Wang Bin Torture in Commercial Quality, High Quality, and Museum Quality :: March 13 -April 6, 2010 :: Opening: March 20; 7:00 - 10:00 pm :: Open Source Gallery, 255 17th Street, Brooklyn, NY.

Ondrej Brody (CZ) & Kristofer Paetau’s (FIN) work, Painting China Now (2007), is the starting point for their new work on display at Open Source Gallery. Painting China Now is a collection of 30 oil paintings depicting violence inflicted by the Chinese government on Falun Dafa members. The paintings were rendered with varying degrees of realism by Chinese craftsmen* specializing in copying pictures sent via e-mail. These pictures, censored and forbidden in China, were painted with oil on canvas in China and then exported to Europe for exhibition display. Continue reading

Tiananmen Square: Do you exclusively paint Thomas Kinkade paintings?

June 3, 2009

Four years ago, in preparation for a research visit to Shenzhen’s Dafen Painting Village, I requested that roughly a dozen Chinese painters paint a copy of the image of the man standing in front of the tanks during the Tiananmen Square protest on June 4, 1989. I did this partly out an interest in copies and reproductions and partly just to see if I could do it: the image is famous worldwide, but I have since learned it is virtually unknown under Chinese national censorship. Continue reading

Amirali Ghazemi — Parallel Paths of Contemporary Iranian Art :: May 13, 2009; 8:00 pm :: Project Room SCCA, Metelkova 6, Ljubljana.

A multimedia lecture and an artistic intervention, performed by Amirali Ghazemi will present Ghazemi’s curatorial work, particularly his eleven years long collaboration with Teheran underground Parkingallery and his collaboration with International Roaming Biennial of Tehran.

The focus of the lecture will be on the characteristics of contemporary Iranian art which is determined by controlled production, the lack of freedom of speech, censorship and centralization. Continue reading

Upgrade! Istanbul: Accessing Information - Mithat Bereket & Atilkunst :: March 19, 2009; 6:30 - 8:30 pm :: Cibali Campus, Cinema Hall #2, Kadir Has University, Faculty of Communication, Istanbul.

The meeting concentrates on mobile journalism, alternative information channels, activist criticism on media, censorship and auto-censorship in Turkish media.

Mithat Bereket discusses mobile journalism by giving a special emphasis to the Middle East and the alternative information channels. The talk also covers activism and censorship in Turkey. In this context, Atilkunst talks about the series ‘gündem fazlasi’ (excess agenda) by presenting some samples from the series. ‘Gündem fazlasi’ (excess agenda) is a reading of the agenda with critical interventions. Continue reading

Among all countries that limit access to Internet content, China has the most extensive censorship. Thanks to the Golden Shield Project (aka Great Firewall of China), China has proved itself able to deny a vast majority of its Internet users access to information that it feels could weaken its authoritarian power. The system blocks content by preventing IP addresses from being routed through, and consists of standard firewall and proxy servers at the Internet gateways. The Firefox add-on China Channel offers Internet surfers outside China the chance to the experience how frustrating browsing the Internet can be for a Chinese person living in the mainland. Created by Aram Bartholl, Even Roth, Tobias Leingruber, this open source add-on uses Jeremy Gillick’s Switch Proxy add-on to connect the user to various Internet proxies inside the country. This allows the user to surf the Web using a Chinese IP address, protected from taboo topics such as police brutality, Tiananmen protests, freedom of speech, democracy, Tibet. Continue reading

Speaking Out Loud Symposium and launch of Gate peepin’ — With: Florian Cramer, Jaromil, An Mertens and Peter Westenberg, Linda Hilfling, Susanne Jaschko (Moderator) :: December 18, 2008; 8:00 pm :: Netherlands Media Art Institute, Keizersgracht 264, 1016 EV Amsterdam, The Netherlands :: LIVE STREAM.

Most works in the Speaking Out Loud exhibition suggest that language is a fluid, dynamic system which offers itself for individual expression and performance. On the other hand, language is a rational system not driven by instinct but whose strict rules and signs we must learn in a life long, enduring process. Continue reading

Call for support: Pirates of the Amazon, taken down by Amazon.com (Felix Stadler, tobias c. van veen, Edward Shanken, Dan Calin, Jon Ippolito, Florian Cramer, Olia Lialina):

Many Nettimers might already have read about www.pirates-of-the-amazon.com. The website provided a Firefox add-on that changed the experience of browsing Amazon.com by putting a slick “Download 4 Free” button on top of every product - whether a CD, DVD or book - also listed as a bittorrent on The Pirate Bay. Clicking the button on the Amazon.com product page for, say, Madonna’s latest album would yield a background search on The Pirate Bay and start up a bittorrent client to download a corresponding torrent.

After being published this Monday, the project made headline news on digg.com and has been covered among others by CNET, the Washington Post and currently more than 1000 blog entries worldwide. Continue reading

Reminder: Emerging Ethical Issues of Life in Virtual Worlds :: Revised call for chapters - Deadline: August 15, 2008.

Scholarly articles on emerging issues of life in virtual worlds such as Second Life are solicited. Work that connects streams of ethics research and theory to virtual worlds as they are and to what they are developing into is particularly sought. Among the virtual world issues explicitly invited are: privacy, monitoring and eavesdropping, the fear of being exploited, the loss of identity, ethical impacts of aesthetic decisions, values and ethics manifested in the social processes and their relevance for activities such as design there, professional ethics, standards of integrity given identity issues and Continue reading

[Image: "Sentimental Objects In Attempt to befriend a Virus" by Caitlin Berrigan] ” … I have been in the midst of a serious battle with my university over a censorship case and issues of freedom of speech (not “bioart” related). An exhibition, “Virutal Jihadi,” by an Iraqi / U.S. artist Wafaa Bilal was closed because the university did not think the content was appropriate. Then this same exhibition was moved to a non-profit art space in the city of Troy, and the day after the exhibition opened the city closed that art space down claiming their building had code violations. So needless to say it is all a mess and has been taking up much of my time. The university is now proposing to set up a committee to review all exhibition proposals. For further details please go to www.wafaabilal.com. Continue reading