Neural.it :: media culture, hacktivism

art . hacktivism . performance . privacy

How to build a fake Google Street View car and keep your data

F.A.T. (Free Art & Technology) Lab, fake Google Street View, fat_fake_google_street_view_car.jpg

Google Street View is an application that allows users to virtually dive into Google's popular Maps feature and travel around at street level. It uses millions of 3D photographs to give users a 360° horizontal and 290° vertical view of their location. The photos are typically taken via car-mounted ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 07:05 AM - Mar 19/2010
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book . hacktivism . privacy . software

edited by Wolfgang Sützl & Geoff Cox - Creating Insecurity: art and culture in the age of security, DATA browser 04

Autonomedia, ISBN 978-1570272059, UK, 2009, English
The 4th anthology of texts realized by the DATA Browser series editorial group, is focused on "security", an ambiguous yet extremely popular concept, exploited by governments in order to claim its necessity, programmability and the consequent need to build a security infrastructure. The artificiality of this approach and the dangerous consequences of the current unilateral concern for security inspired the ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 04:56 PM - Mar 16/2010
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art . code . hacking . hacktivism . software

Island2, a squatted computer memory zone

Island2, Martin Howse, island_2_martin_howse.jpg

Conceptually, a computer's memory is not only the place where code and data are temporary hosted, but it is also the short term reference for everything that is rendered on the screen. In a way, it represents something like the computer's "awareness" at a given moment, more than its "short term" ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 11:28 AM - Mar 12/2010
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art . book . videogame

Mary Flanagan - Critical Play, Radical Game Design

The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262062688, USA, 2009, English
After a few years of serious and prolific videogame studies, fed by the industry boom, the research is starting to focus on reconnecting with the history of games through strong links that would help to understand and expand videogame paradigms. In this articulate book Flanagan starts with a major ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 01:13 PM - Mar 8/2010
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art . software

Artificial Smile, it's a happy world, after all

Artificial Smile, Stefan Stubbe, Andreas Schmelas, artificial_smile.jpg

The digital representation of reality is technically and conceptually a fake, and this "fake" is more and more what we're used to. The process of reducing in pixels (causing a loss of details), approximating colors (causing a loss of tones) and sounds (causing a loss of frequencies) are definitively creating a ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 09:01 PM - Mar 2/2010
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art . book . software . visual

Iman Moradi. Ant Scott, Joe Gilmore, Christopher Murphy - Glitch: Designing Imperfection

Mark Batty Publisher, ISBN 978-0979966668, USA, 2009, English
Error, and even more importantly, its perception and visual beauty are at the heart of the "glitch art" movement. Be it ethereal, as with a few seconds of uncertainty in the graphic rendering, or fixed, as a more or less stable bug in a file, the glitch is a recurrent, yet peripheral visual component. This is the ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 12:45 AM - Feb 26/2010
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art . music . software . sound

Sonicity, live data space

With the installation Sonicity, the English artist Stanza adds another significant chapter to his quest for new metaphors to translate the countless interactions produced by data passing through an environment into a sensory plane. Stanza's aim is to create a data space that is perceived as alive. To achieve this goal he has installed a great number of sensors that are ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 12:36 AM - Feb 25/2010
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art . book . net . preservation . software

Dragan Espenschied, Olia Lialina - Digital Folklore: To Computer Users, with Love and Respect

Merz Akademie, ISBN-13: 978-3937982250, Germany, 2009, English
Olga Lialina and Dragan Espenschied have invested a huge amount of time in investigating something that others have simplistically dismissed as "mundane". They have been among the very few to understand the importance of a historic moment (the first years of the world wide web) and the birth of its "pop culture" - a history they appropriately define as "digital folklore". Beyond the recurrent naivete ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 11:46 AM - Feb 22/2010
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art . privacy . visual

Stolen Moments, a human webcam in New York

Stolen Moments, Yasmine Chatila, stolen_moments.jpg

The process of getting used to being constantly watched and monitored by webcams, social networks and unscrupulous invaders of our privacy has certainly had an effect on our expressions and movements. Our everyday gestures have necessarily taken on an artificial quality due to the feeling of ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 11:28 AM - Feb 19/2010
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book . music . sound . visual

edited by Cornelia Lund, Holger Lund - Audio.Visual: On Visual and Related Media

Cornelia Lund, Holger Lund, Audio.Visual On Visual and Related Media, audio_visual.jpg

Arnoldsche Verlagsanstalt, ISBN 978-3897902930, Germany, 2009, English
Cornelia and Holger Lund established and run the Fluctuating Images gallery in Stuttgart since 2004, and in 2009 they relocated to Berlin. Their activity was centered on connecting the local audiovisual artist community (with a special care for the VJ scene) with the international one through works and ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 12:34 AM - Feb 18/2010
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art . biotech . robot . science

Propagations, light robots as cellular automata

Propagations, Leo Nunez, leo_nunez_propagations.jpg

The basic mechanisms of artificial intelligence are still around, probably because there are still few real applications able to make a user think that a machine has some kind of "intelligence". So "organic" qualities are not yet generally associated with digital machines. Cellular automata (a grid of cells ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 12:32 PM - Feb 15/2010
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book . hacktivism . music . science . sound

Steve Goodman - Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear

The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262013475, U.S.A., 2010, English
Sound waves can't usually damage your ears unless you constantly keep headphone volume too high,or you insist on standing very close to tall speakers during a concert for too long. Used in the right way (or wrong way), however, they can be a scary armament, able to inflict various degrees of harassment, ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 12:18 PM - Jan 29/2010
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art . net . preservation . software

Temporary.cc, interaction is destruction 

Temporary.cc, Zach Gage, temporary_cc.jpg

Digital data has a paradoxical status. Immaterial by definition, it nonetheless has a need for a physical substance (hardware) to manifest itself. Eternal and not subject to decay, it is forced to bond its life to the hosting support, inheriting fragility and a tendency to degenerate. Furthermore, data legibility is ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 11:51 AM - Jan 28/2010
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art . book . copyright . net

Cornelia Sollfrank - Expanded Original

Hatje Cantz, ISBN 978-3775723909, Germany, 2009, English, German
The work of Cornelia Sollfrank is one of the most enlightening attempts to describe the consequences of immateriality in art. She consistently points to the obsolescence of concepts such as "original" and "copyrighted", developing a full spectrum of perspectives. Even if the core of her work comes out of the ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 07:57 PM - Jan 6/2010
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art . hacking . hacktivism . net

Web 2.0 suicide machine + Seppukoo, social network self-destruction

Web 2.0 suicide machine, Gordan Savicic, web_2_0_suicide_machine_seppukoo.jpg

Parodies of social networking services started to appear since the Friendster boom in the early 2000s. Anti-social networking platforms as introvertster, snubster, enemybook or isolatr playfully subverted online community dynamics targeting their shallowness as much as ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 05:53 PM - Dec 31/2009
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art . book . science . software . visual

Sherry Turkle - Simulation and Its Discontents

The MIT Press, ISBN 978-0262012706, USA, 2009, English
Starting with two ethnographic studies she undertook twenty years apart, Sherry Turkle is able to make a timely investigation in this book, addressing the role played by simulation in higher education, physics, chemistry and architecture research. The pivotal perception shift that is pervading the younger "world creators" seems highly risky, especially when seen from the previous generation's perspective, ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 02:36 PM - Dec 24/2009
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