Month: May 2016

Posted on by adnan Uncategorized

after.video @ AMRO

Art Meets Radical Openness
Festival dedicated to Art, Hacktivism and Open Culture

“Art Meets Radical Openness” is a community festival, an open lab, and a meeting point for artists, developers, hactivists, and idealists involved with the culture of sharing and communal production. They are catalysts that spark new discourses and open up new directions of thinking. Free Open Source Software, open tools in general and the use of free licenses are the precondition and basis for the digital practice of a community like this, which impels social transformation. This tangible transformation goes beyond a digital practice and also changes our real life.

This exhibit and/or paper presents the after.video video book, discussing the topic of “Online and offline platforms for the exhibition and circulation of audiovisual media”. The after.video book represents a fusion of the modes of the digital/networked publication and the traditional form of the physical (wasted?) book. There have been first thoughts about the links and exchanges of the old traditional format of the book and the possible accordances of the digital book on a more practical level. The theoretical framing is given by thinkers of the book like Bob Stein: “the computer screen became a place for synchronous and asynchronous conversation. As web technology improved people started putting essays and books in a browser with a dynamic margin where readers could make comments visible to everyone. Over the past ten years the experience of dozens of ‘social reading’ platforms suggests that books will become places where people congregate to hash out thoughts and ideas.” (1). Practically this fusion of the possibilities and formats of new digital media (like video) and traditional academic text-form is also making headways – like exemplified in the ‘Frames of Mind’-project (2). Open Humanities Press has taken these beginnings and fused different pre-existing trajectories of development as instantiated by above projects and conceptions, and fused them with the idea of rendering the digital book after.video as a physical device, much along the lines already taken in the landmark project “The Weise7 in/compatible Laboratorium Archive” (3). This conceptual leap represented by the dual-mode video-book enables the Centre for Digital Cultures (4) and Open Humanities Press (5) to not only go beyond the format offered by the first two volumes of Video Vortex (as put out by the Institute for Network Cultures (6), but also beyond the current state of digital publishing in media-rich, video-centric contexts, thus presenting a unique publication which reflects upon video theoretically, but attempts to fuse form and content in its own dual format.

We also participated in the Liquid Democracy workshop, a report (in German) can be found here.

Posted on by d.tv Deptford.TV, lunatics, mazi, Report, reports, research

Energising Interest

Though our initial work with Minesweeper Collective as part of Mazi project pilot in Deptford Creek, we have talked a lot about how improvements to energy infrastructure could have a huge impact on quality of life and sustainability for those living on boats or otherwise off-grid. Wind turbines and solar collectors have long been used in these situations where fixed land connections for mains power are scarce. Harvested energy is stored in large batteries which need monitoring and management then safe, low loss re-distribution.

Boattr project illustrates some of these issues with DIY solutions to regulate energy and integrate with on board computers and sensors. Various initiatives are underway to bring these issues together and offer complimentary tool for those setting up autonomous energy systems.

Posted on by d.tv mazi, news, Report, reports, research

Vexed, hashed and ported

Battlemesh 09 was the latest in a series of intensive exchanges organised and attended by the prime of mesh firmware developers, hardware hackers and community activists – An international movement of open wireless network innovation with it’s root in the earliest moments of net culture.

More than 80 contributors from Korea, Colombia, India, Argentina and across Europe gathered at the Faculty of Engineering in the University of Porto (Portugal) for a week in the deep code of OLSR, Babel, B.A.T.M.A.N, BMX and Batman-ADV, each contenders for eternal glory!

All use the OpenWRT operating system first issued at the outbreak of contemporary mesh networking in 2004, when discovery of GPL code in the very affordable Linksys WRT54G router triggered release of it’s proprietary sources for open re-engineering.

Each afternoon lightning talks and presentations were held in a space between the busy workgroups. We listened to memorable accounts from international groups and community actions, a film première of Sarantaporo documentary (Greece) and reviewed GNUnet and netJason projects two of many others listed in the packed event schedule. Our hosts even arranged us a cruise on the Douru River with spectacular views, bridges and fresh air!

Work progressed on setup of the Battlemesh ‘Wibed’ testbed, itself an ambitious and complex set of configurations, to allow for easy switching between competing firmware to enable monitoring of the 30 or so wireless routers now dotted about the university. Inevitable bugs obstructed completion but we start to see results at the eleventh hour, hoorah!

Key members of the OpenWRT developers group gathered to announce it’s community reboot as new project LEDE which resolves to shake off legacy constrictions in the operational structure of the old system. There was widespread delight mixed with a sense of some trepidation this news should schism the project. Overall it seems, this is an overdue shift toward a more flexible approach to future development of firmware for embedded devices, so good luck with that!

Overshadowing the event for all this year is the news that FCC have followed steps taken at EU to legislate a lockdown of firmware on equipment (RED) featuring 5ghz wireless devices, so that critical weather and aviation radar systems cannot be compromised by non standard radio uses. New hardware will not permit firmware modification and improvements by community in the future will no longer be possible! It’s hard to follow the exact conditions that have lead to this unfortunate situation, certainly manufactures have taken flight and entirely re factored their products to adhere to the rules as they understand them, in fear of heavy fines should they fail.

Suspicions were voiced, that telecom interests have influenced authorities to revise controls allowing them capture pubic access spectrum for more exclusive commercial uses. Here is the joint statement from the wireless network community, more needs to be done to highlight the situation.

Posted on by adnan Events, news, presentations, projects, publications, Report, reports, research

after.video @ LibreGraphics

Adnan presented the after.video project at the LibreGraphics conference.

after.video is a new online service which will be making available a series of variably aged video presentations which cover a collection of topics. What it represents then is a repackaging (Assemblages) of material from a variety of sources, presumably professionally edited and augmented. If you visit their website, you see they are not quite operational, and that this is a paid subscription service.

Now in its 11th year, the international Libre Graphics Meeting turns its focus for 2016 to the theme “Other Dimensions”, encompassing time-based media and the third dimension, new additions to LGM’s established focus on graphics.

From its first edition in 2006, held in Lyon, France, Libre Graphics Meeting has been a locus for software contributors, artists, designers, and users to come together and share their knowledge and to experience camaraderie. This year will see four days of presentations, talks, hacking sessions, workshops, and meetings.

Prominent software projects such as GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, GNOME, and others will come together to demonstrate the progress on their projects and to discuss them within the context of the larger Libre Graphics community. LGM 2016 will play host to animators, architects, artists, book designers, cartographers, developers, documenters, educators, engravers, graphic designers, git visualizers, hackers, photographers, rasterizers, reverse engineers, tool makers, type designers, and video archivers (among others!).

The 2016 edition of LGM will have a full program of workshops, presentations and talks across the entire spectrum of Free/Libre and Open Source graphics projects and communities. The full program can be found online http://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2016/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/LGM2016program.pdf

With a great after party: Autonomous Tech Fetish & also check out Lara’s project dataunion.

The next LibreGraphics meeting will be in Rio De Jaineiro.

Posted on by adnan news

Cyberparty: popular politics in digital times

In recent years – and in particular since the explosion of the financial crisis of 2008 – we have witnessed the rise of an array of new political parties – sometimes described as ‘digital parties’, ‘internet parties’ or ‘network parties’ – that attempt to utilise digital communication technologies as means to construct new forms of political participation and organisation against a background of widespread political disaffection with mainstream politics.

From the 5 Star Movement in Italy, to Podemos in Spain, and the Pirate Party in Iceland, Sweden and Germany, to the municipalist formations that recently won the mayoralties of Barcelona and Madrid, the signs of this surprising revival of the political party in digital times are growing. These new political organisations that are entering the political arena in a number of countries in Europe and beyond make use of the tools and practices that typify the present digital era, from Twitter channels and Facebook pages to Whatsapp groups and decision-making platforms. Furthermore, they embody the new demands that reflect the ways of life, fears and desires of an era of mass digital connectivity: demands for free information, privacy, connectivity and basic income.

What is the meaning and what the implications of these emerging digital parties? How do they reflect and respond to the current phase of economic and political crisis? What are the new issues and policies they bring to the fore? What are their forms of organisation, participation and leadership?

The Cyberparty conference hosted by the newly formed Centre for Digital Culture at King’s College London will explore these issues by bringing together experts and activists from the forefront of political innovation. It will ask what is specific to the emerging ‘digital party-form’ underpinning these formaions, how it compares with the mass parties of the industrial era and the electoral-professional parties of the neoliberal era and to what extent it can become a vehicle for social and political change. Furthermore, it will inquire in which ways more traditional political phenomena such as the Labour party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders’ campaign in the US are trying to adopt some of the emerging organisational structures and practices coming from digital parties.

Different aspects of digital parties will be examined: their forms of communication and propaganda; their decision-making platforms; their policy platform and social base, with dedicated panels on these issues.

The conference will also host a special panel on digital activism in Eastern Europe.