Transmissions reSynced

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.

piratem11 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.

Wilderness reSynced

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.

CwnBerLon

IS4CWN was held in Berlin 2nd to 4th October at cBase  home of Freifunk celbrating a decade of wireless freenetworking. James Stevens travelled there with Alexei Blinov and was reunited with long term Consume collaborator Julian Priest (nz) currently living in Pisa Italy.

IMG_0517Juergen Neuman ( freifunk ) arranged for us all to stay in the old pig sty at K9 a housing commune/bar. Then, 3 days of workshops, Wednesday 2nd, Thursday 3rd and Friday 4th during which time we listened, questioned and exchanged information with the many international community wireless network groups represented.

IMG_0520The first day we spent visiting the three presentation rooms as well as enjoying the hospitality at cBase. In the afternoon Julian Priest presented the picosat project ‘weight of information‘ and we met with Luka Mustafa from Ljubljana who has spent three years in London at uni and returned to europe with a  3D printed prototype of gigabit optical networking solution inspired by Ronja. Met with Rodger of Guifi.net (topnotch) Attended a range of sessions… see timetable. lots of drinking all day then diner with Juergen, Alexei and Julian.

IMG_0530After a morning spent recovering from the night before and a lovely walk along the river, met with Richard from Austin wireless and talked about Borgfest his latest project, also talked with Sam of Occupy London and Hacklab London who showed a fantastic video playback project (link lost). Spent short periods in a selection of sessions till Freifunkers celebrated ten years meshness.IMG_0525 Thursday evening keynote from Amelia Anderstrotter of German Pirate Party . Diner with Juergen and gf Julian, Alexei and joined by Ramon Rocco (guifi.net) and Axel Nuemann (Batman)

Met with Robert Horvitz from Open Spectrum Alliance he invited us to attend his exhibition in London at glasshouse trust gallery (weird link) attended many session including one of the last  on Friday explaining progress on libre-mesh.org a very recent collaboration of IMG_0544AlterMesh (from AlterMundi, Argentina), qMp (from guifi.net, Catalunya), eigenNet (from eigenLab, Ninux, Italia). This was the most inspiring and fascinating moments of the summit.. pure technical insight and progressive utilisation of BATMAN eXtended (layer2), BMX (layer3)  to hugely extend the scope and scale of future networks.. brilliant.

IMG_0528

Finished off talking with Sven-Ola architect of much freifunk advanced work as we plan to offer VLAN exchange with SPC in London and complete the 11 year round trip of BerLon!

 

 

reSync @ Deckspace

Deckspace.tv have arranged a series of themed public events @ Deckspace for October and November 2013, each recognising key interests of its subscribers during the last decade.

reSync – Wilderness | Transmissions | Rights | Objectives | Origins | Screens | Futures

Review existing SPC and subscriber projects to collect fresh insights and inspiration from the originators and work together to republish using a range of flexible, efficient and playful technologies and techniques.

Check out the Workshops tab…

Mozfest

One of our workshops will take place during/at the Mozfest. Meeting up with the Flossmanuals people, joining the School of Open (Creative Commons & P2PU) and  the Open Knowledge Foundation for a fun evening to connect with peers in the open education space. Mick Fuzz writes: “So many efforts exist to “open” up  education around the world. How can we help connect these efforts? We’d  like to start by collaboratively building a human timeline of open education — Do you remember when and where you first became aware of open education?  When did you first become passionate about “open” or  participate in an “open” event or job? Where and what was it? What else in this area has most inspired you? We will share experiences and manually place ourselves along a real world  timeline (think rolls of butcher paper, markers, glitter is optional). Then we’ll start fleshing out  the timeline with key events and persons that we think brought the open education and knowledge movement to where it is today. We’ll stop whenever we get tired, make merry with refreshments and snacks, and  digitize whatever we have by the end of the evening for further contributions from everyone and anyone on the web. We’ll make the resulting timeline available openly (either via CC0, CC BY, or CC  BY-SA), and feature it in a chapter of the Open Education Handbook!

Organizer descriptions: (for School of Open, Creative Commons, P2PU, Open Knowledge Foundation and FLOSS Manuals Foundation)
The School of Open  is a community of volunteers focused on providing free education  opportunities on the meaning, application, and impact of “openness” in  the digital age and its benefit to creative endeavors, education,  research, and more. Volunteers develop and run online courses, real  world workshops, and training programs on topics such as Creative  Commons licenses, open educational resources, and sharing creative  works. 
The School of Open is coordinated by Creative Commons, a  globally focused nonprofit dedicated to making it easier for people to  share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of  copyright, and P2PU, an active peer learning platform and community for developing and running free online courses.
The Open Knowledge Foundation  (OKF) is a non-profit organisation founded in 2004 and dedicated to  promoting open data and open content in all their forms – including  government data, publicly funded research and public domain cultural  content.

The FLOSS Manuals Foundation is a collection of different language communities that produce educational materials about Free Software using innovative collaborative tools and processes. http://www.flossmanuals.org/”

reSource 006

The Transmediale resource006 event runs under the title: Overflow. Transmediale therefore manifests on their website that “In the current development of digital culture we are experiencing an “overflow condition”, where more information is being transmitted than machines can process, and humans can handle. This need for accumulation make us part of a constant flow of data, so big and complex that it becomes impossible to analyse and to filter. The urgent pressure of issues such as ownership and privacy related to data overflow makes us wonder if producing more data instead means generating more control.”

deadSwap

Recruiting performance of the Telekommunisten for deadSwap, “Agents Recruiting for deadSwap // Numbers Station by the Telekommunisten network activists. Whistleblowers. Spies. Covert action requires clandestine networks. Data hidden in public space. Seemingly random numbers spoken on the radio. What does it mean? There must be a system! How do you join the network? Can you be counted on? Are you committed? Do you have what it takes to join the network?”

Dead Drop ness

Danya Vassilev had similar system (proposal) for transport (buses, trams)
Aram Barthold  had something similar too -> Dead Drops

Work of previous PML fellows was discussed in the Mining the Image session.

cbase

A short c-base visit in order to sync up between the open wireless network OWN in London, and the open wireless network FREIFUNK in Berlin.

James Stevens will visit the international summit for community wireless networks next month meeting technology experts, policy analysts, on-the-ground specialists, university research, discussing state-of-the-art community wireless projects, and their futures.

Quote from the agenda:

How to Avoid Tragedy of The Commons in Wi-Fi Networks:
The performance of a Wi-Fi link (in meshes and in access point settings) is subject to sometimes uncontrollable interference and channel congestion. But until now it was very hard to troubleshoot and find out what really causes a link to perform poorly without investing heavily in special measurement equipment and time. This has changed now. We present a heavily modified and enhanced version the already existing software tool called “horst” (lightweight IEEE802.11 wireless LAN analyzer similar to tcpdump, Wireshark or Kismet). This can be used to implement mechanisms/protocols to cooperatively conserve channel airtime–to avoid depletion of the resources shared—in order to avoid the tragedy of the commons.

start of fellowship

We started the PML fellowship with meeting sessions during the Transmediale resource006 event: Overflow.

Talked about theories, praxis, & administration (media utopianism of the 90s being trashed by web 2.0 / political, collective, social).

Jonathan Kempp and Martin Howse discussed christal worlds, drill corez, segmentation of the mind, stack/frame/heap, bio leaching…

Fabian Giraud presented several projects, burning the chip of a camera in the focus point of a particle accelerator underneath the louvre.

We also discussed the January 2014 event titled ‘Taking care of Things’

some more notes:
Howard Slater on Post Media
Claus Pias on Cybernetics
Mark B Hensen on human agency & social life
Forian Cramer on Anti-Media
Graswurzel.TV  Susa Neubronner
Conrad Atkinson on Dreams of Permanence: Dreams of Transience
Fassbinder’s film Welt am Draht
Kate Rich on bureau of inverse technology
Friedrich Kittler on time based media
Wolfgang Welsch on Ästhetisches Denken
Robin Mackay editor collapse journal

Anti-political Aesthetics

The Anti-political Aesthetics of Objects and Worlds Beyond (Svenja Bromberg)

quotes:
“Since dOCUMENTA there has been a real explosion in art exhibitions that explicitly centre around objects and articulate a relation to the philosophical strand of Object-Oriented Ontolgy (OOO)
“…”
As Diedrich Diederichsen outlines in a recent e-flux article, it is precisely what was still antithetical to the Fordist assembly line – different modes of dreaming ‘dangerously’ or living authentic or alternative lives – that seems to have become part of the post-Fordist ‘imperative to produce a perfect self as a perfect thing’.
“…”
Harman’s ‘Object-Oriented Aesthetics’
“…”
Interaction, relationship, causation, linkage are finally the names for a complex process that can be initiated between two real objects or two sensual objects only by a third intentional agent of the opposite type (in the first case sensual, in the second case real). Because, while real objects cannot touch each other, ‘sensual objects always touch real ones’, as they only exist for real objects.
“…”
There is no way in which Harman could account for the accumulation of powers and forces within specific objects or object constellations that violate certain relations or even deny access to them; there is no way in which objects might be distributed unequally in different networks of relations or in which relations might bind objects to conditions of extreme suffering, of suffocation, of death – and we could here speak of relations between people and their means of subsistence as much as of the relation between a company that emits toxic fumes and its surrounding biosphere.
“…”
Philosophy and simultaneously aesthetics have thus become extremely impoverished, as they have lost any concepts that could allow judgements that go beyond the question if a ‘new’ relation has been forged or not. With respect to the spectator, Harman seems to remain extremely Kantian, in the sense that for him art is fundamentally about the encounter between the artwork and the spectator and the emerging aesthetic reaction or ‘judgement’.
“…”
Meillassoux’s ‘Inaesthetics’
“…”
[P]hilosophy is concerned with a real and dense possible which I call the ‘may-be’ [peut-être]. This peut-être […] is very close to the final peut-être of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés…
“…”
Against his master Alain Badiou, Meillassoux sees these questions not resolved in Coup de dès in relation to an evental configuration of the poem towards a newly emerging truth, but as precisely eternalised in a hypothetical ‘perhaps’, by means of a metre that simultaneously exists and in-exists: the activity of ‘fixer l’infini’. Meillassoux argues this on the grounds of the ‘unique Number’ that we can find alluded to but finally suspended in the line of the poem ‘it was the number – were it to have existed’, but that nevertheless has an, albeit questionable, hidden existence via a code within the poem.
“…”
At the same time the aesthetics of hope Meillassoux’s philosophy offers us is not a Blochian ‘not-yet-being’ that, in its utopian sense, is nevertheless directed in a very concrete way against the oppressive material conditions of existence under capitalism, and which is itself only generated by the participation in that very same struggle. Meillassoux’s real of superchaos, which art might help us to access is, whilst radically contingent, also absolute, containing in itself ‘the equal contingency of order and disorder, of becoming and sempiternity’.