anon1 from Gabriella Coleman on Vimeo.

Old and New Net Wars Over Free Speech and Secrecy or How to Understand the Lulz Battle Against the Church of Scientology by Gabriella Coleman.

anon2 from Gabriella Coleman on Vimeo.

anon3 from Gabriella Coleman on Vimeo.

anon4 from Gabriella Coleman on Vimeo.

Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist who examines ethics and online collaboration as well as the role of the law and new media technologies in extending and critiquing liberal values and sustaining new forms of political activism. Between 2001-2003 she conducted ethnographic research on computer hackers primarily in San Francisco, the Netherlands, as well as those hackers who work on the largest free software project, Debian. Coleman received her Ph.D. in Socio-cultural Anthropology at the University of Chicago in 2005 where she completed a dissertation on free and open source software hacking. She is currently an assistant professor at NYU in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and is completing a book manuscript Coding Liberal Freedom: Hacker Pleasure and the Ethics of Free and Open Source Software under contract with Princeton University Press. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including ones from the National Science Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. Her research interests include computer hacking, the intersection of law and science in securing and critiquing liberal values, the history of psychiatry, and the role of new media technologies in sustaining new forms of collaboration and patient activism. You can find out more about her work and publications here.

Note: On trolls/tricksters… Also see Henry Jenkins/Peter Ludlow on Second Life griefers Watching the Watchers: Power and Politics in Second Life (Part One), Watching the Watchers: Power and Politics in Second Life (Part Two).

Ondrej Brody (CZ) & Kristofer Paetau’s (FIN) work, Painting China Now (2007), is the starting point for their new work on display at Open Source Gallery. Painting China Now is a collection of 30 oil paintings depicting violence inflicted by the Chinese government on Falun Dafa members. The paintings were rendered with varying degrees of realism by Chinese craftsmen* specializing in copying pictures sent via e-mail. These pictures, censored and forbidden in China, were painted with oil on canvas in China and then exported to Europe for exhibition display.

For their first Brooklyn exhibition at Open Source Gallery: Wang Bin Torture in Commercial Quality, High Quality, and Museum Quality, the artists chose an explicit photograph of the massacred torso of Falun Dafa member Wang Bin**. Although the original photograph is unsharp, there is no doubt about what it is depicting. Using the Chinese painting companies’ own product quality grade system, Brody & Paetau commissioned the image to be painted in three grades: Commercial Quality, High Quality and Museum Quality. To compound the political with the aesthetic, these will be shown side by side, as a triptych.

What at the first glance appears as cynical artistic exploitation can also be seen as a shock of realities revealed through a conceptual artistic process. On one hand, most civilized countries condemn torture and censorship, on the other, they are eager to profit from Chinas’ cheap production forces and ruthless commercialism. The marketing of art in ‘Commercial Quality, High Quality, and Museum Quality’ is alien to general gallery practice as the artistic and monetary value of a painting is usually not relative to labor time or technical skill.

*This company and its details will be not named at their own request for fear of reprisals.

** Wang Bin, born on August 2, 1956, was a computer software engineer at the Institute of Exploration and Development in the Daqing Petroleum Field. He had received science and technology awards on many occasions, and for three sessions in a row, he had been a representative of the employee’s assembly at the institute.

Open Source is a participant-driven art initiative in Brooklyn, NY that provides space, community and conceptual context for creative play and critical commentary.

June 3, 2009

Four years ago, in preparation for a research visit to Shenzhen’s Dafen Painting Village, I requested that roughly a dozen Chinese painters paint a copy of the image of the man standing in front of the tanks during the Tiananmen Square protest on June 4, 1989. I did this partly out an interest in copies and reproductions and partly just to see if I could do it: the image is famous worldwide, but I have since learned it is virtually unknown under Chinese national censorship.

Tiananmen Square: You can add the person to painting when you get it.

Of the dozen requests I sent, most were returned with a price and the universal salutation “it is a pleasure to do business with you.” A few painters suggested I just leave the man and the lamp post out, often for unclear reasons: political or aesthetic? One person outright declared that he could not paint the image. I have titled each image with a snippet of dialogue from the negotiations for each painting.

Tiananmen Square: The man and the white lights will be painted or not?

Twenty years have passed since that violent government crack down on the twenty-something college students occupying the public square in pro-democracy protest. Enough time for the protestors’ children to grow up without ever seeing this famous image that was eradicated by the media. It lies cloaked lies cloaked in Google searches, behind the Great Firewall of China.

Tiananmen Square: our art products will give you total satisfation

This famous image did not exist. This was one manifestation of China’s pattern of Internet censorship. Another pattern was that if a scandals breaks out in China, all webpages outside of China are temporarily disabled. During my month there, two regional politicians were caught in corruptions investigations. One of them was sentenced to death, and the other killed himself. The official reports glossed over the details, and focused on the new appointee. The New York Times, on the other hand, did an in-depth analysis, which I happened to read, as I was up at a strange jet-lagged hour. It was gone the next day.

Tiananmen Square: composition without lights

Just yesterday the New York Times published a small series of editorials about the anniversary. And just now they are reporting on extensive shutdowns of most major communications platforms, from the NYTimes.com to Twitter. Ironically, that article will not make it through the firewall either.

Tiananmen Square: kindly please follow instructions for online payment

My translator & fixer that helped me get access to the painting factories said she had never seen this image. She was a very successful college-educated journalist, who was leaving China to work in Canada. She was a worldly person. She had heard stories but she refused to believe them; stories from family friends whose children disappeared that day, 20 years ago tomorrow.

Tiananmen Square: Chinese people forgot the history

I send images of these paintings out now as a quiet memorial, and an attempt to reseed this image of strength in the face of threats to humanity, tyranny, and the freedom of information

Michael [posted by Michael Mandiberg on his website]

Painters compete during a facsimile match in Dafen Village, Shenzhen City, south China’s Guangdong Province, Thursday, May 18, 2006. More than 110 contestants make facsimile of portrait or scenery oil painting in the timed game held in the village which is famous for its oil painting facsimile industry. (AP Photo / Xinhua, Feng Ming)

A multimedia lecture and an artistic intervention, performed by Amirali Ghazemi will present Ghazemi’s curatorial work, particularly his eleven years long collaboration with Teheran underground Parkingallery and his collaboration with International Roaming Biennial of Tehran.

The focus of the lecture will be on the characteristics of contemporary Iranian art which is determined by controlled production, the lack of freedom of speech, censorship and centralization. His presentation will acquaint us more closely with the alternative situation, the tactics of operation and the strategies of survival in Iran and its capital, relatively closed from the outside world. He will outline the parallel routes and the systems that operate in Iran as initiatives and as incentives of artists and organizations and are realized in the informal alternative production conditions. He will also talk about his recent projects, realized in the international arena, particularly in Germany (Coffeeshop Ladies, Tehran Remixed …).

Amirali Ghazemi is a freelance curator and new media artist from Tehran who leads the underground Parkingallery. He is the initiator and main organizer of International Roaming Biennial of Tehran, which can not take place in its home town because of a constant misunderstanding of local and state authorities as well as the restrictive censorship, but operates in the asylum instead (the first edition took place in Istanbul, later it was transferred to Berlin, London, and this year it just closed in Belgrade). Ghazemi belongs to the generation and the scene of Iranian artists and cultural workers who operate completely outside the official state art system, on the verge of national culture and he has received much more attention from the international arena. A very rigid Islamic law prevents the operation of the individual in the state-run, ideologically driven policy that requires the display of revolutionary propaganda and restricts the entry into the global world of art. The duality of operation of Iranian artists is also one of the main characteristics of the branched art scene in Iran and Tehran.

The meeting concentrates on mobile journalism, alternative information channels, activist criticism on media, censorship and auto-censorship in Turkish media.

Mithat Bereket discusses mobile journalism by giving a special emphasis to the Middle East and the alternative information channels. The talk also covers activism and censorship in Turkey. In this context, Atilkunst talks about the series ‘gündem fazlasi’ (excess agenda) by presenting some samples from the series. ‘Gündem fazlasi’ (excess agenda) is a reading of the agenda with critical interventions. This act is a reminder of an agenda which could be also personal.

Atilkunst is an activist group. Atilkunst started the group activities in 2006. Atilkunst acts and thinks through irony. Instead of considering and processing a single concept in details, it creates an up-to-date reaction area. Atilkunst starts its action with words, then transforms these words to images. Those images are shown in public or private places in various formats, such as stickers, videos, photo-novels. Actions of the group could not be considered as street art in its strict sense, but streets are also a their area of action. By using the communication methods of mass media, Atilkunst makes strong remarks on political agendas and dominant daily expressions.

In addition to its artistic context, Atilkunst can be considered as an activist and culture jammer group. Under the attack of today’s image bombardment, Atilkunst works with the similar tools of mass media in purpose of constructing an alternative lateral culture.

Mithat Bereket graduated from Ankara University, Department of Political Science. He completed his post-graduate studies at Lancaster University, Department of International Relations in England. He is doing his PhD on “Radical Islam” at the same University.

Bereket was the chief news anchor for some significant affairs that NTV has covered. These affairs include Bill Clinton’s visit to Turkey, The OSCE summit in Istanbul, The European Union Helsinki Summit, Greek National Elections, Cyprus Elections, US elections and the World Trade Center attacks. He followed and covered many important international affairs including the Gulf War, the war in Bosnia, the war in Afghanistan, the conflicts in Algeria and Karabakh, the war in Chechnya, The Palestinian Intafada and the NATO operations in Kosovo. He is currently traveling around the globe as a war correspondent. He had exclusive interviews and some of the interviewees include, Nelson Mandela, Benazir Bhutto, Muammar al-Gaddafi, Yasser Arafat, B. Boutros-Ghali, Teslima Nesrin, Tadeuzs Mazawiecki, Massoud Barzani, Jalal Talabani, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu, Frederick De Klerk, Antonio Di Pietro, Shamil Basayev, Ibrahim Rugova, Mikhail Kalashnikov, Jörg Haider and Bill Clinton. Bereket has been producing and hosting a news magazine “Pusula” since 1995. He produces an on-air show on a national radio station called Radio Time. He also produces and hosts a daily news program called “Manset,” which is broadcast on CNNTURK. He writes in the weekly Businessweek Magazine. Mithat Bereket, who has been giving lectures on International Diplomacy and Daily Politics at Universities and high-schools, is teaching “Media and Politics” at Kadir Has University.

Most works in the Speaking Out Loud exhibition suggest that language is a fluid, dynamic system which offers itself for individual expression and performance. On the other hand, language is a rational system not driven by instinct but whose strict rules and signs we must learn in a life long, enduring process. Looking at language from this other perspective, we are confronted with an authority, a rigid system of code that is preserved and governed even. Language shares this ambivalence with the Internet, a system that on the one hand develops dynamically through its users’ contributions, on the other hand, it is a highly regulated space, that is less and less public but where the transfer of copyrights and censorship affect the Internet’s appearance and use at its core.

In this session, the speakers will discuss the nature of both systems language and the Internet from their various perspectives, particularly looking at ways to artistically respond to, escape and circumvent their rigidness and constraints. On this occasion, Linda Hilfling will launch Gate Peepin, her new work that she has developed during a residency at NIMk.

Florian Cramer is a theoretician and course director media design at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. He is the author of the essay ‘Words Made Flesh, code, culture imagination‘. Previously, Florian was a junior lecturer in Comparative Literature at Freie Universitdt Berlin and had published papers in the area of code poetry, comparative studies in the literature and the arts, modernism, text theory, literature and computing, collaborated on the runme.org Software Art repository and edited the Unstable Digest of code poetry.

Jaromil is a media artist, GNU/Linux hacker, activist and researcher at the Netherlands Media Art Institute. In 2005 he and jodi.org joined for an artistic collaboration that led to the development of a tool to write and publish time-based text to be used in email communications and websites. ‘Time Based Text’ is currently exhibited in the Speaking Out loud exhibition and very recently has been nominated for the Vilem Flusser Theory Award of transmediale.09. Jaromil will talk about the background and intention of Time Based Text and the concept of property in the context of new media.

An Mertens and Peter Westenberg are members of Constant, Brussels. Constant develops radio, electronic music and database projects, by means of migrating from cultural work to work places and back again. An Mertens is a fiction writer, storyteller and dramaturge. She is experimenting with analog and digital forms of storytelling. Peter Westenberg is visual artist and film- and videomaker. His projects evolve from an interest in social cartography, urban anomalies and the relationships between locative identity and cultural geography. Together they will talk about thoughts and motivations underlying their up-coming long-term project ‘Schaerbeekse taal / La langue schaerbeekoise’ which deals with the construction of an artificial language.

Danish artist Linda Hilfling works with the premises of participation and public spaces within media structures, with a focus on means of control (codes, organisation and law) and their cultural impact. Her artistic practice takes the form of interventions reflecting upon or revealing hidden gaps in these structures. She will discuss her new art work Gate peepin that reflects on the hidden layers of regulations governing the use of so-called democratic web-spaces. The Firefox extension analyses the terms of services of Web 2.0 platforms and reedits their content, thus enabling a new browsing experience. At the launch, copies of the ‘Gate peepin’ publication will be available for free.

The Speaking Out Loud exhibition is on show until 24 January 2009 with works from: Tudor Bratu (RO), Tim Etchells (UK) and Vlatka Horvat (CRO/US), Linda Hilfling (DEN), Michael Hoepfel (DE, Jaromil (IT/NL) and Jodi (NL), KH Jeron (DE), Christoph Keller (DE), Manu Luksch (AT) and Mukul Patel (UK), Evan Roth (US), Charles Sandison (UK), Trikoton (DE).

Many Nettimers might already have read about www.pirates-of-the-amazon.com. The website provided a Firefox add-on that changed the experience of browsing Amazon.com by putting a slick “Download 4 Free” button on top of every product - whether a CD, DVD or book - also listed as a bittorrent on The Pirate Bay. Clicking the button on the Amazon.com product page for, say, Madonna’s latest album would yield a background search on The Pirate Bay and start up a bittorrent client to download a corresponding torrent.

After being published this Monday, the project made headline news on digg.com and has been covered among others by CNET, the Washington Post and currently more than 1000 blog entries worldwide.

Via its provider, the project received a take down request by the lawyers of Amazon.com yesterday. In our point of view, the legal grounds for that are contestable since the add-on itself did not download anything. It only provided a user interface link between the web sites Amazon.com and thepiratebay.org. Nevertheless, the creators complied to the request, taking both the add-on and original web site offline.

What is perhaps more disturbing however, are the openly hostile and aggressive Internet user comments in blogs and on digg.com. Unlike in a comparable situation only a couple of years ago, the majority of commentators failed to see the highly parodistic and artistic nature of “Pirates of the Amazon”. The project was created by two students at the Media Design M.A. department of the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam, one of them being a student in the course, the other being an exchange student from the New Media programme of Merz Akademie Stuttgart. The work was part of a regular trimester project. We - jaromil, the project tutor, and Florian Cramer, the head of the course - were the academic supervisors of this work. We supported and encouraged it from its early beginnings. What’s more, we’re proud to have such students and such interesting work coming out of our teaching.

Apart from its humorous value and cleverness, the project is interesting on many levels and layers: For example, not just as a funny artistic hack of Amazon.com and The Pirate Bay, but also as a critique of mainstream media consumer culture creating the great “content” overlap between the two sites. We clearly see this project as a practical media experiment and artistic design investigation into the status of media creation, distribution and consumption on the Internet.

With the take down notice from Amazon.com, our students have been scared away from pursuing their art, research and learning in our institute. We do not want a culture in which students have to preemptively censor their study because their work confronts culture with controversial and challenging issues.

We would like to gather statements in support of the “Pirates of the Amazon”. The students are turning their web sites into a documentation of their project and the reactions it triggered. If you would like to support them and contribute a short statement, please get in touch with us.

Florian Cramer & jaromil

tobias c. van veen wrote:

What does it mean to connect two things together? Much of critical scholarly work relies upon the process of citation: taking a piece of X in order to link it to Y, and thereby revealing the ways in which X and Y relate to each other. Without the ability to cite things, to sample them and to link them together, the process of scholarly work, if not writing and creative action itself, is obliterated before it begins. What does citation mean on the internet? It means not only ’sampling’ as we commonly grasp it, but the ability to hyperlink. What is critical scholarly work on the internet? Such work no longer only takes the shape of a discourse or commentary, an essay posted somewhere or a blog; such work is increasingly taking the shape — and has for some time — of a website or other piece of software that demonstrates the principles it wishes to investigate. Such is the software project [ pirates-of-the-amazon.com ]. By linking the BitTorrent search engine [piratebay.org] to [Amazon.com] in such a way to reveal the ‘links’ between paid and free content, a critical operation is opened between the two sites that, in its turn, opens a debate over the evolution of property in the 21st century. Such critical scholarly work in the shape of software, Firefox add-ons and other methods demonstrates its force precisely when it is able to carry out what it conceptualizes. Thus we must ask what is achieved when such work is not only attacked by the corporate entity in this discussion, Amazon.com, but when the service provider is pressured to in turn subject pressure on the scholarly researchers to censure, remove and shut down the project. This is nothing less than the censorship of a critical scholarly text — a kind of book-burning of the 21C. That it takes on a very different form today illustrates how censorship itself is no longer about *what* you write, or *where* you get it from, but how the nature of the citation itself — from written text to resampling code & providing links to controversial methods of property redistribution — has shifted with the digital era. While such censure demonstrates the value of critical online work such as [ pirates-of-the-amazon.com ], it is also all too frighteningly effective in silencing the possibility of debate over precisely these questions of property, citation, hyperlinking, and sampling.

– tobias c. van Veen

Edward Shanken wrote:

Two points:

1) You must realize that by getting coverage in digg, cnet, etc., and earning Amazon’s wrath the students won? It never ceases to amaze me that corporations continuously fail to realize that by attempting to censor creative work, they generate a groundswell of attention for precisely that which they want to squash? If your students are scared by this, then they should take advanced courses in “guts” and learn how to manipulate the media, or they should take up watercolors. They must have wanted to generate some kind of response but when the response was bigger than they anticipated, they cower? This is rather the time to strike!

2) Regarding “critical scholarly work on the internet,” Pirates of the Amazon seems a bit “lite” to warrant such a lofty moniker. It is a clever exercise/hack that demonstrates what anyone who is net-savvy already knows. Maybe I’m being too critical. Nonetheless, as a form of creative expression, I agree with Tobias’s point about the importance of it being protected from censorship. If there is a critical scholarly moment to be identified here, I believe it pertains to questions of the censorship of particular types of software. If they were my students, I would encourage then to take that as the starting point of their next project.

Eddie Shanken

Dan Calin wrote;

Dutch culture coined a very useful term for evaluating the position of an art discourse in relation with societal issues such as the ones questioned by the Pirates … ; it is called autonomy.

Autonomy entitles art to float freely in the interstices of the social fabric, to experiment and to steer in unexpected directions. When experiment and steering relate directly to the fabric itself, the art discourse looses autonomy and gains relational power (in the sense designed by Nic. Bourriaud). Relational art has an increased chance to acknowledgement, but also - naturally - to criticism, coming not only from the comfortable inner circles, but also from the structures to which the respective discourse >relates<. Needless to say that both concepts (autonomous, relational) have no axiological power; they are not about quality, they are about method.

The student work that generated this thread is obviously relational. So, it got its moment of attention, including censorship. All unfolded as planned, I suppose; if not, then there was something flawed in the initial planning and/or in the authors’ / tutors’ expectations.

One might say that the whole issue is about the unexpected reactions of the general users, who rejected the project. Well, this was after all (or wasn’t it?) an art project - so people are free to reject it as they please.

Another could argue that the whole fuss is about the IP playing the watch dog for Amazon. Well again, there is probably a learning curve in the way corporate environments deal with tactical art projects; something to think about, maybe.

What under-streams all aspects of the discussion till here is the old double standard mentality lurking in our (self)perception as artists and cultural workers: we would like to be autonomous (i.e. free of consequences for our decisions), but also relational (therefore socially efficient), and - of course - vastly accepted. Too bad, as in the end art is neither autonomous nor relational; it is just one of the multitude of human manifestations competing for attention in a surcharged environment.

Felix Stadler wrote:

On Saturday, 6. December 2008, Calin Dan wrote:

> Autonomy entitles art to float freely in the interstices of the social
> fabric, to experiment and to steer in unexpected directions. When
> experiment and steering relate directly to the fabric itself, the art
> discourse looses autonomy and gains relational power (in the sense
> designed by Nic. Bouriaud). Relational art has an increased chance to
> acknowledgement, but also - naturally - to criticism, coming not only
> from the comfortable inner circles, but also from the structures to
> which the respective discourse >relates<. Needless to say that both
> concepts (autonomous, relational) have no axiological power; they are
> not about quality, they are about method.

I agree. The concept of artistic freedom seems tied to the notion of art as an autonomous, i.e. distinct, sphere. At least, the two concepts appeared historically at the same moment. If you give up one (and there are good reasons to do that), then the other rings a bit hollow.

> The student work that generated this thread is obviously relational. So,
> it got its moment of attention, including censorship. All unfolded as
> planned, I suppose; if not, then there was something flawed in the
> initial planning and/or in the authors’ / tutors’ expectations.

Again, I cannot but agree, which makes me wonder why it was closed down so quickly (though, it’s always easy to criticize others for not taking the heat).

> One might say that the whole issue is about the unexpected reactions of
> the general users, who rejected the project. Well, this was after all
> (or wasn’t it?) an art project - so people are free to reject it as they
> please.

This for me — much more than the amazon’s reaction — is what makes this project really interesting. This is not only about people being free to reject an art project. I don’t think the relevant point is whether this is art or not (at least not for the people hating the project). Rather, it seems to reveal how much the “free culture movement” (if there ever was such a thing) has been reshaped as “web2.0″ and how much it is now happy with this niche of “user generated content” or “amateur creativity”. This niche is promising respectability and, who knows, perhaps even a career or two, but for this to succeed it needs to be disassociated from the more radical approaches — e.g. file sharing — that cannot be assimilated so easily.

Projects like the “Pirates of the Amazon” blur this distinction and threaten to undo the last couple of years of work of building respectability for the CC and YouTube set. This, I think is why the reactions on digg.com and other web2.0 sites are so hostile.

Felix

Jon Ippolito wrote:

Felix Stalder on December 6, 2008 at 3:42 PM -0500 wrote:

>> One might say that the whole issue is about the unexpected reactions of
>> the general users, who rejected the project
…
>I don’t think the relevant point is whether this is
>art or not (at least not for the people hating the project). Rather, it
>seems to reveal how much the “free culture movement” (if there ever was
>such a thing) has been reshaped as “web2.0″ and how much it is now happy
>with this niche of “user generated content” or “amateur creativity”. This
>niche is promising respectability and, who knows, perhaps even a career or
>two, but for this to succeed it needs to be disassociated from the more
>radical approaches — e.g. file sharing — that cannot be assimilated so
>easily.
…
>
>Projects like the “Pirates of the Amazon” blur this distinction and
>threaten to undo the last couple of years of work of building
>respectability for the CC and YouTube set. This, I think is why the
>reactions on digg.com and other web2.0 sites are so hostile.

I agree, and because the student project triggered this revelation, Eddie Shanken is right to call it successful.

That said, I think there is an ulterior, perhaps unconscious motive in Digg users condemning the project. Most of them pirate games and movies when they’re not at their respectable Web 2.0 jobs, but they don’t want artists calling attention to such “radical approaches” for fear that they’ll lose free and easy access to the entertainment that makes holding down a job more palatable in the first place.

Cheers,

jon

Florian Cramer wrote:

On Saturday, December 06 2008, 21:42 (+0100), Felix Stalder wrote:

> I agree. The concept of artistic freedom seems tied to the notion
> of art as an autonomous, i.e. distinct, sphere.

…which literally means its confinement to exhibition spaces and a predefined art context, a point also made by Arthur C. Danto in his book “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace”. While art movements from Futurism to Fluxus have attempted to break out of those spaces, these attempts mostly remained symbolic gestures, ultimately contained by remnant objects and documents [such as Johannes Baader's Dada pamphlets or Fluxus event scores and photographs] that preserved the intervention and safely brought it back to art exhibition spaces.

The quality of interventions by ubermorgen, the YesMen and now the Pirates of the Amazon (although the students themselves never intended to act in such a position and legacy, being quite intimidated by the news media attention their project received) lies exactly in the fact that they are not confided to these safe spaces. To use Calin’s terminology, the “relational” aesthetics is not just aesthetic, often even hardly recognizable as aesthetic, but intervenes straight into the actual economic and political systems, thanks to the fact that social and economic structures have been coded into software and thus are also prone to be disrupted by software that finds a clever crack in the symbolic system. (The YesMen’s ReamWeaver and ubermorgen’s voteauction.com are more such examples.)

> Again, I cannot but agree, which makes me wonder why it was closed
> down so quickly (though, it’s always easy to criticize others for not
> taking the heat).

It was the learning experience for the students themselves that it takes so little to go from a more safeguarded space of artistic and school experimentation to headline news. I think it needs to be respected if they do not want to take the heat, and it’s my responsibility as their teacher and mentor to support them in this respect.

> Rather, it seems to reveal how much the “free
> culture movement” (if there ever was such a thing) has been reshaped
> as “web2.0″ and how much it is now happy with this niche of “user
> generated content” or “amateur creativity”.

[...]

> Projects like the “Pirates of the Amazon” blur this distinction
> and threaten to undo the last couple of years of work of building
> respectability for the CC and YouTube set. This, I think is why the
> reactions on digg.com and other web2.0 sites are so hostile.

Yes, I couldn’t agree more, Felix! But it even goes further than that. The hostile reactions were not only to be found on the web2.0 sites, but also on sites like torrentfreak. What the “Pirates of the Amazon” revealed is that even the p2p file sharing community is happy with its niche, and eager to keep it like that. Amazon and The Pirate Bay are two parallel systems that don’t bother each other very much [although their media content is quite similar]. In interfacing the two sites, the plug-in violated a taboo for Amazon.com as much for the P2P “pirate” community which was afraid that, through the plug-in, their niche could be discovered by the mainstream and consequently shut down.

This why I think the students are absolutely right in characterizing their plug-in as parodist. Kristoffer’s hint to Bataille and Klossowski is helpful here indeed - I am also reminded of Kurt Kren’s 1967 experimental short film “20. September”, a montage that directly connects eating mouths to urinating penises and defecating anuses. The seemingly “perverse” link between Amazon and the Pirate Bay states a similarly simple truth that the cultural mainstream (whether Amazon customers, Web 2.0 amateurs or P2P downloaders) does not enjoy to be reminded of.

-F

Olia Lialina wrote:

> What is perhaps more disturbing however, are the openly hostile and
> aggressive Internet user comments in blogs and on digg.com. Unlike in a
> comparable situation only a couple of years ago, the majority of
> commentators failed to see the highly parodistic and artistic nature of
> “Pirates of the Amazon”.

Yes, exactly, users don’t want to be disturbed, and their reaction is more scary and frustrating than all the legal letters in the world.

Last summer another student of Dragan Espenschied’s web development course at Merz Akademie published a beautiful service — Web 1.0. It offered to the users of social network StudiVZ (German FaceBook) to see their own profiles and profiles of their friends in 90es aesthetics, with under construction signs and star backgrounds, as if they made them themselves as if being online was fun again.

Of course the school was contacted by StudiVZ’s system administrator with the request to shut down the project. But this was not the reason why the student gave up. All what is left is the documentation:

http://web.1punkt0.net/docu
login: olia
password: netart

It was the flood of hate messages he got from the users of that Social Network. They didn’t want to have fun and, what is more alarming, they were blaming Web1.0 project for violating their privacy. Clean layouts of StudiVZ, Facebook and others make users believe that their data is save there. That they are protected and professionally taken care of.

Both of these projects state a simple truth that almost everybody knows: filesharing is mainstream, what is on the web is public. Strangely these are still taboos. Users don’t want to be reminded of them.

forever yours,
olia

Jon Ippolito wrote:

‘Well, you may get an angry letter from your adopted organization, but you can just say you were playing a funny surrealist game.’ — The manual for Reamweaver, a software package for creating bogus versions of existing Web sites.

When people use generic terms like ‘hacking’ or ‘hacktivism’ to refer to all online subversion, they blur an important distinction between political design and executable art. Sure, artists have disrupted World Trade Organization conferences and uploaded biotech blueprints for home-grown tissue cultures. But while political designers and hacktivist artists may use similar tools and techniques, they have different long-term social functions.

Politics tries to change the world directly and with force; art seeks to question it, often with humor or irreverence. If politics seeks to destroy its enemies, art seeks to ridicule them. When Patrick Ball, an open-source programmer / human-rights activist, presented evidence at Milosevic’s war-crimes trial, his data had to be sound rather than surreal. On the other hand, when the Yes Men abused GATT invitations to proclaim that democracy was obsolete, their masquerade had to be extreme enough to make their listeners think twice.

That doesn’t mean the targets of hactivist art are always happy about the attention they get. If Reamweaver’s tactics are only part of a funny surrealist game, then why would the WTO try to shut it down? Joline Blais says the reason is that artistic power in the Internet age is executable; for its part, Pirates of the Amazon executes both computer and legal codes.

But was the effect of that execution to create and exploit a weakness of Amazon’s, or just to reveal one? Back when artist collectives like RTMark and the Yes Men scuttled the market value of eToys and Dow Chemical, some felt sorry for these company’s stockholders. I feel more sorry for stockholders now: after the subprime meltdown, the unsustainability of corporate practices is self evident, and we don’t need RTMark or the Yes Men to point it out to us. If those stockholders had thought a little more about easy it was to exploit weaknesses inherent in global finance–”Even artists can do it!”–we might not be in this mess.

To the extent that a work operates in the field of power, trying to destroy its enemy, it veers toward political design; to the extent that a work operates in the field of play, pointing at the emperor’s nakedness rather than plotting his assassination, it veers toward executable art. I think Pirates of the Amazon qualify as the latter; for more to bolster this claim, see the chapter “Designing Politics” in the book At the Edge of Art.

jon

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Scholarly articles on emerging issues of life in virtual worlds such as Second Life are solicited. Work that connects streams of ethics research and theory to virtual worlds as they are and to what they are developing into is particularly sought. Among the virtual world issues explicitly invited are: privacy, monitoring and eavesdropping, the fear of being exploited, the loss of identity, ethical impacts of aesthetic decisions, values and ethics manifested in the social processes and their relevance for activities such as design there, professional ethics, standards of integrity given identity issues and practices, malevolence and altruism, legal and ethical doctrines of confidential and privileged information, ethics for students and instructors, ethical development stages and issues, vandalism, harassment and crime, how ethics and values are inscribed in the discourse and practices of social groups, and how they can change and emerge in the midst of pragmatic concerns, such as collective tasks.

Proposals of any length are welcome, though the more detailed and clear the easier it will be for us to have it properly reviewed. Also, include your full contact information, institution affiliation and position. Please include information on your related publications and other work.

Schedule.

Proposals due August 15, 2008.
Notification of acceptance/rejection decision after review process, September 1, 2008.
First drafts of chapters due, January 15, 2009.
Revised final drafts due, March 15, 2009.
Publication, June 15, 2009 (Information Age Publishing, Charlotte, NC).

Editors: Charles Wankel, St. John’s University, New York, and Shaun Malleck, University of California, Irvine. Send all correspondence to both wankelc [at] stjohns.edu and smalleck [at] uci.edu. Include in the subject field VW ETHICS.

Board of Editorial Review

Constantinos Athanasopoulos, University of Leeds Carol Haig, University of Salford Edward Lamoureux, Bradley University Stephen Marvin, West Chester University Elena Pasquinelli, Group Compas, de l Institut de l’Ecole Normale Superieure John S Fraker, University of Twente.

I mention all of these events not just as an excuse for my slow response, but also to give you all a sense of my current framework / mindset and to contextualize something that I have witnessed in the U.S. Over time, there have been more restrictions put into place, an erosion of freedoms, and citizens in this country take fewer risks particularly apt when thinking about new art practices such as “bioart”. Akos just mentioned issues of fear and doubt around exhibition of bioart and I think that this is real here, because it is also being conflated with things such as “bioterrorism” and “biowarfare” which of course Steve Kurtz and CAE speak to so well. I know many exhibiting venues that have had a difficult time raising funding for this area. So I think we are living in a particular moment of caution that makes this kind of practice even more difficult to show.

I am currently working with some colleagues, Rich Pell and Daniela Kostova, on a project we call the Bioart Initiative at my university. The name came about because of the collaboration between the Arts Dept and the Biotech Center so it was used as a simple identification of the collaborating parties. (I would love to see other terms used as I, too, am frustrated with this too broad nomenclature.) This is a multi-pronged project that has been funded for 15 months to bring in speakers, have exhibitions and sponsor residencies of artists working in the laboratory. The goals are to encourage more exchange between artists and the scientists who work in the building, the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS).

One of the recent projects was “Sentimental Objects In Attempt to befriend a Virus” by Caitlin Berrigan. Berrigan occupied the lobby area at CBIS with her geodesic domes resembling the hepatitis C virus, and held a series of “tea parties” offering dandelion tea and viral shaped chocolates to discuss the basis for the work. Berrigan has Hep C and uses this work to explore her relationship to the virus, build public awareness about transmission and more. One sculptural object almost closed the show down: along with the geodesic viral domes on exhibit were three potted dandelions. Berrigan claimed that she had fed her own blood to the dandelions and had a poster to this effect on the wall. This fact was picked up by the biosafety people on campus, and they freaked. Exposed blood, particularly infected blood was not allowed in the lobby of the building and was a grave bio-hazard. Besides the fact that this artist did not in fact feed the plants her blood, this potential risk was potentially enough to have the entire program shut down.

After we calmed them down, we did get to have some valuable discussions about the transmission potential - or not - for four day old blood, and the actual realities about Hep C transmission. http://www.metroland.net/back_issues/vol30_no45/art.html

And while I do not consider myself an expert in bioart exhibition, I am concerned with curation and exhibition and issues such as the caretaking needs of live things in the gallery or museum. When I exhibited “Embracing Animal“, a 10 month exhibition with live transgenic rats, I was amazed with the response of the museum staff. They not only gave public tours and lecture about the work, but the night-watchman also adopted the rats and would tend to them and play with them all night. They become the “keepers” and observers of these small lives, a role very different from their usual curatorial duties. They had to not only feed, water, change litter, but also watch and smell the rats to make sure they didn’t get ill; oversee the public and make sure they weren’t harassing the rats; and also make time to play with the rats. This was a complete reversal of their usual schedule. And while I am not advocating turning galleries / museums into zoos, this is a shift in the approach to exhibition that involves a different kind of different attention and care. I think we need some of these encounters in these spaces to broaden how we see ourselves to science / research subjects and what was once “nature”.

I will sign off now and add more later, thanks, Kathy High

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