about Black Boxes, hiding and the growing demand for transparency

Posted by Christian

Sascha Lobo talking about how politics, the media and the economy used to be ‘black boxes’, simply because of the high costs of communicating details about their inner workings. Now with the Internet and cheap communication, the trade secret becomes the exception, rather than the rule. People want to know why and how things get decided.

http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/0,1518,811007,00.html

(In German)

I feel that trend, too. Funny how hard it is to resist the urge to disclose the references and  sources of your art works. Now with art I’d argue that often it’s better to hide the strings of your puppets. Or what do you think?

Call for papers: TRANSDICIPLINARY IMAGING

Posted by Christian

CFP: The Second International Conference on TRANSDICIPLINARY IMAGING at the Intersections between Art, Science and Culture

Takes place on 22 * 23, June at Victorian College of the Arts, Federation Hall, Grant Street, Southbank, Melbourne 3006 Call for papers: Interference strategies for art Deadline for Abstracts: March 30, 2012

The Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference seeks papers that explore the theme of *Interference* within practices of contemporary image making. Today we*re saturated with images from all disciplines, whether it*s the creation of *beautiful visualisations* for science, the torrent of images uploaded to social media services like Flickr, or the billions of queries made to vast visual data archives such as Google Images. These machinic interpretations of the visual and sensorial experience of the world are producing a new spectacle of media pollution. Machines are in many ways the new artists.

The notion of *Interference* is posed here as an antagonism between production and seduction, as a redirection of affect, or as an untapped potential for repositioning artistic critique. Maybe art doesn*t have to work as a wave that displaces or reinforces the standardized protocols of data/messages, but can instead function as a kind of signal that disrupts and challenges perceptions. *Interference* can stand as a mediating incantation that might create a layer between the constructed image of the *everyday* given to us by science, technological social networks and the means of its construction.

The Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference wants papers that ask:

· Can art interfere with the chaotic storms of data visualization and information processing, or is it merely eulogizing contemporary media?

· Can we think of *interference* as a key tactic for the contemporary image in disrupting and critiquing the continual flood of constructed imagery?

· Are contemporary forms and strategies of interference the same as historical ones? What kinds of similarities and differences exist?

The conference will explore areasrelated to: Painting, Drawing, Film, Video, Photography, Computer visualization, Real-time imaging, Intelligent systems, Image Science.
Participants are asked to address at least one the following areas in
their abstract: –
* Expanded image
* Remediated image
* Hypermediacy
* Expanded film
* Imaging science
* Computer Vision
* Networked Image
* Immersion

Conference chairs:
Professor Su BAKER Associate Professor Paul THOMAS
Conference Committee
Brad BUCKLEY :: Brogan BUNT :: Ted COLLESS :: Vince DZIEKAN :: Donal FITZPATRICK :: Petra GEMEINBOECK:: JulianGODDARD :: Ross HARLEY :: Martyn JOLLY :: Leon MARVELL :: Anna MUNSTER :: Daniel MAFE :: Darren TOFTS ::

Conference Partners
National Institute of Experimental Art, College of Fine Art, University of New South Wales; Victorian College of Art, University of Melbourne,.

Conference Sponsors
Australian National University, CurtinUniversity, Deakin University; Monash University; Queensland College of Art, Gold Coast Griffith University; Queensland University of Technology, RMIT University, Swinburne University; University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Technology Sydney, University of Wollongong.

http://blogs.unsw.edu.au/tiic/

facial recognition technology

Posted by Christian

Face Recognition and Privacy 

Face Detection  Face Detection

Face matching Face matching

Face identification Face identification

Identity verification Identity verification

all from http://tagmenot.info/content/face-recognition-and-privacy

Detection and Analysis of Objects and Faces

advertising: “The Nikon S60. Detects up to 12 faces.” – count them…

http://www.rachelhulin.com/blog/2009/11/the-nikon-s60-detects-up-to-12-faces.html

Real-time facial expression analysis, take 2

Wikileaks targeting surveillance companies

Posted by Christian

There’s a new round of Wikileaks disclosures. Hurray! This time they are revealing internal documents from surveillance companies from around the world. If you want to know what’s possible, and where to get it from (if you have some spare change), check out http://wikileaks.org/the-spyfiles.html

As a starting point, you might want to have a look at what a local company, DigiTask, the makers of the much maligned and ridiculed Staatstrojaner (see our post from October 11) have on offer. I like the look of the WiFi interceptor! http://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/list/company-name/digitask.html

P.S. wow, this is a lot of information. Haven’t heard that term before: “Offensive Security”. Used as a euphemism for actively intruding into a system in order to insert a trojan/spyware.