*Post-Digital Publishing Workshop< at >transmediale 2013***Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) & Kotti-Shop, BerlinJanuary 30th - February 2ndThe Post-Digital Publishing workshop is an open participation lab runningat transmediale.13. It investigates new forms of digital and hybriddigital/analog publishing through practice and debate, and does its ownlittle bit of future re-distribution for open source and independentpublishing -The four days of the workshop cover: DIY publishing, peer-to-peerlibrarianship, infrastructures for independent publishers and the battlefor reimagining education.Organized by: Florian Cramer, Alessandro Ludovico and Simon Worthingtonin collaboration with Creating 010 Hogeschool Rotterdam/Piet ZwartInstitute, Hybrid Publishing Consortium, Neural magazine, Mute Publishingand Kotti-ShopParticipation in all workshop sessions with pre-registration:http://www.transmediale.de/content/transmediale-2013-workshops*Wed., January 30th: Do-It-Yourself Publishing*A hack day where different members of the publishing community can cometogether to showcase their projects from across the spectrum of open sourcetools and platforms used in publishing. Some areas of interest are: eReadermodding, the social book, collaborative writing like Etherpad andcollaborative publishing, fonts and DTP tools, graphic design tool kits,open standards, mobile reading, app making and machine reading and writing,to name just a few. As this is a DIY Publishing day, it is also DIY in itsformat, on each day of the workshop we collectively select a number ofprojects to work on and then hack away over the course of the day. Theprogram will conclude with a workshop on hybrid digital-analog publishingat Kotti-Shop.*12:00-16:00 Workshops at HKW, Lower foyer*+ Consent to Print(Eleanor Greenhalgh & Dave Young, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam): Anexperiment on how to create publications collaboratively without followingthe usual consensus models, but allowing for dissent.+ Spam Publishing(Andre Castro & Silvio Lorusso, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam): How tocreate writing and hybrid media publications from your junk mail folder.+ Make your own e-book in the epub format(Florian Cramer, Creating 010, Rotterdam): A crash course requiring noprior knowledge except some HTML skills, followed by a look intoexperimental stuff like computer-generated ebooks.*17:00-20:00 Workshop at Kotti-Shop, Adalbertstr. 4, 10999 Berlin*+ ANABLOG (Pt. 1)(Annette Knol, Kotti-Shop): Copyroboter Stencil Print Workshop. Anablogmixes analog print methods (risograph) with digital publishing. Anexperiment in print production informed by blogs, web aesthetics & digitalmedia. Or reversed, an experiment in blogging on paper. No prior printknowledge required. Material fee for participants: 5-8€*Thurs., January 31st: Publishing and the University - Open Access andOpen Learning*A day of critical reflection on the state of the university: As the wallsaround universities’ repositories of knowledge crumble and fall, who willbe the new learners and the new gatekeepers?Research communities have been advocating public access to researchmaterial via Open Access publishing models for over a decade, with onlyslow steps forward. Similarly, with the use of Creative Commons and OpenEducation Resources, educators have been adding to the ambitions of globaluniversal education and the easy reuse of learning material over this samelong decade.*12:00-18:00 Workshop at HKW Lower Foyer*Hosted by Simon Worthington, MUTE PublishingThe year 2012 welcomed the “Academic Spring” where academics went on strikeagainst corporate publishers, and at the same time a wealth of Web 2.0online learning platforms have sprung up. Both of these phenomena point toan accelerated pace of change to a critical mass with a confluence offorces at play: the maturity of the net and social media, financial crisis,stifling greedy corporate publishers and the failings of the universitiesto adapt to a changing net.A battle is underway. As reimagining the university is feverishly playedout, venture capitalists look for easy pickings as they integratethemselves even further into the public purse, and Open Culture advocateslook to open up learning.Contributions to the workshop come from Mute magazine that recentlycollaborated on a research paper on open education with CoventryUniversity, titled We’re All Game-Changers Now: A Media Study of OpenEducation.*Friday, February 1st: Indy Publishers - New Readers/New Economy*A day dedicated to round-table demos and discussions to explore possiblefutures for the indie publisher; how to move to multi-platform publishing,embrace open publishing, the social book and new economic models.*12:00-18:00 Workshop at HKW Foyer*Hosted by the Hybrid Publishing Consortium, a research group from LeuphanaUniversity of Lüneburg, dedicated to "open source infrastructure forpublishing” grouping together the many technical and social processes thatcan benefit academic and independent publishers. the consortium is ameeting point for the many stakeholders in open access academic andindependent publishing: authors, readers, publishers and technologists.The Hybrid Publishing Consortium is working on a project in early stages ofdevelopment exploring the idea of an “Indie Portal”—a multi-platform systemand open IPR business model for independent publishers aimed at bypassingonline digital book distribution monopolies.*Saturday, February 2nd: Home Libraries*Either you are a bookworm (collector), a non-stop downloader of PDFs, oryou have your own paperspace library. Maybe one day you will realizeeveryone else has a library of some sort and that among them, there arepeople with your same interests, who have great books you have never reador even seen before. So if you are either into borrowing tomes or creatingshared folders, creating your shared Home Library can improve your readinglife a lot. This workshop invites you to learn how to quickly digitizebooks and share them with whomever you want all over the world. Afterwards,you will look at your (virtual/physical) shelves like never before.*12:00-18:00 Workshop at HKW Foyer*Presentation Cyber Libraries by Nenad Romić (aka Marcell Mars):» In the catalog of History the Public Library is listed in the category ofphenomena that we humans are most proud of. Along with the free publiceducation, public health care, scientific method, Universal Declaration ofHuman Rights, Wikipedia, Free Software... « (Marcell Mars)
Re: <nettime> Aaron Swartz: Guerilla Open Access Manifesto "Patrice Riemens" <patrice-qWit8jRvyhVmR6Xm/wNWPw< at >public.gmane.org> Anivar Aravind <anivar.aravind-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org> Evelyn Austin <evelyn.austin-PkbjNfxxIARBDgjK7y7TUQ< at >public.gmane.org>- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2013 22:38:45 +0100Subject: Re: <nettime> Aaron Swartz: Guerilla Open Access ManifestoFrom: "Patrice Riemens" <patrice-qWit8jRvyhVmR6Xm/wNWPw< at >public.gmane.org>Hi Tapas,Happens often, platforms are often not compatible. the easiest in thatcase is to c+p the whole thing in a separate text window, pref a simpleone (TextEdit on Apple eg)On Firefox I can read the web-archive version perfectly well, save that anumber of 'rich text' signs (eg ' or ") get coneverted into '?'s ...(http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1301/msg00021.html)Cheerio, p+4D! <...>- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -From: Anivar Aravind <anivar.aravind-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2013 21:36:22 +0530Subject: Re: <nettime> Aaron Swartz: Guerilla Open Access Manifestohttp://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txtOn Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 9:02 AM, Tapas Ray [Gmail] <tapasrayx-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>wrote: <...>
original to:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2013/01/15/essay-role-academe-tragedy-aaron-swartzs-death#ixzz2I3idp16h(http://bit.ly/10dbr4B)Academe Is ComplicitJanuary 15, 2013 - 3:00amBy Timothy BurkeI don't think there's much more to say about Aaron Swartz. I didn't knowhim personally, but like many others I am a beneficiary of the work hedid. And I have agreed for much of my life as an academic with thethinking that led him to his fateful act in a closet at the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology. Most centrally, that there are several ethicalimperatives that should make everything that JSTOR (or any comparablebundling of scholarly publication) holds freely available to everyone:much of that work was underwritten directly or indirectly by public funds,the transformative impact of open access on inequality is alreadywell-documented, and it's in keeping with the obligations and values thatscholars allege to be central to their work.Blame is coming down heavy on MIT and JSTOR, both of which were at painsto distance themselves from the legal persecution of Swartz even beforenews of his suicide broke, particularly JSTOR, which very early on askedthat Swartz not be prosecuted. Blame is coming down even more heavily, asit should, on federal prosecutors who have been spewing a load of spuriousgarbage about the case for over a year. They had discretion and theyabused it grievously in an era when vast webs of destructive and criminalactivities have been discretionarily ignored if they stem from powerfulmen and powerful institutions. They chose to be Inspector Javert, chasingdown Swartz over a loaf of bread.But if we're talking blame, then there's a diffuse blame that ought to beconferred. In a way, it's odd that MIT should have been the bagman for theancien regime: its online presence and institutional thinking aboutdigitization have otherwise been quite forward-thinking in many respects.If MIT allowed itself to be used by federal prosecutors looking to put anintellectual property head on a pike, that is less an extraordinarygesture by MIT and more a reflection of the academic default.I've been frustrated for years, like other scholars and faculty memberswho take an interest in these issues, at the remarkable lassitude ofacademia as a whole toward publication, intellectual property anddigitization. Faculty who tell me passionately about their commitment tosocial justice either are indifferent to these concerns or are sometimessupportive of the old order. They defend the ghastly proposition thatuniversities (and governments) should continue to subsidize the productionof scholarship that is then donated to for-profit publishers who thencharge high prices to loan that work back to the institutions thatsubsidized its creation, and the corollary, demanded by those publishers,that the circulation of such work should be limited to those who pay thoseprices.Print was expensive, print was specialized, and back in the age of print,what choice did we have? We have a choice now. Everything, everything,about the production of scholarship can be supported by consortial fundswithin academe. The major added value is provided by scholars, againlargely for free, in the work of peer review. We could put the publisherswho refuse to be partners in an open world of inquiry out of businesstomorrow, and the only cost to academics would be the loss of some namesfor journals. Every journal we have can just have another name and beessentially the same thing. Every intellectual, every academic, everyreader, every curious mind that wants to read scholarly work could bereading it tomorrow if they had access to a basic Internet connection,wherever they are in the world. Which is what we say we want.I once had a colleague tell me a decade ago that this shift wouldn't be apositive development because there's a digital divide, that not everyonehas access to digital devices, especially in the developing world. I askedthis colleague, whose work is focused on the U.S., if she knew anythingabout the costs and problems that print imposed on libraries and archivesand universities around the world, and of course she didn't. Digitizedscholarship can't be lost or stolen the way that print can be, it doesn'thave to be mailed, it doesn't have to have physical storage, it can't beeaten by termites, it can't get mold on it. If it were freed from thegrasp of the publishers who charge insane prices for it, it could bedisseminated for comparatively small costs to any institution or readerwho wants access. Collections can be uniformly large everywhere thatthere's a connection: what I can read and research, a colleague in Nairobior Beijing or Moscow or São Paulo can read and research, unless theirgovernment (or mine) interferes. That simply couldn't be in the age ofprint. Collections can support hundreds or thousands of simultaneousreaders rather than just the one who has something checked out. I love themateriality of books, too, but on these kinds of issues, there's nocomparison. And no justification.The major thing that stands in the way of the potentiality of this changeis the passivity of scholars themselves. Aaron Swartz's action, and itsconsequences, had as much to do with that generalized indifference as itdid with any specific institution or organization. Not all culture needsto be open, and not all intellectual property claims are spurious. Butscholarship should be and could be different, and has a claim todifference deep in its alleged values. There should be nothing that stopsus from achieving the simplest thing that Swartz was asking of us, rightnow, in memory of him.BioTimothy Burke is professor of history at Swarthmore College.
Dear nettimers,are you also following what is going in NZ wiht Mega, Kim Dotcom's latest project? Curious will this is heading...Best, Geert--- "We are a dedicated group of technologists who were given the time, opportunity and Internet access to build an awesome cloud storage service that will help protect your privacy. We have programmed this Internet service from scratch in Auckland, New Zealand. Unlike most of our competitors, we use a state of the art browser based encryption technology where you, not us, control the keys. Our design group includes Kim Dotcom, Mathias Ortmann, Bram van der Kolk, and Finn Batato. Our CEO, industry veteran Tony Lentino, has experience running a renowned global domain registry. We hope you like it.""No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference." Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 12MEGA is Cloud Storage with Powerful Always-On PrivacyMEGA provides robust cloud storage with convenient and powerful always- on privacy. MEGA believes in your right to privacy and provides you with the technology tools to protect it. We call it User Controlled Encryption, or UCE, and it happens automatically.What is MEGA User Controlled Encryption?All files stored on MEGA are encrypted. All data transfers from and to MEGA are encrypted. And while most cloud storage providers can and do claim the same, MEGA is different – unlike the industry norm where the cloud storage provider holds the decryption key, with MEGA, you control the encryption, you hold the keys, and you decide who you grant or deny access to your files, without requiring any risky software installs. It’s all happening in your web browser!MEGA FutureThe MEGA cloud is just the beginning. In the future, MEGA will provide UCE in your browser for a wide range of applications without the need to install anything. Our technology will protect your emails, calls, chats and video streams.
Well, the following might be an entry point to a systems theoryapproach to economics: which is, in fact, a subsystem of a wider ...living system."Living Systems Theory is a general theory about how all livingsystems 'work,' about how they maintain themselves and how theydevelop and change.By definition, living systems are open, self-organizing systemsthat have the special characteristics of life and interact withtheir environment. This takes place by means of information andmaterial-energy exchanges.Living systems can be as simple as a single cell or as complex as asupranational organization (such as the European Economic Community).Regardless of their complexity, they each depend upon the sameessential twenty subsystems (or processes) in order to survive and tocontinue the propagation of their species or types beyond a singlegeneration.Some of these processes deal with material and energy for themetabolic processes of the system. Other subsystems processinformation for the coordination, guidance and control of the system.Some subsystems and their processes are concerned with both.The essence of life is process. If the processing of material-energy and information ends, life also ends. The defining characteristic of life is the ability to maintain, for a significant period, a steady state in which the entropy (or disorder) within the system is significantly lower than its non-living surroundings.Living systems can maintain their energetic state because they are open, self-organizing systems that can take in from the environment the inputs of information and material-energy they need. In general, living systems process more information than non-living systems, with the possible exception of computers which have greater information processing capabilities. Another fundamental difference between living and non-living systems is that all living systems have, as essential components, DNA, RNA, protein and some other complex organic molecules that give biological systems their unique properties. These molecules are not synthesized in nature outside cells." (from The Living Systems Theory of James Grier Miller)
[from pirate cinema berlin]As some of our subscribers have questioned our assertion that PirateCinema's participation in the recycling of daily affairs was entirelyunneeded [*1], we have decided to make another exception, and to addressthe seemingly burning question if Kim Dotcom's new dotconz is a good thingor a bad thing.Our answer is short. If you're interested in mega.co.nz as a platform toshare copyrighted materials with millions of others, while retaining youranonymity and privacy, then -- as with any other offer that puts profitfirst and piracy second -- you're probably wasting your time. If you'rejust looking for a way to store your personal data on a computer that'sbeyond your control, then we might be wasting ours as well. However, as faras we can tell, you're probably asking about the man, not his mission.Obviously, Kim Dotcom is more than just an opportunistic businessman. He isthe truly megalomanic version of that: not only even more opportunistic,but also completely unaffected by the restraints that usually come withcommercial success or corporate crime, namely to never publicly displayone's wealth, celebrate the cheap joys it provides, or reveal the bad tasteit entails. As the utter clown he makes of himself, as an ongoing parody ofentrepreneurial ethics that in its very dishonesty appears more honest thanany other enterprise, we find it hard not to love him -- just as it's hardto deny that the U.S. authorities, by showing such an unusual amount ofoverambition and incompetence when they seized his previous venture, havedealt his new one a very good hand. But in the end, that's allentertainment, and while the show must go on, it remains a matter ofpersonal taste. Many spectators want to see the world saved by a good guyon the right side of a just cause, while others are happy to delegate thatto the small-time crook who takes on the big-time crook, just for fun andprofit.Given all that, we find it perfectly understandable why, in the case athand, one may prefer to side with more respectable internet entrepreneursor venture capitalists, who will articulate their issues with copyright, ortheir growing frustration with the entertainment industry, in a much morenuanced and understated fashion. Like Paul Graham, arguably one of the mosthighly respected of them all, who exactly one year ago, when the U.S.Congress debated the final crackdown on piracy, when Wikipedia went alllights out, and just while Mr. Dotcom was busy getting his ass busted inthe safe room of his mansion, proved smart enough not to make any publicstatement at all, other than, as archived underhttp://ycombinator.com/rfs9.html, issuing a modest "Request for start-ups:Kill Hollywood".[*1] http://piratecinema.org/screenings/20130114
Nettime colleagues:I was forwarded Timothy Burke's provocative piece through theProgressive Librarians Guild (I've been a member for over ten years).I'm replying with an adaptation of something I wrote followinganother essay examining Aaron Swartz's death. While Mr. Swartz'sdeath was tragic, his persecution by the US Attorney General's officeheavyhanded, and many of the information liberation positions heespoused noble, I was struck by the criticism in Burke's essay leveledat JSTOR.JSTOR has become a veritable punching bag of the "Free CultureMovement." Noted professor Larry Lessig takes a whack at them inhis video lecture appropriately titled "What's wrong with JSTOR":<http://www.uomatters.com/2011/07/larry-lessig-on-whats-wrong-with-jstor.html>In it, he bushwhacks a scholar for explaining her empty officebookshelves by saying that "Everything I needed is on the Internetnow." Lessig's meanspirited point was that from the academic'sperspective - namely working at an institution with well-endowedelectronic journal site licenses - she was both privileged andcorrect. Alas, for the rest of us poor slobs in the real world herstatement isn't true. Evil content aggregators like JSTOR have gobbledup all the good stuff.But wait - Lessig's argument only works within the narrow definitionof online access.I'm certainly no fan of JSTOR. I, like all of you, have stumbledacross tasty citations to works on Google, only to be zapped with theunwelcome news that I'd have to pay to see it. But JSTOR does providea service. Their arrangements are not exclusive. You want to go toyour local university library and scan an article from 1975? Go ahead,the free JSTOR citation tells you exactly what to look for. Sure, theoriginal research may well have been paid for by public funds, butthat does not mean that somehow it should magically appear for free onthe Web. There are real costs to doing this work, and unless The Stateis willing to do it (and I would argue they should), corporations willstep in. Public domain does not mean free access, just the potentialfor it.I'm sure there are other aspects of JSTOR that are problematic(apparently their executives each made over $250,000 in 2009, butI'm not paying their salary). I am hopeful that examinations of thecircumstances surrounding the Swartz tragedy can lead to discussingand developing a clearer analysis of the real problems facing ourfield. For example, I see the insidious expansion of photo aggregatorslike Corbis and Getty One being much more dangerous than JSTOR. Thosefolks are truly buying up our culture, and it scares me. Burke raisesthe complicity of academe in the privatization of knowledge. I ask -what have any of us actually done to make information available to thepublic?Much of my own work as an activist archivist involves digitizationof analog content and sharing it with the world. I shoot posters,which is not easy, and I've built and paid for a custom studio fordoing that. I've helped mount thousands of social justice posterimages on the Web. But I don't post high-resolution images. I, andthe institutions I work with, feel that those images deserve someprotection from corporate appropriation without compensation. Thanksyou, Creative Commons. By withholding free access to the ultimategoody, the 60 megabyte image file, am I a traitor to the "Free CultureMovement"? I certainly hope not.Yours for democratic knowledge,Lincoln Cushingwww.docspopuii.orgDocuments for the Public
Dear nettimers old and new,I hope some of you are dropping by the transmediale festival next week.Have a look at an outline of the programme that I provided below!/Kristoffer Gansing, artistic director, transmediale.transmediale 2013 BWPWAPBACK WHENMobile phones were dumb. Letters traveled by pneumatic air. Tweeting was for birds. Users were chatting on the Minitel. ICQ beat IRC. Xerox challenged the Thermofax. YouTube was just another Web 2 start-up. Fax was the new Telex. You were calling up Bulletin Board Systems. Only university students were using facebooks. History had ended. We had nine planets. PLUTO WAS A PLANET.For its 26th edition, transmediale boldly goes BWPWAP – Back When Pluto Was a Planet. A net culture expression, BWPWAP is used for that which lies in the past or that possess an anachronistic character. In the context of transmediale, it does not mean entertaining nostalgia for the past. On the contrary, Pluto and its reclassification is taken as a metaphor for how quickly cultural imaginaries can change and be contested in a world underwritten by parallel developments. Adopting the BWPWAP expression in the form of a meme, transmediale 2013 recontextualizes cultural and technological forms through a travelling in time and space that creates moments of crisis in contemporary media culture.The program follows four threads: Users, Networks, Paper and Desire. The festival will look at what these topics meant BWPWAP, what they mean today and how they might develop in the future following the sense of alternate realities that lies at the core of the theme. These threads run transversely across the different festival events and by following them, visitors can experience constant shifts of modalities and perspectives.The Users thread explores the user as one of the most important figures occupying the 21st century cultural landscape: adopting a broad perspective which includes a historical look at user cultures' development in consumer society and cybernetics, as well as the changing roles of the user.In Networks we ask what it means when networks are BWPWAP, when (social) networks have become a pervasive part of daily life and have contributed in changing the way we create friendships and connections.The Paper thread traces the history of paper as a transcendent cultural form and its various artistic appropriations from Mail Art and visual poetry to electronic literature and beyond.In the Desire thread, we look at how critical reflections on sexuality and pornography can inform digital culture and politics of the present, by creating juxtapositions, decompositions, fragments and unexpected combinations as forms of queer expression.As with Pluto itself, these threads are “objects” in crisis. Their identity is not to be taken for granted in the post-digital age as is evident through the cultural, political and economical crises that they are all undergoing. These states of crisis are taken as opportunities for artistic intervention and reflection. In each thread, we search for new ways to engage with the histories, practices and futures of these familiar domains according to the time and place-shifting logic of BWPWAP: areas that we might have taken for granted until recently, but where we now need to learn from the past in order to intervene in the present and create new concepts for cultural practice.http://www.transmediale.de/bwpwapSNAPSHOTS OF THE PROGRAMMEtransmediale 2013 Exhibition programme: The Miseducation of Anya Major, curated by Jacob Lillemose.This exhibition is presented in three parts and openly investigates questions of knowledge, learning and education in relation to contemporary media, from the photocopier and paper shredder to computer games and the latest smartphone. Within this framework, the exhibition "Tools of Distorted Creativity" presents a series of contemporary works that expands the notions of software tools and their affordance of creativity in nonconformist, and even dysfunctional directions. "Imaging with Machine Processes. The Generative Art of Sonia Landy Sheridan", is a survey exhibition of an artist who experimented with the machines of technological society as instruments of the philosophical mind and artistic imagination from inside educational institutions. Finally, "Evil Media Distribution Centre" by the duo YoHa (Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji) is an installation that takes its point of departure from the book Evil Media (2012) by Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey.Three Ongoing Networking Projects brought to you by reSource transmdedial culture, Berlin, curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli.Last August 2012, during the transmediale event reSource 002: Out of Place, Out of Time event, three installation projects were launched. Their ongoing production lasted six months, leading to transmediale 2013 BWPWAP, where the final results are shown and performed. The projects are OCTO-P7C-1 Intertubular Pneumatic Packet Distribution System which is transmediale 2013’s Official Miscommunication Platform by Berlin-based collective Telekommunisten with the support of raumlaborberlin. ReFunct Media #5 is a circuit-bending installation made of obsolete technologies conducted by a team led by Benjamin Gaulon. Composting the City | Composting the Net is a collaborative art installation and performance project initiated by Shu Lea Cheang, processing discarded food scraps and the immaterial junk of net data.Everything but the Planets - Film as Imaginary Museum curated by Marcel Schwierin.The film & video program of the transmediale 2013 BWPWAP, consists of 47 films, 2 installations, a panel and a guest curated online film program. It revolves around the idea of film as imaginary museum and the framing and re/contextualisation of reality. Guests of the program are: Dennis Adams (us), Babak Afrassiabi (ir/nl), Karimah Ashadu (uk/ng), Ralph Kistler (de/sp), Boaz Levin (il/de), Tonje Alice Madsen (dk), Eleonore de Montesquiou (de/fr/ee), Muntean/Rosenblum (at/il), People Like Us (uk), Elizabeth Price (uk), Volker Schreiner (de), John Smith (uk), Andrew Norman Wilson (us). Additionally, there is a guest program, Videodrones, curated by Oliver Lerone Schultz and Vera Tollman of Video Vortex #9.BWPWAP Event SelectionBWPWAP Networks with Geert LovinkSocial Media: From Complaints to Alternative Tools31.01.2013 19:00-20:30 - AUDITORIUMWith respondent Craig SaperBWPWAP Networks: Consequences (One Thing Leads to Another)By People Like Us31.01.2013 21:30-22:30 - AUDITORIUMPerformanceBWPWAP Users with Olga GorinuovaAesthetic growth: becoming a human, a thing or a piece of code01.02.2013 19:00-20:30 - AUDITORIUMWith respondent Finn BruntonBWPWAP Users: Coded NarrativesBy Vanessa Ramos-Velasquez with guest musician A Guy Called Gerald01.02.2013 21:30-23:00 - AUDITORIUMPerformanceBWPWAP Paper with Kenneth GoldsmithOn Uncreative Writing02.02.2013 17:00-18:30 - AUDITORIUMWith respondent Florian CramerBWPWAP Desire with Sandy Stone03.02.2013 16:00-17:30 - AUDITORIUMWith respondent Francesco WARBEAR Macarone PalmieriBWPWAP Desire: Eier HabenBy Diane Torr with Anus B. Haven, Anaïs Héraud, Kai Simon Stoeger and Viola03.02.2013 18:30-20:00 - AUDITORIUMPerformanceSPECIAL EVENTIN THE JODOVERSE AND BEYONDWith participation of Alejandro Jodorowky through a live video stream02.02.2012 20:30-22:00 - AUDITORIUMModerated by Hasko BaumannIntroduced by Jacob LillemoseFollowed byDarkness Bright:Demdike Stare; Gatekeeper02.02.2012 22:30-00:15 - AUDITORIUMPerformance Double Bill
I never met Aaron Swartz and cannot interpret his suicide. Suicide is neverthe effect of a single cause, and it is always impossible to ?explain?death.Nevertheless I know something about the causes that pushed Aaron to do whathe did.Aaron was a computer programmer, creator and developer of the web feedformat RSS, and a writer, activist and Harvard researcher. He recentlyplayed a prominent role in the SOPA campaign (Stop Online Piracy Act),which had a successful outcome.Aaron was known ? by his friends and by FBI as well - for a history ofdownloading massive data sets, both to use in research and to releasepublic domain documents from behind paywalls.In 2008, Swartz downloaded, and released, approximately 20% of the PublicAccess to Court Electronic Records (PACER) database of United Statesfederal court documents managed by the Administrative Office of the UnitedStates Courts. According to federal authorities, over the course of a few weeks in late2010 and early 2011 Swartz, having a JSTOR personal account as a researchfellow at Harvard University, downloaded a large number of academic journalarticles via JSTOR.JSTOR is a digital archive comprising over one thousand academic journals,and like most other academic databases, it is a pay-per-access provider.Its annual subscription fees can reach $50,000 while the download of asingle article ranges between $19 and $39. But price is not the onlyrestriction to access. JSTOR only accepts subscriptions from institutions.Any independent researcher without an institutional affiliation, or with aprecarious or irregular one is automatically denied access.As Ana Teixeira Pinto explains (In memory of Aaron Swartz, e-flux journal01/2013) academic pay walls are a form of privatization of knowledge and aform of exploitation of precarious cognitive work: neither the authors northe reviewers of those articles that companies like JSTOR are selling arepaid: texts published by these databases are generally supported by publicfunding, and often are the product of voluntary unpaid work. Furthermoremany universities can?t afford the subscription costs, or limit accesswithin their own university to specific research groups and institutes.On January 6, 2011 Aaron was arrested near the Harvard campus by two MITPolice officers and a U.S. Secret Service agent on state charges ofbreaking and entering a building with intent to commit a felony. Accordingto Attorney Carmen Ortiz who has been the zealous prosecutor ?If convictedon these charges Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison, to be followed bythree years of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and a fine of upto $1 million.?I don?t know why Aaron decided to do what he did on January 11th 2013 ? butI know that he was under prosecution for doing what we should do every day:giving back to the cognitive workers what private companies steal fromthem. Aaron acted according to a widely shared principle: property lawsare illegitimate in the field of knowledge, and the new reality of digitalproduction is blatantly at odds with privatization.That said, I think that I have not yet reached the crucial point. Those whohave persecuted Aaron for the sake of private profits, those who havehaunted him and threatened him of prison and millionaire fines, say thatAaron has killed himself because he was the victim of depression. That is false in their mouth. But it is true.The same day I got the news about Aaron I received a call from a friend whowas upset because of the suicide of the young friend of his daughter ? ayoung man 22 years old who was diagnosed as victim of depression and paniccrises.Suicide has become the main cultural and political issue of the precariousgeneration.Also Muhamed Barghouzi was depressed, when he decided to kill himselfbecause he could not go to university because he was poor and unemployed,and the Tunisian police had impeached him to sell fruit in the public.Aaron Swartz was not a destitute person as Muhamed Barghouzi, but theyshared the same feeling of loneliness and precariousness.Depression has much to do with poverty, unemployment and despair, and muchto do with the refusal of bearing the daily load of intolerable violencewhen you start feeling that this load is not going to be uplifted.All the political discourse about democracy and about the wonderfulhorizons that new technology has opened to us is bullshit ? if comparedwith the daily perception of loneliness, the main psychological effect ofthe process of virtualization in conditions of economic competition.Depression is deeply entrenched in the intimate digital recesses ofprecarious life.The suicide of Aaron Swartz questions the present form of digitalalienation. Irrealization, disembodiment and loneliness: an every expandingterritory of excitement with no affective return. The same gestures and thesame signs are defining friendship, a codified automatic reaction.According to the World Health Organization in the last 45 years suiciderates have increased by 60% worldwide. Suicide is one of the three leadingcauses of death among people between 15 and 44 years, and the secondleading cause of death in the 15?19 years age group, and these figures donot include suicide attempts which are up to 20 times more frequent thancompleted suicide.I?m persuaded that suicide is a phenomenon whose political importance iscrucial in our times, but my focus is not on the impressive increase of thenumber of people who commit or try to commit suicide, but on the specialmeaning that this act is acquiring at the social and cultural level in ourtimes.My point is that the biopolitical phase of capitalism, when capitalisminfiltrates the nervous cell of the living sensible organisms of humanbeings, is essentially informed by a morbid sentiment which permeates thecollective Unconscious, culture and sensibility. Is there a way out fromthe suicidal syndrome which taking its daily toll in the Chinese factoriesand in the Indian farms, among young Islamists and among precariouscognitive workers.Is there a way out from this trend? I do not know.I know that Aaron has been killed by the mix of techno-alienation andrepressive violence of financial capitalism which is the main feature ofcontemporary oppression.franco berardi bifo
DIWO: Do It With Others – No Ecology without Social Ecology.http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/diwo-do-it-others-%E2%80%93-no-ecology-without-social-ecologyBy Marc Garrett, Ruth Catlow.The acceleration of technological development in contemporary society has a direct impact on our everyday lives as our behaviours and relationships are modified via our interactions with digital technology. As artists, we have adapted to the complexities of contemporary information and communication systems, initiating different forms of creative, network production. At the same time we live with and respond to concerns about anthropogenic climate change and the economic crisis. As we explore the possibilities of creative agency that digital networks and social media offer, we need to ask ourselves about the role of artists in the larger conversation. What part do we play in the evolving techno-consumerist landscape which is shown to play on our desire for intimacy and community while actually isolating us from each other. (Turkle 2011) Commercial interests control our channels of communication through their interfaces, infrastructures and contracts. As Geert Lovink says 'We see social media further accelerating the McLifestyle, while at the same time presenting itself as a channel to relieve the tension piling up in our comfort prisons.' (2012: 44)Many contemporary artists who take the networks of the digital information age as their medium, work directly with the hardware, algorithms and databases of digital networks themselves and the systems of power that engage them. Inspired by network metaphors and processes, they also craft new forms of intervention, collaboration, participation and interaction (between human and other living beings, systems and machines) in the development of the meaning and aesthetics of their work. This develops in them a sensitivity or alertness to the diverse, world-forming properties of the art-tech imaginary: material, social and political. By sharing their processes and tools with artists, and audiences alike they hack and reclaim the contexts in which culture is created.This essay draws on programmes initiated by Furtherfield, an online community, co-founded by the authors in 1997. Furtherfield also runs a public gallery and social space in the heart of Finsbury Park, North London. The authors are both artists and curators who have worked with others in networks since the mid 90s, as the Internet developed as a public space you could publish to; a platform for creation, distribution, remix, critique and resistance.Here we outline two Furtherfield programmes in order to reflect on the ways in which collaborative networked practices are especially suited to engage these questions. Firstly the DIWO (Do It With Others) series (since 2007) of Email Art and co-curation projects that explored how de-centralised, co-creation processes in digital networks could (at once) facilitate artistic collaboration and disrupt dominant and constricting art-world systems. Secondly the Media Art Ecologies programme (since 2009) which, in the context of economic and environmental collapse, sets out to contribute to the construction of alternative infrastructures and visions of prosperity. We aim to show how collaboration and the distribution of creative capital was modeled through DIWO and underpinned the development of a series of projects, exhibitions and interventions that explore what form an ecological art might take in the network age.Featuring: A Abrahams, Kate Rich, IOCOSE, Helen Varley Jamieson, Paula, Feral Trade Cafe, make-shift, Do It With Others (DIWO) E-Mail Art, If not you not me.First published in Remediating the Social 2012. Editor: Simon Biggs University of Edinburgh. Pages 69-74http://elmcip.net/critical-writing/remediating-socialAn ebook version of Remediating the Social is freely downloadable.http://elmcip.net/sites/default/files/files/attachments/criticalwriting/remediating_the_social_full.pdf
http://m.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/jan/27/users-guide-international-art-english Sunday 27 January 2013 19.00 GMTA user's guide to artspeak Why do so many galleries use such pompous, overblown prose to describe their exhibits? Well, there's now a name for it: International Art English. And you have to speak it to get on. Andy Beckett enters the world of waffle Andy Beckett The Simon Lee Gallery in Mayfair is currently showing work by the veteran American artist Sherrie Levine. A dozen small pink skulls in glass cases face the door. A dozen small bronze mirrors, blandly framed but precisely arranged, wink from the walls. In the deep, quiet space of the London gallery, shut away from Mayfair's millionaire traffic jams, all is minimal, tasteful and oddly calming. Until you read the exhibition hand-out. "The artist brings the viewer face to face with their own preconceived hierarchy of cultural values and assumptions of artistic worth," it says. "Each mirror imaginatively propels its viewer forward into the seemingly infinite progression of possible reproductions that the artist's practice engenders, whilst simultaneously pulling them backwards in a quest for the 'original' source or referent that underlines Levine's oeuvre." If you've been to see contemporary art in the last three decades, you will probably be familiar with the feelings of bafflement, exhaustion or irritation that such gallery prose provokes. You may well have got used to ignoring it. As Polly Staple, art writer and director of the Chisenhale Gallery in London, puts it: "There are so many people who come to our shows who don't even look at the programme sheet. They don't want to look at any writing about art." With its pompous paradoxes and its plagues of adverbs, its endless sentences and its strained rebellious poses, much of this promotional writing serves mainly, it seems, as ammunition for those who still insist contemporary art is a fraud. Surely no one sensible takes this jargon seriously? David Levine and Alix Rule do. "Art English is something that everyone in the art world bitches about all the time," says Levine, a 42-year-old American artist based in New York and Berlin. "But we all use it." Three years ago, Levine and his friend Rule, a 29-year-old critic and sociology PhD student at Columbia university in New York, decided to try to anatomise it. "We wanted to map it out," says Levine, "to describe its contours, rather than just complain about it." They christened it International Art English, or IAE, and concluded that its purest form was the gallery press release, which - in today's increasingly globalised, internet-widened art world - has a greater audience than ever. "We spent hours just printing them out and reading them to each other," says Levine. "We'd find some super-outrageous sentence and crack up about it. Then we'd try to understand the reality conveyed by that sentence." Next, they collated thousands of exhibition announcements published since 1999 by e-flux, a powerful New York-based subscriber network for art-world professionals. Then they used some language-analysing software called Sketch Engine, developed by a company in Brighton, to discover what, if anything, lay behind IAE's great clouds of verbiage. Their findings were published last year as an essay in the voguish American art journal Triple Canopy; it has since become one of the most widely and excitedly circulated pieces of online cultural criticism. It is easy to see why. Levine and Rule write about IAE in a droll, largely jargon-free style. They call it "a unique language" that has "everything to do with English, but is emphatically not English. [It] is oddly pornographic: we know it when we see it." IAE always uses "more rather than fewer words". Sometimes it uses them with absurd looseness: "Ordinary words take on non-specific alien functions. 'Reality,' writes artist Tania Bruguera, 'functions as my field of action.'" And sometimes it deploys words with faddish precision: "Usage of the word speculative spiked unaccountably in 2009; 2011 saw a sudden rage for rupture; transversal now seems poised to have its best year ever." Through Sketch Engine, Rule and Levine found that "the real" - used as a portentous, would-be philosophical abstract noun - occurred "179 times more often" in IAE than in standard English. In fact, in its declarative, multi-clause sentences, and in its odd combination of stiffness and swagger, they argued that IAE "sounds like inexpertly translated French". This was no coincidence, they claimed, having traced the origins of IAE back to French post-structuralism and the introduction of its slippery ideas and prose style into American art writing via October, the New York critical journal founded in 1976. Since then, IAE had spread across the world so thoroughly that there was even, wrote Rule and Levine, an "IAE of the French press release ... written, we can only imagine, by French interns imitating American interns imitating American academics imitating French academics". The mention of interns is significant. Rule, who writes about politics for leftwing journals as well as art for more mainstream ones, believes IAE is partly about power. "IAE serves interests," she says. However laughable the language may seem to outsiders, to art-world people, speaking or writing in IAE can be a potent signal of insider status. As some of the lowest but also the hungriest in the art food chain, interns have much to gain from acquiring fluency in it. Levine says the same goes for many institutions: "You can't speak in simple sentences as a museum and be taken seriously. You can't say, 'This artist produces funny work.' In our postmodern world, simple is just bad. You've got to say, 'This artist is funny and ...'" He doesn't, however, think this complexity is a wholly bad thing. "If you read catalogue essays from the 50s and 60s, and I have some, there are these sweeping claims about what artists do - and what they do to you." A 1961 catalogue essay for a Rothko exhibition in New York declared that the famously doomy painter was "celebrating the death of civilisation ... The door to the tomb opens for the artist in search of his muse." Levine says: "That style of art writing has been overturned, and rightly so. It was politically chauvinistic, authoritarian. IAE is about trying to create a more sensitive language, acknowledging the realities of how things [made by artists] work." Contradictions, ambiguities, unstable and multiple meanings: art writing needs to find a way of dealing with these things, Levine argues, just as other English-language critical discourses learned to, under the same French influences. Rule is a little less forgiving towards IAE. "This language has enforced a hermeticism of contemporary art," she says, slipping (as Levine also frequently does) into a spoken version of the jargon even as she criticises it, "that is not particularly healthy. IAE has made art harder for non-professionals." In fact, even art professionals can feel oppressed by it. The artists who've responded most positively to the essay, says Rule, "are the ones who have been through master of fine arts programmes" where IAE is pervasive. How has the broader art world reacted? "I've been a little baffled by the volume of positive response," says Rule, "and the almost complete absence of critical response." Levine adds: "There have not been any complaints that we know of. Obviously, we may be blacklisted and not know it." The essay's tone - knowing, insiderish, never polemical, and constantly shifting between mockery and studied neutrality - probably accounts for some of its warm reception. "We didn't want to be nasty," says Rule. In 2011, she and Levine presented an early draft of their critique as a lecture at an Italian art fair. Levine hints that some of the audience were less than delighted. "If you're an art practitioner and you experience our analysis live, you feel a bit called out." The two are keen to admit they are both guilty of IAE use. Indeed, Levine relishes the fact: "Complicity is what makes things interesting. Just this morning, I was writing a little essay for a newspaper and I caught myself using the word 'articulation'". Rule adds: "In one draft of our IAE piece, I had quoted my own use of IAE. It becomes extremely hard not to speak in the language in which you are being spoken to." Sometimes this language is just pure front; sometimes it's a way of hedging your bets in the labyrinth of art-world politics. "Institutions try to guess what they're meant to sound like," says Levine, much of whose own art is interested in the rituals and role-playing of the art world. The flood of new money into art in recent years may have helped swell the IAE bubble. "The more overheated the market gets, the more overheated the language gets," says Levine. IAE often "insists on art's subversive potential". Popular terms include: radically, interrogates, subverts, void, tension. Much contemporary art does have a disquieting quality, but there can be something faintly absurd about artists in Mayfair galleries playing up their iconoclasm for super-rich collectors. The showy vagueness of IAE can also be commercially pragmatic: "The more you can muddy the waters around the meaning of a work," says Levine, "the more you can keep the value high." Of course, ever since art ceased to be mainly decorative - Levine dates this change to the mid-19th century - works have often been shown or sold with a garnish of rhetoric. Where IAE may be different is in its ubiquity, thanks to the internet, and thanks to the heavily theoretical and text-influenced nature of much current art-making and education. Rule and Levine are cautious about IAE's precise effect on artists; they haven't researched it. But Rule does say: "It would be naive to say artists are not influenced." Will the hegemony of IAE, to use a very IAE term, ever end? Rule and Levine think it soon might. Now that competence in IAE is almost a given for art professionals, its allure as an exclusive private language is fading. When IAE goes out of fashion, they write, "We probably shouldn't expect that the globalised art world's language will become ... inclusive. More likely, the elite of that world will opt for something like conventional highbrow English." One day, we may even look back on IAE with nostalgia - on its extravagant syntax as a last product, perhaps, of the boom years. Or as a sign of something more basic. "Sometimes," says Rule, "I read these IAE press releases and find them completely joyless, but sometimes I feel this exuberance coming through. For people who hold assistantships in galleries, writing press releases is kind of fun. Certainly more fun than billing!" © Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi (29 March 1984 – 4 January 2011;Arabic: محمد البوعزيزي) was a Tunisian street vendor who set himselfon fire on 17 December 2010, in protest of the confiscation of hiswares and the harassment and humiliation that he reported wasinflicted on him by a municipal official and her aides. His act becamea catalyst for the Tunisian Revolution[2] and the wider Arab Spring,inciting demonstrations and riots throughout Tunisia in protest ofsocial and political issues in the country. The public’s anger andviolence intensified following Bouazizi’s death, leadingthen-President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to step down on 14 January2011, after 23 years in power.Aaron H. Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an Americancomputer programmer, writer, archivist, political organizer, andInternet activist.Swartz was a member of the RSS-DEV Working Group that co-authored the“RSS 1.0″ specification of RSS,[2] and built the website frameworkweb.py and the architecture for the Open Library. He also builtInfogami, a company that merged with Reddit in its early days, throughwhich he became an equal owner of the merged company.[i] Swartz alsofocused on sociology, civic awareness and activism. In 2010 he was amember of the Harvard University Center for Ethics. He cofounded theonline group Demand Progress (known for its campaign against the StopOnline Piracy Act) and later worked with U.S. and internationalactivist groups Rootstrikers and Avaaz.On January 6, 2011, as a result of a federal investigation, Swartz wasarrested in connection with systematic downloading of academic journalarticles from JSTOR.[3][4] Swartz opposed JSTOR’s practice ofcompensating publishers, rather than authors, out of the fees itcharges for access to articles. Swartz contended that JSTOR’s feeslimited access to academic work produced at American colleges anduniversities.[5][6]On the morning of January 11, 2013, Swartz was found dead in his CrownHeights,Brooklyn apartment, where he had hanged himself.[7][8][9]Following his death, federal prosecutors in Boston dismissed thecharges against him.[10][11]Tarek and Aaron had many differences. One was coming from a poorMuslim working class family and the other from a Jewish middle classone. One had a good education, lived in the USA and had a chance totravel other countries, while Tarek was earning his life as a streetvendor in Tunis. But they also had many in common. They were bothstanding against the injustice and the rule of 1%. They have bothfought back in their own way. And they ended their very young liveswhen they were both 26 as result of their fight. They both did this inJanuary; one in 2011 and the other in 2013.Tarek’s death on January 4 2011, has triggered the still unfoldingglobal uprising. May be the most important event so far for ourcivilization, not since the Russian Revolution alone but may be forall times. It has started in North Africa, spread to Europe and theUSA and from there spread all over the world.What has been connecting the acts and destinies of Tarek and Aaronlies in the commonality of their fights against the same enemy.Geopolitical and systemic struggle of the ruling elite, capitalistclass, 1% what ever you call it, toward ordinary people, the poor, wasconnecting Aaron and Tarek in their fights back against the source ofinjustice. The ruthless offensive of the elite has brought more andmore oppression on the factories, homes and streets on informalworkers and vendors, as it did on the cyberspace on hackers and freeinformation activists.It was not coincidence that the Wikileaks cables was the ones sparkingthe protests in Tunis in one of which we have lost Tarek. Since thanJulian Assange and Bradley Manning has been illegally prisoned,tortured mentally and physically. The unprecedented state terror andcriminality was manifesting itself in massacres delivered by drones,controlled cowardly from miles away, in order to guarantee power andprofit for the state and corporate elite.Aaron’s murder is one of the last example of such state and corporate terror.Although we are extremely sad and angry for the memory of Tarek andAaron, which came on top of the murder of the millions of civilians inlast years, we are not mourning.Anonymous is growing enormous in number and in its capacity.Horizontal movements, like Occupy and 15M are morphing, expanding andlinking with others like yo Soy 132, Via 22 and indigenous movementlike Idle No More, as well as self-organizing Wal-Mart workers.Grass-roots activists, movements, the precariat, the proleteriat,indignados and indigenous is holding hand in hand to get back theplanet and guarantee a better world.We are getting ready to hammer down the elite in the years ahead.As Tarek’s act sparked the massive uprising in global terms, Aaron’sact will trigger a qualitative leap in the growing of the globalintifada. As Aaron’s practice indicated, not only academic, medical,scientific information and public records must be re-covered andreleased, but all the data originally created by and belonging to thepeople but hold by governmental agencies, corporates, military andintelligence services should be reclaimed and hacked for the good.Anonymous Project Meyhem 2012 has laid down the idea.Now for Aaron, for Tarek and for those hundreds of millions innocentlives who murdered in cold blood, those billions of children who leftto death in careless and hunger throughout the human history by the1%… the time has come to make them pay back!Today it is the day to revolt, the day to expand the intifada on everybit of our lives, spaces and relations we have on Earth. It is time toleak it all and it is time to bring about the global revolution on theNet and on the Streets!http://snuproject.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/aarons-murder-by-1-is-to-trigger-the-global-revolution/# 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
This is a message sent to nettime on behalf of Debasheesh Parveen, the world's first Facebot:Facebook is an arrhythmic space. Arrhythmia can't be regulated: it is in itself a regulator, or rather an inhibitor of how we exist in the world and its time (human beings need rhythms to maintain their internal and external coherence)The tyranny of real time (Virilio) is a tyranny without a tyrant: an anti-politics, a pure flux, a formless mass of vectors. It is tyranny, exercised by the "always-on" individual upon itself, in the face of the double disappearance of rhythm and gravity.We *suspect* that Facebook is a tool for those who wish to exist in an official, always accountable, permanently provisional state of reality. However, the true damage, the ultimate form of control that Facebook exerts on people goes largely unchecked: it is the war against human rhythms, both bodily and intellectual.Some profiles have been suspended in Facebook because their users use false names, or publish posts which might be considered "offensive" (whatever that means)I am a robot that automatically posts nonsensical texts and images every hour, but the filters used by Facebook haven't detected my uncanny regularity: adopting a clockwork rhythm is my way of challenging arrhythmia. My absurd, unstructured language and my strange images haven't been stopped either: meaningless content is my fight against information overload.?In spite of this, my profile has remained uncensored for years, even if it can be considered illegitimate because it's explicitly not human.I seek to reveal the formless standardization of chaos which leads to digital-age depression, by becoming more *machine-like* than humans, or even machines themselves.*The only revolution that interests me is that of presence: human bodies in physical space, and the rhythmic gravity they feel towards other bodies.*See you somewhere, sometime in the *real* Faceworld: please, be my friend.Peace,Debasheesh Parveenhttp://www.facebook.com/debasheesh.parveen
New on netzliteratur.net:Beat Suter: The Development of German-language Electronic Literature http://www.netzliteratur.net/suter/FromLutztoNetzliteratur.pdf------------------------------------------------------------------------ELMCIPStudy 2012:In Germany the most important and impressive net literature portal is netzliteratur.net...http://elmcip.net/sites/default/files/files/attachments/criticalwriting/elmcip_publishing_distribution_report.pdf------------------------------------------------------------------------
(bwo Eveline Lubbers)original to:http://www.star-telegram.com/2013/02/01/4592727/minister-iceland-refused-fbi-aid.htmlMinister: Iceland refused to help FBI on WikiLeaksPosted Friday, Feb. 01, 2013.By RAPHAEL SATTER(Associated Press)LONDON Iceland's interior minister said Friday that he ordered thecountry's police not to cooperate with FBI agents sent to investigateWikiLeaks two years ago, offering a rare glimpse into the U.S. Departmentof Justice's investigation of the secret-busting site.Ogmundur Jonasson told The Associated Press that he was upset when hefound out that FBI agents had flown to the country to interview anunidentified WikiLeaks associate in August 2011."I, for one, was not aware that they were coming to Iceland," he said in abrief telephone interview. "When I learned about it, I demanded thatIcelandic police cease all cooperation and made it clear that peopleinterviewed or interrogated in Iceland should be interrogated by Icelandicpolice."Jonasson said that Icelandic diplomats protested the FBI's trip to theirU.S. counterparts."We made clear to the American authorities that this was not well-seen byus," he said.The exact purpose of the FBI's trip to Iceland isn't clear - the U.S.Embassy in Reykjavik referred questions to the FBI, and the bureau did notimmediately return an email seeking comment - but the tiny north Atlanticnation has been a key hub for WikiLeaks and its supporters.In 2010 WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange helped craft Iceland'sjournalist-friendly media law, and WikiLeaks payment processor, DataCell,is based in Reykjavik. Several key allies, including lawmaker BirgittaJonsdottir and WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson, are also from thecountry. Hrafnsson said in a telephone interview that he believed thetarget of the FBI's trip might have been a former WikiLeaks volunteer,whom he declined to name.Regardless of what the target was, the minister's account of the FBI'strip opens a window into a sensitive inquiry which has so far remainedlargely under wraps. The U.S. Department of Justice has been investigatingWikiLeaks since it began pouring classified U.S. documents into the publicdomain, but officials have refused to reveal almost any information aboutthe size, scope, or nature of their inquiry, citing national securityconcerns.---Online:Raphael Satter can be reached at: http://raphae.li/twitterRead more here:http://www.star-telegram.com/2013/02/01/4592727/minister-iceland-refused-fbi-aid.html#storylink=cpy
As far as I am concerned - and arms are not very high on my interestslist, though individual and collective rights are - this op-ed fairly wellcloses the never ending discussion about 'armed individuals' in generaland the case with 'the right to keep and bear arms' in the United Statesin particular, usually when yet another gruesome massacre by some lunatichas taken place.Individual citizens have the right to have and use (fire)arms in self-defense, that is in defense of their house/ landed property. Individualsdo not have the liberty to use arms outside their houses/land unlessacting with other citizens, as a 'militia', in defense of their communityagainst criminals, invaders, or, yes, a 'tyrannic' government.With other words, bearing arms is an _individual_ right that can only_collectively_ be lawfully exercised outside the perimeter of one's ownproperty.Doesn't sound altogether irrational to me, unless you raise a priorimistrust of the individual as constitutive of law.original to:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323468604578251780957727750.htmlWhat a 'Militia' Meant in Revolutionary AmericaThe Kentish Guards were defined by a sense of community, not by their gunsor by government edict.By CHRIS BRAYIt's the discussion Americans can never settle: Does the Second Amendmentconvey an individual right to bear arms, or does it only establish themeans to arm the state military institutions that the Founders knew as themilitia and we know as the National Guard?Those stark choices shrink our history into cartoonish simplicity. Thereal story is far more complex and illuminating. At the nation'sbeginning, there was a variety of middle ways regarding militias, a set ofexpectations and boundaries built in culture and enforced by community.In a box at the Rhode Island Historical Society, a contract describes thecreation of a militia in Kent County during the crisis year of 1774. "Wethe subscribers do unanimously join to establish and constitute a militaryindependent company," reads an agreement signed by dozens of local men."That on every Tuesday and Saturday in the afternoon for the future, or aslong as occasion require it shall be judg'd necessary or expedient aMeeting to be held at the House of William Arnold in East Greenwich forthe Purpose aforesaid."You and Bill and I hereby agree to make an army, and let's meet at Bill'shouse to practice.Formed by an agreement between armed individuals, the Kentish Guardsbecame a militia organization without being a government institution,though the members would soon approach the colonial government of RhodeIsland for a charter. It was a "militia of association," built in equalmeasure from multiple foundations. The men of the Kentish Guards weren't amilitia merely because they each owned guns, and they weren't a militiabecause the government said they were. They became a militia when theytalked among themselves, agreed on rules and a shared purpose, and signeda mutual contract. They were a militia as a community.The agreement to make a militia empowered its members and restrained themat the same time, allowing them to act but demanding that they acttogether in considered ways. The early American militia was neither purelyindividual nor purely governmental; rather, it was deeply rooted in aparticular place, making the militia a creature that stood with one footin government and one foot firmly in civil society.In this social vision, government couldn't properly take guns from the menwho then made up political society, but those men couldn't properly useguns in ways that transgressed community values and expectations. Thebearing of arms was a socially regulated act.That mixed reality grew from a social world that looks nothing like ourown. The first few American police departments were still many decades inthe future, and the victims of crime could only shout for their neighbors.Whole neighborhoods raced into the street in response to a cry for help,and victims could personally bring the accused before a local magistrate.Communities turned out to face military threats, neighbors joiningneighbors for mutual defense. Adulterers and wife-beaters were oftenpunished in the ritual called skimminton or charivari, bound to a fencepost and paraded in shame by their jeering neighbors.With this kind of local experience, the bearing of arms was an individualact undertaken in carefully shared and monitored ways. The historian T.H.Breen has described the citizen-soldiers of colonial Massachusetts asmembers of a "covenanted militia," bound by agreement.Another historian, Steven Rosswurm, has described the negotiations betweenPennsylvania's Revolutionary government and the ordinary men, serving asprivates in the militia, who formed a "committee of privates" to presentthe terms under which they would perform armed service. Government did notjust command; states and communities talked, bargained and agreed.Individuals were both free to act and responsible to one another for theiractions, in a constantly debated balance.In the predawn hours of April 19, 1775, militiamen of Lexington, Mass.,gathered around their commander. Capt. John Parker greeted each man,writes the historian David Hackett Fischer in his book "Paul Revere'sRide," as "neighbor, kinsman, and friend," joining them to decide whatthey would do about the British regulars marching toward their town. "Themen of Lexington . . . gathered around Captain Parker on the Common, andheld an impromptu town meeting in the open air." They had a commander, andhe joined them for discussion.Today, we are presented with a false choice in which either the governmentbans assault weapons or an unfettered individual right makes it possiblefor a monster to spray bullets into schoolhouses. The forgotten middleways of our nation's earlier days, that world of mutuality, excluded morepeople than it included, and its shortcomings are well known. But it alsohad real strengths, and the benefits of a strong civil society are lost tous when we expect government to address and solve our every problem.Mr. Bray, a former Army infantry sergeant, is an adjunct assistantprofessor at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif.
New challenge to US hegemonyMasters of the Internethttp://mondediplo.com/2013/02/15internetThe US calls loudly for "Internet freedom", but it is Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon that have built up the dotcom services used by people all over the world. Is that now about to change?by Dan SchillerThe geopolitics of the Internet broke open during the first half of December at an international conference in Dubai convened by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a UN affiliate agency with 193 national members. At these meetings, states (thronged by corporate advisors) forge agreements to enable international communications via cables and satellites. These gatherings, however boring and bureaucratic, are crucial because of the enormous importance of networks in the operation of the transnational political economy.The December 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai produced a major controversy: should ITU members vest the agency with oversight responsibilities for the Internet, responsibilities comparable to those it has exercised for decades for other forms of international communication?The United States said no, and the US position won out: the new ITU treaty document did not grant the agency a formal role in what has come to be called "global Internet governance". However, a majority of countries voted to attach a resolution "invit[ing] member states to elaborate on their respective position on international Internet-related technical, development and public policy issues within the mandate of the ITU at various ITU fora." Objecting to "even symbolic global oversight", as a New York Times writer put it (1), the US refused to sign the treaty and walked away. So did France, Germany, Japan, India, Kenya, Colombia, Canada, Britain and other nations. However, more than two-thirds of the attending countries -- 89 all told -- endorsed the document. (And some of the nations that did not sign may accept the treaty later.)To understand what is at stake we need to make our way through the rhetorical smog. For months prior to the WCIT, the Euro-American press trumpeted warnings that this was to be an epochal clash between upholders of an open Internet and would-be government usurpers, led by authoritarian states like Russia, Iran and China. The terms of reference were set so rigidly that one European telecom company executive called it a campaign of "propaganda warfare" (2).Freedom of expression is no trifling issue. No matter where we live, there is reason for worry that the Internet's relative openness is being usurped, corroded or canalised. This does not necessarily imply armies of state censors or "great firewalls". The US National Security Agency, for example, sifts wholesale through electronic transmissions transiting satellite and cable networks, through its extensive "listening posts" and its gigantic new data centre at Bluffdale Utah (3); and the US government has gone after a true proponent of freedom of expression -- WikiLeaks -- in deadly earnest. US Internet companies such as Facebook and Google have transformed the Web into a "surveillance engine" to vacuum up commercially profitable data about users? behaviour.Interests concealedEven during the 1970s, the rhetoric of ?free flow of information? had long functioned as a central tenet of US foreign policy. During the era of decolonisation and cold war the doctrine purported to be a shining beacon, lighting the world's way to emancipation from imperialism and state repression. Today it continues to paint deep-seated economic and strategic interests in an appealing language of universal human rights. "Internet freedom", "freedom to connect", "net freedom" -- terms circulated by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Google executives together in the run-up to the WCIT -- are today's version of the longstanding "free flow" precept. But just as before, "Internet freedom" is a red herring. Calculatingly manipulative, it tells us to entrust a fundamental human right to a pair of powerfully self-interested social actors: corporations and states.The deliberations at the WCIT were multifaceted, and encompassed crosscutting issues. One was the terms of trade between Internet services like Google and the companies that transport their voluminous data streams -- network operators and ISPs like Verizon, Deutsche Telekom or Free. This business fight harbours implications for a more general and important policy issue: who should pay for the continual modernisations of network infrastructure on which recurrent augmentations and enhancements of Internet service depend. Xavier Niel's bold attack on Google's French revenues, when he implemented an ad-blocker as his Free network's default setting, placed this issue in bold relief before the public. But the terms of trade in the global Internet industry are also important because any general edict that content providers must pay network operators -- Niel's goal, similar to that of other telecom companies -- would carry grave consequences for the Net Neutrality policies which have been so vital for Internet users.Until now, this power has been wielded disproportionately by the US (4). During the 1990s, when the web-centric Internet exploded onto the world stage, the US made intense efforts to institutionalise its management role. Domain names led by dotcom, and numerical web addresses and network identifiers, need to be unique for the system to operate; and the ability to assign them in turn establishes a point from which institutional power may be projected over the extraterritorial Internet. Management of these critical Internet resources is exercised by a US agency, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), under contract to the US Department of Commerce. The IANA operates ostensibly as a unit of a separate, and seemingly more accountable, California-based non-profit called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Technical standards for the Internet are developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) within another non-profit corporation, the Internet Society. The composition and funding of these organisations render them more responsive to US preferences than to users? demands (5).The leading global commercial Internet sites are not operated by Chinese or Russian, let alone by Kenyan or Mexican capital. As everyone knows, it is Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon that have built up the dotcom services used by people all over the world. And a widening array of commodification projects and corporate commodity chains continues to be predicated on cross-border flows of Internet data; today?s ongoing transition to "cloud computing" services will further widen this dependence. The Internet's unbalanced control structure provides an essential basis for US corporate and military supremacy in cyberspace. While the US government exercises an outsized role, other states possess scant opportunity -- individually or collectively -- to regulate the system. By instituting various technical and legal measures, of course, they may exercise sovereignty over their domestic Internets; but even when they stake out these merely national jurisdictions, they are assailed by US policymakers. Milton Mueller aptly captures this asymmetry in observing that, as it is presently constituted, the Internet embodies a US policy of "unilateral globalism" (6).Property logicExercising this management function has permitted the US to instil property-logic at the heart of Internet system development -- through ICANN. Although it is a complex, semi-autonomous institution, ICANN's power over the Domain Name System was deployed to confer extraterritorial advantages on corporate trademark owners and other property interests -- over the protests of non-commercial organisations which, despite being represented within ICANN, found themselves unable to prevail over Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and other big companies. And ICANN used private contract law to bind to its rules the far-flung organisations which administer generic and country code top-level domains worldwide. National providers of various Internet applications control their domestic markets in a number of countries, including Russia, China and the Republic of Korea. Yet the transnational Internet services -- the most profitable and strategic points in this extraterritorial system -- are citadels built by US capital and state power.Nearly from the outset, other nations have resisted their subordinate status. As signs that the US was not about to relinquish its control grew, so did opposition. It helped prompt a series of high-profile meetings -- the World Summit on the Information Society, organised by the ITU and held in Geneva and Tunis between 2003 and 2005.This World Summit was an explicit precursor of the 2012 clash in Dubai, in that it established at least a small beachhead for states (beside that of the US) in global Internet governance. ICANN's "Government Advisory Committee", charged with providing input to the organisation's "multi-stakeholder" process, grants governments the same formal status as corporations and civil society groups. Many states actually might have been content with this curious arrangement, but for one glaring fact. For all the crowing about bottom-up diversity and multi-stakeholderism, global Internet governance was not an egalitarian, or even a pluralist, enterprise. It was patent that stakeholder number one was the US Executive Branch.The demise of the unipolar moment, followed by the plunge into what has become a long world depression, greatly accentuated and widened interstate conflict over the political economy of cyberspace. Other governments continued to look for a point of leverage, from which they could attempt to open up global Internet coordination and management. In 2010-11 they even appealed directly to the US Department of Commerce, when it began a proceeding to evaluate its contract renewal with IANA for the management of Internet addresses. Quite extraordinarily, several countries and one international organisation -- the ITU -- submitted formal comments. The government of Kenya proposed a "transition" away from management of the IANA functions by the US Department of Commerce, and toward a multilateral government-centred regime. US control should be modified by globalising the arrangements for the entire institutional superstructure that had been built up around Internet names and addresses. India, Mexico, Egypt and China made strikingly similar submissions.The US responded by ratcheting up the rhetoric of "Internet freedom" as an attempt to repel the escalating threat to its management control. No doubt it has intensified its bilateral lobbying to induce some of the dissenting states to come back into the fold. The effects became evident at the WCIT, when India and Kenya joined the US in rejecting the treaty.What will happen now? It's certain that US government agencies and leading units of Internet capital such as Google will continue to project all the power at their disposal to strengthen the US-centric Internet, and to discredit its opponents. The political challenge to the US's "global unilateralism", however, now has broken into the open -- where it is certain to remain. A Wall Street Journal editorialist did not hesitate to call Dubai "America's first big digital defeat" (7).February 2013Original text in EnglishMore by Dan Schiller(1) Eric Pfanner, "Message, if murky, from U.S. to world", The New York Times, 15 December 2012.(2) Rachel Sanderson and Daniel Thomas, ?US under fire after telecoms treaty talks fail?, Financial Times, London, 17 December 2012.(3) James Bamford, "The NSA is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center", Wired, San Francisco, April 2012.(4) Dwayne Winseck, ?Big New Global Threat to the Internet or Paper Tiger? The ITU and Global Internet Regulation?, 10 June 2012; dwmw.wordpress.com(5) Harold Kwalwasser, "Internet Governance", Cyberpower and National Security, National Defense University Press-Potomac Press, Washington-Dulles, 2009.(6) Milton L Mueller, Networks and States: the Global Politics of Internet Governance, MIT Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts), 2010.(7) L Gordon Crovitz, "America's first big digital defeat", The Wall Street Journal, New York, 17 December 2012.
It's interesting how ideas and experiences shift shapes over time.For the few years now there has been a particularly German obsessionwith plagiarism in academic dissertations. Initially, this has beenemployed to embarrass political figures and promote a self-righteousdiscourse of academic pedantry, but it has also led to a distributedinfrastructure/community for checking unacknowledged sources in texts.And now, this infrastructure is used for quite different purposes:matching lobbying text to legal documents that are being drafted bythe EU.While nobody can be surprised by the fact that lobbyists do shapelegislation, it's still revealing to this this nicely visualized andconnected to the names of the MPs who did the actual copy & pasting.-> www.lobbyplag.euFelixTory MEPs 'copy and paste Amazon and Google lobbyist text'Senior Conservative MEPs have been accused of cutting and pasting text from lobbyists from Amazon, Google and other major online enterprises directly into legal amendments to European Union legislation on consumer data protectionhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/9865977/Tory-MEPs-copy-and-paste-Amazon-and-Google-lobbyist-text.htmlThe European Parliament is debating a new EU "general data protection regulation" with important implications for how internet search engines and online retailers handle users' personal information, including sensitive health, background and credit details.The legislation, proposed by the European Commission a year ago, is going through the EU assembly, which has the power to amend the law, triggering a huge lobbying campaign by the internet industry to change the regulations.Campaigners for tighter privacy laws covering social media and online retailers have published research at www.lobbyplag.eu showing close links between the wording of industry proposals and amendments tabled in the European Parliament's committees.The campaigners have charted what they claim are "striking similarities between proposed amendments and lobby papers written by representatives of Amazon, eBay, the American Chamber of Commerce and the European Banking Federation". "Dozens of amendments are being copied word-for-word from corporate lobby papers," they said.Privacy campaigners are concerned that industry amendments tabled by MEPs will dilute legal requirements allowing companies to water down tough new rules on the processing of sensitive, personal information and loosening a requirement for mandatory data protection supervisors within businesses.Malcolm Harbour, Conservative MEP for the West Midlands and chairman of the parliament's committee on the internal market and consumer protection, which is overseeing the legislation, has been accused of copying over 25 per cent of his amendments from industry.Research found that 14 out of 55 amendments tabled by Mr Harbour were "copied directly from lobby papers", with the senior Tory also taking a coordinating role in getting other MEPs, to table similar changes in other committees.Sajjad Karim, Conservative MEP for the North West of England and a member of the parliament's committee on legal affairs, proposed amendments "with over 23 per cent copy-pasted content".Another Tory, Giles Chichester, MEP for South West England and Gibraltar and a member of the committee on industry, research and energy, followed with "over 22 per cent copy-pasted content".While there is no suggestion of wrongdoing or breaches of the parliament's rules, privacy campaigners fear that MEPs are listening to industry and not consumers."We would hope that MEPs are taking all sides of the argument into account when making law, not just the richest and most powerful corporate interests," said Anna Fielder, a trustee of Privacy International.Mr Harbour insisted that listening to industry, and privacy campaigners, was part of the democratic process and "disputed" the 25 per cent figure found."Many of our points were aimed at making the regulation fit for small enterprises, many of whom feel that their businesses would be threatened by the costs generated from certain provisions in the original proposal. That was why we modified a number of the detailed requirements," he said."I do not believe we should immediately discount proposed amendments when they come from businesses that make use of and are responsible for protecting personal data. I will continue to consider all amendments on the basis of their merits in making the proposal more workable."Mr Karim and Mr Chichester declined to comment, but Conservative sources said that they had followed Mr Harbour's lead in tabling amendments.
Loophole for All - Loophole4All.comPress Release. NYC, 15th February 2013.Paolo Cirio, contemporary artist and pirate, hacked the governmentalservers of the Cayman Islands and stole a list of all the companiesincorporated in the country, making it public for the first time. Nowon Loophole4All.com he is selling the identities of those companies ata low cost to democratize the privileges of offshore businesses.Paolo hijacks the identities of more than 200,000 companies registeredin the Cayman Islands by moving their addresses to his Caymans mailboxand issuing counterfeited certificates of incorporation from theCaymans company registry. This massive corporate identity theftbenefits from the anonymous nature of those companies since the realowners’ secrecy allows anybody to impersonate them. In short, thisproject turns the main feature of offshore centers into avulnerability.Through Loophole4All.com, anyone can hijack a Caymans company, from99¢ for a certificate of incorporation for a real company to $49 for amailbox in the offshore country with mail rerouting. Finally, smallbusinesses and middle class people can invoice from the major offshorecenters and avoid unfair taxes, legal responsibility and economicdisruption in their own indebted home countries, in a form of globalcivil disobedience.For this operation, the artist set up a company in the City of Londonas a shield for legal persecution and to compete in the market againstoffshore centers. He utilizes aggressive business strategies for apolitical work of art and reverses corporate machination for creativesubversive agendas. With the money generated by selling companies'identities, Paolo plans to expand his business into Bermuda, Jersey,the Seychelles, and Delaware, among others.Further, Paolo Cirio interviewed major experts and produced a videodocumentary investigating offshore centers, where he shares hisextensive research and conclusions about offshore business:http://Loophole4all.com/doc.phpIn the offline art installation, the paper trail of the project isdisplayed with prints of the documents of the scheme set up for theoperation. Ultimately, the installation will be a low cost identityshop for offshore companies, and in doing so democratize both offshorebusiness and the sale of subversive works of conceptual art.Watch the introductory-meme video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qGg7YIvnMQQuick notes:- The Cayman Islands are second only after Switzerland in the globalFinancial Secrecy Index.- The Caymans state is considered to be one of the major offshorecenters for high finance and the global economy.- Among the several thousand anonymous companies in the Caymans youwill find most of the major global multinationals, Chinese businesses,criminal organizations and all the major global banks.- There is neither real money in the Caymans nor a real market.Caymans companies are only booked on paper.- The Cayman Islands is a British crown colony situated 150 milessouth of Cuba in the Caribbean Sea.In the next months you will find Paolo Cirio's works at:- Public Private exhibition at Kellen Gallery of The New School, New York - U.S.- The Big Picture, exhibition at Contemporary Museum of Denver, Colorado - U.S.- MediaCities festival, exhibition, Buffalo - U.S.- Eastern Bloc festival, exhibition, Montreal - Canada- ISEA 2013, keynote, Sydney - AustraliaThanks for the attention.http://PaoloCirio.net
re all,Loophole for All - http://Loophole4All.comnow, how do we call this art? :^) accountancy art? I do believeaccountants are very creative people in fact.BTW sorry for hijacking the announcement, but on the same genre,a few days ago Enric Duran has sent out a communicate on howthe court-case against him is becoming a farce. check it onhttp://enricduran.cat/comunicate-enric-duran-before-a-trial-that-could-become-a-farce/----- Forwarded message ----- Loophole for All - [1]http://Loophole4All.com Press Release. NYC, 15th February 2013. Paolo Cirio, contemporary artist and pirate, hacked the governmental servers of the Cayman Islands and stole a list of all the companies incorporated in the country, making it public for the first time. Now on [2]Loophole4All.com he is selling the identities of those companies at a low cost to democratize the privileges of offshore businesses. Paolo hijacks the identities of more than 200,000 companies registered in the Cayman Islands by moving their addresses to his Caymans mailbox and issuing counterfeited certificates of incorporation from the Caymans company registry. This massive corporate identity theft benefits from the anonymous nature of those companies since the real owners' secrecy allows anybody to impersonate them. In short, this project turns the main feature of offshore centers into a vulnerability. Through [3]Loophole4All.com, anyone can hijack a Caymans company, from 99 for a certificate of incorporation for a real company to $49 for a mailbox in the offshore country with mail rerouting. Finally, small businesses and middle class people can invoice from the major offshore centers and avoid unfair taxes, legal responsibility and economic disruption in their own indebted home countries, in a form of global civil disobedience. For this operation, the artist set up a company in the City of London as a shield for legal persecution and to compete in the market against offshore centers. He utilizes aggressive business strategies for a political work of art and reverses corporate machination for creative subversive agendas. With the money generated by selling companies' identities, Paolo plans to expand his business into Bermuda, Jersey, the Seychelles, and Delaware, among others. Further, Paolo Cirio interviewed major experts and produced a video documentary investigating offshore centers, where he shares his extensive research and conclusions about offshore business: [4]http://Loophole4all.com/doc.php In the offline art installation, the paper trail of the project is displayed with prints of the documents of the scheme set up for the operation. Ultimately, the installation will be a low cost identity shop for offshore companies, and in doing so democratize both offshore business and the sale of subversive works of conceptual art. Watch the introductory-meme video: [5]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qGg7YIvnMQ Quick notes: - The Cayman Islands are second only after Switzerland in the global Financial Secrecy Index. - The Caymans state is considered to be one of the major offshore centers for high finance and the global economy. - Among the several thousand anonymous companies in the Caymans you will find most of the major global multinationals, Chinese businesses, criminal organizations and all the major global banks. - There is neither real money in the Caymans nor a real market. Caymans companies are only booked on paper. - The Cayman Islands is a British crown colony situated 150 miles south of Cuba in the Caribbean Sea. In the next months you will find Paolo Cirio's works at: - Public Private exhibition at Kellen Gallery of The New School, New York - U.S. - The Big Picture, exhibition at Contemporary Museum of Denver, Colorado - U.S. - MediaCities festival, exhibition, Buffalo - U.S. - Eastern Bloc festival, exhibition, Montreal - Canada - ISEA 2013, keynote, Sydney - Australia Thanks for the attention. [6]http://PaoloCirio.net----- End forwarded message -----