. media culture . hacktivism
book . hacktivism . media

Leah Lievrouw, Alternative and Activist New Media

alternative_and_activist_newmedia.jpg Polity Press, 200 pages, 2011, English, ISBN-13: 978-0745641843
Defining new media has always been tricky. Here, the author gives a clear and thorough definition of new media based on three components: the device/artifact which enables the ability to communicate, the communication activity/practice, and the social arrangements and organizational forms created around the artifact and the practice. This is a strong base that, coupled with an explicit reference to  ... [ Continue ]


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hacktivism . media

Occupy George, talking dollars

Occupy George, Chiara Ciociola, occupy_george.jpg Printing on (real) one dollar bills (the ones with George Washington) enjoyable and graphically concrete data concerning the distribution of wealth in the United States: this is the premise of Occupy George, a performance created in the wake of the many growing participatory movements born out of the original "Occupy Wall Street." The notes, constituting medium and message with an incisiveness that  ... [ Continue ]


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book . hacktivism . net

Mirko Tobias Schafer, Bastard Culture! How User Participation Transforms Cultural Production

249 pages, Amsterdam University Press, 2011, English, ISBN-13: 978-9089642561, bastard_culture.jpg 249 pages, Amsterdam University Press, 2011, English, ISBN-13: 978-9089642561
Internet has been since the beginning of its commercial diffusion a popular medium, but only recently has there been a rising interest in its own internal social dynamics, including its folklore and how it has radically reshaped the relationship  ... [ Continue ]


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hacktivism . music

Sound Tossing, Artificial Urban Crickets

Sound Tossing,Soundfiti, matteo marangoni, sound_tossing.jpg In the urban landscape it can be hard to distinguish a sign from a trace and sometimes even from a piece of garbage. The global popularity of shoe tossing, the practice of throwing worn out shoes over telephone wires, can be partially attributed to this ambiguity. What does it mean when a pair of shoes are seen hanging overhead? While the motives of shoe-tossers remain unknown, they have inspired  ... [ Continue ]


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art . hacktivism . media . privacy

People Staring at Computers: the discreet gaze of the commodities

Kyle McDonald, People staring at computers, Paolo Pedercini, Apple, Steve Jobs, people_staring_at_computers.jpg Kyle McDonald is well-known for exploring the boundaries of public and private space in our post-privacy world. With his Keytweeter he placed himself under digital surveillance for an entire year, capturing everything he typed with a keylogger and posting in on Twitter - 140 keystrokes at time. His most recent project gives another conceptual twist on spyware. 'People staring at  ... [ Continue ]


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hacktivism . magazine . media

Marshall McLuhan, W. Terrence Gordon - Counterblast: 1954 Facsimile

counterblast_marchall_mcluhan.jpg Gingko Press, Inc, English, ISBN-13: 978-1584234524, 32 pages
McLuhan "zine"?!? This must be the first reaction once exposed to Counterblast. In the early golden era of the mimeograph, which also lead to a wave of science fiction zines in the U.S., the visionary theorist was already experimenting in communicating his own sharp and enlightening ideas. In the year of the McLuhan centennial, Transmediale festival has cooperated with Gingko Press to reprint a facsimile  ... [ Continue ]


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art . hacktivism . music

L.S.D./Sonic Graffiti – Urban Screen Sonifier

L.S.D./Sonic Graffiti, Benjamin Gaulon, Recyclism, L_s_d_Sonic-_Graffiti.jpg Recyclism aka Benjamin Gaulon offers an original and playful reading of video advertisement displays. Competing for attention in our daily lives, plasma, led and lcd screens have become ordinary elements of the urban landscape, delivering familiar corporate propaganda in a technologically updated form. Gaulon employs his L.S.D. (light to sound device) to  ... [ Continue ]


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hacktivism . media . mobile . net

Boskoi, wilderness addiction

Boskoi, Joey van der Bie, Maarten van der Mark, Vincent Vijn, Chiara Ciociola, boskoi.jpg Boskoi is an application for Android mobiles that allows people to create a checklist of geo-localized spontaneous food in urban areas. Created by Joey van der Bie, Maarten van der Mark and Vincent Vijn the application was developed with Ushahidi, an useful open source platform for collecting, displaying and mapping information on mobile devices. Recently it has been tried in Amsterdam where  ... [ Continue ]


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book . hacktivism . net

Douglas Rushkoff - Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age

Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, OR Books, ISBN: 978-1935928157, 140 pages, 2010, English, program_or_be_programmed.jpg OR Books, ISBN: 978-1935928157, 140 pages, 2010, English
In the early days of digital networks there was a set of social conventions, called Netiquette, meant to facilitate interaction over networks (they were even codified in an official Internet Engineering Task Force document: RFC 1855). The time/space coordinates of the new medium (the network) were causing various embarrassing communication problems among online users, so the rules were  ... [ Continue ]


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art . hacktivism

Simulen, funny electric control

Simulen, Jean Katambayi Mukendi, Chiara Ciociola, simulen.jpg The genesis of "Simulen", a work by Congolese artist Jean Katambayi Mukendi exhibited at Pixelache 2011 festival in Helsinki, is very delicate. From the functional point of view it is a prototype for the automatic correction of electricity distribution trouble. The spark that triggered its creation is the absolute anarchy of the electrical infrastructure of the city where the artist lives, Lumbumbashi in  ... [ Continue ]


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book . hacktivism . net

Joss Hands - @ Is For Activism: Dissent, Resistance And Rebellion In A Digital Culture

Joss Hands, @ Is For Activism: Dissent, Resistance And Rebellion In A Digital Culture, Pluto Press, ISBN: 978-0745327006, 2011, English, 224 pages, @_is_for_activism_joss_hands.jpg Pluto Press, ISBN: 978-0745327006, 2011, English, 224 pages
After all the myths about the magical use of digital networks for political reasons, including the north African uprisings, and the consequent hype, it's healthy to read a book focusing on giving context and perspective to practices. Hands feels it a necessity to question what Slavoj Zizek calls "interpassivity", or the illusion of doing something (like the popular act of signing online petitions) which don't really affect  ... [ Continue ]


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art . hacktivism . media . net

FoodMatch, surfing the fridges

FoodMatch, Secret Cooks Club of Singapore, food_match_Secret_Cooks_Club.jpg The single portions of food at the supermarket are a strange business entity. The skimpy, perfect packaging directly links with the little windows of the huge buildings of one-room flats that are filling up all the big cities. The quantity of food inside them is always slightly more than necessary, so  ... [ Continue ]


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book . hacktivism . media . net

Zizi Papacharissi A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites [Paperback]

Zizi Papacharissi, A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites [Paperback], 336 pages, Routledge, English, ISBN: 978-0415801812, a_networked_self_Zizi_Papacharissi.jpg 336 pages, Routledge, English, ISBN: 978-0415801812
Although hundreds of millions of people use social media platforms almost instinctively, the value, the meaning and the scale of what they are doing there is often missed, or, at best, only guessed at. In the context of a sort of global social experiment (which can't be disconnected from the rise of related industries), personal dynamics have to deal with a completely different dimension that does not  ... [ Continue ]


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art . hacking . hacktivism . media . net . performance . video

Highscreen, hacking public spaces with media archaeology

Highscreen, Aram Bartholl, aram_bartholl_highscreen.jpg Net.Art already belongs to media archaeology as Oslo 2003 “Written in Stone” exhibition clearly stated. Exhibiting net art has always been all about commitment, because it is simply not possible to avoid interpretation if you want to show this art in a way that engages the audience in an exhibition space beyond the click of a mouse. But what happens if the action of exhibiting net.art, becomes an artwork in itself and the display area is the public space?  ... [ Continue ]


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art . hacktivism . mobile . net . software

Newstweek, mutant news

Newstweek, Julian Oliver, Danja Vasiliev, newstweek_Julian_Oliver_Danja_Vasiliev.jpg In a crowded restaurant a small plastic box attached to a power outlet goes unnoticed. It could be a transformer or a charger. The box conceals, in fact, a small computer capable of mapping the traffic of the wireless network environment. The mini-device accesses the intercepted network by creating an SSH tunnel. Using a simple "search and replace" process, the online content viewed by users  ... [ Continue ]


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book . hacktivism

Gerald Raunig - A Thousand Machines: A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement

Semiotext(e), ISBN-13: 978-1584350859, March 31, 2010, English, Gerald_Raunig_a_thousand_machines.jpg Semiotext(e), ISBN-13: 978-1584350859, March 31, 2010, English
After "Art and Revolution", Gerald Raunig has written a different book elaborating on a concept formulated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari about the machine, seen not as technical apparatus, but as a social composition. The reference is quite evident in the title ("A Thousand Machines"), but it's only the starting point. Although close to "Art and Revolution", with which it shares some material,  ... [ Continue ]


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art . hacktivism . interactive . videogame

Automatypewriter, a semiotic interaction with fiction

Automatypewriter, Jonathan M. Guberman, automatypewriter.jpg Automatype- writer is a typewriter that works on its own: the buttons operate automatically, writing on the sheet without the need to type. The machine is also capable to detect human text and elaborate plausible answers in various ways. Jonathan M. Guberman has designed and developed it as a new game interface for old adventure games like Zork, those, it is worth remembering, in which the  ... [ Continue ]


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art . hacktivism . net

Dyndy, no money economy

Dyndy, Jaromil, Marco Sachy, dyndy.jpg The capital economy is going to cyclically collapse on itself: this now is a fact. The latest (disastrous) decade has spawned a variety of initiatives to create alternative systems for the exchange of "values", that are not necessarily monetary in nature. These economic systems are varied: they sometimes propose an exchange based on non-monetary resources (such as Time Banking, which allows  ... [ Continue ]


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art . hacktivism

P2P Gift Credit Cards, popular born credits

P2P Gift Credit Cards, paolo cirio, p2p.jpg Paolo Cirio’s new project was born with the goal of exploring the possibility of generating wealth for ordinary people through a more equitable system of wealth distribution. Currently, banks are the only (legitimate) entities playing the role of custodians of credit. But as demonstrated in the last recession, credit does not always have a corresponding value in reality (in terms of a material value). A new,  ... [ Continue ]


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art . hacktivism . media

Crashvertise, let's make crashes happen!

Crashvertise, guerriglia marketing, Kook Artgency, crashvertise.jpg The traffic accidents aggravated the dense urban crowd and immediately the news was spread by word of mouth. People just stopped, attracted by the feverish show of a tragedy. People no longer ran, distracted by the frenzy of everyday life, but suddenly found time to stop, trying to find a place as close as possible to the scene. And they did nothing but watch. What better location for advertisements  ... [ Continue ]


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art . book . hacktivism

Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett, Corrado Morgana - 
Artists Re: Thinking Games


Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett, Corrado Morgana, 
Artists Re: Thinking Games, FACT/Liverpool University Press, 
87 pages, 
2010, 
English, 
ISBN-13: 978-1846312472, 
artists_rethinking_games.jpg FACT/Liverpool University Press, 
87 pages
, 2010, 
English
, ISBN-13: 978-1846312472
Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett, the two founders of Furtherfield (a collaborative artist-led community and organization dealing with art, technology and social change since 1996) are joined by artist and curator Corrado Morgana in editing this nice compendium of texts about game art. In the Furtherfield tradition the book is centered on artistic practice and is engaged with re-thinking games and  ... [ Continue ]


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hacktivism . net . performance . video

Mechanical Games, online sports video for turkers

Mechanical Games, Xtine Burrough,mechanical_games.jpg Mechanical Games is an online sports-themed video contest. The five competition categories (lifting weights, swimming, hockey, fencing, volleyball) can be realistically represented or interpreted freely (sometimes with surreal results) through 30-60-minute videos. The participants involved were recruited in different ways. The artist  ... [ Continue ]


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art . hacktivism

This painting is not available in your country, paint error

This painting is not available in your country, Paul Mutant, this_painting_is_not_available_in_your_country.jpg "This painting is not available in your country" is a spartan acrylic on canvas. The title immediately conjures the question of "regional lockout", a business strategy which prevents the reproduction, from one country to another, of a media designed for a device marketed in both countries. The unsettling effect  ... [ Continue ]


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book . hacktivism . videogame

Nick Dyer-Witheford, Greig de Peuter - Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games

Nick Dyer-Witheford, Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games, University of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-0816666119, games_of_empire.jpg University of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-0816666119, USA, 2009, English
Activism (or better hacktivism) usually conjugates with video games when a new political or highly controversial art-game (or artistic intervention in a game platform) is announced. Otherwise the most profitable entertainment industry is not very affected by political criticism, and neither are the hordes of  ... [ Continue ]


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art . book . hacktivism . magazine

various editors - monochrom #26-34 Ye Olde Self-Referentiality

edition mono/monochrom, ISBN-13: 978-3950237269, monochrom #26-34 Ye Olde Self-Referentiality, monochrom_26_34.jpg edition mono/monochrom, ISBN 978-3950237269, Austria, 2010, English
Printing a 500-page book using the look and feel of a nineties xeroxed fanzine, with an impressive number of essays is a clear statement in 2010. This is not meant to be an outrageously expensive art book for collectors, nor a sleek coffee table book to be flipped through in an alternative club. It is  ... [ Continue ]


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book . hacking . hacktivism . music . sound

edited by Mattin & Anthony Iles - Noise & Capitalism

edited by Mattin & Anthony Iles, Noise & Capitalism, Arteleku Audiolab, ISBN 978-8479086221, mattin_iles_noise_and_capitalism.jpg Arteleku Audiolab, ISBN 978-8479086221, Spain, 2009, English
This book is an exception to the rule that a product can be judged from its price. It is free (either downloading it or trading a printed copy) and it sports professional editing, graphic design and production. But it seems just a direct consequence of the  ... [ Continue ]


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book . hacktivism . media

Elizabeth Losh - Virtualpolitik

elizabeth_losh_virtualpolitik.jpg The MIT Press, ISBN 978-0262123044, USA, 2009, English
In middle nineties EFF founder John Perry Barlow wrote "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" formalizing the new autonomy from the real world bureaucracy and its walls as felt then by the Internet elite. Among the different statements it still can be read as a mounting impatience with digitally illiterate bureaucrats and their failing rhetoric, generated by a growing fear of an open and  ... [ Continue ]


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book . hacktivism . media

Franco "Bifo" Berardi - The Soul at Work

Franco Bifo Berardi, The Soul at Work, Semiotext(e), ISBN 978-1584350767, bifo_soul_at_work.jpg Semiotext(e), ISBN 978-1584350767, USA, 2009, English
The life of the Italian philosopher Franco Bifo Berardi has been often connected to contemporaneity. After his seminal gestures and exploits in the seventies, his fundamental writings in the nineties about communication technologies and social movements, and his pivotal contribution to the birth of  ... [ Continue ]


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book . hacking . hacktivism . net . privacy . software

edited by Konrad Becker and Felix Stalder - Deep Search: The Politics of Search Beyond Google

edited by Konrad Becker and Felix Stalder, Deep Search, The Politics of Search Beyond Google, deep_search_becker_stalder.jpg Studienverlag & Transaction Publishers, ISBN 978-3706547956, Austria, 2009, English
The centrality of search engines in everyday lives has recently been focused on by different institutions involved in the critical analysis of Internet culture. Among them are the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam, and the World-Information Institute in Vienna that organized the Deep Search conference,  ... [ Continue ]


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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 ]


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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

edited by Wolfgang Sützl, Geoff Cox, Creating Insecurity, art and culture in the age of security, DATA browser 04, Autonomedia, ISBN 978-1570272059, creating_insecurity_data_browser_04.jpg 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 ]


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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 ]


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book . hacktivism . music . science . sound

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

Steve Goodman - Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262013475, sonic_warfare.jpg 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 ]


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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 ]


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book . hacktivism . media . net

Manuel Castells - Communication Power

Manuel Castells, Communication Power, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0199567041, U.S.A., 2009, English, manuel_castells_communication_power.jpg Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0199567041, U.S.A., 2009, English
"Where does power lie in the network society?" This is the central question that Manuel Castells tries to answer in his first book in ten years. After the disillusionment of the internet utopia as a liberating medium per se, Castells describes society using hardware/software terminology, drawing a stimulating picture. He grounds his analysis of the network society through different mass media conflicts like the  ... [ Continue ]


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