nettime mailinglist

(as originally posted to nettime-nl)[on behalf of Annet Dekker]Dear Nettimers,With kind permission of Jorine Seijdel and Liesbeth Melis, editors ofOPEN, cahier on Art and the Public Domain, I like to share the review ofthe excellent publication Art Platforms and Cultural Production on theInternet by Olga Goriunova (Routledge, 2011). The book is a valuableaddition to the net art discourse and offers an analytic and thoughtfulcounter (or at least interesting compliment) to the recent 'discussion' onnew aesthetics.all best, annet--------------Review of Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet by OlgaGoriunova (Routledge, 2011)by Annet DekkerOlga Goriunova is well known for her involvement and contributionto the shaping of the field of software art, as co-organiser ofthe software art festivals Read_me, the set-up of Runme.org, anonline software art repository, as well as curator of Funware, aninternational travelling exhibition that deals with the appreciationof fun as an inventive force in software (art) development. In her newpublication ‘Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet’she turns her attention to the organisational aesthetics of processesthat produce digital culture.A platform is an organisational concept with a long history. Intimes of political and social unrest, revolutions and avant-gardespeople form groups that are organised around a number of guidelinesor specific issues. In 2005 Tim O’Reilly en John Battelle coined thephrase “the web as platform” as the core principle of Web2.0, therebygiving the notion of a platform renewed, albeit as Goriunova attest aflattened, meaning. Whereas the web as platform is foremost describedas a conglomerate of technical development, Goriunova stresses theimportance of art platforms as experiments in the aesthetics oforganisation. Rather than a set of objects, these experiments show aspecific kind of cultural practice that is open-ended and emerges fromgrass-roots processes.Groiunova clearly makes a difference between art platforms andearlier attempts to define online practices as networked. Althoughthe art platform is a genre of networked organisation in which itprovides a “conceptual device that allows for a differentiation andproblematization of networks”, by following the theoretical discoursearound network theory, moving from Bruno Latour’s sociologistActor-Network Theory back to the concept of network theory. In thelast decade, network theory was popularised by the publication Linked(2003) by physicist Albert-László Barabási, but Goriunova makes clearthat that the coming together of the social sciences with the exactsciences was foremost based on misunderstanding which can still betraced today. This, as Goriunova shows, doesn’t mean that thinkingabout networks has stopped, several approaches can be named that havetried to imagine networks in heterogeneous and nonlinear ways, like“bifurcation (Progogine and Deleuze/Guattari), networks as assemblages(Manuel DeLanda), and ecologies and media ecologies (Guattari, Batesonand Fuller)” (5). So what does the notion of art platforms add to thisplethora?An art platform would ideally be a concept that reflects upon its ownmedia ecology. Whereas media ecology is a way of looking, seeing,doing and making, Goriunova describes an art platform as an entity,an activity and a process of development. “Art platforms engage withliving practices in their blurred and ‘dirty’ forms between a morebroadly defined swathe of culture and art”, they are to be found inthe ‘grey’ zones of cultural production. Furthermore, she argues, artplatforms make you think about the organisational forms of culture,thus an organisational aesthetics. Such an approach “sheds light onthe ways in which digital culture and aesthetics are constituted andadvanced” (13). Goriunova defines organisational aesthetics as “aprocess of emergence and a mode of enquiry that gives us a way tounderstand a digital object, process or body. It is not only a way oflooking, but also a dynamic assembling and coming up with such a body”(17). Organisational aesthetics is grounded in the digital nativeand, while structuring and organising creativity that traverses artplatforms, it highlights the development of new forces to overcomerepetition and strive for vitality. Moreover, it pays attention tothe interplays of power and the kinds of structures and conduct theseimply.Goriunova makes these forces explicit in thickly and minutiaedescriptions of several of these art practices. Maybe not surprisingthese examples move beyond the obvious internet art practices thathave gained some recognition over the years. By affirming that thebrilliant can be found in the grey and banal corners of the Internet,thereby moving away from the economically and socially deterministicpost-Marxist critique of subordination as well as the liberal thinkingon creative industries, Goriunova points to the first example and whatfew readers would consider art: Udaff.com. At first site resemblinga porn site and swearing pool inhabited by white male adults, oncloser inspection Udaff turns out to be especially interesting in itswriting of kreativs. As Goriunova explains, Udaff is a popular Russianlanguage platform that hosts a variety of literary practices, of whichthe kreativs are the most vital. By analysing its structure, beinginnately digital and thus following digital structures of organisationand aesthetic, its writing, “DIY vocabulary; virtuoso and abundantswearing; and elegantly, purposefully wrong orthography” (54), and itsusage of commenting as well as the power of social figures that arebeing extended and transformed through the networks of production,Goriunova makes a strong argument that talks across social histories,networks, concepts and actors.In a similar vain, Goriunova analyses the software art repositoryRunme.org which she co-founded and was part of during its time ofexistence (2001 – present; although the site still functions its primeimportance lasted for five years). Runme.org was created as “a format thatwould be something between an out-of-scale festival, a distributed salon,infinite exhibition, and open collection, sets of samizdat books, and setsof relationships – all in all, an art platform in the making” (71). Againit is by closely tracing and analysing the structure and making variousrelations that the brilliance of the art platform happens and starts toshine. The quotes and snippets of conversations, of which the moreinteresting ones can also be found in the footnotes, exemplify theformation and functioning of the art platform. At times hilarious, funnyand anecdotal it is always through thorough analysis that Goriunova makesher argument. Goriunova also tackles recent developments and practices onSecond Life and phenomena like surf clubs and digital folklore. The breathand reach of her observations, understanding and ability to decipher thesepractices is remarkable and not found in current writings about digitalpractices.Goriunova is not someone to take her own writing, and analysisfor that matter, for granted. This shows itself in the detailedexplanations and elaborations of her reasoning by making connectionsto current and past (theoretical) debates. Nor is she afraid to tacklethorny issues, as for example the issue of the usefulness of openand free software, pointing her finger to the sore spots that areoften neglected or (deliberately) ignored. For example she arguesthat a break away “from the fetishism of proprietary software maylead to the commodification of social processes that are layered intosoftware production and operation” (23). The only drawback of thebook is that it is too short making it at times too dense. It wouldbe great to elaborate on specifics to accommodate the reader who isnot necessarily familiar with the various strands of thought thatpermeate the book. Nevertheless this book is extremely valuable. Froma theoretical point of view it shows how can we discuss and analysenew digital phenomenon from a material and aesthetics point of view.From a practical view, Goriunova provides us with a wonderful andthick description of current usage of the web. Although she is leavingit open to where these new tendencies may lead to, she providesusers, audiences and theoreticians workable tools and methods toanalyse current movements. Or, as Goriunova has taught us by now, itis by “creating a means to speak about what is grey and banal on theInternet [that] allows for a recognition of the brilliant; and sucha means of cautious differentiation may likely turn out to develop asensibility for a set of interesting tendencies rather than dispensingwith the developments in new media reign of banality at large” (45).Annet Dekker, 15 February 2012Originally written for: Open #23 - "New Forms of Freedom and Independencein Art and Culture" Cahier on Art and the Public Domain, Amsterdam, 2012.http://www.skor.nl/eng/site/item/open-23-autonomy-new-forms-of-freedom-and-independence-in-art-and-culture?single=1SKOR | Foundation for Art and Public Domain and the Van Abbemuseum,present a lecture and discussion by and with artist Andrea Fraser onSaturday June 16, 2012 in the Van Abbemuseum, to celebrate the launch ofOpen 23.Goriunova, Olga (2011) Art Platforms and Cultural Production on theInternet. New York/London:Routledge.http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415893107/ (a soft cover willbe published after a certain number of copies are sold, in the meantime,ask your local library to order the book!)

On the occasion of the Zagreb Pride 2012, within olympic year, duringthe European football championship and actuality of topics relating tosport discrimination, qSPORT in collaboration with artists andinitiatives that work in the field of sport and LGBTQ issues -organizes an international exhibition and a program of workshops,discussions and screenings in the Gallery Nova.PRESS RELEASE: http://goo.gl/8AKBW"Another SPORT is Possible ? ! ."< at >Gallery Nova, Zagreb, CROATIA(12-17/06/2012, Galerija Nova, Teslina 7, Zagreb)+ QueerSport.LAB with program:12/06/2012 - 18:30 Queering Sport - workshop: qSPORT & co.14/06/2012 - 18:30 Trans x Sport - screenings +skype-in: Tom Weller17/06/2012 - 14:00 QS Brunch - screening “Justin” doc. +skype-in: Juliet Jacques_artists:Tom Weller (Berlin, Germany), http://www.tom-weller.de/Jason Hall (Brighton, UK), http://www.outlinegallery.com/Željko Blaće (Zagreb, Croatia), http://zeljko.blace.name/_communities:Boxing Girls / Boxing Queers (Berlin, Germany), http://www.boxgirls.org/The Justin Campaign (Brighton, UK), http://www.thejustincampaign.com/qSPORT (Zagreb, Croatia), http://www.qsport.info/_individual contributors:Alex Brahim - curator and critic (Barcelona, Spain)Juliet Jacques - critic and co-founder of The Justin Campaign (Brighton, UK)Karmen Ratković - social activist and educator in arts (Zagreb, Croatia)Vesna Vuković - curator and producer in arts (Zagreb, Croatia)_from the introduction text to exhibition:- Contemporary sport (hypercompetitive, commercialized,institutionalized, politicized...) is often perceived uncritically -especially as a mechanism of capitalist ideology and in its capacityof a globalizer/normalizer of societies. It is equally a source ofcountless traumatic, stressful and frustrating experiences for (queer)youth, (trans) individuals and others who challenge or do not fit itsexisting norms. If Sport (as Art) can be considered a laboratory and acontested site, then it is potentially one of the largest domains forsocial, cultural and political experimentation, but also innovation incontemporary societies...- This exhibition and the QueerSport.LAB program is part of a broaderinternational creative inquiry into tensions between Sport andLGBT/Queer realities. Artists and communities presented here withtheir works and documentation point to some of many tangents in whichcreative engagement can work against the normativity of sport throughqueer expression. Though physically far apart, contextuallyconstrained and of different methodologies and operational networks,all share a common understanding of sport as a context that is neitherfixed nor given, but one that needs constant claiming andself-organizing and most of all, imagining viable alternatives._supported by:Ministry of Culture of Croatia and City of Zagreb_thanks to:Multimedijalni institut http://www.mi2.hr/Heinrich Boell Stiftung - Hrvatska http://www.Boell.hr/PhD Arts http://www.PhDArts.eu/… and individuals:Myriam Van Imschoot, Sher Doruff, Jose Begega,Kat Bowman, Dejan Škaljac,Tomislav Medak, Nenad Romić, Dejan Kršić..._all events in Gallery Nova are co-oragnized by:WHW - what, how and for whom - http://www.whw.hr/AGM - http://www.agm.hr/# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime< at >kein.org

From: knowbotiq <huebler-q3XZZGzsZu0< at >public.gmane.org> Date: 12 June 2012 4:45:27 PM To: <knowbotiq-q3XZZGzsZu0< at >public.gmane.org> Subject: dancing with?without Darwin dear friends, we are happy to announce of having received yesterday the Swiss Art Award / Eidgen?ssischer Kunstpreis 2012 for dancing with?without Darwin, knowbotiq 2012 as a follow-up of the reciprocal affair of critical Blackness and Whiteness, the signifyin? voice of spoken word artist Zulile Blinker is weaving the post/colonial history/ies of the the black dutch population via an open mic into ornaments, variations of camouflage/costumes and potential parodistic dances. footnotes: Charleston Parade, Jean Renoir, 1927 knowbotiq, dancing with?without Darwin installation: microphon, ornament-generator, camouflage/costumes (kotomisi, MacGhillie) and a marker for a line-dance in collaboration with Zulile Blinker, Joana Aderi, MacGhillie (voices) and Simon Broggi (ornament-software) Swiss Art Award, Art Basel 12.6.-17.6.2012 images: http://krcf.org/krcf.org/?p=1271 voices: http://krcf.org/dancing/darwin5.mp3 greetings yvonne, christian

Dear Friends,The Japanese Prime Minister Noda has announced his decision to orderthe restart two nuclear reactors in the town of Ohi in the prefectureof Fukui in Western Japan. He also claimed that nuclear energy willremain an important source of energy for Japan also in the future,thereby reconfirming Japans nuclear energy policy.Despite all our efforts, despite the strong resistance in the region ofWestern Japan surrounding Ohi, and despite the fact that a majority ofthe Japanese people is against nuclear power, the Japanese governmentis bowing to pressures of the nuclear lobby in Japan. We have triedhard on our own, but now we believe that coordinated internationalpressure on the Japan government is essential to bring on real andsubstantial change. We believe that the Japanese government and theJapanese public will react very sensitively to international pressure,so we wish to ask you for your support to initiate and coordinateinternational protest against the Japanese government.Specifically we suggest the following action within the following days(preferably on Wednesday to Friday this week / June 13~15, 2012):1. Please assemble in front of the Japanese embassies in your capitalto voice your protest against the decision and policy of Prime MinisterNoda.2. Please try to submit a letter of protest -addressed to PrimeMinister Noda- to the Japanese Ambassador in your country and requestthe Japanese Ambassador to forward this letter of protest to theJapanese Prime Minister.3. Please try to seek coverage of this action by your local andinternational media, especially Japanese media, as well as on theInternet.4. Please give us notice about your planned action, so we can organizea press event in Japan to reinforce your message to the Japanesegovernment.Please note that we wish these protests to be absolutely civil andpeaceful, and to fully observe the sovereign rights of the Japaneseembassies abroad.A draft letter of protest is attached, so you just need to sign it.We thank you for your support.Japan, June 11th, 2012Hideyuki BAN, Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center (CNIC)Kanna MITSUTA, FoE JapanAileen Mioko SMITH, Green ActionDaisuke SATO, No Nukes Asia ForumAkira KAWASAKI, Peace BoatKaori IZUMI, Shut TomariContact: info(at)greenaction-japan.org

In her informative and entertaing talks Seda Gürses {1} often refers to the process of "responsibilization." Speaking about privacy, she argues that new, privately operated, online platforms are transforming responsibility of providing safety and privacy to users of these platforms, where users would previously have had the expectations that operators and regulators would bear this responsibility. Responsibilization is the transfer of responsibility form being something that is social and shared, to being held solely by individuals.Just looking at communications media, privacy on the postal system and the mail system was legislated, and operators and users where held responsible for complying to socially imposed standards.Yet, on modern online platforms, despite their increasing importance, users are for the most part governed by the site operators' user agreements, and the responsibility of understanding the sites privacy and safety implications, including often complex settings and options, is help by the user alone.This raises a very important question.Do we have a collective right to social aspirations? Do we have a collective right to work towards socially determining social outcomes?Should people simply get the privacy and safety they deserve as determined by their own behaviour? Or do we want a society where people can expect that their privacy and safety is something that can be socially determined?What's worse, is that there is a significant moral hazard at work, even when legislation, regulation, or simply user outcry, seeks to improve the privacy policies of a platform, the site has significant incentive to resist, foot-drag or out right ignore such expectations. The business models of most operators is based on monetizing user interaction and user data, and therefor whatever the regulatory environment or user desire, so long as it's up to the operators to implement privacy, we're leaving the fox in charge of the hen house, as the saying goes.Can we realistically expect private platforms to enthusiastically place social concerns above there shareholder's profit interest?And even if strong regulations, vigilant user advocacy groups or some other incentives can manage to keep the fox from making diner of the hens, is this watchdog state of affairs, with social watchdogs watching profit watchdogs and fighting over every decision really the best way to manage communications platforms?Ours is often called the communications age, and the development global digital network communications network is often cited as one of the most important development in human history, comparable to electricity, or even agriculture.Yet, the commercial Internet was born in a neoliberal era, an era when we are no longer allowed to have collective social aspirations, we are no longer allowed to want social outcomes, or even work towards them. We are allowed only to simply accept outcomes as facts, to believe that outcomes are determined by some sort of exogenous logic, be it the market or economy or politics or nature itself, and this often comes hand in hand with blaming the victims for their misfortune. If they where faster, stronger, smarter or even luckier they would have done better with the whole privacy and safety thing, or further the whole wealth and power thing.Yet, being white, male and rich are often more significant than being fast, strong, smart or talented. By accepting a world where we get what we deserve, where outcomes are the result of individual merit, we embrace a delusion, a make believe land where power, privilege and wealth do not exist.This delusion is killing the Internet.Too often, solutions to the social issues of communications are presented as being individual or collective. Too often, privacy concerns about online platforms are responded to with "Well, just don't use Facebook, if you don't like it" or even more unrealistically, "You should make something better then. If their was a market demand for something better, somebody would have made it, so obviously people don't care about your issues."The fact is that "making something better" requires investment, requires wealth, which means in most cases, capital. Yet, capitalists must invest in ways capture profit, which brings up the moral hazard again. Don't trust this fox with your hens? Find a different fox!More and more it feels like the biggest challenge of our age is the challenge of making people people that we have a right to collectively work towards our social aspirations, that we can and must work together to achieve social outcomes. Not only for privacy and safety on line, but to create the kind of society we want broadly.A society where wealth and power, and responsibility is more broadly shared.{1} http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/unlikeus/2012/03/09/seda-gurses-and-privacy-in-online-social-networks/

Dear nettimers,Herzlich Wilkommen to the second Post-Media Lab event. PML is a two yearresearch lab into post-media based at Leuphana University, co-directed byMute magazine, and part of the Lneburg Innovation Incubator. This eventwill bring together some key debates and perspectives around networkassembled communities, the crisis of privacy and the commodification ofaffect within biopower. All are welcome to join us, and the event is free.Hope to see you there,JosieThe Community Complex, A Post-Media Lab conferenceFriday, 22 June 2012, 13:00-20:00Venue: Denkerei, Oranienplatz 2, 10999 BerlinWhether you want to have something to do with the community industry ornot, it has something to do with you. Through its burgeoning expansion,our forms of relating, caring, communicating and collaborating, are beingtransformed, enclosed, templated and put to work. The most affectivecomponents of network culture are rapidly being engineered into product.Just as virtual space is augmented, real space becomes ever morevirtualised, securitised and impoverished. The rise of thenetwork-assembled community has coincided with a radical disinvestment ofnational and municipal communities in the age of austerity. As servicesare withdrawn, the community itself is enjoined to step into the breach.Community, in the era of networked neoliberalism, has become both atarget of governance as well as of business.Beyond the commercial drive which is connecting people apart,communities of difference are also flourishing in the post-internet age.Reimagining community is not just the preserve of belligerent nationalismsand Web 2.0 but also a long-standing activity of alternative, artistic andpolitical cultures responses to commercialisation and industrialisation,from the 17th century puritans and diggers, the artist communes of the19th century, through to the political squatter scenes of post-68generation, the hacklabs of the past years and new movements such asAnonymous. The Community Complex will ask how normative forms of socialityand identification are not only produced but also challenged in todaysmashup of the virtual and real, free and waged labour, computational andaffectual, real-time and bio-time, as well as minor and molar imaginingsof connection. To achieve this we bring together different perspectivesand experiences of critically engaging with the new realities ofmediatised community and its reimagination.Participants: Johannes Paul Raether (Basso), McKenzie Wark (The NewSchool, New York), Nishant Shah (Centre for Internet & Society,Bangalore), Marcell Mars (MaMa, Zagreb), Tatiana Bazzichelli(transmediale/reSource), Clemens Caspar Mierau (Spackeria/c-base), Pod(CiTiZEN KiNO/XLterrestrials, Berlin/San Francisco), Graswurzel TV(Lneburg), foebud e.v. (Bielefeld), Tactical Technology Collective(Berlin and Bangalore), Freifunk (Berlin).13:00-15:00 / Workshop I: Practice15:00-15:30 / Pause15:30-17:30 / Workshop II: Privacy18:00-20:00 / Evening PanelAfter conference event: Performative screening - XLterrestrials andPML-present: CiTiZEN KiNO (#16): Technotopia / Dystopia : A SocialGarden-i-fication Is Elsewhere!22:00-lateVenue: c-base, Rungestrasse 20, 10179 Berlin23 JuneLive Stream/Media Lounge: From Waste to Resource. Recovering SustainableAttitudesVenue: Kulinarisches Kollektiv, Berlin. 17:00-20:00Event booking (free) http://pml.eventbrite.co.ukContact info-zfqFY3BLp6bqI0r2KlAcIg< at >public.gmane.orghttp://www.postmedialab.org/cpa-events booking (free) =96 http://pQ

We did it!In 24 hours.http://15mparato.wordpress.com/the-clear-message/https://15mparato.wordpress.com/legal-campaign/Enjoy it ;-)Soon more (and even better ;-)) news.https://15mparato.wordpress.com/300 000 press results:https://www.google.es/search?q=15mparato&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:es-ES:official&client=firefox-a#hl=es&gs_nf=1&pq=15mparato&cp=11&gs_id=66&xhr=t&q=%2215mparato%22&pf=p&client=firefox-a&hs=3go&rls=org.mozilla:es-ES%3Aofficial&sclient=psy-ab&oq=%2215mparato%22&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=3ecb5371e9da3be1&biw=977&bih=436

Rodney King died today under still unclear circumstancesThe man whose beating up by LA police was documented - by chance - by an amateur video camera user, which footage reached within a short time span, a local, national and international audience. It heralded the moment in which main stream media became a channel for local activist material. His case not only triggered a local and national uproar, but also a new ideology of what was soon to be called 'tactical media'. Grass root activism explained away by post-modern media theorists. It became a social movement with often more high brow theories than down to earth actions, with its first conference in Amsterdamin 1993: Next 5 Minutes. The - yet - unclear death of Rodney King, is a marker in time that challenges us to look back and see the same events with other eyes, now, almost twenty years later.Tjebbe van TijenImaginary Museum ProjectsDramatizing Historical Informationhttp://imaginarymuseum.orgweb-blog: The Limping Messengerhttp://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/

Elinor Ostrom Remembered (1933-2012)Tuesday, June 12, 2012http://bollier.org/blog/elinor-ostrom-remembered-1933-2012The world lost a brave, creative mind when Elinor Ostrom died this morning from cancer. She was 78, a professor at Indiana University, and the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, in 2009. Without her pioneering work and global outreach, it’s doubtful that the commons would have survived the “tragedy of the commons” myth that Garrett Hardin inflicted on it in 1968. Nor would the commons have gone on to become a respected paradigm of governance, let alone an orienting framework for the current surge of commons policy advocacy and social activism.In the 1970s, economics was quickly veering into a kind of religious fundamentalism. It was a discipline obsessed with “rational individualism,” private property rights and markets even though the universe of meaningful human activity is much broader and complex. Lin Ostrom pioneered a different, more humanistic way of thinking about “the economy” and resource management. She originally focused on property rights and “common-pool resources,” collective resources over which no one has private property rights or exclusive control, such as fishers, grazing lands and groundwater. This work later evolved into a broader study of the commons as a rich, cross-cultural socio-ecological paradigm. Working within the social sciences, Ostrom proceeded to build a new school of thought within the standard economic narrative while extending it in vital ways. Professor Elinor Ostrom. Photo courtesy of Indiana University.As important, Ostrom built a global network of colleagues and a vast literature that explores how people can actually cooperate in managing resources. At Indiana University, she and her husband, political scientist Vincent Ostrom, in 1973 founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, a crucible for much seminal thinking about the commons. Internationally, she helped start the International Association for the Study of the Commons, an academic network whose hundreds of members have developed a rich literature documenting how ordinary people create fair rules and institutions for managing shared resources in sustainable ways. Much of this literature can be found at the Digital Library of the Commons, which is affiliated with the Workshop at Indiana University.Eschewing the mathematical abstractions of conventional economists, Ostrom went out and did extensive field work in Africa, Asia and Latin America. She came to see the on-the-ground realities of cooperation in their sovereign human dimensions, which then became the basis for her creative theorizing about how commons work and how they fail. That's largely why Ostrom's work has been so durable: it's based on some hard-earned empirical observations. Working from within economics but mindful of its limits, she enriched our vocabulary for understanding how humans can collaborate in effective, ongoing ways.Lin Ostrom was active until the end. Last month, Ostrom published a new book, with co-authors Amy R. Poteete and Marco A. Janssen, that takes on the “my method is better than yours, my discipline is better than yours” mentality, which she considered destructive. The book, Working Together: Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice, describes the advantages of using several different research methods to study a problem.I had the rare pleasure of meeting Lin Ostrom in October 2009 the weekend before she won the Nobel Prize. I was speaking at a community-organized event, not an academic gathering, on the commons in Bloomington, Indiana, her hometown. Here is how I reflected on Ostrom at the time: Perhaps because she is not an economist, Ostrom was able to see that free-market theories fail to explain many things of economic importance. Perhaps because she is a woman, she was more attentive to the relational aspects of economic activity — the ways in which people interact and negotiate with each other to forge rules and informal social understandings. The social, moral and political, she realized in the 1960s as a graduate student, may hold many important clues for how communities can govern themselves and manage collective resources. It’s not all about economics (as traditionally construed).That 2009 blog post reviewed Ostrom’s brilliant career and her enormous contribution to the social science and economics of the commons. But perhaps what I remember most was how remarkably gracious and generous Lin Ostrom was. She never stood on ceremony or her credentials. I think this sensibility and openness is what made Lin Ostrom so fertile as a thinker: she was willing to engage openly with people and phenomena on their own terms. Even after winning her Nobel Prize, Ostrom remained a down-to-earth colleague and fellow seeker. After I gave a talk at the International Association for the Study of Commons conference in India last year, Lin was surrounded by TV camera crews in the Green Room, but managed to flash me a "thumbs up."I later learned that she had had to dart off early from that conference to meet some grassroots organizations in Asia and then to meet with some top government officials, and then to make six other stops before getting home. This was apparently her new routine after receiving her Nobel Prize. At age 75, Ostrom intensified her travels and outreach around the world as if to make the most of her remaining time to educate yet another government ministry, another economics conference and another university gathering. The comforting thought is that, among the thousands of people that she reached and the hundreds of colleagues that she worked with, her legacy is very much alive.

When I wrote about rethinking the commons and its potential to re-embed the economy into a larger social contexts, one of the projects I was thinking on was goteo.org.I recently conducted a lengthy interview with Olivier Schulbaum and Enric Senabre Hidalgo which which might be of interest here.Felixhttp://www.shareable.net/blog/crowdfunding-the-commons-interviewWe are reinventing social and cultural practices. By necessity anddesire. New ways of collaborating require, not the least, new waysof organizing financial means. In the cultural sector, commercialmodels based on copyrights (selling copies) and government fundedmodels (subsidies) are in crisis and are increasingly inadequate orpolitically unsustainable.If we take the crisis of (cultural) production seriously and arelooking for alternatives, three developments need to be taken intoaccount. First, while we should not let the state simply skip outof its responsibilities, it's unlikely that public cultural fundingwill ever expand at the same rate as cultural practice. Second,producers and users are coming in much closer contact with one anotherand in the process the roles in between “artist” and “audience” aremultiplying. Third, the control of the distribution and use of copiescannot be a way to finance the creation of the first copy.The most innovative answer to these issues has been the rise ofcrowdfunding, as a way of pre-financing the first copy by creating acommunity around emerging projects. Kickstarter.com has establisheditself as the dominant model and countless derivatives are imitatingit.Unfortunately, Kickstarter is, in essence, simply a reverse market.Rather than buying the product after it has been produced, one can nowbuy it before it is produced and, if one donates more than a certainamount, inscribe oneself to a very limited degree into the productitself (e.g. by being mentioned a co-financier in the credits of afilm project). Besides that, very little chances.But does that need to be? Crowdfunding is a promising field becauseit can address many of the dynamics that underlie the crisis ofthe cultural economy and its transformation from a commodity- to acommons-based environment. So, it's high-time to think about andexperiment with this approach in a more comprehensive way and exploremore radical approaches to alternative cultural economies. How canthese new means be used to fund the commons, rather than to kickstartyet another round of “cool” new products?To explore this question, Felix Stalder caught up with Enric Senabreand Olivier Schulbaum who recently launched the Spanish platform Goteo(which means “to drip”) which bills itself as a “social network forco-financing and collaborating with creative projects that further thecommon good."__You started your crowdfunding platform in 2010, just whenKickstarter was establishing itself as the dominant model in thisfield. Why do something different?First of all there's the practical limitation of not being able topublish projects without an American bank account. But there ismore than that. Kickstarter and many similar platforms design thecrowdfunding process in ways that very easily lend themselves to whatwe see as problematic practices of "crowd capitalism." For example,one of its most prominent projects, TikTok, a watch based on theiPod Nano, uses crowdfunding simply to expand the commercial model.Raising money to initiate standard global production processes, evensubcontracting critical tasks to global sweatshop factories, no matterhow or where.Especially that last thing, we don't want to support that. Or takeDiaspora, for example. The distributed social network project had agreat success when when it launched its crowdfunding campaign. Yet,eventually Kickstarter changed its policies in order to avoid softwaredevelopment projects. Maybe because Disapora started to become tooprominent for the platform and threatened its brand-building. Themain issue seems to be that software projects often have not-so-clearrewards and the boundaries between contributing money and contributingother stuff is less fixed, as compared to other types of projects suchas movies, videos, books, music, etc, where you get, say, a printedcopy of the book when you donate $20, and a signed copy when youdonate $50 and so on, but are otherwise not really involved.So, the “Kickstarter” model seems to limit the sociability of projectswhen they break down the barriers between “artists/producers”and “audiences/consumers.” For example, by being able to acceptcontributions other than money and thus really generating adistributed or cooperative economy.But these are the aspects we are most interested in. We think thecrowdfunding processes offer many opportunities for learning,collaboration and community if we explore the full range of “crowdbenefits,” financial as well as social ones.__Could you explain what you mean by sociability of a project?Goteo’s approach is that crowdfunding should also imply crowd benefitsor community benefits, if you prefer. These benefits might be social,educational or economical in character. We want to look at thesethings together, rather than as different dimensions separated fromone another. Thus, our projects need to have a strong connection tothe commons.Goteo establishes, together with producers, lawyers, economistsand fiscal experts, a simple, effective tool for both donors andrecipients to make transparent the core principles they are committedto in the project and how these lead to reinforcing the commons andassuring shared community benefits. This question of sociability isreally about developing the skills of interacting well with others, ona peer-to-peer basis.A central question is how do we generate a new economy and realizethe potential of collective production? We need to go beyond theco-creation standards of the industry. We want to ensure thatinnovation is distributed. So we want to combine crowdfunding withcrowdsourcing in a way that does not simple help private companies toimprove their products.Rather, co-design should imply opening up to contributorsthe processes of micro-entrepreneurship, micro-distribution,micro-production. In other words, everyone who contributes to aproject should become part of the economic/productive/creativeprocess they helped to improve, rather than support the generating ofknowledge and resources for a private party.An example of a fertile territory for such a development is openhardware or the emerging open craft movement, which is growingparticularly fast. If we can get to the point where backers or donorsof a project end up being the future producers or providers for thecommunity or find their way to be actively part of the project theyhelped, this is when we really open the circle of sociability!Besides sociability, we also talk about a commonability orshareability. So part of our mission is helping producers ororganizations with defining their scale of shareability well. That'swhy in Goteo we make a clear distinction between social good andcommons good. NGOs are usually oriented toward social goods in thesense that they are orientated towards creating positive change inconcrete places or communities. For us, this is not enough. Goteoisn't really interested in social initiatives if they don't clearlyestablish a collective return.This means that they ensure that the project is transferable andreusable by other people and collectives (common good) according tothe rights which govern free knowledge and which are usually regulatedon a legal level through free and open licenses.Something we are observing with Goteo is that the more tangible aproject is, (for example the DIY shoes kit, a project with the supportof Fablab Barcelona), the more sociable it gets. It reminds me ofa conversation with Dmytri Kleiner about his text Critique of PeerProduction Ideology where he pointed out: "What is needed for Peerproduction to incorporate material goods into the common-stock is asystem for the allocation of material assets among the independentpeers which imposes only a minimal co-ordination burden.” We thinkthis is a key point!But of course, again because crowdfunding is not really about moneyand more about creating communities, OPEN CROWDFUNDING SHOULD BECROWDFUN!__How does that translate to Spain, where Goteo is situated?Over the years here, we have seen more and more projects developedby creative agents operating beyond the traditional boundaries ofart/culture. These are often projects with a high level of innovationand enormous potential for social and economic impact and growth,capable of generating value in the broadest sense of the word.However, the Spanish context still lacks the proper communicationchannels to connect creative individuals, social/cultural agents, andpotential investors and micro-donors.We are still tied to traditional resources such as grants andsponsorships, which we think need to be redesigned. Becoming thatchannel is precisely the goal of Goteo. An online community capable ofcreating efficient and transparent links between public and privateagents; to identify problem areas and suggest possible solutions; andto facilitate a catalog of financing options, infrastructures andother resources.Given the current socioeconomic situation in Spain of less andless sources of public and private funding for such type of openinitiatives, at a local, regional and national level, there is muchmore urgency for new practical alternatives such as ours.You say that Goteo is less about raising money and morecommunity-building. Can you explain how this works, and what Goteooffers in the case of a concrete project?Apart from raising money, every project or campaign also has theopportunity of asking for collaboration in different areas, thatincludes, knowledge, concrete tasks, infrastructure and/or materialgoods. This is something that we knew was important to attach to thecrowdfunding model. This would open it towards crowd sourcing in aform that could lead to more community building and shared processeswhile creating an open project.For example, tuderechoasaber. This is project is about creating aweb-based service where any person will be able to send and accessopen data information requests to Spanish public bodies. Apart fromraising more than the 150% of the minimum funding needed, it asked andhas received many offers from people. From gathering contact detailsfor public bodies, to server administration and moderating on the site(solving questions from new users, verifying requests are not spam,handling email bounces, etc), or translating the platform to severallanguages.Another example could be the Infinit Loop. It's a reusable wrap forgifts of high quality cloth with QR identification code, that allowsyou to follow further presents with web geolocation. It got all theminimum funding needed and also help from many users who wanted tobe volunteer beta-testers of the system, and app developers forsmart-phones. Even offers of partnership to produce and distributetheir product (which has an open licensed design).A third case could be Nodo Móvil, a mobile wifi connection unit forsocial movements and public spaces. The project raised around 145% ofits minimum goal as well as developers, a hacklab space for working,a 3D printer for prototyping, testers for arduino, Xbee, Androidand GPS, and collaboration from a local entity to help test it ona public area. This even applies if they could not achieve theirminimum financial goal, but are able to benefit from other forms ofcontributions.We gather all this dynamic information at every project's messagewall, where people can publicly agree to collaborate. At the sametime, Goteo offers the tools for basic communication betweenproject leaders and volunteers (one-to-one or in groups). Once theconversation has started, every project can use its own communicationor collaboration tools for getting the job done, but we think it'simportant to first have that kind of social agreement on the site,encouraging transparency and examples of mutual help.__How many projects have managed to get off the ground thanks toGoteo?Twenty-five projects have been fully funded and supported so far. Theygathered more than 100,000 euros and around 400 offers of differenttype of collaboration. At the moment there are 18 more still incampaign, and most of them are doing pretty well. We're scaling alittle bit these days trying to apply all the lessons learned duringthe first four months of activity, from project edition assessmentto media follow-up during campaigns. I think it's important to takea qualitative look as well at the first results, since at the momentdifferent collective benefits are being created.Some examples: Tuderechoasaber is already providing the beta versionof its Rebelaos! and has distributed 500,000 issues around Spain of apaper publication for social transformation.Copy this Festival has developed a formula for spreadingself-organized Creative Commons film festivals, and is beingreplicated in cities like Lima and Buenos Aires, with many more tocome in the forthcoming months.Infinit Loop is sending its initial prototypes to backers and testers,with its alpha version of the platform already produced. These, andsome other projects (even some that have not been successful at theircampaign), are mainly performing well precisely for the commitmentmade with backers but also collaborators, and this community buildingor amplification process helps them and motivates them to do thingsquickly and properly.KinoRaw is developing audiovisual tools and extracting all the juiceout of Blender software for experimenting with the Elphel openhardware camera.Goteo does not just do crowdfunding and crowd sourcing, but also workson creating a foundation that distributes money and resources in amore traditional way. What is the foundation about and how do the twomechanisms (foundation and crowdfunding) relate to one another?The foundation, Fundación Fuentes Abiertas (which means “opensources”), does two things. First, it's the legal entity that runsGoteo. The project leaders sign a contract with the foundation inwhich they specify individual rewards as well as the collective returnof the project. The foundation receives the donations from backersand distributes them to the projects. It is also the receiver of thepercentage of transactions, 8%, that goes completely to cover workthat goes into the platform and the support given by the platform tothe projects.The foundation publishes yearly results, budget and operations.Second, it also provides the framework for partnering with otherinstitutions. We are trying to raise feeder capital, that is moneythat is not donated to individual projects, but is raised by thefoundation itself through specific campaigns, agreements and parallelactivities like the workshops. This money is then distributed toprojects directly by the foundation. This will help us to supportprojects we think are important but have a hard time raising thenecessary funds.We seek new ways of funding that not only include individual fundingand cooperation, via crowdfunding, but also a clear approach toalliances with main actors (public bodies, organizations, otherfoundations, companies) that share our mission and can add “feedercapital” to specific calls and projects. This way we could somehowbypass current problems and paradigms, by letting them participatein a new model where crowdfunding is moving even more resources andmultiplying people's impact.__What are the immediate steps and challenges to develop goteo.orgfurther?We're always working on the technical and foundational concepts of theplatform. From recent improvements like the wall of friends, to easilyvisualize and share backers, or a landing page for specific calls,to other ones underway like an open data module for easily obtainingaggregated data and more visualizations about open crowdfunding, aswell as a "Recommended by" badge for certain projects or a "flat rate"for regular donations of highly attached members of the community.(See more information about the landing pages here and here.)We also focus on developing an open algorithm to facilitate dialoguebetween project producers, local public administration and privatemicro-investors and mid-investors, as well as producing a set ofopen data stats regarding the projects and tendencies and backers'psychology and motivations, trying to define limits between openphilanthropy and open investment.The most important step at the moment, though, is the developmentof a separated platform for the first official autonomous node ofGoteo that will be in the Basque Country. We fund these activities inpartnerships with other institutions and occasionally public fundingon specific topics and areas of interest that match our mission.

Inspired by the Institute for the Future of the Book, Minor Compositions is launching a digital form for the forthcoming book Artpolitik: Social Anarchist Aesthetics in an Age of Fragmentation by Neala Schleuning.Over the next month the entirety of the draft manuscript will be posted here: http://artpolitik.digress.it.Comments and discussions will be integrated into revisions of the book before it is printed later this year (which will, as with all other Minor Compositions titles, be available for free download).Cheers, stevphenMore informationArtpolitik: Social Anarchist Aesthetics in an Age of FragmentationNeala SchleuningArtpolitik examines the relationship between art and politics, focusing on radical political aesthetics in western culture since the end of the nineteenth century. Drawing from Surrealism, Socialist Realism, the Situationist International, capitalist consumer aesthetics, and critical theory, Neala Schleuning elaborates a social anarchist approach to aesthetics.Artpolitik is not a history of radical art production but an exploration of the core ideas inspiring radical art. This provocative book is guaranteed to both challenge and inform, reframing radical aesthetics for the challenges of the present. It features an exploration of ideas and techniques employed by artists for more effective communication of radical political ideas. Art has played a central role in revolutionary change throughout history, and our own times call for a revitalization of art in the service of liberatory politics. This book is an effort to understand how new ideas seeking to position themselves vis a vis the aesthetic tradition while simultaneously reflecting the transformation of political and social movement cultures in new directions.Bio: Neala Schleuning is a writer and educator. She received her PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota in 1978 with an emphasis in political philosophy and intellectual history. Fulbright Scholar to the Russian Federation, she is the author of many articles, higher education policy papers, films and radio productions, and several books, including America: Song We Sang Without Knowing (1983); Idle Hands and Empty Hearts: Work and Freedom in the United States (1990); Women, Community, and the Hormel Strike of 1985-86 (1994); and To Have and to Hold: the Meaning of Ownership in the United States (1997).Minor Compositions, Wivenhoe / Brooklyn / Port WatsonMinor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life.Requisite fb page: http://www.facebook.com/artpolitikthebookMinor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia: http://www.minorcompositions.info

Hello,well since I first received this request of support from E-Flux I havebeen wondering about the implications; not good - not good at all.This seems to me to be a rather blatant power grab on the part of theE-Flux crew. The E-Flux service (which may or may not be non-profit)has more than a slight elitist tinge about it especially consideringthe high rates it charges which are deliberating skewed in favour ofmuseums (with good subsidies) or established galleries.The tone of the letter requesting support is crudely self-aggrandisingonce one manages to take the time to figure out exactly what isgoing on; if you can manage to peruse their application you'll see(aside from the application jargon) that the model for the 'selectionprocess' by which the .art domain name is awarded to prospectiveapplicants is not at all transparent but will be outfitted withvarious 'experts' who will determine who is qualified to get thedomain name (and at what cost). In a concession to the reality thatnot all applicants would be able to afford the top-shelf fees there isthe inclusion of a sliding scale for those not quite on the radar ofthe New York cognoscenti.What is also particularly disturbing about this is E-Flux's requestis its framing with the phrase 'wouldn't you want someone who REALLYknows about art and the art world' determining who has the privilegeof acquiring the .art domain. Meaning that now the E-Flux brandis really going global and seeking to position itself as the EastBroadway gatekeepers to the glorious and important world of art.I have no idea who the other applicants are and to what degree theyare better or worse but this does not seem at all like a good way togo.allan

"Rodney King" the Dutch way... PURE DENIAL ... or in other wordsbelieve the police and not what has been filmed by a passerby throughthe yes of his phone camera. A video witness movie put on the Internetabout two Rotterdam police functionaries doing an arrest of whathad now come to be knows as a "non-aggressive drunken" man fromLetland, was shown last week on television. People trusting their ownexperienced eyes of knowing how the arrest of a non-agressive drunkshould look like, felt this to be the non-professional way of doingsuch a thing. Also the trained eyes - we assume - of the editorialboard of Dutch National television (NOS Journaal) thought so and theydid broadcast theYouTube witness movie, A Rodney King incident inthe style of the 3 March 1991 beating up of a black man beaten up byLos Angelus police, an event by chance captured on video by someonewith an amateur video camera, and subsequently broadcasted on publictelevision.The video can be watched at this URL:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWBRCB4HkXYThe Dutch way is that the whole affair is in process to be smolderedand extinguished by Dutch police and justice authorities, who do carrysuch a strong feeling, that anything they do must be right, and evenmore so because it concerns a non-Dutch so called East European andon top of that 'a drunken man', that they simply close their eyes towhat can be seen on the video and state that the whole procedure wascorrect."In de doofpot stoppen" we call that in Dutch, it translates formerlyas "hush up a thing" but the Dutch metaphor is more material andpoints back to the time of the use of small pieces of coal for heatingcontraptions that would keep your feet warm in winter. As coal doesnot 'switch off; when you do not need it any more, there was theinvention of an extinguisher of burning coal: a metal pot with a litthat fitted so well that no fresh oxygen would reach the piece ofburning coal, resulting in it being extinguished.In - now - historical cartoons one sees often a depiction of the'doofpot' to illustrate a political 'cover-up'. The authoritariannature of Dutch society - often not recognised as such - with a pressthat does little counter-play when it comes to such blunt denials ofgiven facts, has once more been proven.Recently the formal head of the local police of Amsterdam, the mayorof the town Van der Laan, had the courage to comment on a series ofmobile phone movies, showing a group of policemen (and women) beatingalong into a non-resistant trained group of squatters, had the courageand wits to say on television "this does not look good" and addingthat he would have had the case researched. It was an exception thatproves the rule, I have to say with regret.Police, Rotterdam mayor and a Justice spokes-woman have tried to throwlots of sand in our eyes, speaking about an incomplete documentationand that without what happened before one could not judge what canbe seen on the video. Another bystander, the girlfriend of the manwho was taking the video was quoted by them as having said that theman before the violent arrest was "behaving aggressive." In a laterreaction that same lady said that the authorities had "twisted" herwords and she also has taken contact with newspapers to have her wordscorrected in that way.See this link (in Dutch) about her views:http://www.volkskrant.nl/vk/nl/2686/Binnenland/article/detail/3277405/2012/06/26/Dronken-Let-was-niet-agressief.dhtml#.T-nxqnTjF9Q.facebookA nice example of the Dutch 'doofpot' metaphor can befound on this independent critical media web site:http://www.argusoog.org/spotprent-vd-week-wk15-?-doofpot/Tjebbe van Tijen 26/6/2012

Dear nettimers,we would like to introduce you to our new project.We have been using crowdsourcing to generate a series of potentialconspiracy theories. The online project, named 'A Crowded Apocalypse',is available at http://www.acrowdedapocalypse.com. Here you can seethe process through which the crowd has contributed to create a seriesof conspiracy narratives and, in the final stage, has 'protested'against them.We have also recently discussed the implications of thiswork in an interview with Marc Garrett, available athttp://andfestival.org.uk/blog/iocose-garrett-interview-furtherfieldHope you'll find this interesting. Best,--*IOCOSEA Crowded Apocalypse*(2012)Link (pictures and information):*http://www.iocose.org/works/a_crowded_apocalypse**STATEMENT**In the Atlantean period there were many energies being used andinformation and knowledge being used which were, for particularreasons of safety, withdrawn, shall we say, to prevent completecatastrophe, to prevent total destruction of your planet *- David Icke, conspiracy theoristConspiracy theories are, by their definition, neither ultimatelyrefutable or acceptable. In order to hold true, they rely on theacceptance that the full evidence is not reachable. They are based ona shared belief: the idea that each one of us is an unaware piece in amysterious master plan.Crowdsourcing, instead, makes this more transparent. Each usercontributes to the creation of something which is bigger than the sumof each singular production. The final plan remains unknown, but it isactively produced by a large crowd.IOCOSE has been drawing on crowdsourcing to hijack the collectiveimagination. From January until June 2012, the "crowd" has beenassembling its own conspiracies and protested against theirprotagonists and effects.*http://acrowdedapocalypse.com**PRESS RELEASE*on crowdsourcing to generate a multitude of conspiracy theories. Thegroup has commissioned a series of micro tasks, each of them beingalmost completely meaningless. However, when put together, the taskscollectively contributed to generate a series of potential paranoias.In the final stage, IOCOSE has paid the 'crowd' to go in the streetsand 'protest' against the stories generated through crowdsourcing. Theoutcome is a collection of pictures of online workers, from all overthe world, who received money to simulate a global conspiracy.The website *http://acrowdedapocalypse.com* displays the processthrough which the group IOCOSE has completed the project. In aninitial stage, the group asked the crowd to draw a symbol. Thencommissioned a list of potential dangerous corporations, governmentsor fictitious entities. The next stage required the crowd to combinethese names with the symbol and generate evidences of a secret plan,which linked these names together. Then the crowd was asked toarticulate further and narrate these potential conspiracies, while inthe final stage they were asked to write a slogan, go in the streetsand take a picture of themselves, with their face covered. In eachstage, the workers were not aware of where that task was coming from,and where it was headed.Sony, the government of Pakistan, American Apparel and Pizza Hut,among other real or fictitious entities, have been involved in thisglobal protest. An uncountable number of potential reasons of concernand mysterious secret plans have been generated through crowdsourcing,each piece costing less than a few US Dollars.IOCOSE has investigated the relation between crowdsourcing andconspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are, by their definition,neither ultimately refutable or acceptable. In order to hold true,they rely on the acceptance that the full evidence is not reachable.They are based on a shared belief: the idea that each one of us is anunaware piece in a mysterious master plan. Crowdsourcing, instead,makes this more transparent. Each user contributes to the creation ofsomething which is bigger than the sum of each singular production.The final plan remains unknown, but it is actively produced by a largecrowd.*CONTACT**http://acrowdedapocalypse.com**http://www.iocose.org/works/a_crowded_apocalypse**contact-f4r9wR1XVE4dnm+yROfE0A< at >public.gmane.org**CREDITS**A Crowded Apocalypse* is commissioned by *ANDFestival<http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fandfestival.org.uk%2Fevent%2Fonline-crowded-apocalypse-0&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGabhuM8qzQBscvouD4stbIF-iXtQ>* and *Furtherfield<http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.furtherfield.org%2Fprogrammes%2Fexhibition%2Finvisible-forces&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNEpPfAPHal23OHP-qIpq-GFzrRQ6g>*. *ARTIST BIO* Artist group *IOCOSE <http://iocose.org/>* has been working since2006. Their mission is to subvert ideologies, processes and practicesof identification and production of meanings. IOCOSE work withcamouflage, mimicry, fakes and pranks, mostly based in news, socialand mass media. Among their works, IOCOSE have hijacked an exhibitionat Tate Modern, invented a spam campaign for the Italian DemocraticParty, designed a religious hi-tech product based on electric shock,crafted an IKEA guillottine, experimented a drug made out of floppydiscs, and organized an international contest for the most valuelessvideo on YouTube. IOCOSE have exhibited, among many, at the VeniceBiennale (2011), Tate Modern (London, UK, 2011), Jeu de Paume (Paris,France, 2011), FACT (Liverpool, 2011), Aksioma (Slovenia, 2008, 2009),Shift festival (Switzerland, 2010), The Influencers (Spain, 2010).--IOCOSEhttp://iocose.org

Dear nettimers we are extending the deadline of the call for works for transmediale 2013 until July 15.transmediale 2013: BWPWAP (Back When Pluto was a Planet), Berlin, Jan 29- Feb 03, 2013.Back When Pluto Was a Planet: with this title transmediale 2013 willexplore the simultaneous displacement and invention that takes place incultural processes mediated by technology. Can impossible andunrealistic uses and abuses of technology be translated into newcultural imaginaries? Into networks out of place and out of time? Like BWPWAP!?More info on the call at: http://www.transmediale.de/de/node/21238Also don't forget our call for the Vilem Flusser Residency for artisticresearch 2013, deadline July 31st:http://www.transmediale.de/de/node/21240

Today is the last day in service of France's "bogus brother of theInternet" (Le Monde), that strange square box called the Minitel, launchedin 1981/1982.The Minitel has been object of much derision once Internet use became(relatively) widespread outside of France, yet it did antedate the 'publicInternet' by at least 15 years, and, contrary to a commonly held belief,the Minitel did not at all hamper the diffusion of the Internet in Franceafter it had really taken of (say, by the second half of the nineties).The Minitel had a number of drawbacks, the most important for users beingthe lack of graphic interface (and thus it spawned much ingenuity in'ascii art'), but it had a lot of advantages for service providers, asconnection was charged and nearly every content priced (between FF 0,02and FF 1,41 /minute) and directly billed to the user's phone subscription,with the takings neatly shared between the (state) phone authority and theproviders, enabling the former to offer the whole appliance for free andstill make a robust profit in the process.Another funny feature of the Minitel (and the one that made it soprofitable) was its accidental extension into the realm of (text-based)pornography and sexual dating, known in French as "la messagerie rose"(the pink messaging service) - that's how grandpa (or his grandchild)raked those hefty telephone bills, not by checking out the SNCF timetable(the state railways - still rather pricey at FF 0,34/minute).On the technical side, the Minitel was the losing pawn in the end in the'system battle' between the centralised Transpac/X.25 network and thedistributed TCP/IP based Internet (whose basic feature, packet switching,is claimed by the French to be rather Louis Pouzin's than Vint Cerf'sinvention ;-) Transpac also goes this evening, together with the Minitel.Last but not least, the Minitel did make the large swathes of the Frenchpopulation IT-savvy, or at least IT acquainted, ten years ahead of therest of the world. It's penetration (in 'la France profonde', deep France)was astonishing, and has only recently been matched by Internetconnectivity, since it went together with the telephone, but a no extraconnection of subscription cost (phone customers were offered the optionbetween the paper directory or a Minitel box).And as today's Le Monde article points out, the Minitel was the last ofFrance's technological 'Grands Projets'. So let's salute this evening thisswansong of the 'Colbertist State'.Le Monde article's is here: http://bit.ly/MuG57t"Le Minitel, "faux frère" d'Internet, ferme définitivement"see also: http://on.msnbc.com/Lc9LBR"Minitel online terminals recycled after three decades of use in France"

Hi Nettimers,For any of you who were at the Transmediale in 2008, you will definitelyremember Moving Forest - a peripatetic performance across Berlin, in whichartists, technologists, ranters, hackers, poets and wotnot improvised withthe ciphers, signals and sonic dimensions of the city. The AKA the Castlecollective have wrangled another edition of it in London this year, whichwill reach its apotheosis at the Parade Ground of the Chelsea School ofArt this Wednesday 4th July in a 12 hour performance/occupation (seebelow) and a workshop (Coda) on Thursday 5th. Please come and join in thefestivities, and vent some Olympics/militarised city induced bile.Hope to see you there,JosieFor the full programme events see:http://www.movingforest.net/MOVING FOREST AKA THE CASTLEA twelve-day prelude moving across the city; a twelve-hour sound art operaof betrayal and rebellion culminating in a spectacular series ofdisturbing performances in Chelsea College of Art Parade Ground; a one-daycoda of debate.Moving Forest expands the last 12 minute of Kurosawa’s adaptation ofShakespeare’s Macbeth, ‘Throne of Blood’ (1957), into a sonic performancesaga with a prelude of 12 days, a durational performance of 6 acts in 12hours and a closing Coda for the sake of argument.First presented at Transmediale.08, Berlin 2008, Moving Forest London mapsan imaginary castle and a camouflaged forest revolt onto thehyper-playground of the London metropolis on the eve of Olympics 2012.Presented by a temporarily assembled troupe AKA the castle, Moving Forestbrings together diverse visual/sonic/electronic/digital/ performanceartists along with writers, walkers, coders, hackers, mobile agents,twitters, networkers and the general public to realize a contemporaryversion of a classic play. Making use of all media, the acts elaborateoperatic manoeuvres into an escalating scheme of conspiracy and itscontemporaneous political manifestations. The camouflage tree branches ofBirnam Wood are electronically updated with contemporary forms of stealthand insurrection. Armed with signals and slogans, the Moving Forest forcesan entry into the Castle. A final merging of forest and castle occursduring a moment of downfall, jubilation and loss.PRELUDE - 12 days - How does a forest move?During these 12 day prelude leading up to the 6 acts 12 hour performanceday, self- assigned/collectively mobilized acts and actions in the form ofwalking, reading, talking, workshops, performance, installation take placein London metropolis and on the net.PERFORMANCE - 6 acts 12 hoursIn the forest (greater London metropolis), omen[act0] begins with witchesmessaging prophecy and prediction. Inside the castle, classic andcontemporary tales of remorse[act1], betrayal[act2] and overthrow [act3]unfold. Each act is realized by collaborating visual, sound andperformance artists making use of all mediums, elaborating operaticmanoeuvre into an escalating scheme of conspiracy and its contemporaneouspolitical manifestations.Outside the castle, the mobile forest, electronically updated withantennas, electronic magnetic waves, geolocation, armed with bytes andpixels, signals and slogans, is assembled for simulated insurgencymeasures. Mobilized urbanites, empowered by free network emissions, carrythe camouflage tree antennas, in a spider-shaped movement,towards the Castle Central. As the sheer strength of signals forces anentry into the Castle, a final merging of forest and castle occurs duringthe act4 - Insurgency; a moment of downfall, jubilation and loss. The actof eternal return [act5] brings us back to [act0]omen set admist a dusted,ruined castle.During the 12 hour performance, Harwood’s 12 hours rendering of the last12 minutes of Throne of Blood (Kurosawa) is projected, act by act, alongwith the performance at Triangle Space.July 5, CODA - One day Workshop!This workshop follows on from the Moving Forest event on July 4 as a coda,giving a time for reflection and for developing the argument andexperience of the work along other lines. It involves participants,organisers and guests, and people from CCW, CCS, RADA and activists,artists and others from across the sprawl.What are the aesthetics of the unitised/securitised/database city, onescorched by thick steams of capital, excitation and control? What forms oftiming, synchronisation, disruption and commune are possible, dead, ormaking themselves happen? What kinds of signals and distribution can startother forms of composition? What lines do the arrows that fill the airdescribes, how does the forest move?Taking Moving Forest as a case study, the conference gathers togetherthinkers, artists, programmers, schemers and strategists to provide acontext for unravelling complex innovative and challenging performanceworks.Participants: The Hexists, Linda Dement, Marco Donnarumma, Laura OldfieldFord, Francesca da Rimini, Kendra Jones, Ophelia Bellio, Dena RysdamMiller, Valentina Vuksic, Oliver Wolf, Ewa Justka, Kaffe Matthews, xname,Anat Ben-David, Linda Dement, Dani Villalba Suñol, Larisa Blazic,YoHA, Stephene Fortune, Bioni Samp, Vasco Alves, Tom Keene, CliffordHammett, Alexandra Sofie Joensson, Anna Blumenkranz, Atau Tanaka, TetsuoKogawa, Toby Heys, Steve Goodman, Marc Widmer, Jonas Öhrström,Patric Kaufmann, Onigiri force, The Militant City (with IsaacMarrero-Guillamón), MzTEK, John Jordan, Lottie Child, Shu LeaCheang, Matthew Fuller, Graham Harwood, Rachel Baker, David Garcia, EleniIkoniadou, Josephine Berry-Slater, John Cunningham, Jesse Darling, BrianAshton, Nick Thoburn, Robin Bale, Derek Shaw, James Stevens, Ilze Black,Susana Gonzalez Garcia, Martinez Gonzalez, Kim Jakobsen To

This is the email Mark just replied to(we didn't notice nettime was not receiving, sorry)---------- Forwarded message ----------From: paolo - IOCOSE <contact-f4r9wR1XVE4dnm+yROfE0A< at >public.gmane.org>Date: 2 July 2012 09:42Subject: Re: <nettime> IOCOSE (2012) - A Crowded ApocalypseTo: Newmedia-YDxpq3io04c< at >public.gmane.orgHi Mark,thank you for your emailyes these are definitely interesting questions. we don't necessarilybelieve there are no 'real' conspiracies any more, but is definitely truethat the multiplication of theories that can now be found online (in formof youtube videos, or blogs) is undermining the respectability of the fewactual investigations. We liked the idea, however, of combining a form ofwork, such as crowdsourcing, where the reasons and motives behind the jobare not known and not asked, to produce conspiracy theories, which arenever complete (otherwise they would be provable, and deniable).Which, as you say, brings to the question of sort of environmentcrowdsourcing is, and how does it frame its employers and employees. AmazonMechanical Turk defines itself as 'artificial artificial intelligence',suggesting that crowdsourcing is an activity where human cognitive abilityis applied to a pure mechanical (and quantifiable) work.Questions which have not really been asked so far. We have been left withthe enthusiastic narratives about crowdsourcing (Wired magazine, forexample, has contributed to this a few years ago), and yet we have failedto acknowledge that crowdsourcing is now something quite different fromwhat we hoped and imagined.Best,On 29 June 2012 13:50, <Newmedia-YDxpq3io04c< at >public.gmane.org> wrote: <...>

Gregory M BernardWhistleblowing in a Wikileaks WorldA Model for Responsible Disclosure in Homeland SecurityPhD thesis (March 2012)Naval Postgraduate School (US Navy)Monterey, CaliforniaFull text thru: http://calhoun.nps.edu/public/handle/10945/6769EXECUTIVE SUMMARYIntroductionA dramatic change in the information-sharing environment has occurred overthe last decade. New technologies, the rapid evolution of the Internet,and innovations in social media have provided the ability to gather andshare information at an unprecedented level. The Executive Branch of theU.S. Government touts the virtues of transparency, while Congress defineswhistleblowing and the disclosure of government fraud/waste/abuse as a“civic duty”, and yet the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) process isbroken, the Whistleblower Protection Act (WPA) is woefully inadequate, andsecrecy continues to run rampant. The disclosure of hundreds of thousandsof potentially classified documents to the organization Wikileaks may bean example of what this contradiction has caused. The existence ofWikileaks as an organization is irrelevant now, and their most significantcontribution is not the release of 1.2 million documents. Rather, the mostsignificant impact of Wikileaks is their successful demonstration andvalidation of the ‘Wikileaks model.’ Wikileaks has demonstrated the powerof the Internet using web technologies to provide protections throughanonymity, while giving individuals access to a worldwide audience. Thecurrent troubles faced by the organization may or may not portend the endof Wikileaks; however, it does provide a glimpse into the future ofwhistleblowing. Building upon the apparent success of the Wikileaks model,the Wall Street Journal and Al-Jazeera have both implemented “anonymous”whistleblower submission sites. This new paradigm for communications, asenabled by the innovative uses of the Internet and social media, providesboth opportunities and areas for concern regarding governmenttransparency.Problem StatementWhistleblowing serves as a critical check and balance system to governmentbureaucracy, helping to circumvent administrative roadblocks and toprovide a mechanism through which homeland security can monitor andincrease efficiency in its operations. Homeland security also deals withinformation that can be of a sensitive or secret nature, the unauthorizeddisclosure of which can cause damage to both homeland security efforts andnational security. Maintaining the balance between secrecy andtransparency is a difficult proposition; however, current governmentefforts, particularly its handling of whistleblowers, places that balancein jeopardy. The government has taken some steps to address some of theseproblems; however, the government has also taken extreme measures toprosecute any whistleblowers who stray outside the appropriate submissionprocess (i.e., deemed an unauthorized leak of sensitive/classifiedinformation) or are not protected by the WPA. Instead of acknowledgingthat current policy on whistleblowers is broken, the government’s currentcourse of action decreases the likelihood important fraud/waste/abuseinformation will be received from whistleblowers, while possiblyinfluencing their decision and encouraging them to bypass authorizedchannels and instead utilize the Internet to protect themselves fromidentification and retaliation. The current lack of public trust ingovernment, and the existence of alternative avenues for disclosure thatprovide greater protections than those currently offered by the U.S.Government, serve to exacerbate the problem.Research QuestionWhat policy model and associated technological process could the U.S. DHSimplement that will encourage whistleblowers to submit information throughauthorized channels as opposed to leaking information to unauthorizedparties?AnalysisTo answer the research question, this thesis explores three primary areas.The first is the whistleblowing environment, to include definitions,applicable policies, laws (both domestic and international), authorizedand unauthorized processes, motivations, public trust, requirements, andintentions of all parties involved. The second area of focus istechnology, specifically, the available options, best practices, andvulnerabilities of potential technological solutions (e.g., phone, email,web). The final portion of thesis serves to develop and evaluate policyoptions based on the findings and conclusions identified in the first twoareas of analysis.Those findings are as follows:•Overclassification is a problem•Information sharing is critical to both U.S. security and U.S democracy•Homeland security efforts require public (to include its employees andpartners) trust and support to succeed•The ability to keep secrets and maintain control of classifiedinformation will continue to decrease•Decreasing overclassification will save the United States money•Whistleblowing is a civic duty xvi•The government is committed to providing whistleblower protections•Whistleblowers are in large part motivated by patriotism•Anonymity is a positive incentive for whistleblowers•Fourth and Fifth Estates (media and stateless news organizations)provide alternatives to the government process•Public trust in the government has declined•Public trust can be increased through the use of third parties•Technology exists to provide anonymity to whistleblowers•Current options for whistleblowing are inadequate These premises formthe foundation and justification for the implementation of any solution.Current legitimate/authorized processes, such as submission throughstandard government channels, present significant riskstothewhistleblower. Clandestine/unauthorized processes, such as theInternet (Wikileaks) and mainstream media, represent a clear breach of thelaw, which is in conflict with the “do the right thing” mindset of manywhistleblowers. If whistleblowers had a way to communicate identifiedissues through an authorized third party that would serve as a proxy ontheir behalf, it would undermine the current processes (both legitimateand clandestine), potentially making them obsolete. It would reduce thepersonal risk faced by whistleblowers by providing the anonymity thatmakes the clandestine approach attractive, without clearly breaking thelaw. The Department of Homeland Security has an opportunity to build uponand improve the “Wikileaks Model,” to harness its use of technology andprocess to create a solution that would meet the needs of bothwhistleblowers and the government. If implemented correctly, the number oflegitimate whistleblower complaints would increase (overall submissionswould increase), and the number of whistleblowers who choose unauthorizedavenues would be expected to decrease.RecommendationFor any solution to be considered successful, it is critical to establisha clear definition of success. This thesis proposes the followingdefinition of success for any whistleblowing solution. To promote thevoluntary disclosure of information by any man or woman who reasonablybelieves that organizational wrongdoing has occurred, the facilitation ofcorrective action to address the wrongdoing, and providing for theprotection of the submitter while maintaining information security, allwithin the bounds of U.S. law.Four key pillars create the foundation for success.•Whistleblowers must have the support of leadership•Legislation and policies must be clear and straightforward•Whistleblowing policies must enforce accountability•Authorized channels must provide at least as much protection asunauthorized channelsThe conclusions drawn in this thesis, including the policy modelultimately recommended, is based on the research and the findingsidentified above. Combined with a current understanding of the problem,the evaluation criteria, and the potential solutions available, it isrecommended that the government establish a partnership with a non-government organization (NGO) within U.S. legal jurisdiction, andsubsidize the establishment of a government sponsored whistleblowersubmission website and virtual private network. This solution would allowwhistleblowers to submit information to the government with the protectionof anonymity, through the third party NGO. Establishing this policyprovides whistleblowers who truly believe in improving governmentoperations through the submission of information on fraud/waste/abuse orother types of concerns, a legitimate way to achieve their goal withoutrisking their career and future on the weak whistleblower protectionscurrently in place. While it may not completely eliminate leaks to themedia or organizations, such as Wikileaks, the researcher believes thoseleaks will decrease as more whistleblowers give the government anopportunity to act on their submission.

Hello nettimersI'm absolutely indifferent to top level domains and domain names in general. Would not give a cent for .art after my name, not even for .lolAt the same time I'm a big old fan of both URLs and the location bar. http://art.teleportacia.org/Location_Yes/ (1999)I'm fascinated about the way one can narrate in the location bar and communicate literary everything through it, including business interests and copyright issues. All significant net art projects are incorporating address space, some of them take place in this bar solely. And I always try to resist any attempt to hide the adress bar in favour of a cleaner presentation. And am very sensitive to the intentions of developers to get rid of this interface artefact that look oh so unnecessarily technical. Because it is the last command line users still have. Our only front end to the algorithmic culture :)So I have mixed feelings when watching the new top level domain rush. The nice and optimistic one is that if big players are keen to pay all those hundreds of thousands for the words to appear in the location bar, it means the location bar will still stay visible in the browsers. And that browsers and the WWW are still the future.At the same time -- I'm getting pessimistic again -- if really big big players would care about the content in the address bar, they would already find the way to have "facebook", "google" or "amazon" as a top level domain. So the interest is not that huge?What do you think? Will the location bar survive?bestolia<http://art.teleportacia.org/>