Ideas

Now, my purpose here is not to write an essay on political theory, but rather to prepare the grounds for a discussion of a concept that is closely aligned with these macro-political trends, and that has surfaced recently in a range of different discussions, and across a range of different disciplines and contexts: the notion of the “commons”. Interestingly the concept of the commons has popped up quite persistently in discussions about the social dimension of communication and networking technol...

The vision of JCR Licklider and then of users who Michael recognized were netizens has helped to guide and spread a participatory and interactive new form of communication infrastructure. However the commercial model for the Internet’s development is very different. It aims to create passive users who are at the mercy of powerful corporations both for their access to the Net and for the determination of how they can use the Net. The commercial model is a challenge to the early vision of a partic...

Recombinant architecture examines the deep cultural impact of biotechnologies, including genetic, genomic and transgenic engineering, on the architectural imagination. [...] Recombinant architecture explodes allegorical relationships between body and structure, incorporating biologic and architectural bodies into indiscrete and reversible interiors and exteriors including cyborgs and transgenic bodies, generative tissue textiles, body-architecture hybrids, replicating habitats and genetically en...

Thus for artists working with landscape data, there are aesthetic correlates to the original question involving the strategic and tactical approaches that are necessary for dealing with the inherent uncertainty of mined/revealed relations amidst (or between) extremely large sets of geo-data organized logically and discretely, particularly in consideration of data with a formal basis in relational or multidimensional algebra. [...] It is possible, and perhaps even likely, that computer artists wo...

Quantum Finance is a new field that seeks to resolve problems that are experienced with the Standard Model, (i.e. money is real, and takes the form of cash and assets). Interestingly the whole endeavour arose as a result of a discussion between a CERN experimental physicist and his private banker in Geneva. This lead to a collaboration between CERN and a select group of Swiss bankers, who between them created the discrete GW (Gnomes and Wizards) Forum, the papers of which this summary is based o...

The key problem of an empirics of new media aesthetics resides in its failure, in a number of instances, to understand that the aesthetics of artworks, software applications and technologies are conditioned by social relations as well as the theoretical paradigms through which analysis proceeds. Technology [...] is found in the processual dimension of articulation, where the media is but one contingent element that undergoes transformation upon every re-articulation. This presents a challenge to...

Assembly is the fundamental logic of post-industrial and industrial society, whether particular elements are manually assembled by a human author in a fixed sequence or automatically assembled in infinite arrangements by a programmatic software application; the process and consequence is of assembly. Digital Media enhances and reinforces the dominant social logic of assembly from the basic level of assembling Bits of data in order to execute rudimentary electronic commands, to assembling samples...

Di fronte alla net art il sito museale deve recuperare tutte le sue funzioni e prerogative e tornare ad essere non solo luogo di comunicazione ed educazione, ma anche di collezione, conservazione, ricerca ed esposizione. L’arte in Rete trova infatti nel Web il suo luogo naturale di elaborazione e di presentazione, e nonostante gli sforzi che sono stati fatti per inserire opere di net art in mostre allestite negli spazi reali di una galleria o di un museo, è in Rete che un’opera di net art va all...

Jonny looks around, confused, his train of thought disrupted. He collects himself, and stares at the teacher with a steady eye. ‘I want to code demos,’ he says, his words becoming stronger and more confidant as he speaks. ‘I want to write something that will change people’s perception of reality. I want them to walk away from the computer dazed, unsure of their footing and eyesight. I want to write something that will reach out of the screen and grab them, making heartbeats and breathing slow to...

The truth of social experience is always local, but we need to extend ourselves to grasp what kind of world society we live in. Such a global society is constituted by power relations, but the bridge to an understanding of our common humanity is moral. Morality is the ability to make personal judgements about the good and bad behaviour of people, including ourselves. Anthropology ought to be a means of helping us to do that more effectively. There is no guarantee that people in the future will w...

Musei e archivi sono depositari di una quantità di informazione e di cultura spesso inaccessibile per motivi di vario tipo – limitatezza delle strutture, delicatezza delle opere, esigenze di conservazione etc. Rendere accessibile tutto ciò tramite la Rete non limita affatto – come si riteneva all’inizio – l’accesso diretto alle opere e alla struttura reale del museo, anzi piuttosto la promuove, e nello stesso tempo consente potenzialmente a chiunque l’accesso a risorse di grande valore e che alt...

When computers communicate over a network, they do so through sound. Before information can be sent over wires run between computers, it must first be translated into tones. The composer Luke Dubois, of Columbia University's electronic music department, has described the static you hear when a modem connects as a hyper-accelerated Morse Code, a billion dots and dashes sung each second, too fast for the human ear to discern. This has been true since the dawn of networked computing. When the first...

Dopo aver trattato i musei denominati “tradizionali virtuali”, per concludere vorremmo passare ai “musei realmente virtuali”, riprendendo la definizione di questi ultimi: il museo realmente virtuale è un museo che, a differenza di quello fisico, non illustra virtualmente collezioni, edifici, sale espositive, attività culturali varie realmente esistenti e riconducibili a un ente fisicamente tangibile (il Museo); pur trattando tematiche rapportabili ad opere, a reperti museali esistenti, esso non ...

Consumption, and the lifestyle it necessitates, has become the number one social duty. There are penalties for those who wish to live other lives, penalties that are not only financial and legal, but also social. The delight that consumer culture takes in all that is forbidden elsewhere - "Imagine, children, a place where men and women may not even look at each other" - is a diversion from the fact that here such traditional regimes of prohibition have been replaced by new ones that are less bru...

As art and technology conferences mature, greater expectations on simplistic input and output seem to be prevalent. Gone are the days when interactive or digital art can be justified with theory and art jargon if the interactive experience fails to be compelling. Especially when exhibited, audiences seem less inclined to spend time with digital projects if their own personal frustration with computers encroaches on the artistic intention. Maybe we don't want to be reminded that we are interactin...

Landscape and its data can be viewed as interrelated components in the complex adaptive system, Earth. The Earth viewed from a holistic vantage point suggests a Gain sensibility, but I would suggest not in Lovelock’s Gain sense as an organism, but rather in Margulis’s sense as an ecosystem. An autonomous system, as proposed in Varela’s interpretation of Gaia, with operational closure, that is a fully self-referential network that specifies its own identity and also specifies its response to emer...

If software art could be generally defined as an art of which the material is formal instruction code, and/or which addresses cultural concepts of software, then each of their positions sides with exactly one of the two aspects. If Software Art would be reduced to only the first, one would risk ending up a with a neo-classicist understanding of software art as beautiful and elegant code along the lines of Knuth and Levy. Reduced on the other hand to only the cultural aspect, Software Art could e...

Il World Wide Web ha trasformato l’enorme massa di risorse già presenti nella Rete Internet in un enorme ipertesto globale che grazie al sistema dei link le può rendere immediatamente e facilmente accessibili all’utente. Rispetto ad altri tipo di ipertesto, il linguaggio html consente di fatto una scelta piuttosto limitata di possibilità e di legami ipertestuali, ma questo limite è largamente compensato dal fatto che, in quanto ipertesto globale, il web consente di collegare fra di loro risorse ...

Notiamo come comunemente i siti si dividano in differenti sezioni il cui accesso è garantito da hotword costituenti la barra di navigazione, tale meccanismo sviluppa la possibilità di selezionare percorsi interattivi personalizzati o guidati e gestire continui e volendo (in base alla più o meno accurata realizzazione) infiniti collegamenti ipertestuali. Abbiamo anche visto che la strutturazione delle varie parti di un sito è più o meno simile: le parti create similarmente sono quelle dedicate ai...

The popular new media concept of transcoding does indeed speak of a limitless and highly effective translatability. Coupled with the associated premise of numerical representation, it proposes that the application of protocols to numbers has conjured up a science that programs closure into every transaction, every translation, and every transposition of what presents itself, in each transmuted instance, as the transcendental identity of the signifier/signified. There is an unprecedented equivoca...

In its first part the following text presents the canvas for reevalution of author and authorship with certain art history method. To be able to position the author in the demanding frame a certain selfpositioning of the viewer has to be developed. Thus, in the second part of the text I argue the position of the active viewer and co-author. [...] To decide for technology, when various theoreticians are already claiming there is no more difference between artificial and natural, means to decide f...

Per via ipotetica si può delineare uno scenario plausibile che tenga conto di quanto detto: in primo luogo i visitatori tradizionali potranno diminuire notevolmente inizialmente per poi riconquistare la fruizione fisica, ipotesi possibile considerando l’incremento dell’alfabetizzazione informatica nella popolazione mondiale (la popolazione che non si è adattata all’utilizzo della strumentazione elettronica, in realtà rappresentata da individui appartenenti a un’epoca precedente alla grossa diffu...

We recognize that the public uses the Internet, but is the Internet in anyway public? Do we and can we recognize that communication is also a right? If we want to have a social good or public interest in our network society, than we need the Internet to be "public", in the same way we think of the airwaves as being in the public domain and subject to regulation. In order for the Internet to be public, bandwidth must be free. Free as in subsidized. Costs still exist, and its important to account ...