TELE_TRUST by Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat: How do we trust each other as networking bodies? Do we need to look each other in the eyes? Or do we need to touch each other?

In TELE_TRUST Lancel and Maat explore how in our changing social eco-system we increasingly demand transparency; while at the same time we increasingly cover our vulnerable bodies with personal communication-technology. For TELE_TRUST Lancel and Maat designed a hybrid play zone for a vulnerable process, of balancing between fear AND desire for the other. In a visual, poetic way they explore the emotional and social tension between visibility and invisibility; privacy and trust. Continue reading

Situated Technologies Pamphlets 6 — MicroPublicPlaces by Hans Frei and Marc Böhlen :: Available from lulu.com or as a free download.

The Situated Technologies Pamphlets series, published by the Architectural League, explores the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism. How are our experience of the city and the choices we make in it are affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics and other “situated” technologies?

In response to the rise of pervasive information technologies and the privatization of the public sphere, Situated Technologies Pamphlets 6 proposes hybrid architectural programs called MicroPublicPlaces (MPPs). MPPs combine insights from ambient intelligence, human computing, architecture, social engineering, and urbanism to initiate ways to reanimate public life in contemporary societies.

I Spy: Surveillance and Security with Deborah Aschheim, Hasan Elahi, Trevor Paglen, Paul Shambroom :: until April 30, 2010 :: Sun Valley Center for the Arts, 191 5th Street East, Ketchum, Idaho.

I Spy: Surveillance and Security examines the relationship between surveillance, security and privacy in the early 21st century.

The attempted bombing on Christmas Day of a Detroit-bound flight reopened the urgent national conversation about security and surveillance that has been going on since September 11, 2001. Government today has unprecedented access into our lives. Continue reading

Turbulence Commission: I’m Not Stalking You; I’m Socializing: Black & White by Liz Filardi

One of the original cases of criminal stalking in America is retold within the framework of a social network called Black & White, which consists of two mirrored profiles, those of Laura Black and Richard Farley. The website extrapolates on the tongue-and-cheek usage of the term “stalking” to describe the accepted social protocol, a far cry from the original behavior that, in this case, lead to a massacre at a booming Silicon Valley company in 1988. This project points to new and different levels of trust, privacy and social order in our networked society, tells the story behind the first Anti-Stalking Law passed in California in 1991 in the language and structure of networks, and tragically binds together two tormented Americans, once at opposite ends of an ineffective restraining order. Continue reading

Localitzats [Located] aims to show how the emergence of technology in each of the different aspects of our daily life leads to the irreversible loss of privacy, which affects us all; a fact that we often do not seem to be sufficiently aware of.

In this case, the work focuses on the Priorat region, a territory that allows the development of the project because of its size and small number of villages and residents. Localitzats_PRIORAT displays the first and last names of more than three thousand residents of Priorat that have been located on the Network. This information was obtained through a simple search by locality carried out in one of the many telephone contact records on the Internet. Continue reading

Casco Office for Art, Design and Theory presents If You Lived Here Still… An archive project by Martha Rosler :: January 17 – March 14, 2010 :: Opening: January 16; 5:00 pm :: Open forum: January 17; 2:00 - 5:00 pm :: Nieuwekade 213-215, 3511RW Utrecht, The Netherlands.

In 1989-1991, artist Martha Rosler organized her project ‘If You Lived Here…’ at the Dia Art Foundation in New York City. ‘If You Lived Here…’ was a seminal group project on housing, homelessness and the systems and conditions underlying them such as gentrification, bureaucratic complicity or non-compliance and increasing privatisation of the public sector. It took a radical approach toward art and institutions of that time, in a mode that might be called cross-disciplinary and “participatory”. Continue reading

Turbulence Commission: I’m Not Stalking You; I’m Socializing: Status Grabber by Liz Filardi:

A record of telephone interactions is gathered under the pretense of a social networking service called Status Grabber, in which a representative makes personal phone calls to request very short “status updates” from strangers. Call recipients are told that someone they know has anonymously requested a status update about them, and that they should provide the representative with an open statement about their career, family, social life, or literal whereabouts. The service mimics the social activity of users on Facebook and Twitter, where users stay connected without directly interacting. In creating an analog version of those services, Status Grabber places analogous pressure on individuals to relinquish privacy in order to participate in this new model of socialization. Continue reading

Nick Knouf wrote: This past Saturday DARPA sponsored a challenge to find 10 red weather balloons spread across the United States. Working in teams, the first team to find all of the balloons would receive the reward, $40,000, and distribute it amongst the team in whatever manner they see fit. The winner, as you might expect, was a team from MIT and lead by a post-doc at the MIT Media Lab, a not-insignificant fact for me personally (and something I will return to in a moment). The Washington Post article on the event provides a good background.

The title of the hunt was the “Network Challenge“, and was announced to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the first transmission of packets across ARPANET. Continue reading

Ephemeral City: Speakers: Kora Van den Bulcke and Thomas Soetens (Workspace Unlimited), Jason Crow, M.Arch Ph.D. candidate, Department of Architecture, McGill University; Direction: Chris Salter :: December 3, 2009; 6:00 - 8:00 pm :: CCA/Centre Canadien d’Architecture, Maison Shaughnessy. 1920, rue Baile, Montréal, Québec, Canada.

What can games and gaming experience reveal about the city? How does play in public spaces differ from solitary play. What new aesthetic social practices might arise as a result of the mixing between the physical urban space and the digital realm. This forum will feature research and artistic projects that take gaming beyond the single computer screen and into the urban realm, both real and imaginary. Continue reading

I. From the Dematerialized Object to Immaterial Labor

Anglo-American Conceptual art, which emerged in the mid to late 1960s, displayed a new interest in linguistics and information theory that clearly distinguished it from the industrially coded production aesthetics of Pop art and Minimalism. The thesis that went along with this was that replacing author-centered object production with linguistic or information-based propositions represented a challenge not only to any traditional “material-object paradigm” (Art & Language) but also to those aspects of craftsmanship within “production values” that are crucial to any claims to authorship and the “work,” and this perhaps helps to explain how and why the history of Conceptual art has mistakenly been written as a history of “dematerialization of the object.”(1) Continue reading