Un jour, pendant une vente

It started with a question about a specific event. "Do you think we could translate its micro and macro choreography to a  virtual/digital space?" But what event, we asked? "The one where a migrant was killed at an auction. Someone tested a gun on him".

A discussion on visualisation followed. We watched a work together that mapped the many sightings of a boat, attempting to cross the Mediterranean. The boat never arrived in Lampedusa.

We started to wonder how to make the event appear without relying on conventional aesthetics of legitimatization and reconstruction. Discomfort with the way another story could be told using the same tools, the same rigid map, the same military data [left-to-die]. The stability of the voice of the narrator was one way we understood that there was a reconstitution of a stable truth, different from those of the ones that had allowed the boat to sink, but in the same register of authority somehow.

We started searching for news coverage of the auction in Libya. Soon we realised there was only one sentence circulating, a single fragment describing the event: "Un jour, pendant une vente, un homme à côté de moi a été abattu d’une balle dans la tête. L’acheteur voulait tester un revolver qu’il voulait acheter." (One day, during a sale, a man next to me was shot in the head. The buyer wanted to test a revolver he wanted to buy).

The sentence circulated often in the company of a specific image, referring to another testimony related to people being sold. Several men sit together on a small surface. One of them has his face turned towards a camera, the upper part of his face is pixelated. [vendent]

We traced the appearance online of the sentence at the one hand, and the image on the other, and the places where they appear together. It seemed that they originated from different events. However by being placed next to each other within the news interface, the image illustrates the sentence, the sentence illustrates the image without leaving room for doubt to their ‘authenticity’.

What would it mean to re-construct the event from these fragments? To attempt to re-construct the noise, uncertainties and frailed edges while acknowledging the passing of time the event has been extracted from.          

We were wondering what a reconstruction of the pixelated face would reveal. Rather than an attempt to identify the face and as such clarify information, the reconstruction was an experiment at getting a physical grasp, a materialisation of the image?          

There are a total of 44 square pixels used by an unknown person or persons in an attempt to hide the identity of the man facing the camera. Is 44 pixels enough to hide their identity? Or can this attempt at anonymisation be reversed through a process of de-anonymisation with technologies from now or technologies yet to be developed? Is the top-half of the face enough to obscure their identity? Should the whole face have been pixelated or is the 44 pixel area sufficient? What tool was chosen to pixelate this image?          

With these questions in mind we chose to re-imagine the 44 pixels with 44 individual pieces of A4 paper. We reconstructed the reconstruction of a reconstructed event. We were constrained by the colour of the paper available to us, and made personal choices as to the colour and order of each representation of a pixel.  We see this as a different approach to rigid and static reconstruction of the events we first addressed.

Similarly to the pixelated face, the clearly annunciated emotionless voiceover struck us as a reduction of the event for the sake of a seemingly fact-based account. We recorded 11 different voices reading the sentence communicating the event: "Un jour, pendant une vente, un homme à côté de moi a été abattu d’une balle dans la tête. L’acheteur voulait tester un revolver qu’il voulait acheter." The voices were recorded egardless of the speakers level of the language creating an ad-hoc database of versions based on the same source. We then layered the recordings, aligning them at different parts within the sentence. Playing these layered versions puts emphasis at different registration points within the 11 recordings. As such the sentence reveals itself through 12 versions over time.

However, does the aesthetic of the pixelated face as well as the standardized voice merely render the event 'clean' without allowing any of the ambiguities surrounding it? 















De-militarization of visualisation, its aesthetic and tools (from bullet points to visualisation)

What would be a feminist interface to this event, different ways of representing?

Describing what you see, to understand differently what you are looking at. A close-caption exercise that would maybe act as an interface in itself.

Acts of re-enactment, reconstruction. Alignment, multiple, layers. Fiction, language and integrity. The trouble with embodiment.

Amanda Baggs - In My language

By standardizing the voice of a news, it is also a way to indivisible the event, through the use of many voices with different intensities, different genders we are giving density, orientation and presence to an event that its not so easy to digest.          

[left-to-die]         http://www.forensic-architecture.org/case/left-die-boat/
[vendent]         http://www.bouyafar.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/maxresdefault.jpg


Un jour
pendant une vente
un homme
à côté de moi
a été abattu
d’une balle
dans la tête.
L’acheteur
voulait tester
un revolver
qu’il voulait
acheter


Challenge: The feminist de-militarization of (re)construction interfaces: A how-to

or 

How to construct this sentence 'without' reconstructing a voice
"Un jour, pendant une vente, un homme à côté de moi a été abattu d’une balle dans la tête. L’acheteur voulait tester un revolver qu’il voulait acheter."
(One day, during a sale, a man next to me was shot in the head. The buyer wanted to test a revolver he wanted to buy.)
This is a quote taken from the article, said by one of the migrants who were part of an auction of migrants in Lybia.
We 'have' only the textual testimony, not the name of the migrant nor his identity.

+

an image: 

Lines of inquiry / explorations

    - Military aesthetics  - legitimate, scientific, convincing, power status, stiffnes -how do we read it, imposes a truth. 
    - Can you dismantle the masters house through using the masters tools? And if not are we able to reimagine the tools?
    - Multi-projections [not] as 'ground truth' - every events echoes out mediations and by bringing these echoes out to the same plane it brings it back to the same anchor point. How to think about the reconstruction not as a reconstruction of truth but as something else. Thinking through problems with 'reconstruction' and 'evidence', the difference with 'situations' as anchor point 
    - Respond to how it is or - two oreintations - reconstructions and the problems we have with that - or interfere with them 
    - Choreography as distruption. Choregraphy as a mode of interaction. Choreopgraphy as analysis. Choreography as distription. Choregraphy to look at a situation. Renegotating the acts that took place.
    - Repetition, loops, images.
    - Alternative methods of reconstruction 
    - Embodiment of stories - using our bodies, uses other senses. Who should we embody? Instead of bodies embody the interfaces. Ethical considerations with emboding stories that are not our own
    - Information that has ambiguitiy, multi-layer, information that can be fluid, or the interface itlself allows for fluidity (morphing, development)- going away from one truth through the inclusion and exclusion of elements. Can you dance an interface? Imagination and subjectivity. Ambgious. 
    - Who is making the software, who is making the re-enactments - can we do a forensic analysis on forensic analytists
    - A manual on what to question when being told what to think through interfaces 
    - Access to the archives - Adam Curtis already priviledged - who owns those archives and who has access to them? 
    - Fiction / truths. Examples. Docu-fiction.
    - Listener in the Room: Machinic translation, Voice-to-text algo?...
    - unstable voices, hesitation, trembling, ...

re-enactment / re-construction

How do we embody a multipllicity of truths

What would be a feminist approach to de-militarization? 
- See holistically
- See causality of actions and events and choices 
- inclusivity 


Interfering with Interfaces

The cases:
Libya testimony was one line - in an article, in french.  "One man shot just after he was bought." Looked at as a series of actions. 
http://www.infomigrants.net/fr/post/6102/libye-une-journaliste-americaine-reussit-a-filmer-une-vente-aux-encheres-de-migrants?klkl=iooi
Date: 16/11/2017, by Charlotte Boitiaux, for infomigrants.net - a website creating content to inform migrants of "misinformation along the points of their journeys". InfoMigrants is a collaboration led by three major European media sources: France Médias Monde (France 24, Radio France International, Monte Carlo Doualiya), the German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle, and the Italian press agency ANSA. InfoMigrants is co-financed by the European Union.

Sentence spread - info-migrants is the originator 
The video in the story was first published on YouTube on August 21 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTLaq-igbVQ


http://www.infomigrants.net/fr/post/6102/libye-une-journaliste-americaine-reussit-a-filmer-une-vente-aux-encheres-de-migrants
https://www.iom.int/fr/news/loim-decouvre-des-marches-aux-esclaves-qui-mettent-en-peril-la-vie-des-migrants-en-afrique-du

Examples / references:



What To Do

A still image that is a video
Juxtaposing the sentence to it

Ways to make sound from a sentence

relation between interface and reconstruction
assembly

analyse the appearance of an image in/on a newssite

converging (or collapsing)

analysis/interfere with an assembly
and
reconstructing

plus the question of tools in all this


14:45 
Shop. try the pixels
FS tries to relanguage sentence
SN tries sonify the sentence
15:45
16:45
17:45

http://www.maison-lefebvre.be/

Some element/fragments:

Appearances of the phrase:

Appearances of the image:

Share lab - https://labs.rs/en/facebook-algorithmic-factory-immaterial-labour-and-data-harvesting/
How do these aesthetics work? How to bring the hesitation of movement into this interface?

Documentation/document. Something that comes on top/later.

Why was there an image added to a sound

sparse image resolution

re-construction vs re-enactment

training

making people faceless: visible/invisible [not recognising faces or being too good at recognising them ... the special unit elite squad of super-recognisers]

blurring-unblurring as a way to reveal infrastructures
opacity

http://www.maison-lefebvre.be/
How is the situation exposed to us

reconstructuring of something that is already constructed.


Title: Un jour, pendant une vente

These two xxxx [sketches?] started with an event, and a question about how to translate its choreography, followed by a discussion on visualisation. We looked together at a work on mapping the layers of sightings of the unfinished trajectory of a single boat attempting to cross the Mediterranean.

We started to wonder how to make this event appear without relying on conventional aesthetics of legitimatization. Discomfort with the way another story could be told using the same tools, the same rigid map, the same military data. The stability of the voice of the narrator was one way we understood that there was a reconstitution of a stable truth, different from those of the ones that had allowed the boat to sink, but in the same register of authority somehow.

We started looking for news coverage of the event that happened one day during a sales. Soon we realised there was only one sentence circulating, one fragment describing the event: 
"Un jour, pendant une vente, un homme à côté de moi a été abattu d’une balle dans la tête. L’acheteur voulait tester un revolver qu’il voulait acheter." (One day, during a sale, a man next to me was shot in the head. The buyer wanted to test a revolver he wanted to buy.) We did not know much.

The sentence circulated often in the company of a specific image, where we can make out a boat, a face of a man turned towards a camera, his face pixelated.

We started to look at the appearance on-line of the sentence at the one hand, and the image on the other, and at places where they where put together. It seemed that they originated from different events, but they were creating another event in each other's company.

What would it mean to re-construct the event from these fragments? Or the face of the migrant from the pixelated image?
De-militarization of visualisation, its aesthetic and tools (from bullet points to visualisation)
What would be a feminist interface to this event, different ways of representing?

Describing what you see, to understand differently what you are looking at. A close-caption exercise that would maybe act as an interface in itself.

Acts of re-enactment, reconstruction. Alignment, multiple, layers. Fiction, language and integrity. The trouble with embodiment.
Amanda Baggs - In My language

Pixels, papers. Projecting one standard system over another; reconstructing its construction, somehow.
time element. showing time, changes over time.



Un jour
pendant une vente
un homme
à côté de moi
a été abattu
d’une balle
dans la tête.
L’acheteur
voulait tester
un revolver
qu’il voulait
acheter








Thursday
10:00am
Gabi
Joana
Florence
Elvira


11am
Florence left

12:20
Arkadi joined

13:17 stopped for lunch

15:41 began again
Azahara joined 
Joana
Arkadi
Gabi
Benjamin joined

16:30 - Benjamin left 

16:20 - Joana left


17:00 we finished 

Friday_Timeline
10:37 
Arkadi
Azahara
Gabi
Simone
Femke
[Philip]

10:43 
Joined: Peggy
10:45 - Peggy left

11:09 - Group rejoins others

11:55
Femke 
Arkadi
Simone
Gabi
[Peter]

12:00
Peter left
Azahara joined
Joana joined

12:09
Jonathon joined
Arduino joined

13:00 - finished

14:08
Arkadi
Simone
Gabi
(Peter)
(Pierre)

14:11
{Peter} [Pierre}

14:19 
Azahara - joined

14:26
Femke joined

14:31 
{Peter joined)

14:36 
{peter left

16:12 the group comes together
16:35 - Joana left