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Notes on Capture

The study unfolds and expands in a non-linear way, structure and outcome co-evolving through my contingent thinking and activity.

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The idea of CAPTCHAs:

  • The goal of CAPTCHAs and Google’s reCAPTCHA was to find a way to filter out the overwhelming armies of spambots pretending to be people.
    Subsequently, what was produced was a large reservoir of data. This preservation of human knowledge and accessible information has formed our modern day library of Alexandria. 
  • Developed in 2000, CAPTCHAs are human designed computer tests to prove someone is a human. This virtual security of the boundless matrix of the internet to prevent glitches, spam, and bots is ironic. A robot delivers the test to a human agent trying to access a website, in order to prevent unwanted agents. It is ironic that a robot is asking a human to prove they are a human. 
  • CAPTCHA acronym sounds like “capture”. It stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.”
  • Soon after development, CAPTCHA farms were created, with humans completing thousands of CAPTCHA puzzles for mere cents.
  • reCAPTCHA was established in response and sold to Google, and instead of using randomized words, reCAPTCHA asked users to translate images of real words and numbers taken from archival texts that the computer could not read.
  • Smeary ink, damaged paper, or other human error may make some words in archived works hard to read for the computer
  • A two word prompt would appear, one word being the hard to read text for the computer, and the secondary word being a word the computer knew, only slightly modified and distorted. If you got the already verified word correct, the computer would treat your answer to the illegible one as verifiable.
  • reCAPTCHA tries to capture these glitches through intentional illegibility asked to be made legible. The irony here is multi-layered-- 1. Is the proof of being human to make something illegible, legible? 2. Or perhaps, is the proof of being human to find legibility, understanding, and meaning in an error? 3. It is ironic to have a computer prove to it that we are human. The robot is asking us, the human, if we are a robot. 3. It is ironic to have a state of the art technology trying to make something inaccurate and using that to capture glitches.
  • Within the machine, we as humans have tried to adhere to our politics of control and order in the form of the machine observing, testing, and monitoring us. CAPTCHAs and reCAPTCHA are now virtually defunct, with most websites opting for “No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA” system, which relies not on a users’ ability to decipher text, but on their online behavior prior to the security checkpoint. While a user is on a page, an invisible algorithm is monitoring how they interact with the content to determine if they’re human or robot.
  • By forcing legibility, we are trying to control.
  • By creating intentionally illegible CAPTCHAs, the machine is asking you to decipher and make yourself known, thereby manipulating you, while contributing to the feeding of the AI.
  • It’s a style of policing, creating an immaterial boundary, a checkpoint to seek out the glitch. Establishing the boundary in a boundary-less place. What is the CAPTCHA protecting? What frontier is it protecting, and for whom? Who are the owners and why are we the visitors of this digital space? Whose security is it protecting? What is inside of the robot?

The idea labor

  • Spam-sponsored CAPTCHA farms soon gained popularity in countries like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, China, Brazil, Nigeria, and Russia, offering workers mere cents to solve CAPTCHA boxes by the thousands.  
  • Millions of people were voluntarily translating illegible images into text, which seemed, the creators, like a waste of perfectly good free labor.
  • CAPTCHA was then evolved into reCAPTCHA which used the user’s labor to digitize books, from the archive of Google books, without compensation, for posterity. 
  • Now, Google has us contributing involuntarily to machine learning with the new image based reCAPTCHAs asking us to pick out street signs and stop lights, to aid in the development of self-driving cars, as well as further the advancement of computer understanding of our world. Thanks to our unpaid labor the entirety of Google’s archive of books and articles, millions of books containing the sum total of human knowledge, has been digitized.
  • We have nonconsensually signed on as free labor to one of the single most destructive corporations in the history of the world to advance machine learning and make human error legible-- make legible those texts that the computer can't understand, but we as humans can. Those mistakes that only a human can see. The glitch, the error, is human; an intrinsic part of being human it seems. By making those errors legible to the machine, are we making the machine human or are we, the human, becoming the machine? In the rapidly advancing virtual world, can we separate humans from machines? Are we on our way to becoming composite cyborgs of both realities?
  • This weaving is a lot of labor lol. It took me months of tedious hours to complete. I called it my forced agony hours.

The idea of ownership

  • The intersection of how this concept ties into colonization and land ownership, is rooted in the question of who owns the digital space. Using the metaphor of CAPTCHA as a means to establish a boundary, between human and glitch, I question how the policing of such is inherently rooted in the colonial belief of us vs. them, native vs. immigrant, good vs. bad.
  • These boundaries that CAPTCHA tries to establish are essentially arbitrary tests. Arbitrary boundaries, parcels, divisions between us and them, much like the physical world. In real time we can see how the development of tech reflects complicated and oppressive attributes of the external world. 
  • Are CAPTCHAs conquistadors of the glitch? Can the glitch push against CAPTCHAs and capitalism at large? If I embody the nature of a glitch, can I destablilize the oppressive forces in power?
  • Power is used in the digital edifice to perpetuate capitalism and colonialism via technological builders who shape how users experience digital worlds and their politics. If we want to deconstruct the modern fascist police state we exist in, remaining critical of how we construct and the digital edifice is crucial. 

The idea of Glitch Feminism

  • To be a glitch is to go against the status quo, to exist in fact, in a post-status quo concept of the world. Post-binary, post-gender, post- colonial. It is to be a rip, a tear, a slit to slip through in the matrix. To be too slippery to catch.
  • Virtual and land ownership are disturbed by these glitches:
    • Virtually in the form of bots and spam
    • Land in the way of possessing an identity that is outside the system.
  • Both virtual and land ownership battle the glitch by means of control, through means of proving to them who you are, making yourself legible.
    • “Legibility [becomes] a condition of manipulation” (Russell).
  • CAPTCHA asks you to decipher something illegible, and in the real world we are tasked to make ourselves legible to another by use of identities, language, and assimilation to allow the powers that be to put us neatly into a category. Into a boundary.
  • Humans have these ways of trying to control the boundary of another-- to see legibly where they end and begin.
  • The irony of that is that the matrix of the internet is boundless-- in cyberspace we are all immigrants in a foreign land.
  • There's freedom in that-- constructing the virtual edifices of humanity in a boundless space, it’s practically utopian.
  • But there's also instability there, a lack of the social contract that one adheres to, and the dangers of exponential existentially threatening growth. The convergence of those two is where the multiplicity of oneself lives-- the cyborg.
  • In the digital we reinvent, we create imagined worlds. Through the glitch we enter our divised, limitless utopias.


The idea of security

  • In cyberspace, we are all immigrants. We belong to another physical land but exist within the virtual world of the internet, away from our “native” home. We inhabit, therefore, a dual identity. Thinking of this notion of “immigrant” in cyberspace, if we embody the ethos of Glitch Feminism, embodying the glitch, can we subvert the policing and control of the CAPTCHA, of Big Tech at large? 
  • The solution isn't to stop using CAPTCHAs, or to not invest in cyber security, But more so to investigate the power Big Tech has in establishing and mirroring the problems of our physical world. Our tech builders are making a new masters house with the masters tools. A space that by nature is limitless, utopian, expansive, and queered.

The idea of mother/matrix/weaving

  • The etymology of the word matrix is “womb” from latin “mother”
  • Matrix of life is the womb
  • The internet is a matrix, a mother, a womb, for what?
  • What do we allow to grow there? What convergence of human and machine can find rapid evolution and existence there?
  • A weaving is created in a matrix of parallel horizontal and vertical lines, an array. It is a material matrix in the sense that it is made of tangible existing material, and it is a material in of itself. 
  • Weavings were actually used as models for early computers.
  • Thinking of the matrix of cloth, of weavings, as the motherboard.
  • I am creating a topographical textile.
  • I am creating a textile, a suppressed and feminine gendered art style.
  • I am creating a textile map for a glitch to exist in, for posterity.  
  • Matrixial theory-- The matrixial theory formulates Aesthetics and artistic creativity in terms of witnessing, compassion, wondering and 'fascinance', as well as Ethics of witnessing, responsibility, respect, compassion and care, and the passage from co-response-ability to responsibility and from com-passion to compassion
  • According to Griselda Pollock, Bracha L. Ettinger's matrixial sphere allows us to escape the "notion of the discrete and singular subject formed by the establishment of the boundaries that distinguish it from an oceanic or undifferentiated otherness of the world or the maternal body". Venn adds that the matrix allows the concept of the gaze to extend beyond the visual realm to touch, sound, and movement.
  • This weaving is a matrix, the weaving envelopes the glitch, it is imperfectly woven, itself containing lots of glitches.
  • It is pulled taut over the frame, making it look like an animal hide. These metaphorical frames that we establish in society are the formation of the skin of humankind. How we choose to engage in the creation of the internet reflects on how we form our own skin here in the physical world. 

The idea of textile design

  • The cognitive process of thinking in a textile way, of understanding the textile design,  contributes to an understanding of ‘textile thinking’ and situates textile practice against established theories of design research.
  • Textile design inhabits a liminal space that spans art, design, craft; the decorative and functional; from handiwork to industrial manufacture.
  • This paradigm of design thinking rests upon the significance of long-established textile metaphors for the embodied and interconnected activities of cognition and action, and is indicative of particular views of post-Postmodernist thought.

The idea of map-making/topography/land

  • The weaving looks like a topographical map.
  • The first project I built this frame for was for a type of suspension loom that used rocks sourced from my family’s land in Los Angeles as the suspended weight for the warp threads.
  • Distorted topographical map that charts the matrix of a virtual and physical world
  • It is an act in trying to explore and understand the expansiveness of the juncture of the cyber and physical world
  • Map-making, mind-mapping, network development were synonymous for the research of this project so a map-making exercise seemed fitting as the manifestation of this research

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