Networkingart

Conference-Colloquium, Aarhus University, June 12 &14, 2010, ADA building, room 333.

Crowd in Italy during a strike, 2008, from the book Sono Anna Adamolo (ed. 2009)

This conference-colloquium at the Humanistic Faculty, Aarhus University, will relate to the widespread use of the concepts event and/or affect in contemporary research of media, art, philosophy, politics and culture. It is the aim to qualify, explore and investigate the scope of the terms event and affect in different analytical fields. We assume that the renewed focus on event and affect is partly due to the impact of new (electronic and digital) media and the new forms of immediacy created by real-time control and transmission.
The conference will therefore investigate two key issues: 1) How can we describe event and affect on philosophical, artistic, political and cultural levels? 2) Has a new paradigm of the signal – related to the bypassing of representation in real-time transmissions – superseded the sign? What characterizes the signal?

By combining these questions the conference wants to initiate a broader discussion on a paradigmatic transformation from sign to signal in relation to the concepts of event and affect and their use and scope in art, politics and culture.

[The text above is an extract of the Conference's call. The arrangement team consists of: Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, Britta Timm Knudsen, Dorthe Refslund Christensen, Carsten Stage, Camilla Møhring Reestorff, Mathias Bonde Korsgaard and Jonas Fritsch].

Download the program.

Keynotes:
Nigel Thrift, Brian Massumi and Erin Manning.
Speakers:
Niels Albertsen, Mads Anders Baggesgaard, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Christian Borch, Christoph Brunner, Merete Carlson, Dorthe Refslund Christensen, Leila Dawney, Carsten Friberg, Jonas Fritsch, Jan Ifversen, Britta Timm Knudsen, Mathias Bonde Korsgaard, Christoffer Kølvrå, Annette Svaneklink Jakobsen, Thomas Jellis, Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen, Thomas Markussen, Casper Høeg Radil, Carsten Stage, Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, Anne Marit Waade.
Participants:
Lise Nygaard Christensen, Lise Dilling, Jette Geil, Lars Bo Løfgreen, Kirsten Marie Pedersen, Rebecca Parbo.

My paper is about networked events as political and social practices of criticism in grassroots communities. Title is: The Network Events. Networked art as a challenge for sociopolitical transformation. I will address some artistic and activist projects as an example of fertile zones of rewriting and experimentation of cultural and political codes. In particular, I will describe the Italian case of Anna Adamolo (2008-2009).

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Seminar & Workshops at Aarhus University, April 22 – 2010
KaserneScenen, starts 9.30.

Due to the ash- and eruption related cancellation of the three-day seminar Interweaving Technologies – the Aesthetics of Digital Urban Living, The DARC, Digital Aesthetics Research Center, and The Center for Digital Urban Living, Aarhus University, organise the mini-seminar Aesthetic eruptions of the digital. The seminar is arranged by Lone Koefoed Hansen and Lars Bo Løfgreen.

It will be a 3-4 hour seminar with some talks by presenters from the Aarhus area. Additionally, there will be two workshops:  Psychogeographics Aarhus by Martin Howse (UK/DE) and Wi-Fi cracking workshop by Gordan Savicic (AU/NL).

I will be part of the panel The Politics of Networks with Geoff Cox, Søren Pold and Christian Ulrik Andersen, giving a talk entitled “Aesthetics of Common Participation and Networking Enterprises”.
Read the rest of program here. Read the workshop descriptions below (extract from the Conference’s website).

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Parla come navighi. Antologia della webletteratura italiana (Anthology of Italian Webliterature) is published. I wrote the preface, with the title: ‘Per una letteratura della partecipazione’ (’Towards a Participatory Literature’).

The Anthology is a collections of writings, poetry, essays, and reflections on the new forms of experimental  literature in the era of social media. Published by Il Foglio Letterario, is edited by Mario Gerosa, with editing assistance by Roberta Peveri.
The title might be literally translated into ’speak the way you surf’, even it makes not so much sense in English. The idea comes from ‘parla come mangi’ (speak the way you eat), the Italian common way to say ‘be simple’, ‘don’t try to be rhetoric’, or better, ‘don’t overdo when you speak’. Basically, the Anthology wants to present the microcosm of the Italian web- and network-literature, and the consequent experimental effort in creating new languages and new forms of writing by the social media users. The focus is therefore not just to use social media as a inexpressive communication tool, but to transform them into a platform of creation.

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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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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 »

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!