#system – @nickkahler on Tumblr

We’re obviously dealing with people who have operational security knowledge. They have the whole law enforcement system and intelligence system after them. And they haven’t been caught.

Jake Williams in Scott Shane, Nicole Perlroth, and David E. Sanger, “Security Breach at the NSA,” 2017

#jake williams #scott shane #nicole perlroth #david e. sanger #security #breach #knowledge #operation #enforcement #system #intelligence #caught #crime #capture #secret #steal #nsa #national security administration

nickkahler

Like all true infrastructures, the invisibility of global data systems in everyday life means that they are only really noticed (and then, only fleetingly) when they cease to function. At such moments, the constant calculative operations sustaining global digital capitalism momentarily materialize, until reinstatement occurs and the assemblage sinks into the background once again.

Stephen Graham, “Stealth Architectures and the Geographies of Backup” in Geographies of Information, 2016

nickkahler

Reverse engineering forensically extracts, inspects, improves or contests 'design blueprints' embedded in manmade systems. Cryptome reverse-engineers the technics and codes hardwired into panoptical information and communications technologies as a way of examining their diagrams of power. This 'revolt against the gaze' is our tactic in the Eyeball Series when flipping the technology of national security vision back onto itself through reversals of geospatial imagery. Or reversing top-down geopolitical maps through countercartographies that favor micro-historical method. It's also Crytome's general approach to the everyday, incremental construction of a public domain library around the inchoate classification of so-called banned documents.

Deborah Natsios + John Young in Nicholas Korody, “The Whistleblower Architects,” 2016

nickkahler

We are under attack 24/7. This is not a race. It is a chess game. You have to think about the opponent’s next movement. You can never relax.

Carlos Rienzi, “The Security System for the Xapo Swiss Bitcoin Bunker,” 2017

#carlos rienzi #security #system #xapo #swiss #switzerland #bitcoin #bunker #24/7 #attack #race #chess #game #move #movement #relax #relaxation #prediction #defense #finance #money #tactics #strategy

nickkahler

Defense, in the course of the Second World War, switched from entrenchment to intelligence through the prodigious development of detection systems and telecommunications. ... Not only was artillery no longer blind, but now it could see in advance. This integral visibility piercing through each and every obstacle made the space of this new warfare transparent, while time was reduced by systems of prediction and foresight.

Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 1975

nickkahler

During my trips along European coasts, I grew more and more selective, picking up only traces of the defense system. Everyday life at the seaside had disappeared. The space I was charting with surveys and measurements of different types of casemates was the space of a different historical time than that of the moment of my trip; the conflict I perceived between the summer of seaside bathing and the summer of combat would never again cease. For me the organization of space would now go hand in hand with the manifestation of time.

Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 1975

nickkahler

It's beyond time for a new generation of art historians not only to open up the system and let art be the garden that it is, home to exotic blooms of known and unknown phenomena. It's time to work against this system. We can't say painting is dead just as women and artist of color started to show up in art history. Our art history has stiffened into an ideology that clear-cuts a medium, pronounces it dead (like undertakers) and moves on like conquistadors to the next stage. The idea that art has an overall goal of advancing or perfecting its terms and techniques is made up. Imagined. Idiotic. Except to those benefiting from this intellectual fundamentalism. Someday, people will look back at this phase of art history the way we look back at manifest destiny and colonialism.

Jerry Saltz, “The Tyranny of Art History in Contemporary Art,” 2016

nickkahler

For these artists every object contains the whole world and is part of a family of forms. They look at the world in a meta way; inspiration is a compelling force from within. Not art history. In this holistic way the whole shapes the parts, taxonomical units cohere into clouds, microcosms mushroom into macrocosms, webs of interrelationship form. These artists are in search of what might be called ur-forms, conceptual templates, archetypal systems, secret chords, flows, things here for millions of centuries that are embedded in materials and in the fabric of time.

Jerry Saltz, “The Tyranny of Art History in Contemporary Art,” 2016

nickkahler

Recent curatorial practices have also employed the 'not enough' strategy in attempts to elude the overbearing nature of thematic exhibitions and to permit works of art to remain unburdened by curatorial claims. ... The curator chooses a system that allows him to make selections; he provides his audience with information about that system, but not enough for a theme to parasite the active pursuit of looking at and appreciating art.

Anthony Huberman, “I (Not Love) Information,” 2007

#anthony huberman #information #data #enough #art #burden #theme #selection #audience #system #parasite #meaning #appreciation #pursuit #active

nickkahler

Now more so than ever: the efficiency, quantity and immediacy of information and information-systems has placed art and the artistic gesture at risk of being identified, categorised, digested, cannibalised and made into information before it has a chance to begin being art. Curiosity is being castrated by information.

Anthony Huberman, “I (Not Love) Information,” 2007

#anthony huberman #information #efficiency #quantity #immediacy #system #art #artistic #gesture #identify #categorize #cannibalize #castrate #castration #quote

nickkahler

Falling into the hands of someone who has never seen this document before, the Mishnah must cause puzzlement. From the first line to the last, discourse takes up questions internal to a system that is never introduced. The Mishnah provides information without establishing context. It presents disputes about facts hardly urgent outside a circle of faceless disputants. Consequently, we start with the impression that we join a conversation already long under way about topics we can never grasp anyhow. Even though the language is our own, the substance is not.

Jacob Neusner, “Introduction” to the Mishnah, c. 200 CE

#jacob neusner #quote #introduction #document #mishnah #puzzle #language #hebrew #text #fact #debate #dispute #impression #topic #grasp #system #question #context

nickkahler

We think of this kind of nature as a nice harmonious, periodic cycling. There’s a physical reason for that. We started our settled mode of existence (the Neolithic) at the start of the Holocene, which was characterized by nice periodic cycling Earth systems (you know, the carbon cycle and so on). The funny thing is, we might have even caused that cycling ourselves through farming and hunting and so on! But even if we didn’t, so-called civilization was (dangerously) coincident with a nice harmonious cycling biosphere that was able therefore to run in the background like a smoothly functioning OS and thus massively contributed to this idea of humans-and-their-cattle-over-here, nature-over-there. Lulled by that myth of smooth functioning, we kept on and on running the logistical program that started in the Fertile Crescent and elsewhere, until it required fossil fuels to keep going. ... So the really extreme way of putting it is, nature is the Anthropocene in its less obvious, seemingly smooth (for humans) mode.

Timothy Morton, “On Object-Oriented Ontology,” 2016

nickkahler

Architecture has since about 1900 been based on vectors of pollution flow—gotta keep the bad air out, for instance, so you need air conditioning. But when you think about things at Earth magnitude, at that scale, where does it go? It doesn’t go 'away,' it just goes somewhere else in the system. Nature, if you like, is a sort of fourth wall concept (you know theater?) by which we try to separate the human from everything else.

Timothy Morton, “On Object-Oriented Ontology,” 2016

#architecture #quote #vector #pollution #flow #instance #air conditioning #mep #magnitude #system #nature #natural #fourth wall #concept #theatre #philosophy #ontology #object oriented ontology #timothy morton

nickkahler

The enemy is information. While nothing can ever escape its grasp – this very text is information, exists because of it, makes use of it and creates more of it – challenging its ubiquity and its effects has never been a more urgent and necessary task. Sure, we need information to understand the world, but the systems we have invented to generate, disperse, translate and consume information have become poisonous. Meant to grease the wheels of freedom, today's information machines and economies instead have thrown the human mind into a vicious circle of addiction, withdrawal and fleeting satisfaction. Like all drugs, information takes hold of everything, surrounds it, swallows it, clings to it, bludgeons it and spits it back out.

Anthony Huberman, “I (Not Love) Information,” 2007

#anthony huberman #information #enemy #quote #escape #text #existence #system #task #consumption #freedom #economy #drug #mind #addiction #data

nickkahler

The enemy seems to have been well posted as to the character and capacity of our troops ... and to have been well guided by persons thoroughly acquainted with the river and country.

Harriet Tubman’s Spy Network, A Confederate Report, c. 1864

#harriet tubman #quote #spy #network #system #confederate #report #civil war #american civil war #enemy #troop #character #capacity #river #country #history #espionage

nickkahler

Well aware that telegraph wires could be tapped, he enciphered his dispatches and sent them by messenger. At times, he had as many as 100 men and women working for him from Mississippi to Georgia. His security precautions were so thorough that little still is known about his operations or the names of most of his agents.

On Grenville M. Dodge, “On Military Intelligence and Strategy,” c. 2000