29th May – Meaningful Interaction

Sleeping with the enemy, can interactivity and stories get along?

How do brands create meaning in an interactive world?
How can multiple authors create a compelling story?

Nik and Tom Roope, leaders in interactive stories, will look back at their digital footprint over the last 20 years from Antirom and Tomato Interactive to Poke and the Rumpus Room.

They’ll also share their insights on what consumers are really looking for through digital media, and how best to give it to them.

Can interactivity tell a good tale? How do we tell online stories that speak to the human condition?

“I’ve always said every time we try and combine games and stories to make something new – an adventure game or interactive cinema – it doesn’t work. But I’ve secretly hoped to be proven wrong…”
- Andy Cameron
(Co-founder of Antirom and Cybersalon; Creative Director of Benetton’s Fabrica Lab and Weiden + Kennedy)

In 1994 Antirom was one of the first creative collectives to treat interactivity as a medium in its own right, rather than simply a way to access content. Antirom also blurred the line between artist and commercial agency.

Come along for a lively debate on the future of story-telling!

The narrative is dead! Long live the narrative!

Speakers

Tom Roope- Co-founder Antirom/ co-founder and Creative Director, The Rumpus Room

The Rumpus Room was founded in 2007 to harness the power of people building experiences together and align this activity with brand communication. Tom’s work at The Rumpus Room has been integral in the company being recognised with some of the highest accolades, by award bodies including D&AD, Cannes, One Show, Brit Insurance Design of the Year and Campaign Media Awards.

In 2012 Tom was one of the first 30 British inductees into the Bima Digital Hall of Fame as well as presented the award of Honorary Royal Designer for Industry by the Royal Society of Arts, in recognition of his “innovative work in taking computer interactions beyond the desktop and into communities and shared spaces” – Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA.

Nik Roope- Co-founder Antirom/ co-founder and Creative Director, Poke

Nicolas is an artist, and one of his materials of choice is interactive media and the communities and businesses that drive it. A lot of this interest is expressed through Poke, a vibrant, rigorous creative company that believes in the power of creativity as a force for unlocking and creating value. Poke are highly acclaimed by creative peers in the field and also by long standing clients who repeatedly witness the results of their deep, honest approach.

Nicolas was included in The Wired 100 and Adage Creative 50 lists in 2011 and inducted into the BIMA Digital Hall of Fame in 2012.

Chair: Niki Gomez (co-founder Cybersalon)

Niki is an independent digital strategist and an MIT graduate. Andy Cameron and the members of Antirom were her inspiration to enter the field of digital media, discovering them whilst working at the Cybertheatre, an early experimental Net cafe in Brussels. She works between London and Mumbai.

The future of entertainment? I’m still waiting
by Andy Cameron

Once upon a time I wrote an earnest article about how games and stories could never be mixed. It seemed to me then, and it still seems to me now, that every time we try and combine games and stories to make something new – an adventure game or interactive cinema or whatever we decide to call it – it doesn’t work. We end up with a hybrid monster, neither fish nor fowl. We end up with a chimera.

And yet, deep down, I’ve secretly hoped to be proven wrong. The dream of combining the best bits of storytelling with the best bits of gameplay is a beguiling one… more

Antirom

The Antirom collective was formed in 1994 by a group of Londoners as a protest against “ill-conceived point-and-click 3D interfaces” grafted onto re-purposed old content – video, text, images, audio and so on – and repackaged as multimedia. The members of Antirom felt they could do better than this multi-mediocrity, or at least no worse.

The idea was to explore interactivity and try to understand what made an interactive experience engaging a simple question but one that proved difficult to resolve. Inspired by Gerald Van Der Kaap’s BlindRom, Antirom’s eponymous first CD-ROM was a collection of small interactive pieces that were playful, fun, often silly and usually explored only one interactive idea at a time… more

Tom Roope talks about those Antirom Days

Nik Roope talks about Things versus Ads

Rumpus Room: a user generated experience for the launch of the new Google Chromebook

Poke: Make Hackney Snow (and help EE to bring the community together at Christmas while showcasing the brand’s full breadth of tech wizardry.)

If you’re feeling intellectual read:

Dissimulations, an essay by Andy Cameron
The Illusion of Interactivity

Interactivity refers to the possibility of an audience actively participating in the control of an artwork or representation. Until now, what we call culture has not allowed for a great deal of interaction from the audience. The audience is given a space for interpretation and a space for reaction, but not for interaction. There are those who argue that interpretation is interaction, and so of course it is, but not in the sense intended here. For the purposes of this discussion, interactivity means the ability to intervene in a meaningful way within the representation itself, not to read it differently. Thus interactivity in music would mean the ability to change the sound, interactivity in painting to change colours, or make marks, interactivity in film the the ability to change the way the movie comes out and so on. In its most fully realised form, that of the simulation, interactivity allows narrative situations to be described in potentia and then set into motion – a process whereby model building supercedes storytelling, and the what-if engine replaces narrative sequence…more

Cybersalon Net Politics – April 24th 2013 Summary

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Part of the Then and Now Series of Talks

Bitcoin speak about financial freedom

Event Summary- by Eva Pascoe, Alexandra Reynolds & Niki Gomez

On an unusually hot and steamy April day our regular hangout Arts Catalyst (Clerkenwell, London) felt rather cool and breezy with the beers being nicely chilled in the giant kegs (Cyberpolitics is a thirsty business). Last preparations done, projector on, pizzas in the oven for the hungry Clerkenwellians and we were ready to kick-off our session on Net Politics Then and Now. To be frank, we were not sure what to expect as the original Netpolitics event was planned months before the funeral of Mrs Thatcher when all appeared very theoretical and safe. However, with the ashes barely cooling on the effigy burial in Goldthorpe, the political temperature in town seemed to have reached new proportions. But brave souls we are, after much debate we decided to face it head on and proceed. Our invitees were from very diverse backgrounds and we were quietly preparing for the evening to turn into a rally or a fist-fight (which depends on your definition of the successful political event).
Introduction by Paolo Gerbaudo – the author of Tweets and The Streets and a leading researcher on the impact of the New Media tools on the politics of protest.

The Net Politics Cybersalon is introduced in terms of the fact that digital communications technologies matter and influence politics and that in this session we will be exploring how exactly these technologies can be understood to change or influence politics. The session will also touch upon whether politics and political issues are different now, or if it is simply ‘old wine in new bottles’, ‘new wine in new bottles’ or perhaps post-politics or something entirely different altogether.

Dr Richard Barbrook – the context for the debate was framed by the leading Net critic, whose critique of Techno-Utopias in ‘The California Ideology’ with Andy Cameron in 1995 and ‘Imaginary Futures” in 2007 has initiated a more reflective attitude to the Internet, continued by Jaron Lanier and more recently by Evgeny Morozov.

“VC used to mean VietCong- now it means Venture Capital”

Barbrook’s introduction centred around the idea that we now live in an unexpectedly novel mix of neo-liberal Right and Left-wing political environment. The free spirit of the 1960’s beatniks and hippies has been taken on and used in the name of entrepreneurial and commercial spirit: techno-hippies. Steve Jobs embodied this thinking, he said, against Vietnam and pro-liberal.

Barbrook discussed the mixed economy of the Net, which was funded for the first twenty years by the US Military budget. Then, once built, was leveraged by the Venture Capital movement led from Palo Alto as a platform for commercial start-ups. This amalgamated background of today’s Net leads to ambiguity between Left and Right. Its intrinsic relationship to powerful public institutions such as Berkeley University, DARPA and funding by the US Military budget, as opposed to its use as a private start-up platform. Equally used as a mode of community activism and medium of choice for collective endeavours and a new self-organising model for future social entrepreneurs.

Barbrook’s talk was wholly based on reinterpreting The Californian Ideology- a piece of writing he had co-authored 18 years ago. Today, he realised they were mostly still correct. Their one glaring omission, he admitted, was not including the financial markets. “The biggest computer network was and still is finance”, he said.

Barbrook also talked about the idea of the ‘Jeffersonian Democracy’- who was celebrated by many, including Wired magazine, as a great revolutionary. What they didn’t mention was that he was also a slave-owner. For Barbrook, this points to the dichotomy of the Californian Ideology- by claiming freedom and rights for yourself, you are denying them from others.

We also have to be mindful of the alienation noticeable in Palo Alto, where next to Venture Capital -funded grandiose office blocks (Richard showed some pictures of the shiny Facebook HeadQuarters) employing immigrant cleaners and with homelessness on the other side of the tracks: an inequality of income that is truly extreme.

“Are we Left, Right, Forward or Backward? Are we part of big business or anti-capitalist? Could we possibly be both?”

Barbrook had set this polemic: the origins of the Net (State-funded) and the Californian Ideology (privately-funded) and commented that he was surprised that the discourse surrounding the Net had altered so little over the last twenty years. He stated that the Internet will truly become radical when it becomes ubiquitous, when it becomes mass media (via mobiles and tablets) across all demographics.

“Neo-liberalism used to be bad but it worked. Now Neo-liberalism is still bad and it doesn’t work”.

Barbrook ended his talk by calling for new practical models to be developed 5 years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, by countercultural uses of the Net which could be a viable alternative to Neo-liberalism. Reflective analysis of these amalgam politics is also required to provide a true understanding of how to provide firm foundations for the next decades of the Net development, recognising the needs of the commercial as well as social needs.

Amir Taaki – Bitcoin developer and community spokesman / Pablo Martin – Bitcoin developer and representative from post-capitalist Catalonia Collective project, Calafou.

“The idea of Left and Right is old-fashioned. Politics as we know it is obsolete… The free market is not free. There are rules, cartels and monopolies. Bitcoin is a real free market that anyone, even a 10-year old can use”.

Amir began by stating that the Left and Right are no longer viable categories. He continued saying that Bitcoin was one way to help produce a truly free market outside of the grip of institutions such as the State and the Finance industry, to allow resources to be redistributed more fairly. He mentioned the unfair level of surplus profit usually taken by capitalist companies and banks, particularly in the area of currency exchange.

He explained how he travelled the world using Bitcoin to transferring money, without paying currency charges. He also spoke about how Internet payments are censored and that Pay Pal block access from 60 countries. When Wikileaks donations were blocked, Bitcoin became their lifeline. Similarly after Megaupload’s (a file sharing site) assets were seized by the United States Department of Justice (which Amir feels was wrong), the site relaunched as Mega, and accepts Bitcoin.

He cited much of his thinking as well as Bitcoin development as coming from the Open Source movement, which, he said is a radical new way of self-organising, against the current economic system. It’s not based on scarce resources and ownership, he said. It allows for the avoidance of monopolies, which in his opinion, gives rise to “people scamming each other”.

Amir also spoke about other digital technologies which he felt could allow power to be placed back into the hands of the people in fairer models of exchange. He commented that, “We ain’t doing it because it is easy, we are doing it because it is hard”. Amir explained that Bitcoin is a platform providing a new environment for today’s world where the States are too weak to collect taxes due to massive growth in tax havens, so we may as well self-organise ourselves reflecting the global world of money flow and get our community to be conceptualised as global.

He elaborated on Bitcoin having an open-data ledger and providing a totally transparent record of transactions, which theoretically can be used to be monitored at a State level if required. Amir explained that the rich people and corporates have usurped the power of banks to move funds around avoiding taxes and laundering money (see Cyprus, Swiss-American fiasco, Germany where the State had to sanction hacking into Swiss banks to get to the true level of German money laundering practices).

“We’re giving normal people a tool to be free. They can also launder money with this tool- something rich people have been doing for years. However I believe most people are good.”

Amir mentioned alternative technologies like 3D printing as a possible way to print one’s own material needs, much more cheaply as only for the cost of these materials themselves. Of course these technologies for ill-use too, but he talks about technology being neutral and that it’s up to us how we use it.

Amir also argues that “payment is a form of speech”, that is a form of voting and communicating about who we trust. It carries implied consent, which he feels we should be withholding from the State as the excessive printing money at the moment is devaluing our assets, pensions and the trust in State money is eroding rapidly. That is relevant to all countries that have introduced quantitative easing i.e. inflation of assets. We get the feeling Bitcoin developers are not necessarily against the State, it is just looking to re-think how we can look at society globally and organise ourselves, catching up with what new technologies can help to fix.

If all transactions online were done in Bitcoins, we would have visibility of those transactions via open-data Ledger available to all.

The truth of where the all money is going will allow us to take appropriate actions as a global community and consider the correct response. I for one would love a desktop application where at a touch of a button I could see where Amazon’s money (profit from my transaction) is flowing to today – is it Panama, Belize or still Luxembourg? We could add infographics and make our own diagrams of the tax evasion paths like watching flocks of birds whizzing past on their way to warmer climes.

Amir also spoke about a new ecology and considering one’s environmental actions with the concept of the same individual ‘ledger’ of our interacting with our environment. That would totally increase people’s awareness of how much mess they generate and how one-sided our interaction with the immediate environment is.

Pablo Martin, from the Catalonia post-capitalist project briefly introduced his project which seeks to produce a collective of people living through a Bitcoin framework as part of a post-capitalist model of exchange.

The cooperative is legal and is part of a network that crosses the whole country. Calafou, in Catalonia, has acquired a disused factory in the mountains. To allow a new way of self-organisation in the environment where the State is weak and can not provide a satisfactory framework for its citizens.

The unemployment in Spain is now over 30 % with the youth reaching 50%, so it is the role and duty of the older generation to help the young ones to self-organise and be self-sufficient in the times of State crisis. Pablo looks like an elder statesmen and has a look in his eyes that tells me he has seen more than your average hacker. His commitment to finding better bottom-up ways to get the Spanish youth out of the current hole is deep and the Bitcoin framework is a stepping stone in their pilgrimage to a post-State future. A few evenings earlier we had shared a great organic dinner with Pablo, Amir and their collective. I have to say the cooking was top notch and the use of a vegetable stand doubling as a stand for a projector during presentation was a cutting edge minimalist interior design element that I am keen to introduce to Cybersalon! They have their hearts in the right place and seem grounded. We feel Bitcoin is in good hands, whatever the future will bring to their mission.

Yvonne de Rosa- photographer and activist, part of the Italian Five Star MoVement (MoVimento 5 Stelle, M5S)

The 5Star Movement were successful in the recent Italian election, gaining 25% of new Members of Parliament using only a white van and social media!
“We’re building a new way of doing politics. People can make their own choices, rather than following their family choices”.
Yvonne began by reiterating the contention that there is no Left or Right any more, and that in her view we are living in a post-political or post ideological world, where we are producing our own culture. She gave an overview of her work as an activist in the Five Star MoVement in Italy, which has meant entering government directly. Yvonne was an advocate of the idea of openness as a way to produce new power relations. The way Beppe Grillo (and his “Grilleni” as his supporters are called) seized the power, was simply by blogging and providing space for comments for his supporters, reaching up to 13,000 comments at some of his blogs. His tech partner is an inspired builder of communication platform (no headhunters calls please, he is staying with Beppe).

“Politics is not a career. You can’t be a M5S representative for more than two terms”.
The media scene in Italy is entirely controlled by Silvio Berlusconi and the choice of social media as strategy was clearly driven according to Yvonne by the fear that Berlusconi will misrepresent the message if they use traditional TV. It was an inspired strategy and after the election, Beppe and his Grilleni entered the established political scene by the back door, providing an argument for the urgent need for amateur politicians to replace the so called professional politicians. This rang a lot of bells with the audience as UK politics are in dire need of change of tack on the ‘politics as a profession’.

“The Internet and trust put us together. Beppe Grillo was trusted”.
Yvonne then talked about the relatively low-budget requirements for a new party and the ease of set up of the communication tools using existing platforms like Facebook, Twitter instead of AK-47s. Power is taken and not given, but 5Star Movement is a great example that the taking can be done peacefully and the power of the majority can be clearly visible on online. That is a new element in the post-newspaper world where it was not transparent how many supporters any political grouping actually has until the day of elections.
Italian social media has delivered (at least on this occasion) a new group of MPs who do not come from ‘pro-political’ background and that is a very strong message for today to anyone in Europe and the US which is dominated by dynasty politics not dissimilar to modern India.

Jamie Bartlett- Head of Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the Demos think-tank

Jamie also spoke about the Five Star MoVement, an organisation he has written on recently. Jamie was particularly interested in how the Five Star MoVement could impact UK politics, and how Beppe Grillo had used social media to gain the trust of people and then organise on the streets, turning his 1 million Facebook friends into more than just clicktivists.

“People don’t trust parties anymore. They trust each other- friends, small businesses and information they find on-line”.
He mentioned that the Internet is now statistically the most trusted way to get news information in the UK, and analysed this in terms of the fact that we do not trust our politicians and media, rather trusting friends and local connections. He spoke about this in terms of decentralised rather than hierarchical power, and suggested that our politicians in the UK needed to rebuild trust in their role and the state by using similar means to Five Star MoVement.

“We know that the better-off and the better-educated are those that will go on protests and also go on social media”.
He also mentioned that at present what you find is that those using the internet for political purposes tend to be educated middle classes, and that this is in danger of producing a new class, who would replicate the traditional class divide in political power.

Clare Solomon- the ex-president of ULU during the 2010 UK student protests and founder of Firebox, a political cafe in Kings Cross.

Clare Solomon was a leader of the Student Protests in 2010 and survived a Newsnight grilling by Jeremy Paxman in the aftermath of her demo.
She gave a Leninist interpretation of political thinking today- reading out from his manifesto.

Solomon suggested Lenin was talking about leadership and power in networks when he was writing, and so his work constitutes a helpful model from which to draw today. Gramsci, similarly, she claimed as the inventor of citizen journalism. Solomon suggested we should not shy away from the use of the word leader, but that we should ensure that all members of a movement are understood to be potential leaders.
She also mentioned that in Lenin’s time, if members of the group could not read, he would read to them, and that this could also be a useful strategy regarding the development of technological literacy. Solomon runs a ‘Festival of Dangerous Ideas’ which we were all warmly invited to participate. She gave a very passionate speech and is clearly highly versed in the use of social media in organising, reflecting and formulating programs contexts.

“Left-wing organisations are dissolving towards new organisations. However 7m people in the UK in a recent survey identified themselves as Left. How do we reach these people?”
For Solomon, the answer was clearly social media, with her Firebox café in Kings Cross providing a real-world venue for meeting, organising and debate.

Paolo (the Chair) described her political practice as ‘old wine in a new bottle’ a description with which she is quite happy. The Left and Right divisions appear to be still very appropriate to her and she considers her framework to fit today’s political environment.

Chaired Questions to the Panel

Paolo picked out some key themes which had been recurrent within the talks to expand upon in the discussion. This included exploring the idea of decentralised power and post-ideology.
Paolo asked: is it true that centralisation does not matter at all, or do we need centres of sorts? Is Bitcoin a decentralised politics?
Amir makes the point that decentralisation does not mean homogeneity, but rather that it is about individuality and allows good people to do good things. A new speaker (Michael Parsons), an ex-banker, gave a clear overview of the potential usefulness of Bitcoin as a non-capitalist model of exchange, which is global and decentralised, produced by the people for the people.

Paolo asks about the role of centralisation in the Five Star MoVement.

Yvonne makes the point that Five Star MoVement is working against mainstream centralised parties and in doing so they are giving control back to citizens. Amir makes the point that co-opting the infrastructure is a sensible thing to do and that there are many ways to fight. Effectiveness is garnered by looking around your current resources and making the best of them. This usually happens, he said, by sharing them and collaborating with the network- a very important part of Open Source philosophy.
Paolo asks about the role of the State and whether the notion of the State is still relevant today in a globalised post nation-state world?
Solomon goes back to Gramsci and the relationship between media, business, universities and how this controls ideology. She says that the State does need to be got rid of.
She is probably the strongest anti-State proponent as others consider the responsibility of the State today still significant, albeit exceeding the actual resources they have and thus their effectiveness.

Paolo to Richard – when you were writing it was Web 1.0 – are things still the same?
Richard says it is astounding how little things have changed – the ambiguity still exists. Bitcoin can be seen as a reflection of this – it can be seen as a neoliberal tool and project, but also as a potentially radical initiative. He says the big problem now is not the state but the banks, and that the state is often working for the banks as a result of lobbyists and interest groups. Still talking about the rhizome versus the tree – nothing has changed since the 1960s. Need to think of a new system that works and is good and will sustain the Internet development for the commercial as well as social entrepreneurship.

Paolo to Jamie: UK government is centralised by almost every Prime Minister having studied PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) at Oxford. How realistic is it that the UK system can be altered and decentralised?
Jamie ducks the question and says that the State is actually key and can help care for others, but has not worked as well as it needs to as it is not accountable. The UK system is not representative of the population however, and they are not trusted. Professionalization of politics is highly problematic and not what democracy is supposed to be about. Five Star MoVement is particularly interesting in this way, making politics far more representative. UK parties are in a battle for the centre – we are going into a much more chaotic movement with renegade and upstart parties.
Amir – first past the post is exclusionary – means people have to take recourse to official parties. Their values, interests and processes are just simply irrelevant in today’s global world.
Jamie – it is still possible for upstart parties in the UK – George Galloway is an example – it is just harder. It is bizarre that to wrestle the power from the government in UK one needs to be a taking a position as extreme as Galloway, there is a very big lesson in this to the current overseers of the political process!
Questions from the Audience

1) Nico Macdonald from the Twitter feed –
We have been talking about the tools, but what about the content?
Amir Taaki – we need new structures in place which force people to rethink their behaviour. Technologies are neutral.
Richard Barbrook- No, technology cannot be neutral! They are a battleground.

2) Is Net politics local politics and how does the local matter?
Using the internet to help provide peoples basic needs outside the capitalist system – food, housing, clothes – is what Pablo’s project is attempting to do.
2) Technocratic discussion about tools, but what is the aim? (Not answered)

3) Is the Five Star MoVement a first step towards a system capable of facilitating direct democracy?
Yvonne de Rosa – we do not do TV shows, the media does not like us because we are dangerous and outside the system. We fix a date and organise locally using social media, and then deal with locals and decide what is needed, through this the movement grows incrementally.
Jamie Bartlett- none of us know what will happen as it is still early days. The Five Star MoVement is not a lack of vision, we need to maximise the power we have over institutions and the state. The Five Star MoVement is a rebellion against the lack of control over the way politics works. It replicates ideals in a grassroots way against a closed system.
Richard Barbrook- we still don’t have annual elections – we need to re-present the word ‘citizen’ – we need to reengage with the state and put it under our control.

Second Round of Questions
1) Terence McKenna said culture is an operating system – what is our agenda? What is the most valuable thing technology can bring for the future?
Amir Taaki – to globalise and localise at the same time – flows of information, but also local providers. Need free internet access to all – use that technology to develop tools for the good of the global community.
Richard Barbrook – technology will always be caught up in where people are at culturally and be used at hand to different ends.
Jamie Bartlett – access to information.

2) Has Net Politics caused the death of ideology or is it the renaissance?
Left and Right are defunct, but is this the end of ideology?
Richard Barbrook: we should be sceptical about people who think this is new.
Yvonne de Rosa – the most important thing is participation – we should not vote for a political party and just give over the power – we need to participate.
Jamie Bartlett– I agree in the meta argument of accountability – left and right as ideas about how society is organised will remain, as a fundamental human trait.
Claire Solomon: we want to live collectively, and to do this we must participate.

We finish with more questions than answers but with the feeling that we are granularising the arguments and developing a common vocabulary for future discussions across the most opposed political groupings. Social media gives a better framework to cross-political debate as opposed to the divisive and polarising dead-tree variety of media. We are happy to note that the Daily Mail has only 123K Likes, while Horse and House has 184K Likes. We had finished all the beer and felt that the level of conversation has reached a pub quality which is why we happily retire to the Slaughtered Lamb for further explorations of the Net Politics Then and Now.

More pictures:

https://www.facebook.com/Cybrsalon

The Tweet Story via Storify http://sfy.co/hIYY

See you next time!
On 29th May we’ll be discussing whether interactivity can tell a good story- with digital pioneers Antirom. Book your free tickets.

Reading for Cybersalon’s Net Politics Event- 24 April 2013

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- The Californian Ideology by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron (Richard will be updating it at the event)
- “Social media is changing politics across Europe…” Beppe Grillo and the M5S by Jamie Bartlett et al
- Bitcoin Ends the Taboo on Money by Jaromil
- “Springtime: The New Student Rebellions” by Claire Solomon

- A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow

Wed 24th April 2013 – Net Politics

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Wed 24th April from 7pm - Net Politics

The Future: Then and Now

This month’s Cybersalon is looking at how new media have inspired new forms of activism over the past two decades and will explore the transformative possibilities of the next wave of technological innovation.

In his 1996 ‘Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace’, John Perry Barlow announced the coming of a hi-tech utopia where rugged individualists would escape from the stifling controls and onerous taxes of national governments into a borderless and deregulated virtual world.

Over the past two decades, this seductive mix of hippie and entrepreneurial libertarianism codified in the Californian Ideology has dominated our understanding of the political impact of the Net. Left or Right, mainstream and alternative, mass connectivity is still celebrated as the technological antidote to the multiple failings of Westminster politics from voter apathy to out-of-touch MPs. While deep scepticism is required about the predictions of dotcom boosters, no one can deny that the rapid diffusion of social media has enabled much more participatory forms of campaigning, organising and mobilising.

From the Arab Spring to the Five Star Movement in Italy, citizens have bypassed the old party structures to create their own autonomous groups. As in Athens, Madrid or New York, London’s anti-austerity protesters are tech-savvy and always on-line.

In Bitcoin, hackers now believe that they have discovered a way of liberating money from the clutches of the power elite.

The Net is still only a toddler, but it has already established itself as the people’s forum for political debate and decision-making. With the status-quo seemingly no longer viable, the collaborative experience of social media should now inspire an emancipatory vision of what it means to be a citizen in 21st century Europe.

What are the lessons of Then and Now that we can apply confidently when we’re anticipating the future of Net Politics?

Speakers

Richard Barbrook - University of Westminster politics lecturer, co-author of The Californian Ideology and author of Imaginary Futures - will trace the evolution of dotcom neo-liberalism from the techno-utopian early-1990s to today’s more austere times.

http://www.imaginaryfutures.net

Amir Taaki - open source programmer, co-founder of the Bitcoin Consultancy project development and principal of Intersango, a Bitcoin exchange - will explain how Bitcoin challenges the monetary hegemony of both big banks and big government.

https://intersango.com

Clare Solomon - the ex-president of ULU during the 2010 student protests, editor of the book Springtime: The New Student Rebellions and now runs the radical Firebox cafe in King’s Cross - will describe how the participatory structure of the Net is inspiring new methods and ideas of political campaigning.

http://fireboxlondon.net

Jamie Bartlett - the Head of Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the Demos think-tank – will describe how the electoral success of the Five Star movement in Italy was achieved through the intelligent use of on-line campaigning, the subject of his recent study.

http://www.demos.co.uk/people/jamiebartlett

Yvonne de Rosa- member of the M5S Movement.

Chair

Paolo Gerbaudo teaches at Kings College, University of London and is author of Tweets and the Streets: social media and contemporary activism.
http://www.tweetsandthestreets.org

We won’t be live streaming the event, but you can follow the goings on via our Twitter feed @cybrsalon or #cybersalon.

Audio recordings, tweet timeline and transcript of the discussion will be available on this site shortly afterwards.

Entrance is free but please book.

6.30pm: doors open and drinks.
Discussion: 7.00 – 9.00 pm.

Venue:
The Arts Catalyst,
50-54 Clerkenwell Road,
London EC1M 5PS

Tubes: Old St/ Barbican
Barclays Bikes: Right outside the venue
Arts Catalyst is next to Foxtons on Clerkenwell Road.

Followed by drinks in the pub round the corner: The Slaughtered Lamb.

Media Art Then and Now: 27 March 2013

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Summary

Listen to the Audio

This event was the place to be on a freezing Wednesday 27^th March. We all gathered at the ever so the hospitable Arts Catalyst (thank you Rob), armed with beer and pizzas (thank you Easynet) and barely able to contain our excitement at what was to come tonight.

The event was kicked off by Ilze Black, the Chair for the evening, who gave a brief intro to the topic and run through our working taxonomy of the New Media Art.

William Latham

William Latham was the first speaker and took us on his own Computer Art personal journey, talking about how after graduating from RCA he started messing with maths and ended up producing rave videos for The Shamen!

His initial idea was to explore the rules of evolution and attempt to create a software code based on those rules, to encourage the computer to create its own 3D creatures simulating evolutionary organic mutations (the code was aptly named Mutator). His work predated the Web as he started as early as 1986, but he used the Web to connect the computers to maximise their power. The process of generating Mutations required immense computer muscle which was very difficult to obtain in those days and only a sponsor like IBM could support him.

William was 100% sponsored as an artist by IBM, who were interested in the patents that Mutator’s work with the genius programmer, Steve Todd, generated for them. IBM provided the computer power impossible to get at home at that time. Mutator needed top-end rendering machines and computational power, which was why William needed a commercial backer. It was a bit like in the Medici times, he said. We should look at re-instating that today!

William was attracted to the works of Mandelbrot, Musgrave, Norton and Karl Sims, who were then at the peak of their creativity and used to meet at Siggraph (in California) from 1987-1993 to swap code and try to outdo each other by pushing human-computer creations to their limits. William described those years as the ‘Golden Years of Siggraph’ when the concept of artist-scientist was born and where the future of Computer Art was debated, much of the work being based on Dawkin’s theories.

Artists such as Karl Sims worked on mutations using the Lisp programming language on Thinking Machine; Mandelbrot was seeing how far he could go with fractals, while William was interested in how natural, organic forms could grow in synthetic environments.

WiIliam’s work was based specifically around the horn structure, a twisted structure which was then allowed to develop freely by the mutating algorithms. At a later stage William developed the concept of artist as a gardener, as the 3D organic creatures required regular trimming and re-directing to keep the aesthetic fresh. It was commented on as ‘maths sliding on the bannisters and shouting “whoopee!”’ as some of these organic creatures looked very mischievous!

Once they had created rules for the code, William had an infinite range of structures generated automatically through the computer with high rates of mutation. When William visited Henry Moore, the sculptor, whose arms were deep in plaster, William commented that Henry’s method seemed the anti-thesis of the sculpture he was doing on machines. Similarly the ready- made art of people like Jeff Koons, was not exciting for him, as it was fetishizing an existing object instead of creating new forms.

The organic 3D sculptures made by the joint effort of human and machine were very different as they offered infinite number of directions and creative output. William knew the mainstream art world would never warm to him, as the critics were frightened of the new field of human-computer duos creating art.

William’s exhibition, ‘The Conquest of Form’ exhibited in the UK for 2 years. The Scientific Press covered it, but the Art Press did not as the critics did not understand it and were afraid in case it heralded elimination of a human in the process of art creation. The art critics were too focused on unmade beds and preserved sharks and were victims of Saatchi’s art scene manipulations!

IBM then cut his post as a result of the recession and William’s involvement in rave culture. This was too much of an existential jump for IBM. William moved into popular culture as he had a huge following in the rave movement where people fell in love with his organic art forms during the raves where clubs used them to project real-time mutations on the screens. The Ravers were eco-warriers and often found chained to trees in a battle to prevent non-sustainable developments, so the organic nature of William’s work was appealing to them aesthetically as well as philosophically as machines were suddenly seen as possessing a ‘nature-like’ imagination.

The band The Shamen called WIlliam up and invited him to direct their videos. They claimed that whenever they took a certain Amazonian mushroom, they would visualise his forms! The Shamen found it hard to believe he didn’t take drugs too and that the magic of the synergy of his human ideas and maths led the computer to create forms so beloved by them.

It was commented that maybe it was human-computer merged subconscious that created the forms which felt so familiar to us yet so unique. William ended up directing The Shamen’s videos and designing all their album covers. A new aesthetic was born, that then dominated the club scene till late 1990’s. For one of the videos, for the single ‘Ebeneezer Goode’, the images were delivered by rendering video across IBM’s networks during a night-time session.This didn’t go down well with IBM due to the band’s link to Ecstasy (although the track went on to reach No.1 in the charts).

William then decided to explore the creative opportunities in game development and worked with Hollywood including projects for Mattel and Warner Bros. The journey of a geeky artist from an IBM basement to a club scene God would make a great movie- any interested scriptwriters, please get in touch with Cybersalon!

The Invention of the Web, released into public domain in April 1993 opened new dizzying opportunities for New Media artists, but also limited them as the bandwidth available in 1994-1997 was painfully low. That environment favoured text and low-bandwidth Web Art and led to retraction of Virtual Reality (Virtual Nightclub by Olaf Wendt) and Mutator to off-line environments like games. At this point the Computer Art and Net Art separated for the forseable future till the bandwidth improved.

Ilze Black

Ilze Black (artist and PhD at Queen Mary’s) talked about what happened to New Media Art since 1993, when the Web was made available by Tim Berners-Lee.

She outlined the different genres of Media Art including Computer Art, Net Art, software art, art created as a result of software by companies like Macromedia and Adobe. She mentioned the first cybercafé in London, Cyberia, and the Hypermedia Research Centre at University of Westminster (both of which led to the birth and resurgence of Cybersalon).

Ilze had set up Latvian E-Lab before arriving in London in 1996, at Backspace, which was the ‘Unofficial Heart of the City’s digital art scene’ founded by James Stevens.

Ilze fell in love with Backspace and took part in their Anti-Wide festival, organised by Heath Bunting an artist from the duo irational, when New Labour had just got into power. New Media was strongly in opposition to much of the YBA Movement (at the end of 1997 was the Sensation exhibition). Backspace represented a contest to the commercial art manipulation and mainstream market-led ‘art’ production.

To emphasise this point, Ilze showed irational artist, Rachel Baker’s Tesco Club Card piece which was a critique of the use of private data, an anti-corporate comment on the alienation of the individual from his data. She also showed Spam and Matt Fuller’s and IOD Collective- Web Stalker with the warning: “Software is mind control – get some”.

There would be no New Media Art without the server space! Access to servers was very important and spaces that offered it like Backspace, Cyberia, Hypermedia Research Centre and others were like ‘Medici patrons of the New Media Art’ in the early ‘90s. It was like giving a canvas to a painter!

To celebrate the role of the Server, Backspace ran a festival aptly named ‘Art Servers Unlimited’.

Other artists collectives such as Lo-Res.org, Obsolete and Blast Theory were all involved. In 1998 Blast Theory put up posters saying ‘Sign up to be kidnapped’ and those selected actually were! The action/performance was all streamed online, so others could watch and participate in real-time.

It was the beginning of the Net Art form, a real-time creative participation of people at various nodes on the network. In this vein, between 1994-1998 Cyberia Café ran a number of projects for the legendary London nightclubs Megatripolis and Heaven, linking over ISDN to other clubs in US and UK, inviting speakers and joint performances over the Net (with Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Fraser Clark, David Bowie and Boy George). These were mainly produced and created by Martin Kavanagh and staffed by Cyberians, holding the cables and routers under the ravers’ feet and avoiding the temptations of the freely available Acid pills. Character building to say the least! The collaborative opportunities for Net Art were being slowly understood and explored.

Until 1999 nearly all Web projects were non-commercial, led by artists and experimentation. Towards the beginning of 1999 the market took interest in the previously very under-ground Web and the creative ambience changed drastically. The effect of massive commercialisation of the Net and the DotCom boom heralded the shift in the attention towards commercial projects, advertising Websites and the end of the ‘punk’ attitude to corporates (at least for a while). Alex Galloway from Rhizome, famously said: ’Net Art is dead”.

New Media Art and commercial practice merged: Jodi said “Fuck You” to a prize at the Webby Awards, as it was perceived biased towards commercial projects. Ars Electronica gave a prize to Linux. Etoy (the company) sued Etoy (the artists) in the atmosphere of scandal and rights debate. The reality of copyrights arrived (and limited the ability to create mash-ups and collages) and created a lot of issues; Rhizome launched the ARTBASE. An art flea market in London, Art Expo Destructo took place. The London scene was getting more market-friendly perhaps. Mongrel developed software and sold it.

However, the positive development was that the broadband had arrived and Net Streaming radio was introduced. Ilze joined a collective called Ambient TV and made a Net piece using streaming video which lasted for 5 years. It was early crowd-sourcing: they hacked, reused and reappropriated other people’s webcams. It lasted for five years and gave birth to a concept of sharing our private images as a legitimate source for public art projects. Voyeurism, already present in video art, became acceptable on the Net and joined a mainstream creative vocabulary. Later Ilze was also involved with Soft Cinema and Database cinema and is very interested in how we share and accept/reject the boundaries of private-public images as artwork source.

Ilze also showed a map of Wireless Britain in 2001 by James Stevens ‘Consume.Net’- artists using networks.

She ended by showing one of her pieces- RichAir2030- where Roller girls raced around and tested the free wifi networks.

Cybersalon’s selection of New Media Art

Work from THEN

1. Vuk Cosic: Hollywood Films such as Deep Throat and Godzilla converted into moving ASCII Art.

http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii/film/

2. William Latham: images and videos of early generative computer art emerging from his IBM residency. He was responsible for this aesthetic so popular with the rave and music scene in London in the 1990s.

http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~mas01whl/

3. Expo-Destructo: a new media art festival in London in 1999.

http://rad.spc.org/expo/interviews/

(Needs Real Player plugin)

An archive of interviews from Expo-Destructo: post-media pressure was a one day event combining a series of talks to celebrate the launch of a new book ‘README! ascii culture and the revenge of knowledge’, and a public gathering of media activists, webzines, artists working in electronic media, troublemakers and plenty others: a post-media flea-market on 20 March 1999 at Open,144 Charing Cross Road, London.

This archive is hosted on Back Space’s servers – this was a cutting-edge collaborative artist-run space in London that fuelled the early creative scene.

4. Irational: important political artists duo based in London and made up of Rachel Baker and Heath Bunting.

Donating Net Art to Art Institutions to give them value and be collectible:

http://www.irational.org/donate/

Also important to see the aesthetic of the time.

Their most famous piece is no longer online, as Tesco asked for it to be removed, but there is documentation here

http://www.irational.org/irational/media/telepolis2.html

They used Tesco Clubcard’s marketing strategy in order to create their own club card for surfing the Net, via a database that created connections not separations between the members. The web project creates a system which allows you to earn points when you surf. Using Tesco clubcards it provides the holder of the pirate card a ‘reward’ incentive to visit selected websites.

Ivan Pope

Ivan Pope

In 1993 Ivan created the first piece of Hypertext art on the Web. He reconstructed it for tonight – and warned the audience: ’you’ll be surprised to see it’. It is text with hyperlinks.

http://lwods.ivanpope.com

It’s called the ‘Last Words of Dutch Schulz’ and is based on a film script by William Burroughs. It was an amazing multimedia script from an author whose books influenced David Bowie and punk movement. In the new, low-bandwidth, Mosaic-based environment, text was the best tool to explore the Net’s creative potential.

For Ivan the Web was all about text in the early days – it was about Hypertext and HTML which was very pure and minimalist, including the famous Gray Background. As Roland Barthes said “Any text is an intertext” which influenced Ivan’s thinking at that time. Artists were online, but on a text-based network! Ivan explained that they were surrounded by text online, which was both mind-blowing and extremely challenging after the years of Rococo, Mutator, Virtual Nightclub and Virtual Reality visual opulence! We had to wave good bye to those and start with text-led, minimalist art. It was a massive, sudden disruption to Computer Art at that time and traumatised a whole generation of artists who have not found themselves anew in the Web low-bandwidth environment.

But it also opened the door to a new wave of creative people who came from all walks of life, not from traditional fine art schools. The tools of Net Art were becoming very democratic with the cost of computers and modems coming down rapidly.

Demon Internet and Easynet allowed people to get on line cheaply (the famous “tenner a month” Internet subscription was the call-for-arms in that times as mentioned by Wendy Grossman who witnessed the birth of low-cost Internet Providers as we know it on CIX in 1993). Immediately after he got on line, in 1993, Ivan published a digital newsletter called World Wide Web, a term he casually borrowed from Tim (Berners-Lee) and called young artists to contribute to the Hypertext art movement.

Ivan, unlike William Latham, used cheap computers as this was the only tech available outside big corporates. He graduated from Goldsmiths amongst the Damien Hirst YBA movement in 1988. No one used a computer at Goldsmiths then. The computer lab was converted from the old Science lab! It highlighted the move from Science to Technology, but was extremely limited and only used for desktop publishing (which Ivan embraced with the speed of light as he was a survivor of the punk-zines movement and knew how to put a printed zine together - it did not take him long to figure out how to do ‘punk’ zines online!)

Do check out Fine Art Forum on Pandora urges Ivan, the whole archive is there!

In 1984: Barcode

In 1994: PGP code

That was how technology has moved forward, Ivan concluded. The dream-like and non-sequential poetry of hypertext was explored shortly after by other artists, who found the ‘naked hypertext’ irresistible. It wasn’t till Adobe and Macromedia stepped in with image and animation layers, that artists started playing with visuals again, culminating in Shockwave Baroque.

An example of this is:

Hotel: an interactive narrative by Han Hoogerbrugge, 2004.

http://hotel.submarinechannel.com/splash.html

Hans started out as a painter and cartoonist until he found the internet in 1996. He is the creator of the extremely popular Modern Living Neurotica series. Hotel was created for the online SubmarineChannel.

This work is important because it shows the Shockwave Flash aesthetic that was prominent at the time.

Sean Cubitt

Sean Cubitt

An early New Media activist, author of the early ‘Digital Art’ book published in 1997(!), now academic at Goldsmiths, Sean gave us a very good overview of New Media Art with a strong focus on Liverpool, but also wider. He has moved around the world a lot and shared artistic experiences with the artists in UK as well as Australia (a very active scene that is not known enough of on our shores).

Sean started off talking about Moviola, Eddie Berg’s video art festival, explored the concept of tactical media and the Yes Men who got on the BBC pretending to be Dow Corporation apologising for the Bhopal disaster- video here.

The Next 5 Minutes Festival showed what could be done with networks. Tactical media was about showing that the media we’ve inherited is lethal, “let’s puncture them” was the call for arms and BBC was one of the early targets. The theme of anti-establishment attitude of New Media is here again, with many participants of the scene hailing from the contesting movements, often very political and anti-corporates.

Laurie Anderson, AudioRom, AntiRom were key example of New Media Arts.

For Sean, one of the most moving Internet projects ever was ‘My boyfriend came back from the War’ by Olia Lialina (about the Afghanistan Soviet War).

http://myboyfriendcamebackfromth.ewar.ru/

Jodi.org and Potato Land were then discussed as was how important Open Source had been for those without corporate budgets. Sean thinks that with CSS (Style Sheets) things started to go wrong and that creativity disappeared as CSS closed down the options very severely. The European New Media Art scene grew fast, with the Browser Art, Software Art, ZKM opened in Karlsruhe, ISEA and Ars Electronica festivals keeping the flame alive and commissioning new work. But limitations were increasingly visible, and when Rhizome.org asked for subscriptions, everyone left to the Nettime list, but it diminished in importance. Many artists joined commercial agencies and left the field.

New Media Art Festivals always struggled with the challenges of how to show CD Rom art and Web art in galleries, which was an issue then and it is now. The experience of interactive arts is individual, but the gallery space is plural and the challenge of showing those works in a public space has not been addressed successfully. New Media Art is still looking for its temple.

However, many artists like Keith Piper from the UK, Sarai from India and Itau Cultural from Brazil came and broadened the story by giving a non Western centric viewpoint

For Sean digital is only a tool. Techno-determinism is only part of the story of Media Art. He is also critical about calling it “alternative” media. New channels have an emotional connect with audiences (Daniel Reeves et al) and should be consider on par with other, mainstream art.

The lessons we learnt from the 1990s was that it wasn’t all about cyber utopia, and fighting the mass media ‘bad guys’. It was also about giving a voice to a new generation that had emerged from the raves, from deep recession in UK of early ‘90s and who lapped up the opportunity to tell their stories in a hypertext format.

Furtherfield

Ruth Catlow and Marc Garret- Furtherfield

Furtherfield is a gallery in Finsbury Park, London that specialises in Media Art

The Net is a new public space (a Digital Common) and at the Furtherfield gallery in Finsbury Park people come to see Media Art “without knowing it’s Media Art” as Marc explains. It’s about creativity in community and “making heroes out of those who aren’t in the Art History books”.

Ruth is from a fine art background and used to find all the ArtNet and Bulletin Board work uninspiring at the beginning as it was just text. But slowly it got under her skin and she has developed a fascination with the Net, interested in it especially because of the power of networks for collaborative, peer-to-peer art and the opportunity for engaging non-traditional art audience/creators.

Marc and Ruth were involved in DIWO (Do It With Others), evolving from DIY culture. This is about collaboration and interaction, sharing and incremental value of peer to peer (p2p) artworks. Networks gave artists a way to category hop and opened them up to new connections. That connection is not just to each other but to their audience (or ’people formerly known as audience’ as described by Doc Searls in The Cluetrain Manifesto).

Marc coined the term ‘post-art’, that is art that is not selected by a hierarchy of “misogynists or commercial agents” or art speculators influenced by the desire for profit from the art sales. Rather, post-art is open and it is for the people by the people. This is what his am is for Media Art, to be a tool, a framework facilitating people’s own creative efforts, a tool for democratisation of art practice not just via free server space but open source code pieces that visitors can use to collaborate in real-time.

They both believe showing Media Art in a physical space is vital for social conversation and interaction between people, demonstrating the power of the networks. But they are also suggesting that it is Not about showing Web pieces or CD-Roms in a gallery, but more about building a gallery space and tools that people can use there to creatively connect with others, to interact physically, virtually and share their thoughts and emotions. The gallery is the temple not to admire the work of others but to create our own contribution of an artistic piece.

They mentioned new artists such as Jeremy Bailey, where the audience play a crucial part and is on par with the artist. Other piece showing the collaborative traction is an HTML embroidery by Ele Carpenter which attracted 70% of audience over 60 (Granny demographics). It’s a physical manifestation of a Wiki with hyperlink layers, knitted by a number of different contributors.

Marc also discussed the “Zero Dollar Laptop”- a project one-up from MIT Media Lab’s $100 laptop project- rather giving unused and recycled laptops and free and open source software for people on low budgets to get on line and to encourage creative contributions.

For their opening exhibition Furtherfield showed Thompson and Craighead’s London Wall N4 which is based on Twitter and on increasing interest in ‘shared’ creativity.

Audience

Conclusions

In summary, the evening covered a wide spectrum of New Media Art, from pre-Web Computer Art (Mandelbrot, William Latham) which required massive computing power and allowed us a rare glimpse at a human-computer creative duet in exploration of a joint subconscious. They used maths matter to sculpt generative 3D organic-looking forms that so inspired the rave aesthetics and went on to star in The Shamen’s chart-topping videos and in Visual Jockeying works from the period.

We noted the disrupting effect on the art scene of the low-bandwidth Web arriving in 1993 and forcing Virtual Reality, Mutator and many others to find new ways as creative outlets in Games (as gaming was not networked at that time and did not need to be concerned with low-bandwidth limitations. Instead, the new Net Art was initially text-based, using hypertext as a main tool of self-expression and was highly political, anti-corporate and had a lot in common with punk zines from the late 1970s in terms of contesting attitudes (Ivan Pope). The common themes from the UK-based Computer Art and Hypertext Art was that they were deeply rooted in contempt for the mainstream YBA movement and attacked the politics of the commercial art creation process in their own commentary. As bandwidth improved, artists experimented with Webcams and crowdsourcing, and new aesthetics emerged as a result of commercial new media practice, of Shockwave and Flash, dubbed ‘Shockwave Baroque’, influenced by Vector graphics.

Finally, many of the earlier ideas and themes are being revisited by Media artists. They now have the increased confidence of Web users and their sense of self-worth in terms of creativity, possibly as a result of experience with Twitter, Tumblr and similar tools, coupled with increased bandwidth and wider Net participation. New Media Art Practice has again shifted from an individual artist to a shared, collaborative process. It can be either with a key lead artist participation (Jeremy Baily piece) or just peer 2 peer, using a tool or a framework developed for the specific art event. An example of such work is Simon Sarginson’s Thea’s Aura (shown at Cybersalon Feb 2013), where the body of the dancer is acting as a brush for the canvas of a computer screen, the dancer being either a professional dancer or an audience member or a passer-by who wants to contribute to the piece. Other examples of such democratisation of New Media Art is the SnapChat series by Furtherfield.

A similar approach was present in Fabrica’s New Media Art pieces for Benetton under the creative leadership of the late Andy Cameron, Cybersalon co-founder, who was an early promoter of the new digital technologies offering a certain liberalisation of art creation from a narrow definition to something wider and more democratic.

Marc Garret from Futherfield summarised the discussion by predicting that New Media Art will continue to thrive in its many formats and surprises, commenting that the new wave and direction will not only come from ‘the left field’ when no one expects it, but probably will be developed by the young artists in the Cybersalon audience!

Event notes by Eva Pascoe & Niki Gomez

Cybersalon Selection of New Media Art from NOW

1. Fabio Lattanzi Antinori- Totem: this is a video of an installation in a gallery of his work.

http://fabiolattanziantinori.com/totems.php

2. Aaron Koblin:

Aaron is a creative technologist who now works for Google. Much of his work uses the wisdom and input of crowds.

http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work.html

Some highlights are:

- Sheepmarket

http://www.thesheepmarket.com/

The Wilderness Downtown

http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

Bicycle built for 2000 (inspired by HAL and 2001, A Space Odyssey)

http://www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com/

3. DNA Spoofing: DIY Counter-Surveillance

https://vimeo.com/60928966 (approx 3.40 mins)

This video is about genetic surveillance in the post-apocalyptic present.

By: Heather Dewey-Hagborg , Adam Harvey, Aurelia Moser , Allison Burtch

James Stevens and Ivan Pope

About the Speakers

- Artist William Latham showed and spoke about his early experimental work on digital sculptures, developing Mutator and its influence on the aesthetics of the London club scene of the 1990s.

- The Chair Ilze Black, currently completing her PhD at Queen Mary, University of London, co-founder of network media group Take2030 and seminal art initiative art bureau OPEN in 1990s post-Soviet Latvia.

- Ivan Pope the founder of ArtNet BBS and co-founder of Webmedia will show the thinking, creation and impact of his first Web artwork – The Last Words of Dutch Schultz – and its implication for today’s users of the Web.

- Sean Cubitt from Goldsmiths, University of London, built on more than twenty years of working with and writing about electronic artists and their technologies.

- Founders of Furtherfield , artists Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett, shared their story of the Net art collective that was set up in 1997 and sustained by the work of its community as the Internet took shape as a new public space for internationally connected cultural production.

New Media Art on show at Cybersalon

Storify- Tweets from Digital Design Cybersalon

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