Yogyakarta, August 2018-July 2019,

When we were invited to contribute an essay to WHATEVER SPECULATION, the fourth edition of MaHKUscript, it was through the framework of ALMANAK, a solo exhibition by artist Natasha Tontey in collaboration with curator Syafiatudina at Cemeti-Institute for Art and Society in Yogyakarta in 2018, where Sanne Oorthuizen was co-chief curator at the time. The exhibition centered on speculation and future-telling, combining a pseudo- science fiction narrative with Xenofeminism and various kinds of prophecies that Tontey continues to collect. In ALMANAK, Tontey presented a new video work and a manifesto written especially for the occasion, entitled The Manifesto of Tactile and Fanciful Tactics on how to build a Speculative Future through 1.0 list of an alternative and plausible cosmic solution.

We agreed to write the contribution to WHATEVER SPECULATION together and to take its title at face value: not only to speculate in whatever way about whatever topic, but also to take it lightly, to say ‘whatever, let’s just do it’. We aim to use this publication as a space for experimentation and learning, we aim to actively do speculation (even though or perhaps just because this is grammatically incorrect), and to do so in the dark. Point 0.8 of the Manifesto of Tactile and Fanciful Tactics serves as our incantation and guide.

* Disclaimer: we have decided to leave out any footnoting or listing of sources in keeping with the spirit and content of this contribution. Images consist of material found online and in the writers’ archives. Some of the images and text contain links. You may want to download an onion browser.

Sanne Oorthuizen andNatasha Tontey

through 1.0 list of an alternative and plausible cosmic solution.

Cemeti - Institut Seni dan MasyarakatCemeti - Institute for Art and Society

ALMANAK adalah proyek yang diinisiasi oleh seniman Natasha Tontey bekerja sama dengan kurator Syafiatudina, di Cemeti-Institut untuk Seni dan Masyarakat. ALMANAK terdiri dari dua bagian: sebuah pameran yang menampilkan karya baru Natasha Tontey (5-30 Juni 2018) dan serangkaian acara publik berjudul Trip, di mana Natasha Tontey dan kurator Syafiatudina menanggapi kekhawatiran, pertanyaan dan imajinasi utama terhadap proyek ini, yang bersifat ganda, terfragmentasi, dan pada dasarnya tidak terelakkan.

Proyek ini bermula dari minat spekulasi dan penceritaan di masa depan. Pada akhir 2015 Natasha Tontey mulai mengumpulkan berbagai macam ramalan. Selama satu setengah tahun lebih, dia menemui perantara, dukun, paranormal dan peramal, untuk membangun “arsip masa depan”. Namun, seluruh ramalan yang dikumpulkan masih sangat bergantung pada norma sosial dan struktur kuasa yang ada. Mulai dari prediksi menjadi istri seseorang untuk melahirkan anak sebelum usia tiga puluh tahun, hingga perilaku stereotip serta mencirikan kepribadian seseorang berdasarkan penampilannya. Pertanyaan yang kemudian muncul adalah apakah ada kemungkinan untuk membatalkan untaian masa kini dan masa lalu yang menyimpan spekulasi masa depan kita? Dan apakah makna masa depan alternatif bagi Anda?

Menggunakan narasi fiksi i lmiah semu dan mengambil inspirasi dari gagasan xenofeminisme, Natasha Tontey mengembangkan sebuah karya video baru yang mengeksplorasi kemungkinan masa depan alternatif dan spekulatif melalui solusi kosmik yang masuk akal, melintasi batas antara apa yang nyata dan apa yang tidak, merajut bersama masa lalu, sekarang dan masa depan. Plotnya melibatkan semacam paradoks waktu yang tidak dapat dipahami, animasi digital yang gaduh, masa angkasa Indonesia yang hilang yang dicirikan oleh bangunan Apotek Sputnik di Semarang, dan seekor kecoa raksasa yang abadi. Natasha Tontey juga telah menulis sebuah manifesto bertajuk Manifesto Persekongkolan Jagad Raya yang Tidak Realistis Tentang bagaimana membangun sebuah Spekulasi Masa Depan melalui daftar 1.0 solusi kosmik alternatif dan mungkin sedikit masuk akal . Manifesto ini juga akan dipresentasikan dalam pameran di Cemeti.

ALMANAK is a project by artist Natasha Tontey in collaboration with curator Syafiatudina at Cemeti-Institute for Art and Society. ALMANAK consists of two parts: an exhibition with new artworks by Natasha Tontey (5-30 June 2018) and a series of public events called “Trips”, in which Tontey and curator Syafiatudina respond to the project’s key concerns, questions and imaginations, which are multiple and fragmented.

Coming from an interest in speculations and future telling, Natasha Tontey star ted collecting prophecies from late 2015 onwards. During this past year and a half, she met with mediums, shamans, paranormals, psychics and fortune tellers, slowly building “an archive of the future”. It turned out that all the prophecies she collected stil l heavily relied on existing social norms and power structures, from the prediction of become someone’s wife to bearing children before turning thir ty, to stereotyping behaviours to characterising one’s personality based on appearance. The question that arises is whether it is possible to undo the strings of the present and past that holds our future speculations? And what does an alternative future mean to you?

Using a pseudo science-fiction narrative and taking inspiration from xenofeminism, Natasha Tontey developed a new video work exploring the possibility of alternative and speculative futures through a plausible cosmic solution, crossing the borderline between what is real and what is not, drawing together past, present and future. Its plot involving some kind of inscrutable time paradox, a glitchy digital animation, a lost Indonesian space age characterized by the Semarang building Apotek Sputnik, and a giant, immortal cockroach. Tontey has furthermore written a manifesto entitled The Manifesto of Tactile and Fanciful Tactics on how to build a Speculative Future through 1.0 list of an alternative and plausible cosmic solution, which will be presented in the exhibition.

Kar

ya V

ideo

di A

LMA

NA

K d

i pro

duse

ri ol

eh N

atas

ha T

onte

y de

ngan

ban

tuan

SU

PE

RS

CA

N S

TUD

IO (

Toky

o, J

apan

), T

euku

Mirz

a, d

an R

iar

RIz

aldi

Vide

o pi

ece

in A

LMA

NA

K p

rodu

ced

by N

atas

ha T

onte

y w

ith h

elp

by S

UP

ER

SC

AN

STU

DIO

(To

kyo,

Jap

an),

Teu

ku M

irza

, and

Ria

r R

izal

di.

Pameran ini merupakan bagian

keenam dan terakhir dari seri

pameran Berbagi di Cemeti

Institute, yang terdiri atas

proyek-proyek yang bereksperimen

dengan format praktik kolaboratif

yang berbeda-beda. Berbagi

menandai draft kedua dari

Maintenance Works , program

untuk memikirkan masa depan

alternatif untuk Cemeti (Januari

2017-Juni 2018).

This exhibition is the sixth and last

of Cemeti Institute’s Berbagi

series of exhibitions, consisting of

projects experimenting with

different forms of collaborative

practice. Berbagi marks the

second draft of Maintenance

Works, a program aimed to think

through alternative possible

futures for Cemeti (January

2017-June 2018).

0.8 Demon, ghost, fiend, terror, dreams and

fear are synonyms of future.

We fear the unknown.

The future is unknown.

Why do we fear the unknown?

Why do we fear a place called hell as well as the repression of chasing nirvana?

Am I forever wrong?

Is that all we have?

What if I said, that in our present condition, fear is fabricated by the one who has power?

fiction and speculation are the

antidote of fearfulness.

I’m sitting in a cafe, as close to the WIFI router as possible. I’m learning about the Dark Web by surfing the Internet, maybe not the most efficient way, but it’s a first getting-to-know. Clicking link after link, the screens popping up asking me for cookies are starting to annoy me. Actually they don’t ask as much as tell me that my cookies are being taken. And they are, taken. They feed a digital body I have no ownership over and no access to. My digital self belongs to those who feast on it, who process it for financial

gain. Guys, I need money too, you know! Finally, I feel myself being pushed upwards very slowly ‘til I’m standing on top of the iceberg, face to face with them, the Hungry Oracle. They don’t speak, they never speak, they only take, so I have two options: stay and

be eaten whole, freeze to death or slide down the side of the iceberg into the cold dark water below. I wonder if there are sharks down there. I shiver and make up my mind. I guess I’ll find out soon enough. Well, what would you have done?

Speculation abounds in our daily lives, from the personal escapes of daydreams to the global powers of financial speculation. As the latter continues to take ownership over our lives, we are in dire need of other, alternative forms of speculation that can imagine post-capitalist futures and practice alternative forms of living. Not only with other humans, but with animals, plants, fungi, the manifold entities that make up a world that is essentially relational, always “in-common”.

The question of why we fear the unknown is an interesting

and timeless one. Here, we enter the Dark Web.

If the World Wide Web is an iceberg, and we start at the top, we first encounter the Internet (a.k.a. “clear web” or “surface web”), the place we access when we go online and that is accessible through standard web browsers. Any Internet connection is related to a personal IP address and can therefore be traced. The part of the iceberg that lies under water is called the Deep Web, a realm that contains an estimated 96% of all content to be found circulating online. The Deep Web contains everything in the Internet that cannot be found through regular search engines; it includes your email passwords, academic papers, paid subscriptions to sites like Netflix, government data and other kinds of information that is not meant for any old eyes. At the bottom of the Deep Web resides the Dark Web. The Dark Web can only be accessed through specialized

software, like Tor or other onion browsers, which provide anonymity by encrypting and randomly bouncing communications through a network of relays, which makes it impossible to pinpoint one’s location, browsing activity and IP information.

The Dark Web is considered to be a scary place for illegal activities that consumes you whole once you enter, an image eagerly conjured up by authorities, governments, companies and others “in power” who lose control once an internet user goes “off the grid”. The dominant narrative that is being created is that the Dark Web is a pool of vile; an underworld like Knockturn Alley in Harry Potter’s Wizarding World where visitors who are up to no good skulk around, browsing shops devoted to illegal activities, specialised in objects with curious, strong properties. Of course there are activities in the Dark Web that for various reasons do not see the light of day, from marketplaces where one can buy firearms, drugs or hire assassins, to websites offering all kinds of sex fetishes. But there is more: because of its encrypted nature, the Dark Web provides a safe haven for activists, reporters and whistleblowers who use the Dark Web’s anonymity to fight the powers that be.

The Dark Web comes closer to the way the Internet was initially imagined, or so we read in John P. Barlow’s A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996): “Governments derive their just

powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world.Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature

and it grows itself through our collective actions.” In the past 20+ years, the Internet has indeed turned into a construction project. Its free spirit, however, moved down the iceberg, into deep, dark waters, and became the Dark Web. The question we want to ask is this: if the Internet has become a tool of capitalist speculation and governmental “security”, could the Dark Web offer a multidimensional space where speculation can break free from oppressive regimes of power? Could it offer a space like the one Barlow sketches here: “Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships and

thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live”?

0.0 How Much Does a Cookie Weigh?

An0nBit9 : Hello World!

Thinking about anonymity: surveillance is not just about government monitoring, but it also encompasses daily interactions between people and their social surroundings, their neighbourhoods, gossip, how people judge others based on the identity that is put onto them. This is what I mean; surveillance does not only happen in the digital world—surveillance is embedded within our social structures. Let’s go back to Harry Potter’s Wizarding World. Here,

there are various ways to hide identities, for example, the Invisibility Cloak acts like a VPN, obscuring one’s location and identity, giving one the privilege to move freely through different places and communities, engage in all kinds of activities without being watched,

detected, or judged on one’s behaviour, mischievous or not. Imagine what secrets someone might uncover if they could enter the restricted section of the Hogwarts Library, the Vault of Fears or Knockturn Alley. At the same, in

I wish I knew what I was doing.0ct0pu5s : .__ / |\ Hello! | o| | Can I help you? \_|/ / |\ Here I am the 0ct0pu5sAn0nBit9 : How much does a co0kie weigh?0ct0pu5s : A c0okie weighs around a byte of chit chat that should really be encryptedAn0nBit9 : Is it like someone is eavesdropping on us while we’re whispering to each other in the Cafe?0ct0pu5s : It’s more like a Déjà vu.0ct0pu5s : I once saw the screen settings,0ct0pu5s : a vague memory popped up.0ct0pu5s : I visited this setting before, saw “Once”, had a brain fart and selected it,0ct0pu5s : because I wanted to see the alert exactly once.An0nBit9 : ppl sometimes forget their passwords

but the Hungry Oracle keeps them

this world, it is safe for both Lord Voldemort (villain) and Hermione Granger (protagonist) to learn about the Dark Arts. Does anonymity mean that there is no longer a differentiation between the role of villain and protagonist?

The Dark Web facilitates our desire to be invisible, it encourages anonymity. And

when we talk about anonymity, we talk about identity. In the Dark Web, identity politics are no longer necessary. Traditional and narrow understandings of identity based on nationality, gender, religion, etc. are obsolete. Isn’t that what we wanted? If we understand the Dark Web as a space for anonymity—at least for our virtual doppelgangers—it becomes an interesting speculative space. In point 0.0 of the The Manifesto of Tactile and Fanciful Tactics,

it reads: “Society sculpted us into a binary position: we are either an adequate or an inadequate person. There is indeed no room for imaginary utopias in-between what we can build through daydreaming. What if we said that we can be

a cosmic traveller and just a boring ordinary person living in a cubicle and an exciting psychonaut in the age of iOs at the same time?” Perhaps the Dark Web is one answer: here, we can have a virtual doppelganger without identity, or with any identity we want. An existence that is purely based on and valued by our thoughts and communications. A body without organs.

0.1 Fuck it, I’m off surfing

An0nBit9 : Does anybody here kn0w any onion links to Russian graphic Sci-fi novels?0ct0pu5s : Rich Text Format0ct0pu5s : or HTTPs? какие-либо предпочтения?mad[wo]man3 : Don’t share pix of beheaded ppl or that doggie on the moon flying on the rocket Belka Strelka.mad[wo]man3 : Skunk everywhere.

In daily life, parents, teachers, neighbours and friends moderate what and how we learn. It is based on a social contract, an understanding of ethics, morality, law and history that is written and implemented by a few. The surface web has become an extension of our physical world, the space where “real” bodies of power collide with the digital. Facebook and other social media networks are repeatedly or consistently blocked by governments because of what they consider to be “unintended usership”. Of course this comes with a sharp ideology, often dripping with financial motives. The Internet has various omniscient narrators

that moderate content, apply censorship and shape the way they think the Internet should be(have), creating small bubbles in an otherwise huge online world. The aesthetics of the Dark Web might look strange if we compare it to that of the surface web: its (no-design) design has no moderator either. I’m beginning to understand why most of the Internet looks and feels the same. If almost everything in the surface web contains the same gestures and language, can entering the Dark Web be seen as an act of resistance?

Educator and philosopher Paulo Freire defined critical education as being part of a larger politics of democratic change. Education cannot be separated from other social and political movements that are struggling, fighting and organising for equality and change. The same can be said for art practice, and for speculation. The Dark Web acts as a space where citizens living under oppressive regimes can come together in solidarity, providing encrypted communication channels to coordinate protests and harbouring important communication tools for human rights, political dissidents, and every other user who, for whatever reason, wishes not to be traced, stalked, or spied upon. The Dark Web might be one of the remaining fortifications of anonymity and resistance against corporate and governmental snooping and data mining; a possible safe space. It furthermore offers open source access to different tools for study, such as libraries where you can find banned, rare, cursed or annotated digital books that, in the surface or clear web, would be privatised or accessible via (paid) subscription. Although these sources are there, as a user you still have to know where to look, and work on gaining access by building trust in that specific community.

What if we compare this to the “community economies” theory by political economists and feminists Gibson-Graham? In the iceberg diagram they made, we see that wage labor under capitalism is only a fraction of the

mass of ice that constitutes the economy, but, much like the surface web, it’s the only part that is “visible”, and therefore valued. While financial accumulation has become the highest marker of success, economy has become synonymous with capitalism. However, Gibson and Graham’s iceberg shows that economy is pluriform. Economies come in all shapes and sizes, from cooperatives to bartering to photosynthesis (who said plants are not economic?). The iceberg not only highlights

the economies usually left unseen, but also makes us aware of our own blinkered views. Not economies themselves need to change, but we should re-evaluate our relationship to its values and meanings. If we started valuing and emphasizing other kinds of economies, wouldn’t the iceberg image, and the power systems that underlie it, change?

Ok, just to speculate a little here: let’s say we want to change the dominant systems of food production and distribution that are so detrimental to the earth. What if we use the sources available on the Dark Web to learn how to

grow our own food and tend to our gardens? Would we nourish the soil and our bodies differently? Would we have something stacked next to our laptops that does not resemble a three-month old

pizza box? Could we unglue our eyes from the screen, exit crunch culture, take actuals breaks—oh yes, and sleep at night, when it’s dark, when we’re meant to sleep—and take care of ourselves and each other in a more sustainable way?

0.2 What kind of proxy are you wearing?

An0nBit9 : ASL pls!

0ct0pu5s : Hi, thanks for asking but I don’t think I have that info, or at least, no one here can have it.An0nBit9 : In the surface web, you need to register a phone number and email to join a forum, and I’ve even heard that in some countries, like Indonesia, a sim card is linked to national identity cards. In some cases it’s quite hard to have multiple accounts at once.An0nBit9 : I expected it to be like a regular dating App.0ct0pu5s : Well, it exists, but it takes time.0ct0pu5s : Most sites don’t ask for registration.0ct0pu5s : You ought to know what you’re looking for0ct0pu5s : It’s not like Tinder or Ok-Cupid,0ct0pu5s : There’s no swapping or swooshing here,0ct0pu5s : just people.An0nBit9 : So how do we make friends?0ct0pu5s : We are cosplay to each other.0ct0pu5s : Everyday is Hallowe’en.An0nBit9 : Kthx!

To access many Internet services, and apps for that matter, you need to share your personal information, bank details (and here you enter the Deep Web). It’s much like a transaction in a shop. In the forums on the Dark Web, there is none of that if you don’t want it. A VPN can turn you into anything and anyone you want. As Laboria Cuboniks wrote in their Xenofeminist Manifesto (2018): “‘Gender abolitionism’ is shorthand for the ambition to construct a society where traits currently assembled under the rubric of gender, no longer furnish a grid for the asymmetric operation of power.” Instead, it is peer-to-peer communication that rules. However, much like any small community, to gain access you need to build trust, learn unwritten social codes and be present. What it means to be present though is pretty open.

Forums centre on interests, some of which are actually pretty everyday, from finding information on internet privacy to chess games, IT tutorials, safe email providers and reading groups. Because the government, and particularly the arm of the law, gets stuck in the onion, not only communication, but also knowledge is shared more freely on the Dark Web. Book clubs often focus on anarchism, conspiracy theories and hacking. Copyrighted books in many languages are free to download, plus there are no marketeers chattering in the background, collecting cookies on your reading history to

use in their next sales pitch. There are even users that offer E-books that have been digitally cleaned up to give you a better reading experience. Talk about a library! The Dark Web offers an interesting space for creative and digital commons, a space where ownership and usership are one and the same. Is this the kind of anarchic future we are searching for?

0.3. Resurrection

An0nBit9 : Who owns the internet?0ct0pu5s : The internet has no master, but infrastructure doesAn0nBit9 : Cables criss cross countries and oceans,An0nBit9 : Who benefits from the internet?

Since entering the dark, muddy waters of the Dark Web, my body is no longer, I’m sailing blindly in the valley of the sharks, but I see. Currents lead me astray. But astray is where I wanted to be, unfound, untraceable, dismembered, fragmented. I’ve become mere specks. The water is warmer than the air at the top of the iceberg, where words freeze and seeds are stored for the apocalypse to come, speculating what and for whom? Scientists practice Cryonics in the hope that it may be possible to resurrect in the future? Is this human survival instinct? I am fine here, I am not lost, merely drifting, and I am not alone.

Waves lick the edges of the ice, slowly dissipating its vastness into rising waters. What happens if the iceberg of the World Wide Web melts all together? Would it have the same devastating effects as the melting ice caps have for life on earth? Would the World Wide Web turn into a galaxy

without order and algorithms? Would the Dark Web take over? Could it prophesize a new, wholly decentralised future more in keeping with the ideals of the Declaration of Cyberspace? We demand transparency from the central bodies that govern and mediate our lives, but do we need the opacity of the Dark Web to be truly “free”? And, if we are all water, all drifters, will we recognize each/the other? Will we be less scared of the unknown? And perhaps, as a side effect, can we more clearly see the values and systems that instruct and construct our “real” bodies in our daily lives?

Of course these are just speculations. For the moment here we are, sitting across from one another, with our backs arched behind our laptops in another internet cafe, connecting through Google Docs, hughacking through our devices, buying coffee to stay awake in the midst of different freelance jobs that are always underpaid and we are online, submitting ourselves to the invisible tyranny of third-party cookies.

0.4. Vault of Fears

An0nBit9 : I heard here is the skulkiest place in the 0n10n.An0nBit9 : Isdatchu?

0ct0pu5s :

,--. .--.

/ \. ./ \

/ /\/ “ \/\ \

/ _/ /~~~v~~~\ \_ \

/ /####|####\ \

; /\{#####|#####}/\ \

|_/ {#####|#####} \_:

| {#####|#####} |

| /{#####|#####}\ |

| / {#####|#####} \ |

| / {#####|#####} \ |

| \ \#####|#####/ / |

| \ \####|####/ / |

\ \ \###|###/ / /

\ / ~~~~~ \ /

An0nBit9 : Faa Faa Voom!

0.6. !$*!@%@)#$@(#!(*^(#$)%(#)#(!)$##%#)

(#%#&#$(!)#(#)%($#)^*)!#)@$#(@%@!*$!

(#%#&#$(!)#(#)%($#)^*)!#)@$#(@%@!*$!

This webpage could not be found =(