Ideas

A nostro avviso, anche il primo Foucault potrebbe tornare utile a pensare la profondità del potere contemporaneo. Oggi le cronache ci parlano sempre più di manipolazione dei corpi e la riflessione filosofica si incentra sempre più sulla biopolitica. Forse varrebbe la pena di non escludere l’eventualità che i processi di socializzazione che ci abituano a determinati desideri, passino anche se non in primo luogo dai nostri corpi, da quei grovigli irriducibili che ci costituiscono. Questo non compo...

Art that concretely deals with carbon-based biological systems is ephemeral by its very nature. The artists featured in Still, Living act less by pure technophile affirmation of anthropocentric biotechnological prowess or cognitive dominance over the non-human than by reflected scepticism towards our current notions of progress.

My interest in this talk is to consider what the political concept of organized networks might mean for designers wondering how to make a buck. I know for sure that I won't be able to offer a one-size-fits all business model, so if that's what you were hoping for, then be disappointed now. Instead, I will focus on what I consider the primary conditions that attend the practice of collaboration in an era of network cultures and informational economies.

The technology of video is now as common as a pencil for the middle classes. People who never even considered working seriously in video find themselves with digital camcorders and non-linear video-editing software on their personal computers. They can set up their own “television stations” with video streaming via the Web without much trouble. The revolution in video-display technologies is creating massive, under-utilized screen space and time, as virtually all architecture and surfaces become...

Facing the challenges of digital technologies, global communications, and networking environments, as well as the inherant ignorance of traditional systems towards these, 'working together' has emerged as an unsystematic mode of collective learning processes.

The virtual embassy in Second Life will be a copy of a real world embassy: The House of Sweden, situated in central Washington DC next to a big park and a river. The embassy was developed as a consequence of the new politics on architecture. A competition was announced by the Swedish National Property Board (SVF) in 2002 and the winning proposal, designed by Gert Wingårdh and Thomas Hansen opened 2006. House of Sweden is a concept developed in collaboration between the Swedish National Property ...

Grazie alla trasparenza delle ICTs, l’e-government può assicurare “il comune di vetro”, ma dentro la teca non c’è più niente da vedere perché ogni tensione conflittuale che unicamente sostanzia di sé il potere è neutralizzata. Nelle sale dei consigli comunali si decide sempre meno e senza assumersi la responsabilità di scontentare qualcuno.

Soprattutto dalla metà degli anni ’90 del secolo scorso sono apparse forme espressive collegate a strumenti e approcci del tutto diversi da quelli di derivazione informatica. Pure spesso condividendo alcune delle istanze provenienti dallo stesso quadro filosofico e scientifico generale di riferimento e talvolta ibridandosi con tecnologie di derivazione informatica, queste nuove forme hanno fatto riferimento soprattutto alla dimensione organica, all’ambito della biologia, alle “discipline del viv...

Science Fiction as a rotating hall of mirrors... there are two prominent figures within the wide boundaries of SF which I would like to discuss here: One is the model, the miniature, the other is the time machine.

We see before us a turning in free culture. This turning, lies between the claims of the ordinary against those of the extraordinary, and suggests that we need to carefully examine our current situation. The ordinary highlights the fact that even in the beginnings of free culture there existed its middle and its end, that its past invaded its present, and even the most extreme attention to the present is invaded by a concern for the future.

The global society, born from the contingent spread of capital over new physical territories (Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia), is not the result of capital spread over certain geo-political lines (states, etc.), but of disappearance of the very borders of these territories/states. The new territories are not at all physical, but fields of science, communication technologies, cyberspace, art and culture, and, last but not least, the human body.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.”