Ken Linehan Report
PROJECT REPORT
Para-arts Research: Studies in Total Information Awareness
“ listen to your present time tapes and you will begin to see who you are and what you are doing here mix yesterday in with today and hear tomorrow your future rising out of old recordings…the techniques and experiments described here have been used and are being used by agencies official and non-official without your awareness and very much to your disadvantage any number can play”
William S. Burroughs from The Ticket that Exploded 1
“ We must find the [them] in a world of noise…We must become much more efficient and more clever in the ways we find new sources of data, mine information from the new and old, generate information, make it available for analysis, convert it to knowledge, and create actionable options.
John Poindexter from an Information Awareness Office (IAO) Overview 2
In 2002, plans were announced by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop an “ultra large scale” data base through which could be channeled the vast quantities of information generated daily by everything from personal credit card transactions and library card loans to driver identification checks and public transportation passenger manifests. The accumulated memory of this database has been envisioned as a sort of technologically facilitated omniscience, made possible by the existence of highly specialized software algorithms, which can act as a medium for the interpretation of the information passing through the system. Directed by Doctor John Poindexter, the project originally know as Total Information Awareness (TIA) seeks to decode patterns of activity from within the noise of this “transaction space” and translate them into a vision of the future that may be acted on preemptively. At its core, TIA embodies the belief that advanced and highly specialized technologies can provide a us as kind of oracular view of the future, through their ability to interpret a reservoir of events both past and presently unfolding.
For your own safety, you are being recorded
The quest for total information awareness exists as a contemporary manifestation of the belief in the mediumistic potential of electronic media. Suggestions of this potential have persisted since the earliest days of electronic communication, with inventions ranging from telegraphy and phonographic recording, to wireless signal transmission, magnetic information storage and the expansive networked environments of the Internet repeatedly being implicated, both directly and indirectly, as facilitators of supernatural experience.
Spiritualists on the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries embraced the language of electricity and telegraphy, in an attempt to explain the role played by human mediums as a conduit between the spirit and living worlds. “It was the animating powers of electricity, after all, that gave the telegraph its distinctive property of simultaneity and its unique sense of disembodied presence, allowing the device to vanquish previous barriers of space, time, and in the Spiritualists imagination, even death.” 3
The rapid dissemination of new media technologies into the public sphere, following in the wake of the invention of the telegraph, was driven in part by a boom in experimentation from both commercial and amateur researchers. This push to explore the possibilities and limits of electronic communication has resulted in a move away from the model of human mediums acting in the role of spiritual electronic devices, towards a direct investigation of the medium of electronics and how it may be applied in the quest for otherworldly contact. Working with commercially available tape recorders in the 1960’s, researchers like Friedrich Jürgenson and Konstantin Raudive reported hearing voices attempting to communicate with them from the beyond via the medium of magnetic tape.4 Both Jürgenson and Raudive suggest the possibility that these voices, inaudible in the original signal being captured, appeared as impressions of a previously imperceptible mode of communication which had been made manifest through the act of recording itself. This notion, that the electronic medium itself, can act as a conduit which allows us to move outside of “normal” time, to commune with the dead and peer into the future, is the foundation for Para-arts Studies in Total Information Awareness.
The processes and artifacts of magnetic recording have, necessarily, played a central role in this research. The data captured, stored and retrieved by these devices exists as a virtualization of our selves, transducing our behaviors into patterns of electricity and lines of magnetic force. In a society increasingly reliant on these systems as a medium for the retention of our knowledge and memories, the information stored within them has, in a growing number of instances, become a replacement for direct experience and first person communication. Consumer production of magnetic storage devices ranging from audio and videocassette recorders to computer hard drives and magnetic information cards has resulted in the proliferation of these media into all aspects of our daily existence. It is the very extent of this proliferation, the sheer quantity of information and the minutia of its detail that has led to many to a belief in the possibility of obtaining total information awareness, or a complete electro-magnetic transduction of all that is knowable into a medium from which the future may be revealed in its formative stages.
Like vessels of disembodied memory, magnetic media trap these multitudes of representations, severing them from their sources by time, physical geography and the context of first person experience. The whole of recorded images, sounds and data collected through this staggering range of devices and media, radiating outward from the earth as radio and television waves, and coursing through the veins of the global information network exist as sort of collective cultural memory bank, fragmented shattered and disembodied from the beings upon whose its existence was once inextricably tied.
The replication and fragmentation inherent to the reified form of memory found in electronic media has in many ways reshaped the way that we perceive our selves and the realities of our environment. We have become comfortable with the disposability and casual disassociation of our electronic identities. We speak of these information artifacts as mere images, representations, devoid of the weight of a reality perceived, readily copied, easily manipulated, erased and discarded. It is perhaps worthy to note here the specific relationship that exists between these developments in communications media and the forces of planned obsolescence that have driven their production. The effects of this multi-laired detachment, have caused us to suffer from a sort of collective out of body experience, a trans-dimensional existence brought on through the dispossession of identities into the reified realm our technological progeny. The case of the biomorphic identification card, a device where control over the determination of the very facts of our physical being may be relinquished to the benchmark of our electronic others, is offered here as an illustration of this condition.
From their earliest incarnations, born out of phonographic lathe and wax cylinder recording techniques, the products of media technology have portended the dangerous potentialities risked through this process of identity transference. “ The phonographed voice had lost its loyalty; it no longer evaporated in the moment of expressivity but lived on to plague one’s absence, and it had no respect for the dead. As Edison said, ‘ This tongueless, toothless instrument, without larynx or pharynx, dumb, voiceless matter, nevertheless utters your words, and centuries after you have crumbled to dust will repeat again and again to a generation that will never know you, every idle thought, every fond fancy, every vain word that you choose to whisper against this thin iron diaphragm.’ ” 5
While the phonograph and tape recorder have proven most effective in this process of separation, their contemporaries in the realm of digital electronic devices have vastly expanded the rift. A valuable example may be found in the now omnipresent magnetic information card (fig.1). Closely related to the largely obsolete format of audio recording tape, and most commonly found in the form of a personal credit card, these thin plastic objects exist today as one of the most powerful icons of the transference of our identities into the electronic medium. This separation effect has become so charged that the theft of ones credit card information is now commonly referred to as identity theft, a phenomenon made ever more potent by the increasing rate at which are interactions are becoming mediated, almost exclusively in some instances, through electronic devices.
In response to these prevailing conditions, Para-arts research into the mediumistic potential of electronic media seeks to operate directly out of the steadily flowing refuse of this trade in electronic memory and disembodied identity. Devices, developed while in residence at the Berwick Research Institute, and constructed in large part from these discarded media technologies, have been created in an attempt to perceive a phenomenon so commonplace it has faded into an apparent transparency. We are no longer awed, by the sights and sounds of our spirits existing outside of our physical being. The very banality of this occurrence in an age rife with electronic media has largely obscured any context through which the effects of this disembodiment my be related, rendering these spirits of representation invisible with regards to their effects and influence upon our physical being.
Through the modification, hybridization, and adaptive reuse of these obsolete communications systems, an attempt has been made to alter the way in which we experience, and subsequently relate to the transference of our selves into the electronic otherworld. Working with disposed of and second-hand consumer technologies, common cassette recorders have been modified to allow us to hear the voices of our doppelgangers, trapped within the stripes of the magnetic information cards that bear our identities. When passed across the head of an appropriately modified audio tape player (fig.2), we can hear the voices of our electronic others speaking to us directly through a translation of data into sound. Unlike traditional magnetic tape systems, these new devices do not seek to simply reproduce or mirror the original source, but instead, through the mediumistic properties of the magnetic recording head, to translate them into a new form of communication by which we may regain perspective on the otherworldly potentialities of our electronically disembodied selves.
Of all the specialized technologies used in recorded media, it is this magnetic head that is perhaps particularly suited to service in communication as both electronic and supernatural medium. In the process of storing and retrieving magnetic information, the head serves as a point of focus through which all data is transmitted. It is, in essence, both the ear that hears and the mouth that speaks the language of electricity to the waiting memory of the magnetic medium. Development of the head was arguably the single most important step towards the realization of the concept storing and retrieving information within a magnetically receptive material. Information is memorized into this system through the transduciton of electricity into magnetism and back again. Speaking through the head gap, the mouth of this technologized head is quite literally an opening in the otherwise closed electrical loop of the voicing coils (fig.3). This gap acts both as an opening through which electrical impulses escape the head as lines of magnetic force, and as a finely tuned orifice through which the head listens to the magnetically stored signal for translation back into the realm of electricity. It is this translation that enables the transference of information to and from this stored memory and in turn, facilitates the temporal and physical dislocations inherent to recorded media.
The anthropomorphic nature of these devices is by no means incidental or insignificant. We speak ever more frequently of the possibilities of artificial intelligence. The underlying assumption being that as technology advances, its increasing complexity may allow it to approach a human like potential for intelligence. Vast computational algorithms, working in conjunction with large resources of data storage and powerful computer processors, have offered us a vision of the devices of our creation, ultimately set free from the constraints of their human inter-dependency. But as critic John Zerzan discusses in a lecture entitled “Against Technology,” 6 we may be failing to see the evidence that precisely the inversion of this may be at play in the humanization of our electronic progeny, that is, that our increasing awareness of the potential for these electronic devices to become more human, comes as the direct result of an increasing tendency to identify ourselves through, and subsequently within, the context of these perceptual extensions. Put another way, we can see technology becoming more like us, because we have seen ourselves become technology, our spirits transduced and reified within a network of electronics and magnetism.
Writing in “Oh What a Blow that Phantom Gave Me,” Edmund Carpenter relays the stories of his experiences during the 1960’s, introducing electronic media to the Biami people from the Papuan Plateau of New Guinea. “Throughout New Guinea, it [is] commonly feared that if ones name or image falls into the hands of an enemy, he may use it mischievously. Sorcerers believe they can render even the mightiest helpless by naming, or injure another by introducing his likeness into an unpleasant situation. A sorcerer who possesses any part of his victim, anything once him…has him at his mercy.” 7 While the scientific veil of technology has largely moved us to dismiss such statements as superstition, viewing them as the simplifications of an unsophisticated and unscientific people, it is with these very thoughts that we find ourselves looking once again between the lines, and within the words of Doctor John Poindexter and the Office of Information Awareness. The disembodiment of our spirits through the transductive conduit of electronic media has left them prey to use as mere tools in the agendas of a rapidly expanding information economy. The quest for total information awareness, accessed via the accumulated memory of our disembodied past in an instant of electronic simultaneity, may be seen in this light to be symptomatic of the process by which our identities have become trapped inside of the technological devices of our own creation.
But in the words of William Burroughs, any number can play, and so the products of this research may be seen to have been pursued less in the quest for fixed conclusions, suggesting closure and the finality of a deed now done, than as the probing searches resultant from a perceived need for action, or more precisely reaction, to the situations described herein. The instruments developed by Para-arts for its Studies in Total Information Awareness have been, and continue to be employed, in a type of post obsolescent conjuring of our electronic ancestry. The magnetic card translator exists as a point of interface, an attempt to facilitate a reconnection with the intuitive respect of people like the Biami, for the potentialities unleashed by the willing separation of one from their own identity as experienced through electronic media. In a transduction of data into sound, the card translator allows the disembodied spirit, trapped within the stripe of its magnetic card and stripped of the formal associations to that which it identifies, to be perceived in a moment of sonic reveal, as alien within its own reified context.
1.Burroughs, William. The Ticket That Exploded.
New York: Grove Press, 1967.
2.http://www.darpa.mil/darpatech2002/presentations/
iao_pdf/speeches/origpoindex.pdf
3.Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence From Telegraphy To Television. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000
4.Ellis, David J. “The Mediumship of the Tape Recorder: A detailed examination of the Jürgenson, Raudive Phenomenon Of Voice Extras On Tape Recordings.” Presented in completion of the Perrott-Warrick Studentship at Trinity College. Cambridge, England. 1978.
5.Kahn, Douglas. “Death In Light Of The Phonograph...” In Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio And The Avant Garde. 1st ed. Paperback. Edited by Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.
6.Zerzan, John. Running On Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization.
Los Angeles: Feral House, 2002
7.Carpenter, Edmund. Oh, What A Blow That Phantom Gave Me.
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973.
