ecopolis

I’ve been to Picnic 08 in Amsterdam, kindly invited by Planetart, that will have a big show on Friday at the final party of the festival.
The bad news news, although anyone knows about, because on Picnic program there was nearly nothing about Planetart activities, for the Picnic attenders is that on that night there won’t be the Tesla Coils show due to security problems.

The good news is there was the sun for three days.
Anyhow from the photo you see a little of the atmosphear there,fizzy and vibrant, in line with the talks: always brilliant and looking forward, with a lot of assertion and few questions. It’s a festival emotioned by technology.
Really well curated in all the details, a little bit tooo much..

Coming at picnic i thought it would be more focused on creativity, where it’s much more about making business with creativity or sometimes entertain guests.

A lot interesting talkers between them Adam Greenfield, that presented his idea of “Long here and Big Now”, about the explosion the time/place coordinates in or contemporary cities, Michael Tchao, general manager of the Nike Tech Lab, that presented the ideas of Nike to connect physical objects, the shoes, to online services and communities, talking a lot about “motivation within motivation”, so looking at technology as a force of motivation. ( to run and to use your running shoes…).
Today there was the director of Business Developmnent of Goggle Europe: the room was thrilled and also the presetators, that was always perfect, seemed a little bit nervous. My impression was that Google has a strong corporate message and she delivered it precisely. Then she did’nt tell anything really itneresting about Google. What was clear is that Goggle is betting on open platforms, letting the user decide how to use it and that’s good for them i think. I think their operationl keyword now is OPEN, meaning that they want to enter everywhere.

Besides the conferences i saw a lot of people having fun and joking, presenting a playful attitude to technology not so much critical.
The only critical content be found inside the free Books printed by Institute of Network Cultures, distribuited at the bookshop.
Then a part from the main room conference i think more interesting insights can be found in the other locations, where there were interesting and more foucsed speech about the impact of newtechnologies in Africa, about RFID, about digital art.

Talking about the e-art exhbition i found it a little bit too clean, I think it’s Picnic style this neat attitude, but personally it brings everything too much on the side of business and less of creativity.

They tell us that Iran is the worst enemy on the planet, but at the same moment seems that their sronget arm is…Photoshop.
As you can see on the image their 3° missile is copyed from the 2° and pasted with the stamp tool of Photoshop.

Here’s the original one.

And it wasn’t even the first time….

Does Iran’s state media use Photoshop? The charge has been leveled before. So far, though, it can’t be said with any certainty whether there is any official Iranian involvement in this instance. Sepah apparently published the three-missile version of the image today without further explanation.

For its part, Agence France-Presse retracted its four-missile version this morning, saying that the image was “apparently digitally altered” by Iranian state media. The fourth missile “has apparently been added in digital retouch to cover a grounded missile that may have failed during the test,” the agency said. Later, it published an article quoting several experts backing that argument.

via New York Times

Introduction to Add-Art from Steve Lambert on Vimeo.

Steve Lambert, a programmer/conceptual artist, has crated an application that replaces the display ads with curator-picked artwork from contemporary artists.

Add-Art is a Firefox extension which replaces advertising images on web pages with art images from a curated database.

It is a free and open source project, currently being developed at the Eyebeam Development site.

Of the 100+ add-ons available for Firefox, “adblockers” are the most popular. The most current, Adblock Plus, has over 18 million downloads (as of May 2008) since Jan 2006 (currently over 250,000/week). It’s predecessor, Adblock, has been downloaded over 8 million times. These extensions work by preventing advertising images from downloading and replacing the ads with blank space. Their popularity has risen as pop-up ads, banner ads, and ads incorporating sound and animation have permeated the internet.

For many, replacing ads with blank space would be enough. Add-Art attempts to do something more interesting than just blocking ads – it turns your browser into an art gallery. Every time you visit the New York Times online or check the weather you’ll also see a spattering of images by a young contemporary artist.

The project will be supported by an small website providing information on the current artists and curator, along with a schedule of past and upcoming Add-Art shows. Each 2 weeks will include 5-8 artists selected by emerging and established curators. Images will have to be cropped to standard banner sizes or can be custom made for the project. Artists can target sites (such as every ad on FoxNews.com) and/or default to any page on the internet with ads. One artist will be shown per page. The curatorial duty will be passed among curators through recommendations, word of mouth, and solicitations to the Add-Art site.

With the overwhelming popularity of adblockers, if Add-Art were to attract 5% of existing users, the numbers would be in the hundreds of thousands. Add-Art can bring contemporary art to the desktops of all types of people at home and in their workplace – all over the world.

Add-Art was possible because Firefox, the four-year-old browser developed by the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, does not have proprietary code like the leading browser, Microsoft Internet Explorer, that precludes users from developing such add-ons without paying licensing fees. Firefox is the second-most-popular browser, with 15 percent of the market share, according to Net Applications (Internet Explorer leads with 78 percent, Safari is third with 5 percent).

Add-Art is an open source project and has been developed by the following people:

* Steve Lambert
* Wladimir Palant
* Jamie Wilkinson
* Matt Katz
* Tobias Leingruber
* Ethan Ham
* Michael Mandiberg
* Jeff Crouse
* Sean Salmon
* Evan Harper
* Michelle Kempner
* Dan Phiffer
* Mushon Zer-Aviv

All Street Artists Around the world are welcomed to support the Event with sending their hand made / Printed stickers for the combo. Event page : http://www.kolahstudio.com/KSC

Address:
P.O.box: 15875 / 6935
Tehran 15875 / IRAN

The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet. Established in 1996 during the Web’s infancy, the Webbys are presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a 550-member body of leading Web experts, business figures, luminaries, visionaries and creative celebrities.

OH, BY THE WAY!

The Webby Awards presents two honors in every category — The Webby Award and The People’s Voice Award — in each of its four entry types: Websites, Interactive Advertising, Online Film & Video and Mobile. Members of The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences select the nominees for both awards in each category, as well as the winners of the Webby Awards. Winner’s Announced May 6!

Check the Nominees

Google, the world’s largest Internet search engine, is on several
fronts a danger that has to be stopped, a study released by Austria’s Graz University claims.

A research team led by Prof. Hermann Maurer, chairman of Graz University’s Institute for Information Systems and Computer Media, argues that Google is turning into a new version of George Orwell’s “Big Brother” – creating unacceptable monopolies in many areas of the worldwide web.

According to his research, around 61 billion Internet searches are conducted each month. In the US, on average 57 percent of searches are conducted with Google, and up to 95 percent of Internet users use Google at least sometimes.

It is dangerous enough that single entity such as Google is dominant as a search engine, Maurer and his co-writers say, but the fact that Google is operating many other services and is probably colluding with still further players was “unacceptable”.

“Google is massively invading privacy,” the study said with the company knowing more than any other organization about individuals and companies, but not bound by national data protection laws. Google was amassing data by using data mining tools in its applications like
Google Earth or Gmail in connection with being its search engine function.

Thus, the search engine could potentially turn into the world’s largest detective agency, the Austrian researchers warned, using the data it was collecting from its users via its applications. Even if Google did not use that potential now, it might have to do so in the future in the interest of its shareholders.

The study argues that Google is influencing economies in the way advertisements and documents are ranked. “The more a company pays, the more often will the ad be visible.” The study believes influence may be increased by also ranking results from queries, and that Google could, for business reasons, in the future rank paying customers higher in search results.

Moreover, Maurer was worried that Google could use its “almost universal” knowledge of what was happening in the world to play global stock markets to its advantage.

The danger of a distorted “googling” reality loomed ever closer, the report said. “Google has become the main interface of our reality,” the study authors said.

Most material written today was in some way based on Google and Wikipedia – and if those did not reflect reality, a distortion was possible, the researchers said, recalling biased contributions frequently placed on Wikipedia.

Furthermore, there is some indication of cooperation between Google and Wikipedia. Sample statistics showed that random selected Wiki entries consistently ranked higher on Google than on other search engines, the Graz team said.

Maurer also criticized journalists who increasingly started researching their stories by googling them, as well as students copying significant amounts of their work from the Internet.

“Google’s open aim is to know everything there is to know on Earth,” the researchers concluded. “It cannot be tolerated that a private company has that much power: it can extort, control, and dominate the world at will.”

Stopping the insidious aspects of Google was however not possible by a head-on strategy, as the company was too powerful, the Austrian researchers warn. Rather, they say, the “Google effect” can be minimized by the introduction of special-purpose search engines that are better in their areas of application that the larger company is.