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.

References:
Fred Turner, ‘Burning Man at Google: A Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production’. New Media & Society, Vol.11, No.1-2 (April, 2009), 145-66.
PDF: http://www.stanford.edu/~fturner/Turner%20Burning%20Man%20at%20Google%20NMS.pdf

Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy, Semiotext(e) 2008.

Hardt & Negri’s Common-wealth
http://angeleconomics.blogspot.com/2009/10/review-of-hardt-and-negris-commonwealth.html

Davenport and Beck’s The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Economy of Business (2001)

Pine and Gilmore’s  The Experience Economy (1999).

Share festival ‘Market Forces’, 2009
http://www.toshare.it/?page_id=1641&lang=en

viralcommunication.nl
http://pzwart.wdka.nl/communication-in-a-digital-age/2010/01/26/conference-announcement-viral-communication/

Other typical sources include: Tapscott & Williams’s Wikinomics (2006); Floridi’s The Rise of the Creative Class; Eric S. Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar; all those key texts that explore the new immaterial economy enthusiastically.

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.

As we read in the introduction by Mario Gerosa, the digital revolution has changed the way we express our identity. Today we can get an idea of people based on how they communicate on the Internet. Once said ’speak the way you eat’, now, to understand the other, you look at the way you write on the Web. With the advent of Web 2.0 new languages are blooming and new forms of expression came to life, both designed by professionals as amateurs, all of them sharing the same enthusiasm for the new instruments of communication. Twitter in hendecasyllables and Facebook status are the starting point for existential implications; chats in Second Life tell you about complex virtual relationships; feuilleton weblogs, experimental novels to read on the screen are some of the new expressions that form the galaxy of the Italian webilterature. A new trend, yet to be discovered and analyzed, which reconciles opposites, and next to the Neo-avantguardes which Internet advocates, show the dear, old, good poetry, re-enacted in the virtual domains. This Anthology offers a first taste of this new literature, a first result of the Web 2.0 communication phenomenon, an invitation to get to know a rich and unexplored territory from virtual worlds to social networks.

Last Friday, on April 9, 2010, I presented the topics of this Anthology at the the Department of Language, Literature & Culture, Italian culture (http://italiensk.au.dk) of Aarhus University,  together with the ones of my book Networking. La rete come arte | The Net as Artwork, published in Italian in December 2006 by Costa & Nolan (Milan) and in English by DARC, the Digital Aesthetics Research Center of Aarhus, 2009 – with the Preface by Derrick de Kerckhove. Starting from the idea of networking (which we found in the concept of participatory literacy, as well) I investigated the development of net art, hacker art and digital culture in Italy. The seminar presented some Italian artistic and activist projects and ended with the analysis of the new forms of experimentation in social media.

If you are interested, this is the link to buy the Italian Anthology of Webliterature.

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.

Bio:

In his role as associate director of the Stanford Humanities Lab Henrik Bennetsen maintains a strong interest in 3D collaborative spaces and open source technology. He is heading the Speed Limits research project, a collaboration with the Danish Bornholm’s Kunstmuseum on how 3D collaborative technologies may augment traditional cultural institutions. As part of this, he is deeply involved in the development of the open source Sirkata platform for the deployment of games and virtual worlds. Previously Henrik lead the Lifesquared research project that explored animating traditional archives using new technology. In 2007 he co-founded the Stanford Open Source Lab that has since grown to about 60 members from across the Stanford community. Henrik is Danish and has a MSc. In Media Technology and games from the IT University of Copenhagen and a BSc. in Medialogy from Aalborg University. Before his return to the world of academia Henrik was a professional musician and still has a strong side interest in creative self expression augmented by technology.