This injunction to share reminds me of Zizek’s observation on capitalism’s injunction to enjoy, namely that despite appearing otherwise, it‘s designed to avoid us experiencing excessive jouissance, in order that we may achieve a homeostatic balance. If the demand is too effective on its own terms, it threatens to burst into destructive hedonism, and that’s no good for productivity. This typically late capitalist request functions effectively by luring the subject into a form of self-regulation.

Just as capitalism demands that we have a good time, digital networks demand that we broadcast our data selves on a never-ending treadmill of affective labour. Unlike capitalism and enjoyment, this ‘social turn’ in software is not designed to rebalance our sense of the private through disclosure — a digital show-and-tell demarcating and reinforcing the public. It is designed rather to elicit the performative impulses at the heart of social life, and from these generate attention as an exploitable resource.

Attention as a resource is the basis for much of the so-called digital economy. It can be generated as long as cognitive surplus exists in the world. Once subjected to this decree to share, we find it difficult to self-regulate, precisely because our brains have such a surprising amount of surplus cognition available to them at any given time. As humans, we are primed for performative social activity, so the continuous cues to perform online are obediently heeded. Both the private and public domains are casualties of this decree, collateral damage for an entire industry focused on intensifying attention on performative data.

The industry seems quite a way from reaching peak attention. I’m yet to see a projection of such a saturation of cognition based on neuroscience. The resource continues to expand, both geographically and in volume. Wearable technology, for example, is primed to produce new levels of productive eyeballs, while the expansion of digital BRIC economies presents another leap in resource.

That this affective labour is performed entirely within an attention economy is not news. What is new is the proliferation of behavioural data it produces, collected through mechanisms that become indistinguishable from advanced forms of surveillance. This is part of a wider trend — an underworld of what I would call dark data is emerging as an increasingly influential actor in technology.

Dark data is data we know exists but is never made visible to us as citizens and consumers. Like dark matter, we see only its effects. Instantaneous stock market crashes, precision drone strikes, personalised advertising, denials of credit — all can be seen as mediators of dark data. Occasionally it leaks directly into public discourse through privacy transgressions, cast as an abused party. This rendering is illusory: Dark data is not just ‘out there’, like all data it is manufactured, be it by physical sensors or software. It requires the deployment of an extensive infrastructure controlled by organisations with the means to create it.

Examples of dark data: browsing histories collected by cross-site marketing firms and search companies. Our credit histories. Retail purchase histories. High frequency trading logs. State-sponsored intelligence data. The raw material for Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm. CCTV. Our IP addresses and access logs. Our phone communications, from calls to SMS. Our GPS tracks. Photographs containing our face. Biometric fingerprints. Eventually our dietary intake and DNA. Not to mention our medical records.

The discourse on dark data exposes what Bruno Latour has identified as the paradoxa that is the modern constitution. Further evidence, if any were needed, that we are still not modern. On the one hand, we have outgrown the naivety implied by the belief that data might belong to a transcendent Nature, a thing-in-itself which we happen to stumble upon. CEOs aside — they have dubbed dark data that which is not analysed or acted upon by enterprise, but in a typical feat of cognitive dissonance haven’t owned up to why it’s there in the first place — we are fully aware of its social dimension, its material status. It suffices for sociologists like Manuel Castells to remind us of this fact. On the other hand many social actors, from Stewart Brand to the Pirate Party or the Open Data movement, ascribe data its own agency. Employing a rhetoric of liberation, they assert its desire to be freed, as if following a pre-determined destiny of its own.

We can’t have it both ways, adhering to a doctrine both of transcendence (‘information wants to be free’), and immanent social constructivism (‘data is manufactured and thus political’). This discursive stalemate bears all the hallmarks of the modern.

The discourse on data needs to shift into the realm of hybrid networks, to uncover and clarify the effects of these dark actors at the heart of modern life. Yes, data can ally with other non-human actors — such as TCP, the internet’s transmission protocol — to exert its own forces on so-called social systems, just as data is intricately entangled with human, technocratic power structures that ally to generate it. Precisely because all this is true, neither pointing at the ‘social’ nor making techno-determinist claims about data’s desire will further the debate.

We must accept the entanglement of human and non-human entities, the mutuality of their relations, and discard the primacy of the subject-object relation. Only once we recognise dark data’s position in this vast network of interrelated objects can we begin to understand it and its affinities. An empirical analysis of its mediators (from Edgerank to HFT algorithms), its allied infrastructure (from data centers to fibre optics), its spokesmen and women (from Wikileaks to Mark Zuckerberg), the organisations involved in its creation (from Google to Transport for London), and the technologies required for its analysis (from Hadoop to Storm), will allow us to trace dark data and its influence.

In many ways, dark data and its surrounding infrastructure is the sewerage system of the 21st century. Out of sight and out of mind, it increasingly provides vital services to the modern world. It is undoubtedly the modern repository of unconscious desire. It contains all the unspeakable acts we cannot articulate as a society. Like any intrusion of the Real, its leakage into the everyday is toxic and hazardous.

As with sewage treatment, dark data is the offspring of a technocratic world. It continues to proliferate exponentially, the dark goo oozing from the cracks in contemporary life. Once we begin scrutinising it, we may be surprised at just how far its networks of allies extend.

We can control continuous transformations of large sets of granular and/or continuous sounds. In fact densities, durations, registers, speeds etc... can all be subjected to the law of large numbers with the necessary approximations. We can therefore with the aid of means and deviations shape these sets and make them evolve in different directions. The best known is that which moves from order to disorder, or vice versa, it is that which introduces the concept of entropy.

After the first unfolding of a series of twelve sounds of the tempered scale, the unpredictability has fallen to zero, the constraint is maximum, the choice is nil, and the entropy is zero. Richness and hence interest are displaced to other fields, such as harmonies, timbres and durations, and many other compositional wiles are aimed at reviving entropy. In fact sonic discourse is nothing but the perpetual fluctuations of entropy in all its forms.

- Xenakis quotes, Nouritza Matossian (1986)

More.

- Sol Le Witt, Sentences on Conceptual Art (1967)

Le Witt articulating the condition of the instance in parametric composition: Always alluding to a state space beyond.

Olympus Mons, Mars. The largest (volcanic) mountain in the solar system.

Every thought emits a throw of the dice.

- Mallarmé, A Throw of the Dice Never will Abolish Chance (1897)

The true subject of art is unity.

- Theo Van Doesburg, Against Imitative Artists (1922)

Every appeal to the One is theological

- Alain Badiou, Being and Event (1988)

I've been studying the works of De Stijl (1917-1924) - that moment in abstract painting and architecture in which the two entered an intimate, coordinated and prolonged liaison. Whilst trying to unpack my own thoughts on the output of the group, I've increasingly been drawn to the schematics of founder Theo Van Doesburg, which have become a departure point for some of my recent work.

In the essays of De Stijl a strict anti-individualism is the basis for an appeal to aesthetic unity in the arts. The essays talk of a "new plasticism" (Mondrian, No Axiom but the Plastic), the importance of diagonal lines (Van Doesburg, Elementarism), colour as a physical material (Van Doesburg, The New Aesthetic), and other principles often guided by a naive notion of unity.

- Van Doesburg, Architecture Analysis (1923)

A: But I still don't understand why you favour the straight line and have come entirely to exclude the curved.

B: In searching for an expression of vastness, I was led to seek the greatest tension: the straight line, because all curvature resolves into the straight, no place remains for the curved.

- Mondrian, Dialogue on Neo-Plasticism (1918)

In some ways, the graphical sensibility of De Stijl outran its conceptual positioning, in that I can see an interest in stochastic composition within the work of Mondrian and Van Doesburg that undermines their repeated claims to universalism (cf. Komposition Weiss, Komposition IX, Pier and Ocean). It's interesting to take a trajectory from De Stijl to early computer art to see how aesthetic unity as a paradigm breaks down during the decades that follow.

- Manfred Mohr, Random Walk (1969)

Take the pioneering stochastic works of Manfred Mohr, whose Random Walks, printed on an ink plotter in the 1960s, I was fortunate enough to see at DAM during a trip to Berlin. Their graphical resemblance to De Stijl only serves to further enmesh these works, which I see as part of a wider path taken by the Century on its way to uncovering first multiplicity, then complexity. Computation only served to unmask the full potential of aleatory composition — which pre-dates the computer algorithm through so much modernist work — turning it from an anti-motif to an embedded technique ever-present in cultural production, latent in everything from auto-tune and granular synthesis to photography filters and film cgi.

The demise of the whole — as articulated by Deleuze (assemblages) and Badiou (being as inconsistent multiple) — could be considered the foundation of computer art. Computers, ever adept at exploring parameter spaces, are engines of multiplicity - they can't help but explore parametric multiples.

- Van Doesburg, Contra Construction. Maison Particulaire (1923)

If Van Doesburg was probing how architecture and visual abstraction could intertwine (a path culminating in parametric design), Mohr was making explicit how computers could express a new understanding of order through art. The decades that followed ‘Random Walks’ were dominated culturally by the twin paradigms of fragmentation and multiplicity, leading to a climate in which a benign visual complexity has emerged as a cliché of both the abstract (digital) arts and parametric architecture.

I began creating sketches using De Stijl principles at some stage along my readings, as both documentation and an exercise in encoding aesthetic knowledge, and these became a trigger for the production of a piece I call 'Markov Walks'.

I've been producing alterbots. They combine mimetic and stochastic tendencies. I feed them artworks, some my own, some from the history of art. These 'alterbots' draw for me. Their brains are based on markov chains: a probabilistic, memoryless scheme trained on input graphics. The bots use these chains to conduct graphical 'walks' on a canvas. They forget where they've been. They wander. They absorb aesthetic knowledge, encoded digitally, producing original work as they go along. They exhibit a markov uncanny redolent of twitterbots. I'm in a prolonged collaboration with them.

- Markov Walks (2012), teaching the alterbot to draw.

In Markov Walks I've produced a documentation of this trajectory from De Stijl to Random Walks, taking the axonometric schematics of the former, producing my own hand-drawn sketches and feeding them to my alterbot to produce a modern variant of the latter. I think of it as artist and algorithm working closely in a joint wandering, a form of 21st Century dérive through a period that shaped our present aesthetic sensibilities.

- Markov Walks (2012)

You can see the whole piece over at st.dio 012.

- Negri, Multitude (2004)

From Copernicus through Marx, Darwin, and Freud, we learned we are decentered beings, inhabiting a Universe of processes that happen whether we are aware of them or not, whether we name those processes 'astrophysics', 'economic relations', the 'unconscious', or 'evolution'. The correct but surprising conclusion to draw from ecological humiliation, however is not some form of nominalism or nihilism, but a politicised intimacy with other beings.

Out of an axiomatised interdependence theorem arise a number of concepts: hyperobjects (objects massively distributed in space and time, such as Climate or Styrene), strange strangers (our encounters with other beings are strangely strange), the mesh (entangled strangers) , dark ecology (“dark ecology is melancholic; melancholy is the Earth humour, and the residuum of our unbreakable psychic link with all life forms”).

All of this, of course, entails a radical debasing of Nature as essential substance; “the featureless remainder”, “an empty category looking for something to fill it”. [1]

I particularly like this,

Heidegger's environmentalism is a sad, fascist, stunted bonsai version, forced to grow in a tiny iron flowerpot by a cottage in the German Black Forest.

My notes on The Ecological Thought are here.

- Bruno Latour, in conversation with Anselm Franke. See Also: Latour on Digital Societies.

If music is prophesy — Exhibit A: Native Instruments. An incipient mode of production — digital fabrication — lurks behind the compositional signature. The spectre is a mode.

Beyond serial production: As an evolution of systems aesthetics, parametricism inhabits n dimensional phase-spaces. Computation opens up vast planes.

Identity as instance. Points in a trajectory as state. The primacy of the instance asserts: No art without instantiation.

Trajectories subject to the whim of singularity, attractor, catastrophe, bifurcation; the vortex pull of basins.

Tight clumps of symbols produce infinite domains. The instance and the wilderness of the parameter space beyond. Knob twiddlers forage in the undergrowth.

The parametric sublime is a vertigo of instantiation. Don't look down.