Reclaim our University

Reclaiming Our University Conference at Goldsmiths

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The marketisation of Higher Education has radically undermined the idea of the university as a public institution – gearing institutional priorities towards what is financially profitable rather than socially and culturally worthwhile.

In this context of intense competition between universities for students and research funding, there has been a dramatic growth of capital projects, advertising budgets and Vice Chancellors pay. Meanwhile students face a huge debt burden, and staff, a working environment characterised by unmanageably high workloads, stress, inequality and insecurity.

Read the report.

Cryptoparty @ ThoughtWorks

Cryptoparty: Possible Topics

  • mobile security
  • encrypt emails with PGP
  • encrypt your IMs with XMPP and OTR
  • anonymous surfing Tor
  • privacy enhancing browser plugins
  • file and hard-drive encryption with TrueCrypt hard-drive encryption with LUKS
  • password security and managers
  • Linux installation
  • Tails (safe and anonymous operating system… please bring a thumb drive if interested)
  • Pond (encrypted Tor based messaging system without meta data and spam)

Also worth a look: index of the handbook
Useful for non-journalists as well: Information Security for Journalists

Timetable

  • 7 p.m.: short intro and welcome speech, possibly followed by short lectures
  • 8 p.m. (at the latest) we’ll start the laptops, learn about the topics your interested in and install/configure the related software

Rules

  • Taking photos or filming will not be allowed. Please leave the cameras in your pockets.
  • Smoking is possible in the yard.

Contact

Please send questions to the Berlin mailinglist. Or through cryptoparty@enteig.net

Weapons of the geek

Exploring digital spheres with Gabriella Coleman.

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CC BY 2.0: Zak Milofsky on flickr

Gabriella Coleman is on of the most (if not the most) prominent anthropologist in the field of hacking culture and digital activism. During the last years, she became known as «the world’s foremost scholar on Anonymous». Her research intensively accompanied Anonymous through the developments of the last years, gaining deep insights on «what began as a network of trolls [and] has become a wellspring of online insurgency», as her new book Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous states. It recently has been named to Kirkus Reviews’Best Books of 2014.

after.video @ Besides the Screen

… this was the abstract for the ‘show & tell’
… which we adapted and updated a little with the actual presentation:

» Show & Tell: the ‘S.o.S’ piratebox & beyondthis ‘show & tell’, held together with Adnan Hadzi, presents the reflections of the journey of the ‘S.o.S’ piratebox, a research hosted and interlinked with work-and-research structures of the Brazil Besides the Screen conference, the Istanbul Video Vortex event, the reSync Athens workshop, and finally the Berlin Transmediale festival.
Materials were loaded onto a research-black-box (Pirate-Box) that could & can accumulate and ‘commonize’ critical material, travel and be presented at any place in any time.in particular we would like to discuss our ideas on new modes of collective and spectral research.
… and possibly give an outlook of the upcoming ‘after.video’ project that evolved partly out of this – basing theory exposition on video as carrying format.—in my part I show some attempts to develop formats of credible ‘theory’-production beyond the text-form – and show some collective and media-saturated examples, also arguing for blurry lines between ‘academic’ theory building and other forms when it comes to contemporary cultural and social phenomena – or media culture itself.I also touch upon the impact a social semiotics approach has to formats of theory (theoretical referencing) itself, and touch upon questions of ‘cultural referencing’ – and its inherent difficulties in times of new global copyright regimes that particularly enclose the ‘moving image’.while complex systems of para-textual reference, exposition and theory-building are getting more and more abundant (making it possible to turn events like a conference into a hyper-text), the options to extend cultural references to the most central cultural ‘para-texts’ and semiotic resources is getting more and more problematic.
… thus the current phenomena in research, theory building and other forms of systematic ‘cultural referencing’ are showing us, how every new medial formation – and indeed: every new research formation – implies new forms of ‘piracy’ in its entourage. «

Departing from the relation of movie piracy with the economy and politics of content distribution, the symposium means to discuss the dynamics of authority embedded in contemporary systems of communication and explore how informal media practices might intervene with the development of new technologies, frame film curating, foster or inhibit particular scholarships, and even raise questions about the ontology of the moving image. BTS 2015 announcement

:: Besides the Screen
» seeks to make an intervention into film and screen studies by examining and considering the elements of cinematic experience, production and dissemination that exist beside the screen. New media technologies impact cinema well beyond the screen; they also promote the reorganization of its logic of distribution, modes of consumption and viewing regimes. This publication speculates about the changes in modes of accessing, distributing, storing and promoting moving images and how they might affect cinematographic experience, economy and historiography. In doing so, Besides the Screen examines three key themes: distribution, promotion and curation. The volume’s main argument is that we must examine those practices that exist besides the screen if we are to consider fully how filmic experience is mediated by various technological and societal changes in the early decades of the twenty-first century «

Programme

Thursday 9th April 2015 12.00 – 17.00 – DMLL Grass – Workshop [invited participants online]
17.00 – 19.30: Besides the Screen Book Launch

Friday 10th April 2015 DMLL Teaching Room

10.00 – 10.30: Welcome and Intro to Besides the Screen Network – Virginia Crisp

10.30 – 12.00: Panel 1
_ The Pirate Cinema – Nicolas Maigret The Pirate Cinema
_ Read Me – Maria Roszkowska
_ Tropa(s) de Elite: of the Forms Created within Informal Media – Gabriel Menotti

12.15 – 13.45: Panel 2

_ Torrentocracy: Archival Chivalry and Piratical Honourability – Jonas Andersson Schwarz
_ Show and Tell: the ‘S.o.S’ Piratebox and Beyond – Adnan Hadzi and Oliver Lerone Schultz
_ Gambiarra Culture in Brazil and its Impact on Piracy – h.d. Mabuse

14:30 – 16.00: Panel 3

_ Piracy and Access to Educational Materials in Rio de Janeiro: Shadow Libraries and Beyond – Pedro Mizukami
_ Reimagining Film History Through Piracy: Reflections on the Case of Budget Films, 1975 – Paul McDonald
_ Pirate Capitalism: The Theory and Practice of Monstrosity – Gary Hall

16.15 – 17.45: Plenary Lecture
_ Piracy and Economic Plurality Ramon Lobato

17.45 – 18.00 Closing remarks – Virginia Crisp

 

Adnan Hadzi – Spectrals of the Spectacular from Besides the Screen on Vimeo.

The Yes Men are revolting @ Human Rights Filmfestival

Our friends the Yes Men opened with ‘The Yes Men are revolting‘ the Human Rights Watch film festival in London.

For the last 20 years, notorious activists the Yes Men have staged outrageous and hilarious hoaxes to draw international attention to corporate crimes against humanity and the environment. Armed with nothing but quick wits and thrift-store suits, these iconoclastic revolutionaries lie their way into business events and government functions to expose the dangers of letting greed run our world. In their third cinematic outing (after The Yes Men and The Yes Men Fix The World), they are now well into their 40s, and their mid-life crises are threatening to drive them out of activism forever—even as they prepare to take on the biggest challenge they’ve ever faced: climate change.
Opens theatrically at IFC Center following the festival screening.

D-Cent & Snowden @ FutureFest

Today our friend Jaromil chaired a panel discussion on “Blockchain: How Encryption Will Shape The Economics and Politics of the future” @ FutureFest.
Denis “Jaromil” Roio (chair), Brett Scott, Jorge Timón, Stacy Herbert

FutureFest is a multi format event which gives visitors ample opportunity to take self-guided journeys. This year’s speakers include the visionary musician George Clinton, NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, fashion designer and activist Vivienne Westwood, and journalist/best-selling author Jon Ronson, among others.

D-CENT hosts two panels:

  • Networks, Movements and Parties: D-Cent and the challenges of net-era politics
    Francesca Bria (chair), Birgitta Jonsdottir, Davide Barillari, Fabrizio Sestini, Miguel Arana Catania
  • Blockchain: How Encryption Will Shape The Economics and Politics of the future
    Denis “Jaromil” Roio (chair), Brett Scott, Jorge Timón, Stacy Herber

Vivienne Westwood at FutureFest 2015: End Vulture Capitalism from Nesta UK on Vimeo.

Edward Snowden at FutureFest: full interview from Nesta UK on Vimeo.

Worth mentioning is Vivienne Westwood’s engagement in the protest against TTIP in the campaign Artists against TTIP.

What is Artists Against TTIP?

Artists Against TTIP is a growing group of performers, musicians, designers, visual artists, directors and thinkers who have come together to raise awareness of the threats posed by TTIP.

BUT WHAT IS TTIP?

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP, pronounced tee-tip) is a comprehensive free trade and investment treaty currently being negotiated – largely in secret – between the European Union and the USA.

The scope of the negotiations is very broad. The stated goal is to reduce “barriers to trade” between the EU and US. In practice TTIP would lead to a huge transfer of power from democratically elected governments to large corporations. The implications for public health, the environment, public service provision, financial regulation, labour standards and social protections are profound. On top of this, research produced for the European Commission estimates that TTIP will lead to the loss of 1 million jobs.

The Post-Digital Review: Cultural Commons

The Post-Digital Review gathers experts to discuss shifting forms of cultural practice, of organisations, of the economy.

CAT: Conference
DAY: Sun 01.02.
DUR: 120 min
PLC: auditorium hkw

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.

Superglue Demonstration

Demonstration. Make you own websites and host them at home.

DAY: Sat 31.01.
DUR: 60 min
PLC: hkw foyer

Demonstration
At Foyer Hub 3

Over the last 18 months a team of artists, engineers, programmers, designers and researchers have been building Superglue – a visual web authoring tool and personal server, which enables you to make your own websites and host them at home. The Superglue visual web authoring tool comes as a handy browser add-on, which enables you to create websites directly in the browser window. To host your website at home the team of the project developed the Superglue personal server, which comes as a preconfigured device which you plug into the wall and instantly have your own Internet server. Superglue is a tool based on the original DIY (Do-It-Yourself) ethos of the Internet.

After its test launch in October 2014, Superglue is now open for public trials. For transmediale 2015, team members Michael Zeder, Abigail Smith and Teresa Dillon will provide a short overview of Superglue, demonstrating how the author tool and server works and discussing the ideas behind the project.

Participants can bring their own routers (TP-LINK TL-WR710N or D-Link DIR-505) or try the pre-configured devices that will be available for public test.

Bringing a laptop will be in any case necessary.

Superglue is developed by Danja Vasiliev, Joscha Jaeger, Michael Zeder in collaboration with Teresa Dillon, VERBALVISUAL and zerbamine.

Facilitated by: WORM.

Supported by: Greenhost
>superglue.it

offline networks unite!

Discussion. 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.

DAY: Sat 31.01.
DUR: 120 min
PLC: hkw foyer

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.

off.networks_transmediale

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

All Play And No Work: The Quantified Us

Conference Stream Play. A discussion on the gains and the losses of an emerging gameful world.

CAT: Conference
DAY: Fri 30.01.
DUR: 90 min
PLC: auditorium hkw

Conference Stream Play

How does it feel when your FitBit score is taken into consideration as part of your job performance? Or when you know that your successful liked Selfies attract the attention not only of your network but also of your employers? Does this new form of playful and multilayered surveillance make us more productive and why do we willingly engage in an economy which driven by play translates everything into accelerated work? It seems that to fit in, in a world ruled by numbers , we need to become part of an endless feedback loop, constantly adjusting our image and habits to new scores and norms.

Taking into consideration the wide use of gamification and the popularity of the Quantified Self movement, the panel will look into how play can set behaviors and discuss the gains and the losses of today’s gameful world. Are we experiencing a preset game-of-data where play rules through freedom or can we still count on new forms of data-play and dis-measure that can oppose the logic of a life tied to playful but continuous work?

Presented in cooperation with Leuphana University of Lüneburg

Daphne_Dragona_p0_round

Daphne Dragona (gr)

Daphne Dragona is a curator, writer and researcher living and working in Athens and Berlin. Since 2001, she has been collaborating with centers, museums and festivals in Greece and abroad for exhibitions, conferences, workshops and media art events. Among them are the National Museum of Contemporary Art (Athens), LABoral Centro de Arte y Creacion Industrial (Gijon), Alta Tecnologia Andina (Lima), Goethe-Institut Athen and the Hybrid City Conference organised by the University of Athens. Daphne has worked extensively on game art, net and network based art as well as on artistic practices connected to the urban and digital commons. Her current research and curatorial practice particularly involves critical data-driven art, playful exploits and off-the-cloud initiatives, explored as tools for users’ empowerment and emancipation. Articles of hers have been published in numerous books, journals and magazines.