environment
Ulrik Ekman
Ulrik Ekman is well known in the field of digi- tal studies as editor of the 2013 MIT Press com- pendium Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging
with Ubiquitous Computing and co-editor of the
2015 Routledge anthology Ubiquitous Computing,
Complexity and Culture. His main research inter-
ests are in the fields of cybernetics and ICT, the network society, new media art, critical design and aesthetics, as well as recent cultural theory. His publications include research articles and chapters such as ”Editorial: Interaction Designs for Ubicomp Cultures” (Fibreculture 19), “Design as Topology: U-City” (Media Art and the Urban Environment; Springer 2015), and “Of Transductive Speed – Stiegler” (Parallax 13.4). Ulrik Ekman is a trained computer scientist who worked for years as a sys- tems programmer and systems planner before study- ing in the humanities (languages, the arts, literary theory, philosophy, cultural studies). He works now
as Associate Professor at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen.
Ulrik Ekman discusses the (assumed) democratic potential of digital technology and social media, the haunting of Turing’s ghost, the third wave of computing as its extension into the social and human environment and externalization of psycho- logical individuation in techniques. He talks about the role of algorithms as means of personalization and foreclosure, the affirmative and subversive energy of surveillance art, the trans- disciplinary call of media literacy and the ‘interpellative’ aspect of participatory culture.
Prelude
Roberto Simanowski: If you could go back in history of new
media and digital culture in order to prevent something from happening or somebody from doing something, what or who would it be?
Ulrik Ekman: It would be quite interesting to have been in
a position to insert some kind of critical wedge in a relatively important situation back in the 1930s when Turing came up with the model of the computer as a universal machine. This notion of a universal machine with the potential to simulate all other machines and their programs almost founds and certainly forms the context for what can be called “digital media studies” and “digital culture.” It has been incredibly influential, first as an idea, then as a model and a sort of blueprint, and then not least for the making of ever so many real computers. If I wanted to make different noise and disturbance here, this is motivated by the tensions in Turing’s thought, the tendential idealization of the modern computer, as well as by the questions raised by con- temporary developments in the culture of ubiquitous computing. I continue to question the tensions between the finite and the infinite, the discrete and the continuous in Turing’s work. One cannot but note the tension: all real computers must by necessity remain finite and discrete, but in order to take on all computation
they must have infinite and continuous memory. A disturbance here would almost certainly have deconstructed the ideality so as to afford openings of different epistemologies of computation. These, or some of these, would be less than universal, perhaps general, perhaps particular, perhaps oriented towards the sin- gularity of computation. Some of them would surely also deviate from ideality towards questions of various real embodiments of computation in machines.
RS: What would have changed through such a disturbance? UE: In a sense, my wish to disturb stems from having just one
apparently simple question in mind: are the computational units of current developments in the culture of ubiquitous computing still modern computers of which one could say that they are truly Turing heirs? If the heuristic idea of ubicomp today is supposed to be one of computation qua embodied virtuality in operation, if the diagram today is supposed to be a human-oriented, con- text-aware, and calm computing, and if such a diagram maps out in practical concretizations as multitudes of wired and wireless computational infrastructures with decentralized distributions of sometimes highly specialized units demonstrating mobility and ad hoc networking… are we then still talking about modern computers? Do you still want to think of the link between a sen- sor and an actuator in a dynamically connective and mobile net- work dealing only with the temperatures of 200 square feet in a forest or a field as something involving a universal machine? So, my wish to make different noise with and against Turing has quite a bit to do with seeing a need for a revised set-up of the- oretical ideas. I also see a need for recognizing another set of existing blueprints or diagrams for computation and computers. Not least I affirm a need to observe that saying “digital culture” today often implies that we are already living with an enormous and growing set of real computers that might be becoming dif- ferent together and have us exist differently, too. I am still not done with the intricacies of Turing machines, but perhaps we can return to this later.
Politics and Government
RS: From early on the Internet has been attributed with demo-
cratic value as a new public sphere of radically liberated com- munication, an update of Habermas’ model of deliberative democracy. With the Web 2.0 the promise even increased with keywords such as participation and transparency. During the last years, however, a critical turn in digital media studies has pointed out the perils rather than the promises of the Internet, Web 2.0, and mobile media. How do you see this matter?
UE: How can it be that one can come across arguments during
the 1990s that the ‘information society’ and ‘cyberspace’ are more or less inherently ‘democratic,’ that they in and of them- selves offer a new kind of ‘community’ in a way that earlier social and cultural studies had apparently left as an unresolved mat- ter; and that they give us the kind of ‘public sphere’ presumably requested in the wake of the semi-demise of much Frankfurt School theoretical work? I am still amazed that critical engage- ments with these kinds of lines of argument have either tended to be too absent or to peter out relatively fast. One of the things behind my wish to have been inserted as a critical wedge at some relevant point in this broad discursive development is that it seems to repeat itself without enough of a difference that makes a difference. When we get to the period around 2005, we see much the same kind of statements being made, only now it is in the main a question of the positive potential versus pitfalls of social media, blogging, micro-blogging, and then mobile media.
Of course, it is not that critical efforts are entirely absent – I recall self-reflexive efforts in the media and in journalism, alongside research articles discussing this critically, and a number of reconsiderations of the work of Durkheim, Raymond Williams, Habermas, Giddens, Castells, and more. However, these efforts were inconclusive, did not lead to any consensus, and dwindled away within a five-year period. In the next cycle, from 2005 onward, the critical engagement is actually much weaker, smaller in scale, and even less influential. Considering the demise of the Left, the broad socio-historical developments
after 1989, and the impact of liberalisms on globalization pro- cesses in a broad sense, this is hardly surprising. Nonetheless, I would still like to have disturbed this tendential silencing of critical or alternative or differential thoughts.
RS: Maybe it was even this, the declared end of Grand Narratives
and of History, as competition between different socio-political models, that made all desire for a better world emigrate into new media, hoping technology would save us from post modern and post historical frustration.
UE: I think we agree on now being able to identify a certain
historical and theoretical rupture here. Perhaps you are right that some of the perceived losses in this have fueled some of the remarkably strong interest in new media as well as science and technology studies. It might be an exaggeration, however, to say that all desire and all hope emigrated to these fields. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that one finds here a rather strong tendency to idealize and emphasize rather one-sidedly what appeared to many as the positive potential in these devel- opments. To my mind this still calls for different critical reevalu- ations. Today it remains interesting and non-trivial to ask in what senses computers, computer science, and cybernetics as the discipline of steering and control could be said to afford media, mediations, and communicational platforms for ‘democ- racy,’ ‘community,’ and ‘public spheres.’ Something analogous goes for the ethico-political potential of networks, network (dis) organizations, and network protocols to be ‘democratic,’ ‘social,’ and capably open to differentiated debates with a certain rea- sonableness and egalitarian influence. Network societies, decen- tralized networks, and the overriding concern with security and control of infrastructure and information with a view to survival originated not least in post-WWII military-industrial complexes alongside a small number of university research centers in the Western hemisphere. The numerous ethico-political and socio- cultural tensions and differences inherent in this have neither been resolved nor yet been treated thoroughly and convinc- ingly in existing research nor in the media, in my opinion. If that
were the case, we could not today be witnessing in the media a late outcome of the post-9/11 ethico-political coupling in ‘demo- cratic’ network societies of terror, security, and surveillance. I am thinking not just of the quiet acceptance or affirmation of the ‘need’ for surveillance by the people in many ‘democratic’ nations, nor just of much needed momentary alternate wake-up calls like Snowdon’s, but of how disturbingly exceptional it is to see influential prime ministers object publicly to foreign intel- ligence services tapping their cellphones.
RS: If you allude to the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, I
am less surprised than you that she abstained from serious reproaching her ally United States – in contrast for example to the Brazilian president Dilma Russeff who used her objection against the U.S. to overcome the Vemprarua-turbulence in her own country. While in the 1990s, regarding the Internet, the government in the Western World experienced itself “at war with our own products,” as Klaus Lenk put it in the 1997 edition The
Governance of Cyberspace, today all governments of the world
are certainly relieved that the anarchy of the early days has morphed into the regulation and control we experience now. 9/11 is only an excuse for what was already clear after Perry Barlow’s 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace: That the “Governments of the Industrial World” will not leave alone “the new home of mind“ as Barlow describes the cyberspace.
UE: In my earlier remarks my focus was somewhat more limited.
My attention was on one part of the political axis, notably the post-9/11 developments concerning intimate linkages among terror, national security, and surveillance – up to and including the current operations of the NSA. Today some of the more criti- cal and heated exchanges among the U.S. and several European nations concerning the politics of surveillance appear to have worrisome potential outcomes. The messages from Germany, France, and others make it clear that the Internet and the WWW as we have known them should perhaps not be taken for granted. We might see the reappearance of strictly regional and not least strictly national politics of informational security and
surveillance that will imply so many deconstructions of the very idea of a decentralized global network of networks such as the Internet. Of course, such politics have always been there, but increasingly strong general strictures of this national sort would still mean an incredible loss of potential for the development of network societies on a global and more cosmopolitan scale. The “new home of the mind” that you mention could very well come to stay much closer to your physical national territory and its politi- cal governance.
RS: As for the “new home of mind” these 15 years later, your
collection of essays Throughout. Art and Culture Emerging with
Ubiquitous Computing 2013 with MIT Press presents almost
700 pages with essays by more than 40 leading researchers on digital media and cultural theory from a vast array of academic fields with quite different perspectives on the promises and per- ils of computing. What are the most interesting or challenging aspects to you about this topic?
UE: During the period we have worked on the book (it started
in 2008 via a Danish but very internationally oriented research network), ubicomp, pervasive computing, ambient intelligence, things that think, and the Internet of Things have become much more of an empirical fact. Enough so that we have net addresses and a net protocol with the capacity to deal with the billions of computational units involved, enough so that these major lines of development are becoming solid parts of the latest editions of the standard textbooks in computer science, hardware engineer- ing, software development, and HCI. And enough so that a great many people in the world are beginning to notice that the ground is shifting here and there underneath network societies that now begin to move from a phase one to a phase two, expanding and intensifying networking problematics along the way.
RS: Can you illustrate this shift to a phase two and the problems
it contains?
UE: For example, even in a very small country like Denmark
healthcare,’ something whose massive distribution and use of smart computational things and wirelessness might well soon alter our notion of the home, healthcare, and how to address the elderly in nations with a demography tilting in that direction. Or consider the first dozen intelligent cities, smart cities, and u-cit- ies now being built with some kinds of ubicomp capacity from the ground up. These are experimental projects in South-East Asia mostly, but also factual developments in an epoch with an inten- sive interest in the development of edge cities, megacities, and new kinds of urban regions. But I should still start by stressing that on the other side of the initial visions from Mark Weiser and his Xerox Parc colleagues along with many others in Europe and Asia, multitudes of technical issues remain unresolved. The cul- tural dimension remains very much more underdeveloped both in research and in cultural practices. This is an asymmetry that this book is trying to address and change a bit by focusing some- what more on the cultural and human sides of this.
RS: Ubiquitous computing furthers the information society we
live in by extending the presentation and processing of informa- tion beyond computers. The new buzzwords, you already said it, are Internet of things or programmable world referring to objects that talk to each other and process information even without presenting themselves to us. Advocates speak of the swimming pool that heats up when it sees there is a Barbecue on the cal- endar, they project the fridge that automatically restocks, and they hope for sensors attached to asthma inhalers mapping their usage to communicate areas of risk as part of that ‘pervasive healthcare’ you mentioned. Skeptics, on the other side, warn of even more loss of privacy as well as of malicious hacks into shop- ping lists, cars, and pacemakers. How do you see this develop- ment? Are the perils worth the benefits?
UE: Thank you for your insistence on pressing these issues of
critical evaluation. I hear more than a faint echo of your last question here, so let me return to the interesting and the chal- lenging, the benefits and the perils… Perhaps there is only one issue, perhaps Simondon saw this already. It might be he was
right that the organization of complexity is a phylogenetic aim which belongs to biological species but finds interesting analo- gies in the way technical objects and systems exist. The most interesting and the most challenging, the benefits and the perils are but flip sides of this: ubicomp cultures design complexity and this is their frontier. Technically speaking, the passage of time and all the repeated design processes make ubicomp objects and systems pass through successive modifications. This tends to have them develop from more abstract and diagrammatic states to more concrete states, something we are approaching today in rudimentary ways. The benefit-peril here is that ubicomp sys- tems are called upon to move from a more or less self-referential performance structure (not entirely unlike what you tend to find in Turing machines) to one that is hetero-referential.
RS: That means the systems are open to their environments? UE: Ubicomp systems are precisely not to remain disconnected
from the context but are to become gradually more contextu- alized in a process of mutual adaptation of system and context or environment. This is a route that leads towards the more complex – the solution of complexity is a phylogenetic aim, as Simondon liked to say. It is interesting-challenging that adapta- tion to context is still truly difficult for computational systems, and that ‘context’ here tends to mean both the real/virtual envi- ronment and its human inhabitants. There is a reason for the nicknaming of these main lines of development (ubiquitous, per- vasive, ambient, etc.): they are all taking names to suggest the expanded character of computation and computing. So, pressed by your questions I would point to these two main sources of ben- eficial-perilous complexification: context-awareness and adapta- tion to the anthropos, both of which will demand the production and recognition of meaning.
RS: As for the expanded character of computing, this reminds
me of McLuhan’s take on media as extension of man. Since the computer is already such an extension, are we then talking about the extension of extension and should we, since McLuhan consid- ered such an extension at the same time an amputation of human
capacity, also talk about the expansion of amputation? With the words I used before: What about malfunctions and hacks in com- plex context-oriented computational systems?
UE: One large part of computing in the expanded field concerns
such extensions of man. But perhaps your remarks stay a little too close to the anthropocentric. For approaching current devel- opments along this path might often lead to blindness or forget- ting of the more singularly technical relationalities, including those of autonomous agents communicating among themselves without any human interception. Naturally, this might be what you have in mind when referring to McLuhan’s notion of ampu- tations of human capacity. To my mind, the use of this term would then tend towards a too one-sided and negatively critical