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

From Jonathan Harris:

[...] After 2+ years of work, 145,000+ lines of code, one Icelandic grass hut, one night in jail, one serving of jellied ram’s testicles with fermented shark meat, and countless pieces of toast with orange marmalade, it is my great pleasure to introduce you to Cowbird, a labor of love, and hopefully something that will have a long and meaningful life.

Cowbird is a community of storytellers, focused on deeper, longer-lasting, more personal storytelling than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web.

Cowbird allows you to keep a beautiful audio-visual diary of your life (here’s mine), and to collaborate with others in documenting the overarching “sagas” that shape our world today (starting with the Occupy Wall Street movement).

Our short-term goal is to pioneer a new form of participatory journalism, grounded in the simple human stories behind major news events. Our long-term goal is to build a public library of human experience — kind of like a Wikipedia for real life (but much more beautiful).

Here is an overview of the project:
http://cowbird.com/about

Here are some good Cowbird stories:
http://cowbird.com/author/jonathan/#/2278
http://cowbird.com/author/scottthrift/#/608
http://cowbird.com/author/annie/#/2509

Here is the story of me getting arrested a few weeks ago at Occupy Oakland :)
http://cowbird.com/saga/occupy/story/2312

Our community is still very small. We are looking for excellent storytellers — photographers, writers, filmmakers, journalists, etc. If you would like to become a Cowbird storyteller, please request an invitation (we’re trying to grow slowly).

If you know other folks who would be a natural fit for Cowbird, please send them our way.

Please spread the word about this project. Tweet it. Facebook it. Tumble it. Email it. Talk about it. Shout it from the rooftops, where those silly pigeons are roosting and pooping. Tell those dirty birds to move over, and make a little room for a different kind of bird.

Beautiful things lie ahead.

Jonathan
http://number27.org

We have just finished two and a half glorious days at the University of Michigan. Soon we at HASTAC Central will write a formal thank you blog to all the incredible planners, organizers, and participants of our fifth HASTAC Conference, Digital Scholarly Communications, sponsored by the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Kidder Residency in the Arts, and led by two of our HASTAC Steering Committee members, Danny Herwitz and Julie Thompson Klein. And many others. Incredible event.Incredible people.

Now some overview thinking, not just about the #hastac2011 but about what it all means at this point in HASTAC’s history:

In 2002, David Theo Goldberg and I left a formal meeting of humanists who were determined “to take a stand against technology” because we knew that kind of stand would be the death of humanism and the impoverishment of whatever is meant by “technology.” That luddite stance also didn’t jive with the multidisciplinary passions of the students we were seeing in our classrooms and the brilliant colleagues we knew in so many different fields who understood the revolutionary implications of new forms of interactive communication and interaction. In 2003, we gathered our first groups of scholars, at UCHRI, at NSF, and then at Stanford and Duke, and among our founding principles was the idea that we could take the practices and principles of open web developers, the collaborative methods through which the World Wide Web was created, and explore the ways that those principles and methods could transform higher education.

Some basic other parts of this include these aims: to rebalance intelligence for the interactive digital age with emphasis on collaboration, on interdisciplinary crosstalk (“collaboration by difference”); by remelding the two cultures of arts, humanities and social sciences on one side and technology and natural and computational sciences on the other; by erasing the distinction between theory and practice, thinking and making; to think about all research as public (in process as well as in final product) and shared and sharable; to use historical perspective and the archive to substitute either “techno-utopianism” or “techno-apocalypse” with “technopragmatism” and “technorealism” based on hands’ on practice not punditry (most punditry is based on what I call the “baseline of nostalgia” — an imagined past from which declension can be measured); to meld research with teaching, and teaching with perpetual learning; to re-examine pedagogy; to challenge contemporary modes of assessment; and to realize that professional seniority often does mean privilege but does not necessarily mean excellence.

That is why HASTAC is largely a network of networks, why membership simply requires signing into the website, and why we work very hard to instill the idea of productive creativity moving forward rather than critique of one another’s foibles as the best basis for the “critical thinking” that we all prize. From the beginning our three areas have been new media (building it, using it, modding it, thinking about it), critical thinking, and participatory learning. I personally do not believe you can have participator, connected interactive learning without a generous view of critical thinking, where one learns from mistakes — one does not strive to humiliate others for making them. To me, a practice based on flaming others for their failures is inherently conservative. It means that you set your own bar only at “higher than that last stupid guy’s bar” and that, to my mind, is way too low.

Here’s another part of that: calculated optimism. That is, if everything around you is a disaster, if the future only looks bleak, if there seems to be some devolution from some (mythical) past that was free of problems, easier, where everyone who went before you had a “pass,” made it in a simple way whereas you have to deal with catastrophe at every turn, then, well, why bother? The past is never as simple or easy as we think it was — either through imagination or memory. The baseline of nostalgia is more like quicksand … we get stuck there, unable to move. It is self-defeating and self-undermining. (NB: if you are a theorist and haven’t read Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, you should!)

I am very happy to say that, in paper after paper at HASTAC2011, I saw productive, collaborative, process-oriented, creative, imaginative, interdisciplinary, engaged, and critically optimistic thinking that began with its own goals and ideals as the high bar and didn’t waste a lot of time yapping about what some other random strawperson had done badly. The critical thinking was turned towards one’s own project, how to make it better, rich, full, and, well, critical.

I was mulling these thoughts when I went to Josh Greenberg’s excellent talk “Data, Code, and Research at Scale.” I’m going to take some of the basic insights from that talk and apply them to general and personal observations from my experience at #HASTAC2011. In this endeavor I am aided by the public notetaking of HASTAC Scholar Karen Petruska, from Georgia State, whose notes for all the keynotes are on the HASTAC site and are just brilliant. I have used hers to supplement my own. You can find them here. Some HASTAC Principles Going Forward (inspired by Josh’s talk and, needless to say, my own Now You See It ideas about how we got here and where we need to be going):

(1) Learning/research as Macroscope: “Telescopes let you see far, microscopes let you see small, now we are talking about a macroscope — that let’s you see big and complex.” One of HASTAC’s founding ideas is that, if individual achievement in highly specialized research on even more specialized topics as credentialed by a hierarchy of institutions is key to the Industrial Age project of task-oriented, quantifiable, measurable productivity, then what is key to our age? Learning as Macroscope is a good metaphor for the post-1993 Internet-inspired Information Age project of collaborative, self-publishable, collectively editable thinking that aims at thinking big and complex and developing better tools for that job. Over and over at #hastac2011 I heard talks that were doing exactly that.

(2) Code is Never Finished. Josh asked, “what if scholarship worked like code?” In code, there is version control, you release an idea time stamped and you can go back and revise it later. Code is always evolving. The whole point of the HTML that Tim Berners-Lee evolved for writing the World Wide Web is that it was open and anyone could contribute, including those he had never met whose credentials were unknown or located in their skill, not in their certification or degrees or reputations. A system grants its terms of access and anyone who meets that standard can then contribute. But everything you contribute has attribution, and what you contribute becomes your reputation — and your gateway to continued participation or denial of access. Version control: that means, in part, that if an editor is doing something that impedes the improving of the code, he or she might not be invited to edit in the future. In a loose way, that is exactly how we have structured HASTAC membership. You cannot contribute to the network, to the www.hastac.org website, without signing in, but once you sign in you can contribute as you wish, as long as you realize your contribution has attribution. You are responsible to the participatory community’s flourishing by your contribution. Trust is a key component of open web development, attribution is part of that trust.

(3) Ability to tell stories with data. In every field I know right now, the ability to make narratives, to tell stories of the massive amounts of data we now have access to is absolutely key. Collaboration by difference should be sending social scientists, computational scientists, and natural scientists into massive collaboration with humanists and artists right now — and vice versa — because it is almost impossible to be brilliant at story telling and brilliant at data mining all on your own. Macroscopic research is almost always collaborative and cross disciplinary because, despite our highly successful lifelong training as academics in, for, and by Industrial Age timed, item-response testing, reaching beyond those restrictive modes is the only way to succeed in the world we live in now. The ability to tell stories with data requires understanding where, how, why, and when that data is generated, to what purpose, and by what means. Very #hastac2011.

(4) Forking. In writing code together, sometimes there are crucial and key disagreements. You come to a fork in the code and one participant wants to go one way, one another. Forking allows you to mark the place of disagreement and get past it. You agree to follow one fork. If it isn’t working, if it isn’t giving you the macroscopic view, you can then go back to the fork, and try to pursue the other path. What is great about this method in open web development, is returning to the fork, having pursued the other one, almost always means that you disagree with your original position, and now pursue the opposite form but in a way that has been transformed by having followed the other path for a time. We do not have a built-in practice — yet — of forking scholarly discourse, but, in the many papers I heard, I was seeing this open web practice incorporated as an intellectual, collaborative practice.

(5) Building Better Tools Together. As Josh said, we do not yet have forms of scholarly communication that allow us to express collaborative differences and the divergent, forked modes of working out disagreement and profiting from it. We need better modes. Having written The Future of Thinking on an open Comment Press platform and having worked to create a potential Master’s in Knowledge Network on that platform, I am all to aware of its clumsy, frustrating, difficult, and clunky affordances — yet it is also helpful because it does allow line by line annotation by others without changing the original tesk and attribution is part of contribution. But we need better tools to serve our goals.

For now, #hastac2011 was the best possible “tool” for all these goals. I leave for the airport now, returning back to Durham, energized, inspired, grateful, engaged, and, well, fired up and ready to go again. THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR PARTICIPATION AND CONTRIBUTION.

And next time, Toronto: I can’t wait. Our first international conference. Hosted by Caitlin Fisher (York) and Maureen Engel (Alberta). It is going to be awesome. I can’t wait for our reunion, can’t wait to see you all there, and to meet others new to our HASTAC network. Sixteen months from now, in Toronto, April 25-28, 2013, HASTAC’s 10th Anniversary Celebration.

#FFFFFFspace is an internet-based exhibition forum curated by Polina Teif and Shannon Garden-Smith. The name, #FFFFFFspace, is derived from the html code that designates the colour white and is thus an abbreviated form of “white space” signalling its reconstitution of the physically manifest exhibition space of the “white cube”. While the platform acknowledges its curatorial antecedent of the real-space gallery, it is not a simple transference of the modes of presentation employed therein. Of course, using the term “real-space” to signify what the internet exhibition space is not might seem to set-up a dichotomy between two models that relegates #FFFFFFspace to a somehow “un-real” space.

However, in no way does the project seek to negate the existence of online space. “Real space” is merely a convenient term that is the domicile to the curatorial concerns that attend the physical site. #FFFFFFspace is not beholden to the fixity of the physical, and conscientiously operates within the amorphousness particular to the web. The curatorial mandate is to feature works that are all expressly of this space, and can exist only within it. In this sense, #FFFFFFspace as an exhibition platform uses the same means as the comprising art works, instituting an ambiguity between the boundaries of content and context.

Please email your work (or link), a brief statement and bio to info [at] FFFFFFspace.net

Tracing Mobility sets out to examine the shifting terrain of global versus individual mobility and how its hand in hand development with networked infrastructure is transforming our conceptions of time, space and distance.

Where can we escape to when online- and offline worlds converge? What does the movement of a body in a landscape indicate when every point of the earth is within reach through the aid of digital technology? How do mobile devices and media alter our mindset and change our perception of time and space?

With installations, videos, performances and paintings, but also iPhone Apps, maps and open-source collaborations, we see artists developing strategies in order to position themselves within this dynamic topography.

A Symposium and the Tracing Mobility Open Platform offer further explorations of these themes via lectures, talks and workshops.

Exhibiting artists: Frank Abbott (UK), Aram Bartholl (DE), Neal Beggs (UK/FR), Heath Bunting (UK), Janet Cardiff / George Bures Miller (CAN), Miles Chalcraft (UK/DE), Simon Faithfull (UK/DE), Yolande Harris (UK/NL), Folke Köbberling & Martin Kaltwasser (DE), Landon Mackenzie (CAN), Open_Sailing, plan b (Sophia New & Dan Belasco Rogers) (UK/DE), Esther Polak & Ivar yan Bekkum (NL), Gordan Savicic (AT/NL), Mark Selby (UK), Michelle Teran (CAN/DE)

Programme:

November 23
7pm Opening
9pm Artist Talk with Simon Faithfull, Landon Mackenzie, Esther Polak & Ivar van Bekkum

November 26
11 – 5pm Symposium, Entrance: 20 €/15 €
2pm Participatory Performance „Performing StreetView“ by Esther Polak & Ivar yan Bekkum (NL)
(registration required)

December 12
7pm Finissage | Artist Talk with Aram Bartholl, Folke Köbberling & Martin Kaltwasser, plan b
(Sophia New & Daniel Belasco Rogers)

High-res pictures are available on request: presse [at] trampoline-berlin.com

Tracing Mobility is a project by Trampoline - Agency for Art & Media, in cooperation with Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Radiator Festival Nottingham, curated by Miles Chalcraft and Anette Schäfer.

Thimbl[1] has been getting some attention lately, party because of my talk at Social Media Week Berlin[2], partly because of a Tweet by the legendary Doc Searls[3].

Despite being part of Transmediale 2010 and winning a distinction at the festival, many people don’t seem to realize that Thimbl is an artwork. It’s a part of Telekommnunisten’s Miscommunication Technologies series along with such works as deadSwap[4] and r15n[5].

Miscommunication Technologies uncover the social relations embedded in communication technology, creating platforms that don’t often work as expected, or work in unexpected ways.

I suppose the fact that Thimbl is an artwork was a surprise to the organizers of Social Media Week, and perhaps would be to Doc Searls as well. Who, like many of the people in the audience an Social Media Week might be thinking. Huh? What makes this art exactly?

The answer is surprisingly simple, it’s art because it is carried out in an art context, at events like Transmediale, Hack.Fem.East, Sousevelance, and at places such Piet Zwart Institute and the Israeli Center for Digital Art.

These works function as a kind of performative science fiction. Introducing the narrative of the political economy of the Internet into the media arts community by way of interactive artworks in the form of telephone and internet platforms, much like the Telekommunist Manifesto introduces the same topics in text. Among the core messages that we wish to contribute to the media art dialogue is an understanding of how centralization and decentralization relate to exploitation and freedom, respectively.

Thimbl is an artwork, not really an alternative to Facebook, Twitter, or even Identi.ca, as it was billed at Social Media Week, unwittingly by the organisers, who where non-the-less quite pleased at the results, and with the discu(s)sion it caused.

Thimbl is about the need for decentralized social media, and illustrates that this is something that has always been a part of the Internet, while also showing that it’s not really so difficult to implement.

Even though it’s ambitions are symbolic, Thimbl actually works.

Because it’s decentralized, we can’t know how many users it has, but you can see the global timeline of all users that we do know about on our own ThimblSinging[6] instance. If you have a finger account on any server, anywhere, with a Thimbl-compatible plan file[7], you can use this site as well, and start using Thimbl without installing anything from the Thimbl project on your own server.

Or, you can grab the code and host a instance of ThimblSinging yourself.[8]

If you prefer the command line, or want to script something, Thimbl-CLI[9] is available, as is the thimblr gem that comes with ThimblSinging. Even the GMail of Thimbl already exists; Phimbl[10], where you can just sign up and have a Thimbl account. And PageKite[11] has added support for Thimbl too, meaning you can even easily self-host your Thimbl account, if you want too, perhaps even on your mobile device.

So, if all this exists, why is Thimbl not a real alternative?

Well, for one, we made it as artwork because it has merit as such w(h)ether or not it becomes a viable platform, just like some ideas that emerge from science fiction become reality, and some don’t, yet the predictive science doesn’t directly determine the merit of the work of fiction.

However, that’s not the main reason. Perhaps even calling it science fiction is misleading here. It’s not Thimbl’s technical viability that’s speculative, but rather it’s economic viability. Thimbl is an economic fiction.

Making it work is not the greatest challenge, making it financially viable is. Thimbl does not provide investors with the ability to control it’s users or their data, and as Thimbl’s Manifesto[12] states “This control is required by the logic of Capitalist finance in order to capture value. Without such control profit-seeking investors do not provide funds.”

For Thimbl, or any other platform with a sim(i)lar vision, to become a real alternative to the capitalist financed platforms like Facebook and Twitter, we need more than running code, even more than a small, perhaps dedicated, user base. These assets are only enough to keep it going as a lively, yet marginal underground medium. A fun platform for experts and enthusiasts, unknown and unknowable to the masses.

To get beyond this and actually break the monopolizing grip of centralized social media we need to match their productive capacities. We need financing on a sim(i)lar scale. so that the development, marketing, and operations budgets are comparable and sufficient to compete. That is what is required to be a true alternative, not a symbolic one. Yet, Capitalism can not provide such financing.

Just like science fiction becomes reality when science transcends the limitations that existed when it was imagined, for economic fiction like Thimbl to become reality economics will need to transcend the limitations that we currently face.

We can write code, we can write texts, we can create artworks. But as a small network of artists and hackers, we can’t change the economic conditions we work in by ourselves.

That is why Thimbl is an artwork; its message must transform society for its vision to become reality. It is a manifesto, written in code.

If you want to see the project succeed, join us, grab the code and ideas you want and run with them.

As usual, I will be enjoying some drinks with friends at Stammtisch, our weekly casual drinking night here in Berlin at Cafe Buchhandlung.[13]. Please come by.

[1] http://thimbl.net
[2] http://socialmediaweek.org
[3] http://twitter.com/#!/dsearls/status/119808351688335362
[4] http://deadswap.net
[5] http://docs.telekommunisten.net/r15n
[6] http://thimbl.tk
[7] http://j.mp/dotplan
[8] https://github.com/fguillen/ThimblSinging
[9] https://github.com/blippy/Thimbl-CLI
[10] http://phimbl.tk
[11] http://pagekite.net/wiki/Howto/FingerAndThimbl/
[12] http://www.thimbl.net/manifesto.html
[13] http://j.mp/buchhandlung

Dmyri Kleiner
Venture Communist

It is in our movement that we give ourselves away. Our trails reveal a course that, when mapped, indicates our design. So we are tracked and our presence logged.

Tracing Mobility sets out to examine the shifting terrain of global versus individual mobility and how its hand in hand development with networked infrastructure is transforming our conceptions of time, space and distance.

WE ARE OPEN: Trampoline opens a platform to anyone who has something to say about mobility and migration in the networked space. Tracing Mobility is particularly open to projects which explore participation in network activity where they intersect with the freedom of movement of individuals, their freedom of self expression and their freedom of conducting economic activity.

In the expectation that many interesting projects and developments on the theme exist already, the curators are inviting artists, cultural practitioners, researchers, NGO’s and the interested public to contribute to the Tracing Mobility – Open Platform.

YOU ARE OPEN: You connect to one of the following statements:

• you have an idea on the how, why and where of ‘tracing mobility’
• an interest in, a technique or a project developed for exploring mobility in music, visual arts, performance or business
• a mind to show, perform or present your work in “mobile formats” whether film, music, talk or speech or publication
• a need to comment on artists’ former and contemporary works that reflect the theme
• and you plan to be, stay or pass by in Berlin on the 26th and 27th of November 2011

JOIN TRACING MOBILITY…. Tracing Mobility Open Platform offers you:

• space at the HKW (Haus der Kulturen der Welt), in its renowned open-space architecture
• an extremely vibrant and well established venue for the visual and performing arts
• a dialogue with an audience of your contemporaries in culture and the arts
• professional technical support
• the chance to take part in the culmination of the Tracing Mobility series of events, the final act.

To join us, please email a half-page description of what you want to contribute (idea, title, format, length) or any questions you may have, either in English or German as soon as possible to tank [at] trampoline-berlin.de

Deadline is October 17th 2011!

Tracing Mobility is a project by Trampoline – Agency for Art & Media, in cooperation with Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Radiator Festival Nottingham

Funded by:
Hauptstadtkulturfond
European Cultural Foundation
Botschaft des Königreichs der Niederlande

A Little Less Conversation will question, in an unusual and dynamic fashion, how contemporary performance art is exhibited. Ephemeral and immaterial in its nature, performance becomes tangible the moment it is exhibited, whether experienced live or through documents. Although it is first and foremost an art of the here and now, the widest access we have to a performance, paradoxically enough, is still based on objects and residual elements such as text, photography, audio or video. But how can contemporary performance be exhibited without these kinds of relics? What role can performativity play in the presentation of performances? What kind of relationship is there between the audience and the performers?

“A Little Less Conversation”, the same title as one of Elvis Presley’s most famous songs, offers ‘a little more action’. Guest curator Marie Frampier tries to change the relationship between theory and practice in making a conference. Often, this relationship is successive, with a concept preceding the exhibition or an analysis emerging from it. In A Little Less Conversation, performance — as exhibition — and theory will be more intertwined, occurring in the same place and at the same time. The conference’s topics and issues will be questioned, performed and made performative rather than just discursive and theoretical. The speakers will share their professional experiences as curator (Mathieu Copeland and Bojana Mladenovic) or theoretician/artist (Lilo Nein). Contemporaneously, the invited artists and performers will explore theoretical and narrative frameworks (Dominique Gilliot), question conference codes (Marie Reinert) and respond to some expectations of the audience (Richard Dedomenici). You could say that the performances are part of the conference and the conference is part of the performances.

Improvisation, infiltration and collaboration with the audience, as well as questioning curatorial conventions, constitute the body of A Little Less Conversation. It is based on an instantaneous dialogue between art practice and theory. There are no stages, tables, or scores, but rather a large amount of trouble and curiosity.

Speakers:

Mathieu Copeland (FR), curator
Bojana Mladenovic (SRB), curator and performer
Lilo Nein (AT), theoretician and performer

Moderator:

Dominique Gilliot (FR), performer

Performers:

Richard Dedomenici (UK), performer
Marie Reinert (FR), performer

Curator:

Marie Frampier (FR)

A Little Less Conversation was set up with the support of Maison Descartes, Amsterdam.

Teleshared actions are procedures for collaborative creation in real time. The works are produced online between two or more users by means of interactive systems or telepresence. These expanded performative practices generate new spaces, languages and narrative forms. The possibility of the “body-less” message. And all of this founded on a basic concept: transform space into time. The workshop consists of teleshared actions which give an incentive to experimentation and critical reflection in relation to remote communication processes.

The workshop has as its main participants: María Domínguez Alba, Manuel Terán, ErnestoGarcía and Sara Malinarich, who collaborate in the areas of lighting, use of camera, video, sound, plastic, action, contents, interfaces and documentation. At distance, experiments are carried out, co-authoring with Alexandre Berthier from Canada and Vicente Pastor from Portugal, who will interact in real time with the participants by means of video conference systems and other software.

Supervised by: Sara Malinarich

Free registration (limited places): talleres [at] laboralcentrodearte.org