Making the Black Box Speak.

Towards a renegade aesthetics of resolution

Visibility and knowledge are based on access to information. We usually consider this as either a question of collecting new or examining existing data. However, the term ‘black box society’ (Frank Pasquale) points to a situation in which data are deliberately concealed: manufacturing information asymmetry – imbalances of power mainly due to misinformation, concealment or fraud – has become an effective tool for gaining competitive advantage across all levels of life. In other words, technocapitalism unleashes a deepening crisis of the body politic.

Making the Black Box Speak

addresses these issues by focusing on resolution. The term’s semiotic wealth – ranging from what we can see to what we can know to how we make decisions – evokes an ecology in which all bodies can communicate; but it also reveals how automated control predicts, curtails and exploits common potentials.
Producing resolution against the black box is, however, barely accessible to direct action or critique. Therefore, we apply a different strategy: we form alliances with those that make the black box speak from inside. Episode 3 revolves around the precarious and ambivalent figure of the renegade – such as a whistleblower or dissident. While the system treats her as a traitor, she is an educator for the public at large: her disclosures constitute crucial intelligence against the social noise of black box asymmetry.

Making the Black Box Speak

probes forms of resistance (epistemic, social and affective) and solidarity (how to share risks together) that cut through the black box. What is at stake here is deeply performative, material and bodied. The question Episode 3 explores is how we can leverage the rich body of resolution to resolve what is disrupted and marginalized.

Making the Black Box Speak

is a call to move from established critical frameworks of art and other fields of research to the insurrection of renegade activism.

Supra-Citizenship

Supra-Citizenship offers a novel framework for migration by bringing together state actors, existing supra-national bodies, digital platforms and the billions of people on the move across our planet.
Citizenship can no longer be maintained by an exclusive contract between the subject and the nation-state. The fragility of this contract is exposed as an increasing number of people are forced to emigrate from areas ravaged by wars, natural disasters and economic strife. Meanwhile, as emphasized by Benjamin Bratton, the author of The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (2016), the emergence of new global actors and forms of utilizing citizenship has charted a global landscape within which digital platforms are increasingly acting like sovereigns that govern over their users while nation-states are increasingly functioning like platforms that offer services to their customer-citizens.
The notion of citizenship that is based on rooted belonging, locality-tied civil participation and fiscal responsibility to one’s nation-state has been irredeemably fragmented. On the one hand, citizenship has been financialized as a means of attracting capital and investment while being divorced from fiscal residency through tax breaks, offshores and e-residency for businesses, and on the other hand, it has been splintered by various forms of digital belonging such as participation in online communities.
In such a world defined by flux and complex technological and social relations, it is crucial to let go of that which no longer serves this reality while at the same time not throwing out the baby with the wash water. Supra-Citizenship integrates the institutional experience and knowledge of established organizational forms as offered by existing state and supra-national mechanisms with the resources and capabilities of technological platforms, and an updated understanding of human rights for the 21st century.
The episode is as a demo of Supra-Citizenship. It mobilizes a networked vision for citizenship in service of everybody’s right to adapt.

DOMINGO CASTILLO is alive and often exhibits artwork and films. In 2010, he co-founded the end / SPRING BREAK, a nomadic artist-run project space in Miami, FL with Patricia Margarita Hernandez and with major contributions by Cristina Farah and Kathryn Marks. In 2013, he co-founded the gallery Noguchi Breton (F.K.A. Guccivuitton and Versace Versace Versace) with Loriel Beltran and Aramis Gutierrez, in 2015 they were joined by Jonathan Gonzalez and together co-founded the design agency Giovanni Beltran.
In 2016, Domingo co-founded Public Displays of Professionalism (PDP), a transdisciplinary think tank, with Patricia Margarita Hernandez, and Natalia Zuluaga.