Media Mutandis - a NODE.London Reader - Art

Future Wireless: practical.discourse.creative • L.Sykes

Mon, 20 Feb 2006 17:33:41 +0000

by Lewis Sykes

Overview
Wireless technologies have changed the world and continue to do so at an unprecedented rate. But as we embrace these technologies, we also need to ask how are they changing our personal and social spaces? Do we really want mobile phone calls on commercial flights – or is ‘always-on’ culture making us wireless wage slaves? Who owns the wireless world and how can we truly realise its creative potential beyond the realms of corporate culture? Has wireless technology liberated communication or has it simply revealed a darker, more dysfunctional side to our natures? What can users and practitioners do to take control of the airwaves and shape and colour their own future? These are just some of the global issues, which Future Wireless addressed – not just through live debate – but also through practical demonstration, workshops and unique artist interventions.

Future Wireless Introduction • Dr. R.Barbrook

Sun, 19 Feb 2006 17:41:36 +0000

by Dr. Richard Barbrook

“It is possible to be enthusiastic about contextualised use of new technologies while being critical of technological progress ideology that still so thoroughly surrounds even critical techno-cultures”.
Tapio Mäkelä

Open Congress - Introduction • M.A.Francis

Sat, 18 Feb 2006 18:21:54 +0000

by Mary Anne Francis

Open Congress and its questions
As its title indicates, this section is concerned with an event at Tate Britain, Open Congress, which took place across two days in October 2005 and was organized by the Critical Practice Research Cluster at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. It addressed the possibility of taking the rapidly expanding phenomenon of Free/Libre [and] Open Source Software (FLOSS) and seeing how its methods could apply to art especially, and cultural production more generally. Whereas FLOSS refers to computer programmes/codes that are freely available for anyone to copy, improve and redistribute, we wanted to explore whether and how the ‘transport’ of FLOSS to cultural production would challenge the ruling paradigms of cultural production. Clearly, the enquiry would centrally engage issues of authorship or creativity, along with issues of the ownership of art. But questions of how a FLOSS (Art) practice affects knowledge (what is known and who knows) and governance (who rules, or wields power and how) were also crucial topics. Indeed, the themes of ‘creativity’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘governance’ organized the Congress’ concurrent strands, while plenary sessions addressed topics that cut across all three.

Future Wireless Vision • C.Benesch

Sat, 18 Feb 2006 11:51:38 +0000

by Christian Benesch

Far from just a long awaited relief from endless troubles with cabling, "wireless" has become a synonym for independence. A term that not only describes the new networks that are becoming so popular, but also devices that can leave their base and be the permanent companion of the owner. They set him free of many prior restrictions. They let him move. They are there when needed to provide their calendars, task lists or the oc

Towards a Human-centric Communication • D.Choi

Fri, 17 Feb 2006 17:31:08 +0000

by Dooeun Choi

Wireless technology lets us be connected anywhere and anytime. So we can expect that a wireless future will bring much more ‘ubiquitous’ connectedness. However, a single node can only manage a limited number of branches, so there should be intermediate nodes that vary in terms of quantity and quality. Therefore the important issue is to whom and what we would like to be connected. The utopia of a wireless future might come if we can figure out how we can relate with other valuable nodes and classify them as ‘personal’ cases.

The Search for Spectrum • P.Cochrane

Thu, 16 Feb 2006 11:53:40 +0000

by Peter Cochrane

Peter Cochrane participated in the Cybersalon & Open Spectrum UK conference, FUTURE WIRELESS: practical.discourse.creative,at the Science Museum's Dana Centre, London, October 4 2005. The following article presents ideas aired in Peter Cochrane's contribution to the evening panel discussion, Wireless Horizons:

The Search for Spectrum
Peter Cochrane's Blog, silicon.com, Monday October 10 2005
Written at Chatham House, London. Copy dispatched via Wi-fi from a London coffee shop.

Future Wireless Vision • C.Condorelli, B.Gibson

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 17:27:45 +0000

by Celine Condorelli and Beatrice Gibson, taxi_onomy

Our vision of a wireless future is dystopic. Being constantly connected means you are forced to simultaneously be doing several things at once, and we see this as a fundamental problem. A world in which we cease to process because we are swamped by the varying and multiple trajectories of information means, in fact, that we are increasingly distracted by our own technology, and that we cannot escape our own data. We become in essence the victims of an economy of distraction.

A Wireless Future • S.Drakopoulou

Tue, 14 Feb 2006 11:50:37 +0000

by Sophia Drakopoulou

A new kind of social space is created out of the transmission and reception of data between mobile phone users. A private communicational space arising from the city's striated space, a social space born out of a new telecommunications technology. This virtual but real communicational space can be thought as a subversive space, a decentralised network where users generate and exchange their own data, take pictures, make phone calls and access the internet.

My research explores the creation and appropriation of this space by its users and investigates a broadcasting model where people will be able to send their text and other multi-media elements and display them onto designated local public screens.

Future Wireless Vision • R.Horvitz

Mon, 13 Feb 2006 11:00:48 +0000

by Robert Horvitz

“Open Spectrum” is based on the realisation that technology can reduce or even eliminate the need for governments to micro-manage wireless communication. In different contexts it can be viewed as:

Future Wireless Vision • A.Hyde

Sun, 12 Feb 2006 11:12:16 +0000

by Adam Hyde

Wireless began its life as a synonym for radio. However, now the two are becoming cousins, related by a common physical phenomenon but also with distinct emergent identities.

Wireless Future Issues • G.Lane

Sat, 11 Feb 2006 11:13:37 +0000

by Giles Lane

The focus on technology deployments must go hand in hand with sensitive community development work, otherwise there is a danger that only the ‘early adopters’ and people most like those excited by the technologies will participate and this will exacerbate a ‘digital divide’.

Utopian Plagiarism, Hypertextuality and Electronic Cultural Production • Critical Art Ensemble

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 12:41:24 +0000

by Critical Art Ensemble

Chapter 5 from The Electronic Disturbance by Critical Art Ensemble (abridged)
Source: http://www.critical-art.net/books/ted/ted5.pdf

Plagiarism has long been considered an evil in the cultural world. Typically it has been viewed as the theft of language, ideas and images by the less than talented, often for the enhancement of personal fortune or prestige. Yet, like most mythologies, the myth of plagiarism is easily inverted. Perhaps it is those who support the legislation of representation and the privatization of language that are suspect; perhaps the plagiarist’s actions, given a specific set of social conditions, are the ones contributing most to cultural enrichment. Prior to the Enlightenment, plagiarism was useful in aiding the distribution of ideas. An English poet could appropriate and translate a sonnet from Petrarch and call it his own. In accordance with the classical aesthetic of art as imitation, this was a perfectly acceptable practice. The real value of this activity rested less in the reinforcement of classical aesthetics than in the distribution of work to areas where otherwise it probably would not have appeared. The works of English plagiarists, such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Sterne, Coleridge and De Quincey, are still a vital part of the English heritage, and remain in the literary canon to this day.

Wireless Creative Fringe and Popular Mobile Cultures • T.Mäkelä

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 11:16:52 +0000

by Tapio Mäkelä

In Norway, it is believed that the fastest growing mobile market is the country’s sheep population, who in the future will carry a customized GSM device transmitting location and other contextual information. Should the creative wireless practitioners follow the pack and start planning for new projects in the rural locative context?

Future Wireless Vision • F.McKee

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 11:18:48 +0000

by Francis McKee

I see two areas of potential worry in a wireless future.

The first is the accelerated loss of privacy. Iris printing in airports is already with us and soon a formidable quantity of data will be attached to these prints. The pervasiveness of wireless technology simply allows this information to be accessed much more quickly and much more comprehensively than ever before. In the post 9/11 + 7/7 context where individual rights are being eroded in the name of protecting the greater public this poses serious threats to liberty and individual privacy. (There is also the annoyance and manipulation of accelerated advertising targeted more specifically at each person’s consumer profile in every public arena).

From Systems-Oriented Art to Biopolitical Art Practice • S.Buchmann

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 15:46:24 +0000

by Sabeth Buchmann

(from a talk first given at the Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970 conference, Tate Modern, London, 17 September 2005)

Concerning the question which the curator Donna de Salvo raises in her abstract of the conference on Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970^[1] “How can we use the period of the 60s and 70s to rethink notions like open systems today?”, I’ll focus on the conceptual and technological 'rhetorics' and 'aesthetics' which are still relevant today to claims for more interdisciplinarity between art, science and new technologies. Three years ago, in their text 'Software Art', Florian Cramer and Ulrike Gabriel wrote about, “a shift of the artist’s view from displays to the creation of systems and processes themselves".^[2] This shift implies a transformation to a mode of production which traditional definitions of artistic practice no longer adequately describe. Keeping in mind the form of presenting instructions for action which has historically been so central to conceptual art, Cramer and Gabriel contest the assumption that there is a “generative code exclusive to computer programming“ [in so doing, they extend a mathematical model of computer programming from the realm of technology to that of artistic practice]. The authors take, as an example, the immateriality of the work of Fluxus artist La Monte Young titled Composition 1961, No. I, January I. In Young’s presentation of the written instructions to “draw a straight line and follow it,“ Cramer and Gabriel recognize a new, metaphysical, conceptual and epistemological tendency in art practice. They see this emerging practice as capable of transcending or moving beyond the confines of the object. Cramer and Gabriel find this tendency in other projects of historical significance such as the exhibition entitled Software – Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art which was curated by artist and critic Jack Burnham in 1970 at the Jewish Museum in New York. Before curating this show, Jack Burnham had participated in several interdisciplinary projects at MIT. His show Software… also took place one year after the publication of Joseph Kosuth’s 'Art after Philosophy'. Burnham’s reference to Kosuth’s controversial manifesto of Conceptual Art becomes obvious in the foreword of the catalogue. Building on Kosuth’s references to structural linguistic theory, Burnham draws parallels between mathematical information theories^[3] and conceptual art. The inherent similarities between conceptual art and mathematical information theory that Burnham sees mean for him a fundamental shift in the focus of art production from the traditional art object to a cultural, social and societally overlapping system of signs, one that eventually undermines the mythical structure of modern art.