Francesco Gagliardi wrote:

I’ve been on the list for a while, but I don’t think I ever introduced myself. I work in performance and occasionally film and video, and write about performance history. Trebor asked me to introduce to the list the work I will be presenting at the Digital Labor conference in November. I can’t say too much about it yet since it is still developing, but here are the basics.

The piece will be based on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. I was struck in learning – through this list I believe – that, according to a recent survey, a good number of (western) MTurk workers engage with the tasks crowdsourced through the service in order to kill time and have fun, rather than simply to earn money. Continue reading

Ray Johnson. Please Add to & Return :: until 10 May 2009 :: Raven Row, 56 Artillery Lane, London.

Raven Row’s inaugural exhibition is the first large UK show of the collages and mailings of New York artist Ray Johnson (1927–1995). Johnson used radical means to construct and distribute images and his influence on twentieth-century art far exceeds the recognition he receives.

A forerunner of American Pop Art, Johnson appropriated found images of celebrities such as Elvis Presley and James Dean in his work in the mid-fifties. He made art out of social life – both real and imagined – gathering celebrities, the art world, and friends into his work. He inadvertently invented the mail art movement, anticipating the digital network. Continue reading

“ABSTRACT: Focusing on the mail art movement and its legacy for other forms of networked art, this article looks at how historically, culture has accompanied technological change.The mail art movement provided separate but fertile ground to explore themes of disembodiment in a networked society prior to spread of digital technology. Surfacing in the 1950s and flourishing in the 1970s, at a time when computers and the internet were still largely the domain of military and government control, mail art challenged the threat of technocracy by making available metaphors and the experience of networking. Its goal of social connection inspired other networked arts, which eventually found a place among digital technology users. An unlikely but productive clash between artists and early users aided, validated and expanded the network ethos of early online social groups or ‘virtual communities’. This investigation shows how art clears the ground for social practices that technology instantiates. From Mail art: networking without technology by Seeta Peña Gangadharan, New Media & Society, Vol. 11, No. 1-2, 279-298 (2009).

On the Culture of Free Software: Interview with Christopher Kelty by Geert Lovink - It is still rare that anthropologists study modern technology, let alone the politics of free software. The Houston-based scholar Christopher Kelty, who just moved from Rice University to UCLA, has done precisely that. Instead of observing the behavior and codes of this professional group of computer engineers, Kelty decided to map the social ideas behind free software production. Kelty’s Two Bits, The Cultural Significance of Free Software contains a historical reconstruction of where the ideas of “openness” and freedom to change code originate. Kelty is not repeating the well-known story about the 1998 schism between the business-minded open source faction around Eric Raymond and the religious free software fighters, lead by Richard Stallman. Instead, we get a fascinating time travel, back to the pre-PC period of early computing. With the different generations of the UNIX operating systems we see how collaborative forms of writing software are taking shape — and how the ideas about ownership grow with it. Continue reading

Nathaniel Stern is an American-born interdisciplinary artist who works in a variety of media, including interactive art, public art interventions, installation, video art, printmaking and physical theatre. Nathaniel graduated with a degree in Textiles and Apparel Design from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York in 1999, and went on to study at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, graduating in 2001. He later taught digital art at the University of the Witwatersrand, while also practicing as an artist, in Johannesburg, South Africa from 2001 - 2006. He is currently pursuing a PhD at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.

Brian Sherwin: Nathaniel, you studied at Cornell University and at New York University. How did your academic years influence the direction of your art? Did you have any influential instructors? Continue reading

Education for a Free Information Society, First International Conference: Free Knowledge, Free Technology :: July 15-17, 2008 :: Barcelona, Spain :: Registration is now open! The deadline for early registration rates is April 30, 2008.

The Free Knowledge, Free Technology Conference (FKFT) is the first international event which will centre on the production and sharing of educational and training materials in the field of Free Software and Open Standards. With the objective of promoting Free Software and the sharing of free knowledge, the FKFT 2008 Conference will bring together hundreds of people from different continents including government representatives, school and university teachers, IT companies, publishers, and NGO’s. Continue reading

[Image: The intensely homoerotic Buffy and Faith storyline in Buffy the Vampire Slayer was developed partly as a direct response to fanfic writers' interpretations of the show in this light] As an undergraduate I read English Language and Literature at one of the oldest and most traditional universities in the world. Even the non-canonical texts came from a canon of the non-canonical – hence, by definition, whatever our course declared to be literature, ipso facto, was such. Recently, though, in the course of our Arts Council research I’ve browsed a fair amount of creative writing online - and found myself increasingly unsure about notions of the canonical or literary in the context of the net. Continue reading

A debate between Trebor Scholz and Paul Hartzog + a call for papers for further discussion. Published on Re-Public. In the debate that launches the special issue with the same title, Paul Hartzog and Trebor Scholz attempt to outline a critique of the social web along 5 axes: production, exploitation, individuality/collectivity, cultural difference, activism.

Thanasis/Pavlos: How central is the question of “who owns the means of production” in relation to the net economy?

Paul Hartzog: I think that what is happening now underscores the fact that ownership was never the issue. Ownership grants you the capacity to make and implement decisions about production, and to enjoy the fruits of those decisions. Ownership gives you access to production. Access has now been disaggregated and mediated. Continue reading

Siegfried Zielinski is an internationally recognized media theorist and educator whose recent work, Deep Time of Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, has just been translated into English and published by M.I.T. Press. Zielinski’s approach to media history provides a method that radiates with a life and dynamism that pays homage to the figures and forms that he traces from the past. Writing on themes as divergent as the electronic music of Mouse on Mars or 17th century polymath Giovanni Battista della Porta, Zielinski’s work affirms the experimentation of new forms, and the science of mixture which can connect through time and space seemingly disparate bodies of thought and media practice. Along with his research, he is also the founding director of the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. Zielinski has very kindly answered five questions that draw on several of the themes from the newly translated work, Deep Time. Continue reading

… a gift economy in an economy of abundance…

Vernacular Video by Tom Sherman: The technology of video is now as common as a pencil for the middle classes. People who never even considered working seriously in video find themselves with digital camcorders and non-linear video-editing software on their personal computers. They can set up their own “television stations” with video streaming via the Web without much trouble. The revolution in video-display technologies is creating massive, under-utilized screen space and time, as virtually all architecture and surfaces become potential screens. Video-phones will expand video’s ubiquity exponentially. These video tools are incredibly powerful and are nowhere near their zenith. If one wishes to be part of the twenty-first-century, media-saturated world and wants to communicate effectively with others or express one’s position on current affairs in considerable detail, with which technology would one chose to do so, digital video or a pencil? - NOEMA.