ecopolis

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?

Project Oekonux researches the economical, political and social forms of Free Software and similar forms of production we collectively call peer production. In Project Oekonux, different people with different reasons and different approaches get together to build something new. A lot of participants want to know, whether and if so, how, the peer production can serve as a basis for a new society.

For the 4th Oekonux Conference Project Oekonux cooperates with the P2P Foundation. The Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives researches, documents and promotes P2P practices in every domain of social life. It’s a global cyber-collective and aims to be a knowledge and internetworking platform for open/free, participatory, and commons-oriented initiatives on a global scale.

During the past decade the phenomenon of Free Software has become successful and well-known. It is still amazing how in the realm of software the creativity of so many volunteers leads to products which are useful for the whole mankind. Ten years after Project Oekonux was founded the world has changed. As expected by us the principles of the development of Free Software are spreading out to other fields. Wikipedia and Open Access are two of the most interesting examples among many. It is time to look at peer production from a broader perspective.

The World of Peer Production takes up this development and widens the perspective from Free Software to other fields of peer production. Project Oekonux and P2P Foundation are proud to welcome nearly 30 invited contributors which will share their experience, studies and insights with us on the following topics:

* Peer production beyond Free Software
o Free Design of material goods for less industrialized countries
o Open Source Car
o Free Science with Open Access
o Open Street Map project
o Peer production in art
o Free Farming
o Free Knitting
* Aspects of Free Software
o Free Software in Latin America
o Innovation in Free Software
o “Others” in the community
o Communities and single developers
o Women in Free Software
* Peer production and social movements
o The Hipatia project
o Social movements and peer production
o Indigenous movements and cyberspace
* Theories on peer production
o Patterns in peer production
o Market and peer production based economies
o Peer production and the concept of truth
o Organization in peer production
* Future of peer production
o Current limitations of peer production
o Money and peer production
o Ideas for expanding peer production
o Political scenarios for expanding peer production

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook’s efforts to build a business model around its online social network have hit another roadblock, as a backlash by its users forced the company to reverse a new policy.

The dispute involves changes that Facebook had made to its terms of service agreement. Some critics said the changes appeared to give the company a perpetual right to content that users post on the network.

People Against the new Terms of Service, a Facebook group created to oppose the changes, counted more than 88,000 users on Wednesday.

The about-face by Facebook underscores the sensitivity that many consumers have about their personal data, even on sites where they freely share information about their lives with online friends.

And it reflects the challenges facing Facebook as it seeks to squeeze money out of its network of 175 million users and to offset the costs of its rapid growth.

Facebook is quickly burning through its initial funding, said Sanford Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay. Among other things, the social network needs to pay for the computers and equipment that host its online service around the world.

“That’s real money,” said Lindsay. “They’re realizing that they have to get a business model.”

via Reuters.

Al Jazeera have made available their exclusive Arabic and English video footage from the Gaza Strip produced by their correspondents and crews. The ongoing war and crisis in Gaza, together with the scarcity of news footage available, make this repository a key resource for anyone producing content on the current situation.

At the precise stroke of the advent of the third millennium, Yesmoke was born in a little town in the Swiss Alps. It was originally an online shop that sold the most popular premium cigarette brands; it quickly became the Number One online shop in the world.
And then, at a certain point, those “bravi ragazzi” (Good Fellas) of Yesmoke, decided to move from the Swiss Alps to North West Italy, to Settimo, in the suburbs of Turin.
And at Settimo, on August 7th 2007, 7 years, 7 months and 7 days after Yesmoke’s birth, they inaugurated a model cigarette production factory, identical to those of multinational cigarette manufacturers.

This is the story of a Davide against an aggressive Golia, but what’s important is that Davide is still alive and he reveal a lot of interesting thing about the sigarette market, that seems to be globazlly not so liberal….

Next days more informations, stay tuned the story is interesting and long.

Matteo Pasquinelli, Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons
Rotterdam: NAi Publishers / Institute of Network Cultures, 2008.
http://www.naipublishers.nl/art/animal_spirits_e.html

After a decade of digital fetishism, the spectres of the financial and energy crisis have also affected new media culture and brought into question the autonomy of networks. Yet activism and the art world still celebrate Creative Commons and the ‘creative cities’ as the new ideals for the Internet generation. Unmasking the animal spirits of the commons, Matteo Pasquinelli identifies the key social conflicts and business models at work behind the rhetoric of Free Culture. The corporate parasite infiltrating file-sharing networks, the hydra of gentrification in ‘creative cities’ such as Berlin and the bicephalous nature of the Internet with its pornographic underworld are three untold dimensions of contemporary ‘politics of the common’. Against the latent puritanism of authors like Baudrillard and Zizek, constantly quoted by both artists and activists, Animal Spirits draws a conceptual ‘book of beasts’. In a world system shaped by a turbulent stock market, Pasquinelli unleashes a politically incorrect grammar for the coming generation of the new commons.

Matteo Pasquinelli is an Amsterdam-based writer and researcher at the Queen Mary University of London and has an activist background in Italy. He edited the collection Media Activism: Strategies and Practices of Independent Communication (2002) and co-edited C’Lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader (2007). Since 2000, he has been editor of the mailing list Rekombinant (www.rekombinant.org).

Fondazione Accademia di Belle Arti Pietro Vannucci – Perugia
October 10th, 2008
10am-1pm / 4pm-7pm

On October 10, the group ‘Umane Energie’ and the ‘Flussi’ section of “Le Arti in Città” festival are promoting a seminar called Open Source Meeting at the ‘Fondazione Accademia di Belle Arti Pietro Vannucci’ in the city of Perugia. This is curated by Moreno Barboni and by Marco Mancuso, critic, curator and director of Digicult, and will be participated by Graffiti Research Lab, Pier Luigi Capucci, Laura Colini, Umane Energie and Confinidigitali.

The Open Source Meeting is dedicated to the ever-expanding circulation of ‘open’ computer resources and is meant to get territorial subjects, such as Confinidigitali and Umane Energie, to meet. Their Beduino open-source platform, derived from the international Arduino project, will be the base of a ‘multimedia park’ featuring national and international guests, so as to elaborate on and divulge the possibilities of open-source in the domain of digital arts and multimedia communication, both from an artistic and planning perspective.

Marco Mancuso and Moreno Barboni have therefore imagined a day of lectures and seminars, a round table of experts, researchers, curators and artists all with different but complementary expertises. This will offer the opportunity to reflect over the enormous potential, however mostly unsaid, of open digital technologies, their impact on the social, operational and political context in which we live, on their interaction with architecture and the social spaces in our urban areas and on comprehending their emotional impact on our perception of new art forms and creative languages.

Evan Roth and James Powderly are the Meeting’s international guests, founders of Graffiti Research Lab, for the second time in Italy after their first public performance ‘Laser Tag’, curated by Marco Mancuso in December 2007 in Rome and projected on the façades of the ‘Colosseo’ and the ‘Cestia’ pyramid. Graffiti Research Lab is wholly dedicated to developing technologies and experimental media to enhance public resources for urban communication. GRL have therefore been invited to explain their artistic/activist project, to describe their performances in cities round the world, to talk about the possible risks and the enormous potential for communication that lies behind applying open source technologies to graffiti and media art.

Pier Luigi Capucci, critic and professor, deals with communication systems and languages and, since the early Eighties, has been investigating the relationship between technologies, culture and society and between art forms, science and technologies. His task in the Meeting will be to trigger the debate around the collective and social impact of open-source technologies. The opportunities of choosing and accessing information and new tools have, in fact, enabled new possibilities for communicating and sharing knowledge extending the awareness of the cognitive, operative, social, and political uses of these same tools.

Marco Mancuso is the chairman of the Meeting. Critic, curator and founder of Digicult he deals with Digital Creative Media and the relationship between images, sound and space within contemporary Audiovisual Art. Focusing on how open-source technologies have affected the digital Audiovisual domain by showing an overview on the most interesting artistic and creative international projects, he will suggest some critical thought around how these tools are used, around shared creativity dynamics on the Web, free code, and around how ever more intertwined art, design and hyper architecture are.
Laura Colini, researcher at the Bauhaus University in Weimar in the department of Architecture, Media and Urban Sociology, will focus on technologies and participated city-making projects. She will describe the concept of participation in urban planning confronting it with the participation to the city entailed by ITC practices. A sort of shared-practices taxonomy to city-making, called ICT spatial practices, that allows to build up critical thinking and awareness around the urban theme of collective planning.

Lastly, the collaboration between Confini Digitali and Umane Energie that has lead to ‘Beduino’, an open-source electronic device meant to develop interactive, artistic installations. It features audio controls, sensor interfaces, led and motor controls. Slightly bigger than a packet of cigarettes Beduino, based on the more famous ‘Arduino’ hardware/software, can be used without having to write any code by those who are not necessarily computer geeks. It can be used as a real-time audio and video controller, as a MIDI control, it is useful for interactive installations, to control led lights, robotic controls and much more.