International Paneling/June 2024
Image by Horster
When the Pet Becomes the Master
by Leo Kuelbs
Berlin
Over the past few months, our friends at Facebook began taking down posts announcing the new issues of International Paneling. It’s funny because, the last time they did it was a week after my FB advertisement finished. The ad was acceptable, but once it was over—the post got flagged as spam-inducing. I reposted it a few days later and moved the link into the comments and the problem was solved.
Stuff like this has been happening all over the place. There’s a thing called The Wrong Biennale, an online art fair, that suffered something similar a few months back and it seems they have stopped activity on the platform. Levels Gallery in Berlin, which I am a part of, had some posts also flagged, blocked, etc. Usually, the problematic posts have links that direct interested parties away from FB, say to the website where further info resides. I guess they really don’t want anyone suggesting an “off campus” fieldtrip.
So, here we are! We have about reached the place where our info-harvesting friends offering their “free” services to connect online with friends and loved ones are finally big enough to say, “We are in charge now. If you aren’t doing what we want you to do, then we don’t need you anymore.” The cute baby is now an aggressive teen testing its boundaries on its unsuspecting users/guinea pigs. We all knew this day might come. I thought it might be a little further down the road, but we already have arrived.
Who asked AI to make this? Did AI make it without any prompting and put it online for me to discover? I mean, yuck!
I spend a lot of time on YouTube, as well. I really wonder what’s going on with an algorithm that always recommends the exact things as what I have already consumed. Actually, Etsy is weirdly like this, too. I bought some used coffee cups four months back and I keep getting recommendations for MORE USED COFFEE CUPS! I mean, I bought eight of them. I totally do not need more. Back to the Youtube situation. So, here I was, scrolling through a bunch of stuff that I have limited interest in. I found myself clicking on “If Black Sabbath played Jolene by Dollie Parton.” I listened to this for about a minute, then I checked myself. Why am I doing this? Do I care about this? Is it actually interesting? Who asked AI to make this? Did AI make it without any prompting and put it online for me to discover? Why?
I mean, yuck! Then I realized that instead of demand determining supply, now we actually have supply shaping our demand. Our online world of platforms are beasts that are getting bigger and bigger. Our cuddly buddies have mined so thoroughly that now they seek to determine for us what we actually want/will tolerate. And all this stuff feeds further into the inevitable exponential growth of AI. Yikes, future people!
It seems that all the internet has ever wanted was to monitor our behavior, in order to better sell us stuff and then whatever happens beyond that. Like a guy in a van offering candy, access to amazing treats were offered and consumed. The we were stuck; hooked! And now we consume about whatever we are offered. It would come as no shock if offerings outside the prescribed box just are not tolerated in the future. Also, the use of AI is massive and I cannot see it ever shrinking. Younger people will be tethered to this going forward and the digital experience will become even more predominate than it already is.
As for me, I am actively trying to spend less time online or in front of a screen. I actually sleep more now. I exercise more. I try to drink less and eat better. But I was one of those people who experienced life before online. For those who never experienced that, I wonder and worry a little. But hey, I am optimistic. Kick ass, you kids!
Video Shorty of the Week: Richard Jochum’s "Tear Crackle Split"
From the Digital Fairy Tales show, “Vengeance is Mine,” Jochum’s 2019 video explores ideas of self destruction, as well as visualizing the birth of irreparable conflict. The text of the larger show explains “For vengeance to exist, there must be a prior perception of victimhood, a grievance. The scale of which is determined by the protagonist, but the roles can quickly be flipped. And flipped and flipped again. The chain of vengeance can go on and on and, unless broken, lead to ever escalating levels of calamity.” Words which ring too true in these days of wars, instability, grievance and vioelnce
Jochum is a teacher at Columbia University’s Teachers College in NYC. Originally hailing from Vienna, Austria, his conceptual work in New Media has appeared all over the world.
Humanity Briefly Chills on the Hate to Gawk at Apocalyptic Sky for Two Hours
by Curtis Flowers
Brooklyn
Star Date 04.08.2024
In a scene excised from Ghostbusters and left on the cutting room floor, Thousands and thousands and thousands of thrillseekers, science nerds, doomsayers, and other assorted gen pop New Yorkers headed outdoors en masse shortly after 2 PM on April 8 and gathered under an increasingly big black sky to crane their necks and gape their mouths as a near-total solar eclipse revealed itself.
Rewarded for our laziness by refusing to trek anywhere at all in order to see a “full” eclipse, let alone travel hours in gridlock to and from Buffalo, Rochester, Water Town, Niagara Falls, we pretended to heed the begging of small town mayors across the state to stay the hell away from their quiet, little hamlets where the skies overhead weren’t black so much as they were cloudy, and a total bust/washout for towns around Lake Ontario. Were we smug in the hours after hearing about these clouds and the dashed dreams they brought into focus? Oh, probably, but we were too self-satisfied to brag much, if at all.
Rich in empathy, we gave everyone a break and made plenty of eye contact as we solemnly nodded our “good days” to nearly every person we encountered.
Why? Because, it was sort of like 9/11/2001 when the World Trade Center Towers belched jet fuel from their burning innards before collapsing under the weight of their melting steel spines. When we dragged our beaten asses home over bridges in our work clothes and gratefully accepted bottled water from total strangers. Or the blackouts of 2003 and 2019, when we did the same walks home and again, in earnest appreciation, accepted bottled water from more, different, and other total strangers. Days we remember being in too much shock to hate our neighbors, familiar and loathsome acquaintances and even the gougers who relentlessly ripped us off over skyrocketing prices of batteries, candles, and alcohol. Dare I say we were “united”? OK. We were united and too weary to cast or roll our evil eyes on enemies real, imagined, and sworn. Rich in empathy, we gave everyone a break and made plenty of eye contact as we solemnly nodded our “good days” to nearly every person we encountered.
Like a good buzz, it eventually faded though not totally forgotten as we nearly sprained our arms patting ourselves on the back for the ability to get along, however briefly, with the rest of humanity. And then we went back to the business of being better than all the other shitheads we come across every damn day and taking note of every way countless others were either stupid, wrong, or both.
Anyway, on the day the universe gave us–that we didn’t even know we wanted or needed–the birds stopped chirping sometime around 2:45. All of them, and I was in Brooklyn, across the street from Prospect Park—where 292 species of birds suddenly all shut the fuck up. Oh, it was eerie all right. The sky grew darker as the Moon inched its way in front of the Sun and its light at 2,285 miles per hour. The temperature dropped by seven or eight degrees, and cartoonishly long shadows stretched across the landscape. If I was a kid I would have probably been losing it: screaming for the loss of my mind.Even as we stood and stared at the sky, we did not call to mind or pay homage to DJT, our nation’s forty-fifth President by taking leave of all sense and using our naked, tender, and unprotected eyes to walk purposefully and stop suddenly to shoot the eclipse a look that suggested it’s not all that. Brilliant.
As if. No, we dutifully carried with us disposable sunglasses certified to the ISO 12312-2 by the American Astronomical Society. We faked the confidence it took to pretend we were certain the free glasses cadged from various libraries and nonprofits were not cheap fakes because you know . . . Americans love to rip off others with fake shit sold as the real thing and to . And it was these free eclipse sunglasses–real or fake–that led to our collective benevolence and magnanimity because while the eclipse lasted well over two hours, no one had any interest in checking it out for more than four or five minutes.
For once, those less fortunate people milling about without giveaway paper eclipse sunglasses were the inspiration for our generosity and our open hearts. “Oh, would you like to use my glasses to see the eclipse,” we asked in our sweetest voices. Absolutely you are welcome. My pleasure!” Wasn’t this just so big of us? I know. Those without likely had no idea that the glasses were free, otherwise wouldn’t they have their own? I liked that you could tell those who were having none of it. Women and children? Cool. If there were lifeboats afloat we’d have been forced to give up our seats. Drunk on our own kindness, we inevitably pushed it too far and smiled at gatherings of men working or talking who did not smile back and did not give a shit about whatever the weirdness was that was taking place in the sky. Our feelings were hurt, and our goodwill returned to its formerly bad self. Fuck them, we thought to ourselves. Those guys are dicks. And as we floated home, still high on the half-life of our many kindnesses that day, we thought of that special someone–someone poor perhaps, or of feeble mind, who we might gift these special sunglasses to. They were worthless to us, afterall, to say nothing of everybody else. The eclipse had passed. We could afford the largesse. There won’t be another full-solar eclipse until May 1, 2079.
Image by ANANI
Between Waves: A Breath of Fresh Water
Dispatch from the Wake: An Excerpt from the Essay; Part Three
by Kamilah Foreman
Harlem
Circa 2022
The daily fireworks, which sometimes started as early as noon and continued until nearly dawn, petered out after Independence Day, a day in which many Americans conflate a proclamation of freedom with a celebration of warfare. While often broadcast on July 4, the national anthem is not a commemoration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. In 1814 slave owner Francis Scott Key adapted a British drinking song to compose a poem rejoicing that U.S. forces had prevented the imperial siege of Baltimore during the War of 1812. Key had witnessed the battle from aboard a British ship in the harbor, his point of view forever memorialized by the unforgettable lines “And the rocket’s red glare, the bomb bursting in air/Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.” Less remembered is the third verse, especially “No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.” While glorifing the “star-spangled banner” and the (stolen) homeland it represents, the anthem revels in the killing of British mercenaries and enslaved peoples who had escaped to fight for the Crown, which had abolished the slave trade seven years earlier. Legally considered stolen property, fugitive slaves were people who had pilfered themselves in their quest for liberty. Their struggle for freedom was treachery in a white supremacist state with an agrarian economy powered by slave labor.
I think instead of my mother, a gymnast at Robert E. Lee High School in Huntsville, Alabama, placed in the back of the team photo and wearing a Confederate flag leotard.
The Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on my father’s lawn when he was growing up. My grandparents passed the poll tax and citizenship test and thus were the only Black people allowed to vote in Meringo County, Alabama, until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. When I think of white supremacy, I rarely imagine the terror of waking up to fire in the middle of the night, the desperate anxiety of putting out the blaze yourself, the uncanniness of kneeling before a cross at church the following Sunday. I think instead of my mother, a gymnast at Robert E. Lee High School in Huntsville, Alabama, placed in the back of the team photo and wearing a Confederate flag leotard. I imagine her on the balance beam, sixteen years old, all muscle, her dark skin directly challenging the school’s mascot, a cartoonish representation of the traitors who seceded from the United States to preserve slavery. My mother was the true Rebelette. Like my mom, my father was reticent about telling us kids about his youth, the searing sting of tear gas while marching for integration and the daily harassment that was his reward. He was the first Black student to attend and graduate from his high school, and during his first year at the white school, he ate alone, the surrounding cafeteria tables empty. When he played football, his classmates’ parents, not the opposition, yelled, “Get the nigger off the field.”
My parents are tenth-generation Americans. If you exclude the Native blood in their veins, who do you want to bet was here first? To win this argument, which documents are most important to cite: passports, military IDs, birth certificates, deeds of sale (not as human property but of land bought by free people after the Civil War), census records tracking my enslaved ancestors’ movements from coastal towns to the Deep South, or other notations going back into the eighteenth century? As one of his last acts before he died unexpectedly this summer, my father encouraged his sister and me to digitize our family history out of his belief that reparations for slavery will come in my lifetime, and we will have to demonstrate our longevity and worthiness. I may not be able to say how I am, but I know who I am.
Until my third protest, I did not cry for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, or Armaud Arbery, the three whose names we shouted during the first weeks.
Until my third protest, I did not cry for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, or Armaud Arbery, the three whose names we shouted during the first weeks. Like most people, I knew the details of their passing, but for me Black people dying at the hands of police is nothing new and nothing to cry about. Often triggered by the daily headlines, rage is far more accessible but must be politely stowed away during my morning commute. In June, over a dozen more have been murdered by the police or their deaths have come to light. Over the past few years, thousands of people have been killed, among them over 900 confirmed Latinx since 2015, with the total number likely higher. For decades, the Indigenous have been most likely to be murdered by police—an absurdly obvious statement considering this country’s genoicidal legacy. In trying to ascertain and verify the total number of police killings in the last few years, I find numerous articles, charts, and graphs, many bearing caveats about underreporting and the limitations of the data. I wonder, how do we understand each and every life taken from us? I gravitate toward the sociological, rendering violence and death into an abstraction. This compartmentalizing is a psychological defense to mitigate my pain as a witness and sense of hopelessness in terms of my ability to effect systemic change as well as out of the presumption that oppression must be quantified to be taken seriously. Statistics on, not personal stories of racism seem to bear the most weight in claims to truth.
My impulse in taking to the streets is to add to the numbers, yet in practice my body is composing another story, an iterative one written step by step by a collective of strangers, shouting a chorus of protest. These marches enact multiple meanings of the wake, “rituals through which to enact grief and memory” as well as “being awake and, also, consciousness” on the part of protestors, all in motion like the aftereffect of movement in water. Moreover, when organizers change tactics and march routes on the fly, they enact the mantra of pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong: be like water. Despite the thrill of communal action and potential showdowns with the police, when the endorphins and adrenaline fade, I am exhausted. How many more years will I wander my city chanting “hands up, don’t shoot” or shouting the names of only the folks with the most memorable murders, whose assailants are still free despite years of public outcry?
No, some stories are told to keep people alive, to inaugurate a reckoning with a murderous state.
In her novel trans(re)lating house one, Poupeh Missaghi writes, “Why should we resurrect the dead? . . . If the stories of the bodies have already been told, why tell them again? . . . What is it about relating to them anew? . . . Will retelling them in the form of art, in the body of a story, change the meaning, the transferring, the impact?” For years I ridiculed essays, often written by people of a certain class, that cite Joan Didion’s absurdly overused quote: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” No, some stories are told to keep people alive, to inaugurate a reckoning with a murderous state. I want to claim that in this pandemic I have sacrificed my own body to “relate to them anew.” Yet, there are limits to how and how often I tell these stories, and to this day, I know of no one who has lived because I retold someone else’s story. Sure, you can’t prove a counterfactual, but can anyone prove I have had any impact at all?
A bike is a useful tool at protests. I have noticed that people who read as men tend to take the offensive positions at the front. They ride ahead, directing oncoming traffic out of the way of marchers or forming a barrier at intersections to stop cars from plowing into protestors. Those at the back, nearly always women, have the more dangerous position. We protect the slower marchers—the elderly, the disabled, and families with children—from an increasing crowd of cars behind us or, when we do have a police escort, cops hurrying us along. I am accustomed to ignoring threats at my back.
I am accustomed to ignoring threats at my back.
As the protests and public debates continue, old memories resurface. The deep scars will never heal, but the microaggressions, the tiny wounds I didn’t fully register before, are starting to reveal themselves. How many times was I asked to show my ID at work when white coworkers could waltz right by? How many peals of laughter suddenly stopped when people remembered I was in the room? How many people refuse to learn how to pronounce my name?
In April we all laughed at the question. How precisely to describe the boredom, loneliness, irritation with loved ones, anxiety? Time was protracted into the endless days of youth. After I had exhausted all possible engagement and activity (news, work, dishes, Instagram, news again, laundry, book, magazine, Twitter, crossword), sometimes I would find myself staring out a window at a brick wall. Each morning delivered a momentary gift: like a child, I awoke surprised that I was in bed and the previous day had ended, and for a precious few seconds, I was buoyed by the energetic prospect of a new day. Until I remembered.
How was I? In calls to family, friends, and colleagues, I began declaring, “I am well in this moment because I am talking to you,” and could nearly hear the other person smile. For a fleeting moment in that narrow horizon for connection, the numbness would abate.
continued next issue…
Minneapolis Construction=Summertime
Covert testing of materials
Image and text by Mark Bailey
Minneapolis
Here in Minneapolis, as soon as the weather got warm, the city virtually shut down my neighborhood with road construction. They'll be working on Hennepin Avenue, a major thoroughfare two blocks from my house, through 2025. As a pedestrian, I don't mind walking alongside torn up roads. There's even something a little adventurous about it.
As a customer, I love how convenient this is. But the fact that these businesses are now operating well below capacity seems like cause for concern.
There are a few restaurants on Hennepin that I go to regularly. There's a burger joint, an Indian place, and a great little diner. With this construction, it's become very easy to get a table at any of these establishments without having to wait. As a customer, I love how convenient this is. But the fact that these businesses are now operating well below capacity seems like cause for concern.
When the construction is completed in a couple of years, Hennepin Avenue will be safer for bicyclists and pedestrians. It will be more accessible to those who use public transportation. But we won't be able to fully enjoy the improvements until 2026 at the earliest. And there are already a large number of storefronts along this corridor that have been sitting vacant since the looting and civil unrest of 2020.
By the time the project is complete, this formerly-bustling avenue will probably be a wasteland of empty buildings and street people doing the fentanyl shuffle. This is already the situation at the intersection of Hennepin Avenue and Lake Street, once a major nightlife destination. With this in mind, all of the city's efforts to improve the neighborhood ironically appear to be making the place worse. It's a classic case of poor alignment between government and the needs of the governed.
The Dawning (at least for me) of Protest Culture
Image by Juliane Pieper
by Leo Kuelbs
About a month ago, I met with a younger colleague of mine who has participated in some of the various protests over the last several years. She was telling me that she and her colleagues helped popularize a move within a larger model of contemporary protest. She went on to describe how “Occupy (Wall Street)” movement was an initiating force in the way protests have been handled since. The George Floyd and now Pro-Palestinian protests have evolved the model.
I guess it isn’t a stretch to wonder how the use online media is a part of this predetermined-feeling situation.
Not long before this conversation, I saw a headline in the NY Times which stated that the PP protests actually include other components related to resisting a police (Fascist?) state. All of these ideas sat stewing in my mind. Then, thinking about the state of our online world, I realized that the supply was beginning to determine demand, and that this idea could extend into a (online) world where the end narrative is included in the shaping of total messaging/communication process. I guess it isn’t a stretch to wonder how the use online media is a part of this predetermined-feeling situation.
But then you look at some of seemingly incongruous combinations popping out at the other end of the spectrum. Odd bedfellows, for sure. But again, perhaps there are overlapping issues—some not currently on the top of the protest list, but there, nonetheless—in play here. And, of course, our totally data-mined, data-for-sale online arbitrators of whatever presses our buttons, are just pushing and pressing away.
In the end, this is just a short follow up to the first piece in this issue and an observation of an actual protest culture, not just protests per case. As well as noticing how the digital experience is used and, also perhaps, shaped by protests. I am all for people using their voices and demanding being heard. But lately I am just feeling that all of this will be observed, noted and put to use somehow in the digital realm, in years to come. I guess change, evolution, mass manipulation, etc have been with us since the dawn of time. It’s a brutal part of human nature, and here we go again.
Meanwhile, in Kiev…
Video courtesy of #headacheeartlaboratory