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 piece uses Craigslist’s RSS feature to obtain new feeds to add to the XML database that the software uses. Once new feeds are obtained, a screen scraping routine is employed to obtain the full text of the post. The software operates in real time, but it keeps a cache of posts to cycle through. This cache is periodically flushed, its period determined by the number of missed connections posts that the program obtains in a day. Like many of my other pieces, Missed Connections was developed in Java. XML reading and writing was made possible via JDOM and the RSS component used ROME for parsing the feeds.

Cristobal Mendoza is a Venezuelan media artist and programmer whose interests lie in the intersection of technology with the personal. His current research involves databases and data bodies, networks and visualizations of networks. He obtained an M.F.A. in Digital + Media from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007, and his B.A. from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in 2003. His work has been shown in various venues in the United States and Italy.

Following on the first Software Studies Workshop organized by Matthew Fuller (Rotterdam, 2006), the Software Studies Workshop @ UCSD is a foundational event bringing together key U.S. scholars in this emerging area. The workshop will discuss what it means to study software cultures, and the direction and goals of Software Studies as an emerging movement. Our goal is for the workshop to result in publishing a founding statement on the field, as well as initiate a set of interdisciplinary project collaborations.

The workshop will take place in Atkinson Hall, home of Calit2, a pre-eminant research center for future computing and telecommunication, where the Software Studies Initiative @ UCSD is located and currently collaborating with researchers on several exciting projects. The workshop has has also been timed to precede (and co-ordinate with) the HASTAC II conference which will begin in nearby UC Irvine on the evening of Thursday May 22.

Participants:

Ian Bogost (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Geoff Bowker (Santa Clara University)
Benjamin Bratton (UCLA)
Matt Fuller (Goldsmiths)
Kate Hayles (UCLA)
Matt Kirschenbaum (University of Maryland)
Peter Lunefeld (ArtCenter)
Mark Marino (USC)
Michael (Mateas (UCSC)
Nick Montfort (MIT)
Rita Raley (UCSB)
Casey Reas (UCLA)
Warren Sack (UCSC)
Doug Sery (MIT Press)
Chandler McWilliams (UCLA)

Campus Participants:

Lev Manovich (UCSD)
Noah Wardrip-Fruin (UCSD)
Jeremy Douglass (UCSD)
Jordan Crandall (UCSD)
Brian Goldfarb (UCSD)
Jim Hollan (UCSD)
Stefan Tanaka (UCSD)
Geoff Voelker (UCSD)

More participants to be confirmed.

The emphasis of the software is on the process of writing / typing. TBT is a tool for time-based recording and playback of the process of typing a message, with the accuracy of milliseconds. The basic interface for typing records all typing and plays it back exactly the way the text was typed the first time, including all hesitations and misspellings. It reveals additional information on digital poetry, because the speed of typing and reading it, are visualised. E-mail, blogs, all kinds of digital media can be given a “human touch” by TBT. The software has been kept as basic as possible, is free to use and users are encouraged to add functionalities. The special TBT website offers space for TBT-created messages, haiku’s and poetry, so that visitors can admire each other work.

TBT was made by Jaromil and conceived by Jaromil and JoDi. Following is a short interview with Jaromil about this new tool.

Annet Dekker: TBT was born as an idea formulated by you and JoDi. An interesting relation, a computer programmer/artist and an artist couple who like nothing more than to deconstruct soft -and hardwares. Could you describe your relation and your shared interest?

Jaromil: It is definitely a result and very much inspired by JoDi. What brought us together, besides the curiosity we nurtured about each other, was this commission for “Net art is dead” by Impakt. So we spent two weekends together. JoDi initially thought of taking the dyne:bolic operating system and subverting its functionalities, but the perspective of working further to subvert something I already invested a lot of effort on building was really discouraging for me.

So I opposed their intention and argued that, if we have something in common, surely it is a minimalist aesthetic and a passion for text and inner processes. At that point JoDi mentioned their interest in building a “key logger” that would record keys typed in any program running, in particular word processors. I insisted in focusing on the aspect of literary production, stripping down the approach to a reference implementation of a time-based text protocol for recording time-based literature - I was extremely excited about developing a software tool for literature. We all realized we like literary experiments in automatic writing and we would be interested in a tool to publish online time-based poetry as well to be used in email communication, where hesitations in writing can be a vehicle for sentiments?

AD: One of the important changes in the way of thinking about language, typography and poetry came from Italy, Marinetti said “my revolution is directed against the so-called typographical harmony of the page, instead I want to grasp words brutally and hurl them in the reader’s face.” is this something you can relate to? Does your own background, also coming from Italy has been of influence in your work?

J: Yes, I was born in Italy, but I’m part of a generation that starts, for necessity and virtue, to think about a common European heritage rather than a restricted (and in case of Italy over-celebrated) national identity. I guess this opens even more ways to play with language than Italians used to do in Italy anyway. My education was as classical as it can get in the south of Italy, mostly focusing on literature and philosophy, in particular ancient Latin and Greek; such traditions of written poetry respect metrical schemes and sometimes adopts a richer punctuation than the modern one we are used to. This is certainly a point of contact with the concept of Time Based Text, but by now I’d say my frequentation of digital haiku circles as the ‘five7five’ mailing list played a more important role in this project.

I find it very difficult to relate to Futurism, which I consider a decadent re-use of Symbolism. While it might be considered true that Marinetti’s furor has contributed to syntactical innovation and modern design, I do believe that was too functional to the mission of the industry to be considered art. Furthermore I fear the aggressive attitude of futurists, but that has more to do with personal taste I guess? My inspiration is coming from writers as James Joyce, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, to name just a few that challenged in various ways the performative act of what used to be called “automatic writing”.

AD: As the title indicates an important aspect of TBT is that it is time based, something that seems almost paradoxical when linked with a computer. How do you see this relation?

J: TBT is about the dimension of time in literature. The act of writing a flow of consciousness discards information. Such information is very abstract when compared to words and concepts, it can intimately describe the writer’s thoughts with all the hesitations occurring in the creative act. TBT offers also to preserve all the sentimental information that is related to the mediation of text in human communication. With TBT we preserve the emotional information produced when writing, at the same time opening the media art domain to the world of literature. The existence of a software as TBT draws complex relationships between code and language: it softly unveils the mutual influence between literary art and computer programming suggesting they can benefit from each other not just in terms of productivity.

AD: TBT reflects much the Japanese haiku’s or dada experiments. Most of these actions in poetry have a strong relation with the human, organic and emotions. Very little do they relate it seems with the ‘hard’ and ‘cold’ language and command lines of computers. How do you view this difference or better, change? Can we finally start to emotionally engage and understand our mechanics?

J: I guess the exploration of our mechanics (as opposed to the mechanics of machines) is always doomed to a sweet failure, the one that poetry celebrates with the best tears one can cry. The literary approach shifts the analysis to a produced fact, which reflects our inner sentiments: a production that is written out of our inner emotions but still sub-consciously shaped by them. Today the act of writing is arguably the most natural act of creation human kind engages on a regular basis, so there are chances to access a precedented undisclosed intimacy of thoughts there, in everyone who writes, between the lines.

AD: What do you think is more artistic the TBT software, as being software art, or the poetry that can be made by using it?

J: I think what is most artistic is the concept of TBT. The software itself and the poetry that can be made by using TBT are also a propagation of the artistic value of this exploration, but the artistic value is rather conceptual, probably definable media art. There is a formal approach in the realization that also can be argued as artistic: it is not by coincidence that both from a programmer’s and user’s point of view TBT will result minimalistic and, when adopted, extremely flexible. At least I refuse the usual rhetoric of presentation for “artistic software”, instead caring very much for functionality and a design that is faithful to text.

AD: In the past you have also talked about making the net more ‘organic’ by devising ‘new ways for information’, is TBT a step in the right direction?

J: Hopefully yes, at least it is an attempt. I hope that it can work in a natural and spontaneous way. That is why the work consists of a portable source code that works as a clean reference implementation and can be included in any other software (being open source and licensed GNU GPL), rather than building a TBT software that does it all for you, that would probably limit its usefulness on the long term. I also expect it to inspire people to think about less superficial ways of communication: right in a time in which our media-scape is getting polluted by opportunist automatas abusing our attention, the difference between us and them might be just…sentiments.

AD: How can you use TBT in your email program?

J: As an external editor: it can be called when the message needs to be written, once done will quit giving back the TBT message, which can be sent in an attachment. The reference implementation is working with the mail client Mutt, but hopefully some mail client will implement TBT natively in future.

AD: Could you tell me step-by-step what I should do to make TBT poetry?

J: once you have downloaded and compiled the source code (or you have booted a dyne:bolic liveCD or downloaded the OSX binary), just open a terminal and type ‘tbt -h’, you will get this help:

TBT - Time Based Text - v0.7 - tbt.dyne.org
Usage: tbt [options] [file]

-h print this help
-v version information
-D debug verbosity level - default 1
-c console interface mode (S-Lang)
-r record tbt - option alias: rectext
-p playback tbt - option alias: playtext -m mail composer - option alias: recmail -s save format in [ bin | ascii | html ] -x convert binary tbt to html or ascii

which suggests various possibilities to write your message, for example to simply write a message type:

tbt -c -r mymessage.tbt

and type your message, once done quit pressing ctrl+c

you can then play the message on the screen with:

tbt -c -p mymessage.tbt

in case you want to create a web TBT do

tbt -c -r -s html mymessage.html

then type and quit with ctrl+c

you can then upload mymessage.html to your website together with the tbt javascript code to be put in the same directory.

TBT currently also include a full website with “guestbook” functionality for others to upload their TBT, it is written in PHP and quite easy to setup on a normal web server.

Jaromil is a free software programmer, a media artist and activist. He has made significant contributions to the development of multimedia and streaming applications on the GNU/Linux platform (the free counterpart of commercial brands like Microsoft and Macintosh). He was born in Pescara, Italy, but now lives in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He is author of the dyne:bolic GNU/Linux liveCD, and of various free software projects, including MuSE (a streaming server) and FreeJ (a free VJ software to live mix and adjust images and sounds). As an artist, he has created performances and netart works as the :(){ :|:& };: forkbomb (when typed in the command line of a Unix system the computer crashes). He also founded dyne.org in 2000 under the flag of Freedom of Creation, playing hybrid between the fields of politics, art and technology.

Annet Dekker is program manager at Virtueel Platform and freelance curator and researcher based in Amsterdam.

The Retrosabotage project is less “artistic”, but in a way more sophisticated: every week it publishes a famous arcade variance. The algorithms are treated as if they were jazz standard, falling short of player’s expectations, still maintaining well-known mechanisms. Mokumentary speculates about a never released Pacman version, where you control the ghosts, Incompatible Visions is an impossible mash-up between Tetris and Duck Hunt, while variances on Space Invaders theme variations push to the absurd the tragic spaceship destiny. Sometimes the “sabotage” generates new game patterns: “Compomise” is a Tetris short circuited for two players, “Build On” and “Balance” turn over the tedious Break Out with new original features. Retrosabotage is a little more than a collection of jokes but nevertheless it gives pleasing disappointments to the Skinner’s mouse hosted in our brain. But probably the most radical experiment in this tradition is probably Rom Check Fail, a sort of psychedelic remix of a dozen classic arcades. Graphic, enemies, scenes and their respective dynamics are randomly remixed by a software gone crazy. Every game is a frantic zapping among unpredictable situations but oddly playable. Remix culture, contaminated the video and now invades videogames. With astonishing achievements. - Paolo Pedercini, Neural.

Introduction: SVEN … is a project developed by Amy Alexander, Wojciech Kosma, and Vincent Rabaud with Jesse Gilbert, Nikhil Rasiwasia, and Marilia Maschion. The following text focuses on SVEN’s approach to and issues surrounding computer vision. Cinematography, and its relationship to both software and surveillance video, is also important to SVEN, but it’s a topic for a different text. (Art is of course of particular importance to SVEN—but that should go without saying.)

SVEN is a piece of tactical software art. Tactical software art comes out of traditions of tactical media and software art. It’s a logical mix: tactical media is a response to the way mainstream media influences culture; software art is a response to the ways mainstream software influences culture. Tactical media often involves a combination of digital actions and meatspace—or street—actions. In SVEN, these are one and the same—digital actions that take place on the street (just off the curb in this case)…” Continue reading About… Software, Surveillance, Scariness, Subjectivity (and SVEN) by Amy Alexander [PDF] .

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.“

Watz uses the computer to generate work which he describes as “a particular brand of visual hedonism, marked by colorful organic shapes and a ‘more is more’ attitude.” Most of his works deal with drawing machines implemented in software, live visuals for music or large-scale projections. The exhibition will showcase a variety of Watz’s generative work, including large scale projections of ElectroPlastiques #1 and #2, five rapid prototypes, large format printouts, and his Universal Digest Machine, which received an Honorary Mention at Ars Electronica — the world’s leading media arts festival in Linz, Austria.

Marius Watz is a Norwegian artist who currently lives in Berlin where he edits the Generator.x blog (a platform for generative art and design) and prepares future Generator.x events including concert tours, exhibitions and conferences. In addition, Watz travels around the world to teach workshops in computational design and generative art.

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.

Burak’s work touches on a number of the topics discussed here on Serial Consign, and he and I have spent the last few weeks firing emails back and forth that delve into economies of exchange, data portability, information visualization and how these themes are explored through his work.

Ever since your 2006 A Stock Market in Life project you’ve exhibited a fascination with incorporating the (data)aesthetics and interface of commodity exchange in a large portion of your work. You were one of the architects of OPENSTUDIO and also launched Meta-Markets last year. Both of these projects deal with trading and speculating on creative goods in quite distinct contexts. I stumbled across the word artonomics on the OPENSTUDIO site - could you discuss this term in relation to your ongoing project of creating platforms for economic simulation?

We made up the term “artonomics” to define the axes of arts, economics, and the participatory social web. In the PLW (Physical Language Workshop at the MIT Media Lab) we focused on building networked infrastructures for creative people, so that they can get economically more powerful and eventually affect politics. In OPENSTUDIO an artwork is a digital drawing. By the time a drawing is completed, it is in the market for sale. From your studio to the market there is no distance. When you buy a piece, you own a share in that person’s body of work. OPENSTUDIO members experience semi-ownership of creative capital. Well this type of living is the promised future right, what if you experience it now, future not only becomes more visible, but also actionable and debatable.

I am particularly interested in collectivity in creative work, which brings in techno-social protocols and economic models for self-organization of large groups of people. In such economic models money represents information. You buy things not because you need it but you show interest in it. In the end, I don’t necessarily consider this type of work as economic simulation or computer simulation, because participants spend real time and energy (aka micro-labor) within these systems. They draw, they click here and there, they decide on things, write comments, tag, mix, edit, vote, recommend etc. These are real relationships woven through experimental and modifiable protocols that organize network of social relationships and economic transactions.

I think today what we see on the social web is that the definition of creative work is changing. Is it an image, a movie, a sculpture, an installation, a process, a response? In this networked world, it is more clear to me that the substance of one’s creative work is not only a material, a recipe, or a code library, but it is also materialized information flowing in multiple layers of networks which are modulated by market forces, power relationships, past events, and future predictions.

[meta-markets performance & entity info for a bookmark of grand text auto]

Meta-Markets is essentially an exchange for social networking entities. In this simulation, social media like del.icio.us bookmarks or Feedburner syndication subscriber counts take on a life of their own and a community of speculators collectively determine the value of this data. I think one of the most interesting things about this project is that it creates a sort-of double presence for these services where users can determine the worth of individual articles of social media that stands outside of the generic web 2.0 chatter about valuation and venture capital. How do you see Meta-Markets in relation to the actual web economy?

The current web economy is not open enough. With Meta-Markets we aim to raise the bar of openness for existing social web services. I don’t mean the locked in data in Facebook or similar web services. I support efforts like DataPortability, these are very important steps to release our data from centralized databases. For us the problem is that the value of our labor is not open in the current web economy. In other words, what we get for our online work is not clear for us while it is clear for the service providers. This problem has been emerging because of the blurred boundaries between work and play, because information is no less real than physical matter, because information is commodity, because of the changing roles of consumers and producers, the prosumer phenomenon as discussed elsewhere. The solution is to have more transparent services, so that both the users and the service providers equally know the value of the work put in the services. Of course this is a complex task, that’s why we approach it collectively by creating a stock market for socially networked creative work.

[burak arikan / terms & conditions / 2007]

You posted an excellent commentary on the economics of Facebook which broadly outlined the disconnect between the bottom-up “social” investment by users and the top-down scramble by management to implement an efficient contextual advertising engine. You quite concisely identified the paradox as follows:

I work for Facebook everyday but I am not getting paid. In their recent Social Ads announcement Facebook says “It is an ad-supported service. It is a free service.” Pause. Did we sign a contract? How do you measure my labor and serve accordingly? I don’t know how you measure the value of my informational content, the value of my informational content uploaded by my friends to your server, the value of my relationships, the value of my activities…

Google’s OpenSocial begins to address the ownership that users are entitled to over their information and social connectivity. How do you see OpenSocial influencing the direction of Meta-Markets?

OpenSocial is hyper-modern politics, so is any other network protocol. Today defining standards and lobbying for the industry to adopt a standard are common political practices of the networked world we all live in. If standardization can happen by the participation of many voices, it becomes more democratic. Although I support current efforts to unlock the centralized databases, I don’t believe it is enough. The benefits of open communication standards are always publicly discussed from the point of view of the user or the developer, but who really benefits are the service providers. When you move your data anywhere, yes the user has the data anywhere, yes the developer builds write - once - works - with - any - other services, but the service provider is also happy because they have free context and free trust networks, which are generated by users’ labor in other places and carried to this service. We may call this distributed free labor. Data portability without ethics is the multiplication of the exploitation of micro-labor. When we use a service, the value generated by our action should be clear and open for all the involving parties. This is not easy, it involves political and economical struggles, but with the Meta-Markets community I believe we can make progress in this endeavor.

This conversation about transparancy and data portability is very interesting given your recent MYPOCKET project for Turbulence (pictured above). In this work, you’ve developed an algorithm to predict future purchases based off the analysis of an archive of receipts. Credit card companies employ similar algorithms to flag sudden shifts in spending habits so that potential credit card fraud can be prevented. I guess it is safe to assume you’re not doing R&D for Citibank so what exactly are your goals with MYPOCKET?

Spending habits are not only for prevention of frauds, but also for modulation of living. With MYPOCKET I see what my spending behavior is, this is probably what a financial analyst sees. I share it with general public to raise awareness and to make closed-door-analysis of our spending behavior debatable. MYPOCKET is also an exploration of the bidirectional adaptation between human and software. Between my behavior and the prediction process there is a feedback loop. Both negative and positive feedback. Positive feedback happens through confirmation of a prediction, which increases weight of that category / item in the database. Negative feedback happens through certain transactions, which have rules. For example a $40 ATM cash withdrawal means that I will not need cash for 4 days, approximately every $10 cash = 1 day, or a $70 metrocard spending (monthly unlimited ride for the NYC subway) means I will not buy a metrocard for another 30 days. These rules, some obvious some specific to me, are added as negative feedbacks in the loop. Over time the software will make smarter predictions about my spending behavior. Sometimes I verify the predictions, sometimes I don’t mind, sometimes I am not conscious, sometimes the predictions determine my future choices, creating a system in which both myself and the software adapt to one another.

[burak arikan / tense / 2007]

All of my questions have approached you as some kind of artist-economist - that is not entirely fair as it is clear you are interested in addressing other issues with your work. You obviously have an interest in the aesthetics of information, networks and connectivity. This is evident in the projects discussed thus far, but many of your other works (i.e. Meta-Control, Tense, Arb, etc.) Could you discuss your approach to visualization?

My interest in geometry ties my seemingly separate practices. Geometry provides instruments not only for organizing space but also for understanding concepts in political philosophy. I started creating dynamic visual compositions in 2002. Since then I work directly with the code, write processes that modulate the geometry and the kinetics, explore the micro relationships, observe the macro behavior, tune, play, contract, scale, stare, change, iterate. My early dynamic compositions are repurposed as peformative artifacts in Meta-Control. Arb and Tense are the same processes, an exploration of growth in networks. From few to many, from simple to complex, from instant contractions to subtle settlements, while the network is being built, nodes push and pull each other, connections paint the color of the forces.

I create systems, they are not visual, visualizations are the visual manifestations of an instance of a system. My OPENSTUDIO visualizations show relationships built in the OPENSTUDIO economy, Micro Fashion Network visualization shows relationships of colors based on how I generate the data. Rather than creating visualizations based on other systems’ data, I prefer to create the system on my own or through collaborations. Like Meta-Markets and OPENSTUDIO, these systems can be living processes which involve many people’s time, energy, and intellect. Manifestations can also be in physical or in other forms. MYPOCKET is a living digital/physical process, which is manifested in three core forms for information: a list, a graph, and an object.

More recently I understand that the systems I create are vectors, vectors as McKenzie Wark, or Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker use the term. A vector is a medium in which information moves. I hope and work for more people to create such liberated systems. [posted by Greg Smith on Serial Consign]