༻༻༻error-friendly networks༻༻
༻༻༻handoutburnout༻༻
Background
Dear ༻,
You have just experienced Burnout. You were chosen to go to the recreation room of High-Tech Park, a special economic zone where IT-workers become embodied outsourced life hours. A place squeezed between a forest with acaridaes, science campus, museum of stones, institute for geophysics and a belt-road.
In order to deal with post-Burnout trauma you would need to practice radical hybridity, deep alienation and self-augmentation. Use this time to dishabituate of what you have learned and experienced.
During 3 days together with 6 other participants you will have a “recovery period”. We will practice the communalization of stress, overcoming the pessimistic visions of futures. To do this, we will try to build our own vision of “futurism” together, but we must take into account the materiality of what is happening with our bodies and environment, so among ourselves we call it “holed futurism”.
Self-augmentation
Remember last time you felt damaged or traumatized. Remember last time you or your fellow have been burned out. I am asking you to remember the most intensive moments from your life. Remember as many details as you can. It’s useful to make notes to be more concrete. How did you feel? How deep were you tired afterwards? Did you feel ill or cheated? Think how mental injure was entangled with your body. Your social body. Techno-body. Think about others who could have the same traumas. What is similar? What is the difference? Why should you have such traumatized experience?
Remember when your body created a “self-generating catastrophe”. What was it? Can a catastrophe happened somewhere between your brain, body and networks you are in, be part of your imagination?
Try to look behind the horizon, place yourself in the position of a node in the plethora of nowadays. What would you like to dishabituate? If you could be someone else who or what it could be?
You are invited to have more agency to design your trauma, to curate your trauma as the possible escape from the techno-medical solutionist narrative that has been built to overcome burnout and return you to the neoliberal form of creative knowledge production.
Think about burnout accident that could take place with your new character, write it down and then tell the others. To put it simpler you can answer the following questions:
Did you work for one of High-Tech Park companies or science campus, or the casino nearby, or a hotel or a library? Were you an outsourcer working from another country? What were your responsibilities? Or an insect living in the Museum of Stones? Were you a machine? Or a pure/messy abstraction like an assemblage of time-modelling algorithms in hyper-trading systems developed there? When was your burnout? How did it look like? How long are you attending this recreation room?
We will try to create a collective “science-fiction of the present day”, implementing our imaginaries into the skin of Guslica environment thinking about this place in a translocal approach.
Yours,
eeefff
IMPORTANT
Any forms of nostalgy are banned.
You can find HERE the working materials that are useful to unpack the theme.
Session with Oracles
🐙 04.02 / 17:00 / Ianina Prudenko / “Cybernetics in the humanities and art in the USSR. Analysis of big databases and computer art“
🐙 05.02 / 18:00 / Alexandra Anikina / “After Modelling: What Moves Non-Player Characters”
🐙 06.02 / 20:10 Jozhi Stolet / “Intimate interfaces”
Program
4 February / Monday
15:00 — 19:00
Setting & Outline of the Inner Protocol
Living the Inner Protocol of the group
Developing of Characters. Dehabitualizing the world of personal experience using various sources&inputs (self-questioning form, visual entry points)
🐙 Session with Oracle: Ianina Prudenko “Cybernetics in the humanities and art in the USSR. Analysis of big databases and computer art”
19:00 — 19:40
Dinner
19:40 — 21:40
Practices of ourselves
terms&tasks&testing&ttttt:
alienation from ourselves, mutating of bodies, pre-life, time shift, mimicry, fictional reality or real fiction, myth-building, traumas of cybernetics, collective imaginaries, algorithmic structures, invisible sensibility, dehabitualizing, artificial real, radical hybridity, somatic algo-knowledge
5 February / Tuesday
09:00 — 10:00
Breakfast
10:00 — 12:00
Morning exercise “The space for collective belief”
Adaptation/Synthesizing for Protocol. Intoxicating the network topologies. Visual-textual associations
12:00 — 14:00
Practices of ourselves
14:00 — 15:00
Lunch
15:00 — 18:00
Implementation of Characters capabilities. Micro-tasks&practices
🐙 Session with Oracle: Alexandra Anikina. “After model”
19:00 — 19:40
Dinner
19:40 — 21:40
Practices of ourselves
terms&tasks&testing&ttttt:
time bubbles, broken connections, fragments-of-knowledge, augmented imagination, what is uncomputable?, sensors, alienation, desire-as-radical-potential, (non)virtual (non)bodies, simulation of simulation, hard-to-stop, logics of (in)visibility, dangerous-anthropocentrism
6 February / Wednesday
09:00 — 10:00
Breakfast
10:00 — 12:00
Augmented imagination play-tested
12:00 — 14:00
Practices of ourselves
14:00 — 15:00
Lunch
15:00 — 18:00
Augmented imagination play-tested
19:00 — 19:40
Dinner
20:10 — 21:00
🐙 Session with Oracle: Jozhi Stolet / “Intimate interfaces”
Practices of ourselves
terms&tasks&testing&ttttt:
questioning the reality, materiality of abstraction, alienation, past-and-futures-collide, manipulation, two-subjectivities-have-become-one, algorithmic imagination, epistemic weapons, complex dynamic systems
4-7 February 2019
Participants
Ekaterina Butorina (Saint Petersburg)
Juan Gomez (Cali/Genève)
Nicolay Novikov (Saint Petersburg)
Patricia Reed (Ottawa/Berlin)
Nicolay Spesivtsev (Minsk/Moscow)
Anna Tokareva (London)
Dzina Zhuk (Minsk/Moscow)
: “We have focused mainly on a landscape that we are in, High-Tech Park, and the Museum of Stones that you need to pass to get there. Someone of us had no energy to go outside of the place that made us traumatized. Someone decided to start from the epicentre of trauma and use this “self-harming-like” behaviour as a tool for a recursive augmentation — a process of transforming individual psychosomatic lacuna into more systematic situated knowledge about techno-social topology of burnout.
: The stones from being non-player agents became those from the perspective of which we were trying to think about our “holed futurism”.
: “Our first trajectory was to discover the agents, attributes, states and operators which can help foster travel from one situation to another.”
: “This video sketch is a guided tour through a skeleton of a traumatic environment of our science fiction of the present day: https://youtu.be/vBgCgJcIkSA Traumatic interface, positive panic attack, curated traumas, surface amnesia are the background of our collective thoughts and discussions. We thought about complex connections that are difficult to grasp, so we somehow came to the idea of having diagram-as-skin. By creating our vision of “holed futurism” we tried to ruffle our imaginations and to take a fresh look at the production of networks in which we are entangled. Using the process of sharing our collective half-fictional situated knowledge we shape the environment where these networks are being unrolled. Holes between nodes and connections are becoming active parts of the environment, making assemblages between human and inhuman.”
: “After we plunged into trauma, we came into contact with the interface. Its surface materialized holes, which revealed another, even more reptilian interface. Inside it, objects collided in another way, from which emerged a different logic of interaction: the logic of trauma. The operations took place without external mediation, but in and of themselves, collapsing from internal contradictions. Digital texts blocked and consumed each other, forming unfamiliar assemblages for such a high order of virtuality. They were definitively here long before us, waiting for a host.”
: “We squatted the imaginary of this place collectively. And the landscape you see here is the map of it.”
