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Parasites live and feed on other plants and animals. Techno-Parasites use
whatever technical systems or apparatuses they can find as hosts, drawing
on their output, their energy supplies and cycles to procreate and grow. A
Techno-Parasite can be a simple or a complex system which is attentive and
adapts to its host's structure. Its inventive struggle for survival has to
cause technical disruptions. Techno-Parasites suck other machines empty,
disrupt their circuits, effect power cuts, disable them, destroy them.
The effective Techno-Parasite irritates humans for two main reasons. It is
a machine which, once constructed and liberated, acts at whim and is out of
human control. As far as the machines are concerned, it is alive. Secondly,
the Techno-Parasite feeds on vital and symbollically charged resources of
our modern existence: light sources, electrical currents, data flows,
communication lines. In so far as these networks are already deeply
inscribed in our unconscious, the Techno-Parasite attacks the very
symbolical infrastructure of contemporary culture.
The Techno-Parasite is no more than a principle for which there is no
copyright or ideological certificate. Moreover, the sketches presented here
are not finished works but suggestions for possible developments which
should inspire others to contribute further designs that can also be shown
on this site. They were initially designed in the late 1980s when they were
part of the machine art developments of the time, and have recently drawn
attention again because of the pertinence of the concept in relation to the
electronic networks.
The Techno-Parasite may also be seen as a commentary to the way in which we
deal with artifices, especially in the media art context. The public
handling for instance of the phenomenon of technical failure shows that a
lot has to happen regarding the understanding of the objecthood of
apparatuses. The destruction of things is an inherent part of them. Imagine
you were telepathic and you were able to see where car accidents are going
to happen. As for me, I would not prevent them but build a podium and sell
tickets. The accident is part of driving a car. The accident makes driving
tangible, graspable. The drama turns the event into something that is
human, it makes it real. Similarly, the computer virus is a drama that
shows what the power of software can be.
The apparent irrelevance of small parts in our environment, like nuts and
bolts, has to be exploited. The notion of what is 'unimportant' has to do
with attentiveness and alertness. In this case, the little objects are
present so frequently that they disappear into the background, they lose
our attention, our concentration and our respect. At the same time, nuts
and bolts are essential parts of our of our culture. What would the world
look like if these little parts didn't exist? Suddenly, everybody would
fall off their chairs, cars would fall apart and the computer would become
a loose collection of objects, ships fragment until only the welded rump
remains. The structure, the different frameworks around us would become
painfully obvious because everything would disintegrate like loose sand.
Realising this kind of loss returns a certain attention to the lost object.
A continuous and latent consciousness is formed, a kind of slumbering sixth
sense.
Similar to nuts and bolts, networks and sensitive systems of soft- and
hardware are opaque and invisible, just as the car has become an
unobtrusive piece of furniture. This is the perfect moment to become
parasitic. In the confusion of the technical systems the Techno-Parasites
can do their utmost to survive at the cost of the unquestioned, the
unobtrusive. Imagine that there are parasites that can live on old, unused
data files, on the scrapyards of old apparatuses, where they use parts of
the old TCP protocols for moving themselves around, for communicating with
the ultimate aim to make themselves beautiful, large and visible.
TP No. EH00020004La
This Techno-Parasite lives off light, acid rain and street lamps. It works
as follows: the parasite consists of a cup which collects water. This
evaporates so that an acid concentrate is left which is collected around
the pole of the street lantern. By creating a difference in potential the
acid first eats through the zink layer and then through the Fe 360 metal of
the pole, which eventually breaks and falls down. The process is based on
the reverse of galvanisation.
TP No. EH00020005Lc
This Techno-Parasite also lives on street lanterns. It has two cutters
(like a pipe cutter) which are driven by a motor that gets its energy from
solar cells that, at night, catch the light from the street lamp, and
sunlight during the day. As the parasite very slowly rotates round the pole
it climbs upwards where it remains until the pole is cut through.
TP No. EH00020006Lh
Another lantern parasite, also climbs up the lantern's pole in a spiral
movement with a light-driven motor. Having arrived at the lamp it destroys
the glas with a hammer, killing its own source of life, and falls to the
ground.
Playing out the machinic dialectics of function and disfunction, the
Techno-Parasites are carefully engineered to use the very energy source
which they are eventually seeking to destroy. Parasitic behaviour might be
the theoretical mechanism that revives the alertness for the systems which
surround us and are absent from our consciousness. A computer virus is a
good example: without the virus the awareness of a notion like 'software'
would have become vague long ago, domesticated like the grass under our
feet.
We believe that also Cyberspace and the electronic networks will only begin
to form complete and viable ecological systems when they are also inhabited
by parasites. Just like there can be no car traffic without crashes, and
just as there can be no machines without failure, it is only
Techno-Parasites which give ecological unity to the Net.
1. OUT OF CONTROL
Our relations with machines are strongly informed by a desiring economy of
dominance and control. We demand them to be efficient and reliable, they
should work smoothly and quietly - just like any good slave. Even where we
use them for the new, telematic experiences we want them to enhance our
lives and experiences in a controllable and meaningful way, whenever we
deal with machines we want to mark and map the territory on which they
operate, and we want to still be able to determine how natural artificial
life forms can get.
The Techno-Parasites, however, show that we are not only out of control
because we are, when dealing with complex technologies, unable to contain
the whole potential of this complexity. Rather, they imply also that there
are other forces in such complex systems, that there is a desiring Other,
which will always disrupt the smooth interfaces and which will force us
into continuous deterritorialisations. Any order implies forces of
disruption that will create disorder and a transformation towards a new
order on a different level.
As the scientist and philosopher, Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers,
have argued, bifurcation, change, amplification only happens when an
'individual, idea, or behavior,[...] are "dangerous" - that is, those that
can exploit to their advantage the nonlinear relations guaranteeing the
stability of the preceding regime. Thus we are led to conclude that the
same nonlinearities may produce an order out of chaos of elementary
processes and still, under different circumstances, be responsible for the
destruction of this same order, eventually producing a new coherence beyond
another bifurcation.' (Prigogine/Stengers 1984:190)
Exaggerating an old tradition from machine art, the Techno-Parasites are
machines that are not only useless or self-destructive and that perform
somehow intelligent or semi-autonomous behaviour. The Techno-Parasites are
machines that actively seek to waste energy, to destroy systems, to defy
human rationality. They might help us to reach those far-from-equilibrium
experiential states which, according to thinkers from Nietzsche to
Prigogine, are a precondition for the creation of something new. At a time
when the channelling and controlling of interactive possibilities in the
political as well as in the telematic field are widespread, we need forces
of displacement, we need gestures that cause sections and cuts, and the
radical redirection of energetic flows from those dominant trends of
territorialisation. At times like these we have to encourage the creation
of insecurity.
This is a question of enhancing technological development and artistic
creativity, as well as of maintaining a fluid and heterogeneous sense of
self. Therefore: Defy the insurance brokers of Cyberspace! Facilitate the
moments of transgression across the boundary of technical rationality. Not
the fantastic but the obnoxious, not the surprising but the shocking will
be the sources of new forms of subjectivity. The confrontation with that
imaginary space of the machinic unconscious which the Techno-Parasites
offer promises a venture into the zones of pleasure and pain where the
boundary, that source of the emergent self, can be explored.
2. ATTACKS ON THE MODERN HUMAN UNCONSCIOUS
Another aspect of the desire connected to machines is the fantasy that they
will work for us forever, or that better ones will replace them, which will
eventually make it possible for us to be universal and immortal. The dream
of flying and of teletransportation, of transgressing the limitations of
space and time, is related to this. Any machine or programme that is
destructive or self-destructive, that has an impossible interface or an
uncontrollable mechanism, potentially undermines this promise of
timelessness, of eternal life, and returns us to what we are - not in the
negativity of virtuality and promise, but in the black hole of our
subjective positivity.
The psychological crisis that the Techno-Parasites point to runs deep - the
hysteria around computer viruses, power cuts and logical bombs which are
represented as actually life-threatening are a case in point. The
Techno-Parasites highlight this mechanism in a more differentiated way,
they materialise the invisible in both a metaphorical and performative way.
The Techno-Parasites are precision weapons for the attack on the modern
human unconscious.
TP No. EH0000002003R.C
This Techno-Parasite reacts to anything that emits or reflects light. The
light sources are attacked and shot at with black material, soot for
instance. In this case light is understood as a form of fire, and soot is
chosen as its opposite. Everything in a room that is reflecting is made
black, the parasite continues until nothing is left that reflects. The
parasite is equipped with light sensors and an apparatus for the automatic
steering of the soot-canon. It also registers its actions and prints this
graphic report - from white to black.
The lantern parasites mentioned earlier target precisely the fear of dark
spaces that we sought to expel from modern cities. Our life has, it seems,
come to depend on artificial light more than on sunlight. In this context,
the soot canon is an even more painful device: it not only cuts the lamp
pole or breaks the bulb by mechanical default, but intentionally seeks out
and eliminates all light sources, making the room, the world, eventually
ourselves disappear in a dark hole of nothingness.
TP No. EH0001001.201A
This Techno-Parasite is a a self-driven automobile, in other words an
auto-automobile. It is equipped with an optical sensor and a metal detector
which yields sufficient information for the auto-auto to find an object the
size of a car and position itself underneath it. By means of a
'neuro-system' the auto-auto can determine where the car's wheel is and
locate the centre as well as a flat surface. It attaches itself to this
surface with two flexible magnets and a rigid one and waits... until the
driver of the car starts driving. The wheels of the auto-auto parasite load
a battery using two ventilator belts and a dynamo. When the charge is high
enough this potential is converted into a high frequency pulse which erases
or damages the electronic control chip in the luxury car. This causes the
steering system to fail and the car halts, dead. The parasite uses the
current left in its battery to go on to the next car, or...
The auto-auto takes its energy from movement which is the charateristic of
the car and copies it by logging onto the car as a part of the system. It
transforms this energy and uses it to immobilise the vehicle, making that
which is desired impossible by realising it. Function and disfunction,
construction and destruction, desire and frustration are necessary aspects
of the same dynamic.
For the participants of this conference, though, the parasites that begin
to populate the electronic networks will probably be the greatest cause of
anxieties. Disabled or mutilated TCP/IP connections, monstrously inflated
attachment files, flame throwers and other attack parasites are hugely
disconcerting. Yet, even more irritation is caused by the passivity of the
new weblock or 'taboo' parasites that temporarily or permanently sends back
error messages when certain addresses are requested or contacted, whether
on the Web or on other network protocols. More than anything we depend on
communication, on access, and on availability for our livelihood and
sensibility, which is why being disconnected or unreachable can cause
traumas about which psychiatrists will soon hold their first congresses.
The Techno-Parasites keep us on the edge between the physical world and the
imaginary environments, they force us to think the materiality of the media
and technical infrastructure with which we live, and they open the
carefully kept Pandora's Box of desires which, with a vicious grin, seek
the disruption and insecurity which the Parasites engineer. They force us
into that superior attitude of intelligent systems, whether human or
non-human: hesitation. Yet, we should not look at the Techno-Parasites too
critically. As an analogy, think about beavers that build dams and block
rivers out of a mixture of self-interest and ecological rationality and
care. They acted as free agents on the network of waterways until this
network was, as they say, cultivated or channelled, which is when a great
beaver hunt was initiated and the species eliminated. The beavers'
subversiveness was not directed against the network, but at using it in a
creative way, following a rationality different from that of the
cultivating humans. Similarly, there is a lot to learn from the
Techno-Parasites and from the way in which they make use of the
technological environment.
3. AN AESTHETICS OF HETROGENEITY
The Techno-Parasites point us in the direction of a new and creative
approach towards engaging with the electronic networks. Here are some of
the features of such an approach.
The future aesthetic of media art will not be one of apparitions or of
virtuality. Art in Cyberspace will only emerge where Cyberspace or, more
generally speaking, the digital territories, are interfaced with the human
body, with the field of our sensory experience. Any 'aesthetic' qualities
that go beyond this field of human experience, however extensively defined,
will not have any relevance for us. (The question whether the machines will
be able to experience the pleasures of order, beauty or cruelty will have
to be put off for yet a while, I guess.)
The new aesthetic of media art will be an aesthetic of heterogeneity. The
commercial and semi-commercial R&D people like to speak of intuitive
interfaces between human and machine, between physical and virtual
realities. We are told continuously that the virtual is becoming more real
than the natural, physical and technological environment which enwraps our
old bodies. Our true selves, we are made to believe, will only come into
their own when they are constituted as parts of a telematically engineered,
universal consciousness. This notion, ultimately grounded in the religious
belief in the objectivity of the binary code, is flawed, and transgressive
little objects like the Techno-Parasites remind us of something we tend to
ignore when confronted with apparently 'unintentional' technical failures:
the degrees of freedom in complex systems allow for a type of irrationality
which will recurrently force us to acknowledge the existential primacy of
our deterritorialised and desiring bodies.
Instead of intuitive interfaces we will see the development of
counter-intuitive interfaces which make it impossible to ignore the
specificities of the systems that are being connected. The slogan will not
be: don't feel the pace-maker, but: feel the pace-maker. Against the smooth
integration of surfaces, we will see a practice which highlights the cracks
and breaks, which allows for the unbounded unfolding of multiplicities, a
practice which works towards what Guattari has called 'Heterogenesis', a
becoming which produces ever new differences, which works against the Large
Molar Units and against digital homogenisation. This, by the way, is not a
new aesthetic paradigm but goes back to, for instance, Nietzsche, Artaud,
Bataille, or Burroughs, who represented an attitude and creative gesture
that went against the modernist affirmation of nihilist functionality.
We should also remind ourselves that the problematic relationship between
art and technology is not something that is unique to the computer age.
Remember for instance the discussions about the aesthetic potential - or
impotence - of photography and film in the late 19th and all through the
20th century. In 1977, Michel Foucault pointed to the strategic necessity
of the attitude described here: 'Today's morals of knowledge is perhaps: to
make the real sharp, piercing, edgy, unacceptable. To make it irrational?
Yes, if making it rational means to make it peaceful, quiet and safe, to
feed it into a great theoretical machine for the production of the ruling
rationalities. Yes, if making [the real] irrational means that it stops
being necessary, that it becomes available for appropriations, fights,
conflicts. Understandable and attackable to the degree to which it has been
"derationalised".' (Foucault, p.217-8)
TP No. EH00230030.201S
This Techno-Parasite is a socket finder which, once it is plugged in,
charges itself like a big battery and subsequently discharges with such a
polluting high-frequency impulse into the electricity network that it
circumvents the filters of all devices and subsequently fries the fuses,
the filters and and the machines in a 100 yard radius. Blammo, computer
gone or, at the very least, chip wiped or damaged.
4. NET - WAR
There is another, political rather than aesthetic dimension to the
phenomenon of Techno-Parasites. They herald a development within the
electronic networks which leads us from the open, peacefully anarchic and
friendly atmosphere among the 'second generation' net community that we
have seen in the last two to five years, to a much rougher, much more
aggressive climate with many, often opposed communities in which the
marginal character of this culture re-emerges, after it has stood in the
lime-light for a brief moment.
Some of you may be familiar with the work of the FBI- Cyberwars
theoreticians John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt of the RAND International
Policy Department who have
predicted that "CYBERWAR IS COMING!" Here are some quotes from their study:
'... Netwar applies to societal struggles most often associated with low
intensity conflict by non-state actors ... Information is becoming a
strategic resource that may prove as valuable and influential in the
post-industrial era as capital and labor have been in the industrial age
... The information revolution, in both its technological and non-
technological aspects, sets in motion forces that challenge the design of
many institutions. It disrupts and erodes the hierarchies around which
institutions are normally designed ... Netwar and cyberwar revolve around
information and communications matters, at a deeper level they are forms of
war about "knowledge," about who knows what, when, where, and why, and
about how secure a society or a
military is regarding its knowledge of itself and its adversaries ...
Netwar refers to information-related conflict at a grand level between
nations or societies. It means trying to disrupt, damage, or modify what a
target population knows or thinks it knows about itself and the world
around it. A netwar may focus on public or elite opinion, or both.'
Computer viruses and Trojan Horses like the recently discovered 'PKZ300B',
which destroys all the data on the hard drive if you download and run it,
show that the Techno-Parasites are in no way unique or particularly vicious
- in fact, quite the opposite, the lantern eaters appear rather cute and
harmless in comparison to these aggressive tools.
Also in the independent and media art scene, projects and sites are
currently being created which are beginning to provide the tools for these
conflicts. In the case of the DigitAll server in Vienna
, the starting point was a critique
of the rules and conventions that were beginning to clogg up the
communication on the Net, and of the way in which the politically correct
variant of netiquette has turned into a tool of censors rather than of
freely communicating individuals. The people at DigitALL, as well as
others, have started creating telematic weapons, censor programmes, word
blasters, mail death and mail blaster tools which are intended initially as
a critical and playful commentary, which however could turn into the
prototypes of rather painful technological developments.
Under such circumstances, Cyberspace might increasingly turn into a space
where you don't want to be, and it wouldn't come as a surprise if the year
1996 was going to mark a watershed when, alongside the continuing trend of
more and more people going online, there will be the emerging counter-trend
of people going offline. Some will still want to be around, but others will
decide to move away, just like you may decide to move away from a city that
gets too expensive, too polluted, or too dangerous.
The Techno-Parasites have no such political, military or ideological
agenda. They are, as any well-bred natural being, completely selfish and
don't care much about power and influence beyond their immediate
environment. The Techno-Parasites are vicious little artificial animals
that disrupt our supposedly smooth, technological environment by
highlighting the 'thingness' of the machines we use, and by forcing us to
pay attention to the marginal, the invisible, and the details which we tend
to ignore. They fill the machines with a life of their own and act out of a
beautiful and perverse independence. They are joyfully dangerous and
generally amoral. There are many more hosts and resources for similar
designs. As concerned environmental techno-activists we should support the
evolution, the diversification and the procreation of these creatures. You
can also be sure that we will soon see new prototypes evolve which choose
the weapons systems of netwar as their hosts, maintaining a healthy
ecological system also in this field, happy parasites who know to turn any
energy resource into a surplus which can feed them.
The Techno-Parasites ecologise the networks. They make these networks more
realistic by introducing a self-destructive element which VR technology
didn't have so far. The Parasites have an important cultural function, and
the virus police should not criminalise them, but acknowledge their
conclusive role for the networks. Their subversiveness is as much part of
the creation of the Net as is hacking. The Techno-Parasites are the Sunday
of the Internet! The seventh day of Creation.
Bibliography
Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Anti-Ödipus. (1972) Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1977
Umberto Eco: Opera aperta. (1967) Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1977
Michel Foucault: "Die gro e Wut über die Tatsachen." In: idem: Dispositive
der Macht. Berlin: Merve, 1978, p.217-24
Manuel De Landa: War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. New York: Zone, 1991
Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers: Order Out of Chaos. New York: Bantam, 1984
Walter Seitter: "Zur Ökologie der Destruktion." (1979) In: K Barck e.a.
(eds): Aisthesis. Leipzig: Reclam, 1990, p.411-28
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