“I am Bashar al-Assad, the President of Syria and Regional Secretary of the Ba’ath Party. The circumstances of my current employment may soon be coming to an end, therefore I am looking for a new job! I will consider all offers of temporary and/or long-term employment. I am especially interested in working abroad. I am expert in all aspects of despotic rule, including torture, general corruption and fixed elections (in the 2007 referendum I received 97.2% of the vote!). While my experience has been resoundingly in the nepotistic dictatorial sector, I would also consider accepting work as a babysitter, dog-walker, prison guard or stand-up comedian. Anything really. My hobbies include crochet, charades and angry birds. References available on request!”

Please re-post this ad to your local Craigslist by March 11 and email the url to Delappe: delappe [at] unr.edu

We used to know how to know. Get some experts, maybe a methodology, add some criteria and credentials, publish the results, and you get knowledge we can all rely on. But as knowledge is absorbed by our new digital medium, it’s becoming clear that the fundamentals of knowledge are not properties of knowledge but of its old paper medium. Skulls don’t scale. But the Net does. Now networked knowledge is taking on the properties of its new medium: never being settled, including disagreement within itself, and becoming not a set of stopping points but a web of temptations. Networked knowledge, for all its strengths, has its own set of problems. But, in knowledge’s new nature there is perhaps a hint about why the Net has such surprising transformative power.

David Weinberger — senior researcher at the Berkman Center and co-director of the Harvard Law School Library Lab — talks about some important take aways from his new book “Too Big to Know“.

Alan Turing’s accomplishments made a fundamental impact on the development of the computer and to our contemporary networked digital culture, and we would like to invite your students and staff to collaborate, on this live global digital media performance.

The Media City foyer and its high definition video wall will act as the hub, receiving and sending content across the world to our international partners, using five high-resolution video wall displays each with their own input. There will be live interactive performance with sound, animation, interactive drawing, poetry, video, motion graphics, virtual environments such as Second Life, collaborative screen sharing, interactive interfaces and playful environments.

Themes may include biological systems, artificial life, coding, recoding decoding or Alan Turing’s life story.

During the day the international partners will broadcast content resulting in a live media jam.
The University of Salford at MediaCity will be the central node receiving ‘coded’ content from other partner nodes and decoding and recoding this content, passing it on to the network of partners, forwarding, sending it back or distributing it further.

Decode/Recode is an interactive media performance with interactive artworks, sound, lights, performers and VJs.

Please contact Charlotte Gould or Paul Sermon for more information and to register your participation.
c.e.gould at salford.ac.uk or p.Sermon at salford.ac.uk

Light and Dark Networks consist of two online data performances taking place anywhere on Whitney.org during sunrise and sunset in New York City, and are directed by actual weather and environmental changes in the New York City area. The two performances are inspired by the structures of natural networks: one aboveground (spider web), the other one underground (mushroom’s mycelium). In the video segments of the piece Endlicher impersonates a spider and several mushroom characters…

The piece looks at networks as living organisms — be they spider webs, mycelium, or the Internet — constantly changing by different artificial or natural parameters. Taking a closer look at the nature of the Internet itself this piece playfully examines how our physical and virtual existence is embedded in networks…

The project takes over the entire Whitney Museum’s website for 30 seconds daily at SUNRISE and SUNSET in New York City, so make sure to get there early. For exact times of daily sunrise and sunset please go to whitney.org/Sunset.

If you like to receive reminders before each performance, follow Ursula on twitter!

For detailed information on Light and Dark Networks go to http://lightdarknetworks.ursenal.net.

Let yourself get entangled…

Together with the other programme strands – the exhibition Dark Drives: Uneasy Energies in Technological Times, the performance programme The Ghosts in the Mashine, the video programme Satellite Stories and the symposium in/compatible: systems | publics | aesthetics – the reSource constitutes a substantial part of the transmediale 2012 programme. It presents a constellation of workshops, talks and performances distributed into five different sub-themes: reSource Methods, reSource Activism, reSource Networks, reSource Markets and reSource Sex.

reSource Methods investigates intersections between artistic production and research, reflecting on methodologies of curating (post)media art as well as on experimental and speculative methods of in/compatibility through artistic practices.

With Martin Howse (uk/de), Anthony Iles (uk), Mattin (se/es), Jonathan Kemp (uk), Shu Lea Cheang (tw/fr), Cornelia Sollfrank (de), Geoff Cox (uk/dk), Florian Cramer (de/nl), Christian Ulrik Andersen (dk), Georg Russegger (au), Michal Wlodkowski (au), Luise Reitstätter (au), Joasia Krysa (pl/dk), Sidney Ogidon (au), Eva Fischer (au), Morten Breinbjerg (dk), Matthias Tarasiewicz (au), Rosa Menkman (nl), Morten Riis (dk), Marie Thompson (uk), Carolin Wiedemann (de), Robert Jackson (uk), Andrew Prior (uk), Magda Tyzlik-Carver (pl/uk) and many others.

reSource Activism sheds light on the practices of artists, activists and hackers who are rethinking critical interventions in the field of art and technology.

With Florian Wüst (de), Kathy Rae Huffman (us/de), Eckart Lottman (de), Pit Schultz (de), Roberta Buiani (it/ca), Alessandra Renzi (it/ca), Nicola Angrisano (it), and others.

reSource Networks reflects on viral and distributed strategies of networking, questioning the concept of networking itself and proposing alternative to proprietary systems.

With Dmytri Kleiner (ca/de), Baruch Gottlieb (ca/de) and the Telekommunisten Network, Aymeric Mansoux (fr/nl), Johannes P Osterhoff (de), Salvatrice Settis (it), Anna Adamolo (it), Victoria Estok (us), Nicholas Knouf (us), Wolfgang Spahn (de) and others.

reSource Markets reflects on the meaning of capitalism in a time of crisis, proposing both critical and playful alternatives to the capitalistic logic by intervening directly within the economical systems.

With Steve Lambert (us), Daniel Garcia Andujar (es), Jaromil (it/nl), Kate Rich (uk), Shintaro Miyazaki (jp/de) and Elanor Colleoni (it/dk).

reSource Sex reflects on the interference and overlapping between sex business and ‘alternative’ porn, aiming to explore and discuss the open interzona which exists in between the often male-oriented mainstream porn, and the more narrow scene of queer and alt porn communities.

With Sergio Messina (it), Karla Grundick (cz/de), Julianne Pierce (au/uk), Liad Hussein Kantorowicz (il/de), Kate Erhardt (za/de), Jacob Appelbaum (us), Zach Blas (us), Aliya Rakhmetova (kz/hu), Gaia Novati (it/de), Gabriella Coleman (us), Katrien Jacobs (be/hk), Francesco Macarone Palmieri aka WARBEAR (it/de), Shu Lea Cheang (tw/fr) and Martin Hug (ch/es).

WORKSHOPS IN THE RESOURCE PROGRAMME

The reSource for transmedial culture presents a series of workshop during transmediale, dealing with art and technology, hacktivism and politics.

Registration for all workshops is possible via the online form on our website!

Floppy Films Workshop. Moving Images on 1.44 MB
With Florian Cramer and guest tutor Dagie Brundert

This workshop will teach you how to revitalise floppy disks for moving images. Using extreme means of compression, we can squeeze whole movies on the 1.44 Megabyte provided by a single floppy disk, using run-of-the-mill video and image formats (MPEG and animated GIFs). Floppy films can be used for various inventive means.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012, 11:00–17:00, Upper Foyer
Thursday, February 2, 2012, 11:00–17:00, Upper Foyer
Friday, February 3, 2012, 11:00–17:00, Upper Foyer

in/compatible Material
Artistic intervention with Martin Howse, Anthony Iles, Mattin, Jonathan Kemp, Shu Lea Cheang, Baruch Gottlieb, and others

As an intervention within the flow of transmediale, the in/compatible Material Laboratory inserts itself in the cut between the compatible protocol(s) and an in/compatible/inverse divinatory materiality through the setup of a series of experimental situations.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012, 12:00–18:00, Café Global Stage and around the HKW

Activism Beyond the Interface: The Sandbox Project
Conceived and hosted by Roberta Buiani and Alessandra Renzi
With Nicola Angrisano and others

The Sandbox Project is a series of experimental production labs in different cities bringing together artists, activists and techies to reflect creatively on the in/compatibility and diversity of artivist practices.

Thursday, February 2, closed session: 10:30–14:30 / open session: 14:30–16:30, Café Global Stage

Google – One Week Piece Workshop
with Johannes P Osterhoff

During the workshop Johannes P Osterhoff and the participants will set up their browsers to automatically publish all their Google searches during transmediale on the web. They will interlink their searches so that they get good rankings and become visible for everyone in everybody’s search results. Participants can join the collaborative Google – One Week Piece and follow the example and communication of other public searchers. To participate you need a computer or mobile phone (Firefox or Chrome browsers).

Thursday, February 2, 2012, 11:00–13:00 / 14:00–16:00, K2

Fluid Nexus
with Nicholas Knouf

In this workshop participants will learn about historical and contemporary experiments in analog and digital network construction. Through activities using simple materials such as pen and paper, participants will create novel designs for information networks. Hands-on experience with Fluid Nexus will give participants a base to extend their explorations after the workshop. No programming experience is necessary.

Friday, February 3, 11:00–14:00, K2

R15N & Technologies of Miscommunication
Dmytri Kleiner and Baruch Gottlieb from the Telekommunisten Network will introduce the R15N system, try it out together with the participants, and discuss and explore possible technologies of miscommunication applications.

Friday February 3, 15:00–18:00, K2

Bio-Game
with Shu Lea Cheang and Martin Hug

The workshop focuses on the study and experiments in: human body as BioNet and blood cells as computing units; human (E)motion sensing using GSR sensor; body sensor data as algorithm to define rules of the game; hack and sabotage - devising collective game with multiple players.

Saturday, February 4, 11:00–14:00, K2
Must be 18 years old to attend!

Words of advice for young pornographers
with Sergio Messina

Sergio Messina, aging porn enthusiast and Realcore expert, will take you on a little tour about the joys of good porn, the pains of bad one, the reasons to make it and the ways to become stars - also trying to establish a few golden rules to make enticing smut.

Saturday, February 4, 15:00–18:00, K2
Must be 18 years old to attend!

Paperduino-Uno – a PaperPCB Workshop
with Wolfgang Spahn

In the workshop Wolfgang Spahn will teach how to create and modify PaperPCBs (Printed Circuit Boards). As an outcome of the workshop every participant will have designed and build his or her own Paperduino-Uno.

Sunday, February 5, 12:00–16:00, K2

ARTWORKS IN THE RESOURCE PROGRAMME

R15N
by Dmytri Kleiner, Baruch Gottlieb and the Telekommunisten Network

Telekommunisten present R15N as a working telephone-based interactive installation which is available as a mobilization and engagement platform for the transmediale community.

R15N is an artwork in the form of an experimental mobile phone service which attempts to generate local community engagement and communication. After registering with the service participants will be joined together in the R15N community, able to initiate and share information about what is going on at transmediale and beyond. Every member thus eventually becomes engaged in a real conversation with another, and this engenders cohesion and complicity.

R15N is the Official Miscommunication Platform of transmediale 2012.

Please register yourself at www.r15n.net

Presentation of R15N at the opening of transmediale, Tuesday January 31, 17:00–18:30

Google – One Week Performance Piece
by Johannes P Osterhoff

From January 1 to December 31, 2011, the Interface Artist Johannes P Osterhoff has been publishing all of his search queries with the search engine Google in a One-year Performance piece called Google. Since for each search a website has been generated automatically, Osterhoff’s searches surface surprisingly well-ranked in Google’s search results. During the week of transmediale Osterhoff opens this hacking of Google’s business model to collaboration. Follow the searches of JODI, Olia Lialina, mspr0, Rene Walter and others or useGooglepublicly yourself.

Presentation as part of the panel Isolation and Empowerment after Web 2.0, Friday, February 3, 11:00–14:00, K1

PERFORMANCES IN THE RESOURCE PROGRAMME

Steam Machine Music
by Morten Riis

Steam Machine Music is a homebuilt mechanical instrument made mostly from vintage Meccano parts. The instrument is driven by a steam engine and the sound material is generated from various strings, dynamos and music boxes. But the most important sound generating part is the sound of the machine itself, the rhythmic patterns and pulsating drones of the steam engine, the squeaking of the gear trains. The instability of the entire mechanism is extremely noticeable, and displays and reflects the physicality of the machine to an extreme degree. Steam Machine Music questions the whole practice and conceptualizing of machine music in a historical perspective that points to the fact that machines always have been malfunctioning. The artist can be watched building up the Steam Machine at the opening night, followed by the performance Steam Machine Music later on. The perfomance will be repeated in a shorter version on Wednesday, February 1, in the framework of the in/compatible research practices event at K1.

Tuesday, January 31, live construction: 17:00–18:30 / performance: 20:30–21:00, K1

Watch Me Work
by Liad Hussein Kantorowicz and Kate Erhardt

Liad works as an erotic performer at an Israeli sex chat site. The usage of cameras, computers and projectors enables the viewers to peer into the live exchange of cyber sex work between sex worker and client, and compare between the sex worker’s actual experience and what is projected to the client. The performance seeks to de-exotify sex work, opting for a realistic perspective, and investigates the discrepancy between the hyped discussion about sex work as compared to the actual sex work experience.

The performance will be held in the context of the panel Commercialising Eros simultaneosly with a discussion with Jacob Appelbaum, Zach Blas, Liad Hussein Kantorowicz and Aliya Rakhmetova, moderated by Gaia Novati.

Saturday, February 4, 13:30 – 15:30, K1
Minimum age for admission 18 years!

RESOURCE LAUNCH AT TRANSMEDIALE 2012

Within the aegis of facilitating collaboration and the sharing of resources and knowledge between the transmediale festival in Berlin and the local and translocal scene engaged with art and digital culture, the reSource acts as a link between the cultural production of art festivals and collaborative networks in the field of art and technology, hacktivism and politics.

After four days of talks, workshops and performances, the reSource programme at transmediale ends with a special game: Zombie Play in the Ludic Salon, reSourcing an Exquisite Media Corpse. The Ludic Interface Research Group (L.I.R.G.) cordially invites all visitors of transmediale 2012 to partake in a contemporary version of the surrealist game Le Cadavre Exquis. In the course of this event, different projects from the reSource for transmedial culture initiative will be brought into a playful dialogue with each other through aleatoric, agonal and just plain ludicrous methods.

With Mark Butler (us/de) (host), Natascha Adamowsky (de), Georg Russegger (au), Daphne Dragona (gr), Mathias Fuchs (de), Gregor Sedlag (de) and other special guests.

This initiative will include the presentation of the OutResourcing project: a collaboration project between transmediale and CEMA – Center for Experimental Media Arts at Sristhi School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore.

With Prayas Abhinav (in), Linda Hilfling (dk/de) and an introduction by Kristoffer Gansing (se/de).

After transmediale 2012, reSource for transmedial culture will extend its activity into a series of events that will be held in the course of 2012 and beyond, as a way to gather and present the results as well as to continue the dialogue further, leading to the next transmediale festival in 2013. The methodology of the reSource as a peer production laboratory of knowledge, research and artistic projects, will be presented in the Auditorium of the HKW on the last day of the festival together with current reSource partners.

With Tatiana Bazzichelli (reSource for transmedial culture), Stéphane Bauer (Kunstraum Kreuzberg /Bethanien, Berlin), Oliver Baurhenn (CTM, Berlin), Clemens Apprich and Oliver Lerone Schultz (Post-Media Lab, Leuphana University Lüneburg).

A final note in the spirit of networking: participate in discussions around the reSource for transmedial culture on twitter via the hashtag #tmresource!

transmediale is a project of Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH in cooperation with Haus der Kulturen der Welt funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation

I thought I should post the intro to my Still There research here. There must be still people on the list who remember what I remember, or remember it differently.

In September 1996, I came to Rotterdam to participate in the Dutch Electronic Art Festival – not as an artist yet but as a film curator, or, to say it better, as a film curator from Moscow who made a website for a film club. For many people, the mid-90s were all about going online, making websites, travelling to the East and to the West.[1]

It was my very first media art event. I was overwhelmed by the scope and scale of the interactive installations – the huge, loud constructions of Knowbotic Research; the scary performances of half-human, half-cyborg Stelarc; the trips in a virtual submarine that seemed so real, and other interactive and immersive stuff distributed throughout the city. The modern architecture of Rotterdam was truly enhanced by all of these futuristic objects with their surprises inside.

One of them – an inflatable internet café floating on a canal in Rotterdam’s centre – left a strong impression on me. I kept thinking about it and talking about it over the years. After all, it was the first thing I saw as I headed from the railway station to the DEAF offices, and it was so different from any other previous experiences I’d had with the internet in public spaces. I had never been to a “normal” internet café before and suddenly I found myself in this totally over-the-top place.

Well, years later I found out that it was not really an internet café but an “an intelligent object,” an “inflatable sculpture with brains connected to the World Wide Web”[2] called ParaSITE and built by the Dutch architect Kas Oosterhuis and his team.

After I squeezed inside through the tight soft gates, I found myself in a space that can probably best be described as the inside of a spaceship or other apparatus designed to take you into outer space. Stylish pillows wrapped in plastic invited you to make yourself comfortable and situate yourself behind the connected computers. As well as check your email — for free.

The place was crowded. People were reading and writing emails, looking up the URLs they had recently received from other festival venues on business cards and pieces of paper. Everyone really enjoyed the atmosphere there.

The festival’s participants would no doubt have enjoyed being online in more trivial situations. They would have happily rushed to the computers even if they hadn’t been installed inside this zeppelin-like bubble. The extraterrestrial beeps and blinks it was producing were not the reason why people were coming and staying inside. But still, it felt very right that the internet-connected PCs had a special space constructed just for them in a special location. After all accessing a mail server is not nearly as exciting as entering the CAVE. Opening a page in a browser can’t be compared to the spectacular act of manipulating Stelarc through electronic impulses. On the other hand, the notion that there was something bigger happening right now was in the air. The interactive monsters of the day were just about to become obsolete, making way for bigger and more important things, namely, the World Wide Web.

Back then, going online and just being online were the thing to do. Networking was the passcode into the new millennium. And we, people on the web, even those who just had started to make their own pages, would fly into it soon to become human apparatuses like that gorgeous zeppelin moored on the channel in Westersingel street.

I came back to Rotterdam in October 2010 with an exciting new challenge from the research program at the Willem de Kooning Academy – to write about Rotterdam’s internet cafés. After years of working online, researching the vernacular web and digital folklore, I was about to begin my investigations of the “low forms” of digital culture in real life.

From my window in my Goethe Institute apartment on the Westersingel, I could see the canal, but, of course, ParaSITE was long gone and, I should add, along with it, all of that mid-90s excitement about the Web as well. But this kind of statement doesn’t really begin to capture what has actually happened since then.

Over the past one-and-a-half decades, the internet has experienced its ups and downs, the WWW has been kissed goodbye and welcomed back a number of times. And as I write this, it has again disappeared from the centre of media attention. In fact, in August 2010, Wired declared the web dead again, with its editor-in-chief casually observing that “The Web is not the culmination of digital revolution.”[3]

Ironically, the next big thing according to Wired is all about interactivity, just like in the early 90s. Only this time, the focus has been narrowed down to the interactions that people have with that one particular mobile device that you can touch and shake. The New Media world is totally preoccupied with imagining and testing new apps for mobile phones. This made it an interesting time for me to commence with my research, just as the spiral of technological evolution was making yet another new turn, bringing a certain completeness to the entire period before it, which gives us an opportunity to highlight it and analyse the phenomena that are still there, but already belong to another era.

Among them are the internet cafés, places you won’t need to visit if you are equipped according to modern standards. And users are fleeing the number one Dutch social network, Hyves, for the seemingly cleaner and better organized Facebook, marking another endpoint of the web’s diversity and decentralisation.

In the mean time, Geocities, millions of home pages created over the past 15 years, was officially shut down by Yahoo in 2009, but was quickly rescued by a group of underground archivists who made it public again in late 2010. Both, Geocities’ destruction and the resurrection, are significant events for web culture.

I’ve been buying connection time in various Rotterdam belhuizen (Dutch for “call shop”), browsing through Hyves user profiles, analyzing Geocities pages, to find myself amongst the ruins of the Web that I believe was a culmination of the digital revolution.

Rotterdam, 2011 - 2012

[1] And getting funding for all those activities from George Soros.
[2] ONL, ParaSITE, 1996, version from 31 December 2011
http://www.oosterhuis.nl/quickstart/index.php?id=173

[3] Chris Anderson, The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet, Wired, 17 August 2010 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1

http://contemporary-home-computing.org/still-there/

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Being Social is the opening exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery in Finsbury Park in North London. Furtherfield has established an international reputation as London’s first gallery for networked media art since 2004. With this exciting move to a more public space Furtherfield invites artists and techies — amateurs, professionals, celebrated stars and private enthusiasts — to engage with local and global, everyday and epic themes in a process of imaginative exchange.

This exhibition brings together artworks by emerging and internationally acclaimed artists: Annie Abrahams, Karen Blissett, Ele Carpenter, Emilie Giles, moddr_ , Liz Sterry and Thomson and Craighead.

Since the mid-90s computers have changed our way of being together. First the Internet then mobile networks have grown as cultural spaces for interaction — wild and banal, bureaucratic and controlling — producing new ways of ‘being social’. Visitors are invited to view art installations, software art, networked performances and to get involved with creative activities to explore how our lives — personal and political — are being shaped by digital technologies.

Furtherfield - A living, breathing, thriving network http://www.furtherfield.org - for art, technology and social change since 1997