Posts Tagged ‘Internet’

Identity and Simulation. Artificial Life on the Networks

Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

With Jussi Parikka, Pau Waelder, Aymeric Mansoux and Mónica Bello. Recorded (VO EN/ES) in Barcelona the 24th of February 2012 as part of the I+C+i Our Life Online session at CCCB.
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NOP at SPEED SHOW vol.5

Sunday, January 9th, 2011

Naked on Pluto will be part of the fifth edition of the Speed Show series! This new release, titled ‘Open Internet’, will be happening in Paris the 13th of January. The event is curated and produced by Aram Bartholl, Marie Lechner & Anne Roquigny. Unfortunately the NOP crew is held hostage by EVr14’s cleaning bots at the moment and won’t make it in time! Please drop by for a chat, an energy drink and some browser based love brought to you by:

Anonymous, Jean-Baptiste Bayle, Christophe Bruno & Samuel Tronçon, Claude Closky, Marika Dermineur, Caroline Delieutraz, Constant Dullaart, JODI, Jérôme Joy, Tobias Leingruber, Aymeric Mansoux & Dave Griffiths & Marloes de Valk, Albertine Meunier, Geraldine Juarez feat. M.I.A., Evan Roth, Systaime, VideOdrome mailing list, La Quadrature du Net (Jérémie Zimmermann).

SPEED SHOW vol.5: ‘Open Internet’
Welat Internetcafe
12 Rue d’Enghien, Paris
13th January  2011
7:00-11:00 PM

More information here: http://fffff.at/speed-show-5/

Plutonian Striptease X: Constant

Sunday, October 31st, 2010

astounding stories of super science: spawn of the stars
Plutonian Striptease is a series of interviews with experts, owners, users, fans and haters of social media, to map the different views on this topic, outside the existing discussions surrounding privacy.

Constant is a non-profit association, an interdisciplinary arts-lab based and active in Brussels since 1997. Constant works in-between media and art and is interested in the culture and ethics of the World Wide Web. The artistic practice of Constant is inspired by the way that technological infrastructures, data-exchange and software determine our daily life. Free software, copyright alternatives and (cyber)feminism are important threads running through the activities of Constant. Constant organizes workshops, print-parties, walks and ‘Verbindingen/Jonctions’-meetings on a regular basis for a public that’s into experiments, discussions and all kinds of exchanges.

Michel Cleempoel, graduated at the national superior art school of la Cambre – Brussels. Author of numerous digital art works and exhibitions, in collaboration with Nicolas Malevé. http://www.deshabillez-vous.be

Nicolas Malevé, a multimedia artist since 1998, has been an active member of the association Constant. As such, he has taken part in organizing various activities to do with alternatives to copyrights, such as Copy.cult & The Original Si(g)n, held in 2000. He has been developing multimedia projects and web applications for cultural organisations. His research work is currently focused on information structures, metadata and the semantic web and the means to visually represent them.

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
Essentially because of their scale. Facebook reports having more than 500 million active users.[1] This, of course, inspires all kinds of commercial dreams. Social networks barely brought something new to the web. For personal pages, Friendster predates largely Facebook and the other social networks. And the functionalities they offer barely innovate. It is their momentum though since a large portion of the online population happily subscribes and uses these services. In our view, social networks are an internet in miniature, what the bourgeois garden is to nature: a domestic version, with fences, controllable, reassuring, narrow-minded. They have their own version of email, chat, links, search, page but everything in redux. As they are powered by social pressure, they are an endless source of anecdotes fueling the media.

It is important to remark that we hear a lot about proprietary social networks and too rarely about free social networks in the mainstream media. They exist though and are used by governments, businesses or academic institutions: ie, elgg[2], a social network releasing its code under the GPL powers various important platforms like Oxfam, Federal Canadian Government, Johns Hopkins University or Université Lille 1. (more…)

Plutonian Striptease VII: Florian Cramer

Saturday, October 9th, 2010

astouning stories of super science: the ape-men of xlotli

Plutonian Striptease is a series of interviews with experts, owners, users, fans and haters of social media, to map the different views on this topic, outside the existing discussions surrounding privacy.

Florian Cramer‘s background is comparative literature and art history with a focus on experimental arts, media, poetics and aesthetics. From 2006 to 2010, he was responsible for the Networked Media Master programme of the Piet Zwart Institute. Since 2008, he works as an applied research professor (Dutch: “lector”) supervising the research programme Communication in a Digital Age of the Piet Zwart Institute.

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
I see two major reasons: One, social networks have popularized classical Internet communication with accessible interfaces. So finally, everyone – including journalists – understands Internet as more than just an electronic distribution channel, and has also been cured from the “cyberspace”, “hypermedia” and “virtual reality” memes. But as a result, functionality and communication culture that has always been a core feature of the Internet is falsely being perceived as new, as a “social media revolution”.

The second reason is widespread job anxiety among the makers of the traditional news media, and those who indirectly live on the food chain of classical mass media production. Research suggests that younger people devote most of their media attention to social networks and “Web 2.0” services. At the same time, nobody except Google and, to a lesser degree, Facebook has figured out a revenue model for them. They help making traditional media marginal, but don’t create equivalent work opportunities for ‘creatives’ – designers, writers, etc. Contrary to the common belief that “social media” brought a shift from centralized one-to-many communication to a decentralized and self-organized model, just the opposite is true in regards to media ownership. A culture of countless local newspapers and TV stations, for example, is being replaced with a few global players in the Internet. The days where filmmakers could live from making MTV video clips, where critics could survive outside academia as newspaper and magazine writers and artists lived from jobs in the advertising industry are almost over. The strong news media coverage of social network mirrors the respective anxiety of the editors. (more…)

Plutonian Striptease V: Geert Lovink

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010

astounding stories of super science: monsters of moyen

Plutonian Striptease is a series of interviews with experts, owners, users, fans and haters of social media, to map the different views on this topic, outside the existing discussions surrounding privacy.

Geert Lovink, founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, is a Dutch-Australian media theorist and critic. He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and in 2003 was at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. In 2004 Lovink was appointed as Research Professor at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and Associate Professor at University of Amsterdam. He is the founder of Internet projects such as nettime and fibreculture. His recent book titles are Dark Fiber (2002), Uncanny Networks (2002) and My First Recession (2003). In 2005-06 he was a fellow at the WissenschaftskollegBerlin Institute for Advanced Study where he finished his third volume on critical Internet culture, Zero Comments (2007).

Social networks are often in the news. Why do you think this is the case?
“Who cares about the internet!” is a phrase I heard kids saying the other day. If only we were there… Internet, the forgotten medium. It is indeed true that I have gotten used to the fact that the internet is overhyped and constantly in news over the past 15 years. Social media is just the latest craze, following terms such as Web 2.0 and the intense reporting around ‘blogging’. We should not forget that part of the urge to report is the fact that these social networking sites are in direct competition with ‘old media’ such as TV and print in terms of the ‘attention economy’ and related advertisement budgets. (more…)

Plutonian Striptease III: Geoff Cox

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

astounding stories of super science: the moon master

Plutonian Striptease is a series of interviews with with experts, owners, users, fans and haters of social media, to map the different views on this topic, outside the existing discussions surrounding privacy.

Geoff Cox is currently a Researcher in Digital Aesthetics as part of the Digital Urban Living Research Center, Aarhus University (DK). He is also an occasional artist, and Associate Curator of Online Projects, Arnolfini, Bristol (UK), adjunct faculty, Transart Institute, Berlin/New York (DE/US) and editor for the DATA Browser book series (published by Autonomedia).

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
Social networks, or more specifically the social web, are bound up with vested interests and the social imaginary. They have become key sites for entertainment, making business and even doing politics. Along with this, and as communications technologies become key sites for various forms of contestation, there are bound to be some juicy stories. In addition, social networks are becoming the apparatus of the news. On the one hand, there is the use of platforms for various kinds of social movements and alternative news gathering, and on the other, the old news apparatus is adapting itself to new kinds of distribution channels – rather like selling any other product. (more…)

Plutonian Striptease I: Rob Myers

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

astounding stories of super science - brigands of the moon

First in a series of interviews with experts, owners, users, fans and haters of social media, to map the different views on this topic, outside the existing discussions surrounding privacy.

Rob Myers is an artist, writer and hacker based in Peterborough, England. He is part of the GNU Social team. GNU social is a decentralized social network that you can install on your own server. Project catchphrase:

What if you could authorize your server to reveal as much, or as little information about you to other sites, as you wish… one time, one day, or forever?.

Social networks are often in the news, why do you think this is?
Often it’s moral panics of the sort that accompany the spread of any new technology. But there’s a growing awareness in old media that social networking software sites are starting to gain the kind of hold on human communication that postal, telegraph, and telephone networks have had in the past. That kind of power is always abused. Old media used to and still does where it can. (more…)

The Art of Surviving in Simcities

Saturday, June 26th, 2010

Here is a post from a chapter that I wrote for the Walled Garden publication released in 2009 by Virtueel Platform as a follow up of the 2008 Walled Garden conference in Amsterdam. The book was edited by Annet Dekker en Annette Wolfsberger. Reading my paper again today, I did not change my mind on the issues of “information exhibitionism” and “privacy as currency for gratis services”, but I would certainly mention the recent discussions that are happening in the GNU Social list, as well as several other efforts to develop social software as a distributed infrastructure.

Introduction

Used and abused by many, the notion of “2.0, 3.0, x.0” is mostly jargon that inherited its vagueness from a desire to inflate technological value and its cultural impact. This is nothing but a commercial attempt to resuscitate the dotcom era by promising a future of connected services and communication. Unfortunately there is nothing new in terms of network infrastructure nor in terms of how people have used the Internet to date. At most, another layer of abstraction has been built on pre-existing technology, and some interoperability has been added in terms of data exchange. It doesn’t matter though, if all this vapour ends up either up in the clouds, or stuck in condensation on some forgotten server. All of us are experiencing how the use of the Internet and the growing dependence on computation has a serious impact on our everyday lives. There is no need to pretend this is a side effect of new web application trends and their social impact. On the contrary, the transition phase we are experiencing now is rather simple to understand: humanity has started its slow shift from total offline activity to complete online and digitally assisted life. (more…)