Networkingart

Conference-Colloquium, Aarhus University, June 12 &14, 2010, ADA building, room 333.

Crowd in Italy during a strike, 2008, from the book Sono Anna Adamolo (ed. 2009)

This conference-colloquium at the Humanistic Faculty, Aarhus University, will relate to the widespread use of the concepts event and/or affect in contemporary research of media, art, philosophy, politics and culture. It is the aim to qualify, explore and investigate the scope of the terms event and affect in different analytical fields. We assume that the renewed focus on event and affect is partly due to the impact of new (electronic and digital) media and the new forms of immediacy created by real-time control and transmission.
The conference will therefore investigate two key issues: 1) How can we describe event and affect on philosophical, artistic, political and cultural levels? 2) Has a new paradigm of the signal – related to the bypassing of representation in real-time transmissions – superseded the sign? What characterizes the signal?

By combining these questions the conference wants to initiate a broader discussion on a paradigmatic transformation from sign to signal in relation to the concepts of event and affect and their use and scope in art, politics and culture.

[The text above is an extract of the Conference's call. The arrangement team consists of: Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, Britta Timm Knudsen, Dorthe Refslund Christensen, Carsten Stage, Camilla Møhring Reestorff, Mathias Bonde Korsgaard and Jonas Fritsch].

Download the program.

Keynotes:
Nigel Thrift, Brian Massumi and Erin Manning.
Speakers:
Niels Albertsen, Mads Anders Baggesgaard, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Christian Borch, Christoph Brunner, Merete Carlson, Dorthe Refslund Christensen, Leila Dawney, Carsten Friberg, Jonas Fritsch, Jan Ifversen, Britta Timm Knudsen, Mathias Bonde Korsgaard, Christoffer Kølvrå, Annette Svaneklink Jakobsen, Thomas Jellis, Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen, Thomas Markussen, Casper Høeg Radil, Carsten Stage, Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, Anne Marit Waade.
Participants:
Lise Nygaard Christensen, Lise Dilling, Jette Geil, Lars Bo Løfgreen, Kirsten Marie Pedersen, Rebecca Parbo.

My paper is about networked events as political and social practices of criticism in grassroots communities. Title is: The Network Events. Networked art as a challenge for sociopolitical transformation. I will address some artistic and activist projects as an example of fertile zones of rewriting and experimentation of cultural and political codes. In particular, I will describe the Italian case of Anna Adamolo (2008-2009).

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Free Beers by Superflex

Last May 21st, I ran a seminar together with Geoff Cox on the intersections between art, business and activism, at Aarhus University.

The seminar, as part of the DARC, Digital Aesthetics Research Center meetings, addressed the new forms of business that emerge from the uses of social media and critical arts practices, models that offer new insights into exploitation and even new ways of creating value. Geoff and I opened  the discussion on how best to translate these topics  into future research projects (e.g. in collaboration with SNYK), while presenting a range of different concepts. The research seminar was scheduled for Friday the 21st of May, 10-12, Aarhus University.
The title “Disruptive Art of Business” derives from a paper I wrote for an upcoming book, as part of my PhD Research investigation on Networking 2.0.

Key concepts: crisis of value, debt economies, alternative models (eg. music industry), donations based models, open source business, P2P (see Peer to Peer Foundation for instance), non-monetarised exchange and the gift, free software development, waged and unwaged labour, transformation of the institution, new forms of organization that take cue from networks culture (Organized Networks), buzz words, like sustainability, recuperation and tactical media strategies, disruptive art.

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Seminar & Workshops at Aarhus University, April 22 – 2010
KaserneScenen, starts 9.30.

Due to the ash- and eruption related cancellation of the three-day seminar Interweaving Technologies – the Aesthetics of Digital Urban Living, The DARC, Digital Aesthetics Research Center, and The Center for Digital Urban Living, Aarhus University, organise the mini-seminar Aesthetic eruptions of the digital. The seminar is arranged by Lone Koefoed Hansen and Lars Bo Løfgreen.

It will be a 3-4 hour seminar with some talks by presenters from the Aarhus area. Additionally, there will be two workshops:  Psychogeographics Aarhus by Martin Howse (UK/DE) and Wi-Fi cracking workshop by Gordan Savicic (AU/NL).

I will be part of the panel The Politics of Networks with Geoff Cox, Søren Pold and Christian Ulrik Andersen, giving a talk entitled “Aesthetics of Common Participation and Networking Enterprises”.
Read the rest of program here. Read the workshop descriptions below (extract from the Conference’s website).

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Parla come navighi. Antologia della webletteratura italiana (Anthology of Italian Webliterature) is published. I wrote the preface, with the title: ‘Per una letteratura della partecipazione’ (’Towards a Participatory Literature’).

The Anthology is a collections of writings, poetry, essays, and reflections on the new forms of experimental  literature in the era of social media. Published by Il Foglio Letterario, is edited by Mario Gerosa, with editing assistance by Roberta Peveri.
The title might be literally translated into ’speak the way you surf’, even it makes not so much sense in English. The idea comes from ‘parla come mangi’ (speak the way you eat), the Italian common way to say ‘be simple’, ‘don’t try to be rhetoric’, or better, ‘don’t overdo when you speak’. Basically, the Anthology wants to present the microcosm of the Italian web- and network-literature, and the consequent experimental effort in creating new languages and new forms of writing by the social media users. The focus is therefore not just to use social media as a inexpressive communication tool, but to transform them into a platform of creation.

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"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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Tuesday, February 2, 2010, 5:00pm – 7:00pm. SpringLab, Finlandsgade 24A, Aarhus.

Yesterday was the opening night of Hack Århus, the new hacker space in the city of Århus. A lot of people came despite the snow storm and we had fun with some talks, hack-presentations and circuit bending. I gave a short speech about the roots of hacker ethics and the background of hackerspaces, with examples from Italy, Germany and California.

There were some people from Labitat, the hackerspace in Copenhagen, who shared their experience with us, and some projects presentations followed – like the very interesting one about the coding-wooden-sculpture machine from Jacob Pedersen, who is one of the initiators of the Hackerspace.

Some more info about Hack Aarhus:

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Presentation of Sirikata, open source platform for games and virtual worlds
with: Henrik Bennetsen, Stanford Humanities Lab
Friday, January 15th, 13.15-15.00. Room T014, Turing building, Åbogade 34, Aarhus University.

Promoted by DUL: Digital Urban Living and DARC: Digital Aesthetics Research Center.
Presented by Tatiana Bazzichelli.

Sirikata (www.sirikata.com) is a BSD licensed open source platform for games and virtual worlds. The platform has grown out of a several years of research at Stanford University, initiated by Media X, and the current ambition is to expand into a fully community run open source project. At the Stanford Humanities Lab we have built practical projects that explores potential futures of collaboration, cultural institutions and musical performance. Bennetsen will demonstrate and discuss this work in context of new technological possibilities offered by Sirikata.

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