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

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

The Deleted City is a digital archaeology of the world wide web as it exploded into the 21st century. At that time the web was often described as an enormous digital library that you could visit or contribute to by building a homepage. The early citizens of the net (or netizens) took their netizenship serious, and built homepages about themselves and subjects they were experts in. These pioneers found their brave new world at Geocities, a free webhosting provider that was modelled after a city and where you could get a free “piece of land” to build your digital home in a certain neighbourhood based on the subject of your homepage. Heartland was – as a neigbourhood for all things rural – by far the largest, but there were neighbourhoods for fashion, arts and far east related topics to name just a few. Continue reading


Spontaneous Combustion! Performance and Social Networking in Digital Art :: New Media Caucus Sponsored Panel at College Art Association, Los Angeles, 2012 :: Call for Papers — Deadline: November 1, 2011.

This panel will explore the dynamics of social networking sites and open source software as it is being utilized in postmodern digital art practice. Currently, artists are collaborating, networking, performing and creating interventions in social, political and conceptual art utilizing frameworks created under a variety of contexts. Continue reading