28 September 2011

Nuart Festival - Norway





In July-August 2011, five street artists were invited to NHH Norwegian School of Economics to give their comments on capitalism directly on the schools huge white walls. The project was a collaboration with the Nuart Festival, and what Escif, M-City, EINE, DOLK and Hyuro came up with can be seen from this video. For more information, visit CAPITALISM.NO


"From Ad busting critiques to political and polemical murals, “______capitalism?” aims to present for the wider public, the opportunity to engage with an institution that sits at the heart of most of our futures. Street Art is also ideally placed to question the hegemony of consensus based public art and the cooption of our public spaces, often “public” only in name, for corporate profit."

25 September 2011

People Staring at Computers

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"People Staring at Computers by Kyle McDonald “People Staring at Computers” is a photographic intervention. I wrote a simple application that took one picture every minute. If it found a face, it uploaded the photo to my server. I installed the app around NYC over three days, collecting more than a thousand photos. Before sharing the photos online, I decided to exhibit them in the same places they were originally captured. So I wrote another app that could be remotely triggered after being installed on all the computers in one location. When the app starts up, it takes a picture and slowly fades in that photo. A moment later, it starts cycling through older photos. Most people instinctively quit the app less than 10 seconds after recognizing their own face, so the exhibition was relegated to the unused machines.

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"Artist Kyle McDonald installed a program on computers in two New York Apple Store locations that automatically takes a photo every minute. Now his personal computers have been confiscated by the U.S. Secret Service.  ...

Over the course of the project, McDonald set up roughly 100 Apple store computers to call his servers every minute. That’s a lot of network traffic, and he learned that Apple monitors traffic in its stores when he received a photo from a Cupertino computer of what appeared to be an Apple technician. The technician had apparently traced the traffic to the site McDonald used to upload the program to Apple Store computers — and installed it himself.
McDonald figured that Apple had decided the program wasn’t a big deal. That was until four Secret Service men in suits woke him up on Thursday morning with a search warrant for computer fraud. ...

Before he began, he got permission from Apple’s security guards to take photos in the store, then asked customers if he could take their photos (with a camera). Had they all said no, he says, he wouldn’t have proceeded. He also refrained from putting the code for the photo-taking program online, as he does with most of his projects, because he recognized that the technology behind his art project could be used for less benign purposes. "



Using Apple Store computers to accomplish the photography is a separate issue, and given that the Secret Service’s search warrant was for computer fraud, the use of them is likely the issue in question.
On Thursday, McDonald tweeted that the search warrant said he was in violation of 18 USC section 1030.
Eric Goldman, the director of the High Tech Law Institute and associate professor at Santa Clara Law, says that the law “restricts accessing someone else’s computer and obtaining information from that computer” and that “capturing images from Apple’s computers could trigger that standard.” Some other provisions of the same law could also apply, he says.


Pictoplasma - NY

Pictoplasma NYC
CONFERENCE: 4 + 5 NOVEMBER 2011
PARSONS THE NEW SCHOOL FOR DESIGN
TISHMAN AUDITORIUM
66 WEST 12TH STREET, NEW YORK
EXHIBITIONS: 3 - 6 NOVEMBER 2011

The PICTOPLASMA NYC FESTIVAL once more stages ... a ... celebration of contemporary character culture, with a dense, extended weekend program of inspiring artist presentations, conference lectures, animation festival, character walk exhibitions and performances!
http://nyc.pictoplasma.com/

24 September 2011

Inside Outside

Inside Outside: Art on both sides of the law Follow artists from 4 cities on 3 continents who blur the lines between legal and illegal art.

http://www.babelgum.com/insideoutside

Space Patrol 60's Sci Fi TV



The futuristic 1963 series "Space Patrol" ("Planet Patrol" in the US) was an extraordinary, but not widely distributed, puppet show set in the year 2100.

For further investigation, the ultimate Space Patrol resource is undoubtedly: http://homepages.tesco.net/~space.patrol/SpacePatrol/Home.htm .

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Apple ipad and 2001




As any 5-year-old is all too happy to point out, most things look like other things. The ongoing slapfight over patent infringements that’s defining the mobile technology market these days is largely based on everyone’s little black-or-white rectangle looking identical to everyone else’s.

No company appears more intent on blocking everyone else from selling tiny black rectangles than Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL). The company is waging an international litigation war against Samsung (PINK:SSNLF) looking to block its line of Galaxy portables from releasing in a growing number of markets. Samsung, of course, claims Apple is being ridiculous. 

The Korean technology company’s lawyers filed a declaration with a federal district court in California on Aug. 15 that said Apple’s iPad replicates the design of mocked-up tablet computers used in Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The filing even included a YouTube link to demonstrate. It points to how Dave and another astronaut are using machines with “an overall rectangular shape with a dominant display screen, narrow borders, a predominantly flat front surface, a flat black surface, (and) a thin form factor.” This is, the filing says, identical to the design featured in Apple’s D’889 Patent.

full story
http://www.investorplace.com/2011/08/also-sprach-samsung-apple-cant-copyright-ipad-because-of-2001-a-space-odyssey/



Secret History of Social Networking

In this three-part series the BBC's technology correspondent Rory Cellan Jones traces the hidden story of social networking, from the early days of computing and the 60s counterculture through to the businesses worth billions today.

17 September 2011

Protest and media - de balie

 Social protest has become almost inseparably linked to a plethora of media images and messages distributed via internet, mobile phones, social media, internet video platforms and of course traditional media outlets such as newspapers, radio and television. A popular category to have emerged recently is the 'twitter-revolution'. In almost all cases (Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, London) the role of the platform turned out to be less than essential in retrospect. Protests mostly manifested on the streets and particularly the public squares ('Take the Square'). Deeply rooted blogger-networks did however play a mayor role, preparing the protests that have now been dubbed the "Arabian Spring'. And internet played a crucial role in the organisation and co-ordination of the European 'anti-austerity' protests (Spain, Greece, UK, Italy).

This international seminar brings together theorists, artists, designers, activists and media specialists to develop a critical analysis of the new forms of social protest and their media dimension. The program is divided into two blocks. The first block focuses on an in-depth analysis of the evolving WikiLeaks-saga, while the second block will examine the remarkable string of protests in the Mediterranean region. These discussions will be interrupted at times by startling artistic interventions in current social and political debates.


The seminar is part of an on-going research into Tactical Media, the fusion of art, media, politics and cultural activism, centred around the "Tactical Media Files", an on-line documentation resource of Tactical Media practices world-wide.