SnowCrash Project

"Paik artista concettuale: scopre ed esorcizza la TV nella triplice natura di mezzo di comunicazione di massa, di broadcast e di oggetto-totem. Paik imitatore della natura, inventore, veggente: nei suoi video concepisce un nuovo linguaggio basato sulla simultaneità e il collage, replicando il flusso continuo e apparentemente indistinto della coscienza e intrecciandolo ad una ininterrotta corrente metaindividuale e transculturale, in tessiture cinetiche e iconoclastiche;"

"La preconizzazione orwelliana della diffusione mass-mediale di una rappresentazione della realtà unica, controllata dall’alto come strumento di controllo e uniformazione, è rovesciata dall’ottimismo di Paik: la televisione, esempio di tecnologia accessibile, può essere un luogo di incontro e condivisione democratico, libero e universale tra genti e mondi lontani. Non si tratta di una positivista fiducia nel movimento ciecamente univoco e progressivo delle conquiste tecnologiche, ma di una riflessione - nel tempo sempre meno utopistica - intorno a una comunicazione globale e a una cultura espressiva alternative a quelle proposte dalla televisione commerciale che conosciamo, che vivono oggi in parte in canali di comunicazione democratici rappresentati da YouTube e dal social network."

"Io conosco bene il mio ruolo: qualcosa che sia tra lo sviluppo dell'hardware e quello del software. E quello che so è che mi riesce bene fare da interfaccia". Paik

è l'approccio hacker alla tecnologia che incontra la vocazione sociale dell'arte; l'utilizzo non convenzionale, artistico, sovversivo di mezzi tecnologici per esprimersi, creare nuovi linguaggi e indurre riflessioni critiche;

Nel suo lavoro del 1965 "Magnet TV", Nam June Paik posizionò una grande calamita sopra un televisore per distorcere la sua immagine; sebbene tecnicamente piuttosto rozzo, questo esperimento ha fatto da precursore per l'elaborazione moderna delle immagini elettroniche, considerevolmente più "sofisticata", che avrebbe caratterizzato la video arte dei nostri giorni. "Magnet TV" è un tipico esempio di hacking e approccio hacker alla tecnologia, una presenza costante nel lavoro di Paik e nei lavori di molti artisti multimediali che lo hanno poi seguito. Prima che i personal computer super veloci con enormi quantità di memoria rendessero l'elaborazione video digitale semplice e comune come l'elaborazione di un testo, gli hack di Paik erano l'unico modo di manipolare le immagini visive in tempo reale o di creare collegamenti tra video e audio.

MicroMega

Subpixel è "uno strumento realizzato a mano con acrilico tagliato al laser, elastici e nove lamette da barba", che possono trasformare "un piccolo spazio di una pubblicità metropolitana 'unidirezionale flusso incessante di merda' in un griglia di pixel adesivi otto per otto, per un'interazione bidirezionale con il pubblico".

http://fffff.at/subpixel/

OBSOLESCENZA PROGRAMMATA: beni progettati per "scadere".Elettrodomestici, apparecchi tecnologici, automobili... ma anche vestiti e utensili. Tutto è progettato per durare il meno possibile, perché il mercato deve essere in continuo movimento. Ma i consumatori cominciano a prendere coscienza e cercano strade alternative (come la decrescita felice proposta da Serge Latouche).

Printing on (real) one dollar bills (the ones with George Washington) enjoyable and graphically concrete data concerning the distribution of wealth in the United States: this is the premise of Occupy George, a performance created in the wake of the many growing participatory movements born out of the original "Occupy Wall Street."

Alternative and Activist New Media provides a rich and accessible overview of the ways in which activists, artists, and citizen groups around the world use new media and information technologies to gain visibility and voice, present alternative or marginal views, share their own DIY information systems and content, and otherwise resist, talk back to, or confront dominant media culture.

L.S.D Sonic Graffiti (Testing @Penn Station New York) from recyclism on Vimeo.

Concept/development: Benjamin Gaulon
Technical Support: Patrick Cashin, Lourens Rozema
Research and recent innovations have led to an amazing increase of types and uses of visual displays and screens; indeed, in our predominantly visual culture, they are everywhere. A typical person carries at least one device with a screen, is presented with them in public places, uses them at work and in many leisure activities. They are so ingrained in our everyday acts and habits that we don’t even notice them anymore.

L.S.D invites its users to engage in a new perception of their daily environment.

L.S.D feeds on light via two LDR (light depending resistor) mounted on a suction cup, allowing the sensors to be mounted on any screen surface. An analogue synthesizer converts the light input to sound waves. This device can be used in many different configurations and feeds from any light sources. Even if L.S.D can be controlled by any light source, its design is aimed at screen reading/listening.

http://www.recyclism.com/lsd_sonicgraffiti.php

As an insider recently told me, one of several ways Comcast is considering tackling excessive consumption (aside from throttling "hogs" and 250GB caps) is to boot users who get more than four DMCA warning letters in a twelve-month period. Comcast might want to reconsider.

While booting pirates is one way to ease congestion, the process currently used to identify and warn them has been shown to be seriously flawed. The companies the entertainment industry uses aren't really accountable to anybody, and they methods they use are suspect.

To drive that point home, researchers this week at the University of Washington released a study that shows that the current DMCA-warning model is not only flawed, but it can be abused to frame other people, or their printers.

By profiling copyright enforcement in the popular BitTorrent file sharing system, we were able to generate hundreds of real DMCA takedown notices for computers at the University of Washington that never downloaded nor shared any content whatsoever. Further, we were able to remotely generate complaints for nonsense devices including several printers and a (non-NAT) wireless access point. Our results demonstrate several simple techniques that a malicious user could use to frame arbitrary network endpoints.

The capital economy is going to cyclically collapse on itself: this now is a fact. The latest (disastrous) decade has spawned a variety of initiatives to create alternative systems for the exchange of "values", that are not necessarily monetary in nature. These economic systems are varied: they sometimes propose an exchange based on non-monetary resources (such as Time Banking, which allows you to trade your time spent doing something specific for other people); or they can be created by special networks, usually half-closed, in which the sharing of credit transactions and facilitation of internal trade accelerate the local development or the specific market sector, like a real complementary economy. Dyndy , a project by Jaromil and Marco Sachy, is a platform for exchange and dialogue on these issues.

http://www.dyndy.net/

Everywhere we go today we are constantly under surveillance by cctv networks. Video Sniffin' is way to turn these security devices into your own environmental television studio by plucking the wireless signals from the air and capturing them to your own recording device. Why bother to buy a camera when there are so many already within the environment?

http://gearbox.mediashed.org/?section=tutorials&action=view&id=120

The book represents a first tentative reconstruction of the history of artistic networking in Italy, through an analysis of the realities which during the past twenty years have given way to a creative, shared and aware use of technologies, from video to computers, contributing to the formation of Italian hacker communities.

Written by Tatiana Bazzichelli, with the preface of Derrick De Kerckhove and the epilogue of the videoartist Simonetta Fadda.
Translated by Helen Pringle and Maria Anna Calamia.

http://www.networkingart.eu/contents.html

http://www.google.com/governmentrequests/

This project, funded by the AHRC, is led by Dr Joss Hands and Dr Jussi Parikka and based at ARCDigital (Anglia Research Centre in Digital Culture) at Anglia Ruskin University. The project will explore the intersection of politics, networks and cultural practices. The network will work on an analysis of how the emergence of a 'network society' is reshaping the ground upon which we think about politics and culture. The primary objective is therefore to open up a dialogue between researchers, practitioners and activists that begins to map this important new domain of social, political and cultural production. Given that the notion of the network is contested, and entails many variations, the network will also have to address its own form, thus the project will entail a reflexive element which will encourage exploratory and innovative practices. To put it bluntly, it takes a network to understand the network. This will necessitate exploring emerging and ground-breaking media, communications and multi-disciplinary approaches to both scholarship and the dissemination of scholarship. This website will act as a hub for this activity and will be updated with more features and information shortly.

http://www.networkpolitics.org/