a list of such since commonly described by earlier participants in leary's ongoing drug experiments so the rest of my presentation is based on my research with published reports as well as manuscripts photographs and session reports contained within co inventor timothy leary's personal archives housed locally at new york public library these primary sources show leary and his collaborators working within a broader context of research applying the principles of feedback collection and looping systems and their attempts to collect psychological feedback from users converted into discrete pieces of information and then use it to modulate users subjective states based on analysis i suggest that contemporary debates around psychological manipulation via information technology need to be reframed in terms of a much longer genealogy of state and corporate research dating back at least to the growing interest in experimentation with psychedelic drugs as well as new electronic writing and inscription devices and we'll go back to this slide scholar paul edwards characterized this institutional research culture as existing within a broader post war program concerned with establishing american managerial control over the greatest possible geographical and social expanse building from claude shannon and warren weaver's one thousand nine hundred and forty eight mathematical theory of communication pictured here and norbert and fifty theory of cybernetics also pictured here researchers within this context increasingly worked to standardize and to automate the collection of information regarding individual behavior and affective states timothy leary's research both while employed as a lecturer at harvard between one thousand nine hundred and fifty nine and one thousand nine hundred and sixty three as well as in subsequent years as a public intellectual applied both information oriented theories of cognition as well as mystical theories of religious experience t psychedelic drugs as a result his research from this era provides an excellent case study in the early combination of self actualization and military law enforcement discourses common  both the height of the cold war era and in our current debates around online manipulation now aside from leary and linsley the experiential typewriter team also included graduate student ralph fitz gable who went on to  published in the psychedelic review a journal published by leary directed institute for internal freedom that article was later reprinted in an edited volume by schmitz cable and his twin brother robert entitled psycho technology electronic control of mind and behavior writing together in the introduction to psycho technology the schvitz cable brothers invoke norbert wieners theory of cybernetics to convey their aims in terms of control over psychological phenomena stating that the term control refers to quote nothing but the sending of messages which effectively change the behavior of the recipient and quote nothing as nefarious as we might think something fairly banal actually the author's also take special care to note that such control can be exercised equally effectively using computer machinery as we're used to today but also with mass media and also perception altering drugs in terms of the experiential typewriter the switz cable statements help to decouple popular conceptions of cybernetics from their current association with specifically digital information technologies reminding us that electronic information technologies are important predecessors so back to the experiential typewriter leary described  machine as follows quote let's imagine twenty buttons which the subject will push to record his reactions one button is for thrill another is for lights another is for sick and the last is for dizzy we then train the subject for hours in the code system until he gets to the point of automatic proficiency the touch typist who can rattle off copy without thinking of what she is doing describing possible use cases for the machine li reaffirmed the value of real time nonverbal data collection writing that quote  observer read the typewriter and sees that the subject is not experiencing what he had planned he can immediately communicate with the subject and get instant feedback as to whether his intervention has changed the subjects consciousness in the direction of the plan end quote in other words the experiential typewriter was designed as a general purpose subjectivity modulation technology allowing researchers to monitor and manage participants affective states so in this sense experiential typewriter shares several characteristics with modern social media especially related to the placement of nonverbal signifiers of sentiment on a linear timeline so if this invention exists within and exemplifies the genealogical tradition of contemporary tracking and control technologies i should note that this doesn't mean that the machine ever achieved significant widespread adoption the researchers attempts at standardizing a code system for expressing subjective experiences produced a learning curve which limited the device's audience without a widely practiced and well known key layout it's difficult to imagine research participants achieving the level of consistent and accurate recording that the researchers desired to this end the experiential typewriter notes  leary's archive showed the psychologist mapping out several lists of abstract subjective experiences grouped into clusters of about five one for each of the users fingers as we see depicted up here these concepts include awareness of concepts such as the void the body the self objects space time revelations hallucinations mood mind etc and research assistant sorry research participants ability to report on the presence or absence of these abstract categories with ease would require considerable training and practice so to conclude ubiquiti breeds familiarity but the experiential typewriter never became a bic with us and thus it never became familiar enough to facilitate feedback collection at the scale that its inventors may have imagined in one particularly illustrative example graduate student ralph metzner noted difficulty setting up and running the invention in a small handwritten note adjust to leary during mid one thousand nine hundred and sixty three which read quote i do not know how to hook up the et nor does the recorder have any ink and quote so without widespread access to tools documentation training support you know the usefulness of a tool like this is indeed rather limited today however the problem of ubiquity has largely been solved real time data about user reactions to stimuli are collected constantly both in quasi written forms like emoji and reaction buttons but also in even subtler forms like  biometrics and gps enabled location tracking so with this in mind i'd argue that the current more moral panics about facebook and cambridge analytic a seemed to me like problems related to the scale and distribution of tracking and control techniques rather than any qualitative difference between current and past discourses surrounding psychology information technology or so called psycho metrics thanks thank you that's thank you james now we have a jeff apple jeff i was telling everybody today i i'm in philosophy religion and most of my the next one works ok so it might just be dead that first one do with it what you will so my paper is called what in the world is originally techni city and i want to explore maybe some higher level political implications of this emergent philosophical concept my intention today i want to make this as clear as possible because often in the words of bernard stiegler who's the theorist i'm going to use today original concerns each and every one of us and thus becomes a primary question for the world as a whole so what are we talking about for originally tecna city there's some ways of summing up right here at the ground level it's the th what we call the human being is always the product of its prosthesis its supplements and its technological objects this means that there is something fundamental about the human tendency to  into tools artifacts language and technical memory devices more than this our life proceeds in relation with these non autopoietic or non biological elements the this means that technologies are not something external and contingent but are rather the essential dimension to the human and it's becoming so put simply originally tecna city claims that the human and technology are found in a constitutive irreducible relation where one element cannot exist without the other okay so the better catch sight of what i'm talking about i want to discuss it in light  something which might seem funny at first memory the question of human memory and its relation to technology is one that is as old as western civilization itself for instance through socrates plato argued that there is a qualifiable difference between natural human memory or what he called anamnesis and then artificial are technical or what he called true form of knowing that is autonomous and free thinking like this image on the right i'm sorry your left against this memory plato opposed hypothesis or the of human memory into non human ciphers so a technology such as writing these technologies they help us remember but because they're disembodied they're artificial and because they autonomy of human thought they signal a less el lesser form of knowing or even a false knowing for plato importantly plato argued that artificial memory is pharmacon or a gift that is also a threat so while it's ambiguous in nature plato cited more with the threat side of the meaning of pharmacon a technology such as orthographic writing it might help us retain more but it simultaneously makes the development of our own memory our own autonomous thinking less important so i'm going to come back to this idea of pharmacon towards the end so hold on to that conditions for human memory to exist in the first place so this means that everything from the first stone tools to ideo chromatic writing the alphabetic writing to analog and digital recording something to do with technological memory so hypo nieces or this exteriorized technical memory it always works together with it interfaces with and it's always complicated with animus they composed through one another they can't be neatly separated so let's take an example by stiegler to better see this process so archaeological evidence suggests that in the transition from the phenomenon through binary thinking or chicken chicken and egg which came first did the tool proceed and allow for the development of the prefrontal cortex or is there something of cerebral development that was happening that anamnesis now to take a more contemporary example consider the practice of orthographic writing writing is a technology that allows us to record archive and transmit speeches spoke passed it's also one that allows us to think to learn and to transform it to become something different we are able to meditate on plato's philosophy for example because he wrote it down and because we have learned how to decode texts through the process of reading in other words reading and writing our skills or know how that we adopt over a long period of time in order to set into motion so once again you can't neatly separate the technology from the way that we think now falling from this stiegler makes a second observation if everything hinges on how exteriorized technical memories articulated with  anamnesis then we're left with a collective question not merely an individual one it could be posed like this how might the relation between the collective and technology how might that relation facilitate the development of memory and composing meaningful symbolic practices and communal formations now this might sound strange to discuss symbolic commun practices here but remember we humans live and we evolve by recording and transmitting our experiences to others through technical artifacts and support systems so given the fact that i was not born or i was born into a world not of my making my consciousness must be constituted and oriented by objects and practices that were not created by me this is the same for all of us each of us is the product of traditions of cultures and habits and each of us have activated and grown into these experiences that were not personally ours through the technical systems so collective memory is technological it's not merely inter subjective and i picked this slide because i think what we want to do is we want to look at the pictures of the individuals and say these are the people that came before me while ignoring that the photograph is a technology that helps us capture what came before us it helps us see what this is saint john of the cross called the great kind of cloud of  witnesses what these people who came before me the world that they set up so that i inherited and get to then so again just because i'm using him a bunch consider plato we can neither inherit nor practice the art of philosophy if plato's works were not written down if his students had not engaged his work and attempt to refine it clarify it change it reject it and then pass on that tradition to us allowed life to preserve the trace of its individual experience while transmitting that trace through between generations so this means that a knife is not merely an instrument for cutting it's also a memory support that contains it conserves and it transmits an inscribed cultural heritage right of cutting of stabbing of throwing of killing in fact stiegler argues that this is how we ought to think of technical objects in general they are the condition of the constitution of a relation to a past so in other words we inherit and we adopt a collective memory through technological through that which was recorded and given to us now i typically take a lot of time so i'm gonna jump to the end here and look at some of the political  ramifications of this so too often today we kind of see this binary thinking that technology is either leading us to all sorts of pathologies and addictions or it's going to liberate us and solve every problem that we've ever encountered right remember in the ways that technologies could open up a future for future generations and one of the ways that he orient's how we ought to think about like technologies as pharmacon is through this this question of adoption versus he calls it adaption or adaptation and so when we think about our technologies do they help us adopt a communal formation that's centered on various aspects tiegler's as they ought to be centred on care or kind of passing things down transmitting things to the generations right or are they centered on adaptations right which kind of are always keeping us  structurally dependent addicted consuming or even as some of us might be reading in the the discourse of the anthropocene right like for real legit absence of a world to pass on technologies to connect doctoral students who want to hang around and learn from stiegler educational communities in urban areas mostly in paris that are experiencing like really low test scores and are in need of some kind of boost but they don't have the public funding for it so stiegler said why don't we actually have something where we have students can come study with with you know with stiegler they can kind of get what they want they then connect with these students and teach them philosophy wherever they're at it's usually through some sort of internet medium and then during the summer they invite all the students both doctoral students and the element elementary students together to have this kind of like three week hangout and so they develop these relationships through the year and then they kind of spend some time together so that's one instance of stigler's saying like here's how we can actually set up how technology could be a curative process we can generate knowledge still and we can do it without being stuck with kind of the addictive aspects of it while also passing on a heritage to the future so that's it take a lot of pictures and doing so unlocks kind of also this digital archive of my life it's nicely organized in a chronological order and i can go back to any point in time assuming i took a photo and kind of reveal where i was clearly based on this screenshot in december two thousand and sixteen the stroopwafel gives it away i was in amsterdam and earlier that day i found myself at the rijksmuseum i'm a avid museum goer and i was particularly struck clearly by several of the pieces there one in particular this vermeer i was struck not only because of the woman's kind of famous cerulean dress but because one of my fellow museum goers a man he was about fifty years old he did something that's common that we see he went up to the painting not just taking a quick photo but he not once looked at it through the naked eye and obviously this was something i had seen in other museum context but i took a step back being in school at the time and said i wonder if anyone has actually figured out like how and why we do this is it that we're habituated to our phone kind of like some of implied is it that we want to remember what exactly is the reasoning for it and surprisingly very little anthropological research had been done on smartphone photography indistinct museum context so despite having a cognitive science background i thought it would be cool to transform my rijksmuseum anecdote into a more robust ethnography of this practice in the museum and to me the smartphone is not just another iteration of kind of how we photograph throughout history but rather a completely new moment in technological history where because of this fusion of connectivity and portability ubiquity it kind of changes how we use it to engage with our visual environment and to me beyond the hobbyist interest in museums museums are highly visual context they've been quote unquote disrupted with photography i'm sure if you go upstairs i was browsing one of the exhibits and it it had share this on instagram share this on social but very little actual observational work had been done in this space so sorry my slides are strange too so the museum context is of course highly visual thought leaders academics have thought about museums as a paradigm for thinking about authentic viewing i think sarah's gonna speak about that um but i just wanted to observe talk to people and actually look on instagram to kind of predict and make some comment on why we do this which i'm sure you all have insight into so originally i restricted my pursuit to kind of the prototypical artist ideal which i would say is an italian renaissance painting room in the ashmolean museum in oxford but then broadened it to an anthropology museum a natural history museum and then to be completely frank kind of by accident as a comparison point a cultural history museum actually situated in the geographic environment that it is focused on in the jewish museum berlin so for the purposes of this talk i will kind of on a high level talk about similarities across all of the museum's and then zoom in on something that i personally found surprising and distinctive about what i've observed in the jewish museum and connected to jeff's talk on a memory and collective  so these are all messed up so again it's the desire to remember i'd argue the rewarding nature of social engagement online and then this habitual connection and fast paced environment in which we exist that motivates this strange photography practice so high level when i spoke to all of those at the museum those who shunned smartphone photography and not once took out their phone implied that it would threaten their in person visual engagement as though doing exist in the present in a museum and truly authentically engage with your visual environment would be completely disrupted if you were to take out your phone whereas those who did seem to imply a desire to remember to use this technology to later return to the moment the way i might on my camera rol l sorry so the social engagement idea kind of took two forms one how did people engage socially in person when they whipped out their phone and also then how did they engage online with the photograph they may have taken so strangely if you actually if you observed the museum today if you see people even if they visit with friends they take out their phone i'm gonna kind of step to this side there's this whole like physical isolation isolation and solitary existence that comes from taking a photo whereas those who come in and kind of don't take out their phone i observed there was a lot of gesticulation which clearly i'm fond of and movement around the piece and pointing so it was a highly social endeavor to exist in this visual world without the phone however of course those who did take the photograph i'm sure many of you are taking photos i'm not pointing you out by looking at you today um posting online they had motivations for engaging socially with some online audience and as you might imagine i thought it would be cool to do what i which is looking at the public profiles of these museums what you might expect a lot we're emphasizing their location their presence beyond just the museum but here i am in new york city at the museum of the moving image and their tastes preferences and opinions and you may think it's silly to have this amalgamation of you know pictures you find quote beautiful or amazing but if you take a step back it's not completely unlike maybe elias a schmo who was the namesake of the ashmolean museum who back in the day collected kind of tangible objects to imply something about his tastes his preferences and his experiences and in some ways it's this democratization of kind of a museum collector that's existed for throughout time um and lastly one cool thing i spoke to a lot of museum guards who i would say do my job as an anthropologist of museums kind of and they seem to suggest that those who move around the museum taking photos do so very quickly they whizzed around there is a world where you use your phone to zoom in zoom out and engage in close looking but strangely whether it's the smartphone era of disruption and addiction and fast paced movement people didn't do that they moved quickly from piece to piece so despite these ideas of just memory social engagement and habituation emotionality kind of emerged in the context of the jewish museum as this really powerful force motivating the desire to photograph i would say that the jewish museum for those familiar it is in berlin it's of course commemorating a atrocity that is powerful and moving but also architectural ii and a lot of the art there is supposed to elicit feelings of loss and  are these places within the museum called voids that the architect daniel liebe skin created to kind of have no heat no air the sense of uneasiness elicited in the viewer and when i was there certain things  two pieces in these voids that were immersive artistic pieces seem to spark new questions as to what might prompt this smartphone photography engagement of one's visual surroundings in the museum so the  first this is called the holocaust tower sorry it is it is is covered basically it's this big concrete slab of oh sure sure sure  this big concrete slab it has one slit of light permeating the top of the piece and in order to get in you have to push this heavy concrete door which i would argue and requires both physical and mental exertion and as i there for a few hours watching people and then talking to people i found they really weren't taking out their phones until later into the experience and having experienced it myself i would say that um the emotionality of the piece kind of builds as you stand there there's something unsettling about standing in this room that's completely dark but eventually many people seem to point their phone to that little bit of sunshine coming through the ceiling could just because it's the most distinctive point in the piece i like to thank some testament to the human urge towards fixation on the optimistic or bright and otherwise anxiety inducing space but clearly here photography seem slow it was actionable it was thoughtful and that maybe by nature of who's attending the jewish museum versus maybe a natural history museum where people are taking selfies with a taxidermy bear but i do think it also implies something about here the artistic piece itself in some way being this antidote to the fast paced um you know the smartphone era has kind of ushered in however as a counterpoint another piece was this one in a void which was quite different he's if you can tell our faces of iron discs the ten thousand of them with clearly agitated facial expressions and before you even encounter the piece visually you hear this kind of dissonant jarring sound based on people stepping on it and as you anticipate it you kind of have this profound emotional moment upon arrival where you step on it and people whipped out their phones right away i personally felt anxious or unsettled when i encountered it and felt some desire to react by sharing it or depicting it online so one high level there's this emotional urge that we have to photograph too whether it's to reconcile our anxiety or it's to preserve how we felt but connecting to our desire to remember and then to share and then changing maybe how habitual connection to the smartphone ultimately manifest itself and alters how we kind of engage with our visual world something interesting on instagram this was confirmed many people use sad face emojis a lot depicted this piece saying it was moving horrible speaking to what they felt emotionally when encountering it but perhaps most interesting and related to jeff's talk in some ways a lot were kind of talking about the historical narrative and memorializ that through these kind of like digital tokens but also their own memories of their encounter an emotional memory of what they were experiencing so despite this is cheesy but despite the fact that these are known as memory voids they were anything but devoid of remembrance and how they were depicted they were injected with people's memories of their own experience and also the depiction of the historical atrocity and moment that the museum was attempting to capture and here's just a kind of poignant  manifestation of that people kept hashtagging to remember and never forget and i like to think that beyond asserting that they were on vacation in berlin they wanted to remember how they felt in response to what i would say is a pretty profound piece and also  say something about preserving the broader historical narrative here yeah so overarching lee at a very high level i attributed the desire to photograph mostly to that tension in terms of preserving or shunning  memory to preserve in person experience the desire to either engage with those socially on a very rewarding platform that is instagram or snapchat etc and just the pace at which this this device has kind of injected it self into our daily lives by being always on and feeling the need to respond habitually in many ways to your phone but also as per the zoomed in lens on the jewish museum this idea that different aspects of an emotional experience could prompt different smartphone photographing behaviors that change how we engage with our visual world so i hope this is something interesting to keep in mind for meandering around the museum and has given you insight into why we all do what we do on our phones thank  you thank you claire finally we have sarah enos so yeah thank you for that great setup cuz i will also be discussing smartphone photography specifically in the context of instagram looking at how we are defining what is quote unquote real or authentic in an age that's very characterized by digital anxiety so a general quick throw out to the approach in general and following pakodi and discourse analysis also building on the idea ranciere of sense which he defines as a certain cutting out of space and time that binds together practices forms of visibility and patterns of intelligibility so the community of sense then being this kind of cohesive consumption and an obsession with the authentic how do we visualize the authentic so here a quick look at this idea of digital anxiety and kind of this crisis over real life and specifically how there's this imposed dualism and dichotomy from what's happening in social media and what's happening in real life so it seems that we're essentially in this crisis of authenticity across blogs think pieces  etc we always see these things compelling people asking to unplug get off their phones live in the real world therefore setting up the digital world is something that is somehow less authentic less real as nathan jorgensen has written  the organizers of this conference to the prominence of digital technology can often feel toxic and threatening often inhuman sparking fears about their effects on users who seem increasingly enticed and dependent on their expediency so we see simultaneously and increasing dependence on these technologies as well as an increasing fear of what being involved with these technologies causes so even while obsessed and consumed with social media and digital technology we're also consuming messages that tell us that this behavior is somehow disconnected from reality leading to this fragmented sense of self so the constant use of social media and iphone photography has subject duss to process and perform the self through the hyper production and hyper consumption of images so then dealing with this anxiety over the authentic we then of course process and come to terms with th images as well so looking here there are currently almost twenty five million photos with the hashtag live authentic though the aesthetic that i'll be discussing definitely seeps beyond this hashtag and exists in physical spaces across advertising etc this provides a pretty centralized look at a lot of the visual pneumatics and also how people are self defining certain experiences certain imagery as authentic  some of the related hashtags include things like wanderlust live folk live outdoors the art of living so visual similarities are here kind of the categorization of these images is clear and then yeah just important to remember that on instagram every photo operates both as an individual post but also as a part of a collective narrative through its appearance both on the grids of personal profiles and then also when they are tethered together by hashtags such as live authentic that speak to the idea of a certain kind of lifestyle and as these hashtags proliferate there's mutual mimicry that occurs and it becomes almost indistinguishable who posted this if it's a professional photographer it's and if it's an advertisement or if it's a casual user so together this imagery under live authentic in many other places kind of develops this visual consensus around what the very concept of authenticity looks like in a digital age so then this forms what rancire would call a community of sense which i read reference before that's gathered by this live authentic hashtag so we see then an emerging normative understanding and  really distinct visual grammar over what qualifies as authentic as sarah bennett weiser says in her book authentic the politics of ambivalence in brand culture contemporary u s society hungers for that which feels authentic and we continue to invest in an the notion that there are these authentic spaces out there that we can access and that we can consume but they always feel kind of vaguely out of reach quickly looking at some of the visual themes around live authentic and what i'm dubbing the authenticity aesthetic nature imagery one of my favorite scenes is like the back of people's heads just like half of the pictures at the back of people's heads specifically a lot of in fields like standing in fields the back of their head kind of assuming this unaware look that they're not aware of the technology that's producing our image again then that soft faded nostalgic look which is characteristic of earl photography a feature of artisanal crafts coffee specifically not dunkin donuts which is not authentic but this like third way of coffee culture of kind of handcrafted espresso drink these are sort of a visual manifestation of our concept of authenticity is founded around this wistful longing for this imagined space in the past or this imagined space beyond us this kind of fanciful imagery of this slow paced simple wholesome living live authentic then serves both as a visual genre and also a morally charged call to action to be more real than i suppose everyone who's hashtag live inauthentic so it becomes a call to action to be more real than the other people on your social media feeds and to participate kind of in this so again as with any public aesthetic we must not only look at what is within the frame and what is made visible but what is intentionally and repeatedly left out beyond the frame and what is rendered invisible so looking at what is rendered invisible in the visual grammar of the authentic so though these images are obviously created and viewed through smartphones modern technology is noticeably absent from these photographs eschewing sleek skylines and images of digital devices these images attempt to capture this world that's above beyond or before technology despite the fact that their existence is predicated on advanced technology these images would not circulate the way that they do they would not have developed such a cohesive aesthetic if not for both creating producing and consuming these images through very advanced mobile photography technology so using digital technology the authenticity aesthetic that's arisen visually excludes digital technology from its a definition of the authentic so essentially i'm suggesting that we use photography and social media as a self soothing practice so performing our own authenticity for ourselves and others via photography is a self soothing soothing in the face of this widespread digital anxiety so in this world where we feel fragmented that we increasingly spend more time tethered to our devices but also consume sink pieces that say that that's not real and that's not the real us we then have this fragmented sense of self that we're urgently trying to kind of subdue a little bit or make a little bit more cohesive in one of the ways that we're doing that is through identifying aesthetics that feel more rooted so as susan sontag writes photography is often not used  artistically but typically as a social right a defense against anxiety in a tool of power so we have the astronomic rise of digital photography and social media platforms that are disseminating images in shaping our subjectivity imaging everyday life becomes integral to our identity performance and our self understanding so we find a respite in this image that we're projecting of ourselves and we are simultaneously broadcasting it out and consuming it to oursel to kind of have this self soothing cycle and yeah so this in a world where we're being told that the real is somehow different than the digital we're trying to create digital digital imagery that denies that it's created by the digital so essentially people are using digital technology to create and consume an analog fantasy it's no coincidence that this aesthetic is dominating in a time that we're seeing the resurgence of vinyl the resurgence of film the resurgence of artisanal crafts and people pickling in brooklyn and things like that we're kind of grasping at images and practices that seem to have a weight of realness this tactility is a really common theme and a lot of what's being imaged and so what i think is most interesting about this aesthetic is that at once it positions itself as a defiant reaction to a device saturated world but at the same time it is a full surrender because it's participating in this aesthetic and this visual grammar that's been purely created through these digital spaces and in general this exposes how our digital and our physical activities are inextricably intertwined so even if i'm sitting on a mountain no wi fi access i'm looking out in processing what i'm seeing through the framing in the context of live authentic my instagram feed etc so even in this space that we may consider ourselves in the physical and not in the digital we're still projecting our digital sensibilities our aesthetic tastes curated by digital spaces as we're interacting with these kind of potentially like pure and untouched spaces that remain  not influenced negatively by technology so i really see that each of these photos that exists on these feeds really carry with them the specter of the technology that has created them while at the same time kind of trying to disown and push back against that therefore kind of further fragmenting and inducing that digital anxiety discussed at the beginning because the way that we're trying to solve for it is by saying yes the only way to be authentic is to live in this reclaimed wood adventuresome travel blog lifestyle but then we're also attaching ourselves more and more and more to the editing tools and the photography on our phones as we also point to those as the problem so i want  end by something that i'm still exploring but i think is an important question raised and problem problematizing this idea of authenticity beyond just that fragmented sense of self but looking at how that essentially this aesthetic is also very highly classed and by creating a visual consensus around the idea of the authentic it then relegates everything that does not have a place in this aesthetic to the realm of inauthentic and dubbing something authentic also carries with it moral judgements in a moral superiority so that's a dangerous thing to do to define a very distinct highly classed inaccessible visuals of life towards the idea of authenticity while kind of dismissing everything else to kind of this world outside of that so this authenticity aesthetic finds a very deep kinship with the visuals of gentrification and then you see within that rather than changing our practices one experiencing this anxiety about our consumption patterns and our technological pattern that rather than adjusting those patterns we then create an aesthetic that projects a narrative that kind of shields us from this need to actually adjust what we're doing the production of images furnishes a ruling ideology social change is replaced by a change in images so as we begin to feel this impulse towards potentially changing how we approach and consume the world in digital technology we're kind of creating an aesthetic that projects this sort of protective shield around i can't be doing something wrong if what i'm doing is authentic if what i'm doing is real and if what i'm doing is somehow more rooted in human nature right and then as especially with gentrification you have increasing displacement but if you have this narrative of authenticity behind a lot of what's going on it kind of throws this red herring and disrupts the general argument about that and sort of writes off hyper thank you to all of our panelists who has a question in the back my question was for sarah and i'm wondering in what direction she sees this authenticity movement moving towards what authenticity trend and if there are any early indicators that we can pick up on on social media hi yeah so i think another thing important to mention is with the authenticity aesthetic that that's one particular way with dealing with this increasingly mediated world i think we also see that idea that you were mentioning before there's like post authentic movement and a lot of like meme culture or tumblr culture around this like net art or ironic or post ironic use of memes that's sort of taking the opposite direction of fully embracing like internet and digital aesthetics and seeing authenticity through then different term right and then the question of authenticity also steeps into how we're dealing with people being able to assume different personas online things like that so i think that this has like many prongs this kind of discussion of how we're grappling with authenticity in the digital age i think this is one way that works honestly usually for a very particular class of people and this is how they're grappling with it but i think there's also many other ways that different people are negotiating with kind of this new so specifically around the jewish museum in berlin there was the an artist made an exhibition yellow cost i would love to hear your opinions about that yeah so there was essentially an artist felt that a lot of people who were interacting with like holocaust exhibitions were very disrespectful and then so the artist created new images with them but posing in front of like concentration by name but it actually anecdotally led me to decide to focus on the jewish museum and for context so there's a installation in berlin i'm sorry i forgot your name but this fellow is describing it them and they don't really know what it represents so this artist superimposed images of killing fields on those so that's kind of a broader context what do i think i think it was very powerful do i ss airily also think that the people who are traveling through berlin with their friends necessarily are trying to be cruel or not aware of their cultural surroundings i don't think they're intending to be necessarily however does it matter if they're intending to be and it it's kind of speaking volumes to kind of how we socialize a historical moment and monument i don't know i don't completely know do i think the artistic piece was a powerful statement yes in a commentary on how we use our phones and behave with our phones to preserve a historical narrative in a certain way ye thank you do we have any other questions so in the front yeah thank you i had a question about thinking about authenticity and then the images that we create the banner of authenticity specifically for advertising purposes i'm just curious how that would play into the idea of cybernetic control and these authentic images being used as a way to control or like direct people's behavior and then what stiegler would say about that as a way of like i don't know like propagating some sort of some sort of way of being into the future right if it's a fake authenticity but it's also being preserved in this medium what would he say about the thing that that's educating the future on or about damn this is a big question i think i'm going to turn that into because i feel like that actually incorporated elements of everybody's presentation so i'm going to turn that into a ticket to the group so let's maybe go sarah james jeff and then claire and if people have thoughts about stuff we can kind of like move through it topic by topic cool i'm gonna start with the first part of the question and then we'll see where it involves from there so specifically on the use of that aesthetic for advertising i think that that's pretty captured in the fact that one of the things thrown around in marketing a lot and a lot of thematics in advertising right now is like millennials prefer experiences over things and so we're then in these advertisements selling these ideas of these endemic lifestyles and i think that that essentially is just reframing the exact same consumption patterns though because sure maybe we would say millennials prefer experiences over things and maybe we call coachella and experience but then all the fast fashion you consume to create the instagram abul experience that you're there the other consumption patterns that you're taking place up for that so i think the authenticity aesthetic is also a way that we reframe our consumption patterns in that way so we we kind of like alleviate that guilt of consumption by being like this is an experience not a thing that's a really good question stiegler a big deal for him is that that's the problem that were in when technics as he calls a technology in our relationship to technology becomes industrialized  so for him he looks at this kind of wide historical narrative of humankind and says that there are always technical evolutions that disorient us that then we are kind of they introduce like new cardinal markers  orientation points that allow us to say okay there's these new things happening how do we kind of create our collective memory based on what's been what's emerged and for him he sees that process speeding up and going faster and faster to the point where when the industrial revolution hits it's it's it's actually the systemic imposition of these industrial imperatives to always be innovating innovation innovation we can't have anything that's that's stable right so for him that's kind of the grand problem with with today is that it's we've entered into this kind of capitalist narrative of everything has to always be moving always changing as quickly as possible  actually everything that that you might consider in off that's inauthentic based on autonomous memory versus technical memory there's there's no snipping of the two you got to keep the two and light together so all that being said industrialization is a huge huge problem and that's why he's trying to introduce something that says can we not avoid the capture of capitol is because i think for him he's like it's just it's hard to get out of this dynamic but how do we how do we start implementing kind of systemic replacements that are based around not just mere consumption and innovating all the time that's a great question it's a classic for the whole panel question which is always a wonderful move and i'm inclined to answer by contextualizing everything that we're discussing here in terms of two things competing discourses which have a sort of we see it if we look back to my historical context today in the s with this strange coexistence of the new age movement but also sort of state and industry funded psychological research and although i am not a historian of the earlier times and the th century i think it even goes back further we could think back to times when the church was dominant in the west where you subject yourself to forms of surveillance through rituals like confession in order to be actualized or to be  sort of absolved from your worries so in that sense i would say we're just looking at a set of different masters from time to time it used to be that your master was the church and then your master perhaps was the state or industry and now seems like your master is face book or instagram and you pray by posting pictures okay so to sum up i'm actually that was nice it was a historical take on it all i'll guess move towards my concerns moving forward with authenticity sarah spoke a lot about kind of digital versus analog and not helping us grapple with what we do in real life versus depict online and i guess what i'll just throw out and not totally answer your question but this what i'm thinking about is when that line becomes more blurred so when a virtual reality type recommender system driven authenticity is created that i'm existing in a more physical manifestation of these like  advertiser driven automated versions of authenticity how will that then kind of come into play so what i mean by that is i think the line is going to be more blurred in the future when there are kind of like a physical manifestation of this like advertising driven experience if you will and it's it's more blurred between what's happening on my instagram feed and what's happening in in in real life and to me that's kind of a that's when it's gonna get very scary when you can't really parse out what has been and i know we don't know what facebook is doing but it's still this distinctive platform i i log into on my phone i know when i'm using it but when we're wearing technology and it's physically embodied i think this notion of authenticity will will  i suspect we have time for one or two more if anybody else has a question i'm really enjoying the image now of plato sitting for a bust over the back of his head this is for anybody i know we're talking a lot about authenticity it's really interesting i was quickly scrolling through the live authentic hash tag on my phone as you're talking i saw a lot of coffee but i didn't see any booze is there is there a moral element to it do we think can you guys talk about th neo pastoral kind of i don't know something but i think all of it is kind of a moral judgment of oneself and others by performing kind of this ideal lifestyle and yeah i think that there you're not seeing booze you're not see michaela is the cgi instagram character who i think is a really interesting character in the terms of like authenticity and like this creation instagram and i think lives in this space between what is real and what is not and i would just like to know your thoughts on that because i think there was like this whole like situation where she was trying or like she was hacked and i think she was trying to establish her the character or the profile was trying to establish itself as a real person at the end of the day with emotions and feelings and i would just like to know what your thoughts are on that whole situation sarah and claire or anybody or anybody because it's a it's a very interesting like yeah also another one is shooty graham which is another like it's just this whole like false kind of profile and character that's now erupting on instagram and it's like where is the line between you know these identities  beings and it's kind of like what you're saying it's like what's real what's not i'll just i'll go back to my other point that if that's already happening now when little mikayla can be physically actualized in some way and robotic mikaela like i find it i'm put at ease by this still idea that you have to go on to instagram to engage with mikayla i'm scared when mikayla is is more embedded in existence and i'm not familiar with her mikayla and the idea of her yeah raises way more questions than answers and i think that that's but that's good i so i don't really have answers as mores like questions like i wonder because it's still for those who don't know who lil mikayla is yeah she's presents herself through her captions as a real person with feelings etc but is very clearly digitally animated but it's unclear for example if animators fully go in and create her like from scratch or digitally alter potentially a physical person to look like that that's still not clear and i feel like that presents kind of this interesting question of in even our own self editing and visual presentation at what point do right then it becomes this spectrum of what like a real person is if there can be like this digital person created from scratch or flow mikaela isn't real but maybe she's physically based on someone else and then there's us who maybe use facetune or filters or edits there then becomes this interesting spectrum of us being mediated as people and identity so i don't have an answer it's just like more interesting spectrum that i i'm so glad that in the spirit of academia were ending with more questions than when we started yeah thank you all so much for coming and i would love a healthy round of applause for our panelists