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.

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When: February 16th 2012 18:30 – 20:30
Location: Studios One and Two, Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin.

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
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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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