Paper presented at the Public Interfaces Conference, 12-14 January 2011, Aarhus University, Denmark.

Abstract:

This paper reflects on the notion of recursive publics proposed by Christopher M. Kelty in the book Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (2008), analyzing the consequences of disruptive dynamics both in so-called underground artistic networks and in the business context of digital economy.

Public interfaces are contextualized through the analysis of disruptive actions in collaborative networks, showing that the vulnerability of networking dynamics in recursive publics might be an opportunity to create political criticism, while the act of generating a/moral dis/order becomes an art practice.

Although the analysis of geek community as a recursive public sharing social imaginary of openness, and a moral order of freedom, is a valid frame to understand geek culture through a sociological point of view, adopting a dialectical perspective in the analysis of network dynamics might open an opportunity to question the notion of artistic intervention itself. This thread connects multiple identities projects and hacker practices of the last decade with business strategies of today, reflecting on the role of activists and artists in social media. Their interventions are thought as a challenge to generate a critical understanding of contemporary informational power (or info-capitalism), and to imagine possible routes of political and artistic action. Furthermore, this analysis questions the methodology of radical clashes of opposite forces to generate socio-political transformation, proposing more flexible viral actions as relevant responses to the ubiquity of capitalism. The strategy of disruptive innovation as a model of artistic creation becomes a challenge for the re-invention and rewriting of symbolic and expressive codes.

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Conference and PhD workshops

Image by Les Liens Invisibles

12-14 January 2011
Aarhus University, Denmark
Kasernen, building 1584, rooms 124 & 120

Public Interfaces Conference brings together researchers from Aarhus University, University of Plymouth, and guests to address the broad theme of Public Interfaces as part of ongoing research in Digital Urban Living. It is organized by Center for Digital Urban Living and DARC (Digital Aesthetics Research Centre), Aarhus University  in collaboration with Dept. of Aesthetic Studies.

Emerging from DARC’s ongoing research around interface criticism, the aim is to broaden issues to encompass the development of urban interfaces, and the changing concept of the ‘public’. What do we mean by public interface now?

Research questions
Whilst experimentation and developments in the culture of free software reflects emergent and self-organizing public actions, how does this modify our understanding of public interfaces? Can the public interface be used as a useful concept for understanding changing relations between public and private realms within other fields? Does the public interface offer a way of further examining relational aesthetics, the cultural regeneration agenda and public art? Does the public interface provide new understandings of the relationship between creative production and the free market sphere? How does the possible dissolution of the public and private spheres relate to bio politics and contemporary forms of power? Does the public interface suggest new borders or even the dissolution of borders between the public and private, humans and machines, the centre and periphery?

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Panel hosted by DARC (Digital Aesthetics Research Centre, Aarhus University)
Presenters: Christian Ulrik Andersen (DK), Tatiana Bazzichelli (IT/DK), Geoff Cox (UK/DK), and Les Liens Invisibles (IT).

Share Festival, Turin, Italy. November 3, 2010. Regional Museum of Natural Science, Conference Hall, 2pm.

The panel investigates some of the interconnections between art, activism and business. Presenters examine how artists, rather than refusing the market, are generating cultural Trojan horses — social hacks, or “smart errors” — producing critical interventions from within. As the distinction between production and consumption appears to have collapsed, every interaction in the info-sphere seems to be a business opportunity.

The phrase “creative economy” is a perversion in this line of thinking. 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, attempts of social innovations, but also unexpected consequences and a deep level of irony. Errors or mistakes demonstrate the permeability of systems — that these can be reworked — and more so, that radical innovation requires modification of the prevailing business logic.
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. 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.

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REFF. The reinvention of the real through critical practices of remix, mash-up, re-contextualization, reenactment.

The book by REFF RomaEuropa FakeFactory is out! I contributed with an essay for the section VOICES, with the title: The Disruptive Art of Business.

Foreword by: Bruce Sterling
Edited by: Cary Hendrickson, Salvatore Iaconesi, Oriana Persico, Federico Ruberti, Luca Simeone (FakePress)
Published by Derive Approdi, Rome, Italy, 2010. Language: Italian.

The fake competition RomaEuropa FakeFactory (www.romaeuropa.org) was an act of artivism, in favor of free culture and non-proprietary rights for authors. This network confronted the themes of art and hacking, political activism and technology, copyright and intellectual property and extended to access, cultural politics, crowdsourcing, open source models, peer-to-peer economic governance and the reinvention of the real.

The story begins with the section “VOICES”: a collection of more than 30 theoretical works on the themes of Free Culture, remixing as creative practice, the re-contextualization of urban spaces and knowledge sharing from international scholars such as Richard Barbrook, Andy Cameron, Stephen Kovats, The Yes Men, 0100101110101101.ORG, Jasmina Tesanovic, Massimo Canevacci Ribeiro, Antonio Caronia, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Marc Garrett, Francesco “Warbear” Macarone Palmieri and many others.

A catalog of the works presented by 32 artists, writers, designers, hackers and architects from all over the world follows in the section entitled “VISIONS”. These contributions give a voice to the unexplored scenarios of contemporary reality representing the worlds of innovation, appropriation and a continuous artistic and political reinvention bringing to light examples of new production models based on freely available contents, knowledge, connections and the possibility of reproducing, remixing and arranging contents, forms and objects; new technological practices, new forms social interaction; new opportunities for building unedited, self-determined imaginaries.

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Bicycle Built for Two Thousand, by Aaron Koblin

Some notes extracted from a paper written for the Conference “Interweaving Technologies. The Aesthetics of Digital Urban Living”, Aarhus, Denmark, April 22nd, 2010.

In the last half of the twentieth century Avant-garde art practices from Fluxus to mail art promised the creation of collaborative art and the production of new models of sharing knowledge. Today, techniques of networking developed in grassroots communities have inspired the structure of Web 2.0 platforms and have been used as a model to expand the markets of business enterprises.

The principal success of a Web 2.0 company or networking enterprise comes from the ability of enabling communities, providing shared communication tools and folksonomies. In this paper, I aim to advance upon earlier studies on networked art using a cross-national design, refusing the widely accepted idea that networked art is mainly technologically determined. Furthermore, I will present a few considerations that connect early experiments of networked art with the establishment of social networking platforms.

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“Coke Side of Life” advertising campaign (2009)

Essay by Tatiana Bazzichelli: “If You Can’t Hack ‘em, Absorb ‘em or the Endless Dance of the Corporate Revolution”, published in Concept Store nr. 3, journal by Arnolfini Contemporary Art Gallery, Bristol, UK. Get the issue here. Get the PDF here. Read the full text below.

What were once the values and philosophy of the hacker ethic are since some years the domain of many of the business companies which represent the development of Web 2.0 and contributed to create the notion of social media.

According to Steven Levy, the first one to use the term hacker ethic as described in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984), the hacker ethic was a “new way of life, with a philosophy, an ethic and a dream”.

A philosophy, which had its own language and rules, and its own representative community, whose roots went back into the 1950s and 1960s, crossing the activity of the hackers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and in the Seventies, the rise of the sharing computer culture in California (well represented by the Community Memory Project in Berkeley and the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley). Embracing the ideas of sharing, openness, decentralization, free access to computers, world improvement and the hand-on imperative (Levy, 1984) the hacker ethics has been a fertile imaginary for many European hackers as well, who started to connect through BBSes in the Eighties.

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"JODI: Something Wrong is Nothing Wrong", Ad by Motherboard TV (DELL)

Keywords:  counterculture, social networking, Web 2.0, business & advertisement.

The above image, published in VICE magazine Vol 7 Nr 2 (2010), is an advertisement for the social networking platform Motherboard TV, sponsored by DELL. But people into digital culture would immediately recognize something else.
The advertisement shows a reconstruction of the homepage http://wwwwww.jodi.org, a work by the Dutch artists JODI.org, a very well known symbol of the early net.art. JODI were part of a recent show at Eyebeam gallery in New York (December 2009) and got interviewed by the team of Motherboard TV (see here).
But this advertisement, branded by DELL, might also be the symbol of something more. What were once the values and philosophy of the hacker ethic are since some years the domain of many of the business companies which represent the development of “Web 2.0” and contributed to create the notion of social media. I have analyzed this matter on an article which is going to be published on the next issue of the Arnolfini journal, ‘Concept Store’ (Bristol, UK) .

The ideas of sharing, openness, decentralization, free access to computers and the hand-on imperative of the hackers’ imaginary, today are strictly connected with the use of commercial platforms. We are facing a progressive commercialization of contexts of software development and sharing, which want to appear open and progressive (very emblematic is the motto “Don’t be evil” by Google), but which are indeed transforming the meaning of communities and networking, and the battle for information rights, placing it into the boundaries of marketplace.This process is changing the meaning of collaboration and art itself.

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