ecopolis

Interview with Jaromil, founder of Dyne.org, rasta coder that trough his work try to “develop and distribute software to manipulate and broadcast audio and video, free as in free speech” and “mantain a GNU/Linux distribution for multimedia production, optimized to run well on old computers and game consoles, for the sake of ecology and accessibility.”
And if you want the T-shirt with the shortest fork-bomb ever, check the gadgets.

He’ll be performing with his HasciiCam at the Stream Fest, Salento New Media Festival, in Galatina from the 26th of july till the 28th.

ECO: the dyne can be defined as “the force required to accelerate a mass of one gram at a rate of one centimeter per second squared.“, in the open source world which is the force, what is weight and waht is lenght?
J: depends to which open source world you are referring
in mine (and i speak only for me)

- – the force is passion and injustice, curiosity and idealism

- – the weight is code

- – the length is how clean, readable and documented is what you write

ECO: Do you have any plans for the Chaos Communication Camp 2007?
J: sure, i’ll be there camping with my tent, but only after attending the zappanale.de

ECO: can you tell something about how the (H)ASCII CAM was born many years ago? in which context? why? with whom?
J: it was inspired by the typical hacker aesthetics in the early 2000 i was around in Austria, peeking in cyberpunk contexts as stadtwerkstadt / servus.at / sil.at / time’s up , as well regularly attending the yearly hackmeeting in italy which we started already in 1998.

when i wrote the software HasciiCam i was working at the Futurelab in the ARS Electronica Center and there was a camera left on the shelf coz the power cord was lost. i took it at home, found out the voltage needed and put it in action: that was the first time i ever made a video camera work on my screen!

then of course the idea came quickly out of Jan Hubicka’s AAlib, the coolest video hack ever done: i wanted to see it live and stream it on the web in the easiest way possible.

the concept was to have a video streaming system for slow networks and old computers, so that even people with a modem could stream something cool: even cooler than canonical videos produced by proprietary software. It was the case of the hackmeeting in Catania in year 2000, where we had a very slow connection from the Freaknet, the southern medialab of Europe.

as soon as i released the software, it quickly grew in popularity, to the point it was mentioned on Slashdot for being used by a department of Sun in California, pointed on a lava lamp, to produce a live random seed for encruption
i have to admit i had never thought of that while writing it..

among the people that contributed to development i’d like to mention Blended: we are friends since more than 10 years i knew him as the cook in the pizzeria Maruzzella in Pescara, now he is a coder and last year he updated HasciiCam’s code to support all USB webcams. big up \o/

Television is a telecommunication system for broadcasting and receiving moving pictures_sound over a distance. The word means “far sight”: from Greek tele, far, and Latin vision, sight (from vidére). From the root *weid- (to know, to see), also present in the English word wit, in the Sanskrit word veda, and the Slavic word videti and in the Latin word vìsus , sanskrit *vid, which means “face”.
What I am trying to say is that television is the first (inter) face. And face the first television.

Television is also called the tube especially in UK. It’s not surprising then, BBC was the first international broadcaster to sign a major deal with the Youtube, Google-owned portal. Broadcast yourself! BBC immediatly understood that Youtube – as responsive* interface – is a perfect platform to reach out and to answer to international audience and to give easy access to new (and young) viewers around the world.
More: the videobloggin’ attitude is designed for helping recognize new style and areas for improvement. Or to (mass) customize? In the mean time European Commission is sharing “the sights and the sounds” of Europe on EUtube.

Al Jazeera is the next one on youtube. The English version is destined to be the English-language channel of reference for Middle Eastern events, by reporting from arabic world to the West. “With YouTube’s community of millions of online users this is set to dramatically increase,” said Al Jazeera English managing director Nigel Parsons. As much as it will increase the production of up-to-the-minute and up-to-date clips. A new(s) global strategy of Trailing vision?

However as is possible with YouTube, the full range of comment, rating and recommendation features will apply to TV videos, with users able to upload video responses to the TV’s and other viewers.

This idea of “responding to foreign demands” shows the fundamental irreciprocity of relationship which characterize communication structure of video response. According to the german philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels, responding results in dealing with foreigners. Responsiveness is considered to be a specific form of handling things we encounter. This handling does not implies anticipations of attitude and goes beyond any intentionality and regularity of behaviour: it is a peculiar logic of responding, which leaves “the foreign its distance”. (Waldenfels, Bernhard – Topographie des Fremden. Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden 1. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1997, p. 52).

For this peculiar logic of responsiveness the viewers find themselves already embedded at distance in this (foreign) world. The viewer is already the user. Further: Production is not free creation, and implies an ethical use. Otherness then receives a cultural (socio-moral-ethical) determination as “open correspondence” between foreignness and ownness. Broadcast yourself as (video) response becomes also pragmatically relevant to fade the distinction between inner and outer. Yourself is always in between. Again a (inter) face which operates symbolically, uniting a feeling with an image: the user is individual and unique. The feeling in this context “means” responsibility as Emmanuel Levinas briefly exposed in conversation with Richard Kearney
“The approach to the face is the most basic mode of responsibility. As such, the face of the other is verticality and uprightness; it spells a relation of rectitude”. You – user- shall not kill. (valbonesi@gmail.com)

Discover the Universe at home, using the Digital Universe Atlas that Hayden Planetarium offers on his website.

Dmytri Kleiner & Brian Wyrick wroted a really interesting article about the real impact of Web 2.0, where what shines is not always gold…

Here some excerpt from that text that you can find here.

The hype surrounding Web 2.0’s ability to democratise content production obscures its centralisation of ownership and the means of sharing. Dmytri Kleiner & Brian Wyrick expose Web 2.0 as a venture capitalist’s paradise where investors pocket the value produced by unpaid users, ride on the technical innovations of the free software movement and kill off the decentralising potential of peer-to-peer production.

Tim Berners-Lee is correct. There is nothing from a technical or user point of view in Web 2.0 which does not have its roots in, and is not a natural development from, Web 1.0. The technology associated with the Web 2.0 banner was possible and in some cases readily available before, but the hype surrounding this usage has certainly affected the growth of Web 2.0 internet sites.

The internet (which is more than the web, actually) has always been about sharing between users. In fact, Usenet, a distributed messaging system, has been operating since 1979! Since long before even Web 1.0, Usenet has been hosting discussions, ‘amateur’ journalism, and enabling photo and file sharing. Like the internet, it is a distributed system not owned or controlled by anyone. It is this quality, a lack of central ownership and control, that differentiate services such as Usenet from Web 2.0.

[...]

If Web 2.0 means anything at all, its meaning lies in the rationale of venture capital. Web 2.0 represents the return of investment in internet startups. After the dotcom bust (the real end of Web 1.0) those wooing investment dollars needed a new rationale for investing in online ventures. ‘Build it and they will come’, the dominant attitude of the ’90s dotcom boom, along with the delusional ‘new economy’, was no longer attractive after so many online ventures failed. Building infrastructure and financing real capitalisation was no longer what investors were looking for. Capturing value created by others, however, proved to be a more attractive proposition.

[...]

The value produced by users of Web 2.0 services such as YouTube is captured by capitalist investors. In some cases, the actual content they contribute winds up the property of site owners. Private appropriation of community created value is a betrayal of the promise of sharing technology and free cooperation.

[...]

The lack of central infrastructure also comes with a lack of central control, meaning that censorship, often a problem with privately-owned ‘communities’ that frequently bend to private and public pressure groups and enforce limitations on the the kinds of content they allow. Also, the lack of large central cross-referencing databases of user information has a strong advantage in terms of privacy.

From this perspective, it can be said that Web 2.0 is capitalism’s preemptive attack against P2P systems.

[...]

Capitalism, rooted in the idea of earning income by way of idle share ownership, requires centralised control, without which peer producers have no reason to share their income with outside shareholders. Capitalism, therefore, is incompatible with free P2P networks, and thus, so long as the financing of internet development comes from private shareholders looking to capture value by owning internet resources, the network will only become more restricted and centralised.

[...]

Thus Web 2.0 is not to be thought of as a second-generation of either the technical or social development of the internet, but rather as the second wave of capitalist enclosure of the Information Commons.

Virtually all of the most used internet resources could be replaced by P2P alternatives.