Posted on May 9, 2015 by adnan news, projects, Report, ReSynced

Mazi Mondays

James Stevens reported on the off networks mailinglist that we “have been sorting out ourselves after a couple of years work with resync.ug. Some of the outcomes of that initiative will continue to return value and there is plenty of scope to develop applications of these mixed techniques. Now a fresh grouping ‘offline networks’ has come together out of a meeting at Transmediale in Berlin during February, that has appealed for funding from the HORIZON 2020 CAPs initiative.James reported on the SPC blog about the MAZI applications: Panayotis Antoniadis co-founder of Nethood has gathered a group of thinkers and network activists around the MAZI project. As part of this initiative, SPC have proposed to revisit the Creekside network in Deptford and help compose a Mazi toolkit. With this, we hope to further the operation of local offline network services over the free information infrastructures such as the long lived OWN. Here he is talking at a recent floss4p2p event in London.

“What I had in mind is that the research would focus on an area covered by a local network either permanently or at least during the duration of the project. This network would host locally crafted educational material and floss applications that would showcase emerging tools and technologies. This could be as simple as a single web hosting device offering short-range access or a community mesh network with broader objectives. “

This preferred area of focus may well coincide with existing mesh node installations.. it’s along the creek so there are indigenous social housing, boating, artistisan, hoodlum, drinking and eating communities as well as inevitable high rise developments and mixed emotions!

SPC has capacity in it’s network to offer uplinks to Mazi for the duration.. Mesh solutions are great for mobile network nodes and for resilience in an unstable environment. Primed with a set of great locations and willing collaborators aplenty, a point to point radial model will ensure greater stability and higher speeds for community needs. We already have a few low power servers and resources available and have set up a mazi subdomain of spc.org

There is a swell of social, cultural and creative interest along Creekside in Deptford where we have enjoyed success in the past. We hope to rekindle interest and activity in support of the Mazi workshop program and the adoption of a locally delivered alternative to commercial web dependencies. Meanwhile the whole area is being “developed” so there are rising blocks on every quarter isolating areas of Deptford which will present a challenge when fixing links and bridging ideas.

The river Ravensbourne snakes from Bromley through Lewisham and opens out after Elverson Road DLR into naturalised riverside alongside Brookmill Park. It retreats into a concrete slot under the A2 at Deptford Bridge DLR and emerges as Deptford Creek up behind LeSoCo (Lewisham College) canyoned by new flats and hotels on the Greenwich side, developments that are set to run the length of Norman Road.

Just as the Creek broadens a little and gets really muddy there is a branch mooring a dozen barges and smaller boats. On land there are a similar array of trailers and vans where people live and work. At the top of Creekside on the corner of Deptford Church Street is the Birdsnest live music pub and local flux point. The yard that wraps around it features Big red Pizza Bus and an array of related performance and construction trades. Other adjacent properties are in progress of reactivation in the sweep of enthusiasm for SE8. APT (artists in perpetuity trust) purchased the old factory building in 1995 and their community of traditional crafts practitioners are at the core of Deptford artist reputation.

Creekside Education Centre has the only direct access to the creek. Boundless broadband coop was first implanted here in 2004, and is still operating an OWN node today. Over the road is the Crossfields council housing estate, repopulated by young families, artists and musicians in 1970’s and regularly commented on. Thereafter it’s a pick n mix run of light industrial yards, Scaffolders, Machinists, Work Units, Art Studios, Cockpit Arts, Laben Dance and bonanza of real estate prospectors with plans to block out the light.

A 2nd world war Minesweeper is moored alongside one of few remaining light industrial estates off Norman Road. It has a mixed crew of arty anarchos who screen print t-shirts and lead on refurbishment of the aged hull, host great parties and a flotilla of smaller boats. Madcap Coalition have just moved to one of the remaining warehouses adjacent to the cement works by the Creek Road lifting bridge. Finally at the mouth a new pedestrian swing bridge links between swanky new condo’s before the creek tips into the Thames.

More, much more info about the area and it’s many great features, ideas and activities are reported in a clutch of local blogs, projects and innovations to numerous to detail here.

Here is the MAZI project outline;
Do-It-Yourself networking refers to a conceptual approach to the use of low-cost hardware and wireless technologies in deploying local communication networks that can operate independently from the public Internet, owned and controlled by local actors.
MAZI means “together” in Greek and the MAZI project invests in this paradigm of technology-supported networking, as a means to bring closer together those living in physical proximity. Through an experienced interdisciplinary consortium, MAZI delivers a DIY networking toolkit that offers tools and guidelines for the easy deployment and customization of local networks and services.

The MAZI toolkit is designed to take advantage of particular characteristics of DIY networking: the de facto physical proximity between those connected; the increased privacy and autonomy; and the inclusive access. Such characteristics are used to promote information exchanges that can develop the location-based collective awareness, as a basis for fostering social cohesion, conviviality, knowledge sharing, and sustainable living.

To achieve this objective, MAZI brings together partners from different disciplines: computer networks, urban planning and interdisciplinary studies, human-computer interaction, community informatics, and design research. These academic partners will collaborate closely with four community partners to ensure that the MAZI toolkit benefits from the grounded experience of citizen engagement.

MAZI draws from the diverse mix of competencies of its consortium to develop a transdisciplinary research framework, which will guide a series of long-term pilot studies in a range of environments, and enhanced by various cross-fertilization events.

The main goal of this process, and its measure of success, is establishing DIY networking as a mainstream technology for enabling the development of collective awareness between those in physical proximity, and the development of surrounding research and theorizing of this approach.

Participants; University of Thessaly, NetHood, Edinburgh Napier University, Berlin University of the Arts, Open University, INURA Zurich Institute, SPC, Prinzessinnengarten, and unMonastery.

Posted on February 1, 2015 by d.tv Events, presentations, ReSynced

The Post-Digital Review: Cultural Commons

The ongoing transmediale project of The Post-Digital Review gathers experts from the fields of digital culture art, policy, curating and research to discuss shifting forms of cultural practice, of organisations, of the economy as well as of politics in a post-digital world. This particular session will focus on the question of how art and culture contribute to build new forms of commons for a post-digital civil society. The first event of the Post-Digital Review, Understanding Post-digital Cultural Forms was an intensive One-Day Review Summit organised by transmediale in cooperation with the German Federal Foreign Office and hosted by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 10 November 2014. In the festival edition of The Post-Digital Review, we invite further experts as well as open up the discussion to the audience. An impulse lecture will be given by Nishant Shah followed by short position statements from the participants and an intensive open discussion.

Posted on January 31, 2015 by d.tv Events, presentations, ReSynced

offline networks unite!

Discussion
At Foyer Stage

The ‘off.networks’ mailing list started as an attempt to bring together researchers, activists and artists that work on the idea of an offline network, operating outside the Internet. Such networks could range from artistic projects (eg. deadrops or wifitagger) and “personal networks” (eg PirateBox.cc or subnod.es), to community networks (eg commotionwireless.net, nethood) and large city-scale mesh networks (eg. guifi.net, freifunk.net, awmn.net.). The first assembly of off.networks took place at the CCC last month. In their second scheduled meeting during transmediale Festival, the members of this network wish to make their first effort to build a diverse and dynamic community around the design, implementation and deployment of offline networks in different contexts. They wish to reflect critically on the role of such local networks in shaping the evolving hybrid urban space and in addressing the threats which are posed by internet corporations and surveillance states on citizens’ privacy and freedom of speech. In other words: How can the under construction “offline networks” allow us to join forces in reaching our common visions without sacrificing pluralism and independence? The answer might not be so simple as offline networks are subject to hybrid design and therefore require the collaboration between people with different expertise; they are context-specific and thus need to be easily installed and customised by non-savvy users; they have to compete with more and more ambiguous commercial initiatives that now pop up claiming a similar logic.

The session will open by short presentations by existing members of the off.networks community: Aram Barholl, Jeff Andreoni, David Darts and Matthias Strubel, Andreas Unteidig, Sarah Grant, Panayotis Antoniadis and Ileana Apostol. Other artists and practitioners taking part in transmediale will also join and an inclusive and open-ended mode of discussion will follow. The stage will be given to participants from the audience who will have 2-3 minutes each to present their thoughts and ideas forming a big round table.

> off.networks@librelist.com

The off.networks community (international)

The offline networksor ‘off.networks’ community has started as an attempt to bring together researchers, activists and artists that work on the idea of an offline network, operating outside the Internet. Such networks could range from artistic projects (eg. deadrops or wifitagger) and “personal networks” (eg. PirateBox.cc or subnod.es), to community networks (eg. commotionwireless.net) and large city-scale mesh networks (eg. guifi.net, freifunk.net, awmn.net). In their second scheduled meeting during transmediale Festival, the members of this network wish to make their first effort to build a diverse and dynamic community around the design, implementation and deployment of offline networks in different contexts. They wish to reflect critically on the role of such local networks in shaping the evolving hybrid urban space and in addressing the threats which are posed by internet corporations and surveillance states on citizens’ privacy and freedom of speech.

Panagiotis Antoniadis (ch) DIY Networking

Panayotis Antoniadis is a senior researcher at ETH Zurich. He has an interdisciplinary profile with background on the design and implementation of distributed systems (Computer Science Department, University of Crete), Ph.D. on the economics of peer-to-peer networks (Athens University of Economics and Business), post-doc on policies for the federation of shared virtualized infrastructures (UPMC Sorbonne Universités), and an on-going collaboration with urban planners on the role of ICTs for bridging the virtual with the physical space in cities (project nethood.org). Panayotis is currently active in the organization of various interdisciplinary events that aim to bring together researchers, practitioners, and activists from various fields around the participatory design of hybrid urban space with a focus on wireless and peer-to-peer technology. In this context, his personal conviction is that there is an urgent need for a global social learning framework, a toolkit, that will allow citizens to build their own local networks for supporting local interactions, and claim their right to the (hybrid) city.

Aram Bartholl (de)

Aram Bartholl‘s work creates an interplay between internet, culture and reality. The versatile communication channels are taken for granted these days, but how do they influence us? According to the paradigm change of media research Bartholl not just asks what man is doing with the media, but what media does with man. The tension between public and private, online and offline, technology infatuation and everyday life creates the core of his producing.

Sarah Grant (us)

Sarah Grant is a Brooklyn-based artist, technologist, and educator. She is a former artist in residence at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center and is currently a Technical Lead at The Barbarian Group in NYC. As an artist, she has been experimenting with both the practical and expressive properties of mesh networks for connecting people together in ways that encourage participation with your immediate geographical location. She is also an Adjunct Professor at NYU Polytechnic in Digital Media.

Hot Probs is a simple chat room designed to run on a Raspberry Pi and within the subnod.es platform. To join the chat room, visitors need to connect to the ‘HOT PROBS’ wireless network, open up a new browser window and navigate to hotprobs.com.

Subnodes is an open source initiative that facilitates the process of creating a portable local area network and a mesh node for anonymous, local communication. Its source code can be found on github.

Telekommunisten (de)

Telekommunisten is a Berlin-based collective whose work investigates the political economy of communications technology. Core themes include the incompatibility of capitalism with free networks and free culture, and the increasing centralisation and enclosure that results, as well as the potential for distributed producers employing a collective stock of productive assets to provide an alternative economic basis for a free society.

deadSwap 2.0 is an android app which lets you coordinate a clandestine communications and off-line sharing network. The technique is the same as the old classic spycraft one of ‘dead drop’, Participants share a flash memory archive, e.g. a USB stick, hiding it in public space. Participants are informed about the current location of the archive through SMS on their cell phones. The deadSwap 2.0 system allows anyone to initiate a distributed sharing session which continues until all members of the network have found the memory device.

Most participants remain ‘sleepers’ who become activated by SMS to go look for a hidden memory device. When they are activated, they become ‘rabbits’. Once they successfully find the hidden device they become ‘agents’ and, after completing any necessary operations on the device (such as copying or adding data), they must hide the device again and inform the system of the new Swap location.

Participants in the network can contribute whatever data they like to the sharing round by simply copying it onto the deadSwap storage device. For the transmediale edition, deadSwap 2.0 comes pre-loaded with DATAFIELD3, as special selection of Henry Warwick’s massive offline shared archive.

David Darts (us)

David Darts is an artist, technologist, and Associate Professor of Art at New York University. His work focuses on the convergences between society, technology and contemporary art and design. He is Co-Director of the NYU Artistic Activism Working Research Group and former Curatorial Director of Conflux, the annual art and technology festival for the creative exploration of urban public space.

Matthias Strubel (us)

Matthias Strubel is the Lead Developer for the PirateBox. He is known for his work on the PirateBox Forum where he provides support for users and developers from around the world. Matthias works as a freelancer for several projects, focusing on software-Integration across different technical systems (i.e. Mainframe and Web). He also provides technical support for the LibraryBox project and actively participates in several open source communities.

In an era of mass-surveillance programs, filtering, and censorship, offline data sharing and communication is becoming more and more important for freedom of communication. The PirateBox is a DIY anonymous offline file-sharing and communications system built with free software and inexpensive off-the-shelf hardware. The system creates offline wireless networks designed for anonymous file sharing, chatting, message boarding, and media streaming. You can think of it as your very own portable offline Internet in a box! PirateBox has been featured in over 175 international online and print publications, including New Scientist, Le Monde, Ars Technica, and Wired Italia.

Participants will build and experiment with PirateBoxes and will also learn about the history and philosophy of the project, including recent updates, ongoing challenges, and future possibilities.

Participants should bring a laptop, an OpenWrt compatible router (TP-Link MR3020) and a USB Flash Drive (4GB or larger).
The PirateBox toolkit (router and usb flash drive) can also be bought upon online registration.

http://www.transmediale.de/content/offline-networks-unite

Posted on January 5, 2014January 4, 2021 by admin ReSynced

Taking care of things

From the 15th till the 18th of January we participated in the Taking Care of Things Meeting at the Stadtarchiv Lüneburg Germany. This was also the closing event for the Post Media Lab Incubator project at Leuphana University and our research fellowship with them.

The visit began with a tour of the city archive during which we heard about the main activities of the institution not least the film, map and image collections. They wish to extend access to these via street access sync points in the near future.

We convened one of seven care groups Mesh Media! to look at open, collaborative systems that facilitate collective abilities to store, curate, share, edit, redistribute and re-purpose media while at the same time creating new frames of reference and practice in public. We were pleased to have presentations by Eric Kluitenberg of Tactical Media Files, Volker Grassmuck and Jan Torge of ‘InternetTV for the newMedia Generation’ Grundversorgung, open wireless network advocates Freifunk Lueneburg and Robert Ochshorn with Interlace. (See last section for more details..)

Media was selected from the respective archives and uploaded to publicly presented syncronisation points adjacent to each Freifunk node in Lueneburg city centre.

We produced a map to illustrate the locations of syncronisation points as a data trail which was toured by a small group of Lueneburg locals. They were encouraged to scan the QRcode posters and NFC tags they found on the street first connecting to Freifunk wireless then activating the BTsync to distribute the images and films.

Please try these BTsyncs yourself 1|2|3|4|5|6 |7|8|9|10|11|12 – or get the set! confused ? see the howTo..

The post-medial is not tied to any particular modality of media, neither to “new” or “old”, “digital” or “analog”, nor to “connected” or “offline”. Nevertheless it relies on new medial affordances (what? affordances! :-)) and possibilities, allowing for new kinds of collective repositories and living archives. How can these new collecitve, transitory and ad-hoc repositories of ‘many media’ look like? What are their (possible) protocols of turning consumers into makers, individuals into groups, and media into structured, living and meaningful (micro-)social memory? What are possible assemblages that withstand idiosyncrasy and expert-ism, but are ‘avant-garde’ and progressive in form and function nevertheless?

_object/ive (for ‘Parliament of Things’)…?!

_Schedule

16th January morning: Introduction

10:30 – 12:30: Introduction of people and workshops + overall choreography *For this we ask you to bring and present an object (any kind of object) that you relate to, care about and are willing to donate to the archive.*

16th January afternoon: Freifunk & Grundversorgnung present their projects & Freifunk nodes flashing

12:30 – 14:00: Lunch

14:00 – 15:00: Grundversorgung (CDCvideo.de, online video interview tool, VODO.net, OPD, Poparchiv) & WikiVision

15:00 – 16:00: Freifunk presentation

16:00 – 18:00: Flashing Freifunk Node & installing them in Lueneburg (10 nodes have been ordered & arrived @ Grundversorgung) // Uploading of materials to an Interlace instance (preparation for Friday afternoon) -> create map of all the freifunk nodes in lueneburg one could walk (for Saturday)

17th January, morning: Interlace & Tactical Media Files presentation

10:00 – 11:00: Tactical Media Files: Presentation about archiving as part of a ‘living’ cultural process, which means that it happens also very much outside of the digital, in embodied encounters and ‘lived practices’ (activism, artistic production, and more).

11:00 – 12:00: Interlace:

17th January, afternoon:

12:00 – 14:00: All together Now! – reviving the legendary ‘Brown Bag’ Session a collective Power-Thought-Exchange-Lunchy-Thing Groups share and receive food and feedback.

14:00 – 14:30: Break

14:30 – 18:00: Media Mesh: Collaborative editing on Interlace with ‘Tactical Medie Files’ & ‘Lueneburg City Archive’ materials (needs preparation & uploading of materials)

21:00 PUBLIC*: Zum Kollektiv, Scharffsches Haus, Heiligengeiststr. 38, 21335 Lüneburg *Screening Things* – an open, partly curated public screening including footage from the Stadtarchiv and works by ‘Taking Care of Things!’ participants

18t January, morning: Start the derive of Lueneburg @ Freiraum

11:00 – 12:00: Meeting @ Freiraum, presenation Freiraum & Freifunk

get bittorrent sync to work on mobile phones

18th January, afternoon: Finish the walk @ city archive, meet up & exchange experiences

12:00 – 14:00: walk through Lueneburg, download media from freifunk nodes over bittorrent sync

14:00 – 17:00: Meeting @ City Archive */Stadtarchiv/ *Parliament of Things * a public fair and exhibition displaying the results of the two-day workshop intermixed with city archive material—an opportunity for the local public to engage with ‘Taking Care of Things!’ and the Stadtarchiv in a variety of activities igniting & deepening conversations around archives, life-cycles and care.

_Participants

Hauke Winkler: Freifunk Lueneburg // http://wiki.freifunk.net/Freifunk_Lueneburg

James Stevens & Adnan Hadzi: DeckspaceTV // http://www.postmedialab.org/adnan-hadzi-james-stevens

Robert Ochshorn: Interlace // http://web.rmozone.com/ + http://interlace.videovortex9.net/

Eric Kluitenberg: Tactical Media Files / http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/

Volker Grassmuck and others from Grundversorgung 2.0 (Jan Torge, Kilian, …) (http://digitale-grundversorgung.de/): WikiVision // http://www.wikivision.eu/

is a media sociologist, free-lance author and activist, has conducted research on the knowledge order of digital media, on copyright and the knowledge commons at Free University Berlin, Tokyo University, Humboldt University Berlin and University of São Paulo and is currently directing the project “Public Service Media 2.0” at the Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC) of Leuphana University Lueneburg. He was project lead of the conference series Wizards-of-OS.org and of the copyright information portal iRights.info, co-founded mikro-berlin.org, privatkopie.net and CompartilhamentoLegal.org and blogs at vgrass.de.

_Keywords

Many Media, kollektive Interface | collective interfaces, Wilde Netzwerke | Wilderness Networks, lokale Übertragung+Speicher | local Transmission+Storage

_Brainstorming

Possible ideas:

– Work with Interlace on the city archives [with Freifunk (http://freifunk-lueneburg.de/) for local media-pickups]

– Work with Freifunk to display site specific (deep-linked) Interlace sections

– Work with Bittorrent Sync (http://www.bittorrent.com/sync) and/or OwnCloud (http://owncloud.org/) to offer the deep-linked media locally

– If we use a NAS @ Deckspace we could use the http://Deckspace.TV container on which Interlace is already running (robert what do you think?)

– we make timecapsules with the archive material -> embedded / injecting meta data into the objects -> share these objects as secrets during the workshop?

– Do a walk/derive on Saturday through Lueneburg, starting from Freiraum (http://www.freiraum-lueneburg.de/), exploring the Freifunk nodes, which are deep-linking into the city archives

Possible actions:

– Install a Freifunk node in the UK @ http://dek.spc.org

– Attach a NAS to the Freifunk node UK

– Thus creating a network between Germany, Sweden, UK (concerning media law & ‘public spheres’ one would have to consider a pan-european publishing network)

– maybe also install a Freifunk node in Switzerland (so to take the network out of the EU juristiction, plus Switzerland has ‘Freedom of Art’ as a constitutional right, see: http://www.unilu.ch/files/kunstbegriffendg.pdf)

– Order 10 Freifunk Nodes – done (Volker)

– Rent small Freiraum room for Saturday morning (two hours) -> budget?

– Flash around 10 nodes during the workshop & install them in Lueneburg (see instructions here: http://wiki.freifunk.net/Freifunk_Lueneburg )

_Freifunk places that are linked:

– Freiraum / Salon Hansen

– Post Media Lab / CDC / Grundversorgung

_Freifunk places to link:

– Stadtarchive

– Anna & Arthur

– Pons bar

– Hausbar

– Apothekenstr

– Cinema Scala

– Jekyl & Hide

– Cafe fleur

– Zum Kollektiv

– Nina home

(see the map above for final list)

_some more links/stuff

– the silent university http://thesilentuniversity.org/

– public library project http://www.memoryoftheworld.org/public-library/

– videovortex interlace http://vortex.inter.numm.org/

– dayanita singh’s archive project: http://www.deutscher-pavillon.org/2013/en/category/dayanita-singh/

– official announcement: http://www.postmedialab.org/taking-care-of-things

_Official Schedule

PROGRAM_January 15-18__Taking Care of Things!_

organized by Post-Media Lab, Habits of Living; in cooperation with Stadtarchiv

Lüneburg

_Wednesday, Jan 15 PUBLIC_

*18:00*

Oliver Lerone Schultz: ‘Intersecting Cycles – A Welcome to a kind of Goodbye’

Nishant Shah: ‘Laying the Grounds – Archives, Life-Cycles, Care’

*18:30*

Kelly Dobson: ‘Why It Matters The Way Things Break’

– introduced by WendyChun

*19:30*

‘Published Things’ – a temporarily installed Public Library offering the first

charge of Post-Media Lab publications. Bring your own devices to download them live!

– Hosted by Clemens Apprich and Marcell Mars

_Thursday, Jan 16 INTERNAL_

*10:00 – 10:30*

‘Opening Up the Archive’: Stadtarchiv Lüneburg – A guided Tour by Danny Kolbe

(Stadtarchiv)

*10:30 – 12:30*

Introduction of people and workshops + overall choreography*For this we ask you to bring and present an object (any kind of object) that

you relate to, care about and are willing to donate to the archive.*

*12:30 – 14:00*

Lunch

*14:00 – 18:00*

6 Care Groups (workshop time)

*19:00*

Group Dinner at a local brewerie (Mälzer)

_Friday, Jan 17 INTERNAL_

*09:30 – 12:00*

6 Care Groups (workshop time)

*12:00 – 14:00*

All together Now! – reviving the legendary ‘Brown Bag’ Session

a collective Power-Thought-Exchange-Lunchy-Thing

Groups share and receive food and feedback.

*14:00 – 14:30 Fresh air & coffee*

*14:30 – till Brooklyn!*

6 Care Groups (workshop time)

*21:00 PUBLIC*

Zum Kollektiv, Scharffsches Haus, Heiligengeiststr. 38, 21335 Lüneburg*Screening Things*

an open, partly curated public screening including footage from the Stadtarchiv

and works by ‘Taking Care of Things!’ participants

_Saturday, Jan 18 INTERNAL_

*until 13:00*

Set-up ‘Parliament of Things’

*13:00 – 17:00 */Stadtarchiv/

*Parliament of Things *

a public fair and exhibition displaying the results of the two-day workshop

intermixed with city archive material—an opportunity for the local public to

engage with ‘Taking Care of Things!’ and the Stadtarchiv in a variety of

activities igniting & deepening conversations around archives, life-cycles and care.

_Sunday, Jan 19_

*10:00*

Breakfast for those still in town.

updates under: http://postmedialab.org/taking-care-of-things

Posted on December 15, 2013 by admin ReSynced

Freiraum reSynced

During the final workshop day today we met again with Alexander the CEO of Freiraum who has been our primary contact and host these three days. He presented an account of establishment and development of Parklokal foundation and illustrated the many areas of activity and ongoing engagement with business and community that have come about since.

We heard about their beginnings at Hausbar and progression to music venue Salon Hansen leading to addition of Freiraum itself and introduction to Lunatic Festival. Please view the great presentation for your self.

Max is a student at Leuphana University and the outgoing chair of Lunatic. He talked in animated terms about his experiences working for the festival, detailing the educational aims and commitment of the university to maintain support of this very successful student run event. The recent addition of arts exhibit at the festival has opened up new opportunities for engagement and involvement of the local community of Lueneburg.

We then collated this workshop report and produced a fresh set of qrcodes and nfc stickers set to link back to this page. These were fixed to windows and walls in the district.

Here is the btsync secret AX65KPZECNZC3U37KNEVEHVPSNWVGSWXJ please use it to syncronise.

In attendance ; Alexander, Max, Adnan, Wjana, James and Nina.

Post Media Lab report summarising the fellowships 2012-2014.

Posted on December 14, 2013 by admin ReSynced

Graswurzel reSynced

Graswurzel.tv has been active since 2006 when they first got involved in filming political actions and publishing their documentaries. Founders Suze & Marco attended the Saturday workshop at Freiraum Lueneburg to present a potted history of their group activities. They showed us some of the many accounts of actions during a very busy 5 years.

More recently they have been mapping the resistance to open cast mining of lignite in the far east of Germany at the border with Poland where devastating environmental damage across a vast area is ongoing in the quest for cheap energy. Thousands of residents have already been decanted to other areas and mining has lead to the disappearance of entire villages.

We discussed how the evidence of these and other campaigns is often buried in the weight of information accumulating from often lengthy campaigns.

Later in the afternoon we turned to the second task of the day to prepare a live linux 4gb USB key for video editing uses and re purposing a small NAS unit to serve as reSync host for data here at Frieraum once we have departed on Monday.

btsync://AMXG3ZTOOSBO6CXCJYPFSRDQCQ4FEKQ2N

In attendance ; Suze, Marco, Adnan, Wjana, Jan, James and Adam.

Posted on December 13, 2013 by admin ReSynced

Freifunk reSynced

You may have scanned this QRcode adjacent to a lueneburg.freifunk.net sticker in Lueneburg city centre in range of the open wireless network. Now you have been directed to this page where we are presenting the outcomes from recent reSync workshops in Lueneburg.

Under each Freifunk sticker is a RFID tag you can now scan with your NFC capable smart phone to open the Btsync point which holds the workshop documentation. You will need BTsync installed and internet connection to activate this link.

btsync://BGDWMQW7IJMWRBZYEBGSZ2CU3CQKC6LMH

Try connecting to Freifunk wireless which offers full fat internet, no blocked ports, access logs or regional paranoia! If you like what you see, find out more by attending one of the monthly meetings (last Wednesday of the month at Pons bar in Lueneburg). They have recently added a dynamic OLSR map.

The workshop featured a great Freifunk presentation by Hauke who lives locally and hosts an access point at his home in the centre of the city. We discussed the many aspects of free network infrastructure and how the local group collaborates to present open access. They run a flavour of Freifunk software that tunnels all the IP traffic crossing the network to a Swedish internet gateway thus navigating the Störerhaftung or ‘Secondary Liability’ otherwise limiting open hearted Germans at home.

We all considered prospects for future collaborations and infrastructure building with Freifunk, interlinking Post Media Lab, Freiraum and Stadtarchiv which could be be attempted in time to coincide with the Taking care of Things conference in January 2014.

The workshop concluded by warwalking about the city on the hunt for Friefunk wireless which we celebrated with the QRcodes, stickers and NFC tags as described above. for more info checkout Howto reSync

Workshop attendees – Adnan, James, Hauke, Jancke, Nora, Alexander and Liene. Thanks everyone !

Posted on November 23, 2013 by admin ReSynced

Futures reSynced

In this final reSync session in the UK we focussed on Futures. It was a very cold day with the wind blowing around the roof perhaps put some people off however It was great to welcome Paolo Cardullo and Atau Tanaka.

Paulo is a photographer and cultural studies tutor currently working on proposals for a Deptford walking/map project with British Library Archives fund so we were able to confer on techniques for street signage with qrcodes and NFC to promote linking and syncing of pictures and maps available.

Atau is currently Professor of Media Computing at Goldsmiths leading a 5 year research project at the Embodied Audiovisual Interaction group. There are some great opportunities for the use of NFC and QRcodes in music yet to be explored as well as a wealth of new media systems now available to aid experimentation eg eMotive . In 2008 Cardiacs frontman and creative powerhouse Tim Smith suffered a catastrophic stroke which left him with impaired voice and motor function. Atau confirmed his department had research and practice commitments for just this sort of disabled support in terms of music making but which may lead to some well needed support in 2014 for Tim.

Gargi Sen from magic lantern movies arrived later in the afternoon to discuss new approaches to the distribution and presentation of documentary film archives which deserve greater development and reward. They are in the process of applying for the NESTA R&D fund for the Arts to develop a documentary film distribution platform for cinema audiences. They are seeking a technical partner in the UK in support of the application they are making now which we can contribute to and perhaps collaborate on next year.

Adnan Hadzi wasn’t available to contribute today as he is travelling with Bitnik to attempt a parcel delivery to Nabeel Rajab in Bahrain

Posted on November 16, 2013 by admin ReSynced

Screens reSynced

Our efforts to date have allowed us plenty of opportunity to re familiarise ourselves with events and productions at deckspace and we continued digging out materials today.

James Braddell joined us for the start of the session on his way out to Rome. It was a great opportunity to discuss some assumptions about the value of archive and practical issues of identifying, processing and representing moving image. Much of his work expresses a wry sense of humour and explores the structures of music with texture and imagination. His latest video work ‘CITY‘ concentrates dense HD into immersive environment compositions.

For more than two decades Exploding Cinema have held open access screenings where thousands of makers make their films public for the love of it. Their zine style show booklets and posters pepper the whole archive. In 2005 the world turned in their home movies, cat fetishes and music videos to Youtube and since then billions pour their daily lives into the stew of social media silos. Finally we have been compromised by universal self and state surveillance.

There has been some breakthrough progress on our efforts to install Interlace as Robert had a bit of time to refine his codebase and get a version working for us for now.

You can now have review some of those SPC DV archives we already spent so many hours digitising but never edited. Interlace opens in a web browser and lays out the film strips end to end down the page.. to activate the viewer click any clip and and presto, like dropping the needle on a record. Each clip is then accessible for metadata tagging, interlinking and dynamic reordering by category and context. See also Video Vortex hyprid-reader.

Rachel Baker arrived in time to find us winding up the days work and reflecting on these screens, origins and objectives and had a lot to offer from her own experiences as member of Irational.org but also as early contributor at Backspace. She is currently at booksprint and urges us to produce a printable set of these notes as part of our workshops!

Irational will also organise a workshop in Lueneburg, the week before we run the Deckspace.TV workshop, on “Archaeology and Futurology of an Artserver An exhibition and event series by art collective irational “.

This ‘Screens’ workshop marked the 10th anniversary of the ‘DMZ‘ festival…

Posted on November 9, 2013 by admin ReSynced

Origins reSynced

This week we set out to explore the material archive we have at Deckspace for the print, image and online records relating to SPC origins. Backspace was open and operational throughout 1996-2000 a period which primed us for so much we have experienced in the years that followed. Independent media production and political action gained new strengths from Internet based communication and we all had an experience of dynamism in the rush of attention on some of the work we produced and the reality of re-generation in the inner cities that eventually closed the space. Before that moment passed so much flowed through, around and over us on its way to the future it was hard to capture.

Javier arrived bang on time for the start of the session at 11am so we had plenty of opportunity to discuss current work and indulge in a little nostalgia for 1999-2003 during the early days of indimedia London and our adoption of Linux. He is currently campaigner at Open-Rights group as well as helping establish a bi-lingual freeschool in Brighton demonstrating an enduring enthusiasm and commitment to a wide scope of civic and political action. The following data dump of what’s new, related and essential in the field of archivism, rights and digital activism took place in a stream of consciousness hard to account for now. (ta for the list Javi !) We certainly talked a while about DIY book and newsprint scanners and the Free Births Deaths and Marriage register projects.

One aspect of the workshops is to dig through the accumulated archives (boxes) containing not least, posters, flyers and stickers for the J18 Carnival Against Capitalism. This crowned an golden period in Backspace when it was used as the first ever Indimedia Centre to help articulate the event and from where a coordination of videos arriving by cycle courier from the City of London actions were streamed to the worlds public via SPC servers.

Giovanni d’Angelo was one of the key backspacers and also joined us again for further excavations as we distilled the stored materials into specially cleared shelves in preparation for closer examination and processing. Before long tables already loaded with lunch debris are joined by contents of the cd racks and VHS silos. The Art for Networks boxes brought up from bitspace featured OWN (in it’s earlier form as POD toolbox), Blink (our iteration of Frequency Clock) and Consume the Net were all featured in the exhibition alongside that of the many contributions curated by Simon Pope in 2002.

Adnan brought along newly acquired NFC/RFID tag writer for misc cards and stickers we have yet to activate but which form the publication and promotion component of our research program. Alexei Blinov, long term collaborator at SPC and instrumental to so much technical practice and support to so many arrived reminding us of his Broom project which utilised similar RFID readers and to help us round off the days work with beer before joining us at Exploding Cinema show in Brixton.

We discussed the GCHQ/NSA big data gathering concerning the change within legislation. The Criminal Justice Act, which was introduced 10 years ago by the British government in order to prevent free parties and festival initiated a mass movement of resistance (up to j18). Mark Harrision stated in an interview by Neil Transpontine (in the last edition of datacide), that “the Criminal Justice Bill was rushed in – and this drove much of the dance music scene back into the hand of The Industry”. Might Eben Moglen’s Freedom Box be a way out?