Due to the circumstances quickly changing this week’s workshop turned into a radical real time performance. The object in question was a parcel send to Mr. Rajab, see http://rajab.bitnik.org (& http://wikileaks.org/rajab).

This radical real time performance  nicely fitted  the theme of the fellowship Life vs. Object, with the  fourth research cycle “Life versus Object. Comrade Things and Alien Life” focusing  on the flattening out of ontological hierarchies between humans, animals, machines and objects and new parametric realities brought about by networked media environments.

The parcel left the Ecuadorian Embassy on Monday the 28th of October with the Twitter status: “Sending Nabeel Rajab a parcel containing a camera. Camera documents its journey through postal system in realtime. http://rajab.bitnik.org/post/1/img/173069.jpg …”

We only received a few images, then the camera went blank, and only black images were transmitted (we speculated that the camera might have been put into a bag). Furthermore we seemed not to move at all, and were stuck in the Parcelforce Depot for over a day.

On Tuesday things moved, and finally the parcel was transported to Stansted Airport, but with not the hoped outcome of being transported out of the country, on the contrary, after another day of waiting the parcel was brought back to the Parcelforce distribution center in Camden.

After still being there for another day !Mediengruppe Bitnik started to inquire into the whereabouts of the parcel and received conflicting status messages from Parcelforce and Fedex.  Bitnik tweeted: “Fedex says parcel it’s at Parcelforce – they say it’s at Fedex. Our GPS says: http://goo.gl/maps/jbvPK“.

After this tweet, things suddenly seemed to be moving (if it was because of this tweet or not we shall never know). Wikileaks’ response to this was: “One can imagine the politics as the political hot-potato parcel is thrown between Royal Mail, Parcel Force, Fedex and UK Customs. No one wants to be left holding the parcel if a story breaks about refusing to let it through to Bahrain’s top political prisoner.”

The Parcel left the country on Thursday night, the 31st of October, on a flight to Paris. It only stayed at the Paris airport for some hours before being loaded onto a flight to Dubai, where it arrived on Friday morning.

Another day passed…

Unfortunately we lost the connection to the parcel on the 2nd of November around 9AM  (GMT) for good. FedEx changed the status of them tracking the parcel to N/A, and !Mediengruppe Bitnik tweeted: “24’010 live images | 23’626 black images | 5594 km | 6 days | 6573 GPS readings | 3 countries | 3 airports | #postdrone” & “#Postdrone from Assange to Nabeel Rajab was stopped at Dubai Airport. But our journey to Bahrain is not over yet. Stay tuned for updates.”

This years Mozfest was again held at Ravensbourne College of Art in North Greenwich adjacent to the O2 Dome. Every view from inside through port holes a reminder of the spectacular transformation in the area since the new millennium.

One of the attractions for us this year was the more formal unveiling of the Firefox phone but there it was in little evidence after the opening night ( which I missed) Instead the mantra was of maker badges and the mushrooming interest and utility of Webmaker products.

One of these initiatives set out to specify a Webmaker teaching kit with kids in mind as well as those who are starting out.. by the time I found them much had already been done! All those post-it notes were transcribed and should appear on the mozfest site.. sometime.

Security and safety on the web was of course a theme on everyone’s mind this year the series of crypto workshops were well attended and explored how to use pgp for email, public key encryption tools for messaging and Tor for web browsers. Those of us with phones installed and configured ‘ChatSecure‘ for Android.

Air | Story | Tracks | Session

Mozfest writeup

This weeks reSync workshop studies the mechanisms for broadcast we have made use of over the years.. We welcomed Anthony Davies from Maydayrooms and missed out on talking to Bruno Sanhueza DJ contributor to the WirelessFM we host at stream.spc.org.

When we first opened Deckspace in 2001 several of our longer term collaborators from Backspace were keen to continue with their live audio and streaming projects.

PirateTV presented live streaming video and audio from their base at first from Coldcut studio in Clink Street till 1999 and later from Outerbongolia in Herne Hill in South London.

<Blink> was featured in a touring Arts for Networks exhibition and utilised the pioneering FrequencyClock engine designed and built by Adam Hyde. He installed a frequencyclock for <Blink> which we used at Deckspace for many years.

Jem Finer authored Longplayer in celebration of the millennium in 2000, a thousand year musical composition driven by supercolider scripts and. SPC has hosted the listening station since 2002 and we work with Longplayer Trust to keep the composition publicly available.

Pirate Radio Listening Station was designed and built by Heath Bunting and was moved to Deckspace from ICA in 2008. It lists pirate radio FM broadcasts receivable in the SE London area and remote control of the tuner which in turn re-streams the selected station.

In 2010 Rob Canning installed SourceFabric’s Airtime server but we haven’t turned to it as a tool so far. Its available at airtime.kiben.net

Today we have been talking about which of the newer solutions could be of use to us as we review the SPC repository we are building at Deckspace.tv. We like Pad.ma for its scope to manipulate meta data and will accommodate ‘deep links’ to the timeline. InterLace by Robert M Ochshorn takes these ideas further incorporating slitscreen views of film strips and contextural interlinking in its web based player. Check this link to his presentation.

During the session it became clear our enthusiasm for bit torrent sync would present issues for our project as it is not open source so we looked at alternative methods of p2p transport for our report publishing. Gio turned up as we began this discussion and suggested we look at Retroshare and Adnan already has an install of Owncloud operational so issued us accounts to test out.

On Friday 11th October we held the first of a series of reSync workshops in Deckspace, ‘Wilderness’ where we reviewed tools for collaborative video production, considered how best to construct reports and investigated the mechanics of Bit Torrent Sync in preparation for inclusion at future workshops.

We began at noon with a run through of the objectives for the workshops and how we might sequence explanation, interaction and expression of the key activities successfully.

Archaeology of SPC resources, review discoveries and publish reports.
it’s the heap : frame : stack motif proposed by Jonathan Kemp.

Some preparation has been done to pull together disparate media files from the many deckspace workstations and external hard disks plus the webservers that host a mass of video, image and audio data. Adnan Hadzi has already engineered a collaborative process for filmmakers at Deptford.tv which we can utilise to annotate, store files and author fresh compositions.

There is a growing range of web browser based playback systems available which we will make use of eg. http://montageinterdit.net/ (which has been constructed by Robert  Ochshorn also a research fellow of Lunueburg uni.)

Each report will detail the range of sources, selected files and size of the data sync.

We will author our own btsync install recipies for linux, windows and mac os users as we felt the available guides fall short in some respects.

Once we installed the available btsync software on desktop, laptop and portable devices we experimented to discover how best to operate the various options and to improve on communication of the p2p sharing concepts and implementation of btsync to date.
Print media to carry the nfc / qrcode that links to the report and associated media resources

Lets also identify case use for read only vs full access ie. server back up requires read only

scenario #1 mobile user wishing to sync library files
discover the URL to library description or send key to library email install btsync and subscribe to library

scenario #2 laptop user offers sync to local directory
we successfully synchronised mobile user (android)  using backup by sending the library an email with secret in. We also used sync to the library by scanning the qrcode.  both worked with mobile and wlan connection

scenario #3 we offered a read only sync folder on our server and syncronised between two laptops on our LAN and a mobile phone on 3G opterator. We also syncronised between 3 pc’s each able to add and remove files as well as reflecting updates with a full access.