NERVOUSystems

Alternative Schemas Part 1
#systems#AI#archive#logistical

Schema:

  1. Technical: A representation of a plan or theory in the form of an outline or model. "A schema of scientific reasoning"

  2. Logic: A syllogistic figure. syllogistic, in logic, the formal analysis of logical terms and operators and the structures that make it possible to infer true conclusions from given premises

The archive of a society, a culture, or a civilisation cannot be described exhaustively: or even, no doubt, the archive of a whole period. On the other hand, it is not possible for us to describe our own archive, since it is from within these rules that we speak, since it is that which gives to what we can say—and to itself, the object of our discourse—its modes of appearance, its forms of existence and coexistence, its system of accumulation, historicity, disappearance. The archive cannot be described in its totality; and in its presence it is unavoidable. It emerges in fragments, regions, levels... Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge [2]

How and where do we begin as we start to think about or partake in the act of sorting?

It is a strange recursive question, especially when reframed as an organisational approach for those that refer to themselves as world builders.

The question may be better asked: how do we sort out our approach to sorting 'stuff' out. This is a particularly important distinction when asking how we can allow a series of alternative schemas to co-evolve and mutate– to form a negotiation and interdependence between sets, subsets of species and processes.

For better or worse: humanity has what Okwui Enwezor refers to as archive fever[1] He categorises this behaviour in six main archiving behaviours:

Archive as:

Form:

Marcel Duchamp’s Codified Archival System / Mobile Museum, La Boîte-en-valise (1935–41)

We can turn to the work of artists such as Marcel Duchamp’s Codified Archival System / Mobile Museum, La Boîte-en-valise (1935–41)- an exploration of a space in-between tradition and a void / emptiness. Or Gerard Richter’s Atlas (1964 – Present) taken as the principles of a given work’s formal organization photography’s innate structural order (its condition as archive) in conjunction with its seemingly infinite multiplicity, capacity for serialization, and aspiration toward comprehensive totality . . .” [3]. A direct involvement with an impossibility, or “hovering [...] between the promise of taxonomic order as divulged in the archive and the total devastation of that promise . . .” [4]. This operates in conjunction with what Jacques Derrida’s understanding of the archive as a physical entity is manifested in a concrete domain: “The dwelling, this place where they dwell permanently . . .”[5]. The archive here is domesticated, grounded, under house arrest.

Public Memory:

Andy Warhol Birmingham Race Riot from X + X (Ten Works by Ten Painters) (1964)

"Artists have interrogated the status of the photographic archive as a historical site that exists between evidence and document, public memory and private history". We can look to Andy Warhol’s reflections on the modern imagination reflected in the morbidity of photography: exploring “celebrity and media spectacle, Warhol grasped the potential of such images as a means of plumbing the psychic ruptures in the American collective imaginary, as a speculum for examining the violence, tragedies, and traumas of the American self ”[6].

The televising of 9/11 created a public memory through the use of instantaneous broadcasting and the creation of ‘sacred ground’, the image interrupted all programming to evidence the September 11th terror attack on the World Trade Towers in 2001. It can be seen as the arrival of a ‘new economy’[7] achieved through the image and archive, that surpasses that of Warhol- it created a folded and anxious vastness of the iconic, linking video archive and trauma in real time.

Intelligence Failure:

IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei (L) and UNMOVIC Executive Chairman Hans Blix (R) brief the UN Security Council on Iraq inspections March 7, 2003.

There are numerous accounts of archival failure, including the frantic and useless search for weapons of mass destruction in the Iraq War of 2003. The search, led by the UN inspector Hans Blix and International Atomic Energy Officials fabricated intelligence to suit the U.S. authority over the invasion. Later, Blix and IAEA were both accused of being agents of misinformation. This manipulation of archived intelligence to justify war, underscores issues surrounding NooPolitiks and the calibration of communication structures for alternative means.

Monument / Time Negotiation:

© ZKM | Center for Art and Media, photographed by Martin Wagenhan (2015)

Exploration of the archive as a temporality in relation to an object and its past. This can especially be seen in the work of sound artists such as Ryoji Ikeda, as processes of looping and cyclical mechanisms of displaying information are used to transform archives of sound into closed circuit spatial operations situated and inhabited in the experience of his work.

Medium:

Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out Of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World (2021)

“The document . . . is no longer for history an inert material through which it tries to reconstitute what men have done or said, the events of which only the trace remains; history is now trying to define within the documentary material itself unities, totalities, series, relations.”[8]

Ethnography:

Author/Copyright holder: Unknown (pending investigation)

“The telling of history as a sequence of events acted out by individual agents is displaced by a focus on the simultaneity of separate but contingent social frameworks and an infinity of participating agents, and the process of history is reconceived as a structural system of perpetually changing interactions and permutations between economic and ecological givens, class formations and their ideologies, and the resulting types of social and cultural interactions specific to each particular moment.” [9]

From Mathematical to Social Calculus / Networked Regression

Children playing Paperboy on an Amstrad CPC 464 in 1988.

Twenty years ago networked computers became ubiquitous and shifted the building and management protocols from calculation (a continuum of the early mechanist logic of the industrial revolution), to social calculus. By the end of the aughts we were fully cloaked in a social net that turned our modest connections into a global broadcasting phenomenon, storing masses of information in a suspended belt of physical servers.

Server Farms Data Center in Feltham, UK

The archive is a medium that can be designed. To begin to think about the players, techniques and material impact of how our contemporary archives relate and are organised opens a new mode for the architects and builders of such systems.

The archive, a grouping of distinct figures, can alternate with peripheral elemental relations and play murkier and deceptive games with its participatory elements (both the material of the archive itself, as well as the human intelligence and operators).

World systems design (Core, Semi-periphery, periphery models) example: Post-war town planning.

Logistical systems.

Defence infrastructures.

Stock Markets value and tickers.

The list above are all elements of world building archive structures. So too are the archaeological sites, oil deposits, fossilised mobile phones, vast mycellium forest networks and polymer modified sands.

Synthetic fibers microplastic in beach sand 40x magnification

The proliferation of machine learning and the explosive northward curve of AI hybridises the mathematical and social in calculative decision making. With the arrival of a prompting public comes a rekindled but (for most) unconscious relationship with the storage of data (both physical and digital). Recommendation and siloing algorithms comb and scrape our data servers and earth, reinforcing an anxious condition facilitated by platforms acting as brokers / middle men. Often not considered, the infrastructure that enables platforms and networks such as OpenAI is a neo-colonial logic of peripheral exploitation. Kenyan workers for example, paid less than $2 an hour, are tasked with making OpenAI less toxic. To build a safer AI, prompters must feed the model examples of violence, sexual abuse and hate speech to allow it to learn what is not accepted. OpenAI outsources snippets of descriptions that include child abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture and incest. San Francisco-based firm Sama then employs workers in Kenya, Uganda and India to label data for the giants of Sili-val under the pretence of developing a global and ethical AI.

Image taken from Sama's website

Planetarity

“Cultures develop in a single planetary space but to different ‘times.’ It would be impossible to determine either a real chronological order or an unquestionable hierarchical order for these times.” Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 1990

API takes up this understanding of dissolution and time displacement in relation to the poetics of planetary systems. What I am attempting to express so far is that the dilution and absorption of archives into 'just-in-time' logistics via media is a result of modernist progressive thinking. More importantly it is a challenge to the way in which we gather around the archive.

Let me pick up on the image of the synthetic fibers captured by Frank Pins personal research into detecting micro-plastics in beach sand. The Anthropocene forces us to partake in a seemingly dual dynamic, between the consideration of a techno-archaelogical (in real-time) and ecological / planetary archive. This begins to strip bare the enlightenment model of progress and asks for alternative proposals within an expanded interior.

To be clearer- there is no ‘outside’ for the planetary archive, as it eludes distinction. What is outside can be considered a part of its interior (I hope this makes more sense as we further develop NERVOUSystems and this series of observations through API).

High resolution image of mycelium network, Loreto Oyarte Galvez

Closing Remarks

If you're not already questioning the role/ design of the planetary archive, I hope that this starts to re-frame your relationship with the archive and the varying degrees of fever our species and you personally may have with it. This process of reflection starts by simply starting to define it through observation.

References:

  1. Enwezor, Archive Fever Photography between History and Monument, 2007
  2. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 127.
  3. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive,” October 88 (Spring 1999), p. 118.
  4. Lynne Cooke, Gerhard Richter: Atlas, exhibition. brochure, Dia Center
  5. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 5.
  6. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enl. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979)
  7. Terry Smith in The Architecture of Aftermath (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006 image economy as “more than the dense image manipulation that prevails in cultures predicated on conspicuous and incessant consumption” (p. 2).
  8. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 7.
  9. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas,” p. 129.