El arte del anonimato: criaturas de la mito-poesía y otras máscaras

Art of the Faceless: mythopoetic media creatures and other masks (draft) By Geert Lovink & Daniël de Zeeuw To be published in La Maleta “In the future, everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes” - Ian Alan Paul At a now infamous press conference in February 2002 Donald Rumsfeld distinguished between three categories of things: known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. That two jet planes would destroy the World Trade Center towers in New York belonged to the third category, according to Rumsfeld.1 The moment it appeared, like every event without warning, it tore open the smooth surface of a new world order. Yet, it also provided the Bush administration with the perfect occasion for consolidating its policies by declaring war on the unknown and push through towards Total Information Awareness, the results which only became clear after Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extent of NSA surveillance capabilities. Indiscriminate scraping and analysis of personal data by governments and corporations such as Google and Facebook have virtually eradicated the conditions for what was once a core value and of internet culture: anonymity. Early .net culture offered a range of possibilities, from pseudonyms and multiple identities in role model games to anonymous remailers as part of a playful, innocent phase of cyberculture before the medium became mainstream. Needless to say there is no such thing as absolute anonymity, now or then: in the last instance, everyone is traceable. Anonymity isn't a purely technical issue but a social contract signed with the sys admins and their contractors and built on the techno-libertarian consensus that data will not be passed on to commercial or governmental parties. As of Snowden, this relationship is shattered: once we passed the moment we realized to have ‘lost control’ (Kontroll Verlust, as described by Michael Seemann2) the social contract is broken. We cannot trust hardware manufacturers, ISPs, platform operators and not even crypto-software, let alone our anonymous brothers and sisters. To speak and act without others knowing who or what you are or represent, or to build an entirely new personality for yourself or your group is what made the internet appeal to so many. Instead, the commercialization and militarization of the web leads to the concatenation of online and offline identities, supported by the hegemony of the client-server architecture. This development is reinforced by the type of bourgeois sensibility that finds it difficult to deal with the intrinsically risky nature of anonymous communications, preferring the retreat behind the safe walls of the Facebook community by cultivating ones “true self” to a small circle of family and friends. Trapped in this glass house, the citizen-user finds itself immobilized, and falls back into depression, the natural psychic state of today’s temp office worker. Instead of focusing on anonymity as a protective cover of the individual against the intrusive policies of both governments, corporations and fellow citizens, in this essay will will emphasize the performative ‘anon’ act by writers and artist collectives. Anonymity works best when it is

understood as a mask in process of transformation. Even though there is a great necessity for users to take defensive measures, anonymity as a culture really only thrives when individuals, temporarily, merge into swarms and go on the offensive. The specific history of the 2008-2012 Anonymous movement, as described by Gabrielle Coleman3 and captured in documentaries such as We Are Legion4 is a tragic case of the slogan United We Stand, Divided We Fall. Anonymity is the unknown state of exception. As in the case of all Events, we never know when it arrives, nor if it ever did. All we can do is be prepared when it is time to swarm and break out of B-E-P (boredomexcitement-paranoia), the vicious circle that the contemporary psychic state in the age of digital networks is caught in. The Con-dividuum
 Plenty examples of similar experiments with collective anonymity can be found in the margins of the conceptual and performance arts of the previous decades. The Italian Luther Blissett Project is probably best known for using the tactic of using an (imaginary) person's name for a movement of several unknown actors. Since 1994, this proper name - actually a former football player of AC Milan - is considered an open character or 'multiple single' that every artist can freely use. The best known piece of writing by Luther Blissett is “Q”. In this novel he coined the term con-dividuum: “It is necessary to get rid of the concept of In-dividuum, once and for all. That concept is deeply reactionary, anthropocentric and forever associated with such concepts as originality and copyright. Instead, we ought to embrace the idea of a Con-dividuum, i.e., a multiple singularity whose unfolding entails new definitions of ‘responsibility’ and ‘will,’ and is no good for lawyers and judges”. In the German autonome a.f.r.i.k.a Gruppe (founded in 1997) too, multiple anonymous artists operate under the same name: “The multiple name cancels out the separation between the individual and the collective. It magically grants a share in the collective figure of the imaginary person, in which the movement and power of an invisible mass are embodied.”5 Likewise, Michel Foucault in his day refers to the imaginary mathematician Nicolas Bourbaki as an ideal model, as scientific disciplines are “elaborated under the anonymity of a fantastic name.”6 This short biography of anonymity in the arts can easily be expanded. The Yippies, mail artists and Situationists, Black Mask, Against the Wall Motherfucker and other neoists used similar tactics. Other illustrious predecessors of Luther Blissett are Coleman Healy, Karen Eliot and Monty Cantsin (an open pop star 'invented by Al Ackerman in 1978). Recent successors vary from 0100101110101101.ORG, Adilkno and Sonja Bruenzel to Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee. In 2000 a group of Italian authors who had already been involved in Luther Blissett started the writers collective Wu Ming, a Chinese term meaning either "anonymous", "unknown" or "five people". It also refers to the third sentence from the Tao Te Ching: "Unnamed is the origin of Heaven and Earth." Together Wu Ming wrote several novels such as 54 (2002), Manituana (2007) and Altai (2009). Members of the group were involved in the Italian Autonomia movement in the seventies and eighties and the Mao-Dadaist radio station Radio Alice, about which in 2005 the collective together with Guido Chieso produced a film called Lavorare Con Lentezza. What does all this all have to say about the ossified relationship between individual and collective? Seductive figures invite to transform. Do we witness the coming into being of an escape route for the codified subject, a search for larger aggregates? Is it better to design imaginary entities yourself or to connect to a larger collective, "an open dynamic where singularity or difference is an

expression of collectivity, and vice versa"7? In any case it is important to maintain that anonymity revolves around a game of hidden identity at a specific moment and in a specific context. Anonymity is above all a temporary experience, a ramshackle structure that works as long as it works and may disappear at once when decay of return on investment sets in. To stick to Temporary Common Denominators in a dogmatic fashion is always unwise - it's better to pass them on. That's what the internet has taught us. It has also informed a generation of artists that grew up online, and that are now attempting to adapt to the new situation. Anonymity by Design We all remember a man falling from one of the WTC skyscrapers on 11 September 2001 at 9:41:15 a.m. Untill today we do not know his name. All we see is a figure, a silhouet in perfect alignment with the vertical columns of the building grappling with gravity soon to follow his course. The following years we became acquainted with images of masked terrorists shot by cheap camcorders that legitimized the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bogomir Doringer, artist and curator of an 2014 exhibition at the Amsterdam art space Mediamatic, surveys the role anonymity plays in contemporary design and media art. Doringer relates his growing interest in anonymity to the witnessing of these events towards a culture of ‘facelessness’. During his study at the Rietveld Academy he noticed many other artists and (fashion) designers engaged with anonymity as an experimental aesthetic and political form, using masks and other cloaking devices, manipulating and transforming the natural shapes of the human face, experimenting with morphing official and perceived identities, paranoiac forms of perception and new surveillance technologies. Doringer: “The unstable identity of the present begs for the return of power of the mask from ancient times, when it was used as a form of protection, disguise, performance, or just plain entertainment.”8 The exhibited artworks can be roughly categorized as engaging a politics of surveillance and a politics of identity. Yet the most interesting projects are actually those in which these distinctions become redundant, where the artful deference of surveillance itself turns into an alternative identity. It is at this juncture that premodern connotations and functions of the artist resurface: that of the jester or trickster, where deceitful appearances invoke a temporary retreat from Historical Seriousness. In Carmen Schabracqs work for example, in which woollen masks and sculptures invoke a sense of the intimate association between anonymity, the body, and animality so wellestablished in the pop culture of the preceding decades.9 Photographers Frank Schallmaier and Hester Scheurwater take as their research object the online self-presentations of gay men and women. Schallmaier, by collecting selfies and penis-comparisons on gay dating sites, and presenting them in a thematically organized manner.10 Scheurwater, by taking pictures of herself inspired on the anonymizing (in)formalities of many selfies with which the obscenely transparent body (and the complicit observer) is increasingly associated, and whose material universality replaces the distinct face-name coalition. The atypical alignment of legs and arms without face centered around the recording mobile device reminds one of those alien lifeforms described in sci-fi novels. She organized these images - first published on the social media platforms on which they were inspired - into a booklet called "Shooting Back".11 The work Islamic Carding by Iranian artist Shahram Entkhabi instead juxtaposes within a single image two seemingly irreconcilable aesthetic and ethical regimes - that of Western and Islamic

culture. The former is afraid of anything that refuses to show itself; the latter of what might be revealed when it happens. The critique of the burqa is typically articulated in terms of women's rights, violated by a backward religious doctrine. Yet without wanting to replace this explanation, an alternative hypothesis (explaining our unease with the burqa-phenomenon) is possible - the tendency of the West to perpetually prepare all objects for their incessant circulation and subsequent consumption on the basis of a founding transparency that makes them structurally available and 'gives them away' in a manner (ironically) similar to the actual giving away of women in those very backward cultures. All services 24 Hrs.12 Redefining the Online Self Snowden's revelations about data surveillance have further despaired and dissociated those who continue to value privacy and anonymity, both online and offline. In today's socio-economic climate unconnectedness makes obsolescent and opacity incriminates ('to attract secret services, please encrypt'). It drives old-time defenders of a socialist appropriation of mass media towards Thoreau or Unabomber-like musings (Enzensberger).13 There's something to say for a society where anonymity doesn't require wearing bizarre masks in public. But when it comes to imagining alternatives to an ever more omniscient network society, recourse is often taken to legalistic or ethical measures. (1) Present unlimited technological possibilities with one hand (e.g. Google Glass); (2) present user licence agreement and ethical code of conduct with the other - you do the math. Instead, an aesthetic approach to anonymity as a form of (dis)identity politics is in a sense the polar opposite of a legalistic defence of privacy. It presents what is in fact most needed: a broadening of our imagination regarding new forms of collective life based on sociality that nevertheless defy the superpanoptical machinery. Like the Invisible Committee - a French anonymous collective that in 2007 unleashed a provocative pamphlet called The Coming Insurrection - who encourage us to “flee visibility” and to “turn anonymity into an offensive position”. Anonymous can be seen as a collective artwork, a performance of social potential, leaving behind the poverty of an overly self-reflexive identity politics. The act of coming out is traditionally seen as liberating—and has been accordingly deconstructed as a 1970s Western consumerist agenda to install capitalist notions of the Self. Anonymous is a collective artwork in neo-liberal times of permanent depression, a performance of social potential of the ‘precariat’ as a networked class, overcoming the antinomies of bourgeois thought, escaping, just for now, the unbearable truth of identity. The Guy Fawkes mask is only one of a multitude of possible characters that can be adopted. Our global popular culture is a rich resource for Common Denominator Design. In order to get a better understanding of its dynamics, we need to distinguish it from the speed at which memes come and go. Anonymous is not an escape route for the despaired but a call to team up and go public together. The heterogeneity of its strategies should not scare us and instead urge us to further theorize these new formations of the social in a time of crisis of the existing institutional forms of power and representation such as the political party, the trade union, the church or the tribe. As the ‘new social movement’ concept ended up in the dead end street of the NGO, the current network discourse is too weak to take its place—as of yet. We’re desperate to team up, but how? The artistic subversion of the projects discussed so far lies not all in the pop-cultural use (or abuse) of internet applications, but in the conditions it creates for open characters, in the broadest sense of that term. Consider the automated creation of user profiles; fictional whistleblowers; search engines

where queries are lost rather than found; new versions of Chatroulette, conspiring digital body parts; the automatic creation of bulk Facebook profiles by bots, the control of group behavior and the emergence of collective identities within MMOs, and so on. After dire self-management of Facebook there is a whole world to discover. The last thing that is that we have to take away even more by NSA revelations. Despite the legitimacy of a certain weariness with postmodern solutions to fundamental political and socio-economic problems, these types of identity games can short circuit an immersive post-Snowden defeatism. Parallel to this more dedicated binary-friendly minds must set to work on dismantling current en developing different infrastructures and protocols, in which case state repression will obviously be most severe. In other words, the need for artistic and activist experiments with collective forms of anonymity remains. In a spectacle society obsessed with restricting the flourishing of singularities it itself proliferates, by means of monitoring, commodifying and personalising experience, anonymity unlocks a range of alternatives that would release, in its purest form, an enormous and dangerous energy: "The question is how to re-imagine anonymity not as an attainable categorical state, but as a way to recoup an energy of metamorphosis, the desire to become someone else."14 The artistic projects discussed here are broadening and re-invigorating our imagination, if not actually effective in disaggregating the forces that prevent them from appearing. Aware of the paranoia lurking in these forces, that wants to protect the individual-that-has-nothing to-hide against the terrorist, one flights forward into anonymity. It is the policy of the disappearing act, a leap into the unknown unknown. Paranoia becomes a weakness, forever undermined by the existence of these unknown unknowns, collapsing under the weight of its own energy-guzzling data parks. The preferred tactic to accelerate this process is not to expose the status quo - favored method of critical theory - but to mask ourselves. This is done not according to the law of reduction, but to the law of multiplication. Because the less you are, the more you can be; and the more everyone can be, the more no one is anything. What happens when unknown starts to act? Expect a collective orgy of appearance and disappearance. Invisibility is briefly visible; but also ready to dissolve in the masses. Are you ready for an epic long-con? 1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns. The Wikipedia page mentions Slavoj Žižeks fourth category, the unknown knowns. 2

http://www.ctrl-verlust.net/glossar/kontrollverlust/.

3

Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous, London/New York, Verso Books, 2014. 4

Brian Knappenberger, We Are Legion, January 2012. More information on http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/We_Are_Legion. 5

See for instance this English text: http://www.republicart.net/disc/artsabotage/ afrikagruppe01_en.htm. 6

Foucault, Michael.1996. “The Discourse of History.” In Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer, 19–50. Trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston, New York: Semiotext(e). p. 29.

Nicolas Thoburn, To Conquer the Anonymous: Authorship and Myth in the Wu Ming Foundation, in: Cultural Critique 78, Spring 2011, p. 127. 7

8

http://www.mediamatic.net/360812/en/faceless-statement.

9

In her essay on Zach Bias, Hito Steyerl mentions a few more names: “Laura Poitras, Metahaven, Jesse Darling, Sang Mun, Tyler Coburn, Dmytri Kleiner, Andrew Norman Wilson and James Bridle, and organisations such as Auto Italia South East deal.” ArtReview, March 2014 FutureGreats issue, URL: http://artreview.com/features/2014_futuregreats_zach_blas/. 10

See http://www.facelessexhibition.net/frank-schallmaier.

11

For more information on her work, please visit http://www.hesterscheurwater.com/.

12

URL: http://www.facelessexhibition.net/shahram-entekhabi.

13

URL: http://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1403/msg00000.html

14

For more indications in this direction, see the small but very rich anthology opaque presence, manual of latent invisibilities, edited by andreas brockmann and knowbotic research, diaphanes, Zurich, 2010.