Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

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The Evolution of Data Christo Buschek

He does data driven investigation. They won the Pulitzer prize last year.

Data has been using data since the 70s. They used to mostly do statistics. The new idea is data-driven where they use data to discover things.

Human rights research is also often data driven investigation. This is a collaborative process involving technology, design, etc

The process is preservation, exploration, verification and narration

He and some collaborators tried to discover how many people are imprisoned in China in Xinjang. They found camps big enough to hold a million people.

Theystarted knowing that some camps existed, but not much else. Journalists had no access to the region.

Baidu Maps is the Chinese mapping service like google maps. They censor some areas by loading the image and then loading a white box over it. So the journalists decided to first look at censored squares.

They had three types of tiles. Satellite pictures. Watermark images that have no data. And censorship images.

he wrote a script that emulated a human noodling around and ran it across a cluster.

Of 50 million tiles. 5 million were masked. They decided to look for infrastructure that could support camps. This reduced the tiles to 800k.

The next step was verification. This is a human process that takes time. Verification subjects data to due process. It is a creative process.

He wrote a tool for researchers to annotate metadata. They built a rubrick as they looked at the data.

428 locations bear the hallmarks of prisons and detention centres. Around 2017ish structures became permanent.

they had three categories: certain, like and unsure. Certain ones had external verification.

Their output was articles and the data set which was then also used by others. A local activist/ journalist travelled to some of the camps and filmed them.

Christo built the method and tools. He says that humans shapes tools and tools shape humans. He says technology is not neutral. Toolsencode systems of values. He notes that Silicon Valley is extremely ideological. Their tools do not reflect our values. We must make our own tools.

Our tools and systems reflect our social structures. Our communities are organised as open-ended gatherings. Collaboration is central. Tools are.nodes in networks.

Any tool is a positive choice and also a negative trade off of what it can’t do.

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The Mediterranean isbecoming a militarised border.

Border Forensics is looking at border violence and policing. They are documenting this violence. They rely some on human rights reports and try to augment them with visible data. They are part of network of forensic organisations creating documentation and demanding investigation.

The “left to die” boat was a rubber raft that was tracked leaving Tripoli. They called for help and then entered the Maltese search and rescue zone. 9 out of 72 people died after their boat ran out of fuel and was left to drift for weeks until it drifted back to Tripoli. They had a legal right to assistance and.multiple contacts with state authorities.

A ship wreck in April of last year had 130 passengers which radioed for help and spoke to alarm phone. Alarm phone contacted the EU border frontex, who sighted the boat, but did not help. The Libyan coast card intercepted them and did not help. A merchant boat passed closeby but also didn’t help.

Merchabt boats began to search for them overnight, but nothing was seen until wreckage and bodies were found.

These cases were ten years apart. They were both in a highly surveiled area. Airplanes doing border patrol saw both boats.

There are no survivors from April and thus no witness testimony.

In those ten years, there’s been a shift from sea to sky. Aircraft are used to surveil, but can’t rescue people or bring them to Europe. The duty of rescue only legally applies to boats. The planes radio Libya who capture and mistreat the would-be migrants.

In 2014 Mare Nostrum saved thousands of lives but couldn’t get EU funding. Frontex Operation Tritone was cheaper and covered a smaller area. Their budget got bigger and bigger. In 2018 they launched a new mission, with far fewer naval assets, relying more and more on planes and drones.

Italy and the EU have paid Libya to increase its coverage area.

Frontex is difficult to research and its hard to FOI them.

The presence of drones but the absence of boats is a form of structural violence.

Policies and decisions are also not transparent.

Frontex’s drone is also hard to perceive.

There’s a link between aerial surveillance and increased interception. They want to map their data.

Cross referencing aerial data with geolocation data from the boat is a major technical challenge.

Frontex uses what’s app to contact the Libyan coast guard.

Frontex uses a heron drone. Its hard to tell if a drone has seen a boat on distress by looking at the track. The track also is fragmented. The drone thus escapes oversight.

Aerial surveillance was an infrastructure decision that shows a policy of structural violence. They attempt to escape accountability.

Activism and demanding accountability is the most usefulthing to do.

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e-waste arrives by the trtruckload in some Indian cities. This is disassembled. Another group of people will try to retrieve metals using dangerous, polluting processes. More workers will smelt the reclaimed.metal. They make faucets and like connectors.

However, thrre is a lot of waste and runoff. This is dangerous. Metals end up in top soil.

Yoir smart phone is 54% metal. Mining these causes massive pollution. More than 81% of this metal ends up in an unknown place after being in your phone. Every year, we make 50 millions of e-waste. This is the size of Manhattan.

The US recycles less than 10% of ewaste. Europe is better. (Maybe). The value of the materials in the waste is very high.

e waste is generated in the global north and exported to the global south.

Making computers needs water, fuel and metal. Making chips uses.much more energy than the computer will consume in power consumption during its life.

E waste ends up I’m Acra, where people liveamongst the waste. Workers burn computers to access metals. They were given machines to strip cables, but sold them.

Post industrial pollution also exists in Austria. Old factories have toxic soil and ground water pollution. Some of these toxic places are used by dogwalkers. Could hyperaccumulators help?

Some of the plants are non native and don’t cope well with Austrian weather. But if it did, this would be invasive.

Serpentine soil has toxic dust.

Toxic stories is a collection of an audio archive of people working in remediation.

Earthworm traffic moves soil around which makes toxins hard to measure.

Q: Is gold recycled from e waste because its valuable or because its easy?

A: Different methods get some materials while sacrificing others. So gold may be prioritised. Informal recycling has poor recovery rates. Recycling also is energy intensive.

Recycling could maybe be enabled by making it the responsibility of the producer.

Q: How is labour connected to pollution?

A: Labour conditions in recycling in India is exploitative. Poor people work in dire conditions. The work environment is terrible in Ghana, but displaced rural workers find it an accessible job. Young people aren’t worried are about their health when they start. Its like smoking, said one person.

Q: How has global capital pushed ewaste onto poor countries? Can we change that?

A: There are EU regulations and policies requring European ewaste to be recycled in Europe. But unethical traders claim that they are selling second hand computers. A lot of trash ends up in west Africa.

Capitalism requires inequality. We couldn’t “afford- cheap stuff if we paid globally fair wages. This has implications with regards to externalities, mining, pollution and environmental stewardship.

Recyclers now also have working smartphones.

The price of nickel has spiked in the last year. Hyperaccumulators allow more possibilities for mining as it doesn’t look like mining.

Q: What if you had clothes as a service? Do we own our computers or phones if we can’t modify it? Is there a tradeoff where wecan meaningfully control our phones if we don’t own them?

A: The European Green Deal includes extended producer responsibility. However, meaningful recycling access will need design changes that take end of life into account. Goods should be disassemablable.

India has an ewaste law that’s been in place for years. NGOs had to sue producers. The producers, however, use the informal sector to meet recycling targets. On paper everything is perfect.

Comment: Reduce is the first word in reduce reuse recycle. Badly written software drives the upgrade cycle. Linux is part of the answer.

(In the UK, poor people did not want refurbished linux laptops because it made them feel stigmatised.)

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Bugs! We are now repeating the moth myth of why computers have “bugs”.

Debugging means being aware of hidden structures. We can easily lose sight of bigger pictures. So how do we identify hidden structures, zooming out of our practice?

Doom talk person: Our past haunts us.

Other doom talk person: She’s unemotional about bugs.

Reading group person: The bigger pictures are theoretical or practical. Is this a bug for you or a thing you haveto live with? Is it a problem to be solved? If there’s an attention crisis, is it a problem or just how thingsvare now?

Other reading group person: He is fascinated by assessing which theories are worthwhile as a form.of a debugging. Some theories are applicable to the world thatwe have now and some are not. The accelerationism framework seemed a very useful way to talk about modernity.

Time, for Time’s up: When they build a space they put in a lot detail to illuminate structures, but they also leave gaps. Their bar doesn’t have a price list because they don’t want to speculate about currency or political stability of existing structures. The price says too much that is too specific. They “unask” the question. The audience can build their own vision into those gaps.

The remote guy: Bugs could be exploited positively to bring about possible futures. They are an open scar where computational machines show vulnerability. But gorialls grooming are also debugging each other. To take the positive side, a bug is not a way to see a place for improvement, but an interruption that keeps us same. The dream of the virtual is interrupted and we are back in our real world. As long as there errors, we still have a reality to latch on to. We are saved from the Matrix.

Reafing group guy: We can’t always know what the solutions are fornour problems. We might replicate the problems we already have. Our understanding of what the bugs even are changes as we tackle the problem as they.move from sabstract to the real.

Q: How do limits create openness?

Reading group guy: Anarchist organisations are sometimes saturated by active individuals which can create informal hierarchies. Their app does not solve this problem but pushes it on to users after they match. They have not decided whether to intervene or how.

Other reading group guy: He was struck that the same ideas were raised in past centuries. Communism will organically arise from capitalism, according to Marx. But sometimes solutions are like “poetry will save us.” It won’t, but memes are a form of ideological warfare. Feedback loops can lead us someplace.

Q: Debugging is the identification of a mistake. Is that a part of your art practice?

Other doom woman: She exploited a system in the Austrian National Library to get a “publication” of a volunteer digitisation of an archive.

Doom woman: She has not specialised. But every project is about deconstructing tools. Is something a bug? Is it a feature? We create new fires by putting out old fires.

Q: Debugging contains bugging – being annoying and uncomfortable. Should we be bugs?

Remote guy: If we are to be bugs, it can make our artistic practice meaningful. What’s left after our bad ideas? We could abandon technologyand be anprims. A discourse emerged about this in regards to a 20th century Worlds Fair. Is technology a tool of war or neutral? The neutral camp won. But we try to use technology to solve the problems of technology. We can position ourselves outside thetechnological system in order to big it.

Tim: They’ve tried to put green tech into their experiences, but its annoyingly hard. Most of our tech tools haven’t been around long and won’t last. Political bugs have greater longevity.

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Tim from Time’s Up.

A laboraey butory for the construction of experimental and experiential situations. Artifacts help thinking. Play helps thinking. Kids learn through play and adults can too.

Narrative is how we understand things.

They have possible futures. There is not one set determined future.

They build spaces to explore ideas and possible futures. They “roomify” it to create experiences and narratives. Experiences are memorable and build understanding.

immersice spaces are social. Doing things socially, in public, changes us.

they built an imaginimaginry town 25 years in the future. Turnton. Spaces in real lifehave things for the people inthem, ideals they want to convey and things left out accidentally.

They use headphones in the bar to simulate overheard conversations.

Turnton is a mixed model.of insufficient action but with utopic elements.

an experiential future makes abstract scenarios feel present.

they like Kim StanStanley Robinson. They like cocreation to bring in many perspectives.

social dreaming is a way to get groups to think about possible futures.

timesup.org

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Sophie Carolina Wagner and Rosemary Lee

A very quick overview of her her arts practice Open a glam lab.

They are here to talk about climate despair etc. How do we carry on in these times? The UN warns of total social collapse but also wants growth in an extinction economy.

Can technology help? The political parties don’t understand tech and just want to spy on us.

tech is fragile. Taking down leftpad broke thetech giants. Machines are not sentient and this is distracting for the real problems of AI.

Artists are stuck in capitalism.

There are no good manifestos. We have only bad ideas.

Now Rosemary says: she’s researching algorithmic processing in image production. Her forthcoming book is Algorithm Image Art. Machine learning is new, but the issues it raises aren’t. Value, authorship, meaning and truthfulness of photos can be exploredthrough media archeology. A deep time perspective of media allows us to apple a historical analysis.

Machine learning is responsibility absolving for corporations. Artists are asked to “perform ethics” around these systems. Artists are treated as reformers of technology. They want to make art but are stuck eemediating technology.

Personal responsibility and online image consumption will not help save the world.

They want to start an open dialogue. The personal, the political, the emotions. We are stuck in doom. Can art do anything? Should art even?

We should at least talk about this. Are we being instrumentalised? Are we equipped to deal with this? We can barely pay our rent. Funding situations do not lend themselves to good art, let alone critical engagement.

Is mutual aid part of theway forward?

Glitches can make some space for us maybe.

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Jan Kstanjevec and Makes Valencic

they started as a reading group. Reading groups require periodic synchronous meetings. People take notes but it does not produce a product. They don’t have the strengths of a seminar. However they are a safe, collaborative space to allow the externalisation of thought.

GIA is an abstraction of reading groups. They are investigating infrastructure and tools. Intellectual work is a muktinlear pipeline. The process of thought externalisation is productive and allows collaboration. They want to be able to facilitate this.

In the humanities, modes of collaboration are not well-developed. Its not easy to create spaces for shared reading. It represents a major commitment, which is not ideal. Schools of philosophy and think tanks do undertake this.

Collective intelligence is increasingly subjected to technological intervention. They are using their reading group as a model.

Small groups can have safe environments for communication. The safe space idea is one of comfort. They want a space to share notes.

chunks are units of memory and analysis, but this is wasted if not used. Chunks get maintained when they are repeated, for example in schools, circularity, etc. This need not be an institutional production, but it usually is. They could optimise by making chucks available with less commitment.

Chunks are like capital, but harder to evaluate the value of. They want to keep chinks inthe group. Forgetting chunks issometimes good, but forgetting good ones is wasteful. There may also be too many chunks.

Memory is cultivated. This can benaided with tools. But small communities also have dangers. They can get into groupthink. They can have trolls or people who dominate conversations. There are also barriers to people participating due tonshyness or social barriers. How should they be actually open in practice.

Open science models arenot quite applicable. Neo liberalisation wants to impose market logic, which leads to closure and paywalls.

Systemisation of content could be done with some data crunching, so they tried that.

They want to do case studies to better develop tools. Locality does not garuntee a safespace. They are using next cloud. Their app is called ContentMatcher.

Cm.kompot.si git.kompot.si

Their demo is a bit like PDF speed dating, which does seem useful.

Q: this is like standpoint.org

A: thanks

There is a workshop today at 2