News from the Collective

Interview by Hoçâ Cové-Mbede

In March 2021 London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit issued a warning towards students and universities to stop visiting Sci-Hub, the first website in the world to provide mass and public access to millions of research papers, a project designed, programmed and maintained by Alexandra Elbakyan since 2011.

The press statement displays terms and compounds such as malicious, phishing, compromised access, cybercrime, bad actors, fraud and hacking in order to build a specific profile that speculates around the active use of the site. The move is not surprising or impressive for Sci-Hub’s standards, since its rise as one of the most important sources/archives for scientific research globally, Elbakyan has been dealing with constant turmoil: suspensions from social media platforms, permanent blocks, takedown orders, legal prosecution for copyright infringement, spying accusations, censorship and media backlash.

But not all sides are hostile in advance, the scrutiny and feedback taken from public and private conversations about the apparatuses that paywall database-knowledge for profit also devised a reputation for Elbakyan during all these years, cementing her as an unparalleled figure to talk about digital + bypass redistribution (aka the Robin Hood of Science Publishing), and not only that, Sci-Hub’s way to operate and interact puts interesting question marks on the limits of online ownership and the involvement of academic institutions regarding open access.

2021 will bring backward-looking moments for Sci-Hub, in September S-H will celebrate a decade of existence, which hopefully will open reviews about the impact of the uninterrupted service the site provides, analysis on the media-portraits made of Elbakyan by third actors in the public sphere, and our role in the current corporate model of production/access of scientific knowledge.

In June of 2020 I contacted Alexandra to have an extended conversation that covers S-H’s revolution in science, copy + paste archival practices in favour of copyright abolition, US Justice Department targeting S-H as an undercover espionage-project, private ownership of science, prejudices against women in IT, astrology and its nexus with information flow and Elsevier’s attempts to worldwide-block S-H.

This conversation previously appeared in a shorter version on Netzpolitik.org.

Hoçâ Cové-Mbede: Multiple profiles depict you with specific associations and comparisons with other projects or personas historically and culturally related with online piracy in the USA—from Piratebay, Megaupload and Napster to Wikileaks, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. What are your thoughts on how the media covers Sci-Hub? I’m thinking in particular of an article in Nature from 2016 and a profile published in The Verge in 2018, both of which get cited regularly in relation to Sci-Hub.

Alexandra Elbakyan: In my opinion, Sci-Hub’s media coverage was very little, unfair and biased. I would even say that discussion of Sci-Hub was censored in the media. Sci-Hub is a real revolution in science comparable to CRISPR but the media prefer to keep silent about it.

Sci-Hub started in 2011 and from the very beginning was recognized as a revolutionary Open Science project and gained huge popularity among researchers. But only in 2016 did articles about Sci-Hub in the media start to appear. That censorship is perhaps the result of the general perception of Sci-Hub as a Russian project opposed to the US.

I would say that the discussion of Sci-Hub in the journal Nature is very small compared to its real impact. In particular, Nature published very detailed descriptions of such open science projects as Unpaywall with pictures. The Unpaywall project is tiny compared to Sci-Hub, but Nature published only very short pieces about Sci-Hub, without pictures. So some readers of Nature journal who do not know much about the topic will have the wrong impression that Unpaywall is much bigger than Sci-Hub, because Nature has described it in detail while discussion of Sci-Hub was little. But in reality, the opposite is true: Unpaywall is tiny compared to Sci-Hub. If Nature was unbiased to Sci-Hub it would have put Sci-Hub on its cover picture in 2016.

You’re correct that even those articles about Sci-Hub that appeared in the media are focused not on the project itself but on comparisons, trying to belittle Sci-Hub and present it as secondary, while in reality it is revolutionary and unique. In the Verge article, journalists have presented a skewed picture of my conflict with the Russian science fund “Dynasty”, supporting Dynasty. They did not even bother to ask me about the information they collect so I could comment on it!

Wrong information appears not just in the media, but in more reputable sources also, for example, books, such as “Shadow Libraries” published by MIT and in dissertations. I read some of them and there were serious mistakes in my biography and the description of how Sci-Hub works. Again, authors of these works did not even bother contacting me.

However in Russian media the current state of affairs is much worse. An extremely unfair picture of me is being promoted; good facts about Sci-Hub are not published. I am being presented as a person who blocked access to academic literature while the reality is opposite. I opened access and not blocked it.  Also, usually journalists attach to their articles the most horrendous photo of me they can find, instead of asking me to send them a good photo. I guess that some of the bad media publications about me and Sci-Hub could be directly paid by Elsevier.

There’s a current pattern of legal tactics that label common words or compounds employed in open knowledge activities as criminal-by-association in regards to free access and text-private-property. Why do you think these legal tactics under the argument of capitalist loss have been used to try to slow down sharing networks and archival repositories? 

There is a huge industry around science publishing and copyright law in general, and they have enough money and power to support the status quo.

Do you think the measures against you, like the legal prosecution directed by Elsevier to cease Sci-Hub in 2015, are similar to Middle Age’s curses intended to protect against the theft of books?

Alexandra Elbakyan: In the Middle Ages books were copied by hand and it was a very tedious task and books were precious. So to protect books from stealing, a popular method was to insert a curse in the beginning or the end of the book, so that somebody who would steal that book will be cursed and go to Hell or get an illness or something else very bad will happen to them. Because Elsevier and other publishers also insist that their books and articles are being stolen by such websites as Sci-Hub and Library Genesis, I thought that is quite funny if they would also try using curses to protect their articles and books. Perhaps that will be a better method than suing us for copyright?

Images by Hoçâ Cové-Mbede.

It is fascinating how the tense relationship between the USA and Russia during the Cold War plays an important precedent in the public eye to generate plots and theories about the origins and intentions of Sci-Hub on copyrighted territories, even though you repeatedly insisted that Sci-Hub is a project you started in 2011. These theories suggest a plethoric range of possibilities, from a fully state funded project by Russian Intelligence, to an ongoing investigation directed by the US Justice Department that targets Sci-Hub as an undercover espionage-project. What is your response to these accusations and what is behind the constant emergence of conspiracy plots toward Sci-Hub?

Alexandra Elbakyan: First of all, these suspicions are understandable: Sci-Hub is an openly communistic project, coming from the former USSR or Russia, with a picture of Lenin pinned on its twitter page. I studied information security at the university, supported Putin politics and Sci-Hub uses supposedly hacked credentials to log in into university systems. All these facts taken together create a classical picture of some Russian intelligence. Also US authorities could suspect that Sci-Hub is an attempt to influence US researchers by the Russian government.

And the second reason for conspiracies is that Sci-Hub is a very cool and advanced project. So many people think: how could an Armenian woman coming from Kazakhstan create this herself? There should be a team of developers behind her face and so on. We still have a lot of prejudices against women, especially young—still many people think that women cannot code or do some serious work in IT—prejudices against race and countries. Just think of the Borat movie about Kazakhstan! After watching this movie, who can believe that something great such as Sci-Hub—and many people consider it great—can come from Kazakhstan? And so on. The funniest thing here is perhaps that because of all that, who will consider me for any great job at all? Hence all I can work on is a project that is illegal in all countries. But even then that work will not be considered mine. It is necessary to note that these prejudices were much stronger a few years ago, when Sci-Hub started, now they are becoming weaker.

In 2016 Marcia Mcnutt (former president of the National Academy of Sciences) wrote a column for Science Magazine titled My love-hate of Sci-Hub in which she argues that downloading papers from Sci-Hub could create collateral damage for authors, publishing houses, universities, fellowships, science education, among other areas. The love-hate scenario Mcnutt paints is nonetheless confusing for the debate she wants to open about corporate knowledge inside institutions, since the whole text leaves serious cracks in her depiction of the publishing system’s function. Accidentally in the same text, she evidences a chain of normalized exploitation towards researchers in her community—by not rewarding them. To use her own words “Journals have real costs, even though they don’t pay authors or reviewers, as they help ensure accuracy, consistency, and clarity in scientific communication.” If access means power and power is fueled by elevated amounts of money, what are the standards of politically correct access to information aiming for, if not capital accumulation?

Of course Sci-Hub creates damage: damage to the status quo, because old ways of doing things die and a new reality is born—what is perceived as damage to old ways is just transformation and change.

In her article Marcia McNutt says: “Authors do not benefit from download statistics, for example, which are increasingly being used to assess the impact of their work.” That does not seem to be a strong objection to me. After all, the real impact is when some work is cited, not just downloaded? I download many papers for later reading, for example. You can download and read some paper because it has a catchy title, but it will turn out to be useless for your work.

Sci-Hub collects download statistics, although they are not public, but all download statistics have been recorded since 2011 and I have a plan to add the number of views each paper has in the future. So Sci-Hub can be updated to provide such information.

The article goes on… “Libraries cannot properly track usage for the journals they provide and could wind up discontinuing titles that are useful to their institution. As institutions cancel subscriptions, the ability of non-profit scientific societies to provide journals and support their research communities is diminished.” In my opinion, it is very good when institutions cancel subscriptions, because we need to get rid of that outdated subscription model that operates by blocking access to knowledge for everyone who has not paid for a subscription. I don’t see it as damage but as a good thing.

The argument continues that journals have real costs. My response is that the prices currently charged for subscriptions are not used to cover the costs but simply to increase the profits. An example to illustrate this is that papers published in the 2010s and earlier are paywalled. Why? There is no reason—these papers have been published more than 10 years ago. Haven’t the costs of publishing them been covered already? They could be free, but they are being kept with closed access only to extract more profits.

Sci-Hub’s borderless pirate distribution is generating not only scientific capital but also cultural capital, in an availability of knowledge never experienced before. Language barriers aside, the capacities for scientific development in countries with research shortages may have significant growth in the next ten years thanks to Theft Trade Communication.

In a presentation you made this year about the mythology of science titled The Open Science Idea you made an unexpected statement: modern science grew out of theft. What is the nexus between cognition, communism, and theft inside your studies about the cultural history of science?

Since about 2010 I have had astrology as a hobby (yes, I know that is considered to be pseudoscience) and in modern astrology, there is planet Mercury that is responsible for all communication and information flow. That is because Mercury is an ancient god of language and speech, trade, travel, and theft. I thought that corresponds very well with Sci-Hub’s mission  and the common idea behind all these different activities is the idea of communication. We can find similar gods in other cultures and they are also gods of knowledge, and the god Mercury later developed as god of alchemy, astrology or the earliest forms of science. What we can see here is that science from its inception was connected to communication or to the idea of making something common. Hence private ownership of science by corporations is contradictory to science itself.

Is also worth noticing the high contrast amid the graphic assertions from Elsevier and Sci-Hub and what each one represents and stands for in regard to power and information. I’ve always wondered about Sci-Hub’s logo genesis, because in this case the graphisms go beyond the symbolic.

Alexandra Elbakyan: The history of Sci-Hub logo is less intriguing than it appears to be. When Sci-Hub started in 2011, its first logo was a simple Soviet hammer and sickle, and when the mouse pointer hovered upon it, a text showed up stating: “Communism is … common ownership of the means of production with free access to articles of consumption.”

I took this communism definition from a Wikipedia page and it fitted Sci-Hub very neatly. I was lucky because that definition of communism in Wikipedia was only in 2011—if you check earlier versions of Wiki articles about communism or later versions, they do not contain anything about “free access to articles.”

In 2014 I created a group in a social network to bring together Sci-Hub users (vk.com/sci_hub). First I used the Mendeleev table as a logo, after that it was an alchemical serpent. Later I decided to look up some pictures in Google with a key and books to use as a group logo, and found Raven sitting on books, holding a key. I loved that picture and immediately put it up as a logo on Sci-Hub’s social network group. Later in 2015, I decided to re-design Sci-Hub website and create a more current design, and used the group raven logo as a website logo.

Now that you discovered attractive routes to study information patterns and similarities through history, What do you think about the future of file-sharing consumption under severe .net regulations?

It is quite hard to predict the future, but I hope everything will be OK with Sci-Hub and it will have millions of daily visitors, not just half a million, and be recognized as a legal project.

We are in the middle of important changes at institutional, corporate and cultural levels in the context of Open Science and information access. In June of 2020 MIT ended negotiations with Elsevier for a new contract, and recently the University of California also renewed negotiations launching open access resolutions with the company. At the same time, many universities are inaugurating new protocols and initiatives to ensure wide and free access for academic resources. Do you consider the recent measures taken by academic organizations to be enough to abolish the paywall-economy?

As we can see paywalls are still there, and Sci-Hub is getting a lot of traffic. It could help if all—or most—science organizations stopped support of the paywall system, not just MIT and the University of California.

In May 2020 you were nominated for the John Maddox Prize by Fergus Kane after almost ten years of navigating heavily corporate waters. One curious detail about the award is that it has support from the international scientific journal Nature, Nature’s news team covered Sci-Hub’s legal battle in New York courts unfavorably. What is your approach to this nomination and how significant could it be for Sci-Hub’s potential?

I have seen many times in social networks how people say that I should get a Nobel Prize for Sci-Hub! So I expect a Nobel Prize, not just John Maddox, but of course the prize condition of Sci-Hub is just as unfair as its media condition. Sci-Hub has existed for 9 years so far, praised—and sometimes worshipped—by researchers all around the world: many people say that without Sci-Hub they would barely be able to do science, the project is extremely popular and considered to be revolutionary and… in the nine years of its existence it never got a single prize! That John Maddox nomination is a small step towards justice.

Can you elaborate the statement you made about Elon Musk’s Neuralink similarities with your Global Brain project developed back in 2010?

I’ve written a lot about neural chips in my blog and participated in conferences on that topic. Now Elon Musk is working on exactly the same things I wanted to work on and talked about 10 years ago. But there is not as much work as there is publicity: nothing is done yet, but everyone all over the world knows about that Neuralink—so when you talk about brain chips or brain-machine interfaces, people will immediately think that you’re somehow copy-cating Elon Musk, right? In fact, that topic of brain chips is quite old, attempts to develop and discuss something similar were made back in 2003 and earlier, it all started way before Elon Musk, but the advertisement works in such a way that most people think that is Elon Musk’s Neuralink.

A similar thing happened with Aaron Swartz. His name became so strongly associated with that “free science papers” topic that when people finally learned about Sci-Hub it was perceived as nothing but a shadow copy of Aaron Swartz work, while in reality Sci-Hub started and became popular before Aaron Swartz’s case.

Sci-Hub was a unique and extremely revolutionary project, but it became perceived as a shadow copycat just because it was given publicity only after the name of another person has been associated with the idea of freeing science by stealing research papers. In the beginning, it really felt as if Sci-Hub was working hard to free itself from that “copycat“ image. And I wonder whether something similar is being done with Neuralink. Elon Musk is very unappreciative of communism, as we can see from his twitter. So, I wonder if Sci-Hub was somehow the reason behind Elon Musk’s Neuralink.

What is your opinion about Elsevier’s Scholarly Networks Security Initiative (SNSI) founded together with other large publishers that proposes an analysis engine with biometric data and conspicuous usage patterns spyware, to prevent “cyber-attacks targeting institutions” and even hosting a presentation titled “The threat presented by Sci-Hub and other state-sponsored or individual bad actors”?

Actually I don’t know much about that surveillance scandal, I myself learned from Twitter about their plans, some people posted a link to that Times Higher Education article, I wanted to read it but it was not available in full—I had to register in their website. I did that, read the article and then re-posted it in Sci-Hub’s twitter. A well-known Open Access advocate Björn Brembs, who was mentioned in that article, has more on this topic in his twitter. I do not know him, but he often shares opinions in support of Sci-Hub.

You mentioned before that since 2010 you study astrology/modern astrology as a hobby. I would like to ask you to do a prediction about Sci-Hub (or Elsevier).

Ha! You’re the first journalist to ask such questions. Most questions are just duplicates: they ask how Sci-Hub works, why the science must be open, and what I’m going to do next. I cannot give a prediction for Elsevier, because for astrology, you need to know precisely, in minutes, time and place of birth—or, for websites and companies, time and place where they launched first. I can do it for Sci-Hub only. I actually looked into the Sci-Hub natal chart only in September 2017, when my friend’s ex-boyfriend, interested in astrology, contacted me and asked about Sci-Hub.

Sci-Hub has Mars in Cancer in its 10th house. What does that mean? 10th house (out of 12) is the middle of heavens. Mars is a god of war and god of heroes, so perhaps that’s why Sci-Hub is fighting the system. Usually Mars in Cancer is considered to be bad for Mars, because, as I read in one astrology source, Mars is a planet of energy, and inside Cancer that energy is hitting the shell and gets blocked, so the person’s energy is blocked, until sometimes that shell explodes. I thought that is a good metaphor of what Sci-Hub does: that is the service to breaking walls or shells where Science is currently incarcerated. On the other side, that is destiny: Sci-Hub gets blocked everywhere. You can also make a rough prediction, that since Mars is in Cancer, Mars is in a weak position, that usually signifies losers, or people who prefer to sit at home with their mother (Cancer is home/mother sign) than go fighting, because they think that will be smarter. Partially, that description fits Sci-Hub: so far it lost in all courts, because it was never participating—and that is a actually a smart thing to do, because fighting against such a huge corporation as Elsevier, with current law on their side, would obviously make no sense. But in astrology, as well as human life, is more complicated than just win or lose.

To compare, I have Mars in first degree. Aries (the strongest position that Aries can be) in 3rd house. The 3rd house in the human horoscope represents communication, studying and information—people often say that I’m too aggressive when communicating. Another feature I noticed in Sci-Hub’s horoscope is Neptune in the 6th house. That house represents work (not career) and Neptune is the planet of confusion (Neptune in astrology is opposed to Mercury, planet of rational knowledge). I noticed that no matter how much I explain how Sci-Hub works, still after several years people are very confused about it.

There is the 12th house in the human horoscope that represents death and life outcomes, Sci-Hub has the Sun and Venus here, they both bring luck and good fortune. So I hope the outcome of Sci-Hub will be better!

In September of 2020 the http://sci-hub.tw domain was blocked under a Website Infringement Complaints lawsuit by Elsevier using legal representation from Beijing. Can you explain the reasons behind this worldwide block and the suspicious follow-up appearance of fake look-alike Sci-Hub domains?

I have doubts about the real reason for the Elsevier lawsuit. Why? Well, I bought the .tw domain a few years ago from one Russian Internet company and since then, sci-hub.tw was never blocked, while other domains (Sci-Hub had a lot of them) did not live long, a couple of months or so. But the .tw domain was miraculously resilient to this. I was thinking, perhaps Chinese government (back then I did not know about the conflict between mainland China and Taiwan) was silently supporting Sci-Hub because of communist ideas?… What prevented Elsevier from seizing the .tw domain, just like they did with all other domains? (Another resilient domain is .se but Pirate Party in Sweden is backing it up).

When sci-hub.tw suddenly got blocked in September, I contacted that Russian company asking them what happened, because I had no letters from the domain registrar in my mailbox that are usually sent before the domain gets blocked. They took a long pause and then responded that they had asked the company where the .tw domain was registered, but they were silent and did not reply. I asked whether I can ask them myself, and they gave me an email. I sent a letter on 29 September, but then already I felt something was not clear here. The company responded the next day, very shortly, ‘we have sent you the document, please check, thanks’ I asked whether they could send me the document again because I received nothing! After 10 days, they finally responded with a document, explaining that there was a lawsuit filed by Elsevier (I posted that on Sci-Hub Twitter).

Then it popped up. sci-hub.tw was a very popular domain, it popped up first in Google search results, 45% of Sci-Hub users were coming from Google and other search engines (now percentage of search traffic is only 22%) but after it got blocked, it disappeared and instead, some suspicious ‘Sci-Hub’ websites started to appear first in Google (I also posted about that on Twitter)

By suspicious ‘Sci-Hub’ websites I mean scihub.wikicn.top, sci-hub.tf, sci-hub.ren, sci-hub.shop, and sci-hub.scihubtw.tw. These websites are actually the same, and they worked as a proxy to Sci-Hub, so they receive request from the users, redirect it to real Sci-Hub website (using some non-blocked Sci-Hub address) and give user the response, hiding/masking the address of real Sci-Hub. Actually, such websites can, in theory, have good goals, just to unblock Sci-Hub in those places where access to real Sci-Hub is blocked, for example, scihub.unblockit.top or scihub.unblockit.lat work the same way – but we can easily see these as generic services to unblock various blocked websites.

In the case of the websites mentioned above, the first time I encountered this was when one of the Sci-Hub domains was blocked in Russia. In such cases I usually add a new Sci-Hub domain for Russian users to work. After .se was blocked in Russia back in 2019, I quickly added sci-hub.st (if I remember correctly) as a replacement but then I noticed, that surprisingly, instead of this new domain published by me, people promoted some ‘sci-hub.ltd’ website. I opened it and it worked as a proxy, and I really did not like that, also because .ltd domain means ‘limited’ and Sci-Hub should not be limited. I found their IP address and configured Sci-Hub, so that when Sci-Hub is accessed though sci-hub.ltd proxy, it shows the REAL Sci-Hub addresses that people can use instead.

After I did that, the sci-hub.ltd author contacted me, and instead of providing some good reason for his .ltd website, such as “we want to provide access to Sci-Hub where real addresses are blocked” mumbled something about promoting Sci-Hub through this domain!

Then coronavirus happened and I forgot about this, but this September it all resurfaced as a replacement for the .tw website worldwide. These websites are adding advertisements while real Sci-Hub has no advertisements. They use suspicious domains such as ‘shop’ or ‘tf’ which reads as ‘thief’. Just like previously, I replaced their content with real Sci-Hub addresses (.st .se and .do) and they were aggressively fighting it! They tried using multiple proxies to hide their IP, they were desperately replacing and removing real Sci-Hub addresses from my message, they changed my email (!) on my About page (sci-hub.do/alexandra) to some another email registered at 163.com, and later they removed link to my page completely. If they had good intentions, just to unblock Sci-Hub, they could SIMPLY provide real Sci-Hub addresses in the left menu, with an explanation that they are only a proxy to help people when Sci-Hub is inaccessible by real addresses. They did nothing, instead they started to redirect to some Sci-Hub database mirror instead, and for new articles they put a completely fake “proxy search” page, while in fact it does not search anything, is just an imitation of the real Sci-Hub.

I really suspect that these websites are kind of man-in-the-middle attack from publishers (or somebody else!), who are providing fake Sci-Hub websites instead of the real one, to manipulate or control Sci-Hub’s image. But they could not do this with the.tw domain live, they needed to block it in order to replace Sci-Hub with their fake Sci-Hub they can control. This happened soon after I posted “About me” information on Sci-Hub for everyone to read. See? Somebody might want to prevent such information from being posted, so they need a controlled Sci-Hub, so there will be no “About me” or “about Sci-Hub” pages that can provide true facts about Sci-Hub. Media is controlled, but I could post my story on Sci-Hub, and everyone respects Sci-Hub… they want to block this opportunity. Additionally, simple advertisements already create a negative impression of Sci-Hub as some shady website, while real Sci-Hub does not rely on advertisements.

—

Co-edited by Serafin Dinges.

Hoçâ Cové-Mbede is a writer, graphic designer and cultural vector, who focuses on interviews-as-templates to explore topics fueled by Silicon Valley criticism, guerilla media, surveillance aesthetics and technology + information. C-M’s work has been featured on platforms such as the Institute of Network Cultures, The Wrong Biennale, TTT in Art & Science, The Quietus and Metal Magazine.

Alexandra Elbakyan is a web developer and a researcher focused in neuro and cognitive sciences, Open Access/Science and theories of knowledge, with a bachelor degree in Computer Technology and master’s degree in Linguistics from the Saint-Petersburg State University in Russia. Elbakyan is the founder of Sci-Hub, the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to millions research papers.

Maya Man is a young artist, dancer and technologist from New York. Utilising her background in coding and computer science, she makes projects that enhance and expand online experiences. Her work incorporates themes of joy, nostalgia and curiosity all at once, often leaning on early internet aesthetics while projecting a vision of embodied technological bodies into the future.

Maya Man’s personal website (2021). Click to explore.

Maya’s art excites me because it celebrates the possibilities that open up when people and machines work together, and avoids falling into naiveté over the possible risks of such collaboration. I hope more people recognise the potential her works have to change our relationship to the internet and AI. My aim here is to show and discuss a few key works, and invite you to explore Man’s projects yourself, as they are best when experienced first-hand.

Moving with the Machine

“PoseNet Sketchbook” was the first Maya Man artwork I saw online. It is made with a modified algorithm sourced on tensorflow.js. PoseNet tracks a moving body and creates a variety of distorted moving images based on the user’s movements. When I saw the work, I immediately thought of Myron Krueger’s first experiments with immersive environments in the 1970s, like VIDEOPLACE, developed in the 1970s and 1980s.

One of many PoseNet experiments

Still from YouTube video showing one of Krueger’s VIDEOPLACE experiments (1985).

Both works show an interest in tracking and modifying the movements of a body. However, I thought Maya’s work facilitated a more intimate relationship between the participant and the technology capturing their movements. Since the 1970s, our understanding of developing everyday technologies deepened, and various machines entered our daily lives and the very fabric of societies. This shift irreversibly affected how we interact with everyday technologies, and influences the level on which we acknowledge or bypass their existence and visibility.

In Kruger’s immersive environments, the experiences were communal, new and exciting, all-encompassing for as long as participants interacted with the meticulously-built environment. Man’s work, on the other hand, disenchants the spectacle of technological possibility and represents the inseparability of our entanglements with the machine. “PoseNet Sketchbook” exists in multiple places at once, on computer screens of individual users as their shapes shift, distort and layer. The miracle of endless possibility is gone – now, we explore what to do with what remains. Each movement is like a brushstroke, and the effect lasts for as long as the browser tab is open. There is something beautiful and pure in this temporary interaction.

Some of Maya Man’s PoseNet experiments, available to try (click on image).

An intimate staring contest

The idea of close encounters with daily technologies appears in Maya’s other works, establishing itself as a theme. The screens of users are their primary mode of exhibition and existence. Take, for instance, “Glance Back,” a Google Chrome extension that captures the webcam image from a device once a day and prompts the user to record what they were thinking about at that moment.

This process makes visible the data collection that already occurs in search engines and on other platforms that facilitate our online activity. While the browser extension asking you about your thoughts might be jarring to some, it is simply a more streamlined and direct cousin of algorithms that track and predict our actions. “Glance Back” adds nuance to these relations. It acts as a personal diary and prompts personal interest in the performing machine. Unlike other modes of online surveillance, “Glance Back” operates under the agency and consent of the user. Maya explains on the project’s website: “It’s important to note that all of the photos are saved to your browser’s local storage. This means that they never leave your machine. This is a collection shared purely between you and your computer.”

To me, “Glance Back” provides an opportunity to acknowledge the physical and emotional closeness between ourselves and our machines, especially now, when we use them to work, relax, but also socialise with other internet users (our friends and family). Or, more specifically, “Glance Back” allows users to decide whether or not they wish to share such personal data with the extension. Choosing to download it can be an act of making visible the personal connections many of us already have with our devices. However, can it lead to acknowledging this relationship might be toxic? I am not sure. I would love to see Maya engage with the concept of surveillance capitalism and the attention economy further in her practice.

What are you willing to share?

What happens when we willingly share personal information online? A few things. We begin building an archive of feelings and reflections; a sporadic, erratic digitised diary. We hope somebody out there listens, interacts, relates. We might even share things online that we are unwilling to communicate face-to-face. However, doing this invites unwanted attention too, and provides a source that others can use in malicious ways in the future.

Using code as her medium, Maya reinterprets Madeleine’s large file of personal data she’d shared with the artist. Maya built a website that shows notes from Madeleine’s iPhone. What emerges is an intimate portrait of a young woman recording significant, useful and introspective information over the years. For personal use, until now. Looking at the website, I feel like an intruder, even though I am aware she shared the data willingly. Still, it feels too personal to be accessed by just anybody.

Madeleine’s Notes.

I cannot help but keep swiping and reading note after note, and the blue skies in the background add to the whimsical, otherworldly feeling the website evokes. Can this be a modern-day confessional, embedded in code and designed to fit a specific aesthetic, a millennial nostalgic about websites they grew up visiting? I am conflicted, but I keep looking. I realise that this project shows online activity does not have to be so heavily curated. Madeleines.notes and Glance Back take away the users’ ability to select, edit and filter content that reflects who they are. Why not give that agency away? To think how many hours I’ve spent thinking about how to present myself online. I am sick of it now, like many others. I want to refuse to participate in the spectacle, but I am unsure how. Is there an alternative way of relating to social networks? I see Maya’s work can be a stepping stone towards a more balanced and healthy relationship between our actual selves and our virtual/online extensions.

Digital Literacy Now

Maya’s presence online takes many forms, but always carries an interest in embodying compassion and care through machine learning and code. I consider her website to be an artwork in and of itself, a source for artworks and education; points of departure. The Racial Justice Bookshelf needs to be mentioned here. It is a resource made to make it easier to buy anti-racist books from black-owned businesses in the US. Then there is are.na; Maya’s scrapbook of inspiration and information, an ever-growing archive of online happenings and references.

The difficult part is this: Maya’s work does require quite a high level of digital/internet literacy. In the beginning, I struggled to understand how are.na or GitHub even work. However, when I moved past confusion, I started to appreciate and see the exciting potential of alternative platforms, creative coding, and the artistic expression they allow.

“Pretty Machines” on Man’s are.na

Maya speaks openly about her passion for computers and coding, and her interest in facilitating new interactions between bodies and everyday technologies they already encounter and absorb. The future of online content can be more transparent and genuine, based less on the logic of the attention economy and more on the needs and interests of individual users, who come together to experience and share their embodied technological selves. It starts with looking back at the machine that is already watching.

In the early morning of April 14th, 2021, the four editors of the journal DOXA were arrested by Russian authorities. Armen Aramyan, Natasha Tyshkevich, Volodya Metelkin and Alla Gutnikova appeared in court later that day. The purpose of the charges were made clear by the judge – to silence critics – who ordered the editors to house arrest and has restricted them from all electronic communication.

DOXA is a Russian student-run popular journal dedicated to critiques of the modern university. They have served as a clearinghouse for disseminating radical philosophy, especially feminist, Marxist, and anarchist voices. It also hosts editorials about the sprawling Russian university system, highlights student protests, and organizes solidarity for students harassed for speaking out.

The charges against the editors are preposterous. DOXA had posted a rather innocent video urging others to protest without fear and that expelling students for political reasons was unlawful. In response, the Russian communications authority Roskomnadzor demanded they remove the video. DOXA complied and removed the video. Even then, the editors were charged under Article 151.2 of Russian law (“involvement of youth in activities that can be harmful to them”).

Perhaps there is some honor to being charged with the same crime as Socrates? Yet it is remarkable to suggest that university students need protection from DOXA. Only one who uses education to manufacture obedience outlaws critical thinking as self-harm. And it is no coincidence that laws like these are also used against social critics, queers, and migrants.

The Institute of Network Cultures urges all charges to be dropped against the DOXA editors and that all harassment of students immediately cease.

More information:

1) https://doxajournal.ru/ (in Russian)

2) Chronology of Events (in English) https://open-assembly.calarts.edu/index.php/2021/04/14/doxa-chronology-of-events/

3) News report on the Amnesty site: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/04/russia-police-searches-at-student-magazine-are-a-new-low-for-press-freedom/

4) The Moscow Times: Russian Student Journalists Face Jail Over Navalny Protest Video https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/04/14/russian-student-journalists-face-jail-over-navalny-protest-video-a73585

The information above has, in part, been collected by ‘Dark Deleuze’ Andrew Culp, now teaching at Calarts/LA. Please sign his petition. He writes:

This is the follow-up of the three-part blog series of the insightful conversation between film professor, media producer, theorist, and activist dr. Alexandra Juhasz and journalist, historian, and filmmaker Peter Snowdon.

Alex

Peter, I really love the way you write about each of the distinct videos in your book The People Are Not an Image, your deep close readings. You let each small work take time on the page to stand as a separate complex object, while at the same time making larger claims about vernacular video and its place within these movements. YouTube videos so rarely get seen (by critics) with the kind of attention we more typically offer to great works of media art. And then, your writing about the video itself produces that very feeling of mediated-connectedness, or maybe even friendship that we’ve been discussing.

You dedicate each chapter to one video, often beginning with a transcript of audio and some screenwriting direction to let us see the piece, followed by an analysis that develops through what you learn in conversation with each short work. Chapter One, “A Happy Man,” focuses on a video by rideaudur, posted January 17, 2011. You begin:

In this short clip, we hear more than we see a man walking up and down along a main artery (“the avenue,” as he calls it) of a North African city. As he walks, he improvises a poetic panegyric in honor of the people of his country and the freedom they have won for themselves. Yet the people of whom and to whom he speaks are nowhere to be seen. Indeed, as the clip progresses, it may seem that he is less assuming their existence than trying to conjure them into being. (pg, 29)

9. A Happy Man from Peter Snowdon on Vimeo.

Peter

That particular video is one that means a lot to me, as I believe it did to many other people. It is one of the few that made it into my film more or less unedited. And a large part of what I was doing in the book came from something that occurred to me fairly early on when making the film. I had to accept that, as a general rule, I couldn’t keep the videos whole, that I had to edit them. And so the writing became, in part, a project to restore the integrity of each video.

I was seeing short films coming from a place that I had never expected, which were made in an audiovisual language that seemed both very new, but also coherent with languages that I knew from traditions of experimental media work that seemed to me to have nothing to do with this place and time, and which may or may not have been particularly political in their intent. So, when I was describing these individual videos, I really wanted the writing to recreate for me, and thus for the reader, this sense that this may only be three minutes and 27 seconds of screen time, but this is an actual “work,” as solid and as densely wrought and as present as anything you might pay to see in a cinema (or, more likely, a cinematheque…).

If I insist on the sensory and kinetic qualities of these videos, it is because the videos themselves insist on them. They are above all exercises in the concrete, and as such, acts of resistance against the kinds of abstraction that characterize both the practice of government and certain species of intellectual discourse. (…) They do not offer etiologies, genealogies, or any other type of rationalization. They do not explain, much less explain away. They are presentations rather than representations. They are committed to appearance as a space of action in and for its own sake, not as something to be decoded or demystified. (p. 3)

There is so much that happens in each video which needs to be recognised and honoured. So, in some sense, it was a relief to be able to just attend to one video at a time, and not to have to be also thinking of all the others, or negotiating between them, as I had in making the film where I began to understand the work of editing not just at a practical level, but also more theoretically. My hypothesis was that these videos could together tell a story that would be intelligible without any external assistance, without the need for narration or context. That they could do that work themselves, and that all I had to do was trust the videos. But then, I discovered that it wasn’t enough to trust the videos – they also had to accommodate each other, to make space for one another, without any one of them cancelling or erasing the others. Just as you can’t have a collectivity in which each person does nothing but proclaim their individuality, you cannot have a film in which each shot runs its full unedited length. And in this precise sense, editing is, by its very nature, a political enterprise.

Alex

In this sense, so too is videomaking. It is always an act of selection, framing, argument-building, and affect-production in service of communication or inspiration. But I need to emphasize that not all vernacular video is political video, and this is where I find your close readings and associated theorizing of this body of work so important. You are writing about video that engages self-documentation with a revolutionary duty. You outline the many conditions that need to be in place for people-made video (always in conversation with or even as corporate media) to be active in a project of world-changing and revolution-making. You bring to our attention a kinetic, affective regime, in its formal dimensions, and as a body of video made of individual work by individual people—how this makes us feel, and what it asks us to do.

Figure 10: Still from The Uprising(2013) / YouTube video uploaded by feb tub, February 14, 2011.

Peter

My focus was on disrupting definitions that decree what is and is not possible. I was consciously writing in opposition to a lot of the rhetoric and ideology around YouTube and social media which seemed to posit a form of “sharing” which is actually not an act of sharing at all. In particular, the term “vernacular” is often used in a very apolitical, and watered-down sense. I wanted to reclaim the word vernacular as that which is outside of, and resistant to, the administered and governed life. I took this from Ivan Illich, who I had first read back in Paris in the 1990s. It wasn’t an accident that these videos which seemed to be contesting the conventional, Euro-American sense of the vernacular as a kind of inoffensive amateurization, rather than a space of resistance and contestation, were happening in these specific places and at this particular time – that is, within an Arab world where, as Mohamed Bamyeh has argued, a centuries-old “civic ethics” still persists today, not as some sort of ossified tradition, but as “an old, rational and enlightened common attitude” that continues to guide people as they work through the trials and tribulations of everyday life.  In these countries, there is still a certain real experience of shared space as itself a form of never-ending negotiation, and community as something tangible, not merely aspirational. And this is true not only in working-class neighbourhoods or farming villages, but also to a large extent for many strata of the middle classes, including those who might be seen to have benefited from economic liberalisation, in so far as their position remains contested, and often fragile.

Alex

You use the word vernacular two more times in the book. On top of “vernacular video,” you also take up this verb, vernacularization: video that records daily life and in so doing understands this new kind of visibility as part of a larger political project that you say exceeds the local. It must be local to make it vernacular, but the vernacularization occurs in its mediation and distribution when technology assures that the daily exceeds the local. You claim that this is performative. There’s a necessary self-awareness in the enacting of the self, and the place, and its dailiness, which is written formally and received affectively and hence politically.

Figure 11: screengrab of YouTube video uploaded by webamri amri, 29 January 2011.

I wrote something quite similar about AIDS activist video when I was theorizing my own community-based video activism by, for, and about urban women of colour and AIDS. While realist practices might seem to outsiders as untutored, unintentional, and not of the more rigorous practices of artists or intellectuals, media coming from and for a movement knows itself with a formal self-awareness. This is a political awareness because it is generated through an often dangerous personal act of coming into voice and community. It is performed and received as such by viewers from that place. That’s easy to feel for its local viewership (which is the point), but harder to name for others, I think. And that’s what you’re attending to when you so carefully engage in close readings of the quick, daily, but connected mediation of actual bodies and their political lives.

Can you talk about the tension between how vernacular videos document actual people, bodies, and their political lives and how these fit into vernacular anarchives: a complex assembly of all these discrete videos—and their people— that is bigger and more convincing than what any one video can do.

Peter

Maybe this goes back to what I alluded to before, that my own formative experiences of community were not experiences of unproblematic self-identity, but rather of complex and even disruptive forms of displacement. Community doesn’t always coincide with itself, or with the local. Perhaps it would be better to think of it as a certain way of being with displacement and non-coincidence, and not as their absence or their abolition. And then, community always needs an outside. The question is what is the relationship to that outside – is it generative, or is it simply erasure and violence? Somewhere we’re afraid of? Or somewhere we can escape to?

These videos are very much addressed to an outside—to multiple outsides—in a way that is not strictly bounded or policed, though at times there are boundaries which are, and have to be, very firmly asserted. But in general, their address is open. They don’t exist as atoms but are already an assemblage. Even in each individual video, there’s a sense that it’s the collectivity of videos that matters, not any single gesture. And the power of that assemblage is not simply numerical. It’s not simply a question of how many people are in the street, or how many videos take over the internet. What matters is to create an intensity which can attract people to it. So, between the individual video and the anarchive as an open totality, there are all these specific associations and assemblages that come into being for a certain time, and act as attractors of energy, as provisional poles of clarity, and as creators and distributors of meaning.

If filming was a means of participation for the filmer, then the videos that were produced and uploaded were not just documents of that participation, but rather (in the most direct sense) invitations to others to act in their turn. (…) More specifically, they were inviting the viewer not only to emulate but also to compete with what they had seen, to try to exceed the model in revolutionary fervour. (p. 175)

Figure 12: still from The Uprising (2013) / YouTube video uploaded by 5000zukoo, September 21, 2011.

Alex

You suggest that the possibility of an outside is critical for an ethics of solidarity: what you call “a we.” This calling comes from of a local, every day, but also, of course, exceptional I that is living and taping in-community in-revolution. There could be, or perhaps there must be, an anticipated outsider—a you—who is called by this performative address, someone who is outside the local, someone who needs this representation, someone who might connect. That is one reason, among many, why each I is making and distributing each short videotape: to be seen and heard, yes, but also to connect to other I’s in this articulation. In your book, you write about that person, that outsider, that imagined or hailed viewer, as being close by, in proximity, although not exactly local: ideally in one of these countries in revolution, and thus called not just to look or connect but also to the/their street. The call asks: who’s going to join us in the street and become the we?

Figure 13: screengrab of YouTube video uploaded by Iyad El-Baghdadi, 2 February, 2011.

But what of the “we” who is not nearby, not in or of the region? We who hear the call and cannot respond. Before the internet, if you made a work like this it would stay local, and it would take many years for it to circulate to others around the world: a local call displaced by time. You suggest that for this body of video from the Arab Spring, and because of social media, this nearby in place happens in real time. But I think about this differently. I actually understand the production of this kind of “we” as a failed promise of YouTube; the deep lie of the internet; and an aspect of your theorizing of vernacular video that is not yet complete. What does it mean when we reach that person, those people, in great numbers—really reach an outsider, and you, who is distant and other. Yes, the reaching happens, the call is heard, but the associated doing that you build into your theory of vernacular video stays impossible, even if it is felt in each work.

Figure 14: screengrab of YouTube video uploaded by LLWProductions, 20 March, 2011.

The energy of the call and response to the street that you find so intoxicating in these videos is consumed differently for another “we” that is made up of distant viewers, like me (and not you!), even as or perhaps because the intoxication of the local and the revolution is so very evident, so skillfully produced, in each iteration. Voices from afar on the internet are intoxicating, yes, and just as often also paralyzing. We can’t help, we can’t go there. And things on the internet, even when they are intoxicating, are also always interchangeable. For that other, for this we, there is another consumption and a different politics. What is the value of vernacular video for viewers who can’t join in the street, who never will even as they are moved by the videos, if momentarily but frequently?

Figure 15: screengrab of YouTube video uploaded by LLWProductions, 20 March, 2011.

And then, of course, there’s difference in time as well as distance. Over time, the videos stay there online, and they also stay the same. Do they continue to call for a “we,” even as their insurrections are over, or have failed? How do they work now, still there in their “anarchive.”

Peter

In 2001, there was a major uprising in Algeria which almost brought the regime to its knees. I remember following this, both through daily reports in the French and Algerian press, and by listening to stories told by my friends, which they had heard from their families back “home.” Shortly afterwards, I came across Jaime Semprun’s book, Apologie de l’insurrection algérienne,  which had a huge impact on me (though I later understood how partial some of his sources probably were, and thus the potential for other interpretations of these events). I remember how at the very end of this short text, he writes that, while we cannot know whether this insurrection will fail or succeed, what we do know already is that there has never been a group of revolutionaries who were so completely isolated, both inside their own country and outside it, as those in Algeria in 2001.

From this, I inherited a sense that an essential question for those on the outside – and so, for me, in 2011 – was, what could we do to address and alleviate this isolation? That is, how could we retrieve and restore forms of international or transnational political practice which already, in 2001, seemed to hang in the balance? This was very much in my mind when I was working on the film and book. Semprun also says that anybody in Europe who is following what is happening in Algeria through the newspapers can only feel ashamed of their own failure to stand up to the forms of oppression and dehumanization under which they themselves live.

And so, it seems to me that he suggests two axes along which we can approach these different degrees or kinds of outsiderness: the transnational other and the ethical other. And both these forms are in need of re-activation.

While obviously most people who watch these videos outside the places where they were made – or even within those countries – do not act, that is not necessarily the fault of those videos. If we are in Brussels or Paris or London or New York (or in some province of one of the countries of which these cities claim to be in some sense the capital) and we do not act, it is not because there is nothing to do and no one to act with. After all, even if we do not go there, “our” governments often do, with armies and weapons that are operated by our compatriots and funded by our tax dollars. And the people who live “there”, and whose only aspiration is perhaps to continue living there in peace, increasingly and massively take the enormous risk of coming here, because the risk of staying where they are even one day longer has become quite literally intolerable.

So perhaps we should see our inaction rather as one symptom of a larger problem – a problem of modes of isolation, demotivation, and disempowerment, that do not require literal physical distance to play a structuring role in our lives, and which can be questioned and ultimately overcome starting in many places, not just one. And perhaps our anger and frustration with these videos, and with the passivity-enchancing effect we imagine they may regularly (but not infallibly) have on people around us, is just one part of a larger process that is actively pushing many of us to act, not just against video, but against the causes of (this kind of) video, too.

In any case, we cannot isolate video as one total self-sufficient moment or action, and then find it wanting. No single form of communication will ever be adequate in itself. Video may be useful as part of a larger process, but it is not a substitute for that larger process. And the basis of that larger process, if it is to be fruitful, has to begin with the recovery of lived practices of mutual support and trust, not only within, but also across the frontiers and barriers that are used to divide and separate us.

So, perhaps what we are lacking is not so much the means to act from wherever we may happen to find ourselves, but the capacity to see through the barriers that are carefully placed in the way of our impulses to solidarity. The question, then, for the images of vernacular video would be: do they act to naturalise those barriers, to make them seem even more immovable and opaque? Or to reveal them for what they are – artificial, impermanent, and fragile in proportion to the force that has to be deployed to defend them?

In any case, we cannot simply say that for we who are “outside” or far away there is nothing to do, that there is no concrete way to convert affective solidarity into action. The crucial role played by so many diasporas, and their allies, in the decolonial and national liberation struggles of the 20^th century is sufficient to demonstrate the opposite. And today, when the world is even more intricately interlinked by transnational infrastructures of circulation and extraction, the potential for strategies of distributed solidarity and disruption is, if anything, even greater than in the past! Andreas Malm’s recent call to revive the North-South anti-imperialist fronts that characterised the second half of the 20^th century as the only strategically adequate response to climate change is just one example of how this potential could be channelled into meaningful action.

But beyond that, I think these videos and the worlds they invoke should also encourage us to question our definition of “action.” Historically, many of the most potent forms are in fact assertive inaction: the boycott, the strike… What we saw across the Arab world in 2011-12 is perhaps better figured as a series of massively disruptive interruptions in the forms of habitual activity that support and sustain existing forms of power and governance. Occupying squares, or marching slowly down streets, are themselves, first and foremost, ways of bringing traffic to a halt, of preventing the unquestioned continuation of all those other connections between us – the ones we do not choose, the ones we may not want.

In a world that is running to its ruin in large part because of the psychotic addiction of a small but influential minority of people to producing things that nobody needs (and to producing the desires that can make those things seem necessary), the refusal to produce anything, to “do” anything, even to desire anything, can still, I think, be a radical act – and depending on how it is configured, perhaps, the most radical. And this potential – to down tools, to cease to consume, to withdraw our attention and our participation, to become not only more self-reliant (materially, emotionally, and intellectually) but also less productive, less visible, less “active” – is always available, everywhere. It is not equally possible for everyone, of course; but it is equally available. Making it equally possible, equally imaginable – that is the work.

Alex

So, your work with vernacular video, your new book about it, and this conversation all focus on ethical media engagements: through friendship, hospitality, and lived community. These are less actions than better ways of being human, together, by making use of technology, as needed. You suggest that there is a vernacular form of mediamaking that produces, invites, and moves this ethics of engagement. I think we are together suggesting that deeper commitments—beyond a received-hail and its linked feelings of being seen or a momentary exhilaration—must align with the call to connect through representation for this work to be revolutionary or perhaps transformative. Are we making a case for the mediated local, a known, felt, and sharable here-and-now of a specific person for a known people?

Figure 16: still from The Uprising / YouTube video uploaded by FreedomRevolution25, January 24, 2012.

Peter

I certainly don’t want to minimise the importance of the local in any way. As long as our economies and lifeways have not been completely deracinated, then the local will continue to be where many of our most important relations emerge and flourish. But I don’t want to fetishise it, either. There are many different kinds of relationships that we can embrace on many different scales. Effective change will probably require us to mobilise across many or even all of them, in different combinations and for different purposes. Strong linkages, after all, can surely work both ways– to facilitate trust, but also to block change. The devil seems to me, as always, to be in the detail.

As for the question you raise about what happens to these videos when the insurrections are “over,” when they have “failed” (whatever that means – and without denying that, in one very real sense at least, their immediate aftermath has been catastrophic both for those from this region who were most directly involved in these movements, as well as for the larger society around them), this is a very important one. But in writing, I have always felt that part of my work is, precisely, to keep the question of success or failure open. In 2013, 2014, many other people were writing about these events as if they were already history. And to me, already then, that just seemed wrong. 

In 2013, I spent almost two months in Egypt. And I remember the second time I came back I was physically depressed by the experience – by what I was picking up from what was going on with my friends. Most of them were not frontline actors: they were of my generation, already in their late 40s or 50s, and it was often their children who’d been in the streets more than they had. And I wanted to write against that depression, and all its suppositions and assumptions. I was looking for something like an antidote. So it seemed to me more important at the time to try and keep this idea alive: that these videos were still speaking to us in the present tense. And therefore, that the possibilities that they had opened were somehow still alive. And it is part of the nature of moving images – their perpetual, ineliminable present tense – that they are constantly moving us to respond to them as if they were present – as if what they show us is still unfolding. Even if that presentness is, in some sense, a fiction – the fiction that is embedded at the heart of every act of viewing an audiovisual document (or of reading an essay, or a poem, or…): that the past is not yet past, and so that the future of that past might still turn out differently. That it, somehow, still depends on us, on what we choose to do.

It was the same when I made the film: I wanted it to end in such a way that whatever was in the newspaper the next morning, I wouldn’t feel like I’d foreclosed a future that was still unfolding, by over-committing to one specific concrete narrative, to one particular outcome, whether it be labelled “success” or “failure.” And, when I watch the film again myself, I see how my own response varies wildly from screening to screening. Of course, that’s true of all images, and of all art and all media. Our perception, our changing awareness, is an index of how we’re reading ourselves into the image at any particular viewing. Our reading, our response, is always a function of the state which we ourselves are in. Our ability to engage or not to engage with what an image may be proposing varies widely, and often in ways we are not aware of. This is part of the radical openness of media – that they expose us also to our own radical openness, and thus, ultimately, to our own capacity for change, both personal and collective.

––

Read the final part of the conversation here.

This is the first of what will be a three-part blog series in which we present the insightful conversation between film professor, media producer, theorist, and activist dr. Alexandra Juhasz and journalist, historian, and filmmaker Peter Snowdon. Last year, the two held multiple virtual conversations at the digital roundtables of Zoom about the ubiquity of such communication methods and underlying philosophical themes such as being human in communities across distance in times of the pandemic.

In the Fall of 2020, Alex Juhasz, in lockdown at home in Brooklyn, NY wrote an email to Peter Snowdon in Belgium. They didn’t know each other, but he had quoted her once or twice in his new book, The People Are Not an Image (Verso: 2020), which she had just completed reading. They knew of each other, as people of certain intellectual/art worlds are wont to do. Over a few email back-and-forths, she explained that beyond complimenting him on his book, she hoped for something quite a bit more: might they talk? Could they record this, transcribe it, and try to share what emerged from their digital encounter about online video? These resulting words have been both edited and changed for clarity, and at one or two points extended, to give space for tracks of thought unfolding. What follows became something they named and did together online during COVID (to which they both ultimately succumbed over this time!): a demonstration of some possibilities for being alive, human, and connected, in what we hope is a non-sentimental, non-simplifying kind of way, albeit via corporate technologies and their dominant capitalist platforms.

Alex

Peter, I want to start by situating ourselves in place and time and technology—a conversation recorded and transcribed from Zoom—for reasons related to our kindred theories and practices around what you call “vernacular video.” I also need you to know that this will be my last scholarly endeavor for a while. My mother is really sick and I’m flying to Colorado this afternoon. I’m very stressed out. But I also need you to know that I prepared for this conversation as one of the last things I did in my own specific space of COVID-inspired trauma. I was just as re-energized and excited by your book this morning as I was the first time I read it, and this reminded me that our intellectual and activist commitments, and the ideas and practices that matter to us as individuals and allies, are part of what makes me feel most alive, human, and connected. So, that’s where I’m coming from: a little distracted and stressed and also a human being meeting and talking with you for the first time on a video-screen about activist digital media, what I myself called “ThirdTube” in 2007 in my born-and-stay-digital Learning from YouTube (MIT Press), so many years ago now in the short but fertile life of social media and its dominant capitalist platforms.

Figure 1: View of corporate mall/long-stay hotel complex where Alex lived, isolated for a month, in the outskirts of her hometown of Boulder CO.

Peter

Thank you for that—for making the space and time to talk at a moment that is so fraught for you, and for letting me know that for you, this conversation isn’t just another piece of work, but—like all the best things we call “work”—something that gives you energy.

It’s a strange period. As we speak, I’m sitting in an unorthodox position myself, not surrounded by books or DVDs for once, because I’m in the bedroom! My partner and I, we’re both working from home in an apartment that is large enough, but still isn’t really designed for that. But it’s quite nice in some ways to be in what is not my usual space! And I’m really grateful to you for reaching out because this is the first evidence for me that the book physically exists, aside from one friend who posted a photograph of it on Twitter just before I completely bailed out of social media in order to try and remain relatively sane. So, it’s nice to feel that the connections that can arise by publishing a book can continue in different forms in this time and even make possible some things which weren’t possible—or were at least a lot less likely—before.

Figure 2: Corner of Peter’s workspace, with detail from Anna Boghiguian’s painting of the street on Geziret El-Manial, Cairo, where Anna and Peter were neighbours in the late 1990s.

And what you said about feeling human through being engaged with reading or watching actually resonates a lot with my feelings when I was working on the whole project: which for me is indivisibly made up of the film I made back in 2013 (The Uprising), the book I have just published, and also—just as vitally—all the invisible networks of roots and tendrils around them and which connect them to each other, and which are by far, for me who was in them, the larger part of the iceberg. For there was something about the insurrections that broke out across the Arab world in 2010-2011, and about the videos produced by their actors which, when I encountered them at the time they were being made, reconnected me with a sense of my own humanity. So, if the book serves any purpose, I would hope that it is one of reconnection—in a non-sentimental, non-simplifying kind of way—that mirrors some of what I experienced when watching and working with these videos the first time.

Figure 3: Still from The Uprising (2013) / YouTube video uploaded by Gigi Ibrahim, 24 March 2011.

Alex

I have gotten into the practice of reaching out to authors when I read a book that moves me. Usually just a short email of recognition and thanks. But in your case, I wanted more! I was writing voluminously in its margins as I was reading; I was so active and excited. I no longer really work on YouTube. But this isn’t because I’m not interested in its potential, or what we can learn about people, technology, activism, and video inside of and because of this corporate media behemoth. So, I didn’t just want to read you, I wanted to talk with you about people-made video, so many years after I had spent too much time in that very space. And I wanted to actively engage with you as a writer and thinker, because while our work shares an object, a political sensibility, a shared training in avant-gardist or formalist media traditions, our findings are often quite dissimilar. I’m excited to learn with you and I’m really thankful to you for your book. This is a review, a celebration, a conversation.

I thought we could start by you explaining the book and the larger project.

Figure 4: Front cover of The People Are Not an Image (Verso Books, 2020)

Peter

I think everything I do is part of my own learning process. So, I hope the book remains open-ended in its inquiry. Now that I am in some sense detached from the arguments I put forward – if only by the simple fact of the book being out there, in the world, in material form, and I cannot change it anymore – I can step back a little and look at them again.

The book grew out of making the film, The Uprising – a montage film made exclusively out of videos posted to social media in 2011-12 by the actors of the Arab revolutions. But the film too grew out of something else, because it was not originally intended to be “a film.” It became what it is through a series of decisions that were made over the years, and which were all oriented towards trying to help these videos reach as many people as possible. While I was working on the film, over two years of research and editing with my friend and partner in crime, Bruno Tracq, I was seeing lots of things that I couldn’t put in it and having lots of ideas that didn’t fit into the constraints that we had set. So, I began to write about these things in order to provide an outlet for everything that was bubbling. Over time that slowly grew into this book.

And there was also a more formal context that encouraged the choice to seek an outlet in writing: I was only able to do all that I did because I had, at a rather late age, entered a PhD program for which I had been awarded a very generous bursary. This meant I was able to give up other forms of gainful employment for a while and really just focus on my filmmaking and writing. I was doing a practice-based PhD, so as the written component, I was able to present a piece of writing that was more like a book than a traditional dissertation. I wanted above all to write something that could stand on its own, independently of the film, because I didn’t want the reception of the book to be conditioned by people’s reception of the film – I wanted it to be able to win its own audience, including among people who might not like, or might even be quite hostile, to the film itself. So, the book isn’t an attempt to explain the film, though I hope that it can provide a context which may lead some people to be able to see the film differently than they would have done without it.

In any case, the book and the film are driven by the same underlying invitation, which is that I want people to look at the videos produced by the actors of the Arab revolutions. I want people to actually take the time to see these videos and to form their own responses and reactions to them. I want to persuade people that it’s worth taking the time to engage with these images as an aesthetic proposition, not just a data point for social scientists. And I want to argue that both the videos themselves, and the act of posting them online, are worthy of our attention, whether we feel ourselves to be addressed by them directly, or less directly.

Alex

I am drawn to be in conversation with you in large part because you are doing work that I think of as in conversation or connection to mine: a practice-based engagement with contemporary political media.

You started this project by making a film, but your making was not disconnected to your writing or your PhD work. And that was not disconnected to a political project in which you seem deeply invested. Your orientation and practice as a media maker and writer invested in digital culture called to me because I don’t have many compatriots in a practice-based project itself rooted in a deeply felt and enacted political and theoretical engagement in the space of media. In my own PhD research in the eighties, I was making AIDS activist video with a VHS camcorder within my own activist community. My collective’s video activism (The Women’s AIDS Video Enterprise) became part of my doctoral research that itself evolved into my first monograph on activist media, AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video (Duke 1995).

Figure 5: AIDS TV and screengrab from “We Care: A Video for Care Providers of People Affected by AIDS” (The Women’s AIDS Video Enterprise, 1990)

These linked meditated iterations—making, thinking, and writing—about activist media were embedded within the first decade of the ongoing AIDS pandemic in North America. And that raises my first question: what was your political stake and position in relation to the uprisings and their videos? And did that change through the period you were making the film, and then writing your book, that is through your praxis?

Peter

Perhaps what I am most conscious of, also coming out of other films that I’ve made, whether they were explicitly political or not, is that all of them extend for me out of something that one might call not simply an ethics, but also a politics of friendship. I’ve realized over time that one reason why I’m a lousy would-be professional filmmaker is that I don’t enjoy making films with people who are not or could not potentially become my friends. There has to be a sense of complicity, and of mutual play, which can possibly – but not certainly – open up on to a deepening sense of trust. So, I guess I see friendship in this context as both a politics, and an experiment – something that may not work out, a risk that has to be taken, and which is deeply imbricated with the eventual success or failure of the film. And for me, this is far more important than anything more rationally identifiable, like a conceptual or ideological alignment, or even some participatory protocol that is meant to safeguard against the abuse of power, but will probably, or even inevitably, fail.

Alex

I’m curious to know what led you to believe that you could be in an ethical friendship with these human beings, these video makers. My practice as a community-based activist video maker and theorist has led me to try to make video in communities in which I already reside. So, it’s not even friendship for me, it’s shared alignment in a known community. I made AIDS activist videos when I was an AIDS activist. I made a documentary about leftist understandings of media and the scale of political movements with and about my sister, Antonia, a well-known activist and writer in the United States during and about ending the Bush administration (Scale: Measuring Media Might, 2007). I understand making media where I live, and with those with whom I want to change the world, as a feminist ethics of documentary. So, do you want to talk about how potential friendship was a facet of your politics or practice of with these videos?

Figure 6: Flier for Scale: Measuring Might in the Media Age (digital video, 58 mins, 2007)

Peter

Perhaps the basic question is, why was I watching these videos in the first place? And the simple answer is that at the time when these revolutions broke out, a lot of my closest friends were living in these countries – were from there, had been born there – and I wanted to know what was going on with them.

My work on these videos was therefore one outcome of my own personal journey over the preceding twenty years. And there were two essential stages to that. The first was when I moved from the UK to live in Paris in 1992. I was there for five years, and by the time I left, essentially 90% of my time was spent among friends who were Algerian immigrants or the children of immigrants. At a certain moment, when I was beginning to struggle with the fact of being a foreigner in Paris, through a series of chance encounters, these people had – from within their own even more complex and conflicted situation – taken me in, and adopted me, as it were. There was one family in particular who gave me a sense of being at home, even though – and, perhaps, especially because – this was with and among people who were never going to really feel straightforwardly at home themselves. This was my first real encounter with structural racism, not as something analysed in a book, or implicated in my own relative privilege (“relative” as in “situated,” not “relative” as in “less than”), but as something directly impacting the people who were at the centre of my life. But it was also more than that – it was an experience of great generosity welling up out of the centre of that injustice, despite and beyond it. From these friends, I learned something important about being a human being which connected with and deepened things I already knew, if more obscurely, through my own family background, as someone who had grown up at one generation’s remove from the working class. And if I had to sum that up in one word, it would be, hospitality.

My friends in Paris were not all Algerian, of course. When my time in Paris ran out, I’d been working for a year or so on short-term contracts with UNESCO, where I’d met people from across the whole world, including most of the Arab region. And so, as I was beginning to think about leaving a city where I felt there was no professional future for me, and I didn’t have a clue about what to do with my life, an opportunity came up through an Egyptian friend to go and work there. I jumped at that opportunity. After all, I had spent several years writing documents for UNESCO about what was wrong with the way that “the West” dealt with other peoples and their cultures, but I’d never been outside Europe. And I thought, well, what if I’m all wrong about that? I should go and see!

So, I went to Egypt and lived there for three years, working at the English edition of the Al-Ahram newspaper, and that was also a deeply transformative experience for me, both personally and politically. Not least because Cairo in general, and the paper in particular, were a meeting point for people from well beyond Egypt: from Palestine of course, but also from Sudan, Zimbabwe, Ghana… what felt like a large part of the African continent. It was also a place that looked east, towards the Indian sub-continent and the rest of Asia, in a very different way from the way that Europe did. Which meant that when I finally went to India, I arrived there from Egypt – not just in the sense that that was where I got on the plane, but conceptually, too. This helped reconfigure my inner map of the world, not just intellectually, but also physically and intuitively. It helped me realise in my bones that there isn’t just one world, one map, but many, and that “my” map – the one I had grown up with – had no particular importance or priority, in and of itself.

Figure 7: Guy Fawks, Cairo, 9 October 2012 (march to commemorate the martyrs of Maspero). Photo: Peter Snowdon

After I came back to Europe in 2000, I spent much of the next decade travelling back to Cairo at every opportunity. It was Cairo that still felt like “home,” like the place where my most important, and most vital, friendships were. I put a lot of energy into maintaining that as best I could, despite the distance. So, in 2011, when the revolutions broke out, almost the first thing I did was go online looking for my friends.

Remember, in the first days of the Egyptian uprising, there was a concerted attempt by the regime to disrupt communications with the outside world. So, I couldn’t get in touch with anyone by email, and the telephone lines weren’t working. But many of my friends were journalists, as I had been when I lived in Cairo. I knew that if anyone had access to a satellite phone, it would be them. I might be able to find them online to see if they were safe, even if I couldn’t talk to them directly. Almost immediately, I fell down the rabbit hole that is social media in times of popular unrest. And at the bottom of the rabbit hole were not just many of my friends, who were, by and large, doing okay, but also all these people making videos. And suddenly, I was spending all my waking hours hanging out with these videos, and with the people who were making them, some of whom I knew personally, and some of whom I came to know, or at least be in contact with, through the online connections forming around these events.

A lot of this activity was sharing videos and talking about them, and that combination of circulation and discussion stuck with me. Everything I’ve done since is basically an attempt to enlarge (or recreate) the circle of that initial sense of residing in a community through video – a community of discourse and exchange that goes well beyond just looking at images, and includes many, many layers of displacement and non-coincidence.

Alex

Your words resonate with what draws me to social media as well. I became a theorist of the internet and internet video in the decades after my AIDS work because my media praxis has always been medium agnostic. I am not a theorist or maker of video or film or websites per se. Rather, I’m an activist and a human being who wants to be in community and change the world with like-minded people using whatever medium is at hand. Your “being human” in community across distance is particularly resonant to me, especially because I’ve been recently working on practices of media proximity, given the protocols of social distancing and the fact of fake news (fakenews-poetry.org).

Figure 8: Participants at the New Haven Fake News Poetry Workshop, one of 25+ held around the world from 2017-ongoing.

My current work on fake news and radical digital media literacy (including a 2021 book co-written with Nishant Shah, Really Fake! that blends out creative renderings of situated authentification through stories, poetry, photos, and dating, in its many senses, temporal and inter-personal) strives to be human together while not letting go of technology. Media suit or align with their people, struggles, and places. I appreciate how your work on vernacular video is situated in a specific local and temporal struggle—what became known as the Arab Spring—itself locally and differently experienced across the countries of the region, and the changing conditions of their struggles. You name here and with more detail in the book, how making video and then also talking about and sharing this is a powerful place for political empowerment, agency, and humanity making—well, I agree with you—and am pleased to learn about this in both its situated and distributed formats.

Peter

For me, too, these videos were never just about “video”. They were always about experimenting with the multi-layered nature of community via technologies that preserve or repurpose some of those layers in order to bring us together differently, even as they create new kinds and qualities of distance and absence. And that is also what we are doing “here” today – coming together differently to trace out yet another path, or at least one segment of what may become one, through these fields of presence and absence we call “media”.

––

Read the follow-up to the conversation here.

by: Xuan Zhao & Heather Morrison

Abstract

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ, http://doaj.org/) is an essential world-wide open access service (16,134 journals listed, as of March 29, 2021), which promotes quality, peer-reviewed open access journals. The journals included can get higher and broader visibility. To make the most of this service, journal editors need to pay attention to the accuracy of their entries in the DOAJ metadata (journal-title, publisher information, location information, subject, language, URLs, etc.). This post aims to explain the benefits for journals of improving the quality of metadata and what journal editors can do. 

Our discussion is mainly based on recent research of the Sustaining the Knowledge Commons team and cites some other researchers’ findings. 

For journals, what are the benefits of improving the DOAJ metadata?

As detailed on the DOAJ website (DOAJ, https://doaj.org/apply/why-index/), there are five benefits for journals indexed in DOAJ, and accordingly, five reasons to improve the metadata: 

1. “Reputation and prominence”

“DOAJ is the most important community-driven, open access service in the world and has a reputation for advocating best practices and standards in open access. By indexing your journal in DOAJ, its reputation and prominence will be enhanced.”

We assume that journals with accurate and precise entries can give a serious and active impression, helping them maintain the reputation. 

2. “Standards and best practice”

“DOAJ’s basic criteria for inclusion have become the accepted way of measuring an open access journal’s adherence to standards in scholarly publishing. We can help you adopt a range of ethical and quality standards, making your journals more attractive publishing channels. DOAJ is committed to combatting questionable publishers and questionable publishing practices, helping to protect researchers from becoming trapped by unethical journals.”

As open access journals are listed in a quality standards system like DOAJ, it is important to make sure that their information is correct to distinguish them from the questionable journals undoubtedly. 

3. “Funding and compliance”

“Open access publication funds often require that authors who want funding must publish in journals that are included in DOAJ. Indexing in DOAJ makes your journals compliant with many initiatives and programmes around the world, for example Plan S in Europe or Capes/Qualis in Brazil.”

With correct entries in metadata, the DOAJ journals can be more easily discovered by foundations, related programmes and organizations.

4. “Discoverability and visibility”

“DOAJ metadata is free for anyone to collect and use, which means it is easily incorporated into search engines and discovery services. It is then propagated across the internet. If you provide us with article metadata for your journal, this will be supplied to all the major aggregators and the many research organisations and university library portals who use our widgets, RSS feeds, API and other services. Indexing your journal in DOAJ is likely to increase traffic to your website and give greater exposure to your published content. Levels of traffic to a journal website typically increase threefold after inclusion in DOAJ. Your journal’s visibility in search engines, such as Google, will improve.”

Indexing journals in DOAJ means they are more easily discovered and cited by other researchers. Correcting metadata will help raise the chances that people working in the same area will find the relevant research they need.

5. “International coverage”

“Our database includes more open access journals from a diverse list of countries than any of the other major indexing services. We have a global editorial team via a network of Managing Editors, Ambassadors and volunteers, so we will do our best to offer local support in your language. We promise you that information about your journal will be seen around the world.”

The DOAJ journals are aimed at readers from all over the world and may be seen by people who are not proficient in the journals’ language. In this case, journal editors need to ensure the correctness of data entry so that readers can read with confidence. 

What’s more, a higher quality database will be more valuable for researchers and promote the entire OA ecosystem. Especially for services like university libraries, which tend to keep up with the latest content and take advantage of metadata corrections. 

In brief, keeping the entries of DOAJ metadata correct reinforces the advantages for journals mentioned above and benefits the users of DOAJ. 

As journal editors, what can we do?

As demonstrated in a study of the SKC (Zhao, Borges & Morrison, 2021), “as of January 5, 2021, only 30% of DOAJ journals have a ‘last update’ date within the previous year (2020)”, which means only 30% of DOAJ journals fully or partially updated their information in DOAJ system. To make the best use of DOAJ, journal editors should regularly check their entries to ensure that their data is correct and up to date. For example, if journal URLs are not kept up to date, an incorrect URL means, at best, that the journal cannot be found. Crawford (2016), in a study of DOAJ journals, found journals flagged that were as malware (or as containing malware) by Mal- warebytes, Windows Defender, McAfee Site Advisor or Office 2013. 

Most of the visible inconsistencies in the metadata are input errors or location errors (listed below). Most of the input errors are “small differences in punctuation and/or characters, extra spaces at the beginning and/or at the end”, as reported by SKC (Zhao, Borges & Morrison, 2021). Combined with the findings of Crawford (2016), we list the data to be modified by categories as follows:

• Input error or location error in:

wrong column, journal title, special character, keywords, copyright information URL, plagiarism information URL, URL for journal’s instructions for authors, other submission fees information URL, preservation services, preservation service: national library, preservation information URL, deposit policy directory, persistent article identifiers, URL for journal’s open access statement, etc. 

• Publisher name duplicates:

Extra space or short of space, minor detail (e.g. non-English character in one but not the other), minor difference in punctuations and/or characters (e.g. “Abant İzzet Baysal Üniversitesi” vs. “Abant İzzet Baysal University”), abbreviation in one but not the other (e.g. “Asociación Interuniversitaria de Investigación Pedagógía” vs. “Asociación Interuniversitaria de Investigacion Pedagogica (AIDIPE)”), etc.

• “APC-charging journals that don’t clearly state the amount charged” (Crawford, 2016)

Sometimes it is hard to indicate “who is the publisher”. We list some situations below:

• When there are branch publishers under one publisher, and all of them are recorded in DOAJ, especially when their journals’ websites do not have any clear indications ;
• When a publisher has more than one active names (perhaps due to different sponsors of one publisher, or the nature of commercial publishers), but their journals’ websites do not have any clear indications ;
• When journals changed their websites but didn’t renew the URLs in the DOAJ database;
• Invalid URLs;
• Unmatched publisher name/journal name and URLs.

DOAJ also provides article-level search and is working to encourage more journals to provide article-level metadata. It makes both the journal-level and article-level metadata available for anyone to download. (DOAJ, https://doaj.org/docs/public-data-dump/) Thus, it would be better if journal editors can ensure the correctness of the articles’ information. 

References

Crawford, W. (2016). Gold Open Access Journals 2011 – 2015. https://waltcrawford.name/goaj1115.pdf

Directory of Open Access Journals. Retrieved March 29, 2021, from http://doaj.org/

Public data dump. Directory of Open Access Journals. Retrieved March 29, 2021, from https://doaj.org/docs/public-data-dump/

Why index your journal in DOAJ? Directory of Open Access Journals. Retrieved March 29, 2021, from https://doaj.org/apply/why-index/

Zhao, X., Borges, L., & Morrison, H. (2021). Some limitations of DOAJ metadata for research purposes. Sustaining the Knowledge Commons. https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2021/02/10/some-limitations-of-doaj-metadata-for-research-purposes/