Panel Statement

Panel: Don’t Anthropomorpise Me: Electronic Performance Tools, Automatons and The Vanity Apocalypse

Any mod­ern com­puter Op­er­at­ing Sys­tem (OS) is de­signed with self-main­te­nance and self-sup­port fea­tures under the hood. OS mon­i­tors the health of hard­ware it runs on, ac­tiv­ity of ex­ter­nal pe­riph­ery, user input; it de­ter­mines the nec­es­sary pro­cess­ing and han­dles its own state. For ex­am­ple – in case of a se­vere error or over­load an OS can de­cide to re­boot a com­puter; other time, when user pro­gram uses too much mem­ory an OS would ter­mi­nate the program.?My in­ter­est here is to ex­plore be­hav­ior of OSes under dif­fer­ent con­di­tions and cir­cum­stances, ob­serve the meth­ods they uti­lize for self-main­te­nance, se­cu­rity and con­trol. Is User pro­gram prefer­able to Sys­tem process from the per­spec­tive of Linux ker­nel? Can one use an OS with­out ever leav­ing a trace in sys­tem logs? Does User im­pose ul­ti­mate con­trol over a run­ning OS or why the ‘shut­down’ com­mand some­times does not work?

• Danja Vasiliev is a Russ­ian born com­puter artist, en­gi­neer and re­searcher. Danja re­cently won the highly cov­eted Golden Nica in In­ter­ac­tive Art for his work “New­st­week” made in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Ju­lian Oliver (NZ). His in­ter­ests lay in sub­jects of net­worked en­vi­ron­ments, com­puter op­er­at­ing sys­tems, ma­chine-2-hu­man in­ter­faces, data foren­sics, re­al­ity hack­ing, dig­i­tal life and every­day tech­nol­ogy and else. Using net­worked com­put­ers as a raw model/base Danja chal­lenges con­tem­po­rary af­fec­tion for dig­i­tal life and global ten­dency for cy­borgina­tion. His works are often de­scribed as tech­no­log­i­cal in­ter­ven­tions, be those hard­ware, soft­ware or con­cep­tual pieces. Im­por­tant re­cent works in­clude crowd-dri­ven com­puter net­work in­tended to re­place the In­ter­net (“Net­less”, 2010), Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion that joins the con­cepts of Tur­ing ma­chines and ques­tiones tech­no­log­i­cal Sin­gu­lar­ity (“RE:buntu”, 2009), a me­chan­i­cal web-server that is ac­ces­si­ble over the In­ter­net (“m/e/m/e 2.0”, 2008). In 2010 to­gether with Ju­lian Oliver de­fined a con­cept of “Crit­i­cal En­gi­neer­ing”. Cur­rently Danja is work­ing on a set of in­ter­ven­tion­ist’s de­vices for con­duct­ing ex­per­i­ments on the bor­der be­tween com­puter net­works and phys­i­cal space. The re­search is con­cerned about the in­ad­e­quate and often false knowl­edge re­gard­ing on­line pri­vacy and com­mu­ni­ca­tion that is deeply rooted into con­tem­po­rary, net­worked so­ci­ety.