Orwell-Windsor Cockney

Orwell had a big problem with Kipling's use of dialect in stories and poems; no soldier would recognise Kipling's dialogue: it often appears as comic stylised cockney; he looks down from a distorting class perspective Orwell concludes and goes on to translate barrack room ballads back into
standard English to get away from this romantic, empire-glorifying view.
Kipling spent several years as a provincial journalist in India mixing with soldiers, engineers and local people-a great lover of  detail and the world of things. He even imagines a story about a bridge building project told from the point of the view of the worker and specifies it should not be patronizing albeit narrated in dialect. Why would Kipling suddenly abandon a desire to make close observation in place of comic romanticisation?  Maybe people actually say 'follow me 'ome '

The problem lies with Orwell. Little survives of Orwell's speaking voice but people who knew him said that if he met working people he lapsed into Windsor Cockney (fancy a nice cappa tea lav) like the speakers who he ridicules in Kipling's Barrack Room ballads. Kipling was comfortable with people of all backgrounds and races; Orwell wasn't.

Epistemological defeat

What is it like to be unable to know something-for example knowledge of the non human? Capek considered the case of talking newts; here humans simply exploited the alien as a resource. Lem's investigators sometimes do the same resorting to military or nuclear techniques to deal with the unknown entity (eg HMV)
In The Investigation and Chain of Chance the unknown is probability and coincidence. All the investigator can do in these cases is carry on with such techniques as exist and come up with can explanation however obscure even though the true cause is unknowable.Usually in Lem, investigators become anthropomorphic; Solaris researchers consult their own archives for clues. In HMV Rappaport suggests looking at science fiction for ideas to interpret the code. In Fiasco the idea is to use a cartoon display to get through to the aliens; after all every civilisation must use symbols of some sort. In summary, to talk to the non human we tell stories about humans. Phillip Dick's electric ant/android cannot know it is not human-it has to believe it is the same as the humans
Perhaps the best example of epistemological defeat is Kafka's dog which will never know how it's food originates; as the dog ponders it tells mystical dog-stories to itself about singing and hovering dog-entities- more imaginative stories than Lem's. This lead Walter Benjamin to conclude that Kafka's dog inhabited a place 'far away from the continent of man' thus occupying a more privileged epistemological position that any of the above.

Nearly Victor Serge

I was nearly Victor Serge; Like him I  was also a 'dissident's dissident'. Everyone said I had the look of Basque Beatnik-frizzy hair, jaunty scarf and Trotsky glasses. I may not be working class but I can do a good scouse accent. I have published a book about him; I've tried be like him; sometimes I think I am him.
I know that part of me was with him at Kronstadt; I swear we were together at Petrograd when Trotsky's War Train steamed in and drove the Whites out. Together with Pankratov, Eltsin and other Trotkyist comrades we served our years in exile at Orenburg
I have lived by his code. I have served with The International Socialists (IS) in York and Leeds; Like he would have done I split with IS over entryism as I did over Hungary.
But recently he has grown more distant to me. I now realise Shipley cannot be Mexico. I've been going through some of his last papers and as I walked home last night by the Shipley canal V spoke to me:
  a night filled with stars; a darkness filled with you

Kudo and Ionesco

We know Tetsumi Kudo and Ionesco fell out during the making of La Vase; looking at how Kudo went on to use Ionesco in his work. it must have been a very serious misunderstanding. Ionesco's head (right) plays a special part in Kudo's  Pollution-Cultivation-New Ecology programme.
First 'pollution' (deconstruction): here Ionesco moults or sheds his body parts which are hung around his head in a tiny cage, displayed as ornaments; also included a tiny crucifix, little chits with 'merci' written on them and what looks like a glass of Chimay. The caption for this work is 'end of some generation'  ie end of Euro/Christian/ Humanist generation; Ionesco's face is the face of this generation.
That is not the end of the story: after 'pollution' and 'moulting' cultivation can begin. Ionesco's parts reassemble, uncaged, democratically living alongside other organic and non-organic elements; his head is now growing but notice the electronic circuitry. Finally (below) Ionesco is free to develop in a hydroponic sphere part of a New Ecology flourishing, wired up, among plants, valves and reproductive organs. Amazing what can happen to an aging, surrealist intellectual. He'd be grateful.

dreamy smurf

Snowden has told us something new about NSA/GCHQ; they have an instrument, styled Dreamy Smurf, for taking  over your phone and instructing it to take pictures-presumably of you. From Snowden we also now know more about NSA's in-house graphic design styles usually derived from magic and fantasy (smurfs?). More interestingly another Snowden slide contains an image of an online game called Shadowfist  in which a monkey fights a robot. We already know that the CIA recruit from young Xbox wizards for their drone bombing controllers. There is an art form (Machinima) which uses video game technology to make films. Feng Bo  is a Chinese '8 bit' artist, famous for The Long March, a pixellated account of Mao's struggles.Ahmed El Shaer, more adventurously, in his work Nekh, tackles the Tahrir square camel battle in Cairo in the now-forgotten Arab spring: in the game aspect of Nekh nobody wins- hopefully the Mukhabarat don't have an 8 bit section.
There is a new genre emerging: SIGDEV is the overall term for the world of surveillance. What about SIGART?  Candidates are Dreamy Smurf and Shadowfist.  But El Shaer's Venice Biennale video installation Green is more complex: the colour geeen is manipulative; mosques are often green; in Green there is a 'green'  terrorist organisation. SIGART embraces the art  of the Watcher (Shadow Fist) and the Watched as they watch each other.

spy toaster

Hamilton's Interior containing Thatcher's TV image gazing upon a seedy NHS space moves out of the interior and swiftly mutates into the ubiquitous Toaster; we, the viewer now gaze at the shiny, metallic structure; it reflects our faces and other faces merging our identities. It is a surveillance rather than a consumerist aesthetic. The job of the Toaster  (breakfast) is forgotten and a new principle of usage arises; we use our shiny appliances and the people at GCHQ  use that use. Hamilton wished to investigate the epic in everyday objects; he was re-examining Toaster as late as 2008; Toaster de luxe 1 is both epic and secret expressing Government's insatiable desire for machines that can can capture all information irregardless of its value.

Wei Wei at 5000 feet

Since Edward Snowden we should be talking about surveillance: not so; either it is accepted as inevitable or desirable or OK up to a point. Artists don't see it like that. Certainly not Wei Wei whose Disposition allows the viewer to gaze into boxes within which he is gazed at by Chinese guards while he sleeps or sits on the toilet. Richard Hamilton's Treatment room shows us a seedy, institutional interior evoking NSA/GCHQ's surveillance of Yahoo user's  intimate, shared photos.
 But Art can deal with surveillance in many ways: Arnall's Robot Readable World goes inside the  black box and represents the CCTV material as 'found footage'. The Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT) fly their own drone and can look down on the watchers (NSA and GCHQ). Or what about collaboration? In Luksch's The Eye dancers run through Busby Berkeley routines under CCTV and then request the footage from the data companies. Another form of collaboration is to deconstruct the 'found footage' and reflect on the 'uncanny- is the figure on the footage really there or is it a doppelganger? Omer Fast's Better at 5000 feet talks to the drone operators as they wax lyrical about the 'white blossom' or heat signature of potential targets. It has been noted that drone operators come from the X Box generation. Two forms of drone-operator- playfulness exist: the aesthetic appreciation of  'white blossoms' or X Box frenzy. Figures dodging behind boulders in the Yemeni desert must hope for the former and can request the found footage from the CIA.
Wei Wei shows us the way: he follows the secret police in his car even snatching the agent's ash tray complete with fag ends and relocating it in an art exhibition as found object.  But how do we reclaim the digital traces of us that GCHQ routinely hoover up, turn them into refound footage and display as art? Well:  Arnall and Luksch have made a start.

• in Elmgreen and Dragset's Phone Home visitors to the installation can connect with friends and family worldwide (free) while other visitors can monitor their calls in an adjacent room.
• Jud and Wachter in Berlin set up a wifi network (can you hear me) on the Swiss embassy to relay their own messages to NSA/GCHQ posts on nearby embassies.
• Simon Denny's Secret Power looks in detail at the visual style that went into the power point slides that Snowden took from the NSA. Although the viewer cannot 'phone home' we can follow the same interpretive steps as the NSA analysts.
• Take another look at the slides in Secret Power specifically the GCHQ slides depicting Online Covert Action; imagine the mental states of the analysts who create this Tower of Babel; to reverse this algorithmic damage they need to use Taryn Simon's Image Atlas. Here is a drill for using the Atlas: take each term from each box in the Snowden slide ACNO-key skills strand and feed them one by one into the Image Atlas search engine.
• Paglen has deconstructed the Facebook algorithm which scans our images for dress style and repurposed it so only images relevant to Freud and Marx are selected, He also is planning an orbiting satellite which has no use or purpose (ie spying); it will be an aesthetic object-simply to look at.