Networkingart

Tuesday, February 2, 2010, 5:00pm – 7:00pm. SpringLab, Finlandsgade 24A, Aarhus.

Yesterday was the opening night of Hack Århus, the new hacker space in the city of Århus. A lot of people came despite the snow storm and we had fun with some talks, hack-presentations and circuit bending. I gave a short speech about the roots of hacker ethics and the background of hackerspaces, with examples from Italy, Germany and California.

There were some people from Labitat, the hackerspace in Copenhagen, who shared their experience with us, and some projects presentations followed – like the very interesting one about the coding-wooden-sculpture machine from Jacob Pedersen, who is one of the initiators of the Hackerspace.

Some more info about Hack Aarhus:

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AHAcktitude 2009 [27-28-29th November, Milan, Italy]
# Organised by:
aha@lists.ecn.org and AHA: Activism-Hacking-Artivism

AHAcktitude 2009, Milan

The community of aha@lists.ecn.org, the Italian mailing list on art and hacktivism is organizing a 3 day event in Milan at the Cantiere Social Centre. They called it AHAcktitude, as a collective development of the AHA: Activism-Hacking-Artivism project which I founded in 2001. I will contribute via Skype from San Francisco with a presentation on the topics I am researching during my visiting scholarship at Stanford University (starting August 2009).
The name of my presentation is: From Silicon Valley with Love, and it will connect art, tech and grassroots projects in the Bay Area (Saturday November 28, 9.30pm).

Here is the AHAcktitude press announcement:

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Image by antisocial notworking http://project.arnolfini.org.uk

My post was sent on September 25 to Nettime mailing-list, following the thread Has Facebook superseded Nettime? started by Florian Cramer.

It was published on the Nettime digest the day after. My answer pointed out many of the topics I am researching right now, in particular some relevant connections between hacker culture, networking art and Web 2.0.

Original Txt from Florian Cramer: <nettime> Has Facebook superseded Nettime?
From: Florian Cramer <fc-nettime {AT} pleintekst.nl>
Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:58:08 +0200

“For about two years, I’ve noted that a sizable part of the media artistic, -activist and -scholarly community that makes up Nettime has moved to Facebook, in the sense of being more active and networked there than here. At the same time, there seems to no public discussion of this fact, making Facebook an elephant in the room. I’m speculating that Facebook is seen as a friendlier environment – but nobody dares to mention it because, among others, it’s a corporate site built on blatant user data mining [see http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=863] with scary surveillance and privacy implications. What is the solution? Is something like Facebook needed, but as a decentralized, non-data-minable, user-owned system?”

My answer is following below. Read the rest of this entry »

Slide by Jason Scott, http://ascii.textfiles.com/

Here they are! The photos from Arse Elektronika 2009: check the photostream!

Of Intercourse and Intracourse. Sexuality, Genetics, Biotech, Wetware, Body mods.

Arse Elektronika 2009

October is coming in San Francisco, and together with the breezy fog, we have a new occasion to re-fresh our minds: Arse Elektronika 2009, October 1-4, San Francisco.
This year sex and technology meet the future at Arse Elektronika, as reported in the LA Times.
The Arse Elektronika Festival, which is not the one about media art organized in Linz every year – even if it sounds the same :) – also comes from Austria: founded by the experimental art group monochrom and managed by Johannes Grenzfurthner it is at its third edition (the first was in 2007).

CUM2CUT, the Indie-Porn-Short-Film Festival which I founded (together with Gaia Novati) in Berlin in 2006, is among the Festival partners. Some CUM2CUT movies will be shown at the Prixxx Arse Elektronika on October 1 at 6 PM, at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco’s Mission district.

Beside this, I will be involved in the festival program, taking part in the final panel,  Of Hypercrotch and Nanobot, together with Rose White, Violet Blue, Saul Albert, Eleanor Saitta and Johannes Grenzfurthner: Saturday, October 3, 8 PM @ PariSoMa

Here is the official press release. Spread the word!

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From August 20 until December 20, 2009, I am hosted as Visiting Scholar at the Human Sciences & Technologies Advanced Research Institute at Stanford University, California H-STAR, working within the Stanford Humanities Lab.

Thanks to a partnership agreement between the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation (DASTI) and H-STAR at Stanford University, it has been possible to apply for a research grant at Stanford University, being involved in programs that connect Stanford resources in human sciences with research and innovation about information technology. This semester (fall 2oo9) six PhD Scholars, including myself, are hosted by HSTAR (see here for more details). Aim of my research at Stanford is to investigate how networking practices are able to change the model of production of Internet contents and artistic creations, connecting the development of hacker ethics and current digital artistic practices with the creation of Web 2.0 social networking platforms. Fred Turner, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, is my research co-supervisor.

The Stanford Humanities Lab is a loosely structured, self-supporting research collaboratory built around the work of its faculty leaders. It serves as a platform for transdiciplinary/post-disciplinary study dedicated to exploring innovative scenarios for the future of knowledge production and reproduction in the arts and humanities. Their research focus is about what it is to be human, about experience in a connected world, about the boundaries of culture and nature — transcend old divisions between the arts, sciences, and humanities; between the academy, industry, and the public sphere. The people behind the Lab are: Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Founder and Director), Henry Lowood, Michael Shanks and John Willinsky (Directors); Henrik Bennetsen (Associate Director), Matteo Bittanti (Associate Member); Core Collaborators are: Dena DeBry, Brandon Jones, Gordon Knox, Susan J. Rojo and Galen Davis (read more here).

Among the current projects at the SHL are: Speed Limits and the developing of Sirikata, a BSD licensed open source platform for games and virtual worlds. On September 12 and 13, a Mixed Reality Performance: An Evening on Sirikata took place. A performance at the MiTo International festival of Music in Milan, Italy, presented by the Stanford Humanities Lab [SHL] and the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics [CCRMA], Stanford University).

Stay tuned!