reSource for transmedial culture: Programme at transmediale 2k+12 (résumé by Tatiana Bazzichelli)

The reSource of transmediale culture (www.transmediale.de/resource) is a new initiative of transmediale festival that happens throughout the year in the city of Berlin, developing ongoing activities with decisive touchdowns at each festival. It is curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli, and works in collaboration with CTM/DISK, Kunstraum Kreuzberg /Bethanien and the Post-Media Lab of the Leuphana University Lüneburg, the three main institutional partners of the project.

The launch of reSource took place at transmediale 2012 (January 31-February 5, 2012) with a constellation of workshops, talks and performances distributed into five different sub-themes: reSource methods, reSource activism, reSource networks, reSource markets and reSource sex (read more here).

Realisation of the Programme
Coherently with the concept and methodology of developing reflection and exchange all year round, the programme of the reSource of transmedial culture started already in November 2011 co-organising an initiative at the Berlin University of the Arts. It was followed by the intense programme during transmediale festival, and later, it will go on producing some distributed initiatives which will lead to transmediale 2013.

The event on 16-18 November 2011 was organised in collaboration with the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre of Aarhus University (Denmark) and the Vilém Flusser Archive at the Berlin University of the Arts. It took the name of In/compatible Research PhD workshop and conference, involving 18 PhD students coming from various countries who answered to a public call for contributions spread some months before. Together with them, a group of international researchers (for a total of 25 participants) reflected on the theme in/compatible producing theoretical and practical outcomes that converged into a thematic publication distributed during the festival.

Through a collaborative ‘peer-review’ process including the In/compatible Research PhD workshop and conference, the thematic transmediale 2012 publication took the form of a research newspaper: “World of the News”, in/compatible research newspaper, reversing the title of the famous and controversial “News of the Words” newspaper – the British Sunday tabloid owned by News Corporation – therefore advocating a reflection on non economically or power driven methodologies of research and knowledge dissemination. As an attempt to bring a research agenda into an art festival, this newspaper broke with some of the current academic conventions of peer-review and academic reputation. Unlike education in many countries, the newspaper was free, providing an insight into research from academics, practitioners, and PhD students working with in/compatibility.

At transmediale 2012, the results of such peer-to-peer process were expressed in the one-day event named In/compatible research practices (10.30-16.00, K1), where all the PhD students that participated at the conference in November reflected on practice-based methodologies of research proposing a series of presentations and a plenary session, followed by the formal Newspaper launch in the evening. The plenary session was moderated by Robert Jackson, Andrew Prior, Magda Tyzlik-Carver, while the Newspaper launch by Christian Ulrik Andersen, Geoff Cox and Morten Breinbjerg.

The rest of the reSource Methods programme presented both a constellation of events related to the activities of researcher and cultural producers (i.e. the panel CODED CULTURES – Subcuratorship beyond Media Arts, Thursday February 2, 16:00-18:00 in K1, with Mic Wlodkowski, Georg Russegger, Luise Reitstätter, Joasia Krysa, Sidney Ogidon, and Eva Fischer), and a series of workshops and interventions developing experimental methodologies of artistic practice based on the reflection on the in/compatible (i.e. Floppy films Workshop – Moving Images on 1.44 MB by Florian Cramer, with guest tutor Dagie Brundert, on February 1-3 from 11.00-17.00; and the In/compatible material intervention by Martin Howse, Anthony Iles, Mattin, Jonathan Kemp, and Shu Lea Cheang on Wednesday February1 from 12.00-18.00).

In particular, part of the PhD student presentation programme was the performance Steam Machine Music by Morten Riis, which was also executed during the opening night of transmediale, assembling and playing his homebuilt mechanical instrument made mostly from vintage Meccano parts.

The reSource Activism thematic stream included the open conversation Videomakers Unite! on video art and net culture, media collectives and counter publics conceived and moderated by Florian Wüst with Kathy Rae Huffman, Eckart Lottman, and Pit Schultz (Thursday February 2, 11:00-14:00, K1) and the workshop: Activism Beyond the Interface: The Sandbox Project conceived and hosted by Roberta Buiani and Alessandra Renzi with Nicola Angrisano and many others, with the aim to rethink the composition of online and off-line platforms for collaboration, and their economic, aesthetic and ethical expressions (February 2, 10.30-16.30, Café Stage).

The reSource Network programme was realised through the panel discussion Isolation and Empowerment after Web 2.0 moderated by Geoff Cox, which was divided in two parts: “Trapped and Tracked” with Aymeric Mansoux and Johannes P. Osterhoff and “Mobilizing the Unrepresentable” with Salvatrice Settis /Anna Adamolo and Victoria Estok, that analysed the topology and the effects of artistic and hacktivist practices both off-line and online, reflecting on power structures, networking methodologies as well as on the tension between increasing connectivity and virtualisation of social relationships (Friday February 3, 11.00-14.00, K1). reSource Networks included also the workshop Fluid Nexus by Nicholas Knouf (Friday February 3, 11:00-14:00, K2), based on historical and contemporary experiments in analog and digital network construction and the R15N & Technologies of Miscommunication workshop/discussion on the projects by Dmytri Kleiner, Baruch Gottlieb + Telekommunisten Network (Friday February 3, 15:00-18:00, K2). R15N was initially presented in the context of the reSource during the opening night of the festival, since the project functioned as the official miscommunication platform for transmediale 2012. R15N was an artwork in the form of an experimental phone service created with the scope to generate community engagement and communication. Unlike group emails or typical social networks, where communication happens all at once, R15N worked through the unpredictable co-operation of a heterogeneous community, therefore becoming an ongoing networking platform for the whole festival itself. Finally, reSource Networks included the Paperduino-Uno – a PaperPCB Workshop by Wolfgang Spahn, where participants learned how to create and modify paper printed circuit boards (Sunday, 12.00-16.00, K2).

reSource Markets was developed mainly through the panel Crashed Economy: Debugging and Rebooting which included two sections moderated by Elanor Colleoni: “What Capitalism?” with Steve Lambert and Daniel Garcia Andujar; and “Hacking Finance, Rethinking Trade” with Jaromil, Kate Rich and Shintaro Miyazaki (Friday February 3, K1, 15.00-18.15). The panel questioned the notion of capitalism through direct intervention and collective reflections, and proposed an exodus from proprietary money and trade regulation through distributed commons and practices of social networking. In the workshop programme, the reSource Market thematic component was expressed by the Google – One Week Piece Workshop by Johannes P Osterhoff, where he shared knowledge and results acquired during his Google – One Year Performance Piece. In the Google Performance Piece he documented all searches he performed with the search engine for an entire year making his everyday life publicly available on the Internet: during transmediale, the artist repeated the experience with a selected group of participants, developing a specific artistic project before and during the festival.

Finally, the reSource Sex programme, taking place on Saturday February 5 in K1 and K2, presented the panel Sexuality of Machines with Karla Grundick and Julianne Pierce, moderated by Gabriella Coleman (11.00-12.30, K1), an investigation on the aesthetic and practice of DIY porn from the 90s until today; and the panel Commercialising Eros, with Jacob Appelbaum, Zach Blas, Liad Hussein Kantorowicz, and Aliya Rakhmetova, moderated by Gaia Novati, which shed light on the interferences and tensions between sex and business, analyzing practices and strategies of technology entrepreneurship and networking models, online sexual imagery and queer virality (13.30-15.30, K1). The latter included also the performance “Watch Me Work” by Liad Hussein Kantorowicz and Kate Erhardt, as a simultaneous practice-based exploration in the everyday life of sexworking, which seek to de-exotify sex work, opting for a realistic perspective, and investigated the discrepancy between the hyped discussion about sex work as compared to the actual sex work experience. The reSource sex thematic day ended with the presentation Porn, Patriotism and Paranoia on the Chinese Internet by Katrien Jacobs moderated by Francesco Macarone Palmieri aka WARBEAR, offering a fascinating glimpse into the unique tactics and flavours of Chinese pornography and its associated subcultures (14.30-18.00. K1). The same day, the Bio-Game Workshop by Shu Lea Cheang and Martin Hug took place in K2 (11.00-14.00): it constituted a public engaged development session of UKI viral game focusing on the study and experiments in human (E)motion sensing using GSR sensors.

Sunday, the final day of the reSource programme at transmediale, focused on the launch of the reSource ongoing platform after the festival. To express through artistic practices the distributed and decentralised component of the reSource, the Sunday event took the form of a networking game. Hosted by Mark Butler, the event Zombie Play in the Ludic Salon: reSourcing an Exquisite Media Corpse (K1, 13.00-17.00), included a series of local and translocal projects from artists, hackers and activists who participated in the reSource programme during transmediale or that answered previously to the reSource statement of interest spread online some weeks before the festival start. Different projects from the reSource were brought into a playful dialogue with each other through aleatoric, agonal and just plain ludicrous methods. The presentation of the reSource concept and the dialogue between the reSource institutional partners took place at the following event Beyond in/compatible (Auditorium, 17.30-18.30) reflecting on methodologies of cultural production and networking strategies in the city of Berlin and the broader context of netculture, introducing the subsequent reSource projects after the festival.

To follow up in the investigation on how collaborative practices among communities of artists, activists and hackers contribute in shaping new courses of action, tools and contents within (and beyond) digital culture production, the programme of the reSource after the festival will be oriented towards the creation of distributed contexts of sharing, exchange and visibility for local and translocal communities. Next events will be held at General Public (May 11-12) and at Kunstraum Kreuzberg /Bethanien (August 22-24), where the reSource for transmedial culture will aim to generate an accessible and dynamic forum for both the media art scene as well as for cultural researchers in the city of Berlin and abroad.

More info: www.transmediale.de/resource

Data 51.0 brings together an international selection of media artists and theorists, to explore the links between activism, art, and business. Where open source, hactivism and media art generally are still presented as ideologically opposed to the logics of information capitalism, the reality is that many hackerspaces receive corporate funding, open source platforms and user-generated content form the basis for many commercially orientated applications and much of the dominant media art of today is to varying degrees reliant on the financial trajectories of technological R&D. Rather than denying this relationship or refusing to engage with the corporation, we want to ask how artists and activists might use their position in the market and their creative tools to critique, disrupt, or even potentially reshape economic spaces from within. Speakers: Editor of Neural Alessandro Ludovico, and artist Paolo Cirio, creators of Google Will Eat Itself, and Face to Facebook, and artist/theorist Tatiana Bazzichelli, author of Networking: The Net as Artwork.

This event is funded by the Centre for Telecommunications Research (CTVR) and Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin.

More info

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).