"JODI: Something Wrong is Nothing Wrong", Ad by Motherboard TV (DELL)

Keywords:  counterculture, social networking, Web 2.0, business & advertisement.

The above image, published in VICE magazine Vol 7 Nr 2 (2010), is an advertisement for the social networking platform Motherboard TV, sponsored by DELL. But people into digital culture would immediately recognize something else.
The advertisement shows a reconstruction of the homepage http://wwwwww.jodi.org, a work by the Dutch artists JODI.org, a very well known symbol of the early net.art. JODI were part of a recent show at Eyebeam gallery in New York (December 2009) and got interviewed by the team of Motherboard TV (see here).
But this advertisement, branded by DELL, might also be the symbol of something more. 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. I have analyzed this matter on an article which is going to be published on the next issue of the Arnolfini journal, ‘Concept Store’ (Bristol, UK) .

The ideas of sharing, openness, decentralization, free access to computers and the hand-on imperative of the hackers’ imaginary, today are strictly connected with the use of commercial platforms. We are facing a progressive commercialization of contexts of software development and sharing, which want to appear open and progressive (very emblematic is the motto “Don’t be evil” by Google), but which are indeed transforming the meaning of communities and networking, and the battle for information rights, placing it into the boundaries of marketplace.This process is changing the meaning of collaboration and art itself.

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Venue: Culture Lab, Space 4/5, Newcastle, UK
Time/Date: 9th March 2010 – 10th March 2010, 09:00 – 17:00
AHRC funded Collaborative Research

I am leaving for Newcastle to attend the event: Creative Digital Media Research Practice: Production Through Exhibition. It is an AHRC funded Collaborative Research Training project on digital media, art research and curating. I’ll be part of a a panel on Do It Yourself research practice (moderated by Lalya Gaye) and I am going to present the topics of my current research at Aarhus University, Networking 2.0, An aesthetic, technological and social critique of collective art. I will also share my methodological approach, which is inspired by the Ethnographic Surrealism of James Clifford, (1981) and present my current investigation, which combines a multi-semiotic approach, and an empirical “intermedia” of networking practices, hacker and activist strategies.

Here is a description of the event – my talk is scheduled on the afternoon of March 10, Culture Lab, Newcastle.

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