Experiments in Cyberspace

I missed the computer revolution by a few years. True, I could have caught up if I had really wanted to (this statement is not entirely true) but I was in the wrong place and Madame Fortune had swung me on a different path. I tried to find and correct the missing pieces in the years to come and to a great extent I was successful. Barring programming, I can almost do anything on/with a PC. Then came the next revolution: the mobile phone. I did not like it very much. Maybe this can be attributed to my age at that time. I do not remember where I read it but it was something like this: humans are quick and eager to grasp (and use) innovations only up to a certain age. Then, we tend to be more conservative. So, apart from its basic and originally intended use, i.e. talking, I hardly use a mobile phone. I usually find it impractical. I did not make a fuss or give a second thought about it until I decided to observe how people and friends around me used their computers. Their interactio...

The world wide web is rich. Even by the best estimate, search engines can only crawl one fourth of it. The rest? It is waiting for you to be uncovered by other methods so that they can see the daylight in the dark and dusty recesses of this cob web where they silently weep. Hidden treasures, interesting sites, rarely heard games, articles that few read... Some do not even use the hypertext, i.e. HTTP protocol. They are all waiting to be discovered, unhidden so to speak. Some might have already been found by spiders or bots, if only you could type those weird keywords in a search form... Some had their day. They cherished the victory, enjoyed the glory, only to be forgotten again. A spark, a momentary fame that did not last. Some can only be accessed via Internet Archive; if they were fortunate to be archived, of course. The servers that hosted them have probably been scrapped or thrown to a junk yard. They are all part of our culture . If we lose them, we also lose a part of o...

A precious item for anyone who cares. Carlo M. Cipolla 's "The Basic Laws of Stupidity" is a short essay I can heartily recommend. You can read the full on-line version at Fravia's. I am inserting just the headlines here, only to remind myself of the foolish mistakes I have done in the past and will undoubtedly do in the future. "What about present?" you may ask. Everything seems sooo right now that one should later look back in time to judge. Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places ...

When a network settles down, and is not so new anymore, it can be quite a challenge to keep it’s activity level. Should a network then transform into a so-called ‘organized network’? Organizing a network does not necessarily mean decreasing the level of spontaneity to make way for rules and hierarchy: it can provide a place for sustainable knowledge sharing and production. As Ned Rossiter argues in his book Organized Networks (2006), face-to-face meetings are crucial “if the network is to maintain momentum, revitalize energy, consolidate old friendships and discover new ones, recast ideas, undertake further planning activities, and so on.” Network Cultures Winter Camp is therefore meant for those networks and (potential) network members that need support to gather in real life, conspire, discuss and make the necessary steps forward. Winter Camp does not have an (academic) educational or training component, but there is a lot to learn. Winter Camp will be organized by the Institute o...

Some headlines from the Vienna Document by the Open Cultures Working Group hosted by "Towards a Culture of Open Networks" - a collaborative program developed by Sarai CSDS (Delhi), Waag Society (Amsterdam) and World-Information.Org (Vienna). While global information cities increasingly resemble neo-medieval city states, market concentrations establish a dominion over knowledge. On the way to information feudalism, diversity seems to loose out. We applaud all initiatives that reclaim the benefits of new communication technologies for the common public. We know that the future is too precious to leave it to experts; digital human rights in everyday life are everyone's concern. We trust nodes open of information cultures to explore the diversity of choices in the shaping of information societies based on semiotic democracy. We recognize that street level open intelligence is of high public value and a cultural process that is highly dependent on information climat...

Sousveillance, original French, as well as inverse surveillance are terms coined by Steve Mann (Toronto, Canada) to describe the recording of an activity from the perspective of a participant. "Surveillance" denotes the act of watching from above, whereas "sousveillance" denotes bringing the practice of observation down to human level (ordinary people doing the watching, rather than higher authorities or architectures doing the watching). If you are in Aarhus Denmark around or on Feb 8-9 and do not know what to do, Sousveillance , the art of inverse surveillance conference is an event not to be missed. From the web site: Moving away from cameras and directional microphones, face and voice recognition, the pervasive technologies offer not only the ability to gather and organize huge amounts of dissimilar data, but as well on grounds of these to predict probable patterns of behavior. Commercial mobile variants of Google Maps, YouTube or Facebook are by far the onl...

Chris 'The Falcon' Han has compiled the songs with "love" in their titles. The point, however, is his use of sequencer interface. It acts as the visual of the mix for a functional and aesthetic experience. I cannot say I agree with the songs chosen but I have to admit I liked the feeling while watching it. Love Songs from Chris 'The Falcon' Han on Vimeo .

Web is a fun place. What is not imaginable twenty years ago becomes achievable at the push of a button. As publishing software improves, contributing to the cyberspace gets easier, even for the novice. The creative genie is out of its bottle in spite of all the efforts of some. This is from the web site of NUCA ,  Network of Un-Collectable Artists : NUCA is a nation-wide affiliation connecting those who gravitate towards ephemeral projects, participatory experiences, illegal art actions, and activities that oddify everyday life. Some members make unwieldy installation projects, while others alter billboards, project images in abandoned spaces at night, or exchange ideas rather than objects. Some simply make dead ugly paintings that would never sell. Because such artworks are often fiendishly tricky to document, they seldom grace the columns of "recognized" publications. NUCA is building a publicity machine of its own, so artists may exchange essential info about their act...

   Art lovers all around the world will from now on be able to see fourteen of the Prado Museum's masterpieces in very high resolution with the launch of Google's Prado layer on Google Earth. From the Prado site: The Prado Museum has become the first art gallery in the world to provide access to and navigation of its collection in Google Earth.  Using the advanced features of Google Earth art historians, students and tourists everywhere can zoom in on and explore the finer details of the artist's brushwork that can be easily missed at first glance. The paintings have been photographed and contain as many as 14,000 million pixels (14 gigapixels). With this high level resolution you are able to see fine details such as the tiny bee on a flower in The Three Graces by Rubens, delicate tears on the faces of the figures in The Descent from the Cross by Roger van der Weyden and complex figures in The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. Of course, not everyone...

A Poem by Brian Routh , from 2005 . Cyber Me I upload myself to the computer to see just how I look Am I a person or am I a book? On the hard drive I look so fine and slick Better get it on the website double quick. Is it me is it not? Who am I... I forgot. How many megabytes am I? 'Trigabytes!' I hear my laptop cry. Now I am in my system folder Buried deep and so much older. Try to find me if you can Ask Jeeves or Google if I'm the man? I live forever in Cyberspace An epitaph to the human race No longer am I flesh and bone But numbers in the computer zone. A JPEG here a PDF there I'm FTP'd everywhere. Upload, download, refresh, save, Join the new computer slaves. My mobile plugs into my ear Adds to my brain an extra gear. Now I am an external drive Am I dead or am I alive? Connected to the Internet It doesn't matter if I forget, My memory's out there on the web An eternal Cyberspace celeb.

I have seldom been to Second Life ; not that I do not like the idea but because of my unstable and slow Internet connection, which turns the experience to a misery. I am aware that some people are not easy with the idea of an on-line 3D world created by its virtual residents' wild imagination but to tell you the truth, it can be fascinating. Let's see if I can change your mind, too. According to Second Life Herald, the always-fairly-unbalanced e-zine founded by philosophy professor Peter Ludlow, two virtual world ballet companies premiered new productions on Sunday, November 23, 2008. La Performance with its high school gym-style performance of "You Are So Beautiful" of Shakespeare (music by Zucchero, and choreography by Jie Loon), and Ballet Pixelle (formerly known as Second Life Ballet) with "The Nut: A Slightly Abridged Telling of The Nutcracker" (music by the Bolshoi Ballet Theatre Orchestra, and choreography by Inarra Saarien) opened the season. ...

In their recently published article Collecting and Preserving Video games and Their Related Materials: A Review of Current Practice, Game-Related Archives and Research Projects , Megan A. Winget and Caitlin Murray[1] argue for the importance of collecting and coming to a better understanding of video game "artifacts of creation," which will help build a more detailed understanding of the essential qualities of these culturally significant artifacts. Surprised? Don't! Digital Age has its own quirks, and preservation of its products [data] may have a lot more impact than you think. Compare it to what had happened in the Middle Ages, when people were using pergament :[2] Some researchers have been formed, using special tools, methods and approaches, in order to study and teach a very specific and "weird" scientific field: "written history sources of the early middle ages" 600-987). This field is quite different from analogous "more ancient" ...