The lack of Corporate and Governmental transparency has been a topic of much controversy in recent years, yet our only tool for encouraging greater openness is the slow, tedious process of policy reform.

Presented in the form of a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, the Transparency Grenade is an iconic cure for these frustrations, making the process of leaking information from closed meetings as easy as pulling a pin.

Equipped with a tiny computer, microphone and powerful wireless antenna, the Transparency Grenade captures network traffic and audio at the site and securely and anonymously streams it to a dedicated server where it is mined for information. Continue reading

Negative Dialectics in the Google Era: A Conversation with Trevor Paglen by Julian Stallabrass :: OCTOBER 138, Fall 2011, pp. 3–14.

In the last seven years, in a series of performances, publications, exhibitions, and installations, Trevor Paglen has explored the world of hidden military projects and infrastructure. One of his best-known series is Limit Telephotography, for which he trained lenses designed for astronomical photography on secret military bases in the U.S., using their very-long-range photographic capabilities to capture images that would otherwise be hidden to civilian eyes. These are the “limits” that lie at the heart of Paglen’s project: the limits of democracy, secrecy, visibility, and the knowable. Continue reading

Beyond Blind Mist: A Conversation with Brad Troemel and Jonathan Vingiano by Nicholas O’Brien, Bad At Sports:

“Over the past year Brad Troemel and Jonathan Vingiano have been steadily collaborating together to create platforms of digital exchange and dialog through their development of various browser-exclusive projects… Continue reading

Radius 18: Imaginary Forces’ CT Room (43:01) :: Continuously looped for a three hour period on December 20, 21, 27 and 28 at 4:00 pm CST.

CT Room is a collage of field recordings taken from various online video chat rooms and instant messenger services. In many of the recordings, the subjects that chose to type responses instead of speak, were unaware that they had left their computer microphones on. In some of these cases, the computer was left on even after the person had stopped chatting. Hart was able to record the sounds of these seemingly empty spaces and the personal conversations that would take place outside the designated chat space. Continue reading

Naked on Pluto — by Dave Griffiths, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk — is the winner of VIDA 13.2, the prestigious international art and artificial life contest. Continue reading

“In a very short time since they appeared, digital photo frames have become so popular that they now regularly invite aesthetic experimentation. In his recent project Poser, Constant Dullaart has offered an ironic view of this media. Slipping inside the device, the artist has designed some chroma keys of himself and, using a cinematic technique, he has added himself into some group portraits found online (one of the distinguishing features of the Dutch artist is his reworking of material from the web). From Leon Battista Alberti onwards, art history is littered with attempts to overcome the physical limits of the frame - to enter into or move beyond it.

Therefore the originality of Poser is not to be found in this invasion, but rather in the artist’s intention to inhabit contemporary technological devices, to become part of them and to understand their specific natures. Continue reading

Gretta Louw - Controlling Connectivity :: Online Performances: November 2-12, 2011 (see times below) :: Exhibition: November 26, 2011 - January 15, 2012 :: Art Laboratory Berlin.

With the opportunity for connectivity and limitless access to information comes the obligation to be increasingly available to receive and transmit; to be perpetually connected. The consequent erosion of true leisure time, the blurring of the traditional professional / personal, public / private dichotomies, and an information overload are creating hitherto unknown levels of psychological pressure. Continue reading

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Welcome to Jack Gamble’s entry for the 2011 Nowa Nowa Nudes.

The goal of this profile is to explore themes of Narcissism and the Virtual Nude in the context of social networking. The premise of the entry surmises, that in participating with Network Culture, we relinquish certain rights and expose ourselves to Deep Web meta-searches, data collection/trade and are left “naked”, often without even realising it.

There are two goals to this profile. The first is to interact as a true facebook account. The second goal is to exist in the context of net.art. My hope is that through status updates, image uploads, wall posts and contacts, the profile will function and interact as it’s own input and output.