*#unibrennt cloud*: institute for science and technology ars (ISTA) of unibrennt (AT) with http://unibrennt.tvhttp://unsereuni.at [award of distinction]
*CBA – Cultural Broadcasting Archive*: Ingo Leindecker (AT) , Thomas Diesenreiter (DE), http://cba.fro.at [honorable mention]
*A Golden Era – making and unmaking of Piratbyrån*: Golden bus + archive (SE) 2003-2010 http://piratbyran.se
*monochrom’s Arse Elektronika: Sex, Tech, and the Future of Screw-It-Yourself*: talk, monochrom.at / Johannes Grenzfurthner (AT); http://www.monochrom.at/arse-elektronika/
*Artzilla*: Skate the web! workshops and contests, Tobias Leingruber (DE); 2010 http://artzilla.org
*HyperAudio-Linking * X-OP, Leo Findeisen (DE/AT), transformingfreedom.org
Detailed project descriptions:
*CCC*: Tim Pritlove (DE), Andreas Lehner (DE) a.o.; https://www.ccc.de/ Golden Nica
The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) is an organization of hackers. The CCC is based in Germany and other German-speaking countries and currently has over 4,000 members.
The CCC describes itself as “a galactic community of life’s beings, independent of age, sex, race or societal orientation, which strives across borders for freedom of information….” In general, the CCC advocates more transparency in government, freedom of information, and human right to communication. Supporting the principles of the hacker ethic, the club also fights for free access to computers and technological infrastructure for everybody.
Kibera’s first complete free and open map November 2009.
Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya, widely known as Africa’s largest slum, remains a blank spot on the map. Without basic knowledge of the geography and resources of Kibera it is impossible to have an informed discussion on how to improve the lives of residents. This November, young Kiberans create the first public digital map of their own community.
the ubiquitous #unibrennt cloud is the name of student protests that began in October 2009
with the occupation of university lecture halls in Vienna and turned into one of the most remarkable protest movements of recent decades in the German-speaking world. Protest was directed against the dramatic situation at universities and the state of the educational system in general. the ubiquitous #unibrennt cloud does not want to be understood as a project but as an event. It is a chaotic venture, spontaneous, without plans or goals. It has no budget, structure, employees, or professional campaign management, leading figures or organizational framework. Within a few days, a broad networked self-organized movement evolved with astonishing capacities. Hundreds of thousands were mobilized and became involved—on site at universities, at demonstrations and flash mobs in public places, and above all online. A wildfire that would, of course, be inconceivable without Twitter or Facebook. the ubiquitous #unibrennt cloud, this protest movement in the German-speaking world, draws on the dynamics of social networks in ways previously unforeseen. the ubiquitous #unibrennt cloud does not just use these networks as media channels for content that has been generated collaboratively: to a certain degree, social networks also provide the organizational and structural matrix for the protest movement per se. the ubiquitous #unibrennt cloud does not reflect the structures of previous student movements, but the forms of self-administration and communication found in social networks.
CBA is an audioarchive, which is developed for the special needs of free radio stations. a platform for networking projects of different radio stations. Different editorships can take part on a common project and exchange text and soundfiles over the internet. Content from different sources can be published together.
Everybody can download and use the audiofiles except for commercial use.
MakerBot Industries is a company founded in January 2009 by Bre Pettis, Adam Mayer, and Zach “Hoeken” Smith producing an open source 3D printer rapid prototyping machine called the Cupcake CNC. The Cupcake incorporates the ideas of the RepRap Project with the goal of bringing desktop 3D printing into the home at an affordable price, partially due to being able to produce some of its own parts.It allows people to make their own bots that can build almost anything up to 4″x4″x6″. They print with acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polylactic acid (PLA) plastics.
*The Tor Project*: Anonymity online, Andreas Lehner (DE) http://torproject.orgHonorable Mention.
Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis. Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location.
Tired of your Social Network?Liberate your newbie friends with a Web2.0 suicide! This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego. The machine is just a metaphor for the website which moddr_ is hosting; the belly of the beast where the web2.0 suicide scripts are maintained. Our service currently runs with Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and LinkedIn!
*A Golden Era – making and unmaking of Piratbyrån*: Bus (SE) 2003-10 http://piratbyran.se
“Piratbyrån (The Bureau of Piracy) is not an organization, at least not primarily. First and foremost, Piratbyrån is since its beginning in 2003 an ongoing conversation. We are reflecting over questions regarding copying, information infrastructure and digital culture. Within the group, using our own different experiences and skills, as in our daily encounters with other people. These conversations often bring about different kinds of activities.”
We may not forget that mankind is a sexual and tool-using species. From the depiction of a vulva in a cave painting to the newest Internet porno, technology and sexuality have always been closely linked. New technologies are quick to appeal to pornography consumers, and thus these customers represent a profitable market segment for the suppliers of new products and services. Currently, all factors show that high-tech developments owe a great deal of their success to the need for further sexual stimulation. One could cite the example provided by the science fiction concept of a full-body interface designed to produce sexual stimulation. But it isn’t science fiction anymore.It’s DIY.
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?
*Artzilla*: Skate the web! workshops, Tobias Leingruber (DE); 2010 http://artzilla.org
Artzilla is dedicated to the development of experimental browser software.The platform collects and exhibits creative works, shares code and tutorials, and publishes news from the scene.Their collection of browser modifications challenges online society and uses online services to create art work. Internet artists, street artists and skateboarders use public architecture in ways, the creators didn’t expect it to be used.
Diaspora is an open-source personal web server software intended to provide a distributed social networking service, a decentralized alternative to Facebook.
The project’s intent is to provide the ability to have “the little games, the little walls, the little chat” that a Facebook user’s experience currently provides, but instead hosted on users’ personal web servers so that users can fully control the information they share.
Technical innovations shape only a small part of computer and network culture. It doesn’t matter much who invented the microprocessor, the mouse, TCP/IP or the World Wide Web; nor does it matter what ideas were behind these inventions.What matters is who uses them. Only when users start to express themselves with these technical innovations do they truly become relevant to culture at large.
Users’ endeavors, like glittering star backgrounds, photos of cute kittens and rainbow gradients, are mostly derided as kitsch or in the most extreme cases, postulated as the end of culture itself. In fact this evolving vernacular, created by users for users, is the most important, beautiful and misunderstood language of new media.
As the first book of its kind, this reader contains essays and projects investigating many different facets of Digital Folklore: online amateur culture, dirtstyle, typo-nihilism, memes, teapots, penis enlargement.
FatCloud is an open-source cloud computing initiative launched by members of the Free Art & Technology (FAT) Lab. We’re donating our time & servers to open-source web applications at no cost. Our goal is to incubate large-scale, turnkey web services — alternatives to daily essentials like Google Search, Facebook, Flickr, Gmail and more — by removing the cost and headache of server administration and allowing open-source hackers to focus on code. FatCloud provides the financial & technical backbone necessary to incubate a new generation of FreeGoogles and OpenFacebooks: “public good” projects built on free software, transparency, and respect for individuals’ privacy. All hosted applications must be entirely open-source and free of commercial advertising. A granting process admits applicants on a rolling basis.
At Ars Electronica, the famous Firewall icon will be transferred to real space. In a workshop we will play Firewall Ball and develop the rules of the Game of the Future. The game is open to all visitors of the Digitial Communities Space.
*flattr*: social micropayment platform, Peter Sunde (SE) http://flattr.com
Flattr is a micropayment system, which launched publicly in March 2010 on an invite-only basis, and then opened up to the public in August 2010.
Users will be able to pay a small monthly amount and then click buttons on sites to share out the money they paid in among those sites, sort of like an Internet tip jar. The minimum users will have to pay is 2 euros per month. The money you pay each month will be spread evenly among the buttons you click in a month. We want to encourage people to share money as well as content.
*Metalab Squad of Awesome*: Viennese hackerspace (AT)http://metalab.at
The Metalab is a 200sqm non-profit hackspace in Vienna’s first district – right next to the vienna city hall. It offers space for free exchange of information, and collaboration between technical-creative enthusiasts, hackers and founders. Metalab is dedicated to providing infrastructure for projects and offers a physical space for interested people from the wide fields of IT, new media, and hacker culture.
*My last Ars*: live gif mashup – VJ set, Evan Roth (US) 2010http://evan-roth.com
Evan Roth is an artist and researcher whose work focuses on technology, tools of empowerment, open source and popular culture. His notable projects include L.A.S.E.R. Tag and LED Throwies (with Graffiti Research Lab), White Glove Tracking, Explicit Content Only and Graffiti Analysis. From experimenting with crowd sourcing to creating art with airport security and collaborating with Jay-Z on the first open source rap video, Roth’s work explores the overlap between free culture and popular culture.
OPEN ACTA es un sitio dedicado a informar a la sociedad mexicana acerca de ACTA y crear conciencia acerca de la importancia de que el gobierno mexicano y todos los gobiernos que hoy negocian el ACTA, inicien una verdadera discusión pública y democrática sobre el verdadero contenido y alcances del mismo.
Star Wars Uncut is a crowdsourced recreation of the sci-fi classicmade by stitching together hundreds of 15-second clips created by fans. Star Wars was a natural choice to explore the dynamics of community creation on the web – the worldwide response from fans has been overwhelming and the resulting movie is incredibly fun to watch. SWU recently won an Emmy for “Outstanding Achievement in Interactive Media (Fiction)”
Superbertram is our all friend, he is a representative of a new species of enriched, mobile gadgets, who have a lot of different features combined in a pleasant housing which does not look like a high-tech-tool at all. Superbertrams main feature consists in delivering live pictures from his close surrounding to the World Wide Web. For doing so, he is equipped with two moveable cameras, which are able to capture visual information at the size of 640 x 480 pixels with a frame rate up to 15 fps, depending on the actual connection speed. Their framing can be controlled by everyone through the easy-to-use web interface by simply clicking into the picture, centering the framing at the clicked position, their range of movement is 90 degrees horizontally and 50 degrees vertically each, which can create a quiet impressive panorama view. While streaming without intermission, Superbertram preservers the seen at the popular online photo community “Flickr.com” automatically in a pre-defined interval, which can range from four frames per minute to two frames per day (Left & Right eye).
Telecomix News Agency is both an experiment and a real service. “Issues that cannot make it to the general news agenda is now be promoted by the public itself. The old rules no longer apply. Users can find each other and start talking. In countries where correspondents are no longer allowed to report, citizens can themselves reach out for global support, and find ways to bypass the digital roadblocks built by their oppressors.”
Jodi is a collective of two internet artists: Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans; since the mid-1990s they started to create original artworks for the World Wide Web.
Thumbing is an ongoing Youtube intervention. The option to video comment on a Youtube video is used by the artists group JODI as a tool for performance. By holding up the thumb very close to the webcam for a 2-3 second moment the video-site monopoly gets infiltrated by an endless series of useless ‘pokes’. The performance itself is split into thousands short clips on random Youtube videos. The blurred and flesh colored video bits evoke again harsh reactions from the actual audience on Youtube.
Crosslinking isn’t en vogue too much in todays web, which could soon make it a quite sad and lonely place. How much fun you could have surfing through the digital universe with a good linked web!The Beautiful Zeros and Ugly Ones, a project group at Merz Akademie Stuttgart led by Olia Lialina, set up the Trail Blazers contest and show moderated by Dragan Espenschied, where users are to surf the classic way from Amazon to Piratebay and lots of other great trails.Show off your PRO surfing skills without keyboard, without Google, just with pure links!
*BOSCO-Uganda*, *ceibalJAM!*, *CulturaDigital.Br*, *FixMyStreet*, *Kloop*, *Puncar Action!*, *Sourcemap*, *TEDtoChina*, (all honorable mentions of Digital Communities)
Mz Baltazar’s Laboratory is a women-only, weekly event taking place at Metalab, Vienna. Women who love to make things, rather than consuming them, meet up to share their skills. Mz Baltazar’s participants come from different backgrounds, ages and mindsets to exchange equipement, build circuits, play with DIY electronics and interactive art. We encourage each other to learn new tools and collaborate. All workshops are free in order to offer a fearless, accessible plattform to tinker with male connotated toys. The artwork created at Mz Baltazar’s Laboratory is generated with Open Source Soft- and Hardware.
*CCC*: Tim Pritlove (DE), Andreas Lehner (DE) a.o.; https://www.ccc.de/ Golden Nica
The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) is an organization of hackers. The CCC is based in Germany and other German-speaking countries and currently has over 4,000 members.
The CCC describes itself as “a galactic community of life’s beings, independent of age, sex, race or societal orientation, which strives across borders for freedom of informationâ¦.” In general, the CCC advocates more transparency in government, freedom of information, and human right to communication. Supporting the principles of the hacker ethic, the club also fights for free access to computers and technological infrastructure for everybody.
*Map Kibera*: Mikel Maron (US) http://mapkibera.org Awad of Distinction
Kibera’s first complete free and open map November 2009.                   Â
Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya, widely known as Africa’s largest slum, remains a blank spot on the map. Without basic knowledge of the geography and resources of Kibera it is impossible to have an informed discussion on how to improve the lives of residents. This November, young Kiberans create the first public digital map of their own community.      Â
*#unibrennt cloud*:Â (ISTA) of unibrennt (AT) with http://unibrennt.tv http://unsereuni.at
Award of Distinction
the ubiquitous #unibrennt cloud is the name of student protests that began in October 2009
with the occupation of university lecture halls in Vienna and turned into one of the most remarkable protest movements of recent decades in the German-speaking world. Protest was directed against the dramatic situation at universities and the state of the educational system in general. the ubiquitous #unibrennt cloud does not want to be understood as a project but as an event. It is a chaotic venture, spontaneous, without plans or goals. It has no budget, structure, employees, or professional campaign management, leading figures or organizational framework. Within a few days, a broad networked self-organized movement evolved with astonishing capacities. Hundreds of thousands were mobilized and became involvedâon site at universities, at demonstrations and flash mobs in public places, and above all online. A wildfire that would, of course, be inconceivable without Twitter or Facebook. the ubiquitous #unibrennt cloud, this protest movement in the German-speaking world, draws on the dynamics of social networks in ways previously unforeseen. the ubiquitous #unibrennt cloud does not just use these networks as media channels for content that has been generated collaboratively: to a certain degree, social networks also provide the organizational and structural matrix for the protest movement per se. the ubiquitous #unibrennt cloud does not reflect the structures of previous student movements, but the forms of self-administration and communication found in social networks.
*CBA – Archive*: Ingo Leindecker (AT) , Thomas Diesenreiter (DE), http://cba.fro.at
CBA is an audioarchive, which is developed for the special needs of free radio stations.
a platform for networking projects of different radio stations.Â
Different editorships can take part on a common project and exchange text and soundfiles over the internet. Content from different sources can be published together.Â
Everybody can download and use the audiofiles except for commercial use.
*MakerBot Industries*: Bre Pettis (US); http://makerbot.com Honorable Mention
MakerBot Industries is a company founded in January 2009 by Bre Pettis, Adam Mayer, and Zach âHoekenâ Smith producing an open source 3D printer rapid prototyping machine called the Cupcake CNC. The Cupcake incorporates the ideas of the RepRap Project with the goal of bringing desktop 3D printing into the home at an affordable price, partially due to being able to produce some of its own parts.It allows people to make their own bots that can build almost anything up to 4″x4″x6″. They print with acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polylactic acid (PLA) plastics.
*The Tor Project*: Anonymity online, Andreas Lehner (DE)Â http://torproject.org Honorable Mention.
Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis. Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location.Â
Â
*Web2.0 suicide machine*Â -Â moddr_ /WORM; http://moddr.net | http://worm.orgÂ
– Honorable Mention
Tired of your Social Network?
Liberate your newbie friends with a Web2.0 suicide! This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego. The machine is just a metaphor for the website which moddr_ is hosting; the belly of the beast where the web2.0 suicide scripts are maintained. Our service currently runs with Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and LinkedIn! Â
Commit NOW !   http://suicidemachine.org/
*A Golden Era Рmaking and unmaking of Piratbyr̴n*: Bus (SE) 2003-10 http://piratbyran.se
“PiratbyrÃ¥n (The Bureau of Piracy) is not an organization, at least not primarily. First and foremost, PiratbyrÃ¥n is since its beginning in 2003 an ongoing conversation. We are reflecting over questions regarding copying, information infrastructure and digital culture. Within the group, using our own different experiences and skills, as in our daily encounters with other people. These conversations often bring about different kinds of activities.”
*Arse Elektronika: Sex, Tech, and the Future of Screw-It-Yourself*: talk monochrom.at / Johannes Grenzfurthner (AT); http://www.monochrom.at/arse-elektronika/Â Â
We may not forget that mankind is a sexual and tool-using species. From the depiction of a vulva in a cave painting to the newest Internet porno, technology and sexuality have always been closely linked. New technologies are quick to appeal to pornography consumers, and thus these customers represent a profitable market segment for the suppliers of new products and services. Currently, all factors show that high-tech developments owe a great deal of their success to the need for further sexual stimulation. One could cite the example provided by the science fiction concept of a full-body interface designed to produce sexual stimulation. But it isnâ™t science fiction anymore. It’s DIY.
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?Â
Â
*Artzilla*: Skate the web! workshops, Tobias Leingruber (DE); 2010 http://artzilla.org
Artzilla is dedicated to the development of experimental browser software.The platform collects and exhibits creative works, shares code and tutorials, and publishes news from the scene.Their collection of browser modifications challenges online society and uses online services to create art work. Internet artists, street artists and skateboarders use public architecture in ways, the creators didnâ™t expect it to be used.Â
*DIASPORA*: Maxwell Salzberg (US) http://joindiaspora.com
Diaspora is an open-source personal web server software intended to provide a distributed social networking service, a decentralized alternative to Facebook.Â
The project’s intent is to provide the ability to have “the little games, the little walls, the little chat” that a Facebook user’s experience currently provides, but instead hosted on users’ personal web servers so that users can fully control the information they share.
*Digital Folklore*: Olia Lialina (RU) & Dragan Espenschied (DE); 2009 http://digital-folklore.org
Technical innovations shape only a small part of computer and network culture. It doesn’t matter much who invented the microprocessor, the mouse, TCP/IP or the World Wide Web; nor does it matter what ideas were behind these inventions. What matters is who uses them. Only when users start to express themselves with these technical innovations do they truly become relevant to culture at large.     Â
Users’ endeavors, like glittering star backgrounds, photos of cute kittens and rainbow gradients, are mostly derided as kitsch or in the most extreme cases, postulated as the end of culture itself. In fact this evolving vernacular, created by users for users, is the most important, beautiful and misunderstood language of new media.
As the first book of its kind, this reader contains essays and projects investigating many different facets of Digital Folklore: online amateur culture, dirtstyle, typo-nihilism, memes, teapots, penis enlargement.
*F.A.T. Lab*: Free Art & Technology Lab: Cloud services, Jamie Wilkinson, 2010 http://fffff.at
The Free Art and Technology Lab is an organization dedicated to enriching the public domain through the research and development of creative technologies and media. The entire FAT network of artists, engineers, scientists, lawyers, musicians and Bornas are committed to supporting open values and the public domain through the use of emerging open licenses, support for open entrepreneurship and the admonishment of secrecy, copyright monopoliesÂ
and patents.
*Firewall Ball*: Johannes P Osterhoff (DE) 2010 http://johannes-p-osterhoff.com
At Ars Electronica, the famous Firewall icon will be transferred to real space. In a workshop we will play Firewall Ball and develop the rules of the Game of the Future. The game is open to all visitors of the Digitial Communities Space.
*flattr*: social micropayment platform, Peter Sunde (SE) http://flattr.com
Flattr is a micropayment system, which launched publicly in March 2010 on an invite-only basis, and then opened up to the public in August 2010.
Users will be able to pay a small monthly amount and then click buttons on sites to share out the money they paid in among those sites, sort of like an Internet tip jar. The minimum users will have to pay is 2 euros per month. The money you pay each month will be spread evenly among the buttons you click in a month. We want to encourage people to share money as well as content.
*Metalab Squad of Awesome*:Â Viennese hackerspace (AT) http://metalab.at
The Metalab is a 200sqm non-profit hackspace in Vienna’s first district – right next to the vienna city hall. It offers space for free exchange of information, and collaboration between technical-creative enthusiasts, hackers and founders. Metalab is dedicated to providing infrastructure for projects and offers a physical space for interested people from the wide fields of IT, new media, and hacker culture. Â
*My last Ars*: live gif mashup – VJ set, Evan Roth (US) 201http://piratepad.net/5l4Yv3PPrc0 http://evan-roth.com
Evan Roth is an artist and researcher whose work focuses on technology, tools of empowerment, open source and popular culture. His notable projects include L.A.S.E.R. Tag and LED Throwies (with Graffiti Research Lab), White Glove Tracking, Explicit Content Only and Graffiti Analysis. From experimenting with crowd sourcing to creating art with airport security and collaborating with Jay-Z on the first open source rap video, Roth’s work explores the overlap between free culture and popular culture.
*OpenActa / AFI*: Geraldine Juarez (MX) a-f-i.tumblr.com http://www.openacta.org
OPEN ACTA es un sitio dedicado a informar a la sociedad mexicana acerca de ACTA y crear conciencia acerca de la importancia de que el gobierno mexicano y todos los gobiernos que hoy negocian el ACTA,  inicien una verdadera discusión pública y democrática sobre el  verdadero contenido y alcances del mismo.
*Star Wars Uncut*: the movie, Casey Pugh, http://starwarsuncut.com/
Star Wars Uncut is a crowdsourced version of the sci-fi classic that was made by stitching together hundreds of fan-submitted scenes. Star Wars was a natural choice to explore the dynamics of community creation on the web – the response from fans has been overwhelming worldwide and the resulting movie is incredibly fun to watch.
*superbertram*: Georg Schütz (AT) 2007-2010 http://superbertram.com
Superbertram is our all friend, he is a representative of a new species of enriched, mobile gadgets, who have a lot of different features combined in a pleasant housing which does not look like a high-tech-tool at all. Superbertrams main feature consists in delivering live pictures from his close surrounding to the World Wide Web. For doing so, he is equipped with two moveable cameras, which are able to capture visual information at the size of 640 x 480 pixels with a frame rate up to 15 fps, depending on the actual connection speed. Their framing can be controlled by everyone through the easy-to-use web interface by simply clicking into the picture, centering the framing at the clicked position, their range of movement is 90 degrees horizontally and 50 degrees vertically each, which can create a quiet impressive panorama view. While streaming without intermission, Superbertram preservers the seen at the popular online photo community “Flickr.com” automatically in a pre-defined interval, which can range from four frames per minute to two frames per day (Left & Right eye).
*Telecomix*: A sociocyphernetic jellyfish cluster, (SE) http://telecomix.org
Telecomix News Agency is both an experiment and a real service. “Issues that cannot make it to the general news agenda is now be promoted by the public itself. The old rules no longer apply. Users can find each other and start talking. In countries where correspondents are no longer allowed to report, citizens can themselves reach out for global support, and find ways to bypass the digital roadblocks built by their oppressors.”
*Thumbing & FolkSomy.vj*: JODI (NL/BE); 2010 http://thumbing.org http://folksomy.net
Jodi is a collective of two internet artists: Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans; since the mid-1990s they started to create original artworks for the World Wide Web. A few years later, they also turned to software art and artistic computer game modification. Since 2002, they have been in what has been called their “Screen Grab” period, making video works by recording the computer monitor’s output while working, playing video games, or coding. To those that are not in on their conceptual jokes, Jodi’s works seem inaccessible and impenetrable, appearing to make the user’s computer run amok. In more recent works, they modified old video games such as Wolfenstein 3D, Quake, Jet Set Willy, and the latest, Max Payne 2 to create a new set of art games. Jodi’s approach to game modification is comparable in many ways to deconstructivism in architecture, because they would disassemble the game to its basic parts, and reassemble it in ways that do not make intuitive sense.
*Trail Blazers*: Theo Seemann & B.Z.a.U.O., (DE); 2010 http://nm.merz-akademie.de/trailblazers
Crosslinking isn’t en vogue too much in todays web, which could soon make it a quite sad and lonely place. How much fun you could have surfing through the digital universe with a good linked web!Â
The Beautiful Zeros and Ugly Ones, a project group at Merz Akademie Stuttgart led by Olia Lialina, set up the Trail Blazers contest and show moderated by Dragan Espenschied, where users are to surf the classic way from Amazon to Piratebay and lots of other great trails. Show off your PRO surfing skills without keyboard, without Google, just with pure links!Â
TELE-INTERNET 2nd-6th September 2010 Digital Communities, Ars Electronica
Participants
The CCC describes itself as “a galactic community of life’s beings, independent of age, sex, race or societal orientation, which strives across borders for freedom of information….” In general, the CCC advocates more transparency in government, freedom of information, and human right to communication. Supporting the principles of the hacker ethic, the club also fights for free access to computers and technological infrastructure for everybody.
Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya, widely known as Africa’s largest slum, remains a blank spot on the map. Without basic knowledge of the geography and resources of Kibera it is impossible to have an informed discussion on how to improve the lives of residents. This November, young Kiberans create the first public digital map of their own community.
Everybody can download and use the audiofiles except for commercial use.
MakerBot Industries is a company founded in January 2009 by Bre Pettis, Adam Mayer, and Zach “Hoeken” Smith producing an open source 3D printer rapid prototyping machine called the Cupcake CNC. The Cupcake incorporates the ideas of the RepRap Project with the goal of bringing desktop 3D printing into the home at an affordable price, partially due to being able to produce some of its own parts.It allows people to make their own bots that can build almost anything up to 4″x4″x6″. They print with acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polylactic acid (PLA) plastics.
Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis. Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location.
Commit NOW ! http://suicidemachine.org/
“Piratbyrån (The Bureau of Piracy) is not an organization, at least not primarily. First and foremost, Piratbyrån is since its beginning in 2003 an ongoing conversation. We are reflecting over questions regarding copying, information infrastructure and digital culture. Within the group, using our own different experiences and skills, as in our daily encounters with other people. These conversations often bring about different kinds of activities.”
Don’t you think, replicants?
Artzilla is dedicated to the development of experimental browser software.The platform collects and exhibits creative works, shares code and tutorials, and publishes news from the scene.Their collection of browser modifications challenges online society and uses online services to create art work. Internet artists, street artists and skateboarders use public architecture in ways, the creators didn’t expect it to be used.
The project’s intent is to provide the ability to have “the little games, the little walls, the little chat” that a Facebook user’s experience currently provides, but instead hosted on users’ personal web servers so that users can fully control the information they share.
As the first book of its kind, this reader contains essays and projects investigating many different facets of Digital Folklore: online amateur culture, dirtstyle, typo-nihilism, memes, teapots, penis enlargement.
At Ars Electronica, the famous Firewall icon will be transferred to real space. In a workshop we will play Firewall Ball and develop the rules of the Game of the Future. The game is open to all visitors of the Digitial Communities Space.
Users will be able to pay a small monthly amount and then click buttons on sites to share out the money they paid in among those sites, sort of like an Internet tip jar. The minimum users will have to pay is 2 euros per month. The money you pay each month will be spread evenly among the buttons you click in a month. We want to encourage people to share money as well as content.
The Metalab is a 200sqm non-profit hackspace in Vienna’s first district – right next to the vienna city hall. It offers space for free exchange of information, and collaboration between technical-creative enthusiasts, hackers and founders. Metalab is dedicated to providing infrastructure for projects and offers a physical space for interested people from the wide fields of IT, new media, and hacker culture.
Evan Roth is an artist and researcher whose work focuses on technology, tools of empowerment, open source and popular culture. His notable projects include L.A.S.E.R. Tag and LED Throwies (with Graffiti Research Lab), White Glove Tracking, Explicit Content Only and Graffiti Analysis. From experimenting with crowd sourcing to creating art with airport security and collaborating with Jay-Z on the first open source rap video, Roth’s work explores the overlap between free culture and popular culture.
OPEN ACTA es un sitio dedicado a informar a la sociedad mexicana acerca de ACTA y crear conciencia acerca de la importancia de que el gobierno mexicano y todos los gobiernos que hoy negocian el ACTA, inicien una verdadera discusión pública y democrática sobre el verdadero contenido y alcances del mismo.
Superbertram is our all friend, he is a representative of a new species of enriched, mobile gadgets, who have a lot of different features combined in a pleasant housing which does not look like a high-tech-tool at all. Superbertrams main feature consists in delivering live pictures from his close surrounding to the World Wide Web. For doing so, he is equipped with two moveable cameras, which are able to capture visual information at the size of 640 x 480 pixels with a frame rate up to 15 fps, depending on the actual connection speed. Their framing can be controlled by everyone through the easy-to-use web interface by simply clicking into the picture, centering the framing at the clicked position, their range of movement is 90 degrees horizontally and 50 degrees vertically each, which can create a quiet impressive panorama view. While streaming without intermission, Superbertram preservers the seen at the popular online photo community “Flickr.com” automatically in a pre-defined interval, which can range from four frames per minute to two frames per day (Left & Right eye).
Telecomix News Agency is both an experiment and a real service. “Issues that cannot make it to the general news agenda is now be promoted by the public itself. The old rules no longer apply. Users can find each other and start talking. In countries where correspondents are no longer allowed to report, citizens can themselves reach out for global support, and find ways to bypass the digital roadblocks built by their oppressors.”
Detailed project descriptions:
*CCC*: Tim Pritlove (DE), Andreas Lehner (DE) a.o.; https://www.ccc.de/ Golden Nica
The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) is an organization of hackers. The CCC is based in Germany and other German-speaking countries and currently has over 4,000 members.
The CCC describes itself as “a galactic community of life’s beings, independent of age, sex, race or societal orientation, which strives across borders for freedom of informationâ¦.” In general, the CCC advocates more transparency in government, freedom of information, and human right to communication. Supporting the principles of the hacker ethic, the club also fights for free access to computers and technological infrastructure for everybody.
*Map Kibera*: Mikel Maron (US) http://mapkibera.org Awad of Distinction
Kibera’s first complete free and open map November 2009.                   Â
Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya, widely known as Africa’s largest slum, remains a blank spot on the map. Without basic knowledge of the geography and resources of Kibera it is impossible to have an informed discussion on how to improve the lives of residents. This November, young Kiberans create the first public digital map of their own community.      Â
*#unibrennt cloud*:Â (ISTA) of unibrennt (AT) with http://unibrennt.tv http://unsereuni.at
Award of Distinction
the ubiquitous #unibrennt cloud is the name of student protests that began in October 2009
with the occupation of university lecture halls in Vienna and turned into one of the most remarkable protest movements of recent decades in the German-speaking world. Protest was directed against the dramatic situation at universities and the state of the educational system in general. the ubiquitous #unibrennt cloud does not want to be understood as a project but as an event. It is a chaotic venture, spontaneous, without plans or goals. It has no budget, structure, employees, or professional campaign management, leading figures or organizational framework. Within a few days, a broad networked self-organized movement evolved with astonishing capacities. Hundreds of thousands were mobilized and became involvedâon site at universities, at demonstrations and flash mobs in public places, and above all online. A wildfire that would, of course, be inconceivable without Twitter or Facebook. the ubiquitous #unibrennt cloud, this protest movement in the German-speaking world, draws on the dynamics of social networks in ways previously unforeseen. the ubiquitous #unibrennt cloud does not just use these networks as media channels for content that has been generated collaboratively: to a certain degree, social networks also provide the organizational and structural matrix for the protest movement per se. the ubiquitous #unibrennt cloud does not reflect the structures of previous student movements, but the forms of self-administration and communication found in social networks.
*CBA – Archive*: Ingo Leindecker (AT) , Thomas Diesenreiter (DE), http://cba.fro.at
CBA is an audioarchive, which is developed for the special needs of free radio stations.
a platform for networking projects of different radio stations.Â
Different editorships can take part on a common project and exchange text and soundfiles over the internet. Content from different sources can be published together.Â
Everybody can download and use the audiofiles except for commercial use.
*MakerBot Industries*: Bre Pettis (US); http://makerbot.com Honorable Mention
MakerBot Industries is a company founded in January 2009 by Bre Pettis, Adam Mayer, and Zach âHoekenâ Smith producing an open source 3D printer rapid prototyping machine called the Cupcake CNC. The Cupcake incorporates the ideas of the RepRap Project with the goal of bringing desktop 3D printing into the home at an affordable price, partially due to being able to produce some of its own parts.It allows people to make their own bots that can build almost anything up to 4″x4″x6″. They print with acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polylactic acid (PLA) plastics.
*The Tor Project*: Anonymity online, Andreas Lehner (DE)Â http://torproject.org Honorable Mention.
Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis. Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location.Â
Â
*Web2.0 suicide machine*Â -Â moddr_ /WORM; http://moddr.net | http://worm.orgÂ
– Honorable Mention
Tired of your Social Network?
Liberate your newbie friends with a Web2.0 suicide! This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego. The machine is just a metaphor for the website which moddr_ is hosting; the belly of the beast where the web2.0 suicide scripts are maintained. Our service currently runs with Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and LinkedIn! Â
Commit NOW !   http://suicidemachine.org/
*A Golden Era Рmaking and unmaking of Piratbyr̴n*: Bus (SE) 2003-10 http://piratbyran.se
“PiratbyrÃ¥n (The Bureau of Piracy) is not an organization, at least not primarily. First and foremost, PiratbyrÃ¥n is since its beginning in 2003 an ongoing conversation. We are reflecting over questions regarding copying, information infrastructure and digital culture. Within the group, using our own different experiences and skills, as in our daily encounters with other people. These conversations often bring about different kinds of activities.”
*Arse Elektronika: Sex, Tech, and the Future of Screw-It-Yourself*: talk monochrom.at / Johannes Grenzfurthner (AT); http://www.monochrom.at/arse-elektronika/Â Â
We may not forget that mankind is a sexual and tool-using species. From the depiction of a vulva in a cave painting to the newest Internet porno, technology and sexuality have always been closely linked. New technologies are quick to appeal to pornography consumers, and thus these customers represent a profitable market segment for the suppliers of new products and services. Currently, all factors show that high-tech developments owe a great deal of their success to the need for further sexual stimulation. One could cite the example provided by the science fiction concept of a full-body interface designed to produce sexual stimulation. But it isnâ™t science fiction anymore. It’s DIY.
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?Â
Â
*Artzilla*: Skate the web! workshops, Tobias Leingruber (DE); 2010 http://artzilla.org
Artzilla is dedicated to the development of experimental browser software.The platform collects and exhibits creative works, shares code and tutorials, and publishes news from the scene.Their collection of browser modifications challenges online society and uses online services to create art work. Internet artists, street artists and skateboarders use public architecture in ways, the creators didnâ™t expect it to be used.Â
*DIASPORA*: Maxwell Salzberg (US) http://joindiaspora.com
Diaspora is an open-source personal web server software intended to provide a distributed social networking service, a decentralized alternative to Facebook.Â
The project’s intent is to provide the ability to have “the little games, the little walls, the little chat” that a Facebook user’s experience currently provides, but instead hosted on users’ personal web servers so that users can fully control the information they share.
*Digital Folklore*: Olia Lialina (RU) & Dragan Espenschied (DE); 2009 http://digital-folklore.org
Technical innovations shape only a small part of computer and network culture. It doesn’t matter much who invented the microprocessor, the mouse, TCP/IP or the World Wide Web; nor does it matter what ideas were behind these inventions. What matters is who uses them. Only when users start to express themselves with these technical innovations do they truly become relevant to culture at large.     Â
Users’ endeavors, like glittering star backgrounds, photos of cute kittens and rainbow gradients, are mostly derided as kitsch or in the most extreme cases, postulated as the end of culture itself. In fact this evolving vernacular, created by users for users, is the most important, beautiful and misunderstood language of new media.
As the first book of its kind, this reader contains essays and projects investigating many different facets of Digital Folklore: online amateur culture, dirtstyle, typo-nihilism, memes, teapots, penis enlargement.
*F.A.T. Lab*: Free Art & Technology Lab: Cloud services, Jamie Wilkinson, 2010 http://fffff.at
The Free Art and Technology Lab is an organization dedicated to enriching the public domain through the research and development of creative technologies and media. The entire FAT network of artists, engineers, scientists, lawyers, musicians and Bornas are committed to supporting open values and the public domain through the use of emerging open licenses, support for open entrepreneurship and the admonishment of secrecy, copyright monopoliesÂ
and patents.
*Firewall Ball*: Johannes P Osterhoff (DE) 2010 http://johannes-p-osterhoff.com
At Ars Electronica, the famous Firewall icon will be transferred to real space. In a workshop we will play Firewall Ball and develop the rules of the Game of the Future. The game is open to all visitors of the Digitial Communities Space.
*flattr*: social micropayment platform, Peter Sunde (SE) http://flattr.com
Flattr is a micropayment system, which launched publicly in March 2010 on an invite-only basis, and then opened up to the public in August 2010.
Users will be able to pay a small monthly amount and then click buttons on sites to share out the money they paid in among those sites, sort of like an Internet tip jar. The minimum users will have to pay is 2 euros per month. The money you pay each month will be spread evenly among the buttons you click in a month. We want to encourage people to share money as well as content.
*Metalab Squad of Awesome*:Â Viennese hackerspace (AT) http://metalab.at
The Metalab is a 200sqm non-profit hackspace in Vienna’s first district – right next to the vienna city hall. It offers space for free exchange of information, and collaboration between technical-creative enthusiasts, hackers and founders. Metalab is dedicated to providing infrastructure for projects and offers a physical space for interested people from the wide fields of IT, new media, and hacker culture. Â
*My last Ars*: live gif mashup – VJ set, Evan Roth (US) 201http://piratepad.net/5l4Yv3PPrc0 http://evan-roth.com
Evan Roth is an artist and researcher whose work focuses on technology, tools of empowerment, open source and popular culture. His notable projects include L.A.S.E.R. Tag and LED Throwies (with Graffiti Research Lab), White Glove Tracking, Explicit Content Only and Graffiti Analysis. From experimenting with crowd sourcing to creating art with airport security and collaborating with Jay-Z on the first open source rap video, Roth’s work explores the overlap between free culture and popular culture.
*OpenActa / AFI*: Geraldine Juarez (MX) a-f-i.tumblr.com http://www.openacta.org
OPEN ACTA es un sitio dedicado a informar a la sociedad mexicana acerca de ACTA y crear conciencia acerca de la importancia de que el gobierno mexicano y todos los gobiernos que hoy negocian el ACTA,  inicien una verdadera discusión pública y democrática sobre el  verdadero contenido y alcances del mismo.
*Star Wars Uncut*: the movie, Casey Pugh, http://starwarsuncut.com/
Star Wars Uncut is a crowdsourced version of the sci-fi classic that was made by stitching together hundreds of fan-submitted scenes. Star Wars was a natural choice to explore the dynamics of community creation on the web – the response from fans has been overwhelming worldwide and the resulting movie is incredibly fun to watch.
*superbertram*: Georg Schütz (AT) 2007-2010 http://superbertram.com
Superbertram is our all friend, he is a representative of a new species of enriched, mobile gadgets, who have a lot of different features combined in a pleasant housing which does not look like a high-tech-tool at all. Superbertrams main feature consists in delivering live pictures from his close surrounding to the World Wide Web. For doing so, he is equipped with two moveable cameras, which are able to capture visual information at the size of 640 x 480 pixels with a frame rate up to 15 fps, depending on the actual connection speed. Their framing can be controlled by everyone through the easy-to-use web interface by simply clicking into the picture, centering the framing at the clicked position, their range of movement is 90 degrees horizontally and 50 degrees vertically each, which can create a quiet impressive panorama view. While streaming without intermission, Superbertram preservers the seen at the popular online photo community “Flickr.com” automatically in a pre-defined interval, which can range from four frames per minute to two frames per day (Left & Right eye).
*Telecomix*: A sociocyphernetic jellyfish cluster, (SE) http://telecomix.org
Telecomix News Agency is both an experiment and a real service. “Issues that cannot make it to the general news agenda is now be promoted by the public itself. The old rules no longer apply. Users can find each other and start talking. In countries where correspondents are no longer allowed to report, citizens can themselves reach out for global support, and find ways to bypass the digital roadblocks built by their oppressors.”
*Thumbing & FolkSomy.vj*: JODI (NL/BE); 2010 http://thumbing.org http://folksomy.net
Jodi is a collective of two internet artists: Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans; since the mid-1990s they started to create original artworks for the World Wide Web. A few years later, they also turned to software art and artistic computer game modification. Since 2002, they have been in what has been called their “Screen Grab” period, making video works by recording the computer monitor’s output while working, playing video games, or coding. To those that are not in on their conceptual jokes, Jodi’s works seem inaccessible and impenetrable, appearing to make the user’s computer run amok. In more recent works, they modified old video games such as Wolfenstein 3D, Quake, Jet Set Willy, and the latest, Max Payne 2 to create a new set of art games. Jodi’s approach to game modification is comparable in many ways to deconstructivism in architecture, because they would disassemble the game to its basic parts, and reassemble it in ways that do not make intuitive sense.
*Trail Blazers*: Theo Seemann & B.Z.a.U.O., (DE); 2010 http://nm.merz-akademie.de/trailblazers
Crosslinking isn’t en vogue too much in todays web, which could soon make it a quite sad and lonely place. How much fun you could have surfing through the digital universe with a good linked web!Â
The Beautiful Zeros and Ugly Ones, a project group at Merz Akademie Stuttgart led by Olia Lialina, set up the Trail Blazers contest and show moderated by Dragan Espenschied, where users are to surf the classic way from Amazon to Piratebay and lots of other great trails. Show off your PRO surfing skills without keyboard, without Google, just with pure links!Â