Education for a Free Information Society, First International Conference: Free Knowledge, Free Technology :: July 15-17, 2008 :: Barcelona, Spain :: Registration is now open! The deadline for early registration rates is April 30, 2008.

The Free Knowledge, Free Technology Conference (FKFT) is the first international event which will centre on the production and sharing of educational and training materials in the field of Free Software and Open Standards. With the objective of promoting Free Software and the sharing of free knowledge, the FKFT 2008 Conference will bring together hundreds of people from different continents including government representatives, school and university teachers, IT companies, publishers, and NGO’s. Continue reading

[Image: The intensely homoerotic Buffy and Faith storyline in Buffy the Vampire Slayer was developed partly as a direct response to fanfic writers’ interpretations of the show in this light] As an undergraduate I read English Language and Literature at one of the oldest and most traditional universities in the world. Even the non-canonical texts came from a canon of the non-canonical – hence, by definition, whatever our course declared to be literature, ipso facto, was such. Recently, though, in the course of our Arts Council research I’ve browsed a fair amount of creative writing online - and found myself increasingly unsure about notions of the canonical or literary in the context of the net. Continue reading

A debate between Trebor Scholz and Paul Hartzog + a call for papers for further discussion. Published on Re-Public. In the debate that launches the special issue with the same title, Paul Hartzog and Trebor Scholz attempt to outline a critique of the social web along 5 axes: production, exploitation, individuality/collectivity, cultural difference, activism.

Thanasis/Pavlos: How central is the question of “who owns the means of production” in relation to the net economy?

Paul Hartzog: I think that what is happening now underscores the fact that ownership was never the issue. Ownership grants you the capacity to make and implement decisions about production, and to enjoy the fruits of those decisions. Ownership gives you access to production. Access has now been disaggregated and mediated. Continue reading

Siegfried Zielinski is an internationally recognized media theorist and educator whose recent work, Deep Time of Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, has just been translated into English and published by M.I.T. Press. Zielinski’s approach to media history provides a method that radiates with a life and dynamism that pays homage to the figures and forms that he traces from the past. Writing on themes as divergent as the electronic music of Mouse on Mars or 17th century polymath Giovanni Battista della Porta, Zielinski’s work affirms the experimentation of new forms, and the science of mixture which can connect through time and space seemingly disparate bodies of thought and media practice. Along with his research, he is also the founding director of the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. Zielinski has very kindly answered five questions that draw on several of the themes from the newly translated work, Deep Time. Continue reading

… a gift economy in an economy of abundance…

Vernacular Video by Tom Sherman: The technology of video is now as common as a pencil for the middle classes. People who never even considered working seriously in video find themselves with digital camcorders and non-linear video-editing software on their personal computers. They can set up their own “television stations” with video streaming via the Web without much trouble. The revolution in video-display technologies is creating massive, under-utilized screen space and time, as virtually all architecture and surfaces become potential screens. Video-phones will expand video’s ubiquity exponentially. These video tools are incredibly powerful and are nowhere near their zenith. If one wishes to be part of the twenty-first-century, media-saturated world and wants to communicate effectively with others or express one’s position on current affairs in considerable detail, with which technology would one chose to do so, digital video or a pencil? - NOEMA.

The Emergence of Open Source Culture

The Next Layer or: The Emergence of Open Source Culture :: Draft text for Pixelache publication, Armin Medosch, London/Vienna 2006-2007

First we had media art. In the early days of electronic and digital culture media art was an important way of considering relationships between society and technology, suggesting new practices and cultural techniques. It served as an outlet for the critique of the dark side of computer culture’s roots in the military-industrial complex; and it suggested numerous utopian and beautiful ways of engagement with technology, new types of interactivity, sensuous interfaces, participative media practices, for instance. However, the more critical, egalitarian and participative branches of media art tended to be overshadowed by the advocacy of a high-tech and high-art version of it. This high-media art conceptually merged postmodern media theories with the techno-imaginary from computer sciences and new wave cybernetics. Uncritical towards capitalisms embrace of technology as provider of economic growth and a weirdly paradoxical notion of progress, high-media art was successful in institutionalizing itself and finding the support of the elites but drew a lot of criticism from other quarters of society. It stuck to the notion of the artist as a solitary genius who creates works of art which exist in an economy of scarcity and for which intellectual ownership rights are declared. Continue reading

[…] Simon Mills: How do you think the plethora of so-called Web 2.0 applications (E.g. Myspace, Youtube, Bitorrent, Google) are changing the media landscape? These are all predominantly based on constantly evolving databases so exhibit a distinctly new media aesthetic. They also seem to aid a more democratic means of cultural production making publication and involvement cheap and easy. Are you sold on the idea of ‘network as platform’?

Sean Cubitt: Cheap and easy is always good. talk, as they say, is cheap. Thank God. It takes millions of people talking (and writing, which is nearly as cheap) to produce one poet; and it takes millions strumming away to produce one musician. Those of us who only talk and strum are nonetheless experts, in the sense that we know how hard it is to make words and sounds do what you want them to, and so we are the perfect audience for the poet and the muso. It will take a million mash-ups to make one work that will really make your jaw drop. Continue reading

Call for Contributors

M/C - Media and Culture is calling for contributors to the ‘mobile’ issue of M/C Journal. M/C Journal is looking for new contributors. M/C is a crossover journal between the popular and the academic, and a blind- and peer-reviewed journal. In 2007, M/C Journal celebrates its tenth year in publication. To find out how and in what format to contribute your work, visit >>.

Call for Papers: ‘mobile’ :: Edited by Larissa Hjorth & Olivia Khoo: Convergence has become part of burgeoning mobile media. The mobile phone has come of age. As an integral component of visual media cultures, camera phone practices are arguably both extending and creating emerging ways of seeing and representing. In media footage of late, camera phones have been heralded as providing everyday users with the possibility of self- expression and voice in the once unidirectional model of mass media. In addition, the “exchange” and gift-giving economy underpinning mobile phone practices (Taylor and Harper 2003) is further enunciated by the camera phone’s ability to “share” moments between intimates (and strangers) through various contextual frameworks and archives from MMS, blogs, virtual community sites to actual face-to-face digital storytelling. Continue reading

The Exquisite Corpse

This is an essay I’ve written as the foreward to an anthology on the classic game The Exquisite Corpse: Collaboration, Creativity, and the World’s Most Popular Parlor Game edited by Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Davis Schneiderman, and Tom Denlinger, to be published by University of Nebraska Press (2007). This collection is the first set of original essays to provide a broad retrospective on the legacy of the Corpse project-and we are defining this legacy fairly loosely, with representation from historical, literary, collaborative, moments (etc.). The vibe is open and the text, I guess, is too. –enjoy! Paul aka Dj Spooky [via iDC] Continue reading

Call for Participation

This summer and fall you are invited to contribute to the creation of an open-access publishing house, a Free Press, to be launched at Roda Sten contemporary art center in Goteborg, Sweden. A project of artist Sal Randolph, Free Press will accept all kinds of writing from the public; contributions in any language can be as short as a single word or as long as an encyclopedia and can include manifestos, statements, documentations, studies, stories, recipes, poems and whatever you can imagine. Continue reading