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.

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. By gathering together people from all these groups, we aim to stimulate both present and future collaboration between diverse disciplines, sectors and countries, through the medium of free software programs and the sharing of successful experiences related to free software and free technologies.

The Free Knowledge Institute and the SELF Consortium will collaborate to organise the content of the conference and to build strong relationships between attendees. The programme consists of an elegant mix between keynote speakers, panel discussions and parallel tracks on topics such as Social implications of Free Knowledge and Free Technologies, Technological aspects of e-learning, Learning Standards, Free Software in society, Legal issues of Free Knowledge, Free Knowledge in public bodies, the SELF Platform, and many more. During the social evening the Award Ceremony of the SELF Open Documentary Contest will take place.

Shirky takes a largely hands-off line - these are historical rapids, made turbulent by a Gutenberg-level of social transformation, in which the best we can do is to ’stay upright on our kayak’. Leadbeater believes that there are elements of mass collaboration - open source biology? ‘we-think’ between terrorists or criminal networks? - that politicians and citizens need to try and police, through some intervention in the enabling network infrastructures. (Lessig’s update of Code 2.0 - which I also reviewed in the Independent addresses this issue too.)

I’m no clearer from reading both of these powerful, comprehensive books what the right model for legal/political internet governance should be.

Any thoughts? On this, and on other issues that these books raise?

Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky. We-Think, by Charles Leadbeater
On the road to Wikitopia
Reviewed by Pat Kane, March 21, 2008

Have you noticed how much of a nethead you are these days? As one of these writers puts it, the internet gets socially interesting when it becomes technologically boring – when its tools become as banal to us as pen, paper, TV or telephone. Both these essential guides to web society could easily gather under the title (with a nod to Richard Hoggart), “the uses of techno-literacy”. But those uses turn out to be more important than serving the narcissism of the connected classes.

In Clay Shirky’s account, the power of the web is that its networks make it “ridiculously easy” to form groups. In the UK, this might sound familiar: the “little platoons” of civil society, as outlined by Smith, Ferguson and Burke in the 18th century. The cheaply printed and distributed pamphlet or journal drove “gentlemen of ideas” to coffee-houses in Edinburgh and London, as a blog forum can enable devotees of a cause to turn up in a front room in Hampstead or Halifax.

What Shirky is claiming as revolutionary is the combination of power and cheapness that social software offers – greatly amplifying our natural desire to create associations. If traditional organisations want to get large groups acting together, they usually need a costly hierarchy of management to orchestrate their thousands, or tens of thousands, of employees. And organisations, particularly commercial ones, will only do those (profitable) things that justify the expense of all that managerial structure.
What the fecund social chaos of the net reveals is that so much group activity can easily happen, if the “transactional costs” of organising it (as the jargon has it) are brought close to zero. Which is exactly what Web 2.0 does. Take the exemplar of this new world, Wikipedia. This extraordinary resource exists because the web allows it: those who have an idealism about education and knowledge (remember the Enlightenment?) can easily come together, mutually monitoring their contributions to a global encyclopedia. They can take their own time, too: when there are no institutional overheads, “you don’t have to be efficient, just effective”.

However, when the LA Times turned its op-eds into “wikitorials” in 2005 – open to emendation by all – it was an abuse-ridden disaster. Many suppressed voices finally got their chance to rail at editorial pomposity. Wikis work “when people are committed to the outcomes… when they augment community, not replace it”. Our social tools, says Shirky without a hint of a blush, “are turning love and care into a renewable building material”. If people stopped believing in the Wikipedian ideal, and used its tools for vandalism, “it’s unlikely the whole enterprise would survive a week”.

Shirky attempts to be as usable as the technology he writes about. He provides the clearest explanation I have yet read of why Microsoft is being challenged by open-source software communities like Linux. In an echo of Beckett’s “fail again, fail better”, it turns out that the costs of perpetual innovation in open-source are amazingly low. It might look an uneven and erratic process from a Microsoft manager’s perspective, but all this perpetual tinkering (”more like accreting a coral reef, than building a car”) is enough to produce an operating system immensely cheaper but just as robust as Bill Gates’s offering.

Here Comes Everybody has a refreshing interest in activism, rather than yet more digital pabulum for worried CEOs. Shirky is interested in how social software can help human-rights protesters in Belarus, the Philippines or Egypt raise a stink; how it can allow Catholics to protest against Church corruption, or help frequently-stranded flyers demand a bill of consumer rights from aviation behemoths.

He evinces a Tom-Paine-ish belief in the power of informed grassroots democracy, but effectively throws his hands up faced with the flipside of US politics – how these social tools can also “increase the resilience of networked terrorist groups”. The spread of the web is like “steering a kayak” in an unstoppable technological stream. “Our principle challenge is not to decide where we want to go but rather to stay upright as we go there.”

To Charles Leadbeater, who used to advise Tony Blair and quotes both the young Milibands in his acknowledgements, such a hands-off approach to steering social development is anathema. Covering many of the same case studies as Shirky, the tone of We-Think is more like a benign guardian looking over the playground of the web, hoping gently to encourage or discourage particular behaviours.

Leadbeater raises some useful questions. No one could object to sprawling processes of “mass innovation” creating public encyclopedias and seed banks for developing countries, turning cities into giant learning spaces and citizens into journalists. Leadbeater’s mantra “we are what we share” could conceivably become “an economy’s motive force”, particularly if consumerism begins to hit the limits of ecological sustainability hard. A vision of living as an active, creative player-with-others has inspired this particular reviewer for many years.

But, as he reminds us, some areas – such as care services – won’t be affected by We-Think: “you cannot change a wet nappy with a text message”. Nor harvest food, nor extract minerals, nor generate energy. Although the participatory structure of the web was founded by a singular mix of values (”the academic, the hippie, the peasant and the geek”), there’s no guarantee that happy ethos will guide all behaviour within its halls.

Are we ready for open-source biology, for example – a process of mass innovation based on our “sharing” of the genomic code? Do we want pro-ams in their garages fooling around with viruses and proteins, or accredited professionals? There are under-theorised questions of governance and control (and, maybe more importantly, self-control) in web culture. Leadbeater is right to alert us to them.

We-Think concludes, correctly, that the message about the developed world that web culture delivers – trust, collaboration and shared goods, in pursuit of better ideas, based on solid evidence – is much more attractive than the “Coke and carbines” that too much of the planet has been used to from the West. He holds out the tantalising prospect that these soft, pliable new tools from the master might be more enthusiastically grasped and applied by developing countries than by our own. If that happens, then the daily banality of the web may herald the most exciting of historical processes. There’s more than YouTube, Facebook and viagra spam to come down those wires yet.

Pat Kane is the author of The Play Ethic, and one half of Hue and Cry.

iDC — mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (distributedcreativity.org) iDC[at]mailman.thing.net
https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc
List Archive: http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/
iDC Photo Stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/
RSS feed: http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc
iDC Chat on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647
Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref

Another reason Thayer released an online version is because of its “documentation.” The “about this work” link reveals the source-code for the work, which Thayer has open-sourced under a GPL license. He writes “The source-code is presented in a framework I’ve designed called CodeChat.”

Separated into three categories — (1) Visualizer client (what you see), (2) Image retrieval, image manipulation and network communication, and (3) Real-time seismic data retrieval — “it’s a web-based, threaded discussion forum that allows for separate discussion at each line of the code. What I do to start things off is put in a few comments, trying to focus mostly on the conceptual and aesthetic implications of the lines I choose to comment on as I want the discussion to be more at that level rather than a technical level. By doing this what I’m pointing out … is that everything you need to know about the work is in the code … (which) can easily be materialized … (W)hen galleries and museums are wondering how to preserve this type of art, they should be looking at preserving the source-code.“

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.

Disclosures is a multi-faceted project that looks at the manifestations of Open Source methodologies in fields of cultural production outside of the Internet. Openness – or its technological underpinning, Open Source – here refers to situations in which the viewer, reader, listener or Internet user becomes emancipated through egalitarian participation, collaborative authorship and/or the breaking down of hierarchical and social boundaries.

If openness is found in varied cultural practices, it matches certain systems and economies (internet-based or media practices) better than others (the artworld or the film and music industries). Issues around Intellectual Property and copyright – and the question of whether or not diffuse authorship and unrestrictive distribution are financially viable – come immediately to mind. Meanwhile, assessing the socio-economic, political and cultural conditions for openness is a necessary step.

A second reading of openness revolves around the idea of transparency and of availability of information. Of relevance here are practices which are committed to releasing public information and resources that have been out of civic reach for political, economic, historic or bureaucratic reasons. Disclosures will address histories and genealogies that inscribe themselves outside of the rigid bonds of ‘monopolistic’ versus ‘alternative’ social and cultural activity.

A range of practitioners, from tactical media practitioners, to cultural theorists, music producers and artists, will help identify and discuss references and strategies that have been common to two interrelated areas of practice: critical media practice and socially-collaborative work in the expanded visual art field. The various facets of the project will attempt to find a common language and to set up the basis for improved understanding and greater collaboration between the two fields.

LAUNCH

Date: Thursday 27 March 2008, 20.00–01.00
Location: Mother/333
Participants: Oliver Ressler | Eileen Simpson and Ben White (Open Music Archive)

SEMINAR

Dates: Saturday 29 - Sunday 30 March 2008, 10.30–19.30
Location: Toynbee Hall (Saturday 29th) and Middlesex Street Estate (Sunday 30th)
Participants: Electronest | Critical Practice | Ilze Black | Tim Jones | Saul Albert | Marina Vishmidt | The MicroPolitics Research Group | Nenad Romic | Simon Sheikh | Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre | Neil Kenlock | Marysia Lewandowska | Toni Prug | Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran | Adnan Hadzi | Harold Offeh | The People Speak | Emily Druiff | Tony Nwachukwu and Gavin Alexander | Matthew Fuller | Usman Haque | Tsila Hassine | Goldin+ Senneby | agency | Mai Abu ElDahab | Francis McKee | Rodrigo Nunes

FILM AND READING LIBRARY

Dates: Preview on Thursday 10 April, runs till Sunday 18 May. Open Wed-Sun, 12.00–18.00
Location: Gasworks, 155 Vauxhall Street, London SE11 5RH
Films by: Shaina Anand | Amy Balkin | Neil Cummings, Marysia Lewandowska, Eileen Simpson, Ben White | Carles Guerra | Nicoline von Harskamp | Tsila Hassine | Abhishek Hazra | Kurator | The League of Noble Peers | Oliver Ressler | Ashok Sukumaran

FLOATING EVENTS

Date: Thursday 10 April, 18.30-19.30
Location: Gasworks
Event: Deleted Swedish stories. A performative lecture by artist Petra Bauer to launch the library.

Date: Friday 11 April, 19.00-21.00
Location: Gasworks
Screening: Lavorare con Lentezza - Radio Alice 100.6 Mhz (2004) dir. Guido Chiesa, scriptwriters: Guido Chiesa and Wu Ming (duration 111 min); followed by a discussion with artist Petra Bauer and philosopher Rodrigo Nunes.

Date: Monday 21 April, 11.00-16.00
Location: Ben Pimlott Building, Seminar Room, Digital Studios, Goldsmiths University of London, New Cross SE14 6NW
Workshop: Taxi to Praxi (and back again): the next layer research day, a collaboration between Armin Medosch and Adnan Hadzi to address and discuss some of the generic, rather than discipline-specific, challenges of undertaking practice-based research within academia.

Date: Sunday 18 May, 12.00-20.00
Location: Gasworks
Screening: La Commune (1999) dir. Peter Watkins (duration 345 min). Includes breaks with refreshments, food and discussions. This event will mark the closing of the library.

Disclosures is supported by Arts Council England, Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, Henry Moore Foundation and the Austrian Cultural Forum, London. Disclosures is part of NODE.London Spring ‘08.

About Gasworks: Founded in 1994, Gasworks is an art organisation based in South London, housing twelve artists’ studios and proposing a programme of exhibitions and events, artists’ residencies, international fellowships and educational projects. Gasworks focuses on visual arts practice in its broadest sense, working discursively with UK-based and international artists to facilitate the development of their work. Gasworks’ programme is committed to providing a responsive context for the work of emerging and mid-career artists, and to disseminating critical practices to a wider audience. Gasworks is part of Triangle Arts Trust, an international network of artists and organisations.

In 2008 the training will take place in Thessaloniki (Greece) and Sofia (Bulgaria) and will be available in three sessions:

- General Blender techniques, tips and tricks
- Media content for the web, e-Marketing, streaming techniques
- Advanced Blender techniques, external rendering engines, Python scripting

Deadline: April 10.

Each session has a participation fee of 1000 Euro, that covers the training and 6 days accommodation in Sofia, including coffee-breaks and lunches. Scholarships will be available.

Ten development grants of up to $2,000 will be awarded to individuals and collectives using ShiftSpace as a platform to create new “Spaces” and “Trails”.

About ShiftSpace: While the Internet’s design is widely understood to be open and distributed, control over how users interact online has given us largely centralized and closed systems. The web is undergoing a transformation whose promise is user empowerment - but who controls the terms of this new read / write web? The web has followed the physical movement of the city’s social center from the (public) town square to the (private) mall. ShiftSpace attempts to subvert this trend by providing a new public space on the web.

By pressing the [Shift] + [Space] keys, a ShiftSpace user can invoke a new meta layer above any web page to browse and create additional interpretations, contextualizations and interventions - which are called “Shifts”. Users can choose between several authoring tools - called “Spaces” - that allow web users to annotate, modify and shift the content of a page and through ShiftSpace, share that shift with the rest of the web. “Trails” are maps of shifts (shiftspace content) that create meta-layer navigation across websites. These trails might be used as a platform for collaborative research, for curating net art exhibitions, or as a way to facilitate a context-based public debate.

Go to the commissions site, watch the introductory video, apply for a grant and help us spread the word.

The ShiftSpace Commissions Program is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

BIOGRAPHIES

Dan Phiffer is a new media hacker from California, interested in exploring the cultural dimension of inexpensive communications networks such as voice telephony and the Internet.

Mushon Zer-Aviv is a designer, teacher and a media activist from Tel-Aviv whose work explores media in public space and public space in media. Mushon is the co-founder of Shual.com, ShiftSpace.org, YouAreNotHere.org and the Tel Aviv node of the Upgrade international network.

Other presenter Noel Hidalgo will talk about his amazing project the Luck of Seven, an open-source journey around the world documenting free culture, social innovators & global change. I am quiet interested in the discussion on what he says 21st century anthropological view of the personalities in physical / digital world.

Marie Evelyn will present the Analogous initiative, an organization that seeks to support complexity-driven art and artists. She calls it a sort of “Santa Fe Institute” for the arts.

See you if you are around. It is Wednesday 7 pm at Location One in Soho.

* The image on top is the stamp I use to mark the predicted receipts of MYPOCKET. [posted by Burak Arikan on his blog]

Video artifacts seen in ANEMICodeCINEMA were taken from encrypted DVD and Windows Media video sources (including Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema) and decoded using free, open source software. This work is dedicated to the authors of patent-free audiovisual protocols and software.

After years of waiting for Macromedia / Adobe to release Linux-compatible versions of its Flash player, it appears the trouble with codecs will resume with Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin. Although promoted as “cross-platform,” there is no mention of support for Linux or other free, open source operating systems. Such privately controlled and patented codecs and protocols coerce content developers to exclude audiences.