Okay, warmly welcome everyone to this lecture today organized by the seed box, Mr. Formas Environmental Humanities Collaboratory. And for those of you who don't know, the Seedbox is an international research program consisting of a consortium of 13 universities with a base here at Linköping University. The program is funded by Mista and Formas and its initial phase, the one we're in now, runs from 2015 to 2019.
Part of the Seedbox is an extensive visiting scholars and residencies program which includes a number of visits from distinguished professors, postdocs, PhDs and artists. And in this month of May we are honoured to have as a visiting professor Matthew Fuller from Goldsmiths at the University of London. Matthew is a writer and artist and a professor of cultural studies as well as director of the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths. Since the 1990s he has explored and written extensively on the intersections between art cultural practices everyday life and technical media and not least digital media both in a scholarly and theoretical
and a more artistic vein what one might say for instance he's been a pioneer in the quite recently established field of software studies and he has engaged in practically oriented work in media design and has collaborated with numerous contemporary designers and artists and artist collectives. Right now he is, for example, engaged in a project together with architect E.L. Weissmann, known for his work in so-called forensic architecture. Matthew's many essays and books traverse a field that one might describe as media theory or media studies or perhaps better media ecology to use the term from one of his most important
publications media ecologies materialist energies and art and techno culture which came out at mit already in 2005 and was i should say decisive in the rejuvenation of this concept or term once coined in the post-war culture of the 60s and today functioning as a kind of critical crucial critical probe for the investigation of contemporary environments and nature cultures since then a number of works have been published and distributed such as evil media from 2012 written together with andrew goffey and how to be a geek essays on the culture of software which came out last year the most recent volume however is this one that i'm showing you here
with the captivating title how to sleep something that engages us all of course and a subtitle the art biology and cultures of unconsciousness which came out of Bloomsburg this year it is a great pleasure and honor to welcome Matthew here today to share with us a lecture under the justice fascinating title investigative aesthetics. So please. Okay, thank you, Jesper. Thanks. Yeah, thanks. All of you coming and taking your time to listen to this. I hope it's of interest. And there were a chance to discuss afterwards. What I want to propose really is a way of thinking about
aesthetics in a kind of wider sense, in a way that record that kind of echoes some of the moves in contemporary art and contemporary culture more broadly. First of all, I want to kind of thank the community here at Linköping and Tema Yenos at the Seed Box, the staff and postdocs and PhD students here who've been incredibly welcoming and it's been great to be here and have a chance to develop this work. But I do mention it's work that I'm developing, so it's a work in progress. Some of it may, as I'm kind of working through, I'm giving you a set of sections of a short book that I'm writing with Eyal, as Jesper mentioned.
And so some of it is slightly unfinished or subject to questions, so I'm really looking forward to your feedback. and that means you all have to be extremely brilliant, of course, so no pressure or anything. But, yeah, I'm interested in feedback and questions about the status of the argument or the kind of mode of particular sections of the argument. The book is a short one, and it's made via a number of kind of quite prismatic lines of inquiry, So there are several series of shorter sub essays within it that try and address different facets of the question.
I think part of the part of the thing we're interested in is really, as you'll see, this kind of mode of argument that moves backwards and forwards from different between different epistemic frames and kind of sees a jostling between different modes of interpretation. as key to what we're interested in. So the work is developed with E.L. Weissman, who's an architect, or rather a kind of post-architect, someone who works with architectural techniques, tools, frameworks, methods, in order to do other things than build buildings or paper architecture.
His work has been for a long time engaged with human rights and more recently kind of ecological questions, specifically as they pertain to human rights, and has had a long kind of engagement with the questions of the built environment and architecture as they pertain specifically to the way in which the conflict in Israel-Palestine has been kind of established maintained and prolonged. How architecture relates to human rights, how architecture relates to law, to warfare and so on. More recently his work has been worked
through this agency forensic architecture which attempts to use a kind toolkit of primarily architectural or post architectural techniques to look at specific events, crimes, human rights abuses, murders and so on in order to address new modes of knowledge and new forms of counter knowledge. So the question of the forensic has always caught up with the question of the counter forensic, how to untangle an official story, how to pull the loose threads from out of a particular kind of fabric that has been pulled over an
event. So some of that will also come through this kind of work, is what's the relationship between how to make a proposition, how to make an argument, how to elicit an argument around the truth, how to establish a relationship to fact. This question of fact, I think, is a crucial one in a sense that there are recent claims that the field of the ecological or feminist post-humanitist has nothing to do with the question of realism or of fact. What we're interested in this argument is to try and make
a counter-claim that fact can be arrived at by different modalities of knowledge. Some of these we want to extract from or to work with from the arts, architecture, art, and so on in order to make these these kind of claims so rather than get caught up in the kind of realism versus broadly speaking critical thinking mode we want to make some some propositions that are derived directly from this these kinds of experiences So we're interested in developing the mode of knowledge for the arts and humanities.
So what is in the contemporary university, contemporary knowledge politics, what is the status of the kind of knowledge that can be made? What kind of claims to truth can be asserted by artists and others? and these kind of questions about what constitutes relationship to truth shift over the passage of historical time and we think there are certain tendencies in the present that allow us to propose some new considerations around the question of knowledge of fact and the mode of arriving at that fact those set of facts which we call investigation.
So that's the kind of preamble. I'm going to start reading just so you know that I'm a proper humanities scholar. I'm going to read a paper rather than, you know, think freely. So at the heart of this talk is the proposition that aesthetics is about making sense. in the double meaning of the term, both as a way of exploring new sensory modes, new senses, and also about the production of knowledge. These two kinds of aesthetics are not reducible to each other, so the aesthetics of sensation, of sense, and aesthetics as making sense are not necessarily reducible, but they have some interesting sensual
and practical overlaps. Further, we want to propose that aesthetics has something significant to do in relationship to questions of investigation, that is, put simply, finding out the facts of a matter. Given these two considerations, our proposition is that a mode of aesthetic practices is emerging that expands our understanding of aesthetics into what we want to call an investigative aesthetics. Okay, so this, as I said, this lecture is built around a number of kind of micro essays in a sense. One of these draws on work around contemporary re-readings of Whitehead in relationship to
the question of sense. So one of the key texts that we're interested in is this book by Jennifer Gabri's Programme Earth. And we want to think about aesthetics beyond straightforward human perception. So aesthetics, what we're calling aesthetics beyond perception. Aesthetics in the investigative sense does not occupy a wholly different domain than epistemology. It's not a distortion or a subversion of true, unmediated knowledge, but in fact a key way into, perhaps a sole way into, knowledge. Just like matter, plants or software processes, we can know the world as we perceive it to be, which is often very limited.
limited. The aesthetics we seek to account for then is not based on observations in the ocular sense or necessarily on any human senses but rather on a prosthetic and composite form of sensorial aesthetics. As Jennifer Gabris argues in her book Program Earth, to sense is a networked business that is composed from a multiplicity of different proximate and remote senses in in the air, ground, and space. The aesthetic sensing always a part of a massive composition that requires ways of registering and processing phenomena from networks of weather stations to forms of machine sensing that are beyond immediate human perception,
that are based in the processing of vast amounts of data, to the sensual world of plants and physical substances, buildings, the earth itself. The act of composing material coming from different senses bypasses the very idea of an image. Rather, it's partially code-to-code communication that assembles and composes fragments. And I'll go on to discuss the kind of question of translation that is implied by and required by these forms of communication. It's now obvious that the investigative mode does not simply distrust the sensorium in the manner kind of typical of critical theory, but seeks to augment, radicalise and network
compose it. And here's the catch. In doing so, it also needs all the illuminations it can muster from years of critical training, the critique of representation, the analysis of media, in defining its limitations, what is perceived and what escapes representation. The debate about truth is thus no longer bound to the question of distrusting representations, we can think back to the kind of debate around hermeneutics of suspicion, for instance, or of peeling them off, but becomes that of assembling what we want to call fragile truths. And I'll get onto that in a bit. First of all, aesthetics. This is somewhat deprecated,
simultaneously adored form of knowledge. Aesthetics is both excluded from real power. The artist is unreliable, is a double agent, working for themselves as well as for the stabilization of order. At the same time, as power is saturated, with the operations of aesthetics. Because a political aesthetics renders visible the assumed naturalization of certain kinds of power and the modes of sensing and making sense that constitute them. This condition of being pushed to the side also involves being held up as being a figure of the highest value as the flower of a culture
in a way that will be familiar to women. This second condition, if it can be survived, potentially gives aesthetic work a means of surprise, a tangential line of attack, or the ability to gently suffuse a condition with its workings until perhaps, and the odds are not great, it can no longer be withstood. Complexifying this condition is that aesthetics and the various disciplines and fields that work on it has never been a simply utilitarian form of activity. It works because it always had a surplus, even when it's most focused on achieving an end. This has made it untrustworthy to the players of structures
such as law, heavily codified with relations between means and ends and the observance of rules. So what's the investigation? And how does its definition get affected by its encounter with aesthetics. Investigation is a mode of inquiry that is different from not, but not antagonistic to the standard mode of critical inquiry. Investigative aesthetics comes to designate a descriptive rather than reflective type of inquiry aimed at the production of truths. Its proposition seems obvious and self-evident. Research is about interrogating the world.
The orientation towards the truth is a challenge because the investigative mode's commitment to it pushes it in the opposite direction to the critical mode suspicion of everything passing under the label of truth. Both of these modes of inquiry depend on a different way of describing the world. The critical mode conjures a worldview that is somewhat geological, composed of stratigraphic layers in which observable surface phenomena exposed to the senses hide layers of obfuscated subterranean forces. These forces are powerful precisely because they're buried and invisible.
The obfuscating layers are variably understood as surfaces of representations such as media. Critical analytical schemas like psychoanalysis, Marxism, or Nietzschean-Foucauldian analysis of power, and then more recent derivatives in architectural, digital, and media theories, are archaeological in the sense of engaging with a careful peeling of the surface layers to discover hidden truths of, say, class struggle, the unconscious, the death drive, the will to power, surveillance or ideology lurking dangerously in the depths. The archaeologists of the critical mode must be suspicious of the visible layers of representation
and mediations. However, the truth that the critical mode seeks to carefully excavate it is always pre-existing, object-like and pre-formed, though it must never be fully intact. It is perhaps analogous to a marble statue, buried under compacted layers of soil, hands and nose broken off, colour worn away, but still containing the basis of an ideal shape. To be studied, this object must be exposed, but at other times it should be destroyed. Here, critique functions like a harpoon that pierces the sensible surface, tears through layers of representation and mediatisation
on its way to strike at what is moving in the depths. To move with critique, but beyond its limits, it's thus not enough to disavow its methods, but primarily to reimagine the world. In the image of the world conjured up by the investigative mode, the stratigraphy of surfaces is not understood as a hierarchy starting from a real that's gradually distorted, blurred or diluted by layers of representations. Instead, all layers are simultaneously both presence and representation, matter and media all the way down. All material formations, organic or inorganic,
are media representations in the sense that they're embedded within and imprinted by proximate and remote forces. In this, they imagine their environment, but they also have a physical presence in the world in the sense that one can crash against them. The top surface exposed to the senses is just like any other surface, as goes for the deep reality of lower ones. I want to talk about this question of fragile truths. We draw specifically from the work of Isabel Stengers on this kind of work. Obviously another reader of Whitehead along with Gabri's.
So it's a kind of constellation of texts as well as specific examples I wanna talk about here. Amongst the political mechanisms of the world today, truth is not simply a fortress occupied by hegemonic power, but rather a political construct with its own multifarious inclinations that needs to withstand an onslaught by all sorts of objections, deniers and falsifiers that are now called fake news, as if this were a novelty, a new phase. Corporations and governments through techniques as varied as controlling access to satellite imaging and the deployment of information mining
limit knowledge of the surface of the real, what can be represented, known, disputed, proven at all scales from the individual pixel to the vast agglomerations of big data. The political issues of our time challenge us to investigate differently. And when one faces a constructed truth as a means of political control, we must reach again for critique. We need it and to use its toolbox as a means to trace obfuscations, decoys, proxies, ruses, and straightforward lies, but also to recognise truth fabricating powers. Facts need to be worked at.
They are fragile in relationship to the discourses and instruments by which they become visible and tractable. The institutions and instruments that discover and clarify them, the cultural forms that articulate and test them, They need defence as well as questioning. In an expanded form, critical approaches allow for the recognition of the multiplicity of forces acting on and through events and sensible things, of the aggregation of reality through translations and mediations that include ideological, cultural and political forces. The investigative mode is not a rejection or a surpassing of critique, but extends it with the ability to establish facts, not only destroy them through a revelation of how they are constructed.
this means that we recognize that ideas including discourses that have become digitally programmatic have the capacity to produce effects and interpretations in distinct ways these may combine as assemblages with forces and substances that in turn are more readily mapped by, say, thermodynamic or mechanic description, and without reducing these to mere formulae. Indeed, that these things are intertwined and come with their idiomatic limits and constraints, for instance, one can't simply believe things into being
other than those beliefs, means that the aesthetic of an investigation is crucial in its capacity to form relations with, including inquiries into, other scales of reality. Political struggles today therefore require both the demolition and the establishment of facts and putative facts, candidate facts. This is because if you know how to build them, you know how also to dismantle them. The combined power is to destroy and create, and thus intervene within the differential of power. Investigative aesthetics thus seeks to reflect on facts and figurations, critically assessing their foundations and uncovering their genealogies, but also to elicit, produce and compose new
facts and then mobilise them in the world in the production and destruction of others. Investigative aesthetics must thus combine the roles of the projective capacity of the architect or artist with that of the nosy investigative journalist. Underlying this conjoint mode is the recognition of mediation which is a general condition of aesthetics. It's also one of facticity in the instruments and ideas about facts as well as flows of information of various kinds are required in order to establish and test them. This work always involves transformation. What Michel Sayre calls translation in the book we have here.
Becoming fact requires transitions, the observance and observation of the thresholds and consistencies of such translations. Eliciting facts requires the invention and deployment of sensorial mediations, attuned to catch and to count them as part of the process of the genesis of fact. Computational media and the greater generality of art renders this condition more plastic and multi-layered. Software cultures as a contemporary expanding condition of recording and noise creation reorient our understanding and matters of fact more widely. Approaches that are simultaneously both digital
and materialist are required techniques that are able to move whilst recognising the transitions across technologies, languages, ideas, economies, architectures, substances, representations and the stuff that makes the world. Such approaches allow for a combination that sees how abstractions, such as numbers or ideas, conjugate with or fail to gain traction on other kinds of substance, such as sensing devices. That knowledge arises in coupling with social forces that may partially divulge themselves in chemical residues
or in metadata means that we can work with abstractions, with cultures, with different kinds of substances as part of the same composition, and to use the tools of critique to trace and differentiate amongst them. To return to the figure of the archaeologist, how does it work today in the investigative mode? Crucially, the figure-ground relation is less straightforward. Whilst the art is still in recognizing the figures in the ground, the truth that we seek may not be the suggestive fragmentary remains of an elegant figure. It may be only the dust itself.
The real is not simply buried as an object or a concept, like our handless and noseless marble statue that is hidden but more or less intact under layers of compact earth. That is to say, our problem today is not one of exposing a given reality behind layers of representation, operating like a geological stratigraphy or a set of distorted mirrors. Rather, it's the necessity to reconstruct a possible occluded reality fragmented in millions of specks of dust. how from impulverised fragments can facts be recomposed in and amidst all their possible latent forms what does one need to be able to invert figure and ground and analyse the composition of grains
of sand or fine particles of dust to sort all variations of marble forms that could exist all possible sitters that could have been. To some, this sorting of all particles of dust is a merely computational problem. It's one that exists within a mechanistic universe with well-behaved dust of known properties. But what is archaeology when the geological layers to be peeled away are themselves products of human culture, compacting themselves as an ecology of technologies actively configuring their environment. The investigative tools of today may even be the means by which power both operates and can be confronted.
Leaks, false flag information, algorithmic prediction, hacking, open source research scouring through social media, automation, artificial intelligence, algorithmic real-time analysis. What is in common to these is that in order to uncover the real, we must make the real. You must bring it into being rather than understand it as existing and needing discovery. And here's another catch. The real nature of institutions of power comes into being in contact with its decoders rather than existing somewhere in latent form. Investigative aesthetics thus proposes working with materials of data, apparatuses, testimony, recordings, measurements, but also with falsifications.
Attempts by powerful institutions to create sense-clogging dust, like a squid produces ink, that are generated in response. All of these can be pulled together in triangulating the particles of dust kicked up in the melees around fragile truths. In order for cities as well as statues to be sifted out from the ground, in order for the people who were buried within them, their ruins to step forward and speak, aesthetic nuance and practices of figuration and attention to the minutest networks of detail are needed. So let's take a step back. What are investigations? How did we get there? And what are investigations and the people that undertake them?
There are multiple figures and investigation. One of those they often revolve around is the dual figure of the individual as opposed to that of the organisation. the crime drama and the detective novel the police procedural and the tale of the righteous renegade the maverick and the mass ranks of the earnest and rule observing party members the individual is the eye or in the case of our collaborator and artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan who has developed the field of audio investigations, we can say that it's also a private ear. The private eye is the private one,
the idiosyncratic entity. The office is the figure of the bureaucracy of knowledge that works by a molar amassing of data and connections between it. Where the office follows up all good leads in parallel, amassing and sifting to let nothing go amiss, the eye zigzags across the city on the basis of intuition. The eye's damaged cogito causes tangential insight that allows them to arrive at a glimmer of a clue. Hierarchical, observant and relentless, the office is the figure of the production and acquisition of knowledge that is slow and reliable, that is able to tabulate, track,
and cross-reference multiple positions, that does things by the book to outwit, by sheer force of numbers, the propensity for brilliant rookie errors. Another figuration of this duality can be found in the world of physics. The collective knowledge culture of institutions such as CERN versus the loners of the winning formula reached in moments of beatitudinous insight. In their dreams, the police operate in the Fordy's factory of facts. The private eye operates by stitching together the stray and splintered synapses of the city and of the polis. But this duality is fragmented into a range of other figures of investigation.
Agents for the intelligence service freelance at the weekend in order to pay their ambitious mortgages. Special Forces operatives take early retirement and do consultancy gigs Fatigued soldiers go on holidays across the border Maverick operators provide plausible deniability to state operations And renegades move into offices to generalise their methods Arms-length inquiries provide pivot points for assets that may or may not yield use in the future information. Informational derivatives hedge the result of the use of gossip, tip-offs, leaks, recordings, ghosting, blackmail, malware, disinformation and surveillance.
The recent Trump dossier, assembled from a series of memos by a British intelligence agent turned freelancer, provides a condensed sample of kinds of sources. Here, the fruits of investigation include notes on claims to the existence of Compromat. Short remarks on hacking teams, leaks, bugged conversations, bribes and payments via real estate interests and pensions show the mix of age-old and newer techniques. Information comes by the milking of assets and contacts, back doors introduced into IT systems, tip-offs, back-channel reports. The interception of communications provides validation of the techniques of those who emphasize the secret
but there is also the building up of an atmosphere of indicators. Much of this work relates to classic shoe-leather journalism or detective work asking direct questions to persons able to verify or falsify a supposition or line of inquiry. This is work that relies both on doggedness and non-linear effects, the idea that a string will be pulled at some point, that we'll wrench the drapery from our eyes and reveal the truth. Observation and inquiry may also be combined with harassment, disinformation campaigns and violent control by private contractors and subcontractors hired to provide security and information or by state agencies.
The outsourcing of state functions has epistemic effects. When chains of command and renewals of contract come into play, intelligence reports may be laced with marketing and self-aggrandisement, rendering such documents noisy and unreliable. in a different way than they might be simply from the tropes of self-aggrandisement and indifference that haunt the dossiers of the state in the bureaucratic mode. Equally, certain contractors may come with optics sourced from prior experience. They may see less of a society and more of a theatre of operations. Intelligence and monitoring reports may be heavily laced with misconstruals derived from a framing
reducing all contexts to a reduced military playbook. This might lead to problems of the overstatement of threats that can be interpreted as either cynical or stupid. The techniques and vocabulary of imperialist counterinsurgency learned in the US Army by a mercenary startup called TigerSwan, one of a number trying to angle a slice of this kind of lucrative business, were applied to civil demonstrations, for instance, those against the Dakota Access Pipeline last year. These demonstrations were treated by TigerSwan as quote unquote insurgencies with significant consequences for interpretation and action.
The previous counterintelligence program of the United States running from the fifties to the 1970s readily mixed blackmail, disinformation, assassination, abundant use of informants and the framing of activists as informants with the gathering of what could pass in the lugubrious mayhem as intelligence. Outsourcing illegalities and repression, like other kinds of public-private partnership with revolving door recruitment and a comradely sharing of information is a matter of course here. Now we want to talk about a facet of the argument that we want to think about media. So the epistemic politics of outsourcing and the kind of proxification of intelligence that we find with outfits such as Tiger Swan has one set of epistemic and aesthetic consequences.
A more classical understanding of this can also be understood through addressing media. Tied to all of this, there's a potent media history of policing that feeds into and provides the organs of its history of investigation. The USA's Federal Bureau of Investigation was one of the first forces that used the power of bureaucracy. The techniques of observing, inquiring, writing, filing, keeping and cross-referencing reports that they developed, established the procedure as a key actor. An agent was to be an asset to the procedure, memorious, full of rectitude and loyalty to the director,
a machine part. Such components worked alongside the 1920s development of techniques such as bugging, using miniature radios to listen in on the locales of suspects or potential rivals. The rise of telephones established the easy analog capacity for telephone eavesdropping and logging. And such techniques rank alongside fingerprinting, mug shots and sensors taking in developing machining capabilities for the dual movements that characterize modern biopolitics. One of both individualizing and identifying an entity such as a suspect, but also generalizing across populations to figure out connections, similarities and likelihoods. The population and the individual must be
assembled, cross-checked and ratified by technologies. In the USA these techniques worked in turn both to cross-check and intensify the crazes and monomanias of the periodic red scares and the influence of crime as a form of entertainment in the growing era of radio, pulp media and the talkies. True crime stories being told by cops themselves or being given there in premature were notable examples would be Pinkerton in the 19th century, he ran his own monthly, and Flynn, the founder of the FBI, who was the editor of Flynn's Weekly in the early 20th century, where he would recycle
the investigations or imaginary versions of the investigations of the FBI into a kind of weekly scandal sheet. But they also developed a form of grey literature, the report, the memo, the blackmail letter, and so on. A famous example, obviously, of the FBI's blackmail letters is that sent to Martin Luther King, suggesting he do them a favour by putting a bullet in his head. But there are, you know, in the history of the counterintelligence program, there are numerous examples of these. The scientific and procedural character of the Bureau was also elaborated in a frenzy of publicity designed to counterbalance the gangster mania of prohibition and the depression amassed in cinema scandal sheets, radio and comics.
Once established, the FBI's massive gathering of intelligence during the Second World War gained it a near monopoly on variously political and salacious leaks and tip-offs to the press. Leaks became part of the necessary plumbing of the spectacle, its exciting slops tray and control valve. Luckily, a special function of moral conservatism is to render more and more things liable to judicious use of blackmail. Aside from electromagnetically sensitised membranes placed in cars, bars and bedrooms, media intensified novel kinds of investigative sensation. The new kinds of scandalous and immediate images made available by flash photography
as it moved from the time-consuming bursts of light emitted by small explosions to lightweight photography and electronic lights. The oxygen of publicity is in part a figure of speech, but it's also a necessary component of the first flashbulb invented by Ostermeyer in 1929. Investigations may be about the capture of a certain moment or the eruption of an information-gathering apparatus into a private space. Whilst the technology for sending photos by wire was already established by 1907, the now widespread network technologies organise a more distributed calculus of capture and invasion. It becomes difficult to differentiate between investigation
and social contract, surveillance and marketing. We come to this condition again when we discuss data, but for now it's also important to explain what we mean by media as a condition. Media act as the means of investigation, even in the case of a simple eyeglass. Media also act as the condition in which an investigation operates, from the writing of a report in a standardized form to a witness recalling an experience by using a model of a building as an aid memoir. The way in which media condition the relays of inquiry and understanding can be decisive.
One succinct example of this is in the identification of what's been called a new organ in the human body, the interstitium, you can see here, in March this year. The interstitium is a fluid-filled human tissue structure that was recently discovered by the team. This is the reference if you want to follow it up. The ability to recognize this form of tissue, the structure of tissue, was due to the move from examining dried specimens under a microscope to the use of confocal laser endomicroscopy, which allows for the examination of wet tissue.
That is the tissue, rather than being a flat, two-dimensional dried material on a glass slide was able to be looked at in the round in three dimensions, which allowed the scientists to discover that the tissue was actually full of a particular kind of fluid that had a function that they're now working out what it does. This distinction between media as the means of investigation and as its condition can can be broken down into two distinct types. Media may act as simple indicator or a means of probing a context for investigation, a sensor tracking pollution in a patch of air, or a measuring system supporting a spatiotemporal inquiry into the movement of entities within a video recording.
This is the classical description of media as a tool, But media can also manifest as the context in which both events and processes and their investigation take place. One of the by now well-known aspects of this is the generalization of metadata circulation and analysis in contemporary media systems dominated by regimes of aggregation and analysis. This is one of the figurations of media as an ecology. Both of these approaches have their degree of precision. but the way in which both images of media condition investigation must be taken into account, never taken as something that is transparent. This lack of absolute transparency in turn should be understood in relation to our opening comments about sensing.
Each media system has its own sensual and sense-making capacities. These interfere with, enhance, amplify, detour, invent and block each other. Something as simple as a numerical value given on a speedometer correctly attached to a vehicle and a numerical value in a Bitcoin exchange are substantially different things. The data they represent have different degrees of freedom in relationship to the mechanisms by which they make that representation and the few or multiple layers of translation by further media that each of them relies on. There are incidental qualities, however, to these movements of medial interference, enhancement, amplification, detouring, invention and blockage
that also allow investigative significance to be derived. Their very texturing provides information about their mediation. this is something that does not go unaccounted for in the technologies of computing as a general environment for intelligence when mediation happens in a condition that also consists of the processing of and this is in google's words hundreds of billions of parameters on hundreds of billions of example records using many hundreds of machines there are new conditions for truth extraction and new agents engaged in it that in turn shape what it means. The recognition of patterns amongst data is one of the promises and requirements
of open source intelligence, OSINT. What happens leaves traces, even unexpected ones. It takes the work of a total institution, such as sociologist Irving Goffman described, the church, army, cruise ships and other controlled environments, where many if not all variables are under the control of one system, to even pretend to be able to control significant data. As the state outsources some of its tasks of repression and control, the totalness of the institutions carrying out its operations starts to fray. goods as we maintained even something as simple as petrol or water must be bought in from other contractors
so if you're running a a rendition centre somewhere and you're subcontracted by the CIA to do it you need to buy your water from somewhere so the particular brand of water you buy from a local contractor will likely give a geographic indicator of where that rendition centre is, which can then be used to extract further information about the operations of that centre. This is something that a team in New York University recently discovered in reverse engineering the CIA's rendition operations via in-depth interviews
with people who were tortured in these centres. So goods must be brought in from other contractors and providers, leaving trails of invoices, bills of lading, flight recordings, and so on. Open source intelligence therefore also emphasizes what is seen to be insignificant, something that we'll discuss later in remarks on the work of historian Carlo Ginzburg. Open source intelligence focuses on what can be gleaned from publicly available information, or surfaces and structures that are rendered public in certain ways. Some things are inherently public because they're done in the open.
in the open. To become data they must be recalled, transcribed, sensed, recorded, annotated. Others are public because they are institutional matters of record, such as a court transcript or the proceedings of a parliament included in the registry of property ownership or registry of company directors. Such things differentially intersect with the various kinds of secret that we can unpack it at a different time. Modes of secretness disrupt openness, but it's a presupposition of open source intelligence that every secret is to some extent hiding in plain sight. Finding the means of sensing that secret, even by the particular texture of the presence of an absence
and finding the parameters of such an absence is crucial to investigative aesthetics. To hide in plain sight in turn requires a certain obliviousness, one perhaps coupled with a fatalism as required the fate of the secret. There is so much stuff out there, but we've often been looking at it in the wrong ways. The question is to do the work of seeing, hence it's an aesthetic task. such an approach you don't simply look at videos of events as they crop up on social media. You treat the set of videos of the event as an array of variables in themselves. In order to investigate you look at the relationships between the
files, cross-referencing clips and entities depicted within the videos. This cross-referencing means to abstract and work into the time-space relationship between the entities that are sensed by the cameras and the compression and networks that leave us the video file. This condition of elements in digital media systems being amenable to cross-referencing is part of its condition as an aggregate of media that have computational aspects. Open source intelligence is also conditioned by and sometimes finds sucker or unexpected sources in the strange mixes of openness and secrecy to be found in social media. And it's worth briefly remarking on this context.
The majority of commercial apps and platforms leave privacy settings wide open as the default in order to harvest personal data and the data of those one is linked to. I mean, the kind of current scandals around Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and others are part of this, but it's a wider condition. The depth and variety of this material can be substantial, with Facebook claiming to hold up to 30,000 distinct categories of information on a user. The timeliness of the data is also important. At the time of writing, Facebook's location setting, for instance, is public as a default, allowing for a user to be tracked in real time by any other entity with a Facebook account.
But Facebook is just one relatively obvious target. Silicon Valley and its tributaries are awash with petabytes of sloppily handled data, which it swills around to propitiate startups. Okay, I want to move on to then the question of indicators in relationship to open source intelligence. Direct pointers versus vague indicators, superficial likenesses between things are a crucial form of contemporary aesthetic. And such likenesses may be expressed as sets of unstructured data
in which both repetitions, habits, proximities, routines, shared features and outliers from all of these are described by the armature of set theory and NoSQL databases. Numbers characteristically produce superficial likenesses between things and they index that they index, count and reference. Relations between numbers themselves produce patterns that may seem meaningful, but there are simply qualities of numbers as media. Social media companies deliberately break conventions of openness and secrecy that have evolved in cultures over time in order to make use of the capacity of data
and of data turned into number of establishing identity. The more they can become the general exchange mechanism for data, whether it's about persons, politics or pussycats, the more they break down barriers between socially conventionalised circuits of information, such as those of families, work, friends, lovers, markets, universities, parties and so on, the more they can intensify their role as this kind of general exchequer of information. As has now been noted, this also has unusual effects in the ability for novel kinds of connection between previously more marginal groups and interests to snowball in size, also due to the nature of the algorithms concerned to spontaneously produce informational silos or echo chambers.
This shifting of the informational and affective boundaries and the creation of silos creates cracks between one form and another. This can happen by accident. A soldier may, for instance, share data with their friends that becomes public. It can happen by intent. People act as witnesses using their smartphones to video events. It can happen by subterfuge. For instance, homophobes or police may start using or start cruising for guys on Grindr, which has happened in a number of locations, in order to arrest them or to beat them up. Or it can happen by design. Informational entities such as
memes which are designed to prompt an immediate response of outrage, schadenfreude, enjoyment or fun and be quickly circulated are able to move across contexts, keying in also to the quick hit of sharing and checking in. This is not simply the effect of social media which are merely the form of a wider panoply of transformations set in play by computational network digital media in its iterations, but they're an amplification of wider social transformations. In this condition, where information floats free from its prior social moorings, and the kind of siloing of it around particular social institutions, but is also corralled by machine readings of habits,
affinities, predispositions, investigation, can consist simply of grepping a stroll through feeds of data. GREP is a unit's command for finding terms or finding similar strings or identical strings within a text field. So finding repetitions of the same term, a string of characters in fields of data, always cross-referencing, saving, comparing, but making sure never to stick with what it is fed. Many other things become public incidentally. Files may be left online in open directories.
What constitutes the open in open source intelligence is also often a matter of grayness. What is distinct about the nature of computation as a general medium for investigation, but also for control, is the way in which this grayness is inhabited. OS open source intelligence tallies with the question of the perceiving of the world. One might find a corpse in a shallow grave due to the large number of flies and other insects in the air above it, or one might find that a particular species of grass is avid in its ability to grow in such ground, perhaps because it's been turned over, making the soil looser or because the presence of certain chemicals that inhibit its competitors
or provide significant nutrients. One might equally find a human rights violation due to military personnel swapping images in which certain information also crops up. And there are a number of examples of this moving from Palestine to Cameroon that we look at in more detail. Learning how to see other species perceive and sense or rather to recognize means to note changes in behavior and communication that hint at such sensing may be a crucial investigative task in times of ecological crises. open source intelligence interest in the accumulation of seemingly insignificant details
is related to the increasing capacity of media technologies to gather sense and make sense of events and processes as yielding what it registers as data this data under the rubric of big data may not have any direct bearing on the phenomenon at hand, but only be concerned with the sifting and learning of data to elaborate a proposition about what might be relevant. It might, on the other hand, provide a means of intentionally finding patterns amongst massive data sets of billions of elements. In both cases, such approaches are relevant to questions of investigation. What is at play here is the question of significance and of detail. Each media system may be read by what it brings to the fore as a significance and what it deprecates or suppresses as of being mere detail.
The idiomatic texture of this elicitation and suppression of details that characterise much of a regime of sensing and the question of elaborating an approach to such things is crucial in the elaboration of investigation. To some extent, and as an aside on the problematic of knowledge in the present, the work of machine learning is an attempt to produce a system general enough to hold off this question. A danger here, though, is that both this generality is insufficiently abstract and that in its detail it's insufficiently local. In such cases, the detail may suppress the general or what is learned and taken to be general may miss its own local nature. in the essay clues clues roots of an evidential paradigm the historian carlo ginsberg maps some
of this arrangement between significance and deprecation in the context of another media history that of painting ginsberg's essay ginsberg's essay concerns the development of the concept of evidence and he's particularly concerned with the elaboration of techniques for eliciting evidence in art historical analyses aimed at establishing the authorship of paintings. The case he works with implicitly evokes Ginsburg's own concerns with history at the microhistoric scale. What is the minimal residue out of which some distinction can be made or to which some claim to discernment must make itself answerable? In turn, he asks,
how do these concerns also establish unorthodox modes of making sense? It's important to mention that Ginsburg's micro scale is the scale of the individual caught up within power regimes. The simple people, supposedly, and also kind of history from below, with the most explicit example being the voice of the defendant in the Inquisition trials. and that to a certain extent the microspace is the scale of the trial, the guilt of innocence, the pleading and evidence regarding particular people at particular times. Finding and determining evidence consists of a vast range of practices and has an equally deep history.
Much of these, like our proposals here, are provisional and discontinuous, continuous based on a pragmatics whilst being oriented towards truth claims. One example, for instance, would be the elucidation of relations between cause and effects in fields such as medicine. Here, the art of spotting evidence and the reading of conjunctures of such evidence for the conjectures they give rise to is part of the art of naming and then curing a malady. There are two elements in Ginzburg's argument that are particularly relevant here. In counter-forensic work, investigation often aims to tease at or undo a narrative that smooths over a rupture or an event.
Such investigation may often start from a cluster of details. Presences, absences, accounts that don't fit well with the generality of the official story. The itchy detail is often where one starts. Ginzburg's attention to the detail draws on Sigmund Freud's reading of the work of the art historian Morelli. An interesting character from the 19th century who originally under a double mask, a pseudonymous name of a translator of a pen name, Morelli introduced the idea of the technical analysis of details into the examination of paintings. His work, jarring with the then dominant form of scholarship, led to the re-attribution of numerous paintings.
For Freud, Morelli's approach was telling in relationship to the unconscious, since painters seemingly revealed themselves the more when they were least intent on what they were doing. That is, assembling the parts of the painting they paid least attention to, such as the manner of painting earlobes or the pattern of characteristic strokes. by paying attention to these things, and not for instance, the theme of the painting or its overall composition. In Ginzburg's terms, details usually considered of little importance, even trivial or minor provided the key. To determine something as a detail entails a transformation in the conception of the detail itself
and in the whole of which it is potentially a part. apart. This transformation is a reconception of an actual or implied proposition of the whole of one of the set of possibilities. Initially such a transformation unmakes the assumed whole, turning it back into the conjuncture of its composition. But it also goes on to call upon understanding in a different way. In this manner, the telling or itchy detail involves the renewed interplay of different formations of objectivity as they are nurtured by and rendered difficult by different formulations, techniques and aims of knowledge. And that's what I want to turn to in a section called Two Logics of Facticity, Removal and
solution. The allure of the insignificant detail can of course be a means of throwing one off the track by the subtle play of logics of suggestion characteristic of the conjurer or the whisperer. The detail stands in for a whole but where there are no concern for the work required to arrive at fact rather than fabulation. This is the incantatory routine of climate damage deniers and conspiracists. But there are other figures that operate by a different logic. One of these is that revered incarnation of the I versus the office, Sherlock Holmes. In a famous phrase, Arthur Conan Doyle had his hero remark that in analysing an event, when you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. This is a succinct statement of what the Greeks called the apagogic proof, a proposition to which the contrary or anything different is absurd. The method goes like this. Assemble all possible candidate facts, remove what cannot be true, what remains must be the truth. No further reductions can be made without causing a crisis in truth itself. The method is a recursive logic of analysis and removal. If the police in their bureaucratic form are a factory that chews over and churns out facts, here the detective is the cold assassin of putative facts, the annihilator of tales.
So alongside removal as a method, we want to propose there is also the question of solution. In his fantastic book on contemporary mathematics, Fernando Zalamea discusses some of the means for problem solving described by the mathematician Alexander Grotendijk. These reflections on ways of working are particularly given in Grotendijk's lengthy and discursive text, Recault et Sommé. Our interest here is in the relation to the figure of the solution dissolving the data and the givens of the field commensurate to the problem in a new proposition. So here, solution rather than being a reduction becomes a new possibility of generalization.
Zalamea describes a dyadic movement of the investigation of mathematical problems, part of which is the question of the condition of mathematical thought. On the one hand, there's an approach to problems provided by a hammer and chisel, similar to the harpoon that we discussed earlier, which can crack open a nut, gaining access to its interior by a movement of of extreme force at the risk of pulverizing its contents. The nut is the prize and the force of insight is rewarded by it. And Grotendieck opened up many such sweet capsules. A different aspect of the cognitive faculties allows for another way of approaching the nut. That is by immersing the problems in a more general field
within which it can be won over in a manner of great delicacy. Such an immersion does not lose the precision and specificity of the problem, nor does it render immobile or meaningless the internal and local differences within the nut of the problem, but rather dissolves their irregularities that have previously rendered it incoherent. It's this latter movement that Zalamea sees as representing the defining work of the mathematics of the latter half of the 20th century, the work of synthesis. The process of immersion is not one of subsumption and dissolution of the problem, but rather of a more polyphonic movement in which a plurality of questions, notions and approaches establish relays and concatenations of ideation.
These questions and approaches inflect and excite each other without enforcing silences. perhaps Grotendieck's two approaches echo or refract those that are about related to the question of the secret and the question of the open source that we described earlier but for Grotendieck there seems to be an almost an ethical question of this question of solution what we what we want to entertain here though is the idea of synthesis as a form of investigation And I'm going to move on now to a discussion of different modalities of synthesis in investigative aesthetics.
What we want to propose is a kind of rereading of history of painting as a mode of aesthetic inquiry. and this is a kind of closing set of remarks. How do things happen? What are counted as causes and effects? These are aesthetic questions as much as they are those of law or of mechanics. Indeed, they are core modes of inquiry for the art of the 20th century. How does one mark on a canvas lead to another and under what terms do they cohere or not as a whole or evade such a fate.
The circuits such marks are routed through, including possible way markers as the eye, such possible way markers as the eye, hand and paint, or their deliberate removal or variation, are alongside the complex routines for making such arrangements involving training, chance, the composition of a surface, questions of minimal and maximal expressivity of parts, alongside numerous other factors such as the question of the detail. Such circuits may be run through a relation to the world, drawing in questions of figuration. As imaging systems such as photography, television, print, they may also enter into the compositional plane of the canvas, whereas in this case the piece of paper, these circuits develop
more branches, additional routes and relays of event, process and interpretation. Paint in turn, full of its own quirks and accretions, becomes a means of registering and probing their particularity. We want to propose here that there are two kinds of causation that need attending to. Okay, I've got low battery, so I'm going to die or the presentation is going to die first. We'll see what happens. We want to propose here that there are two kinds of causation that need attending to. Field causality and minimal causation. have their aesthetic imperatives and both arrive at an aesthetic for questions that are both
epistemic and related to power. This given we want to address field causality and minimal causation each through art historical considerations and then in a wider context. The art critic David Sylvester talks about a painting style that he describes as afocal in his 1949 essay on late clay. This is an example of it. In such work, and we're talking about Paul Clay, the painter, rather than clay from some geological layer. In such work, the eye moves around the composition without any place to rest on as a fulcrum. Sylvester's account
of skeins and streams of intersecting lines and budding forms suggests an account of networks, but he also talks about an aesthetics of scattering, of creating a non-tensile set of relations between things in which the eye drifts. The work can be said to be disaggregate seeing, giving it a new terrain rather than a gymnasium of focuses that entrain it. In this field of body marks, the seeing eye moves through fields of forces, which it jointly composes. These formulations can be seen as part of a modernist aesthetics of simultaneity. Other forms of such would be found in novels such as David Jones's ambivalent
account of the First World War in parenthesis, Apollinaire's images of the city as complexes of forces and experiences, or Laurence Stern's simultaneous construction and demolition of the form of the novel in its earliest days. Simultaneity is not simply the structure of the all-over image, but a formulation of the universe as incessantly being made and unmade everywhere in many directions at once. Our proposition here is that alongside the way in which these kinds of forces set up non-representational accounts of the image, they can also be potent in developing an analytical account of the world. Such developments in the history of art allow us to propose a wider category than is important for investigative aesthetics. Field causality. Field causality
is neither solely direct nor simply indirect causes, but conditions that induce possibilities and constraints of action. Field causality is not uniform but highly varied in its characteristics. Causality may act by means of strict demarcation or might shape a context by means of a subtle shift in a gradient of force or conditioning. Fields may be highly internally differentiated and heterogeneous rather than simply uniform and monotonic. Interactions between fields, and they're usually multiple, introduce further dynamics and ranges of constraint, action, multiplication. For Marx, the defining field is established by dialectical tensions between capital and
the historical figures it brings into being. Within that field, all human relations are somehow magnetised and reworked in relationship to money. Social feminism reworks these insights to figure a matrix of oppressions and identity formation as multiple fields of force overlay and modify each other. Such fields can be highly dispersed, appear with irregular periodicity and be sporadic rather than uniform in terms of their effects. One formulation developed in cultural studies to talk about field causalities also implies that they are dynamic movements of forces that inflect different kinds of materials and opportunities.
Antonio Gramsci's formulation of the conjuncture is for Stuart Hall, a way of understanding the world, sorry, I'll just as a quote, a way of understanding the condensation of these elements at a moment which is not repeatable in a condition which is not repeatable. Gramsci draws upon Machiavelli's writings where the conjunction is a figure that couples both contingency and the mapping of forces. Fortune is a river whose ripples and rivulets never exactly repeat, but they have discernible broad tendencies. The currents of the river shape the land they course through as much as they buffet, spin, surmount, amplify and conjoin each other. Figuring field causality is something done well
in various ways in the sciences, where changes in materials and forces may be readily identified. They are less readily so in accounts that attempt to precisely show the causation of the actions of individual humans. Here, accounts that harpoon the hidden meaning or reason proliferate. These we can call accounts of minimal causation. One way of describing them is through perspective. The complement and the opposite of what Sylvester called the afocal is the focal. Renaissance images where perspective is invented pivot around a face or a gesture. They're arrayed in rooms that describe a theatre of vision organized around the appearance of vanishing points.
Here, perspective becomes the governing axiomatic, but one ameliorated by use of other complementary rules of composition within its framework, such as the golden mean. For our purpose, perspective is an excellent mechanism to describe a direct cause, the moment when an order is given and when it's acted upon or interpreted, the drift of a chemical through a mobile mass of air, the trajectory of a projectile of a given kind through a particular kind of material, the optics of a soldier with a scope. Whatever the hidden desire, neurotic impulse, or underlying imperative, geometry offers a trace of a contour
to pinpoint something, a number, a line, a quanta, that might work as standing in for a location or a moving object. The move to the perspectival image occurs in the Renaissance partly because it's a means of describing an individual between the twin poles of heaven and hell and amongst other beings in the world. The Renaissance world is caught in this tension as it negotiates the new conditions of humanism. The relationships established by this matrix are legible and work as a narrative and diagrammatic whole. In another theatre, that of law, there are also logical legal demands for evidence of a particular sort.
It's hard, if not impossible, to talk about background causes or questions of metaphysics in a courtroom. Here, explainably direct, that is with the smallest possible chain of causation, rather than ambient causal associations between people and things are paramount. Just as in data-oriented scientific research, causal associations between variables are what matters. This can be called the requirement for minimal causation. It asks, what is the minimal act or inaction that causes an event to occur? Court cases tend to be the context in which such claims are honed down. They then apply legal code to the interpretation of those acts.
As such, a crucial threshold for formulating field causality is the question of the causality of the event, the specific interface with the law's ideal humanist individual. In Aristotelian metaphysics, God is the unmoved mover. Field causality looks for moving movers. Legal requirements for minimal causation look for movers in the last instance rather than the first instance. The question is rather that of who finally pulled the trigger or gave the order, who exercise will or reasonable agency. Exceptions are built into such systems. Soldiers following orders,
workers applying flammable cladding to a building rather than the contract holders who subcontracted it to the companies that they work for or the building regulations officials who should have checked it. The court's problem is not whether a particular form of economics or governance by chains of contract is culpable at a macro scale, but that of determining at the smallest scale that is realisable of who carries the can. Other forms and scales of governance must wrestle with the tractability of different fields of causality. They may be more or less capable of doing so. Okay, I want to stop there. There's plenty more, but I'll cut you off there. Okay, thank you.