limits of networks...
Dear all, Maybe I can take the opportunity to plug in to the running discussions by shamelessly plugging the announcement of the next transmediale festival which aims to deal exactly with the topics of networks, as it appeared here as a recurring common concern. https://2020.transmediale.de/festival-2020 I think its quite interesting how the thread on nettime being in a bad shape and the one Rachel O' Dwyer started on net-art is converging around questions that have to do with how the limits of networks have become more tangible today, technically as well as in the form of "network idealism". Molly Hankwitz wrote: > The question comes up more and more - where is the whole idea of networks > that was once? Answer: sorry, social media has everyone blissed out on > their own screen. > > The great debates that enlivened networks of the 90s, have become muddled > to the point that "networks" per se don't seem to carry much weight online > - now its the app, its the website - which don't always reflect a living > community of net-users as we know...or maybe we are imagining networks > differently than before and that does not help. Common interests which > drove the formulation of networks and network 'flows' seem to have been > replaced by something else. Who is the we of any network now... Rachel: > Can we still speak about ?tactical media? or ?the exploit?, and if not is > this because > > a) network activism has transformed so that these older descriptions no > longer accurately describe net art and ?hacktivist? practices, or > > b) these art practices have stayed much the same, but they are no longer > effective in the current political and economic context? I would not agree with David Garcia that these meta-discussions is a sign of the decline of nettime however, rather that the discussion of networked forms seems to be returning at the moment, maybe especially also on a list like nettime, because it seems as if it disappeared from the big "digitalisation" debates that are now anyway everywhere. (except for the breaking up of THE social network) Meanwhile, users are returning to smaller networked forms in the form of the fediverse or in other intimate constellations taking their cue from safe spaces and intersectional practices online, offline or rather in between. Maybe we need new ways of modeling networks also beyond the canonical Baran diagram of centralized, decentralized and distributed, along with nodocentric visualizations that have been so prevalent from the 1990's and basically up until today? best, Kristoffer # 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 # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Towards a Non-facebook (Pit Schultz)
Pit wrote: > Towards a Non-facebook > a pretext > > > The current facebook debate is a chance to get your act together and > get organized - just a little. Thanks for this call to action Pit, much needed in these times of inflated and often misinformed social media critique. As someone who never joined facebook in the first place, I can’t help wondering what then to do. Is a facebook user strike strictly for users, since we have frequently been told you cannot really be outside facebook whether you are indeed active on it or not. In other words, does suspending your account for a week really amount to a strike? Your article touches upon many of the blind spots and deficiencies of the current drive to create a more “ethical” and/or “transparent” digital society, i.e. the points about interoperability leading to great arguments about the need to change education and the referral to a possible deindividualization of the social media model. What I can’t help find both fascinating and slightly discomforting however is that you, as a long-time local radio activist and co-founder of this list, start out by so vehemently dismissing those who are engaged in imagining and sometimes designing the outside. Don’t get me wrong, I think one of the cornerstones of nettime and critical net culture has always been its resistance to the naive dreams of the cyberlibertarians and I think your suggestion here that critical art practice might operate a similar reality diversion pretty healthy, especially when regarded in the context of a larger “industry of critique” that starts to get absurd when you see it in connection with the rise of explicit cultural mechanisms (in organisations and at events) of disarming everything negative (techlash notwithstanding). But, the larger question I would like to ask here is if your critique then does not indeed dismiss artistic and much post-digital activist practice per se? If we have to give up imagining the outside altogether, why then also still have what you call “collective agencies of real resistance: running archives, sharing strange interests and hobbies, collecting and filtering what has been easily neglected or forgotten.” Would any of that even exist in a world which ceased imagining an outside to facebook or any other dominant mode of social interaction? To escape totalitarian thinking, one should not boil it down to two movements, one fighting against and one from within. Both and many more struggles have to be allowed to co-exist and continue to contradict each other from a truly “radical democratic point of view” (if we by that also mean agonistic). Posing a new universalism is catchy and seems attractive, but hampered by a nostalgia for a world that’s not possible to simplify like that any longer, without (again) committing severe violence, and we should probably rather look into what Povinelli has called “extimate existence” , considering entanglements and differences in order to create interoperability from there. So, please reformulate and help me strike against facebook also if I’m not already part of it. /Kristoffer # 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 # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Reflections on Florian Cramer & Angela Nagle, discussion
David Garcia wrote: > A questioner towards the end of the discussion asked if Cramer and Nagle > could talk more about affect and affective politics.. more about the > emergence of movements and how sub-cultural energies today mobilised. Which > the questioner added is ?also a question of power that is able to legitimise > these subcultural sentiments in ways that enable them to enter into the > political mainstream.. I?d like you to address the strategies, sentiments > within subcultural politics. It was a very good point but sadly it arose to > close to the end.. Perhaps we can take up this challenge here? Thanks to David for taking the time to transcribe and comment on this dense discussion. Together with Daphne Dragona, I was responsible for organising this and felt that the atmosphere during the event was one of great attention and sense of urgency in terms of the audience wanting to have more of a say. Due to time constraints and two very talkative speakers, this didn't happen as much as it should have but it's nice to see the discussion continuing here. Since I was the one asking the question David mentions at the end, I can't but to help to step in and elaborate on this further. While I agree that one should not ascribe intrinsically progressive values to subcultures, I think it is important to situate the rise of the academic study and idealisation of subcultures in a historical context. Adorno and Horkheimer in all glory but what the British culture studies approach did was to take pop culture seriously as a thrust against the idealisation of high culture. One might say that this was snobbish academic appropriation of popular and working class cultural movements - but today the impact of this can also be seen in how academia has become more accessible to many, where being in a subculture and researching it at the same time might even be a viable option. Also this question of being in a subculture needs to be better addressed as I felt that Florian and Angela were in their critique of the cultural studies take on subcultures, actually themselves committing the mistake of taking subcultures too literally, while in fact the Birmingham school and co. would not essentialize subcultures to the degree that I felt was being done here. As if a subculture does exist in almost a static way, easily recognized by its symbolic language and styles, rather than something that is always transitory and, especially in the digital age, can be plugged in and out to at will. This is for me where the affective aspect come in, as I believe there are much more subcultural sentiments being circulated today without people behind them assuming a 1:1 identity with them. But this doesn't make them harmless of course, and actually creates a public sphere even more prone to manipulation through those who can indeed legitimise certain views over others as well as ascribing power to a form of quantified affect, where opinions with more followers, more data etc increasingly looks like valid knowledge. To just start addressing some of the "challenge" that David mentioned... best, Kristoffer PS. David ends saying that this discussion is not posted prominently on the transmediale website: in fact it is not more or less prominently posted than any other event of the recent festival since we didn't yet publish anything on specific events or even yet publish the videos. so for now, the audio documentation is there in a database structure like all the other events. # 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 # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Reflections on Florian Cramer & Angela Nagle, discussion
David Garcia wrote: > A questioner towards the end of the discussion asked if Cramer and Nagle > could talk more about affect and affective politics.. more about the > emergence of movements and how sub-cultural energies today mobilised. Which > the questioner added is ?also a question of power that is able to legitimise > these subcultural sentiments in ways that enable them to enter into the > political mainstream.. I?d like you to address the strategies, sentiments > within subcultural politics. It was a very good point but sadly it arose to > close to the end.. Perhaps we can take up this challenge here? Thanks to David for taking the time to transcribe and comment on this dense discussion. Together with Daphne Dragona, I was responsible for organising this and felt that the atmosphere during the event was one of great attention and sense of urgency in terms of the audience wanting to have more of a say. Due to time constraints and two very talkative speakers, this didn't happen as much as it should have but it's nice to see the discussion continuing here. Since I was the one asking the question David mentions at the end, I can't but to help to step in and elaborate on this further. While I agree that one should not ascribe intrinsically progressive values to subcultures, I think it is important to situate the rise of the academic study and idealisation of subcultures in a historical context. Adorno and Horkheimer in all glory but what the British culture studies approach did was to take pop culture seriously as a thrust against the idealisation of high culture. One might say that this was snobbish academic appropriation of popular and working class cultural movements - but today the impact of this can also be seen in how academia has become more accessible to many, where being in a subculture and researching it at the same time might even be a viable option. Also this question of being in a subculture needs to be better addressed as I felt that Florian and Angela were in their critique of the cultural studies take on subcultures, actually themselves committing the mistake of taking subcultures too literally, while in fact the Birmingham school and co. would not essentialize subcultures to the degree that I felt was being done here. As if a subculture does exist in almost a static way, easily recognized by its symbolic language and styles, rather than something that is always transitory and, especially in the digital age, can be plugged in and out to at will. This is for me where the affective aspect come in, as I believe there are much more subcultural sentiments being circulated today without people behind them assuming a 1:1 identity with them. But this doesn't make them harmless of course, and actually creates a public sphere even more prone to manipulation through those who can indeed legitimise certain views over others as well as ascribing power to a form of quantified affect, where opinions with more followers, more data etc increasingly looks like valid knowledge. To just start addressing some of the "challenge" that David mentioned... best, Kristoffer PS. David ends saying that this discussion is not posted prominently on the transmediale website: in fact it is not more or less prominently posted than any other event of the recent festival since we didn't yet publish anything on specific events or even yet publish the videos. so for now, the audio documentation is there in a database structure like all the other events. # 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 # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Reflections on Florian Cramer & Angela Nagle, discussion
David Garcia wrote: > A questioner towards the end of the discussion asked if Cramer and Nagle > could talk more about affect and affective politics.. more about the > emergence of movements and how sub-cultural energies today mobilised. Which > the questioner added is ?also a question of power that is able to legitimise > these subcultural sentiments in ways that enable them to enter into the > political mainstream.. I?d like you to address the strategies, sentiments > within subcultural politics. It was a very good point but sadly it arose to > close to the end.. Perhaps we can take up this challenge here? Thanks to David for taking the time to transcribe and comment on this dense discussion. Together with Daphne Dragona, I was responsible for organising this and felt that the atmosphere during the event was one of great attention and sense of urgency in terms of the audience wanting to have more of a say. Due to time constraints and two very talkative speakers, this didn't happen as much as it should have but it's nice to see the discussion continuing here. Since I was the one asking the question David mentions at the end, I can't but to help to step in and elaborate on this further. While I agree that one should not ascribe intrinsically progressive values to subcultures, I think it is important to situate the rise of the academic study and idealisation of subcultures in a historical context. Adorno and Horkheimer in all glory but what the British culture studies approach did was to take pop culture seriously as a thrust against the idealisation of high culture. One might say that th is was snobbish academic appropriation of popular and working class cultural movements - but today the impact of this can also be seen in how academia has become more accessible to many, where being in a subculture and researching it at the same time might even be a viable option. Also this question of being in a subculture needs to be better addressed as I felt that Florian and Angela were in their critique of the cultural studies take on subcultures, actually themselves committing the mistake of taking subcultures too literally, while in fact the Birmingham school and co. would not essentialize subcultures to the degree that I felt was being done here. As if a subculture does exist in almost a static way, easily recognized by its symbolic language and styles, rather than something that is always transitory and, especially in the digital age, can be plugged in and out to at will. This is for me where the affective aspect come in, as I believe there are much more subcultural sentiments being circulated today without people behind them assuming a 1:1 identity with them. But this doesn't make them harmless of course, and actually creates a public sphere even more prone to manipulation through those who can indeed legitimise certain views over others as well as a scribing power to a form of quantified affect, where opinions with more followers, more data etc increasingly looks like valid knowledge. To just start addressing some of the "challenge" that David mentioned... best, Kristoffer PS. David ends saying that this discussion is not posted prominently on the transmediale website: in fact it is not more or less prominently posted than any other event of the recent festival since we didn't yet publish anything on specific events or even yet publish the videos. so for now, the audio documentation is there in a database structure like all the other events. # 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 # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Locating ArtScience
Dear Eric and all, Thanks for a really enjoyable discussion so far. Not long ago, I would skip over most ArtScience related material, because as Florian Cramer already pointed out, this seems to belong to another era and a particular lab-oriented approach that isn't up to scratch to the challenges of today. But in the past year or so, I had been wondering why Art & Science seems to be making a comeback and Eric's article is a timely response to this. The reason why I am under the impression that this "field" is surging back is simple - I surprisingly found that this year, all my transmediale related invitations to participate in a panel or give a talk were under an ArtScience umbrella. This is rather unusual for a festival that isn't overtly concerned with Art & Science and its relation to the legacy of Leonardo and artists that work within the natural or so called hard sciences. What I ended up doing at these talks was arguing for transversal approaches, across and beyond disciplines (much like Eric is advocating), the recognition of the value of the arts beyond advancing knowledge in linear ways (art does not have to be good, innovative) while still interacting with all sectors of society and the importance of including humanities based approaches into ArtScience. The latter point was made by Eric too and reiterated in the discussion with Gary Hall - and I can't stress how important this is as there seems to be a tremendous lack of critical theoretical discussions in many of these artscience gatherings. At the same time though, there is a doer's mentality in ArtScience which is refreshing in our current times, not to say that it is reactionary but rather that there is a positive outlook on hybridity and the possibility of making ArtScience out of that. This became evident to me at a meeting in Grenoble under the title "Future Collaborations between Art & Sciences and their Role for Europe" which seemed untypical as the participants were a mix of "softer" cultural institutions like transmediale and Schloss Solitude, EU politicians, science labs and big corporations. It was uneasy for sure, but there was a feeling of uncertainty of how to move this field further that could be productive. At least, it is important to intervene in this field as Eric suggests, since a lot of policy making and financial resources are being invested in it, an aspect which has not so much been brought up here yet. Just take the Horizon 2020 programmes which has set a new agenda for collaboration between art, technology and science on a European level and which dictates a very technology-centred view with clear quantifiable results. A few interesting projects have been able to slip through and we need to see much more tactical action and long-term strategies to influence this growing field. As Eric's post was initially coming from an institutional context, maybe there are other voices on the list who can share experiences from working "within" projects in this field and reflect on how it might be transforming? best, Kristoffer # 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 # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: ttip: digital respect and resistance
Dear Felix, Olia, Susanne and all, Thanks for your thoughtful responses. Picking up on Susanne Gerbers last point: > Is it not possible, that digital culture, or at least parts of it, in > the meantime has switched sides and belongs already more to the TTIP > creators? Then we have to rethink the whole context > and 'Berührungsangst' would mean something else. Maybe I should first clarify that this was a quickly written statement for a presentation of transmediale as a partner in the EMARE, media art residency exchange programme set up by Werkleitz, a fantastic long running media art organisation in Halle (and the village of Werkleitz). This exchange programme has shifting geographical focus but this year the partners came from Germany, Canada and Australia. So in this context, my aim was not to say that this type of exchange shares the same set of values underwriting agreements like TTIP but because of its international structure could have potential to form an important enclave in the resistance against this and the other agreements. It would of course be only one among many initiatives and not the most significant one, but I do see a lack of transnational coalitions opposing TTIP in the cultural sector as the debates at least when it relates to Germany and France seem to follow the usual protectionist lines of argument, where protecting cultural diversity (in the UNESCO sense) is foremost about protecting national cultures or European cultural heritage. I am not arguing against safeguarding particularities, but it seems to me that what has especially been built up in parts of the net culture / digital art spheres, perhaps through tele-presence in a positive sense, are transversal forms of thinking and practice, that yes, might seem simply to be contingent with the exploitative planetary networks of the "Three Big T's", but which are eventually underwritten by completely different values and goals. This is where Felix rightly points to the key issue of the feeling of powerlessness of the individual and specialized settings towards these immense meta-frameworks that seem to challenges everything at once. And yet we have known for a long time that even without these agreements, this is where the world is going and maybe it is time to accentuate the conflicts and differences within what seems to be one big picture or one big collect it all scheme. As I am pretty sure that even if as Olia pointed out, it's "Drones yesterday, Snowden today" (or rather the other way around), the engagement with these topics is not just a capitalisation from culture professionals of trending social and economic agendas, but also stemming from a genuine, however at times misinformed or naive, intention to change our perception, knowledge and agency in such issues. Many times, this is also a question of developing new vocabularies instead of trying to bridge the differences or find the common points of understanding, I think it is now far more relevant to find ways of making the different positions clear which would amount to an understanding of the meta-levels - this is what is needed to at all adress something like the regulation of the regulation and not become lost in the echo-chambers or opinion against opinion bubbles. best, Kristoffer # 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
ttip: digital respect and resistance
Dear old nettimers, I am not a particularly regular contributor here, but as long time lurker, occasional event announcer and artistic director of transmediale in Berlin, I would like to share with you a short statement that I prepared for my presentation at the Werkleitz Festival 2015 ".move ON" in Halle on October 10. As this day coincides with a big anti-TTIP demo in Berlin, I choose not to prepare the usual festival presentation but to offer some reflections on the troubling relation between the digital art and culture field to this and other free trade agreements currently in negotiation. My apologies for the somewhat raw, underresearched, possibly naive and spoken word like form of this text - I am just curious to see what kind of response it will evoke! Especially I am curious if the nettime community has anything to say about the supposed fear of dealing with TTIP within digital art and culture, well knowing of course that there is an assumed "field" here that might already be declared obsolete or for which there are many names and definitions. best, Kristoffer Gansing First of all I would like to say that I am extremely happy to be here among many respected colleagues and to enjoy the impressive programme of this year's move.on werkleitz festival. I and transmediale are very happy to have occasionally taken part in the different cross-border exchanges that Peter Zorn and his team have so impressively set up over the years. And I am very happy to have hosted the work of the artist Robyn Moody at the transmediale festival earlier this year and to see its finished iteration later here today. This said, I am painfully aware of the fact that while we are gathering here we are missing out on a manifestation going on in Berlin that deals critically with a completely different kind of cross-border exchange. I am talking about today's big demonstration against the TTIP ??? The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. And I am saying that I am painfully aware since I was really planning to join this demo and if not possible physically then at least by publishing a critical article that asks why it is that the digital art and culture scene has so far shown so little engagement in the debate of TTIP. This is paradoxical since it seems as if the area of digital culture is highly implicated in the scarce info we have on the ongoing secret negotiations. The little I have been able to read up on TTIP and similar current trade deals has led me to assume that digital art and culture has what one in German calls a ???ber??hrungsangst??? that is a kind of fearful respect towards critically engaging with this topic precisely because it is steeped in rhetorics and strategies of border-crossing, access, digital freedom and innovation. It would not be a new critique of our field that it exploits hype waves of technological development that are intimately connected to neoliberal agendas. But I think we are also all in agreement that we are trying to change such schemes from within and provide the space for artists, activists and other critical thinkers to formulate alternatives. The recent drive of media art to capitalise on the EU's interest in promoting innovation through funding collaboration between the technology sector and artists is a case in point ??? and it is yet to be seen if projects formulated in this framework will really be able to break out of the bubble of quantification and profit oriented conditions of production that are now being established. So where do actors in digital art and culture stand in relation TTIP? A cynical interpretation could be that in this field, we are already so accustomed to simultaneously adapt and bending the rules of changing economic and political agendas that there is a kind laissez-fair attitude ??? come whatever come and we will use it to our gain somehow. And especially regarding transnational trade agreements there seems to be a language at play that comes close to the border-crossing ideals of digital art and culture ??? BUT, I would argue that the actual practice associated with these ideals in the end are among the ones that could be most endangered by TTIP and that there is now an urgent need within digital culture to drop the ???ber??hrungsangst??? and formulate a critique of these free trade agreements and their post-digital brand of neoliberalism. But as I hinted at in the beginning, part of the problem is that we are always busy somewhere else. This might be both the biggest asset and curse of media art and digital culture : that it is always moving on. The next place, the next site, the next discourse, the next big trend. When is digital art and culture going to really grow up and deal with the here and now? How can you formulate a real alternative in the present when you are always too busy being tele-present? These questions haunts me on a daily basis as I try to balance my intensive working life of being the artist
nettime transmediale 2015 CAPTURE ALL Call for Works
Dear all, transmediale has just published the Call for Works announcing the transmediale 2015 festival. Looking forward to your contributions and any reflections on the theme which is included below. /Kristoffer Gansing, artistic director, transmediale. transmediale 2015 CAPTURE ALL Festival for Art Digital Culture, Berlin. 28.01 - 01.02 2015 Call For Works, Deadline 10 August, 2014 http://www.transmediale.de/content/transmediale-2015-capture-all THEMATIC FRAMEWORK: CAPTURE ALL In a society ruled by algorithms, data is always at play. The drive towards the quantification of everything means that we are all contributing to a state of permanent capture of life into data. As citizens, workers and players of the networks we (often involuntarily) double as sensors for bodies of global data collection, working for the potential extraction of value everywhere and increasing the productivity of everyday life. If work and leisure became mathematically manageable data units for the assembly line production model of industrial capitalism, today’s workers even offer their free time to the extent that it serves a form of unaware labour facilitated by playful technologies and game-like mechanics. Are there still modes of being that resist the imperative of digital capitalism to CAPTURE ALL or is there no option but to play along? If so, are there artistic strategies and speculative approaches that do not play this game of quantification by the numbers? What are the blind spots and gaps of relentless quantification and gamification that can be exploited in order to carve out new ways of living? Flash crashes caused by out of control algorithms, imprecise “precision strikes”, the unintended consequences of a badly interpreted meta-data, the biometrics of a dog applied to a human being, the mismatch of work and life: not only the productivity but also such evident dysfunctions of the CAPTURE ALL society originate in the constant algorithmic operation on data, in instant data-play and the illusion of boundless control. Playful and participatory structures are purposefully used to render personal information traceable, social relationships exploitable and behavioral patterns recognizable. The events of the most recent past instantly feed the datafied present and are used to predict a probable future in an endless interpretation loop which is the founding principle of a society of control hopelessly out of control. transmediale 2015 sets out to push against the limits of digital culture's pervasive logic of CAPTURE ALL and its quantification of life, work and play. We are looking for artistic works, critical media projects and speculative research that delimit modes of existence by operating in and exploiting the blind spots of a datafied society. There is always something in excess that bypasses normalization, even in the most integrated processes of capture. Following this idea, transmediale calls for artistic descriptions and actions that form pro-active responses to phenomena like gamification, quantification and algorithmic control and their ways of making the spheres of everyday life, work and play increasingly indistinguishable. We welcome proposals for action and (-de)constructive counter-action including miscalculation and disproportioning, overidentification and obfuscation, metamodeling and re-purposing, acceleration and exaggeration, de-gamification and counter-gamification. We are seeking responses that outsmart and outplay the logic of CAPTURE ALL and that organise more intimate modes of post-digital life, work and play. SUBMIT YOUR WORK transmediale 2015 will take place from January 28 to February 1 at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. The programme will feature a diversity of different types of work in a thematic exhibition as well as film and video screenings, workshops, performances, and a conference programme. transmediale is always interested in works exploring our complex relation to technology, be it through new or old media. Use our online submission form to submit your work. The final deadline for handing in your submission is 10 August 2014. Please read our conditions of entry closely before submitting your work. http://www.transmediale.de/content/transmediale-2015-capture-all -- Kristoffer Gansing – artistic director transmediale*/artdigitalculture* Klosterstr. 68, 10179 Berlin, Germany - tel +49 30 24749 769 - fax +49 30 24749 760, Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH, Amtsgericht Berlin Charlottenburg, HRB 41312 B, Stellv. Vorsitzende des Aufsichtsrates: Dr. Christa Juretzka,, Geschäftsführer Moritz van Dülmen http://www.transmediale.de/ # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime 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
nettime transmediale 2014 afterglow
Dear nettimers, It is that time of year again, transmediale festival is coming up at the end of the month, this month heading into and hopefully beyond the afterglow of digital culture. Accreditations for professionals and press ends on Jan 15. Read the programme announcement below and full details at www.transmediale.de Hope to see you there. /Kristoffer Gansing, artistic director, transmediale festival for art and digital culture, Berlin. transmediale 2014 afterglow, 29 Jan - 2 Feb 2014 ///The revolution is over. Welcome to the afterglow./// /// The digital revolution was a dinner party but its afterglow is not. The once utopian promises of high-definition audiovisuals, real-time electronic communication and infinite storage possibilities are just some of the digital culture perspectives that are now widely disseminated. At the same time as these phenomena are still shrouded in the glossy aesthetics of the digital, their tarnished appeal cannot be denied in a world where 'big data' is also the 'big brother' of mass surveillance and where the 'cloud' is made of the metals and minerals of the 'earth' on which data centers are built. Far from immaterial and neutral, our post-digital culture is one where tech is deeply embedded in the geophysical and geopolitical. This is evident at the significant 'other sites' of digital culture such as e-waste dumps, mines, mass-digitisation companies and security agencies. transmediale 2014 proposes the post-digital moment of 'afterglow' as a diagnosis of the current status of the digital hovering between 'trash and treasure'. afterglow conjures up the ambivalent state of digital culture, where what seems to remain from the digital revolution is a paradoxical nostalgia for the futuristic high-tech it once promised us but that is now crumbling in our hands. The challenge that this moment poses is how to use that state of post-digital culture between trash and treasure as a still not overdetermined space from which to invent new speculative thought and practice. Are there means of renewal in the excess, overflow and waste products of the digital afterglow? http://www.transmediale.de/content/afterglow ### Conference programme ### The conference of this year’s transmediale, curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli and Kristoffer Gansing in collaboration with Ryan Bishop, Jussi Parikka, Francesco Warbear Macarone Palmieri und Katrien Jacobs, takes afterglow as a metaphor for the present condition of digital culture, examining the geopolitical, infrastructural and bodily consequences of the excessive digitalisation that has taken place over the course of the last three decades. Central motifs are mass surveillance, excessive big data schemes, whistleblowing, the corrupt ecology of technological resources and the effects of digitalisation on identity and sexuality. Japanese artist Sputniko! will thematise technology’s impact on everyday life in a performative keynote, the panel The Chinese Dream: The Doctrine and the Sexy will feature a discussion about attitudes towards patriotism, surveillance culture and body politics in the Chinese sphere with Sufeng Song and recorded interventions by Ai Weiwei and Ai Xiaoming. Independent security analyst Jacob Appelbaum and documentary film director Laura Poitras reflect with artist and geograph Trevor Paglen on upcoming frontiers of action and awareness for hackers, activists and artists in the present context of geopolitical surveillance and control. Sean Cubitt and Denisa Kera will talk about the effects of electronic and synthetic waste on geological and biological bodies, Bill Binney and Annie Machon deal with the question how the ethics of cypherpunk, whistle-blowing and investigative journalism are evolving into a hybrid form of civic resistance. The conference programme is supported by the Federal Agency for Civic Education and one of its streams is presented in collaboration with the Winchester School of Art. Among the participant highlights are: Sputniko!, Laura Poitras, Trevor Paglen, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeremy Scahill, Douglas Coupland, Benjamin H. Bratton, Metahaven, James Bridle, Sean Cubitt, Olia Lialina, William Binney, Fabiane Borges, Salvatore Iaconesi, Geraldine Juarez, Denisa Kera, Khan, Annie Machon, Shaka McGlotten, Sufeng Song, recorded interventions by Ai Weiwei and Ai Xiaoming *** **KEYNOTES** *** Art as Evidence Participants: Trevor Paglen, Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras,Tatiana Bazzichelli (moderator) Location: Auditorium Thu, 30.1. 20:30h - 22:30h http://www.transmediale.de/content/keynote-art-as-evidence The Black Stack Participants
nettime transmediale 2013 BWPWAP
Dear nettimers old and new, I hope some of you are dropping by the transmediale festival next week. Have a look at an outline of the programme that I provided below! /Kristoffer Gansing, artistic director, transmediale. transmediale 2013 BWPWAP BACK WHEN Mobile phones were dumb. Letters traveled by pneumatic air. Tweeting was for birds. Users were chatting on the Minitel. ICQ beat IRC. Xerox challenged the Thermofax. YouTube was just another Web 2 start-up. Fax was the new Telex. You were calling up Bulletin Board Systems. Only university students were using facebooks. History had ended. We had nine planets. PLUTO WAS A PLANET. For its 26th edition, transmediale boldly goes BWPWAP – Back When Pluto Was a Planet. A net culture expression, BWPWAP is used for that which lies in the past or that possess an anachronistic character. In the context of transmediale, it does not mean entertaining nostalgia for the past. On the contrary, Pluto and its reclassification is taken as a metaphor for how quickly cultural imaginaries can change and be contested in a world underwritten by parallel developments. Adopting the BWPWAP expression in the form of a meme, transmediale 2013 recontextualizes cultural and technological forms through a travelling in time and space that creates moments of crisis in contemporary media culture. The program follows four threads: Users, Networks, Paper and Desire. The festival will look at what these topics meant BWPWAP, what they mean today and how they might develop in the future following the sense of alternate realities that lies at the core of the theme. These threads run transversely across the different festival events and by following them, visitors can experience constant shifts of modalities and perspectives. The Users thread explores the user as one of the most important figures occupying the 21st century cultural landscape: adopting a broad perspective which includes a historical look at user cultures' development in consumer society and cybernetics, as well as the changing roles of the user. In Networks we ask what it means when networks are BWPWAP, when (social) networks have become a pervasive part of daily life and have contributed in changing the way we create friendships and connections. The Paper thread traces the history of paper as a transcendent cultural form and its various artistic appropriations from Mail Art and visual poetry to electronic literature and beyond. In the Desire thread, we look at how critical reflections on sexuality and pornography can inform digital culture and politics of the present, by creating juxtapositions, decompositions, fragments and unexpected combinations as forms of queer expression. As with Pluto itself, these threads are “objects” in crisis. Their identity is not to be taken for granted in the post-digital age as is evident through the cultural, political and economical crises that they are all undergoing. These states of crisis are taken as opportunities for artistic intervention and reflection. In each thread, we search for new ways to engage with the histories, practices and futures of these familiar domains according to the time and place-shifting logic of BWPWAP: areas that we might have taken for granted until recently, but where we now need to learn from the past in order to intervene in the present and create new concepts for cultural practice. http://www.transmediale.de/bwpwap SNAPSHOTS OF THE PROGRAMME transmediale 2013 Exhibition programme: The Miseducation of Anya Major, curated by Jacob Lillemose. This exhibition is presented in three parts and openly investigates questions of knowledge, learning and education in relation to contemporary media, from the photocopier and paper shredder to computer games and the latest smartphone. Within this framework, the exhibition Tools of Distorted Creativity presents a series of contemporary works that expands the notions of software tools and their affordance of creativity in nonconformist, and even dysfunctional directions. Imaging with Machine Processes. The Generative Art of Sonia Landy Sheridan, is a survey exhibition of an artist who experimented with the machines of technological society as instruments of the philosophical mind and artistic imagination from inside educational institutions. Finally, Evil Media Distribution Centre by the duo YoHa (Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji) is an installation that takes its point of departure from the book Evil Media (2012) by Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey. Three Ongoing Networking Projects brought to you by reSource transmdedial culture, Berlin, curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli. Last August 2012, during the transmediale event reSource 002: Out of Place, Out of Time event, three installation projects were launched. Their ongoing production lasted six months, leading to transmediale 2013 BWPWAP, where the final results are shown and performed
