Year: 2010

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Symphony of Deptford

At the end of the Node.London season Deptford.TV meets for a collaborative editing session. One of the proposed topics is the editing of the derives which have been organised by the !Mediengruppe Bitnik (see bellow), as well as a documentary on OWN, the Open Wireless Network.

LOOKING OUT FOR YOU — Instruction for a Dérive
……………………………………………………

Duration: approx. 2h

Please follow the instructions on your own (individually).
This is a self-experimental dérive through the
environment of the financial sector of London.
……………………………………………………

Silent observer. Follows. Pursues. Goes by.

1.
Go to the Liverpool Street Station today, Wednesday,
Aug 4, 2010 at 2:30pm

2.
Look around for the next bank or bank office
building. Follow the next person to leave the building
inconspicuously.

3.
Let this person guide you through The City by following
him/her until he/she reaches a private building into
which you cannot enter. Wait to see whether the person
emerges from the building within a short time and continue
following him/her.

4.
Document your mutual journey live using your
mobile telephone by calling +44 8458 699 187 (answering
machine). Describe every change in direction, the routes,
stops and activities of your leading person in short
messages.

5.
If your chosen guide enters a private building shortly
after you start your mutual journey: start again at
step 2 of the instructions.

…………………………………………………..
…………………………………………………..
…………………………………………………..
…………………………………………………..
…………………………………………………..

Your calls will be recorded on the answering machine for
documentation purposes (of course, your phone number /
personal details will not be disclosed).

All material produced will be published under the Free
Art License.

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Subject consored: UBS Lies, 2009

Sender nettime-l@kein.org <nettime-l@kein.org>
Date  15.09.2010 19:52

Dear all,
Over a week ago (2 Sept) a work by Bitnik Mediengruppe (UBS Lies, 2009) was taken down from its billboard site in North London under the threat of legal action. The billboard space was hired for a month in the context of an exhibition called ‘Too Big Too Fail, Too Small Too Succeed’ at [ space ] Gallery in Hackney, London, and themed around ‘artist’s responses to the financial crisis’. The following is an eyewitness account
I arrived late at the opening and found everybody spilling out into the street already, but then I realised they were all heading towards the billboard site next to the gallery. A small flatbed truck was parked by the billboard and there was some discussion going on with the driver of the truck who was wearing a hardhat and fluorescent vest.
The backlight on the billboard was switched off but I could still clearly see a photograph of a nondescript street scene in which a silver-haired man in a long black coat stands in front of a USB bank branch, holding up a white piece of cardboard that has the word ‘LIES’ handwritten on it. I realised that this must be the work of the Mediengruppe Bitnik, which is a homage and an update to the photograph of Peter Weibel from 1971, in which he stands in front an Austrian police station holding up a sign that reads ‘LÜGT’ under the ‘POLIZEI’ sign so that the image forms the temporary statement ‘POLIZEI LÜGT’ (police lies), meant as a protest against what Peter Weibel considered the abuse of state power. I had heard that Mediengruppe Bitnik had re-enacted this photograph in 2009 but I’d never actually seen it.
Pretty quickly it became clear to me that the man in the flatbed truck was here to take the photograph down, and that the artists and the curator were questioning him as to the reason – to which he had no reply: he had simply been instructed by the advertising company running the billboard to take the image down ‘because there’d been a complaint’. The atmosphere was not relaxed, but I’d describe it more as baffled rather than tense. We’re not used to seeing any kind of physical enforcement deployed against artwork anymore, and are not sure how to react.
Eventually one member of the Bitniks stepped on to a crate and asked the crowd ‘don’t harass the worker’ because he was ‘only doing his job’. He explained that they assumed there might have been a complaint from USB bank, but that there’s no hard information at this point – clearly the gallery had not been informed of anything yet. He also explained the provenance of the photograph, and rather mysteriously, that the man holding up the sign is an ‘unknown financier’.
The billboard worker then climbed into the billboard case and proceeded to take down the offending photograph, and then took a long time to put a grubby white tarpaulin sheet in its place. It looked like a genuine piece of performance art, watched by a group of artsy spectators who by now were joined by some of the local drinkers from the London Fields pub next door.
All the buzz on the night was about how the image was now surely going to go viral, and surely the Bitniks and the gallery were going to get lots of attention from this, but in the following days I didn’t hear or see anything.  Out of curiosity, I asked around people I’d met on the night and someone who didn’t want to be named said that indeed the gallery had received a threatening letter from UBS and could not be seen to publicise the case pending possible legal action (presumably a libel case, in which of course both the gallery, which is a non-commercial space, and the artists would be ‘too small to succeed’). The image was taken down from the [ space ] gallery website, but the german version can still be found on
http://www.likeyou.com/en/node/19582
I think the whole incident throws up some interesting questions about the limits of freedom of (visual) speech, freedom of art, the difference between making a controversial gesture in public space vs doing the same inside the sanitised, screened-off space of the art gallery, etc.
With its legal threats UBS is nicely illustrating what was the point of the work in the first place: in our time, it is corporate and financial entities that are ‘too big to fail’ that can use libel and copyright laws to repress freedom of speech, analogous to the way the police was used as a tool of state repression at the time of Peter Weibel’s image from 1971.
All the best
Lennaart
Lennaart van Oldenborgh
lennaart@hofilms.co.uk
#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org

email from nettime:

Dear all,
Over a week ago (2 Sept) a work by Bitnik Mediengruppe (UBS Lies, 2009) was taken down from its billboard site in North London under the threat of legal action. The billboard space was hired for a month in the context of an exhibition called 'Too Big Too Fail, Too Small Too Succeed' at [ space ] Gallery in Hackney, London, and themed around 'artist's responses to the financial crisis'. The following is an eyewitness account
I arrived late at the opening and found everybody spilling out into the street already, but then I realised they were all heading towards the billboard site next to the gallery. A small flatbed truck was parked by the billboard and there was some discussion going on with the driver of the truck who was wearing a hardhat and fluorescent vest.
The backlight on the billboard was switched off but I could still clearly see a photograph of a nondescript street scene in which a silver-haired man in a long black coat stands in front of a USB bank branch, holding up a white piece of cardboard that has the word 'LIES' handwritten on it. I realised that this must be the work of the Mediengruppe Bitnik, which is a homage and an update to the photograph of Peter Weibel from 1971, in which he stands in front an Austrian police station holding up a sign that reads 'LÜGT' under the 'POLIZEI' sign so that the image forms the temporary statement 'POLIZEI LÜGT' (police lies), meant as a protest against what Peter Weibel considered the abuse of state power. I had heard that Mediengruppe Bitnik had re-enacted this photograph in 2009 but I'd never actually seen it.
Pretty quickly it became clear to me that the man in the flatbed truck was here to take the photograph down, and that the artists and the curator were questioning him as to the reason - to which he had no reply: he had simply been instructed by the advertising company running the billboard to take the image down 'because there'd been a complaint'. The atmosphere was not relaxed, but I'd describe it more as baffled rather than tense. We're not used to seeing any kind of physical enforcement deployed against artwork anymore, and are not sure how to react.
Eventually one member of the Bitniks stepped on to a crate and asked the crowd 'don't harass the worker' because he was 'only doing his job'. He explained that they assumed there might have been a complaint from USB bank, but that there's no hard information at this point - clearly the gallery had not been informed of anything yet. He also explained the provenance of the photograph, and rather mysteriously, that the man holding up the sign is an 'unknown financier'.
The billboard worker then climbed into the billboard case and proceeded to take down the offending photograph, and then took a long time to put a grubby white tarpaulin sheet in its place. It looked like a genuine piece of performance art, watched by a group of artsy spectators who by now were joined by some of the local drinkers from the London Fields pub next door.
All the buzz on the night was about how the image was now surely going to go viral, and surely the Bitniks and the gallery were going to get lots of attention from this, but in the following days I didn't hear or see anything.  Out of curiosity, I asked around people I'd met on the night and someone who didn't want to be named said that indeed the gallery had received a threatening letter from UBS and could not be seen to publicise the case pending possible legal action (presumably a libel case, in which of course both the gallery, which is a non-commercial space, and the artists would be 'too small to succeed'). The image was taken down from the [ space ] gallery website, but the german version can still be found on
http://www.likeyou.com/en/node/19582
I think the whole incident throws up some interesting questions about the limits of freedom of (visual) speech, freedom of art, the difference between making a controversial gesture in public space vs doing the same inside the sanitised, screened-off space of the art gallery, etc.
With its legal threats UBS is nicely illustrating what was the point of the work in the first place: in our time, it is corporate and financial entities that are 'too big to fail' that can use libel and copyright laws to repress freedom of speech, analogous to the way the police was used as a tool of state repression at the time of Peter Weibel's image from 1971.
All the best
Lennaart
Lennaart van Oldenborgh
lennaart@hofilms.co.uk
#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org

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!MEDIENGRUPPE BITNIK: Too Big to Fail Too Small to Succeed SEPT 03 – OCT 02

An Intervention into the financial systems of London and Zurich: From Crisis to Crime to Punishment.

Reconaissance, media technologies and advertsing playfully probe the blind spots of the financial districts and question the shift in power from state to corporation.

This is Swiss artist collective !Mediengruppe Bitnik’s first UK solo exhibition and is presented concurrently with an exhibition at Les Complices in Zurich. It follows their three-month PERMACULTURES residency at SPACE investigating the parasitic potential of media-based systems against the backdrop of the financial crises. !Mediengruppe Bitnik describe their work as an ‘explorative practice’ to determine how systems can be subverted, interfered with and transformed.

Too Big To Fail / Too Small To Succeed is kindly supported by Swiss Cultural Fund in Britain.

PERMACULTURES Artists residencies: Media, technology & ecologies

Preview: Thursday 2nd September 6pm – 9pm

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nodel.london Autumn 2010

Do It Yourself

Deptford.TV and !Mediengruppe Bitnik are taking part in nodel season 2010.

The Nodel London network convenes again this Autumn for a season of Do It Yourself media activity across London. The open source movement has taken up residence in our consciousness and pushed itself firmly into our hardware. Now we all can make our own monster to take on the Big Society.

Following the node.london ’06 and ’08 seasons, London venues, organisations and artists come together again to treat you to an Autumn of media events, exhibitions, workshops and residencies.

Highlights include Waterman’s ‘Unleashed Devices’ exhibition, a series of workshops at SPACE using electronics and Arduino, A10 Media Lab performances and a Digital Weekend at the V&A Sackler Centre.

Can we subvert the machine and build ourselves an alternative?

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Deptford.TV at Open Video Conference 2010

For the second time Deptford.TV will present during the Open Video Conference in NY.

OVC2010 will take place on October 1-2, 2010 in New York City. OVC is a two-day summit to explore the future of video on the web. OVC will appeal to anyone with a stake in the future of creative expression and the moving image.

OVC is host to inspiring talks, hands-on workshops, technology working groups, film screenings, and much more. It’s as much about the underlying technologies as the people and projects who use them. Whether you are a developer, a storyteller, an entrepreneur, an academic, or just a citizen of the web, OVC will spark your imagination for what’s possible with video on the web.

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Deptford.TV running Active Archives

During the active archives code sprint in June 2010 Deptford.TV got the active archives system installed, see pictures. Soon we will be running an active archives workshop in London.

Manifesto for an Active Archive

From ActiveArchives

This Manifesto is a work in progress. The text introduces the ideas and motivations behind the Active Archive project lead by Constant in collaboration with Arteleku, and was initiated in 2006. This project aims at creating a free software platform to connect practices of library, media library, publications on paper (as magazines, books, catalogues), productions of audio-visual objects, events, workshops, discursive productions, etc. Practices which can take place on line or in various geographical places, and which can be at various stages of visibility for reasons of rights of access or for reasons of research and privacy conditions. The development will take place during 2008-2009 and regular workshops will be organised to stimulate dialog between future users, developers and cultural workers and researchers.

Image:Event-manager-5.jpg

Creating web pages and displaying information on-line has become easier and easier for non-expert users. The Active Archives project starts from the observation that most of the interesting cultural archives that have been developed over the last few years have taken advantage of those new facilities for instant publishing, but mostly in the form of websites that mirror regular information brochures, announcements and text-publishing. Often, they are conceived as “We” give information to “You”. Within Active Archives, we aim to set up multi-directional communication channels, and are interested in making information circulate back and forth. We would like to give material away and receive it transformed: enriched by different connections, contexts and contradictions.

Decentralizing the archive

When we want to share with other cultural associations and groups/institutions, the challenge is as follows: how do “We” share information “Together”, how do we channel information through each others’ network, under which conditions? How do we produce digital content together? To develop common infrastructures, we will need to discuss what kind of licensing we prefer, and work on norms and a common agreement on formats. We also need to find a shared understanding of classifications or maybe first question existing ones.

Digital cultural archives today fall into two categories: fragmented archives and over-centralized archives. Fragmented archives look like isolated islands. Every institution sits on top of its treasure and tries to regulate and control the way it is used with at most offering a timid RSS feed. Centralized archives gather collections and resources from different origins but disconnect the material from its original context. Accessibility and searchability come at the cost of legitimisation.

An active archive is a decentralized archive which is not only open for reading but also for re-appropriation, comment, divergences, transformations. This manifesto is a plea for such a decentralized archive: an archive constituted from many sites and voices that keep their own contexts without fear of sharing, mirroring, connecting and using common protocols.

Owning our infrastructure

If public television channels decide to publish their archives on YouTube, libraries work in partnership with Google etc., why does the Active Archive not make use of the existing web 2.0 infrastructure? Flickr + MySpace + FaceBook with a bit of Delicious to glue it all together… who needs more? But to upload digital culture on the servers of dotcom billionaires might not be such a good idea after all.

However much influence the functionalities of Web 2.0 had in popularising the digital archive, we need to be aware of their terms of use. We would like to prevent that cultural archives serve as footage for ad-placement or as honey pot for market profilers and for this reason we need to make the effort to build our own infrastructure.

An active archive should provide to its contributors a clean and clear contract where the terms of the participation are fair and legible for everyone. The goal of an active archive is to produce more interesting content in the first place. Not to make profit in monitoring the users and selling their behavioural patterns. Only when the different parties involved own their own infrastructure and accept to share it, they can ensure the conditions for access without strings attached. This means open content licenses for all material stored, so that the conditions for use are clear for everyone. An infrastructure built with free software so that everybody can co-own the source code.

Distributing more than text

An active archive needs to go beyond mere text-publishing. Artists, cultural groups and institutions regularly produce video and audio images for various communication or creative purposes. It is necessary to take into account that media content requires different material configurations: they need more disk space and more bandwidth, therefore they require clever strategies of distribution. Peer-to-peer networks have pioneered large scale experiments with the distribution of audiovisual media, and it is time to learn from them.

Integrating audiovisual media is not just adding another type of file. It requires a new approach to navigation, searching, linking, subtitling and translation so that audio and video content can connect to text-based content because otherwise those files remain black holes in the archives.

Image:exchange-of-tools.jpg

Promoting re-use

The material that is made available through the Active Archive is thought of as source material for other works. This means, systems need to be put in to place to make referencing and re-use of the material easy, but also make sure that versions of the material can filter back to the place it original came from. These systems are partially technical, and partially cultural: a series of commissions, workshops, exhibitions and publications will inspire creative use.

Between tags and ontologies

To improve the search facilities, to group elements, to link them and to create new meaning and new experiences, an archive needs a system of classification. Librarians and archivists are used to work with fixed standards but the work produced and discussed within contemporary culture tends to escape these classification schemes.

An Active Archive requires the creation and discussion of vocabularies and taxonomies that can evolve, diverge or merge. These vocabularies and taxonomies should neither be brutally top-down or completely flat. The system should stimulate the sharing of common classifications, allow for divergence and promote the convergence of knowledge trees. Active Archive needs a classification system with a difference.

Moving through new gestures

Sharing is the principal motivation to create an Active Archive. This means that we need to update our assumptions about the users of such an archive, the sources that are used and the circulation of its content. An Active Archive is not a black box with a Download button, it is information reconfigured. And it has to start now.

Image:researcher.jpg Image:radiomaker.jpg Image:librarian.jpg

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Cinelerra Server for FLOSS Manuals

The plan is to integrate the Cinelerra Server project into the Cinelerra FLOSSMANUAL, see http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Cinelerra/WebHome

What is FLOSS Manuals?

FLOSS Manuals is a collection of manuals about free and open source software together with the tools used to create them and the community that uses those tools. They include authors, editors, artists, software developers, activists, and many others. There are manuals that explain how to install and use a range of free and open source softwares, about how to do things (like design) with open source software, and manuals about free culture services that use or support free software and formats. Anyone can contribute to a manual – to fix a spelling mistake, to add a more detailed explanation, to write a new chapter, or to start a whole new manual on a topic. You can read and use the manuals in a number of different ways. They are available online in separately indexed chapters, and you can use the website as a reference base in this way. You can also view, download, or print each manual as a PDF file. It is also possible to ‘remix’ manuals to create a version that only includes specific aspects of a particular manual, or that combines chapters from two or more manuals in a single document. These can be downloaded and printed, added to websites, and used for any purpose. You can also print a manual, or an individually ‘remixed’ manual, as a book via the print-to-order service of Lulu.com.

What does FLOSS stand for?

F. L. O. S. S. stands for Free Libre Open Source Software. Basically, this means software that makes its code available for anyone to use, change, and redistribute under the same terms. If you’re still confused, you can read more below.

What is Open Source? What is the difference between Free and Open?

Open Source emphasizes availability of source code to software users. This means not only that the source code is available at no cost and with little difficulty, but that users can modify the source code and distribute the results under the same conditions. Bruce Perens wrote the original Open Source definition for Debian. Free Software emphasizes the freedom to modify and reuse software, which of course also requires that source code be readily available. Richard M. Stallman initiated the definition of Free Software as part of the creation of the Free Software Foundation and its GNU project (GNU’s Not Unix) to create a completely Free Unix-compatible operating system and set of software tools. GNU software together with the Linux kernel, plus contributions from many other sources, constitute the GNU/Linux Operating System, commonly known as Linux. So in practice the differences in meaning between the two phrases are not great, but they lead to some differences in attitude, terminology, and use of specific license terms. One reason for the difference in terminology is that “Free” is ambiguous in English. FSF has to explain that it means, “Free as in Free Speech, not as in Free Beer.” To counter this, the unambiguous French term “Libre” can be added in, resulting in FLOSS, or Free (Libre) Open Source Software. FSF maintains a page explaining the various Free and Non-FREE licenses. The BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) license, for example, allows users to modify source code and put the changes under a restrictive commercial copyright, as Apple has done in Mac OS/X. Since most BSD users put their changes under BSD, it can be considered somewhat, but not entirely, Free. In addition to these software licenses, there are several licenses for documentation and other content, most notably the GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License) and the various Creative Commons licenses. FLOSS Manuals uses the Free Software GPL for all of its work. For details of definitions and available licenses, see

A Little About the History..

Adam Hyde started FLOSS Manuals while a digital artist. Adam had made a living running workshops on free software all over the world and had accumulated a lot of support material in the form of workshop manuals. In 2005 this material was put into a wiki with the help of Aleksandar Erkalovic and Lotte Meijer did the design. In 2006 Lotte Meijer and Adam Hyde applied for and recieved funding from Digital Pioneers to extend FLOSS Manuals. Thus the development and design of FLOSS Manuals as it is now started in 2006. This is the same year the Foundation was registered. Several digital artists were commissioned to write manuals on Audacity, Gimp, Blender, and PureData. The actual site wasn’t ready until May 2007. The first unsolicited edit on the site was in July 2007. FLOSS Manuals was officially launched at a party at Montevideo Time Based Arts (Amsterdam) in October 2007. In 2008 we created the Farsi version of FLOSS Manuals (http://fa.flossmanuals.net) and started our first Book Sprints. Now there are over 40 manuals on free software, and 1200 registered contributors and a healthy and active mailing list. Burmese, French, Finnish and Spanish language communities are currently being established.

What’s the benefit to me of using FLOSS and FLOSS Manuals?

By using free/libre/open-source software, you have the right to use, change  and share the software freely. FLOSS is also usually no-cost. You are not dependent on a big company to add features or fix problems; for FLOSS, these issues are handled by a community of software developers, which often responds more quickly. If the FLOSS community doesn’t address a problem that have with the software, you can hire a programmer to do it for you; this is almost never possible with proprietary software. Similarly, when you use free/libre/open-source manuals, you have the right to use, modify and share the documentation freely. Manuals on the FLOSS Manuals site are no-cost to use online. For paper copies, we charge just for the paper and printing, and a little extra to support making more books. You can also take the online version as a PDF file and print it yourself. You can also edit the documents on the site, for example, if you find things are incorrect, out of date, or incomplete. (You can also change your own copy, but we appreciate if you help us make the manuals on the site better.)

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Live Stage: Images of Ebb [uk London]

The End of Something — A collection of reflections on the Global Crisis :: July 31 – August 30, 2009 :: Volume, 114-116 Amersham Vale, Deptford Police Station, New Cross, London :: Images of Ebb Workshop :: August 1; 1:00 – 5:00 pm :: Deskspace medialab. To reserve a place, please RSVP with phone number to: a.hadzi(a)gold.ac.uk (limited space!).

Images of Ebb (with Adnan Hadzi (Deptford TV) + Rob Canning (GOTO10)) will introduce participants to Sousveillance and CCTV filmmaking where material and images from the Deptford.TV archive will be edited to submissions from Sounds of Ebb. Footage taken from Deptford.TV was filmed during a previous TV hacking workshop where participants equipped with CCTV surveillance signal receivers were lead through the city by incoming surveillance camera signals. CCTV video signal receivers cached surveillance camera signals into public and private spaces and were made visible: surveillance became sousveillance. By making images visible which normally remain hidden, we gain access to the “surveillance from above” enabling us to use these images to create personal narratives of the city. The Images of Ebb Workshop will look at constructing a narrative to the Sounds of Ebb.

Sound of Ebb (a branch project of The End of Something) is an open source sound series that asks sound artists and artists working with sound to respond to the question: What is the sound of Recession? Contributions are collected internationally reflecting the affects of crisis and recession from various social contexts and geographic locations. Together the Sounds of Ebb and images from Sousveillance produce articulations of a local city in crisis with global resonances of recession.

Deptford.TV is a research project on collaborative film – initiated by Adnan Hadzi in collaboration with the Deckspace media lab, Bitnik media collective, Boundless project, Liquid Culture initiative, and Goldsmiths College. It is an online media database documenting the urban change of Deptford, in Sout East London. Deptford TV functions as an open, collaborative platform that allows artists, filmmakers and people living and working around Deptford to store, share, re-edit and redistribute the documentation of Deptford.

GOTO10 is a collective of international artists and programmers, dedicated to Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) and digital arts. GOTO10 aims to support and grow digital art projects and tools for artistic creation, located on the blurry line between software programming and art.

The End of Something is a critical archival project that aims create a platform for reflection on the global crisis. During August 2009, LOUDSPKR in collaboration with Volume will embark on an on-going process of accumulation to build up an archive of personal, critical and creative reflections from a local and international community. Located in the former “Archive Room” of a police station, Volume will become once again a bureau and repository for information. The archive exists both online in a ‘digital archive’ and in a physical archive at Volume. As a provisional space, the archive is perpetually incomplete and flawed. It, however, offers a space for dialogue and critical reflection on notions of crises that demand urgency as it increasingly seeps into our everyday. Through events, workshops and talks, the public will be engaged in processes of creating and imagining new narratives and understandings of a rather complex time.

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FEAR Sarai Reader 08

Deptford.TV ‘data spheres’ essay published in FEAR, Sarai Reader 08
Author/Editor : Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta and Jeebesh Bagchi, Eds.

Sarai Reader 08 is interested in the phenomenon of fear in the form of nuclear attacks, lethal outbreak of a virus, of flash floods and freak storms, etc not as empirical facts but as cultural processes. The book aims to question how fear and anxiety shape individual and collective dispositions, how lives and social processes are designed around and against them, and what effects they have on our politics and our economy. It is especially interested in fear as language, as mode of communication, as a way of ordering and rendering the world…

… The Reader gathers to itself texts and contributions in the form of image-text assemblages that look at the transmission, generation and processing of fear on an intimate as well as on an industrial scale. They encompass mechanisms designed either to allay or intensify fear or ratchet up and down levels of anxiety and feelings of security. We see this as a beginning, and a broad range of questions and areas of interest, some of which have been touched upon this book, still remain to be unaccounted for. While Sarai Reader 08 does not claim to be exhaustive, it does aim to straddle a wide territory. The form that contributions to the Reader have taken is as varied as the content. While there are stand-alone essays, there are also reports, interviews, photographs, image-text combinations, comics, art-works, personal journal entries, research and commentaries. We believe that this diversity helps the Reader evoke responses to the idea of fear in all its myriad dimensions.

We have always viewed the Sarai Reader as a comfort zone for new and unprecedented ideas, as a space of refuge where wayward reflections can meet half-forgotten agendas. This is why we see it possible to imagine Sarai Reader 08 as setting the stage for a productive encounter with the demand for an account of the limits, margins and edges of our times.

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A Hack a Day #12: Frequency Modulations

Workshop with !Mediengruppe Bitnik (.ch /.uk)

Radio is a surprisingly straightforward media – you only need to assemble a few electronic components for a low-range broadcast with your own micro FM transmitter.

In this workshop participants soldered their own low-range FM transmitter using a predesigned printed circuit board by piradio.de (a Berlin based free radio initiative). Once assembled, this board gave every participant a 0,15 Watt transmitter with mini-jack input and USB as power source. After a brief introduction from !Mediengruppe Bitnik to some of their more recent works related to media hacking, the group experimented with different ways to use our FM transmitters: As a tactical tool, an artistic device, a communications media.

No previous soldering experience required!

!Mediengruppe Bitnik is an artists group based in Zurich, Switzerland.

Their artistic practice is focused on medial systems, mediatized realities and live media feeds which they like to manipulate and reproduce so as to give the viewer a novel and refined understanding of their mechanisms. In doing so, Bitnik aims at revealing functionalities and operational methods which allow other uses and extend the utilities of these systems.

Bitnik are currently in a three-month residency at SPACE media lab.

http://www.bitnik.org