Architectures of Violence

After the December 6th insurrection, I was looking through the archives of an online discussion platform for a radical pro-Trump group. If you only looked at the website’s design — ignoring the text — you’d think it was all quite normal. The code was taken from Reddit, a site ostensibly designed for facilitating a good conversation. But once exiled for extremist views, the group simply took Reddit’s architecture somewhere else, and used it to facilitate a whole different idea of what “a good conversation” was meant to be.

The rhetoric was stomach churning in its violent fantasies, but there was something banal about it all. People were so comfortable planning these things, earning upvotes — small symbolic rewards — for contributing more extreme, more vile, and more violent rhetoric to the frenzy. The architecture, designed to reward contributions, had normalized a race to harm. It wrapped a coup in the simple, everyday architectures of social media interfaces. And that’s what struck me: these sites work just as well for sharing ideas with your local beekeeping group as it for plotting to overthrow a government.

In contrast, Caroline Sinders’ new work, Architectures of Violence, is uncomfortable and full of friction. The show “ruminates on harassment, harm and white supremacy in digital spaces and how those spaces are designed.” One piece, the net art work “within the terms and conditions,” includes a series of multi-layered, 15-minute-long videos which gather streaming videos from extremist online media sources, presenting collages of simultaneous broadcasts on nine topics — white supremacy, gender-based violence, anti-trans rhetoric, covid conspiracy theory videos, anti-vax videos, and more. The films are the results of Sinders’ online harassment research work, all found on mainstream platforms through search and recommendations. 

This week I’m sharing excerpts from a longer interview with Caroline in advance of the opening of Architectures of Violence at Telematic Media Arts in San Francisco. The piece ‘within the terms and conditions,’ was commissioned by the Photographer’s Gallery in London in May 2021.

This conversation has been edited for space, clarity, and flow. A longer version of this conversation is over at Cybernetic Forests.

Caroline Sinders: 
I’ve been thinking about digital and net art as a form of photojournalism and witnessing. As a white woman who studies white supremacy and online harassment, it’s important for me to have a conversation about the really hard parts of the internet. 

The work may be more pedantic and direct than traditional fine art, but when you’re trying to combat harm you have to be pretty direct or you run the risk of endorsing that harm. But it’s necessary to have these conversations around the politics of platforms. Art is a good place to do that, because why not have these conversations in the museum? Why not confront politics in the white cube space? 

My work is trying to do that and play with the idea of “expanded documentary,” taking a journalism or research ethos to another kind of art form. For me, that’s using ripped or found media, or placing actual data in a place for conversation. 

Eryk Salvaggio:
Architectures of Violence feels like you’ve walked into the Internet with a camera and documented what you found. Memes, screen grabs, and ripped YouTube videos are unusual topics for “photojournalism,” partly because the Web is already a flat space — it’s already images. 

You’re taking the Web seriously as a place where we live and things happen. That’s at odds with the common excuses for online abuse — “it’s just the internet, it’s not real.” 

CS:
I’m definitely interested in uneasiness and making other white people uncomfortable about this. People with dominance ought to feel uncomfortable and sit with their discomfort and challenge what causes that. Some of these ideas come out of my experience in human rights research. That isn’t comfortable research. You’re looking at atrocities out in the world, and so you have to learn how to sit with your own discomfort. In my space of human rights technology, we’re often having a lot of hard, personal conversations about working through inequity and pain. 

It also feels like there’s an open sea of content promoting white supremacy in spaces like YouTube or Facebook. It’s there, but with filter bubbles and algorithmic search, it’s often hard to see or find if you aren’t looking for it. Imagine having a map and not being able to see massive regions where something is happening. This work is about saying “it’s here” — not on some hidden corner of the internet, but on the same platform you give your kids to watch videos, where you watch TED Talks or upload makeup tutorials. It’s not the darknet, it’s right here. 

ES: 
What did compiling this work show you? 

CS:
There’s a casualness to this brutality, and that casualness is a result of platforms. It’s very easy to upload videos, it’s very easy to post a meme. I’m not saying to limit that access. But it’s important to reflect on the idea of feeds. 

So the work became informed by friction, the videos are meant to be overwhelming. Nothing should feel easy — it’s my observation on the current ease of platforms. There’s so much data here, on big tech platforms. It was easy to get. I’m a UX designer, a researcher and an artist, so I’m looking at functionality, and what I wanted to create was a space where you can’t “zoom out” of this. I like inserting that friction. If you get on these platforms, the biggest source of friction is logging in. After that you can get anywhere. 

Read the full interview at Cybernetic Forests.

Check out ‘within the terms and conditions’ here.

Things I’m Reading this Week

I asked Caroline Sinders what she had read this week, and then I read them.

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All the Good Earth
Ayla Angelos

A piece on Virginia Hanusik’s photographs of New Orleans, which explore the climate change that has brought flooding and heavy rains to an already wet and rainy city. But rather than emphasizing photographs of destruction, Hanusik’s work explores the radiance and warmth of the place.

“Living in New Orleans for the greater part of the last 10 years has made me acutely aware of the role water plays in shaping the city’s geography and culture … It begs the question of how sustainable our current system of operating really is. Hard infrastructure – canals, levees and drainage pumps – are all around us, making life possible here, and we’ve normalised these massive alterations to natural systems.”

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What if Space Junk and Climate Change Become the Same Problem?
Jonathan O’Callaghan

When we launch Satellites and Space Objects, we rely on Earth’s dense outer atmosphere to break them up upon their return. But thanks to CO2, that atmosphere is becoming less dense, meaning objects hang out up there for longer periods of time, meaning we may someday have as many as 125,000 pieces of space garbage clogging up the boundaries between Earth and the stars. In short: humans may soon be leaving garbage literally everywhere.

Things I’m Listening to This Week

Furtherfield’s “News from Where We Are” podcast is always a treat, and this one happens to include “California Ideology,” a new song I released over at notype last week. But I’m including the link because the other conversations are all so interesting, from Auriea Harvey talking about her move from net art to indie games, Morehshin Allahyari on political, social, and cultural contradictions in technology, and a conversation that left me wondering what “post-contemporary” art could actually be.