Thursday the 8th of March started with a showcase of alternative social media. Representatives of Crabgrass, Freedombox, Lorea, Secushare, Briar, Social Swarm, TheGlobalSquare, Thimbl and Unhosted were present. After a short introduction by the representatives, the audience was free to walk around and have a chat with the alternative media developers.

Next, Silvio Lorusso took the floor and introduces the artists of the Unlike Art session. Twelve Networked Media students of Piet Zwart Institute (Rotterdam) came to present their work. ‘A lot of projects are experiments and works in progress’ says Silvio, the moderator and curator of the session. ‘We hope to inspire others with the projects.’

The first project was ‘The Fruitsalad Enigma’ by Dave Young. Dave is looking at different ways to create a micro social network in a social network. For this project, he worked on an algorithm to use on Facebook with the goal to trigger a debate and do something that is playful and provocative. The Fruitsalad enigma converts words into fruits. For example, ‘Hi how are you’ is converted into: ‘pomegranate lemon grapefruit orange lemon kiwi watermelon grapefruit raspberry lemon grapefruit lemon pomegranate grape?’ For Dave, the strength of the encryption is not really important; the project is more about ‘what does this mean’ and ‘how can you trigger people to talk about it’. The converter can be used inside Facebook or as a browser plugin. When used as a build-in text window, the converter could for example be used for a status update on Facebook.
Read the rest of this entry »