Digital #MediaArt(s) Numérique(s)

Final post and attempt to wrap up The Influencers, an art & activism festival curated by researcher and producer Bani Brusadin and by artists Eva & Franco Mattes a.k.a. 0100101110101101.ORG.

The 11th edition of this festival of unconventional and radical art was anchored into the most banal manifestations of our networked society, one that is made of surveillance, social bullying, communication guerrilla and disintegration of the space of free speech and ideas that internet was meant to be...

Backslash -- an "art/design" project from NYU Interactive Technology Program researchers Xuedi Chen and Pedro G. C. Oliveira -- is a set of high-tech tools for protesters facing down a "hyper-militarized," surviellance-heavy state adversary, including a device to help protesters keep clear of police kettles; a jammer to foil Stingray mobile-phone surveillance; a mesh-networking router; a "personal cloud" that tries to mirror photos and videos from a protest to an offsite location; and tools for covertly signalling situational reports to other protesters.

The kit was inspired by the experiences of protesters at the Gezi Park demonstrations in Turkey; the Hong Kong Umbrella Revolution; and Brazil's Vinegar Revolt. The designers don't plan on making the kit available; instead, it's designed as a "provocation" to stimulate discussion about the nature of protest in the 21st century.

Benjamin Gaulon aka Recyclism est artiste, chercheur, enseignant à Parsons Paris The New School for Design. Dans chacune de ces activités, il s’attache à développer une approche créative et critique autour de la technologie, des médias et des modes de consommation qu’ils génèrent. Il organise également depuis 2005 des « e-waste workshop » où le public s’initie au circuit bending, au hardware hacking, ainsi qu’aux problématiques liées à l’obsolescence programmée : on y détourne du matériel en apparence obsolète pour recomposer ainsi de nouveaux objets électroniques. L’expérimentation pédagogique, envisagée comme mode de recherche, vient compléter l’arsenal des tactiques de cet artiste qui recycle, hack et détourne.

Tor saw the attack coming, but failed to stop it. Law enforcement has been complaining for years about the Web “going dark,” saying that encryption and privacy tools are frustrating their ability to track criminals online. But massive FBI operations over the last year that have busted ‘hidden sites’ used for the sale of drugs, hacking tools, and child pornography suggest the digital criminal world has gotten lighter, with law enforcement bragging that criminals can’t “hide in the shadows of the Dark Web anymore.” While mysterious about its tactics, law enforcement indicated that it had found a way to circumvent the tool on which these sites relied, a software called Tor. But criminals are not the only ones who rely on it.

In 2013 MUTEK Montréal launched MUTEK_IMG, a spin-off festival to augment its focus on electronic music by developing a platform that would serve as a dedicated “forum on currrent practiecs in digital creation.” Back with a second edition focused on virtual reality and immersive media, MUTEK_IMG 2015 will consider VR’s possible role as “the next platform in experiential technology” and bring together researchers, technologists, media artists, and related production and distribution companies for a critical consideration of the emerging medium. With a number of VR headsets already available and the long-awaited release of the Oculus Rift due in early 2016, it is an ideal moment to survey the immersive media landscape and consider opportunities for both creation and commercialization.

Taking place on October 1st–3rd at Montréal’s PHI Centre, MUTEK_IMG’s program is broken into three major components: a daylong VR Salon, a VR exhibition, and a symposium foregrounding current topics in projection mapping, hacking, and interactive art in urban space.

Draw a triangle with the co-ordinates hacktivism, interactive art and gif mashups, and the zone created is where Evan Roth calls home. Having recently coloured Dublin’s streets with the Science Gallery’s Propulsion Paintings workshop, Roth returns for a collaborative show with found material artist Constant Dullaart for GLITCH. ...

Obsolescence, a difficult word that is used more and more often in non-specialist fields, indicates “the state of being which occurs when an object, service, or practice is no longer wanted even though it may still be in good working order”.

The success of this word comes from the fact that we experience it every day, immersed as we are in products manufactured to become obsolete – and I am not referring only to smartphones and tablets. Planned obsolescence causes the rising of material which is obsolete and unusable according to the logic of the system: the junk. In recent years the planned elimination of materials from the horizon of functionality has attracted the attention of artists and intellectuals.

Sašo Sedlaček (b. 1974), Slovenian artist (that Digicult knows with the project Infocalypse Now included in the exhibition The Mediagate at Galeria NT /Imaginarium, in 2010 in Lodz, Poland, curated by Marco Mancuso and Claudia D’Alonzo – http://goo.gl/eyRXl9)...

We talked to the web cloning app makers Slava Balasanov and Analisa Teachworth as they bear their high hopes and high traffic, the day after launch.

By the time Hopes&Fears arrived at New York offices of 4REAL on Friday afternoon, their latest venture Clone Zone had gone viral. Early on, somebody used the app to spoof news coverage and incessant speculation surrounding Elizabeth Warren running for president. Just hours earlier, the New York Times "ran" a very informative exposé on artist Ryder Ripps' "homage to Versailles" in his Manhattan condo. ...

A new tool just made every website on the internet instantly and totally customizable. Now what?

Introduce into this environment of perpetual factual ambiguity Clone Zone, a new tool that makes it easy to edit any web page on the internet. Pick your canvas of choice—it’s as simple as entering a URL. Clone Zone immediately creates an editable copy. Upload your own images, drop in your own text, and share. With Clone Zone, anyone can treat themselves to a New York Times byline or the announcement of a lucrative round of funding on TechCrunch. With this tool, the whole internet is instantly and totally customizable. ...

The European Commission and Council want to adopt a regulation that would allow internet service providers (ISPs) to discriminate among customers and charge extra for different types of online services. Only those who pay more will have easy access to an audience online – killing the openness that drives the internet's social and economic success.

The internet as we know it today gives everyone the same freedoms and chance to succeed, but without net neutrality internet providers become gatekeepers that offer a premium fast lane internet for those can pay, and the slow lane for the rest of us.

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Welcome to Phase Zero, a new Gawker Media site that will cover the world of spying and killing.

Phase Zero will attempt to apply Gawker's modus operandi of honesty and impertinence to the deadly serious world of intelligence, war, policing, and homeland security. With an assist from Gawker's Adam Weinstein, I will expose secrets. I will name secret programs and tell you where they live, who is running them, and what they are doing in your name. I will try to drag the architecture of permanent war out of the shadowy protection program its stewards in the Pentagon, Congress, intelligence community, and journalistic establishment have built for it.

The name requires a bit of an explanation: "Phase Zero" is national security jargon. I first noticed it popping up in official documents about a year ago. When I hunted down the bureaucratic definition, I was amused but not surprised: It means peace. Not peace like a normal person might define it. Instead, think "pre-war." Pentagon planners like to chop their wars up into neat, easily digestible nuggets—Phase One, for instance, is the "deterrent phase," when we try to scare the enemy into backing down. Phase Two is seizing the initiative and deploying forces, etc., on to Phase Five, the return of conquered lands to civilian authority. ...

Since 1997, The HTMlles has brought together artists, scholars, and activists passionate about critically engaging new technologies from a feminist perspective. The festival takes place biannually in Montreal, and its aim is to showcase cutting-edge projects produced by local and international artists. Each edition focuses on a specific theme and addresses urgent socio-political questions by pushing the boundaries of artistic and feminist practices.

The 12th edition of the festival will coincide with the 20th anniversary of Studio XX! To celebrate such a collective accomplishment, we launch our open call for proposals to local and international artists so that, together, we can continue to enact creative and critical feminist interventions in media arts and digital culture.

Current discussions around privacy are shaped by the role new technologies play in enabling modern forms of individual, corporate, and state surveillance. In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) operates numerous global surveillance programs targeting governments, corporations, and civilians in the United States and abroad, and thus what everyone suspected became official: that we—tech consumers—are watched, listened to, traced, and monitored in real time via our gadgets and personal computers. As we speak or type, programs of mass surveillance gather our personal data and mega-data. Further, Snowden's leaked classified information revealed that the problem goes beyond the NSA, linking Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States and the United Kingdom in an intelligence alliance known as the “five-eyes”...

Gaby Cepeda, an independent curator based in Lima, Peru, founded the Girls of the Internet Museum as a way to archive Internet works made by an international group of women. Controlled and personified, social media has become a haven for feminist exploration; artists are now carefully constructing the ways in which their bodies are presented and consumed. Cepeda discusses how these practices are reconstructing the self-as-performance, allowing artists to consider gender identity, politics, and emotional relationships through the openness of virtual communities...

This exhibition at ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, from 03 October 2015 to 01 May 2016, is based on the collaboration with a network of scientists, journalists, activists, and artists in some twenty countries around the world, and in cooperation with expert organizations such as the German PEN Center, the Chaos Computer Club, Reporters Without Borders, and such platforms as netzpolitik. org, digitalcourage.de, WikiLeaks, and others.

The exhibition’s aim is to expand public debate about the ever-present surveillance and censorship methods, which is an urgent priority not only due to constant new reports in the media, but especially because of the extensive obstruction of the investigation of these practices...

"It is not accidental that at a point in history when hierarchical power and manipulation have reached their most threatening proportions, the very concepts of hierarchy, power and manipulation come into question. The challenge to these concepts comes from a redsicovery of the importance of spontaneity - a rediscovery nourished by ecology, by a heightened conception of self-development, and by a new understanding of the revolutionary process in society.” Murray Bookchin. Post-scarcity and Anarchism (1968).

The rise of neo-liberalism as a hegemonic mode of discourse, infiltrates every aspect of our social lives. Its exponential growth has been helped by gate-keepers of top-down orientated alliances; holding key positions of power and considerable wealth and influence. Educational, collective and social institutions have been dismantled, especially community groups and organisations sharing values associated with social needs in the public realm. ...

Accepting cookies is a part of our digital life. If we said no, would the Internet still work? Let’s trace the economic origins of online tracking. By Upian, Arte, ONF & BR

Recognised Faces is an internet application that generates a daily image of a face from images found via google’s lists of top search terms. Facial features in the found images are identified, using facial recognition technologies usually reserved for mass surveillance, before being combined into an image of a new face. After being generated these faces are used as the personal avatar of Kristoffer Ørum on his website, on various social networks and anywhere else his image might be indexed and scanned for facial features by intelligence agencies, commercial agents or other interested parties.

By constructing new faces from parts of the most looked upon images on the internet Recognised Faces creates a snapshot of the flow of data collection and facial recognition that happens daily on the internet, thus utilising facial recognition to generate phantom faces that reflect how computers perceive us as vaguely recognisable patterns in an ocean of data.

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Projet de loi relatif au Renseignement, loi Renseignement, Surveillance de masse des citoyens, Légalisation de pratiques illégales, Pas de contrôle des services de renseignement...

Le projet de loi Renseignement contient deux articles qui permettent une interception de l'ensemble des données de tous les citoyens français en temps réel sur Internet, dans le but de faire tourner dessus des outils de détection des comportements déviants. Cette surveillance massive de l'ensemble de la population est inadmissible : c'est une pratique dangereuse pour la démocratie et les libertés d'expression, de réunion, de pensée, d'action.

Nous ne voulons pas d'une copie de la NSA en France !