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book, DIY, USA, 2009, English
Almost none of the dozens of interactive music tables have escaped the "abstraction" trap, sticking with similar, familiar "elements" made in perfect geometric shapes that assume the identity of "instruments", "samples", "drums", you name it. Yuri Suzuki's "Sound Chaser" instead tries to exploit a connective system that has already
proven to be functional: the rail system. His small but very well designed machine simply follows the tracks of chipped pieces of vinyl records (that the author got at second hand stores) joined together. It's a double process: the records are dissected and broke into pieces, destroying their original published unity. But their pieces, as cells of a new organism, come back into life through the join and the "chaser" running through them in a playful path freely constructible by the user. The manipulation of sounds becomes purely manual, mechanic but seamlessly recombinant.
cd+, 2009, Kvitnu
Pirate Bay owners Gottfrid Svartholm (aka anakata), Peter Sunde (aka brokep), Fredrik Neij (aka TiAMO), and Carl Lundstrom recently were given prison sentences for their roles in running a BitTorrent torrent aggregator that centralises free music, film and software trading. Ordered to pay 30 million Swedish
kronor (SEK), Anakata has instead launched a campaign dubbed "internet-avgift", or "internet fee", a play on Sweden's television licence fee, the tv-avgift. Using a website modelled on the one run by Sweden's television licensing body, Pirate Bay founders are encouraging their fans to assist them in sending money to Danowsky & Partners, the law firm that represented the music industry at their trial. The internet-avgift in fact consists of a "DDO$" attack, a reference to DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. While a standard DDOS attack encourages a flood of e-traffic to knock a website offline, the so-called DDO$ encourages a shower of payments to overload the victim. Receiving no more than one Swedish kronor at a time, the Danowsky firm will be forced to spend a huge amount of money processing little more than pocket change, as the bank account to which the payments are directed has only 1000 free transfers, after which any transfers have a surcharge of 2 SEK for the account holder. Pirate Bay's captains are some of the world's sneakiest filesharers and their last mischievous act could end up ruining the law firm. Will the ill-equipped lawyers succumb to a torrent of payments? Or will they end up on top? The trial continues.
National Art Museum of China, The MIT Press, ISBN 978-0262512268, China/USA, 2009, English
WikiLeaks is an astonishing community platform that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive documents relating to governmental, corporate, or religious acts, effectively preserving the anonymity and untraceability of its
contributors. Actually they claim to host 1.2 million documents sent by dissident communities and anonymous sources. It's an incredibly powerful tool for research, a priceless database for freedom of information and especially investigative journalism, and it should be taken into account that bloggers (especially) still have a different status from journalists. They avoided the trap of free posts, so they now check and edit everything, taking responsibility of what they publish. WikiLeaks mission is just to allow public evaluation of the documents and they have already proven bold enough to reject censorship pressures from giants like the Chinese government or the Scientology religious sect. And that's quite a remarkable attitude.