Ph.d-forsvar (Public Defence): Tatiana Bazzichelli

Networked Disruption
Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and the Business of Social Networking

In connection with the submission of her PhD dissertation “Networked Disruption. Rethinking oppositions in art, hacktivism and the business of social networking” to the Faculty of Arts at Aarhus University for the award of a PhD degree in Information and Media Studies, Tatiana Bazzichelli will publicly defend her research in an open forum, 14-17 on Monday December 5, 2011, in Det lille Auditorium, Incuba Science Park, Åbogade 15, Aarhus University, Denmark.

The objective of this research is to rethink the meaning of oppositional practices in art, hacktivism and the business of social networking. By identifying the emerging contradictions within the current economical and political framework of Web 2.0, hacker and artistic practices are analysed through business instead of in opposition to it. Shedding light on the mutual interferences between networking participation and disruptive business innovation, this research explores the current transformation in political and technological criticism. After the emergence of Web 2.0, the critical framework of art and hacktivism has shifted from developing strategies of opposition to embarking on the art of disruption. Disruption becomes a two-way strategy in networking contexts, a practice to generate criticism, and a methodology to create business innovation.

Connecting together disruptive practices of networked art and hacking in California and in Europe, the author proposes a constellation of social networking projects that challenge the notion of power and hegemony, such as mail art, Neoism, The Church of the SubGenius, Luther Blissett, Anonymous, Anna Adamolo, Les Liens Invisibles, the Telekommunisten collective, The San Francisco Suicide Club, The Cacophony Society, the early Burning Man Festival, the NoiseBridge hackerspace, and many others.

Examining committee:
Senior Lecturer Olga Goriunova, Dept. of Applied Social Sciences, London Metropolitan University, United Kingdom;
Professor Franco Berardi, Accademia di Belle Arti, Carrara, Italy;
Associate Professor Geoff Cox, Dept. of Information and Media Studies, Aarhus University (chairman).

After the PhD degree there will be a reception in room 229, Nygaard Building, Finlandsgade 21, 8200 Aarhus N.

from: Vittore Baroni, "Real Corrispondence 6", 1981

The reSource is an initiative of transmediale – festival for art and digital culture, Berlin in collaboration with CTM/DISK GbR and Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, on the search for further partners during 2012.

## reSource – A new initiative of the transmediale festival

The reSource for transmedial culture is a new framework for transmediale festival related projects that happen throughout the year in the city of Berlin. It is an initiative that extends into ongoing activities with decisive touchdowns at each festival. Within the aegis of facilitating collaboration and the sharing of resources and knowledge between the transmediale festival in Berlin and the local and translocal scene engaged with art and digital culture, the objective of the reSource for transmedial culture is to act as a link between the cultural production of art festivals and collaborative networks in the field of art and technology, hacktivism and politics.

This statement of interest is directed mainly to local and international artists, cultural producers, hackers, activists, and gender-situated communities active in the city of Berlin and in the broader field of net culture regionally and internationally, to co-develop experiences which invite exploration, experimentation and reflection. By generating a set of questions and issues which are addressed to local and translocal communities within (and beyond) digital cultural production, the main idea is to develop mutual exchanges of methodologies and knowledge, as well as project-space experiences, investigating new ways of forming a cultural public and producing a meta reflection on strategies of collaborative actions.

The launch of the reSource will take place at transmediale 2012 through different project disseminations such as workshops, talks and performances. It will in itself be an important feature of the 25th anniversary of the transmediale, looking into the future while acknowledging the importance of the festival as an accessible and dynamic forum for the translocal art scene as well as for interdisciplinary cultural producers and researchers.

The reSource launch at transmediale is anticipated by a beta-reSource event on November 16-18, 2011 at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) organised in partnership with the Digital Aesthetics Research Center (DARC) of Aarhus University and the Vilém Flusser Archive. After transmediale 2012, the reSource will extend its activity in collaboration with two main partners: CTM/DISK, proposing a series of open events held in the spring 2012, and Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, organising a public event in August 2012, which will show the results of the first phase of collaboration and sharing within the context of the reSource for transmedial culture.

This statement of interest is thought as a call for collaborations to involve a number of additional projects and partners towards the creation of a distributed platform during 2012 and further, envisioning the festival form as a peer-production context of knowledge and research.

## reSource – A year-round distributed project

If a source is the beginning, or origin of something, reSource is used in this context as a starting point from which a distributed sharing process, and a common executable (artistic) program, is produced. The aim of the reSource for transmedial culture is to be distributed in a form that extends into an ongoing, year-round activity with touchdowns at each festival. This form includes both its executable files, and its source code. Source codes are useful to modify a program or understand how it works. Taking this notion more broadly, in the framework of the reSource for transmedial culture, the objective becomes to develop a networking distributed platform and an (executable) meta reflection on the meaning and the practices of networked art, hacking and collaborative art production within the context of an international art festival.

Starting from the assumption that the increasing commercialisation of the contexts of sharing and networking is currently transforming the meaning of art and participation, what should be the answer of artists, activists and hackers working on a critical dimension of networking? And if hacker and artistic practices are developing in the context of a deep transformation of the meaning of participation, often reflecting a precarious cultural and economical configuration, what is the responsibility and the role of cultural institutions engaging with art and digital technologies, towards a critical articulation of culture production? In Berlin, hacker, activist and artistic practices are very much realised outside the realm of artistic institutions. Some of those practices are contributing to transform the economy and the cultural asset of the city, but they are also becoming easy targets to be exploited by the market. However, this is not only a local phenomenon: At this present time, while financial markets are deeply influencing the development of cultural production and, more generally, our daily life flexibility, direct participation and common engagement are becoming pervasive business logics. The progressive involvement of users in the production process generates new possibilities of interaction among peers, but also of hierarchical control.

Analysing the topology and the effects of artistic and hacktivist practices in decentralised social networks implies a reflection on power structures, business methodologies as well as on the relationship between art and economy. The social media and social networking phenomenon brings about contradictions and ambiguities. The subject of social networking is constantly transforming, and requires both a theoretical and empirical involvement of researchers and artists, theoreticians and practitioners before it can be fully understood. It becomes necessary to rethink concepts such as innovation and disruption, co-optation and opposition, as a mutual feedback loop, and a two-way disruption.

## reSource – A shared knowledge laboratory

The reSource for transmedial culture aims to work towards the creation of a shared knowledge laboratory within transmediale, and a project for local and trans-local distributed networks by organising events, workshops and talks involving artists, hackers, activists, researchers and cultural producers active in the city of Berlin and abroad. The aim of the reSource is to involve communities that not only engage directly with network technologies, but that are also critically reflecting on decentralised and distributed strategies of networking and anti-hegemonic practices, from hackers and activists to feminist, queer, transgender and porn communities.

Within this framework, the reSource statement of interest poses the following objectives:
- To rethink the concepts of (social) networking, collaborative practices, innovation and participation, through the creation of a platform of distributed networks involving grassroots communities of hackers, artists, performers, activists, curators and cultural producers;
- To apply the concept of disruptive innovation to the art field so as to open up a critical perspective on the “network economy”, working in collaboration with local and translocal communities in Berlin and abroad, trying to understand how the market works after de-assembling its strategies and mechanisms of production;
- To generate disruptive modalities of art production after the emergence of social media, reflecting on distributive decentralised and socially engaged contexts of participation and innovation;
- To analyse the concept of transmedial culture, investigating creative approaches across digital and analogue media, reflecting on the intersections between cultural production, networking and disruptive art practices;
- To reflect on the strategies of networked art and hacktivism, by developing an empirical methodology based on mutual exchanges between the members of the (post-) media art scene, cultural producers and researchers in the field of the humanities.

The analyses of these subjects necessarily imply sharing methodologies whereby artists, hackers, activists and researchers join together to form practice-oriented contexts of reflection and give feedback to both theory and practice through an interdisciplinary, distributed and polyphonic approach. Artistic and hacker practices are thought therefore both as a resource for producing cultural innovation, but also as a strategic challenge to generate media criticism – and a meta reflection on artistic production in the framework of digital culture and network economy.

This statement of interest must be imagined as an initial input and a starting point for further collaboration on the analysis and the production of disruptive hacker and artistic practices in the framework of (social) networking, but also as an input to generate a collective investigation into the practice of networking as an art strategy – and an applied research method.

Contacts:

Tatiana Bazzichelli: tbazz[at]transmediale.de
reSource concept and programme developer

Daniela Silvestrin: ds[at]transmediale.de
reSource programme assistant

More info: http://www.transmediale.de/beyond/tm-resource

http://darc.imv.au.dk/incompatible/?page_id=18

International PhD workshop and conference, organised by the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre/Centre for Digital Urban Living (Aarhus University), in collaboration with the reSource for transmedial culture (transmediale festival, Berlin) and Vilém Flusser Archive, Universität der Künste, Berlin.

In the context of developing a platform for knowledge exchange, and research across the arts and sciences, transmediale festival (Berlin) and Digital Aesthetics Research Centre/Centre for Digital Urban Living (Aarhus University) have established a partnership to foster new forms of collaborative peer-review and knowledge dissemination. Departing from the theme of the upcoming transmediale festival in 2012: in/compatible, a PhD workshop and conference is taking place on November 16–18, at the Vilém Flusser Archive, Universität der Künste, Berlin.

This event addresses the theme of the transmediale festival in a number of ways: in/compatible interfaces, in/compatible methods, and in/compatible markets, focusing on the unresolved tensions in-between different technologies, their cultures of production and use, as well as the tensions between different approaches to contemporary media culture. The PhD workshop and the conference will lead to a collaborative peer-reviewed publication presented as part of the programme of the festival in 2012.

The actual workshop is restricted to the PhD students selected from an open call this summer. However, the conference programme and the plenary session will be open to the public.

Keynotes: Tiziana Terranova (it), Siegfried Zielinski (de).
Conference Participants: Christian Ulrik Andersen (dk), Tatiana Bazzichelli (it/de), Claudia  Becker (de), Morten Breinbjerg (dk), Geoff Cox (uk/dk), Kristoffer Gansing (se/de), Andrew Murphie (au), Jussi Parikka (fi), Søren Pold  (dk), Cornelia Sollfrank (de).
Artistic Interventions: Alberto de Campo (de), Dmytri Kleiner (ca/de) & the Telekommunisten Network.
PhD Workshop Participants: Cesar Baio (br/de), Zach Blas (usa), Jacob Gaboury (usa), Baruch  Gottlieb (ca/de), Ioana Jucan (ro/usa), Tero Karppi (fi), Thomas Bjoernsten Kristensen (dk), Magnus Lawrie (uk), Aymeric Mansoux (fr/nl), Rosa Menkman (nl), Gabriel Menotti Gonring (br/uk), Anne Popiel (usa/de), Morten Riis (dk), Lasse Scherffig (de), Matthias Tarasiewicz (at), Marie Thompson (uk), Nina Wenhart (at), Carolin Wiedemann (de).

in/compatible Research – Conference Programme:

Day 1 – Wednesday 16 Nov
in/compatible interfaces and methods
18.00–18.10 Tatiana Bazzichelli & Christian Ulrik Andersen – introduction
18.10–19.00 Keynote: Siegfried Zielinski, moderated by Kristoffer Gansing

Panel
What methods allow for the investigation of neglected histories and technologies? How to use the tensions between various approaches productively?

19.15¬–20.30  short presentations by Cornelia Sollfrank, Morten Breinbjerg, Jussi Parikka, Søren Pold/Christian Ulrik Andersen and moderated discussion by Claudia Becker.

Day 2 – Thursday 17 Nov
in/compatible methods and markets
18.30–18.40 introduction
18.40–19.30 Keynote: Tiziana Terranova, moderated by Geoff Cox

Panel
Knowledge production relates to different economical frameworks, but how to avoid the deadening forces of marketisation? Can this be reconceptualised outside the confines of financial capitalism?
19.45–20.45  short presentations by Andrew Murphie, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Søren Pold/Christian Ulrik Andersen, and moderated discussion by Geoff Cox.
20.45–21.00 transmediale statement – Kristoffer Gansing
21.15–late: bar + open interventions by the workshop participants

Day 3 – Friday 18 Nov
plenary session
15.00–17.00 What next? A common reflection on in/compatible research practices hosted by the reSource for transmedial culture and moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli, with the participants of the programme and the public audience.

Ongoing artistic experiments:
::R15N:: (beta-test) by Dmytri Kleiner & the Telekommunisten Network
“Varia Zoosystematica Profundorum – Experimental studies in deep sea communication” by Alberto de Campo

More info:

http://darc.imv.au.dk/incompatible

http://www.transmediale.de/content/resource-incompatible-research-workshop-conference

Time: November 5, 2011, 12:00-16:30

Where: Theater Kikker Grote Zaal/Main Hall, Utrecht, NL.

curated by Stephen Kovats (Transmediale 2008-2011, McLuhan in Europe 2011)

Focusing on the ‘Right to Know’ the Summit invites discussion on how digital media engulfing our daily lives are now accessible in not only new but perhaps previously unimagined ways. Such accessibility also creates new forms of openness and malleability blurring the lines between the hack, the hoax and the objective. The public focus of the Net as being a broad ranging arena of information exchange moderated by proxies such as ICANN and dominated by enterprises incl. Google, Facebook and Amazon is once again shifting. Two decades into our life within the World Wide Web, a much wider and more diverse group of users has emerged using the Net as a central arena of critical socio-political activity.

The currently unfolding ‘Arab Spring’, as well as the victory of the Pirate Party in Berlin’s State elections, fuels forces that have the ability to create new forms of information visibility and data malleability. These major popular movements have radically influenced all sides and players in the rapidly evolving and seemingly completely unpredictable shifts in social and political orders. The recent case of the ‘unmasked’ fraudulent (or simply naive prankster) U.S-based blogger who purported to be a Syrian Lesbian rights activist moving to the fore of that country’s current revolt underscores the precarious level of blind trust mass media and digital society at large nonetheless still places on the power of ‘sincerity’ in net-based communication. Hacktivism itself, once the poetic domain of seemingly invisible forces, is becoming mainstream. Is there a danger that the rough, highly unstable edges of digital media and network practice, including political hacktivism, open source protocol design (i.e. Thimbl, DIY tools and apps) and evolving movements such as Sharism, will be ‘corporatised’? Where do these forces converge, and where does the opportunity lie to entrench the idealism of the Net’s ability to be the essential guarantor of expressive freedom and mobility? By supporting and embracing the rough edges of the media, keeping these in flux and critical, we have the historical opportunity to firmly guarantee, as an entire society, the Net’s primary strengths and characteristics: that of a truly open, unregulated and free tool of communication.

Featuring: Alejo Duque, Christopher Adams, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Sami Ben Gharbia, Alejandra Perez Nunez, Rui Guerra and Sunil Abraham. Introduced and moderated by Stephen Kovats, respondent Chris van der Heijden.

Programme:

12.00 – 12.15: Introduction

12.15 – 12.45: A critique of openness: Sunil Abraham

12.45 – 13.15: How to create a perverse social network in 3 steps: Rui Guerra

13.15 – 13.45: The right to radical media: the case of student movement in Chile 2006-2011: Alejandra Perez Nunez

13.45 – 14.00: Summit discussion

14.00 – 14.15: Break

14.15 – 14.45: Roughing up Copyright: The Right to Know and our Agreement to Share: Christopher Adams

14.45 – 15.45: Networked Disruption: A critique of oppositional practices in the business of social networking: Tatiana Bazzichelli

15.15 – 15.45: Contested Zones: Alejo Duque

15.45 – 16.15: Sami Ben Gharbia

16.15 – 16.45: response / summit discussion: Chris van der Heijden

16.45 – 17.00: Performance by HIMW

17.00: End

More info: www.impakt.nl

Panel, ISEA Istanbul, Monday, 19 September, 2011 – 09:00 – 10:30

Sabaci University, Sabaci Center, Room 3, Istanbul, Turkey

The panel investigates some of the interconnections between art, activism and business. “Don’t hate the media, become the media”, was one of the slogans of Indymedia. We are applying this critical hands-on perspective to the business framework.

The panel investigates some of the interconnections between art, activism and business. “Don’t hate the media, become the media”, was one of the slogans of Indymedia. We are applying this critical hands-on perspective to the business framework. Presenters examine how artists, rather than refusing the market, are producing critical interventions from within. As the distinction between production and consumption appears to have collapsed, every interaction in the info-sphere seems to have become a business opportunity. 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 or social hacks that use a deep level of irony, but also unexpected consequences. The tactics demonstrate the permeability of systems — that these can be reworked — and more so, that radical innovation requires modification of the prevailing business logic.

The backdrop of the Istanbul Biennale makes a useful reference point here as one of the markers along with art fairs in general for the commodity exchange of artistic production. 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.

The panel explores some of these contradictions: that on the one hand, there are alternative or disruptive business models that derive from the art scene, often as critical or activist interventions, but on the other how these practices can be easily co-opted by proprietary business logic. This is perhaps exemplified by the business idea of ‘disruption-innovation’, where disruption is considered to be a creative act that shifts the way a particular logic operates and thus presents newfound opportunities. Does this mean that well-meaning critical strategies of artists and activists are self-defeating? How do we develop disruptive business models that do not simply become new models for business that ultimately follow capitalist logic?

We maintain there is nothing wrong with doing business as such.

Chair: Tatiana Bazzichelli, Geoff Cox
Presenters: Christian Ulrik Andersen & Søren Bro Pold
Contributors: Dmytri Kleiner, Elanor Colleoni, Maya Balcioglu

The occasion is also thought as launch of the project DisruptivBiz, a platform of research on the topics of Disruptive Art and Business curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli and Geoff Cox.

More information

On August 31, 2011, I handed-in my PhD dissertation (Department of Information and Media Studies, Aarhus University), which will be discussed at the beginning of December (date to be announced). The following is a short abstract of the contents.

PhD Dissertation Abstract:

Networked Disruption
Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and the Business of Social Networking
by Tatiana Bazzichelli

Objective:
The objective of this research is to rethink the meaning of critical and oppositional practices in art, hacktivism and the business of social networking. The aim is to analyse hacker and artistic practices through business instead of in opposition to it. By identifying the emerging contradictions within the current economical and political framework of Web 2.0, my aim is to reflect on the status of activist and hacker practices as well as those of artists in the new generation of social media (or so called Web 2.0 technologies), analysing the interferences between networking participation and disruptive business innovation.

Hypothesis:
My hypothesis is that mutual interferences between art, hacktivism and the business of social networking have changed the meaning and contexts of political and technological criticism. Hackers and artists have been active agents in business innovation, while at the same time also undermining business. After the emergence of Web 2.0, the critical framework of art and hacktivism has shifted from developing strategies of opposition to embarking on the art of disruption. Artists and hackers use disruptive techniques of networking within the framework of social media, opening up a critical perspective towards business to generate unpredictable feedback and unexpected reactions; business enterprises apply disruption as a form of innovation to create new markets and network values, which are often just as unpredictable. Disruption becomes a two-way strategy in networking contexts, a practice to generate criticism, and a methodology to create business innovation.

Theoretical Background:
Adopting Fred Turner’s perspective of investigating the interferences between business and radical culture through coexisting layers instead of progressive cooptation, I developed the concept of the Art of Disruptive Business as a possible model for deconstructing business logic through the act of experiencing it from within. The concept of disrupting business in social media sheds light on the practices of artists, activists and hackers who are rethinking critical interventions in the field of art and technology by deciding to act inside the market scenario. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image, I propose to adopt a dialectic approach in which the oppositions coexist. Bypassing the classic power/contra-power dichotomy, the dialectical opposition between business and its undermining therefore shifts into a synergetic tension where one is part of the other, and they mutually contribute to each other’s formation. Conscious that nowadays contradictions and dichotomies are an inherent part of business logic, the challenge lies in the exploration of symbolic dissolutions of powers, where hackers and artists directly engage in such contradictions and provoke unexpected consequences, which can be seen as an art form. Building on the analysis of non-hegemonic practices and the logic of affinity by Richard J. F. Day, I propose an analysis of practices that challenge the notion of power and hegemony, and the battle for dominance, generating distributed, decentralised and fluid networking practices which act through the bugs inherent in economical systems.

Methodology:
The method is based on the reformulation of a research approach which functions within the subject of research, rather than on the subject of research. Adopting the montage method derived from Benjamin’s writing style of Denkbilder (thought-images), decentralised and plural viewpoints become part of theory and practice. The result is a methodological constellation of networking practices, which I define as ethnography of networks, which aims to actualise – and to question – the notion of “fieldwork” itself. The theoretical viewpoint of this research is closely connected with the act of being a direct part of the research subject, creating a mutual exchange with the actors of the analysis through conversations and interviews as well as participating in some of the projects described here. To investigate the progressive commercialisation of sharing and networking platforms, it is necessary to understand business culture from within. My research develops through the analysis of different conceptual nodes of a network, connecting together disruptive practices of networked art and hacking in the framework of a network economy. To sort through the various effects of networking art and hacking in the business of social media, I examine their development and influence on a cross-national scale. Case studies cross space and time: hackers, activists and artists in California (especially those in the Bay Area) are closely connected to those in Europe.

Case Studies:
The case studies analysed in this research are those based on the concept of disruption rather than opposition. Artists and hackers adopt viral and flexible strategies, as does contemporary networking business by provoking contradictions, paradoxes and incongruities. I investigate two different but related critical scenes: the art and technological context in California and the European contexts of net culture, which generate a constellation of projects created by hackers, artists, networkers and entrepreneurs acting at the boundary between art, business and social networking. This perspective binds together different models of disruption in business contexts of social media and artistic practices focused on networking, thereby adopting a disruptive critical dimension. In particular, I analyse: the genesis and the creation of several grassroots networks applying methodologies of disruption (e.g. mail art, Neoism, The Church of the SubGenius, Luther Blissett, Anonymous); the development of underground artistic and hacker practices in California and its synergies with the business of social networking (e.g. The Suicide Club, The Cacophony Society, Burning Man Festival, NoiseBridge, Kink.com); projects highlighting the paradoxes and limits of social media (e.g. Anna Adamolo, Seppukoo by Les Liens Invisibles and Face to Facebook by Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico) and decentralised techniques of networking based on peer production and the distribution of productive assets (Venture communism by Dmytri Kleiner and the Telekommunisten collective).

Conclusions:
What were once marginal practices of networking in underground hacker and artistic contexts have in recent years become a core business for many Web 2.0 companies. The increasing commercialisation of sharing and networking contexts is transforming the meaning of art as well as that of business. Artistic practices develop beyond the realms of artistic institutions and some of them are transforming the meaning of business. If business is adopting hacker and artistic strategies of disruption, what is the answer of artists and hackers working within a critical networking dimension?
Distributed, autonomous and decentralised networking practices of disruption. become a means for rethinking oppositional hacktivist and artistic strategies within the framework of art and business.

Department of Information and Media Studies, Aarhus University, 2011
Supervisor: Søren Pold, Associate Professor
Department of Information and Media Studies, Aarhus University.
Co-supervisor: Fred Turner, Associate Professor
Communication Department, Stanford University, California.

DESCRIPTION

As the distinction between production and consumption appears to have collapsed, every interaction in the info-sphere seems to have become a business opportunity. The creative intersections between business and art become a crucial territory for political actions, social innovation, but also unexpected consequences and a deep level of irony and modification of prevailing business logic. 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 network economy.

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. More specifically, we would cite the significance of radical sharing communities on the net to disrupt the business ecosystem, and offer alternatives, even if this comes in compromised form in the case of the social web. And yet, clearly value is produced from the social web too; it becomes more a question of what kind of business model is preferred and how returns, or rather benefits, are distributed.
We maintain there is nothing wrong with doing business as such.

GOALS
To introduce concepts and examples that relate to an understanding of contemporary arts practice; to develop strategies to support a critical framework for research and future development of creative production; to reflect upon some of the economic conditions that frame creative practice.

DAY 1 – INTRODUCTION TO THE ART OF DISRUPTIVE BUSINESS
The seminar is introduced against a backdrop of the financial crisis, the withdrawal of public subsidy for the arts, and the peculiar relationship of art to the economy. It begins by exploring some of the key contradictions: that on the one hand, there are alternative or disruptive business models that derive from the art scene, often as critical or activist interventions, but on the other how these practices can be easily co-opted by proprietary business logic.

ESSENTIAL READING:
Tom Watson, ed. derive reader #1 – Artists interventions into the market economy, 2009, http://issuu.com/derive/docs/derive_reader_2, pp. 16
Felix Stalder, ‘The Stuff of Culture’ (extract), in Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks, Revolver, 2005, pp. 12-42.

SOME EXAMPLES:
Carey Young (http://www.careyyoung.com/); Gregory Shollette (http://www.gregorysholette.com/); The Yes Men (http://theyesmen.org/).

DAY 2 – COMMON PARTICIPATION AND NETWORKING ENTERPRISES.
FROM NETWORKED ART TO SOCIAL NETWORKING (TB)
At a first glance it may seem evident that business enterprises of social networking built their corporate image by re-appropriating the language and the values of the first phase of networked art and hacker culture. However, the free software community is not alien to the progressive corporate takeover of the hacker counterculture. The question is whether the cooptation theory of the counterculture might be the right explanation to understand the present development, or better, implosion, of the networking and hacker culture. Is it possible to imagine alternative artistic and activist routes to intervene creatively within (and not merely against) business models?

ESSENTIAL READING:
Fred Turner, “Burning Man at Google: A Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production.” New Media & Society, Vol.11, No.1-2 (April, 2009), pp. 145-66, http://www.stanford.edu/~fturner/Turner%20Burning%20Man%20at%20Google%20NMS.pdf)
Tatiana Bazzichelli, “If You Can’t Hack ‘em, Absorb ‘em or the Endless Dance of the Corporate Revolution”, essay in Concept Store nr. 3, journal, 2010, Arnolfini, Bristol, 2010, http://www.tatianabazzichelli.com/PDF_files/Bazzichelli_Endless_Dance_Corporate_Revolution.pdf
Antonio Caronia, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Loretta Borrelli (2009) “Anna Adamolo: Practical Critique of Ideology”, trans. Valeira Grillo, in _digicult_, mag41, feb 2009, http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1384

SOME EXAMPLES:
Luther Blissett (http://www.lutherblissett.net); Neoism (http://neoism.pleintekst.nl); Anna Adamolo (http://annaadamolo.noblogs.org/); Les Liens Invisibles’ Seppukoo (http://www.seppukoo.com); Web 2.0 Suicide Machine (http://suicidemachine.org).

DAY 3 – PEOPLE TO PEOPLE ART/BUSINESS (GC)
Are there ways of doing business that challenge definitions of social wealth: a distinction between revenue and benefit sharing that the commons is founded upon (on the one hand, extracting monetary value from social processes and on the other imagining more sustainable alternatives to capitalist economy that have collective benefit). A peer to peer system in this way might be considered ‘postcapitalist’ in the production of a social relation based on sharing and the common good.

ESSENTIAL READING:
Geoff Cox, “antisocial notworking”, http://www.anti-thesis.net/contents/texts/antisocial.pdf
Michel Bauwens, “The Social Web and its Social Contracts: Some Notes on Social Antagonism in Netarchical Capitalism”, 2008, http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=261
Discussion, from “The Currency of the Commons: The Price and Value of Free Culture”, transmediale festival 2011, http://www.transmediale.de/de/content/currency-commons

SOME EXAMPLES:
Paolo Cirio, P@P Credit Card, http://www.p2pgiftcredit.com/ (See “Infoshop” for a list of other resources, http://www.p2pgiftcredit.com/infoshop.php); Flattr / Creative Fundraising and Microfunding Initiatives, Peter Sunde (http://flattr.com/).

DAY 4 – DISRUPTIVE ART/BUSINESS
The business idea of ‘disruption-innovation’ represents a creative act that shifts the way a particular logic operates and thus presents newfound opportunities. Does this mean that well-meaning critical strategies of artists and activists are self-defeating? How do we develop disruptive business models that do not simply become new models for business that simply follows capitalist logic?

Francesca Bria, “A crisis of finance: financialisation as a crisis of accumulation of new capitalism” (on Marazzi’s The Violence of Financial Capitalism), ephemera, volume 9(4), pp. 388-395, http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/9-4/9-4bria.pdf
Dymtri Kleiner, The Telekommunist Manifesto, Network Notebooks 03, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2010, pp. 8-25, http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/publications/network-notebooks/the-telekommunist/

SOME EXAMPLES:
Telekommunisten, especially thimble, Dmytri Kleiner (http://www.thimbl.net/); Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/).

TASK
We will ask participants to write and present a business plan that addresses creative and conceptual aspects of the seminar.

FURTHER READING:

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm
Chris Anderson “Free. How Today’s Smartest Businesses Profit By Giving Something For Nothing”, Hyperion, New York, 2009
Michel Bauwens, ‘Peer production, peer governance, peer property’, http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=87
Tatiana Bazzichelli “When Art Goes Disruptive: The A/Moral Dis/Order of Recursive Publics”, Public Interfaces Conference, Aarhus University, January 2011, http://darc.imv.au.dk/publicinterfaces/?p=150
Yockai Benkler, Wealth of Networks, http://www.benkler.org/wonchapters.html
Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, ed., Code: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2005
Stewart Home, “Click This? MySpace + the Pornography of Corporately Controlled Virtual Life”, Diffusion generator, 2009. No profit publication.
Christopher M. Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, Duke University Press, 2008, pp. 1-26 & 27-64, http://www.anti-thesis.net/contents/texts/references/kelty-TwoBits.pdf
Craig J. Saper, Networked Art, University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Dymtri Kleiner, The Telekommunist Manifesto, Network Notebooks 03, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2010
Dmytri Kleiner & Brian Wyrick, ‘Info-Enclosure 2.0′, _Web 2.0: Man’s Best Friendster?_, _Mute_ vol. 2 #4, January 2007, http://www.metamute.org/Web-2.0-Mans-bestfriendster/
Jaron Lanier, “You are Not a Gadget”, Knopf, New York, 2010
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/
Christian Marazzi, Language and Capital: From the New Economy to the War Economy, Semiotexte 2008
Christian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism    The Violence of Financial Capitalism, Semiotexte 2010
Marx/Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1948, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/
Karl Marx, Capital Volume One, Part I: Commodities and Money, Chapter One: Commodities, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm
Marcel Mauss (1970) _The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies_, London: Cohen & West
Mute, “Living in a bubble: credit, debt & crisis”, MetaMute, Vol. 2 #6, http://www.metamute.org/en/Mute-vol-2-6-Living-in-a-Bubble-Credit-debt-and-crisis
Eric S. Raymond, ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’ (originally published March 1998), in First Monday, Special issue on Open Source, 2005, http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/issue/view/212
Felix Stalder, Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks, Revolver, 2005
Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce, Tate 2003
Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art, Oxford University Press, 2005
Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Portfolio 2006
Fred Turner, “Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy. The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community”, Technology and Culture, Volume 46, Number 3, July 2005, pp. 485-512, http:www.stanford.edu/~fturner/Turner%20Tech%20&%20Culture%2046%203.pdf
Chin-Tao Wu, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s, Verso 2003

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Tatiana Bazzichelli (IT/DK) is PhD Scholar at Aarhus University. She is board member of the Digital Aesthetics Research Center in Aarhus and was visiting scholar at Stanford University (2009). She has been active in the Italian hacker community since the end of the 1990s and is the founder of the AHA: Activism-Hacking-Artivism project (http://www.ecn.org/aha), which won the honorary mention for digital communities at Ars Electronica (2007). She wrote the book: Networking. La rete come arte /The Net as Artwork (Costa & Nolan, 2006, http://www.networkingart.eu).

Geoff Cox (UK/DK) is currently a Researcher in Digital Aesthetics as part of the Digital Urban Living Research Center, Aarhus University (DK). He is also an occasional artist, and Associate Curator of Online Projects, Arnolfini, Bristol (UK), adjunct faculty, Transart Institute, Berlin/New York (DE/US), Associate Professor (Reader), University of Plymouth (UK). He is an editor for the DATA Browser book series (published by Autonomedia, New York), and co-edited ‘Economising Culture’ (2004), ‘Engineering Culture’ (2005) and ‘Creating Insecurity’ (2009).

Image: Vittore Baroni, "Real Corrispondence 6", 1981 (part of a series of homonym flyers). The diagram was later re-edited in the postcard "The Evolution of Art", published by Ragged Edge Press in 1990.

The transmediale (Festival for Art and Digital Culture of Berlin, Germany) website has been updated, with information about the new festival structure, the new transmediale direction and team, dates of the festival, call for works and description of ongoing projects. The next festival will take place from January 31st until February 5th, and the theme for the 2012 edition is: In/Compatible.

Since September 1st, 2011, I will be taking part of the transmediale team in Berlin running a new experimental project named Resource for Transmedial Culture, a networking and curating initiative that extends into ongoing, year-round activity with touchdowns at each festival. The resource works towards the creation of a project of distributed networks and a knowledge production laboratory of art and research within transmediale.

As a combination of networking, research and curating, the resource is a new framework for festival related projects that happen throughout the year. Through the resource Transmediale aims at giving something back to local and translocal community as well to create a dynamic feedback to the festival content. Through a separate call later in the year, a number of projects will be selected to be co-hosted by the resource, with events during 2012 and a presence at the 2013 festival.

The launch of the resource will take place in Febraury 2012 and will in itself be an important feature of the Transmediale 25th anniversary, looking into the future while acknowledging the importance of the festival as an accessible and dynamic forum for the translocal media art scene as well as for interdisciplinary cultural producers and researchers.

More info will follow!

http://www.transmediale.de/beyond/tm-resource

In the essay The author as a producer (1934), Walter Benjamin describes the author’s role through the figure of the engineer. Instead of reproducing the production apparatuses, the author/engineer is able to intervene within them, transforming the cultural production function itself and opening it up to the collective intervention.
The engineer figure described by Walter Benjamin reminds the “tactical” art by Paolo Cirio, who contributes to transform the meaning of the artistic practice from within, by unveiling the unsolved knots in the art field. Through his artworks, Paolo Cirio (http://www.paolocirio.net) intervenes tactically locating some plugs of a puzzle which can be finished only by directly involving its referents, being them either corporations, media apparatuses, or the so-called network “users”.

His artworks, some of which were created together with Alessandro Ludovico and Ubermorgen.com (GWEI, Google Will Eat Itself e Amazon Noir), some others were created individually (such as Drowning NYC, The Big Plot e Open Society Structures), redefine the author’s and art’s role, which becomes a premise to think over social and political dynamics. By manipulating the media and the news media, as he himself claims, his work “often pushes the boundaries of the representation, going beyond the use of a single media and focusing on the information environment created by the data flow.” His artworks deal with the language, the narrations, the creation of conspiracy plots, but also with the meaning of power, democracy, privacy and control. Not always without provoking contraddictions and controversies. But it is just through this dynamic of the imperfect and the unknown – once they are started, artworks are opened to possible developments and interpretations – that it is possible to experiment how the information and media flows build their meaning.

This interview, starting from the description of the meaning of tactics and strategies applied to the artistic practice, and wondering about some concepts such as “the media robbery”, ends thinking over some sensible knots revealed by the last projects: Face to Facebook, created with Alessandro Ludovico and launched at the last Transmediale 2011, and P2P Gift Credit Card protagonist of an action in London on March 25th, in which the “revolutionary” credit cards have been distributed in strategic places.

Both projects, exhibited at a solo show, REALITYFLOWHACKED, which opened in Ljubljana on April 26th at the Aksioma Project Space, become an incentive through which analyzing the intersections between art and market, the contradictions and paradoxes of neoliberal capitalism, the artist’s role itself and, at the same time, the one of the user.

In the social media era, the relational dynamics and the information data flow become more and more part of the production processes, not often validating the utopian perspective assumed by Walter Benjamin in 1934. That is why it becomes central to reflect on such processes, imagining possible alternatives, provoking critical contradictions and producing new visions and experiences.

Read the interview with Paolo Cirio here.