Steam punk is dead, anarchronism is the new black of cultural appropriation!

Anarchronism is a proposal to approach contemporary practices through a portmanteau word that might bring some confusion: the error, deliberate or not, of the anachronism meets the chaos and autonomy of anarchy/ism. The compression of the two words allows us to comprehend artworks that are themselves the results of compressions, suggesting temporal bifurcations materialised by artefacts that are difficult to date.

Notions such as media archaeology, retro-futurism, retromania, neo-analogue or post-internet put at stake time, technology and memory. Anarchronism belongs to the same constellation of concepts, without being the exact equivalent of any of those. This idea, and the resulting artworks, create situations that ruthlessly reconfigure the relations between digital and analogue, vernacular and retro, innovation and obsolescence, mass media and DIY approach to hardware, software and protocols.

The exhibition deals with the interactions between digital and memory; digital technology has been advertised as an everlasting mean to access data, but didn’t fulfil its mission. Some artists shake it up conceptually and aesthetically by capturing flux, disrupting time scales and creating new ways to encode, decode and to lose information.

Each presented work modifies, in its own way, the operating modes of the successive strata of digital and analogue technologies: the invention of a new long-term storage media in “1.8s”, or of new ways of encoding and decoding information in “SKOR Codex”; the return to less common uses of mass media (the audio cassette as a storage for code), mixed with contemporary elements in “LogForData”; the creation of new ways to read existing media, like the “REMAP” plotter reading a magnetic tape.

Another approach is to materialise digital information: the history of a Wikipedia page becomes a paper encyclopedia in “The Iraq War: A History of Wikipedia Changelogs”; a mp3 recording of the growl of a highly endangered Pyrenean brown bear is carved into the granite stele of “Stèle binaire”; in “Hexen 2.0”, the interlinked history of technologies and ideas appears both as diagrams and tarot cards. “The Weise7 in/compatible Laboratorium Archive” takes the opposite approach: the analogue form is dematerialised, through a wireless server hidden inside a book. Materiality is also a key aspect of “Copies non conformes”, going back and forth between digital and analogue in a recursive process of printing and scanning.

Finally, some of the exhibited artworks offer a change of perspective: by exploring forms of earth-based computation and programming, “Sketches for an earth computer” transforms the place of human in technology; “Refonte” suggests a prehistory of the future by transforming e-waste into rudimentary weapons; finally, in “Trace I”, the perspective literally changes through the mechanical scan of a bust.

Artists: Cécile Babiole (FR), projectsinge (FR/BE), Balint Bolygo (HU/UK), James Bridle (UK), Collectif Dardex (FR), David Guez (FR), Martin Howse (UK/DE), Flo Kaufmann (CH), Signal to Noise (UK), Société Anonyme (NL), Suzanne Treister (UK) en Weise 7 (DE).

The exhibition is curated by Anne Laforet and Yves Bernard. It runs until the 14th of June 2015 at iMAL.

The Tokyo National Art Center owned copy of the SKOR Codex is taking a trip to Bandung in Indonesia at Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, as part of the CRYPTOBIOSIS exhbition curated by NAKAO Tomomichi from the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan.

One of the greatest discoveries in art history to occur in 2014 was surely the world’s oldest cave paintings found on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia. Showing hand shapes and animal drawings, these ancient cave paintings encapsulate the impulses of the people who lived here amidst Sulawesi Island’s natural wilderness that they needed to express and record just like a time capsule.

Even if they are not ancient cave paintings, artistic works are all essentially time capsules encapsulating the emotions experienced by the artist at a certain time and in a certain place in the sense that something hidden within each work is given new life and begins to more through the empathy of viewers.

In biology, the act of animals and plants temporarily shutting down life activity in order to survive in the harsh natural environment is called “cryptobiosis (hidden life activity)”. Lotus flowers germinating from seeds that are several thousands of years old and water bears that did not die after being released into cosmic space for several days can be said to be astonishing examples of cryptobiosis. That is to say, cryptobiosis is simultaneously the stopping of life activity premised on the expectation that the life activity will start up again and a method for survival.

Here, by amplifying the biological phenomenon of cryptobiosis to include human social activities and media art, we wish to consider nature and archives as latent human capabilities or memories, old and new styles or technologies, and the wellspring of art. To this end, from amongst past award-winning works of the Japan Media Arts Festival we wish to focus on works that attempt to resurrect through some method something that has been buried somewhere in our world, their existence and value long forgotten, and try to gather together in Bandung, Indonesia.

The opening is today (23rd January 2014), more information can be found here, with the participation of YAMAMOTO Yoshihiro, Saigo No Shudan (ARISAKA Ayumu, OITA Mai, KOHATA Ren), KANNO So & YAMAGUCHI Takahiro, TOYAMA Keiichiro, Nanmo (YANAGIHARA Takayuki), La Societé Anonyme, WADA Ei, INABA Takuya, James Bridle, SHINTSUBO Kenshu＋IKEGAMI Takashi, IGARASHI Daisuke, Syaiful Aulia Garibaldi, Bagus Pandega.

via pi.kuri.mu

RECHARGE: the Experimenta 6th International Biennial of Media Art
28 November 2014 til 21 February 2015
Melbourne, Australia

RECHARGE: the Experimenta 6th International Biennial of Media Art, focuses on artists whose work is consciously inspired by and entangled with the past and who use the most contemporary of tools. Recharge asks does knowledge change when it is presented in different cultural contexts and technological forms? By producing unconventional perspectives, can experimental artists illuminate existing knowledge and meaning for a new generation? Can artists lead us to entirely new modes of consciousness?

The exhibition presents works from more than 15 acclaimed Australian and international artists, featuring many new artworks. Media art is inherently multidisciplinary, born out of the processing power of computer technology that made possible, for the first time, a substantial interplay between various media and practices. For the Experimenta 6th International Biennial of Media Art, Artistic Director Jonathan Parsons has selected works that draw from photography, installation, electronic sculpture, interactive and immersive media, robotics, bio art, live art, sound art, 3D printing, animation, film and video.

“The artists in the Experimenta 6th International Biennial of Media Art are alert to both the intimate and the broader cultural contexts through which they move and live. By listening, watching, thinking and making, they recharge knowledge and meaning systems, reinvigorating these systems or radically transforming them. “ [Jonathan Parsons, Artistic Director]

We’ve sent our very own @cmos4040 to safely deliver the sixth copy of the book and represent the vocoder department of our corporation.

When I started my PhD, I first wanted to write about the potential role of free culture licences as substitute for art manifestos when the former were used in the context of an artistic practice. This idea led to the writing of the paper “My Lawyer is an Artist” which was presented in 2011 at ISEA.

I had the chance to revise it recently for Hz Journal and benefited from very helpful editorial feedback. As a consequence, the result is more than a minor revision to the original essay and provides, I hope, some more historical unfolding that is necessary for my argument, yet was only briefly mentioned in the first version.

Abstract:

“My Lawyer is an Artist” looks back at the nineties’ free culture Pangea that saw the first artistic appropriation of the free software movement with projects such as GNUArt and the Free Art License. It argues that although today many different voices are muffled by the globalist tone of free culture, this early adoption was a conscious political choice belonging to a rich lineage of proto-copyleft artistic practices. By adopting free culture licenses, artists have turned contracts into manifestos.

You can read the whole paper here.

Last year in May, I had the opportunity to give a talk in Porto, on what I coined “sandbox culture” at the closing event of the Libre Graphics Research Unit (LGRU) research project. I had great feedback and was able to improve the way I was articulating this analysis of free culture. The result will be published online by the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe (ZKM) in the coming months and the argument is further developed in the closing chapter of my PhD thesis that should be baked and ready to serve sometimes around the end of this year.

Meanwhile, I am very happy to join the Interference next month, a gathering of people, perspectives, theories, and actions that share a critical approach to society and technology. It will take place in Amsterdam, August 15th-17th. The preliminary program looks really nice already, and here is below a copypasta of the updated talk abstract on sandbox culture, that I will be giving there:

Figures of speech, such as metaphors, are often used to communicate technological ideas to a broader audience. The Cloud comes to mind, yet what is lesser known is that computer technology can in turn also be used metaphorically to describe more general societal concerns. For instance Lawrence Lessig uses the terms of Read-Only (RO) versus Read-Write (RW) culture to describe the problems of access and rights to culture. Alas, as much metaphors attempt to clarify a signal by simplifying its information, the result of such drastic filtering often results in a plethora of misunderstandings that end up interfering with each others.

In the case of free culture, the RO vs RW approach reaches quickly its limits as soon as one steps out of the simplified binary narrative. However, by pushing this analogy of file attributes to its limits, this presentation will challenge the ideas of cultural freedom by putting it in perspective of Unix-like file permissions and venerable filesystem trickery such as the chroot command, so as to reveal a lesser known facet of free culture in its struggle to combine a dream of universalism with the harsh reality of local sandboxed particularities.

See you there!

https://interference.io

Photo: based on Scott Robinson’s Sandbox Shadow, CC-BY 2.0

As one of the awarded work of the Japan Media Arts Festival, The SKOR Codex is currently exhibited at the National Art Center of Tokyo. Discussions have started regarding to which Japanese cultural institution the Codex will be donated once the exhibition is over. Meanwhile here are some phone shots from the lucky Société Anonyme shareholder who flew there to hand over the work and collect the award.

訳してください

Last month, Pau Waelder, who I had the pleasure meeting with during a panel discussion at CCB in 2012, interviewed Dave Griffiths, Marloes de Valk and myself for the Fundación Telefónica. The purpose of the discussion was to reflect back on Naked on Pluto, a work that won the foundation VIDA award back in 2011.

The interview is available in English and Castilian.

Below a copypasta of the English version, for local archiving.

You created Naked on Pluto, a project on privacy and social networks that won the First Prize at VIDA 13.2. What drove your attention towards social networks and Facebook in particular, and how did you develop the project?

Dave: I’m interested in a technology like this when it starts being used by people who are not interested in technology. At the start of the Naked on Pluto project, social networking was reaching vast audiences. For many people then –as now– Facebook was the Internet. For some it’s the first time they use a computer. This provides a fascinating space to explore possibilities, probe the reasons why things were made the way they were – look for and document hidden assumptions of the engineers and business practices that surround the networks. We started out by researching the Facebook api and writing small prototypes to see what we could do, how it felt to be given this power – to pull data from users (with ourselves as test cases) and look at it in different contexts, and try and get some of this feeling into the game design.

Marloes: What drove my attention towards social networks was the change they brought about in my own environment. As the use of platforms like Twitter and Facebook increased, they became the new preferred mode of communication, replacing text messaging and email for a large part. It changed social mechanics in a way. Not sharing and not using these platforms meant partial social exclusion. Sharing parts of your life via social media became a new status symbol, with amounts of friends, followers, likes, etc. as measures. This of course had a big impact on other parts of life, such as the amount of time spent using mobile devices. Only one year after we started work on Naked on Pluto the first social media addiction rehab clinic appeared. It’s been quite a revolution and a very interesting one. It raises questions about social behavior and the impact technology and economy have on it. A fantastic starting point for an artistic investigation.

Facebook is well known for sending cease and desist letters to other artistic projects that have automated tasks within their platform, such as Web 2.0 Suicide Machine or Seppukoo. Did you have problems with this company due to the use of bots that cull information from the player’s profile?

Aymeric: Not at all. We can only speculate on the reasons why. My personal theory as for why we managed to stay either under the radar or irrelevant to Facebook concerns goes like this: 1. We have not made any direct confrontation with Facebook that would lead to ridicule directly the company or influence its users to leave the platform. Of course Elastic Versailles is the embodiment of everything we think is wrong with Facebook and I personally hope that whoever has been exposed with the game, and the research we made around it, will at least have a better grasp about the ill-formed notion of online privacy. Yet this is not something literally expressed in the application itself. 2. We have made sure, in every possible details, that we are not breaking any terms of service or using deceptive techniques to engage more users in the application. 3. We have left the application in what Facebook calls a developer’s sandbox, which, while making it fully playable, prevents the application from being visible in Facebook game directory, making the work spreading through the word of mouth, more or less. All these decisions were consciously made, we wanted Naked on Pluto to be a humble constant background noise, and not a hyped peak.

Dave: My thinking behind this approach came from a conversation with Maja Kuzmanovic at FoAM. We were discussing interventions of this type and the problems that come with a head on confrontation – that it creates publicity, a lot of ‘heat and light’ but doesn’t really encourage enough meaningful debate or further exploration. I consider one of the great strengths of this project was an avoidance of a simplistic message, we all use social networking, the corporations involved are simply following the logical conclusions of their business practices to satisfy their shareholders, and what is required is a much more informed debate on the issues involved. For these reasons it was vitally important that we strictly adhered to the rules of Facebook’s API use in relation to privacy (to do otherwise would have been deeply hypocritical) – it’s an open source project so the code can be audited, they had no technical or legal justification to act in our case.

Since it was created, Naked on Pluto has been presented in several exhibitions as an installation. How do you translate a web-based artwork that usually interacts with the user in the privacy of his home computer into an artistic environment in the context of a public show?

Marloes: We’ve exhibited the project in two different ways. At FILE 2012 for instance, Naked on Pluto was simply shown on a computer next to other works of net art. For this purpose we created a newspaper-style front page with reports from the game, so that when visitors are hesitant to log in to the game on a public computer using their Facebook account, they still get news from the game world via reports from SpyBots, ReporterBots and InterviewBots. At the ARCO exhibition in Madrid and the TEA Super Connect exhibition in Taipei we exhibited the project in installation form. The visitor would enter a dark library with light emitting books on the shelfs. The library plays a central role in the game and the installation was a physical representation of it. The space had EVr14 slogans printed on the shelves, books with logs of objects from the game world and everything that had happened to the object since the beginning of the game, peepholes in the walls and a projection of the game world on the floor showing all bots and players moving through the different spaces in the game and a few terminals where visitors could play the game. The whole set up evoked the feeling of being monitored by this big entity, Plutonian Corp.

Have you updated or modified the software in Naked on Pluto over the last two years? Do you consider it a work in progress?

Dave: Naked on Pluto has been the basis of lots of subsequent experiments, one of the biggest spin off projects was the FaceSponge Facebook livecoding system. This was a way to allow workshop participants to program with the Facebook API directly, and learn how to make their own social advertising software and search their friends data for interesting patterns, and share the programs they wrote with the other participants. This became one of the most effective ways to collaboratively explore the issues with online privacy. Outside of online privacy, the Naked on Pluto source code has gone on to form the basis for other work, such as SlubWorld – a collaboration between Alex McLean, Marloes and me – a collaborative musical online livecoding installation for Arnolfini in Bristol and Kunsthal Aarhus.

You made the code from Naked on Pluto freely available under a GNU Affero General Public License (AGPLv3). Do you know if it has been used to develop other projects (artistic or non-artistic)? You advocate the use of Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) in the making of artistic projects. Which are the advantages of using this kind of software?

Aymeric: There are all sorts of reasons why you would like to distribute a work of art under a free culture license. However it is not necessarily as a hope that it will be used by other artists directly. Or said differently, artists releasing their work as a free culture expression should not expect that it will be used by other artists. If we look at free culture beyond the demagogical discourse of remix culture, putting our work with such a license is more of a statement about culture, and how the latter emerges from a constant appropriation of existing ideas and materials, rather than a means to provide the tools for others to make new projects. It can happen, of course, but this is something relatively rare outside of tightly linked collectives and closely related artistic practices, as Dave was pointing in his answer to the previous question. In that sense a free software art does not change the dynamics of cooperation and collaboration between artists. We also chose the AGPL, a copyleft license specifically geared towards server side applications, to highlight and contrast with the closed nature of the source code used by Facebook once we are passed the open and welcoming appearance of its developer documentation and API calls. As for the link with the tools that we use, I find that free software provide us with an autonomy, independence, and of course a potential for appropriation through direct modification of the source code, that is simply unmatched by closed source proprietary tools and formats. Whether this is something that can fit into any existing artistic practice or lead to a better art would be however a dubious statement to make. However, the question of empowerment, autonomy and production appropriation in the context of art and design is frequently overlooked. By being more clear and expressive about one’s practice, I hope that such discussions get more attention so as to not reduce the question of tools to the one of disposable apolitical things. Spoiler: they are not.

You have stated that “software is the artwork.” In your opinion, is the current development of new media art limited by what software developers are able or willing to provide?

Aymeric: Software can be approached as a medium. Here, I refer to two things: the medium as a communication device that can carry information, and the artistic medium that is the material used to make art. In both cases, it is obvious that the current state of software development, and technology in general, has a drastic impact on the aesthetics and the cultural context of so-called media art and all its branches. This limitation certainly is a constraint. Yet, art history has shown that constraints are possibly the most interesting catalyst for art creation. Next to that, this constraint is also a cultural one, in the sense that it can be used to address timely matters. For instance, in Naked on Pluto both aspects of the software as medium are expressed: we deliberately rely on Facebook software infrastructure to make a work that aims to communicate our concerns about Facebook itself.

Dave: Following up Aymeric’s analogy I think it’s hard to produce art with a medium that you don’t have a full understanding of, so I think it’s advantageous for artists working with software to learn some programming. This is not to say that we all have to be able to write our own software, but in terms of forming good working practice when collaborating, a literacy of what is possible – it’s greatly helped by a shared common understanding of the raw materials being used. Further to this, to a large extent I think this is true for everyone – as we move into a world where algorithms are increasingly deeply ingrained in our environment, programming – or more specifically a general ‘algorithmic literacy’ becomes an increasingly important life skill.

In the current overwhelming flow of information, everything is content. How can art stand out from this flow and, ideally, provide a reflection of what it means to live immersed in data?

Aymeric: Two approaches are possible: embracing or resisting. The first one is about engaging with the competitive process in which content is published, transformed and consumed online. The second one precisely aims at refusing to play such game, by making a counter-intuitive, counter-fashion one might say, use of media. Both require quick adaptation as whether they embrace or resist, they need to evolve with their cultural context. For instance, in the fist case, art must be very topical to become one with social media. One way to do it is by adopting the forms and modes of production of the latter, such as borrowing meme strategies so as to maximize visibility in social networks; or by overemphasizing gorgeous looking video documentation to be reproduced in trendy blogs and that will most likely be the only hyperreal part of the work with which most people will ever be able to engage with; or to simply work on top or against a specific popular web platform providing some sort net dialogue. At the opposite, to stand out is to simply refuse to engage with such matters, to develop more challenging aesthetics, in which case what you refer to as living immersed in data will become visible or questionable due to the absence of its cultural and technological context in the work. Of course what I am sketching here is a bit black and white, it is however the two extreme positions in which a work can deal with the self inflicted saturation of information and short attention span promoted for the best or the worst by all the software and hardware gadgets available today. That said, both strategies have downfalls. Resisting always come with the risk of being unable to engage with contemporary concerns, or even an audience, or instead, manages to do so within the walled gardens of an artistic intelligentsia. With Naked on Pluto, we are naturally more positioned in the first category and we’re already paying the consequences of being highly topical: from a technological perspective with the need to fight against the unavoidable obsolescence of the project against Facebook software changes, and from a cultural perspective as best exemplified with the recent Snowden’s revelations that turned out to be even more alienating than our satirical fiction, or any dystopian fictional work one could have thought of!

The use of bots in Naked on Pluto introduce the user to the increasingly common experience of interacting with seemingly intelligent machines. Will the future web become a sort of Elastic Versailles, a constant dialogue with artificially intelligent entities in a controlled environment?

Aymeric: Well, to some extent this is already the case. We’re quite far from the days where websites where just fully or semi manually formatted information sent by a server to a browser, and you could also go one step before to take into account the history of protocols such as gopher. Today, websites are essentially a mix of software running on the server and on the browser, and for all sorts of reasons, such software is trying to be clever and therefore it highly mediates the information we have access to. This has been explicitly demonstrated with the problem of filter bubble in search engines, namely how search engines tailor our search results based on our search habits. But of course this is not only specific to the web. Society as a whole has been increasingly relying on software assisted telecommunications for decades now. This form of assistance is growing as hardware improves and knowledge of computer science and engineering evolve. I think most people are still perceiving artificial intelligence as some very figurative thing, like a robot helping old people or an animated paperclip asking you if you want to run a spell checker on the resume you’re typing. In fact such representations, and their cultural context, of hardware and software technology are cursed by our desire to design useful anthropomorphic things. What happens instead is that so-called artificial intelligence implemented today is just a feature of some software that is necessary to make a task easier or a process more efficient and productive; the way it manifests itself is not connected to its nature and effects, let it be its interface. Practically speaking there is some artificial intelligence in all the gadgets we use, and it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of what they do, how it manipulates us, and what happens when all these things start to interact with each others. This is probably why the openness of such things as well as their thorough peer-reviewing will become more and more essential in the years to come. But even then, even without talking about the speculative sentience of such things, the risks and abuses of technology can happen at so many different levels that transparency and analysis is not enough. This is to the point where I believe that we are more and more running towards a future where any basic technologically improved or assisted human activities will require an incredible leap of faith, otherwise denial … or some serious resilience.

Finally, how would you define artificial life?

Dave: Artificial life is a term that comes out of the remnants of artificial intelligence research in the eighties, and is concerned with a preference for emergent properties over planned ones – bottom up rather than top down design. A great deal of research was carried out in the nineties ‘growing’ software agents from populations of individuals, or studying how interactions between large numbers of simple organisms could result in complex behavior. The roots of this approach to design came from cybernetics, which is being increasingly scrutinized lately, as it is also the philosophical basis to the technology and networks that form the internet. Artificial life provided us with a consistent artistic approach to explore these kinds of issues, as Naked on Pluto is orchestrated by the interactions of a large number of independent agents, rather than a singular “grand plan”.

Aymeric: A thing that makes us wonder about our own existence and becoming.

Marloes: As “magic”, letting go of mastering, predicting and steering towards results and surrendering to anthropomorphism. Artificial life is the setting in motion of a series of automated processes that influence each other in such a way that their behavior becomes hard to predict, creating the illusion that they have a “life” of their own. A wonderful tool to tell stories about how we interact with technology.

La Société Anonyme has been invited to give a workshop at ArtEZ Institute of the Arts next week, the 21-22-23 of January. The workshop is at the cross road of the collective’s latest interest in using the Raspberry Pi as a standalone Unix like timesharing time travel machine, and the new “sandbox” MA and BA course at the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy.

Here is the blurb:

Community Memory
A workshop by La Société Anonyme

///

Community Memory is a three days workshop that aims at exploring the notion of individualism and collectivism through the culture of free and open source UNIX-like software and computer hardware from the viewpoint of a small device: the Raspberry Pi. During this session, students will be exposed to historical and technical elements of computing that are nowadays buried under an app centric culture grown in the names of user-friendliness, transparency and deceptive allegories such as the cloud.

New technologies, like smart phones and web services, promise cutting edge technologies and software as a means to empower users with a seemingly endless progression of new digital possibilities. In fact, many of these new services are striking for the many constraints they
place (where can this be played, how many “friends” can connect, who decides a remix means and if it can be “shared”). Many of the platforms are themselves built on decades old technologies & software. Community Memory aims at opening up the digital black boxes, revealing the hidden historical and technological layers of software and hardware, as well as their modes of production, with the aim of empowering the workshop participants through literacy of reading these systems.

In the workshop we will give a crash course on the modern history of computing. We will give a brief overview covering the early days of computers from ENIAC to Von Neumann architectures, and how the later combined with rising telecommunication technology have paved the way towards the embedding of politics of knowledge right into integrated circuits and software. Most importantly we will examine how the concept of time sharing in modern operating systems, that is the possibility for several users to run different programs at the same time on one single machine, relates to capitalism, hierarchy, control and the development of logistics, yet at the same time provide a software playground waiting to be radically appropriated and subverted, as best exemplified by the 1970s project Community Memory that we will look at.

Practically speaking, and next to the more theoretical elements of the workshop, we will be using the Raspberry Pi as a mainframe computer which computing resources will be shared among all the workshop participants. With this setup we will explore command line tools, how to combine and write together different small C programs to make sound and generally explore what it means to be … a user. Next to that we will examine and role play different modes of production found in free and open source software development. Finally we will work on a small reenactment of the project Community Memory, where the Raspberry Pi will be used to provide a standalone, off-the-Internet, wireless imageboard and discussion platform that we will put somewhere in town, literally exploring the idea of paratextual architectures and urban darknets.

No previous knowledge of programming or Unix like operating systems is required. However not being afraid to use your fancy laptop as dumb terminal and navigating through several layers of venerable command line software via text based interface is very much needed!

Workshop is for ArtEZ students, you can try to sneak in depending on available places left. Contact Thomas Buxó t-dot-buxo-at-artez-dot-nl for more information.

Wednesday the 22nd of January I will be giving a presentation of The SKOR Codex on behalf of La Société Anonyme. Next to my lecture, there will also be talks from Daniel Eatock and Harmen Liemburg.

The event is free and open to the public. It is organised by Graphic Design Arnhem.

Wednesday 22 January 2014
19:00 Rietveld Canteen

ArtEZ Arnhem
Onderlangs 9
6821CE Arnhem
The Netherlands

Info:
T 026 353 5624
E graphicdesign.arnhem@artez.nl

Ah!

I just received my English and French copies of the quite monumental 665 pages Digital Art Conservation, Preservation of Digital Art: Theory and Practice. It is an impressive collection of articles that represent the outcome of the three-year digital art conservation project (2010-2012) initiated at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. This book, edited by Bernhard Serexhe, manages to cover a wide range of views, from speculative to pragmatic, geeky to scholarly, and is likely to become a reference for anyone busy with digital art conservation.

Here is the blurb:

Are you born-digital?

This could be the ultimate, decisive question in the future when it comes to preserving and making the art of our time accessible for future generations.
The book presents the results of the digital art conservation project that was conceived at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and it designed to foster the international debate on the conservation of digital art.

It includes text contributions by major theorists, restorers, programmers, and artists as well as case studies. It is designed to foster the international debate on the conservation of digital art. With contributions by Edmond Couchot, Alain Depocas, Johannes Gfeller, Sabine Himmelsbach, Anne Laforet, Aymeric Mansoux, Antoni Muntadas, Jussi Parikka, Bernhard Serexhe, Siegfried Zielinski, and many others.

You can get a copy there. I hope they’ll publish a PDF eventually.

You can read my contribution, How Deep is your Source, here. If digital art conservation is your thing, make sure to also check out Archives2020 edited by Annet Dekker :)

I have been invited to talk at the fourteenth edition of Verbindingen/Jonctions, Are you being served?, which program this year is particularly dedicated to a feminist review of mesh- cloud- autonomous- and D.I.Y. servers.

Here is the abstract of my talk:

In 1982 Leslie Kaplan writes about the factory as an encompassing infinity, a timeless world without boundaries for those that live and struggle within its realm. With Kaplan, the factory universe is described as a place that breathes in place of its inhabitants, where things co-exist simultaneously, and where production happens all the time without a break. There, she describes that all space is occupied, everything becomes waste, skin, teeth, even our gaze. Reaching now the increasingly liberal mid-2010s, the universe of physical labour has led to the birth of a multiverse of software factories driven by the hyper realist lifestyle of a technological utopianism. More particularly, in the decentralised software factory multiverse, the literate worker is empowered by the merging of the centralised server authority and the labour of its clients. In this lecture I am arguing that what is perceived as both a social progress and an ethical mode of cooperation, is at the same time as much alienating and wasteful, as the factory universe of the previous century. Drawing on the story behind Natacha Porté’s libupskirt software library, I will explore the ethics of distributed software production; forking as both value and transaction mechanism; the exhibitionist property of free culture; and the growing disappearance of consensus in the individualist decentralised factory multiverse.

My lecture is Friday 10th of December, 19:00 at La Poissonnerie. Check the rest of the great program here!

La Société Anonyme got a “New Face” award at the seventeenth edition of the Japan Media Arts Festival. The book will be handed over and exhibited in Tokyo next year :))

作品概要

本作は、現代の生活や文化を書籍化し、何世紀か先に伝えるために世界各地へ 届けるプロジェクトだ。現代の生活や文化の多様性を描写している画像と音のファイルを2進コードに変換し、そのデータを紙とインクを用いることで、印刷し て残す。データの老朽化や、ハードウェアの損傷を思えば、何世紀も先へ残すメディアとして、「本」の形式が安全であることを示唆する本作は、未来の知的生 命体や地球上の人類に向けられている。本の起源とコンテンツの復元方法は、記号的な言語で「取扱説明書」に記された。ここには「この書籍は、遠い未来に地 球が高度な文明社会だった場合に限り、復元されるだろう。本作はアートに込めた“希望”でもある」と記されている。

贈賞理由

アイメリック・マンスーを含む4人のアーティストによる「ソシエテ・アノニム」（株式会社） は、2013年度のオランダ政府による芸術基金削減に対抗して結成された。アムステルダムを拠点とするこの集団の初作品となる本作はこうした現状に抵抗 し、先端的なメディアを駆使して現代生活の豊かさと芸術文化の多様性を、未来永劫に残す目的で本というタイムカプセルに落とし込まれた。その壮大で独創的 な意図と解読されるべき精緻なダイヤグラムの高度な質を高く評価した。制作された全8巻の内3巻はすでに海外の主要な図書館に保管され、第4巻は日本に残 される予定である。（岡部 あおみ）

source: http://j-mediaarts.jp