Legal updates, Award, Exhibitions & More – Face to Facebook Newsletter
Press Release,
September 7th, 2011. Linz.
Face to Facebook
http://www.face-to-facebook.net
Stealing 1 million Facebook profiles, filtering them with
face-recognition software and posting them without user authorization
on a custom-made dating website, sorted by the characteristics of
their facial expressions.
A project by Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico.
The awesome news:
The Face to Facebook project won a prestigious Award of Distinction at
Prix Ars Electronica 2011 in the "Interactive Art" category.
Furthermore the work was also on display in the related Cyberarts 2011
exhibition, which took place at the OK Centrum, in Linz (Austria).
Face to Facebook presentation, September 5, Prix Ars Electronica Forum 2011:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZKW0ArCmmk
Face to Facebook installation, "Cyberarts 2011" exhibition, OK Center:
http://www.face-to-facebook.net/face-to-facebook/face-to-facebook_ars.php
Legal update (new downloadable files):
We have published the entire legal correspondence between our lawyer
and Facebook's legal team so far:
http://www.face-to-facebook.net/legal.php
September 5th is our response to the allegations contained in
Facebook's letter of April 7th. Our lawyer answered all their
questions precisely, pointing out Facebook's vulnerability (the
website did not have any anti-scraping protection for years), the
inconsistency of the accusations of criminal violations (we didn't
break security measures) and our right to document our art project on
the website face-to-facebook.net.
The letter ends: "Moreover, given the recent controversy and questions
regarding the legality of Facebook's own "facial recognition" software
("Facebook 'Face Recognition' Feature Draws Privacy Scrutiny",
Bloomberg News, July 8 2011), we are surprised that Facebook would
continue to aggressively pursue a nonprofit conceptual art project
that illustrated the risks of sharing data on social networking
websites and wrapped up long ago."
The social experiment (new documents):
We published the personal reactions that we have received so far. The
anonymous reactions were obtained through contact forms on the
lovely-faces.comand face-to-facebook.net websites. They included
responses from a variety of people; some upset, some confused and some
very enthusiastic. Check them out here:
http://www.face-to-facebook.net/social_experiment.php
The Global Mass Media Hack Performance (new downloadable files):
The almost overwhelming press reactions have been archived in the form
of screenshots. The whole archive of over one thousand global media
reviews (still yet to be completed) can be downloaded from:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1527685/face-to-facebook/f2f_press_coverage_screenshots.zip
Exhibitions and lectures:
In the next months we have the following lectures scheduled:
* 28 September, Rewire Conference, lecture, Liverpool - UK
* 13 October, Unsound Festival, lecture, Krakow - Poland
* 5-9 December, Psychoeconomy!, lecture, Seville, Spain
In the last few months Face to Facebook was included in seven
exhibitions and we made ten presentations around Europe and beyond.
Here are some of the installation pictures:
* Origin at Ars Electronica Festival 2011 in Linz:
http://www.face-to-facebook.net/face-to-facebook/face-to-facebook_ars.php
* REALITYFLOWHACKED at Aksioma Project Space in Ljubljana:
http://www.face-to-facebook.net/face-to-facebook/face-to-facebook_lub.php
* ENTER | DATAPOLIS at 5th Art|tech Biennale in Prague:
http://www.face-to-facebook.net/face-to-facebook/face-to-facebook_enter.php
* Chilling Effects at Tetem in Enschede:
http://www.face-to-facebook.net/face-to-facebook/face-to-facebook_tetem.php
* File PAI Festival 2011 in Sao Paulo:
http://www.face-to-facebook.net/face-to-facebook/face-to-facebook_file.php
* Data cuerpos y retratos compartidos at De Centro Fundación Telefónica in Lima:
http://www.face-to-facebook.net/face-to-facebook/face-to-facebook_lima.php
* RESPONSE:ABILITY at Transmediale Festival 2011 in Berlin:
http://www.face-to-facebook.net/face-to-facebook/face-to-facebook_tm.php
Thanks for your attention.
Paolo & Alessandro
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The Washington Declaration on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest
For those interested, the Declaration is open for endorsement. http://infojustice.org/washington-declaration There is still time to claim a coveted spot in the top 500. Cheers, Joe Joe Karaganis Vice President The American Assembly # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
EU extends music copyright for another 20 years
[What Mickey Mouse is to the US, Beatles are to Europe..] EU regulators vote to extend music copyright for another 20 years By Mark Brown 08 September 11 http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-09/08/eu-copyright-extension EU regulators in Brussels have voted to approve a controversial directive that would see musicians retain copyright over their sound recordings for a further 20 years -- a move that appeases ageing rock legends, but has plenty of opposition elsewhere. Currently, as the UK's Intellectual Property Office explains, "if a song is recorded then copyright in this sound recording lasts for 50 years from the end of the year in which it was made." Record labels and musicians have lobbied to extend this to 70 (or, in some cases, 95) years. This doesn't affect composers, though. Those who write the music retain copyright for as long as they live and a further 70 years beyond that -- the same as authors, film directors and screenwriters. The proposed extension is sometimes called the "Cliff Richard Law" or "The Beatles Extension", because both 60s-era artists are seeing the copyright on their recordings expire at the moment and both Cliff Richard and Paul McCartney have campaigned for copyright term extensions. The Who singer Roger Daltry -- another campaigner for term extensions -- told BBC News in 2007 that thousands of artists had "no pensions and rely on royalties," and "they are not asking for a handout, just a fair reward for their creative endeavours." But a government-backed, independent review of copyright doesn't agree. A 2006 Gowers Review of Intellectual Property said, "The European Commission should retain the length of protection on sound recordings and performers' rights at 50 years" In its conclusion, the review says, "it is our view that a term extension will likely result in a net loss to UK society as a whole", arguing that while retrospective extensions would line the pockets of the largest record producers, money to individual performers would be minimal and the cost to the consumer would be massive. But that report has mattered little, as regulators in the EU have given the thumbs up to extending copyright terms to 70 years. On 12 September 2011, a Council of Ministers will have the final say and if they rubber-stamp the changes, member states will be required to write them into law by 2014. And that means no public domain Beatles works for us to mash up on YouTube for another two decades. Damn. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Out of Ink | Interview with Freek Lomme, director of Onomatopee
«Nowadays artistic practice should not be a modernistic practice, it shouldn’t be a feticism on matter and form which respond to previous matter and form. It should deal with actual cultural production. We try to produce culture progressively.» http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/outofink/?p=399 -- Silvio Lorusso - via Cassano n.6 70022 Altamura (Bari) 338.73.78.059 silvioloru...@gmail.com http://www.silviolorusso.com/ # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Help us launch the Yes Lab! Support our Kickstarter campaign
Please support the Yes Lab! Dear Friends, The Yes Men need your help. For years, we’ve been tossing our little buckets of water on the blazes of social injustice. Last year, we decided to form a bucket brigade: a system (we’re calling it the Yes Lab) to help others do the kind of funny, headline-grabbing actions we’re known for. It worked. In its embryonic first year, the Yes Lab helped launch nearly a dozen activist media campaigns (see below), garnering a total of 4.5 metric tons of media hype. It even attracted threatening legal letters (frames not included) from five coal companies, one oil transport company, one utility, France, and GE! (Seriously, GE, no one meant to knock $3.5 billion off your share price. But no one’s sorry, either.) Given this proof of concept, the Yes Lab is now (almost) ready for prime time. It’s got a brand-new home at New York University, complete with plenty of space, a big supportive crew, lots of eager collaborators, and a structure that will let it tackle five or so projects at once. (If you’re in New York, come to our launch Sept. 14 and see how you can get involved!) It’s also got a lovely new website that will soon have a number of fancy tools to help hundreds more carry out or join up with Yes Lab projects. There’s only one hitch. We’ve got the venue, the participants, and (soon) the tools. But we’re short on cash for the projects themselves— which, of course, are the entire point of the Yes Lab. That’s why today, we’re asking for $10,000 on Kickstarter, to hire project managers and cover expenses for projects that don’t have other funding. It's all the Yes Lab needs to become a fully-functioning mischief machine. OK, you got the point of this email: the Yes Lab needs money. So here, without further ado, is a summary of last year's mischief, accomplished by just a few dozen folks. Imagine what hundreds will be able to do! General Electric Short-Circuited Activists US Uncut, with a little help from the Yes Lab, sent out a press release announcing that General Electric would repay the $3.2 billion tax credit they received last year despite massive profits. The announcement was momentarily picked up as true by the AP, and the market, unable to leave a good deed unpunished, responded by knocking $3.5 billion off GE’s share price. The result was massive, enlightening coverage of GE’s tax-cheating ways on everything from local TV to CNN. What the heck is an Asthmaze? A small group of activists wondered how a big coal company might address the fact that coal causes childhood asthma. The result: “Coal Cares,” a faux greenwashing campaign in which Peabody Coal tried to “make asthma cool” with free themed inhalers to kids living within 200 miles of a coal plant. The site, taken as real by many, quickly went massively viral, which didn’t amuse Peabody one bit but did help publicize coal as a major public health issue. And as it happened, in the week following the launch of Coal Cares, a real-life attempt by the coal industry to mislead children was defeated by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. Hooray! Beat Up On Chevron? We Agree. Chevron decided to launch a $90 million greenwashing campaign with a street-art aesthetic, and was stupid enough to approach street artists for help. One of them, Cesar Maxit, promptly leaked Chevron’s plans to Amazon Watch. The Yes Lab helped Amazon Watch and Rainforest Action Network (RAN) release a much more honest version of Chevron’s campaign just hours ahead of the “real” McCoy, generating a deluge of media coverage. Hundreds of user submissions and some amazing videos from FunnyOrDie further derailed Chevron’s $90 million lie, infuriating Chevron even more—though not quite as much as the $18 billion judgment against them in Ecuador, which Chevron has vowed never to pay. The fight goes on. Coal Burns Wealthy Neighborhood. Neighbors Nonplussed. Students from Columbia College in Chicago came together with Greenpeace and the Yes Lab to create the illusion that a new coal plant was planned in their city—but that instead of going in a poor neighborhood (like the two coal plants that already exist in Chicago), this one would be built in a rich one. The plans got a rise out of residents and the media, and helped focus attention on Chicago’s much- needed Clean Power Ordinance. Canada was the victim of two Yes-Lab-assisted actions, both targeting the Alberta Tar Sands, the England-sized mess that has made Canada the worst per-capita carbon emitter on earth. Hair Clogs Pipeline In the first Canadian action, a group of activists had Enbridge—who are aiming to build a massive pipeline from the Alberta Tar Sands through pristine wilderness to the British Columbia coast—announce “My Hair Cares,” a crackpot plan to sop up inevitable spills along the pipeline route with the hair of volunteers. The result
Re: Artreview: Important message regarding (the censorship of) user content
I have started a petition about this to gauge interest and if significant enough present to Artreview. If you are a member of the Artreview community, use the site, read the magazine or feel that this is yet another example of creative expression suppressed online then please sign the petition here: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/artreview-isp-censorship/ and forward to lists, family, friends, colleagues etc. Garrett On 6 Sep 2011, at 23:59, Vera Frenkel wrote: >To those in charge at ArtReview.com, > >This is to say I agree with Garrett Lynch's comments. I hope that >your investigation of the complaints will result in a robust defense >of the artists' rights to choose their modes of expression and that >unless the works involved are clearly racist or vicious in some >contagious way, that you protect your constituency. > >Vera Frenkel _ garr...@asquare.org http://www.asquare.org/ http://www.asquare.org/networkresearch/ # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
