Ideas

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

While “globalization” describes a stage of capitalism, it also implies a threshold of history. Here networks have much to offer. As Castells and many others have pointed out, networking technology is not exclusively a tool of Capital, by Capital, and for Capital. The open-standards common-carrier properties of the Internet makes it a playing field (although maybe not level), or battleground, in any case contested space, and not a proprietary theme park.

There is no need to reject the promises of biotechnology with regard to the human Code and its technological products. What needs to be rejected is the sequestering of the Code via patents and corporate hegemony as part of genetic industry, because it violates the sovereignty of the human species. There is a nostalgia for supremacy in control of the Code. In line with historical trends, the illusory power of the Code, (like military power, economic power, technological power, etc.), is being con...

The importance of cultural learning was first brought home to me in the mid-1990s, when I was Executive Secretary of the World Commission on Culture and Development. The concerns expressed then, from all corners of the world, have been reiterated and modulated in my subsequent engagement with cultural policy, whose interface with educational policy is still, alas, highly underdeveloped. These concerns have led me to envision the stakes of cultural learning, its lacunae as well as the obstacles t...

In the preindustrial agrarian societies subsistence production of goods for immediate living needs was the crucial constant. In industrial society, this agrarian-social constant was replaced by more general material production of commodities, and the production of goods for immediate needs became increasingly just an appendage of industrial production. The entire society was so crucially shaped by this change in the mode of production that we must speak of it as a change in historical epoch. In ...