Image by antisocial notworking http://project.arnolfini.org.uk

My post was sent on September 25 to Nettime mailing-list, following the thread Has Facebook superseded Nettime? started by Florian Cramer.

It was published on the Nettime digest the day after. My answer pointed out many of the topics I am researching right now, in particular some relevant connections between hacker culture, networking art and Web 2.0.

Original Txt from Florian Cramer: <nettime> Has Facebook superseded Nettime?
From: Florian Cramer <fc-nettime {AT} pleintekst.nl>
Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:58:08 +0200

“For about two years, I’ve noted that a sizable part of the media artistic, -activist and -scholarly community that makes up Nettime has moved to Facebook, in the sense of being more active and networked there than here. At the same time, there seems to no public discussion of this fact, making Facebook an elephant in the room. I’m speculating that Facebook is seen as a friendlier environment – but nobody dares to mention it because, among others, it’s a corporate site built on blatant user data mining [see http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=863] with scary surveillance and privacy implications. What is the solution? Is something like Facebook needed, but as a decentralized, non-data-minable, user-owned system?”

My answer is following below.

Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:38:15 -0700
From: Tatiana Bazzichelli <t.bazzichelli {AT} mclink.it>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Has Facebook superseded Nettime?

Hi,

referring to the post sent by Florian Cramer some days ago, I think that the question why a lot of nettimers have moved to Facebook is an interesting and important one, which demands deeper investigation and reflection. Anyway, I don’t think it is appropriate to stage Facebook and Nettime on the same level, since the conversations you can have here have a completely different perspective and depth than the superficial chatting on Facebook.
The question is perhaps why people feel so comfortable on Facebook, and are using that platform more than the ‘traditional’ mailing-lists, even if in that way they are giving away their private information to a corporation, and they are helping this corporation to create its revenue.
A simple answer could be that today people are looking for a more ‘personal’ relationship when they network with other people: somehow using a mailing-list creates an intellectual barrier, and you don’t see the persons behind the texts. That was once a very important privacy issue, instead it seems that today people want not only to access your mind, but your personal life (just with one click you can see what that person is doing, her/his photos, which are his/her friends and so on). So each person becomes a node of private information, which I believe is more interesting to some people – and more ego-fulfilling.
As a lot of companies of the Web 2.0 era, i.e. Google or Facebook, presents themself as a good giants – do you remember the slogan: Don’t be Evil!, made at the beginning by Google? The services are simple to use, are presented as open, and have great technical infrastructures behind them which allows fast uploads of videos, pictures, etc.

But how can we reflect tactically on that?

I have been reflecting on the issue of social networking vs. activism and open knowledge since last year – my research is still going on – and I believe that the strategy is once again to be conscious of what you are using, and which the ‘bugs’ of the system are, that you can turn into your own advantage.
I don’t think the solution is just to refuse something because it’s proprietary. Considering that Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, etc, are attracting a lot of users – and not only the ones with a critical background – I think it is a good strategy to try to use them to access many more people than a mailing-list allowed you to do in the past. The question is perhaps: what to communicate on these platforms?
I am researching disruptive practices in the social networks, which try to give a critical response to the relationship between activism and the digital economy. I think it is still possible to speak about social hacks and cultural Trojan Horses, even if you are using proprietary platforms, and create the unpredictable where it is not supposed to be.

Some people in Italy have tried to move in that direction with the project of Anna Adamolo. As a reference I could give you a paper I wrote for the Oekonux Conference last March, where I connect experiences of Luther Blissett, the Neoist Web Conspiracy and other pranks made by multiple identities with some interventions in the Web 2.0 (i.e. the Anna Adamolo one).
You can read it here (in particular, have a look at the last pharagraph, ‘From Networking to Hacktivism: The Experience of Anna Adamolo’):
http://www.oekonux.org/list-en/archive/msg05812.html

We also organized an event in Italy within the AHA project, where we discussed, among other topics, the social and artistic critique of Web 2.0.
I wrote a report on it, which I also sent to Nettime some time ago:

A Reflection on the Activist Strategies in the Web 2.0 Era
http://www.mail-archive.com/nettime-l@kein.org/msg01305.html

The topics of the intersection between critical thinking and social networking are also often discussed on the IDC mailling-list (the Institute for Distributed Creativity)

http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/

Trebor Scholz (IDC mailing-list) is organizing a very good conference in November at the New School University, NYC: The Internet as Playground and Factory: http://digitallabor.org/
Topics will be the intersections between ‘labor’ and the new forms of digital sociality, considering that all of us who are writing content in the social networks, are actually indirectly working for the corporations who own them. I am looking forward to going there, because I am sure many of these question marks will be touched upon.

At the same time, projects like Telekommunisten (http://www.telekommunisten.net/) are trying to use social networks as a tool for critically spreading their venture communist services, and people like Saul Albert and Michael Weinkove, of ‘The People Speak’ (http://theps.net) are trying to create physical social networks as an alternative form of business. This could be another way of seeing the matter.

Time ago I was speaking about the relationship between social networking and ‘traditional’ networking, like mail art, with the mail artist Vittore Baroni. An interview came out of it, which might be useful to reflect on the meaning of networking over the last 30 years:
From Mail Art to Web 2.0: http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1423

> What is the solution? Is something like Facebook needed, but as a
> decentralized, non-data-minable, user-owned system?

I don’t know what the solution is…but I think there is still space for critical reflection.

Best,

Tatiana

Slide by Jason Scott, http://ascii.textfiles.com/

Here they are! The photos from Arse Elektronika 2009: check the photostream!

Arse Elektronika 2009

October is coming in San Francisco, and together with the breezy fog, we have a new occasion to re-fresh our minds: Arse Elektronika 2009, October 1-4, San Francisco.
This year sex and technology meet the future at Arse Elektronika, as reported in the LA Times.
The Arse Elektronika Festival, which is not the one about media art organized in Linz every year – even if it sounds the same – also comes from Austria: founded by the experimental art group monochrom and managed by Johannes Grenzfurthner it is at its third edition (the first was in 2007).

CUM2CUT, the Indie-Porn-Short-Film Festival which I founded (together with Gaia Novati) in Berlin in 2006, is among the Festival partners. Some CUM2CUT movies will be shown at the Prixxx Arse Elektronika on October 1 at 6 PM, at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco’s Mission district.

Beside this, I will be involved in the festival program, taking part in the final panel,  Of Hypercrotch and Nanobot, together with Rose White, Violet Blue, Saul Albert, Eleanor Saitta and Johannes Grenzfurthner: Saturday, October 3, 8 PM @ PariSoMa

Here is the official press release. Spread the word!

==cut==
monochrom’s
ARSE ELEKTRONIKA 2009
“OF INTERCOURSE AND INTRACOURSE”

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Conference, film festival, DIY workshops, performances.
Oct 1-4, 2009. San Francisco.

With talks, machines and performances by Allen Stein, R. U. Sirius, Noah Weinstein, Randy Sarafan, Uncle Abdul, Jonathon Keats, Ani Niow, Jason Scott, Annalee Newitz, Rainer Prohaska, Douglas Spink, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Violet Blue, Eleanor Saitta, Reesa Brown, Saul Albert, Monika Kribusz, Kim De Vries, Pepper Mint, Micha Cárdenas, Rose White, Elle Mehrmand and many more…
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Scottish SF author Iain Banks created a fictitious group-civilisation called ‘Culture’ in his eponymous narrative. The vast majority of humanoid people in the ‘Culture’ are born with greatly altered glands housed within their central nervous systems, who secrete – on command – mood- and sensory-appreciationaltering compounds into the person’s bloodstream. Additionally many inhabitants have subtly altered reproductive organs – and control over the associated nerves – to enhance sexual pleasure. Ovulation is at will in the female, and a fetus up to a certain stage may be re-absorbed, aborted, or held at a static point in its development; again, as willed. Also, a viral change from one sex into the other, is possible. And there is a convention that each person should give birth to one child in their lives. It may sound strange, but Banks states that a society in which it is so easy to change sex will rapidly find out if it is treating one gender better than the other. Pressure for change within society would presumably build up until some form of sexual equality and hence numerical parity will be established. Does this set-up sound too futuristic? Too utopian? Too bizarre?

We may not forget that mankind is a sexual and tool-using species. And that’s why our annual conference Arse Elektronika deals with sex, technology and the future. As bio-hacking, sexually enhanced bodies, genetic utopias and plethora of gender have long been the focus of literature, science fiction and, increasingly, pornography, this year will see us explore the possibilities that fictional and authentic bodies have to offer. Our world is already way more bizarre than our ancestors could have ever imagined. But it may not be bizarre enough.

“Bizarre enough for what?” — you might ask. Bizarre enough to subvert the heterosexist matrix that is underlying our world and that we should hack and overcome for some quite pressing reasons within the next century.
Don’t you think, replicants?

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Festival Schedule:

October 1 (6 PM-midnight): Film festival, opening
ceremony and Prixxx Arse Elektronika Gala @ Roxie Theater
October 2 (8 PM-midnight): Art, pixels,
interactive performance @ Center for Sex and Culture
October 3 (11:30 AM-9 PM): Talks and discourse @ PariSoMa
October 3 (after 10 PM): Party and performance night @ Femina Potens Gallery
October 4 (12 noon-10 PM): DIY workshops @ Noisebridge

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Up-to-date info on festival site:
http://www.monochrom.at/arse-elektronika/

Tickets:
http://bit.ly/arse2009-tickets

From August 20 until December 20, 2009, I am hosted as Visiting Scholar at the Human Sciences & Technologies Advanced Research Institute at Stanford University, California H-STAR, working within the Stanford Humanities Lab.

Thanks to a partnership agreement between the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation (DASTI) and H-STAR at Stanford University, it has been possible to apply for a research grant at Stanford University, being involved in programs that connect Stanford resources in human sciences with research and innovation about information technology. This semester (fall 2oo9) six PhD Scholars, including myself, are hosted by HSTAR (see here for more details). Aim of my research at Stanford is to investigate how networking practices are able to change the model of production of Internet contents and artistic creations, connecting the development of hacker ethics and current digital artistic practices with the creation of Web 2.0 social networking platforms. Fred Turner, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, is my research co-supervisor.

The Stanford Humanities Lab is a loosely structured, self-supporting research collaboratory built around the work of its faculty leaders. It serves as a platform for transdiciplinary/post-disciplinary study dedicated to exploring innovative scenarios for the future of knowledge production and reproduction in the arts and humanities. Their research focus is about what it is to be human, about experience in a connected world, about the boundaries of culture and nature — transcend old divisions between the arts, sciences, and humanities; between the academy, industry, and the public sphere. The people behind the Lab are: Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Founder and Director), Henry Lowood, Michael Shanks and John Willinsky (Directors); Henrik Bennetsen (Associate Director), Matteo Bittanti (Associate Member); Core Collaborators are: Dena DeBry, Brandon Jones, Gordon Knox, Susan J. Rojo and Galen Davis (read more here).

Among the current projects at the SHL are: Speed Limits and the developing of Sirikata, a BSD licensed open source platform for games and virtual worlds. On September 12 and 13, a Mixed Reality Performance: An Evening on Sirikata took place. A performance at the MiTo International festival of Music in Milan, Italy, presented by the Stanford Humanities Lab [SHL] and the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics [CCRMA], Stanford University).

Stay tuned!