"Way to sell out for the money :D Where is your ideals gone now friends? Ha, I cannot believe I supported you guys. Same old same old. Where will it end?" driver779
"I'd say this is the death of PirateBay, they wanna make PirateBay a legit place if I understand the news being spread around. Thats is done by removing all the illegal files (90%+ of the torrents?) And this will make most people go away too." Mith0s
I have heard the sum of 60 million Swedish Crowns (30 in cash and 30 in stocks) being accepted for the sale of the site. TPB 'heads' are speaking abut a transfer and new impetus in the operation. I am not sure about this and I tend to agree with many of the comments on the blog site. However, TPB was always a limited thing and the end was in some way inevitable. I am disappointed that it was the private sector which stepped up and took over the machinery of TPB. It should have been made a research object for the people of Sweden to be used to develop new web applications and architetcures.
The collected resources of TPB (those that survived the legal onslaught of the past three years) is now passing into the hands of entrepreneurs. The business community perhaps has a better idea of the worth of such network ventures that TPB represents. The law however restricts what can be done with such a developed network structure. I have seen this recently in my experimentation with Spotify, another Swedish innovation that attempts to deliver unlimited streamed music over the net. While Spotify does deliver music, its network possibilities are extreamly limited. One cannot share play lists within the program (email of links is the only option), link to other users, watch other users for tips and so on. In effect one is alone on Spotify. TPB is/was a community and that was its strength and greatest weakness in the eyes of the law. By allowing for a horizontal spread of network connections users were/are able to share things. How this can be adopted to a legitimate business model by something like Global Gaming Factory X AB will be interesting to see.
I posted a comment on the Videogum website on a post titled "Go To Bed, Twitter, It Is Your Bedtime". The comment was not published (democratic??) so I added to it and post it here.
Michael Jackson died yesterday, RIP 4 Real, which is when Twitter did what Twitter does worst: go completely crazy. Look, I understand that people want to get the word out there, but there's something about Twitter's implication that everyone is a newsmaker that is ridiculous.
The concept of community aggregation is also part of the Twitter's affordances I would argue. One of the Twitter feeds I followed at the time of MJs death was from a obsessed fan who seemed to be profoundly overcome by the news of her idol's demise. Sharing this feeling with others was made possible by Twitter. Maybe it helped her come to terms with it?
and
All of this came just days after the Twitter eruption over Iran. I'm not talking about the actual Twitter eruption over Iran as conducted by Iranians. I'm talking about the Brooklyn co-option of the Twitter eruption over Iran. Of course, you can't really say anything too mean about people changing the color of their avatar in support of a totally worthwhile cause, because even if it is completely meaningless, hearts are in the right places. But also haha. Really?
To which I reply:
Twitter can be used in many different ways. You restrict these to changing the colour of the avatar, making jokes and tweeting (yes it does feel ridiculous) about events in a place other than where one lives. It does not define the whole range of behaviours I have seen on the site. I would also add that Twitter is a small, but currently noisy, part of a much larger thing. It will be popular for a while yet but by the end of the year it will have gone the way of Second Life as far as the public imagination (i.e. old media channels) is concerned.
Twitter is also being used by the repressive authorities in Iran to track and arrest people, so it is not really something I would call "democratic" or a source of "dissent" in itself. It is a tool, that allows for communication from a relatively privileged many to a relatively privileged many. It is not going to save us or Iran.
Next Go to bed Twitter featured a video:
So there were also lots of jokes about that on Twitter last night, too, about how Iran must be so mad that Michael Jackson's death has taken over the one democratic means of overt dissent. Or about how quickly people threw Iran into the garbage now that Michael Jackson died. You know, jokes. And anyway, all of this is just to say that the ridiculousness of Twitter and this strange convergence of events was captured in this video perfectly:
Still images of the turmoil in Iran with MJ's Beat It as the sound. Clever convergence of topics; MJ,s death, the Iran situation and the lyrics of a mega-hit single that seem to match both if read the right way. The video is a clever example of a digital mash-up. I would argue that it has little to do with the situation in Iran and more to do with contemporary online culture. While the author of the video is attributed to be from Hungary (despite the video telling the 'fanatics' to 'get out of my land'), this mash-up style can be traced back to the sound systems of Jamaica and its diaspora (See DJ Spooky). From Jamaica to the world via the (USA controlled) internet. What role does Iran play in this; the images. Distributing the images of what is happening in Iran is important and since all non-government approved journalists are banned from working in Iran, the distribution of these images has found other channels. These images are created by the people in the streets, taking great risks and often using mobile phone cameras (which the police and Basiji search protestors for) and they are then distributed via websites, BitTorrent, TwitterPics and servers. The URLs for these images are often linked to from Twitter. Many of the images in the video probably came into the control of the video maker Mydorood via Twitter. These images are also tracked and analyzed by the security forces in Iran and as a result of the flood of images coming out of the Islamic Republic, some of their subjects have probably paid with their lives.
Finally, I believe we should respect what those who oppose the regime in Iran are doing. These images and scraps of information that are distributed via Twitter and other network sites are important. However, we should not overestimate the medium, either by ‘hating it’ or assigning it powers which it clearly does not have.
Like many others I have been following the text emerging from what has been tagged #IranElection on Twitter. I stare fascinated at the screen as horror and hope are mixed in dizzy ratios with short sharp statements and links to media.
I did the same thing back in January when the last Gaza War raged. It is different this time. The Iran twitter cascade has recourse to a sophistication that the desperate Palestinians and ideological Israelis seemed to miss. Iranians are online and have been for a long time. The use of blogs in the nation is famous. Watching the images from the street demonstrations and battles from Tehran I see young people dressed in designer jeans and tops, all carrying mobile media devices. One video I watched this morning has a group of young people gathered in a chaotic bunch around a supine body of a young man. He appears to be dead, but as some try to open an airway and clumsily maneuver his still head, others thrust mobile cameras into his still and bloody face. I began to feel something I remember from 1989.
When the students gathered in Tienanmen Square in Beijing China in June 1989 (strangely exact 20 years ago) I understand they had little collective idea of what their goal was beyond 'democracy'.
The protests lacked a unified cause or leadership; participants included disillusioned Communist Party members and Trotskyists as well as free market reformers, who were generally against the government's authoritarianism and voiced calls for economic change and democratic reform within the structure of the government. Wikipedia
Nobody is sure how many died in Tienanmen square. We know the 100 000 protesters gathered there faced tanks. That local regiments refused to attack them and they were replaced by soldiers from outlying regions who would do the job. I remember seeing then Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke weep as he read out a report of what had happened, tanks rolling over the bodies of students in the square.
While the catalyst for the present wave of protest in Iran is the alleged (but looking at the track record, likely) rigging of an election, the thousands on the street in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz and so on seem to be mostly young and mostly just fed up with living in a theocratic dictatorship. So far I have seen 'freedom' used in numerous contexts related to #IranElection. These include American folk music of the 1960's folk variety, the words of Che Guevara (the short, pithy phrases found on T-shirts around the world), and even reclaim the streets style tactics including artificial traffic jams that are blocks long. The diverse collection of concerns pointing towards 'freedom' through spontaneous protests that are becoming increasingly blood soaked bind it all together into a mediated frenzy.
It will take a while to determine what is happening in Iran beyond the images that are being re/produced and recycled around the theme/meme of #IranElection. Something that impressed me back in 1989 following Tienanmen was how the students had been basically let down and left to their fate by what little leadership they had (which also suffered greatly as a result of their own actions and limited abilities to bring about change). While Mousavi may be the figurehead for this movement, I am not sure he represents it. As well, his own abilities to do anything are severely restricted by the present political structure of Iran (hence the impetus for change). In the meantime the images of what this movement could be and what it is circulate around the online world. Distinguishing between the two, even for those involved, seems to be a difficult thing. Not being able to distinguish between them can be a very dangerous thing for those running through the streets and campuses of Iran just now.
From Sweden, Adiam Dymott, born 17th December 1982, is a Swedish singer living in Södermalm in Stockholm.
Welcome to my regular list of recommended media for the last week or two (its been a busy time). Adiam Dymott is a face on the Swedish pop scene at the moment and I think the music is cool and the look alluring, although I will not be rushing out to buy the CD. I thought to add it here to give an idea of what is happening in Sweden at the moment.
I am moving out of the family apartment following what has become, after two months of discussion, a mutual decision for us to live apart. With two kids (9 and 4 years) we will of course continue to work together daily. It is a difficult thing with uncertainty the main feeling I am experiencing at the moment. However, the results of the decision are already being felt with a much more relaxed atmosphere between us. I thought I should mention it here, as this blog is my main presence on the net.
Now on to the media that I think is special:
American Prince 2009 In 1978, director Martin Scorsese turned his camera on his friend and roommate, Steven Prince, with his lost documentary "American Boy". Best known for his role as the gun salesman in Taxi Driver, Prince was a true-life raconteur, actor, ex-drug addict, and road manager for Neil Diamond. To Scorsese, Steven's life was more fascinating than what any screenwriter could dream up, it had to be captured in celluloid. To Tarantino, one of the most memorable scenes in film history is an homage that actually happened to Prince in real life. Three decades later, filmmaker Tommy Pallotta draws out Steven Prince to recount his days since "American Boy" and to compose the next chapter of his story.
Times ain't like they used to be: Africa and The Blues In 1969 Gerhard Kubik chanced to encounter a Mozambican labor migrant, a miner in Transvaal, South Africa, tapping a cipendani, a mouth-resonated musical bow. A comparable instrument was seen in the hands of a white Appalachian musician who claimed it as part of his own cultural heritage. Through connections like these Kubik realized that the link between these two far-flung musicians is African-American music, the sound that became the blues.
Such discoveries reveal a narrative of music evolution for Kubik, a cultural anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. Traveling in Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, and the United States, he spent forty years in the field gathering the material for Africa and the Blues. In this book, Kubik relentlessly traces the remote genealogies of African cultural music through eighteen African nations, especially in the Western and Central Sudanic Belt.
Included is a comprehensive map of this cradle of the blues, along with 31 photographs gathered in his fieldwork. The author also adds clear musical notations and descriptions of both African and African American traditions and practices and calls into question the many assumptions about which elements of the blues were "European" in origin and about which came from Africa. Unique to this book is Kubik's insight into the ways present-day African musicians have adopted and enlivened the blues with their own traditions.
Benjamin Zephaniah: Rasta X Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah (born 15 April 1958, Coleshill, Birmingham, England) is a British Rastafarian writer and dub poet. He is a well-known figure in contemporary English literature, and was included in The Times list of Britain's top 50 post-war writers in 2008. Zephaniah has said that his mission is to fight the dead image of poetry in academia, and to "take [it] everywhere" to people who do not read books.
Prince Rama of Ayodhya live at WFMU (MP3's) The trio of Michael Collins, Taraka Larson, and Nimai Larson met in the summer of 2007 on a Florida Hare Krishna farm, relocating to Boston and immersing themselves deep into the creation of ritualistic, holistic, and cinematic psychedelic sound. Having played shows in the US and UK with the likes of Teeth Mountain, Magik Markers, Indian Jewelry and others, their live sets have garnered a reputation for incorporating its audiences into the instrumental fold, and drawing musically from a rich variety of multicultural sources. They brought their live set to Brian Turner's show on May 12th and kindly let us put up these MP3s.
Intelligent Video: The Top Cultural & Educational Video Sites | Open Culture Looking for great cultural and educational video? Then you’ve come to the right place. Below, we have compiled a list of 35 sites that feature intelligent videos. This list was produced with the help of our faithful readers, and it will grow over time. If you find it useful, please share it as widely as you can. And if we’re missing good sites, please list them in the comments below.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds :: Austria, October ‘86 Posthof, Linz, Austria gig from October 9, 1986. The mp3s are culled from a vinyl bootleg (audience recording) known as the Black Folder. Anyone interested in the intensity of the Bad Seeds during the mid-eighties ought to give these at least a cursory spin.
WFMU's Beware of the Blog: Jean Baudrillard, Rock Star! Unbelievable but true! Baudrillard recites his poetry backed up by an all star band featuring Tom Watson, Mike Kelley, George Hurley, Lynn Johnston, Dave Muller and Amy Stoll, special guest vocalist Allucquère Rosanne Stone. Recorded live as part of the Chance Festival at Whiskey Pete’s Casino in Stateline Nevada, 1996. You’ve never heard Baudrillard like this before! Music to read Nietzsche to.
LEPORK RECORDS Lepork Records is a new net label specializing in South American punk artists. The small offering of online albums is interesting but I was especially drawn to The Leftouts and their free album titled Last One Standing. It is a raucous effort incorporating power pop with punk. I especially like the opening track, “19 Days” and the tense title tune. This album, as well the the albums by other bands on this net label deserve a listen for their inexhaustible energy but also to show how global the punk genre has become.
UbuWeb Sound - Gwilly Edmondez Gwilly Edmondez emerged as a singular entity from South Wales's legendary Radioactive Sparrow (1980-2003) in late 1980s. His work is about immediate performance, collage, and improvisation. He operates both as a solo artist and as collaborator in several groups (mostly duos). He also issues recordings as Virginia Pipe (fantasy breaks); Copydex (collage); and Gustav Thomas (Gameboy compositions). In his day job, he teaches postvernacular composition at Newcastle University. HARRY PARTCH VS LLYN FOULKES In this corner: Harry Partch, dead, former hobo who spent the '30s and '40s hopping trains, traveling around the country in pursuit of a buck and a meal, composer of songs that sometimes reflected this background, creator of fantastical micro-tonal instruments, the subject of a concert this Fri and Sat downtown at the REDCAT performed on said instruments, lovingly restored.
Harry Partch: "Barstow: Eight Hitchiker Inscriptions" from the out-of-print '60s classic "The World of Harry Partch," tho a remake from 1982 by his ensemble can be found on "The Harry Partch Collection, Vol 2."
And in this corner, Llyn Foulkes, alive, one of the "Visionary Artists From L.A." featured at the Hammer Museum in Westwood whose non-conformist attitudes have kept the art-world from embracing them, even as "outsiders," who will be performing original songs inspired by his Spike Jones and swing-infused youth this Friday night on his "Machine," a one-man band riot of honk-horns, percussion, organ pipes, and a bass string.
Negative Sound Institute Negative Sound Institute offers music that is available exclusively through free mp3 downloads
Shipwreck Radio By Nurse With Wound's Steven Stapleton and Colin Potter Curated by Anne Hilde Neset and Rob Young for Lofoten International Art Festival Produced by Eivind Furnesvik and Kunst I Nordland A radio art intervention in Lofoten, Norway, June 2004 The string of islands off the northern coast of Norway, high up above the Arctic Circle, is better known for its dried cod and midnight sun than for sound art. Between May and July 2004, this changed as two of the UK's most respected, enigmatic sonic artists were marooned with the task of making a sonic record of their time on these unfamiliar islands. The airwaves were hijacked as their work in progress made interventions on the local radio station Lofotradioen 104.4 FM. The piece was eventually re-edited and made into two double NWW albums for release on Stapleton's label United Dairies, Shipwreck Radio Vol1 and Shipwreck Radio Vol2.
The AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music The AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM) was established on 1 April 2004, supported by a 5-year grant of just under £1m from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. A partnership of Royal Holloway, University of London (host institution) with King's College, London and the University of Sheffield, CHARM's aim was to promote the musicological study of recordings, drawing on a wide range of approaches ranging from computational analysis to business history; click here for further details. Its activities included a major discographical project , residential symposia and other events, and research projects. Through this website you can discover more about these activities, access our online discography and library of ex-copyright recordings, see details about our publications, or find information about early recording history and methods for analysing recordings. CHARM researchers won a further five years of funding from 2009 under the AHRC's Phase 2 Research Centres scheme, but with a new research programme focussing on the musicological study of live performance. This changed focus is reflected in the successor centre's name: the AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP). The new Centre will begin on 1 October 2009.
Pathway To Unknown Worlds: Augustus Pablo Meets Lee Perry & the Wailers - Rare Dubs 1970 - 71 A1 Soul Rebel Dub A2 Don't Rock My Boat Dub A3 Corner Stone Dub A4 Rainbow Country Dub A5 Screwface Dub A6 400 Years Dub A7 Concrete Jungle Dub B1 Satisfy My Soul Dub B2 It's Alright Dub B3 Put It On Dub B4 Long Long Winter Dub B5 Soul Almighty Dub B6 No Sympathy Dub B7 Keep On Moving Dub
Producer : Lee Perry
Backing Band : The Wailers Drums : Carlton Barrett Bass : Family Man Guitar : Alva Reggie Lewis Keyboards : Glen Adams Melodica : Augustus Pablo & Keesy
Electronic Music from the Middle Eastern Avant-Garde (1959-2001) As part of Ubu’s new partnership with Bidoun Magazine - Art & Culture from the Middle East, we’ll be bringing you a slew of wildly rare avant-garde culture. We begin by featuring six historic electronic musicians and sound poets:
Dariush Dolat-Shahi “Electronic music, Tar and Setar” (1985) and “Otashgah” (1986) [MP3]
Halim El-Dabh “Leiyla Visitations” (1959) [MP3]
Forough Farrokhzad “Radio Tehran Sessions” (1962-1964) [MP3]
Ali Reza Mashayekhi “Electronic Music” (1970-2001) [MP3]
We are living in exceptional times. Scientists tell us that we have 10 years to change the way we live, avert the depletion of natural resources and the catastrophic evolution of the Earth's climate.
The stakes are high for us and our children. Everyone should take part in the effort, and HOME has been conceived to take a message of mobilization out to every human being.
For this purpose, HOME needs to be free. A patron, the PPR Group, made this possible. EuropaCorp, the distributor, also pledged not to make any profit because Home is a non-profit film.
HOME has been made for you : share it! And act for the planet.
(There is a link from the image in slide 10 to a short video)
This presentation discusses a selection of examples of what I term ‘rhetorical holiness’ created using Second Life (SL), a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) on the internet. Second Life is a three dimensional persistent space made up of thousands of islands (called sims). In SL a person is represented by an avatar, a body which they manipulate in the environment. The avatar can travel around the huge space of SL in real time visiting themed sites, buying and selling virtual commodities and participating in social and cultural events with others. The shared online three dimensional spaces of SL include religiously themed sites where the holy is one of the main defining criteria of interaction. The sites in SL that I have examined are the Buddhist island of “Bodhi Sim: Land of Buddhadharma - a Second Life fansite” and two mosques built in SL; the Sultan Ahmed Mosque and the Cordoba Mosque. Finally the Koinonia Congregational Church of Second Life is a Christian church which operates entirely in SL. For the purposes of this presentation, these sites are examined for the use of symbols from three established religious contexts that have been re-deployed in the virtual environment. The purpose of such an exercise is to identify a system of rhetoric within a larger literacy for such three dimensional virtual environments.
Christian Engström (left) and leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, Rickard Falkvinge as activists. Christian is now on his way to a seat in the European Parliament
The winning of a seat in the European Parliament by Christian Engström from the Swedish Pirate Party (PP) should be considered an important turn in the ongoing (and far from over) developments around the law and the conceptualization of intellectual property.
Only a dismal 44% of Swedes actually bothered to vote in the 2009 EU elections (compared to around 89% that voted in the last national election in 2007) and the PP received 7.1% of the vote. The primary base for the PP vote is apparently younger people (under 30) and males. The commentators attributed this demographic to the PP preventing an extreme right wing party gaining a Swedish seat in the EU parliament.
While the figure are flying in the Swedish media tonight about how many and who brought this new political party into a representative institution, the broader ramifications are yet to be discussed on television or in the press. On the state broadcast news tonight Rickard Falkvinge was questioned about policies on tax, abortion, employment and health care. The PP does not have policies on these issues in a sense that they are dealt with separably from policies on the development of an information based society. I find this extreamly important as a development in the media ecology of the region.
If I were to go into describing the revolution we are living in when it comes to media I would be stuck at this keyboard for a longer time that I can afford, but consider this example that I gleaned from my Twitter feed just now:
"There is fundamental challenge to the foundational modus operandi of the University — the model of pedagogy. Specifically, there is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big universities and the natural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn." Edge
At the moment many universities are struggling to keep up with changes in media and information creation, storage and distribution. One of the major epistemological tenets of the struggle to come to terms with what is happening is the concept of 'real life' and the virtual, online, cyberspace or 'whatever it is that people are doing with digital media' (even finding names for some of these practices and realisations is difficult and confusing).
My impression is that the virtual/real discrepancy is prevalent in university leadership throughout much of Europe. The major parties in the Swedish EU elections expressed a 'real life' and 'virtual life' dichotomy when describing such issues as Peer to Peer file sharing prior to the EU election day last weekend. In the recent Pirate Bay trial here in Sweden the now mythic phrase "We don't use IRL. Everything is real life. We use AFK." (IRL- In Real Life, AFK- Away From Keyboard) was uttered in the courtroom by one of the defendants. The concept of AFK summarises many of the problems that have brought a representative of the PP to a seat in the EU parliament. These problems should be considered in light of Sweden being a land that has a very advanced level of digital media connectivity. Fast broadband is standard in Sweden. I believe that the situation in Sweden represents a future scenario for many presently less connected societies.
The narrowness of confining multimedia representation and embodiment to a 'virtual' sphere is fast running out of currency. The list of examples I could summon on the reality of what is happening just in online, so-called 'virtual worlds' is long. The Swedish tax authorities are struggling to find a solution for taxing the income of those who work with such communities as Second Life. How does one organise a working day according to union regulations when one works in a 24 hour world mediated by super-fast high resolution three dimensional internet worlds. Last term I tried to convince students (yes, young people who are supposed to be 'digital natives') that they can work according to the time it is in Second Life. Weekends could be used for socialising inworld rather than in the local pub. They did not like the idea. But this is something many of us are dealing with already. I read that our local hospital here has sent two doctors to live and work in Australia. Their jobs are to review x-rays that are done by Umeå Univesity Hospital in the north of Sweden during the day and are then sent to them in Sydney, where there is a 8 to 9 hour time difference. While the patient sleeps through the night here, the doctors in Australia examine the x-rays, sending a report by morning. The savings from not having to pay a night rate to two doctors makes the project worth while. These are just a few examples of the digital society we are seeing developing around us now.
Mr. Engström alone in Brussels will probably not be able to accomplish much. The desired goal of the PP of
"All non-commercial copying and use should be completely free. File sharing and p2p networking should be encouraged rather than criminalized. Culture and knowledge are good things, that increase in value the more they are shared. The Internet could become the greatest public library ever created." Pirate Party
Involves the dissolution of several international treaties to which Sweden and the rest of Europe are party to. Furthermore I am uncertain of the logic involved in the idea that all "culture and knowledge are good things". I think it does seem idealistic and somewhat naive. But is is also brave, and the sentiment behind the idea is to be admired. I think that what we see in the election of Mr Engström to the EU assembly is an important turn. This turn is away from the court rooms and the police raids that have filled the pages of our dying newspapers over the past few years, to the activities in the legislative bodies of the democratic state. I think there will be more stories in the coming year or two about how those that oppose the attempted preservation of the hierarchical media model as it has been for the past hundred years are seeking direct political representation.
from the /ETC website... "The Eclectic Tech Carnival is a gathering of women with a critical interested in Free Information and Open Standards technology. The event creates an opportunity for women to network, exchange skills and have fun! It's been held at least once a year since 2002, each time in a place where there is a group of women intersted and willing to host and organise it. Its roots are in the Genderchangers hardware and FLOSS courses.
