Ideas

A lot has been written in recent years about the "Gift Economy" operating within the confines of networked art and culture. This economy of information and ideas works in contrast to the monolithic economy of financial capital, or so it is said by many of its proponents. [...] The desire for technological progress to be evolutionary is blind utopianism at best and violently authoritarian at worst. To be sure, I don't want to criticize the practice of a gift economy, per se, but rather the belief...

Existence has sculptural form, because it is executed in a spatial environment. The placement of urban or rural features; of objects in a household; of furniture in a hotel room: they constitute sculptural arrangements. LIFE, when lived with a minimum of self-reflection, is formed in ways similar to an artefact. Art, on the other hand, can become an operational tool for existence similar to a household object: by being less of a representational device but more of a tool for self-reflection. As ...

The future is a series of small steps leading away from the wreckage of the past, sometimes its actors walk face forward, blind to the history played out behind their backs, other times, they walk backwards, seeing only the unfulfilled destiny of a vanished time. The promise of the tactical media of the future – the end of the spectacular media circus as everyone begins to lay their hands on cheap 'do it yourself' media technologies made possible by new forms of production and distribution – was...

At the basis of each piece of software there are definite algorithms, but if conventional programs are instruments serving purely pragmatic purposes, the result of the work of artistic programs often finds itself outside of the pragmatic and the rational. Because the process of the digitalisation of culture and other components of social life is inevitable, it is necessary to consider adequate ideas and mechanisms for the transfer of those spheres into digital space, to find adequate conditions ...

I was writing and thinking about the algorithmic and the allegoric. I've been struck by how so much contemporary art practice has been informed by the algorithmic. Having done work in information engines and various net art pieces using algorithms for the display and organization of information, I was equally intrigued by what we get after we've deployed all these little engines and are outside the event of instructions. Do we start from outside or inside? Even though the boundary of these thing...

Any discussion of software as art requires consideration of the whole creative process involved into its concept and realization, which leads to a new operability in the digital domain: our attention here is focused on source codes, the fascinating world of algebra and algorithm that can be seen in many expressions of form within the digital immanence and all of them can be reformulated and produce meaning.

Quando parliamo di software come di arte è bene considerare l'intero processo creativo che porta alla sua concezione e realizzazione, concezione e realizzazione di una nuova operabilità nel dominio digitale: stiamo volgendo il nostro sguardo al codice sorgente, all'affascinante mondo dell'algebra e dell'algoritmo che nell'immanenza digitale prende forma in espressioni molteplici: dense, riformulabili e produttrici di senso.

There is nothing subtle about recombinant aesthetics today. Recombinant work is aggressive, vindictive and destructive (not necessarily deconstructive). Deconstruction depends on a certain level of representation. The howl of image-blenders today is the scream of a new abstraction. Rapid, sustained repeats of an image leave an impression of total, otherworldly, abstraction. Electronic images, having already broken away from the physical world (automobiles often "fly" like an "eagle"), are even m...

www.TVPredictions.com è un sito web un po' particolare: come annuncia il nome, in esso si trovano delle previsioni riguardanti il medium televisivo in tutte le sue evoluzioni, dall'High Definition alla TV interattiva fino alla Web TV e altro ancora. Il curatore del sito è Phillip Swann, un futurologo fantasioso ma attento che sfodera argomenti intelligenti, a volte però trattati con una baldanza tecnologica quantomeno discutibile. Da questo sito, aggiornato quotidianamente dalla sfera di cristal...

As a Counter-Strike newbie I was sometimes even able to solicit help from my enemies, indicating a clear awareness of the game as fictional play space. [...] But I still am critical that this domain, the network of thousands of international Counter-Strike servers spanning Taiwan to Germany, has been reified as an exclusively male “realistic” combat zone. [...] I am also disturbed that the binary logic of the shooter is being implemented on a global military scale. Personally I would like to see...

Nel caso sia della scrittura sia del teatro, la prospettiva non riguarda la morte dell'arte, bensì una ridefinizione dei compiti dell'autore, in un caso, e dell'attore, nell'altro. Sono problemi strettamente connessi all'individuazione del valore dell'opera d'arte stessa, a volte nei termini di una differente dialettica tra originale e copia, a volte nei termini di presenza e distanza nell'esperienza artistica contemporanea. Dunque i tentativi di contaminazione tra spettacolo teatrale e tecnolog...

The solution I'd suggest to the digital liability of open licenses is as practical as it is radical: a "digital sanctuary." Digital objects are like rabbits - they reproduce easily. It is this promiscuity that creates practical problems for the commons approach. Let's say you take your pet rabbit for a walk in a public commons. If it gives birth, the offspring are still your property, and you can prosecute anyone who takes them from you. But if your promiscuous bunny's offspring happen to hop th...

Cell phones are an intense source of high-frequency magnetic fields that is held very close to the brain. Studies have investigated various health hazards – reduced fertility, brain tumours, memory loss, behavioural changes, and damaging effects on a child's development. Naturally, this has raised concern and fear about the effect of cell phones on human health. [...] At this point in time, what is needed is a comprehensive precautionary approach to the use of cell phone technologies. This doesn...

To understand the socio-political implications of experimental strolls in the city, it is important to know how the public-domains functions as the place where individuals meet, so forming communities form & as a consequence society on the most fundamental level emerges out of the interaction of/between/inside crowds. This public domain is not an autonomous field, but the result of the interplay between public-space & urbanism: the dialectic between the physic objects in a city & the...

Singularity theorists think they see an important similarity between humans and computers: they both think. However, given the vast differences in the circumstances under which humans and computers compute, this discovery of similarity is both a remarkable and a suspicious one. Even when thinking only of thinking, the differences between both seem to be more important. The current machine computer performs it's tasks in glorious isolation from which it can be interrupted, the human computer is c...