In diretta su internet
giovedì 9 aprile ore 21,30
http://www.oistros.it/lunapiena

Ignazio Licata è un fisico teorico, professore presso l’Institute for Basic Research di Palm Harbor, Florida, Usa ed attualmente direttore scientifico dell’ISEM, Institute for Scientific Methodology a Bagheria, Palermo. Ha iniziato lavorando nel campo delle particelle e della cosmologia quantistica. Ha discusso le sue ricerche con teorici del calibro di David Bohm e J. P.Vigier.
Oltre ai numerosi contributi specialistici (www.i-sem.net) ha pubblicato: Osservando la Sfinge. La realtà virtuale della fisica quantistica, Di Renzo, Roma, 2006 e La Logica Aperta della Mente, Codice Edizioni, Torino, 2008 che hanno incontrato un notevole successo di pubblico.
A settembre dell’anno scorso ha ricevuto il Premio “Veneri di Parabita” per l’arte e la scienza che gli ha permesso di aprire un proficuo rapporto col Salento ed in particolare con le ricerche condotte dal gruppo Oistros sul tema del tarantismo.
Un Incontro nella luna piena del 9 aprile specialissimo, dunque, che prenderà le mosse da una domanda: Se tanti percorsi di conoscenza si sono risolti in circoli viziosi, possiamo continuare a pensare entro le gabbie delle discipline come ci hanno insegnato a fare, o è possibile trovare percorsi virtuosi?

From 24 to 26 September 2008, thousands of creative minds from all over the world will come together in Amsterdam for the third PICNIC.

In Madrid, from the 5th to the 14th of May, 2008

In 2007, the Rencontres Internationales, which initially took place in Paris and Berlin, opened up to a third city: Madrid. This event now constitutes a unique artistic and cultural platform in Europe for artists, professional networks and different audiences.

The Rencontres Internationales reflects the specificities and convergences of art practices between new cinema and contemporary art, explores emerging art practices and their critical purposes and allows this necessary time when points of view meet and are exchanged.

The event wish to contribute to a reflection on our contemporary culture of image via a demanding program open to everyone.

Download Programme 2008

On Friday the 14th of March 2008 ten ’street radio’ nodes went live in Southampton narrowcasting.
Hidden Histories – stories from Southamptons Oral History Archive selected and arranged to correspond with the location of the 10 nodes.
Participants started to meet at around 11 am at the gallery cafe in Southampton’s Civic Centre. There they received maps of the Hidden Histories trail and those who needed them could borrow little FM radio receivers.

The underlying technology has been developed by Hivenetworks over the past 3, 4 years. The technologically creative mastermind behind the project is Alexei Blinov. For many years he has supported artists by finding technical solutions for their ideas. This time it was the other way round, as the basic concept behind Hive Networks is based on ideas and research carried out by Blinov, supported by a network of collaborators and friends. Blinov conceived the idea of a network that is not just a carrier of information but one that sees hears, smells, and which automatically adds new nodes and drops them if necessary, a hive of little devices which interact with each other and the public. While similar ideas have been emanating from computer science labs such as the MIT for the past 20 years, only now, through the drop in hardware prices and the collaborative efforts of free, libre and open source software developers, it has become possible for garage inventor outfits such as Blinov’s Raylabs to experiments hands on with a DIY approach to ubiquituous computing. The concept of Hivenetworks was created by the artist-engineer Alexei Blinov with the proposition that it should enable media artists to create complex public art works without having to get into the deep end of technological development.
This is where Armin Medosch comes in.
The street radio set up deployed by Hivenetworks uses technology which people already carry in their pocket. Most of the newer mobile phones have bluetooth and FM reception. Having headphones, even small ones, really improve the experience. But that’s it, oiff you go and listen to stories from Southampton’s maritime past while taking a walk through the city, smelling the air, seeing radio masts of ships in the distance, being ‘disturbed’ by some live seagulls.

Extracted from The Next Layer.

Is it the end of the privacy?

VOCENTO and ARCO announce an Open Call for Proposals addressing the potential of Web 2.0 for art galleries. The competition invites proposals for web solutions that respond to the needs and enhance the presence of art galleries online.

VOCENTO and ARCO invite proposals for innovative and experimental online platforms and effective tools to foster and stimulate the presence, exhibition, communication and management of art on the Internet. Selected proposal will be awarded with 15.000 euros (taxes included) of a production budget to realise the project.

The competition wishes to encourage research in the field of social technologies and artistic practice, and more specifically to identify current needs and provide suitable solutions for art galleries in the context of the Internet. The solutions will notably benefit communication between art and society.

The proposal, a complete web concept, or environment, or tool will be an applicable service to be implemented by art galleries.

The winning proposal will be selected by an international Jury, made up of two experts in the field of art and technology: (Joasia Krysa of KURATOR/UoP, UK and Santiago Ortiz, artist, moebio.com), a representative of VOCENTO; LaAgencia will act as coordinator of the award and jury secretary.

· Production of the award-winning proposal has to be completed in a maximum period of six months. Once produced, a complete web concept, or environment, or tool, will be freely distributed for implementation by the participant galleries at ARCO´s 2008 edition and the galleries participating at ARCO´s 2009 edition.

· Notification of the winner date: 16th of February 2008.

· The Award prize: the winning proposal will receive a total of 15.000 euros budget (taxes included).

Conditions for entry to participate:

· The Call for Proposals ARTE 2.0 VOCENTO is an open call to any individual or a group, of any nationality or legal entity. It is open and international award contest.

· The proposal must be submitted through an application form available on the dedicated ‘Call for Proposals’ website.

· Each individual or a group is allowed to submit only one proposal. In case of submission of more than one proposal, only the first proposal will be considered.

· Proposals sent by e-mail, post or any other way will not be accepted.

· Applications for ARTE 2.0 VOCENTO competition can be submitted in English or Spanish. We highly recommend submitting bilingual versions of the proposal.

· The participating proposals must be for projects realisable for the value of the prize money, i.e. €15,000 (including taxes), within a maximum production period of six months from the date of the Jury’s decision.

· The Jury reserves the right to accept or reject any of the projects, and its decision is final.

· Accepting the prize implies the transfer of property rights of the awarded project to VOCENTO, after the termination of its free distribution among art galleries participating at ARCO 2008 and those taking part in the 2009 edition. VOCENTO agrees not to commercialise nor distribute it in any other form than that described. After two years VOCENTO will make the project available to the public under the license CreativeCommons, Attribution 2.5 Spain.

APPLICATIONS

· Opening date for applications to ARTE 2.0 VOCENTO competition is the 1st January 2008 at 17:00 hours (GMT+1) through the Call for Proposals website.

· Deadline for applications to ARTE 2.0 VOCENTO competition is the 31st January 2008 at 17:00 hours (GMT+1) through the Call of Proposals website.

ARTE 2.0 VOCENTO competition aims not only to enable the development of a powerful tool or web environment serving art, but also to promote the development of a creative, striking and original environment appropriate to its target, ART, which can express the sensibility of both creators and a dynamic public eager for creative environments.

Therefore, this Call for Proposals is not only a search for efficiency but also for creativity, originality and innovation; for collaborative proposals by programmers, software engineers and artists alike reflecting the new social sensibility, and art’s ability to surprise.

You can download the guidelines (provisionally) from here.

On Tuesday Pentagon officials admitted that hackers from China had entered the network of the Pentagon and in June they had to stop the non encrypted email system for three weeks.
But a spokesman of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) denies that was responsible for the hack and he said: “It is often very difficult to pinpoint the true origin of a particular intrusion”.
A report in the Financial Times, citing former US officials, said the PLA was behind the hack, and described the cyber attack as the most successful on Pentagon networks.
The FT cited one source as saying there was a “very high level of confidence … trending towards total certainty” that the PLA was to blame.

Instead Al Jazeera says that China denies Pentagon cyber attack…

Who is tellling the truth? China or U.S.A.? Financial Times or Al Jazeera?

The StreamFest – Salento New Media Festival is finished. I was invited there and i directly saw the less and the wonderful features of this magic land that is Salento.
I can say that the on-stage section of the festival had some problems, because the space was too big and the territory was not ready for a new media festival like this, but it’s important to try if not nobody would brake the digital divide. And when the Salento New Media Festival will be settled in the future years, everyone will remember this crazy and emotional first edition.
And there’ll be a future for the StreamFest beacuse all the people gathered there by Antonio Rollo saw the possibility of a landscape like Salento, that can suggest to media critic and artist a possible different approach and view on technology.

Then everything off-stage was great as you can see

Anyhow there was a really interesting pavillion of installations and a big stage where local, national and international artist performed.

Among the installations i remember the HASCII-Cam of Jaromil, the installation called Virtual Identity Process of the student of the NABA Academy:

Online Videos by ECOPOLIS

Then also Alsos, a wonderful garden where the spectator could change the sound environment playing with a light torch and sensor-powered flowers

created by the french group Scenocosme and the Nitido videoinstallation by Giulia Mainenti.

About the musicians and dj you can see the video of the a short piece of Dj Foresta and Enrico Ascoli, Claudio Sinatti and Pierpaolo Leo, A Spider Called Andromeda, AgroElettronica, Gambo and Titta from Tonimusic, Minimono, then Pulsar and Mk05 and Daddi from Illogik Records and Kiddz, and at the end Esa Rouho aka Lackluster:

Online Videos by ECOPOLIS

It was really important for all the people gathered there to meet eachother and confront in a amazing setting as Salento. Everyone was really kind and every artist was in the best situation to express himself.

Just to show how well organized it was the Festival for the artist, here you can see the Sombrero Party guys, F.X. Randomize and Carsten Schulz, in action

and relaxed

while other musicians, Enrico Ascoli and Marco Foresta where preparing their liveset

There was also on saturday 29th of july a conference at the Masseria Torcito, where Carlo Infante coordinated a discussion about being a new media festival in a border land as Salento, there was also Paolo Atzori, Fabrizio Pecori, the director of the festival Antonio Rollo and all the artists invited there.

I think that also if the Festival wasn’t perfect it can open a new door/vision for the traditional media art festival, that usually are just focused on the technology, while StreamFest can be a festival about people and connection, besides being an important showcase of digital technology for this land that has a lot of sun and not so much technology.

And last but not not least the photo of the best driver you can find in all Salento: Luca.

The Bedazzle Studios has directed a movie entirely shooted inside Second Life. It all started from Eric Call, senior artist at Linden Lab, that came across the story of Silver Bells and Golden Spurs in a book of cowboy poetry several years ago, then he decided to shoot it. He started realizing a screen play adaptation and creating some of the stanza of the film, but it was too big to realize it alone. One day one of Linden Lab’s engineers demoed a QuickTime movie applied to an avatar face mesh and Eric realized that he could try to shoot his cowboy movie using this new Second Life’s feature.

So it started the making of the first movie shooted inside Second Life. Eric started the research phase made of visits to several mining and ghost towns in the Sierra Nevada to gather reference material and textures for the production and readings of books and surfingon the Internet to find images of the right buildings, clothing and props.
Then he needed some help and he find it by the Bedazzle Studios artists for recreation of the film.

On the “making page” of the film Eric Call explains deeply all the process, talking also about the research goals that he saw during the production phase that could serve as a proof of concept for several features, particularly speech emulation.

Also he talks about the acting of the avatars: “All of the actors were given a library of character animations they could manipulate through control scripts, and I directed them to perform specific actions during video capture. This allowed them some creative freedom so they could personalize their character, and at the same time assured me that I’d get the kind of actions I wanted.”

And about the goals: “Uncovering bugs, developing techniques for building and texturing, and revealing areas for improvement are just a few of the benefits to Linden Lab. Bells and Spurs sets new goals for quality and creativity in resident creations. It promotes a level of thoughtfulness and craftsmanship that will empower residents to use more of Second Life’s capabilities.”

ECO: What do you mean with “privatization of the glance”?
CB: The idea of “privatization of the glance” comes from a general tendancy that can be perceived in the transition from market capitalism to network capitalism. At first, there is a postmodernist “dematerialization” phase, which unveils the emergence of libertarian ideals of sharing and freedom but ends up with commodification of the ultimate “atoms” of human relations ; this is what happenened in the realm of language with The Google Adwords Happening. The post-fordist ideas that are at play in the economic dynamics of global structures like Google show the rise of 2.0 markets for these networked commodities involving “long tails” phenomenons (the Adwords/Adsense system for instance). According to contemporary graph theory (cf Barabasi: Linked), the “long tail” (or web 2.0 or “aristocratic network”) phenomenon is the mode according to which globalization is achieved in a closed unregulated networked ecosystem ; by definition it is an extension of the concept of the fordist object to the globality and variety of the human desires.

The new stake of capitalism is the control of these “global objects” through what I called “colonization of intimacy”: for instance when they bought Blogger, Google took a strong position towards the control of Language as a global 2.0 object, because they took hold of the gold mine of mankind’s intimacy.

Finally, there is an unavoidable rematerialization phase because this 2.0 trend invades all sectors of economy. Here there are some limitations because strictly speaking, 2.0 markets need low storage costs, typical of the dematerialization phase, cf: The Long Tail – but this becomes less and less important as “on demand” production increases.

In the panoptic environment of networked capitalism, the question of the accounting of glance (cf for instance a piece of mine from 2001, Fascinum) is quite similar to the question of the accounting of language introduced by Google; and the question of privatization of the glance arises then quite naturally.

It is also worth to say here that we cannot think of the Web as separated from other media phenomenons. The Web – and specifically Web 2.0 – allowed the final implementation of society of control, but the whole enslavement mechanism (which I called “taylorization of speech”) involves the spectacular society (TV, Web 1.0…) as well. In this approach I tend to consider that the main transition is not the rise of the Web, but the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, contemporary to 911. Web 2.0 is not just the next craze of the Internet. If you digg a little bit you realize that the ideology of Web 2.0 (scale-free networks theory of Barabasi, small worlds, rich get richer, long tail…) is nothing but the updated neoclassical theory of value (Walras, Pareto etc.). The law of diminishing marginal utility or Pareto law, which is just the precursor of the long tail, was an epistemological break with the classical economy (Smith, Ricardo, Marx) based on the labor theory of value. This epistemological cut is far from being digested…

ECO: Is the mash up the new aesthetic of the interconnected global world?
CB: Let me quote Walter Benjamin in the Epilogue of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction“, which deals precisely with the question of mash up and aesthetics:

“The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its *Fuhrer* cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.”

The decay of the aura of the object has several developments. The first one was the “transfiguration of the commonplace” (cf Danto) and the antidialectic cut performed by Pop Art towards the concept of “absolute merchandise” (cf Baudrillard: “De la marchandise absolue”).

The second one is the postfordist web 2.0 phenomenon – ie the mashup – which consists in a fake return of the aura of the object. According to the “long tail” rule, the object is supposed to match the intimate desire of each individual. In this adaptation of markets to the individuals one may ask if there isn’t a breakdown of the reproductibility of the object, that one could be perceived as a return of the aura of the object. Indeed, in the limit of perfect mashup, each object is now meant to become not-duplicable – not because of a lack of technology, but because it is made to be adapted to one individual only. But in fact, because capitalism has enter this new 2.0 phase, reproductibility is still here but has reached a new stage: what is now reproducible is the experience of the encounter consumer-object, and not only the object alone ; capitalism is now supposedly able to massively produce not only objects, but indefinitely many encounters between subjects and objects (for instance in the Google Adwords Happening, this encounter is defined by the click on the ad, which is precisely the unit – ie the root reproducible element – on which the whole Adword economic system is based). The experience of consumption (and its affects) has also become an act of production that enters the optimization process of capitalism 2.0.

So we have a fake return of the aura of the object, and a decay of the aura of the performative (the encounter which becomes reproducible). The paradox that lies in Benjamin’s text enters new developments: in the same way as the aura was reinjected into the fordist object by Pop Art, the aura of the HIC ET NUNC at the postfordist globalized era is reinjected into global brands (for instance Google as the brand of Language ..) whose aim is to be present EVERYWHERE EVERYTIME in the performative life of individuals and to control global 2.0 markets, a stage which was not totally reached in the fordist era where there was still some large opaque (ie not-yet-colonized) regions in the space of intimacy. This EVERYWHERE EVERYTIME, as opposed to the HIC ET NUNC, is nothing but the definition of the privatization of the glance.

ECO: What do you think about the “informatic profile” of every web citizen? In a way it depends on the pattern recognition algoritm that is used….Does it means my pubblic web image depends on values decided by ….Google?
CB: Sure but behind this question lies another one which is more tricky. It is definitely a problem that a private company may tune their algorithm so that the image of an individual would in a way reflect more the criteria of the company than the identity of the individual… By the way this is a very general and universal property of the concept of “image”, that computer science will not be able to solve; there is no objectivity here but instead an interplay between subjectivities (the subjectivity of those who wrote the program in that case).

What these companies want when they use pattern recognition to decide for instance if they are going to grant you a loan, is to have the most reliable universal method to predict your behaviour and evaluate their risk. Because there is no such universal theory, they have to use modelizations which depend on some arbitrary considerations and parameters and hence they have to make arbitrary choices. Now a problem arises when the method used is falsely claimed to be indeed universal and true. This is what is actually happening nowadays with the current expansion of technologies of control and there is a great danger that we are lead to a totalitarian mechanism.

But there is also a paradox. At some point, companies have in fact no interest in cheating and pretending they have a universal scientific method. This attitude is actually a modernist attitude which has been outdated by postmodernity. Any company that would do that takes the risk of being sooner or later suspected and despised. Moreover by imposing a normativity they lose track of what lies ouside the norm. Since what lies ouside the norm may become the seed of the markets of the future, this may reveal to be a self-contradictory strategy. In a 2.0 globalized world, if they put barriers to freedom, they are just unable to optimize the whole process because they lose data!

This is exactely what a company like Google understood. Google has a VERY long term stategy. They keep promoting freedom of speech and avoid any normative positionning because they know that this attitude is the basis for the optimization of their adwords/adsense system which is a neverending process. This is the paradox: freedom of speech has become a tool of totalitarianism (cf Benjamin text) and instead of modernist totalitarianism we are witnessing the rise of totalitarianism of the hypermodernity. This trend is a large scale trend. As the world-system reaches its EXTERNAL limitations (depletion of natural resources, expected end of low-cost labour, the end of the ideology of liberalism, the fading of desire, etc.), capitalism tries to relaunch its machinery by pushing back its INTERNAL limits. Thus freedom of speech is revealed to be the prerequisite for the scientific colonization of intimacy as well as collective hallucination is the prerequisite for the privatization if the glance.