Ideas

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 ...

As computer hardware and the programming skills needed to operate it became more accessible, the question ‘Can the computer make art?’ was asked less and less often. By the beginning of the ‘80s artists were using the first personal computers to produce more varied kinds of work until, with all this activity growing, the question of whether art was possible on a computer lost all sense. There was a moment when the parameters of the question were redrawn, from ‘Can the computer make art?’ to ‘Can...

Over the past several decades in computationally-driven cultures, we have witnessed the emergence of increasingly networked and automated apparatuses of engagement that are used for security, combat and navigation. These are strategic applications that facilitate distributed fields of intelligence and agency. We might recognize them at work when we see calculations and computer graphical overlays on screen-based representations of events, or luminous portable information scrims that hover betwee...

Our thesis is that if it were possible for the public to directly access the airwaves, without having to negotiate with an intermediary – the FCC or one of it’s sanctioned industry kingpins – then perhaps it would be possible to expand vital community media services to all communities. It may even be possible for community-based communications providers, and home-grown communications tools built in-house by organizations who need them, to grow and thrive on an as-needed basis. We believe that cu...

However [...] one could ask about the specific kinds of games that we have begun to play today, in the age of the so-called new media. For our embrace, as a population, of miniaturized, networked electronic devices, has made us into avid producers of signals, emanating from all aspects of our psychic, sexual, professional, political and affective lives. These signals of belief and desire are eminently susceptible to interception, storage in databases, and transformation into statistics, which ca...

For the acts of seepage to connect to form new patterns, many new conversations will have to be opened, and mobile dialects will have to rub shoulders with each other to create new, networked Creoles. Perhaps art practice in a networked reality can itself aspire to create the disfigurations on the wall, to induce some anxieties in the structure, even while making possible the reading of the face in the spreading stain, the serendipitous discovery of an interesting pattern or cluster of patterns,...

Cerchiamo di trarre un senso dalla molteplicità di segni, seguendo questa strategia espositiva: caduti dal surf, si scende negli abissi, rischiando di annegare, solo poi si può ritornare a galla, scalfendo la superficie dell’acqua. Riflettiamo sul rischio di annegare che l’arte corre, ma anche sulla possibilità, sull’opportunità che tale rischio rappresenta. In seguito, potremo osservare l’arte ritornare a galla, scalfendo le superfici abitative. Viaggio di andata e ritorno, movimento tra mondi ...

Security seems to know no ideological boundaries; from the manuals of the Brazilian Urban Guerrilla to those of the School of Americas, never the slightest sign of laxity in the maintenance of security measures and regulations was permitted. In Security Culture the concept of creative industries, to bring the fine arts in from the cold into the productive forces of industry and thus bring security to the artists and culture to the machines of capital is advanced into the understanding of the art...

My own feeling about digital writing is that it is still in its infancy on a societal level, but has been developed into something like a strong beginning by digital writers. It is in its infancy on the societal level in the sense that peoples’ consciousness of writing as a polyartistic enterprise through several media is not as widely prevalent as print-minded literacy. People do not have much of a sense of composition in several media, and their reading skills of such work — and by ‘reading’ I...

In their zeal to stop spam, many organizations and companies are blocking the delivery of wanted messages, especially those sent through email lists. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that most blocking processes are not transparent to the email sender or recipient, and email users are generally given little or no control over which emails are blocked. Instead, system administrators, creators of spam-blocking tools, and ISPs all too often attempt to predict what mail a recipient does and d...

Locative media as an artistic and cultural practice can be seen as a more sophisticated way of addressing this complexity of how the geography and the (wireless) electronic networks interweave. At the very least it heightens the experience of a new hybrid spatial sensibility. But these practices do not contribute self-evidently to countering the paradox of isolation in visibility in public space – I can be very isolated in the singular concentration on my geolocative contraptions. The question r...

Recently, the communities of IP critics and P2P filesharers has been hit by a wave of demands for an “alternative compensation system”. June 2004 was a month of European breakthrough for the idea of “content flatrate”, as a solution intended to save filesharing, whilst “compensating” copyright holders who feel that their traditional means of income are slipping out of hand due to technological development. Here I will discuss this new tendency, its premises, weaknesses and its relation to anti-c...

The situation of mediated contact, or interface, between the individual and the “public,” places the blogger in a position of an intermediary or mediator. For de Certeau, the transmission of communication through a network involves three levels: intermediaries, original sources, and the practices of circulation and transmission. Bloggers map quite well onto de Certeau’s loose schema as mediators - those “who decode and recode fragments of knowledge, link them, transform them by generalization.” ...

The apparent audacity of ideas like the information commons or the guaranteed basic income – their apparent lack of “realism” – merely underscores the crying absence of the political in today’s debates. There’s more at stake here than a catchy tune, or a pill to make you dream. Only an ambition to change the rules of the economy and, ultimately, the existing form of state, can supply the oppositional force that is needed in the early twentieth-first century. Yet the proposals above, inspired in ...

La prospettiva che distingue unicamente fra reale e virtuale oltre a mostrare tutti i limiti di un rigido modello dicotomico, che per sua natura implica una semplificazione spesso eccessiva, contiene in se stessa un rischio piuttosto insidioso. Porsi il compito di analizzare gli eventi ed i conflitti che si dispiegano nell’arena Internet indossando un paio di “occhiali teorici” così rozzi porterebbe a considerare tali accadimenti come non facenti parte dell’ambito del reale ed a liquidarli come ...

Interrogato sui nuovi scenari lavorativi che i nuovi media stanno aprendo, Manovich ha presentato il caso dell'opera premiata con la Golden Nica quest'anno - un'opera interattiva con le maggiori chat di internet, che andava a ricercare frasi su argomenti variabili per riproporle su un gran numero di piccoli display disposti ad emicerchio in una sala ovattata e riempita di suono - ed ha posto a sua volta la questione di cosa accade quando grosse aree della società divengono governate dal software...

Dopo il boom di diffusione dell'inizio degli anni Novanta, con l'irrompere delle masse nel cyberspazio, la rilevanza acquisita da fenomeni come quelli del file sharing, della sorveglianza elettronica e della tutela dei dati personali, hanno assunto proporzioni che non li rendono ignorabili ed hanno scatenato conflitti che coinvolgono di volta in volta imprese, governi, semplici utenti e organizzazioni per la tutela dei diritti digitali. In questo breve saggio cercherò di ripercorrere, seppur bre...

Behind the dream which we humans call “immortality” lies the unstoppable pulse of existence, of achievement, of improvement, of elimination of suffering. As is now happening, the new technological instruments of artistic research finally result in an “art” (if we still want to use this term) profoundly different from that – mostly cold, closed, myopic, obtuse, schematic and pretextual, solipsistic, founded on appearance, repetitivity and without life, force, ideals, emotions, “mechanical and wit...