In the recent article I wrote for the Italian IT portal Punto Informatico, “NetStArt/ I retroscena delle geografie digitali”, I presented the new project of the Italian duo Les Liens Invisibles: R.I.O.T. – Reality Is Out There.

Created for the Share Festival in Turin and presented during an outdoor workshop for the first time, the work “R.I.O.T. / Reality Is Out There” (here the website) is based on the concept of “augmented reality”. Through the use of smart phones in the urban landscape it is possible to access a parallel infosphere, and as Les Liens Invisibles point out, re-appropriate the public space. The various virtual data and geo-coded levels visible using smart phones become a geography to discover and reveal, but also an opportunity to invade and decompose consciously – and ironically – the everyday life. As stated in the website of the Share Festival, “the inspiration of the new Les Liens Invisibles project is the theme of Share Festival 2010: the error / smart mistakes, which the team plays creating an alteration of reality with the help of these technologies“. The workshop developed through a collective walk in the city of Turin, discovering the installations hidden in the virtual landscape (see the map).

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Panel hosted by DARC (Digital Aesthetics Research Centre, Aarhus University)
Presenters: Christian Ulrik Andersen (DK), Tatiana Bazzichelli (IT/DK), Geoff Cox (UK/DK), and Les Liens Invisibles (IT).

Share Festival, Turin, Italy. November 3, 2010. Regional Museum of Natural Science, Conference Hall, 2pm.

The panel investigates some of the interconnections between art, activism and business. Presenters examine how artists, rather than refusing the market, are generating cultural Trojan horses — social hacks, or “smart errors” — producing critical interventions from within. As the distinction between production and consumption appears to have collapsed, every interaction in the info-sphere seems to be a business opportunity.

The phrase “creative economy” is a perversion in this line of thinking. Therefore, the creative intersections between business and art become a crucial territory for re-invention and the rewriting of symbolic and cultural codes, generating political actions, attempts of social innovations, but also unexpected consequences and a deep level of irony. Errors or mistakes demonstrate the permeability of systems — that these can be reworked — and more so, that radical innovation requires modification of the prevailing business logic.
We are not suggesting these are new issues — as there are many examples of artists making interventions into the art market and alternatives to commodity exchange — but we aim to discuss some of the recent strategies that have emerged from a deep understanding of the net economy and its markets. Examples derive from software development and net cultures, such as peer production, free culture initiatives, gift economies, extreme sharing networks or open source business models.

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REFF. The reinvention of the real through critical practices of remix, mash-up, re-contextualization, reenactment.

The book by REFF RomaEuropa FakeFactory is out! I contributed with an essay for the section VOICES, with the title: The Disruptive Art of Business.

Foreword by: Bruce Sterling
Edited by: Cary Hendrickson, Salvatore Iaconesi, Oriana Persico, Federico Ruberti, Luca Simeone (FakePress)
Published by Derive Approdi, Rome, Italy, 2010. Language: Italian.

The fake competition RomaEuropa FakeFactory (www.romaeuropa.org) was an act of artivism, in favor of free culture and non-proprietary rights for authors. This network confronted the themes of art and hacking, political activism and technology, copyright and intellectual property and extended to access, cultural politics, crowdsourcing, open source models, peer-to-peer economic governance and the reinvention of the real.

The story begins with the section “VOICES”: a collection of more than 30 theoretical works on the themes of Free Culture, remixing as creative practice, the re-contextualization of urban spaces and knowledge sharing from international scholars such as Richard Barbrook, Andy Cameron, Stephen Kovats, The Yes Men, 0100101110101101.ORG, Jasmina Tesanovic, Massimo Canevacci Ribeiro, Antonio Caronia, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Marc Garrett, Francesco “Warbear” Macarone Palmieri and many others.

A catalog of the works presented by 32 artists, writers, designers, hackers and architects from all over the world follows in the section entitled “VISIONS”. These contributions give a voice to the unexplored scenarios of contemporary reality representing the worlds of innovation, appropriation and a continuous artistic and political reinvention bringing to light examples of new production models based on freely available contents, knowledge, connections and the possibility of reproducing, remixing and arranging contents, forms and objects; new technological practices, new forms social interaction; new opportunities for building unedited, self-determined imaginaries.

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Talk at the Emotion, Media and Crime Conference
September 29 – October 1, 2010, Aarhus University

The aim of the conference Emotions, Media and Crime in Aarhus is to highlight the relationship between emotion, media and crime in contemporary culture.

“Crime is the central point of an extensive production of fiction in books, films, TV series, and games. Crime is also a popular subject of journalism, mediated in newspapers and electronic media, not least the internet. Import and export flourish, developing intercultural exchange in a variety of fiction genres as well as forms of journalism. In short, national and transnational mediation – and mediatization ? of crime has been a crucial factor in determining how crime is perceived and discussed within the public sphere. Popular crime fiction, TV series and crime scenes have even become concepts in tourism and destination branding”.

My proposal reflects on the activity of a series of media artists and activists in Italy who created fictional myths, conspiracies and mythopoiesis – between urban legends and alleged crimes – in the middle of the 1990s. It addresses the creation of media ghosts and conspiracy theories as a form of art, where tactical and strategic use of media aims to underline sensitive nodes of social and political reflection (Wu Ming, 2006). Through the analysis of some pranks, conspiracies and artistic interventions, I will describe the process of creation of fictional identities as a challenge for cultural criticism. The method will be comparative, based on the ethnographic investigation of a few cases. First, I will address the pranks by the Luther Blissett Project (1994-1999).

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Seminar and Electronic Music Performance by Roberto Paci Dalò
Giardini Pensili – Rimini/Berlin

Seminar/Performance: Wednesday, October 6, 9.00-11.00
Student workshop: 11.00-12.00
Room 114B (Lydlab.), Adorno Building, Aarhus University

Roberto Paci Dalò is an Italian artist, composer and artistic director of Giardini Pensili and Velvet Factory, currently based in Rimini and Berlin.

Sensorial Cartography shows examples from Roberto Paci Dalò’s works based on urban explorations and expanded cartography. Through sound and projection (light, video, film) Roberto’s work tends to re-design (and remix) the perception of usual (and sometimes forgotten) places. From opera houses to industrial archaeologies, from radio to telecommunication systems, these projects deliberately work on media strategies, tactic and subliminal information, “sonic warfare”, and memory layers.

The seminar includes the live electronic music performance and screening of Atlas of Emotion Stream, inspired by the book Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film by Giuliana Bruno.
After the seminar and performance, a student workshop will follow.

Supported by: DARC, Digital Aesthetics Research Centre
Hosted by: Morten Breinbjerg and Tatiana Bazzichelli

Bicycle Built for Two Thousand, by Aaron Koblin

Some notes extracted from a paper written for the Conference “Interweaving Technologies. The Aesthetics of Digital Urban Living”, Aarhus, Denmark, April 22nd, 2010.

In the last half of the twentieth century Avant-garde art practices from Fluxus to mail art promised the creation of collaborative art and the production of new models of sharing knowledge. Today, techniques of networking developed in grassroots communities have inspired the structure of Web 2.0 platforms and have been used as a model to expand the markets of business enterprises.

The principal success of a Web 2.0 company or networking enterprise comes from the ability of enabling communities, providing shared communication tools and folksonomies. In this paper, I aim to advance upon earlier studies on networked art using a cross-national design, refusing the widely accepted idea that networked art is mainly technologically determined. Furthermore, I will present a few considerations that connect early experiments of networked art with the establishment of social networking platforms.

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Tech-Talk Tuesday at Open Space Aarhus, September 7, 19.00.-22.00.

CUM2CUT 2006 - Deep Dive Superhero by Joachim Muehleisen

After the talk I got interviewed for the Danish IT newspaper Comon.
Published as: “Hackere skaber ny form for porno” > read more here.

What is the connection between hacking and pornography? If we consider the hacker and activist backgrounds of the Italian and Spanish underground culture of the past thirty years, the hacktivist attitude is very often connected with the radical-punk idea of self-management, DIY and independent production. But the idea of creating networks of relations among individuals and collective experiences where subversive use of technology is connected to radical politics is not just limited to the creative use of computers and technology. Sex might also be seen as a working field of hacker experimentation and a context in which to express the DIY punk approach.

While hacktivism is the direct political and social action online, pornography becomes the direct political and social action on one’s own body (outside and within the network). Some experiences in the European queer and activist culture showed how to transfer this experimental hacker and DIY attitude from technology to the body and to the broader concept of sexuality. Experiences where the DIY-structure of the punk scene, and the hacker ideas of sharing, openness, decentralization, free access to information, and the hands-on imperative (Levy, 1984) became a challenge to create a different kind of pornography. Some video materials from the CUM2CUT Festival (Berlin, 2006-2007) will be shown.

Read more on my paper:  On Hacktivist Pornography and Networked Porn, essay in the Arse Elektronika Catalogue, edited by Monochrom (AT), Re/Search Publications, San Francisco, USA, upcoming October 2010 + PDF.

“Coke Side of Life” advertising campaign (2009)

Essay by Tatiana Bazzichelli: “If You Can’t Hack ‘em, Absorb ‘em or the Endless Dance of the Corporate Revolution”, published in Concept Store nr. 3, journal by Arnolfini Contemporary Art Gallery, Bristol, UK. Get the issue here. Get the PDF here. Read the full text below.

What were once the values and philosophy of the hacker ethic are since some years the domain of many of the business companies which represent the development of Web 2.0 and contributed to create the notion of social media.

According to Steven Levy, the first one to use the term hacker ethic as described in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984), the hacker ethic was a “new way of life, with a philosophy, an ethic and a dream”.

A philosophy, which had its own language and rules, and its own representative community, whose roots went back into the 1950s and 1960s, crossing the activity of the hackers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and in the Seventies, the rise of the sharing computer culture in California (well represented by the Community Memory Project in Berkeley and the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley). Embracing the ideas of sharing, openness, decentralization, free access to computers, world improvement and the hand-on imperative (Levy, 1984) the hacker ethics has been a fertile imaginary for many European hackers as well, who started to connect through BBSes in the Eighties.

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