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.