Naked on Pluto proposes a playful yet disturbing online game world, developed with Free/ Libre Open Source Software, which parodies the insidiously invasive traits of much “social software”. The city of “Elastic Versailles” is animated by the quirky combinatorial logics of a community of fifty seven AI bots that glean Facebook data from subscribers to the game. Naked on Pluto’s bot crew, which are hard to distinguish from other agents in this text-based environment, are dysfunctional gatekeepers whose access-control means are broken by the participants only to be elastically “healed” by the bots. Players attempt to override the game’s restrictions, teaming up in order to ultimately crash and escape from the system. Reporting on activities via a blog and Twitter, and issuing a constant stream of incitations to click, declare, poke and buy, the bots run havoc with one’s own and one’s friends’ data, generating more or less spurious links with chillingly escalating speed. Disconcertingly familiar faces and information from one’s personal and associated profiles are indiscriminately blended in a brash prosumer landscape which, like the original Versailles, is designed for promotional parades of inseparable personal and ideological attributes. No player information is shared, stored, or relayed back to Facebook in this malleable social ecosystem where all that counts are glimpses of fleeting visibility.

Naked on Pluto caricatures the proliferation of virtual agents that harvest our personal data to insidiously reshape our online environments and profiles, highlighting the ambivalent hallmarks of major social networks: friends as quantifiable and commodifiable online assets, personas carefully fashioned contrived to impart a sense of “intimacy”, and disingenuous publishing of “private” data as self-advertising. The emergence of intelligence in this game is ultimately, hopefully, that of the players who manage to escape from it.

Project blog, full credits and interviews:
http://pluto.kuri.mu

Paper about the project
http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/naked-pluto

GPL/AGPL/CC/FAL code, art and misc. documentation:
https://gitorious.org/naked-on-pluto

The VIDA Awards were created by Fundación Telefónica in 1999 to promote artistic creation based on new technologies and artificial life. A total of 198 projects from 36 countries entered into contest in this edition. The works will be showcased at Fundación Telefónica?s stand in ARCO 2012.

The Principle of Reciprocity by Dr. Hector Rodriguez from Videotage Unlimited on Vimeo.

Wikitopia :: Keynote Speech 1
The Principle of Reciprocity
by Dr. Hector Rodriguez
September 18, 2010
HKU SPACE Po Leung Kuk Community College

Marcel Mauss’ classic study of The Gift introduced the principle of reciprocity, which has played a fundamental role in the evolution of modern social anthropology and critical theory. Mauss regarded the giving and receiving of gifts as a widespread cultural phenomenon. Although the gift often appears to have been spontaneously and freely offered, it is in fact obligatory. According to Mauss, it consists of “three obligations”: the obligation to receive, to give, and to return. The exchange of gifts thus exemplifies a complex procedure of ritualized exchange.

The principle of reciprocity can be understood in at least two different ways. First of all, the study of gift exchange constitutes a prehistory of the modern contract. Mauss showed that modern market transactions grew out of the ritualized gift practices characteristic of many societies. Mauss opposed the practices of the capitalist economic system and regarded the gift as an alternative model of exchange based on sharing and common participation. This idea clarifies the nature of public licenses and the aims of the free culture, copyleft, and creative commons movement. Secondly, the principle of reciprocity can be understood as a new version of social contract theory. As developed by philosopher Thomas Hobbes, social contract theory addressed the main question of classical political philosophy: How is society possible?

This presentation explains the theory of reciprocity, describes its implications and possible interpretations, and traces its influence on such contemporary theorists as Claude Levi-Strauss, Georges Bataille, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Paul Sartrre, Marshall Sahlins, and Boris Groys.

Since 2005 we release and maintain the free and open source software that we use to distribute multi-channel video artworks. More information on our R&D department. The digital video syncstarter software is developed and employed by NIMk to provide synced playback of multiple videos on multiple screens. In the video art field there are many artworks requiring the real-time synced playback of audio/video: HDSync provides such a functionality for HD decoders, to sync HD video playback on multiple devices.

HDSync is been developed in-house at NIMk on a specific hardware configuration: WD HD Live players running B-Rad’s WDLXTV firmware, something artists themselves can afford for approx 100EUR on the
consumer market.

Development in Progress

This release can synchronise the playback of multiple channels (virtually unlimited) on the same local network: hdsync can automatically handshake and start playing in sync, restoring the sync at every loop. Empirical tests show an error margin of 10-15 frames, with further development we aim to achieve frame exact sync.

Support and Warranty

The purpose of this release is to make the project open source to allow collaboration with developers interested: we release HDSync as free and open source (GNU GPL v3) in the hope it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY.

Theoretical and practical audiovisual live performance laboratory using FLOSS. Pure Data audiovisual real-time processing, tricks and tips to create your own performance tool. Complete program available here (in Italian; please write us to request comprehensive info in English).

Aim: The seminary seeks to give the participants who don’t have previous experience in programming and Live Media practice the needed theoretical and practical knowledge and skills to feel comfortable within the FLOSS creation environment. The classes’ aim is to make the participants able to understand and assimilate the diverse passages of the creation process of software ad-hoc in order to be independent during the planning and development of a FLOSS project (musical, audiovisual, multi-media or theatre pieces) using the audiovisual language.

The workshop will be preparatory to the implementation of Live Media performances realized by participants and presented in November 2010 at the “80 seconds” International Contest.

As the first Jordanian audio-visual works begin to fall into the public domain, a constellation of interests are translating, drafting and revising copyrights laws, trade agreements and licences to control the flow of culture and build new markets. Against the backdrop of these emerging intellectual property markets, in 2008 artists Eileen Simpson and Ben White embarked on a period of research in Amman, Jordan – speaking to lawyers, copyright activists, software developers, artists, musicians, journalists, curators, filmmakers and critics – in an attempt to seek out the common cultural resources of Jordan’s public domain.

The result is Struggle In Jerash – a project convened around a lost 1957 Jordanian feature film of the same name, which fell out of copyright the year of the artists’ residency, and is used as a catalyst to explore value and meaning in archival material.

Eileen Simpson and Ben White re-animate the original feature by appropriating the tactic of the commercial DVD director’s commentary, subverting its standard authorial voice and placing the audience at the centre of the film.

Running time: 62 minutes
Commentary by: Rifqi Assaf, Samah Hijawi, Saba Innab, Alma Khasawnih, Karma Hijawi, Adnan Madanat with translation by Adbullah Khasawnih, Anees Maani, Rafique Nasereddin, Ruba Saqr, Hanan Toukan, Ala Younis
Recorded: May 2008 Amman, Jordan

Eileen Simpson and Ben White work at the intersection of art, music and information networks. Their projects are situated within the current discourse surrounding the porting of Free/Libre and Open Source software models to wider creative contexts. They seek to challenge conventional mechanisms for the authorship, ownership and distribution of culture – particularly through working with archive material.

For more information visit
www.openmusicarchive.org/projects

Mashup Cultures presents a broader view of the effects and consequences of current remix practices and the recombination of existing digital cultural content. The complexity of this book … also by necessity seeks to familiarize the reader with a profound glossary and vocabulary of Web 2.0 cultural techniques.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss: Introduction: Mashups, Remix Practices and the Recombination of Existing Digital Content
• Axel Bruns: Distributed Creativity: Filesharing and Produsage
• Brenda Castro: The Virtual Art Garden: A Case Study of User-centered Design for Improving Interaction in Distant Learning Communities of Art Students
• Doris Gassert: “You met me at a very strange time in my life.” Fight Club and the Moving Image on the Verge of ‘Going Digital’
• David Gauntlett: Creativity, Participation and Connectedness: An Interview with David Gauntlett
• Mizuko Ito: Mobilizing the Imagination in Everyday Play: The Case of Japanese Media Mixes
• Henry Jenkins: Multiculturalism, Appropriation, and the New Media Literacies: Remixing Moby Dick
• Owen Kelly: Sexton Blake & the Virtual Culture of Rosario: A Biji
• Torsten Meyer: On the Database Principle: Knowledge and Delusion
• Eduardo Navas: Regressive and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture
• Christina Schwalbe: Change of Media, Change of Scholarship, Change of University: Transition from the Graphosphere to a Digital Mediosphere
• Noora Sopula & Joni Leimu: A Classroom 2.0 Experiment
• Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss: Communication Techniques, Practices and Strategies of Generation “Web n+1″
• Wey-Han Tan: Playing (with) Educational Games - Integrated Game Design and Second Order Gaming
• Tere Vadén interviewed by Juha Varto: Tepidity of the Majority and Participatory Creativity

Contributing artists and theorists: Burak Arikan & Engin Erdogan (Τurkey), Samuel Bianchini (France), Michael Bielicky, Kamila B. Richter (Chech Republic/ Germany), Marcelo Expósito (Spain), Furtherfield (UK), Pat Kane (UK), Carlos Katastrofsky (Austria), Dmytri Kleiner (Germany), Nicholas Knouf (USA), Tobias Leingruber (Germany)/ Jamie Wilkinson (USA)/ Greg Leuch (USA), Aarton Koblin & Daniel Massey (USA), Geert Lovink (Netherlands), MediaShed & Eyebeam (UK/ USA), Molleindustria (Italy), Ge Jin aka Jingle (China), Matteo Pasquinelli (Italy), Platoniq.net (Spain), Juan Martin Prada (Spain), Kate Rich (UK), Stephanie Rothenberg & Jeff Crouse (USA), Trebor Scholz (USA), Anders Weberg (Sweden), Dan Phiffer & Mushon Zer-Aviv (US/IL).

The network society and especially the internet culture of the last twenty years has changed our mode of working, communicating and living. The numerous and continuously evolving digital networks of people, institutions, movements and organisations have been based on the new possibilities of technology but have also given birth to new forms of economy and value that fit into the immaterial time and space of flows. The elements of collaboration, collective intelligence, free and common knowledge have now become principal and have empowered a multitude of people that believe in the new potentialities given in the networked reality. This digital multitude, the new contemporary creative working class, surpassed the borders between work and leisure, driven by a desire to learn, to share, to collaborate. The notions of the attention economy, the gift economy, the common wealth, the immaterial, affective but also precarious labour are frequently used to describe the phenomena of our era. But, what is the meaning of these new features of economy in times of global financial crisis?

What role do the networks really play? Can the offer alternative and sustainable models of collaboration and production? Or they are a contemporary illusion that contributes to the difficulties and adversities that the contemporary multitude needs to face?

The new online exhibition hosted in the website of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, aims to focus on the new forms of labor as well as on the new values and costs emerging in the new connected reality and it therefore presents:

• artists’ projects and critical perspectives commenting on the new forms of internet economy
• initiatives and open platforms by independent creators who encourage the use of free and open software, the exchange of knowledge and experience,
• texts by critics and media theorists on networks, economy and the arts.

The online exhibition Esse, Nosse, Posse: Common Wealth for Common People has the form of an open platform aiming to be continuously enriched and updated with proposals, works, initiatives and texts on the specific field.

Interactivos’10 is a workshop which develops projects gathering and putting into action collaboration and local urban knowledge networks using free software and hardware technologies and “Do it yourself” (DIY) and “Do it with others” (DIWO) methods.

The proposals will be carried out in multidisciplinary task groups comprised by the author(s) and interested collaborators, with conceptual and technical advice from the teaching staff. The call for collaborators will be open from May 4 through June 4.

Some orientative subjects are:

* Urban Infrastructure: mobility, transport, urban and telecommunication networks
* Health and environmental issues: quality of the air and water, meteorology, nutrition, gastronomy and recipes, urban gardens, etc.
* Social relations and cultural production, games, education and learning in the street; exchange of services and knowledge, etc.

Papers: A maximum of 5 theoretical works will be selected, among theoretical and research papers, presentations and analysis of the experiences about the proposed subject matter.

Questions: interactivos (at) medialab-prado.es

Wikipedia is at the brink of becoming the de facto global reference of dynamic knowledge. The heated debates over its accuracy, anonymity, trust, vandalism and expertise only seem to fuel further growth of Wikipedia and its user base. Apart from leaving its modern counterparts Britannica and Encarta in the dust, such scale and breadth places Wikipedia on par with such historical milestones as Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, the Ming Dynasty’s Wen-hsien ta- ch’ eng, and the key work of French Enlightenment, the Encyclopedie. The multilingual Wikipedia as digital collaborative and fluid knowledge production platform might be said to be the most visible and successful example of the migration of FLOSS (Free/ Libre/ Open Source Software) principles into mainstream culture. However, such celebration should contain critical insights, informed by the changing realities of the Internet at large and the Wikipedia project in particular.

The CPOV Research Initiative was founded from the urge to stimulate critical Wikipedia research: quantitative and qualitative research that could benefit both the wide user-base and the active Wikipedia community itself. On top of this, Wikipedia offers critical insights into the contemporary status of knowledge, its organizing principles, function, and impact; its production styles, mechanisms for conflict resolution and power (re-)constitution. The overarching research agenda is at once a philosophical, epistemological and theoretical investigation of knowledge artifacts, cultural production and social relations, and an empirical investigation of the specific phenomenon of the Wikipedia.

Conference Themes: Wiki Theory, Encyclopedia Histories, Wiki Art, Wikipedia Analytics, Designing Debate and Global Issues and Outlooks.

Confirmed speakers: Florian Cramer (DE/NL), Andrew Famiglietti (UK), Stuart Geiger (USA), Hendrik-Jan Grievink (NL), Charles van den Heuvel (NL), Jeanette Hofmann (DE), Athina Karatzogianni (UK), Scott Kildall (USA), Patrick Lichty (USA), Hans Varghese Mathews (IN), Teemu Mikkonen (FI), Mayo Fuster Morell (IT), Mathieu O’Neil (AU), Felipe Ortega (ES), Dan O’Sullivan (UK), Joseph Reagle (USA), Ramón Reichert (AU), Richard Rogers (USA/NL), Alan Shapiro (USA/DE), Maja van der Velden (NL/NO), Gérard Wormser (FR).

Editorial team: Sabine Niederer and Geert Lovink (Amsterdam), Nishant Shah and Sunil Abraham (Bangalore), Johanna Niesyto (Siegen), Nathaniel Tkacz (Melbourne). Project manager CPOV Amsterdam: Margreet Riphagen. Research intern: Juliana Brunello. Production intern: Serena Westra.

The CPOV conference in Amsterdam will be the second conference of the CPOV Wikipedia Research Initiative. The launch of the initiative took place in Bangalore India, with the conference WikiWars in January 2010. After the first two events, the CPOV organization will work on producing a reader, to be launched early 2011. For more information or submitting a reader contribution.

Buy your ticket online (with iDeal), or register by sending an email to: info (at) networkcultures.org. One day ticket: €25, students and OBA members: €12,50. Full conference pass (2 days): €40, students and OBA members: 25.

Organized by the Institute of Network Cultures Amsterdam, in cooperation with the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India.

The workshop hello wor(l)d! is an introduction to 3 different artistic approaches to programming, using three different programming styles: graphical, textual (code poetry) and live coding. The workshop gives a taste of all three flavours and is meant as inspiration and exploration for those artists curious about these forms of art. You cannot learn how to program in 3 days, especially not in 3 different ways, but it is well worth giving different languages and styles a try.

Day 1: Pure Data by IOhannes Zmölnig
Day 2: Microcodes by Pall Thayer
Day 3: Fluxus by Dave Griffiths and Gabor Papp

No previous programming experience required, as long as you’re not afraid to work in a terminal. Basic experience with any scripting or markup language (even if it is HTML/CSS) will make it easier to follow.

Entrance: free!, but please register (limited places available) — send name, phone, and CV to signnl [at] gmail.com. If you are bringing a laptop, please specify your operating system.

Hello wor(l)d! is part of make art, an international festival focused on Free/ Libre/ Open Source Software (FLOSS) and open content in digital arts. Make art offers performances, presentations, workshops and an exhibition, focused on the blurred line between art and software programming.

The fifth edition - chmod +x art - will take place in Groningen (NL), from the 2nd to the 7th of March 2010.

Organised by Sign and GOTO10