Install
A catalog of formats for digital discomfort
... and other ways to resist totalitarian zoomification
What are the potentials hidden in surprising ways of combining different media, in existing memories of community organizing, or in re-appro-priations of techniques? What forms of remote gathering otherwise might be more opportune to our present presences?
Rocha, Jara (2020) A catalog of formats for digital discomfort. Edited by Seda Gürses and Jara Rocha. The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest. Available at: http://titipi.org/projects/discomfort/CatalogOFFDigitalDiscomfort.pdf.
Anti-video chat manifesto
By Dr. Kasprzak
Today, we are the ones who have turned off our video cameras, and they will stay
OFF
On Zoom — NO! On Microsoft Teams — NO! On GoToMeeting — NO! On Jitsi — NO! On Skype — NO! On Google Meet — NO!
Comrades, the time has come. We learn from each other’s voices, not each other’s disembodied faces on a flat panel monitor or greasy mobile screen.
...
Heads in the Clouds: Measuring the Implications of Universities Migrating to Public Clouds
Zoomification
Figure 4: Overview of video chat solutions used by universities between January 2015 and December 2020
Fiebig, Tobias, Seda Gürses, Carlos H. Gañán, Erna Kotkamp, Fernando Kuipers, Martina Lindorfer, Menghua Prisse, and Taritha Sari. ‘Heads in the Clouds: Measuring the Implications of Universities Migrating to Public Clouds’. ArXiv:2104.09462 [Cs], 20 April 2021. http://arxiv.org/abs/2104.09462.
Sabotage: The Ultimate Video Game
As discussed on This Machine Kills
What office worker hasn't thought of dousing the keyboard of her word processor with a cup of steaming coffee, hurling her modular telephone handset through the plate glass window of her supervisor's cubicle, or torching up the stack of input forms waiting in her in-box with a "misplaced" cigarette? The impulse to sabotage the work environment is probably as old as wage-labor itself, perhaps older.
Gidgit Digit (1982) ‘Sabotage: The Ultimate Video Game’, Processed World, (5). http://www.processedworld.com/Issues/issue05/05sabotage.htm.
The anatomy of Zoom fatigue
Welcome to the electronic monitoring programme. As we continue to develop our online personas, real-life meetings feel clandestine. We are trapped in the videophone future. J. G. Ballard foresaw this ending only in collective mayhem and mutual murder, once flesh re-encountered the world of the living.
Lovink, Geert. ‘The Anatomy of Zoom Fatigue’. Eurozine, 2 November 2020. https://www.eurozine.com/the-anatomy-of-zoom-fatigue/#
The Zoom Gaze
The various permutations of settings across different video platforms are virtually innumerable. When you enter a meeting will your camera and microphone automatically be on without notice? What if you mostly just want to listen and are in your PJs? Will you be able to text-chat during the meeting? Will it be recorded? It’s impossible to know in advance, and there are no established cultural norms that push meeting hosts to communicate such nuances beforehand. Instead, the Zoom gaze currently institutionalizes uncertainty as the norm.
Autumm Caines (2020) ‘The Zoom Gaze’, Real Life. https://reallifemag.com/the-zoom-gaze/.
This Machine Kills
EP. 28 The Hammer of Ludd
EP. 29 Sabotage Feels Good (feat. Sabotage: The Ultimate Video Game)
Podcast hosted by Jathan Sadowski and Edward Ongweso Jr., Produced by Jereme Brown
Unguilty Pleasures
This is a space to share and document micro-disobediences at work.
Jeremiasz Rzenno & Kat Zavada, 05.04.2021 http://unguiltypleasures.xyz/
Zoom Obscura
Artistic interventions in video calling during a pandemic.
A UK Human Data Interaction EPSRC Network+ funded project.
Publication PDF
See also: itsnotreally.me