Ph.d-forsvar (Public Defence): Tatiana Bazzichelli
5. December 2011, 14:00 to 17:00
Det lille Auditorium, Incuba Science Park, Åbogade 15, Aarhus University
[Ph.d - 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.

reSource for transmedial culture
Statement of interest & call for collaborations [download as pdf]

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.

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in/compatible Research – Workshop/Conference
November 16–18, 2011
Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), Vilém Flusser Archive, Aula 110, 1st floor
Grunewaldstr. 2-5, 10823 Berlin – (U7 Kleistpark)

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).

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By Tatiana Bazzichelli, published in Digimag 63, April 2011

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.

A series of initiatives on Post Porn organized by the students of the Brera Academy of Fine Art in Milan: Sapessi com’è strano il Postoporno a Milano!

Together with Gaia Novati, I will held a seminar on Indie Porn & Net Porn – Pornography as a subjective and collaborative experience, on April 5 (10.00-18.00) at the Brera Art Academy – and in the night of the same day, after long time The Traveling Porno Karaoke Show (Italian version) will come back at the Social Center Torchiera in Milan (starting: 19.30)!

English version: Tatiana Bazzichelli, Aarhus, May 2010

In 1981, writing about the concept of ‘ethnographic surrealism’, James Clifford referred to Lautreamont’s definition of beauty: “The chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella” [1].

James Clifford described the ethnographic attitude as ways of dismantle culture’s hierarchies and holistic truths. Cultural orders are substituted with unusual juxtapositions, decomposition of reality, fragments and unexpected combinations; the objective of research is not really seen in rendering the unfamiliar comprehensible as part of the ethnographic tradition wanted, but in making the familiar strange “by a continuous play of the familiar and the strange, of which ethnography and surrealism are two elements” [2] [3].

Aesthetics that values fragments, and a methodology of revealing evident contradictions without solving them, but rather leaving them open to new interpretations, as a form of cultural criticism and a way to understand contemporary phenomena. This method, showing our present as a collage of incongruities which don’t just resolve in a dialectic of oppositions, give us input to think about future tactical strategies in the field of art and media.

The present essay deals with the concept of social networking and with the development of folksonomies through social media platforms. It reflects on the status of artistic and activist practices in the Web 2.0 analyzing interferences between networking and business. I will start referring to the dialectical perspective ‘Ästhetisierung der Politik – Politisierung der Kunst’ (aesthetization of politics – politicization of art) by Walter Benjamin [4], in the present context used to describe the development of social networks as an aesthetic representation of social commons, and consequently, to analyze possible strategies of artistic and activist interventions in the social media. Another fragment of my analysis shows how the endless cycles of rebellion and transgression coexist with the development of business culture in Western society, breaking the juxtaposition between art as an aesthetic form of collective representation and art as a form of political intervention by a collectivity. I will show how, since the Avant-gardes, critical art and business have had evident signs of interconnection, especially in the frame of the collective representation of the masses. In conclusion, I will develop the concept of The Disruptive Art of Business as a form of artistic intervention within the business field of Web 2.0, where artists and activists, conscious of the pervasive presence of consumer culture in our daily life, react strategically and playfully from within. The essay ends suggesting possible strategies of artistic action, as a result of framing open contradictions without wanting to resolve them through an encompassing synthesis.

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Volume two, issue two is out!

Voices of dissent: activists’ engagements in the creation of alternative, autonomous, radical and independent media

Interface Journal

Volume two, issue two of Interface, a peer-reviewed e-journal produced and refereed by social movement practitioners and engaged movement researchers, is now out, on the special theme “Voices of dissent: activists’ engagements in the creation of alternative, autonomous, radical and independent media”.

FULL ISSUE (PDF 5.05 MB)

Interface is open-access (free), global and programmatically multilingual. Our overall aim is to “learn from each other’s struggles”: to develop a dialogue between practitioners and researchers, but also between different social movements, intellectual traditions and national contexts.
http://interfacejournal.nuim.ie

This issue of Interface includes 26 pieces in 4 languages by authors from Austria, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, Palestine, Russia, South Korea, Sweden, the UK and the US, including:

Theme-related articles: Tina Askanius and Nils Gustafsson, Mainstreaming the alternative: the changing media practices of protest movements
•    Patrick McCurdy, Breaking the spiral of silence: the “media debate” within global justice movements. A case study of Dissent! and the Gleneagles G8 summit
•    Tatiana Bazzichelli, Towards a critique of social networking: practices of networking in grassroots communities from mail art to the case of Anna Adamolo
•    Clemens Apprich, Upload dissident culture: Public Netbase’s intervention into digital and urban space
•    Dongwon Jo, Real-time networked media activism in the 2008 Chotbul protest
•    Brigitte Geiger and Margit Hauser, Medien der neuen Frauenbewegung in Archiv / Archiving feminist grassroots media
•    Margaret Gillan, Class and voice: challenges for grassroots community activists using media in 21st century Ireland.

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