Critical Engineering

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Description

Julian Oliver [1]:

"I'd like to introduce the term Critical Engineering, one my colleague Danja Vasiliev and I came up with last year in an effort to emphasise our own relation with technology in a critically and creatively transformative context.

We firmly believe that the most transformative language of our time, one that defines whole economies, how we trade, how and what we eat, how we communicate, how we move around the world -and increasingly how we think- is that of Engineering.

We feel art itself, as a frame, is increasingly diluted in transformative power; more a contemporary past-time of playful reflection where the strategic re-appropriation and displacement of cultural tropes are anticipated and coveted in turn (to follow Baudrillard's 'Conspiracy of Art'). As such, art has become safe: so bold in its crusade to cast aside boundaries there is little left to break..

Critical Engineering takes the language of engineering and lifts it out from a strictly utilitarian space, positioning it as a language for rich, creative and critical inquiry, away from this kind of black box reality of corporations making things for civilians and not explaining to us how they work, competing for our attention with an end to designed dependence.

In a race condition between consumption and planned obsolescence (coupled with ever shrinking componentry, ubiquity and technical sophistication) a worrying ignorance sets in, one that writers of media studies, artists and public are equally vulnerable to in their effort to critically engage their cultural and political environment.

The Critical Engineer takes this predicament as a challenge, working at the level of the very stuff of media; the hard stuff of circuitry, code and cables. The Critical Engineer positions the soldering iron, work of philosophy and code editor as equally critically capable tools." (empyre list, July 2011)


Examples

Julian Oliver: [2]

Networkshop

Here is an example of Critical Engineering at work.

Four days ago Danja and I gave a 'Networkshop' in Lima, Peru, where we took artists and creators through the process of learning all about low level networking using only command line tools. The workshop was held at Fundación Telefonica, an important point, as you'll see shortly.

Network routes (and thus topologies) were created and manipulated. Network packets were captured and examined. Strategies for surveilling other users of the network were explored, viewing the images they are viewing in their browsers, etc. In doing so we answered two questions few people can: "What is a computer network?", "What is the Internet?" "Where am I on the Internet?".

Only by learning about packet tracing (a method for following the flow of network packets from source to destination) and network topologies, could students see that the entire Peruvian route to the internet passed through Madrid, Spain, by way of the Spanish telco monopolist Telefonica. Spain, one could see, can effectively turn off the Peruvian telecommunications infrastructure. While Peru is politically and geographically sovereign, the colonial imperial process has merely shifted into the corporate domain and Peruvians it seemed, were completely unaware of this. Much discussion followed..

Network topologies are, in themselves, political topologies. Only by understanding how networks actually work, on the level of their stuff and the routing of electrical events over them, can you understand your political and capital subjectivity on that network. The Critical Engineer is a practitioner that engages the network it on its own terms, on the level of its stuff, as it already is, and reads and writes from there." (empyre list, July 2011)


Newstweek

"Another example of Critical Engineering is our latest project Newstweek, for which we were lucky to get the Golden Nica, at Ars Electronica this year.

Newstweek addresses the bizarre reality that modern democracies entirely depend on private entities called news corporations to summarise the economic, environmental, socio-political reality we understand ourselves to be living in. We place all our trust in these entities. A capital entity rather than a state separated power (such as the justice system), the news corporation is free to have and exert political and economic ambitions, inevitably factoring into what news we read and how it is written.

By reading summaries written by private companies, along with the experience of first hand symptoms of our political choices, our democratic decisions are informed.

Increasingly we read our news in the browser, something we refer to as the Browser-defined Reality. En-route from the server to your tablet computer, smartphone or laptop, news might flow through some 30 different machines, each with a number of employees responsible for the given machine.

Newstweek provides a strategy for manipulating the news on a per-network basis, fixing back the facts where otherwise they might be awry.

In the form of a small and unobtrusive wall-plug, Newstweek appears part of the infrastructure. Once plugged into the wall it boots up and manipulates the local wireless network, re-routing all traffic through itself. With the aid of a remote browser interface, a Newstweeker can manipulate the news experienced on that network, whether it be at a library, airport, business or school. Each network becomes a sort of 'reality island'; people reading news on that network will experience a different reality than those using other non-tweeked networks.

News sites currently targeted by Newstweek include The Guardian, CNN, Newsweek, BBC, La Vanguardia, El Comercio, El Pais, to name a few.

You can read more about it here: http://newstweek.com/overview, http://newstweek.com" (empyre list, July 2011)


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