theory

SA VIRTUAL Group: 2nd streaming

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FORMATOLOGY

surveillance and self-surveillance are belonging to the actual setup of understanding and acting public space, intimacy and (tele-)communication, not only between individuals, but also between situations and “formats” of/for space.

The figurative idea of Surveillant Architectures coined by artist Julia Scher, is (maybe?) not just referring to the imperative that,
if you want to “understand” – explore, discuss, maybe practice – surveillance, then you have to “think on” or to “argue with” architecture/s,
but much more that there is a kind of (post historic?) perspective on the issues of public space, intimacy, questioning the privatization of spaces, the publicity of privacy, the defensible attitude of semi-public spaces, the generalized practice of “doing” public opinion – making opinions and preferences public -:
all this could be asked to declare itself as surveillance-related, in a surveillant perspective.

VIRTUAL_GROUP is inviting you to participate in the upcoming broadcast

TUE NOV 30th at 18 CET (17UTC)
WED DEC 1st at 11 CET (10 UTC)

http://www.livestream.com/virtual_group

Surveillance, Performance and New Media Art

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Vol 7, No 2 (2010)
Surveillance, Performance and New Media Art

The relationship between the visual arts and surveillance has been explored through large scale exhibitions (CTRL:Space, ZKM), and texts such as Loving Big Brother (McGrath, 2004) have introduced questions of performance and performativity into the surveillance debate. However, as the technological possibilities available to artists grow, and the social impact of surveillance is increasingly recognized, there is a need for a thorough examination of the uses of surveillance in the visual arts, particularly in the genres of new media and performance art, where issues regarding technological engagement and embodiment come to the fore. This special issue of Surveillance & Society presents papers and works that examine the complexities of surveillance in new media and performance art.

http://surveillance-and-society.org/ojs/index.php/journal/issue/view/Performance/showToc

Call For Papers

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Sixth International Summer School
organised jointly by the EU FP7 project PrimeLife
and the IFIP Working Groups 9.2, 9.6/11.7 11.4, 11.6
Privacy and Identity Management for Life (PrimeLife/IFIP Summer School 2010)
to be held in Helsingborg, Sweden, 2nd – 6th August 2010
in cooperation with the EU FP7 project ETICA
http://www.cs.kau.se/IFIP-summerschool/

After the success of the 2009 PrimeLife/IFIP Summer School, the European project PrimeLife and IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing, Working Groups 9.2, 9.6/11.7 11.4, 11.6) will continue their joint cooperation. This year they will hold an International Summer School on the topic of Privacy and Identity Management for Emerging Internet Applications throughout a Person’s Lifetime.

Emerging Internet Applications, such as Web 2.0 applications and cloud computing, increasingly pose privacy dilemmas. When they communicate over the Internet, individuals leave trails of personal data which may be stored for many years to come. In recent years, social network sites, where users tend to disclose very intimate personal details about their personal, social, and professional lives, have caused serious privacy concerns. The collaborative character of the Internet enables anyone to compose services and distribute information. Due to the low costs and technical advances of storage technologies, masses of personal data can easily be stored. Once disclosed, this data may be retained forever and be removed with difficulty. It has become hard for individuals to manage and control the release and use of information that concerns them. They may particularly find it difficult to eliminate outdated or unwanted personal information.

These developments raise substantial new challenges for personal privacy at the technical, social, ethical, regulatory, and legal levels:

  • How can privacy be protected in emerging Internet applications such as collaborative scenarios and virtual communities?
  • What frameworks and tools could be used to gain, regain and maintain informational self-determination and lifelong privacy?

Both IFIP, PrimeLife and ETICA take a holistic approach to technology and support interdisciplinary exchange. In particular, participants’ contributions that combine technical, legal, regulatory, socio-economic, ethical, philosophical, or psychological perspectives are welcome.
We are especially inviting contributions from students who are at the stage of preparing either masters’ or doctoral theses qualifications. The school is interactive in character, and is composed of keynote lectures and seminars, tutorials and workshops with PhD student presentations. The principle is to encourage young academic and industry entrants to the privacy and identity management world to share their own ideas and to build up a collegial relationship with others. Students that actively participate, in particular those who present a paper, can receive a course certificate which awards 3 ECTS at the PhD level. The certificate can certify the topic of the contributed paper to demonstrate its relation or non-relation to the student’s masters’/PhD thesis.

Related European, national, or regional/community research projects are also very welcome to present papers or to organise workshops as part of the Summer School.

A special one-day stream within the Summer School, to which abstracts/papers can be submitted directly, will be organised by the EU FP7 project ETICA on privacy and related ethical issues that arise from emerging information and communication technologies.

\BOOK\ byproducts: On the Excess of Embedded Art Practices

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byproduct examines artist’s projects whose artfulness lies in building micro-worlds within other non- artworld systems. While parasitically reliant on the socioeconomic structure and symbolic order of other dominant systems, these artworks ­ or “byproducts” — exploit loopholes, surpluses, and exceptions in order to affirm individual agency and complicate the mechanisms of their dominant “host.” As pivots or turning points between art and other sectors, these works function as carriers for meaning across disciplines.

While responding to 20th century precedents that investigate the relationship between artists and industry, ‘Byproducts’ suggests these outlines and vocabulary for evaluating relevant analytic criteria such as the outcome, duration, retention of a critical voice, assimilation or reconciliation, etc. As a book responding to the emergent genre of ‘interventionism’ in contemporary artists’ practices, byproducts shifts focus away from the artist’s singular, anarchic gesture and instead towards the integration of art into everyday life.

read more:

http://www.rev-it.org/projects/byproducts.htm

Coco Fusco at MC

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http://www.afterall.org/online/coco.fusco.at.mc

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Coco Fusco’s recent exhibit at MC, Los Angeles (2006) included the photographic series Bare Life Study #1, a fictional military interrogation training manual for women, an enigmatic presentation of real manuals on a desk, and in an adjoining room, the 59-minute video Operation Atropos. The show explored the weaponization of female sexuality by the US military that was exposed by the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prisoner abuse scandals.

read more!

MIT wins $40,000 prize in nationwide balloon-hunt contest

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http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/05/darpa.balloon.challenge/index.html

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(CNN) — A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won $40,000 in a high-tech scavenger hunt on Saturday by discovering the location of 10 red weather balloons.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced that the MIT team was the first group in the contest to report the latitude and longitude coordinates of all 10 balloons, which were scattered across the United States.

DARPA is the U.S. military’s research arm. Saturday’s challenge is the latest in a series that the agency has hosted since 2004.

This contest was designed to test the way social networking and lesser-known Web-based techniques can help accomplish a large-scale, time-critical task.

read more…

Art and Its Cultural Contradictions, Joshua Decter

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 http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.22/art.and.the.cultural.contradictions.of.urban.regeneration.social.justice.and.sustainability

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What is at stake when artists, architects, curators, organisers and other cultural producers facilitate bricks-and-mortar change, on the ground in cities, with citizens, communities and institutions? How do we test the interrelationships between the practices of artists and urban policy makers? What is the metric that we might utilise to determine effectiveness? And what do we mean by effectiveness? Critical effect? (Or, for that matter, critical affect?) The putatively emancipatory outcome generated by some kind of new situational knowledge? Or, is it a question of generating ambiguity, per se, as a means of problematising hegemonic political, economic and cultural formations?

read more…

DICTIONARY OF WAR

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http://dictionaryofwar.org/concepts/

DICTIONARY OF WAR is a collaborative platform for creating 100 concepts on the issue of war, to be invented, arranged and presented by scientists, artists, theorists and activists at four public, two-day events in Frankfurt, Munich, Graz and Berlin. The aim is to create key concepts that either play a significant role in current discussions of war, have so far been neglected, or have yet to be created.

DICTIONARY OF WAR is about polemics in various respects: It seeks confrontation with a reality that is characterised by the concealment of power relations the more that one talks about war and peace. But it is also about finding out to what extent war may function as an “analyzer of power relations” that constitutes current changes.

Changes that have been producing ever new wordings: The new war, post-modern war, global war, immanent war – all sorts of labels that indicate that the juridical model of sovereignty would seem to have had its day: war as an armed confrontation between sovereign nation states is a thing of the past.

While this still refers to conflict between different interest groups that are defined by the degree of their intensity and extension, unlike in the past war serves to regulate rather than destroy or renew existing power relations.

War is a “constitutive form of a new order” that no longer knows an inside or outside, that not only destroys but also produces life. In this new world order there is no difference between war and non-war: war is perpetual and everywhere.

So like so many other things these days, war too seems to be subject to a de- and re-regulation process that radically challenges old certainties and replaces them with new premises that shall not be questioned. DICTIONARY OF WAR sets out to oppose war and, at the same time, calls for “desertion” from a war of words in which facts are created with such force in their communication and propaganda that they can no longer be challenged.

The aim of DICTIONARY OF WAR is to make the creation or revaluation of concepts transparent into more or less open processes in which we can and need to intervene; at the same time, the aim is to develop models that redefine the creation of concepts on the basis not of interdisciplinary but rather undisciplined, not co-operative but rather collaborative processes.

“At least, when we create concepts, we are doing something.” The idea of DICTIONARY OF WAR, then, begins by referring to the theory of creating concepts proposed by Deleuze and Guattari: Concepts must be invented, created, produced; concepts refer to problems without which they would be meaningless. It is not about definitions, anecdotes, original opinions or entertainment, but rather about developing the tools with which to attain new ideas.

The concepts are created by conceptual personae, who are not identical to the author, philosopher, artist self, but rather testify to a third person beneath or beside. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “we do not do something by saying it but produce movement by thinking it, through the intermediary of a conceptual persona”.

DICTIONARY OF WAR is not a book in the proper sense. It is not about texts, deadlines or editing but about performativity. The concepts are introduced in alphabetical order by their conceptual personae in twenty-minute presentations.

There are no restrictions with regard to format. DICTIONARY OF WAR will be composed of lectures, choreographies, films, slide shows, readings or whatever format authors, actors, organisers and conceptual personae choose to use.

Finally, DICTIONARY OF WAR may well be a kind of war machine itself: the concepts are not intended to be deployed as means of control that regulate meanings, but which rather activate developments and processes and evoke events. “To draw speech to oneself and bring something incomprehensible into the world.” (Kleist)