A Peer-Reviewed Journal About

Doing Content/Form

Christian Ulrik Andersen, Geoff Cox — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Content cannot be separated from the forms through which it is rendered. If our attachment to standardised forms and formats – served to us by big tech – limit the space for political possibility and collective action, then we ask what alternatives might be envisioned, including for research itself? What does research do in the world, and how best to facilitate meaningful intervention with attention to content and form? Perhaps what is missing is a stronger account of the structures that render our research experiences, that serve to produce new imaginaries, new spatial and temporal forms?

About Wiki-To-Print

Manetta Berends, Simon Browne — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0100

This brief statment explains the production of Content/Form from the designer' perspective: The journal is made with wiki-to-print, a collective publishing environment based on MediaWiki software, Paged Media CSS techniques and the JavaScript library Paged.js, which renders a preview of the PDF in the browser. Using wiki-to-print allows us to work shoulder-to-shoulder as collaborative writers, editors, designers, developers, in a non-linear publishing workflow where design and content unfolds at the same time, allowing the one to shape the other.

On Critical “Technopolitical Pedagogies”

Denise Helene Sumi — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0100

This article explores the pedagogical and political dimensions of the specific content-form relations of the projects Public Library/Memory of the World and syllabus ⦚ Pirate Care. Public Library/Memory of the World (2012–ongoing) by Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak serves as an online shadow library in response to the ongoing commodification of academic research and threats to public libraries. syllabus⦚ Pirate Care (2019), a project initiated by Valeria Graziano, Mars, and Medak, offers learning resources that address the crisis of care and its criminalisation under neoliberal policies. By employing “technopolitical pedagogies” and advocating the sharing of knowledge, these projects enable forms of practical and political orientation in a world of “insuppressible friction.” They use network technologies and open-source tools to provide access to information and support civil disobedience against restrictive intellectual property laws. The article argues that these projects represent critical pedagogical interventions, hacking the monodimensional tendencies of educational systems and library catalogues, and produce commoner positions.

Zines And Computational Publishing Practices

Kendal Beynon — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0100

This paper explores the parallels between historical zine culture and contemporary DIY computational publishing practices, highlighting their roles as countercultural movements within their own right. Both mediums, from zines of the 1990s to personal homepages and feminist servers, provide spaces for identity formation, community building, and resistance against mainstream societal norms. Drawing on Stephen Duncombe's insights into zine culture, this research examines how these practices embody democratic, communal ideals and act as a rebuttal to mass consumerism and dominant media structures. The paper argues that personal homepages and web rings serve as digital analogues to zines, fostering participatory and grassroots networks and underscores the importance of these DIY practices in redefining production, labour, and the role of the individual within cultural and societal contexts, advocating for a more inclusive and participatory digital landscape. Through an examination of both zines and their digital counterparts, this research reveals their shared ethos of authenticity, creativity, and resistance.

Between the Archive and the Feed

Bilyana Palankasova — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0100

This article discusses feminist performance and internet art practices of the 21st century through the lens of Boris Groys’s theory of innovation. It analyses works by Signe Pierce, Molly Soda, and Maya Man, to position practices of self-documentation online in exchange with feminist art histories of performance and electronic media. The text proposes that the discussed contemporary art practices fulfil the process of innovation detailed by Groys through a process of re-valuation of values via an exchange between the everyday, trivial, and heterogenous realm of social media (‘the profane’) and the valorised realm of cultural memory (‘the archive’). Using digital ethnography and contextual analysis, framed by the theory of innovation, the text introduced ‘content value’ as a feature of contemporary art on the Internet. The article demonstrates how feminist internet art practices expand on cultural value through the realisation of a process of innovation via an intra-cultural exchange between the feed and the institution.

Platform Pragmatics

Edoardo Biscossi — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0100

This article proposes platform pragmatics as a framework for understanding collective behaviour and forms of labour within platform ecosystems. It contributes to the field of platform criticism by problematising a certain view of users as passive victims of surveillance and algorithmic governmentality. The main argument is developed by thinking through the production of content and forms by users, and their circulation through computational logic and aective contagion. Through some illustrative cases and analyses of cultural habits, the article addresses the political and aesthetic configuration of these forms of production — not only of content/forms, but also of culture and subjectivity. This is explored by thinking through three themes: the subsumption of creativity and opportunism in platform economies; the mobilisation of speculative temporalities not only in computation but also across user practices; and the generalisation of self-reflexivity as a feminised cultural behaviour and aesthetic mode. Finally, I propose to understand platform pragmatics as a mode of subaltern power, that might be alien to traditional political reason, but precisely because of this needs to be grappled with through inventive cultural and social criticism.

The Autophagic Mode of Production

Luca Cacini — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0100

This article delves into the autophagic nature of generative AI in content production and its implications for cultural and technological landscapes, defined in the paper as technocene. From a broader perspective, it proposes a metabolic characterization of the technocene and explores the idea of how generative AI, such as large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and DALL-E, resembles an autophagic organism, akin to the biological processes of self-consumption and self- optimization. The article draws parallels between this process and cybernetics, then evokes the mythological symbol of Ouroboros, reflecting on the integration of opposites and the shadow phenomena in LLMs. Specifically, the article discusses the concepts of “Model Collapse”, "Shadow Prompting" and "Shadow Alignment," highlighting the potential for subversion and the generation of potentially harmful, rebellious content by LLMs. It also addresses the ethical implications of generative AI in art and culture, highlighting the risk of a media monoculture, the spread of disinformation and the emergence of a category of Hackers embracing methodologies to deviate these infrastructures. The discourse aims to emphasize the subversive forms of synthetic media that the process of Generative AI, embedded by repetition in the algorithmic model of the machine, may engender. By examining the autophagic nature of generative AI and its potential ethical and cultural ramifications, the article seeks to analyze the reterritorializing of the relations of production by humans in the context of content creation and consumption.

Shaping Vectors

Pierre Depaz — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0100

This article investigates how the word embeddings at the heart of large language models are shaped into acceptable meanings. We show how such shaping follows two educational logics. The use of benchmarks to discover the capabilities of large language models exhibit similar features to Foucault’s disciplining school enclosures, while the process of reinforcement learning is framed as a modulation made explicit in Deleuze’s control societies. The consequences of this shaping into acceptable meaning is argued to result in semantic subspaces. These semantic subspaces are presented as the restricted lexical possibilities of human-machine dialogic interaction, and their consequences are discussed.

Deep Faking in a Flat Reality?

Asker Bryld Staunæs, Maja Bak Herrie — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0100

In this article, we examine surprising examples of how AI-driven political entities integrate within the public sphere. We focus on an image illustration by The Guardian that depicts the US President Joe Biden alongside three agents of The Synthetic Party (Det Syntetiske Parti, DSP) from Denmark, focusing on the theme of deepfakes and elections. We argue that The Guardian’s portrayal of Biden/DSP highlights a paradoxical shift caused by what we call a ‘deep faking’ within a ‘flat reality.’ On this basis, we venture into a conceptually transversal intersection of geometry, politics, and art by interrogating the wide flattening of political realities — a transformation conventionally characterized by a perceived move from depthful, nuanced discourse to a landscape dominated by surface-level engagements and digital simulacra. We suggest that this transformation may lead to a new political morphology, where formal democracy is altered by synthetic simulation.

Logics of War

Marie Naja Lauritzen Dias — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0100

As manifested in Jean Baudrillard’s notoriously provoking claim that “the Gulf War did not take place,” mediatization of war has long been associated with illusion. Today, war images that circulate online are increasingly judged by their proximity to ‘truth,’ eliciting a skepticism towards their ‘evidentiary’ value. By juxtaposing Baudrillard’s reading of the mediatization of the Gulf War with the contemporary image theories of e.g. Cecilia Sjöholm and Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman, the article explores how this skepticism is expressed in a contemporary context. Through visual analysis of a YouTube video of a press conference held at the bombed Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza, it examines the relationship between the f orm through which the war is perceived (the images) and their cont ent (the ‘realities’ of war). Through a lens oered by Georges Didi-Huberman, the article concludes by suggesting that by expanding what I term the snapshot logic of war images to embrace a scenography of war, the press conference video gives form to the condition of desperation and suering in Gaza.

Xeno-Tuning

Esther Rizo-Casado — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Xenoimage Dataset is an artistic practice that unleashes the hallucinatory capacities of image-generating AI to question the perpetuation of power dynamics inherent in normative gender dichotomies. Employing techniques called xeno-tuning, it adapts pre-trained models to produce weird representations of corporealities, criticising the homogenous tendencies and biases inherent in image datasets. The purpose is to define the visuality of the xeno as a transformative agent of current hegemonic identities.

Unstable Frequencies

Mateus Domingos — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0100

In this essay I describe an experimental wifi network sideBand which provided access to a simple message-board during the Content/Form workshop, held at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in January 2024, as part of transmediale. This is considered in relation to the collaborative infrastructure ServPub that was carefully assembled and maintained for the workshop. The production of the hardware and software required for the sideBand network is described with specific consideration of the types of memory and data storage systems that are utilised. The programming that provided message-board (and wider) functionality is also described. The conditions of this production along with the specific ways in which use of the network unfolds are considered in relation to Dunbar-Hester’s propagation and a Luddite framing, that includes sabotage and refusal. This is argued as producing other ways of understanding infrastructure and place, related to the feminist methodologies of ServPub.