Tuesday the 28th of October we launched the network notebook by Rob van Kranenburg, and Sean Dodson at Waag Society. The video will be online at the end of the week, and the pictures can be viewed on flickr.

Master of Media Tjerk Timan has blogged the event.

Special thanks to Margreet Riphagen, Sam Nemeth and Lipika Bansal, for organizing all this, and to Martijn de Waal, Eric Kluitenberg, and Denis Jaromil Rojo for their wonderful contributions. And again: huge congratulations to Rob van Kranenburg and Sean Dodson!

More about this publication, and the downloadable pdf: http://networkcultures.org/publications/network-notebooks/the-internet-of-things/.
Order a printed copy by email: books[at]networkcultures[dot]org

Download the presentation of Denis Jaromil Rojo here.

Friday evening 24th of October, de Balie, Amsterdam

De Balie organized Friday evening an event with presentations from  Worthington and Merijn Oudenampsen around the project More is More -Independent Media Distribution-. More is More is a recent launched web-based community project that focuses on creating alternative distribution channels for print publishing's, independent publications and small-scale cultural productions. The aim of the presentation is to analyze this model and gather interesting publishers to participate, and how to get publications spread around the globe if there is hardly any money available for distribution?

Website More is More

The evening started very nice by Eric Kluitenberg handing over the book Spectropia -illuminating investigations in the electromagnetic- to me. With the request if I could give back the book to Geert with kind regards from Rasa Smite. A typical example of Eric being part of the community courier following the More is More concept.

Print on demand example from Spectropia - Acoustic Space, issue #7

The first presentation was from Simon Worthington, co-director and publisher at Mute Publishing. He is active in the More is More network for more then 14 years. A network from media makers, media, distribution agent, orders, shipment, payments, community couriers, outlets and video screenings.

How it works
The economical model of an article is as following. Lets say the media sales price of an item is $ 10,-, then
5%  $ 0,50 for More is More
30% $ 3,- for the outlet
50% $ 5,- for the media makers
15% 4 1,50 for the distributors

More is More uses community couriers. People who are traveling over the world and carrying publications with them to spread them over the globe by delivering them at events or local bookstores. On the website people offer or request a community courier by putting online their traveling schedule and how much kilo's people are able to bring along their journey. With a system like this you really must have a lot of fellow travelers who you can rely on.

There are some comments from the audience that it is not affordable to carry around so many books. More interesting maybe is the idea to focus on the end point, according to Paul Keller (who works at Kennisland, who sponsored the project More is More is within the Digitale Pioniers). He brings up the suggestion for the consumer to use the possibility to go to your local bookstore and ask them to order a specific publication.

Another option instead of distributing trees around the world is the e-book reader -a device to read books on- says Reinder Rustema. Unfortunately this type of technology is still quite expensive and not for sale yet in Europe.

Of course there are still people who really like it to have a physical example of the book in their cupboard, instead of using the e-book reader.

Print on demand
Print on demand (POD), is a printing technology process in which new copies of a book are not printed until an order has been received. Often it is not economical to print single copies using traditional printing technologies. It's a solution for small book publishers to print older titles that had been out of print.

For more information about this topic read the POD paper from OpenMute or visit their website OpenMute. OpenMute has spent the last year researching and developing ways to solve the ongoing problems of
small print cultural/ community producers, essentially financial and reaching the audience.

About More is More
More is More is an open source, on-line distribution system for small and independent media. It's aim is to bring together publishers and local outlets and events. Commercial distributors are often not able to distribute publications and media products from the small-scale cultural sector, the non-profit sector or the political and community corner.

Interesting about More is More is that they are trying the fill the gap between purely local publications -which are sufficient with a physical distribution- and the large-scale distribution mechanisms used by the larger publishers, but where the smaller publications hardly have access to.

The second day of the Video Vortex Ankara conference opened with a panel on Participatory Culture, which started with a presentation by Michael Liegl about Share. Share is a series of jam sessions in NYC (and other cities) that Liegl characterized as multi-modal space, and perceived as a sociological object of study. (http://share.dj/share/). Liegl’s documentary of Share Montreal is available on the Share website.
Martin Koplin presented an interactive storytelling project funded by the EU, called Mobile 2 Culture (M2C): Mobile Media as E-Culture. Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen gave a very interesting talk in which he proposed a distributed video-sharing platform, in which everybody hosts their own video content. As the project is still under development, keep an eye on his blog www.solitude.dk.

Dan Oki and I used the break to discuss the program and preparations for the next Video Vortex event in Split! When we got back into the conference, it was unfortunately quite near the end of Başak Şenova’s talk, which was titled “Navigating in Digital Territories.” The presentation was by videoblogger Michael Verdi, about the topic of Videoblogging as Networked Relationships. In 2004, Verdi’s daughter Dylan was on ABC news, as she was elected as one of the People of the year. The reason? She was the world’s youngest videoblogger. Verdi gave beautiful examples of the powerful medium of online video, and the of the enstrangement it can cause (when recording you don’t know who your audience is, so there’s no specific context other than your own). He also told the story of a couple that got together online, and really got to know eachother through starting a private videoblog where they posted video messages to eachother (-and yes, they are a couple now).
Sarah Késenne presented her research on ‘gig flix’, and compared the multicamera set-up of professionally produced concert registrations (in which the fans are extras, and the footage is often simultaneously recorded and edited), to the amateur footage (often made with mobile phones) available on online video platforms such as YouTube. Her research has been published in the Video Vortex reader, which is available here.
During the Q&A, Dominic Pettman asked Michael Verdi if after the mirror stage, there might be something as a webcam stage? The answer was simple and beautiful: We are outsourcing our memory to a network.

The last panel was about Art Online. The first speaker was Brittany Shoot, a self-proclaimed ‘recovering academic.’ With the strong belief that “sharing is caring”, Shoot has started dvblog.org, an “online resource for art & entertainment movies in QuickTime format”. I can highly recommend it, for it is a non-commercial and highly valuable database of shorts.
Artist and academic Gülsen Bal (http://www.art-axis.org/) talked about her project Folded In, which shows representations of borders in the social networks of Web 2.0. From her website: FOLDED-IN, an online multi-user platform that combines videogame basic elements with the possibility of a constant data flow, addresses the creation of an online community that will not only be part of the game but will create the networking that conveys the world in our absence in its multiplicity.

Dan Oki told a history of new media work, starting with a web project in 2002, in which scenes would be put online, and visitors of the website could start editing. But editing didn’t seem to be enough, they acted as the director too:. People would write to the actors, giving them suggestions, and adding narration. This gave Oki the idea of re-editing the film every time it was shown in a cinema, thus showing the database. Dan Oki ended his talk with his latest project, in which he is tagging his super 8 films. The project is called ‘My last super 8 film.’ A work by Dan Oki was shown in the Video Vortex Ankara exhibition.

Pictures of the event are collected in the Video Vortex Flickr Pool.

by Sabine Niederer

I just got back from a visit to Ankara, Turkey, where I participated in Video Vortex 3, a follow-up on the first two Video Vortex events, which took place in Brussels and Amsterdam. This event was organized by the Bilkent University in Ankara, Department of Communication and Design. Soon, the recordings of the presentations will be made available as video and audio files. My colleague Shirley visited the University last April, to meet up with the conference organizers to discuss the preparations for this event and see the venue. Her impressions can be read here.
It was a fruitful and well-organized event, and apart from my report, which I will post on this blog in several parts, you can find pictures of the Ankara conference and side events in the Video Vortex Flickr group. If you want to order a free copy of the Video Vortex reader, please visit the reader page.

///Thursday, October 9
Thursday there had been a workshop by Markus Schaal on Open Collaborative Mapping, in relation to the One Laptop per Child project and hardware. After that, organizer Andreas Treske and artist Aras Özgün presented screenings. I arrived at an empty Ankara airport on Thursday evening, and a student of Bilkent University was so kind to pick me up and take me to the restaurant where the organizers and speakers had gathered to enjoy lovely food and live music. The students had advised me to spend the Friday morning on a field trip to the Atatürk Museum and Mausoleum, and I decided to go there the next morning.

The Atatürk museum and mausoleum

///Friday, October 10
On Friday Morning, video blogger Michael Verdi gave the students a video blogging boot camp, teaching them all the skills and ways to set up a blog, shoot videos, editing and compressing the video to put it on the Web.

Vera Tollmann, Dan Oki and I spent our morning at the Atatürk museum and mausoleum, before we headed off to the University building. Packed with bags full of Video Vortex readers and Network Notebooks of course, to distribute at the venue.

After a warm word of welcome by Andreas Treske, we started the first session, which I moderated. The topic of this opening session was Political Economy. It started with the pointing out of the political economies that were discussed on the previous Video Vortex events, such as the political economy of YouTube, of distributing video online, of participatory culture, etc. Then we shifted to this session, in which the political economies to be discussed were that of cultural production (by Aras Özgün), that of love and other technologies (by Dominic Pettman), and the political economy of the broadcasted neoliberal self (Kylie Jarrett).

The first speaker was Kylie Jarrett, who works as a lecturer in Multimedia at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, and who very recently started researching audio-only content on the web (podcasting, pro-am). I’d like to recommend her article titled 'Interactivity is Evil! A Critical Investigation of Web 2.0,' which was published in First Monday in March 2008. In this article, she refutes the opposition between interactivity and discipline, but considers interactivity as a disciplining technology within the neoliberal political economy.

Her talk explored the implications of Web 2.0 around the agency and power of the user. She mentioned the double promise of YouTube, encapsulated in their slogan „Broadcast Yourself“, meaning the demand to broadcast your Self, and at the same time calling for DIY broadcast (it) yourself. (She ignored the trademark symbol for this talk). Jarrett urged the researchers in the audience to interrogate the state of agency of the user related to digital media, as an important focus for thinking about new technologies.
Jarett argued that identity plays a prominent role on YouTube, for not only do people
Broadcast themselves in performative or intimate ways, they also identify with the videos they embed on their MySpace page or blogs. You are what you embed.

Video Conference with Kylie Jarrett.

Furthermore, she elaborated on audio only files and how they could be used to go beyond the idea of popular (human interest) talk shows (like Oprah and Dr Phil), where the guest tells a private and personal story, and the talk show host translates this into a generalized point. On the Web, where the user can tell private stories without that reformulation or generalization, this agency shifts to the user itself, and the legitimization would happen through listeners, maybe. Or experts. I wonder if this would also be applicable to an image-only platform like Flickr. Does this also come with more agency, for you can compile the albums yourself and choose what’s on your page, instead of it being mixed up with all the other images made by others within the interface (when not searching)? And isn’t pirate radio a good precedent for what Jarrett describes when she talks about podcasting as a medium without the constraints of a set or centralized organizing principle?

Aras Özgün is a media artist from Ankara who is currently teaching at the New School in New York. He is currently working on his PhD dissertation on the political economy of contemporary cultural production, and has published widely on media, arts, culture and politics. He started his talk with an anecdote of him finding his own video work on YouTube. Not amused, he contacted the user who has uploaded the work to confront him with the copyright infringement and asked him to remove the video from YouTube. The person replied that of course he did not have the copyrights and thus the right to publish it, but that he had put it online because he liked it so much, and wanted to share it. He also thought that the compression of the work was not a bad thing at all, and the quality of a video on YouTube was actually quite good.

Özgün pointed out that he discourse around Web 2.0 has so far been dominated by language from management and economics. And YouTube is of course first and foremost a private channel, not a social platform but a company that (successfully) aims to make profit. Özgün regards the Internet as Haussmannized, referring to the famous Architect Haussmann, who transformed Paris by building Avenues cutting through the entire city. The Internet has YouTube as one of its major avenues.
So where Kylie Jarrett noted that on YouTube people share to show who they are, Aras Özgün argued that with YouTube people share to make things public, but that by sharing it actually becomes privatized.

The final speaker of this first panel was Dominic Pettmann, an Australian theorist based in New York, who has published three books in which he theorizes the libidinal economy of media, building on philosophy and media theory. His most recent book publication came out two years ago and is titled 'Love and Other Technologies: Refitting Eros for the Information Age.' Pettmann showed a fascinating world of virtual lovers, that are texted by their adult subscribers, like Tamagotchis are fed by children to keep them alive. The Asian industry around these dating sims is thriving, and causes a divide between the ones playing with or sustaining relationships with these virtual non-human lovers, and the ones not playing, who often find this behavior quite pathetic.

Dominic Pettmann and an example of a strikingly realistic sim girl

Of course there are plenty of worries about this new generation of what Pettmann referred to as „phone fiddling“ youngsters, texting their inanimate loved-ones. But he pointed out that love, even between two people in the same room is so often surrounded by technology, and that the line can thus not be drawn that easily between the natural or biological and the technological. The main problem of human interaction through technology, however, is that the most basic feature of eye-to-eye communication is still impossible. Even with video chat, it is not possible to look each other in the eyes, because of the separate camera that is based on top of your screen. And with virtual affairs being an often-heard motivation for divorce in China, we can look forward to more research into this field where love meets, or even becomes, technology.

After the first session, I launched the Video Vortex reader, and people were happy to see the book and immediately suggested producing a Volume 2, after the next couple of conferences take place, which of course would be great. I also announced that the next Video Vortex event will take place in Split in May 2009, and will be organized by Dan Oki.

After the book launch, Vera Tollmann, the researcher for the Amsterdam edition of Video Vortex, showed an impressive selection of video works, in a program titled 'Always on your minds.' With works by: Stéphane Querrec (who is currently a researcher at Jan van Eijck Acadeny in Maastricht, NL), Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Martijn Hendriks, Bernd Krauss, Oliver Laric, and Karolin Meunier.

After that, the conference exhibition was opened, which was curated by Andreas Treske. The first conference day ended with a party to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of the Department of Communication and Design. This was celebrated at the university with a party with homemade food, drinks, and a performance by VJs and a DJ (I think even Andreas Treske himself did a small performance!).

Video Vortex exhibition

The Institute of Network Cultures proudly presents its fourth reader:

Video Vortex Reader:  Responses to YouTube

To be launched on Friday October 10, 2008, at Video Vortex 3 in  Ankara!! http://std.comd.bilkent.edu.tr/videovortex/

The Video Vortex Reader is the first collection of critical texts to deal with the rapidly emerging world of online video – from its explosive rise in 2005 with YouTube, to its future as a significant form of personal media. After years of talk about digital convergence and crossmedia platforms we now witness the merger of the Internet and television at a pace no-one predicted. These contributions from scholars, artists and curators evolved from the first two Video Vortex conferences in Brussels and Amsterdam in 2007 which focused on responses to YouTube, and address key issues around independent production and distribution of online video content. What does this new distribution platform mean for artists and activists? What are the alternatives?

Contributors: Tilman Baumgärtel, Jean Burgess, Dominick Chen, Sarah Cook, Sean Cubitt, Stefaan Decostere, Thomas Elsaesser, David Garcia, Alexandra Juhasz, Nelli Kambouri and Pavlos Hatzopoulos, Minke Kampman, Seth Keen, Sarah Késenne, Marsha Kinder, Patricia Lange, Elizabeth Losh, Geert Lovink, Andrew Lowenthal, Lev Manovich, Adrian Miles, Matthew Mitchem, Sabine Niederer, Ana Peraica, Birgit Richard, Keith Sanborn, Florian Schneider, Tom Sherman, Jan Simons, Thomas Thiel, Vera Tollmann, Andreas Treske, Peter Westenberg.

Colophon: Editors: Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer. Editorial Assistance: Marije van Eck and Margreet Riphagen. Copy Editing: Darshana Jayemanne. Design: Katja van Stiphout. Printer: Veenman Drukkers, Rotterdam. Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam. Supported by: Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA)/School of Design and Communication (IAM), and XS4ALL.

Coming weekend Sabine Niederer will blog from Ankara to keep us updated what's going on at Video Vortex. Stay tuned!

Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds.), Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008.  ISBN: 978-90-78146-05-6.

More information: http://networkcultures.org/publications/inc-readers/videovortex/

Download the pdf here or order a copy at: books (at) networkcultures.org

Please add yourself to the Frappr map when you ordered ‘Video Vortex Reader’. This to see in a geographical way were the notebook is spread. Thanks in advance.

Network Notebook #2
Rob van Kranenburg, The Internet of Things. A critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID. Report prepared by Rob van Kranenburg for the Institute of Network Cultures with contributions by Sean Dodson.
Design by Léon & Loes

The Internet of Things - Network Notebook Launch
Date and time: Tuesday 28 October 2008 at 17h00
Location: Waag Society, Theatrum Anatomicum, Nieuwmarkt 4, Amsterdam
Free entrance, send an email to society@waag.org if you want to attend the launch.

The Internet of Things is the second issue in the series of Network Notebooks. It’s a critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID by Rob van Kranenburg. Rob examines what impact RFID and other systems, will have on our cities and our wider society. He currently works at Waag Society as program leader for the Public Domain and wrote earlier an article about this topic in the Waag magazine and is the co-founder of the DIFR Network. The notebook features an introduction by journalist and writer Sean Dodson.

The launch includes short presentations from Martijn de Waal, Eric Kluitenberg and Denis Jaromil Rojo, and a discussion, led by Geert Lovink.

In Network Notebook #2, titled The Internet of Things, Rob van Kranenburg outlines his vision of the future. He tells of his early encounters with the kind of location-based technologies that will soon become commonplace, and what they may mean for us all. He explores the emergence of the “internet of things”, tracing us through its origins in the mundane back-end world of the international supply chain to the domestic applications that already exist in an embryonic stage. He also explains how the adoption of he technologies of the City Control is not inevitable, nor something that we must kindly accept nor sleepwalk into. In van Kranenburg’s account of the creation of the international network of Bricolabs, he also suggests how each of us can help contribute to building technologies of trust and empower ourselves in the age of mass surveillance and ambient technologies.

Table of Contents:

1. Forward: A tale of two cities Sean Dodson
2. Ambient Intelligence and its promises
3. Ambient Intelligence and its catches
4. Bricolabs
5. How to act

This issue is free available in print and pdf form.
To receive a copy of The Internet of Things send an email to books (at) networkcultures.org.

The Network Notebooks series is edited by Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer. Network Notebooks #2 is supported by Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and Waag Society.

For Network Notebooks 01 by Rosalind Gill see:  Technobohemians or the new Cybertariat? .

http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/publications/network-notebooks/

Press: Please contact Rob van Kranenburg at Waag Society, email rob (at) waag.org.

Please add yourself to the Frappr map when you have ordered a copy of 'The Internet of Things'. This will show everyone where the notebook has travelled. Thanks in advance!