Posted on October 22, 2015 by adnan Uncategorized

Cyphersongs @ Piksel15

Our friends Rob, Barbara & Anton performed Cyphersongs @ Piksel15:

CipherSongs: Trustless is the second in a series of performance and installation works reflecting on issues surrounding encrypted network communication technologies. It is a data driven, audio visual installation/performance which responds to real-time data from the Bitmessage service. Bitmessage is a decentralised, peer-to-peer, trustless communications protocol. The service became particularly popular after the 2013 Snowden revelations exposing the widespread collection and analysis of communications metadata. These works respond to the threat to our “right to a private life” posed by the planned amendments in the UK to the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill (aka The Snoopers Charter). This amendment seeks to criminalise the use of encrypted communications in the UK. In this context, CipherSongs functions as the ‘canary in the coal mine’, an early warning system where the disappearance of song indicates a dangerous problem within the system.

This performance is a dialogue between the on-stage performers and the streams of encrypted network data. The data is picked up by performers and improvised into the physical performance space as well as streamed via the TOR hidden service. Alongside the data driven sonic improvisations are woven textual interpretations of both factual and fictional encrypted content.

Rob Canning (Laptop), Antonios Galanopoulos (Laptop), Barbara Kukovec (Voice/Electronics).

Posted on September 23, 2015 by adnan Events, reports, research, ReSynced

Bacalao!

James Stevens & Adnan Hadzi are in Athens attending Hybrid City III where co-collaborators in next years MAZI project met together for the first time to hold a workshop at the event, discuss respective projects and get to know one another.

Armin Medosch gave closing keynote speech and just published the supporting document here!

Our work complete, here we are with Adnan, Andreas and Panos before diner at the beach.. !

This weekend YT will present a quick review of Consume.net at the Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network annual conference where members of the group will meet in Athens to celebrate progress and discuss future plans for development, wider inclusion and enhancements.

AMWN node=10636

Up Periscope! is a printed media campaign to run at street level which presents an opportunity for passers by to investigate AWMN and see the view from the rooftop of each node location eg. Senius 10636. Each poster presents a QRcode for easy linking to the many panoramic images stored on the WIND node database.

can I see my apartment from here? then there is a good chance of making a link back.

So it is a tool for network builders to help identify viable locations to interlink with the free information infrastructure and promote AWMN. Over 1000 high speed wireless network nodes span Athens and across Greece, linking villages and cities alike.

YT and Adnan last visited Athens during New Babylon in 2014 and set out to introduce reStreet workshop group to the delights of file synchronization with SYNC and Syncthing, QRcodes and button badges.

Our friend Mathias Jud visited us in London “Our visit to London last month finally realizes in an online Video. We have been invited to give a talk at a TED Global event. It was a good experience but also quite demanding with rehearsals, mandatory events and a strange diner at the house of the James Bond producer … and somehow asked not to talk about before the event. However the video has been put online today”, when producing a TED talk on Art that lets you talk back to NSA spies.

Posted on September 17, 2015 by adnan Announcement, Events, news, Report, research

Contesting the “Dark Web”. CipherSongs: Trustless an installation for encrypted data streams

Rob Canning composed CipherSongs which one currently can tune into on http://cipher.kiben.net/

The abstract of his paper for BFX describes CipherSongs as:

CipherSongs: Trustless is the first in a proposed series of performance and installation works reflecting on issues surrounding encrypted network communication technologies. It is a data driven, audio visual installation which responds to real-time data from the Bitmessage service. Bitmessage is a decentralised, peer-to-peer, trustless communications protocol (Warren, 2012), the service became particularly popular after the 2013 Snowden revelations exposing the widespread collection and analysis of communications metadata. These works respond to the threat to our “right to a private life” (Article 8 of the Human Rights Act 1998) posed by the recently elected Conservative government’s plans to amend the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA) (Home Office, 2014). The proposed amendment to DRIPA, commonly referred to as “The Snoopers’ Charter”, seeks to abolish the use of encrypted communications in the UK16 . In this context, CipherSongs functions as the ‘canary in the coal mine’, an early warning system where the disappearance of song indicates a dangerous problem within the system.

The installation operates as an agent within the system it references, it is actively engaged with the data and political context that are its subjects. As nodes within both the Tor network and the Bitmessanger system it provides extra robustness and diversity to their decentralised infrastructures. It critiques the dominant assertions of the mainstream or “strategic media” which aligns users of strong cryptography with the “Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse”: drug dealers, paedophiles, money launderers and terrorists (May, 1994).

Posted on September 16, 2015 by adnan news, presentations, projects, Report, research, ReSynced

Contact workshop during Hybrid City III conference

SPC took part in the CONTACT workshop during the Hybrid City III conference, meeting collaborators of the MAZI project.

An indoors/outdoors workshop which explores citizen engagement in the smart city toward more conviviality and human interactions, shifting the perspective from sensors to senses, from Internet-based locative media to offline DIY networks, from algorithmic matching to genuine serendipity, from powerful mediators to local actors.

CONTACT wishes to explore the advantages of offline networks and smart city concepts for the design of technology that can serve face-to-face meetings and local communities. We will first provide a short introduction to certain important concepts that help us guide the workshop participants through a collaborative process of hybrid space design: Do-It-Yourself networking, urban interaction design, field research methodologies, and the role of the stranger. Then we will go out to the streets of Athens to explore the surroundings of the conference’s venue, to analyze the spatial and social aspects of different places, and to identify locations that are candidates for hybrid urban interventions toward our objectives of conviviality and human interactions. After our collective walk, we will gather in a public space to think together about possible applications and possible processes to design them, including software, hardware, surrounding artifacts and performance. We will focus on ways to take advantage of the special characteristics of DIY networking — ownership, de facto physical proximity, anonymity, and inclusive access — to facilitate contact between strangers, in t,his specific part of the city. The next day, building on the number and competencies of the participants, we will develop a few prototypes of selected applications and organize an urban intervention in some of the selected locations.

Posted on September 15, 2015 by adnan news, Uncategorized

MoneyLab#2: Economies of Dissent

The Institute of Network Cultures presents MONEYLAB#2: ECONOMIES OF DISSENT on Thursday 3 & Friday 4 December 2015 at Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam– an international symposium hosting artists, activists, programmers and academics that probe, challenge and hack today’s global economy.

What political imperatives shape the economy of dissent? What different views on the redistribution of wealth and the exchange of value are out there? How can we re-design our financial infrastructures?

The important first steps are being taken beyond moral outrage and towards systemic interventions in the global austerity economy. We witness an impressive amount of financial counter-concepts, works of art, digital currencies, tools and hacks giving shape to an emerging economy of dissent. This economy operates across borders, on different scales, from sole acts of defiance to a sovereign ‘oxi’, and is expressed variously as: strategy, circumvention, innovation, visualization, and making-do.

Posted on September 8, 2015 by adnan Deptford.TV, news, projects, Report

H3333333333K

On the occasion of the new construction for the HeK and Atelier Mondial at Freilager-Platz at the Dreispitzareal, the culture department of the Christoph Merian Foundation, in cooperation with the department kulturelles.bl of the Department for Education, Culture and Sports and the Swisslos-Fonds Basel-Landschaft, carried out a single-stage international “Art at the Building” competition by invitation.

The jury, chaired by Nathalie Unternährer, head of the culture department of the Christoph Merian Foundation, selected from among the six complete and qualitatively outstanding submissions the project proposal “H3333333333K” of !Mediengruppe Bitnik.

Posted on August 15, 2015 by adnan Events, reports, research

Dyne @ CCC Camp

This year Dyne presented Devuan @ the CCC camp. Also see how to take care of skeletons in your closet with tomb.

quoted from the ccc devuan page:

Believe it or not, there are many users and ICT professionals needing to opt-out from systemd, for various reasons for instance to keep compatibility with old scripts or to keep supporting embedded setups, or simply because they don’t believe systemd is going to work. As a matter of fact, from its first announcement in November 2014 until today the Devuan project received enormous media attention and a steady stream of donations up to approximately 10.000€.

This lightning talk will illustrate the state of things in Devuan development, which is quickly approaching its 1.0 Beta release.

For the 1.0 release Devuan will derives its own installer and package repositories from Debian Jessie, applying the necessary modifications to remove systemd. Our objective for 2015 is to make anyone using Debian Wheezy or Jessie able to update or switch to Devuan 1.0 – and we are very close to enter Beta stage.

As of today we have a continuous integration system in place and fully functional based on gitlab, jenkins and a custom repository software called Amprolla. We are also supporting the development of a new, minimal susbstitute for udev which written from scratch and is called vdev.

Posted on August 1, 2015 by adnan news, projects, Report, research, ReSynced

Action timed, envisioned..

James Stevens shared the great news of MAZI getting the Horizon2020 grant, on the SPC blog:

Despite the numerous claims raised by UK councils and GLA to establish public wireless service for all, few examples have made it out of the boardroom and even then, fall to commercial pressure or operational chaos before long.

We are hopeful that the very recently awarded fund for MAZI project starting early in 2016, will re-energize interest and activity along Deptfords Creekside, with a program supporting development of local innovation over the next 3 years that will galvanize existing networks and promote fresh collaborations.

This image is taken from the roof above the DAGE shop on Deptford High Street, one of the dozen surviving OWN nodes which continues to offer public access and mesh with the other points in the area. It retains a unique status in London, an operational model of ‘collectively owned and operated broadband infrastructure’, but by just a thread!

Building and co-coordinating public access networks is very tricky and time consuming operation but increasingly affordable and relevant. As we wake up to the realities of state surveillance and data mining of our interactions, we may well find the recent interest in off-line networking adds a layer of obscurity that’s preferable.

Posted on June 24, 2015 by d.tv Uncategorized

Data Traces: Big Data in the Context of Culture and Society

IXDM will host a conference on data traces.

Big Data describes a passage into a new era in which the power of data induces a radical transformation of a society whose actions and production of knowledge rely increasingly on the accumulation and evaluation of data. The conference ‘Data Traces. Big Data in the Context of Culture & Society’ draws upon this prospect and delves into critical questions of Big Data in dialogue with international experts, academics and artists. It addresses the paradigm of a data-driven society and reflects life in an increasingly datified world. The conference is organized by the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures at the Academy of Art and Design FHNW and HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel). The conference is part of the exhibition ‘Poetics and Politics of Data’ at HeK. Further infos can be found on the IXDM website & the HEK website.

Posted on June 22, 2015 by d.tv Events

Landestelle & HEK @ Art Basel

Our friends Wisard Bros performed the MidiFizz DJ-set at Landestelle.

Read more about the Landestelle project (in German).

At Liste Art Fair HeK presents four artistic positions, Aram Bartholl, Constant Dullaart, Raquel Meyers and Evan Roth under the title PEBKAC IMHO.

“Search the web for ‘iPhone reverse product placement’, and you will find a clip from the first ‘Sex and the City’ movie (2008), in which the character Carrie gets handed an iPhone and shrieks; “I don’t know how to work this’. Shot the year the first Apple smartphone was released, the clip overtly illustrates our current relationship to technology. Carrie was not in the know, did not understand popular technology. Left at the altar, not in control of her life, not able to master new technology. We as the viewer do want to understand how technology works, want control, not be left at the altar, and get an iPhone. read more.

The action of the art group “diezelle” started by 5PM (19 June) in front of Art Basel, as a protest against the police action during the ArtBasel 2013. Another group gathered on the Claramatte for a parallel demonstration using homemade tanks made out of cardboard, shouting: “What is art”

D.TV