is not the kind of content we're used to seeing online now.
EL Putnam:Thinking there's also a time when, TikTok videos became quite popular, videos that are short, that are catchy, that are edited within the phone itself. The capacity to really have a production studio in your itself, the capacity to really have a production studio in your pocket. And what does it mean then to present a video that involves a different kind of attention that can feel kind of stark? I think it's important to think about this because, again, going back to performance art and why I think performance art, art, and aesthetics is so important is because art enables multiple feelings and positions to exist at the same time. You can have a paradox present and not resolve it.
EL Putnam:And with performance art, because it's a time based medium, these emotions change over time, and you're encouraged to experience that. And in many ways, current social media content doesn't allow for that.
Noel Fitzpatrick:So it's kind of that form of speculative inquiry that can take place through the artistic activity itself.
EL Putnam:Yep. And, really, I think if there was something I that drove this book, I was thinking about how art, if we were to think of live streaming from an aesthetic perspective, we can start thinking of it as a kind of aesthetic object or aesthetic, encounter, to be more specific. It's a way of speculative inquiry. It's imagining new ways of being together. And I think the biggest roadblock we're facing here is this desire to want live streaming to replicate our in person engagement when in actuality, it's inevitably different.
EL Putnam:And in order for us to not just become part of these technological infrastructures, which Yacui does warn about in his philosophy of becoming part of this much larger technological general system. It is really a matter of engaging with these tools differently and seeing what we can do, and I do think there's a capacity through art and aesthetics to do that.
Noel Fitzpatrick:I think that's where a lot of the current workarounds, megantropic gestures, all these terms that we're using are, in fact, exactly that. It's not necessarily trying to throw everything out, but it's like, can we repurpose this in a particular way? And through that repurposing, can we get people to think about these objects in different ways?
EL Putnam:And I do want to, I think we can just end on this. I think there's something too, and you've brought this up a lot, Noel, in our conversations over time, is that art and artists use idiosyncratic gestures. They create a sort of specific language through their work with objects that may differ from our commonly understood meaning. And through this develop of these idioms, it introduces that difference.
Noel Fitzpatrick:Yeah. I suppose my current work is looking at that notion of the idiomatic. So how do we have something which is maybe outside the norm? So if you think about computational processes have to go towards or have to tend towards things which are standardized, things which you can be measured, things which are calculated. What my thinking at the moment is what lies outside of that.
Noel Fitzpatrick:So what cannot be calculated? What cannot be measured? And what we find is this kind of space between language as a fixed form and language, as I was saying a moment ago, is some type of open ended performative form. That's where the idiomatic tends to sit is in this individual gesture, which is a once off idiosyncratic, or it becomes something which becomes a bit more stabilized and drifts towards what I call the the idiomatic. So for me, the the example of performance art is a really good example of where that idiomatic is something which comes to the fore as part of the artistic activity itself.
Noel Fitzpatrick:That's the thing which lies outside, I would argue, computation. That's the book which has been written at the moment.
EL Putnam:And it's also why I wanted to talk with you today with this because I think in many ways we have similar, thinking
Noel Fitzpatrick:Yeah.
EL Putnam:On it and and thinking about the capacity of what work can do. Thank you.
Noel Fitzpatrick:Thanks.
EL Putnam:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book, Live Streaming and Aesthetics and Ethics of Technical Encounter is available from the University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.