LOOK UP; spoken word, more than a little cliche, but it will overrun facebook (quite ironically) in no time.

Been doing some research on the Ernst Thälmann statue (a gigantic bust) situated off of Greifswalder Straße in Berlin; mainly writing about how this large material bust persists despite being the near constant target of graffiti artists. Some early preservationists in the recently united Berlin of the 1990s attempted to keep statues like these but alter them subtly in the process; examples included proposals to grow ivy on the statues; however, as you can see, this form of “alteration” did not take, and instead Berliners took alteration into their own hands.

The statue in the Ernst Thälmann Park is the near constant target of graffiti artists. Admittedly, Berlin is no stranger to creative street art, but the statue’s historical legacy with graffiti makes it a pressing concern for the state, especially in maintaining its appearance. By keeping the statue free of graffiti, the state protects its past. Particularly important for Germany, the state must not appear to hide the past, and letting graffiti linger a little too long would constitute objectionable concern by some that state maintenance implies keeping the parks clean. However, the inverse is also important, which is that graffiti constitutes some contemporary context of how the past is viewed in the present, thus, political expression in the form of graffiti ought not to be removed too quickly either for fear of acting as evidence of abundant pride in the past. As a less than scientific, but no less real testament to this idea, we conducted a modest data collection using Google images; we documented the outcome of a search for “Ernst Thälmann Park” and recorded in order whether the image contained the Ernst Thälmann statue and, for those that do, we determined if the statue was depicted with graffiti. Of the first 100 pictures from the search, we learn that the Thälmann statue is not visible in 59 of the 100 pictures (59%); however, when the statue is present in the image, in 29 of the 41 pictures (71%) the statue is depicted with visible graffiti. We also depict our findings in a bar graph where each observation is presented in the order that they appeared in the Google image search. In the chart, zero implies that the image did not contain the statue, one implies that the statue was visible, and two implies that the statue visibly contained graffiti. We observe a trend. If scores are averaged for every ten observations in order, then we that the prevalence of seeing a graffitied Thälmann decreases the deeper one goes into the image search, thus, the earliest images are the most likely to contain graffiti. In 1-10, the average observation is 1.5, a middle-range observation from 51-60 is 0.6, while the late observations from 81-90 is 0.3, hence, the general downward trend. We assume unscientifically that early images in searches such as these are the operant visual identity of the images that appear, thus, the earliest images viewers see of the Thälmann statue is likely to be a graffitied statue.

In Brian Ladd’s 1997 The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape, we learn why the statue persists despite the reality that its contemporary identity hinges largely on its use as a receptacle for urban art. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a unified Berlin had to determine which monuments to maintain, and, according to Ladd (1997: 201), monuments were to be estimated on their “historical rather than political value.” How to honor the past required consideration of how to also transforms the spaces of their memorialization. For example, proposals during the 1990s included “proposals to plant vegetation in the paved ceremonial spaces around many GDR monuments, or even to grow ivy on the statues,” as a means to “preserve statues, affirm tradition, and at the same time turn politically defined urban spaces into something different” (Ladder 1997: 201). Berlin government officials commissioned an independent group, primarily composed of preservationists, who made compelling claims in their final report to maintain the monuments as part of the “GDR’s interpretation of history,” and in the end “the commission recommended the outright removal of only a few monuments” (primarily related to border guards), although alteration to standing monuments was utilized, in particular, related to the text changes featured in the context of plaques. According to Ladd (1997: 203),

[Ernst] Thälmann [had] … a great deal to do with the image cultivated by the GDR’s leadership. They fashioned a Thälmann who would serve the function that Lenin served for Stalin and his successors: the hero whose prestige and authority they inherited. They suppressed portrayals of Thälmann as a suffering concentration camp inmate in favor of Thälmann as antifascist hero. The combination of historical falsification, authoritarian gesture, and bombastic design understandably made the statue unpopular after 1989.

By 1993, a tone of “universal acceptance” had a toe-hold among preservationists, and

[t]he passage of time worked in their favor: after several years of united Germany, the Thälmann monument was on its way to becoming a historical relic of a past regime, perhaps worth preserving as a document of GDR political ritual. But the strongest argument in favor of keeping the monument, at least provisionally, was its size: no one was willing to pay for its demolition. Meanwhile, the accumulating graffiti around the statue’s base made it clear enough that the heroic Thälmann no longer met with favor. By 1995, three neatly stenciled words higher on the pedestal commented on the fate of the man and his monument: “Imprisoned–murdered–besmeared.” (Ladd 1997: 203)

Now, the most common form of “alteration” to the Thälmann statue appears not in the form of vegetation, but alteration through art; graffiti is added and subtracted, but the monument resists removal, if only through its size, the costliness of its removal, and its life is thusly extended also by benefit of its having been preserved in the first place during the 1990s.

It is official, we are 4 years old. Huzzah!

Interview, just one of many, with Roberto Unger, which indicates that sociology — along with all the other social sciences (psychology, economics, law, and perhaps even political science) — is bunk as well as pseudo science.

Back in January, I wrote a post about empathy and technology. I pondered the possibility of technology like Google Glass and Oculus Rift to open up our  experiences of the Other through shared perception.  In April, Nicholas posted about the all-around failure of Google Glass to be, well, cool.  Not particularly revolutionary and kind douchey when push comes to shove. Glassholes were born. Guys on the subway being creepsters. Concerns over the safety of driving while Googled. Most users behaved badly–doing all those things one would expect of tech geeks with 1500 bucks to spend on a computer for their face.

Molly Crabapple on rhizome.org wrote a compelling piece about the corporate and male gaze of Google Glass. We cannot forget the corporate gaze that follows and tracks our movements in the guise of the “smart. ” She writes, “Glass and the sleeker wearables that will follow are the next step down the path started by smartphones: they are private, trackable, monetizable distraction engines that you need never take off.”

Ms. Crabapple sketched and made art while others watched through livestream, but she felt intuitively that they watched only.  What made “art art” wasn’t present.

Can we expect that seeing what others see through Glass will give us insight into what they are “really” seeing or experiencing? Will technology allow allow us to see through another’s eyes in a spiritual way, for lack of a better term? Or will Google Glass, and other future and more sophisticated products, be technological navel gazing and vapid self-obsession?

Glass is not the revolution it could have been, certainly, dear readers, but I remain ever hopeful that the future will transform into everything we dreamed of as VHS kiddies. Little Gen Xers dreaming of flying skateboards, TVs for our wrists, and weekend trips to the moon. We did get iPods. I may have to back off on my hopes for empathy and focus on something else.

With this I present another kind of wearable tech: 3D printed fabric. The BB.suit by Dutch designer Borre Akkersdijk is truly wearable, not just carry-able. There is still serious R and D to be done, but fabric of the future could be walking web access, GPS ready, and Bluetooth compatible.  Your suit as a walking URL. User experience would differ with every wearer.

Alas, the prototype was quite unattractive. An ill-fitting ecru onesie. But in lieu of my iPod implanted into my arm I’ll take a wearable playlist for floating through urban space.

No hoverboard, but you can get Marty’s shoes. Thanks Nike!

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, RIP

….the actinobacteria! Another example of modern enchantment, or who says science and modernity killed all the magic?

Via The Crafty Chemist and AsapSCIENCE

A recent art installation is trying to disrupt the dehumanizing effects of drone technology and the metaphor of the “bugsplat” when talking about the “targets” of drone strikes. The images can be found at http://notabugsplat.com/

The installation is a huge picture of child that the drone operator can see and is meant to disrupt the pilot’s ability to dehumanize the victims of the strikes.

From the blog:

In military slang, Predator drone operators often refer to kills as ‘bug splats’, since viewing the body through a grainy video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed.

To challenge this insensitivity as well as raise awareness of civilian casualties, an artist collective installed a massive portrait facing up in the heavily bombed Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa region of Pakistan, where drone attacks regularly occur. Now, when viewed by a drone camera, what an operator sees on his screen is not an anonymous dot on the landscape, but an innocent child victim’s face.

I have written on a similar subject: the use of medicine and surgical metaphors in warfare.  The rhetoric and feeling of this use of language is the same. For example

To [John] Brennan the people of north-west Pakistan are neither insects nor grass: his targets are a ‘cancerous tumour’, the rest of society ‘the tissue around it’”.

To highlight war, metaphor, and their relationship George Lakoff writes that

there is a common metaphor in which military control by the enemy is seen as a cancer that can spread. In this metaphor, military “operations” are seen as hygienic, to “clean out” enemy fortifications. Bombing raids are portrayed as “surgical strikes” to “take out” anything that can serve a military purpose. The metaphor is supported by imagery of shiny metallic instruments of war, especially jets (Lakoff 1991).

In the case of humanitarian intervention, the language used often frames the interventionist actions creating metaphors from the field of medicine.  We offer humanitarian “relief, “injections” of foreign aid, and “prescriptions” for ameliorating unrest.  These metaphorical frames show that bodies must behave in certain ways, thereby implicitly arguing that certain ideas about healthy bodies and lives must serve as a template for unhealthy ones.  Humanitarian intervention is then about healing these “unhealthy” bodies.

In medicine, “germs” are spoken of as “enemies” to good health.  We are in “wars” against cancer.  New research in AIDS helps us “conquer” the virus.  In fact “militaristic language pops up in almost every scientific domain: conservation biology (‘invasive species,’ ‘biosecurity’); global warming (‘global war on global warming’); and biomedicine (‘killer cells,’ ‘hitting multiple targets’)” (Wenner 2007).

How does this language affect how we speak of enemies and opponents?  I offer these examples of this from various news sources:

This is from the Guardian’s News Blog, March 21, 2011:  “8.13am: Yesterday we heard that supporters of Gaddafi had formed a human shield around his compound in Tripoli, with men, women and children singing songs against the rebel “germs” (Blog 2011).

From the Israeli News website: National Union MK Michael Ben-Ari, while speaking at an SOS Israel conference in Jerusalem is quoted as referring to members of leftist organizations as “traitors who must be persecuted at any cost” (Sofi).  He called the leftists “germs” and “enemies of Israel” and added “If we’ll have to enact a law in the Knesset to eradicate this dangerous enemy, that is what we’ll do. Such a germ can destroy Israeli society. This enemy threatens the state’s existence” (Sofi)

In the Sunday Times, Mark Franchetti interviews a soldier who says  “The Iraqis are sick people and we are the chemotherapy,” said Corporal Ryan Dupre. “I am starting to hate this country. Wait till I get hold of a friggin’ Iraqi. No, I won’t get hold of one. I’ll just kill him.” (Franchetti 2003).

What does this circulation do? A crucial point is that “[A]nalogies and metaphors are the often hidden devices that serve to rationalize choices of conceptual variants and to render plausible the narrative in which our political concepts are embedded” (Whitehead 2011, 293).  In other words, by perceiving war and intervention as a “treatment” for sickness, we are blinded to other responses that may address the situation more effectively.  These “hidden devices” can also invite and justify violent responses as shown above.  Which metaphorical constructions make this circulation a possibility?  What makes all these ways of speaking about intervention, states, and war, so compelling, so facile? How can it be made less facile?

This art installation is an amazing attempt to inject (to use the metaphor against itself) this sterile understanding with ethics and morals. To make these inhuman ways of relating to others less facile.

The victims aren’t bug splats or tumors, but children, men, women, wedding guests, and yes, sometimes even “terrorists,” but targeted killings are an ugly, immoral, and, more often than not, illegal business. It isn’t collateral damage, it’s murder.

It behooves us all to put a human face on civilian deaths.  Go to this site and read the names of the dead.  Click on the above site and look at their pictures.

Odd, but interesting.

I just returned from the International Studies Association annual conference.  It’s a large professional conference–a 250 page book of panels, a plurality of approaches to the study of international relations, and hundreds of academics presenting and discussing their research.  This means it takes a lot of space: two hotels for the conference itself and then 2-3 additional hotels for participants. And this doesn’t include all the people that venture farther out for hotels in non-conference space.

I started going to ISA in 2008 during my third year of graduate school. It was in San Francisco that year and I remember being overwhelmed by the amount of panels and the amount of people.  I am not sure what my insight for this post is, but it seems worthwhile to think through how we organize ourselves in relation to space and place during that once-a-year conference. Most disciplines have them, right?  And it seems that these conferences do discipline us in many ways. This is not a rant about how terrible conferences can be–in fact, far from it. I am intrigued that they seem to work so well for so many things.  Seeing old friends, hashing out the finer points of theory with like-minded geeks, placing your body in various vectors for various reasons: potential employment connections, publication deals, professional contacts, new ideas.

There is also the politics of which city is chosen over another and how this affects the conference.  In New York, fewer panels were accepted due to less room at the conference hotel.  The first year ISA went to NOLA, there was a heated debate about the state’s stance on gay marriage and LGBTQ rights.  Many called for a boycott of the conference and others countered that the economic boon of a big conference would be welcome in a post-Katrina economy. San Diego, in an informal bad social science poll done by yours truly, was a favorite.  Lots of space to stand and talk, a decent and roomy bar in the main hotel, and a Starbuck’s right near the center. All these things are necessary as most people are jet lagged and exhausted from writing their paper on the way to the conference. New York was abysmal–nowhere to stand, the elevators were slow and terrifying, and there was nowhere grab a quick bite in Times Square. I discovered this year in Toronto that the best place to people watch and wait for friends/contacts/people you should meet to advance your career is at the top of an escalator that leads to the meeting rooms. Future ISAs for me will be deemed a success if they have a well placed escalator or two.

Finally, ISA is profoundly un-international in its choice of conference venues. The most international US ISA members have to get is to cross the border to Canada. It might have been in Brazil one year, but that was way before my time and I may be remembering incorrectly. Maybe we just talked about wishing it were somewhere other than US.  This gives the US and Canadian members a distinct advantage. I watch Aussie, European and UK friends stumble around jet lagged for days and feel better just in time to board a plane for home.  This choice of North American space only seems quite strange. Why is the International Studies Association not international?

Unfortunately, I was not able to attend the 4S conference this year, but it was in San Diego, and maybe even in the same hotel as the ISA awarded with the best venue award (at least in my opinion). Anyone want to chime in on what the space of the conference does for their discipline?

2014 DASTS Conference on RUC

Call for papers: Enacting Futures – extended deadline for abstracts is April 4
This year’s DASTS conference wants to highlight and display the political, conceptual and practical consequences of the ontological turn. Rather than continuing with the Modern belief in grand narratives and a singular ontology, researchers within the field of STS outline an alternative history with several modes of existence and thus a plurality of truth conditions. But what are the implications of multiple modes of existence? How are diplomatic encounters and politics performed across modes? And what does the plurality of truth conditions mean for the institution of Academia? How can we envision new forms of posthumanities in socio-technical worlds? With these questions, the theme of the conference will be enactments of futures.

At the location of Roskilde University this theme is particularly fitting. Since its origin in 1972 Roskilde University has been propagating action research and problem-based group-work to not only criticize but also engage in practices for example through participatory design and research processes. When DASTS is for the first time held at Roskilde University, we find it appropriate to reflect upon a new utopian agenda for researchers. Also, as STS is growing and moves beyond its original fields of science and technology studies, contributions are invited to consider different fields of research as different modes of existence, considering the spreading of STS across disciplines as a transdisciplinary approach. Last but not least, the theme of the conference is inspired by the AIME project: An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, which contributors could reflect upon concerning its theoretical foundation and its online platform.

To address the theme of enacting futures, contributions could focus on identifying characteristics of specific modes of existence, addressing connections between different domains, comparing domains, and/or discussing diplomacy, negotiations over values, and the (re-)invention of subjectivities/posthumanities and institutions. In doing so, contributors could turn attention to research methods and practices, looking at connections to politics, private companies, and/or artistic approaches. DASTS also invite artistic contributions that can be set on display and/or shown at the conference. It is also a possibility to couple traditional conference paper presentations in dialogue with an artistic oeuvre.

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The call for papers is meant as inspirational. More than inviting papers relating to the announced theme, we also welcome papers and oeuvres discussing and/or performing other STS subject matters. The DASTS annual conference is open for all and the committee welcomes entries from all areas of science and technology studies. Especially junior researchers wanting to present and discuss their research are invited to present their work. The main purpose of the conference is to fertilize STS research broadly by providing an occasion for researchers working with STS in Denmark to exchange their current works and thoughts, and of course to stimulate networking across STS-inspired environments. For this latter reason the conference fee also includes conference dinner. The main language is Danish, but presentations in English are welcome, and a few sessions as well as the key note presentations will be held in English. The conference aims to be a friendly and encouraging scientific environment in which not only well-established scholars, but also Ph.D. and master students should feel confident to present and discuss their work with colleagues.

Keynotes at DASTS 2014: Adrian MacKenzie and Kristoffer Ørum.

Registration is now open: http://ruconf.ruc.dk/index.php/DASTS2014/DASTS2014

Practical information
Dates: June 12 – 13, 2014
Place: Roskilde University, Universitetsvej 1, DK-4000 Roskilde

Deadline for submission of abstracts (max app. 300 words): April 4, 2014 (extended).
Please state in your abstract your preferred language of presentation, and if English is a possibility for you.
Abstracts should be submitted to dasts@ruc.dk.

Great event in a couple weeks at Penn State; details at Larry Backer‘s “Law at the End of the Day” blog. Hoping to attend myself.