There is no freedom celebrated here. Everything
is deliberate, made to function within the same
constraints evoked by the materials: disease,
depression, fear, fever, bondage, torture, addiction,
the life of “a one-legged glowingly beautiful exwhore...” It’s a far cry from the corporate dream
of a cheerful interactivity which lets users choose,
not lose control... She isn’t making pictures: these
are diagrams. She isn’t an artist, but a software
engineer.
Opening
On view through
— Sadie Plant (Zeros and Ones)
Friday, June 15, 7–9pm
August 25, 2018
Tue–Sat, 12–5pm
Free and open to the public
Squeaky Wheel is proud to present the first
solo exhibition of media theorist/artist Yvette
Granata. The exhibition poses the concept
of a ‘post-cyberfeminist datum’ as a type
of data that has been banned in the future.
Works in the show include performance video
works, immersive 360 videos, AI devices in
conversation with each other, and more.
Join us on Friday, June 15th for the opening
reception of the exhibition at Squeaky Wheel
at 7pm. A newly commissioned essay in
response to Granata’s work by scholar Bogna
M. Konior accompanies the exhibition.
1
Public programs presented
as part of this exhibition
June 15
7–9pm
Opening reception, with Yvette Granata
in conversation with Executive Director,
Maiko Tanaka at 7:30pm.
June 29
7pm
Performance: XENOYOGA((I REALLY
WANT SOME)) by DJ xenoyoga.
July 6
9pm
Augmented Reality Tour with Yvette
Granata at secret site.
August 18 3pm
Curator’s Tour of #d8e0ea with
Ekrem Serdar.
Visit squeaky.org for more info.
S QU
WH
L
EE
Squeaky Wheel
Film & Media Art Center
617 Main St.
Buffalo, NY
Y
EAK
squeaky.org
Can we exploit the fact that our technosocial systems suck? Or is the future
already prescribed by the obsessive
intrusion of social media platforms,
machine recognition bias, and the AI
arms race to come?
Data is no longer just captured; it is
used to predict a particular slice of the
future, to move beyond the 180 degree
limit of human linear space-time. Social
intelligence is now energy intelligence.
Everyone is a data farm. Machine learning systems consume vasts amount of
data in order to learn the decisional arc
of human-mindsteps. But are we building data walls that make intel-silos? Are
we building AI assistant gender-tyrants?
Are recognition systems making us into
boring products for a shelf? What can
we do with the empty silos of this data
wasteland?
The show thinks through these questions by positing (and depositing) a
cyberfeminist data form. It imagines
electronic torture chambers in the future used for the policing of data-bodies
and poses the concept of a post-cyberfeminist datum as a type of data that has
already been banned in the future. From
the age of technological reproduction to
the age of data reduction, the topology
of cyber-feminist data bytes are an
endless VR day, confined and trapped
already.
Works include: a webVR essay that
explores Google’s Machine Vision API
in a fictional cyberfeminist design office, a series of dead drops that contain
intersectional cryptographic syn-sets for
machine learning models for training
future non-targets (human-bots and/
or creatures-fems and/or slime-minds),
a cyberfem sound sculpture of an AI
named ‘Evie’ in conversation with Siri
and Alexa (broadcast on the sidewalk),
and a secret exploration of a possible
factory.
#d8e0ea thinks through a possible
fall-out shelter for social intelligence,
a new information ontology that respins humans and data, and performs
an interface of a zero a user-experience.
— Yvette Granata
2
Ancestral Cyberspace:
On the Technics of Secrecy
By Bogna M. Konior
buried and its practitioners eliminated
that a post-cyberfeminist must engage
in the excavation, encoding and decoding of data-corpses, buried in wet soil of
the earth and in the knots of submarine
“Hiding the self through a faithful
communication cables.
mapping of the universe is the only
Decrypting ancestral secrecy trade
path to eternity.”
— Cixin Liu and a cyberfeminist ancestry, one might
find the corpse of Caterina Sforza, the
It was women’s fingers that enfolded the progenitrix of the Medici family and one
data-corpse into the fabric of the world. of the women who defined the burgeoning scientific culture of the Italian ReSadie Plant tells us that these fingers
naissance. Remembered for her military
are like a spider’s spinnerets, extrudgenius and personal bravado (in response
ing digital silk, weaving the history of
networked technology, which at its core to an enemy threatening her with the
death of her children, she grabbed her
is a cunning practice of emasculation:
crotch and retorted that she could easily
‘cyberspace is out of man’s control, [it]
make more), she held a keen interest in
destroys his identity...at the peak of
the trading of secrets, especially perhis triumph, the culmination of his
taining to natural philosophy, medicine
machinic erections, man confronts the
and alchemy. In Daughters of Alchemy,
system he built for his own protection
Meredith Ray describes the specular
and finds it female and dangerous.’ For
economy of secrecy in the early modern
Plant, man sentenced himself to annihilation when he let the feminine hydra Italy, where secrets circulated in letters,
of digital technology out of its black box. manuscripts—libri di segreti—and through
Now, it is everywhere, slyly completing word of mouth. Secrets were a valued
gift and a fitting expression of loyalty.
its task.
This arcane internet was a netCyberfeminism is an occult form
of warfare. It understands about ‘cyber- worked web of secrets, where the exchange of occult data between women
space’ what Cixin Liu’s ‘dark forest’
formed a clandestine practice of science.
theory understands about the cosmos:
From beauty recipes to alchemical atall existence is determined by hostility
tempts at the transmutation of matter
and so the highest form of intelligence
into gold (believed to mirror the formlies in occluding one’s coordinates. The
ing of a fetus in the womb), Sforza’s
hypothesis explains why the universe,
research into concealed knowledge
statistically full of life, is dead silent.
It is not because, as is commonly thought, served her in military, intellectual and
political endeavors. In her notebooks,
life has not found a way to communinever intended for publication, she
cate, but because it understands that
recorded recipes for poisons distilled
silence is the most advanced form of
from scorpion venom as well as inintelligence. Our physical and virtual
structions for concealing written text
spaces, which are increasingly insepwith slowly disappearing, ‘invisible’ ink.
arable, are alike a dark forest, where
This non-formal practice of science was
every step must be taken with care, as
a way of interacting with the unknown
revealing one’s existence portends annot for its presupposed sanctity but its
nihilation. The most desirable skill, the
pragmatic utility.
most coveted trick, and the most longed
Secrets, Ray writes, were synonyfor disposition can only be this—a fluency in the trading of secrets. The skills we mous with experimentation, ‘referring
need to strategically deploy concealment, not to something unknown but rather to
something that was proven.’ The most
de-concealment and re-concealment.
prized secrets were those that, when
In this secrecy lies a genealogy of
deployed, produced the desired results.
a post-cyberfeminism that always has
A post-cyberfeminist secret is the provbeen: an ancestral politics of cyberen unknown that loses none of its stealth:
space. Any feminism is a practice of
a secret is the instruction built for calgenealogy but also of desecration—so
culated obfuscation, a mechanism of
much technical knowledge has been
encryption. Books of secrets, Ray tells
us, could be deciphered according to a
‘generic code,’ meant for distinguishing
valuable information from mere noise.
Reading, writing, and circulating libri
di segreti was a form of data analysis,
a structural technique of (de)classifying
information, contingent on maintaining
the balance between obfuscation and
analysis.
This cryptic practice of science was
also an alternate economy. Secrets were
a non-monetary currency used to establish debt and political influence. This
specular economy of occluded knowledge built extended social, technical
and publishing networks between
women during the Scientific Revolution. Camilla Erculiani, an apothecary
from Padua, attracted the attention of
the Inquisition for her visibly public
contribution to the scientific community and her heretical interpretation
of theology. She later found protection with Anna Jagiellon, the queen
of Poland, herself an intellectual and
a potion mistress. Women’s work is a
priori heretical by the very fact of its
existence. Secrecy thus becomes a necessary form, both in the web of political
life and in the approach to technology
and knowledge. Post-cyberfeminist
data is a priori banned in the future
and exists in a banished land. Predicting its own illegality, it nevertheless
codes a possibility: une autre fin du
monde est possible (another end of the
world is possible), as an anonymous
French graffiti recently proclaimed.
What post-cyberfeminist data has been
already imprisoned in the future?
Erculiani’s interest was in the material fabric of the world: ‘the causes of
the universal deluge, the composition of
rainbows.’
Among Caterina’s medicinal recipes [were]
a number of distilled waters, unguents,
and elixirs produced through alchemical
procedures such as multiplication, a kind of
progressive distillation whereby a substance
assumes greater and more diverse powers
during the course of preparation.
Encrypting data could be for a postcyberfeminism a pata-political model.
Just like pata-physics is a science of the
imaginary realm beyond philosophical
metaphysics, pata-politics is a political
Squeaky Wheel’s exhibition programs,
residencies and events are made
possible with generous support by the
County of Erie and County Executive
Mark Poloncarz, the National
Endowment of the Arts, the New York
State Council on the Arts with the
support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo
and the New York State Legislature,
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the
Visual Arts, and individual members,
businesses, and supporters. Special
thank you to Paradise Wine.
Squeaky Wheel is certified by Working
Artists and the Greater Economy.
Yvette Granata would like to thank:
Department of Media Study, Teri
Rueb, Tero Karppi, Paige Sarlin, Bogna
Konior, Carl Spartz, Sophia Yung, Kate
Gaudy, Andrew Blanton, Shane Farrell,
Halbe Kuipers, Joevenn Neo, and
Nitasha Dhillon. A special thanks to my
parents and my brother. A big thank
you to Ekrem Serdar, Maiko Tanaka,
and Squeaky Wheel.
science of the coming data-wasteland,
beyond current political practices.
Treated as non-existent and excluded from history, women’s technology
endures both in its erased past and its
banned future. These technologies do
not promise liberation—they instead
assure our survival. Post-cyberfeminist data is a type of camouflage: an
ancestral practice now augmented and
automated with algorithmic technologies. From its genealogy of secrecy
into the future, it mutates and updates
itself: what once was a book of secrets
now becomes machine vision, a camera
for algorithmic secrecy.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
4
Evans, Claire L. Broad Band: The Untold Story
of Women Who Made the Internet. Portfolio,
2018.
A web VR essay that explores machine vision in
a fictional cyberfeminist design ofice that creates new models of vision within a post-data silo
world. Part immersive essay, part 360 desktop
documentary, Womxn with a Google API draws
analogy to Dziga Vertov’s film, Man with a Movie
Camera (1929), which posed the camera as its
own perceptual machine as it moved through
the landscape of the city. Womxn with a Google
API instead moves across the landscape of
modeling systems of our current and future
vision machines. The visitor sits at a computer.
It is a regular day, a quotidian moment of sifting
through open tabs on the desktop. You are
the Womxn with a vision API, exploring the
machinic algorithm as a place itself—a spatial
environment in which the algorithm has become
a place to inhabit.
Drawing upon a year of my own interaction
with Google’s vision API and machine learning
vision models, it imagines how current data silos
and data control afects machine vision of the
future and speculates what other models might
be used for training instead. This visual landscape is not invented. It has been woven together by Google’s recognition categories, just like
the fabric of Jacquard looms that inspired Ada
Lovelace to conceive of the infinite possibilities
of textile patterns as algorithms.
Liu, Cixin. The Dark Forest. Translated by Joel
Martinsen. Tor Books, 2015.
1. Womxn with a Google API, 20 minutes,
HD video, 2018
2. #d8e0ea, jump drives with data-sets,
glass, clay, 2018.
Ray, Meredith. Daughters of Alchemy: Women
and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy.
Harvard University Press, 2015.
Plant, Sadie. On The Matrix: The Cyberculture
Reader. Edited by David Bell and Barbara
Kennedy. Psychology Press, 2000.
WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION
3
A series of data-sets and models that were
trained for various future scenarios of possible
data emergencies. In the event of the AI apocalypse, whereby killer robots aim for their targets
based on current recognition categories for
humans, these data-sets subvert current identity categories and human-machine categories.
They can be broken in case of a data emergency,
and used for aiding in the reprogramming of
machine recognition systems gone awry.
Due to the increasing policing of what is
accessible online, these data sets are made
available ofline. They exist in the event that
there is a large scale server farm meltdown
and AI take-over in the near future. Such a
scenario is not far fetched. Access to large data
sets are already limited to a few conglomerate
companies such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook. The free flow of data for machine learning
continues to be further limited due to the repeal
of Net Neutrality, which will greatly restrain machine learning information, especially image and
video data. #d8e0ea thinks through a future in
which the training of new machine recognition
models have been banned in the future, where
only proprietary companies have the right to
produce recognition for machines.
#d8e0ea jump drives each contain a
diferent data set and a diferent trained model
for various future scenarios. They can be used
for training future non-targets. The machine
vision models include data-sets that either
restore or destroy visual recognition categories
of humans (based on Google’s vision API).
ABOUT THE ARTISTS AND CONTRIBUTORS
Yvette Granata is a media artist and Phd
Candidate at SUNY Bufalo in the Department
of Media Study. Her work intersects new media
art-research, design, theory, and philosophy. She explores techno-philosophical and
socio-political technology, non-philosophy,
cyberfeminism and feminist media tech art
practice. She has presented her work at the
Harvard Carpenter Center for the Arts, The Eye
Film Institute in Amsterdam, The Kunsthalle
in Detroit, Papy Gyro Nights in Norway and
Hong Kong, and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts
Center and Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Arts
Center in Bufalo, among others. Her film design
work has appeared on screens at the Sundance
film festival, Tribeca film festival, Rotterdam,
There are reverse models that likewise label
computers as humans, creatures, and blood
donors—diverting which images are labeled as
either ‘human-person’ or ‘computer-person’ or
‘fembot’ or ‘friend-simulation.' Another model
creates a transhuman chimera, meshing images
of humans and creatures and computers into
‘bot-slime’ or ‘slime-god.’ Directions are included
on each drive.
3. XDDDDDDD, 3 minutes, HD video,
2017–2018
Computer vision recognition systems are highly
robust—in certain ways. When looking at a 2-D
image of faces, of objects, of letters, computer
vision can ‘see’ the details across every pixel
in the same resolution. The data-sets used to
prime machine vision make certain recognition
systems sensitive to particular information.
While on the one hand, this makes it a strong
search tool, on the other hand such robustness
often makes computer recognition overly sensitive to the ‘wrong information’—or produces a
type of cyber-synesthesia.
XDDDDDDD accompanies #d8e0ea data
sets, and scrolls through my search for finding
vulnerabilities in cyber-synesthesia and recognition categories. For example, #d8e0ea is the
hexadecimal number for a pale blue color that
confuses Google vision’s API, that I found while
testing the readability of diferent text colors.
Iridescent objects cause problems for machine
recognition. And strings of letters become
visually synthetic strings of images.
XDDDDDDD is an exploration and testing of
cyber-synesthesia for weak spots.
Cannes, Berlinale, the Rome International Film
Fest, SXSW, and CPH:PIX. She has published in
Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy Journal, TRACE:
Journal of Writing, Media, and Ecology, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, and
the International Journal of Cultural Studies.
She received a NYS Council of the Arts Grant
in 2017 and was a visiting researcher at the
Senselab at Concordia, where she developed
some of the work included in the current exhibit.
See more at yvettegranata.com
Squeaky Wheel is located on
Haudenosaunee land and honors
the sovereignty of the Six Nations—
Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga,
Oneida, Seneca, and Tuscarora. This
acknowledgement does not rectify
the on-going violence of settler
colonialism, but is rather meant to
cultivate an unsettling awareness
of its persistence, towards building
reconciliation.
Executive Director
Maiko Tanaka
Curator
Ekrem Serdar
Technical Director
Mark Longolucco
Installer
Katherine Gaudy
Director of Education
Kevin Kline
Education Coordinator
Martina LaVallo
Accountant
Brenda Smith
Curatorial Intern
Mackenzie Karwas
Design
Chris Lee
4. Zero UX (Evie part 1), 11 minutes, HD video/
3-D scans, 2017–2018
Zero UX (zero user experience) is a ‘behind the
scenes’ making of an AI assistant named ‘Evie.'
Evie is an amalgam of 3-D point cloud data from
body scans, social media data, syn-sets, and
performance videos. She is the product of a
fictional cyberfem design ofice. Evie appears
as a pitch for ‘zero user experience’—an AI
assistant that not only moves to the background
of your day to day activities, but also replaces
your interactions with the world. Whereas the
current idea of ‘Zero User Interface’ implies
a screen-less, invisible user interface that AI
assistants such as Alexa bring to the table, Zero
User Experience with Evie replaces the user
entirely. Evie experiences the world for the user.
Your data-body becomes her.
5. Womxn with a Google API (mobile version),
webVR, 3-D prints, 2018
WINDOW GALLERY
Hello Evie, AI assistant sound sculpture,
Alexa, Siri, HD video, 2018
Hello Evie is a concept sound sculpture of the
AI assistant prototype ‘Evie’ in conversation
with Siri and Alexa. The sculpture is distributed
across Amazon servers, Alexa skills, Siri, mobile
networks, the web, and Squeaky Wheel’s front
window. Occasionally, Evie sends a text message to the Womxn With a Google API piece on
display in the gallery space of the exhibit.
Bogna M. Konior is the Media and Technology
editor at the Hong Kong Review of Books and
the director of the Institute for Critical Animal
Studies, Asia. She holds a Research Masters in
Media Studies, a PhD in Cultural Analysis and
was a visiting researcher in Media and Culture
at the ICON Center for the Humanities at the
University of Utrecht. Her recent work in media
cultures and the Anthropocene is published in
Transformations: Journal of Media and Culture
and forthcoming in PostMemes from Punctum
Press. She is the Polish translator of the Xenofeminist Manifesto. Her curatorial and collaborative work exploring theory in the Anthropocene
has been exhibited internationally and can be
viewed at bognamk.com.
FILM & MEDIA ART CENTER
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Phone
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