For us, we like a project like this because it can demo really well the activity of the community, and it’s a great chance to meet face to face and work closely together, since many of us are spread out in different locations. The space and scale of the project is quite big, so we could use tons of help to pull this off. In addition to the work done on site, much of our research and development will occur online so that folks who can’t make it to Linz can also participate, help out and keep track.

So, we are recruiting for the lab …

<new.media.art>
. Ludic Society/Margarete Jahrmann interview.
. Homo Ludens Ludens exhibition report.
. Play Cultures, the world of digital games report.
. Be My Controller, opening the urban, button by button.
news: Emotoscope, Modi 2.0, Rom Check Fail
Amalgus Cycle Process1, HAI.
reviews:
. books/dvd/cd-rom: Delusive Spaces, Unit Operations,
. Art Machines Machines Art, Conspire,
. From Technological to Virtual Art
. centerfold: ‘Totemobile’ by Chico Macmurtrie

<e.music>
. Paul Slocum (interview),
. Modified Toy Orchestra (interview),
news: Skinstrument, Plink Jet, Street Radio, Tinnitus Tamer, BeatBox
reviews: Carsten Nicolai: Static Faders, Fundamentals of Sonic Arts,
. Background Noise, Sonic Acts XII, Rechenzentrum Silence
reviews cd: Mahmoud Refat, Frank Rothkamm, Philip Jeck, Scorn,
. Felix Kubin und das Mineralorchester, Carter Tutti, Charlemagne Palestine,
. An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music vol. 5,
. Saralunden+Andrey Kiritchenko, Maja Ratkje, Fenin, Now Underscan,
. Nemeth, Yuta Segawa, Robert van Heumen, Favourite Places, Autistici,
. Schurer, Kapital Band 1, Josh Russel

<hacktivism>
. Too close to the Screen, Reality and Unreality in wargames,
. The H-Gamer’s Song of Dawn,
. Golden Farmers / Ge Jin (interview),
. news (2.4Ghz, Intelluctual Property Donor, Fake is a Fake, P2P Art,
Logo_Wiki)
. reviews: (MyCreativity Reader, Art and Revolution, Access Denied, An Atlas of Radical Cartography, Digital Contagions)

NEURAL http://neural.it/

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]

Deer Blogs His Own GPS Position in Google Earth - In what may be a short-lived cool geo hack of the day, a deer named “Thor” now has his own blog where he shares his GPS position every five minutes. Someone named ‘Siberian’ at the Google Earth Community posted how he managed to make this happen. Turns out he had collared a deer they named “Thor” with a GPS and cellphone with SMS capability. They are studying deers living in suburban areas in Pennsylvania. Siberian then hacked up a way to use the resulting E-mail to create a spreadsheet which is then converted into a file you can use to track the deer in Google Earth. The system is totally automated using free services. His post goes into detail on how this was all accomplished. Siberian is using some tools by Valery Hronusov - who has developed and posted dozens of cool geo hacks for Google Earth (see his global rainfall example). Valery came up with the idea to let the deer blog his coordinates as well. Thanks to Valery for the tip on this cool deer hack! Note: you can also view the deer’s map in Google Maps. [blogged by Frank Taylor on Google Earth Blog]

What would the Internet look like without hackers? What would computing look like without free and open source software? What would the culture look like with DRM and closed media channels everywhere? Where do art and technology merge? Would Gilbert Simondon be happy if he were alive today? Many questions will be debated during the first Hacker Space Fest from the 16th to the 22nd June 2008 near Paris, at the /tmp/lab in the industrial outskirts of Vitry-sur-Seine.

The first Hacker Space Fest (HSF) will bring together people from many cultural and technological backgrounds and from different Hacker Spaces and Autonomous zones in France and Europe (and from beyond, if they can attend) to share and show what’s going on.

The broad term “hacking” is understood in this context as “creative use of technology” and not “illegal computer break in” (we don’t buy the political & media terror-inducing FUD).

This festival is autonomous, non-profit and collaborative. We encourage you to contribute in any way to this adventure by joining our team for this event, submitting a conference, proposing a workshop or organizing a live concert, a performance, an art exhibition or a sister event at your home location.

The language for the festival speakers is English or French (depending on submissions, we’ll have either one combined track or one conference track per language). You can reach us for any question on irc://irc.freenode.net/frlab (French version below)

1/ Submissions

Each submission is expected in one of the following formats: conference, workshop/demo, or performance (live/sound/video/…)

1.A/ Conference

Presentation format:
* 45 minute talk + 10 minutes of questions
* Video-projected slides
* Internet connectivity possible

Topics we’re interested in:
* Hacker spaces & hack labs around the world
* Arts & Technology
* Media-related performances
* Cyberpunk counter-culture and underground philosophy
* Sound / Music / Video & technology
* Street art & urban invasions
* Viral artforms
* Cultural mutant activities
* Hackers and innovations
* Education & technology
* Development through technologies & novel social organizations (in developed and developing countries)
* International relationships in covert / underground communities
* Privacy tools
* Mesh WiFi and Mesh-everything
* Reverse Engineering (hardware and software)
* P2P networks & applications
* Freedom-respecting VoIP (confidentiality / covertness)
* Security testing
* Circuit bending
* Making technology easier to modify / understand / mutate / create with
* DIY Alternative energies
* Fun technologies
* Covert / Stealth communications networks & tools
* Current issues and trends in Copyrights, Software patents combats and mass network surveillance
* CCTV and ways to protect your privacy
* Interactive / sensor technologies or cultural practices
* Free/Open hardware
* Autonomous zones
* Rural technology applications
* Lightweight Operating Systems
* Food, nature and health in a modern / contemporary world

1.B/ Workshop/Demonstration

Format: * 30mn to 2 hours workshop/demonstration (demos tend to be shorter)

Topics:
* All topics specified in the conference submission (see above)
* DIY electronics
* Operating Systems installations & usages (Linux & other FOSS distributions, innovative OSes, …)
* Network discovery tools
* Wifi / Bluetooth / Zigbee / CPL equipments & DIY techniques
* Content management solutions for communities

1.C/ Performance

Performances with Music / Artwork / Sound / Video

Format:
* Public-inclusive performance, performative demonstration or exhibition
* Indoors or outdoors
* Any kind of medium
* Musical performances with be held in a “placard” format: music for headphone festival, with 1 hour slots (cf. http://leplacard.org/)

2/ Evaluation

All the proposals will be evaluated by the Program Committee using the following criteria:

1. Innovative topic
2. Open technology
3. Demonstration / Live oriented
4. DIY reproducibility
5. Fun potential

The Program Committee:

* Sebastien Bourdeauducq (/tmp/lab, OpenPattern)
* DecereBrain (2600 Lille)
* Vanessa Brunet (VSS, Le groupe sans nom)
* Xavier Carcelle (OpenPattern, /tmp/lab, OLPC France)
* Ivan Chabanaud (Paradigme.org, selfworld.net, chabalab.fr)
* Florian Fainelli (OpenWRT, OpenPattern, /tmp/lab, OLPC France)
* Emmanuel Ferrand (Institut Mathimatique de Jussieu, Universiti Pierre et Marie Curie, Art sonore et post-musique, Labo Technologies Libres, La Ginirale Nord-Est)
* Emmanuel Gadaix (ZCAV, Telecom Security Task Force)
* Jim Geovedi (Bellua, Electrojunkies)
* The Grugq (Pirates sans pantalon)
* Jaromil (dyne.org)
* Philippe Langlois (/tmp/lab, TSTF, Le groupe sans nom, OLPC France, Bricolabs, PSP)
* Aymeric Mansoux (goto10.org)
* Lyle Mars (/tmp/lab)
* Xavier Martin (IT Crowd)
* Raphael Massi (Interstice)
* Marion MASSON (Grep|grrls)
* Erik Minkkinen (Leplacard.org, B|ro)
* Jean-Nokl Montagni (Art Sensitif, CRAS Main D’Oeuvres, Bricolabs)
* Vianney Rancurel
* Patrice Riemens
* Nicolas Thill (OpenWRT, OpenPattern, /tmp/lab, OLPC France)
* Ulrike UHLIG (Grep|grrls)
* Hellekin O. Wolf (Cepheide)
* Fyodor Yarochkin (oOo, Guard Info)
* Anthony Zboralski (Bellua)
* Jeremie Zimmermann (April)

3/ Submission guidelines

3.A/ All the proposal must include the following information:

* Title of the submission:
* Presenter Name:
* Organization / Company:
* Short bio:
* Summary / Abstract:
* Topics/Keywords:
* Includes a demonstration? YES/NO
* A new tool or version is released during this event? YES/NO
* Format: Conference / Workshop / Demonstration
* Internet connectivity needed? YES / NO
* Language: French / English

3.B/ Acceptable formats
* Open Document
* PDF
* Plain Text
* RTF

3.C/Address

Send your submission to:
hsf2008-cfp@lists.tmplab.org

3.D/ Dates
Submission begins: 19 March 2008
Submission deadline: 15 May 2008
Accepted submission notification: 20 May 2008 Program publication: 20 May 2008

The exhibition project in Berlin, HACK.Fem.EAST, seeks to present experimental and artistic practices of artists and activists working in digital networks in Eastern Europe. The focus of the exhibition is on presenting a use of media located somewhere between hacking, art and activism which is driven forward by an international counterculture and avant-garde: the main protagonists are women or projects in which women play an important role. The aim of the project is to provide and to develop a network platform. This will be achieved through five elements: the exhibition, the workshops (Free Space), a conference, a publication in newspaper format, and a website bringing the aspects of the project together.

Existing networks from 11 countries are at the heart of the project and form the basis of the exhibition. A total of 11 networks will be invited to the various rooms of the Kunstraumes Kreuzberg / Bethanien to introduce their work, their strategies and their aims in the form of installations, documentations and presentations. The result is a “network of networks”, visualized in the form of video screenings, installations, computer presentations and documents.

The activists will be offering a weekly workshop (Free Space) throughout the duration of the exhibition. The workshops will be based on the respective presentations in the exhibition as well as on and aims and activities that have been developed further in the context of the project.

A conference held at the outset of the project is intended to bring the lines and networks together and discuss on women perspective in the Eastern cultural scenario. Its aim is to provide a forum for a form of politics based on radical invention - media and internet art projects, performances, network platforms, software development, artistic coding, organisation of media festivals, etc. As part of the publicity for the exhibition, a Berlin daily newspaper (taz) will be publishing a so-called NGO-supplement in an edition of 30.000 copies to coincide with the opening. It will include articles that provide an introduction to the subject and give details regarding the programme.

An integral component of the project is of course the website, with an up-to-date and open presentation of the project’s processes and developments, summarizing them and putting them up for discussion.

Contacts: Tatiana Bazzichelli t.bazzzichelli [at] mclink.it Gaia Novati gaianovaz [at] gmail.com

The Influencers explores controversial forms of art and communication guerrilla, presenting independent projects that play with global popular culture, infiltrate the mass media, and transform fashions, consumption and technological fetishism. The key to The Influencers is found in its guests and stories: impostors, pseudo-totalitarian musicians, conceptual hackers, deviant geographers, anarchitects and actors from invisible theatre. In these three days they are going to present their work, show known and less known material and speak with the public about challenges, goals and strategies.

With The Influencers, the border between disciplines is erased (since the message really is the message, and the medium is just a tactic), links between apparently distant projects are found, and bold genealogies are drawn between different countries and generations. Ambiguities are also explored and contradictions are discussed. In the manipulation of everyday symbols, as well as within what is excessive and politically incorrect, we will possibly find inspiration for changing the present and imagining the future.

Digg.com is a site that allows people all over the globe to discuss and vote on (”digg”) stories. The most popular and talked about stories rise to the top of the page where millions of viewers will see them. Likewise, this button is a simple project that we hope the collective power of Digg will use as a basis for new hacks, mods and projects.

We already have a couple simple projects to get people started: how to power it from USB or batteries, how to make it scroll a simple message, etc. We’ll be updating the mods as more people get their hands on the kits.

For every sale of the Digg button kit we’re giving $1 to the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation). The kit is currently in its first release; new colors and other projects will be available. We even have a plan for making it interface directly to digg.com! (Stay tuned…)

The Digg kit was created when Phillip Torrone (Makezine.com), Kevin Rose (Digg.com) and myself (Ladyada) met up for a drink. We thought it might be interesting to inspire the next generation of technologists and hobbyists who frequent Digg with a fun and easy project that not only teaches but is a lot of fun. [from Limor Fried aka Ladyada, via Architectradure]

Limor Fried is a recent graduate of the MIT Media Lab where she earned a Masters of Engineering in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. For her thesis, Limor developed and built subversive electronic devices, including a pair of glasses that darken whenever television is in view and a jamming device that disables people’s annoying cell phone conversations at the press of a button. She releases much of her work in the form of DIY kits or instruction sets, including persistence of vision displays for bikes, a home brew synthesizer, and a minty iPod charger.

Matthew Fuller: How do you figure ‘the body’ or the biopolitical in your discussion of viruses? Clearly it would be possible to simply fall into the trap of equating computer viruses with biological ones, to mistake the metaphor for the thing named. On the other hand it is possible to trace the ways in which the term has been used to mark a cross-over between categories that is about a kind of understanding of kinds of behaviours not delimited by material instantiation, for instance a certain kind of dynamic of proliferation, that makes the term meaningful. What are the stakes in following this through?

Jussi Parikka: Following a metaphorical line of thought from the beginning would have been the easy way out, writing an analysis of the metaphorics and representations of viruses in popular media. Indeed, that was the way much of virus discourse was approached especially in the 1990s, analysing the translations and linguistic passages between diseases of bodies and diseases of networks. Naturally language has been an essential part of the creation of the so-called viral discourse, but I am keen on insisting at least on two things: 1) language and metaphorics should not be seen as primarily or solely signifying systems but as part of wider material assemblages and that 2) the biopolitics of computer systems is about many other things besides language as well (two related issues of course.)

So firstly, following Deleuze and Guattari, language works as order-words, which is quite evident in the case of software. Whereas it would be interesting to approach software itself as an order-word (where the execution is a defining part of the event of computer systems), the linguistic acts that frame, stabilised and valorise software could be understood as such acts of power and knowledge that try to give a consistency to the contested questions of “what is proper software?”, “what is illegal software?”, “what kind of software and network events are allowed, by whom?” Here, as you note, it is also a question of cross-overs between categories, very tactical cross-overs indeed, of translating and smuggling elements from another, foreign realm to for example technological networks. Here “virality” can perhaps be used as a term that flags towards this virulence of trespassing categories, something I wanted to integrate intimately as part of the methodology of Digital Contagions.

What is troubling with the metaphoric accounts of cultural reality, for example technology, is that they reintroduce a dualist ontology of things in themselves (which should be left untouched by the cultural analyst) and the representations, the linguistic representations we have of them which is supposed to be the terrain of cultural studies. Naturally, this introduces the age old hylomorphic scheme of matter as passive, waiting for a cultural studies scholar to breath life into it. So in other words, I would characterize Digital Contagions not being interested in language per se, but in how it cuts through, intervenes, frames and engages in the messy assemblages not made purely of material “things”, or “processes”, but neither purely of symbolic actions, significations, valorizations.

Hence, the question of biopolitics of network bodies, the biopolitics of viruses and other software. I try to think this through via the Deleuzian framework of allowing bodies to be of various kinds and scales: from bodies of humans, to bodies of software, networks, etc. Michel Foucault and people drawing from his work, like Jonathan Crary and Giorgio Agamben, have of course paved the way towards understanding the crucial mission of modern politics being not that of human being and their linguistic acts (their social life as rational, communicating beings) but as having to do with the “bare life”, the life beyond or in a way “before” human beings as metaphor-using communicators. The birth of modern media culture is one of tapping into the intensive animal reservoirs of the human being: for Foucault this referred to the biological features of the human being (as a species), for Crary, this referred to the new physiological experiments tapping into this human being as a fleshy, animal body. Braidotti has recently wanted to emphasize the animality of this layer by referring instead of “bios” to the concept of “zoe”.

What I wanted to do was to continue this line of thought to technological systems, and biopolitics of software, where the question was not reducible to what people say or think about software, networks, digital technologies, but how the biopolitics of digital culture is not interested (only) in controlling human minds, but the intensive life of software, for example - taking the material assemblages as its object, in a way. Thus, this calls for an ethology of software, of looking at the objects and processes as affects capable of forging relations, making connections, interactions and exchanges.

MF: In writing about the cultural aspects of software there is a real imperative to technical accuracy. Firstly because if this is not achieved it makes the possibility of dialogue with those in the area primarily concerned with technical aspects quite difficult. Secondly, there is a kind of rigour required which is likely to produce new ideas rather than act as a blockage. How have you handled this in Digital Contagions, and how do you see this question developing?

JP: This is a question or an agenda that I learned to appreciate through German media theory, first via reading Friedrich Kittler, then Wolfgang Ernst among others. It also relates to what I just wrote about trying to think beyond the metaphorics of media culture and try to understand the more accurate expressions, techniques and ways of articulation that a medium might use beyond the human representations of it. So technical accuracy is a question of ontology (an often banned word in cultural studies) but as you suggest, it has the potential of acting as a vector beyond the confines of disciplinary boundaries. Now I do not consider myself expert concerning the technical characteristics of computer viruses, but related to the biopolitics question I see that a meticulous interest in this field is of crucial significance.

What recent years of approaches to networks, software and computer systems have achieved is a growing understanding of the questions of immanence of technology and power. Instead of bracketing the materiality of technology in the cultural studies agenda of ideology, much of the research done has succeeded in demonstrating how technologies in their very materiality channel and refashion power relations. They are not only second order phenomena of “social” struggles in the sense of “social” being something removed from the material. An understanding of the technologies at hand is a key prerequisite for an understanding of what kind of new modulations of reality we are dealing with. But I would not perhaps too swiftly call this as an aid in communication or dialogue, because it supposes that the concepts, or the “understanding of technologies at hand”, are transparently stable objects. Instead, also this material level is very much contested and what is crucial to me is not only an approach that takes into account of what kind of technologies we are dealing and tries to find the truth of e.g. software there but an approach which discusses this in terms of materiality that is continuously processual, not pinned down to a certain essence whether technological or social. Instead, we are continuously dealing with processes that are translational, in the process of being defined and across platforms. Not every computer scientist or anti-virus researcher is happy with what I write about viruses, quite the contrary, I’ve encountered arguments that I do not understand the technical reality of what I am talking about and that taking into account e.g. alternative voices in fiction is just leading my analyses astray. Again, in such statements we find the desire to pin down the truth of computer viruses to a certain technical knowledge, cut off from the translations and processes this weird overdetermined object is articulated in. So in addition to valorising technical accuracy, I would like to insist more widely on the materiality of the phenomenon at hand, a materiality that is irreducible to “agreed on” technical characteristics, a materiality that takes into account the various levels of relations and definitions of networks and software. Rigour is a good word, as it connotates a different thing as “technical accuracy”: it takes into account that one can be attuned to the materiality of the networks at hand, but without taking such a stance that “first you have to sort your facts out, then you can make your interpretations of those facts.” If we could do that, we would already have a fixed framework for those interpretations.

MF: Your period of study of computer viruses ends in 1995. Could you say something about why you choose this period as being significant, and what were the aspects of viruses you’d like to have covered in the subsequent period?

JP: Yes, the period my study covers is approximately from the early computer era after the World War II onto approximately the emergence of the “popular Internet.” In a way this is of course stupid to stop there when the Internet was becoming an everyday reality instead of just a discursive promise of a networked future that was proposed in various platforms from professional computer journals to popular culture. But it is also because of this seeming paradox that the earlier period is interesting. For example the security discourse around viruses emerged at the end of the 1980s, and much of the techniques, tactics, and framings we use to make sense and control malware were not so evident at first. Focusing on the earlier period gives one access to the actual genealogical emergence of the phenomena and a truly historical take on the forces that gave consistency to the viral and other forms of malware. Here, one sees the recurring tropes emerging, like the curious insistence in computer security discourse to move from technical issues to social ones. So continuously, from 1960s on, you have the idea of “it’s the human being that is the problem, not the computer or the program” being articulated, similarly as the idea that “there is no good virus”, since the 1980s. Or then the continuous doom laden adverts and discourses warning of “data loss” at least since the early 1980s before viruses; “data loss disasters” to databases and personal computers due to various reasons from natural phenomena like the lightning to malicious intended crime, all of which in a way “paved the way” for viruses to fit into the already stated fear of data loss as a key danger of digital society.

Also, in terms of programs, much of the interesting stuff was done already in the 1950s and 1960s like the Darwin program or early rabbit batch jobs in mainframes. One of those, from 1966, included a RUNCOM command script repeating itself continuously which would then constipate the system (as David Ferbrache suggests in his ‘A Pathology of Computer Viruses’ book). Or how Kevin Driscoll attributed the emergence of viruses not to a specific program but to a short piece instruction, MOVE (Program Counter) –> Program Counter + 1, where the “virus” is less a program entity than an instruction that is continously on the move to the next memory location. Besides being curious examples of an “archaeology of the computer virus”, such processes should be taken as compelling issues that force us to think the digital culture in a historically tuned field.

This choice to focus on the pre-1995 period is in accordance with my belief that historical and temporal perspectives can bring forth novel rewirings and short-circuitings for present discussions and practices. Hence, Digital Contagions analyzes the media archaeology of this specific computer accident as a symptom of a more abstract cultural diagram. The digital virus is not solely an internal computer problem but a trace of cultural trends connected to consumer capitalism, digitality and networking as the central cultural platforms of late twentieth century as well as the media ecology and the so-called biological diagram of the computer where the biological sciences are actively interfaced with computer science often with a special emphasis on bottom-up emergence. Again, we are moving much beyond the more narrow take on recent years of “actual” viruses, and focusing on the archaeological transcrossings of the phenomena. Despite the often-stated idea of cultural studies, in its broad sense, being an approach that takes historical perspectives at its core, most of this is done in a very vague fashion, neglecting e.g. historical examples or reducing them to curiosities. Another way to consider historical perspectives is to contrast them with the affirmative perspective of becomings, which repeats a certain Deleuzian dualism: history as the regime of the State Archive and becomings as ahistorical creations. Instead of repeating this dualism, I wanted to approach the possibility of media archaeology as a nomadic cultural analysis, where “history” is not a marker of “already beens” but a potential, a potentiality that can be rewired into new assemblages of the future. Historically tuned cultural analysis cannot be reduced to a status of repeating the sources, but can be seen as one of summoning events as Foucault coined it.

Of course, this does not mean that focusing on recent years would not provided fresh perspectives. But there are people working already on this, like Tony Sampson from University of East London, finishing a book on cultural theory and viruses. I myself would have definitely refined my take in relation to e.g. botnets, wrote a few more words on net art viruses (which I am doing for the forthcoming Spam Book) and also more carefully would have covered the phenomena of terrorism.

MF: With viruses aimed at mobile phones running Symbian such as Cabir and Cardtrp, the latter which also crosses between Windows machines, the platforms for viruses are becoming more diverse. But with events such as the attacks on Estonian networks and the apparent existence of very large scale botnets, the broader category of ‘malware’ is itself becoming more infrastructural, more built into the internet. How does the figure of the virus work in this wider context?

JP: For sure, the notion of the “virus” or “viral” is in danger of becoming a floating signifier, a notion used for anything related to malware or in contrast, anything “cool” and “rebellious”. This relates to the earlier question concerning technical specificity which can be seen as one way of getting oneself out of the swamp of metaphoricity and vagueness and looking into how on the material level certain types of software function. My point was in general that malware has from early on been infrastructural to the Internet and network societies, this has been evident from early computer security texts since the 1960s on. The shift from protecting computers from human beings to protecting them from malicious software started around 1970s, and the notion of the incidental nature of the viral with networks feeds nicely into this as well. This is why I used the notion of the “universal viral machine” from Fred Cohen, the computer virus research pioneer: to underline that in the age of networked computers, viruses in Turing machines can be thought of as potentially semi-autonomous processes, a ‘”Universal Viral Machine” which can evolve any “computable number”.’ Cohen describes in his early work from 1980s (his PhD thesis came out in 1986) a weird world of computer processes without human interventions, there is not much mention of “intentions” or “social constructions” of computers, but anonymous processes, turing machines, evolutionary sets and also e.g. “Universal Protection Machines” that are aimed to combat the Viral Machines by maintaining subject object matrixes, sequences to be interpreted, the rights of subjects to objects, scheduling of processes etc.

But we should not be blinded to think that because of the underlying Turing sequences, the processes are not system specific and material. Botnets are not the same as early 1990s viruses, nor is the 1988 Morris worm the same thing as current network worms that can spread across the globe in a matter of hours. Several of the early viruses got “extinct” because of technological obsolescence, their ways of proliferation via e.g. floppy disks becoming obsolescent. Much of the talk surrounding the new viruses suggests at least implicitly that viruses and their programmers are continuously finding new platforms and almost universal ways of propagation like via the Bluetooth in mobile phones. However, even though not being an expert on this issue, I understand that for example the Cabir worm relies much on the “kindness of the user” than on a system vulnerability, as e.g. the recipient has to accept to receive the particular piece of data package before the worm spreads. With Cardtrap, despite its malicious payload, it does not seem to work even with all Windows machines where the phone memory card might actually be carrying the Trojan but the autorun file did not at least according to F-Secure information work on Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2000. Again, much more than demonstrating the universality of the viral in the sense of cross platform spreading (which in a way is true as well) this also refers to the metastability of programs and their environments and how easily “things just don’t work” so to speak. This is the reason why Mark Ludwig flagged in the 1990s already that true evolution in software environments - at least the everyday environments like with Windows - is quite a far-fetched dream (or a fear) as the operating systems and software are just too unstable to allow for a random mutation that would work.

As for botnets, it’s the zombie side to them that is interesting. Eugene Thacker has been digging into the zombie world of contemporary biopolitics, looking at contagion and transmission through this figure of the undead, the life on the border of zoe and bios. Again, I would use the idea of the botnet to illustrate how power operates (also) on the level of ahuman technical, before or between the human social bind. Capturing computers in a zombie network is not reducible to a work of ideology, or as in the case of attacks against the sites of Estonian government and other public bodies to a work of international politics (even if it also was touched as the diplomatic relations between Russia and Estonia were involved), but a whole another layer of politics, working at the level of infections, software and networks. A lot of the analysis surrounding the attacks was seeing this from the viewpoint of international relations of two governmental bodies, but more interesting are the sub-governmental forces in action and also the sub-social forces that were harnessed as part of the international politics.

MF: One of the things that is interesting about viruses and other related kinds of software is their approach to computers and networks as a set of experimental zones. Towards the end of your book you mention Stefan Helmreich’s call for a ‘playful science’, showing how Artificial Life can correspond to this. At the same time, Viruses seem to have a slightly different form of playfulness to them. If we can adopt the language of probability for a moment, we could say that because Alife, generally (aside from interesting working done in evolutionary hardware, or in aspects of CrystalPunk work) tends to remain within well-defined boundaries, that of the model for instance. Whilst it has the capacity of offering a ‘theoretical’ playfulness, its is limited to a particular scale of activity. Viruses on the other hand offer a fully ‘experimental’ that is, more multi-dimensional, unpredictable way of inhabiting and shaping the networks. It sets in play are sets of conjunctions that are not simply within the domain of the software per se. The focus on malware tends rather to limit this. Your book calls for a more playful approach, where do you see the most useful historical resources for such playfulness? Which unexplored viral domains are most potentially interesting?

JP: In a more straightforward vein, one could see my book as Foucauldian mapping of how the notion and powers of viral sets became territorialized and captured under the notion of malware, which acted not only as a repressive mechanism but produced a huge amount of books, advice, security instructions, manoeuvres, software etc. But to track this playfulness works a bit further on the issue. This actually relates to the question earlier you asked about why I stopped my analysis in 1995. It is just because the much more surprising stuff is found earlier, trying to follow the related strands of viral programming and the birth of network paradigms in computer labs. I was fascinated to hear from the early pioneers Like Doug McIllroy, Vic Vyssotsky and Ken Thompson of their early experiences with computer ecologies of self-perpetuating programs. In a way, the obvious connection with early experiments had to do with the Cold War and security discourses, but I would say that much of the work done was not reducible to that functionality but also worked on another level of fascination with the expressions of these programs. For example, the simple game called Darwin that tried to out-populate the game ecology by “killing” other programs and spreading its own code is an interesting example. It was popularized later by A.K. Dewdney in Scientific American and now known as Core Wars. But what for example Mark Ludwig flagged in his “black books of computer viruses” is that alife viruses are more or less dysfunctional. Due to the fundamental instability of most of computer systems, even small changes in code cause most likely only system crashes, no evolution. Hence, one has to deal with very limited scales, as you mention, and more interestingly speculate on the possibilities of for example evolving programs. It is a bit same thing as with artificial life art, where the genetically grown forms are indeed interesting and as an idea it has much to contribute, but besides the certain amount of forms “grown”, it starts to get repetitious (without a difference). Another problem in the whole artificial life virus discussion was the rigid way of dealing with the issue: to come up with a minimum qualifying definitions for an entity to be living (definitions adopted from observation of biological entities mostly) and then comparing this to computer viruses. Not a very interesting way to approach the issue - even though alife research has aspired to move away from this model-thinking onto a simulacra-approach, as Claus Emmeche suggested some time ago. In any case, instead of merely following such paths, I wanted to proposed a Spinozian ethological way of approaching “life” not as a substance, not as a form, but as an intensive life of affects, of interactions and relations where the life of technical bits is not to be removed from the life of other scales, or other assemblages. So life is not a metaphor adopted from biology and biology a model used to imitate the intensive code life of programs, but life becomes a movement, interaction and affects. This is the idea of playfulness as well: that the “ecologies” of media are not prefixed, stable natura naturata kind of mechanics in the service of capitalism, but also active virtual ecologies of natura naturans, of creation, probing and experimenting. To put it into Foucauldian vocabulary: let’s leave it to the police to decide whether the stuff really is alive.

Often the more interesting “living” experiments are the earlier, less researched experiments. What also definitely would need much more research are the wonderful early computer ecologies of for example Nils Barricelli, Oliver Selfridge and Beatrice and Sydney Rome, all developing already in the 1950s systems that are relevant to the topic of experimental sciences of computational life. Even if not touching on viruses per se, they speculated in their work on how to make ecological and evolutionary models work with a computational platform and how to make that kind of computation useful. Now if Cohen tried to figure out the usefulness of viral machines in the 1980s, these persons were speculating on this stuff already 30 years earlier! For example Barricelli did not want his work to be seen under the representational paradigm of computers modelled on life, but underlining that the stuff on symbiogenesis in computers is really there, as simulations. In other words, the simulation did not offer information on biological parasites and ecologies, but was an end in itself in offering a computer system that could work in terms of interdependencies, connectedness, symbiotic relations. As interesting are for example Oliver Selfridge’s Pandemonium experiments with semi-autonomous code of demons that “evolve” at least in a restricted way. Computation was understood there as a statistical mesh, a parallel processing based on the connected sum of “shrieks” every data demon of the system communicated to others. This also showed a system of distributed intelligence, as already Manuel DeLanda noted earlier, where such projects were seen as part of the genealogy of passing control from the human to distributed systems. In such a system, ideally, control “floats” from a demon to another which can take up on various functions, enter into flexible changing relations based on the global characteristics of the system that continuously feeds into the local relations of the demons. What is of course funny is how there is a curious correspondance between such computer system characteristics and the post-Fordist notions of e.g. work skills as branded by needed flexibility, adaptation to change, fluid communication…

Another theme are the experimental aesthetics of (technological) failure that characterise modernity. There is whole history of things breaking down, of course, and art has of course been one key practice of modernity where the failures of systems of technology, organisation and control have been catalyzed and experimented upon. This is the famous Paul Virilio’s notion of technical modernity: that accidents are incidental to their functioning. The accident of any system is a future horizon, a virtuality that might not ever actualize but it is still there in reality - often expressed only in statistics, worst-case scenarios and like, or then in simulated accidents by media artists. How much of the early avantgarde “media art” was based on exactly these impossible machines on the edge of breaking down, a Dadaist notion of technological modernity. One wonderful example would be George Perec’s 1960s radio play La Machine where a computer programmed to dissect and recompose in variations Goethe’s poem of The Wanderer’s Night Song. As Florian Cramer writes in his Words Made Flesh, Perec’s imaginary variation computer crashes and the input data turns into a program, working like an self-perpetuating email virus. I do not know whether I would agree with Cramer’s conclusion that this testifies with the superiority of semantics resisting syntactical programming, but I agree that this is an interesting experiment of aesthetics of failure, aesthetics of accidents. So perhaps the playfulness, in general, is trying to think beyond the most obvious choices, to think beyond the security discourse (which is a highly interesting topic of course) towards the experimental takes on viruses and accidents.

MF: Looking at art viruses, such as Biennale.py or those of Tomasso Tozzi in the 1980s there is clearly a further set of parallel imaginaries going on here. With tens of thousands of viruses in the wild, can you imagine or identify a particular strain working with a particular pattern of art methodologies?

JP: The art viruses, especially the Biennale.py project, fits nicely into this geneaology of aesthetics of accidents in its task to create an iconographics of malicious code. I think one of the fundamental successes of the project was to question the ontology of software and the distributed nature of the coded environment. On what level do micropolitics of software function, was an implicit key question of the project, which seemed to refuse a simple answer when distributing the code on t-shirts but also in expensive CD-ROMs etc. - while at the same time insisting on the harmless, invisible nature of the execution of the code. But beyond the way it was framed as part of art (as part of the Venice Biennale), what are the singular points to focus on?

I think Jaromil put it very poetically in the I Love You-exhibition catalogue when referring to digital viruses as a form of making (digital) language stutter in the manner Rimbaud and Verlaine made French stutter as part of an earlier challenge to transparent ways of seeing language. There is a threshold where code turns against itself and into a political gesture, or as Jaromil wrote: “In that chaos, viruses are spontaneous compositions which are like lyrical poems in causing imperfections in machines “made to work” and in representing the rebellion of our digital serfs.”

From existing viruses in the wild, one could perhaps extract certain methodological principles. Much of them relate to finding the threshold just on the border of working and not-working: a virus that destroys completely the system is of relatively small use, instead much more interesting are the ones who are able to infiltrate the system and still keep it working (in a moderated form). That is, to find the threshold, the minimum level of a system before its flipping into a crash. In a way, this could be of course continued to the point of going over the threshold, of letting go of the control structures and seeing what comes up - of exposing oneself to the viral algorithms, as Joseph Nechvatal does with his viral paintings, which demonstrate how the viral noise is not antithetical to the ordered creations of art - virus itself can be turned into an emerging explorations of patterns in painting or in music. Here, variation becomes primacy, and the planned line and sounds are exposed to continuous slight variations of algorithmic kind. The methodological clue in general with viruses being: take any banal repetitious action without an inherent meaning, repeat the action or habit to the point when it starts to change, a point where the pure repetition produces difference from itself. This again can be seen as tracking the smallest differences and thresholds emerging in any systematic action and/or habit.

Another interesting theme is how the algorithmic logic of viruses feeds much beyond the computer code realm and takes advantage of the presumed sociability of human relations. Take the I Love You virus, a simple exercize in unfilled desire perhaps, feeding on the wish of getting a confirmation of love from someone. Or in another form, the gambler virus of early 1990s which forced the user play for the contents of the hard drive; answer incorrectly, and you will lose. This played with a certain mythology of a “demon in the machine”, of the computer possessed which was a theme of Jodi’s early work of course (I think Alessandro Ludovico referred to their projects as insurrecting a certain alien presence in the computer which is a nice way to put it.) The virus examples mark the passing point or interfacing of the human being, but besides just focusing on the idea of the human being as the emotional, fallible creature, more interesting is to see the viruses, for example I Love You and other attachment viruses, as using to their advantage the habits of the user - of tapping into the presumed bodily habits where the meaning of an attachment is to open it etc.

Or then, to just track the parasitic movement and logic of the virus itself, as a way of exposing the dynamic logic of the net. Recently, the Google-Will-Eat-Itself took this parasitical logic of the Net to a new level by creating the paranoid-parasitical machine which draws money from Google to be used against itself. In a way perhaps this could be connected to the methodological ideal of “becoming imperceptible” and a move beyond identity politics. As argued by several Deleuzian writers, the becoming imperceptible of art is a much needed contrapunctual movement against the hegemony of representation analysis and identity thought where often only the only already recognized becomes an object of interest. How to come up with an action, experimentation that relies on the very notion of imperceptibility? An issue related to surveillance for sure, but perhaps also to art. In this context, Bertini’s Vi-Con is related to the notion of invisibility “Yazna and ++ are two viruses in love. They search for each other on the net, running through connected computers. Apart from other viruses, their passages won’t cause any damage to your computer [...]. Theirs is a soft passage, invisible, and extremely fragile.” [via nettime]