Reverse Biology
Essay
Control through neoliberal democracy
Histories of the world (that seems to be without a world, as reference to Alain Badiou “worldless world”) cannot be read as an excess, or as an error or a mistake to be evacuated as soon as possible. It is a paradox: developing such histories today means linking them to new media technology, and it is becoming obvious that what was very local has to be connected to global migration, to exclusion of bodies, – to migratory transitional bodies that are really pushed to the edge of society.
Ready for Action
We have a critical vocabulary to understand the power of media in terms of its ideological effects. Yet we lack a vocabulary to understand the power of media otherwise: that is, in terms of its ability to transmit affects. During at least the last forty years, criticism has focused on the social and cultural construction of knowledge. It has directed attention toward the conditions that make meaning possible.
The Creative Common Misunderstanding
In his blog entry "Creative Commons Is Broken," Alex Bosworth, program manager at the open source company SourceLabs, points out that "of eight million photos" posted under a CC license on Flickr.com "less than a fifth allow free remixing of content under terms similar to an open source license. More than a third don't allow any modifications at all.
Semplicità?
E anche quest’anno, fra il 31 agosto e il 5 settembre, le sirene di Linz hanno attratto migliaia di partecipanti – provenienti davvero da ogni parte del mondo, e soprattutto dall’Oriente (Corea, Cina, Giappone) e dall’America (Usa, Canada) – per portarli a confrontarsi con i temi, le opportunità, le proposte e i problemi legati in particolare al design delle interfacce: sotto l’ombrello, come abbiamo detto, del concetto di Simplicity, associato/contrapposto all’arte della complessità. ...
Robots@Play
Ormai è chiaro che il rapporto tra uomo e robot all’inizio del 2000 è esattamente proporzionabile al rapporto che c’era tra uomo e PC alla fine del ‘900. Quindi tanto vale iniziarci a fare i conti e preparare culturalmente le nostre società, in un processo che neghi le mistificazioni e che viceversa porti certi elementi delle future società a diretto contatto con il pubblico.
La trasformazione multimediale dei linguaggi comunicativi
Multimedialità sintetizza la possibilità di muoversi fra linguaggi attraverso un unico medium digitale e la possibilità di una nuova complessità comunicativa attraverso di essi, fino a negare la “forma compiuta” dei linguaggi espressivi e della narrazione lineare occidentale.
Ethics and Politics in Society of the Spectacle
In a world torn apart by poverty and war, is there any reason why one should be the least interested in the philosophical interplay between ethics and politics? Put otherwise: in a world that is, by most people's standards, unethical, is there any room left for an authentic engagement in what constitutes, or should constitute, an ethical approach toward the continuation of democratic public discourse?
Precarity, Social Movements and Political Communication
Identity, the “us” capable of traversing subjectively (or not) a group of persons and sustaining this group in a prolonged collective action, depends, in good measure, on communicational effects, as much in creating an internal dialogue and the (auto)construction of a communal meaning from inside each experience as in the “reception” and interiorization of “external noise.”
Tempo – Bidimensionale nell’Arte e nella Scienza
Le necessità del cambiamento mentale sono percepite anticipatamente dall’arte ed in seguito dalla trasformazione dei paradigmi della scienza. La tridimensionalità dello spazio e l’unicità del tempo appartengono ad un modello di percezione cartesiana del mondo nella quale si ritiene che le immagini siano una riproduzione fedele della realtà. In vero la percezione umana è storicizzata in quanto si modifica come conseguenza della capacita creativa dell’uomo di costruire modelli mentali innovativi d...
Precision + Guided + Seeing
A large body of theoretical work has focused on the delocalizing or deterritorializing effects of real time technologies. They are often regarded as having contributed to the evacuation of geographical space, overriding the specifics of place and distance. Virilio, for example, has often suggested that real time technologies and their accompanying dimension of "liveness" have prompted the disappearance of physical space - in other words, that "real time" has superceded "real space".
The New Dialectic of Play
As expected, the game show has received fierce criticism, especially from left-wing cultural critics and political parties. But that is hardly important. What is more important is that industrial-age definitions of play and work no longer apply to the contemporary game.
The Stuff of Culture
As culture is infusing more and more aspects of contemporary life, and the range of producers is widening but the special status of the artist and the social capital attached to this position, is being eroded. Artists are becoming, again, artisans, not fundamentally different from others creative producers.
Multisensory interactive installation
This paper presents the “Multisensory Interactive Installation,” (MII) a musical interactive installation based on Kandinsky’s paintings, through which a user can become a painter and a composer simultaneously. The painting’s visual elements are synesthetically linked to musical elements: each color is linked to a specific instrument and chord while each shape is linked to a specific rhythm.
Stepping out of the Sun, Zapatista management rules
All I have to do now is the following. I can not quite put it into adequate terms and I therefore hesitate. I do check my lines regularly for lines that make no sense even in those regions where we need to make no sense for a while in the registers that do make sense so. It has to do with my ability to visualise a setting in which people resonate with media through simulating processes. Simulating processes that are actual processes, for in a digitised real, any process might become experiential...
Libre Commons = Libre Culture + Radical Democracy
We think that the only way to consolidate the power and realize the promise of libre culture is through the creation of a radical democratic project. Such a project rejects all bureaucratic tendencies and silencing tactics. It is premised on the political as much as anything else, where the political is understood in its specificity, as a field of agonistic contestation and circuitous re-articulation. Radical democracy offers a positive vision for libre culture, and a constructive response to th...
Marginal Networks: The Virus between Complexity and Suppression
Currently, it seems very difficult to underscore what is culturally hidden or suppressed. Despite the innovative potential shown by the structure and phenomenology of computer viruses, the gallery goer or the observer will be always immediately attracted to the given notion and by the fascinating way in which such notion is apparently being subverted. What lies beneath is always left over or barely noticed. This constitutes an obstacle that still hasn’t been overcome. The cases examined clearly ...
Reflections on Conceptual Art and its relation to New Media
With new media we experience works that are not materialized in the conventional sense to which conceptualism reacted. This is in part because new media works are easily reproducible. What is unique about new media is that in its beginnings, in order to be legitimated, it did not face what other mediums had faced in the past, because issues of originality and purposiveness were previously dealt with by other media such as photography and most importantly film. In fact, new media, as a general di...
Short invective on theatre and virtuality: Five things I don’t want to hear anymore
The notions of digital virtuality and theatre, because are so close (as I pointed out in my Teatro e mondo digitale, 2003), if come close to each other, multiply their denotative power, producing such a mass of meaning to implode and create a sort of ‘meaning black hole’, where anything is adsorbed and disintegrated. We discuss of simulation and representation without a break; we point at aesthetic values using sociological categories; we act like artists and talk as engineers. Of course, confus...
Connection Machines
Society itself is no longer seen as the interplay of strategic interests, conflict, and power, but is regarded as an emerging property of the interaction of abstract forces that operate outside of anybody’s will or interest. However, the projection of this public image has been largely a deliberate affair, driven by a variety of strategic interests, so much is clear post-WorldCom, post-Enron, post-World On-line.
The Will to Code: Nietzsche and the Democratic Impulse
This paper examines the moral claims of free software through the lens of a (re)reading of their theory and practices together with aspects of Nietzsche’s works. It seeks to make a preliminary sketch of how such an analysis might draw attention to oft-neglected aspects of the free software and open source movements.
Il virtuale, il potenziale, l’attuale ed il reale nell’arte elettronica
Un altro aspetto del canone estetico tradizionalmente applicato all’arte vuole i linguaggi artistici come esclusivamente legati alla disciplina artistica dalla quale essi sono emersi. Sovvertendo le regole del gioco, ibridando linguaggi, tecniche e pratiche, i tre gruppi di artisti dei quali si è trattato vanno oltre i recinti disciplinari del teatro-cinema-musica, le incrociano con pratiche più recenti come la performance, l’installazione, il videogioco, e le reinventano applicando i linguaggi ...
Bios: ars naturans
“Bios”: in greco “vita”, ma è anche l’acronimo/acrostico di B(asic) i(nput) o(utput) s(ystem), cioè sistema operativo di base per la gestione delle operazioni elementari di avviamento del computer e allora sistema fondamentale di ingresso e uscita, si può dire proprio in uno, nella e dalla vita, oggi, tanto mentale che fisica.
Fragmented Places and Open Societies
Human life unfolds simultaneously in three environments, biological, built, and informational. Analytically, they can be distinguished, but in practice they are inseparable. The way we construct our houses reflects as much our bodily as our cultural determination.
Transparency to Exodus. On political process in the mediated democracies
This moment of dissolution is where one could locate exodus, not as a concept, but as a power or a myth of resistance. On the one hand, exodus is a pragmatic response to the society of control, in which any widespread political opposition becomes an object of exacting analysis for those who can afford to invest major resources in the identification, segmentation and manipulation of what we naively call the public. In the face of these strategies, exodus is a power of willful metamorphosis: the c...
Unpacking Internet Governance – And Finding Red Herrings
My objective is not to discourage interest in Internet governance – but how does one get involved? Arguably the only significant governance the Internet enjoys, is that of bodies like the Internet Engineering Task Force. These people manage a process that ensures that the Internet keeps acquiring new abilities at a furious pace, which leaves policy-makers and the legal system far behind. The bureaucrats at international decision-making bodies such as the UN must wonder how it maintains this spee...
Tribù della memoria
Il progetto della mostra è nato dentro la attività laboratoriale di un master universitario molto atipico. Un master sugli eventi – la specificazione “culturali” si deve ad un eccesso di scrupolo tipico degli ambienti universitari – e quindi su contenuti formativi che riguardano proprio le soglie tra storia e presente, tra arte e esperienza ordinaria. Soglie rese sempre più fragili e indistinte dai comportamenti tribali innestati dalla progressiva destrutturazione sociale dei sistemi industriali...
Il Net – Criticism di Geert Lovink
L’attenzione di Lovink è dunque rivolta alle effettive concrete dinamiche che si vanno svolgendo in Rete e all’interazione reciproca con i software che determinano tali dinamiche e da cui i software stessi sono determinati. Un’analisi concentrata soprattutto sul “software sociale” della Rete, al lavorio quotidiano che avviene su e intorno ad essa, alle trame dei discorsi che si sviluppano e si avviluppano sulle mailing-list, sui blog, ma anche agli eventi off-line e ai rapporti che si organizzan...