Knowbotic Research

The Dilemma: naked bandit
Transcoding Extra-territorialities, Floating Sovereignties and Non-publics

Intro: 
'One could ask about the specific kinds of games that we have begun to play today, in the age 
of the so-called new media. For our embrace, as a population, of miniaturized, networked 
electronic devices, has made us into avid producers of signals, emanating from all aspects of 
our psychic, sexual, professional, political and affective lives. These signals of belief and 
desire are eminently susceptible to interception, storage in databases, and transformation into 
statistics, which can be used as guidelines for the informed manipulation of our environment, 
and thus of our behavior. It then becomes important to know what kinds of social 
experiments we might be part of.'
Quoted from Brian Holmes, 'signals, statistics and social experiments/the governance 
conflicts of new media,' nettime mailing list, 2004

Socio-technical experiments
The difference between inside and outside the laboratory is vanishing. Technological 
experiments are leaving the laboratories, society itself is becoming the experiment. 
Socio-technical experiments as described by Brian Holmes redefine a transnational society's 
way of dealing with conflicts and threats, of setting up boundaries, of including, excluding 
and marginalizing.
	But do we have a choice to be part of these experiments? Do we have a choice to 
co-define these experiments? Who is responsible for them, who is writing protocols? Who is 
supervising, who is taking decisions?
	If there is no choice, there is no politics, there is no sovereign. If we don't know where 
and why we are involved in these transnational experiments, then we can say there is a blind 
sovereign (Bruno Latour1). Nobody wants to be the playground of a blind transnational 
sovereign - sovereignty inside these socio-technical experiments has to be newly defined.
	The challenge is to become active participants in these ongoing scenarios, to become 
an self-reflexive transnational public dealing with new forms of sovereignties.

New forms of sovereignty
Politics is always happening parallel real and virtual. The transformation of national 
sovereignties and the ongoing procedures of a constituting transnational sovereign power are 
always enacted as test cases, probed and executed parallel on virtual and real level. The 
results of these probed virtual test cases and experiments are applied in other localities and 
themselves become test cases for other situations.
	Artistic research is able to connect to and transcode the virtual level  of the political 
and thus can develop its own versions of explorations, test cases and experiments with 
different forms of representation. Artists and artistic (research) institutions have to develop 
formats of presentation which have the potential to channel the results of such experiments 
into the ordinary games of governance, giving them the presence they need, making such 
experiments public.

Artistic experiments on degree zero
Knowbotic research is investigating these ongoing sociotechnical experiments and 
transcoding them into 'experiments on degree zero,' experiments below the representation 
level of mass media. Such experiments are able to connect and interface with the constituting 
logic of transnational sovereignties. They are providing virtual and symbolic forms of 
engagement to address and question the conditions of these new sovereignties and are making 
their effects public. Virtual experiment and action mean not 'a derealization (the 
transformation of reality into a collection of possibles) but a displacement of the center' 
(Tiziana Terranova2) and a change of perspective and identity.

New forms of political representation
Tiziana Terranova: 'The aesthetics of the degree zero means the rejection of the "spectacular" 
(the spectacle). Rather than being defined principally through a solution, the experiment on 
degree zero finds its essential consistency within a field of questions asking: Where does 
power come from? Degree zero does not imply a ground, that is an origin, but a full 
potentiality, that needs to be actualized, to find its expression.' The level of representation of 
existing manifold political expressions in the worldwide political arena can be dissolved in 
experiments towards the level of degree zero, the level where the potentialities of these 
political expressions can be actualized, and new forms of political representation can be 
developed.

Transcoding
Virtual actions on degree zero transcode the symbolic levels and logics of these 
socio-technical experiments. Transcodings, i.e. translations of one sign system into another, 
open up other modes of operation and actions and provide changes of perspectives. 
Transcodings are structured by rule systems. Rule systems are never definite or irreversible. 
Transcodings do not constitute power but mirror actual social, political and cultural 
conditions and practices which are open for transformations.
	Transcoding assigns a visibility to those things (complex political processes and 
relations) which through a previous abstract designation process had lost their negotiability. 
Transcoding means the assignment of new codes to existing things and the reflection of this 
transformation process. Transcoding attempts to transform the restrictions of one level of 
code into a newly coded and thus newly imaginable field of action.

Contextualisation: indefinite spheres of sovereignty by Timothy Druckrey
Spheres of sovereignty are legitimated in forms that rely on control of the legal and judicial 
systems, on the sustenance of political hierarchies, on the application of military, police and 
investigatory systems, on the regulation of the communication systems, on the management 
of the information systems - in short, spheres of sovereignty are legitimated in forms that rely 
on the total control of culture.

In the authoritarian atmosphere after 9/11 sovereignty has taken a leap from management to 
domination, and has extended its reach into extra-territorial, extra-legal, extra-national, 
extra-governmental spheres by claiming absolute authority to act unilaterally, unhindered by 
localizations of any sort. This suspension of the old territorial sovereignties has been 
evolving alongside globalization for many decades and is exemplified by the trans-national 
and, in our understanding, non-legitimated power of world organizations.

Transferred into the floating sovereignty of the post 9/11 era, authority has mutated into 
militarized ideologies which claim the entire planet as a potential crime scene and establish 
'state policing' as its central principle. This too comes as a paradox in which a government 
disclaims territoriality but enforces localized ideology.
	This merging of imperial codes and empire logic is both reactionary and 
developmental. It passionately roots the imperium as an entitlement of the good and the just, 
and founds an empire on an renovated sovereignty. By mobilizing itself as exempt from civil 
examination, it deprives the principle it proposes to defend. By creating an overwhelming 
security apparatus (or better a security ecosystem), it legitimates the 'emergency state' whose 
threat condition can never be reduced without undermining its raison d'être. Unable to 
sustain human rights, it substitutes itself in their place: sovereign rights instead of human 
rights.

This astonishing reversal liberates ideology from consensus. Behind the veil of secret 
rationalizations and self-legitimization, it detaches itself from accountability. It is not a 
conspiracy, but a coup d'état, an act of uprising in reverse, an insurgency against 
representative government itself.
	Floating above accusations, it nevertheless maintains a hold on the public sphere, be it 
by legislated restrictions or by extra-legal means. Cowering below this looming territorial 
authority, rights are no longer implicit - or inalienable - but either granted or denied, they are 
ostensible, not definite, subject to circumstance.

In order to provide cover for lingering and inconvenient territorial legalities, the new 
sovereignty invents indefinite spheres, zones in which legal status can be suspended, in which 
citizenship is invalidated, in which the assumption of innocence is thrown away, in which 
representation is denied.

These civil black-holes are the holding-pens in which anyone can be a combatant. Joined 
with a tightening state security apparatus, the social sphere is increasingly one of confinement 
and risk. What in the political sphere used to be the 'illegal immigrant,' the refugee, the 
exiled, the other, has become, in an all too real sense, the world as a political asylum divided 
into combatants and non-combatants, each existing under the reign of an irreproachable 
authority acting on a unsanctioned mandate.


	From Steven Spielberg's The Terminal
	'So, Mr. Navorski, currently you are citizen of nowhere. You don't qualify for asylum, 
refugee status, temporary protective status, humanitarian parole, or non-immigration 
work, travel, diplomatic visas, you don't qualify for any of these things. You are, at 
this time, simply unacceptable!'
	'Unacceptable?'
	'Unacceptable.'
	'Unacceptable.'


Project: naked bandit/here, not here/white sovereign
"I think we have become interested in Pragmatism again because "the public" continues to be 
a problem. "The public" is not what is meant simply by a certain definition of the common 
good. If you speak about it in terms of a common good, then you have to find the experiment 
that makes it work. Where is the experiment that proves that you are right? If you decide you 
can define what is good for Americans, where is the proof? Prove it! Find the protocol of the 
demonstration. Decode this protocol. Engage politics, not in the sense of feeling good and 
having the right set of political positions and so on, but engage around the protocol of 
debriefing the collective experiment."					 Bruno Latour3

The project naked bandit/here, not here/white sovereign is an experiment on degree zero to 
deal with the representation of non-publics and transform/transcode  them in a public 
negotiable process. It is a question of representation, i.e. to conceptualise new signifiers of 
abstract and precarious things/political conditions and to examine them in a public set-up.  
The project enables engagement with virtual forms of transnational sovereignty, 
extra-territoriality, inclusive exclusion of people (specifically in this project: detainment of 
so-called `unlawful enemy combatants').

Extra-territoriality
In this project Knowbotic Research investigates (non)legal coding of transnational 
sovereignty which inscribes and determines in mostly invisible layers, beyond the daily 
surface of mass media images, our fields of action. Global information technologies (satellite, 
GPS, and data surveillance) are producing new territorial principles of order, a new logic of 
space, and constituting forms of transnational power and sovereignty. Transnational 
sovereignty is emerging from permanent processes of exclusion and inclusion of territories 
and people on a global scale, and is producing new territorial phenomena called 
extra-territorialities.
	Extra-territoriality describes a logic of space which is defined outside of the state and 
its law systems, but is yet controlled by the referring state power and sovereignty. 
Extra-territorialities are constructed as non-publics which are external to the existing 
protocols which govern civil conflicts. These mean zones 'in which legal status can be 
suspended, in which citizenship is invalidated, in which the assumption of innocence is 
thrown away, in which representation is denied' (Timothy Druckrey). In the context of the 
'war of terror' any person or territory is under permanent threat of being excluded, becoming 
an unlawful subject or an extra-territoriality.

Inclusive exclusion
The project investigates the formal mechanisms and logic of such an inclusive exclusion of 
people and the inherent formations of power. Inclusive exclusion means that on the one hand 
sovereign power segregates and excludes, and on the other includes and detains/occupies the 
excluded.
	naked bandit/here, not here/white sovereign is about the dilemma of being excluded 
from the legal body and included in a extra-territorial non-location. It focuses specifically on 
the mechanisms of detainment of so-called 'unlawful enemy combatants' (terror suspects not 
granted the legal status of prisoners of war) in extra-territorialities: the (global) sovereign 
defines persons as 'here' (detained) and, at the same moment, 'elsewhere,' not here, no 
longer on the territory of the nation state, and thus banned, stripped off from the legal 
framework which the nation state guarantees ('naked bandit'). 'Naked bandits' are here and 
not here: detained in limbo, in extra-territorial spheres without a form of representation which 
can be directly accessed and publicly enacted.

Transcoding the dilemma
Knowbotic Research unfolds an experimental space which enables the yet very instable, often 
not legitimized coded layers of these new territorial encryptions to become present and to be 
addressed. The project translates/transcodes these non-public coded forms of detainment of 
persons without a legal and political representation ('naked bandits') into different codes and 
levels of visibility and public accessibility:
	- Level 1 transcodes the logic of extra-territoriality into a spatial experiential model of 
floating sovereign power;
	- Level 2 translates the legal codes of the inclusive exclusions into Unix-code 
processes in order to transgress experimentally its paradoxical logic;
	- Level 3 transcodes the constructed non-public sphere into a public addressable 
scenario.

Level 1 - transcoding the space of extra-territoriality
An interactive media-installation provides a spatial model of a floating sovereignty and 
enables a physical presence in the logic and abstractness of extra-territorial inclusions and 
exclusions. To become present means to become able to interfere in this logic.
	The interdependent extra-territorial processes between detainer and detainees are 
presented via a floating system of balloons and an autonomous, indoor flying control system 
(detainer), which is de-territorialized by Knowbotic Research out of the context of scientific 
research (Autonomous Systems Lab, EPFL Lausanne).
	An autonomous robot – a helium-filled blimp (zeppelin) – controls and attacks the 
balloons which, without any technical devices, are kept captive, floating in space. They serve 
both as targets as well as orientation and navigation patterns for the sovereign robotic logic, 
defined by the technological coded processes of zoning, scanning, filtering, profiling, 
detecting and targeting.
	Visitors to the installation can move at the level of the floating control technology – 
in-between the flight operations and navigations of the robotic machinery. The public thus 
confronts and contaminates the logic of this autonomous flight machinery through its 
physical presence (serving as additional targets).

Level 2 - transcoding the naked code of the inclusive exclusion
Knowbotic Research transfers into two scenarios of script code, executable in a Unix shell on 
a personal computer, the legalistic codes (or, more aptly, codes which produce an exemption 
from legality) of the white sovereign's inclusive exclusion of the naked bandit,. The shell 
scripts appropriate the mechanism of the inclusive exclusion in order to overcome it 
experimentally by its own means and logic.
	The project translates the white sovereign/naked bandit interdependencies into 
process relations in the Unix kernel. The kernel is the central element of the Unix operating 
system. It determines the process and data organization on which the other software elements 
running under this operating system are based. 'Process' generally refers to a program in 
execution. In order to initialize a process, the kernel loads the program and assigns memory 
to it. Booting a computer launches the init process. The init process, the highest hierarchical 
status in the operating system, initiates a set of other processes. All these follow-up processes 
descend from a parent process, i.e. the cron descends from the init, the init is the parent of the 
cron, the cron the child process from the init. Inside Unix, each process can trigger a child 
process. There are two ways to terminate parent-child relationships, and for both Unix 
provides different scenarios:
	- a. If the child process is terminated before the parent, it will not immediately be 
removed from the kernel process list. First a signal will be sent to the parent in order for the 
deletion of the child to be confirmed. In the meantime, before confirmation, the child is in an 
intermediate status called 'zombie.' Zombies occupy memory in the process table, but are no 
longer effective.
	 - b. If the parent is terminated before the child, the child loses the parent and becomes 
an orphan process. The init process inherits the orphan, but the orphan stays at its origin 
process group level.

Scenarios of misinformation and escape
- Starting condition: the 'white sovereign' is coded as the parent, the 'naked bandit' as the 
child process.
	- Execution: The naked bandit is enabled to misinform the white sovereign by 
transforming into an orphan process, either through a self-modification of the code or through 
the intervention of an observer. Thus, the naked bandit can escape from the process 
dependency. To enact this misinformation, the child forks into two apparently identical child 
processes, upon which one remains the child of the parent process, while the other becomes 
the child of the child process. Both child processes print in the console the information 
'naked bandit: here, not here.' In the next step, the child of the parent is suspended, the parent 
loses the child, and the child of the child loses the parent and becomes an orphan process.
	- Result: The child of the child alias orphan alias naked bandit process runs 
independently from the parent alias white sovereign process.
	- Verification: By entering a ctrl-c command all foreground processes (including the 
white sovereign) in the shell are suspended (sigterm). But one process in the shell will keep 
running, the child of the child/naked bandit which, as an orphan belongs to the init process.

scenario A
export white_sovereign='not_here() { while [ enclosed ] ; do echo 'naked bandit: here, not 
here'; echo $white_sovereign| sed -e 's/ ( not_here ) /(& \& ) /g'> clone.sh; done; } ; ( 
not_here ) & wait $!'; sh -c '$white_sovereign'

The child forks into two apparently identical child processes. Via a backdoor, the child 
process secretly exports a key, its process ID, into the file-system. Using this key/process ID, 
the child process can be addressed and suspended by an external observer. After suspension 
(of the child), the child of the child runs independently from the white sovereign as an orphan 
process and simulates the presence of the suspended child by printing in the console the same 
phrase that the child process printed before: 'naked bandit: here, not here.'

scenario B
In this scenario, the shell script self-modifies during execution. Executing the self-modified 
script, a copy child of the child is created. After this creation, the child process terminates 
itself and in the manner previously described liberates the child of the child from the white 
sovereign dependency. The child of the child prints: 'naked bandit: here, not here.' During 
execution, the self-modified script overwrites itself in the initial status.

not_here() { echo '$! `>.key; here & wait $! ; } ; here() { while [ enclosed ];do echo 'naked 
bandit: here, not here';done; } ; ( ( not_here ) & while true;do echo 'white sovereign: naked 
bandit here, not here';done ) 

(For a more detailed explanation of the specific processes in the Unix kernel initiated by 
these shell scripts see http://www.krcf.org/Banditweb/scripts/).

+	naked code agency

	[address] the naked bandit
	[install] a backdoor
	[send] a secret key
	[copy] the naked bandit
	[misinform] the white sovereign
	[camouflage] the naked bandit
	[terminate] the dependency
	[restart] the modification

level 3 - transcoding the constructed non-public (spheres of detainment)
This level combines the spatial representation of the naked bandit-white sovereign 
relationship in level 1 with its (Unix) code representation in level 2 and provides interfaces 
for a public to interact with both levels.
	By means of two computer units and a sound system, the installation visitor is given a 
'voice' to address the naked bandit-white sovereign dependency. The installation offers 
manipulated reboot buttons of personal computers: pressing it effects a execution of the white 
sovereign/naked bandit script codes of level 2 and a change in the white sovereign/naked 
bandit interdependencies between the floating balloons in level 1.
	The naked bandit/here, not here/white sovereign shell script processes print out in a 
loop the following dialog which is displayed on the two computer monitors:
	white sovereign: naked bandit here, not here
	naked bandit: here, not here

	The print-outs also become audible as looped audio samples (articulated by two 
different human voices)  in the spatial model of level 1:
	sovereign voice: naked bandit here, not here
	bandit voice: here, not here

	After a specific threshold level of visitor engagement with the computer interfaces is 
attained, the audio sample of a third, so-called 'public,' voice is triggered which addresses 
and locates the naked bandit:
	public voice: naked bandit here and now!

The event of the public voice sends a signal to the flying robot of level 1 which gets  
suspended for a specific amount of time.

Annotations: auto-immunization of sovereignty
From a political perspective spheres of detainment question the ruling concepts of 
sovereignty and citizenship for defining the legal status of an individual. Jacques Derrida 
provokes in his book Voyous ('Rogues') "unimaginable" extensions of democracy across the 
sovereignty of the nation state, via an international juridical-political space, paired with 
divisible and other concepts of sovereignty.
	Derrida mentions the renewed declaration of human rights (but not that of human and 
civil rights) after the second world war as one decisive democratic point of reference for the 
institutions of international law. This point of reference is in virtual contradiction to the 
principle of the nation state sovereignty but which itself it not placed in question by it:
	'As far as – most futilely- one tries to impose borders on the sovereignty of the nation 
state, it happens through calling the declaration of human rights. This declaration acts 
towards the sovereignty of the nation state not as a limitation or a contradiction, not as a 
principle of a non-sovereignty towards a principle of sovereignty. It is rather the case that 
sovereignty stands against sovereignty. The declaration of human rights positions  the (equal, 
free, autonomous) human as the sovereign. The declaration of human rights proclaims 
another sovereignty, and provides the auto-immunization of sovereignty.' (Translated by 
KR).4

Credits
This project was initiated by the art group Knowbotic Research and was developed in the 
context of a research program, 'public/code/agency - Transcoding the Political' at the 
Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Zürich, Department Media and Art, in collaboration 
with the Autonomous System Lab (ASL): Prof. Dario Floreano, Yannick Fournier, 
Jean-Christophe Zufferey; (http://asl.epfl.ch), Institute of Systems Engineering, Swiss Federal 
Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland.
It was so far exhibited in the contexts of fine art (Witte de With Rotterdam and Kunsthalle 
St. Gallen), of architecture (Archilab Biennale Orleans)and media art (Transmediale 05 Berlin, ICC Tokyo).

Notes
1. Bruno Latour, What rules of method for the new socio-scientific experiments?, lecture at 
Darmstadt colloquium, 2001
2. Tiziana Terranova, Degree Zero of Politics: Virtual Cultures & Virtual Social Movement, 
2002
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0202/msg00004.html
3. Interview with Bruno Latour: Decoding the Collective Experiment, 
http://agglutinations.com/archives/000040.html

4. Jacques Derrida, in Voyous ('Rogues'), Edition Galilee, Paris, 2003