AUTO Visits NEWS » Neural.it :: media culture, hacktivism

Neural.it :: media culture, hacktivism (20 unread)

links for 2008-02-29

Posted: February 29th, 2008, 1:19pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- Art and science team up on a very tall city order 25-foot-high experimental microbial fuel cell sculpture by Jon Karafin (tags: art science media)
links for 2008-02-28

Posted: February 28th, 2008, 1:18pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- Steven Poole: Trigger Happier A historical book on videogame culture, freedownload (tags: media video videogame)
Cass R. Sunstein - Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge

Posted: February 28th, 2008, 11:22am GMT by Alessandro Ludovico

book - Oxford University Press - ISBN 9780195189285
Collaboration is in the end what the web has literally revolutionized in its first fifteen years. The collective knowledge development has found, for example, in the Wiki technology a tremendous tool to support its development. This book has been written by a professor in jurisprudence, trying to summarize and connect various dynamics in selecting and producing information flows can be turned itself into a tool for approaching our daily knowledge management differently. For those who don't know yet, learning of prediction markets, deliberation, groupthink, information cocoons, just to name a few, dynamics, would be a true discovery. The collective rationality that can then be reached, facilitated by digital tool can easily lead to utopian visions. But, the author is a pragmatic writer, nevertheless enthusiastic about the democratic possibilities of the wisdom generated by groups of people (that beat experts more often than not). There's a lack in a pure theoretical elaboration (seminal Pierre Levy's "intelligence collectif" strangely enough is never cited), but the value in this text is in being more an insightful guide to innovative social dynamics than a definitive reference.
2.4Ghz, detourned surveillance

Posted: February 26th, 2008, 11:33am GMT by Alessandro Ludovico

The new project by RECYCLISM ™ is hitting, as many media artists are doing yet, the prosperous muse of wireless technologies. 2.4Ghz™ exploits wireless netcams populating the urban space in a very simple but interesting way. BNJMN™ GAULON (alias Benjamin Gaulon) has been riding the streets of a few European cities with a wireless video receiver, like the ones used by parents to remotely watch over their babies. His aim was to detect and record the floating video signals emitted by those network cameras like in the historical work Life's a User's Manual by Michelle Teran. GAULON's project also points out how an increasingly spreading technology of surveillance can be smartly used to acquire data from other surveillance technologies. The detournement as a way of creating conflict within society was a practice widely experimented by the situationist movement (whose theories directly inspire RECYCLISM). But actually the theories of Michel De Certau and his 'practices of everyday life' are maybe more appropriate to interpret 2.4Ghz experience. It changes usage patterns whose consumption is normally assigned to, converting an establishment tool into a weapon potentially useful for our daily practice of liberation. Surveillance cameras were also at the core of the Interception performance, where the cameras' physical hijacking and its use in other more explicit contexts pushes people to easily realize their privacy invasion. But 2.4Ghz tries to make more explicit those signals freed in the air, claiming their accessibility by anyone with a wireless video receiver being not only an observation target but also a more conscious observer. It's interesting the way the whole RECYCLISM™ project is publicly presented: the device is attached to street lamppost, to reveal live the presence of cameras around broadcasting video signals. The project is somehow making a statement about the open economy of the trash (defined as material without owner), which allows people and artists to acquire new stuff and transform it into something with a value. Nevertheless, this position is sarcastically contradicted with all the ™ symbols accurately added to any project's name, establishing a private property claim that trash had originally lost.
Tony Canonico
Transmediale 08, Conspire, report

Posted: February 25th, 2008, 10:50am GMT by Alessandro Ludovico

Transmediale 08 photo set
Transmediale festival 2008 edition brought a series of important innovations: a new artistic director, Stephen Kovats, taking over Andreas Broeckmann after a seven-year period; the coming back to the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, after two editions spent at the Akademie der Künste; the publication of a book on the same festival theme, offering visitors a chance to go deeper with the festival topics and a starting point for a critical reflection, usually precluded with the traditional program guide (still available); the Vilém Flussser Theory Award introduction, an acknowledgment (organized with the homonymous Universität der Künste archive recently opened) to the best research in the media theory field, that probably will evolve in the near future into a residency program open to researchers and theoreticians. The spacious and modern Haus der Kulturen architecture has hosted the usual succession of conferences, sessions, video, exhibitions, performances, and lots of visitors, with events following each other so swiftly to constitute a literally breathtaking schedule. The ample Haus' rooms has facilitated the people flow, almost completely avoiding the tiring cues that have characterized the two previous editions at the Academy. Nevertheless if the organizers would consider to reduce the sessions in parallel and contemporaneous events, they'd probably meet the public's approval. This year theme, "Conspire" has been developed in different ways mostly in the conferences and video selection. If (almost) all the entries in the program can be considered in a political perspective. It's also worth to mention that, especially for the works in the exhibition, it's easy to spot where the ostentation of a political issue seem to be only a pretext to pure aesthetic experiments. Other eminently political opportunities have been presented during the Salon meetings, that this year was named after the Bilderberg group, paying homage to the homonymous conspiratorial group from the past century. The informal meeting structure however settled an ideal atmosphere for spontaneous exchanges and extemporary people/ideas connections as well as ludic moments (an outstanding one was the Monopoly revisited by Hilda Yàñez). The exhibition (also entitled "Conspire") has been curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and it brought an important discontinuity from the previous festival exhibitions, that often blinked to galleries and the art market, consequently loosing their focus on digital art and culture. Curatorial selections has cleverly reconciled the need to clear the new artistic languages with the (often forgot) need of not corrupting them just to please the market. The outcome was a very enjoyable exhibition, where close to many works worth to remember ("End of secrecy", "New worship", "Transitioners" and "Amazon noir" only to name a few), there were others less meaningful, that seem to be there just to purify the mind before a new stimuli and charms assault. Something to definitely improve is the almost missed informations about the works (title, year and author are not enough for both professional and passing-by visitors), either in the exhibition areas, in the program guide and in press releases. The film and video section was a minor one, with some exceptions, avoiding any connection with the digital culture. On the contrary the number of external events, out of the Haus, was substantial and very interesting. Among them it's worth to mention Keiichiro Shibuya's "Filmachine" exhibited at the Podewils'sches palais, and Gregory Shakar's different works exhibited at the characteristic Gravis flagship store. The awards were assigned during the usual ceremony: the media theory first prize was given to Simon Yuill, while Julia Meltzer and David Thorne won the first prize in the artworks category with their video "Not a Matter of If but When"; second prize was awarded to "Amazon Noir" (by Ubermorgen.com, Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico), while the third prize went to Gordan Savicic's "Constraint City: The Pain of Everyday Life". Club Transmediale, the parallel festival devoted to sounds, has been mainly hosted in the usual venue: the Maria am Ostbanhnhof club (except from a few events taking place at the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse and elsewhere). This year title ("Unpredictable"), announced artistic investigations conducted among errors, coincidences and other accidents able to alter the creative gesture dynamics. Among the program highlights there were the Sonic Wargame creative battle and the "Kassetten konzert" by Schnizeler and Seidel. Some live acts were "unpredictable" indeed, in a positive sense in the case of Andy Stott e Claro Intelecto, in a negative one especially in the case of Mouse on Mars: it was widely know that they were reflecting on their artistic identity, but everybody was at least puzzled to see a "rock band" concert even with the ritual strums. So Transmediale proved once again to be a topical and unmissable festival, but a reflection on the current digital culture status is needed. If it's true that it is definitely out of the underground culture ghetto (also thanks to the two decades of this Berlin festival), but it's also true that confusion reigns here: artists, musicians and teoreticians that used to have a specific identity before, now seem to be bewildered as characters in search of an author. Some have embraced mainstream and institutional paradigms and logics, some are still fighting some rearguard battles with an antagonism spirit, and some are simply stuck in the middle, unsure about doing. In this chaotic situation big festivals are suffering from being constitutionally inadequate to summarize what's happening. The necessity to be as exhaustive as possible prevent festivals to specifically focus on specific phenomena. In this very moment of such a radical redefinition, public often seem to be lost and come to prefer attending smaller events that, even if with an obviously limited perspective, let the public come back home with a few more certainties.
Vito Campanelli
Sonic Acts XII, The Cinematic Experience

Posted: February 23rd, 2008, 11:33pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico

Many festival emerged in the last decade, but only a bunch of them find their own way, focusing on some peculiar investigations during the years. Sonic Acts is undoubtedly one of them, presenting every two years in Amsterdam a whole program on aural and visual relationships. Its twelfth edition is entitled "The Cinematic Experience", and it seems to be one of the richest in terms of content and research (previous editions in 2001, 2003, 2004 and 2006). The attracting possibility of connecting to their livestreams is reinforced by the program, physically spread over different (usual) locations in the city, that includes a series of conferences (with Erkki Huhtamo‭ talking about "The Diorama Revisited", Timothy Druckrey presenting "Cinemedia‭: ‬Archaeologies of Computation and AI in Cinema" and Douglas Kahn‭ with "‬The Conditions of Live Cinema" just to name a few of them), seminal films (projected in the De Balie cinema) and outstanding live acts (among them Pe Lang + Zimoun - Untitled Sound Objects, Leafcutter John, ‬D-Fuse with their project Latitude, Ryoichi Kurokawa, Otolab with their project Circo Ipnotico and various Acousmonium live concert/demonstrations). Last but really not least, a proper publication is already available, to preserve memory and ideas of the last research chapter in the intertwining of sound and visual stimuli.
links for 2008-02-23

Posted: February 23rd, 2008, 1:19pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- Ushahidi.com - Timeline Of Events A visualization of the spread of violence over the course of these painful few weeks in Kenya. (tags: hacktivism visual software)
links for 2008-02-22

Posted: February 22nd, 2008, 1:19pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- MAKE: Blog: ABSOLUT MACHINES - Amazing robotic, web connected ping-pong tossing musical instrument, a large-scale electromechanical sculpture Kinetic sculptural fun including fine orchestration. (tags: robot music sound)
- Bent 2008 | The BENT Festival Circuit Bending U.S. based festival (tags: art hacking music sound)
links for 2008-02-21

Posted: February 21st, 2008, 1:22pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- YouTube - REMsuperserious's Channel REM posted eleven music video of theirs on YouTube, free to watch (and eventually download if you know how). (tags: music video copyright)
- Goolag A web auditing tool that enables everyone to audit his or her own web site via Google. The scanner technology is based on "Google hacking," a form of vulnerability research developed by Johnny I Hack Stuff. (tags: hacking)
links for 2008-02-19

Posted: February 19th, 2008, 1:19pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories - More Bugs Stickers: First action shots Sticker action to complain to Microsoft. (tags: hacktivism media software)
links for 2008-02-18

Posted: February 18th, 2008, 1:19pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- Faith Fighter | Molleindustria Religion war as a playful fight. Enjoy. (tags: software hacktivism videogame)
links for 2008-02-17

Posted: February 17th, 2008, 1:17pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- Banksy Outdoors Bansky beautiful and visionary interventions on the wall between Israel and the Palestinian territories. (tags: hacktivism media visual)
- Canon’s Iris Registration Mode - Biological Copyright Metadata : Photography Bay Watermarking with your body data (tags: copyright science hacktivism)
links for 2008-02-16

Posted: February 16th, 2008, 1:19pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- Frozen Grand Central at Improv Everywhere Over 200 Improv Everywhere Agents froze in place at the exact same second for five minutes in the Main Concourse of Grand Central Station (tags: video hacking art)
- Ohm Sweet Ohm: Outgoing Linux Australia president's hot-wired home | Computerworld Domotics in an excellent diy style (tags: hacking software)
links for 2008-02-15

Posted: February 15th, 2008, 1:19pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- The popularity dialer Fake a phone call easily and credibly! (tags: hacking software media)
- the future of music: credo Perhaps the single most influential of Cage's written texts, first delivered as a lecture in 1937 (tags: art music sound)
links for 2008-02-14

Posted: February 14th, 2008, 1:19pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico
- "Sounds" of individual molecules captured Physicists recorded tiny vibrations of individual molecules and put them in audible form. (tags: science sound)
Repeat Please: Cultura VJ

Posted: February 13th, 2008, 6:52pm GMT by Aurelio Cianciotta

Book - Eutopia 2007
Curated by the Zemos98 collective, 'Repeat Please: Cultura VJ', an exhibition included in the rich program of the Eutopia 2007 festival held in Cordoba, Spain, reflects a possible synthesis in the proliferation of realtime audio-video experiments, following the local and international scenes, focusing not only on dance music, but also on more experimental performances and projects (following the developments of a scene that doesn't adapt itself very well to being a simple enrichment for clubs and events). In this catalog, one page after the other, we find pictures of the most recent works by Nam June Paik, a seminal multimedia artist, or of Coldcut/Exstatic in 'Timber' (1997), an inspirational project, both 'political' and ecological. There's also a nice amount of informations on Spanish crews, interleaved with works by other 'historic' videojockeys such as Ryoichi Kurokawa, Lia, Eclectic Method, C-TRL Labs, before a final 'Mapa Vj Mundo', which isn't very comprehensive or particularly representative of themes and trends. Overall, though, this work is interesting and reaffirms the vitality of the small national groups which have been long active in these artistic fields.
Aurelio Cianciotta
Skinstrument, how to generate sound with human skin

Posted: February 12th, 2008, 11:25am GMT by Valentina Culatti

People are used to the sound of skin played by percussion instruments. Most of them consist of at least one membrane (skin) that is stretched over a shell and struck, either directly with parts of a player's body, or with some sort of implement, to produce sound. But what if the skin is human? Percussion denotes the collision of two bodies producing sound. Then what if both the two colliding bodies are human? This scenario is not a morbid fantasy but the core of the latest Daan Brinkmann’s creation: Skinstrument. It's a musical instrument that can be played by two or more people. It works using skin resistance as a parameter to generate sound. Perceiving a subtle, almost imperceptible flow of electricity players become part of a circuit, and touching each other's skin the circuit starts to trigger a sound generation. It's crucial then that the touching intensity determines the sound frequency. So the electric tension is not only translated into sound but also into sexual tension, ironically inspired by the shape of the instrument that resembles a breast and instinctively generated by the touch of other people’s skin. The result is an unpredictable choreography based on human interaction.
Valentina Culatti
Plink Jet, plucking inkjet printers

Posted: February 11th, 2008, 10:17am GMT by Alessandro Ludovico

One of the most common practices in the media art field has always been the hacking of everyday tools, like the countless devices that expand our own computer potential. In recent years, within this trend, we can single out a specific one that uses different kinds of printers with a pure performative approach. After the paradigmatic Dot Matrix Synth (an in-progress project started by Paul Slocum in 2004) there have been a long creative series of installations and attempts (more or less fortunate), rethinking these output devices for different purposes and output. The last is Plink Jet, a robotic musical instrument made by Lesley Flanigan and Andrew Doro with four inkjet printers. These two students at the Tisch School of Arts in the New York University have transformed each of the printers in a guitar string, and the result is an unusual musical instrument that can be literally played by a user, can autonomously produce sounds as well and can finally work combining these two modes. The user can choose from several levels of manual control, all easily accessible, each corresponding to a different degree of man/machine interaction. The result of these collaborative performances is unpredictable, while the quality of the sounds produced, as always happens, depends on the sensitivity and expertise of the single user interacting with the machine.
Vito Campanelli
Victoria Vesna - Database Aesthetics, Art in the Age of Information Overflow

Posted: February 6th, 2008, 11:25am GMT by Alessandro Ludovico

book - University Of Minnesota Press - ISBN 9780816641192
Database are collections of data with an embedded sense and their planned structure defines the conceptual relationships among items. It's a cultural infrastructure, sometimes even similar to literature production, selecting and connecting small or vast amount of data with invisible mutual wires. A database defines: access, philosophy of its structure, and then, eventually, a narrative that tells author's relationships intentions. Of course making art with databases it's not about using data as a sculptor would use marble, but about envisioning sense in structured and homogeneous data collections, turning on a visionary view that would enlighten extensive and intertwined paths within these collections. And if Manovich here states that "creating a work in new media can be understood as the construction of an interface to a database" the many projects and theories described by this anthology contributors rethink the relationships between data, visualizing new possible sense, and even (rarely) going even beyond the interface paradigm. Technical, aesthetic, and ethical analyses support artistic data collection from analog media to the digital dimension, outlining a natural need of using database as cultural archetype, as databases are the core engine of the whole net (somehow the biggest conceived database).
Constellation, the contingency of household appliances as an eternal dilemma

Posted: February 4th, 2008, 12:08pm GMT by Alessandro Ludovico

At the Vitamin Creative Space, in 2007 Freize Art Fair, there was only one Chinese gallery, Guangzhou, that showed among others artworks by Chu Yun, an artist based in Shenzhen, South China. His ‘Constellation’ is an installation consisting of daily household electric appliances. The viewer enters a dark room in which sparkling stars turn out to be indicator lights of the former appliances, once the audience sight adapts to the darkness. When put together, these lights form a world of their own and start to emit communication signals. Chu Yun’s art always seeks to approach invisible forces in everyday life and discloses them. As the 17th Century Dutch philosopher Spinoza believed there is a deterministic universe where "All things in nature proceed from certain necessity and with the utmost perfection." Therefore, nothing happens by chance in Spinoza's world, and reason does not work in terms of contingency - reality is perfection. Today, Spinoza’s interest in the world order of geometric forms reminds us how closely the artificiality of our knowledge corresponds to the world one. Interestingly, his philosophy also evokes a counterforce: contingency, which is exactly the driving force behind our rational observation. Therefore, what Chu Yun attempts to experiment in his artwork is how an individual could find himself surrounded by contingency and the artificial driving forces of his own tracks.
Valentina Culatti