The US Congress is about to pass an internet censorship bill written by the copyright and corporate music and film lobbies, claiming that this bill is written in your name to “protect creativity.” The law would allow the government or corporations to censor entire sites — they just have to convince a judge that the site is “dedicated to copyright infringement.”

In fact, PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are backed and largely written by the Hollywood film industry, namely the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which is trying to sell goods and ideas that are already free. Similar to its most well-known President, Jack Valenti, who represented Hollywood interests in Washington, and vice-versa, the current chairman and CEO of the MPAA is Chris Dodd, a prominent member of the Democratic Party and US Senator from Connecticut for 30 years.

Artists, musicians, actors, writers, and media-makers need to sign. Your statement is powerful because the corporate music and film lobbies push these laws to censor the internet in your name.

In solidarity, Turbulence.org will feature a block out page from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. EST today, January 18.

INTERNET GOES ON STRIKE: ALL SITES AND PEOPLE TO GO OUT

Major sites all over the internet have gone on strike due to SOPA and PIPA, the hot-button anti-piracy legislation. Experts expect strike to last 150 seconds, and agree this is a “near eternity” in internet time.

Congress is about to pass what has been called the internet censorship bill, even though the vast majority of Americans are opposed. The Senate is scheduled to vote on its version of the internet censorship bill on Tuesday, January 24th, and unless there are 41 senators to voice their opposition to allowing the bill to proceed, it is expected to pass.

Legislation called the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House are purported to be a way to crack down on online copyright infringement. In reality the bill is much broader. It would empower governments and corporations to take down virtually any website, create new liabilities and uncertainties for web innovators, and make the web less safe. According to the varied and multitudinous reasons large numbers of sites and individuals are opposed to the bill, it betrays basic American tenets, such as free speech, prosperity, and national security. On top of all that, cybersecurity experts say it wouldn’t stop copyright infringement.

The legislation is backed and largely written by the MPAA, as they have said in media reports. They have also spent millions in lobbying dollars to pass this legislation.

To see the bills, go here:
www.opencongress.org/bill/112-s968/show
www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/show

NOW, IT’S YOUR TURN TO TELL CONGRESS NO TO WEB CENSORSHIP:
CALL (202) 224-3121

WHAT’S WRONG WITH SOPA / PIPA?

Free Speech

Takes down hosts of content and legitimate free speech. The legislation is overly broad and could block some of our favorite websites to Americans only over just one claim to an infringing link posted by users.

The Economy

Creates massive new legal uncertainties and liabilities for web startups, stifling job creation in our most vibrant sector. As 54 leading tech venture capitalists wrote to Congress, the censorship bills would, “stifle investments in internet services, throttle innovation, and hurt American competitiveness.”

Security / Privacy

A web security initiative that has been in development for more than a decade and is just beginning to be implemented, DNSSEC, would be illegal under the bill. The DNS filtering and anti-circumvention provisions in the bill would force a huge step backwards for securing critical national infrastructure from cyberattacks, preventing online identity theft, and stopping the spread of malware.

Copyright Infringement

People that want to share copyrighted content online would still be able to. To get around DNS blocking, all you have to do is enter the IP address of a website into your browser’s url bar.

Learn more:

americancensorship.org is supported by Public Knowledge, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Press, Wikipedia, Creative Commons, Fight for the Future, Participatory Politics Foundation / Open Congress, Center for Democracy and Technology, MoveOn, Cato Institute, Don’t Censor the Net, Urban Dictionary, 4chan, Wikimedia Foundation, Mozilla, Demand Progress, Free Software Foundation, and see more at americancensorship.org/supporters.html

The bill is opposed by:

CEO’s of Huffington Post, Google, Twitter, and thousands and thousands more. To see a full list, go here.

SOPA becoming election liability for backers

To the ranks of same-sex marriage, tax cuts and illegal immigration, add this to the list of polarizing political issues of Election 2012: the Stop Online Piracy Act.

The hot-button anti-piracy legislation that sparked a revolt online is starting to become a political liability for some of SOPA’s major backers. Fueled by Web activists and online fundraising tools, challengers are using the bill to tag its congressional supporters as backers of Big Government—and raise campaign cash while they’re at it.

Among the fattest targets: SOPA’s lead author, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), and two of its most vocal co-sponsors, Reps. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.). House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has also felt the wrath of SOPA opponents.

Even GOP presidential contenders Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum were asked by voters recently to weigh in on the bill (neither gave definitive answers, though activists have interpreted Santorum’s response as more sympathetic to SOPA than Romney’s).

KEY POINTS ABOUT SOPA / PIPA

1. Leading constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe and internet law expert Marvin Ammori have argued that the bill violates the First Amendment because they would restrict considerable speech by people who are not engaging in infringement, either directly or indirectly.

2. 54 leading internet venture capitalists have signed a letter stating that legal uncertainties under PROTECT-IP would “stifle investment in Internet services, throttle innovation, and hurt American competitiveness.”

3. Contrary to its supporters’ claims, the bill will affect domestic websites. Any site that can be shown to enable circumvention of website blocking under the bill would face penalties. This could include sites where users have posted links to IP addresses or new domains for sites that have been blocked.

4. The bill would use DNS filtering to block sites, which is the same technique used for web censorship in China and Iran. The U.S. will no longer have a moral high ground when talking about protecting internet freedom globally.

5. An internet security initiative that has been in the works for more than a decade and is just starting to be implement, DNSSEC, would be considered an illegal circumvention tool under the bill. The DNS filtering and anti-circumvention provisions in the bill would force a huge step backwards for securing critical infrastructure, preventing identity theft, and stopping malware.

6. The bill has not received sufficient committee work and is not ready for floor action. The bill did not receive a single hearing and the mark-up session held by the Judiciary Committee on May 26th lasted less than 8 minutes and featured no amendments and no substantial debate.

Published by internet sites around the world. To get more involved see americancensorship.org

“Online gamers have achieved a feat beyond the realm of Second Life or World of Warcraft: they have deciphered the structure of an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus that had thwarted scientists for a decade.

The exploit was detailed on Sunday in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, where — exceptionally in scientific publishing — both gamers and researchers are honoured as co-authors.” More >>

• A Temporary Memorial Project for Jobbers Canyon Built with Products of ConAgra by Nicholas O’Brien
• Panemoticon by John Priestley and Ali Miharbi
• Searching for Michelle by Maja Kalogera
• Space Video by Kate Armstrong and Michael Tippett
• Woodear by Peter Traub

Turbulence is the oldest and most consistent net art commissions site in the world. Now celebrating 15 years, it has commissioned, exhibited and archived over 200 works.

The data visualizations emerged from our objective to include the input of a “community-author” in knowledge production. Our interactive visualizations are a form of extending expert, popular, and imaginative voices. Configuring ideas and activating virtual landscapes — aggregating, visualizing, reviewing, and building community — R-Shief is a new way to mobilize a multilingual practice.

To become a hub for research and analysis on these issues and to put people in different parts of the world together so they can collaborate, R-Shief is developing a program on joint research initiatives and workshops. In this lab environment, we are committed to fostering innovative research on transnational Arab history and culture. The lab provides activists, scholars, journalists, professionals, and artists with tools and methodologies for comprehending the Arab world through a context of procedural literacy—the interplay between human and technically-mediated processes. While there are a growing number of critical solutions to “open” knowledge, such as UShahidi.com, the need remains to make meaning of these systematic changes affecting all fields, and the technological devices enabling them. We believe that procedural literacy provides a key to 21st century democratic practices.

R-Shief is conceived and designed fully by media artist and critic, Laila Shereen Sakr, who also publishes under the name of “VJ Um Amel.” A series of sentiment and semantic analyses are being produced with the support and collaboration of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab. The site is currently supported with in-kind cloud hosting and development services by technology company, Open Source Solutions, LLC.

As of May 2011, R-Shief is being hosted on a network of computers that enables R-Shief to data mine Twitter and hundreds of sites that have content on the Arab Spring. Our website has been designed for scalability. During the early months of 2011, when tweets on one hash tag were coming in at a rate of 500,000/day, R-Shief managed not only to pull, but also to store, parse, and display all of that data, a process that challenged R-Shief’s resources. The expansion of R-Shief will enhance the project’s ability to aggregate and store data, and will enable users to utilize the data provided for research, art, and academic collaborations more effectively. More here.

Newstweek: Network Permeability and Headline Hacking by Joshua Noble on Vague Terrain.

Newstweek: fixing the facts. from newstweek on Vimeo.

“So the whole question comes down to this: Can the human mind master what the human mind has made?” - Paul Valery

Newstweek, the newest project from Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev, is one of the most elegantly conceived and executed network art projects in the past few years, if not in the brief history of computational art. It exists as a simple box, plugged into the wall in any public space that has a wifi access point, that executes what is called a man-in-the-middle attack, essentially, an undetected interception, injecting data into the communication between the wireless router and a client. A user accesses their favorite news site in a web browser and everything appears normal, logo and banners in the correct place, URL the same as always, but the headlines are outrageous, bizarre, and comical. A small hidden device that can be remotely accessed rewrites any selected text en route from the wireless router to your computer. The question quickly becomes: how much do we trust our news sources? When the BBC or the New York Times spouts drivel, how do we treat that drivel? What are the boundaries of this trust and how do you evaluate them in the face of absurdity?

In the networked age connectivity is infrastructure, a fundamental element in the structuring of space for both working and for relaxation, as key as seating, walls, and roofs. So ubiquitous are wireless networks and so automatic is our use of them to read and communicate that the mechanics disappear, leaving the illusion of an un-interrupted and un-moderated stream of information flowing to us through our laptop. The coffee-shop laptop has taken the ritualistic position of the morning newspaper, increasingly where we contact the organizations that inform our view of the world. So it presents the perfect opportunity for a functional intervention, in the situationist vein, to create an opportunity to see anew that which has become invisible through familiarity. It’s what great art is supposed to do. So many agencies, governments, and corporations already inject alterations that into the news that we read, the cynic asks: why not allow another? One wonders which is more dangerous: the illusion of the sacrosanct news source or the illusion of the impermeable network. As the Oliver and Vasiliev address and investigate both: “a strictly media informed reality is a vulnerable reality” and “part of our project is to signal an educational alert to this extent. A wireless card on a phone or computer is actually technically referred to as a ‘radio device’ for a reason. All one needs to know is how to ‘tune in’.” Indeed, the elements, site and network, become nakedly visible only when tweaked.

The device itself as well is nearly invisible when put in use. They explain: “This particular device was conceptualized during the Chaos Computer Club’s 27th congress, last year in Berlin. We installed an ‘invisible’ wall plug in the building, emitting a vast amount of wireless beacons, and found that it went physically unnoticed for days. We realized we were onto something, that an innocuous plug like this, with a tiny enough computer, could appear as part of the infrastructure, part of the building, commanding to be treated as such.” As the device itself vanishes into the infrastructure, it exposes the infrastructures upon which it acts. Most technology is visible and legible in the same measure as a iceberg: only the top floats above the water, visible. The rest is hidden to us, but just as real and relevant. Critical computational artworks derive their power and beauty from aestheticizing and making visible and comprehensible those invisible or unknown elements of the role that technology plays in our lives. In that it creates a fascinating relationship between art and infrastructure, Newstweek does this beautifully: pranking, questioning, and revealing. As a device, both a physical object and a node on a network, can be seen as a mediating object between art practice and engineering practice, just as a mediating object between client and network. The critical practice that Oliver and Vasiliev are engaged in, much like that of Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Heath Bunting, is equally an investigation into the psychological reality of networked culture and an eloquent art practice.

“Happy New Year to all of our –empyre- subscribers as we prepare to launch our ninth year as a list-serve hosting approximately 1400 subscribers. Since 2002 Melinda Rackham has launched the website from subtle.net. We thank her for all of the energy and support that she has provided in –empyre’s- initial inception and many years of nurturance. Cornell University has agreed to host the site on their library server so you will notice that our URL has changed. Stay tuned to our new URL at empyre.library.cornell.edu and watch our new site evolve over the next few months.

We are incredibly proud to launch into our 2011 line up of discussions and welcome Simon Biggs to moderate the first discussion of the year. While Simon will be introducing the next topic, we thought it might be appropriate to send along a recap of the history and activities of –empyre- over the last several years.

-empyre- soft-skinned space is a global community of new media artists, curators, theorists, producers, and others who participate in monthly thematic discussions via an email list serve. The online discussions facilitate critical perspectives on contemporary cross-disciplinary issues, practices and events in networked media. Anyone interested can register to receive posts and participate following the link for joining at http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/.

The list is currently co-managed by Renate Ferro (USA) and Tim Murray (USA) with the help of Gabriel Menotti (UK), Nicholas Ruiz III (USA), and Simon Biggs (UK). –empyre- also welcomes guest moderators who organize discussions for one month. it enters its ninth year, empyre- soft-skinned space continues to be a platform dedicated to the plurality of global perspectives reaching out beyond the Northern Hemisphere to Asia and Latin America.

The past nine years of archived monthly discussions can be accessed (here). These -empyre- archives are currently archived by Pandora, a project of the National Library of Australia, dedicated to preserving online publications of national significance for future generations and by the Rose Goldsen Archive, as a repository of emergent ideas amongst those working at the leading edge of contemporary practice.

In January 2002, -empyre- soft-skinned space was launched by network artist, critic, and curator, Melinda Rackham (AU). -empyre- was conceived as research forum for Rackham’s PhD research at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW, Australia. Structured as an experimental peer arena, the community grew exponentially and within the first year Adrian Miles (AU) and Rebecca Cannon (AU) joined briefly as facilitators. Long-term facilitators Christina McPhee USA) and Michael Arnold Mages (USA) were invited to the -empyre- curatorium soon after, and during the next years they were joined by Jim Andrews (CA) and Felix Sattler (AU/GER). In 2005 Tracey Meziane (AU) and Marcus Bastos (BR) joined the team, and in 2006 and 2007 it was extended with Sérgio Basbaum (BR),(USA) Renate Ferro (USA) and Tim Murray (USA) Ferro and Murray now serve as the list’s managing moderators with the team of Nicholas Ruiz III USA), Gabriel Menotti (UK), (BR), and Simon Biggs (UK).

The -empyre- global community has supported several special projects over its nine-year history. It was featured as part of documenta 12’s Magazine Project conducting three moderated conversations in 2006 and 2007. In 2008, -empyre- collaborated with the Anderson Art Ranch, in Snowmass, Colorado, to offer two Presidential Full Merit Scholarships to members of the -empyre- community. -empyre- also has collaborated with institutions and festivals to produce dynamic online forums for physically located events. Some of those events have included the Cornerhouse in Manchester, Marcos Weskamp’s Social Circles visualization time slice of the list dynamics, in 2008 in San Francisco a special conference with City Light Books on Paul Virilio, in 2009, a special panel on “viral marketing” at Exit Art, New York City, and in 2010 a discussion held in conjunction with The Making Sense Colloquium at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

The moderating team looks forward to a new year of discussions in 2011 and wishes all of its subscribers a Happy New Year.”

Renate Ferro and Tim Murray,
Managing Co-Moderators

WikiLeaks’ series of exposés is causing a very different news and informational landscape to emerge. Whilst acknowledging the structural leakiness of networked organisations, Felix Stalder finds deeper reasons for the crisis of information security and the new distribution of investigative journalism.

WikiLeaks is one of the defining stories of the Internet, which means by now, one of the defining stories of the present, period. At least four large-scale trends which permeate our societies as a whole are fused here into an explosive mixture whose fall-out is far from clear. First is a change in the materiality of communication. Communication becomes more extensive, more recorded, and the records become more mobile. Second is a crisis of institutions, particularly in western democracies, where moralistic rhetoric and the ugliness of daily practice are diverging ever more at the very moment when institutional personnel are being encouraged to think more for themselves. Third is the rise of new actors, “super-empowered” individuals, capable of intervening into historical developments at a systemic level. Finally, fourth is a structural transformation of the public sphere (through media consolidation at one pole, and the explosion of non-institutional publishers at the other), to an extent that rivals the one described by Habermas with the rise of mass media at the turn of the twentieth century. More >>

The Herbologies/Foraging Networks programme — that took place in Helsinki, Kurzeme region of Latvia, and ISEA2010, exploring the cultural traditions and knowledge of herbs, edible and medicinal plants, within the contemporary context of online networks, open information-sharing and biological technologies. Project was initiated by Andrew Gryf Paterson (SCO/FI), Ulla Taipale / Capsula (FI/ES) and Signe Pucena / SERDE (LV).

The Wedding Between Art and Agriculture — an event celebrating five years, since the experimental platform Kultivator has initiated, attended to- and executed projects that examines the context and cross-fertilization between agriculture and art. It took place in July,Dyestad, Öland, Sweden.

Super Meal — an art project by Erik Sjodin that revolves around growing, cooking and eating the super-waterplant Azolla — one of the world fastest growing plants. The project explores the idea of Azolla as a future fast food.

WindowFarms Finland — that introduced “windowfarms” concept into the Finnish context. They are vertical, hydroponic, modular, “low-energy high-yield” window gardens built using low-impact or recycled local materials. Mikko Laajola, Andrew Gryf Paterson and Niko Punin produced and developed a grand 81 bottle installation in Kiasma takaikkuna for 5 weeks, preluding and part of Pixelache Helsinki Festival 2010.

THE LONG BEAN (WINDOWFARMS RIGA) (sorry, currently most info is in Latvian, but pictures are nice - RIXC Media Space now looks like botanical garden! :)