Presented in the form of a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, the Transparency Grenade is an iconic cure for these frustrations, making the process of leaking information from closed meetings as easy as pulling a pin.

Equipped with a tiny computer, microphone and powerful wireless antenna, the Transparency Grenade captures network traffic and audio at the site and securely and anonymously streams it to a dedicated server where it is mined for information. Email fragments, HTML pages, images and voice extracted from this data are then presented on an online, public map, shown at the location of the detonation.

Whether trusted employee, civil servant or concerned citizen, greater openness was never so close at hand.

The Transparency Grenade was created in January 2012 by Julian Oliver for the Studio Weise7 exhibition at Labor 8, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, curated by Transmediale 2012 Director, Kristoffer Gansing.

The body is made of Tusk2700T, a highly resilient translucent resin, printed from a stereo-lithography model made by CAD designer Ralph Witthuhn based on a replica Soviet F1 Hand Grenade. Metal parts were hand-crafted from 925/1000 sterling silver by Susanne Stauch, complete with operational trigger mechanism, screw-on locking caps and engraving. More here.

In the last seven years, in a series of performances, publications, exhibitions, and installations, Trevor Paglen has explored the world of hidden military projects and infrastructure. One of his best-known series is Limit Telephotography, for which he trained lenses designed for astronomical photography on secret military bases in the U.S., using their very-long-range photographic capabilities to capture images that would otherwise be hidden to civilian eyes. These are the “limits” that lie at the heart of Paglen’s project: the limits of democracy, secrecy, visibility, and the knowable. He is one of many artists who have evolved new and various ways of engaging with the military and the secret state in the years following the declaration of the “War on Terror.” The work of these artists remains as apposite as ever, as the U.S. and its allies continue to bomb suspected enemies (and anyone else who gets “too close”) and to run “black” sites and secret gulags in which people are held (and tortured) beyond the reach of the law. Paglen has made works that raise fundamental questions about what can be known and seen, while simultaneously writing investigative exposés of the shadow state. This interview explores some of the relations and tensions between the two practices.

“Over the past year Brad Troemel and Jonathan Vingiano have been steadily collaborating together to create platforms of digital exchange and dialog through their development of various browser-exclusive projects… Blind Mist then operates as a step in providing a digital commons for artists, creatives, and everyday users to surf a stream that hasn’t already been predigested for some specific means to an end. The randomization of the site then combats the normally predetermined selection process that occurs online as a result of an algorithm based on “likes” and “notes” or a person aiming to depict a curated version of their online persona. Either way, Blind Mist – and similarly Echo Parade (which is currently on pause for maintenance) – abstract and partially remove the ways in which images can be distributed online and reallocates that decision-making to a computer script acting as a “fluxus injection” (paraphrasing Troemel from our conversation)…” Read the article here.

CT Room is a collage of field recordings taken from various online video chat rooms and instant messenger services. In many of the recordings, the subjects that chose to type responses instead of speak, were unaware that they had left their computer microphones on. In some of these cases, the computer was left on even after the person had stopped chatting. Hart was able to record the sounds of these seemingly empty spaces and the personal conversations that would take place outside the designated chat space.

The compiled recorded sounds have been processed only minimally and arranged into a compositional structure. All sounds used are as recorded, complete with defects due to bit rate/streaming. Once arranged apart from the accompanying visual aspects, the sounds become abstracted from their original context and open up to interpretation. The sounds take on a sinister tone and speak to a certain kind of panopticism; a voyeurism where those being watched are perhaps only subconsciously aware that they are potentially being observed by someone else.

Imaginary Forces (Anthoney J Hart, b. Hastings, England 1979) is a London-based electronic music composer. His electronic music trends towards noise music, and is often self released. His music is also released on the label Ohm Resistance and his own label, Sleep Codes. Hart’s early electronic dance music have now moved into a more freeform abstract compositional structure drawing heavily from the early electronic masters as well as literary references, most notably J G Ballard. Using an innovative approach he reduces electronic music to its component elements, deconstructing it, and turning it into something far more challenging.

Alternative versions of CT Room are available on CDr here.

Radius is an experimental radio broadcast platform based in Chicago, IL, USA. The goal is to support work that engages the tonal and public spaces of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Radius features a new project semi-monthly with statements by artists who use radio as a primary element in their work. Radius provides artists with live and experimental formats in radio programming.

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.

Therefore the originality of Poser is not to be found in this invasion, but rather in the artist’s intention to inhabit contemporary technological devices, to become part of them and to understand their specific natures. However, Dullart’s work also raises some important questions about the boundaries between public and private space in our current culture of participation. The Dutch artist dramatically violates the privacy of a group that, in the act of posing, has made explicit its strong mutual bonds of belonging. But a picture published on the web tends to lose its original values and with them the identity and bonds on which it was based. Dullaart takes his advantage from this short-circuit between private reminiscences and the public imaginary to make a foray into the everyday lives of other people, which have become a globalized showcase and - as such - the place of choice of every contemporary artist.” Vito Campanelli, Neural.

With the opportunity for connectivity and limitless access to information comes the obligation to be increasingly available to receive and transmit; to be perpetually connected. The consequent erosion of true leisure time, the blurring of the traditional professional / personal, public / private dichotomies, and an information overload are creating hitherto unknown levels of psychological pressure. Furthermore a controversial debate has emerged as to whether constant use of the internet (and so called phenomena of ‘internet addiction’) actually restructures our brain.1 If these studies prove correct, this suggests that we take part in a subtle act of ‘becoming machine’ or ‘becoming interface’ whenever we spend excessive amounts of time online.

The Australian performance and multimedia artist Gretta Louw explores the manifold implications of total internet immersion in her upcoming performance project Controlling_Connectivity. The performance uses the pervasiveness of internet-based social networking as well as the obligation and opportunity for constant connection with these platforms as a paradigm for a severe and systematic disruption of normal, socially accepted patterns of life and interpersonal interaction during a self-documented performance. Taking to its natural extreme the notion that new technologies are increasingly dictating our social interaction, professional life and have a far reaching effect on many other aspects of daily life, Gretta Louw will complete a durational performance, living in the gallery space in complete isolation except for contact through various online social networking sites.

For 10 days the artist will be available 24 hr/day for discussions, emails, comments, or interviews — of both private and professional nature — for any internet user, from anywhere in the world, wishing to take part in the project. All necessary supplies will be stored within the gallery and the windows will be blacked out to ensure that the environment is not normalised by natural light or social rhythms outside, but defined purely by the internet connection to external participants. Beyond being constantly available on a variety of social media including skype, facebook, google+, twitter and email, a number of planned online events (the artist’s 30th birthday, live talks with partners in New York, interviews with press) will be scheduled at intervals throughout the performance, with these social and professional pressures becoming progressively more difficult to fulfill as sleep deprivation and isolation take effect.

During the performance the artist will create and install the subsequent exhibition at Art Laboratory Berlin, with the aim of examining how extreme internet use, and our reliance on online connectivity could affect psychological functioning; our ability to censor ourselves, and continue to behave in a socially acceptable and comprehensible way under the constant pressure of inexorably increasing connectivity.

Controlling_Connectivity is part of a long tradition of durational performance, whose origins date back to the 1970s and the work of Vito Acconci and Marina Abramovic, but Louw has brought this tradition into the 21st century by addressing the radically new changes that recent technology has made to the way we communicate and spend our time. Louw’s background in psychology informs her methods and paths of inquiry. Both the structure of the performance and the documentation, which will make up part of the exhibition form part of the current dialogue between artistic practice and scientific research, as well as addressing the complex philosophical and ethical questions posed by new technology.

Gretta Louw, who was born in South Africa and grew up in Australia, uses new media art as a form of psychological research in which the notion of the unconscious is examined by means of personality differences and interpersonal behaviors. The artist has lived in Japan and New Zealand and is currently based in Berlin.

Art Laboratory Berlin, a non-profit arts center was established as a platform for projects concentrating on the border between visual arts and related artistic and scholarly fields.

1- http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=does-addictive-internet-use-restructure-brain and http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0020708 (accessed 2011-10-11).

Selected events during the performance (CET= Berlin time):

• November 2 - 13-14 hrs, CET: google + hang out to mark the start of the performance.
• November 3 - 19-21 hrs, CET: 30th birthday party online (google + hangout, twitter, facebook, skype)
• November 4 - TBA: live skype chat with audience at Grace Exhibition Space performance art exhibition, Brooklyn. http://www.grace-exhibition-space.com/
• November 10 - 21.30-23 hrs, CET: live skype chat with Flux Factory’s monthly salon evening event, Flux Thursday.
• November 11 - TBA: live discussion with Panoply Lab during their Conference of Work: Operations and Participations series on performance art. http://www.panoplylab.org/conference.html
• November 12, 2011 - 11-12 hrs Greenwich mean time(12-13 CET): google + hang out to mark the end of the performance.

Selected online venues:

http://controllingconnectivity.tumblr.com/
http://twitter.com/GrettaLouw
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Gretta-Louw-Controlling_Connectivity/232846076767283
https://plus.google.com/111051021342350315664/posts
skype: controlling_connectivity

With most demonstrations and street protests it’s hard to know exactly who hurled the first bottle. Amidst a sea of people engaged in a collaborative state of mind, the sense of anonymity generated can be very empowering. In the ever-congealing, international abyss of the iPhone (the networks, the users and the apparatus itself) anonymity in this perceived collective is curbed by a registered phone number and GPS coordinate tracking. Social networking-enthused developers have been finding more and more ways to implement existing social network platforms to enhance the usage and appeal of their applications.

The iPhone applications which engage in content and experience sharing, which no doubt offer a number of benefits, require new or pre-existing usernames, email addresses or often involve third-party requests for sharing through pre-registered accounts on social network platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. One of the key features of the application TinyRiot, which provides a cathartic soundtrack while its users shake out ‘tiny’ bouts of frustration, is that it does not require users to sign in or register to share.

As users record, title and approve videos, they are auto-uploaded to a shared YouTube account which acts as a sub-platform where users can share and watch each other’s videos in real time. In turn, videos appear embedded on the application’s homepage which also shows the GPS coordinates via a modified GoogleMap API, with lightning bolt icons showing where TinyRiots have occurred around the world.

Aside from location, what makes each video unique is how the iPhone’s audio and visual functions are exploited. With shaking as the guiding praxis, the application’s major functions benefit from two facets of the iPhone’s design — namely the relative positions of the camera and flash as well as the microphone and speaker. With the speaker only a few centimetres away, a howling, reverberating feedback is triggered as the internal microphone begins recording audio.

At the same time, as users shake their iPhones while taking video footage, the pulse of the camera flash is synced and since the lens is a few millimetres to the side, nanoseconds of blinding flashes and visual feedback appear on the user’s screen-cum-viewfinder. Aesthetically, what would be a normal video takes on a disorienting effect that is equal parts entertaining and blinding. The accompanying soundtrack draws on a number of pre-loaded samples and as users shake, a randomized assortment of heavy metal sounds emit.

A simplified, 8-beat format of guitar and drums was chosen for simplicity as the developers saw a similarity in the way teenagers once picked up their instruments and regardless of skill, started playing loud. TinyRiot is to apps what teenagers were to rock - just playing loud and shaking it all out. In doing so, the gesture-based method of sampling and remixing takes another step towards becoming its own platform. Seeing potential in the format, TinyRiot’s main developers Sembo Kensuke of media-art unit Exonemo and Taeji Sawai, who has worked extensively on music-enabling technologies with The Boredoms, teamed up with Atari Teenage Riot frontman Alec Empire and recently released Atari Tiny Riot as an application.

Users are able to play with loaded samples of the artists’ beats and rhythmic arrangements. Banner lyrics such as “Anonymous Teenage Riot” blare through the cacophony and align with a spirit the developers’ and the band champion. In terms of participation it’s in the tradition of mass movements and as a collaboration, the anonymous user videos are uploaded on the TinyRiot page where fans watching each others’ ‘riots’ has an infectious property. With uploading remaining anonymous, the application creates an international, anonymous collective.

As social networking itself no longer wrestles, but rather develops and intensifies its own imperative of increasingly constant and closer connectivity, the parameters of sharing and privacy have manifested themselves in the form of contentious issues for users. Users of TinyRiot find themselves no longer, or less, restrained by the (inadvertently) associated pressures or assumed embarrassment from the “friend” connections maintained on the social networks in which they participate. TinyRiot users can sidestep electing usernames or avatars, however, once a video is uploaded to the mutual YouTube account, the application’s developers have included a prompt for inclined users to further share their videos on existing social platforms.

The model of sharing anonymously or recording video publicly has re-emerged in recent years as an issue entwined with both privacy and ethics. Both have been highlighted in the media-wide coverage of Wikileaks and its submission policy and procedures, as well as in recent legislation in some states of the United States where it has become illegal to record video of law enforcement. Indeed, these issues will remain a nuisance as social networking developers move forward on an increasingly user-generated content and information-dominated superhighway.” — Vicente Gutierrez, Neural.

The goal of this profile is to explore themes of Narcissism and the Virtual Nude in the context of social networking. The premise of the entry surmises, that in participating with Network Culture, we relinquish certain rights and expose ourselves to Deep Web meta-searches, data collection/trade and are left “naked”, often without even realising it.

There are two goals to this profile. The first is to interact as a true facebook account. The second goal is to exist in the context of net.art. My hope is that through status updates, image uploads, wall posts and contacts, the profile will function and interact as it’s own input and output.