[courses]
Brand Lab 4: Here Aliens, Now Posthumans, UCLA D|MA
[03.2008]
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Here Aliens and Now Posthumans, or Branding Beyond Good and Evil
Benjamin H. Bratton
Comments on the 4th D|MA Brand Lab, March 2008
taught with the excellent assistance of Zach Bras
This fourth cycle of the UCLA Design | Media Arts Brand Lab was, I think the most successful so far, and accomplished the most to move the question of brand off the obvious mark.
The four projects (Lighthouse, Google Water, WiiWare, Handbük) are shown in some detail below. What is at work in these is a deceptively provocative ambivalence, a set of projections and reversals that are neither utopian nor dystopian, neither happy nor sad. They are a more complicated species of social science fictions: proposals plausible enough to be alarming in their implications (one might hope they not truly serious) and yet unexpected enough that they represent the outcome of some uncanny alien brief.
Humans and AliensLike several other recent courses taught by Greg Lynn, Rebeca Mendez, Casey Reas, Ed Keller and others, we took as a starting point the online futurist network, Space Collective, pioneered and shepherded by our friend, Rene Daalder. Unlike those others we took the vernacular provocations of Space Collective (SC) more as a starting point than a implied conclusion for our investigations.
One of the interests of SC is post-humanity, and while I needn't speak for Rene's interests in summary as they are available for reading and open conversation on SC, it is clear that for many SC regulars, post-humanism is closely linked with futurity. But for us, in our seminar, they are unbound into a here and a now. The research and projects were structured around the fragility of the human as a construct that we inhabit and embody. The interoperability of the human as machine, animal, dead matter, dying matter, subject, and object are taken not as revelations that may emerge on the future horizon but as inevitable conditions of our everyday work to navigate the real. Our own humanity requires constant formulation, and is nevertheless a quality we lose incrementally, on the go. It slips through.
We also started with a replay of Carl Sagan's messianic, totemic metarevelations of Human Earth for the Voyager and Pioneer probes, only to quickly then let them go. Their comical anthropocentrism, their baffling presumption of the universality of nation-states, not to mention the very premise of "a message" at all (?) became an unacceptable medium for the exploration of what lies on the other side of humanity's cracking membranes: the alien.
And it is just this, the dialogue between two fragile configurations, human its attendant alienation, and specifically to speak to the alien on behalf of the human as the human and to declare the human in the reflection back from the alien that the students fashioned their communication plans and projects.
Instead of projecting that same encounter into the distant future of distant galaxies, we agreed that ours was a far scarier (riskier, higher stakes) approach, to stage the encounter between human and its aliens (ourselves both) in the here and now prosaic narratives of consumer culture and its attendant mythologies (which we cast as "brands") rather than in the accountable wish-space of virtual futures.
Curricular Alienation The course process was deliberately formatted as an analogue to these unsettling slippages, between communicating across this potential alien communication, as it, against it, through it, for it, or in spite of it. The pat resolution of direct sentimental gestures was eradicated at all costs, and students were encouraged to explore and model that exact opposite of what they meant to say as much as to follow where natural tendencies would lead them.
I introduced swerves and harsh shifts into the curricula and assignments at opportune times, forcing the projects (and the students) to unpeal whatever residual layers of decorative obviousness they may fall back on.
Many students felt nauseous from the tumult. Unclear as to whether they were succeeding or failing, they also linking themselves deeper and deeper to the contradictions of their projects and its paradoxical implications.
In this the genuinely unexpected, the potentially unaccountable in-advance, undesignable, became a permanent orientation for their disorientation. The results were, in my eyes, very successful.
Further, I reversed the usual cycle of brand-to brief-to design-to brand. Students developed their project concepts up to the very lip of maturity, and only then were asked to locate their idea into the semiosphere of inherited market mythologies of brands. They built the campaign/concept/communication and had to find a client narrative to install it. And, importantly, they didn't know in advance that they were going to have to do this, and thereby truly did develop their concept in the clear.
They spend another couple of weeks, considering, testing, agonizing over the implications of placing their idea into the adoptive context one mythology or another. It was utterly apparent that the very same concept would mean a totally different thing should it be located into the mythos of a pharmaceutical conglomerate or a beverage bottler or an NGO, and yet both appeared on the horizon as potentially interesting frameworks for the same idea!
We see many smart agencies developing original intellectual property, sometimes on their own and sometimes in conjunction with their expanded networks and then making the executive decisions as to how it will work with client enterprises or on its own. This is, I believe, an important and scalable shift in how design designs.
In terms of the class, this strategy was to shove the students as hard as possible out of the passive client-work mode of conceiving their professional positions, and into a position that is more active, audacious, entrepreneurial. The client-position disempowers design in at least two ways. First, it obviously puts the designer into the role of mere art director, producing visual cultural wrapping for an enterprise but never to design the enterprise itself. Second, and this is apparently preferred by some designers, it also fantastically absolves them of the messy responsibility of having to manage the ethical and economic complexities of actual ventures into actual markets, or so it seems. Here he can remain isolated, retreat into a morally self-referential worlds of "resistance imagery," or pumping out disposable "design acts of irrepressible wit," or otherwise living safely in effete distance from the direct skirmishes of power that catalogue and art-book commissions ensure. This is not acceptable at the U.C. where the only Design program in the entire public university system for this the 10th largest economy should be training students to dive right at and into the vertiginous complexities of power, and to assume the contradictions of leadership for this. There has been a strong impetus to define and realize this position since Rebeca and I initiated the Brand Lab, and this year it has been I believe sharpened and clarified.
Neither Happy Meal Nor Sad Meal This puts, to be sure Brand Lab in some contradistinction with how Brand is taught at other institutions and in other departments. We are neither teaching students to make a brand (logo, messaging, audiencing) nor to unmake a brand (ideological unpacking, counter-reading, semiotic inversions). That is the red pill/ blue pill choice that brand classes are asked to make: "do you accept not only the purpose but the methodologies by which designers can solve this instrumental need for organizations, or you will unmask for us all the Matrix-like simulation that we live in, wiping away our false consciousness with détourned billboards?" It is not only a false choice, one that conceals what is at stake for the social role of brands and enterprise mythologies as such, but for what can be done through them by designers in particular.
In academia these tend to tunnel things toward two dull project typologies, one utopian, one dystopian. The first, like any properly utopian projection, is to configure the brand as an image of the world in which social tensions are not only solved, but have been resolved by some token power of the brand and its artifacts. For some peculiar reasons these today seem to be obsessed with the signifying power of color (chromopolitcs). Lance Armstrong bracelets, for example, stupendously meaningless tokens, signifying nothing other than their own stupid proliferation. These cynical artifacts are in fact the inverse of sincere. We all know that they mean nothing but we cannot say that we know, because to do so would both reject the aspirant community that hopes cancer to be cured but also in the calling the bluff of bad faith, and to insult the intentions of the participants. Very rude. Product (RED) is another stupefying example, or indeed anything involving Bono or black and white portraits of people caught in a state of transcendent authenticity (especially if such portraits involve Africans, wonder-eyed children, or working-folk with their name and age beside them in caption.) Such projects seek to in some way leverage the cynical power of brand by adding another doubled-layer of blackmail sincerity on top of it. In the academic context, the cover story of some sort of humanitarian effort allows some faculty to pretend that the work is of value without having to do the difficult work of negotiating the inevitable violences of symbolization and advocacy, and other students to pretend to pretend the same.
The second typology to be avoided, let's call this blue pill variant "anti-branding" and note that it aspires to the function of the sunglasses in the John Carpenter alien invasion thriller, They Live. The glasses have some kind of ideology filter on them (here ideology is rendered as a real material thing, not just visual but an optical and indeed photonic phenomenon) and anyone who wears them can see the world without its corrosive alien media/brand manipulation. Projects such as EToy, Critical Art Ensemble, some descendants of Obey the Giant, the Billboard Liberation Front, and Adbusters, all in their way seek to provide a similar kind of illumination, or at the very least a display of their own accomplished ability to counter-read what others merely absorb. Such projects tarry with the instruments of symbolic operations --and often provide real innovation for them at no R&D cost to agencies-- but do so as if the formulation of public branding were not only an exclusively Oedipal problematic, but a paternal monologue at that. In reviving and rehashing the same psychodrama ad infinitum they manage to divert their own critical faculties from the more challenging and contradictory table stakes of economic narration. (see image)
Too much can be said about the poverty of both tendencies that I can outline here, but suffice to say that both projects get it wrong, even as both account for the majority of curricula about brand I have encountered. They are extrapolations of a basic misunderstanding or a willful misrecognition of how designed mythos can and do function as and for the social. This is not only because both are predicated on a vulgar behaviorism in place of an actual communication theory, but that both are in fact techniques of self-diversion from the difficulties at hand. As Slajov Zizek demands, "(we) want to a 3rd pill!"
As for Brand Lab, instead I believe that the students are free to play with possibilities and to realize that they may be traps on the one hand, and to engage dubious, profane everyday capital and realize it may be a line of escape toward its apparent opposites, on the other. Importantly they work in groups, to discourage pernicious posturing of self-expression or moralizing signature that would delay their experimenting directly with the muck of the real, and its risky alternatives. Further, these should not be read as fantasies of imaginary control. Too often artists and designers who feel disempowered by the cruel world of capital, disappear into a stance which can have unrestrained mastery within the virtual world of the project.
Instead, with Peter Eisenman's recent provocations about totalitarianism in mind, we moved forward with the risky questions of "?what if something evil causes something good? Is a Fake Good that does nothing, worse or better than a Real Evil that does something both good and evil? And how can we know which is which in advance of its actual deployment? I tried to push them into more of a war gaming/ scenario planning position. Not what do you want to happen? Not who should do this? But what if we extend this tendency along this line of flight, what would it look like and feel like as a variation on the human/alien imbroglio? We are sober peasants reformatting old myths to frame new insights, looking directly for small clues in the banality everyday brands to map what kinds of post-humanity are emerging along with us.
THE PROJECTSSeven Wonders The Lighthouse Project is by far the closest to the Sagan brief of stage-managing a planetary scale signifier out into the void in some hope that it might inspire or solicit communication from intelligent neighbor aliens. But there are important differences. Whereas Sagan's participation was largely the crafting of the just-so content of the message, Lighthouse takes a more direct and wide-angle approach. It is pure signal. They propose a homogenization of the cosmic background radiation surrounding earth from the heterogeneous field it is today, and has been since the Big Bang, into someone perhaps unique in space, a regular field ordered deliberately designed regulation, and therefore a clear sign for scanning aliens. From entropic noise to smooth signal. There is no content within the signal other than its own signification as an ordered instance of information in an otherwise uniformly heterogeneous ether of CBR. It is a lighthouse, a beacon.
This group was resistant to linking their project with a given brand (an acceptable option in the context of the class) and instead explored the trope of the "Wonder" as in Seven Wonders of the World as an early technique of architectural branding, and in simulating an actual deployment (which they did beautifully).
The project, in the spirit of SC, is interested in the out-sized gesture as social medium. The project then takes on, directly and indirectly, all that is useful or useless about overstatement and big symbols. These artificially constructed projective totems work to organize people in the image of their affective scale and awe. In this they bind and cohere a collective image in their reflection (obelisk, flag, security wall, etc.) We discussed as well the importance of totemic subtraction (such as the Berlin Wall or Vendome Column) as an equally valid path, and one suggested even putting the Berlin Wall back.
The group explored a few options for sponsoring brands appropriate to the trillions of dollars their project would likely cost, limiting them to planetary scale institutions, such as states, multinationals, religions, and philanthropists like Paul Allen. I strongly suggested Dubai as their sponsor, as the notion of an Islamic state speaking on behalf of the world --as the USA did with their flag on the moon-- would signal a shift in the asymmetries geopolitics, and make the West very nervous. They rejected the idea for the same reasons.
As a branding problem the nature of their project is clearly B2B. How to position a project to solicit financial support from donors capable of underwriting it with seven figure transactions? A pay-pal link is not going to do the trick. In this they explored how philanthropic networks that do the work of policy and governance such as Xprize type contests, $100 laptops, Gates foundation, etc. position themselves and operate; first how to mimic their cloying, hubristic tone and then to transform that into a voice for the Lighthouse.
SidebarThesis: 1LTPC, that perfect artifact of Neo-Liberalism. A "gift" that comes pre-coded to return itself in the form of the information labor its recipient will perform with it. A free interface into emergent trans-Western markets, and embarrassingly to Negroponte, also a developed product lines by Intel (the Classmate), the XO, the Zonbu, etc. Troubling for him because their undisguised gambit to deliver profitable products to markets in which they wish to cultivate a foothold in effect unscrambles the purpose and profile of his philanthropic venture, but also because it reframes it not a gift but a contract. It obliges a strictly scripted reciprocation.
Antithesis: Even Alain Badiou recently referred to Neo-Liberalism as the "background" against which any politics can take place. But, what if on the contrary, one plausible affirmation is to say that digital economies, planetary computation, are in essence a larger background condition that even Neo-Liberal capitalism. That instead of digital economies functioning inside of Neo-Liberalism, the opposite is the case, and Neo-Liberalism is in fact a serious of interlocking political-economic conditions inside of planetary computation, interweaved with but not enveloping other poles in Caracas, Beijing, Brussels, Lagos, Mecca, etc.
Synthesis: In this 1LTPC's own failure, being overtaken by market-driven alternatives that do not require paternalism, messianism even "worldchanging" benevolence to accomplish the same enrollment of new actors into the common territory of planetary computation, is in fact its success? Did it clear the way, so to speak, for its own obsolescence, and in so doing place more laptops on more laps of southern hemisphere children that it could do by itself?
Google Water The project also places Neo-Liberal Capitalism diagrammatically inside of Planetary Computation, and toys with what kinds of epiphytic economies can be conjured.
It works with the global specificity of water. The substance that most differentiates the Earthly condition is this all pervasive molecule, its many phase conditions, and the variety of life forms that it enables. Humans are after all mostly water, less descendants of Edenic dust than walking oceans.
After the oil wars come the potable water wars. Unless table-top desalinization is soon mastered soon, territorial claims over Greenland and the Arctic Circle may make dwarf the Middle East in violent intensity. Will Copenhagen's legacy over Greenland make it the next Dubai?
This is exacerbated by the profligate overbranding of this building block liquid by bottling companies who have managed to convince people that water freighted to them from across the world is a superior consumer choice than running their tap.
This would, I imagine startle my grandparents' generation for whom water was an unchallengeable public utility (post-Mulholland, at least)
How to make water truly public again? It could be nationalized like the Venezuelan oil company, or rather globalized by a responsible planetary federation made of of local water board collectives. Perhaps (wink) but that is not how this generation of students understands things becoming free that used to cost money.
Music used to cost money. Movies used to cost money. Software used to cost money. It is now very difficult if not impossible to build scarcity economies around digital commodities. Everything (soon physical objects) is becoming "Napstered" What can't be a P2P economy?
So it is not at all surprising to me that when asked how to make water free, this group responds in tune with how other things in their lives have converted to zero cost. Their hypothesis is Google Water. By extending the AdWords auction model to the side of water bottles, this project envisions bottled water becoming free again because subsidized by sponsoring marketers eager to reach audiences at this key moment of regular consumption.
Advertising through Google is itself P2P, to the consternation of big traditional ad agencies, and has enabled an explosion of Long Tail connections between idiosyncratic niches of producers and consumers. Messaging is the opposite of one-size-fits all, and communication the opposite of monologic. Indeed consumers are almost as likely to buy advertising as to receive it, as the open market of sponsorable concepts unfurls into an infinite array of psychographic tendencies.
Google Water all looks the same in the bottles, which themselves all look the same. Unlike pay water brands which make increasingly absurd claims about their uniqueness ("fat free," "untouched by humans," "smartwater," etc.) Google Water references instead the universality of water, the universality of its useful molecular profile. Here water is a binding agent, linking persons of widely different interests into a common platform, much as Google does itself for Search. In choosing Google Water, one imagines a million others making the same choice at the same moment, an image of collective solidarity or totalitarian menace?
But Google Water is also (like Google) an engine of infinite sub-brand differentiation (from one platform, infinite channels) each explicitly organized around purchasable keywords and small acts of self-declaration. A marketer might buy and a consumer might choose: "water for...people who support Barack Obama." "water for...people who hate Jeff Gordon." Water for..people who anything in the world. As on Facebook, where identity is expressed in the overlaps of the ven diagram of declared commodity preferences, here choosing the bottle that properly signifies your human intentions is a self-selecting behavioral target for marketers and a medium of direct or ironic expression for water-drinkers. You are not allowed to have any water unless you express yourself in doing so, this is the new law!
Imagine an Andreas Gursky photograph of a million bottles of the same water on the shelf at once, each appearing the same, but each also with a different wording on its label linking it with a different idea, person, or preference, and know that every bottle is also free for the taking. This is the project.
I mentioned Google Water to Chris Anderson, editor of WIRED, an author of an upcoming book on the "Free" Economy, how sponsored subsidization will make everything free (and potentially very low quality, I would add.) His concern, like others', was the energy footprint of moving bottles filled with with water to points-of-sale and with the landfill issue of so much plastic. All valid. But the project is more an experiment in what P2P models and microsegmented advertising can and should do, what it can make free, and what is the subsequent price we have to pay for things having no cost.
Handbük This project is an IKEA-branded handbook of recipes for how to be a human. It presumes a State of Things in which basic practical knowledge about how to work and re-work ones world has been forgotten by a species of dumbed-down bio-mass and useless, narrow experts.
What if, instead of inventing ourselves into a state of post-humanity with fabulous genetic technologies, we just fade away? Instead of heroically augmenting ourselves with new media based on acts of dazzling imaginative will, we instead simply forget how to be humans? What if we just get distracted by other things and forget? "Human" just washes away like another word written in sand.
It's in the air. Alan Weisman's The World Without Us asks a similar question and finds similar answers about the total non-event of human disappearance. Even Max Brooks' Zombie novel, World War Z, offers the similar lesson: once all this delicate machinery tumbles, post-humanity will emerge dumb, degraded and carnivorous, and the new ruling class with be those who still know how to fix a broken gasoline generator. Cory Doctorow's "When Sysadmins Ruled the World" ends its own apocalypse with post-civilization learning to garden, cook and barter. The coming post-humanity and post-humanity full of post-humans is more about a rebooting to archaic social forms, learning again like trembling infants things that our grandparents did autonomically. I discussed this with David Pescowitz, editor of MAKE magazine which has spawned a cottage industry for industrious cottage-builders, eager to pry open the closed world of consumer goods and re-find within them, or within the prying-open itself, the embodied practical wisdom of self-and-active-world that might characterize the best, modest qualities of human becoming. He did not disagree that MAKE is apocalyptic in its optimism, providing basic skills to a growing number of quilt makers and robot frisbee throwing machines engineers who will surely run the show once the zombie wars commence.
And speaking of Zombies, let's consider IKEA. Its Swedishness already suggests the coddling, soft authoritarianism of Scandinavian social democratic politics, but here that infantalization is extended into a pre-formatted world-making schemes for people too busy or docile to do it themselves. IKEA ostensibly sells furniture and other species-world essentials, but in truth IKEA sells only the building blocks of these things along with their cheerfully branded instructions for end-user assembly. Like a for-real LEGO, IKEA sells various configurations of colored particle board, screws and hinges + cartoons for their particular assembly into particular things.
This group of students abstracted this essence of IKEA --nice instructions in life-world assembly for nice masses-- and developed it into a platform for re-teaching post-humans (or aliens) what it is like to be human and what humans are and do. This abstraction of instruction from furniture to life itself means a regimented, simplified, universal, Swedish one size fits all. Handbük is a training manual for adult post-humans in need of basic instruction in the complexities of drinking a cup of coffee, having a conversation or screwing in a lightbulb. It is a simplification that becomes a discipline. Khaki!
WiiWare This project looks at the process of becoming human, and communicating humanness to its attendant alien, as a matter of embodied play.
It argues that humanness and specific human embodiment are inextricable. The proposal began as a "human suit," which was to be literal garment or skin that an alien could put on to feel what it is like to be a human, and thereby communicate without words or symbols everything important to them what human is and is not.
In exploring the potential of their own human suits, the student skinjobs worked with several "mind hacks," simple, playful techniques of disorienting one's own cognition and perception, and making clear the fallibility of relay chains between sensory apparatuses, brain function and proprioception. By fucking around with the Bergsonian body-image, the work shoots straight through Merleau-Ponty's sensory phenomenology.
This also introduced the difficult problem of defining the peculiarity of human embodiment as none of us is capable of embodying anything else to compare. In order for us to really know what it means to be human, we'd have to experience the non-human to gauge similarities. No reliable conditions of comparison are available and therefore no consistent human experience can be differentiated from other possibilities, especially if the project concedes that all actual humans embody their humanness differently than all others to begin with. The fragility of a core humanness cracks before the test begins. As such, interhuman communication of embodiment would be as important and intrahuman transmission (explored in some detail Deleuze in this works on the foreignness of cinema as virtual embodiment)
Once again they came to see that it was, more specifically, this gap between perception and cognition, between one embodiment and its neighborly alien embodiment (also but differently human) that might be said to define the fragility of the human construction. What would need to be communicated to the alien post-human is not just perception but this gap, the specific, ludic confusion.
Wii was a pretty obvious choice for a simple available platform on which to load their software. I am old enough to remember when to launch a new game meant to introduce and entirely new interactive metaphor, and the potential of Wii and Wii-like systems to incorporate virtual proprioception into the experience of play.
Last Word Of my many interests in Brand Lab at D|MA, one is to confront the tendency in the department that design should have an art-like social function, rather than the other way around. Another is to steer the students as far as possible from the department's very Californian doxa, characterized by an unhealthy preference for dead visionaries like Tesla, Sagan, Fuller and their grand unified theories, from nano to cosmic scale in one fuzzy move. This also appears, unspoken in the soft compunction for graduate students to produce works of and about calming meta-affect, and in their critiques to expect more consensus and platitude than multipolar conflict. Perhaps it also appears as well as the slightly embarrassing OMNI magazine-esque visual rhetorics of many Space Collective posts (words are too slow to truly represent the speed of neurons firing with futurological epiphanies): hairless superbeings wading purposefully through quantum planes of bioinformatic materiality, bathed in lasers on loan from Jean-Michel Jarré. (see image)
At the same time, it must be said that to directly engage "brand" at D|MA as explicit topic of curriculum is to invite the misinterpretation that there is an industrialization of imagination at work, and an inappropriate indoctrination of students into the parameters of corporate gigs. In fact it is more like inoculation, but this is an exactly correct phobia about transforming departments into "practical" relationships with industry. This not only eradicates the quasi-autonomous zone of the academy it also backfires by in fact preventing actual, socially useful innovation to accidentally emerge from playful, circuitous research into barely understood problems. But, at the same time, the defensiveness about corporations also helps enforce a consensual complicit repression of the violence of the State who sponsors and funds the department to begin with. The scandal of one authority screens an alibi for the other.
As far Space Collective, our nominal collaborator in this, we clearly enrolled SC to do something different that it was accustomed to doing, and to leverage the problematics of brand to force something unexpected to emerge from this. To be sure, the reality of post-humanity is taken not as something that might happen in the future, "once the singularity comes," but as something that we experience every single day but do not well name, well narrate or well communicate.
We looked at how in essence we borrow the mythical framework of contemporary brands to tell those stories. Instead of celebrating or "critiquing" the brands, we did them one better by in essence taking them more seriously than they do themselves, and to use the cynical brand as a real myth to image a possible real product, real outcome, real thing: a return of the repressed at the D|MA?
That is, and this the key lesson, the human is not a fixed framework of bordered beingness that can be "hacked" by emergent messianic technologies, through sheer will to visualize possibilities "beyond" the limited consciousness of today's out-dated moralisms. Rather, the "human" is always-already a fragile, unstable configuration of tenuous thresholds between itself and the machine, the animal, the dead, etc. The post-human will not arrive one fine day, it came to us already with the arrival of the human which contains, as a "format" the penetration of its conceptual and practical boundaries. the post-human does not come after the human, it has always accompanied it, defined it even as such.
Ever since authority was linked to stars, outer space has been an "up there" where dreams and insights go. I see it, however, as vast, black "over there" where people put things they can't or won't deal with at home. Walking along the narrow track of the SC narrative is to project and defer the post-human into a potential technological future, is, despite appearances, to homogenize and fix the human as a linear format. Instead of working with the disintegration of the human right here and right now, to delay it it into the extruded and extrapolated future of messianic science is a a fatal deferral. The trick to narrate the intolerability of our constant disintegrations is to recognize them as part of what we are, not of what we transcend.
Further reading:
Agamen's the open, haraway's companion species, lyotard's the inhuman, arendt's on totalitarianism, and especially Adorno's Minima Moralia, Hayles, Merleau Ponty
Tags: branding, ucla, bio media
Published: 03.26.2008
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