Naar aanleiding van de Society of the Query conferentie, die gehouden is in november 2009, is er een interessant interview afgenomen met Siva Vaidhyanathan voor Vrij Nederland.

Siva is de auteur van het boek ‘the Googlization of Everything‘ dat momenteel geschreven wordt. Een boek over één bedrijf, Google, een volledige cultuur, economie en community kan veranderen en waarom wij ons daarover zorgen zouden moeten maken.

Lees het interview ‘Google is een religie’ nu op de Vrij Nederland website.

Een videoregistratie van Siva Vaidhyanathan’s lezing tijdens The Society of the Query kun je hier bekijken als webcollege, of lees het verslag van zijn presentatie op het SOTQ blog.

The Society of the Query werd georganiseerd door het Instituut voor Netwerkcultuur, nieuwe media onderzoekscentrum aan de Hogeschool van Amsterdam.

Critical Point of View
Second international conference of the CPOV Wikipedia Research Initiative

Practical Info
Date: 26-27 March 2010
Location: OBA (Public Library Amsterdam, next to Amsterdam central station), Oosterdokskade 143, Amsterdam
Organized by: Institute of Network Cultures Amsterdam, and Centre for Internet and Society Bangalore, India.
Website: www.networkcultures.org/cpov
Conference program: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/program/amsterdam-program/
Discussion List: http://p10.alfaservers.com/mailman/listinfo/cpov_listcultures.org

About CPOV
Wikipedia is at the brink of becoming the de facto global reference of dynamic knowledge. The heated debates over its accuracy, anonymity, trust, vandalism and expertise only seem to fuel further growth of Wikipedia and its user base. Apart from leaving its modern counterparts Britannica and Encarta in the dust, such scale and breadth places Wikipedia on par with such historical milestones as Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, the Ming Dynasty’s Wen-hsien ta-ch’ eng, and the key work of French Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie. The multilingual Wikipedia as digital collaborative and fluid knowledge production platform might be said to be the most visible and successful example of the migration of FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) principles into mainstream culture. However, such celebration should contain critical insights, informed by the changing realities of the Internet at large and the Wikipedia project in particular.

The CPOV Research Initiative was founded from the urge to stimulate critical Wikipedia research: quantitative and qualitative research that could benefit both the wide user-base and the active Wikipedia community itself. On top of this, Wikipedia offers critical insights into the contemporary status of knowledge, its organizing principles, function, and impact; its production styles, mechanisms for conflict resolution and power (re-)constitution. The overarching research agenda is at once a philosophical, epistemological and theoretical investigation of knowledge artifacts, cultural production and social relations, and an empirical investigation of the specific phenomenon of the Wikipedia.

Conference Themes: Wiki Theory, Encyclopedia Histories, Wiki Art, Wikipedia Analytics, Designing Debate and Global Issues and Outlooks.

Confirmed speakers: Florian Cramer (DE/NL), Andrew Famiglietti (UK), Stuart Geiger (USA), Hendrik-Jan Grievink (NL), Charles van den Heuvel (NL), Jeanette Hofmann (DE), Athina Karatzogianni (UK), Scott Kildall (USA), Patrick Lichty (USA), Hans Varghese Mathews (IN), Teemu Mikkonen (FI), Mayo Fuster Morell (IT), Mathieu O’Neil (AU), Felipe Ortega (ES), Dan O’Sullivan (UK), Joseph Reagle (USA), Ramón Reichert (AU), Richard Rogers (USA/NL), Alan Shapiro (USA/DE), Maja van der Velden (NL/NO), Gérard Wormser (FR).

Editorial team: Sabine Niederer and Geert Lovink (Amsterdam), Nishant Shah and Sunil Abraham (Bangalore), Johanna Niesyto (Siegen), Nathaniel Tkacz (Melbourne). Project manager CPOV Amsterdam: Margreet Riphagen. Research intern: Juliana Brunello. Production intern: Serena Westra.

The CPOV conference in Amsterdam will be the second conference of the CPOV Wikipedia Research Initiative. The launch of the initiative took place in Bangalore India, with the conference WikiWars in January 2010. After the first two events, the CPOV organization will work on producing a reader, to be launched early 2011. For more information or submitting a reader contribution: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/reader/.

Buy your ticket online at: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/practical-info/tickets/ (with iDeal), or register by sending an email to: info (at) networkcultures.org. One day ticket: €25, students and OBA members: €12,50. Full conference pass (2 days): €40, students and OBA members: €25.

More info: www.networkcultures.org/cpov. Contact: info (at) networkcultures.org, phone: +3120 5951866

By Rachel O’Reilly

Introduction
Curatorial practice discussions and debates are still vastly under-programmed in Australia; they sometimes take place in terms of legacy discussions (individual shows/ provocateurs); philosophies of aesthetics; local ritual digestions of recent international publications; or as a showcasing of emergent forms. This is hardly surprising given it has only been recently that curatorial histories and practice http://www.leonardo.info/isast/leobooks/books/graham-cook.html theories http://www.amazon.co.uk/Curating-Now-Imaginative-Practice-Responsibility/dp/0970834608/ref=sr_1_10/279-1843000-1828824?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263822288&sr=1-10 are being externalized, http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Curating-Documents/dp/390582955X/ref=cm_lmf_tit_1 documented http://www.amazon.co.uk/Curating-Subjects-Paul-ONeill/dp/0949004162 and are democratising http://www.amazon.com/Curating-Immateriality-Browser-Joasia-Krysa/dp/1570271739/ref=cm_lmf_tit_5 – across institutional and disciplinary divides. An art-science curatorial workshop adds another layer of complexity and questioning again to these only nascently-theorized intellectual operations and labour practices that contemporary curating is, and has become. It would have been impossible to address the breadth of debate in this area. Notably, prior to ANAT’s Masterclass in Melbourne, the CRUMB list discussed the topic of “interdisciplinary curating” throughout the month of November, and put many of the speakers of Superhuman in dialogue with participants of the “When Art met the Web-Sciences” event at the Institute for the Converging Arts and Sciences, University of Greenwich. There are some great archived posts there if you are interested in some of these debates. See also a condensation of more theoretical contestations among key practitioners here.

The Superhuman Curatorial Masterclass timed to coincide with Re:Live 2009 had a separate entry point to the Superhuman symposium and exhibition (those engaged nanoaesthetics, augmentation, disability arts, robotics, brain-machine interfaces, nanoaesthetics, therapeutic nanotechnologies, biotech ethics, synthetic ecology, and a keynote from artist Paul Brown). Thematically at one remove, the masterclass brought curators in contact with individual art and curatorial practices to showcase around four themes: Bio-art and Nano-art, Digital and Virtual Play, Interactive Installation, and Research and Networks.
Given full recordings of all sessions will soon be online at the ANAT site, this post skips between highlights and reflection on larger curatorial practice discourse.

On bioart – Session 1
Biomedia artist Jens Hauser, curator of Sk-interfaces http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/03/skinterfaces.php and Still, Living http://www.stillliving.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/, discussed his role in Skinterfaces before presenting a number of adaptations of curatorial thinking that happen around “biomedia” or “live biotechnological art” (his preferred terms over “bio-art”). Hauser emphasises/prioritizes: “presentation” over representations, since the art itself labours beyond vision-based hermeneutics; the democratization of biotechnological tools – studying, reviewing and critiquing the life sciences; and artistic experimentation “beyond epistemic value”. In addition to “subverting specific layers of biotechnological processes for aesthetic effect”, he emphasised coming to bioart and curation “beyond anthropocentric or promethean dominance over organic materials”, and using techniques inherently or explicitly critical of “engineering approaches to biomedia”. Hauser specifically introduced the concept of “production of presence” as a framing device or curatorial model for bio art curation, which he takes from Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s book of the same name. His comments about the miscomprehension of bioart “spectatorship” (“it’s not about the image”) dialogued to my mind with larger debates about postconceptual art and spectacle in contemporary art and its marketing. An aesthetics of spectatorship (for bio-art) can only be interpreted by parataxis in Hauser’s view.

Mike Stubbs, CEO at FACT Liverpool, was the only speaker to directly raise the spectre of biopolitics throughout the two days (Hauser later spoke briefly but pointedly on this issue at Relive during question time). Stubbs skipped quickly over the apparent slated topic of ‘risk management’ in bioart at Skinterfaces and instead focussed attention on the lay vernacular connotations of Superhuman of an augmented/cyborgian soldier fighting body. His gesture was a challenge to the tendency to identify (moral) provocation, historic currency, or (scientific/artistic) progression with bioart’s experimentalism tout court. Stubbs essentially requested the audience reflect on the intersection of a ‘bios’/life politics and this un-acknowledged militarist notion of “superhumanism”, and addressed this in the public projection works of Polish artist Krystof Wodjesko. At FACT Liverpool, Wodjesko worked with British Veteran’s group, Combat Stress, to remix the testimonies of returned British soldiers’ psychoses, and their family’s in to night time audio-visual projections in inner-city Liverpool during Britain’s obvious continued troop commitments to Iraq. Stubbs situated risk precisely here: “any discussion of risks should involve thinking about how you take risks and risks that are involved in more than the artworld”!

Artist and academic Paul Thomas spoke about his role as “amateur curator” (his words) of the BEAP (Biennale of Electronic Art Perth) that has been paramount in bringing bio and nano art works, and critical art-science discourse “after Harraway” to Australia. Thomas framed the institution as a sort of necessary liability for bioart practice and exhibition creation, and “invented research questions” for exhibitions in order to attain academic funding. His ambivalence about institution-building spoke also to Douglas Kahn’s later art-historical perspectives on cold war era art-science collaboration; both tending to stress that independent and one-on-one conversations, pseudo-institutional strategies and geographic or intellectual remoteness so often combine to bring genuinely experimental cross-disciplinary projects to life.

On Digital and virtual Play – Session 2
Given that philosophies of play and 90s-theoretical virtuality have been paramount in bringing interactive and ‘live’ media work in to gallery spaces, it was interesting that this panel ended with Helen Stuckey, ex-curator of ACMI Games Lab suggesting that that moment for actual large scale game curating in public institutions has somewhat passed, and “is not so relevant any more”. Stuckey considered that at ACMI at least, the conditions for curating games were compromised from the start; the management/censorship of multi-user realitme interaction a major impasse. She was philosophical: curatorial attention at ACMI had significant impact on the development of a larger independent culture of small scale games production, meanwhile ‘the art world has moved on’.
Speaking first on this panel, Erich Berger chief curator at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, gave an overview of the curatorial research and exhibition design behind his ambitious co-curated show HOMO LUDENS LUDENS. This was a dense theory treat for the game art historians in the audience, with equally strong curatorial attention to exhibition design which you can see here. Those interested in Berger’s curatorial frameworks and theory will enjoy listening to the whole talk.
Angela Main spoke about her interactive art practice through the lens of Richard Shusterman’s work, and his alternative theories of the gaze. Where’s the screen/ interaction theory for this other non-scopic tendency of the gaze? (Interestingly, only monkeys, elephants, humans and crows have been found to have identificatory relationships with the mirror.) Her works elaborate on the peripheral and soft engagement Shusterman outlines in their design. Main also pondered our tendencies to psychologically profile artists and scientists who study biological and psychological processes, from Darwin’s time to today. Darwin suffered terrible health and “reacted poorly to social situations” – does his combination of “complete intellectual dispassion and simultaneous notorious empathy for life” say something about artistic inquiry? See especially his book on barnacles…
Curator/academic Kathy Cleland http://www.kathycleland.com/ considered her curation of Mirror States (co-curated with Lizzy Muller) through a curatorial model of the magic circle: “a temporary world within the ordinary world”. This borrowing of ritual magic and game theory (see also Castranova and Zimmerman) to talk about digitality, interactivity, projection and otherness preceded a tour through individual works in the show. Christine Paul later queried the application of similar concepts to frame art work interaction within what are “highly coded” spaces of exhibition. It might have been interesting to bring up and really recognize this tendency of splitting between Turing and Duchamp (or similar) in new media/-art paradigms, in terms of the way it impacts curatorial and interaction models.

On interactive installation – Session 3
Christiane Paul http://transliteracies.english.ucsb.edu/post/conference-2005/participants/christiane-paul spoke candidly about curatorial tensions and impasses negotiated in her recognised work as Adjunct Curator of new media at the Whitney, New York. Theorising the curator as a “designer of experiences” – she summarised that design work for the Whitney’s 2nd Avenue audiences as tough. From my view, she likened her practice to a sort of persistent, sometimes flagrant, mostly underappreciated practice of considered insertion – placing ‘new media’ work in to what are fairly resolutely conservative zones of spectatorship. Audiences complain: “It’s all about technology; It doesn’t work; It belongs in a science museum; I work on a computer all day, I don’t want to see art on it in my free time; It’s all about technology”. Paul beautifully deconstructed what we all know as the “the wow effect” critique of new media works (in my experience curators/historians, just as often as inexperienced public audiences, draw on this to categorically withdraw an overworked researcher’s gaze). “The wow effect applies”, Paul points out, “to any new media art work where the technology is not understood” but particularly in spaces where “art is the equivalent of consumption” – where the concept of interaction is reduced to account only for the “indic space of play”. Great! Sarah Cook later in the symposium considered such criticisms in the context of the fact that some of the key recognised works of media art have only received support from science museums in the past – the National Science Museum in London have a particularly strong reputation for the public display of new media art as Sarah Cook pointed out.

George Khut’s art practice presentation took seriously the matter of “other spaces” for new media art work and engagement. The Heart Library Project he staged at St Vincent’s hospital was a way for people to collaborate and gather stories about health and their own bodies. The interest lay in the hospital site, “but not as the site of pathology”. Prior to The Heart Library, the hospital already had a funded, but “no frills” (painting, photography) art program, and a large waiting room with a constant potential audience. Khut’s message could perhaps be summarised as: take advantage of existing and purpose-sympathetic infrastructure. “People tend to engage with new media work differently (better, he suggests) outside of art museum spaces.” Khut’s mindfulness of the curation of the project (figured with curator Lizzy Muller) took into account the installation as a perceptual field, and its relational structures in the hospital, down to who is there to greet people each time.

Tina Gonsalves, one of Australia’s prominent media-art-science practitioners gave insight in to the specific kinds of questions (for Gonsalves it was “psychophysiolgocial interactivity”) that lead artists to seek genuine, in-depth relations and long term institutionalised collaboration. Gonsalves: “I wanted to work with people who knew what body data meant, and to create more figurative and emotionally challenging video images that respond biologically to bodies”. What I appreciated most about Gonsalves’ discussion of the works were the complex temporal awareness of the vicitudes of instinct, experience and outcome for each work, the persistent tinkering experimentation, and her interrogation of the full range of the affect system, including obviously her own: feeltrace turned out to be so finely programmed as to be “traumatising”; Feel Insula presented the artist as “so vulnerable that I never wanted to show it again”. Her practice is interesting in this way that it cuts through discourses of spectatorship as a terminal or finite affectivity – this also reflected in her unfolding, multi-stage approach to research and experimentation of adaptations of works across sites and over time. That sort of persistence with variability and experimentation is evident in Emotional Contagion: a longrunning collaboration with neuroscientists, that has an ongoing display and research life due to the work’s own memory system, its gallery tour schedule and institutional research support, and parallel artisticand neuroscientific publication avenues.
Lizzy Muller valiantly changed her topic at the last minute in order to directly address the conversation about “curatorial models” and curatorial labour that was happening more in the discussion periods of the masterclass than in the presentations themselves. Drawing on David Rokeby’s work ‘The Giver of Names’ as a case study, and her experience with video-cued recall to playback and study audience experience, she introduced the concept of “the indeterminate archive” that she developed from her work with media artists “at prototype stage”, as a curator at Beta-space, Casula Powerhouse, and with the David Langlois Foundation, extending the Variable Media Questionaire beyond the preservation of the object. Her point: “Documentation is often completely staged today (for interactive works). The artwork tends to give a completely different experience from that assumed by the artist, and from the version given in its documentation.” For Muller this means there is a “huge gap around the reality of these works. What was it really like to be there?” She gave four examples of entirely different visitors’ engagements with Rokeby’s piece, “not a single one of which”, she emphasised, is “the definitive version of the work… (but) the value is what they reflect back on the idealized descriptions that the artist gives in his intention.” An interdeterminate archive would include all four, “refrain from truth claims about the actual experience of The Giver of Names”; allows conservators to assess a “better idea of original presentation” (through a multiplicity of engagements). I’ve never seen this use of video recall used before to theorise engagement with work (which also featured in George’s talk). I had questions about the model design and its ineluctable focalizations.

(Four great takes on) Networks – Session 4
(1) “Remember the amateurs, and talk one on one” Douglas Kahn brought some critical and art-historical perspective to the art-science and networks conversation. Kahn is not an official member of any (networks), partly because his work doesn’t have a lot of existing scholarship (“there’s plenty on Cage but little post-cage”); but also because there’s “no commodity culture” for experimental music. His historical work involves documenting the extensive and unacknowledged contributions of specific scientists to individual experimental arts practices (e.g. Variation 7 – engineer Bill Kluger). He listed the The Society for Literature, Science and the Arts as one of his preferred academic forums…the College Art Association also. He lurks on the Yahoo VLF (very low frequencies) group and takes on the role of the ‘historian’ of the list, sometimes having conversations (e.g. on Finnegan’s wake and early vlf technology) “kicked off-list by techies”. His ‘networks’ advice: contact anyone and do your homework ahead of time. Bring scientists into historical research – not just as adjuncts or institutional support. “Scientists have ideas and engage with artists and ideas in particular ways… switch from conversations with artists, straight to engineers/scientists for feedback and back again”. He placed due attention on the role of amateur and independent scientists here – acknowledging them in the networks between art and science in a third space, their important legwork. “A lot of scientists are in amateur communities. A lot of artists get information from amateur scientist books. So any discussion of art and science needs to include art, science, and amateurs.”
(2) “Curating around the concept of cool is not that interesting.” That was Amanda McDonald Crowley, Director of Eyebeam en-route to the virtual walk through she gave of the organisations restructure, and many tiered levels and arms of projects via the Eyebeam website. Eyebeam has a highly transparent and research-based curatorial architecture with a whole range of platforms that look out to various communities in the process of the production of new works. Programming comes after, not before, the work of the research community. Beyond ‘new work’ the project is equally about “open cultures research” “open hardware systems” and “open culture” (across organisations), the latter covering dedicated projects on net neutrality, tactical culture and design for change. ”Curating” for Crowley/eyebeam includes “trying to build up a body of knowledge and networks that thread off exhibitions into other grounded projects”. The website as open culture links all this together, archiving practices and knowledge not related to eyebeam but sprouting from the organisation’s work.
(3) Take advantage of curatorial knowledge spaces! Sarah Cook http://www.sarahcook.info/ curator/writer and co-founder of CRUMB pitched a genuine curatorial masterclass presentation around her project Beam me up, and tailored it to both inform and take advantage of the international audience of curators, artists, academics in the room. Cook had the luxury of being approached by xcult.org with a brief to pitch a platform for online work, the only proviso that it be “about science-art concepts regarding ideas of space”. She pitched Beam Me Up, addressing ‘outerspace’ strategically tying it to the International Year of Astronomy, which was a great way to link exhibition communication to some of the similarly-themed science communication initiatives and funding of that year. Beam Me Up straddled art-science complexes in ways that shed insight on curation and science communication practice both. Cook gave some insight in to the kinds of ‘new’ curatorial decisions involved once projects become more heavily dependent on dialogue with scientists. E.g. “Do you just have to take their word for it that they are getting the science right?” ;) To destabilize input along curation vs hard-science lines, she asked the scientist to contribute exhibition/site text, and built her own science communication skills and networks. Her question posed to the audience: what do you think about the timeline and curatorial responsibility for maintaining durationally-specific online projects after they’re over?
(4) Networks need not be about infinite growth! from MAAP put critical perspective on the valorization of (social) networks, as a bastardized concept in media curation. For Machan, MAAP emphasises “relationships” over networks, which better describes personal and institutional flexibility tailored to nail both longrunning and short term meaningful collaborations, as well as MAAPs need for active positioning in pursuit of fresh conceptual space. “Why focus on groups or projects becoming bigger and bigger and bigger?” Growth and continuity is not so necessary: “If it’s not useful (i.e. to the practice community), stop doing it!” Though MAAP is regional, the “map” that the organisation services is just as relational, strategic and conceptual as the organisational plan, given the fact that geographic “networks” or regions are economically drawn. The “Asia” concept is “not marked by common concern but by economic interest in the region”. This emphasis on calling the shots on building and ending projects and networks was a nice end to the day.

Network Links Discussion
The discussion that followed the final session was usefully pragmatic and more macro. Lists of the interesting orgs and networks doing art science work were rattled off: Perry Farrelly – and the Citizen Science projects; Partisan labs; Arts catalyst in the UK; of course Symbiotica; the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille CNRS in France; Seed magazine; The Exploratorium in San Francisco; artsactive.net. What can be said about the fact that Art-science collaborations are more often initiated by the arts insitutions, rather than working the other way around? Douglas Kahn emphasised that in the US, the two cultures/camps mentality is strong because of the kind of graduate training regimes in place. “Its difficult to have conversations with scientists”. He emphasised that he and groups like the Critical Arts Ensemble focus on personal individual relationships only. Sarah Cook similarly emphasised the utility and progressive politics of the concept of the amateur view: “as a curator-facilitator and maker of situations, the move to a model of curation that sees the curator as an amateur knowledge worker is important…not needing to be a specialist in a field is a way of dealing with collaboration and cross-disciplinary practice”. It was mentioned also that the newly established Ri Australia in Adelaide might open up interesting collaborations with ANAT in relation to art-science.

Brief Reflections
The thematic framing of the Superhuman Curatorial Masterclass seemed to be responsible for the curious non-discussion of the inherent criticality of curatorial practice and labour quite generally, and on theme (biopolitics? post-humanism? etc). Some shared reference points apart from the Superhuman exhibition – a book chapter, some links, perhaps a relevant paper gleaned from the symposium? – distributed prior to the sessions might have been useful to implant as a meeting point, given “Superhuman” and “Darwin” are more like synecdoches than concepts able to encourage genuine intersubjectivity. (See a deeply enjoyable but entirely unrelated review of Darwin’s year here. The default vision of curation risks being reduced to singular artwork and network brokerage if/wherever the labour of articulating (and often reframing) specific relationships between knowledges, practices and experimentation, within a range of sometimes conflicting intellectual, professional, and community networks, is taken too much for granted (for a whole range of pragmatic but also symptomatic reasons). On the above points, Superhuman was perhaps not quite of masterclass design. It was however an otherwise rich, immersive, and (over-)stimulating two days; much was gleaned, and the organisers should be thanked for their initiation and incredibly tight management of a rare, generous and open gathering of expertise.

We were very happy with the large amount of people attending the latest Video Vortex conference in Brussels. However, for those of you who could not make it, there is a full video report of all presented lectures to be found here.

Cimatics festival was hosting the 5th Video Vortex conference. Two years after its first edition, Video Vortex returned to Brussels, this time hosted in one of the great icons of mid 20th century modern architecture: the Atomium.

The past two years, the conference series – which focuses on the status and potential of the moving image on the Internet – has visited Amsterdam, Ankara and Split, growing out into an organized network of organizations and individuals. Time for an interim report, perhaps. We asked some participants of the first Video Vortex editions and publication, as well as new ones, to reflect on recent developments in online video culture.

Over the past years the place of the moving image on the Internet has become increasingly prominent. With a wide range of technologies and web applications within anyone’s reach, the potential of video as a personal means of expression has reached a totally new dimension. How is this potential being used? How do artists and other political and social actors react to the popularity of YouTube and other ‘user-generated-content’ websites? What does YouTube tell us about the state of contemporary visual culture? And how can the participation culture of video-sharing and vlogging reach some degree of autonomy and diversity, escaping the laws of the mass media and the strong grip of media conglomerates?

Credits:
Video Vortex V is organized in cooperation with the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam and supported by KASK (Faculty of Fine Arts, University College Ghent) and the Center Leo Apostel (CLEA).

The conference Follow the Money took place on January 14, 2010 in De Balie in Amsterdam. New media professional and MA student at the UvA Margarida Fonseca chose to visualize this event on datavisualization:

When I went to Picnic this year here in Amsterdam, they had a huge screen showing all the tweets people were posting about the conference and one presenter even mentioned something like: “Wow, there is a lot of conversation going on about Picnic over the Internet, even more that it’s actually going here”. That got me curious and prompt me to follow “Follow the money” conference from another angle, the angle of who’s watching and that has obviously something to say. The attendee becomes also a broadcaster.

Margarida Fonseca is currently a Project Manager working mostly on Web related projects: websites, intranets, web advertising and usability projects at a Portuguese Telecom Company. This year, she decided to take a year off work to learn new approaches and to gain insights, and that’s why she moved to Amsterdam to study new media at the UvA. Recently, Margarida became more and more interested in information visualization.

Download Margarida’s report (as a PDF) that doubles as a datavisualization of the Follow the Money event (on Datavisualisation).

Also, read a short summary of the conference by CPOV research intern Juliana Brunello.

On the 19th of February, 2010, the INC launched two new online projects: the Theory on Demand Publication series and Geert Lovink’s online radio archive. The Theory on Demand series, produced by Margreet Riphagen and designed by Katja van Stiphout, is a print-on-demand publication series that kicks of with four books. After an introduction by Geert Lovink, editor of the series, authors Joost Smiers and Marieke van Schijndel were present to talk about their book on (the abolition of) copyright. For more information, ordering and downloading the books, please visit: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/theoryondemand/

The second festive event was the launch of Geert’s audio archive. He explained how in the activist movement of the 80s, a lot was considered elitist, and so was theory. The Bilwet Agentur was launched as a place for theory, not to explain it to a broader public, but to let it flourish. In that spirit, Geert produced 200 hours of interviews with theorists from his own generation, most of which are in Dutch, some in German, others in English. Below please find Geert’s introduction to this inspiring collection (in Dutch). Listen to the audio files on: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/bilwet/
For more information about Bilwet please visit: http://www.thing.desk.nl/bilwet/

Welkom bij het audio archief (1987-2000)
Introductie door Geert Lovink

In de zomer van 2009 heb ik een bananendoos met audiocassettes tevoorschijn getoverd uit de berging en is Margreet (Riphagen) van het INC, met hulp van anderen, begonnen met het digitaliseren van het materiaal. Beetje bij beetje wordt dit materiaal opgeladen naar archive.org tot het archief van ongeveer 200 banden à 1 uur compleet is.

Het archief bestaat uit een aantal categorieën:
1. Het grootste gedeelte, ongeveer 120 programma’s, bestaat uit een uur durende theorie vertelsessies, de Bilwet Portrettengalerij zoals die werd uitgezonden van 1987 tot 1993 op Radio 100 en Radio Patapoe (Amsterdam) en Radio Rataplan (Nijmegen). Het zijn geen interviews in de zin van vragen en antwoorden. De bedoeling was om een ruimte te creëren voor compromisloze theorie in de vorm van verhalen. Veel van de programma’s hebben een geschiedenis achtergrond met een nadruk op het 18e- tot 20e-eeuwse Westerse denken. Natuurlijk volgde ik mijn eigen belangstelling en vandaar dat er een zekere nadruk ligt op Duitse geschiedenis, het fascisme en de periode rond de Tweede Wereldoorlog.

Dit is de post-bewegingsfase, de periode van pril postmodernisme en opleving van Theorie in het algemeen–zelfs in het kille en door crisis geplaagde Nederland. Ook toen al bestond een brede opvatting van theorie als een rijke praktijk van oneigentijdse ideeënvorming. Voor de Bilwet Portrettengalerij hoefde niets uitgelegd te worden aan het brede publiek. Het was ‘extramuraal denken’, aan gene zijde van de universiteit, ook al hadden sommigen wel een bepaalde relatie tot de academie. Het ging om het ‘hekken zitten’ zoals Hans-Peter Duerr het ooit noemde: met een been aan de rationele, formele kant van de filosofie en het andere been aan zijde van het wilde denken, de verbeelding en de droomwereld. De keuze voor de personen en onderwerpen kwam voort uit mijn milieu uit die tijd: post-weekblad Bluf!, Uitgeverij Ravijn, de redactieraad van de uitgeverij SUA, het jaarboek Arcade, de redactie van het tijdschrift Mediamatic en de underground scene van de vrije radio’s zelf. Toch ging het niet om een politiek-correcte radicale theorie. Mijn radio was bedoeld als een positieve bijdrage aan het openen van de vastgelopen, introverte activistentaal en zocht de grenzen op van het ‘bewust irrelevante’ in vergelijking met de rigide mix van cultureel elitisme en populisme, toen al, in de officiële Nederlandse media. In biografische zin is dit voor mij een periode van freischwebende Intelligenz, professionele werkloosheid, post-kraakbeweging, in de overgang van theorie in de brede zin naar een speficieke, historisch georiënteerde (Duitse) mediatheorie.

2. Door mijn betrokkenheid bij Berlijn, Duitsland en Oost-Europa had ‘1989′ en de val van de Muur een belangrijke invloed op mijn radio activiteiten. Vanaf herfst 1990 verhuisde ik voor een tweede keer naar Berlijn en bracht ik steeds meer tijd door in Hongarije en Roemenie. Tegelijkertijd bezocht ik Californië, India en Japan voor de eerste keer. Het begon vanaf 1990 moeilijker te worden om een wekelijkse uitzending te produceren voor de Portrettengalerij. In de winter van 90/91 nam ik een serie persoonlijke radioverslagen op vanuit Berlijn, geheten Germanofobisch Programma. Ook deed ik verslag uit Boekarest en Calcutta. Ook de oorlog in Joegoslavië ging een rol spelen (92).

3. Voor mijn werk als redacteur van Mediamatic, en het verschijnen van het boek Bilwet- Media Archief (begin 1992) kwam ik steeds vaker in contact met collega mediatheoretici. Dit hield ook verband met de aanschaf van een computer (in 1987), een modem (in 1990) en mijn groeiende betrokkenheid bij computer netwerken en cybercultuur. Dit zijn de hoogtijdagen van multimedia, cyberspace en virtual reality. De onderwerpen verschuiven naar het maken van interviews die ik niet alleen uitzond maar ook ging uittypen. Vanaf midden 1993 was ik niet langer bij de sociale dienst en kon als ‘zelfstandige mediatheoreticus’ radio bijdrages maken voor VPRO radio, in nauwe samenwerking met Bart Schut. Dit viel samen met de mijn eerste internet account bij Hacktic (later xs4all), en de oprichting van de Digitale Stad, Desk.nl en nettime. De rest is geschiedenis, zoals men wel zegt. De zaak kwam in een versnelling terecht. Mijn radioactiviteiten gaan steeds meer in het teken staan van internet, tactische media (N5M) en nieuwe media (kunst). Deze fase culmineert waarschijnlijk in het grote interview-radio archief dat ik maakte tijdens de Documenta X in Kassel tijdens het Hybrid Workspace project. De interviews uit deze periode zijn bijeengebracht in mijn boek Uncanny Networks (MIT Press, 2002). Eind jaren 90 verbleef ik steeds minder in Amsterdam, stopte met bijdrages te maken voor de VPRO en Radio Patapoe, reisde steeds meer in Azie en verhuisde uiteindelijk naar Australie. De laatste interviews, opgenomen op cassette, dateren uit 2000.

Rachel O’Reilly

The call for papers for Re:live 2009 was broad: art-science-technology; biology – life – bioart; environment – sustainability – ecology; liveness –performance –networks; innovation – accident – alternative futures. While clusters of themes seemed purposefully solicited in this way, it was individual papers that stood out. This was partly because of the way sessions were only very loosely programmed as a series of discrete paper contributions, partly to do with the sort of reflective space opened up by longview scholarship and compelling close readings of difficult to access work, and partly due to speaker cancellations and facilitation constraints placed upon a rescheduled program.

There was of course much discussion of liveness throughout the four days, this being increasingly pronounced when history-work is equated with archival relations, preservation and re-presentation. Here, the large-scale cross-programming of A-life and robotics papers alongside theatre scenography and biomedia practices tended to productively destabilize discourses of life and liveness made use of, often interrogated. A number of philosophically sophisticated papers gave elaborate readings of individual works, practices and sci/tech moments, contributing greatly to specific histories and aesthetics: Andres Burbano on Konrad Zuse, punched film in the first computers; Caroline Langill on Norman White’s Helpless Robot; Danielle Wilde and also Laura Beloff on wearable technologies; Joanna Walewska on Edward Ihnatowicz’s early cybernetic sculptures; Monika Gorska Olisinka on Polish Digital Poetry; Morten Sondergaard on Thorbjorn Lausten. It was a shame a small chunk of anticipated papers fell out of the program at the very last minute, including McKenzie Wark on the history of nettime.org, Ana Peraica on the tendencies towards historical self-erasure of politically responsive media art, and Anders Carlsson on creative hackers and the demoscene.

Highlight presentations demonstrated quite profoundly the things that theory can do with objects and archives, formed and – most importantly – unformed, that go well beyond the bounds of traditional media/art historical inquiry. Such papers especially Gitelman’s and Kahn’s keynotes took advantage of the depth of focus and interdisciplinary literacy that the Media Art Histories vehicle can promise and expect of speakers and audiences, to combine under-researched objects with explicit, reflexive adaptations of rigorous method-work as genuinely new cultural theory about media in/as art history. In retrospect it seemed difficult to really breathe ‘liveness’ in to a paper inside of the MAH context without this kind of ambitious double-focus on objects and pathways. I wondered why the background, programmatic trajectory, and status of Media Art Histories as a unique research vehicle and delightfully “untame field” was not more explicitly invoked, framed, and interrogated through attention to methods within the program architecture and facilitation in this way. Perhaps a greater foregrounding of this co-inquiry into methods (plural), this ‘doing media + art + history’ – specifically via the MAH vehicle now (that question), on the back of Re:fresh and Re:Place – might have resulted in more elaborate exchanges between speakers-hosts-audiences, taken better advantage of a rare convergence of international scholars, and opened up the historiographics and narrative strategies of papers to their participation in the event itself? The Leonardo Education Forum was of course geared toward some of these more strategic academic meta-musings (see Darren Tofts’ report here) but the absence of such explicit, extensive structural attention within the conference itself, particularly upon opening and closing, may have been a sacrifice of eventfulness. The accelerated posting of proceedings online at www.mediaarthistories.org could have been capitalized upon further by opening those ‘live’ published texts up to online (and reciprocally more longview) comments and discussion, during and after the event itself. Strategic attention to the continuation and recording of critical dialogue around the event, apart from its publication incentives, was generally lacking.

A brief unscheduled conference debrief did take place in the last session on Sunday, after a final virtual paper was cancelled. Responding to concerns about the number and sheer diversity of papers and sessions, Sean Cubitt suggested that while the sessions at Re:live repeatedly brought up questions about methodology “the methodology conversation is difficult (because) the field doesn’t have one. We have professional curators, artists, archivists, media and communications specialists…systems analysts…living archives (as) people…younger scholars” etc. The media that many scholars are engaging with are incredibly ephemeral, and resources are “fugitive”. Cubitt emphasised the duty of writers in these contexts to be “as accurate as possible about description. We race in to theorization but we need the verbal records.” Oliver Grau’s presentation on the demise of many archives in Europe and elsewhere was in this context a uniting concern. Was a specific centralized server for a Media Art Histories archive necessary to organise around? Nina Wenhart spoke against centralization: “it makes no sense to wait for formats to be invented – the dispersal of cultural heritage often means it is more likely to survive”. Other archival concerns raised included: the impact of copyright hindrances; the increasing urgency of video restoration; the “interoperability of archives” as prioritised by the PFA and the Whitney; archiving strategies that deal with the complexities of IP regimes and copyright, but also investigate alternatives to these – different methods and strategies from the ‘aristocratic’ and nationally oriented.

Comparisons were made between the organisation, scale and “conceptual  focus” of Re:live versus the tighter and more interactive Superhuman Symposium, but this was difficult to do, given Superhuman was an actual reduced theme, confident of its own contemporaneity, and with it’s own biopolitical elephant in the room. Arguably the MAH vehicle cannot be honed in, in the same way. Asked one participant, “Is it about everything?” This question about scale and cognitive energetics expended in Melbourne (over a much longer week of programming) was also, it was pointed out, about economic viability: Superhuman was expensive and purportedly failed to match expenses to registrations; Re:live programmed three tiers of concurrent  sessions over four days, and included “virtual” skyped in presentations. While the latter were advertised as such in the program, and these proved comparatively un-engaging for audiences (with the exception of Stelarc and one other) and made panel discussion very difficult – the event was viable precisely because of its mass scale and programming intensity: “you have to make money from speaker registrations”. Alternative scheduling models were suggested as a priority for the next event.

The online print on demand version of the proceedings can be downloaded at the conference website. Images will soon be online there too, and a CDrom made available. Organisers Paul Thomas and Sean Cubitt also announced interest in publishing a Re:Live book, modelled on the strengths of the first Re:Fresh publication.

INC Winter Drinks and launch
Date: 19 January 2010
Location: Hogeschool van Amsterdam, Interactive Media, Expositieruimte (4th floor), Rhijnspoorplein 1, Amsterdam.
Time: Launch starts at 16:00.
Registration: rsvp (at) networkcultures (dot) org

At the INC winter drinks the Institute of Network Cultures will launch two online projects: the audio archive of Geert Lovink 1987-1995 (including the Bilwet interviews) and the Theory on Demand series.

Geert Lovink’s audio archive contains more than 200 hours of digitized material (transferred from audio cassettes to digital audio files). The archive contains editions from the Bilwet Portrait gallery and various other interviews and lectures from 1987 – 1995. For information about the Bilwet Portrait gallery please visit: http://www.thing.desk.nl/bilwet/

Theory on Demand is a new publication series by the Institute of Network Cultures. The name is derived from Print on Demand, a printing technology by which books (or other documents) are only printed when ordered. Print on Demand publishers includes Lulu, Blurb, and Open Mute. The Theory on Demand series mainly focuses on rare finds: manuscripts that haven’t been published yet and books that are already out of print.

The first books in the series are:
# 1 Dynamics of Critical Internet Culture, by Geert Lovink
# 2 Jahre der Jugend Netzkritik: Essays zu Web 1.0, by Geert Lovink and Pit Schultz
# 3 Victim’s Symptoms, PTSD and Culture, by Ana Peraica (ed.)
# 4 Imagine There Is No Copyright and Cultural Conglomorates Too…, by Joost Smiers and Marieke van Schijndel

The books can be downloaded as pdf files from the INC website (from 19 January onwards). Printed copies can be ordered with one of the listed print-on- demand publishers (Lulu, Blurb, OpenMute, Qoop). http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/theoryondemand/

www.followthemoney.nu (video availabe)

Conference on 14.01.2010 at de Balie

Short summary by Juliana Brunello

First Welcome: Hans Maarten van den Brink welcomes us participants to the conference. He shortly explains that this is the 11^th edition of the circuit of conferences done by Mediafonds, Sandberg Institute and for the first time with Erasmus University. The speaker points out, that the theme of today’s conference, which is actually more of a ritual due to its periodicity, is not data visualization, but about ruling the world.

Introduction:  Annelys de Vet starts her introduction with a funny graphic representation of the efforts put into preparing this conference. She concludes that summing all of the costs involved in it, it is as if each one of the participants was paid 117,65€ to be here today.

She continues by asking some important questions: how do we deal with overload of information and numbers? Do we need data visualization to understand it? “If the database is the new narrative then what is the role of visualization?” (Lev Manovich)

She concludes her intro by asking the participants to continue researching about it after the conference; otherwise if there is no interest in doing so, one should leave the conference, as it does not pay the immense effort to put the conference together. Since no one left, she introduced the first speaker and the actual conference started.

Fist Speaker: Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens. Unfortunately for me it is in Dutch. Therefore I have nothing to report.

Second Speaker: Koert van Mensvoort. Money as a Medium

The speaker made a very entertaining and informative presentation, showing new speculative ideas on how the future system could look like. His presentation involved the themes money, media, data and reality. He stated that money is one of the oldest virtual realities in our culture. This also shows that the virtual has a deep penetration our society. “We are moving from the world of things to the world of information. Virtual economy is booming nowadays, the opposite is to say of the real one.” (Not his exact words, but sort of) As an example he shows one of the new millionaires due to second life.

“Virtual money is a pleonasm. Money has “always” been virtual.”  In the beginning cattle had been used as trade object and it was not virtual. Tools were also used as currency. In China, these tools became smaller, just representing the object itself, and then they became round, becoming virtual. These were made of metal, which was too heavy to carry around, so that paper money was developed. Other places they were made of expansive metal. Later on the credit card found its place in our society: physical and virtual at the same time, “but just plastic”.

The speaker continued by showing the difference between implicit weather data (as seen from the window) vs. explicit data (as seen in numbers). Financial data is explicit, but how can it be implicit visualized? There are no natural phenomena in this case. An interesting case in Kenya showed how prepaid airtime became a de-facto monetary value in the country. In this case “the signifier becomes the signified”. Will then telecom providers become banks and v.v.? Who will make the money? Government or corporation?

Mensvoort stated then that database has become our reality. Our days were consisted of things, now of databases (“are we already living in the matrix?”). He also spoke of the concept of Noosphere: the sphere of human thought. It transforms other systems, like the biosphere. Is this therefore a natural phenomenon? Are the financial and virtual systems a kind of ecosystem? If one compares two ecologies: rainforest and financial system – one is stable and the other of rapid growth – one is self sustainable and the other feeds on biosphere – however, both are threatened. A proposed solution was to link the financial system to the environmental one. To deal with climate change we need system change. The proposed solution: Environmental value needs to be monetized.  The eco currency (separate currency) should be created. One would earn to preserve and depending on the environmental urgency, the currency would fluctuate. However, there are many problems involving its implementation.

He finishes his presentation by expressing his hopes, that geosphere, atmosphere, biosphere and datasphere will live in harmony. I hope so too.

Third speaker: Christian Nold

The speaker introduced the idea of Bijlmer Euro, an experimental currency that should support the development of local identity. This way, data visualization can change the local. It is a very interesting project and I will no longer discuss the it here, but suggest a visit to the following website:

http://www.bijlmer.softhook.com/

Forth speakers: Floris Douma

In Dutch…

Fifth speaker: Richard Rogers. Mapping for people

Very interesting and entertaining, sometimes ironical, presentation about mapping. He started his presentation by explaining what the use of mapping is: it is to find out things that actually help who are looking for it. Activists, NGOs, IGOs, States, celebrities and the common men can find use in it.

Activists want for instance to know how big is the movement they are involved with. They collect URLs and map it in order to visualize the scope of the movement. However, cluster maps have its pros and cons, sometimes provoking a sense of concurrence, which was not the initial goal. NGOs can with the help of mapping find out important relationships. INGs can for instance visualize “who spoke during which issue?” and “which issues which delegate speaks or stay silent?”. States can recognize who their allies are per issue, by for instance mapping in clusters of terminological blocks. Celebrities can check how popular they are, what kind of issues they should be associated with and therefore which kind they should support: children, mine bombs or organ donation?

Rogers points out that maps can show and at the same time construct reality. They send out an invitation to enter a symbolic world. They prompt people to rethink their strategies, for instance to make one’s position higher in a hierarchy, as it has large impacts on how one thinks about himself.

For more information check www.govcom.org

Sixth speaker: Staffan Landin. Gapminder

Landin is a very enthusiastic speaker and a true believer in Gapminder. He explained that the data brought from the world is in a “strong” way transformed in statistical data. However, when statistical data should be brought back into the world producing knowledge, it is done in a “weak” way. This enforces the prevalence of pre-conceived ideas, which are actually wrong. Gapminder should make it easier for people to understand statistical data and therefore grasp the knowledge they transmit in a better way.

The graphics shown in the presentation were really nice ones, very entertaining. I do recommend a visit to their website. However, one must keep in mind that it is very ease, even with nice techniques of data visualization, to misinterpret data. One can for instance confuse cause with effect, of join two variables that actually have no connection to each other making it looks like it does.

Check it out at www.gapminder.org

Seventh speaker group: Yuri Engelhardt, Martijn de Waal and Raul Nino Zambrano. Data stories

The central question of this presentation is “how can one use database to tell stories?” One of the speakers explains, that all we do today is stored in databases. This opens up a range of opportunities to get data and tell stories with it. But how? Documentary and filmmakers have been doing that. A new genre has emerged, a new discipline. However, this is not completely new. Minard designed a graphic in 1869 that “told the story” of Napoleon’s march. Another example of the early development of storytelling with graphics is e.g. Land of promise; Rotha (1946), a city speaks (1947).

More presently, the film “an inconvenient truth” (Guggenheim, 2006) provided a kind of prototype to the “powerpoint” cinema. However the graphics don’t do all the work, rhetoric is also needed. (At this point the speakers show the part of the film of an animated data graphic with al gore explaining the development of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.)Other good examples of contemporary films of this genre are “The federal debt” I.O.U.S.A. (Creadon, 2008) and “The crisis of credits” (Jarvis, 2009)

Second genre: Geography data used to tell stories. The example the speakers have chosen is “Britain from Above” (BBC, 2008), which uses for instance GPS data from Londoner taxis and other satellites images to make a film.

Third genre: Database Cinema. The exemple used here is “What a life” (Canada), in which they use several devices, like quizzes, to create a story. One is invited to explore the areas of the website.

Forth genre: Interactive web graphics, with the characteristics of being interactive and online. E.g.: “they rule”, a database that shows the concentration of power. One can upload the maps they created by searching data. Further examples: the “baby name wizard”, “how Americans spend their day” and “we feel fine”

I strongly recommend a visit to the websites they cited for an educational look and good entertainment.

Eight speaker: Judith de Leeuw.

In Dutch.

Ninth speaker: Ian Forrester. BBD Backstage

Missed big part of it…. Sorry…

Tenth speaker: Joris Maltha. Catalogtree

Catalogtree is involved in designing data visualization. At the moment they are doing data visualization mostly to American magazines. However, at the presentation he spoke of their approach to design. He emphasizes the meaning of self organization as design tool.

He showed some projects in which social data of people behaving in a certain way has been used. He presented one in which the theme was cultural norms vs. law enforcement, by using data of a research that showed diplomats parking their car incorrectly and the corruption indexes of the CIA.  The conclusion of this research was that corrupted countries have more diplomats that park their car incorrectly. Biased? Maybe… (flocking diplomats nyc 1999-2002) Using this data they produced different designs in form of posters. You can check them at http://www.catalogtree.net/projects/diplomats

Another example of their work, which also involves social behavior, was a map that became useless because of its continuous use, and the habit of people touching it with the finger where they stood. This part of the map was so worn out, that one could not recognize it anymore.

Further example was “the blue marble”, not done by Catalogtree, but for NASA.. In this case, satellite data should be made understandable to a larger audience. Oceans were painted blue, forests green, etc. It looks like photography, but it is not.

In the end of the presentation there was a weird discussion about the design involving diplomats, if it was biased or not. Fact is, that there were only pictures of their cars, in different sized considering the amount of time they were parked incorrectly. There was no citation to countries or so. Someone pointed out one could still influence something, by changing the color of the poster, that it would make a difference if it were red of white. I don’t see the point… I believe that the speaker also didn’t, as he decided at a certain point to just leave the podium.

Eleventh speaker: Mieke Gerrizen. Infodecodata

In Dutsch, so I left home, as it was the last presentation of the day.

Conclusion:

The conference was very informative and entertaining. I learned a lot just being there and came out with new ideas. I will definitely keep my attention on the subject. I do understand now how data visualization can “control the world” now. One can use it to prove a point, to influence, to convince and not to mention it: to lie. Very tricky thing…

Today is the first day of the Critical Point of View: WikiWars conference in Bangalore!
You can follow the event on Twitter, through #WikiWars, and the CPOV blog: http://www.networkcultures.org/cpov.

The full program of the Bangalore event is online here.