RHIZOME DIGEST: 7.26.02

discussion

Posted July 25 2002 20:00

RHIZOME DIGEST: 7.26.02

RHIZOME DIGEST: July 26, 2002 Content: +editor's note+ 1. Rachel Greene: new faces + forms +announcement+ 2. Videotage: Videotage News August 2002 3. Ray Thomas: Attn BIG Torino artists- Does BIG Torino owe you money? +news+ 4. Liza Sabater-Napier: GEN XY vs Godzilla +report+ 5. are flagan: Read_Me - H2K2 HOPE Conference, Part 1 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 1. Date: 7.25.02 From: Rachel Greene (rachel@rhizome.org) Subject: new faces + forms Some Rhizome.org announcements. We're looking for an intern to help with Marketing and PR. If interested, please email alexis@rhizome.org. I'm happy to announce that Francis Hwang has taken over for Alex Galloway as Technical Director here at headquarters. Alex, who has been core to Rhizome for six years, will start full time teaching this fall at NYU. He's on to exciting new projects, and we congratulate him. Before leaving he called Francis a "genius," which gave us much confidence about the transfer of duties. Besides being a "genius" and a really nice guy, Francis has an impressive, funny bio: 'Francis' most recent artwork is at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://firmament.to">http://firmament.to</a>, and uses a Perl script and the Google Web API to turn any HTML page into a free-associative index for the rest of the web. He has written about technology and culture for Spin, Wired, ArtByte, and Feed. While in college, Francis published a zine on the postmodern implications of tabletop role-playing games. He programmed what may be the only Markov-chainer-driven hallucinogen on a LambdaMOO. He believes that Jaron Lanier is right about cybernetic totalism, and that Star Wars is the health of the state.' Welcome Francis!! Also, this week's Digest features an excerpt from a piece by Are Flagan. It's the first installment of his exhaustive, observant account of his experience and education as a newbie at this month's Hacking conference H2K2. Great reading for those curious about this important creative field. Reminds me of a beautiful David Garcia post from Nettime in 1997: "Although they deal in a language as symbolic as art; "code", the hacker ethic revives the situationist proposal of an alternative type of creativity. A creativity which starts where art leaves off. It is normal everyday life that should be made passionate and rational and dramatic, not its reflection in the seperated world of art." + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 2. Date: 7.24.02 From: Videotage (videotage@yahoo.com) Subject: Videotage News August 2002 VIDEOTAGE NEWS August 2002 Videotage News Contents 1. Experimental Intermedia continues through November 2002 2. Microwave International Media Art Festival open call for entries 3. Telepidemic: Videoart Exhibition, Kobe, Japan, 24-28 July 2002 4. 02 HK Sound + Vision Festival 5. Looking for Mies: a multi-media architectural music performance by Zuni Icosahedron, 16-17 August 2002 6. Repertory Cinema — A Spectrum of Film Classics and Masters: Jean Renoir Hong Kong Space Museum Lecture Hall and Hong Kong Film Archive Cinema 7. Someone Has Done It Before, Para/Site Art Space, continues through 11 August 2002 8. Is It Easy to be Young? Fabrica resident award announced Also: IDN MAGAZINE OFFERS A SPECIAL DISCOUNT TO VIDEOTAGE MEMBERS! Original price for IdN one-year subscription is HK$420 (6 issues/year). -1 year IdN Chinese/English subscription (6 issues) - HK$336 (20% off) -2 year IdN Chinese/English (12 issues) - HK$630 (25% off) -Special price to purchase Flips 4 - HK$250 (35% off). Please call or email Videotage for subscription form. 1. Art Leadership: Experimental Intermedia continues through November 2002. This experimental project which contains four workshops and four series of twenty lectures, providing hands-on experience in exploring the possibility of video and the computer. Workshops are fully booked, but seats are still available for the lecture series. Topics include The aesthetic of technological art, I Shop Therefore I am: e-commerce, On-line consumption and the Notion of Consumerism, The Heresy of Hypertext, among others. Limited enrollment. For more, please contact Videotage, 2573-1869 or go to: www.videotage.org.hk. 2. Microwave International Media Art Festival open call for entries: video and CD Rom art works. Deadline 30 September 2001. Send previews with image files, CV, and art work synopsis to: Microwave International Media Art Festival, Unit 13, Blk PB 567, Cattle Depot Artist Village, 63 Ma Tau Kok Road, To Kwa Wan, Kowloon, Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region. 3. Telepidemic: Videoart Exhibition, Kobe Art Village Center, Japan, 24-28 July 2002. Works include videos by Nose Chan, Fion Ng, and Mark Chan. Exploring the themes, Criticism on Mass-media Form and Concept, Revolution and Illusion, Politics and Activism, Homogenized and Textualized City, Theory of Image Arts, Praxis of Image Arts, Tide of New Videoart Generation and Documentation of Video Artist Workshop. For more go to: www.kavc.or.jp 4. 02HK SOUND And VISION FESTIVAL, 8-25 August 2002. The theme of this year's SVF is "Musica Documenta"- music documentary representing the bare essence or naked truth of the spirit of music that makes appropriate sense for these economically difficult times. SVF¹s film programme from 8-24 August at the Lim Por Yen Film Theatre, Hong Kong Arts Centre features The Rolling Stones/ Gimme Shelter, John & Yoko/ The Bed-in, Music-Love-Man: Chi Chung's Music Road Movies, The Art of Turntablism, Metal Headz: The History of Drum ?N Bass, and much more. Also live events such as Northern Soul (16 August) and Hip-hop night (23 August) at Chemical Suzy and LMF/Rip Slyme at HITEC, 18 August. Programme enquiries, contact Ms. Bobo Lee at 6083-6604 and email: b130401@netvigator.com 5. Looking for Mies: a multi-media architectural music performance by Zuni Icosahedron. Using theatre space to explore the different theories and concepts of architecture by integrating digital arts, sound, music and installation to generate a new form of theatre experiment. Kwai Tsing Theatre Auditorium, 16-17 August 2002. URL: www.zuni.org.hk or www.lcsd.gov.hk/cp 6. Repertory Cinema — A Spectrum of Film Classics and Masters: Jean Renoir, curated by Law Wai Ming for the Leisure and Cultural Service Department. To many critics, Jean Renoir¹s greatness lies in his repeated effort to take risks, to make new sorts of film and to be experimental. The French filmmaker¹s creations vividly chronicled the development of French cinema from the silent movie era up to the overture to the French New Wave. This special series features Renoir¹s Grand Illusion, The Rules of the Game, French Can Can and more. 2-4 August at the Hong Kong Science Museum Lecture Hall and 9-11 August at the Hong Kong Film Archive Cinema. For further details: www.lcsd.gov.hk/fp 7. Someone Has Done It Before, group exhibition featuring the work of the students from the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Para/Site Art Space, 4 July 11 August 2002. URL: www.para-site.org.hk 8. Is It Easy to be Young? Fabrica residency award has been given to Ms. Wanda Choi, a graduate from the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, for her video Operation. Her work was included in Videotage¹s youth video screening program Is It Easy to be Young? this past April. Wanda Choi will spend one year at the Fabrica Research Center in Treviso, Italy. The program was co-curated by Yau Ching and Jaime Hayon of Fabrica. – Videotage Unit 13, Block PB 567, Cattle Depot Artist Village 63 Ma Tau Kok Road To Kwa Wan, Kowloon Hong Kong Tel: 852-2573.1869 Fax: 852-2503.5978 URL: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.videotage.org.hk">http://www.videotage.org.hk</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 3. Date: 7.20.02 From: Ray Thomas (admin@rtmark.com) Subject: Attn BIG Torino artists: Does BIG Torino owe you money? Dear BIG Torino artists and others, The BIG festival (run by Michelangelo Pistoletto) owes us $2700 that we paid out of our own pocket to set up our project there. No amount of e-mail and telephoning from us and from one of the curators has had any success in getting the festival to pay us this money. For a while we thought this might be because of the events that we describe at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.rtmark.com/torino/">http://www.rtmark.com/torino/</a>, but lately we have heard from quite a few other BIG Torino artists who are, likewise, still awaiting payment from BIG; still others had to pursue Fulvio Spada and other BIG staff for weeks in order to get paid. If you too are owed money by BIG (or any of director Michelangelo Pistoletto's other entities, such as Citta dell'arte), we would love to know details of your cases, so that we can pursue collectively various options for forcing them to pay us all. Also, several art journalists in Italy and elsewhere are interested in this subject for articles about the hypocrisy of this festival, directed by the founder of Arte Povvera, that claims to be about art confronting the social and yet doesn't pay its artists. We will be happy to transmit to them any information. Best wishes, Ray Thomas for RTMark + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +ad+ Cover the realm of art, science and technology by subscribing to Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA). Published by LEONARDO, LEA is the leading monthly on-line peer-reviewed journal and web archive in its field. Subscribe now for $35 per year at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/INFORMATION/subscribe.html">http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/INFORMATION/subscribe.html</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 4. Date: 7.26.02 From: Liza Sabater-Napier (liza@potatoland.org) Subject: GEN XY vs Godzilla Technology - Reuters Internet Report Web Filtering Lawsuit Challenges U.S. Copyright Law Thu Jul 25, 5:33 PM ET By Elinor Mills Abreu SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A 22-year-old law student filed a lawsuit on Thursday asking a federal court in Boston to let him crack the digital lock on software that filters Internet Web sites so that he and others can view blocked sites, some of which he says are useful to the public. The suit, filed by the New York-based American Civil Liberties Union ( news - web sites) on behalf of Ben Edelman, challenges the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act ( news - web sites) (DMCA) of 1998. The law prohibits creation or distribution of tools that can be used to unlock digital copyright protections. Edelman, who will enter Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the fall and is a technology analyst at The Berkman Center for Internet & Society there, claims the filtering software is flawed and blocks legitimate Web sites rather than just the pornographic sites it purports to target. "The core reason filtering software is of concern at the moment is because it is being forced upon a substantial number of Americans as they attempt to use the Internet in their local public libraries, public schools, businesses and even in their homes," Edelman told Reuters. For example, a product from Seattle-based N2H2 Inc., named as the defendant in the lawsuit, blocks breast cancer ( news - web sites) Web sites and others with vital public health information, such as the Asian Community Aids ( news - web sites) Services organization, Edelman said. The Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which took effect in 2001, requires that public libraries and schools receiving federal funds use filtering software on their Internet-connected computers. The ACLU challenged the library provision of that law in a lawsuit filed in March 2001. A Pennsylvania federal judge overturned the law in May 2002 and the case is on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court ( news - web sites). Edelman wants to publish the list of blocked sites and distribute software that would enable others to see the Web sites. The lawsuit argues that it is within his "fair use" rights under the U.S. Constitution to do research on the software. CENSORSHIP TOOL Filtering software is also being used by governments in other countries to censor and restrict access to the Internet for politically motivated reasons, including China, Vietnam, Uzbekistan and Saudi Arabia, Edelman said. He said his research found that Saudi Arabia had restricted access to Web pages including the "woman" entry from the Encyclopedia Britannica," and the Amnesty International site. N2H2 is one of the companies vying for a contract to supply Saudi Arabia with blocking software, the ACLU said. Part of the lawsuit challenges N2H2's software license agreement, which prohibits customers from decrypting or otherwise reverse engineering the software. The lawsuit claims the license agreement is unenforceable because by installing the product the customer is forced to automatically consent to the terms of the agreement and cannot negotiate, Ann Beeson, ACLU lead counsel on the case, told Reuters. N2H2 spokesman David Burt told Reuters, "We believe our software licenses are valid and we do intend to defend them and our intellectual property." Other DMCA challenges have not held up. An appellate judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by a Princeton professor who feared recording companies would sue him over research into digital music copyright protections. And movie studios successfully sued Eric Corley after he published software to decrypt DVDs on his hacker Web site, 2600. In another case, trial is set to begin Aug. 26 for Moscow-based ElcomSoft Co. Ltd., which was sued for selling software to unlock copyright protections on digital books. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +ad+ **MUTE MAGAZINE NO. 24 OUT NOW** 'Knocking Holes in Fortress Europe', Florian Schneider on no-border activism in the EU; Brian Holmes on resistance to networked individualism; Alvaro de los Angeles on e-Valencia.org and Andrew Goffey on the politics of immunology. More @ <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.metamute.com/">http://www.metamute.com/</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 5. Date: 7.25.02 From: are flagan (areflagan@mac.com) Subject: Read_Me: H2K2 HOPE Conference, Part 1 Read_Me, Part 1 H2K2 HOPE Conference, July 12-14, Hotel Pennsylvania, NYC, New York H2K2 is only the fourth conference of HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) and the third at Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. From a relatively modest start in 1994, the conference has gradually and quite impressively grown in size from occupying only a small amount of hotel real estate to breach the capacity of an entire floor during the most popular events. While the earliest hacker ³conferences² (usually abbreviated Con, as in SummerCon 1987) were very informal and, sadly, often marred by arrests, the gradual recognition of the hacker enterprise and ethic has led to large public events like HOPE that are comprised of 12 quite exhausting but equally invigorating hours of programming per day. Unlike other hacker gatherings that have taken a very commercial turn, such as the DefCon extravaganza in Las Vegas (which sidelines as the security industry¹s peek-at-the-underground showcase), HOPE is heavily invested in the social and political agendas that motivate and support hacker activity. The list of speakers and topics is consequently not only cloaked in handles and obscure network acronyms. It also includes authors and industry experts that, respectively, have sales ranks on amazon.com and command six-figure salaries. The common thread is belief in a free and open society that readily shares information and knowledge to collectively improve on the world we live in. Faced with the oppressive culture of security and secrecy that currently sweeps this nation, the concerns raised, the information shared, and the stories told at HOPE resonate with an unprecedented urgency when one considers the increasingly analogous relations between computer networks and society at large. Each fundamentally operate according to constantly developing and intermittently agreed-upon protocols that can be equated with democratic principles, but each of these are also increasingly controlled by corporate and legislative interventions. When a bona fide, public forum like HOPE compels some audience members to cover their faces with bandanas (others, presumably jokingly if black humor counts, sported silly false noses and moustaches) to hide from the Feds seated watchfully in the back, the debated lines of contention drawn in session after session found its mirror image in the assembled crowd. You cannot ask of a conference to be more real and relevant than this surreal scenario advertised. Computer hacking is by all accounts driven by compulsive and obsessive behavior that does not rest until a problem is solved or curiosity is satisfied. It was perhaps fitting then that sessions ran back to back on two overlapping tracks with a third track offering an open forum for anyone to speak their mind or report on the latest exploits. Those whose ability to absorb knowledge was not already besieged by this bit-rate could linger in the network, workshop and merchandise area, which also featured what amounted to an archeology of hardware available for nostalgic experimentation. Most, however, came equipped with their own top-of-the-line laptops and the organizers had kindly installed a wireless network to support the impromptu groups that formed to share their experiences at the command line. As such, any gaps in the already overwhelming flow of input were incredulously filled with computation and programming at an advanced level, and considering that many participants seemed to have taken part of their summer vacation in New York City, the sheer endurance of these attendees should bluntly have silenced any academic, or parental for that matter, concerns about falling standards and endemic ADD. Not everyone is of the MTV generation and the Daytona Beach spring break crowd it seems. There were even family values on display by hacker mums and dads who splurged on 2600 (the sponsoring magazine) caps for their offspring and sat through complex talks on ICANN¹s increasingly dubious future with them. This is not to suggest that HOPE was a tech-savvy version of Bible camp. But considering the avatar nature and negative representation of ³hackers,² the uninitiated (counting yours truly) may be excused for initially commenting on the normality and, gender excluded, diversity of the scene behind the screen. And the educational aspects indicated above are not really an attempt to repackage hacker activity in a wholesome glow suitable for wholesale consumption: education, as a transaction in knowledge, actually sketches the very foundation of hacker activity. The central document that supports this claim, commonly known as ³The Hacker Manifesto² (search Google and you will find it by the thousands), was read aloud and commented on by its author in a session entitled ³The Conscience of a Hacker,² which is the original title given the text when it first appeared in Phrack magazine. Written when The Mentor was not much more than a child himself, it bemoans a disillusionment with the educational system and its stifling standards, which are overcome by independent experimentation with computers (this is only a short quote from the text, which was written on January 8, 1986, shortly after The Mentor was arrested): ³I¹ve listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. ³No Ms. Smith, I didn¹t show my work. I did it in my head.² Damn kid. Probably copied it. They¹re all alike. I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to do. If it makes a mistake, it¹s because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn¹t like me. Or feels threatened by me. Or thinks I¹m a smart ass. Or doesn¹t like teaching and shouldn¹t be there. Damn kid.² The Mentor added his own statistics to the latter Manifesto point by estimating that of the roughly 150 teachers he had been in contact with during his career as a student, only two had left an inspirational and inquisitive mark on him through their teaching. Despite its staccato flow and basic language, the relative simplicity of the text hides very complex relationships between institutions and individuals, as well as technology and society. It is fundamentally the failure of living up to the responsibilities of these relations that is being criticized in The Hacker Manifesto, and technology takes on the role of realizing a new set of human relations, born from individual responsibility, that truly value freedom and education. Perhaps easily dismissed, 17 years after it was written, as a conventional litany against authority, the Manifesto nevertheless had a young HOPE audience repeatedly nodding to its message. One can suspect that the approval partly stems from the politicians¹ feebleminded, and still ongoing, attempts to improve the public school system through testing, testing, testing, testing, testing, testing, testing and testing. Meanwhile the Mentor has come of age to comply with some institutional dictums, notably those of Sigmund Freud, by actually marrying a public school teacher, but he is putting all destructive suspicions about his early text to shame by scavenging for discarded computer parts in his spare time to build, in collaboration with his wife, computer labs for the kids. It appears that ³The Conscience of a Hacker² has always been a solid work in progress. There were other proposals aired to integrate a hacker ethic into the school curriculum from a K-12 level. Greg Newby, a professor at the University of North Carolina, who made an overtly strong case for hacker respectability by wearing a tuxedo, proposed that base concepts of information value, privacy, security and secrecy should be taught alongside basic computer literacy. As students progress, he suggested that these concepts would get increasingly complex with attention lent to data integrity and credibility. He also strongly favored a move from an interface and end-user mentality toward a curriculum that exposes the nuts and bolts of computing. Newby fundamentally invoked the curious, motivated and talented hacker, and his or her community of peer group communication, as a role model for such an expansive approach. The prime lesson taught in schools, he noted, must be that honest exploration does not get you into trouble, but serves as the very cornerstone of progressive learning. As the introductory paragraphs suggest, the purpose of HOPE is to share knowledge and Javaman ambitiously kicked off the conference with ³The Shape of the Internet.² He proceeded to dispel any fears that what was coming up would be cloaked in technical terms and incomprehensible code snippets by bravely drawing ³live² on an overhead transparency to illustrate his points. Despite being blinded by the projected light, he managed to adequately trace, with a felt tip pen, various scientific models for how the shape of the Internet has been imagined and mapped. Similar projects have also been undertaken by a number of net artists with varying degrees of success. Those familiar with Starrynight, for example, will partly recognize what Javaman arguably deemed the most advanced and persuasive attempt. By utilizing the BGP protocol, essentially a connect list that each server maintains based on received routing information, it is possible to define the number of edges, or chosen connections, that radiate from each node. Using the premise that every edge that can exist between nodes does indeed exist, it is then possible to compile a graph to express the relations. The result poses all kinds of questions about how the Internet is actually shaped and how its shape is growing, and some findings revealed what we might have suspected: most servers seek to connect via the popular networks and, secondly, routes are chosen for economic reasons. An offshoot is that 1% of ISPs control 99% of the traffic and bandwidth is consequently centralized, which makes it more prone to both failure and surveillance. However, with the recent collapse of some Internet backbones due to corporate bankruptcies, the subject-to-failure part of the theory disproved itself as nodes immediately found new routes when the previous hubs disappeared: the Internet did not collapse. Javaman offered some very interesting alternatives for networking protocols that included various peer-to-peer methods, such as the ³Fisheye² protocol that maintains only cursory routing information toward the periphery of the network. Perhaps the future of what we today subsume in the Internet lies in these types of configurations? END OF PART 1 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Rhizome.org is a 501©(3) nonprofit organization. If you value this free publication, please consider making a contribution within your means. We accept online credit card contributions at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/support">http://rhizome.org/support</a>. Checks may be sent to Rhizome.org, 115 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012. Or call us at +1.212.625.3191. Contributors are gratefully acknowledged on our web site at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/info/10.php3">http://rhizome.org/info/10.php3</a>. Rhizome Digest is supported by grants from The Charles Engelhard Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Rhizome Digest is filtered by Rachel Greene (rachel@rhizome.org). ISSN: 1525-9110. Volume 7, number 30. Article submissions to list@rhizome.org are encouraged. Submissions should relate to the theme of new media art and be less than 1500 words. For information on advertising in Rhizome Digest, please contact info@rhizome.org. 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