Contenu du sommaire : Contre-enquêtes en open source

In parallel with the dossier of artistic works Warren Neidich has prepared for the Icons section, this article lays down the theoretical foundations for conceptual analyses and political experiments making the “brain without organs” a principle of resistance against the dangers posed by the “wired brain”. The multiplication of interfaces promising to ensure a direct communication between our nervous systems and our computational devices is envisaged here through the mutation of the cognitariat of cognitive capitalism into the “superordinate precariat” of neural capitalism, i.e., a labor force whose cognitive, affective, memorial and imaginative capacities would be technically modulable according to the needs of the productive apparatus.

Are we living in an age of new investigations? Or rather, of new counter-investigations? Composite investigative collectives are seizing on the abundant information that the new media—between social networks, leaks and platforms—put into circulation to counter the representations imposed from above…

Previously limited to a handful of insiders, OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) techniques of investigation have conquered a host of new users since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. In the field of journalism, they have even imposed themselves as a perfect solution for covering a conflict that is being played out on both physical and virtual terrains. Here we examine the shift from the margins of journalism to the centre of OSINT in times of war.

The independent associative consultancy INDEX, made up of architects, artists and researchers, investigates State violence in and from France. In this interview, they explain how they politically reinvest the notion of expertise in police investigations, tell us about their links with the Forensic Architecture collective, explain what they mean by “truth” in open source investigations, and what they are doing to allow a greater dissemination of OSINT tools.

The current craze for OSINT practices owes much to their political function of verifying the discourses of authority. But this counter-discursive posture based on open sources is not enough to guarantee the legitimacy of an investigation, and even less the accuracy of its conclusions: a difficulty arises in that the means of open source investigation can also be used for propaganda purposes or produce—intentionally or not—disinformation. This article questions the methodological implications of OSINT counter-surveys in comparison with what Eyal Weizman calls “negative positivism”.

The ongoing war in Ukraine has initiated a change of scale in the use of digital investigations. It is the first high-intensity conflict to take place in an area so widely covered by the Internet, and where the use of social networks by individuals is common practice. Manœuvres, assaults and abuses are documented in near-real time, providing journalists and observers with data on the course of the conflict. However, this same data is analyzed, cross-checked, interpreted and used by the belligerents to optimize their strategies for territorial control in wartime.

Within the Tactical Tech organisation, which campaigns for emancipatory and committed uses of new technologies, Laura Ranca coordinates the “Exposing the invisible” project, which is dedicated to transmitting independent investigative tools as well as giving space to the results of counter-investigations often based on open source data.

The world of intelligence has ceased to be the prerogative of states. there is now a market for intelligence, made up of young start-ups, digital collection and analysis tools, and data accessible on google as well as on the dark web. the pages proposed in this article are taken from a book in progress, la doublure du monde. They include descriptions of cyber tools as well as pages from the osint training manual, and their practical applications in reallife situations, or examples of the alliance between influence work on social networks and the use of artificial neural networks.

Co-written by Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Guillaume Grandjean, the video essay Geo
Markr (22 minutes, 2022) explores different practices of mediated spatial investigation, from Chris Marker's filmic explorations to the video game GeoGuessr. The two authors invited Corentin Lê to join them in an exchange of ideas.

In an age where anyone can produce images, sounds, texts or videos at the click of a button, thanks to “super-media”, this article explores how contemporary poetic practices appropriate open sources of information to investigate realities “uncovered” by the dominant media. By confronting the gigantic mass of publicly available data, these practices undertake to sort, filter, select or re-describe them through different media or formats to make them more accessible, meaningful and expressive. This article examines the formal characteristics of these practices and suggests how they propose a new praxeology of action in the age of “surveillance capitalism”.

More than 30 years after the launch of the Internet, the democratic utopia defended by its creators seems to have been corrupted by big tech companies. At the same time, at virtual spaces' margins, activists and mere users employ a range of tactics to carry out political hijacks of these companies' platforms. Through spam, hoaxes, or by organizing as online communities, they temporarily manage to visibilize themselves and to reclaim a form of agency. Here is a review of their tactics, presenting them at the same time as a source of inspiration and a source of concern for the state of the network utopia.

In 1983, Cedric J. Robinson introduced, under the title of a “black radical tradition”, the idea of a specifically African genealogy of the struggle against slavery, capitalism and imperialism, distinct from European Marxism. “Afropessimist” thought draws on Hortense Spillers to measure the consequences of the subtraction of Blacks from the orders of humanity and political subjectivity, in a violence that converts African lives into flesh. The African American poet and theorist Fred Moten revisits these thoughts today by inventing a “black optimism,” which asserts the ambivalence and ambiguity of blackness, emphasizing its particular potentialities and designating in “the flesh” a possibility of formulating new forms of life.

The text focuses on the ambiguity and vagueness of the concept of design since the 1960s and on our understanding of design as a transformative force or as a problem. Starting from the famous “kitchen debate”, it also questions the discourse about design in the (post)socialist countries. A key role in defining the position of design in the global political context was played by the 9th ICSID Congress, held in Moscow in 1975 under the title Design for Man and Society. Across politically antagonistic systems, the question of the human in, with, and through design has always been at the center of attention and still forms one of the core questions in the search for ways out of the multiple crises.

The discourse on the role of design in addressing and causing existing socio-cultural issues is two-folded. On the one hand, there is a growing interest in and exploration of how design could contribute both to improve social issues and to promote desired socio-cultural transformations. On the other hand, questions have been raised not only on the effectiveness of the contribution of design to this field, but also on the implication of design practices in the emergence of these same issues.

Design appeared at the turn of the industrial revolutions as a breakthrough in the dominant idea of industrialisation, and in recent years has been given a multitude of labels: “ecodesign”, “social design”, “ethical design”, “inclusive design”, etc. One might therefore wonder whether this trend does not highlight a difficulty in understanding what is problematic about design-as-design: having perhaps lost its subversive force, is it now perfectly integrated into the productive forces? What would be the responsibility of design itself?

We wanted to rephrase Cedric Price's famous riddle that questioned the promise of technology. We therefore formulated the following provocation: “Design is the answer, but what was the question?” In this case, what could be the promise of design? We ask another question: “If design is not the answer, what could it be?” Whatever the answer, we make it clear that what design can do is answer the echoes of our relationship with everyone and everything on the planet we share—our common home—and ask what might not happen in a world-without-us—an unthinkable world.

Designers and theorists Ezio Manzini and Virginia Tassinari answer the question posed by the title of the dossier, Design is the answer, but what was the question? If, on the one hand, the question of the social and political impact of design and its responsibility for social change is raised, on the other hand, it is necessary to reflect on the modes of action of design and on the foundations of this action. In this perspective, Manzini highlights the practices of engendering and engaging as strategies of common and com munity action, while Tassinari explains how the definition of designing (more than design) as a political action requires a rethinking of the epistemological frame work that founds it.

The swimming pool is a facility that is colliding with the new climate regime. Many local authorities currently find themselves in a triple impasse (from the point of view of energy, ecology and budget) in the day-to-day management of their aquatic infrastructures. In this article, we look at some new experiments carried out by certain territories that start to think about the end of swimming pools as “exo-terrestrial” infrastructures, characteristic of urban and planning modernity. They invite us to think about an ecology of redirection based on a design of (good) closure and descalarity.

Since our realities are composed of images, we need to think critically about our modern archives in order to deconstruct our most common (re)presentations. The design research project New Weather TV focuses specifically on the images of the mainstream weather report. It apprehends the weather as an artifact of political design that inserts modern (and thus anthropocentric) ideologies into our everyday (Western) realities: global views of our planet, objective posturing, borders, and sublimated images of disaster. By exploring the performativity of design, New Weather TV asks the following question: how can we re-design anthropocentric visions in order to reconfigure human-nature relations?

Born with the Industrial Revolution, design has accompanied the development of the thermo-industrial civilization. At a time when a change of paradigm must be envisaged, design can remain an ally as long as it is reoriented towards other ways of living and inhabiting. Rural areas are privileged territories in this respect. On the basis of this analysis, a “school of decorative arts” has set up an experimental program in the Dordogne, which aims to put design at the service of rural worlds.

How, in the midst of the environmental crisis, can we redirect the creative energy of design in the service of a technical proto-democracy? Based on the hidden capacity of design to construct and deconstruct material environments, we say that it is first and foremost a design process whose reversibility allows us to understand and gradually act on our technical structures. And to try to move in a material world ramified to the extreme.