The 15th annual Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) Distributed Microtopias :: Call For Submissions — Deadline: August 15, 2012. Continue reading

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Flashfl00d is a semi-secretive mass public exhibition of rapidly-distributed hidden flash drives containing downloadable exhibitions. Continue reading

(Read a review here) Good Listeners is a browser plugin that exposes the secret ways in which our browsing habits are shared with and mined by 3rd party web trackers (like Google Analytics and Facebook “Like”) without our consent or knowledge. Whenever a site exposes the visitor’s data to a third party service a confessional booth window is opened and the priest in the window offers words of invisible wisdom, divine providence and spiritual guidance pertaining to matters of web browsing, social networking, e-commerce and digital identity.

Good Listeners in a critical/ amusing/ awkward visualization and sonification of the vast data dimension passively generated by us and aggressively collected and mined by these mysterious omnipresent all-seeing tracking forces of the web. Continue reading

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

Webcasts of Media Squares – International Public Seminar on the New Forms of Protest and their Media (hosted by De Balie, Amsterdam, September 30, 2011).

Social protest has become almost inseparably linked to a plethora of media images and messages distributed via internet, mobile phones, social media, internet video platforms and of course traditional media outlets such as newspapers, radio and television. A popular category to have emerged recently is the ‘twitter-revolution’. In almost all cases (Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, London) the role of the platform turned out to be less than essential in retrospect. Protests mostly manifested on the streets and particularly the public squares (‘Take the Square’). Continue reading

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Betabeat wrote: “For anyone who wasn’t aware, there are a few hundred protesters hanging out downtown in a park plaza two blocks from Wall Street. Despite allegations of Twitter censorship, tweets are collating around the hashtags #occupywallst, #occupywallstreet, #ows and #nycga. So when Betabeat walked past an iPad hooked up to a projector showing short hashtagged messages with the occasional photo, we assumed we were looking at a Twitter client. Turns out that’s not what it is. This app is called Vibe, the “new kid on the social media block,” and it’s something different: a Twitter-esque messaging system built by Hazem Sayed, a professional developer from California who built the app as an anonymous alternative to Twitter, reports the New York Daily News…” More >> Related: TXTmob (2004) by the Institute for Applied Autonomy.

The Rise of Performance Architecture: Camp-Conference on Art/Urban Strategies :: September 22 – October 1, 2011 :: Grisar Park, Brussels, Todays Art Festival.

“Accepting architecture as cultural production, its performative dimension must also contribute to a critical role, that is, to architecture’s capacity to produce commentary regarding the ongoing transformations of culture and society. In this sense, the notion of architectural performance implied here feeds directly upon the tradition of performance art.” — Pedro Gadanho, “Architecture as performance”, revista Dédalo N°2, Porto, 2007 Continue reading

Fluid Nexus is an application for Android phones and desktop computers enabling exchange of messages without the need for centralized mobile networks. Messages are transferred by short-range networking technologies like bluetooth and through the movement of people from one location to another.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, networks continue to be defined by their stable topology represented in an image or graph. Peer-to-peer technologies promised new arrangements absent centralized control, but they still rely on stationary devices. Mobile phones remain wedded to conventional network providers. Continue reading