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The General’s Stork

The General’s Stork

Our friend Heba Y. Amin launched her book ‘The General’s Stork’, accompanying her Solo Show ‘When I see the future, I close my eyes‘.

Eva Eicker writes about the show: In her first UK solo show, Egyptian artist Heba Y. Amin presents ongoing projects combining various media such as video, appropriated archival photographs, performance and real footage. The title When I see the future, I close my eyes lends itself from the song ‘Excellent Birds’ (by Peter Gabriel and Laurie Anderson) for Nam June Paik’s reflection of digital media Good morning, Mr Orwell (1984). In her research-based practise, Amin is tackling the history of the technological influence on politics and the construction of territorial power with a focus on the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. This work could not be more relevant than during these times of global political threats.Inspired by the news in 2013 when Egyptian authorities detained a migratory stork for espionage because of an electronic device fitted to its body – Amin combines colonial narratives with the records of modern technology. In the video work As Birds Flying (2016), she depicts savannahs and wetlands, including settlements in Galilea (Northern Israel), which were captured in found drone footage. The audio presents dialogues from Egyptian actor Adel Imam’s film Birds of Darkness and discusses political tension, censorship, democracy and surveillance, such as “The government wants credibility, but no one trusts them.” Opposite this work, the artist presents wallpaper composed of appropriated archival aerial shots of Palestine and its history over time, again mimicking the (spying) bird’s perspective. The General’s Stork (2016-ongoing) shows a stork’s life and its famous owner Lord Edmund Allenby in Cairo, the British High Commissioner for Egypt and the Sudan from 1919 to 1925. In the photographs the artist appropriates the bird’s colour: flipping from b/w to colour. The work immediately gains a manipulated artificiality, intensified by the stork’s tall, out-of-proportion (but factual) appearance. Here she mashes up reality and appropriation, culminating in a speculative yet satirical approach. “What does it read like in a different context? I wanted to erase and dominate the narrative”, Amin remarked when we met.This ties over to her second project, Operation Sunken Sea (2018-ongoing); installed as a long table with flat lightboxes in a dimly lit space, the work evokes a governmental feel to it. At one end of the room is a b/w portrait of the artist – powerful, tall, a quasi-persona of a dictator. Opposite on the rear wall is a video projection of Amin’s speech recorded in Malta 2018 in front of a live audience. Stitching together quotes from famous dictators ranging from Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini to Former Premier of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev – the artist is mimicking dictators and proposes a solution to the so-called migration crisis by relocating the Mediterranean Sea within the continent of Africa. Occasional and affirmative sounding (if not very staged) cheering interrupts the overall silence of the piece or space, suggesting a focussed and serious listening is required. The lightboxes feature archival material supporting and recording the early twentieth century utopian visions of draining the Mediterranean Sea supported by various world leaders and scientists. This also includes a re-staging of Herman Soergel’s portrait, where Amin poses as the German engineer claiming to unite Europe and Africa as one continent to gain power, which the New York Times called at the time a “utopian phantasm” (14.4.1929). In 1956 a confidential CIA recommendation to Eisenhower proposed to funnel water and ‘create’ peace in the Middle East, stating it hoped “it would keep Nasser’s mind on other matters, because he needs some way to get off the Soviet Hook.”It is easy to become completely absorbed by the sheer visual and audio absurdity of human megalomania. While the politicians seek justification for their action or settlements with the proof of technology or photographs – the artist is taking them out of context opening the discourse: “Can you look at them and remove the context?”The third work, the multi-channel video installation Project Speak2Tweet (2011 – ongoing) features anonymous voice messages left at an online platform initiated by a group of programmers as response to the Egyptian Governments’ Internet shutdown during the 2011 uprising. Posted on Twitter, the uncensored messages by activists and the public resulted in moving messages to update families and friends. Here the artist gives a voice to the people – and the world was listening. Most touching is a man leaving a message not knowing if he will return from his trip to Cairo’s central square. Brilliantly installed as a metal construction, the visitor navigates looped snapshots of destroyed urban structures in Cairo as though meandering through a prison-like interior representing a corrupt dictatorship.For a short-lived moment, this work resonates as a good example of technology in juxtaposition to the other two bodies of work. This is nothing like the unstable-democratic realm and the ideal of ‘never trust the internet’, which we are adopting as norms. The messages are not publicly accessible anymore, and saved on the Twitter server.Eventually the paranoia of stork-espionage was discredited and evidently the bird was part of migration research by zoologists. Subsequently released, the bird was apparently caught and eaten. Without simplifying the complex themes, the exhibition equally manages not to overload the experience in the space and offers plentiful resources. The artist brilliantly dissipates the distinction between the truth and narrative in her projects by manipulating archival material and mimicking the political language and fascist mannerisms to open up debates. One is also left with a bitter aftertaste – the shifting between absurdity and reality is aching. The satirical element is overshadowed by the fact this is not shocking rhetoric anymore: we have become very numb to the increasing politicisation of news and media.

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ILUM @Eleventh International Conference on The Image

Immersive Laboratory University of Malta (ILUM)

Adnan Hadzi presented ‘Immersive Laboratory University of Malta: Artistic Doctorate Visual Pedagogies’ at the Eleventh International Conference on the Image.

As communicative landscapes are increasingly driven by the visual, there is a demand to put ‘the image’ at the center of research practices and educational methodologies. In turn, there is a call for a focus on new approaches to making sense of location, use, and analysis of the image in pedagogical contexts. The 2020 special focus attempts to provoke thinking through the image by: encounters – the personal, social and inter-connectedness of experience to the viewer; place – the where and how of transmission, situatedness and reception; ecologies – appearing within the image, systems, cultures, and context; design – the nature of action in experience and interpretation, from the historical, contemporary, to imaging future worlds. What creative ecologies can be re-imagined in the shared practices of image makers and educators that leads to the development of critical thinking to transform visual experience?

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Algorithms, Ethics & Justice @MAD conference

Algorithms, Ethics & Justice by Adnan Hadzi

Adnan presented Algorithms, Ethics & Justice at the MAD conference. In order to lay the foundations for a discussion around the argument that the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies benefits the powerful few, focussing on their own existential concerns, the paper will narrow down the analysis of the argument to social justice and jurisprudence (i.e. the philosophy of law), considering also the historical context. The paper explores the notion of humanised artificial intelligence in order to discuss potential challenges society might face in the future. The paper does not discuss current forms and applications of artificial intelligence, as, so far, there is no AI technology, which is self-conscious and self-aware, being able to deal with emotional and social intelligence. It is a discussion around AI as a speculative hypothetical entity. One could the ask, if such a speculative self-conscious hardware/software system were created at what point could one talk of personhood? And what criteria could there be in order to say an AI system was capable of committing AI crimes?The paper will discuss the construction of the legal system through the lens of political involvement of what one may want to consider to be powerful elites. Before discussing these aspects the paper will clarify the notion of “powerful elites”. In doing so the paper will be demonstrating that it is difficult to prove that the adoption of AI technologies is undertaken in a way which mainly serves a powerful class in society. Nevertheless, analysing the culture around AI technologies with regard to the nature of law with a philosophical and sociological focus enables one to demonstrate a utilitarian and authoritarian trend in the adoption of AI technologiesThe paper will then look, in a more detailed manner, into theories analysing the historical and social systematisation, or one may say disposition, of laws, and the impingement of neo-liberal tendencies upon the adoption of AI technologies. The regulatory, self-governing potential of AI algorithms and the justification by authority of the current adoption of AI technologies within civil society will be analysed next. The paper will propose an alternative, some might say practically unattainable, approach to the current legal system by looking into restorative justice for AI crimes, and how the ethics of care, through social contracts, could be applied to AI technologies. In conclusion the paper will discuss affect and humanised artificial intelligence with regards to the emotion of shame, when dealing with AI crimes.

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MoneyLab#8

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Critical thinkers, artists, researchers, activists, and geeks in search of other economies and financial discourses for a fair society.

All along, these have been dark times for the economy, as offshore finance wreaks havoc in the very fabric of cities and communities, and crypto-companies navigate the world in search of their own tax havens. Information leaks from financial paradises have made it clear that the wealthy, influential, and well-connected will still escape taxation. These are the same people turning places like Malta and the Bahamas into luxury apartment zones. At the same time, well-documented Dutch fiscal loopholes cost the world approximately 22 billion euros in lost taxes each year. Corporations like Shell tempt governments with scraps of their ill-gained revenues in exchange for legal residence in anonymous letterboxes. Global business and crypto-speculation have debased national regulations to the competitive logics of an international tax marketplace, and local economies and communities struggle to hold up against privatisation and the mass transformation of jobs to a precarious freelance existence in the gig economy.

Weeks into the corona crisis, it is too early to say which aspects of the global financial system have been thrown into the dustbin of history. Pivotal nation-states are now exploring digital currencies as one tool for post-pandemic stimulus (or austerity). How do the earlier proposals for Universal Basic Income relate to the sudden appearance of helicopter money in some countries? Are the Keynesian money proposals to prop up the Western economies an indication of the end of the neoliberal hegemony? Is the ban on cash during the corona crisis an indication of the arrival of the cashless society?

It is a grim scenario, but perhaps not all is lost. The economy is not – and never was – merely in the hands of faceless corporations and cryptocurrency speculators. MoneyLab explores the imaginaries of artists, researchers, activists, and geeks in search of other possible economies and urgently interrogates a different financial discourse. It has always asked: can we use technology critically to support alternative values of cooperation and “commoning” in a world that is dominated by individualism and competition?

MoneyLab #8, the first-ever in a post-socialist country and the first-ever virtual edition, features examples far from the mainstream media spotlight. It zooms in on the effects of offshore finance and explores counter-experiments in the realms of housing, care work, and blockchain technology. In the fringes, something interesting is happening: blockchain is no longer just another tool for capitalist growth obsessions, and people are realising radical visions for fairly-waged care work, redistributed wealth, equitable social relations, and strong grassroots communities. In our world of vanishing cash, corner-cutting multinationals, and weakened social support structures, can community currencies or self-organised care networks strengthen neighbourhoods? What would fair and social housing look like if it was turned into the cornerstone of the economy? Who is building local systems that can stand up against the financialisation of housing in the global platform economy?

MoneyLab #8 sheds light on radical and alternative strategies for self-organisation and pushes on towards new and collective futures situated in resilient local communities.

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Hacking the Computable

Adnan Hadzi presents thoughts on ‘mindless futurism’ at the Hacking the Computable symposium.

Zur ästhetischen Kritik digitaler Rationalität

Eine Tagung der Staatlichen Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Stuttgart/Campus Gegenwart, der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Ästhetik und dem Forum Digitalisierung der Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft in Kooperation mit der Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, der Staatlichen Akademie der bildenden Künste Stuttgart und der Université de Fribourg.

Tatsächlich scheinen mit der digitalen Wende, dem ‘digital disrupture’ sämtliche gesellschaftliche und auch kulturellen Prozesse in ein dichtes Netz von Codierungen und Kontrollen eingesponnen, die ebenfalls die Dinge (die ‚smart‘ werden) als auch die Körper und ihre Identität und Integrität wie das Ästhetische selbst und die Künste betreffen. Digitalisierung und Algorithmisierung tangieren im Sinne entscheidungslogischer Programmarchitekturen mittels Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, stochastischer Zufallsprozesse Denken und Kreativität als vermeintlich letzte Domänen eines ,Anderen’ der Computation und genuines Residuum der conditio humana.Die Vermutung liegt nahe, dass diese ‚letzten‘ Entscheidungen über den Ort des „Menschlichen“ sowie das, was die Rolle von Ethik und Verantwortlichkeit wie gleichermaßen der kritischen Urteilskraft sein kann, auf dem Feld des Ästhetischen ausgetragen werden – ob als spezifisch ästhetische Anmutung des Technischen und Ökonomischen oder in künstlerischen Formen von Erkenntnis und Kritik. Hier geht es um Möglichkeiten einer Widerständigkeit gegenüber der vermeintlich restlosen Usurpation des Realen durch Algorithmik und Digitalisierung. Die Tagung Hacking the Computable. Zur ästhetischen Kritik digitaler Rationalität versteht sich in erster Linie als Diskussionsplattform, die diese und ähnliche Fragen zu untersuchen, kritisch zu hinterfragen und – möglichst kontrovers – zu überprüfen sucht.Veranstalter*innen: Judith Siegmund, Natascha Adamowsky,         Dieter Mersch, Emmanuel Alloa, Daniel Feige

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boattr.uk book & blog

boattr.uk book published with Mute publishers

Digital Arts on the British Waterways 

This boat book & blog documents our journey on our narrowboat ‘Quintessence’ and the development of the boattr prototype in collaboration with MAZI (for “together” in Greek), a Horizon 2020 research project. Boattr connects narrow boats to the ‘Internet-of-Things’ and allows for open wireless mesh-networking within the narrow boat community, by using affordable microcomputers. The main goal of this project is to provide technology and knowledge that aims to 1) empower those narrow boats who are in physical proximity, to shape their hybrid urban space, together, according to the specificities of the respective local environment, and 2) foster participation, conviviality, and location-based collective awareness of the canals.

This is an edited collection of assembled and annotated boat logs, photographs and video essays, manifested, in a scholarly gesture, as a ‘computer book’.

The boattr prototype was built on the MAZI toolkit and the capabilities offered by Do-It-Yourself networking infrastructures – low-cost off-the-shelf hardware and wireless technologies – that allow small communities or individuals to deploy local communication networks that are fully owned by local actors, including all generated data. These DIY networks could cover from a small square (e.g., using a Raspberry Pi) to a city neighbourhood (e.g., the Commotion Construction Kit used at the RedHook WiFi initiative) or even a whole city (e.g., guifi.net, awmn.net, freifunk.net), and in the case of boattr the UK canal network.

The boattr DIY infrastructures offer a unique rich set of special characteristics and affordances for offering local services to the narrow boat community, outside the public Internet: the ownership and control of the whole design process that promotes independence and grass-roots innovation rather than loss of control and fear of data shadows; the de facto physical proximity of those connected without the need for disclosing private location information, such as GPS coordinates, to third parties; the easy and inclusive access through the use of a local captive portal launched automatically when one joins the network; the option for anonymous interactions; and the materiality of the network itself. The prototype integrates existing FLOSS software, from very simple applications to sophisticated distributed solutions (like those under development by the P2Pvalue project, mobile sensing devices, and recent developments in open data and open hardware), allowing it to be appropriated by different non-expert users according to their respective context and use case.

Table of Contents

Research Journal

Adnan Hadzi

Boat Log

Adnan Hadzi & Natascha Sturny

Reflections

Natascha Sturny, Rob Canning & James Stevens

Videos

Adnan Hadzi

Images

Natascha Sturny

Resources

Franz Xaver & Anton Galanopoulos

Editor 

Adnan Hadzi

Authors Collective

Adnan Hadzi

Natascha Sturny

Franz Xaver

Anton Galanopoulos

James Stevens

Rob Canning

Tech Team

Harris Niavis – MAZI Programmer

Giannis Mavridis – Micro-Computer Programmer

Producers

Adnan Hadzi – Format Development & Interface Design

Panayotis Antoniadis – MAZI Project Manager

Mark Gaved – Coordination Creeknet

Quintessence Logo: H1 Reber / Buro Destruct

Cover artwork and booklet design: OpenMute Press

Copyright: the authors

Licence: after.video is dual licensed under the terms of the MIT license and the GPL3

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html

Language: English

Assembly On-demand

OpenMute Press

Acknowledgements

Co-Initiated + Funded by

Horizon 2020 – The EU framework programme for research and innovation

The Mazi project (2016-2018) has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 ICT CAPS initiative under grant agreement no 687983.

Thanks to

Ushi Reiter – Art Meets Radical Openness, Servus.at, Linz

Vince Briffa – Department of Digital Arts, University of Malta

Clemens Apprich – Centre for Digital Cultures, Lüneburg

Rob Canning – School of Art and Design, Coventry University

Gary Hall – School of Art and Design, Coventry University

Simon Worthington – OpenMute Press, London/Berlin

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Dal-Ba’ar Madwarha: Valletta 2018’s major visual arts exhibition

Valletta 2018’s major multi-site exhibition, “Dal-Baħar Madwarha”, opens its doors to curious visitors across the Islands starting from the 10th of March. Curated by Maren Richter, large installations, performances and public interventions are taking place in both traditional and unexpected locations across Malta, exploring the idea of “islandness” in playful and critical ways.

Ibrahim Mahama’s work for the Pixkerija, Valletta’s Old Fish Market, will be directly connected to the fabric of the building of the Pixkerija. Mahama’s large scale intervention – a physical line made of meshes – intends to highlight the working history of the old fish market, its uncertain future and the Mediterranean Sea as a symbol of trading between Africa an Europe.

Only a week from now – 10th of March – the first projects of Dal Bahar Madwarha will start to appear. Kultura paid a visit to Manaf Halbouni: “Uprooted“: What if you are forced to live in a space of 1qm? The Syrian-German artist invites us to imagine ourselves without a home – What if ‚our car‘, a symbol of freedom of mobility, became home due to misfortune or war?

Valletta 2018 – European Capital of Culture’s major multi-site exhibition, “Dal-Baħar Madwarha”, opened its doors to curious visitors across the Islands from 10th of March. Curated by Maren Richter, large installations, performances and public interventions are taking place in both traditional and unexpected locations across Malta, exploring the idea of “islandness” in playful and critical ways. The projects range from design objects to architecture and complex issues of urban development and society with a focus on “research through practice”.

Heba Y Amin – OPERATION SUNKEN SEA
A fictive office that explores colonial omnipotentia by initiating a large-scale infrastructural intervention through the draining and rerouting of the Mediterranean Sea to converge Africa and Europe into one supercontinent. Heba Y Amin is an Egyptian visual artist, researcher and lecturer based in Berlin, whose work engages with narratives of national sovereignty, often in contested territories and questions methodological assumptions embedded within Western historiography.

Dal-Baħar Madwarha – Giraffa: James Micallef Grimaud’s intervention refers to the fact that the Maltese Archipelago are close to both Africa and Europe. Today Africa and Europe seem to further away from each other than ever. New borders and new forms of migration have been established. A transformed crane painted as a giraffe welcomes the travellers when entering the harbour, or those in search for the iconic view over the Grand Harbour and remind us of tolerance and diversity of cultures.

James Micallef Grimaud has directed several artistic projects including the first large scale mural in Malta. He is the founder of the Troglodyte crew, a street art collective working on several projects around Malta. He defines himself as an artist, who maintains critical but positive and witty approach to life on the Island.

This event is on till 1st July at the Marsa/Grand Harbour Docks.

Between spring and summer 2018, curator Maren Richter brings Valletta 2018’s major visual arts exhibition to our European Capital of Culture, with large installations, performances and public interventions taking place in both traditional and unexpected locales across the country. Among the exhibition’s star sites is the Pixkerija at Barriera Wharf, a Grade 2 scheduled building that was built in the 1930’s.

Richter is working with more than twenty-five established and emerging artists from fifteen countries –including Malta, France, Austria, Egypt, Germany, Syria, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Ghana, Spain, and Palestine – who are collaborating with local partners around the Islands.

The title Dal-Baħar Madwarha is inspired by a quote from the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze, ‘The island is what the sea surrounds’. This sets the tone for newly commissioned and existing pieces that explore the idea of “islandness” in playful and critical ways. It’s an artistic journey through the contemporary realities of the Maltese Islands, placing at their helm the Islands’ relationship with their closest neighbour – the Mediterranean Sea.

The exhibition re-traces borders, imagining new geographies that view the sea as fluid and transformable rather than another physical barrier between people, places and culture.

In Richter’s words: “The multi-site programme invites international and Maltese artists to recast and respond to current and past urgencies and challenges, in which the Mediterranean Sea plays a significant role […] The island is a mode of pausing, familiarised by a certain romanticism. Whereas the sea looms large in the language of our imaginations; it is a site of reflection, voyage, and volatile freedom.”

In the light of such thought-provoking inquiries, the exhibition explores the identity of our Islands within a wider global context, bringing creative, social and political visions of the Mediterranean to light through the region’s most iconic and enduring image: the deep blue sea.

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after.video at the indefinite vision symposium @ whitechappel art gallery

after.video will be presented during the indefinite vision
symposium @ whitechappel art gallery, see:
http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/events/indefinite-visions/ (before the
symposium during a workshop on methodologies – see schedule below ->
after.video is in the 4-5.30pm slot)

WORKSHOP: THE AUDIOVISUAL ESSAY WHITECHAPEL GALLERY, LONDON

WEDNESDAY 22nd JUNE

11.30am-1pm. Forms
Themes:
Audiovisual essay forms (close analysis, artistic/poetic montage,
supercut/thematic montage, ‘interstitial’).
Techniques: temporal manipulation, overlays, split-screen, voice-over
Audiovisual essays as supplements to written scholarship and as core
methodology.
Questions:
What types of scholarship are audiovisual essays suited (and not suited) to?
What more could audiovisual essay achieve critically and aesthetically?
11.30-11.45. Presentation: Kevin B. Lee on the current state of the art
11.45-12. Presentation: TBC
12-12.30. Break-out discussions
12.30-1. Group discussion

1pm-2pm. Lunch

2pm-3.30pm. Contexts
Themes:
Role within film journalism, as a critical tool
Role within teaching, as a heuristic tool
Relationship with film-making (‘theory’ vs ‘practice’)
Relationship with artists’ film and video
Questions
How to further incorporate audiovisual essays into mainstream scholarship
via academic legitimation (e.g. increasing publishing opportunities)?
via refinement of the form and its methodologies?
via databasing?
How does the audiovisual essay fit within current copyright law in the
UK and beyond?
Do different distribution models (e.g. peer-reviewed, ‘self-published’,
programmed by cultural gatekeepers) suit different kinds of audiovisual
work?
2.30-2.45. Presentation: Catherine Grant on videographic film studies
and academic publishing
2.45-3. Presentation: David Rodowick on negotiating film theory and film
practice
3-3.30. Break-out discussions
3.30-4. Group discussion

3.30pm-4.00pm. Break

4.00pm-5.30pm. Methodologies
Themes
Terminology (video essay, audiovisual essay, videographic film studies,
digital film studies)
Alternative technologies and methodologies:
Quantitative:
data analysis (e.g. cinemetrics, ECGs and eye tracking)
visualisation – e.g. Volumetric Cinema, Software Studies Initiative
Qualitative:
Annotation (e.g. Popcorn.js, ANVIL, Lignes de Temps)
Creative:
Critical media art (e.g. after.video)
Interactive documentary
Questions
How can audiovisual essay production be connected to adjacent, less
prevalent, digital humanities activities?
What can be learnt from the use of digital technologies in other
humanities disciplines?
What models of collaboration could help audiovisual film scholarship
develop in scope, complexity, and impact?
4.30-4.45. Presentation: David Verdeure on adjacent methodologies
4.45-5. Presentation: Richard Misek on adjacent technologies
5-5.30. Break-out discussions (open)
5.30-6. Group discussion

Viewable during breaks:
Don’t Look Now: paradoxes of suture (interactive video on Mac laptop)
After.Video Assemblages (videos on Raspberry Pi)
Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness (VR experience, at Close Up Film Centre)

 

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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 ideas, presentations, projects, publications, Report, reports, research

after.video @ Transmediale

We held a reception for our soon to be published video book: after.video at the Transmediale Festival.

Seeing Power—What About That?
with: 2/5BZ + after.video collective
Reception/Presentation + Performance
Sat, 06.02.2016 | 20:00 – 21:30 | Cafe Global Stage
part of Stream: Anxious to Act
see here for event-link


New global power complexes demand new multi-sensory ways of seeing power and sensing one’s own position in it: new sets of sensory politics. Following the concept of “altered states”—a geopolitics spectralized by sensory overload and dispossession and by the relocation of power in the post-democratic or post-digital era—the performance GEZILLA DESTROYS ISISTANBUL will reconsider what is (or was) referred to as Europe. It will also engage the Golden Age Global Hologram Doctrine, Isistanbul, and Anxt Hase States, and feature modern isolation tanks as part of the new inventory of “hardcore ultra modernism.” Isistanbul is also the title of a video-essay by Serhat Köksal, included in the upcoming after.video/assemblages, which is the first issue of a new hybrid “video-book” series by Open Humanities Press.
– The transmediale performance of 2/5BZ will be preceded by an open reception by the after.video collective.

This year’s topic of the Transmediale festival was Conversations. The format of transmediale/conversationpiece is not like past festivals: instead of a singular theme with static exhibition and program structures, artistic and research practice will unfold live through a variety of talks, discussions, lectures, workshops, and experimental hybrid formats. Due to the exchange-based nature of the events, many will be registration-only, allowing for a limited number of participants to engage in rigorous discussion and collaboration. Four thematic streams serve as an organizing principle for the conversations and presentations: Anxious to Act, Anxious to Make, Anxious to Share, and Anxious to Secure.

As Deckspace Medialab & former Resync.UG members James & Adnan took part in the Off Network series. Furtherfield has a nice writeup here, plus a blog post on speculating the Smart Metropolis.

I took a note of the following conversations.

Thursday:

Re-examining Global.Ports

Acknowledging a critical moment for diverse port authorities worldwide and at a new global juncture—in Berlin, the EU, and many other international ports—this gathering will be focused specifically on reviewing traditional ports, gathering concrete engagements with their inherent and continuing political-logistical promise of connecting people, places, and important matters. With a mandate to re-establish a communal quality of ports, the Global Port Authority will ask: what docking points could in these moving times provide reliable anchorage, refuge, or sanctuary to a globally distributed ecology of commoning initiatives and people anxious for open interplanetary connectivity? What are the criteria, methods, and practices for attaining open ports?

Infrastructural Violence

Communication and travel networks that open the world to us are the characteristics of globalization. At the same time we feel increasingly isolated, controlled, and threatened by those global systems. How can we react to or modify our dependence upon them? The term “structural power” is used in political theory to analyze the systematic exclusion and repression of minorities. In reference to that concept, this seminar will trace how “infrastructural power” shapes and structures today’s communicative and social foundations.

Snowden Archives 1 & 2

Today, WikiLeaks is building an unprecedented library consisting of millions of leaked documents, thereby advancing a seminal world heritage form. Its immediate prehistory as well as its latest offspring will be investigated in the Tacit Futures dialogues. Participants will explore Cryptome.org, which is widely considered the precursor of digital leaking platforms, and which has been the first organization to start systematically collecting Snowden documents. Moreover the discussion will dive into projects building Snowden archives such as the Snowden Document Search, the Snowden Digital Surveillance Archive, and the Snowden Archive-in-a-Box. Bringing together pioneering archivists of the files leaked by Snowden, this round table is a culturally significant world premiere, aiming to reflect the motivations and challenges experienced by each initiative.

Tactical Media & the Archive

Tactical media were identified in the 1990s as a distinct cluster of critical practices at the intersection of art, political activism, and technological experimentation. Tactical media are participatory forms of politicized self-mediation that give voice to the marginalized and excluded. There has always been a deeply troubling, uneasy and strenuous relationship between tactical media and archives. Archives, which are traditionally conceived as capturing living moments and turn them into historical events, as such would constitute the very opposite of tactical media’s dynamic nature. As a result of their resistance to archiving, the proponents of tactical media have succumbed to a severe form of memory loss, making critical reflection difficult. This is a high price to pay.

Friday

Reprogramming the Internet of Things

This panel critically addresses the prevailing vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) as a top-down mega-infrastructure of interconnected every-things, in an attempt to articulate viable bottom-up alternatives. Practices and methodologies for tweaking, disrupting, and appropriating existing infrastructures will be discussed, bringing to the foreground smaller-scale systems and networks of sensing devices, computational artifacts, and humans, to address issues of importance for the everyday life of the user and the local community. The panelists will ask whether such systems and interventions can become sustainable through enhancing citizens’ literacy on the use and appropriation of IoT technologies and sensor networks.

The Pirate Book

The Pirate Book offers a broad view on media piracy as well as a variety of perspectives on recent issues and historical facts on the topic. It contains a compilation of texts on grassroots strategies to share, distribute, and experience cultural content outside of the confines of local economies, politics, or laws. These stories recount the experiences of individuals from India, Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Mali, and China. The book is structured in four parts, beginning with a historical piracy stories dating back to the invention of the printing press and then expanding to broader issues, such as modern anti-piracy technologies, geographically specific issues, and the rules of the Warez scene (distribution of copyrighted works for free), along with its charters, structure, and visual culture.

Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution by Benjamin H. Bratton

Please join Benjamin H. Bratton and e-flux journal editor Julieta Aranda for the launch of Bratton’s new work of theory-fiction, Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution. The title also marks the tenth book in the e-flux journal Series with Sternberg Press. Benjamin H. Bratton’s kaleidoscopic theory-fiction links the utopian fantasies of political violence with the equally utopian programs of security and control. Both rely on all manner of doubles, models, gimmicks, ruses, prototypes, and shock-and-awe campaigns to realize their propagandas of the deed, threat, and image. Blurring reality and delusion, they collaborate on a literally psychotic politics of architecture. In this mosaic we glimpse a future city built with designed violence and the violence of design. As one ratifies the other, the exception becomes the ruler. Presented in cooperation with e-flux.

Saturday

Book Launch: Networked – A Media Genealogy of the Network Society by Clemens Apprich

Many technologies and practices that have shaped today’s Web 2.0 date back to the 1990s—and so do the ideas of social media, user-generated content, and participatory platforms. From a media-historical perspective, a lot of the ideas from that period about the future of the internet have indeed been implemented, albeit without fulfilling the envisioned socio-political utopias. In his new book, Clemens Apprich explores the history of an alternative web discourse and develops a media genealogical understanding that is necessary to think beyond today’s predominant concept of socio-technical networks and to intervene in current debates about the Internet.

Five Years After

“In case you hadn’t noticed, these days a lot of the world is in some form of rebellion, insurrection, or protest,” wrote Rebecca Solnit in 2012, a year after a barrage of movements symbolically grouped around the Arab Spring erupted. These “post-2011” events challenged the sometimes simplistic narratives of the “post-911” world. What linked the events in this cycle of struggles was not organizational coherence but rather a shared global sentiment mediated by a new form of global sensorium. Social energies headed “back to the streets,” bringing up questions about the consequences of physical exposure, organization, strategy, fragmentation, and violence. New media became double-edged weapons, used for and against emancipation. While after 2011 there were some attempts to decipher these “signs from the future,” as Žižek has put it, now in 2015 it seems that the “global moment” has ended.

Off-the-cloud Zone

The choice to go “off the cloud” stems from current disillusionment with networked connectivity, reaching instead for the potential of emerging user-owned and user-controlled infrastructures. Over the last decade a growing scene of artists, hackers, and network practitioners has been actively working on creating community networks, ad-hoc connectivity, and autonomous systems of sensing and data collecting. But how feasible are the changes these groups want to see? Following last year’s offline networks unite! panel at transmediale and several specially organised workshops, Off-the-Cloud Zone brings together various actors to discuss the challenges, barriers, and possibilities of the field. With open conversation formats and hands-on demonstrations, the event seeks new strategies of joining forces and building common tools to take users beyond the sovereignty of the cloud. Organized in collaboration with the MAZI project.

Translating the Hyper-visible and the Invisible

Within the last year the artist Alona Rodeh has published Safe and Sound, a collection of texts by invited authors on the audiovisual methods of safety and security, from which Rodeh created a series of visual responses. In the same year, Mario de Vega, Victor Mazón Gardoqui, and Daniela Silvestrin have published the book LIMEN, which invited a series of authors to write about the electromagnetic spectrum in response to de Vega’s sound work on invisibility and his collaborations with Gardoqui. Taking these two publications as starting points, this conversation between the authors and the curator and designer Carsten Stabenow will reflect on artist-led publications and research processes and the aesthetics of print media as a means to communicate ideas on sound, visual art, and contemporary social issues.

Seeing Power—What About That?

New global power complexes demand new multi-sensory ways of seeing power and sensing one’s own position in it: new sets of sensory politics. Following the concept of “altered states”—a geopolitics spectralized by sensory overload and dispossession and by the relocation of power in the post-democratic or post-digital era—the performance GEZILLA DESTROYS ISISTANBUL will reconsider what is (or was) referred to as Europe. It will also engage the Golden Age Global Hologram Doctrine, Isistanbul, and Anxt Hase States, and feature modern isolation tanks as part of the new inventory of “hardcore ultra modernism.” Isistanbul is also the title of a video-essay by Serhat Köksal, included in the upcoming after.video/assemblages, which is the first issue of a new hybrid “video-book” series by Open Humanities Press.

Still Be Here

Still Be Here is a unique collaborative performance that draws us into the multiplying realities of a 21st Century pop star, and traces the dynamics at play between fans, corporations, and social desires. Since her 2007 launch in Japan, Hatsune Miku (whose name means “first sound of the future”) has become the ultimate pop star, developed from a vocal synthesizer product into a globally adored and collaboratively constructed cyber celebrity with a growing user community, countless stadium performances as a virtual 3D projection, and more than 100,000 songs released worldwide.

Sunday

Re-examining Global.Ports

Acknowledging a critical moment for diverse port authorities worldwide and at a new global juncture—in Berlin, the EU, and many other international ports—this gathering will be focused specifically on reviewing traditional ports, gathering concrete engagements with their inherent and continuing political-logistical promise of connecting people, places, and important matters. With a mandate to re-establish a communal quality of ports, the Global Port Authority will ask: what docking points could in these moving times provide reliable anchorage, refuge, or sanctuary to a globally distributed ecology of commoning initiatives and people anxious for open interplanetary connectivity? What are the criteria, methods, and practices for attaining open ports?

Archive, Curate, Educate: Active Media Arts

The archive is unbound, no longer restricted to a space of storage or a logic of cultural memory. Today the archive is also a site of sharing, distribution, education, critique, imagination, and artistic activity. This panel brings together curatorial, artistic, and academic perspectives on media art in order to discuss the role archives can play in curation, spatial design, and technology-based art practice. The panelists will discuss examples such as Erkki Kurenniemi’s archival and technological art, artistic projects with the Asger Jorn Archive, and other innovative examples of ways the archive continues to be reimagined. Also at stake are how archives can feed into (media arts) education. How does the archive shift when it becomes an active online environment that can work against reification of knowledge?

Tele_Trust

How do we trust each other online? Do we need to see each other’s eyes? Or do we need to touch? Tele_Trust is a performance-installation for an intimate networking body experience. The presentation creates an engaging agora, researching new parameters for online trust. It presents participants with a paradox: while in our changing social ecosystem we increasingly demand transparency, we cover our bodies with personal communication technology. Participants will meet in a wearable DataVeil, a tangible body interface functioning as a second skin and membrane for “scanning” online trust.

Unmaking: 5 Anxieties

In our mad rush to 3D-print the world (again), we have ignored a few important things: the necessity of physical traction and engagement with materials in creative processes, the realities of material resource chains, and the homogenization and functionalization of once-radical grassroots subcultures and communities. We are all now, somewhat paradoxically, makers and hackers, using kits (prescribed solutions) to develop supposed novelties, using off-the-shelf DIY to do battle with a hegemony that continuously chips away at our laser-cut armor. As part of an afternoon discussion session, participants and the general public are invited to an open conversation about the birth, death, and reconstitution of maker and hacker cultures. Should we all just stop making—or start unmaking? Unmaking as breaking, unmaking as refusal, unmaking as…? Following the event, a summary publication (as a “kit”) will be issued, presenting results.