TX-AP is a joint initiative between media activists in Australia and Indonesia. It is organised collaboratively by EngageMedia (Australia), a video sharing website and free software development, training and networking project and Ruangrupa (Indonesia) a non-profit artist initiative supporting the development of art in the cultural context through events, exhibitions, research and documentation. 50 specially invited media activists and artists will be coming to Indonesia to attend the workshop and share their skills and ideas.

The camp will provide a unique opportunity for artists, video makers, software developers and activists to collaborate and share skills in a global context where on-line video communication skills have become an increasingly important strategy for activists.

Andrew Lowenthal of EngageMedia explained “Transmission Asia-Pacific will be a unique face to face meeting between video makers and open source software developers to shape open source online video sharing applications and their strategic use for social aims”. He went on to explain “free and open source makes sense for organisations with limited means, both from a strictly economic point of view and also as part of their overall strategic aims, as the system of open collaboration and sharing that free software is based on has a natural philosophical fit with organisations working on environmental or social justice issues”.

Participants will attend from around the region, for example participants from from Hong Kong making videos about communities resisting gentrification and over development of urban areas in Hong Kong and China. This group puts video cameras into the hands of those most affected by these policies and then helps them edit and share their work on-line. Projects such as these increase the communication rights of marginalized and displaced peoples allowing them to articulate their concerns to a wider public.

Another media activist from India has been using on-line media distribution to raise awareness of censorship of diverse sexualities in mainstream Indian media outlets. They have produced a satirical and humorous look at queer moments from Bollywood films to draw attention to the marginalisation of these voices within Indian society.

Transmission Asia-Pacific is the 4th in a series of events bringing together video activists and web developers. Previous events have occurred in Rome, London and Amsterdam.

For media access to the camp, stories of individual participants and topics of discussion at the event please contact:

Andrew Lowenthal (EngageMedia): +61 439 093 779 (Australia) +6281319339823 (Indonesia) http://engagemedia.org
Mirwan Andan (Ruangrupa): +62 813 1924 2965 http://ruangrupa.org

For more information on the workshop: http://transmission.cc/txap.

Transmission Asia-Pacific is supported by Hivos and the Open Society Institute.

Our world is continually shaped and reshaped by patterns of mobility. In the United States, motorization and single-use zoning are the principal components of a system that depends upon long distance travel and cheap energy. In the developing world, the wasteful patterns of the West are being repeated in places like China and India where increased automobile and fuel use are quickly becoming the norm. In all parts of the world, city governments struggle to keep pace with the energy and mobility needs of their expanding populations. Tourism, migration, military conflict, and environmental disasters all keep human beings on the move. Many choose their destinations, while others are forced towards them. Our 21st century world may ride the precarious line between the temporary and the permanent, and the ecosystems plundered by our unquenchable energy needs might have the final word. Art, and other forms of cultural reflection, can help to make accessible the structures and! systems that propel us. It falls to all of us as global citizens to redirect our governing institutions and cultural perceptions ? or we may find ourselves facing the end of the road.

The International Guerrilla Video Festival (IGVFest) is a mobile festival integrating video art with the urban and social environment. The festival removes the technologically complex medium of video out of the institutional situation re-positioning it as open and reflexive in the public domain. The artworks have site-specific thematic relations to the space where they are shown, engaging and reflecting upon the unique architectural, historical, and interpersonal context of each area the festival travels to.

One of the aims of the festival is to create a continuous dialogue from the videos into the community, focusing on lapses in the current framework such as an absence of communication or invisible components of the area. Open to local and international artists, the festival widens the panorama of the discourse to include the perspective of communities elsewhere that have parallel circumstances.

A self-contained, transportable GPU (Guerrilla Projector Unit) facilitates the incursions into the public realm. Transforming public space into a fertile ground for experimentation toward new possibilities in the relationship between art and society.

Presentations on the theory & practice of surveillance and contemporary protest art, by graduate students in the ITP program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. The presenters’ talks will be grouped into four panels, to be moderated by their Professor, Marisa Olson (Curator at Large, Rhizome), on topics ranging from voyeurism and play to intervention and networks of control. These panels will consist of both artist talks and critical essays, and audience members will be invited to give feedback on a few works in progress.

Program:

11:45 Open Seating
12:00 Welcome & Introduction, Marisa Olson

12:05-1:15 Voyeurism vs. Exhibitionism: Online and In the Streets
Panelists: Allistar Peters and Meng Li, Ana Maria Gutierrez, Heather Rasley

1:15-2:00 Watchful Intervening: From Scientologists to Spy Shops
Panelists: Amanda Bernsohn and Kacie Kinzer, Syed Salahuddin

2-3:30 Playtime: Games, Toys, and Entertainment
Panelists: Oscar Torres, Scott Hoffer, Shlomit Lehavi and Leah Gilliam

3:30-5 Looking at Control: From Candidate Self-Surveillance to Wireless Subversion
Panelists: Michael Clemow and Tom Jenkins, Alberto Tafoya, Emery Martin

The Change You Want To See is the gallery and convergence stage run by the activist arts collective Not An Alternative.

Ronen is an artist, writer and activist. He has participated in many self-organized exhibitions and festivals, founded and edited over five cultural, art and political journals / magazines and produced many events linking art, culture and grassroots politics. For the past ten years Ronen has been active in anti-occupation and anti-capitalist direct action groups.

Visual Foreign Correspondents is also set in the context of an international program of public debates — The Globalised Crystal Ball — in which aspects of the new phase of globalisation is explored by panels of distinguished commentators. This month’s issue is The Military-Strategic Future Predicted - In 2004 the United Nations published A more secure world: Our shared responsibility, which advised the international community how to tackle common threats. The report suggests that it is time for a new security consensus, one in which “we all share responsibility for each other’s security. And the test of that consensus will be action”. Speakers are:

- Thomas P.M. Barnett is senior Managing Director at Enterra Solutions.
- Andrew Small works for the German Marshall Fund in Brussels since 2006 as the co-ordinator of work on China and transatlantic relations.
- Awil Mohamoud is a political scientist and the founding director of SAHAN research & advice bureau.

De Balie, Klein Gartmanplantsoen 10, Amsterdam :: April 15, 2008; 8:00 pm

In recent years, commentators on game culture and ludology have undertaken the task of analyzing and structuring play. Such work has been strongly influenced by the Dutch researcher Johan Huizinga’s 1938 study of play, Homo Ludens and Roger Callois’s later structuralist elaborations of Huizinga’s research. In this article I want to draw upon a different stream of thought from the mid twentieth century, also informed by Huizinga but not exclusively, that of the Paris Situationist artists and architects, including Guy Debord and Gilles Ivian (also known as [Ivan Chtcheglov). A number of important engagements with play and games by the Situationists are newly relevant today. Rather than offer a historical assessment of Situationism’s theories, I will take cues from their writings to reconsider the potential of games in art. I find useful their critique of play within but nevertheless resistant to capitalism (and by extension imperialism and militarism), their architectural proposals for “player” navigation and transformation of urban “psychogeographic” zones (what we might call “ludic architecture”), their analysis of leisure and non-leisure activities, and their repurposing of Dadaist negativity. These proposals all have direct relevance to what MacKenzie Wark calls our contemporary condition of “Gamespace.” (MacKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory, Harvard University Press, 2007)

Lesson 1: Freeing play

A promising tactic for the early Situationists was the unpredictable yet forceful potential of play — what anthropologist Victor Turner termed the “liminoid,” or the freeing and transformational, moments of play when the normal roles and rules of a community or society are relaxed (via Jon Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy, Game Cultures, Open University Press, 2006). After these temporary (TAZ like) situations “players” settle once more into fixed roles. The Situationists proposed to adopt this liminoid “subjunctive mood”, when anything can happen, the carnival, Anarchy Online the RPG, the Society of Creative Anachronisms, into a more general approach, a way of doing and being in the everyday, in order to transform material life with ludic actions.

“We must develop a systematic intervention based on the complex factors of two components in perpetual interaction: the material environment of life and the behaviors which it gives rise to and which radically transform it. Our action on behavior, linked with other desirable aspects of a revolution in mores, can be briefly defined as the invention of games of an essentially new type.” Guy Debord, (Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action, June 1957)

Situationist games do not respect the boundary between play and work, leisure and non-leisure, between “real life” and Huizinga’s “magic circle”, the separation from “normal space” that facilitates immersion in games and play (Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play). Situationist games are not sports and are not relegated to sports stadiums, arcades, or Playstation home entertainment set-ups. Situationist games bleed into the city, the workplace, the buyplace, the personal computer, the mobile phone, public and private transportation and communication, and into and inside escapist rule-based game environments themselves. In transgressing the “magic circle,” a Situationist gaming tactic attempts to give transformative potential not just to play but to “normal” life.

Lesson 2: Wretched winnings, or challenging competition

“The feeling of the importance of winning in the game, that it is about concrete satisfactions — or, more often than not, illusions — is the wretched product of a wretched society.” Guy Debord (Contribution to Situationist Definition of Play)

The Situationists were critical of the competitive aspects of play, Callois’ “agon”. For them, competition was complicit with capitalism, with the British working class fan’s mindless absorption in football, with the struggle to obtain material goods, investing in lucrative defense stocks, doing whatever it takes to be the last Survivor on the island, playing to get the biggest family home in the Sims neighborhood. The Situationists, like avid gamers, rejected the capitalist derived division between production and consumption, active work vs. passive leisure. Nevertheless, they did acknowledge that an element of competition might be necessary in their games:

“The only success that can be conceived in play is the immediate success of its ambiance, and the constant augmentation of its powers..[ ]..play cannot be completely emancipated from a competitive aspect.“ Guy Debord (Contribution to Situationist Definition of Play)

In our adaptation of Situationist games, perhaps we allow for a degree of competition, among other motivating playful components. Moreover, for the Situationists, ludic actions were also ethical navigations, and therefore the goal of a competition should always be questioned. (Guy Debord, Contribution to Situationist Definition of Play)

Lesson 3: Virtual game worlds: Toward a ludic architecture

“The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be a means of knowledge and a means of action.” Gilles Ivain [Ivan Chtcheglov] (Formulary for a New Urbanism, October 1953 printed in Internationale Situationniste #1)

Situationist Russian architect Gilles Ivain imagined a “playful-constructive” movement through a city’s “psychogeographic” zones, urban zones defined not only by streets, buildings and businesses but also by how people inhabit the city and the collective psychic ambiances they project. Or as Guy Debord later wrote, while describing the now famous Situationist notion of derive, or drifting through a city: from a derive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones. High speed surveillance cameras tracking shopping patterns in stores like the Gap map these hidden currents, a time based techno-capatilist development of the study of psychogeographic zoning the Situationists did not forecast for their fledgling “science.”

“With the aid of old maps, aerial photographs and experimental derives, one can draw up hitherto lacking maps of influences, maps whose inevitable imprecision at this early stage is no worse than that of the first navigational charts. The only difference is that it is no longer a matter of precisely delineating stable continents, but of changing architecture and urbanism.” Guy Debord (Theory of the Derive, Les Levres Nues #9, November 1956, reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #2, December 1958)

Beyond the remapping of existing cities as psychogeographic zones, new city forms were imagined. In “Formulary for a New Urbanism”, from the first edition of Situationist, Gilles Ivain describes a futuristic situationist city’s quarters, and public and private architecture that would be in continuous flux and modifiable according to the whims of the inhabitants, including zones such as a Bizarre Quarter — a Happy Quarter (specially reserved for habitation) — Noble and Tragic Quarter (for good children) — and a Sinister Zone. It is this last example that games have provided countless imaginings, and Ivain described the Sinister Quarter in a way that predicts the contours of many video game worlds:

“The Sinister Quarter, for example, would be a good replacement for those hellholes, those ill-reputed neighborhoods full of sordid dives and unsavory characters, that many peoples once possessed in their capitals: they symbolized all the evil forces of life. The Sinister Quarter would have no need to harbor real dangers, such as traps, dungeons or mines.” Gilles Ivain [Ivan Chtcheglov, (Formulary for a New Urbanism)

In contrast to a current rule-based “algorithmic” emphasis in academic ludology publications, some game researchers such as Chaim Gingold and Henry Jenkins have made convincing arguments for the importance of spatial poetics in structuring game play. (Chaim Gingold, Miniature Gardens and Magic Crayons, Master’s thesis at Georgia Tech, 2003, and Henry Jenkins, Game Design as Narrative Architecture in the anthology First Person, MIT Press, 2002) This latter approach can be informed by the psychogeographic characterization of the city provided by the Situationists. Rather than seeing games as solely algorithmic rule machines, there is a significant attraction in players’ exploration of virtual game spaces provided by games like Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider, and the classic exploratory Myst.

Activities within these games incorporate spatial puzzles and goals tied to specific psychogeographic locations within the virtual game environment or city. For level design of more action based shooter games like Halo and Quake, ludic architectural design of multiplayer fighting terrains, (for hiding, for sniping, for jumping, for flying), and the placement of enemies and obstacles are a significant portion of game level design. The avid gamer’s extensive time involvement in level modification, as was once common with PC games like Doom, Quake and Unreal, is motivated by a desire to focus on and transform not the telic aims of the game but the paratelic space of the game world itself, invoking the Situationist’s call for modifiable, changeable architecture.

“Architectural complexes will be modifiable. Their aspect will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of their inhabitants.” Gilles Ivain [Ivan Chtcheglov] (Formulary for a New Urbanism)

Lesson 4: Situationist games beyond the virtual: intervening in real cities

Situationist games are not necessarily confined to virtual digital game space. Guy Debord describes the original Situationists playful exploits into Parisian cityspace:

“Our loose lifestyle and even certain amusements considered dubious that have always been enjoyed among our entourage — slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition, hitchhiking nonstop and without destination through Paris during a transportation strike in the name of adding to the confusion, wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public, etc. — are expressions of a more general sensibility which is no different from that of the derive. Written descriptions can be no more than passwords to this great game.” Guy Debord (Theory of the Derive)

This description, like much of the Situationists’ practice, anticipates the emergence of new forms of game play as art practice today, most clearly in the example of the London-based artist collective Blast Theory. Blast Theory projects Can You See Me Now? and Uncle Roy All Around You reinscribe urban space with the rules and scenarios of their games. Can You See Me Now? players carry GPS modified devices which contain a simple graphical Pacman style game interface displaying the location of other players in the city. Running panicked through the city streets of Rotterdam in the first performance of Can You See Me Now?, players tried to escape these non-corporeal pursuers who were less restricted by the actual geographic and urban obstacles such as traffic and traffic lights, pedestrians and hills. Similarly, Uncle Roy All Around You repurposed existing city infrastructure like pay phones and car rides to play a mysterious detective style game on the streets of London. Clues and game play advance through text instructions to players’ mobile computers and planted “actors” (who seem like artificial intelligence players in a computer game played by humans). Blast Theory explained:

“The city is an arena where the unfamiliar flourishes, where the disjointed and the disrupted are constantly threatening to overwhelm us. It is also a zone of possibility; new encounters.” Blast Theory

Converging ludic activities and “real” cityspace are not the exclusive domain of Situationist inspired artists. The Situationists did not foresee that mega-players within the “superstructures” would also engage in playing their games. For instance, during the annual E3 game industry conference in 2003 in Los Angeles, the United States Army staged a “playful” publicity stunt for their free recruitment shooter game America’s Army. They catapulted soldiers from a helicopter into downtown Hollywood. Passersby on the street were confused and frightened, and civilian city space became militarized through an intervention blurring the distinction between a soldier’s job and playing soldier in a game. The use of game tactics and play to equivocate and familiarize urban warfare has become increasingly common. In one of the most extreme examples of the post-9/11 military shooter games, KumaWar presented gaming as analogous to soldiering.

This episodic game enterprise released shooter game missions based on current American military events in Iraq. In KumaWar, whose designers regularly solicit advise from a retired United States general, the player always is an American soldier battling “insurgents” in Iraqi cities. Distinguishing civilians from insurgents becomes an important skill for success in the “game”. Again city space (civilian space), military space and game space are conflated.

A Situationist-style game more covertly complicit with militarization of civilian space through ludological means was the innovative I love Bees designed by Jane McGonigal. Microsoft hired McGonigal, then a doctoral candidate in ludology at the University of California at Berkeley, to design a viral marketing campaign and Alternate Reality Game (ARG) for their upcoming X-box release of Halo2. In public places like pay phones, players of I love Bees retrieved information and advances in the game story (a sci-fi “War of the Worlds”-like scenario leading into the storyline of Halo2). When they received game information players would make an ironic military salute (echoing the gestures of futuristic American style soldiers in Halo) and were thus able to identify other I love Bees players in public places like concerts and streets. ILB players posted many photos of this military salute on the web. Overall, the civic space of the city became militarized — even if for a fictional conflict.

Lesson 5: A dash of Dadaist negativity: illegality as play

“The dadaist spirit has nevertheless influenced all the movements that have come after it; and any future constructive position must include a dadaist-type negative aspect, as long as the social conditions that impose the repetition of rotten superstructures [..] have not been wiped out by force.” Guy Debord (Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action, June 1957)

Debord, after describing the role of Dadaism in combating “stale bourgeois culture” and fascism in post-WWI Europe, postulated that a dadaist-type negative aspect would be a necessary component of Situationism as long as undesired social structures were still in existence. These conditions continue today — rapidly globalizing capitalism, imperialist exploitation and increasing militarization, border closures and increasingly hedged in civil liberties in the post-9/11 War on Terror are some powerful present day “rotten superstructures”. Beyond the apolitical or complicit works described above, Situationist tactics have also been adopted as tools in activism.

One artist group who have been playing some urban interventionist, Situationist-like games with a dose of Dadaist negativity is Yo Mango, an Italian/Spanish art collective based in Barcelona. Yo Mango, slang in Spain for “I steal”, regularly stage playful actions such as potlucks where every dish must contain an element of stolen food, Tango dancing in a chain supermarket while stealing, and distributing stylish Yo Mango patches to cover the holes left in stolen clothes by cutting out the plastic security clip. (They recommend stealing only top designer brand name fashions.) Some members of Yo Mango are also loosely connected with the European Squatter Movement, an organized youth movement in opposition to private property who also participate in other activist activities like protesting against gentrification.

Mexican Artist Rene Hiyashi is another artist creating ludic interventions in public space. In India and Argentina he has realized playful architectural structures for street children. In 2006, in collaboration with Mexico City based artist Eder Castillo, Rene Hiyashi created Guatamex, an imaginatively constructed island with computers with Internet access for illegal immigrants, floating on the river dividing Mexico from Guatemala. (His own laptop keyboard was water-damaged during this project.) Like the anti-corporate antics and publicity stunts of the Yes Men and Rtmark, the older public interventions of Critical Art Ensemble, and many of the political art actions that took place during the 2004 New York Republican National Convention, Yo Mango’s and Rene Hiyashi’s artwork can be described as ludic activism in which societal rules (the laws) are willfully broken. Within activist culture itself, maybe since the anti WTO demonstrations in Seattle of 1999, Dadaist humor and ludic activities are more prevalent. (Brian Holmes, The Revenge of the Concept: Artistic Exchanges and Networked Resistance, Nettime 2003)<

Lesson 6: Games inside games: Interventionist tactics in virtual spaces

In their handbook for game designers, Salen and Zimmerman repeatedly emphasize the importance of the “magic circle” and the investment of the player in a separate, pretend space of play (whether abstract or photorealistic, virtual or non-digital). They stress the pleasure in following the rules of games within the clear-cut boundaries of this magic circle. Situationist gamers, however, are more akin to the creative cheater, the game “griefer” or the hacker. They blur the peripheries of the magic circle, taking pleasure in changing the rules of the existing gamespace, which they see as problematic in a fixed state. Situationist mods and hacks intervening inside preexisting games can be more entertaining than the original game.

For instance, the popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) Second Life has been playfully manipulated by the avatar Gazira Babeli, one of the members of the Second Front collective of Second Life artistic hackers. Her Gray Goo hack was an infestation of Second Life space with out-of-control repetitive self-replicating objects, inspired by nanotechnological disaster scenarios. Grey Goo took various forms, from endless Mario character replications to rampant Velvet Underground bananas. It was so effective it slowed down Linden Lab’s game servers, interfering with game play system-wide.

Babeli’s COME.TO.HEAVEN similarly exploited a loophole in Second Life which allows players to create gigantic avatars in proportion to the Second Life world, resulting in unexpected interesting glitches. While the identity (identities) behind the Babeli avatar are kept secret, the code for her Second Life interventions are always made public by posting it online so others can learn from it and reuse it.

A similar, Situationist-themed interventionist game strategy is offered by Pierre Rahola, a French gamer and DJ. During the early phase of the US war on Iraq, Rahola and his collaborators would spray anti-war graffiti inside online shooter games. When I interviewed him in Paris in 2005, he admitted that “intervening in games is more fun than playing the game.” Around the same time Pierre and his friends were playing online shooter games with an activist edge I began a body of work I would describe as situationist gaming. In collaboration with the artists Brody Condon and Joan Leandre, we initiated Velvet-Strike, tagging the then-popular online soldier shooter game Counter-Strike with anti-war graffiti. Velvet-Strike was not only visual modification but also included “recipes” for disruptive actions designed to interfere with regular Counter-Strike gameplay, like one for making friends with your enemy. Recipe for Friendship:

1. Find a Counter-Strike server with 0 or 1 other player on line. (If you go to an empty one most likely someone will show up to see who you are.)
2. Shoot a few times at your enemy.
3. Tell them you are newbie and ask them to show you how to plant the bomb.
4. Ask them which country they are from.
5. Ask them all about themselves.
6. Arrange to meet another time.

Operation Urban Terrain (OUT) was another project I initiated to warp an existing gamespace — the free US army propaganda game America’s Army. With OUT, I wanted to counter the convergence of military and civilian space with a kind of activism that merged virtual urban game space wirelessly with cityspace. I invited many people whom I had met online through Velvet-Strike to participate, including Chris Birke, one of the original Counter-Strike game texturers, Mexico City architect Luis Hernandez and Pierre Rahola. We projected our live performances onto the walls and surfaces of Manhattan and Brooklyn, connected wirelessly to five players around the world during the NYC Republican National Convention of 2004. I matched virtual locations within the America’s Army game servers with physical New York City sites, projecting a live performance of a virtual sit-in inside a tunnel with yellow taxis onto a building in midtown Manhattan, where there were many yellow taxis, and pairing a red brick warehouse in the game with a brick building in Harlem. For the last location I merged a live soldier dancing performance in the popular America’s Army map “Bridge” with projection onto the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn.

Riot Gear for Rollartista, another game inside a game, was a series of machinima performances calling attention to European and British police abuse of Islamic and African immigrants, with players wearing padded “riot gear” costumes designed in collaboration with artist Talice Lee. In the first performance of the project, two player/performers roller-skated around the small Spanish city of Castellon projecting the Playstation2 games Narc and Mechwarrior from an ultra light projector attached to one of the player’s helmets, (technology had developed since the heavy battery and projector of OUT). At each projection location in the city, one player “roller-danced” and handed out flyers with stories of immigrant abuse to interested passers-by while the second player performed with a portable Playstation, controlling a dancing policeman character who violently beats up on civilian city dwellers.

Conclusion

The Situationists predicted an age of expanded ludic possibilities for artists and for anyone. Paraphrasing and remixing both gamer Rebecca Cannon and Situationist architect Gilles Ivain, we are bored with shooter games. We are bored with the suburbs, the stale imperialist sexist engineering biased corporate game industry, and with new academic ludology that reifies existing superstructures. We are ready to play reality TV off camera. We are frustrated with our governments and the military superstructures that control gamespace. We don’t want to play by rules we never agreed upon in the first place. Anyways, even if we had fun playing those games to begin with, it is now more entertaining to mess them up, or to invent new unsanctioned games inside gamespace. If big players are intervening in gamespace, then it is time for Situationist gaming.

Anne-Marie Schleiner

Dissolving the Magic Circle of Play: Lessons from Situationist Gaming will be resented next week at Homo Ludens Ludens in Gijon, Spain. [via nettime]

1st Place - Yeas & Nays: A ShiftSpace widget for calling representatives by Christian Croft ($2000) - A ShiftSpace that allows a citizen to call her representative from any webpage, record her call and publish it on that very page. Yeas & Nays attempts to promote civic responsibility and a democratic discourse and make our citizen duty just a bit easier. This space combines ShiftSpace’s power to layer commentary above existing contexts with advances in VoIP telephony to build a tool for informed civic action. It layers the citizen’s act of calling an official on top of online information substantiating her argument. The proposed space enables a phone call with a representative from a webpage that politically concerns you. Type shift + space, enter a location, and Yeas & Nays fetches your matching representatives. Next, enter your phone number, and the system initiates a call that bridges your phone to that of the representative’s office. After the call, the widget updates to include a recording of your call whose URL you can send as proof of your civic action to all your friends. Read on >>

City Without Walls (cWOW) seeks a curator (or co-curators) for an upcoming group exhibition dealing with issues and ideas about democracy. The exhibition opens in September 2008, taking the pulse of democracy in America and around the world just prior to the Presidential election.

City Without Walls (cWOW) seeks artists and artwork for a group exhibition dealing with issues and ideas about democracy, and scheduled to open this fall just prior to the Presidential election. The exhibition will take the pulse of the state of democracy in America and around the world.

cWOW is a non-profit urban gallery for emerging art that advances the careers of artists while building the audience for contemporary art. cWOW’s gallery in downtown Newark is a state-of-the-art facility with over 1,600 square feet of exhibition space, including a main gallery, a new-media project room, 9-foot screen, several flat-screen TVs, and other video projection equipment (see attached floor plan). cWOW is New Jersey’s oldest not-for-profit alternative art space, founded in 1975, and a three-time recipient of the prestigious NJ State Council on the Arts “Citation of Excellence.”

Call: Evonne M. Davis at 973.622.1188 with questions. Email: info [at] cwow.org

Such thoughtful cues in the physical fabric of the exhibition mean it doesn’t take long to cotton on to the data cloud of this year’s festival: ‘Conspire’. This could at first be taken as a prim allusion to the still-unwieldy legacy of Stasi spookery in German social and political life, as well as contemporary control creep in our western security wings…” Continue reading Fear of Fear Itself by Marina Vishmidt, Mute Magazine.

The /ETC is a unique tech skill-share that has been held annually since 2002. The emphasis has always been women sharing their experiences, knowledge and skills around free software, open hardware and universal interoperability of systems in a fun way. We are calling all women who are interested in the Eclectic Tech Carnival to register here. Registration closes at 23:59 on April 1, 2008.

Women Participate! Whether you want to follow the content of the event or whether you want to present a workshop, lecture, performance, playlab, intervention, exhibition, you name it (to a certain degree) at the /ETC you’re welcome.

In addition to the skill-share program, this year the Eclectic Tech Carnival will be focusing on a number of specific political issues: the “life cycle” of hardware - from mining, to labour practices in the manufacturing industry, to waste management. In addition we will explore why there seems to be so little public interest in Privacy, or lack of, on the Net. And what can we learn from the Creative Commons movement?

The participation fee of /ETC 2008 is as follows:For all seven days: a sliding scale of 30/60/120 Euros (at your own discretion).
Per single day: 6 Euros. The evenings will be open to the public and free of charge.

Our graded, scaled fee system aims to take into account that women are from varying contexts. This includes income, country of origin and personal priorities.

The registration fee is collected from all participants, contributors and organisers. It covers, among other things, vegan food for all.

We cannot accept payment on-line so please be prepared to pay cash, in Euros when you arrive.

We have reserved a limited number of beds in a Youth Hostel, which will be filled on a first come, first served basis. If there are more people in need of accommodation, we will do our best to find a bed among our friends and acquaintances in Amsterdam.

There is a discreet amount of money for those who need a travel grant. Please keep in mind that we do not reimburse flights but only [cheap] 2nd class train or bus tickets. One condition is that you need to register before April 1st 2008. We will look at each request individually.

Please feel free to contact us at any time starting immediately.

C o n t a c t : info2008 [at] eclectictechcarnival.org

The /ETC 2008 is organized by the Genderchangers and EYFA.