1 00:00:00,399 --> 00:00:09,320 preroll music 2 00:00:09,320 --> 00:00:12,389 Herald: And now, a warm welcome for Vera Tollmann. 3 00:00:12,389 --> 00:00:14,939 She is from the research center for proxy politics. 4 00:00:14,939 --> 00:00:18,099 For those ones from Berlin, as far as I know, 5 00:00:18,099 --> 00:00:20,929 there is still a very exciting exhibition 6 00:00:20,929 --> 00:00:23,449 in the Museum of Photography. 7 00:00:23,449 --> 00:00:27,359 So a warm welcome for Vera Tollmann. 8 00:00:27,359 --> 00:00:28,389 (Vera) Thanks. 9 00:00:28,389 --> 00:00:33,740 *applause* 10 00:00:33,740 --> 00:00:36,030 Thank you very much for inviting me. 11 00:00:36,030 --> 00:00:40,780 First of all, it's just me. Boaz Levin, my colleague, 12 00:00:40,780 --> 00:00:43,910 who is also the co-author of this text that I'm going to present today, 13 00:00:43,910 --> 00:00:46,740 didn't make it in the end. 14 00:00:46,740 --> 00:00:52,630 It was also very kind of last minute invitation, that we received a week ago. 15 00:00:52,630 --> 00:00:57,780 I am going to present a text, which is entitled: 16 00:00:57,780 --> 00:01:00,970 “The Body of the Web” or “Proud to relay flesh” 17 00:01:00,970 --> 00:01:07,800 It's a text where we want to install the proxy as a figure of thought. 18 00:01:07,800 --> 00:01:12,200 And continue an argument, that Hito Steyerl, the artist, 19 00:01:12,200 --> 00:01:15,920 started in her text “Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise” 20 00:01:15,920 --> 00:01:18,640 which you can find online. 21 00:01:18,640 --> 00:01:21,610 In this co-authored text we are going to pick up 22 00:01:21,610 --> 00:01:28,560 her trope of the proxy and test it in relation to different cases of protest. 23 00:01:28,560 --> 00:01:33,600 So, from our understanding the notion of proxy politics can be understood 24 00:01:33,600 --> 00:01:39,320 as both a symptom of crisis in current representational political structures 25 00:01:39,320 --> 00:01:44,100 as well as a counter strategy aiming to critically engage and challenge 26 00:01:44,100 --> 00:01:47,970 the existing mechanisms of security and control, 27 00:01:47,970 --> 00:01:51,150 which leads to a series of questions. 28 00:01:51,150 --> 00:01:57,040 What forms of resistance might fit this vague technopolitical economic condition? 29 00:01:57,040 --> 00:01:59,720 Mass protesters become image makers. 30 00:01:59,720 --> 00:02:04,150 Do resistance movements need to employ PR consultants? 31 00:02:04,150 --> 00:02:06,760 How does one protest in public space, 32 00:02:06,760 --> 00:02:09,249 if there is no public space left? 33 00:02:09,249 --> 00:02:10,789 And in what way does this 34 00:02:10,789 --> 00:02:18,859 virtuality and duplicity challenge both public space and human bodies? 35 00:02:18,859 --> 00:02:21,899 Actually the latter is the most important 36 00:02:21,899 --> 00:02:28,559 that we are trying to answer or follow through with this text. 37 00:02:28,559 --> 00:02:31,429 Can you hear me well? Yeah? Good! 38 00:02:31,429 --> 00:02:35,179 Ah, there’s … yes? 39 00:02:35,179 --> 00:02:38,959 No … okay … I just thought there is a comment. 40 00:02:38,959 --> 00:02:40,690 Since July 2015, 41 00:02:40,690 --> 00:02:46,010 protesting in public space in Spain has become an expensive affair. 42 00:02:46,010 --> 00:02:53,060 I don't know, if you remember from media reports in July, there was a huge protest 43 00:02:53,060 --> 00:02:57,909 where they used the hologram as a medium. 44 00:02:57,909 --> 00:03:01,349 So protesters are now threatened by hefty fines 45 00:03:01,349 --> 00:03:02,999 and authoritarian reaction to 46 00:03:02,999 --> 00:03:07,430 the anti-austerity protests three years earlier. 47 00:03:07,430 --> 00:03:11,260 The citizen safety law, otherwise known as the gag law, 48 00:03:11,260 --> 00:03:16,159 criminalises protests, that interfere with public infrastructure. 49 00:03:16,159 --> 00:03:22,760 Under the new law which was passed by the governing People’s Party in December 2014 50 00:03:22,760 --> 00:03:26,980 protesters are liable to fines up to 600.000 EUR, 51 00:03:26,980 --> 00:03:32,919 for marching in front of congress, blocking road, or occupying a square. 52 00:03:32,919 --> 00:03:38,789 The law, criticised as a severe attack on Spaniards’ right of assembly and speech, 53 00:03:38,789 --> 00:03:44,150 is the most recent attempt by the government to curb a wave of popular protests, 54 00:03:44,150 --> 00:03:47,839 that has swept the country since 2011. 55 00:03:47,839 --> 00:03:56,939 With the unemployment rate exceeding 25% and one half of Spaniards under 25 jobless, 56 00:03:56,939 --> 00:04:01,559 hundreds of thousands of outraged citizens took the streets, 57 00:04:01,559 --> 00:04:05,319 occupying squares and universities. 58 00:04:05,319 --> 00:04:11,009 In response to a discredited political class, tarnished by years of political scandal 59 00:04:11,009 --> 00:04:16,078 and corruption, the Indigñados, Spanish for “The outraged”, 60 00:04:16,078 --> 00:04:21,529 sought to mobilise citizens in a series of grassroots demonstrations across the city 61 00:04:21,529 --> 00:04:27,229 by reclaiming their right to public space. 62 00:04:27,229 --> 00:04:30,659 Another flashback to 2011, where protests using 63 00:04:30,659 --> 00:04:35,360 similar occupation strategies were taking place across the world: 64 00:04:35,360 --> 00:04:39,759 in Tunesia, Egypt, Greece, Israel, and the United States. 65 00:04:39,759 --> 00:04:44,889 Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, home to the headquarters of Israel's largest banks, 66 00:04:44,889 --> 00:04:49,340 became a kilometre-long encampment, dubbed “the Tent Republic”. 67 00:04:49,340 --> 00:04:58,530 I have some pictures here. 68 00:04:58,530 --> 00:05:02,930 Lasting for almost three months, this protest called the tent republic. 69 00:05:02,930 --> 00:05:08,150 Syntagma Square in Athens too was filled with tents and make shift dwelling places 70 00:05:08,150 --> 00:05:11,550 and became a site of lasting popular assemblies 71 00:05:11,550 --> 00:05:15,180 and daily clashes with the local authorities. 72 00:05:15,180 --> 00:05:19,230 In Zuccotti Park, New York, activists tapped into the electricity grid 73 00:05:19,230 --> 00:05:21,580 via lantern posts and set up 74 00:05:21,580 --> 00:05:27,050 semi-autonomous mesh networks for the benefit of the protesters. 75 00:05:27,050 --> 00:05:32,199 Though numerous commentators pointed out the role played by new technologies such as 76 00:05:32,199 --> 00:05:34,399 social networks and smart phones, 77 00:05:34,399 --> 00:05:38,680 in facilitating the protests it was the city's square 78 00:05:38,680 --> 00:05:44,509 as old as political thought, which was the true common denominator. 79 00:05:44,509 --> 00:05:50,229 Our understanding of the rights of free speech and assembly as well as the concept of 80 00:05:50,229 --> 00:05:57,330 participatory democracy are deeply indebted to the development of the Greek city state, 81 00:05:57,330 --> 00:06:01,159 the Polis, and later the Roman public square. 82 00:06:01,159 --> 00:06:04,369 In nearly every protest occurring around this time, 83 00:06:04,369 --> 00:06:10,669 the spatial dimension of political action was once again affirmed. 84 00:06:10,669 --> 00:06:16,229 Might this significance be altered by the emergence of new technologies of control 85 00:06:16,229 --> 00:06:18,960 and new modes of resistance? 86 00:06:18,960 --> 00:06:22,190 As Hannah Arendt pointed out, the idea of Polis, 87 00:06:22,190 --> 00:06:26,909 which for her denoted the public realm of a political community, 88 00:06:26,909 --> 00:06:32,809 does not necessarily designate the physical location of the Greek city state, 89 00:06:32,809 --> 00:06:39,100 rather this form of public realm as the organisation of the people, quote: 90 00:06:39,100 --> 00:06:43,469 "as it raises out of acting and speaking together", end of quote. 91 00:06:43,469 --> 00:06:46,489 Thus it's all the more fitting that when 92 00:06:46,489 --> 00:06:50,450 the People’s Party of Spain passed its draconic law, 93 00:06:50,450 --> 00:06:53,100 demonstrators were quick to 94 00:06:53,100 --> 00:06:57,920 seek an alternative to bodily presence and physical space. 95 00:06:57,920 --> 00:07:07,849 Their solution was a hologram protest, the first ever. 96 00:07:07,849 --> 00:07:11,359 The first ever, as media outlets were quick to point out, 97 00:07:11,359 --> 00:07:18,150 skillfully choreographed and artfully projected in front of the gates of congress in Madrid. 98 00:07:18,150 --> 00:07:21,440 The Independent, the newspaper reported: 99 00:07:21,440 --> 00:07:27,749 “Spanish activists have staged the world's first ever virtual political demonstration.” 100 00:07:27,749 --> 00:07:31,949 The Daily Mails headline read: “The world's first hologram protest.” 101 00:07:31,949 --> 00:07:34,480 And News India asked and answered: 102 00:07:34,480 --> 00:07:41,169 “Ghosts on Spain's street? No it's world's first virtual protest.” 103 00:07:41,169 --> 00:07:46,079 In an interview, Cristina Flesher Fominaya, spokeperson for the activist group, 104 00:07:46,079 --> 00:07:49,050 that organised the hologram intervention, 105 00:07:49,050 --> 00:07:53,869 "No somos delito" – in English "We are not a crime" 106 00:07:53,869 --> 00:07:56,139 explained how it all came together. 107 00:07:56,139 --> 00:08:00,409 A group of creative professionals, who decided to remain anonymous, 108 00:08:00,409 --> 00:08:06,209 provided the needed technical support prior to the outdoor projection, 109 00:08:06,209 --> 00:08:09,180 which lasted for the course of an hour. 110 00:08:09,180 --> 00:08:11,749 The campaign was developed online. 111 00:08:11,749 --> 00:08:16,670 A webpage with the slightly lofty title "Holograms for Freedom", 112 00:08:16,670 --> 00:08:20,789 in which anyone can leave their hologram, a written message, or a shoutout, 113 00:08:20,789 --> 00:08:23,599 was where it started. 114 00:08:23,599 --> 00:08:29,800 Finally these composite images were screened across a transparent screen and looped. 115 00:08:29,800 --> 00:08:35,570 By representing people as holograms, which appear in a particular cool blueish tone 116 00:08:35,570 --> 00:08:39,510 reminiscent of surveillance camera footage, 117 00:08:39,510 --> 00:08:46,520 the protest organiser seem to elude to the popular depiction of a dystopian totalitarian state. 118 00:08:46,520 --> 00:08:52,070 Spectors, for once quite literally, haunted the sterile streets 119 00:08:52,070 --> 00:08:56,880 voicing the grievance of those barred from assembling there 120 00:08:56,880 --> 00:09:02,360 The event had been rehearsed, performed, and recorded in a nearby city and the equipment 121 00:09:02,360 --> 00:09:09,350 had been installed in Madrid by a PR company in a clandestine operation. 122 00:09:09,350 --> 00:09:15,210 A tech savvy, [unwittingly] absurd way to demonstrate without violating the new law. 123 00:09:15,210 --> 00:09:21,350 Instead of public space, the demonstrators inhabited a new medium. 124 00:09:21,350 --> 00:09:26,180 After all, bodies in public space pose a problem in contemporary politics. 125 00:09:26,180 --> 00:09:33,400 The natural corporal vulnerability of protesting was now intensified by the threat 126 00:09:33,400 --> 00:09:38,190 of disproportionate financial penalisation. 127 00:09:38,190 --> 00:09:42,770 This was a proxy protest fit for the age of proxy politics. 128 00:09:42,770 --> 00:09:46,820 So, what is a proxy then, like the way we understand it? 129 00:09:46,820 --> 00:09:50,540 A proxy is a decoy or a surrogate. 130 00:09:50,540 --> 00:09:56,910 The word derives from the Latin procurator (Prokurator), meaning someone responsible 131 00:09:56,910 --> 00:10:01,870 for representing someone else in a court of law. 132 00:10:01,870 --> 00:10:06,470 These days, the word proxy is often used to designate a computer server 133 00:10:06,470 --> 00:10:11,180 acting as an intermediary for request from clients. 134 00:10:11,180 --> 00:10:14,170 These servers afford indirect connections to a network, 135 00:10:14,170 --> 00:10:17,170 thus providing users with anonymity. 136 00:10:17,170 --> 00:10:23,770 However, proxy servers are not distinct technology 137 00:10:23,770 --> 00:10:31,020 to hide users but can also be set up for the opposite task: to monitor traffic. 138 00:10:31,020 --> 00:10:38,000 Proxy politics, as defined by Hito Steyerl, as the politics of the stand-in and the decoy, 139 00:10:38,000 --> 00:10:45,850 is characterised by fraudulent contracts, calmarical sovereignties, and void authorities. 140 00:10:45,850 --> 00:10:50,500 The concept of the proxy is emblematic of our post representational, 141 00:10:50,500 --> 00:10:53,210 post democratic political age. 142 00:10:53,210 --> 00:10:58,060 Disembodyment and invisibility of politics and its increasing subordination 143 00:10:58,060 --> 00:10:59,740 to economic interests. 144 00:10:59,740 --> 00:11:06,600 So, this political age is one increasingly populated by bot militias, 145 00:11:06,600 --> 00:11:12,650 puppet states, ghostwriters, and communication relays. 146 00:11:12,650 --> 00:11:19,580 So now one paragraph on post democracy, or the post representational, 147 00:11:19,580 --> 00:11:22,660 what it actually means. 148 00:11:22,660 --> 00:11:27,420 There is a book by Colin Crouch. It's entitled “Post Democracy”. 149 00:11:27,420 --> 00:11:30,000 And there he describes the current political condition 150 00:11:30,000 --> 00:11:34,830 as one in which power is increasingly relinquish to business lobbies 151 00:11:34,830 --> 00:11:37,830 and non-governmental organisations. 152 00:11:37,830 --> 00:11:40,170 As a result, he argues, quote: 153 00:11:40,170 --> 00:11:45,000 "There is little hope for an agenda of strong egalitarian policies 154 00:11:45,000 --> 00:11:53,950 for the redistribution of power and wealth or for the restraint of powerful interests." 155 00:11:53,950 --> 00:11:57,300 As a corollary to the rise of neo-liberalism, 156 00:11:57,300 --> 00:12:01,690 the vision of an autonomous potent political subject is devastated 157 00:12:01,690 --> 00:12:07,190 by the growing power of privileged elites, standing at the nexus of transnational 158 00:12:07,190 --> 00:12:13,050 corporations, extra juridical zones, infrastructural authorities, 159 00:12:13,050 --> 00:12:17,560 non governmental organisations, and covert rule. 160 00:12:17,560 --> 00:12:23,210 Similarly, Jacques Rancière, in his book entitled "Post Democracy", 161 00:12:23,210 --> 00:12:29,610 he refers to democratic action, post-democracy in the government practice, 162 00:12:29,610 --> 00:12:34,140 and conceptual legitimisation of a democracy after the demos, 163 00:12:34,140 --> 00:12:38,300 a democracy that has eliminated the appearance, miscount, 164 00:12:38,300 --> 00:12:42,860 and dispute of the energies and interests. 165 00:12:42,860 --> 00:12:46,520 At the heart of this condition lies an ontology of deception, 166 00:12:46,520 --> 00:12:50,080 where the public realm is conceived as a series of smoke screens, 167 00:12:50,080 --> 00:12:53,330 false flags, and simulations. 168 00:12:53,330 --> 00:12:59,940 The democratic appearance of the people is strictly opposed by its simulated reality. 169 00:12:59,940 --> 00:13:05,820 One, which is set up by the conjunction of media proliferation of whatever is visible 170 00:13:05,820 --> 00:13:12,480 and the endless count of opinions polled and votes simulated. 171 00:13:12,480 --> 00:13:17,190 With this concept of double government, policital scientist Michael Glennen 172 00:13:17,190 --> 00:13:23,200 has introduced a vision of US political power, split between elected government officials, 173 00:13:23,200 --> 00:13:29,430 and a network of institutions constituting a disguised republic. 174 00:13:29,430 --> 00:13:31,820 Glennan traces this phenomenon back to 175 00:13:31,820 --> 00:13:38,870 World War II and president Truman's signing of the national security act of 1947, 176 00:13:38,870 --> 00:13:44,770 which established, among others, the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA. 177 00:13:44,770 --> 00:13:50,450 Since then, he argues, the United Staates has moved toward a double government, 178 00:13:50,450 --> 00:13:52,790 wherein even the president exercises 179 00:13:52,790 --> 00:14:00,030 little substantive over the overall direction of US national security policy. 180 00:14:00,030 --> 00:14:02,590 Similarly, in Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, and Syria, 181 00:14:02,590 --> 00:14:06,860 political commentators have used the notion of the deep state 182 00:14:06,860 --> 00:14:12,460 to describe the nexus of police, intelligence services, politicians, 183 00:14:12,460 --> 00:14:14,840 and organised crime. 184 00:14:14,840 --> 00:14:20,520 Surely, secrecy, or discretion, to use its diplomatic euphemism, 185 00:14:20,520 --> 00:14:24,080 is as old as politics itself. 186 00:14:24,080 --> 00:14:27,900 But its recent resurgence under the guise of democratic rule 187 00:14:27,900 --> 00:14:32,810 reveals “arcana imperii”, the secrets of governance, 188 00:14:32,810 --> 00:14:36,110 to be all but arcane. 189 00:14:36,110 --> 00:14:41,550 So the age of proxy politics is thus one in which power is displaced 190 00:14:41,550 --> 00:14:45,110 into the hands of extra juridical unchecked authorities. 191 00:14:45,110 --> 00:14:50,230 Whether by way of covered institutions that it builds in classified budgets, 192 00:14:50,230 --> 00:14:54,640 organised crimes, and grey markets, or no less disturbingly 193 00:14:54,640 --> 00:15:00,490 through gross privatisation and the rise of transnational corporations. 194 00:15:00,490 --> 00:15:04,800 According to Sheldon Wallin, the paradox of our current regime 195 00:15:04,800 --> 00:15:11,200 is that the more open to the pressures of organised interests, 196 00:15:11,200 --> 00:15:15,370 the more opaque even mysterious politics becomes. 197 00:15:15,370 --> 00:15:20,550 Consequently, responsibility becomes virtually untraceable. 198 00:15:20,550 --> 00:15:25,460 In her “Lying in politics”, a text published in 1972, 199 00:15:25,460 --> 00:15:30,060 written in response to the revelation of the Pentagon Papers, 200 00:15:30,060 --> 00:15:35,860 Hannah Arendt lamented the beginning of an age, in which image making has become 201 00:15:35,860 --> 00:15:39,890 the core value of American global policy. 202 00:15:39,890 --> 00:15:41,610 When image makers govern, 203 00:15:41,610 --> 00:15:48,240 the institutions of representational democracy are destined to become a mere semblance. 204 00:15:48,240 --> 00:15:53,650 The recent example came as the house of representatives voted in May 2015 205 00:15:53,650 --> 00:15:57,920 to end bulk surveillance by the NSA. 206 00:15:57,920 --> 00:16:01,750 Rather than bringing all bulk surveillance to an end, 207 00:16:01,750 --> 00:16:06,530 the vote merely took the government out of the collection business. 208 00:16:06,530 --> 00:16:13,420 It would not deny its access to the information, it would be in the hands of the private sector. 209 00:16:13,420 --> 00:16:19,170 Almost certainly telecommunications companies like ATT, Verizon, and Sprint. 210 00:16:19,170 --> 00:16:24,330 In other words, even after seemingly successful governmental reform, 211 00:16:24,330 --> 00:16:30,390 it was revealed that the corridors of power lay elsewhere between politics 212 00:16:30,390 --> 00:16:34,070 and the private sector. 213 00:16:34,070 --> 00:16:35,920 So popular protests in one country 214 00:16:35,920 --> 00:16:39,040 are often convicts for the expansion of power in another. 215 00:16:39,040 --> 00:16:43,800 In the aftermath of a successful, non violent-regime change in Belgrade, 216 00:16:43,800 --> 00:16:47,600 activits behind the Otpor movement relayed their experiences into 217 00:16:47,600 --> 00:16:49,650 tutorials and training camps, 218 00:16:49,650 --> 00:16:55,590 teaching activists in numerous countries how to ignite and lead a revolution. 219 00:16:55,590 --> 00:16:56,830 What's more, 220 00:16:56,830 --> 00:17:02,740 Srđa Popović and Slobodan Đinović, both former Otpor activists, 221 00:17:02,740 --> 00:17:09,000 founded CANVAS, which is the Center for Applied Non-Violent Actions and Strategies. 222 00:17:09,000 --> 00:17:13,030 With the aim of educating pro-democracy activists around the world 223 00:17:13,030 --> 00:17:19,920 in what they regard as the “universal principles for success in non violent struggle”. 224 00:17:19,920 --> 00:17:22,889 CANVAS has trained activists in more than 50 countries, 225 00:17:22,889 --> 00:17:29,690 including Iran, Ukraine, Palestine, and recently Tunisia and Egypt, to name but a few. 226 00:17:29,690 --> 00:17:33,860 By late November 2000, an article in the New York Times had revealed 227 00:17:33,860 --> 00:17:37,990 that prior to the revolution, Otpor had received funds 228 00:17:37,990 --> 00:17:47,270 from US government affiliated organisations, such as the National Endowment for Democracy. 229 00:17:47,270 --> 00:17:52,600 In addition, their ties to the private global intelligence company “Stratfor”, 230 00:17:52,600 --> 00:17:56,900 also know as the “shadow CIA”, prompted questions concerning 231 00:17:56,900 --> 00:18:03,350 activists’ involvement in global American covert foreign policy. 232 00:18:03,350 --> 00:18:07,760 So how might proxy politics be more than just a condition, 233 00:18:07,760 --> 00:18:13,980 the name of a political regime that thrives an obscurity, opaqueness, and decoys? 234 00:18:13,980 --> 00:18:19,400 How might it also designate a corresponding mode of resistance? 235 00:18:19,400 --> 00:18:25,420 Ideally, proxy politics would encompass myriad modes of withdrawal, 236 00:18:25,420 --> 00:18:28,410 both technical and metaphorical. 237 00:18:28,410 --> 00:18:36,970 Its tools could be a VPN, a holographic surrogate, a stock image, or a double. 238 00:18:36,970 --> 00:18:44,760 Its outcome is always concealment, evasion, subterfuge. 239 00:18:44,760 --> 00:18:48,280 The hope is that strategies such as these 240 00:18:48,280 --> 00:18:51,630 might be effective during our current interim phase, 241 00:18:51,630 --> 00:18:57,220 the period in which the difference between real virtuality and virtual reality, 242 00:18:57,220 --> 00:19:02,380 the tangible and the digital is increasingly difficult to discern. 243 00:19:02,380 --> 00:19:04,040 At the same time, it is becoming 244 00:19:04,040 --> 00:19:08,880 increasingly evident, how severely controlled both spheres are. 245 00:19:08,880 --> 00:19:12,840 The world wide web, by way of its architecture and protocols, 246 00:19:12,840 --> 00:19:18,480 and public space by increasing privatisations. 247 00:19:18,480 --> 00:19:23,690 As Alexander Galloway has observed, instead of a [politicisation] of time or space, 248 00:19:23,690 --> 00:19:25,910 we are witnessing a rise in the 249 00:19:25,910 --> 00:19:34,350 [politicisation] of absence- and presence-oriented themes, such as invisibility, opacity, and anonymity. 250 00:19:34,350 --> 00:19:38,450 Or the relationship between identification and legibility, 251 00:19:38,450 --> 00:19:42,210 or the tactics of non-existence and disappearance. 252 00:19:42,210 --> 00:19:49,480 New struggles around prevention, therapeutics of the body, piracy on contagion, 253 00:19:49,480 --> 00:19:54,860 information capture and the making present of data via data mining. 254 00:19:54,860 --> 00:19:59,030 According to Galloway, recent protest movements' refusal 255 00:19:59,030 --> 00:20:03,670 to make clear demands is a form of black boxing. 256 00:20:03,670 --> 00:20:09,260 A conscious withdrawal from political representation and collective bargaining. 257 00:20:09,260 --> 00:20:16,280 The choice is for relations, relays and links, in the words of Édouard Glissant. 258 00:20:16,280 --> 00:20:20,360 All qualities associated with the proxy. 259 00:20:20,360 --> 00:20:30,020 This politicisation upholds the right to opacity, also a quote from Glissant. 260 00:20:30,020 --> 00:20:35,720 Rather than reverting once again to the age-old demand for transparency. 261 00:20:35,720 --> 00:20:40,330 For Glissant, opacity is the force that drives every community, 262 00:20:40,330 --> 00:20:48,420 the thing that would bring us together forever and makes us permanently distinctive. 263 00:20:48,420 --> 00:20:53,060 Recently in Paris, 264 00:20:53,060 --> 00:20:58,100 where the state of emergency, declared in the wake of recent terror attacks, 265 00:20:58,100 --> 00:21:02,680 prevented climate change activists from assembling in public spaces 266 00:21:02,680 --> 00:21:08,550 during the climate change summit, protesters installed over 10.000 pairs of shoes 267 00:21:08,550 --> 00:21:10,500 at Place de la République, 268 00:21:10,500 --> 00:21:14,900 theatrically standing in place of the absent bodies. 269 00:21:14,900 --> 00:21:17,720 Images of the square circulated widely in the media, 270 00:21:17,720 --> 00:21:22,280 emphasising the inherent mediatisation of contemporary protest 271 00:21:22,280 --> 00:21:28,540 and the need for effective images, not necessarily real bodies. 272 00:21:28,540 --> 00:21:33,620 Holograms and shoes function as placeholders, making it all the more possible 273 00:21:33,620 --> 00:21:40,400 for images of absent bodies to communicate large scale discontent. 274 00:21:40,400 --> 00:21:44,620 So in reference to the wave of protest in 2011, 275 00:21:44,620 --> 00:21:49,260 Judith Butler has suggested that protest in public space has, quote: 276 00:21:49,260 --> 00:21:53,500 "become politically potent only when and if we have a visual and audible 277 00:21:53,500 --> 00:21:59,640 version of the scene communicated in live time, so that the media 278 00:21:59,640 --> 00:22:04,950 does not merely report the scene, but is part of the scene and the action; 279 00:22:04,950 --> 00:22:10,360 indeed, the media is the scene or the space in its extended and replicable 280 00:22:10,360 --> 00:22:13,870 visual and audible dimension." 281 00:22:13,870 --> 00:22:18,740 In Madrid, the shadow-like figures in the hologram embodied a double movement, 282 00:22:18,740 --> 00:22:24,080 a process of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. 283 00:22:24,080 --> 00:22:27,410 Slogans and shouts were crowdsourced online 284 00:22:27,410 --> 00:22:30,980 and synced with holographic images filmed in a nearby city. 285 00:22:30,980 --> 00:22:37,230 Then, the resulting image was meticulously reworked to match the 286 00:22:37,230 --> 00:22:41,260 distances and angles of the scene in front of congress. 287 00:22:43,920 --> 00:22:51,110 So in recent years, there has been a growing interest in the reterritorialisation 288 00:22:51,110 --> 00:22:52,950 of the internet. 289 00:22:52,950 --> 00:22:59,060 The artist Trevor Paglen and theoreticians, such as Tung Hui Hu and Keller Easterling, 290 00:22:59,060 --> 00:23:02,730 have drawn attention to the materiality of the Internet, 291 00:23:02,730 --> 00:23:06,910 data centres, undersea cables, and routers, which in turn 292 00:23:06,910 --> 00:23:12,330 rely on hydro-electric power stations and dams for electricity, as well as 293 00:23:12,330 --> 00:23:20,470 railway tracks and telegraph lines for communication routes. 294 00:23:20,470 --> 00:23:26,620 The web, until recently associated with immateriality, virtually and spacelessness 295 00:23:26,620 --> 00:23:30,970 as exemplified by the popularity of the term “cyberspace”, 296 00:23:30,970 --> 00:23:34,520 clearly has a body, a sprawling physical infrastructure 297 00:23:34,520 --> 00:23:38,190 and ever-growing ecological footprint. 298 00:23:38,190 --> 00:23:43,590 The benign-sounding “cloud” is nothing less than a publicity ploy for a vast campaign 299 00:23:43,590 --> 00:23:49,250 to centralise digital data, and to turn software and hardware into a black box. 300 00:23:49,250 --> 00:23:56,480 As our computers have become thinner and sleeker, the weight of the cloud has only grown greater. 301 00:23:56,480 --> 00:24:00,140 So the body politic is now intertwined with the body of the web, 302 00:24:00,140 --> 00:24:04,380 and the web, the world wide, is constrained by 303 00:24:04,380 --> 00:24:08,360 national policies and geographical realities. 304 00:24:08,360 --> 00:24:10,070 In October 2015, 305 00:24:10,070 --> 00:24:14,630 citizens in Thailand protested against their military government's plan to 306 00:24:14,630 --> 00:24:21,410 channel Internet traffic to international servers through a single network gateway, 307 00:24:21,410 --> 00:24:25,859 with the intention of perfecting state surveillance and censorship. 308 00:24:26,280 --> 00:24:31,080 This political move was dubbed “The Great Firewall of Thailand”. 309 00:24:31,080 --> 00:24:36,510 As in Madrid, the choice of protest space corresponded with the space, 310 00:24:36,510 --> 00:24:39,320 the new law was tailored for. 311 00:24:39,320 --> 00:24:43,420 The military government's websites were targeted and downed for several hours by 312 00:24:43,420 --> 00:24:45,990 denial of service attacks. 313 00:24:45,990 --> 00:24:50,620 The online action was reported beyond activist platforms and international media, 314 00:24:50,620 --> 00:24:55,609 however, it lacked images that could represent the bodies of those who would 315 00:24:55,609 --> 00:24:57,900 literally be barred from leaving Thailand 316 00:24:57,900 --> 00:25:01,500 where the government was following through on its plans 317 00:25:01,500 --> 00:25:04,370 for greater surveillance and censorship. 318 00:25:04,370 --> 00:25:06,560 In the meantime, the hacker collective “Anonymous” 319 00:25:06,560 --> 00:25:10,640 declared cyberwar on the Thai government. 320 00:25:10,640 --> 00:25:14,780 Operation “Single Gateway” targeted Thai police servers in an effort to 321 00:25:14,780 --> 00:25:20,840 demonstrate the actual vulnerability of virtual state institutions. 322 00:25:22,250 --> 00:25:28,290 So, how can one possibly grasp the current relation between the digital and its outside, 323 00:25:28,800 --> 00:25:34,820 back when the Internet was still thought of as synonymous with cyberspace? 324 00:25:34,820 --> 00:25:38,490 Both were clearly defined as separate. 325 00:25:38,490 --> 00:25:40,110 A quote from Wendy Chun: 326 00:25:40,110 --> 00:25:44,020 "Cyberspace as a virtual non-place made the Internet so much more 327 00:25:44,020 --> 00:25:45,930 than a network of networks: 328 00:25:45,930 --> 00:25:51,570 It became a place in which things happened, in which users’ actions separated from their bodies, 329 00:25:51,570 --> 00:25:56,520 and in which local standards became impossible to determine. 330 00:25:56,520 --> 00:26:01,040 It thus freed users from their locations." 331 00:26:01,040 --> 00:26:05,580 So in the 1990s, the Internet was imagined to be a perfect frontier 332 00:26:05,580 --> 00:26:07,870 science fiction dream come true, 333 00:26:07,870 --> 00:26:14,010 where users could navigate as powerful agents, invisible and free of physical constraints. 334 00:26:14,010 --> 00:26:19,750 Yet, as Wendy Chun in her book “Control and Freedom”, published in 2006, 335 00:26:19,750 --> 00:26:23,280 as she has demonstrated, the world wide web was designed 336 00:26:23,280 --> 00:26:27,020 as a technology of control from the start, 337 00:26:27,020 --> 00:26:34,170 geographically rooted and constantly monitoring its users via protocols such as TCP/IP. 338 00:26:34,170 --> 00:26:38,630 So in what way does virtuality challenge our conception of public space 339 00:26:38,630 --> 00:26:42,059 and the mobilisation of human bodies? 340 00:26:42,059 --> 00:26:48,630 As we have seen, the digital and the real coalesce in ever new forms and devices. 341 00:26:48,630 --> 00:26:51,330 And despite the gaming industry's recent success in 342 00:26:51,330 --> 00:26:55,290 bringing early visions of virtual reality to technical perfection, 343 00:26:55,290 --> 00:27:00,900 think of Oculus Rift, or something like the body snap app, 344 00:27:00,900 --> 00:27:05,510 prior myth of virtual reality are slowly, but certainly eroding. 345 00:27:05,510 --> 00:27:09,290 The old demarcations between the human body in physical space 346 00:27:09,290 --> 00:27:15,420 and the so called “immateriality of the digital sphere” are superseded. 347 00:27:15,420 --> 00:27:21,580 Attempts to conceptualise the effect of the synthetic face-to-screen situation 348 00:27:21,580 --> 00:27:26,310 either one that this is downfall of the sovereign subject or 349 00:27:26,310 --> 00:27:32,560 extricate emancipatory potential from the entanglement of humans and technology. 350 00:27:32,680 --> 00:27:38,070 How then might a proxy give way to different bodily modes and morphologies 351 00:27:38,070 --> 00:27:41,360 a body both present and absent? 352 00:27:41,360 --> 00:27:46,300 Whereas Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti have attempted to destabilise the subject 353 00:27:46,300 --> 00:27:52,070 as it was conceived during the 20th century, exploring notions as the cyborg 354 00:27:52,070 --> 00:27:55,760 in conceptualising a feminist post humanism. 355 00:27:55,760 --> 00:28:03,820 Might the proxy antagonistically restabilise a very concrete subject in a synthetic situation, 356 00:28:03,820 --> 00:28:07,890 is a proxy a techno body, does it have flesh after all? 357 00:28:07,890 --> 00:28:12,470 Might it serve as the object other of the high tech clean and efficient bodies 358 00:28:12,470 --> 00:28:16,720 endorsed by contemporary culture as Haraway envisions? 359 00:28:17,060 --> 00:28:21,060 Or rather as a nomadic device that enables people to become 360 00:28:21,060 --> 00:28:25,030 post human subjects in Braidotti's line of thought? 361 00:28:25,030 --> 00:28:32,820 Braidotti warns of a fatal nostalgia for either, humanist past or the cold war cyborg. 362 00:28:32,820 --> 00:28:39,640 And instead proposes that we embraced vulnerability, take pride in being flesh. 363 00:28:40,350 --> 00:28:44,869 Her post-human theory aims at shaping and shifting new subjectivities 364 00:28:44,869 --> 00:28:48,989 against modern humanism, a school of thought she criticises 365 00:28:48,989 --> 00:28:54,170 for its wide male supremacy, eurocentric normativity, imperial past, 366 00:28:54,450 --> 00:28:58,790 and inhuman consequences. 367 00:28:58,790 --> 00:29:03,279 So proxies permit human bodies to step out of the line of fire 368 00:29:03,279 --> 00:29:08,540 to evade forensics, the lack of a human silhouette, 369 00:29:08,540 --> 00:29:13,610 face, or fixed physiognomy and can be associated with numerous 370 00:29:13,610 --> 00:29:16,460 individuals wherever they are. 371 00:29:16,460 --> 00:29:22,420 Rather than the avatar, a creatively designed porn in the network gaming environment, 372 00:29:22,420 --> 00:29:27,910 they assume either a transformative shape and form, or none at all. 373 00:29:27,910 --> 00:29:30,100 Last two sentences. *chuckles* 374 00:29:30,100 --> 00:29:36,640 Proxies are necessary in contemporary political struggle, 375 00:29:36,640 --> 00:29:40,510 they're counter figures to capitalist self improvement 376 00:29:40,510 --> 00:29:43,980 or a [???] opaque other. 377 00:29:43,980 --> 00:29:48,650 So proxies provide an escape route from a schizophrenic situation, 378 00:29:48,650 --> 00:29:56,320 which denies or limits bodies to being mere vessels of biotechnological information. 379 00:29:56,320 --> 00:30:03,740 Proxies offer a path toward a new, a fleeting relation as sovereign bodies. 380 00:30:04,400 --> 00:30:06,900 Thank you. 381 00:30:06,900 --> 00:30:11,199 *applause* 382 00:30:11,919 --> 00:30:14,850 Herald: Thank you very much for the spontaneity and the talk 383 00:30:14,850 --> 00:30:17,640 and I think there might be time for questions outside. 384 00:30:18,480 --> 00:30:19,840 Thank you. 385 00:30:19,840 --> 00:30:30,060 postroll music