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.

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

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

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

Hop into a white limousine with eight strangers to converse about anything in art for one hour. Hosts, who are critics and curators, will guide conversations and offer refreshments.

Featuring: Laurel Beckman; Chris Barr; Julia Bradshaw, James Morgan, and Bennett Goble; Elisheva Biernoff; Cesar Cornejo; Holly Crawford; Sharon Daniel; Bryan and Vita Hewitt with Chuck, Inc.; Heike Liss and Ellen Lake; Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry; Neighborhood Sign Club with Alison Pebworth, Leigh Ann Martin, and Megan Saperstein; Nancy Nisbet; Jennifer Parker with Matthew McGuinness; Sasha Petrenko; Johanna Poethig with VPA Painting and Mural Class, CSU Monterey Bay; Alyssa C. Salomon; Randy Sarafan; and Sherri Lynn Wood.

Subversive Complicity brings together a group of artists whose work inhabits the interstices of contemporary life — physical, temporal, and conceptual gaps within existing structures — in order to subvert everyday systems and raise social awareness in subtle, humorous, and radical ways. What happens when artists working within these spaces adapt and co-opt the strategies, languages, mannerisms, and visualizations from divergent social personas and cultural sources to create alternative modes of action and expression?

The resulting range of projects presented in this exhibition suggests the myriad of possibilities for public and private transformation to emerge when artists assume such diverse roles as agent provocateur, broadcaster, political activist, conversationalist, oral historian, engineer, broker, trader, benefactor, gamer, and even evangelist. Through gallery documentation of past actions and a series of ongoing and special events these artists invite audiences! into a set of conversations, resistances, and exchanges at once real and imagined, geographic and social, local and global.

Come join us in this exploration of how art can disrupt, re-shape, and otherwise invigorate our daily existence through interventions enacted on the streets of San Francisco, across the landscape of the Bay Area, and within other cities and virtual realities far beyond.

This exhibition was developed in association with the Intervene! Interrupt! Rethinking Art as Social Practice Festival hosted by the University of California, Santa Cruz. Critical Conversations in a Limo was organized by Heather M. Mikolaj (Curator) and Clare Haggarty (Assistant Curator), in collaboration with University of California, Santa Cruz faculty Dee Hibbert-Jones and E.G. Crichton.

Flock is a work by digital artists KMA (Kit Monkman and Tom Wexler) and choreographer Tom Sapsford. Inspired by Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, and specially commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Flock premiered in Trafalgar Square in February 2007. Watch in HD.

KMA’s mission is to apply leading digital innovation to large-scale live environments in order to expand the audiences’ experience of theatrical work beyond the physical environment in which it is presented. Within the last few years KMA has become a leading and prolific innovator across stage, film and public environments, expanding expectations of how technology can interface with these fields and how audiences ultimately experience the work.

KMA’s interactive work stems from their joint areas of interest in patterns of social behavior and digital technology as a vehicle for public theatre.

KMA’s most recent large-scale interactive installation projects (Flock, Trafalgar Square, 2007; The Hive, Grand Canal Square, Dublin, 2008) have expanded the horizons for how technology can interface with theatrical activity in an emotional and playful way. These pieces are set out of doors, in large urban spaces, without prepared actors or formal participants. The scale of the work creates a vast aesthetic impact on the urban environments in which these works reside, drawing audiences to it, quite often by chance as people go about their daily lives, curiosity draws people in but it is the intelligence of the language structures which layer within these installations which holds the public attention and engages them in problem solving, play and social engagement. By arresting time and space within the public arena and blurring the distinction between performer and audience, KMA’s work is opening up new and vast environments in which art and audiences meet, equally on each other’s terms.

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

Watermans gallery will be converted into a live design / mapping studio where investigatory, locative media artist Christian Nold together with the designer Daniela Boraschi will be working with local residents to gather information for digital and physical visualizations of the ecological, cultural and economic ‘health’ of Brentford.

Instead of taking tissue samples as one would from a human being Christian Nold and participants will be using a range of cultural probes to investigate the local social body and its unique ailments. Like eastern medicine investigators will be taking a holistic view of Brentford that looks for interconnections between problems and challenges to get a sense of the whole. The project acts as both creative art project as well as hard-nosed consultation with invited stakeholder groups like politicians, historians, the local chamber of commerce as well as ecologists and the general public.

WORKSHOPS

Everyone - young, old and in-between is welcome to take part! First public workshop April 5, 2008 1 pm - 5pm FREE!* Bring your local newspaper, favorite story, images and anything you want to put on the Brentford map!

Further workshops will take place on:
Saturday, April 12 1-5pm
Wednesday, April 23, 6-9pm
Saturday, May 10 1-5pm
Wednesday May 14 6-9pm

Register online: http://www.publicbiopsy.net/join.htm

If you care about the Brentford area you are invited! Come with your own agenda and we will include it!

If you can’t attend a workshop we have arranged for you to be able to contributer online. For online contribution please log on: http://www.publicbiopsy.net/upload.htm.

Cleotronica 08 is the inaugural version of Cleotronica a festival for media, art, and socio-culture organized by Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF) an alternative initiative for art and culture based in Egypt’s second largest city. Cleotronica 08 is planned as a monthly series of public art projects, workshops, lectures, performances, and exhibitions that commenced in January 2008 gradually building up to an international symposium in May. The festival presents a diverse set of projects, mediums, and issues, ranging from net art to tactical media and from public intervention to design.

Apart from being an international festival, Cleotronica is critically involved with and conditioned to its locality, striving to make a distinct contribution to it by extensively interacting with university students and recent art graduates in its projects. While showcasing a broad range of media related art, the festival is particularly reflective of practices that stimulate media, technology, art, and public socio-cultural activity to come together.

Cleotronica 08 Project # 4: The Silent Ornamental Revolution - A Public Art Project by Jan Robert Leegte (NL) :: Starts March 9 :: Selected public locations all over Alexandria, Egypt.

The Silent Ornamental Revolution is a public art project that uses a series of minimal posters created by Jan Robert Leegte based on his work and text developed in Vienna in 2006, it builds on the idea of the ornament as “sublime” intervention, the ornaments Leegte readapts are derived from popular computer interfaces such as the Windows operating system. The works made in 2006 were video collages simulation ideas of ornamental interventions. The project in Alexandria is a true intervention, using modular posters to build endless ornamental patterns. There will be two types of posters, one based on the artist’s “selection” series, and the other going right down to his “scrollbar” series, using bevels. Basically any urban structure will be selectable, and any surface can be transformed to a minimal or hysterically ornamented facade. Art students from Alexandria will play a vital role in assisting Leegte with this series of interventions in public space.

Jan Robert Leegte (1973) studied Fine Arts at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam after having studied Architecture at the University of Delft. Inspired by artists like Bruce Nauman and Fischli & Weiss, Leegte probes the surface of our surrounding world, aiming to reveal the underlying materials. Fascinated by the world behind the computer screen, he explored the sculptural possibilities of the Internet as from 1997. In 2002 he shifted back to the gallery space, taking along his newly discovered favorite materials with him. Recently Leegte is exploring more “embedded” possibilities out of the gallery space into the endlessly deep contexts of the outside world. His work has been exhibited at a widespread selection of international shows and festivals. Leegte lives and works in Amsterdam.

Cleotronica 08 Project # 5: Stammer: A Lecture in Theory - A Live Performance and Video Installation by Shady El Noshokaty (EG) :: Performance: March 9, 7 pm :: March 9-16, opening directly after live performance :: Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF), 10 Hussein Hassab Street, Azarita, Alexandria.

Shady El Noshokaty (1971) is a Cairo based artist and a teacher at the Faculty of Art Education, Helwan University. With a Fulbright grant, he studied avant-garde cinema and video art at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As of 2000, El Noshokaty organized and supervised the annual experimental media art workshop in the Faculty of Art Education until its 5th edition in 2005. His work has been exhibited in numerous local and international institutions including the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, and the Hayward Gallery, London.

Cleotronica 08 Project # 6: Tactical Media Club Alexandria - A Participatory Club for Tactical Media Moderated by Joanne Richardson (RO) and Francesca Bria (IT) :: CLUB MEETINGS: March 2008 20-22: Lecture1: Tactical Media: ast, Present, and Future by Joanne Richardson, March 21, 7 pm; Lecture 2: Social Media, Shared Culture, and the Hacker Movement in Italy by Francesca Bria, March 23, 7 pm :: Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF), 10 Hussein Hassab Street, Azarita, Alexandria.

Tactical media is a concept and set of practices that emerged around the Next Five Minutes festivals in Amsterdam from 1993 to 2003. What is common to these practices is the artistic use of media technologies to subvert power. As part of the Cleotronica 2008 festival Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF) will set up a transient club for ‘Tactical Media’ inside its space. The club seeks to collectively explore ‘Tactical Media’ practices in the different contexts of Europe and Egypt, and conduct brainstorming sessions that investigate the possibility of new intersections between art, media, activism, and theory. Artists, activists, and collectives are invited to be members of the club and participate in its discussion and debate group meetings that will be moderated by Joanne Richardson (Romania) and Francesca Bria (Italy). To become a member and participate in the club’s sessions please send us a brief paragraph about yourself and your interests or your collective in English or Arabic to office [at] acafspace.org, please include your complete contact info and write “club” in the subject box.

Joanne Richardson was born in Bucharest, grew up in New York, currently living between Cluj, Romania and Berlin. Founder of D Media in Romania, an NGO for the production and dissemination of art and digital culture. Editor of Subsol webzine, and author of essays on social movements, postcommunism, immaterial labor, copyleft, tactical media, the history of the avant-gardes, and experimental film & video in Eastern Europe. Recent videos on nationalism, delocalization, migration, activism, precarity and borders.

Francesca Bria is a Film Maker, journalist and Independent Network Activist. Born and currently living in Rome . She teaches digital media and video journalism in Rome and she is active as a free lance video journalist. She is counsultant and expert on access to knowledge policy for the Region of Lazio and the European Commission. She has been coordinating an international cooperation project between Italy and Brazil on Digital Culture and she’s currently coordinating a cooperation project on free software in Venezuela. She is the author of different video documentaries and short experimental films on digital media technology, free knowledge, politics, precarity, migration and social justice. She’s active in different networking and grassroot projects for the promotion of shared culture and free technology.

Cleotronica 08 Project # 7: RECYCLIZER - A Workshop on Sampling in Animation and Solo Show by Jan van Nuenen (NL) :: Workshop: Sampling Animation Workshop March 29-31, 2008 :: Exhibition: Jan van Nuenen Solo Show March 28 – April 6, Opening: March 28, 7 pm :: Lecture: Sampling in Contemporary Animation, March 30, 7 pm :: Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF), 10 Hussein Hassab Street, Azarita, Alexandria.

RECYCLIZER is a 3 part project by Jan van Nuenen. The exhibition showcases screenings of van Nuenen’s sample-constructed animated worlds of automatons, works that can be seen as the descendants of Bosch aesthetics and imagery in the digital age. The workshop on 29, 30, 31 will concentrate on creating a collectively made animated video that will be put up on You Tube, the video will be created using samples collected by all the workshop’s participants. Please apply to the Workshop by sending a brief e-mail that includes your CV/Bio to office [at] acafspace.org , write “workshop” in subject box, basic knowledge of some graphics/animation programs required. Finally the talk on 30 March will summarize the idea and culture of sampling in Animation and its industry today, live Arabic translation will be available.

Jan van Nuenen (1978) is a video artist and animator based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He studied audio-visual design at the art academy St. Joost in Breda, the Netherlands. He has been working on short, experimental animation films and video-installations since 2002. His works are mainly animated collages of found-footage video and photographical material or samples, cut up, combined and edited with the computer and different types of animation software. The films are characterized by a complex and combined action of loops, repetitions and rhythms, where sound plays a vital role. His works have been shown at different international film, video and art festivals. Van Nuenen also creates electronic music some of which is used in his films.

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]