Medialab Prado: Inclusiva-net 1-3 (2007-2009) [English/Spanish]

Inclusiva-net #3: net.art (second epoch). The evolution of artistic creation in the net-system

Publication of texts and videos of the lectures and keynotes presented during the 3rd Inclusiva-net meeting: NET.ART (SECOND EPOCH). The Evolution of Artistic Creation in the Net-system Seminar at the Centro Cultural de España Buenos Aires from March 2 through 6, 2009. Moderator: Juan Martín Prada.

This event was aimed to develop an analysis of the current situation of artistic practices on the Web from various theoretical and critical perspectives.

Throughout the meeting, many topics will be addressed including questions such as: Can we speak of a second epoch in net.art? What do the new art forms based on on/off-line hybridization contribute? What critical reflection do new manifestations of digital creations in networks offer us? What are the new relations between creation and dissention?

Net.art, which arose in the mid-1990s as a form of creative exploration and critical experimentation of the Internet, is one of the contemporary fields of artistic creation that has contributed most to a new outlook on forms of artistic production and experience.

Publisher: Medialab Prado. Área de Las Artes. Dirección General de Promoción y Proyectos Culturales. Madrid. 2009
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution – Share Alike (by-sa)

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Inclusiva-net #2: Digital Networks and Physical Space

From March 3 through 14, 2008, the 2nd Inclusiva-net Meeting, curated by Juan Martín Prada, took place at Medialab-Prado. In addition to a two week production workshop, lectures were held by invited researchers and artists and selected papers were presented.

ISSN 2171-8091
Publisher: Área de Las Artes. Dirección General de Promoción y Proyectos Culturales. Madrid. 2009
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Inclusiva-net #1: New Art Dynamics in Web 2 Mode

Seminars and keynotes presented at the First Inclusiva-net Meeting: [New Art Dynamics in Web 2 Mode] · July 2007.

ISSN 2171-8091
Published by: Área de las Artes. Dirección General de Promoción y Proyectos Culturales.
Madrid, 2007

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A Framework for Web Science (2006)

This text sets out a series of approaches to the analysis and synthesis of the World Wide Web, and other web-like information structures. A comprehensive set of research questions is outlined, together with a sub-disciplinary breakdown, emphasising the multi-faceted nature of the Web, and the multi-disciplinary nature of its study and development. These questions and approaches together set out an agenda for Web Science, the science of decentralised information systems. Web Science is required both as a way to understand the Web, and as a way to focus its development on key communicational and representational requirements. The text surveys central engineering issues, such as the development of the Semantic Web, Web services and P2P. Analytic approaches to discover the Web’s topology, or its graph-like structures, are examined. Finally, the Web as a technology is essentially socially embedded; therefore various issues and requirements for Web use and governance are also reviewed.

Authors: Tim Berners-Lee, Wendy Hall, James A. Hendler, Kieron O’Hara, Nigel Shadbolt and Daniel J. Weitzner
Publisher Now Publishers Inc, 2006
Foundations and Trends in Web Science. Vol. 1, No 1 (2006) pp. 1–130
ISBN 1933019336, 9781933019338
Length 134 pages

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Steven Shaviro: Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales (2010)

Steven Shaviro: “The new issue (14.1) of the open-access journal Film-Philosophy is now online.

Featured in this issue as an ‘extended article’ (it comes out to 100 pages!) is my latest: Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales.

The article is freely available for download; it comprises about two thirds of my forthcoming book Post-Cinematic Affect, appearing sometime later this year from Zero Books. (The book version will include two additional chapters: one on Neveldine/Taylor’s Gamer, and a general conclusion).” (from author’s blog)

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Warren Neidich: Blow Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain (2002)

In Blow-Up, Warren Neidich proposes a different and wholly original paradigm for thinking through cultural history and the philosophy of the human subject. Across the theoretical landscape that Neidich describes, even familiar monuments from the history of art, architecture, philosophy and aesthetics appear strange and disorienting, because the starting point of the primary and secondary repertoires (the nervous system and the pathways of connection built up through interaction between the brain and the outside world) is so totally unexpected. Crucial to Neidich’s narrative is the idea that, in modernity, the technologies that have evolved in the sphere of visual communication have come to operate on the subject with particular vehemence, not only in the realm of meaning but in their determining influence on the primary habits and dispositions of experience. Photography, cinema, television, the internet–as the forces of spectacle gain ever-wider currency in a rapidly globalizing world, those cultural forms that emerge as dominant in the competition for structuring the pathways of consciousness will annex and colonize more and more of the subject’s interior life, worldwide. But Neidich suggests that the subject of culture has the ability to remap itself, rewire itself, and assume forms so creative and protean that it will always outrun the forces that seek to limit its plasticity–even trauma and amputation cannot irreversibly damage the neural body.

Published in Journal of Neuro-Aesthetic Theory #2 (2000-02): Cinema and the Brain
Later published within the book “Blow-up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain” (DAP/UCR/California Museum of Photography, 2003).

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Christoph Spehr: Gleicher als andere. Eine Grundlegung der freien Kooperation (2003) [German]

Die Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts hat immer wieder gezeigt, dass Alternativen jenseits des Staatssozialismus, der die politische Form einer Demokratie verwarf, und einer kapitalistisch dominierten Gesellschaft, die sich zunehmend mit Institutionen einer Demokratie verband, kein Bestand hatten. Der “dritte Weg” des demokratischen Sozialismus bleib eine Vision. Soll dies nicht als bloßer Zufall der Geschichte abgetan werden, muß die Frage beantwortet werden, durch welche wirtschaftliche und politische Ordnung soziale Gleichheit verwirklicht werden kann, ohne dabei des Grundprinzip freier demokratiscsher Willensbildung aufzugeben.

Weitere Beiträge von: Frigga Haug, Ralf Krämer, Stefan Meretz, Dorothee Richter, Babette Scurrell, Uli Weiß, Frieder Otto Wolf u.a.
Reihe: Texte/Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung; Bd. 9
Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag Berlin, 2003
ISBN 3-320-02039-0

Published under GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1

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Paul B. Hartzog: Panarchy: Governance in the Network Age

Paul Hartzog introduces the concept of panarchy, a sociopolitical field that emerges when connective technologies, which lower the threshold for collective action, enable cooperative peer-to-peer production – of knowledge, of tools, of power.

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Elinor Ostrom: Neither Market Nor State: Governance of Common-Pool Resources in the Twenty-First Century (1994)

Property rights and tenure issues are important to assure success in efforts to combine appropriate management of natural resources with productivity increases in developing-country agriculture. Failure to understand existing and alternative property-rights arrangements and how they work may result in inappropriate action by governments and nongovernmental organizations. Research to enhance such understanding is of critical importance and occupies high priority within the current five-year plan of IFPRI. While much attention is paid to the negative effects of free access to natural resources and the potential benefits from privatization of natural resource ownership, this lecture describes common-property institutions and illustrates how they may be superior to both free access and private ownership to achieve appropriate natural resource management and sustainability in agricultural production. Professor Ostrom demonstrates how well-meaning government action aimed at environmental protection may destroy existing community-level arrangements to the detriment of both natural resources and the people living in the community. Action by governments and nongovernmental organizations should enhance rather than replace social capital, which has been built up at the community level over generations. Professor Ostrom argues convincingly that local common-property institutions are effective if not essential components of successful future management of natural resources. While some things are best done by governments or the market, others are more appropriately done by community-level institutions, that is, ‘neither market nor state.’

Lecture presented June 2, 1994.

International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Lecture Series no. 2
Washington, DC: IFPRI, 1994.
33 pages

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Gordon Pask: Heinz von Foerster’s Self Organization, the Progenitor of Conversation and Interaction Theories (1996)

Abstract:
Over more than three decades Heinz von Foerster and I have collaborated and worked together as well as in separate laboratories. This contribution gives a terse account of work which we have done together and which is relevant to Heinz’ prescient notion of self organization and its many arborizations. In the course of doing so it spells out some of the history associated with cybernetics to which both Heinz and I adhere.

The last paper Gordon Pask wrote before his death in 1996.

Published in Systems Research Vol. 13 No. 3, pp. 349-362, 1996

Keywords
concept, conversation (theory), interaction (of actors theory), observer, P-individual, self-organization, spin

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Andrew Pickering: The Science of the Unknowable: Stafford Beer’s Cybernetic Informatics (2006)

This essay derives from a larger project exploring the history of cybernetics in Britain in and after World War II. The project focusses on the work of four British cyberneticians—Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask; here author focuses on Stafford Beer, the founder of the field he called management cybernetics, and his work in informatics.

includes:
Cybernetics and New Ontologies:
An interview session with Andrew Pickering
by Kristian Hvidtfelt Nielsen

Published by The Centre for STS Studies, Aarhus 2006.

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Eden Medina: Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile (2006)

Abstract
This article presents a history of ‘Project Cybersyn’, an early computer network developed in Chile during the socialist presidency of Salvador Allende (1970–1973) to regulate the growing social property area and manage the transition of Chile’s economy from capitalism to socialism. Under the guidance of British cybernetician Stafford Beer, often lauded as the ‘ father of management cybernetics ’, an interdisciplinary Chilean team designed cybernetic models of factories within the nationalised sector and created a network for the rapid transmission of economic data between the government and the factory floor. The article describes the construction of this unorthodox system, examines how its structure reflected the socialist ideology of the Allende government, and documents the contributions of this technology to the Allende administration.

Published in Journal of Latin American Studies 38, pp. 571–606, Cambridge University Press, 2006

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Burning Man at Google: A Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production

Abstract:
Every August for more than a decade, thousands of information technologists and other knowledge workers have trekked out into a barren stretch of alkali desert and built a temporary city devoted to art, technology and communal living: Burning Man. Drawing on extensive archival research, participant observation, and interviews, this paper explores the ways that Burning Man’s bohemian ethos supports new forms of production emerging in Silicon Valley and especially at Google. It shows how elements of the Burning Man world – including the building of a socio-technical commons, participation in project-based artistic labor, and the fusion of social and professional interaction – help shape and legitimate the collaborative manufacturing processes driving the growth of Google and other firms. The paper thus develops the notion that Burning Man serves as a key cultural infrastructure for the Bay area’s new media industries.

Key Words: peer production, counterculture, cultural economy, art and technology, cultural infrastructure, free labor.

Fred Turner
Assistant Professor, Department of Communication
Stanford University

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Nada Švob-Đokić (ed.): The Emerging Creative Industries in Southeastern Europe (2005)

The book The Emerging Creative Industries in Southeastern Europe is a collection of papers that resulted from the postgraduate course Managing Cultural Transitions: Southeastern Europe – The Impact of Creative Industries, organized by the Department for Culture and Communication of the Institute for International Relations, Zagreb, and held at the Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik, 8-15 May 2005. The book gathers contributions by 11 authors who analyze creative industries and cultural cooperation in South East Europe, through three chapters: Creative Industries in Southeastern Europe; Cultural Exchange and Cooperation in Southeastern Europe and Cultural Cooperation Contexts.

The creative industries or, rather, culture industries as they appeared in the Southeastern European countries, stem from the tradition of industrial and market-oriented cultural production taken to be low culture or even kitsch cultural production, undermined during the times of socialism. In the transition period these industries became more associated with the ideas of modernization and technological progress, and strongly prompted by imports of cultural consumerism based on pop cultural products. It became clearly visible that small-scale cultural industries and productions might be both economically and culturally reasonable if supported by regionalist ideas and intra-regional cultural cooperation, which might, perhaps, establish links among small and very diverse Southeastern European cultures. However, the influence of large transnational corporations, which are turning the region into a part of the global cultural market, has not yet been undermined.

In The Emerging Creative Industries in Southeastern Europe authors from the region add a new dimension to this discussion and show how the Southeast European transitional societies, at best “mixed societies” undergoing different types of the modernization process, may react to challenges relating to the development of creative industries and creative economies. The authors clearly stress that in spite of numerous commonalities, the differences between countries in the region, and also within them, may still produce very different reactions to the challenge of creative industries and the markets they may be cultivating.

Collection of papers from the course
Managing Cultural Transitions: Southeastern Europe – The Impact of Creative Industries
Inter-University Centre, Dubrovnik, 8 – 15 May 2005
Edited by Nada Švob-Đokić
Culturelink Joint Publications Series No. 8
Institute for International Relations
Zagreb, 2005
ISBN 953-6096-37-4

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Kristóf Nyíri – The Networked Mind (2005)

The paper discusses the role of networks in cognition on two levels: on the level of the organization of ideas, and on the level of interpersonal communication. Any interesting system of ideas forms a network: ideas presented in a linear order (the order forced upon us by verbal expression) will necessarily convey a distorted picture of the underlying patterns of thought. Networks of ideas typically consist of a great number of nodes with just a few links, and a small number of hubs with very many links; that is, they are, to employ Albert-László Barabási’s term, “scale-free.” Barabási fits into a specific tradition: Hungarians had an early influence on the philosophy of networks, and on the philosophy of communication as developed at Marshall McLuhan’s Toronto Circle. In fact, this was the circle in which certain Hungarian and Austrian ideas on mediated collective thinking first came together—a telling testimony to the conditions of disturbed communication and idiosyncratic networking typical of East-Central Europe, past and present. The nodes-and-hubs pattern is characteristic, too, of social networks, in particular of scholarly and scientific networks. The paper analyses the role of “invisible colleges”—informal groups of scientific elites through whom the communication of information both within a field and across fields is channelled. By way of conclusion the notion of a new type of personality, the “network individual,” is discussed: the network individual is the person reintegrated, after centuries of relative isolation induced by the printing press, into the collective thinking of society—the individual whose mind is manifestly mediated, once again, by the minds of those forming his/her smaller or larger community.

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Transdisciplinary Digital Art. Sound, Vision and the New Screen: Digital Art Weeks and Interactive Futures 2006/2007, Zurich, Switzerland and Victoria, BC, Canada, Selected Papers

This volume collects selected papers from the past two instances of Digital Art Weeks (Zurich, Switzerland) and Interactive Futures (Victoria, BC, Canada), two parallel festivals of digital media art. The work represented in Transdisciplinary Digital Art is a confirmation of the vitality and breadth of the digital arts. Collecting essays that broadly encompass the digital arts, Transdisciplinary Digital Art gives a clear overview of the on-going strength of scientific, philosophical, aesthetic and artistic research that makes digital art perhaps the defining medium of the 21st Century.

Transdisciplinary Digital Art. Sound, Vision and the New Screen: Digital Art Weeks and Interactive Futures 2006/2007, Zurich, Switzerland and Victoria, BC, Canada, Selected Papers
By Randy Adams
Contributor Randy Adams, Steve Gibson, Stefan Muller Arisona
Published by Springer, 2008
ISBN 3540794859, 9783540794851
501 pages
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Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition: System Error (2005)

A resource for student activism on environmental, labor and human rights problems associated with the high-tech industry. The report includes information on responsible recycling and environmentally and socially responsible purchasing.

More info: http://svtc.etoxics.org

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