Media Mutandis - a NODE.London Reader - Activism

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.

The Packet Gang • J.King

Sun, 12 Feb 2006 12:17:30 +0000

by Jamie King

Preface
In this essay, originally produced for Mute magazine http://www.metamute.org in 2004, I was attempting to answer some specific problems. During this period, I had been very involved in the ‘anti-capitalist’ or ‘anti-globalisation’ movement, and had noted the intense excitement and expectation accruing around the organisational idea of ‘openness’. We in the social movements, we told ourselves and others, were ‘open’; we used all the virtues of networked organisation to our advantage, and we didn’t need ‘their’ closed-ness, just as we didn’t need ‘their’ proprietary attitudes.

From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again • B.Neilson, N.Rossiter

Sat, 11 Feb 2006 13:33:01 +0000

Labour, Life and Unstable Networks

by Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter

In Florian Schneider’s documentary Organizing the Unorganizables (2002), Raj Jayadev of the DE-BUG worker’s collective in Silicon Valley identifies the central problem of temporary labour as one of time. Jayadev recounts the story of ‘Edward’, a staff-writer for the Debug magazine: "My Mondays roll into my Tuesdays, and my Tuesdays roll into my Wednesdays without me knowing it. And I lose track of time and I lose hope with what tomorrow’s going to be". Jayadev continues: ‘What concerns temp workers the most is not so much a $2 an hour pay raise or safer working conditions. Rather, they want the ability to create, to look forward to something new, and to reclaim the time of life’. How does this desire to create, all too easily associated with artistic production, intersect with the experiences of other workers who engage in precarious forms of labour?

Radical Machines Against the Techno-Empire • M.Pasquinelli

Sat, 11 Feb 2006 12:38:10 +0000

by Matteo Pasquinelli

Source:
http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/pasquinelli.html
(from Journal of Hyper(+)drome.Manifestation, September 2004)

Everyone of us is a machine of the real, everyone of us is a constructive machine. - Toni Negri

Technical machines only work if they are not out of order. Desiring machines on the contrary continually break down as they run, and in fact run only when they are not functioning properly. Art often takes advantage of this property by creating veritable group fantasies in which desiring production is used to short-circuit social production, and to interfere with the reproductive function of technical machines by introducing an element of dysfunction. - Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, L’anti-Oedipe

Introduction WSFII • J.Walsh

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 15:14:54 +0000

by Jo Walsh

The World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures is a gathering of practitioners, who are also thinkers, in open source GIS, software and hardware, community FM radio and WiFi networking, open information/knowledge, open education,open money ...

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.

WirelessFreeNetworksWhyTo • M.Lenczner

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 15:16:13 +0000

by Mike Lenczner

Why Build A Community Owned and Run Wireless Network?
There are two ways to interpret this question. The question asks for reasons why creating and sustaining a free network (often a Community Wireless Networks or CWN) is important. The question could also be what are our motivations. The answers to the second have a lot to do with sharing a beer, with the joy of having friends who understand your jokes and the typical hacker response of “because it’s there”. The first question is what I'll try to address here.

1) Free as in speech.
This is a biggie. Access to information has always been important and in an “Information Age” it is becoming essential. The concept of network-neutrality is that network operators should provide non-discriminatory transport on their networks between the endpoints of the Internet. Community Networks are important because there is much less of a chance that there will be interference in what content or type of content is sent over them.

User Controlled Technology • K.Kulhavy

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 15:18:38 +0000

by Karel Kulhavy

Intent
The intent of User Controlled Technology is to provide the end-user unrestricted access to intellectual property (IP) including the tools used to create it, in perpetuity.

Detailed meaning
UCT intends to give the user control over the technology and providing opportunity to learn, create and profit. For example:
* The user may study and learn from UCT.
* The user may manufacture a product based upon UCT.
* The user may participate in development of UCT.
* The user may enhance or correct UCT.
* The user may integrate UCT into any system.

Meshing in the Future - The free configuration of everything and everyone with Hive Networks • A.Medosch

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 15:47:25 +0000

by Armin Medosch

[Note: Words or acronyms marked with an * are explained in a glossary appended to this text.]

1.Introduction
One day in spring 2005 I popped over to my friend Adam’s. In his tiny living room, which also serves as the headquarters for free2air http://www.free2air.org, I found another friend, Alexei, hunched over a small technical device. Its case had been removed and the circuitry of the board and the chips could be seen. It had a small hard drive strapped to the back of the main board. Alexei and Adam were trying to make the thing boot from the hard drive. They were so focused that I barely managed to get noticed when I said hello. Slightly daunting technical buzzwords such as ‘cross compilation’, and ‘zeroconf’ were flying through the room. Not all of this meant something to me at the time but what I could figure out was that they were on to something special. This little thing on the table represented the seed of an idea much larger than its petite techno-crab like self.

States of Interdependence • R.Catlow, M.Garrett

Mon, 06 Feb 2006 16:13:53 +0000

by Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett

There is a Sufi fable in which a group of foreigners sit at breakfast, excitedly discussing their previous night’s exploration. One starts saying “…and what about that great beast we came across in the darkest part of the Jungle? It was like a massive, rough wall”. The others look perplexed. “No it wasn’t!” says one, “It was some kind of python”. “Yeah…” another half-agrees, “…but it also had powerful wings”. The shortest of the group looks bemused – “well, it felt like a tree trunk to me”.

The Grey Commons - strategic considerations in the copyfight • P.Torsson and R.Fleischer

Mon, 06 Feb 2006 16:00:02 +0000

by Palle Torsson and Rasmus Fleischer

Speech transcript to 22C3. Berlin. December 2005

[Palle Torsson]

Introduction: We are the many shades of the Grey commons
When DJ Danger Mouse took the vocals from Jay-Z’s The Black Album and remixed it with the Beatles’ White Album to create The Grey Album, he was breaking the copyright law – he was climbing up on the shoulders of giants.

spring_alpha project • S.Yuill

Sun, 05 Feb 2006 16:25:20 +0000

by Simon Yuill

A Spatial Data Infrastructure as big as the Internet that fits in your pocket. • J.Walsh

Sun, 05 Feb 2006 16:11:13 +0000

by Jo Walsh

What is a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), and why would you want one that you can contribute to and, as a user of it, control?
An SDI is made up of geographic information (geodata). Geodata can be potentially any information that describes the location of something in physical space. Geodata can be literal images of spatial things – aerial photographs taken from specially rigged aeroplanes, or satellite imagery taken from 'earth observation' satellites. Geodata can be cartographic images that are designed to look like things in physical space, emphasising certain 'features' that are most useful to the intended user of the map – streetmaps for cities, or contour maps for exploring the countryside. Geodata can be your location as measured by the Global Positioning System (GPS); geodata can be your address; geodata can be any kind of information that has a “spatial component”.

Business Model – The Candida TV Approach • A.Trocchi

Sat, 04 Feb 2006 17:35:23 +0000

by Agnese Trocchi

CandidaTV is a crew of socially engaged and demented videomakers. At the core of their vision there is the “Make your own TV” motto.

Publicwhip • J.Todd

Fri, 03 Feb 2006 16:14:18 +0000

by Julian Todd

A Government is a system for gathering and focusing power to certain ends. Watch carefully how this happens. In the UK the central authority is Parliament which everyone, even the Queen, agrees is supreme. What it says goes. If a long or short document is laid before it, and voted upon, and there are more “Ayes” than “Nos” cast by the members of the House according to procedure, then that is what Parliament says. Literally.