As part of the 2013 Brighton Festival, I was invited by Lighthouse to create another Drone Shadow, a 1:1 outline of a military drone aircraft. This time, we drew an MQ-9 Reaper, the Predator’s larger, more heavily armed successor, currently in service with the RAF and the USAF.

It’s on the seafront for a month. This time it’s green, and Brighton’s local politics (the only Green party MP in the country) made it necessary to articulate this choice – partly forced by local planning laws – although regular readers will recall my feelings about the colour. This green is the colour of the future; chromakey green; greenscreen; the colour onto which we project our hopes and fantasies. It is the colour of technologically-augmented vision; the bright green of digital cameras and machine vision; of laser targetting systems; of late evolution. This green is the least “natural” of colours; or rather, it is the colour of another nature, verdant and elusive, that we live within and alongside, but have barely begun to notice.

On the day we painted the drone on the seafront, May Day, we received the news that the RAF had made its first drone strike since relocating its cadre of remote pilots to RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire from the USAF base at Creech in Nevada. A landmark, of a kind: the first (known) robotic attack in another country, directed from inside the UK.

There is, to put it bluntly and inelegantly, an explosion of drone art around at the moment, in exhibitions, festivals, symposia and discussions. The fever dreams are appearing ever more frequently. It’s thus more important than ever to be clear about what we are talking about when we talk about drones.

As I’ve written before, my interest in drones attempts to go beyond the fetishisation of the objects themselves to understand them as avatars and prostheses of the network itself, embodiments of technology and reifications of the same desires.

In the case of the Canon Drone, the most widely-distributed popular image of a drone in circulation, which I dug out as an entirely constructed, photoshop rendering with a little help from the internet, we see how loose and clouded our own understandings of the drone are, how little we know about it and its operations, and perhaps how little we want to know, like contemporary luddites, ever more despairing at the technology around us, even as we become more dependant upon it. (The same attitudes were revealed in the widespread media reaction to Dronestagram, which revealed a near-total lack of understanding of social media and software systems; with such technophobic spokespeople, it’s little wonder we are so consistently underinformed.)

As part of the festival, I gave a talk at Lighthouse last week on drones and my drone work, which you can watch on YouTube, or below:

Another recent articulation of this slippage or transformation between dimensions which drones permit and facilitate is A Quiet Disposition, exhibited as part of “Coded Conduct” at Pilar Corrias gallery in London, which attempts to replicate and thus expose the unknowable and unquestionable technologies and processes behind the drone programme. The theme of the exhibition was ‘performance’, and here’s the text I contributed to go alongside the work:

“The Disposition Matrix” is the term used by the US Government for its intelligence-gathering and targetting processes. Overseen by the National Counterterrorism Center and in development for some time, the Matrix is usually described as a database for generating capture and “kill lists”, but the criteria for both adding to and acting on the information in the database is not public. One of the outcomes of the process is the ongoing, undeclared CIA drone war in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere. These attacks have killed an estimated 3105 people in Pakistan alone since June 2004, including 535 known civilians and 175 children. (Sources: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, New America Foundation.)

The architectural theorist Keller Easterling uses the term “disposition” in other contexts, to refer to the propensity or temperament of forms which produce actions. Disposition is found not in activity itself, but in the relationships or relative positions of the objects that produce action. Consider a motorway: you can describe the movement of the cars, but the active form is immanent in the concrete itself; the motorway has a disposition. If such forms can be said to have a disposition, to what extent can they be said to possess agency?

For Easterling, architectures and infrastructures perform aspects of their being: not merely spatial objects, they shape the world around them on many levels: legal, political, technological. The sociologist Erving Goffman in turn uses the term “disposition” to describe the entire performance, including – in human terms – gesture, posture, expression and intent. These subtexts are capable of overwhelming what is being merely said: the distinction between the aesthetics of what is being depicted, and what is actually being done.

Drones – the armed, unmanned planes in action around the world – are dispositional. Their significance is not wholly in their appearance, but in how they transform the space around them; both physical space (the privileged view of the weaponised surveillance camera at 50,000 feet) and legal, national and diplomatic spaces that as a result permit new kinds of warfare and assassination. And the Disposition Matrix is an organising principle: not a thing, not a technology, not an object, but an active form, a reorientation of intent into another dimension or mode of expression. In another sense, the Disposition Matrix is the network itself, the internet and us, an abstract machine, intangible but effective. Finally, the Disposition Matrix is an attitude and a performance.

“A Quiet Disposition” is an intelligence-gathering system turned back on its namesake. A weak artificial intelligence or naive neural network, the system exists on the network, constantly searching the internet for news articles and other sources of information about drones, and drone-related technologies, including the Disposition Matrix itself. When it finds relevant texts, it analyses them, cataloguing names, objects, terminologies, and the relationships between them. From these relationships it draws its own conclusions, connecting pairs of names linked through the information it has gathered.

For “Coded Conduct”, Bridle presents a set of ten “Disposition Matrix” books, each containing a snapshot of 250 such pairings identified by the database, dated to their production, together with the linking terms and texts generated automatically by the system in an attempt to make sense of them. Alongside the books, a visualisation of the decision engine in process runs constantly, querying the database and producing new pairings based on the connections it is constantly identifying. The books are an archive of the state of the database as it attempts to understand; the visualisation a reminder that this process is ongoing and indefinite.

A Quiet Disposition, like the dark mirror to A Ship Adrift, is still churning away, somewhere, online, like a starship with half its engines trenched in hyperspace, gathering information. Alongside a number of other drone works, it will be shown at a solo exhibition at the Corcoran in Washington DC in June.

Drones are prostheses of the network. They perform the same affect as the network itself, granting the ability to communicate, to see and take action at great distances. But while the civilian network is tuned to openness, the drones use exactly the same technologies to obscure and divide.

Though I’ve long been a vocal advocate for the new, I also believe that technology actually engenders very few truly novel behaviours; rather it enables or permits latent ones, and thus reveals them to our new, technologically augmented view – if we truly understand them.

Obscurity is a classic tool of power, but it’s now married to another one: ignorance. Actions carried out in plain sight are hidden not from sight, but from understanding, cloaked in the the aura of technology.

Here’s the thing: it’s not about drones at all, it’s about technology, like the render ghosts, like the data centers. The drones stand for all our invisible, intangible, noumenal technologies, but in their jet trails, in the video feeds of distant lands and the craters in those landscapes, we see much older enactments of power and political violence performed in legal, diplomatic and social dimensions, as well as in the physical.

The true state of the world is revealed in the intersections of technology and culture as they emerge into the world, as visual imagery, but also as the more complex psychological responses and mental models that underpin them. This world is formed as much by our understanding of technology as by the technology itself. We live in a world that is almost entirely interleaved with technological, networked processes, where there’s no longer any meaningful distinction between online and off; natural and digital; but we lack much of the vocabulary and metaphor needed to describe this adequately. We need a new language and framework for understanding the world as it actually is, rather than a world underserved by old metaphors, or confused by notions of remote, cartoonish capital-F “Futures”.

But there is hope in the drone work too. In attempting to obscure, the drones, like the network, actually reveal. Power and privilege’s implementation in technology also means it has to be written down, rendering it legible, if we can only learn the techniques to read it. The reification of power in code and infrastructure makes it’s operation more and not less visible, and therefore subject to disruption and critique.

Top image of the Brighton drone by Roberta Mataityte, courtesy of Lighthouse. Drone installation film by Brian McClave. Artist Talk film courtesy of Lighthouse.

Compilation of video footage, credits at Vimeo

Last week I spoke at Afrofuture, a series of events during Milan Design Week, about undersea cables, fiber optics, and the politics of light. The oddness of the venue means I’d like to give the talk again some time, but it also belongs alongside my previous writings on light (The dreadful luminosity of everything, Four Greens) and infrastructures (Secret Servers, GPS, Living inside the Machine), so I present it here, necessarily disjointed as a report of a lecture rather than a textborn essay.

Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Metrocubo d’Infinito in un Cubo Specchiante (‘Square Metre of Infinity in a Mirror Cube’) is one of my favourite artworks in the world. It is as it describes: a one metre by one metre by one metre cube, formed of bound and inward-facing mirrors. There is something about this internal space that warps the mind: a cubic metre of infinity, a bounded space which no light can enter, but from which no light can escape, endlessly reflected, endlessly reproduced; a void, a chamber, an unseen, unknowable volume. It captures light, but repels inspection. It is an artefact worth attempting to hold in the mind, ultimately ungraspable, but always present.

If Pistoletto’s cube is a device for doing something interesting with light, it is one of many in humanity’s long history of communication and other technologies, of which beacons are among the first which might be considered networked. Scandinavian hill-forts, the Brecon Beacons, the coastlines of Elizabethan England and the Scottish Borders all played host to light-bearing networks, fires in the night, fires for warning and communicating. The Great Wall of China might be considered the first great light-based trunk line, a line of 723 beacons some 5,500 miles long. Beacons are also cited in the annals of shipwreckers, who were reputed to lure their targets onto shoals or beaches: dangerous, untrustworthy signals too.

The first wireless telephone transmission was also transmitted by light, on June 30th 1880. Alexander Graham Bell, just four years after being granted his patent for the wired telephone, successfully transmitted the sound of a human voice 700 feet from the roof of the Franklin School in Washington, DC, to the window of Bell’s laboratory. The device Bell created with his assistance Charles Sumner Tainter was the photophone, and he believed it to be his most important invention.

The photophone works by bouncing a beam of sunlight off a reflecting surface, which is vibrated by the voice of the speaker, directed towards the back of the reflector. These vibrations can be picked up a photovoltaic cell, and amplified, in order to reproduce the spoken words.

For this lecture, I built a photophone with a hodgepodge of electronics, and the assistance of a Jameco tutorial, enclosed in African fabrics from Ridley Road market, and a transmitter built from tin foil and a hollowed-out coconut. It works – sort of. The transmitted words are not distinguishable, but there’s definitely a voice speaking amongst the crackling and hissing.

Bell was aware of the limitations of his device – the very clouds above interfered strongly with transmission – but also wondered at it, eulogising in a letter to his father:

I have heard articulate speech by sunlight! I have heard a ray of the sun laugh and cough and sing! …I have been able to hear a shadow and I have even perceived by ear the passage of a cloud across the sun’s disk.

Wider reception was slightly more circumspect. In an editorial of August 30, 1880,
the New York Times wrote:

The ordinary man … will find a little difficulty in comprehending how sunbeams are to be used. Does Prof. Bell intend to connect Boston and Cambridge … with a line of sunbeams hung on telegraph posts, and, if so, what diameter are the sunbeams to be ….[and] will it be necessary to insulate them against the weather … until (the public) sees a man going through the streets with a coil of No. 12 sunbeams on his shoulder, and suspending them from pole to pole, there will be a general feeling that there is something about Professor Bell’s photophone which places a tremendous strain on human credulity.

This image, of carrying a coil of sunbeams over one’s shoulder, and speaking through them, is a resonant and beautiful one, but also, brilliantly, it turns out to be entirely the case. Our contemporary fiber optic communications are a direct descendant of Bell’s invention. What was missing was a method for secure transport, the enclosure of the sunbeam in a series of tubes that might encircle the world.

While we are increasingly familiar with the forms of overland network infrastructures, such as datacenters, carrier hotels, switches, from personal computers and devices up to high-orbit satellites, the light-bearing cable network remains largely invisible to us, buried in the dirt and threaded beneath the oceans.

We can track these lines partially via the computers they connect, through the IP addresses revealed by traceroutes. For example, running a traceroute between my studio in London, and the Nigerian ISP Starcom in Lagos.

The series of IP addresses reveals a set of connections: from my local router, to BT exchanges in Chessington and Ilford, to the Telehouse complex back in East London again, out to Tata’s cable landing point a half mile from the sea in Highbridge, Somerset – and from there leaping first to Seixal in Portugal, another Tata facility, and then to Lagos, to a Main One Cable Landing Station and on to Starcom’s offices a few miles away.

(You can see all these locations on a Google Map – the most obscure location, that of the Main One CLS, I identified from a helpful engineer’s Foursquare checkin.)

It’s the last of these big jumps that’s the most interesting to me. The Main One cable was, at time of opening, the first African-owned cable bringing internet communications to the continent, a significant moment in national networking. The cable went live on July 22, 2010, connecting Seixal in Portugal, a major sea network hub, to Accra in Ghana and Lagos in Nigeria, and further connections to South Africa are planned.

Main One was followed by the GLO-1 system, owned by Nigerian telecommunications company Globacom, 9,800 km long with an advertised capacity of 2.5 Tbit/s, in 2011, also connecting Lagos and Ghana all the way back to the UK. Other complete or forthcoming Nigerian connections include SAT-3/WASC (2002), WACS (2012), ACE (2012) and WASACE (2015) (see submarinecablemap.com for details).

The Main One cable was laid by a ship called the Tyco Resolute, built in 2002, and one of a new generation of cable ships whose capacity, sensors and manoeuvrability permit ever more reliable and extensive undersea networks.

The process of laying cables across the ocean is a fascinating and venerable one, that proceeds in stages out into the deep ocean and back, ploughing trenches into the littoral to lay fragile cable under the sand in shallow areas, and paying it out across the deep seabed far from shore. These cables are fat bundles of optical fibers – millimetre-thick strands of glass, through which light is bounced all the way to its destination.

The most resonant moment comes when the ship reaches shore. When a cable-laying ship is a few hundred metres off shore, the last segment of cable is put on a small boat and brought to the beach. And there, thousands of miles from its origin, a man emerges from the ocean, carrying the internet over his shoulder. Sunbeams, indeed.

The impact of the arrival of true broadband communications are better covered elsewhere, but this is an impact driven by the arrival of these cables, these strands of light. Between 2008 and the end of 2011, according to studies by the World Bank and McKinsey, Nigeria’s online population alone went from 5% to 28% of the total – in a country with a population of 170 million. That’s 3.4 million, to 47.6 million internet users in four years.

Most of these users are concentrated in coastal cities close to the cable landing points: once the fibers reach land, their propagation – the backhaul – becomes the responsibility of the government, who control landbound infrastructures. The slow battle to upgrade these is in stark contrast to the sea, where private enterprise can do pretty much anything it likes, and does. In contrast to Nigeria, where residents complain about a lack of government investment in infrastructure, Kenya’s National Optic Fiber Backbone Infrastructure (NOFBI) is an ambitious plan to connect 36 administrative centres across the country, and from there to the population. A quiet war is building to be the internet heartland of Africa, and, so far, Kenya’s “Silicon Savannah” is making the most progress.

Other infrastructures are coming in to play too, including a microwave project by Main One to connect outlying areas of Lagos, and Nigeria’s National Space Research and Development Agency – the largest African space programme, which has put four satellites into orbit. The first of these failed, as satellites not infrequently do, but it was replaced in December 2011 by NigSatcCom-1R replaced it, broadcasting communications across the whole country. Two other satellites provide country-wide imaging, tracking crops and weather around the country in an effort to protect long-term food supply.

But the sea cables will remain the roots and taps of the internet in Africa and across the world, and they are subject to a number of different pressures.

The first of these is their own fragility. Resting on the seabed, they are subject to damage, malicious or otherwise. They are severed by dragging anchors or scrap hunters – only last week the Egyptian government arrested three divers off Alexandria who it accused of cutting a cable. The navy had been acting on information from Telecom Egypt which reported that the major SMW-4 undersea cable had been broken. Cables are rapidly approaching the status of protected national infrastructures, targets both of security, and potentially of violence.

But over and above these physical concerns, there are questions of ownership and control. Main One and GLO-1 are rare exceptions: most of Africa’s connecting infrastructure is owned by companies based elsewhere. The largest cables are owned by European and Indian telcos; in July 2012, it was announced that the Chinese government would be funding the construction of NOFBI. Nigeria’s satellites are built in Britain, and launched in China. One of the claims repeated in Globacom’s promotional videos: “We connect Nigeria to London, and from there to the world”.

The topography of the network is shaped by older, historical pressures, shipping routes and the networks of Empire. As Julian Oliver notes in an excellent lecture, in which he identifies the pattern of Spanish ownership in South American cable systems, colonialism has moved up from the physical, national space into the sphere of the corporate. As ever, tracing these physical infrastructures reveals the patterns of politics that support them.

And this should come as no surprise, because light itself is political. One of the great examples among many is the “Ancient Lights” law in the UK. In effect, the owner of a building with windows that have received natural daylight for 20 years or more is entitled to forbid any construction or other obstruction that would deprive him or her of that illumination. Once a right to light exists, the owner of the right is entitled to “sufficient light according to the ordinary notions of mankind”. Light is a privilege.

We see this privileged light through the lenses of many of our contemporary technologies, such as the air- and car-borne LIDAR scanners which build our contemporary cartographies. We see it in the one-way viewpoint of fixed and helicopter surveillance – and in the laser weapons deployed against them. Light takes on different qualities when perceived by machines.

But my favourite example of this privileged light brings together two of my frequent obsessions. First, the Light of God, as detailed in a previous post:

“We call it in, and we’re given all the clearances that are necessary, all the approvals and everything else, and then we do something called the Light of God – the Marines like to call it the Light of God. It’s a laser targetting marker. We just send out a beam of laser and when the troops put on their night vision goggles they’ll just see this light that looks like it’s coming from heaven. Right on the spot, coming out of nowhere, from the sky. It’s quite beautiful.”

That is a drone operator talking about targetting an IED site in Afghanistan or Iraq. It follows identification of the site by the operator using a thermal camera, and is immediately followed by a hellfire missile strike, watched by the operator as well as troops on the ground, and other military personnel in command centres, all the way up to the Pentagon. It’s a quote from Omer Fast’s extraordinary film “Five Thousand Feet is the Best” (2011, excerpt).

As I wrote then, I made the above image myself in photoshop, because I could not find one in the real world. And it took me some time to notice I had seen this same effect in action, before my own eyes – so to speak.

For the opening of the Shard, currently Europe’s tallest building, in July of last year, the people of London were promised an extraordinary spectacle, a light show of unprecedented power. I was among those gathered on the riverside, and like many I was disappointed by the flickering of a few weedy fingers of green light. But the following day, the papers were filled with startling, spectacular images, unrecognisable to those present, but captured by the long-exposure sensors of the press photographers’ cameras.

This was a spectacle designed not for human sight, but for technology: power speaking to power through the lens of a privileging technology, like the marines in the desert with their thousands of dollars of augmented vision.

The channels of light outwith the spectrum of human vision are the domain of the machines, and of power. The infrared rings of CCTV cameras allow them to see our activities, criminal or otherwise, in darkness. At the other end of the rainbow, ultraviolet light reveals security markings on banknotes, and the mark of Cain on smartwater-splattered faces. (UV inks are specially controlled by law, unsurprisingly.)

For the lecture, I also constructed another coconut enclosure, this one filled with infrared LEDs. On the left, the object as the human eye perceives it, on the right, its image seen through the lens and screen of an iPhone: a simple device for showing the other spectra visible to (expensive) machines, an augmentation of privileged technology.

The photophone and the iPhone signaller are devices for communicating the transport and politics of light: they relate directly to the infrastructures of communication cables, made possible by Bell’s invention, but invisible to human sight, and charged with intent.

For me, the networks of fiber optics that encircle the planet evoke rich mythic resonances, but also reveal the politics and power relationships inherent and embedded in all of our contemporary technologies. Light itself, privileged and political, stands in for all of our invisble, noumenal technologies.

Pistoletto’s cube, light-bearing networks, lasers and scanners; all these uses, anglings and reflections of light, force us to ask questions about the light itself. What is light when it is information rather than illumination? What is it when it is not perceived by the human eye? Deep beneath the streets and oceans, what is illuminated by the machines, and how are we changed by this illumination?

As well as the Observer column, so far this year (and a bit of last) I have written:

• On Trap Streets for Cabinet Magazine
• On Architectural Visualisations for Domus
• About the New Aesthetic for Form Magazine (German)
• A catalogue essay for the Jerwood / FVU Awards, featuring Ed Atkins and Naheed Raza
• On games and literature, for De Gids (Dutch) – and in English
• About an interesting new substation at Edgware Road for ICON magazine
• Contributed to FutureEverything’s “Digital Public Spaces” book (free to download)

There are a number of upcoming pieces in various formats as well, that I’ll try to link to as they appear. A near-complete record can always be found at my portfolio.

I spent six weeks guest tutoring at Goldsmiths’ on the Design MA, as well as guest tutoring some students on the Fine Art course. There has been a bit of consultancy on the side, for friends. I’ve given artists’ talks at Spike Island in Bristol, the White Building in Hackney Wick, and the Royal Academy Schools. I spoke at Resonate in Belgrade ten days ago – hopefully there will be documentation available soon – and interviewed Jaron Lanier on stage for the School of Life.

For the record, I wish I’d gone after Lanier more – you can watch the video here – as I think some of his ideas are unconscionable and it concerns me to what extent peoples’ critical judgement is suspended as soon as someone is framed as an expert in technology – which Lanier is, but it shouldn’t prevent far more rigorous critique than seems to be the current norm.

I will probably address this a bit in my contribution to Immaterial Labour Isn’t Working, a series of talks, texts and online contributions organised by Huw Lemmey and Auto Italia South East, which I’ll be speaking at on the 11th of May. Other confirmed speaking dates coming up include an April 16th symposium in Brussels, as part of The Digital Now, Digitalt Byliv in Oslo in May, and, further afield, The Conference in Malmö in August.

Finally, I have several art shows and performances coming up. I’m producing new work for Coded Conduct, a group show at Pilar Corrias in London, which opens next week, and participating in Afrofuture at the Milan Design Fair, also, brilliantly next week. For the Brighton Festival in May, I am drawing another drone shadow, which I’m very much looking forward to. There may be more to announce soon as well.

Busy, grateful. If you’d like to talk to me about writing, speaking engagements, consultancy or any other kind of work or creative involvement, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

On the date of that anniversary, I and two friends walked the route of the protest, from Gower Street, down Shaftesbury Avenue and Piccadilly, to Hyde Park. We carried a replica placard from the original event.

I remember moments from that day in 2003. I remember the crowds, how slowly we all moved, how the protest seemed to fill the city. I remember passing the Palace Theatre on Charing Cross Road, where the cast of Les Miserables, in costume, hung from the windows and waved flags and sang revolutionary songs. I remember stamping cold feet as we shuffled through Piccadilly Circus, for what felt like hours. I remember the light rain that began to fall as we finally reached the park, the speeches long finished. That curious protest elation, otherworldly, the city transformed by our passage, our voices hoarse from shouting.

I remember the sense of failure that followed. I remember the invasion, the politicians’ lies, the utter overwhelming sense of helplessness and disgust, the meatgrinder years of war. The feeling of a generation’s psychic hangover; the oppositie of political apathy, a generation—several generations—who spoke out, and were ignored. A legacy of ineffectual, frantic, painful protest that stretches, for me, back to Reclaim The Streets and forward through the campaigns for free higher education, global justice, the environment: campaigns ever more diffuse, ever more unachievable. But still we march.

We didn’t get many comments last week. One man, on a bicycle, said: “Nothing is true. Read the bible.” Another said “Bit late, aren’t you?” Yes. We were too late, then, too. Outside the Wolseley, an elderly Persian lady stopped us but we didn’t understand what she was saying. While she was talking, a young man screeched to a halt in a convertible and pointed to the number-plate: “Y1 RAO”. Why Iraq?

We felt invisible. Cities swallow intent and action in much the same way as history does. Who holds these memories now, memories of things that achieved nothing? Not the written record, not books that seek to rescue it, not books that use it as a backdrop. Only we have the memory, just as only we, all of us, marched. The significance is in the marching, in the memory, because that is all we have.

There is so much more to say about this, but not now. The walk last week was an act of memory, of memorial. A reenactment, indebted to but different from Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave, and Sharon Hayes’ In the Near Future. We talked about memories of that day. We talked about the nature of protest; its inefficacy, its necessity, its confusion, its failure. We walked because I did not know what else to do. I still don’t.

The Street View API doesn’t allow for quite the same grain of control, but you can search by address, bring up a map and drag the marker to change location, and pan and zoom. Or you can just hit R, over and over again, which is all I’ve been doing for a few days. Press I to remove the floating window.

The whole thing, really, is another secret love letter to London, its red brick and blue skies, plane trees and construction hoardings, buses and eternal scaffolds. R. R. R. London as a great Georgian space ship in the sky. Making something magical with the robot photographers.

Here are some of my favourite locations discovered so far, but to be honest, it’s hard not to make something pretty good, if you like cities, patterns, and surprises:

Pollarded trees, New Cross.

Apartments, Putney Hill.

Terraces, Clapham.

Bus in the City.

Inside MoMA in New York.

Inside a shop in Bermondsey.

Telehouse, obviously.

Oh yes—and whatever you do, don’t press H.

You can read more about A Ship Adrift, “a thing made out of ships, weather and the internet”, in the original blog post about the project. In short, the ship is the record of a journey made my a mad, lost, AI autopilot across the web and the world, driven by the weather on the South Bank of the Thames in London.

You can also watch this video from LIFT in Geneva, We Fell In Love In A Coded Space, where I talk about one aspect of Ship Adrift: as a polari of the machines, an argot of attempted communication between us and the information, the processes we share the network with.

You can also read the Ship’s log, a year of strange, broken communiques, that make enough sense in their own tongue to twist the mind: the Ship in its own words.

You have to read it in order. Desperate screeds at the start as it tries to process everything. It crosses the channel and enters its Grindr phase over Poland.

I like the fact it went straight for Poland, Conrad’s nominal birthplace. The whole project — not only the Ship, but the wider Room for London programme — was structured around Conrad, and particularly Heart of Darkness, and the Ship needed to retrace that journey, before truly beginning its own.

The Ship added something to an appreciation of the weather, too. It made it to Poland, then took a sharp turn to the South-West, drifting on a cold wind from Siberia. Three days later, it snowed in London.

It made, I think, discoveries, like Ignacy Domeyko, who said: “How could I forget Polish, when I have always thought in Polish, prayed in Polish, loved in Polish?”

In Belarus, in Belarus.

The names of travellers recurred: Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo.

Not looking for You.

The penguins did it.

In late February, the ship was silent for some time, as it passed over the Sea of Azov, and into Russia. It struggled with the language. March is spent in the deserts of Kazakstan and Uzbekistan, and adrift on the Aral Sea.

It is there, becalmed, that the ship really meets Conrad. “I stop lonely ship were nearly fell intruders“. In May: “The day, over the unavoidable I became of the sea“, and June:

“Throughly trimmed, and smooth water-side of this narrative me terrified in a way.’brothere. I listened in a vast grave; I saw a which I had passes I saw the was as you please. I had vanishes ran up on decaying the damp earth, that. The Russian to lose. ‘s almost certain I course the secrets. I felt an interspersistently, not a word from unded around. My intolerable secrets. I felt an intelligent I was clew to me on decaying something. It’We had been on deck busily. There. It’ yelled back from afar; the Gulf of this whose slim posts reputation.’t conceal – know. It’s friend – in his whose slope of unspeak out. As it be dark than a voice. The other. ‘

It learned the names of rivers. It spoke of genocide over the Balkans. It encountered drones off the coast of Pakistan.

There was a secret story all along, slipping by almost unseen in the night. My favourite Conrad story is The Secret Sharer, about a young sea-captain who picks up and hides a sailor who has deserted another ship; his doppelganger, just as the Ship Adrift is the mad twin of the Roi des Belges aground in London. The whisperings between the unnamed narrator and his co-conspirator echo in the logs as the Ship makes the grand journey across the Indian Ocean, across the seas that Conrad knew so well around South-East Asia.

“He was in the man with its mystery, its great seen in bed wonder.” (September 6th) “‘We broke down mustache, and a white, even teeth.’ I listened.” (November 13th)

Conrad sailed to Australia several times, first arriving in Sydney on the 31st of January, 1879, aboard the clipper Duke of Sutherland. He made the long voyage several times over the next decade, returning aboard the barque Otago, learned much of the Malay archipelago from other captains, and wrote about the continent in The Mirror of the Sea (which, incidentally, also provided the title for Romance…):

I don’t know. I remember a few nights in my lifetime, and in a big ship, too (as big as they made them then), when one did not get flung out of one’s bed simply because one never even attempted to get in; one had been made too weary, too hopeless, to try. The expedient of turning your bedding out on to a damp floor and lying on it there was no earthly good, since you could not keep your place or get a second’s rest in that or any other position. But of the delight of seeing a small craft run bravely amongst the great seas there can be no question to him whose soul does not dwell ashore. Thus I well remember a three days’ run got out of a little barque of 400 tons somewhere between the islands of St. Paul and Amsterdam and Cape Otway on the Australian coast. It was a hard, long gale, gray clouds and green sea, heavy weather undoubtedly, but still what a sailor would call manageable. Under two lower topsails and a reefed foresail the barque seemed to race with a long, steady sea that did not becalm her in the troughs. The solemn thundering combers caught her up from astern, passed her with a fierce boiling up of foam level with the bulwarks, swept on ahead with a swish and a roar: and the little vessel, dipping her jib-boom into the tumbling froth, would go on running in a smooth, glassy hollow, a deep valley between two ridges of the sea, hiding the horizon ahead and astern. There was such fascination in her pluck, nimbleness, the continual exhibition of unfailing seaworthiness, in the semblance of courage and endurance, that I could not give up the delight of watching her run through the three unforgettable days of that gale which my mate also delighted to extol as “a famous shove.”

A Ship Adrift is still out there, somewhere, running bravely amongst the great seas. The network understood as a voyage, through time and knowledge. An active knowledge, which we can listen to, its ten thousand little agencies chattering and competing for attention. A Ship Adrift was intended to give it voice. If you listen closely, if you let it speak, you can hear it too.

I gave, I think, more than twenty public talks. These included — of those available online — Words Words Words for It’s Nice That, We Fell In Love In A Coded Space at Lift, The Future of the Book at the Do Lectures, Metaphors Considered Harmful at NEXT Berlin, a (mostly) different talk with the same title at Open Design, a Four Thought lecture on BBC Radio 4, Our Mutual Friends at Jerwood Space, and Stories from the New Aesthetic at the New Museum.

The original New Aesthetic panel at SXSW is not available online, but it was one of the turning points of the year, obviously, kicking off a whole storm of interest in ideas about the increasingly pervasive networking of the world. The New Aesthetic tumblr continues, and I covered many overlapping areas in blog posts such as Opinions are Non-contemporary, The overlapping consensus, The internet considered as a fifth dimension, that of memory, Living inside the machine and the whole Six posts about the present series.

For the record, Will Wiles’ piece for Aeon Magazine is the best write-up of the first year of the New Aesthetic, I think, but I’m grateful to all of those who were, and remain, part of the conversation.

I wrote articles elsewhere for a number of publications, such as The new value of text for WIRED, on GPS for ICON, on Amazon and Infrastructure for DOMUS, and on Trap Streets for Cabinet, as well as my ongoing Observer column on books and technology.

On the blog, I wrote about things I loved: CERN, Light, Frozen Moments, Green, and Caravaggio, among others.

There was some seriously enjoyable client work on some lovely projects, including Bus-Tops with Art Public, Pepys Road with Storythings, and the John Cage Proms Walk with Caper. (Yes, I am always looking for work, if you’re wondering. Get in touch.)

I took part in two residency programmes this year, the art-tech enquiry of Happenstance at Lighthouse in Brighton, where among other things I made Offbott with Natalia Buckley and coded in public, and the Visible Futures Lab at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

The latter produced the last of this year’s drone works, which will undoubtedly continue next year: Drone Shadows in London and Istanbul, Dronestagram, the Light of God, and the UAV Identification Kit. I’m really pleased that these generated such interest, and look forward to more work in this vein. Also on the art side: A Ship Adrift and A Ship Aground with Artangel, which rapidly approaches its conclusion, and somewhere in between the Mapping Workshop and Balloon Mapping in Guimarães, Portugal.

Finally, I spent a semester in New York, teaching a course on the Interactive Telecommunications Programme (ITP) at NYU. The course was called “Waving at the Machines”, and was about all the things I talk about all the time, but specifically how they might be articulated by technologists and artists in order to be transformed into work and understanding. It was a very good 14 weeks, and I will attempt to write it up soon.

In the mean time, a very Happy New Year. Here’s to the next one.

The Holy Family is a strange one. Long lost, known only from copies, it was not known at all to M’s contemporary biographers. On entering the gallery, it’s the least prepossessing, sinking into darkness beside the bright boys of the other paintings.

But it’s all there, after a moment, the tension, and the pain. This is an awkward family photo. Mary cradles her child, Joseph embraces them, and John reaches up to touch the infant Jesus with a wondering, curious hand. His upturned face, half-hidden, has the quizzical concentration of every exploratory toddler.

Joseph gently restrains John’s hand. It’s a powerful gesture: this, child, is not for you to touch. Gentle, but firm. Joseph has the solemn, careworn face of so many of M’s old men and women. He is very old and tired; his other hand, reaching around to enclose his family, holds a tall stick: Joseph is a traveller, his hands are dark and dirty.

In fact, Joseph is wholly dark, obscured by thick grey hair and brown cloaks. Only enough light catches his face to illuminate his gaze: away from his wife and the child, downward to John. Even his grip on John’s plump arm is shadowed, serving just to break that line of sight and highlight John’s eyeline.

Joseph fades into the background, as he fades from the story. He is loving and protective, full of care, but he is a traveller, and will move on, and out of frame.

The infant Jesus is a little bit too clean, too rounded, to be believable. He’s too cherubic for M’s family, but that’s convention. He too looks down at John; he doesn’t want to go to him, like one child to his playmate: they are strangers, and he wraps his arms around his mother’s neck, presses his cheek to hers.

The greatest discomfort, the tragedy at the heart of the painting, is Mary’s, of course. Of all the subjects, only she bears the full weight of what is to come. John can merely point, heedless of what he does, like a child staring at a cripple or a beggar on the subway, an act that makes adults uncomfortable. Children don’t know why they stare, but they’re good at it.

Joseph is resigned: he knows the child is special, accepts it like he accepts his own burdens, knows that when the time comes he’ll be out of the picture. Jesus is, as ever, too perfect, too unconcerned: he is not of this world, in full awareness of his own immanence, retaining only enough semblance of a child to cling, for now, to his mother, from habit and affection, not from fright.

But Mary knows. She knows why this picture is being made; knows what will happen to her child, whom she loves for himself and not for any other reason, loves in fear of him and what will happen to him, loves with all the pain of a mother who will bury her own son, and sees the inevitability of this end in the oblivious attentions of the infant John, and in the careful attention of the painter. She can meet nobody’s eye—not John; not her, strange, absent, assured child; she cannot even touch her husband, nor he her; she cannot look at the painter; and she cannot look at us, the viewer, complicit in all of this, voyeurs and sinners, responsible for all that will happen to her family. Jesus’ necessary death is on all of us: Mary knows this, she knows what John does, she knows this picture too is necessary, but, with her arm wrapped tight around her child, she gazes down with all the stoic, half-broken sadness in the world.

The Musicians is a bit of a mess—poorly planned, cramped, damaged and restored. It’s all about Mario of course, the centre and focus of the painting; it’s always about Mario. His limpid eyes; his high, wide brows; his full lips; that cleft in his chin; deep dimples under the lip and nose; impossibly pale; pink skin and thick hair. M throws a lush red cloak over him; everything else just crowds Mario really, but there is much else.

The boy at the front, his face turned away, is clearly beautiful. Smooth back, a suggestion of muscles in the arm, one soft, blushed ear. He’s more beautiful than Mario, in fact, but although you can bet they’re fucking, you know M likes the difficult ones, the mean, spoiled ones, the best. Mario has tears in his eyes but he’s not crying about the madrigals they’re singing; he’s just in a mood again.

M’s self-inclusion is breathtakingly bold—not a little rude, even. He paints these beautiful boys, and paints himself between them. He sets a place for the viewer in the foreground, music and instrument laid out for us to pick up, but he’s right there, possessively crowding the frame, his shoulder pressed to Mario’s. His lips are parted, but not in song: it’s a lascivious look, half invitation and half threat. Unlike vacant, bored and moody Mario, he stares straight at us. M even corrupts Cupid. His arrows are sheathed; he reaches for the grapes.

The Musicians is mostly study, but a wonderfully personal, revealing one. Look into M’s eyes, and see what he sees.

Finally, The Lute Player—and guess what, it’s Mario again, although identified by the Met as the castrato Pedro Montoya. I mean, seriously, he’s right there, not six feet away, with the same chin, same eyes, same hair, same mouth.

He is singing here though; he’s not in a mood. The backdrop is barely there, just a dim birdcage for something to do, and a beam of light for contrast, but the foreground is bright and alive. The lack of tension between painter and sitter allows M to focus on the still life, on the music and instruments—particularly the violin—on Mario’s hands instead of his face, on the rich detail of the tablecloth and the clothing.

The Lute Player is the most immediately beautiful of the three paintings, it’s the one that draws the eye on entering, but it’s really the least interesting, least complex and involving. M’s great still lives show his extreme, extraordinary craft, but his passion is revealed in the chaotic, loaded sexuality of the musicians, and the raw depths of emotion, portraiture, and care, of the the Holy Family.

Caravaggio’s paintings are all there: they emerge, breathlessly, out of an art history that has rarely, truly looked at them. I became obsessed with them thanks to Peter Robb’s iconoclastic M, a book widely despised by art critics and praised by literary ones, but you don’t need to read it to get Robb’s point of view; you just need to be lucky enough to spend some time with these canvases, to stand before them, to look into the sitters’ eyes, to share a space with them, and the artist, and it all comes tumbling forth.

This kit consists of three models of contemporary military drones: the MQ-1 Predator, the RQ-170 Sentinel, and the RQ-4 Global Hawk. Human figures are included for scale.

The kit was produced using 3D modelling software and desktop 3D printing technologies, with the assistance of Digital Fabrication Specialist Carlos Cruz.

All three UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) depicted here are in use at the present time to provide situational awareness in conflict zones around the world for a number of armed forces, as well as in domestic use, including border patrol, forest fire and storm observation, and humanitarian relief. These three UAVs are all configured as unarmed surveillance drones, although they may be weaponised.

The kit is based on military and civilian recognition kits: collections of models used to train gunners, radar operators and visual observers.

When I was 15 or so, I spent a week on an army cadet camp in the UK. One day, I saw Gurkha soldiers lying down in the grass with handbooks and binoculars, while an officer, twenty feet away, took small, inch-long lead models of tanks from a chest and placed them on a mound twenty feet away. They were practicing tank recognition and identification. This image has stayed with me ever since.

Models for aircraft recognition and targetting have a long history. Ever since the development of aircraft, there has been a parallel industry in visualising, representing and observing such vehicles, often on the basis of scant information. The wars of the twentieth century made such artefacts vital. Between 1942 and 1945, schoolchildren in the US, Canada and South America assembled hundreds of thousands of aircraft models for this purpose. (The Friend or Foe? Museum maintains an extraordinary collection of such materials centred around the Second World War, from which the images shown below are taken.)

There is also a long history of civilan observation worldwide. The Ground Observer Corps in the United States employed over a million civilians at the height of the Second World War, while the Royal Observer Corps in the United Kingdom, founded in 1925, deployed tens of thousands of civilian personnel during the same period, across a network of 1,500 posts, including one atop Windsor Castle. The latter were only stood down in the 1990s.

Models are still employed for recognition training today, as well as for strategic planning, battlefield, airfield and carrier management, and design testing. Meanwhile, the actual aircraft become ever harder to perceive. Based at remote airfields in conflict zones, and largely operating in other zones inaccessible to ground troops or journalists, the only direct witnesses to their activities are those on the ground beneath them, disconnected from those who pilot them, those who issue their orders, and those in whose name they are directed.

The Kit is a continuation of a range of projects, which include my work on making evident the processes of technological production, as well as the more explicit Drone Shadows and Dronestagram.

The UAV Identification Kit is an act of visualisation, a materialisation of an unseen technology. As our technology grows ever more networked, ever more complex and interconnected, it both brings us together, and distances us. What we choose to do with these technologies is a function of our ability to see and read them, and to act with them: a literacy, a fluency, and an agency.

The Kit is intended to confer and facilitate these things, training the observer, enabling them to bear witness, and to act.

I have written more about this project on another ongoing research blog. In particular, there is a post about the modelling and printing process, and the material traces of 3D printing, and a post about vernacular models, representations and photographs of drones.

More pictures of the kit, and the process, are available at Flickr.

Many thanks again to SVA, and particularly to Leif Krinkle, the director of the VFL, and to Carlos Cruz.

In 2010, I suggested the idea of a network realism, in hindsight the first glob of New Aesthetic / network overlay thinking entering the world. Like most of my ideas, it was roughly and quickly expounded for a talk and in this case compounded by intense jetlag (I’d just arrived in Australia and was thinking pretty much exclusively about timezones).

Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge in early 2011, I got thinking about caisson disease, the form of the bends caused by pressure differentials in the deep foundations of the structure — this surfaced in hauntological futures as a kind of lateral future shock: not the shock of the sudden arrival of the future, but the realisation it was right here all along, in an adjacent chamber.

These posts are texts squeezed between the pressure differentials of the physical and the digital, strata of human and machine, isobars of the network. They are letters from the inside of something that doesn’t have an outside any more.

And yet we continually attempt to describe it as if it does; to nail things down, or to the wall, to turn tweets into manifestos and conversations into movements. As unversed as I am in theory, I always get the sense that art and design criticism, the most frequently applied tools to understanding the internet, don’t really get it. They just don’t, and that’s OK, but they’re too invested in pre-network notions of authenticity, discreteness and scarcity. A true network criticism has something to take from art and design criticism but I feel it might emerge more strongly and more coherently from writing about architecture, perhaps because architectural criticism has always had to engage with context: there’s no white cube for architecture just as there is no white cube for the network. Architecture is always in-the-world-with-us, like the network.

For a while now, I’ve been using Kitchin and Dodge’s description of a code/space to talk about the infrastructure of literature, and about the network. Their description of spaces, such as airports, which are coproductions of architecture and software, extends both to the space of literature, in the form of virtual and physical infrastructures (cf this Domus article) and to our wider experience of the network. I’d really like a better term than “coproduced” but there you go. These things are codependent and co-evolving. Co co co.

Keller Easterling, in her essay The Action is the Form and in her forthcoming book Extrastatecraft traces a network criticism for architecture, which may also be extended to the network itself. (Several quotes here are drawn from this extract of material from Extrastatecraft at e-flux.)

Easterling’s analysis is crucial because it recognises the “soupy matrix” which constitutes the network, an infrastructure both real and virtual, composed of material and immaterial actors from people and buildings to legal frameworks and digital information. “Architecture”, Easterling says, “is making beautiful stones in the water, but the world is making the water. […] Making the stone is a valid artistic choice, but what if the art is in the material?”

This is what land art for the internet is about too: art that is its own infrastructure, made out of its own context, both exposing and transforming its environment.

The internet is not a medium. This is the fundamental issue at the heart of the artworld’s grappling with digital / net art, it’s the issue at the heart of our conceptual problems with ebooks, it’s the fundamental basis for thinking about the New Aesthetic. The post-internet crowd know this: this is what post-internet means. Because we’ve been treating the internet as a medium like photography or sculpture or painting. The internet is not a medium: it is a context.

What Easterling insists on is the necessity of crafting actions rather than objects, active forms, “forms for handling forms”. The key term for Easterling is disposition, which is the designed capacity for a thing to shape space over time. An understanding of software is key to both Easterling and Kitchin/Dodge’s programmes because software has an inherent disposition: it is designed to do work over time; it is a literature of dispositions.

Easterling also reminds us that immanence is the defining quality of the network, a possibility space shaped by the dispositions of the technologies we shape, that shape us, that we shape again.

Deleuze and Guattari’s abstract machine, which we have already established we are living inside, is also an immanent machine, a machine for generating machines, for generating “a real that is yet to come”. As with Gibson’s unevenly-distributed future/present, the immanent is also that which is already here.

Hence a network criticism must be cognisant of its own status as the grease and sand in the abstract machine: the sand that gums the work and shapes the mould, depending on the status of the machine, which is always in flux. In another sense, or set of conditions, a network criticism is also a Borgesian exercise in rearranging what we have already uncovered in order to produce newly activated texts, just as the librarians of Babel search through their books to find the one text that is already immanent in their literature.

And alongside these notions of architectural infrastructures and artistic media, we also need to build into network criticism a fundamental inconclusivity, an instability.

In the conclusion to his recent essay, “The Relevance of Algorithms“, Tarleton Gillespie writes:

“in many ways, algorithms remain outside our grasp, and they are designed to be. This is not to say that we should not aspire to illuminate their workings and impact. We should. But we may also need to prepare ourselves for more and more encounters with the unexpected and ineffable associations they will sometimes draw for us, the fundamental uncertainty about who we are speaking to or hearing, and the palpable but opaque undercurrents that move quietly beneath knowledge when it is managed by algorithms.”

An accommodation with and an accounting for this fundamental uncertainty is core to the new critical and vernacular literacy. To paraphrase Huxley, we cannot reason ourselves out of our basic incoherence. All we can do is learn the art of being incoherent in a reasonable way.

I am talking about art, I am talking about books, about maps, about drones, and some of these are aesthetic discussions and some of them are political ones and some of them are historical, personal, sexual: that’s not the point. What allies them is the network, us and our technologies, the technology you are using to read this and I am using it to write it, but also the sum total of links that brought us here, you and I, the reading we have done, and the context this discussion inhabits and draws itself from.

What this is, what the New Aesthetic is, is an attempt to do what I have been thinking of as long-form writing online; that is, writing with the same range of argument and continuity of thought as book writing, but inhabiting the network, natural to it and fluent in it. Writing with a disposition, just as Dronestagram has a disposition, that is shaped as information, mobile and replicable. A literature comfortable with impermanence and fragmentation.

(It was in conversation with David Weinberger in 2011 that this idea of a wider sphere first emerged, and it was talking to David again recently about this kind of “longform” writing that he coined the term “broadform”.)

Impermanence, fragmentation and disposition are key to networked, broadform writing, to a network criticism. Networked thought: a literature of the playlist, not the manifesto, as Tom Taylor succintly identified it. An instrument that is built as it is played.

When Easterling posits “an internet of things without the internet”, I hear again the name of the network. An understanding and a communication that does not prioritise either the infrastructure or the individual, but the whole; where everything may be treated as the network, because it is.

On modern poetics, Craig Dworkin writes: “So that the test of poetry were no longer whether it could have been done better (the question of the workshop), but whether it could conceivably have been done otherwise.”

The necessity of writing, and of doing it this way, here. Just as fanfiction must inhabit the network because it is verboten, undoable, unsayable elsewhere, it is at the same time the necessary form of expression online.

But all online writing is fanfiction, replicating not the characters but the concepts of the memespace, the context. All writing has always been fanfiction, merely awaiting the network to reveal its true form.

We declared the death of the author prematurely. Barthes was a futurist, like BS Johnson. Technology is our modernity.

On physical computing: “It is difficult today to realise how bold an innovation it was to introduce talk about paper tapes and patterns punched in them into discussions of the foundations of mathematics.”—Max Newman.

Turing did most of his work on paper: it was the tool he had to work with before he built the computer. The first chess program, played out in pencilled notes. He did this with everything. The materials are always insufficient: we are always trying to describe the next level up from Flatland.

“The way in which [Turing] uses concrete objects such as exercise books and printer’s ink to illustrate and control the argument is typical of his insight and originality. Let us praises the uncluttered mind.”—Robin Gandy.

Long before computational systems—which is coming to mean all systems—long before such systems were virtual, Turing took the abstract, invisible conditions of mathematical logic and formalised it into the physical: first as text, then as mechanics, later as electrons.

As these systems begin to boil away again, there is a value in the physicalisation of them again, not out of nostalgia, but to re-comprehend them. I make books, like the Wikipedia historiography, like For Our Times, like the robot atlas: physical objects intended to describe digital, networked concepts. In some sense I only make them so I can photograph them, and put them on the internet, with these words, again. (I have no head.)

Everything beckons to us to perceive it. My appreciation of a contemporary text is an appreciation of the network: will this text link me to further texts which will, knowingly or unknowingly, connect me to other texts that will expand or heighten my appreciation, not of it or the other text, but holistically, will raise the network value of texts and experiences in general. And the texts want this too: they are longing for the network.

Literature always adapts to the most disseminable state, and that state, now, is far more complex than our literatures have addressed, or our mental models, our metaphors, have prepared us to be. They can’t help it, but it doesn’t mean the apophatic silence is hand-waving: it is a necessary condition of the present.

The network is an emergent property of the internet, of the infrastructures we have been building for some time now, which sits atop other infrastructures, physical and cultural.

Everything wants to be, and being is a hybrid, digital state now. Everything wants to be digital. It aspires to that higher form, to be capable of being networked. And the network is what we have been building because it is what we need: the convergence of our tools and our desires, an unconsciously generated machine for unconscious generation.

Once again, we are teaching the petrified forms to dance by singing them their own song.

Some time ago, I wrote about *punk as “a hollowing out of conceptual spaces based on only slightly varied worldlines”. I am less and less convinced that these space are merely conceptual, that these wordlines are imaginary, or divergent from our own. They exist in the same context, if temporarily out of sight.

There’s a reluctance to re-quote William Gibson’s dictum, that “the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet”, but I’ve figured out the problem, and it bears unpacking. The exact wording of Gibson’s original quote is unclear, but even if that yet wasn’t there, you can still hear it.

The yet implies, and I have always read the quote as implying, that the capital-f Future will be evenly distributed, soon, eventually. The future will arrive, we will reach the promised land.

But that’s not how it works. The future never arrives. The future is always unevenly distributed, leaking out here and there as we poke and squeeze the present, as we invent new words and emotions to articulate contemporary experience. Gibson was almost right (he’d be right now, if you asked him again — hence the “endless digital now“).

As an example in the space of literature, I propose *books (starbooks).

*books are books in their unstable form. Dan Hancox’s Utopia and the Valley of Tears narrates a reality that is specific to Europe, to Spain, to the indignados, right now, but invisible. Its narration is necessarily unstable, and its form inhabits such an instability. Utopia… will come out as an expanded paperback version next year, but needs to be and is published and available digitally now — the two editions will not match. It is also necessarily linked to series of blog posts, tweets, and articles elsewhere. Context is part of the form: the form of the book destabilised by the network. A transitional form, always in transition.

Laurie Penny and Molly Crabapple’s Discordia is another *book. It is journalistic writing of the extended, inquiring kind that newspapers can afford to do ever less of but which books have always been too slow to respond to fully. Discordia was written over a few weeks, contained anecdotes from the week before publication, revives illustration as journalistic practice, challenges and changes every form it encounters. It also inhabits the network, as Utopia… does, as part of an ongoing practice and conversation. It is currently available as an ebook, like Utopia…, but that is not all it is: hence *books.

*books are not just political books, but the urgency of political books makes for a good study. “Is Journalism worth saving?” asks Penny in Discordia, as if journalism is some special case of writing, not subject to the same imprecarities as other discourses. These previously opposed forms: fiction and non-, myth-making and journalism, take refuge in the same form, the *book, they flee to it, as the natural condition of a destabilised writing, a communication incised, splayed, and realigned by the network.

Books commidifiability comes in handy again here, because these writers need paying. The New New Journalism will emerge as *books, from the network, just as the New Journalism emerged from the popular magazines of the 1960s and 1970s. But this is a temporary form.

*books are where the story which needs to be told will be told: the spiritual connection back to blogging means that there is always a personal core to this, and the covers and titles of *books are convenient fictions, necessary to commodification but oriented as billboards towards special interests while a continuous flow of thought passes through them.

*books don’t care about objectivity, because there’s never been any such thing, and as networked objects they obey the first law of the network: they reveal. Bias, connection, narrative, interest, complicity. Previously hidden behaviours (no less extant for their invisibility) are revealed.

Don’t be surprised if *books don’t stick to the point: that is, after all, the point. They do not cleave to the commodity, but to the continuum; they are frozen moments, snapshots of an ongoing discourse rather than fully shat-out artefacts of it.

Like the trash theory of Tiqqun. Like Jesse Darling’s assertion:

“I’m into transparency as/of process, and in placing my own works occasionally alongside whatever else I’m posting and reposting, I guess I’m trying to make a statement that this – all of it – is a continuous practice. I’m not sure about the reification of discrete art works within the continuous playbor loop. I think especially now we are all producing work in dialogue with the communities we live in on and offline and I want to be transparent about it, make it explicit.”

This is how we talk about destabilisation.

And this instability applies not only to the writing of these texts, but, crucially, to the reading of them too (which I tried to articulate previously as read/writing: the tight binding between these processes which the network reveals). The condition of reading is in transition and always in transition. Stated as simply as possible, this is the condition of having many tabs open at once. We are always, now, reading a palimpsest. The eye moves easily across multiple texts in different windows, across many services and surfaces, and the mind, despite those nay-sayers who claim we are becoming dumber or less attentive, moves easily with it (we can discount that charge from our own experience, please, now).

In “The Death of the Author”, Barthes distinguished between “literature” and “text”; the latter is authorless – the authorship of the text is simply not important.

We are now ready to declare the death of the work. *books are symptomatic of this death: not of the author, but of the work—of the singular, whole, completed, standalone work. They are hybrid, unformed, inconclusive—inconclusive not in the sense of vague, but their conclusions are not located exclusively within the work, but are distributed across the network.

Books that do work. These are working books in the sense of working definitions: they are arguing towards something, although that something is inconclusive by the above definition. (“Working definition” is related to the “overlapping consensus”.)

The book-container is not dead, any more than blogging is dead, but the work is. The fragmentary nature of media, the expansion of item into stream, signifies that the thing being constructed is higher up the chain. A single tweet or instagram photo is banal — a stream constitutes a far more interesting construction (to say nothing of the coproduced work — likes, comments, retweets, which are now fully integrated into the work itself, a form of collaboration with the audience. Every time a weird twitterer retweets their favstar ranking they’re incorporating the audience into the work itself. You can’t talk about archiving Flickr without archiving everything.)

I used to talk about how Pynchon and Illuminatus and Grant Morrison’s “Invisibles” rewired my brain, but the internet is the greatest work of literature I’ve ever read. It’s my favourite book. A combinatory literature, the literature of the digital dérive, the literature of the wikihole. Hyper-referentiality is the new style – this is why I obsess over Wikipedia, which is a subset of the whole internet, self-similar, at a shorter grain, why I obsess over Fanfiction, which uses the canon as its context: you learn more at each level, like Mandelbrot’s map.

This is why hypertext literature, which we’ve been attempting for 20+ years (and longer on paper), ultimately fails, because it attempts to discard the linearity of the text without dissolving its boundaries. It reconceives the scroll as a cube, but you can pack it as optimally as you like, you can wander across hilbert space in any direction, and you’re still trapped in Koch’s snowflake, endlessly digging up the same old ground. Literature is a hypercube, it exists in many dimensions. The death of the work has already happened: we are living in its aftermath.