Because of my interest in archiving social movements in the Middle East and their histories that are eradicated and manipulated by dictatorial regimes as a form of activism, “The Conditions of Possibility” project by Ian Alan Paul was engaging and thought-provoking. Moreover, because of my background in photography, and my interest in the idea of Flaneur, photo and text, autobiography, and psychogeography, I was also able to study the project as an artwork. It is crucial to remind ourselves that this project is not an objective archive and what we are facing is highly mediated. As the artist notes: “This process and practice of drawing connections between past events in a nonlinear fashion wasn't meant to represent or capture an objective past in a narrative or archival fashion.” Vox Populi project is a great example of digital archival practice on the Egyptian Revolution of 2011.
However, if this project is neither a representation of past in the form of archive or narration, then what is this “framing and constellating different past” project? By who and for whom? Here is where I find the work troubling. Although the artist is present in the streets of Cairo, there is a cognitive distance between them and space. This alienation results in unnecessary and self-evident philosophizing in accompanying texts that do not necessarily add anything substantial. For instance, for them, the presence of buildings and artifacts of different time periods, before the revolution, after that, and after the coup, becomes a fascinating co-existence of past, present, and possible futures. For me as an Iranian, this simultaneous presence of contradicting socio-political elements in the city is axiomatic. There is a romanticizing effect, not of revolution but of the whole situation, that for me has a note of exoticism. This reminds me of Kate Millet’s visit to Iran right after the 1979 revolution as a guest for Women’s Day celebration which quickly turned into her encounter with the misogynist new Islamic state. Negar Mottahedeh in her book “Whisper Tapes” examines Millet’s understanding of Iran based on Millet’s personal audiotapes. Does digitally turning the cell-phone color images into grainy analog-looking photographs have any other effect rather than romanticizing?
Studying electrical engineering for my bachelor of science degree, I was familiar with pattern recognition. In fact, my thesis project worked with a nearest-neighbor algorithm. However, reading MacCorkick’s chapter from the media studies standpoint offered more engaging questions, especially on neural network algorithms and the politics of learning. Since algorithms are based on logical procedures, many perceive them as unbiased and deem their outcomes as objective. However, this is far from the truth in the case of pattern recognition—more broadly machine learning algorithms. For instance, several studies have shown Amazon Rekognition, the company’s facial-recognition technology that is sold to several law enforcement agencies, is biassed against women and people of color and has lower accuracy for these groups. This was also the case for several other face-recognition technologies as well. If a neural network algorithm adjusts its weights and thresholds by itself, where such unfairness takes place? Learning phase and the sample data. In this instance, it has been shown that the data that programmers used to train the standard benchmark that tested these algorithms had more white male samples. Expectedly, these algorithms had to tune themselves finer when it came to white males. As a result of these revelations, the issue of algorithmic fairness has gained more attention in recent years.
In “Drawing Connections—How Interfaces Matter,” Jan Distelmeyer argues for an analysis of interfaces since it “leads to an investigation of programmability, as the basis for both defining processes and allowing for protest and redefinition.” However, the interface that they argue is mainly a graphical one with and what we are facing today is not only graphical but immersive. And as Julie Woletz points out in “interfaces of immersive media,” rather than solely affecting the visual perception of the viewer, immersive interfaces “address the body by enabling kinesthetic action.” Then how it is possible to analyze these interfaces? I found an example of this in “From GUI to NUI: Microsoft Kinect and Politics of the (Body as) Interface” by David M. Rieder. There the author explains one of his projects where rather than using Microsoft Kinect’s skeletal data as the shape of the user’s body, he projected these data on a topological surface and feedback the result to the user. “Once a user’s movements and position are redefined radically, the environmental feedback from the projected movements has the potential to transform how that user experiences herself, which can lead to new, counter-hegemonic experiences of self.” Interestingly, Distelmeyer’s graphical configuration of interfaces is also applicable to the kinesthetic interface of Kinect. The operative images of GUI turn into operative spaces in NUI (Natural User Interface). And while the aesthetics of NUI, too, is one of regulation (in a sense that regulates user’s body movement), as Rieder shows, programmability of NUI’s operative spaces empowers the user to redefine and thus regulate the interface.
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