ecopolis

There’s been great anticipation around Stephen Wolfram’s ambitious project to create a comprehensive “computational knowledge engine.” The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University will host a sneak preview of the Wolfram|Alpha system, and a discussion of its underlying technology and implications. Participants will include Wolfram|Alpha founder Stephen Wolfram and Professor of Law Jonathan Zittrain. Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, the author of A New Kind of Science, and now the creator of Wolfram|Alpha. He is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research.

Proposals before the EU parliament to limit access to the internet across Europe are to be voted on very soon.

If passed, the new law will permit your broadband provider to impose “conditions limiting access to and/or use of services and applications”. Downloading via P2P will almost certainly be forbidden, and blacklists and whitelists are on the hidden agenda, but the proposals also covers copyright enforcement (3-strikes) and risk permitting sinister forms of filtering the networks. They threaten fundamental freedoms for everyone who uses the Internet and anyone who has a website.
These proposals, wrapped up in a series of European Directives which form the ‘Telecoms Package’, are contrary to our fundamental rights as laid down in articles 7, 8,11 and 16 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.

We call on Members of the European Parliament who will vote on the Telecoms Package, and we additionally call on the Council of Ministers who have joint legislative responsibility for it:
We demand:
-the removal of all references to limitations, restrictions, or conditions of use or access to networks, content, applications and services.
-that all measures related to copyright enforcement, 3-strikes and content filtering are rejected.
-that measures related to traffic data shall protect our right to surf the web in privacy.
-that the telecoms market is regulated for the citizen’s interests, and especially:
**a guarantee of open access to all content, services and applications.
** safeguards for users against disproportionate sanctions for downloading and content filtering are reinstated.

Please stop the hijackng of the Internet by big business.

>>>BLACKOUTEUROPE

“Without A Trace” by Jody Zellen
http://turbulence.org/works/without_a_trace

In July 2007, Jody Zellen began saving the daily online version of the comic strip “Real Life Adventures”, removing the text so that all that was left were the empty thought bubbles. She has also been tracing the print version of the New York Times every day, often combining the front and back of a single page (by holding it up to a window). “Without A Trace” takes the idea of this daily ritual as its point of departure.

Each day for a year, a comic image, a trace drawing, and three words from the original comic strip will be randomly selected from an archive. These will be juxtaposed with live text and image feeds from the New York Times online.

A trace is an action. A trace is what remains when almost everything else disappears. “Without A Trace” draws from an archive of traces, presenting them with ephemeral data to provide a fleeting memory, challenging the title and the notion, without a trace.

“Without A Trace” is a 2008 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

Galerija Škuc is proud to announce “RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting”, the exhibition of the works realized in the last three years within the platform “RE:akt!” produced by the Slovenian cultural institution Aksioma.

During recent years the term re-enactment and the practices it refers to have enjoyed increasing success in the artistic context. On one hand, the success of re-enactment appears to be connected to a parallel, vigorous return to performance art, both as a genre practiced by the new generations, and as an artistic practice with its own historicization. On the other hand the term re-enactment accompanies two phenomena that at least at first glance have very little in common: re-staging artistic performances of the past, and revisiting, in performance form, “real” events – be they linked to history or current affairs, past or present.
“RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting” tries both to research on the complexity of this concept and to get rid of it, approaching re-enactment not merely as “live action role-playing” or “living history” but rather as a strategy for cultural critique, analysis and artistic expression. “RE:akt!” – meaning not only “to act again” but also “to respond to / to react upon” and “Regarding: act!”– confronts current ideological and intellectual canons, power structures, policies, and distribution channels by re-enacting selected historical and culturally relevant events. Through processes of analysis, deconstruction, re-enactment and re-reporting, the intermedia research and presentation project “RE:akt!” examines media’s roles in manipulating perceptions and creating postmodern historical myths and contemporary mythology.

Thus, “RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting”, curated by the Italian art critic and curator Domenico Quaranta, will collect ten different approaches to the concept of enaction: from Ich Lubbe Berlin! (2005, SilentCell Network), a take on the 1933 burning of the Reichstag building in Berlin, which explores the contemporary meaning of symbols such as the Reichstag itself, and of concepts such as “communism” and “terrorism”; to Das KAPITAL (2006, Janez Janša), a performance which re-stages the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces with the languages of popular street artists; from C’était un rendez-vous (déja vu) (Janez Janša in collaboration with Quentin Drouet), a project that plays with the paradigmatic history of a well known artwork, the film C’était un rendez-vous by Claude Lelouch, from “cinema verité” to “media fiction”; to VD as VB (2007), a series of actions in which Vaginal Davis, the “grande dame” of the queer underground in Los Angeles, dialogues with Vanessa Beecroft’s performances. In Mount Triglav on Mount Triglav (2007), the three artists Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša re-stage a well known performance of the OHO group from the late Sixties, recently appropriated by the IRWIN group for their Like to Like Series (2004), performing it on the Mount Triglav itself, and then translating it into a monumental golden sculpture; while in Slovene National Theatre (2007), Janez Janša translates an infamous fact of recent racism against Gypsies – known in Slovenia as “the Ambrus case” – into a piece of theatre, re-invoicing it as it was featured by the mass media. In their Synthetic Performances (2007), Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG reenact on the virtual platform of Second Life a series of historical performances that are all but virtual, raising issues such as body, violence, sex and pain, thus exploring the meaning of these very issues in a virtual world. In SS-XXX | Die Frau Helga (2007), Janez Janša (in collaboration with Dejan Dragosavac Ruta) again adds details and proofs of evidence to an “urban legend” recently circulated on the Net and mainstream media, concerning the presumed creation of a cyber-sex doll by the Nazis. Thus, performance and reenactment are far from being the only strategies adopted in “RE:akt!”, which also involves strategies such as documentation, remix, re-invoicement, reconstruction and remediation (such as in the project The Day São Paulo Stopped 2009 by Brazilian artist Lucas Bambozzi), and media such as photographic print, video, media installation and even architecture (such as in the project Il porto dell’amore, by Janez Janša (in collaboration with Bor Pungerčič), an homage to Fiume as an example of pirate utopia).

RE:akt!
Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting
curated by: Domenico Quaranta
www.reakt.org

Galerija Škuc
Stari trg 21, Ljubljana, Slovenia
25 March – 17 April 2009

Presentation of the book: 25 March 2009 at 19:00
Exhibition opening: 25 March 2009 at 20:00

Featured artists: Lucas Bambozzi, Vaginal Davis, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Eva and Franco Mattes (aka 0100101110101101.ORG), SilentCell Network (Mare Bulc, Janez Janša, Bojana Kunst, Igor Štromajer).

On Wednesday, March 25, Škuc will host the presentation of the book RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting featuring the co-editors Janez Janša, artist and director of Aksioma and the italian theoretician Antonio Caronia. The book was published on March 2009 by FPeditions and includes contributions by Rod Dickinson, Jennifer Allen, Jan Verwoert, Antonio Caronia and Domenico Quaranta. More: www.reakt.org/book

On Saturday, March 28, SS-XXX | Die Frau Helga (2007), by Janez Janša will be presented in a solo show at the Fabio Paris Art Gallery in Brescia, Italy. More: www.fabioparisartgallery.com.

On May 22, the exhibition will travel to MMSU – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka (Croatia).

FREE IMAGES FOR PRESS and MORE INFO:
www.reakt.org/press

Production:
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
www.aksioma.org

Galerija Škuc
http://www.galerija.skuc-drustvo.si/

“ABSML” by Jeff Crouse, Andrew Mahon, and Steve Lambert
http://turbulence.org/works/absml/

ABSML is a new markup language that enables the creation of complex sentence formulas for 21st century automatic writing. ABSML tags replace parts of speech and sentence components using sophisticated semantic analysis, regular expressions, and web-based resources. In the right combination, the tags create prose that — while based on formulas and code — do not appear formulaic. ABSML is free and open for others to use, both through an online editor and an API (application programming interface).

“ABSML” is a 2008 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

Companies and celebrities ranging from Arsenal football club to actress Scarlett Johansson filed a record number of “cybersquatting” cases in 2008 to stop others from profiting from their famous names, brands and events, a United Nations agency said on Sunday.

Web sites in dispute in 2008 included references to Madrid’s 2016 Olympics bid, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC), Yale University, Research in Motion’s Blackberry as well as Arsenal and Johansson, and company names such as eBay, Google and Nestle.

The most common business sector in which complaints arose was pharmaceuticals, due to websites offering sales of medicines with protected names. Other top sectors for complaints were banking and finance, Internet and telecommunications, retail, and food, beverages and restaurants.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) handled 2,329 cases under its dispute procedure for Internet page names.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which manages the system of Web addresses with endings like .com and .gov, is preparing to launch many new series of suffixes.

These new generic top-level domain names (gTLDs) will allow a vast increase in the number of Web addresses, providing new scope for trademarked names to be abused — or at least making it harder for the trademark owners to monitor them.

“The creation of an unknowable and potentially vast number of new gTLDs raises significant issues for rights holders, as well as Internet users generally,” WIPO Director-General Francis Gurry said in a statement.

The founder of the World Wide Web said on Friday the names system had become mired in politics and commercial games.

“It would have been interesting to look at systems that didn’t involve domains,” Tim Berners-Lee, who drafted a proposal 20 years ago that led to the Web, told an anniversary celebration.

Gurry said his U.N. agency was working with ICANN, a not-for-profit corporation based in California, on “pre- and post-delegation procedures” to check the proposed new suffixes and help avoid future litigation.

For instance a new suffix “.apple” could well upset the computer, phone and entertainment company Apple.

How such suffixes are used and by whom would be important — a fruit-growing company using the .apple suffix would not have the same effect as a company registering a Website “ipod.apple.”

Gurry told a news conference that trademarks that had no other meaning, such as Sony and Kodak, were stronger and easier to defend than those based on general words or names, which could be ambiguous.
(Reporting by Jonathan Lynn; Editing by Laura MacInnis)

via Reuters.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved and a database of several million human feelings is formed, that can can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices. We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone that grows and changes according to what’s on our blogs, what’s in our minds.

Combining elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling, Jonathan Harris designs systems to explore and explain the human world. He has made projects about human emotion, human desire, modern mythology, science, news, anonymity and language. The winner of two 2005 Webby Awards, Harris’ work has also been recognized by well known festivals and journals globally.

Sep Kamvar is a Consulting Professor of Computational Mathematics at Stanford University and the chairman of Wildflower Capital. He founded Kaltix, a search engine that was acquired by Google in 2003, and Distilled, a clothing line and artist collective based out of San Francisco.

“(sans femme et sans aviateur) is a browser-based work that was inspired by Eric Rohmer’s film The Aviator’s Wife. It depicts contemporary Paris, happened upon following the main locations of the movie. The photographic imagery and the audio material were recorded during walks, and bus and metro rides, in a manner similar to the Nouvelle Vague film maker — although without any pre-arrangements for settings and observations; and with repeated visits to the locations. My intention was to honour Rohmer’s powers to get me interested in Paris, and at the same time make a work that discovers the city, even if only for myself . The work was also made with (the) intention to use the browser as a presentation tool that is independent of user interaction”
- Jorn Ebner