[A network of nodes (29)] Emergence in the Social Web by Liat Berdugo:

Abstract: Complex systems sometimes exhibit what’s known as emergence — the phenomenon wherein the whole is more than the sum of its parts. For instance, ants acting individually are mindless, but collectively they self-organize to form intelligent colonies with intricate behavior patterns. I explore whether something similar can be said of the way that a collective consciousness seems to emerge from the nodes in a social web. I begin by showing why emergence is a compelling way to understand what happens on the social web, and examine meme generation and social movement formation, specifically, as resultant emergent phenomena. The emergence of social phenomena is nothing new — it happens in offline communities like family units, corporations, and cities. Continue reading

BMW Tate Live: Performance Room: Jérôme Bel :: March 22, 2012; 8:00 pm :: online. Continue reading

Video Vortex #8: The Politics, Cultures and Art of Online Video :: May 17-19, 2012 :: The Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Croatia.

Video Vortex has taken place twice in Brussels and Amsterdam and once in Ankara, Split and Yogyakarta. The Video Vortex network was founded in in 2007 and deals with the cultural, political and artistics aspects of online video. Video Vortex 8 is organized by the Kazimir Association in Split and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb in collaboration with the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam. Continue reading

Text by Brad Troemel, Artie Vierkant, Ben Vickers, Brad Troemel & Artie Vierkant, Ben Vickers & Artie Vierkant :: Strikethroughs signify disagreement; Underlines signify agreement :: concept by Brad Troemel: Continue reading

The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive ‘value abundance’? by Michel Bauwens, Aljazeera: [...] Open-source software, shared innovation and crowd-sourced manufacturing threaten capitalism as we know it. Not only is the world faced with a global resource crisis, it is also facing a crisis of intensive development, because value creators are increasingly income-less. The knowledge economy turns out to be a pipe dream, because what is abundant cannot sustain market dynamics.

Thus we have an exponential rise in the creation of use value, but only a linear increase in the creation of monetary value. Continue reading

R15N: The Revolutionization of Communications.

Unlike Us: What to expect in 2012 by Marc Stumpel:

2011 was an exciting year with the Occupy movement, Facebook’s settlement with FTC’s charges, Europe versus Facebook, decentralized social media alternatives developing, critical social media art, more awareness about tracking and a significant wave of criticism after Facebook’s new changes. Moreover, the Unlike Us research network was launched at the Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol, where the first conference was held.

Now in 2012, we are looking forward to Unlike Us #2 in Amsterdam. Artists, designers, scholars, activists and programmers will gather to analyze the economic and cultural aspects of dominant social media platforms and discuss alternative, decentralized social media software. Continue reading

Decode Me by Mushon Zer-Aviv and Guy Saggee (with code by Zohar Arad). Mushon says “It is a code based online campaign for DECODE, an exhibition of code based works. Participants are invited to “decode” their FB profile image into a triangle pixels combination and stamp their share on the timeline. Every day at midnight the participant with the largest share on the timeline (longest time before next decode) gets a free ticket to the show.

The show opened this last Friday and would go on until mid-March, by that time we expect the Decoder of the Day to lead with just a few minutes share…”

SKOR | Foundation Art and Public Space / NAi Publishers: Open Cahier on Art and the Public Domain, no. 22 — Transparency Publicity and Secrecy in the Age of WikiLeaks.

Taking WikiLeaks as an illustrative example, Open 22 investigates how transparency and secrecy relate to one another, to the public and to publicity in our computerized visual cultures. It examines transparency as an ideology, the ideal of the free flow of information versus the fight over access to information and the intrinsic connection between publicity and secrecy. Does transparency only work in a liberating way? Can it not equally have a concealing or controlling effect? Aren’t certain forms of transparency actually the manifestation of the banality of the contemporary spectacle, which revolves around pure display and the production of affects? What role does the media play in this? Continue reading