I know I already published the full version on the site, but – for the vast majority of you, who wouldn’t read the whole thing – the first issue of Frame Journal features a shorter and sharper version of my Master Thesis, From Metaphysics to Metadata. Aesthetics and Politics of Interface. Frame is a peer-reviewed, re-imagined, transdisciplinary rebirth of pART, an art history journal housed at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Check it out here.

ABSTRACT [Or download the full PDF: NicolaBozzi_MP2MD_Conclusion]

In the conclusion of my work I give a few examples of how new stereotypes can be created and spread through the media, thus modifying the interface by the creation of new strategic and socially-conscious metadata: the Muslim punk-rockers depicted in The Taqwacores, the Hip Hop Clowns documented in David LaChapelle’s Rize, or the black-nerd comedy showcased in The Awkward Comedy Show are some of the cases where new figures are promoted to change limiting stereotypes (for example the ghetto = gangster equation) and open new spaces for identity. Sometimes whole countries can reclaim their own version of globalized genres – like sci-fi, in the case of District 9 or Ataque de Pànico.

In the closing lines I propose a mapping of such virtuous uses of metadata and the definition of somewhat of a metadata ethics, in order to take conscience of stereotype and proceed to outline new strategies to escape it.

ABSTRACT [Or download the full PDF: NicolaBozzi_MP2MD_Figures]

In this chapter I define four main types of metadata and four stereotypical figures to exemplify each of them respectively: structural metadata (the Nerd), textural metadata (the Hipster), body metadata (the Comedian), and metadata of scale (the Gangster). The former two are characterized by higher levels of choice and agency, the latter two are instead metadata beyond choice, labels one is subjected to rather than active tools for participation in infrastructure and interface.

The Nerd‘s metadata is mostly structural because it refers to expertise and labels mostly valued in infrastructural environments, such as universities or technology development departments. The Nerd’s familiarity with codes and his/her dual hacker/libertarian attitude towards knowledge and the market makes him/her an emerging figure and an actor in the design of filtering interfaces in institutions and technology. The Nerd also exemplifies what has been called the “Californian Ideology” and the Third Wave economy, both deeply involved in globalization and in the increasing synergy between the market and university institutions.

The Hipster uses textural metadata like interests, hobbies, and clothing to create a sophisticated social persona, particularly sensitive to culturally appealing niche markets. The Hipster’s agency is more limited to interface, as his/her subcultural taste affects the market from the bottom up. Also, hipster migrations are a crucial factor in the gentrification of urban neighborhoods, often used by the institutions as a tool to provide specific areas with labels such as “creative district”. If the Nerd interacts with infrastructure via knowledge and technology, the Hipster interacts with interface via taste and style, working as a factor in the shaping and profiling of cities by cultural parameters.

The Comedian exemplifies body metadata because he/she uses stereotype as a tool to generate laughter. Since physical features, especially ethnic, have a highly stereotypical potential, the Comedian taps into it and combines such metadata with varying levels of consciousness. Some comedians (like Chris Rock) critically reflect on it, others (like Carlos Mencia) fully embrace the compromising logic of metadata and de facto support racial profiling as a controversial social practice. In this section I analyze both negative and virtuous examples in the use of body metadata.

The Gangster is maybe the most complex figure, since metadata of scale draws textural images from a shared global imagery of North American inspiration (the symbols and codes developed by Bloods, Crips, Latin Kings, Mara Salvatrucha, Mara Dieciocho and popularized by the media) and reterritorializes them on different localities (Australia, the Netherlands, Barcelona, El Salvador, the Internet) with different social implications. The aesthetic connections drawn by metadata of scale can create worldwide or local communities, but the horizontal practice of combination of their symbols (“I am a Crip” instead of “I am an African-American” – or maybe Surinamese-Dutch, in the case of the Netherlands Crips) often leads to associations without direction, bonding without a project. In this section I refer to specific literature and documentaries to outline this scenario.

ABSTRACT [Or download full PDF: NicolaBozzi_MP2MD_Channels]

Starting from the example of urban simulacra (in form of virtual environments, mapping applications, or augmented reality renderings), in this chapter I introduce how a virtual infrastructure actualizes into an interface by means of metadata. Relying on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of virtual as used by Pierre Levy, and especially on Michel Foucault’s heterotopia, I also explain the connections between urban simulacra and some emerging practices in urban design and architecture. In particular, I highlight the relationship between the XML node and the shipping container. Referring to Alexander Galloway’s Protocol, I point out how the use of informational units as both a communication device and a content shape is a common protocological practice in both urban simulacra and actual globalized urban landscapes.

In this chapter I also give a detailed definition and concrete examples of how metadata affects space and people in global cities through the rhetorics of the creative industries, explained by David Harvey, Matteo Pasquinelli, and Bas van Heur. In highlighting the dynamics by which such rhetorics spread, I also describe the folksonomical production of metadata and, by referencing again to Pasquinelli, the parasitical nature of infrastructure.

By providing a deeper analysis of the three layers constituting infrastructure, interface, and metadata, and by explaining the relationships between them, I introduce the main problem of the thesis: the compromising nature of metadata and the limiting boundaries of stereotype. Such topics will be more clearly discussed and problematized in the following chapter, by way of analyzing four different figures and as many issues in urban living and identity building: the Nerd, the Hipster, the Comedian, and the Gangster.

INTRODUCTION – ABSTRACT [Download full PDF: NicolaBozzi_MP2MD_Introduction]

This work is a conceptualization of the use of stereotype, as it is deployed as both an active and a passive tool to read people and space as information. Stereotypical tags are attached to professionals as well as immigrants, to particular places or whole neighborhoods. If people and space are data, stereotypes are then metadata, images extracted from a globalized imagery. Metadata affects the imagination of identities, leading them to adhere to certain pre-formatted formulas, and the perception of space, as it is constructed both physically and culturally.

Imagination, as a daily work practice, constitutes a creative and bottom-up process, but nevertheless the principles behind the circulation of metadata are subject to global factors. Such factors are, for example, politics of urban spacing, market fads, economic restructuring, mass-media. Although metadata is produced and shared globally, its circulation is asymmetrical and bound to two different layers: infrastructure and interface. The formats of metadata are shaped by the infrastructure that channels it and by the interface through which it is selected and combined, imposing significant constraints on identity.

I define infrastructure as the sum of the publicly-funded and established technologies and regulations that enable the global flow of people and information. Interface consists instead of the privately-designed filtering system (the media, the market), mediating the organization of metadata by giving an illusion of choice to the actors that interact with it. While infrastructure is more rigid and can be altered only by complex and large scale political action, interface can be subject to emotional perturbations.

Part of this work will focus on the recursive process connecting infrastructure and interface. The former is virtual and actualizes into the latter, in order to get in contact with metadata and filter it. I will take the example of XML as an ideological informational protocol, highlighting an isomorphism with the relational structures around the shipping container, an emerging element in contemporary architecture.
In discussing the properties of infrastructure and interface I will also expose the myth of the creative industries and the way they ignite processes of urban polarization and social segregation.

Through my analysis of the relationships between the three layers involved in metadata circulation (infrastructure, interface, and metadata itself) and the main types of metadata (structural, textural, body, and scale), I will discuss four main emerging figures and relative issues concerning urban spacing, community, and identity. These figures are: the Nerd, connected to the rhetorics of the Californian ideology; the Hipster, involved in the urban phenomenon of gentrification; the Comedian, dealing with stereotypization and racial profiling; and the Gangster, caught between urban fractalization and the global imagery.

After examining the four aforementioned figures, I will highlight examples of strategic uses of metadata, taking advantage of an alliance with the parasitical infrastructure to create new configurations in interface. In the conclusion, I will propose a mapping of such uses, in order to design future tactics to tweak interface and reclaim less stereotypical and compromised identities.

“Dreaming is work, you know – there I am in a comfortable bed, the next thing you know I have to build a go-kart with my ex-landlord. I want a dream of me watching myself sleep.” – Mitch Hedberg

What is probably the most fascinating thing about Deleuze and Guattari’s way of writing is the spatial vividity with which they literally build their concepts like organic sculptures. They place them in relationship to each other as suspended in a 3D space, taking form as they evolve from primitive solids into more sophisticated and combined abstract figures. In their last book What is philosophy?, almost a tutorial for designing philosophical interfaces, we can see this process clearly. The two French philosophers see what they do as creation rather than communication, and for this reason reading the first pages of the Anti-Oedipus can be at once confusing and liberating. But being the book a manifesto for schizoanalysis, this only makes it more consistent.
Schizoanalysis is meant as a materialist revolution of psychiatry, most notably negating the Oedipical triangulations (Father, Mother, Me) which, according to Sigmund Freud, structure the subconscious. The word “materialist” is not the first Marxian echo coming across the pages of the Anti-Oedipus, which together with its later and also very influential companion A Thousand Plateus forms a project entitled “Capitalism and Schizophrenia”. The way these two terms intersect will be made more clear later.

First of all, unlike Freud, Deleuze and Guattari argue the subconscious is in perpetual creation, by means of desire, and that the schizo is the perfect point of view from which to understand the real process of production of man and nature, which are not opposed as in a dichotomy, but part of the same process of production. Such process incorporates the production of production (actions, passions), the production of recording processes (distributions, coordinates, points of reference), and the production of consumption (sensual pleasures, anxiety, pain). Man – the schizo in particular, through his desiring-production – is not opposed to nature and is both producer and product at the same time. Schizophrenia is “the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines, universal primary production as ‘the essential reality of man and nature’”. In other words, there are only flows and machines producing them.
Desiring-machines make us organisms, but at the same time they make us suffer for being organized in such a way, or at all. To Deleuze and Guattari the full body without organs is the total embracement of schizophrenia, the unproductive and unconsumable body belonging to the realm of antiproduction.

So, we have a production and an antiproduction. The former happens by way of the desiring-machines, while the latter is a sort of surface (Socius) on which all production is projected, “miraculated”, that is provided with a quasi-cause. This happens during the recording process, which we could call a process of abstraction when also a reason is given for all things to happen. Such reason can be God or capital, but in both cases it is equally divine (from here the use of the word “miraculated”). All production is then “legitimated” by means of such disjunction, and moved on what we could imagine as a sort of hovering and parcelled out plane.
There is still another process that I mentioned before, and that is consumption. Such process is only possible because of the emergence of somewhat of a subject from the recording process (as you might have guessed, it is just another abstract surcodification the schizo is lucky enough not to be a total victim of). Once we have the subject, sitting next to the desiring-machines, we can have consumption. The subject has some kind of a reward from this process, and the recording process makes it trace it back to the quasi-cause we mentioned before.

Being the subject the result of the friction between the desiring-machines attached to the body without organs, it can turn out to be very conflictual. The machines that affect it the most are the paranoiac machine and the miraculating machine, the former making it suffer as an organism and the latter tricking it into staying anchored on the recording surface, with all its delusional constructions (like Oedipus, for example). This type of subject shifts from state to state in a linear way, letting each state define it.
In some cases, another type of machine kicks in. It’s the celibate machine, which is some sort of compromise of good living, a “new alliance” between the desiring machines and the body without organs. Such machine allows the subject to be reborn with each and every state, experiencing delirium and intensities in a perpetual satisfaction. For this case Deleuze and Guattari make the examples of Judge Schreber, one of Freud’s mental patients, and of Friedrich Nietzsche as schizos and homini historia (because they are able to identify with all characters of history).

The schizo desires as a production of subconscious. Deleuze and Guattari consider desire as a lack to be an Idealistic and outdated conception, and instead argue desiring-production is also the only social production. But why is then the schizo, according to the French philosophers, a product of capitalism?
Capitalism, by decoding the recorded flows of symbols and constructions projected on the Socius, can set the desiring flows free even on such deterritorialized plane, making it closer to a body without organs. By disrupting the abstract structure of society (a few examples could be nation states, historical heritage, local laws) capitalism generates a flow of intensities. This happens while the capital is still doing the opposite, that is “miraculating” such recorded production as a quasi-cause, which makes this even more schizophrenic.
The modern day schizo is still convinced capital makes the world go round, and thus relates to it as an actual factor in the determination of his or her life, but at the same time is carried by it as in a stream whose speed and direction you can’t predict.

More than three decades after the Anti-Oedipus was published, schizophrenia has become a mandatory condition for the globalized urban citizen. We are more and more conscious of the ways we produce ourselves and our identity, but at the same time we are victims of the interfaces we use to create it.
From European bloggers to Central American gang members, we all give in to desire and imagination (which, according to anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, has become a social practice). We shape an image of what we want to be, and proceed to adhere to it as much as possible. We do so not only by filling up detailed profiles on online social networks, but by choosing our clothes, interests, friends, colors, signals, slang. They no longer represent a vertical social hierarchy, but an horizontal cartography of imagined lives and shared customs. In the globalized world people flow like information, and those choices are metadata.

For some, choice is both the biggest liberty and the most pressing duty. The creative class praised by Third Wave theorists like Alvin Toffler and urban advisors like Richard Florida fractalises in niche markets and sub-subcultures, making a living (often barely) off ultra-targeted information. On the other hand, immigrants balkanize in gang-ridden slums, physically deterritorialized and also deterritorializing their imagined identity on a globalized recording surface. The Salvadorian gangs Mara Salvatrucha and Mara 18 were born in American prisons, later to spread in Central America after the Salvadorians who founded them were deported and brought all the American gang signs, symbols and imagery to their home country. And at least according to YouTube, gangs with the same signals and language have been sprouting in the Philippines as well.
Even if for some imagining an identity is a professional choice and for others a mean to survive in extreme conditions, we’re all grasping towards that disrupted Socius while being carried away by a furious flow, which in both the body without organs and the globalized world is more important than us. We’re projecting ethnic, social, professional identities on a shared surface (movie and internet imagery, mostly American) miraculated by globalization, which gives us a quasi-cause to move and work, but ultimately leaves us more schizo than ever given the eventual limitedness of our choices.

To conclude by referring back to the Mitch Hedberg quote at the beginning: dreaming our identities is a full-time job, and not everybody gets much of a wage.

Arjun Appadurai‘s considerations on the work of imagination in modern societies are some of the most interesting and compelling passages of his book Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. According to the anthropologist “imagination has broken out of the special expressive space of art, myth, and ritual and has now become a part of the quotidian mental work of ordinary people in many societies”.
Appadurai focuses in particular on collective imagination, as a tool to create diasporic public spheres through which globalized and often deterritorialized citizens share the same social imaginary.
As an Indian-born American academic, the scholar has been experiencing first-hand what it means to deterritorialize one’s ethnic and cultural background on a different context, and his particular case could be a perfect example of fulfilled American dream. But again the collective, massive dimension of imagination-induced agency is what really makes the difference in comparison to more ancient times: “the images, scripts, models and narratives that come through mass-mediation [...] make the difference between migration today and in the past”. Also, the American dream is all-too-real in our globalized times, and more in general “these new mythographies are charters to new social projects, and not just a counterpoint to the certainties of daily life”.
But migration to a richer country is not the only inherent phenomenon to the rise of imagination as a social practice, and the examples that Appadurai makes are not all positive. There are diasporas of hope, terror, despair.
In support of his thesis that modernity hasn’t seen a total victory of science over religion, as foretold by German scholars such as the Frankfurt school and Max Weber, he mentions Khomeini and the infamous outrage surrounding Salman Rushdie‘s Satanic Verses in the muslim world. We could easily add Al Quaeda and the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy as other instances of diasporic rage, but what’s important here is the relationship between media and social imaginary.

Relying on Benedict Anderson‘s notion of “imagined community” (or, as he calls them himself, “community of sentiment”), which can also be built by printed or electronic media, Appadurai explains that “global processes involving mobile texts and migrant audiences create implosive events that fold global pressures into small, already politicized arenas, producing locality in new, globalized ways”.
Such locality can be generated through different feelings or actions (resistance, irony, selectivity), but they are all rooted in collective imagination. Even more importantly – and even more so with electronic media – diasporic public spheres make agency transnational, going beyond nation-states. The micronarratives of media in fact “domesticate the megarhetoric of delelopmental modernization, [...] allowing modernity to be rewritten more as a vernacular globalization and less as a concession to large-scale national and international policies”.
In other words, imagination is an important factor in globalization and should not be underestimated, most importantly because of its implications in the process of identity-building.

At this point I would like to step back from Appadurai’s analysis of modernity and collective emancipation via the manufacturing of common myths, approaching a different dynamic (or, as we might better phrase it, a dysfuncion) of the imaginary.
The examples made so far are all “imagined communities” or “communities of sentiment” to the extent that they project each individual as a member of the specific community, and at the same time the sum of all the members as a sort of projected community. There is not only the profile of the individual members, each of whom has something in common with all the others, but there is also a collective profile of the community itself, a sort of imaginary, sometimes fabricated macro-individual who often has a particular spokesperson or underlying principles constituting its foundation. To use a rather extreme example, we might say the “Al Quaeda Project” is the destruction of the Western paradigm as an ideal, and such purpose can be considered as a “vertical” parameter to measure how well their own “modernism” (cause) is going. Also, said purpose defines the group itself.
We might make less extreme examples of separatist movements or diaporic nations, but the important thing to point out here is that imagined communities are often defined by a “vertical” purpose, a direction in which to tend. There are some exceptions though, some communities that are indeed children to a globalized imaginary, but at the same time lack that verticality, the urgence to define the group as a primary need.
A good example of this second kind of imagined communities are street gangs.

As pointed out by one of the gangsters interviewed by Stacy Peralta in his very insightful documentary Bloods and Crips: Made in America, gangs began to gain power in Los Angeles after the Black Panther Party disbanded. But while the emancipation of African-Americans was the primary goal for the party, the Crips and the Bloods soon began to kill each other for turf. Instead of a “vertical”, “modern”, emancipatory goal, gangs had a more “horizontal”, “postmodern” (or maybe we should just say “short-sighted”) focus. A gang and its color may constitute a community, but a red or a blue bandana doesn’t have any other claim than its self-evident difference from another equivalent rag. By defining their communal identity mainly on an arbitrary parameter such as a color, gangs like the Bloods and Crips gave up the emancipatory plan that made the Black Panthers an imagined community with a direction.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tXHLQSmIpI&hl=it_IT&fs=1&]

Interestingly enough, despite the lack of a focused social and ethnic drive to better community life, the style, signs and colors of LA gangs have been channelled by the media (like films and hip hop music) and have fascinated youth worldwide. Nowadays sets of Crips and Bloods are known to be present even in Holland, where apparently the members are of Surinamese origin. This is pretty significant: being Suriname a former Dutch colony, Surinamese-Dutch Crips are experiencing a double deterritorialization.
Despite the worldwide diffusion of the LA gang imaginary, its heaviest effects are probably felt in Central America. In El Salvador, two LA-born gangs have been slaughtering each other ferociously for years now, all because of different signs and numbers tattoed on their bodies. Signs and numbers that have been decided many miles and checkpoints away: la Dieciocho derives from LA’s 18th Street Gang, while MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha) was also founded in the City of Angels, but its most characteristic sign, the devil’s horns, was inspired by heavy metal music.
These gangs, now widespread in Salvador, were imported as a sort of franchise: some Salvadorians migrated to the States, wound up being gang members, were deported back to Salvador. Then they recruited more people to go back to the US, only to be deported again. This cycle of deportations has actually fueled the gang phenomenon in El Salvador, while it hasn’t really made the situation North of the border any better: the maras are spreading across the whole North American territory regardless of how many gangsters are sent back, and the process is making the drug trafficking network tighter.
The Salvadorian examples are particularily moving, as they show the way fascination for a globalized imaginary of violence can become all-too-real, even beyond borders, and give way to a bloodshed comparable only to a civil war (to learn more on those gangs you should watch the movie Sin nombre (2009), and deceased Christian Poveda‘s La Vida Loca).

As we have seen, Arjun Appadurai’s notion of imagination as a social practice can be applied to very different phenomena, but we should make the due differences between imagined communities with an identifying direction (be it constructive or disruptive) and the ones who share mainly an aesthetic code and economic interests. If the first ones represent a way to claim agency through the interface of social imaginary, the second constitute a more ambiguous and politically segregated alternative.