In the Future We Will Live the Time We Have the Means to Afford to Live.

"Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.  And it induces regular effects of power.  Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true’" (Foucault 1980 131).

Those who use the Internet are not the agents of power, but are its instruments, its police. Online millions of people contribute to their virtual personae, in a production composed of images, text and audio. The acceptance of image online as meaningful and important does not bestow power to anyone. It locks people, (including celebrities themselves) into webs of trivia and brand-based marketing.

Power has always operated in networks. The Medici could not have been the most powerful family in Tuscany without a network of communication, media and bureaucracy that was based on 'Truth' to support and exercise that power.

With a massive media system now in place globally we are not seeing a revolution in the network. Many follow a similar path to Yochai Benkler, in The Wealth of Networks:

"Benkler tends to overstate the novelty of social production. Firms, for example, have long employed internal markets; delegated decision rights throughout the organization; formed themselves into networks, clusters, and alliances; and otherwise taken advantage of openness and collaboration. Many different organizational forms proliferate within the matrix of private-property rights. Peer production is not new; rather, the relevant question concerns the magnitude of the changes." - The Independent

I would go on to argue it is the small, the unknown, the rare, secret and the enclosed where power is more likely to be realized in terms of autonomy that can lead to more definite social change and new ideas.

I do not believe the most powerful organizations and people on earth are on Twitter and Facebook. Those that use social media and have roles in powerful organizations, for example the World Economic Forum, (which actually has no policy and decision making powers but does include major stakeholders) are not the superstars of social media. I support this idea with the attached graphic from the last WEF in Davos that shows the tweeting was pitiful -  12 278 in total and most of them coming from the USA

 (from http://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2014/social). 

The smokescreen of truth in the form of mass attention to something that says very little and does not share Power with anyone.

Just thinking about what makes the present cultures and societies different, if indeed they are, from earlier similar formations, is the speed of digital media that can result in what has been termed 'Virtual':

“In the virtual, we are no longer dealing with value; we are merely dealing with a turning-into-data, a turning-into-calculations, a generalized computation in which reality-effects disappear. The virtual might be said to be truly the reality-horizon, just as we talk about the event-horizon in physics. But it is also possible to think that all this is merely a roundabout route towards an as yet indiscernible aim.”- Jean Baudrillard. Passwords. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso. 2003: 40-41.

Contrary to the anything that can be termed 'revolutionary' in the idea of a Netocracy (“those who are connected in interactive networks” - Bard), it seems many see the concept as simple digital production supplying markets, such as these entrepreneurs in Eastern Europe.




To extend Baudrillard’s idea, this is just an example of labor and focus turning-into-brand. Here the web is not separate from life but needs the 'need' to be created as "The virtual might be said to be truly the reality-horizon".

I would venture to say that while money is now electronic and pan-global and national currencies may wither, the enforcement of Power through capital ratios associated with money will remain. Bitcoin is just the first wave of a symbolic value experience that will be run as a program, but I believe it will maintain the same dependencies and prohibitions that money has done for centuries.

In relation to the free-ness of Gmail, Facebook etc. 'Free' is here defined by what we are prepared to exchange for a service - a single point in a demographic network or time, or advertising space or data. But Gmail and all the others are creating unequal value for everyone. Traditional sharecropping is managed a similar way. Again, an ancient future.

Finally I would go as far as to say the future is exhausted and this is reflected across those cultures that are adapting to the power that comes with the Virtual. This idea is posited on the fact that the future as a concept was invented - born out of a desire for progress, a belief in historical change, an abandonment of tradition and so on. The future just may not be a sustainable concept in a virtual sense. One example of this I think about a lot is the rampant nostalgia of today in the economies that support abstract levels of symbolic exchange. Examples include retro, hipster, evangelical, right wing extremist- all have nostalgia at their core, often for a time that never really existed. In the future we will live the time we have the means to afford to live. Meanwhile pre-Virtual economies continue to negotiate the encroachment of the virtual via the national, tribal and religious systems of power and economy. Colonial powers take advantage of these systems and exploit them.

Critique remains all we have.

Cited Works
Baudrillard, Jean. Passwords. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso. 2003.

Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks : How social production transforms markets and freedom.New Haven: Yale UNiversity Press, 2006.

Foucault, M. (1980): ‘Truth and Power’. In C. Gordon (ed.): Power/knowledge. Selected Interviews & Other Writings by Michel Foucault, 1972-1977, Brighton: Havester, pp. 109-133.

Ten Online Documentaries on the Digital Revolution

The Internet is now the driving force behind change and innovation in the world.

1. Download: The True Story of the Internet
2. The Age of Big Data
3. Resonance: Beings of Frequency
5. Life In A Day
6. Networked Society: On The Brink
7. Us Now: Social Media and Mass Collaboration
8. WikiRebels: The WikiLeaks Story
9. The Virtual Revolution: The Cost of Free
10. How Hackers Changed the World


290 more documentaries in a similar perspective to arts life and politics here.

Eric Schmidt: The Next 5 Billion - Life in Our New Connected Age

Eric Schmidt Executive Chairman of Google sketches out a future world in which cyberterrorists are targeted by government drone strikes, online identities are taken hostage and held for ransom, and parents explain online privacy to their children long before the subject of sex.

Eric Schmidt also said that his recent trip to North Korea had shown that the population there lives in an "utter information blackout" – but that change was certain to come, as well as for the 5 billion people worldwide not yet connected to the internet, for whom connectivity would bring enormous benefits and transform their lives.

Speaking to an audience at Cambridge University, in the first of a number of speeches outlining his view of the technological future, Schmidt said that he thought change would come "slowly and incrementally" to North Korea as the use of mobile phones spread, and with it information. Google has already updated its maps of the country since Schmidt's visit using "citizen mappers" inputting information to its Mapmaker software.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-eric-schmidt-outlines-a-chilling-drone-filled-future-2013-1#ixzz2JdmSgOAT

A Thought on Zuckerberg

Undertakers wear suits and are those who deal with death. Zuckerber, Gates, Jobs and the others of the life industry, the digital, do not wear suits. Zuckerberg's fortune is built on an advertising industry desperate to connect to the 'always-on' generations, people who are no longer eyeballs on TV or cinema screens (from the good ol' days when media was housed in configured build environments that occupied solid real estate). He is an insanely rich stooge who can code, who relies on the mythology of hacking and the dude culture of 'brogrammers' to push yet another configuration of 'being connected' upon the most politically and socially isolated generation for a century.

Zuckerberg is the Elvis of the digital, the apolitical pseudo-hacker who was plucked from the ranks with one brilliant idea, which it seems was not his but succeeded thanks to intellectual property rights, whereby you cannot own an idea but only a thing and his code, as Facemash. This concept is mutated over and over again for his captured fans by his content paymasters. He is the symbol for a technical expertise that serves the interests of the powerful, who brought him everything he has, and who want to see the continuation of a consumption driven culture at all costs.

Blogging the (Un)Control Machine

“I broke out my camera gun and rushed the temple — This weapon takes and vibrates image to radio static — You see the priests were nothing but word and image, an old film rolling on and on with dead actors — Priests and temple guards went up in silver smoke as I blasted my way into the control room and burned the codices — Earthquake tremors under my feet I got out of there fast, blocks of limestone raining all around me — A great weight fell from the sky, winds of the earth whipping palm trees to the ground — Tidal waves rolled over the Mayan control calendar.” - William S. Burroughs, “The Mayan Caper”.

The author William S. Burroughs proclaimed, “smash the control images, smash the control machine” in “The Mayan Caper” from his 1961 novel The Soft Machine. Burroughs believed that the word and image has been used throughout human history to control thought. He particularly associated it with the Mayan civilization of Meso-America. Whether or not Burroughs was historically correct in his assessment of the “Mayan control calendar” is largely irrelevant today, if one pays attention to Burroughs more simple claim that images and words populate the imaginations of people when they are broadcast using the electronic mass media. Mass media for the majority of Burroughs’s life (1914-1997) was broadcast using the one-to-many model. Newspapers, Television and Radio beamed messages into the lives and minds of millions of people every day. This network of one-way information channels (if one ignores the heavily censored Letters to the Editor and talk back radio) is drowning today in an ocean of user driven digital content. Fourteen years after the death of Burroughs, anyone who can access the Internet can fashion their own ‘camera gun’ and begin beaming images into the minds of others. As a revolutionary force, the writings of William S Burroughs provide us with a set of principles that can be used to understand how the ruling order is replaced in relation to the digital media sphere. The blogs, wikis, live feeds, podcasts, web journals, micro blogs, RSS feeds and forums of today are soft weapons that ‘take and vibrate images to radio static’, breaking them up, distributing them and making the digital food of revolution. Blogging with its millions of channels is now the media ‘uncontrol machine’.  

In his fiction Burroughs paints a picture of a bygone society where one delves “Into the interior: a vast subdivision, antennae of television to the meaningless sky. In lifeproof houses they hover over the young, sop up a little of what they shut out” (Naked Lunch 11). Today it is nearly impossible to shut much out in the average suburban Western home, and controlling production of media content is like trying to contain a solar storm. Millions of channels circle the planet offering input and output possibilities for anyone with a story or an image. Among the many, the Chinese government attempts censorship in the face of this image horde, but there are always holes in any Great Wall. Recently a colleague travelled to China to give a series of lectures on film and the digital image. She was of course unable to access YouTube, so she Skyped instructions about which videos to rip off the site and I sent them to her from Europe via the file-sharing site Sprend. These videos were then shown in a Chinese university lecture hall. This is just one crude example of how information always finds a way. I would like to mention some others.

The proposed revolution of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement is radio-sonic, if one judges by the radiating ‘i’ logo of the Global Revolution livestream site.  Twenty-four hours a day, beginning on September 17^th 2011, people began occupying Zuccotti Park (Liberty Park) in Downtown Manhattan in New York. Coinciding with the physical occupation is the digital barrage of Twitter (micro-blogging run off hashtags), the live video stream, forum discussion, archives of links and comments, blog posts, still images, podcasts, live audio streams, email lists and YouTube videos. This river of information has sparked Occupy [enter-town-name] around the USA and even overseas. What could be relegated as a collection of disenfranchised and left-leaning complainers has quickly evolved into an idea (“occupy everything” seems to be its slogan, and it of course comes with a manifesto http://occupywallst.org/article/a-message-from-occupied-wall-street-day-five/). The ability of digital media to spread this idea (and I am doing it right here) is a testament to the tenacity of the word virus. The need to overcome the dominant dream narratives is most recently articulated by popular Slovenian philosopher Slovoj Zizek when he spoke at OWS on 9^th October 2011 and said, "The ruling history has even limited our capacity to dream". The dream of authenticity goes on.

Philosopher-at-Large Slavoj Zizek addresses the crowd gathered in Liberty Plaza        

Global Revolution media feed, Saturday October 8^th 2011. The end of the Mayan Calendar as we know it?

The OWS movement is the latest and possibly most visible outside mainstream media of a series of high profile digital image barrages connected to popular protest and resistance we have seen develop over the last couple of years. In a rough time line that also shows a growing sophistication, these include the 2008-2009 Israeli-Gaza War, the 2009 election protests in Iran, the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, the civil uprising in Syria, and finally the present Occupation of Wall Street. The Israeli-Gaza War was mostly conducted on the Internet via Twitter, with some videos and websites taking up the events only often after they occurred. The 2009 election protests in Iran were Twitter based, but many of the feeds from the micro blogging site were located outside the boarders of the Islamic Republic. However, videos built an enormous following online for the ideas and demands of the dissident forces in Iran. This culminated in the murder online of Neda Agha-Soltan, a video of the shooting death of a beautiful young woman on a street in Tehran that went viral. As Neda gazed into the camera lens, blood gushing from her nose and mouth, the viewer was propelled into the human drama of a cruel and unjust situation. The image wars in Iran had just been stepped up a notch.

The speed of the revolution in Tunisia stunned the world. On 17^th December 2010 a street vendor in the town of Sidi Bouzid set himself alight in protest over long term persecution by corrupt local street officials. Mohamed Bouazizi died on 4 January 2011, at 5:30 pm local time. Protests began immediately afterwards, and built up until President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunisia with his family on 14 January 2011. The rest is history, and the role of social media in the build up to the flight of Ben Ali is contentious. Wikileaks is said to have playeda significant role in the turn of events in Tunisia, along with high unemployment, inflation and official corruption. However, the Tunisian uprising is clearly an example of the masses no longer believing the official control narrative of the government. As Mohamed Bouazizi lay dying in his hospital bed, Ben Ali visited him on December 28^th 2010, promising to appoint a new Minister of Youth and to look into the unemployment problem (running at around 40% in Sidi Bouzid) . What resulted from the visit was an undermining of the official information line, with Al Jazeera reporting, “For many observers, the official photo of the president looking down on the bandaged young man had a different symbolism from what Ben Ali had probably intended.” The game was over for Ben Ali and a new set of images are still being developed to replace the old in Tunisia.

The revolutions in Egypt and Libya seem to follow a similar pattern to that of Tunisia, as information channels are gradually developed and become dominant, in form if not in content. This progression often mirrors the changes occurring in the streets and corridors of power in each nation. Images replace images as power shifts. Flows of information supporting one group or idea become larger, more regular and more widely distributed, as support grows and gains are made on the ground. What is different from the usual flows of propaganda in any political changeover is that the sources in these contemporary changeovers are multiple based on weight of numbers. While major broadcasters such as Al Jazeera covered the assembly in Tahrir Square in Cairo from atop the buildings around it, creating a visual metaphor of distance and collectivity, the real coverage was happening on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and countless Egyptian blogs. Wael Abbas, Sandmonkey, Hossam Eid, Ali Seif, Nora Younis, Misr Digital, and Baheyya are some of the most popular blogs. It must also be remembered that in the last weeks of the regime of Hosni Mubarak the Internet was shut down for the entire of Egypt in an attempt to silence dissenting images and ideas. Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates commented on the shut down in a highly perceptive analysis, "Whenever you do something extraordinary like that, you're sort of showing people you're afraid of the truth getting out." In the same story by The Huffington Post it was revealed that efforts to shut down such an information network inevitably fail. As they did for Hosni Mubarak.

Attempts are still made in digital media sites to summarize the movement in a single form of language. In doing so the summary attempts to return a movement to the singular, what the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin calls a monoglossia, which identifies the locus of control with the authoritative interpretation of the word. The OWS movement is one example of this, where a major digital news site took pictures of 34 people in Liberty Park and described it, as “This should give you a pretty good idea of the different types of people occupying Wall Street“ .  What I would ask of buzzfeed’s summary of who is occupying Wall Street is where does the occupation begin and end? Is the video feed running 24 hours a day part of the occupation? What about the forums, blog posts, videos, and Tweets? Are they part of the occupation? If they are, where are they? With millions of channels open all over the Internet, the occupation of Wall Street has become part of the infrastructure of the World Wide Web, which as its name suggests, is worldwide. There is no place for an idea, as it occupies the world as a virus does, in time but not in space.

As the forms and practices of the OWS movement become more established they are copied. Well not so much copied, as manifested. It is contagious and how it is going to end we do not know yet. In researching this article I cam across a new site in the United Kingdom called BEYONDCLICKTAVISM, which gives a little bit of background and then four reasons for its existence:

Beyond Clicktivism was set up following the netroots uk event primarily to address the following questions:

• What can we do online that is uniquely progressive so that if others emulate us their response is informed by progressive values?
• How do we get people climbing the ladder of engagement, moving from Facebook “Likes” to actual concrete action?
• How do we integrate progressive use of social media with non-political use of social media?
• How can we build tools that can also be used to call politicians to account and stop the next Blair or Clegg from flying in the face of the principles of their parties and shamelessly tearing up their pledges to the electorate?

Directly below these points is the statement; “The scope and ambitions of the site have expanded since then.” I am sure I can say the same thing about the activists and media artists mentioned in this text, working around the clock and around the globe to realize some crazy dream they have, over and over again.

BBC Interview: danah boyd on youth online

Danah Boyd is a social media researcher at Microsoft Research. She met with Aleks Krotoski to discuss the changes in young people's behaviour when online, their attitudes to privacy and the importance that might be placed upon building their identities online.

These rushes sequences are part of the BBC promise to release content from most of the interviews and some general footage, all under a permissive licence for you to embed, or download a non-branded version and re-edit.

I Love Wooden Veil

The Wooden Veil Awaits



Wooden Veil: Gravity Problems by Hanayo

Wooden Veil is a Berlin-based art group formed in 2007. Inspired by the shared hauntedness of their respective homelands, they combine elements from forgotten and misremembered traditions to create a microcosmic world which only Wooden Veil inhabits, complete with its own symbols, clothing, food and shelters. Performances, installations and videos are characterized by an expansive wardrobe of ritual dress, and the creation of shrines, relics and talismans used to create music.

The group consists of artists Marcel Türkowsky (also a composer, founder of Snake Figures Arkestra, Cones, Uuhuu, collaborations with Datashock and Christoph Heemann), Hanayo (known for her solo work as a photographer and singer, collaborating with the likes of Christoph Schlingensief, Merzbow, Red Crayola, and Kai Althoff), Christopher Kline (Valkenburg Hermitage, †, Night Music, and Soft Peace), Dominik Noé (member of krautrock legends Lustfaust), and Jan Pfeiffer (Songs For Rocks, Soft Peace, Purple).

To understand:

Hold right hand, cupped near right ear; turn hand back and forth slightly with wrist. Bring left hand to opposite eye with the second finger pointing in the direction one is looking. With index and thumb of right hand, form an incomplete circle, space of one inch between tips; hold hand towards the earth, then move it in a curve across the heavens and back toward the horizon.

moon & hamburg wooden veil

"The music of Wooden Veil is at once chaotically ritualistic and curiously precious. From all indications it would seem that the Berlin-based collective have gone to great lengths to reach this dichotomy. Maintaining the project as a way to create a unique world that only Wooden Veil inhabits, the group's performances bring together symbols, clothing and rituals that are to be regarded a part of this world. Borne out of half-remembered traditions and etched in the fringes of culture, the music seems tribal through the eyes of a post-catastrophic modern man. Pieces of a once great culture slip in but it seems that much of their sound inhabits a forced forgetfulness, both innocently and ferociously using the remnants of instrumentation to create a new life in music. Among the pound of drums, the scorch of drones and the wail of frightened voices some beautiful moments emerge; alive but tenuously testing to see if, how and why that's possible." Raven Sings the Blues (includes two Mp3s)


WOODEN VEIL
s/t
LP/CD
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"Belonging to a world that is at once pre-millenial and post-apocalyptic, Wooden Veil’s music is the drumbeat of an ancient yet technological past channeled through the sounds of a post-human race. Masked and costumed, the players invoke a musical force as a shaman would a ghost. Collecting rhythm like wind collecting a storm, Wooden Veil gives grand form to noise – they make it an event. Drums, drones, harmonies and screams clamor in their songs, erupting now and again into a plainsong that rings just long enough for a melody to take shape, before it dissolves back into sonic entropy."
- Carson Chan, Program – Initiative for Art + Architecture, Berlin

"Playing like a semiotic mist, Wooden Veil approach their performances as handmade, patchwork quilt-like structures with emphasis on showing the lines of assembly, sewing together mythologies, traditional song, craft, ritual and acoustics."
- Steven Warwick (Heatsick, Birds of Delay)


Gloom Across the Ice

Wooden Veil on MySpace

Reprap

RepRap from Adrian Bowyer on Vimeo.

Reprap is an example of how sharing has the potential to change the society we live in.

Look at your computer setup and imagine that you hooked up a 3D printer. Instead of printing on bits of paper this 3D printer makes real, robust, mechanical parts. To give you an idea of how robust, think Lego bricks and you're in the right area. You could make lots of useful stuff, but interestingly you could also make most of the parts to make another 3D printer. That would be a machine that could copy itself.

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right - a self-replicating machine. This 3D printer builds the parts up in layers of plastic. This technology already exists, but the cheapest commercial machine would cost you about €30,000. And it isn't even designed so that it can make itself. So what the RepRap team are doing is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about €500). That way it's accessible to small communities in the developing world as well as individuals in the developed world. Following the principles of the Free Software Movement we are distributing the RepRap machine at no cost to everyone under the GNU General Public Licence. So, if you have a RepRap machine, you can use it to make another and give that one to a friend...

Twitter Iran and MJ

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.

"Go To Bed, Twitter, It Is Your Bedtime" includes the observations:

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.

Twitter

Australia on Film

I may actually go and see Baz Luhrmann's Australia as it will be showing here in the far north of Sweden in about a month.
What I am more excited about is the Australian Screen website. It is a treasure trove of Australia cinema going back to its earliest years. There are online streams from hundreds of films and some are in their entirety. Teaching notes and resources such as still images and downloadable segments make the Australian Screen site a valuable potential teaching tool. You can register as a member (there is also a Facebook group) and receive emails and make contacts with others interesting in the amazing world of Australian film.
I was happy to reconnect with a favorite film of mine, The Year My Voice Broke. Not easy to find a copy of these days, but a film that reminds me so much of growing up in rural Queensland.

Gonzo Works to be Streamed Simultaneously with Airing

In my post from yesterday on the piracy situation in Sweden, nobody in the radio broadcast spoke about the velocity of the media allowing for so much piracy to take place. A cinema release in the USA can be on hardrives in Helsinki within a few hours. So this innovative approach from the Japanese animation studio GDH is very interesting:

The Japanese media company GDH has announced that the YouTube, Crunchyroll, and BOST online video services will be streaming new titles from GDH's Gonzo animation studio — worldwide and on the same day as their Japanese broadcast. The video streams, which will be in Japanese with English subtitles, will start with The Tower of Druaga: the Aegis of Uruk and Blassreiter anime series. Druaga will premiere on April 4, and Blassreiter will premiere on April 5.

All three video services offer their content via streaming, although GDH also mentioned "fee-based download of high-resolution movie files" in its press release. America's Viz Media offered NTV's Death Note episodes for download within half a year of their Japanese broadcast, but GDH's new initiative is the first global, simultaneous streaming of multiple series from a major anime studio.

GDH added that its "decision to provide its content globally in parallel with Japanese broadcast is an effort to offer equal accessibility and new viewing opportunities to fans around the world, while at the same time showcasing a legal online alternative to illegal file-sharing and downloading." GDH also emphasized that these services are for foreign viewers only; the company already has deals in place to stream its content through services within Japan.

From Anime News Network via Warren Ellis

Google Social Networking Platform Launches Tomorrow

I have a feeling this is going to be big:

Google is launching their answer to Facebook tomorrow and it is called OpenSocial. The URL for the site opens then.

"OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

Profile Information (user data)
Friends Information (social graph)
Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

Hosts agree to accept the API calls and return appropriate data. Google won’t try to provide universal API coverage for special use cases, instead focusing on the most common uses. Specialized functions/data can be accessed from the hosts directly via their own APIs.

Unlike Facebook, OpenSocial does not have its own markup language (Facebook requires use of FBML for security reasons, but it also makes code unusable outside of Facebook). Instead, developers use normal javascript and html (and can embed Flash elements). The benefit of the Google approach is that developers can use much of their existing front end code and simply tailor it slightly for OpenSocial, so creating applications is even easier than on Facebook.

Applications can have full functionality on profile and/or canvas pages, subject to the specific rules of each host. Facebook, by contrast, limits most functionality to the canvas page, allowing a widget on the profile page with limited features.

OpenSocial is silent when it comes to specific rules and policies of the hosts, like whether or not advertising is accepted or whether any developer can get in without applying first (the Facebook approach). Hosts set and enforce their own policies. The APIs are created with maximum flexibility."
TechCrunch

Music Networks a Threat to Static Management

Record company executives must be finding it difficult to get up in the morning and go to work some days I reckon. This morning the news that Radiohead have earnt an estimated few millions pounds in the first day of offering their new album for download 'by donation' from their own website must have made a few record executive a little bit grumpy. The need for a record deal is becoming less and less as each month goes by. According to the Sydney Morning Herald with 1.2 million downloads from the Radiohead website on the first day:

A poll by The Times of 3000 fans who bought the album found the average price paid was £4 ($9.20) - about half the usual price of an album on iTunes. On those figures, on the first day alone, the band would have collected more than $10 million, and by cutting out the middle man - the record company - the band will receive every cent of it.

If contracted to a record company, the band would have had to sell 10 times that number of physical albums to collect the same profit.

Yesterday on local radio I heard an interview with David Sylvian (does anyone remember Gentlemen Take Polaroids?) who is now doing more interesting things with music. He has abandoned the idea of needing a recording studio and having the musicians in one place in order to make a recording. In the interview (streamed from the link) Sylvian says he is part of a global network of musicians who send files to each other over the net (sounds familiar to me). Each contributes to the recording process in their own time and place and then it is all mixed down at the end somewhere else by someone else.

The use of Internet by both Sylvian and Radiohead seems to me to make recording contracts, and the companies that offer them, irrelevant. Unless the companies can offer something more than manufacturing and distribution they are doomed. I think companies that work with musicians, if they want to continue making profit, need to move into touring, venue management, experience design using musical concepts and the manufacture of more trans medial artifacts (DVDs with books and interactive media components).

What a great Idea....

Platial enables anyone to find, create and use meaningful maps of Places that matter to them. We hope it can connect people, neighborhoods, cities and countries through a citizen-driven common context that goes beyond geopolitical boundaries. We are building it, because we adore Places.

Platial allows uses to build online maps of anything. Wired reports:

Platial, a social mapping a site that collects the "personal atlases" of its users. They launched in December, and they've now mapped 200,000 places, and Platial users have generated over 5,000 custom maps.

Platial users can add photos, comments, and tags to their personal maps. Users can also tag places with "been there" and leave a comment, providing a way for people to find others with common interests.

The most popular uses for Platial members are autobiogeography maps (map your life story), travel maps and common interest maps. There's even a map for the "Lost" TV series that maps all of the locations shown on the program. One user created a "Where I Was on 9/11" map that many have contributed to, adding their own personal stories.

Is Facebook Evil?

"Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them."

About two weeks ago I received an invitation to join Facebook. I had heard a lot about it, mainly from sources in the USA. I have been on many online social networks beginning with Orkut, then Friendster, Myspace (still using it), and the ones like del.icio.us and Last FM that share interests and objects as well. Now I have joined Facebook and it is without doubt the most addictive of the lot. This is digital crack. I have found people I have not heard from for 17 years on Facebook, old friends are re-entering my life with amazing stories of what they have been doing during the last decade. Facebook beats reality TV by a long shot as those people who I re-connect with were once part of my own drama and now we have TWO DRAMAS to compare and contrast; my life and theirs. As well there is the groups aspects where news and information flows through channels of association (and therefore geographical location) rather than just subject interest. The backlash against such immersive narratives has to come soon, and it seems it has already started:

Richard Cullen of SurfControl, an internet filtering company, estimates the site may be costing Australian businesses $5 billion a year. "Our analysis shows that Facebook is the new, and costly, time-waster," he said.

I may send Dr Cullen a friend request.

Free Animation Software from MIT

A free download from the MIT Media Lab; Scratch is an easy to use program that allows kids to make their own animations and post them on the web at the community site where you can download the program from.
The MIT Media Release says:

A new programming language developed at the MIT Media Lab turns kids from media consumers into media producers, enabling them to create their own interactive stories, games, music, and animation for the Web.

With this new software, called Scratch, kids can program interactive creations by simply snapping together graphical blocks, much like LEGO® bricks, without any of the obscure punctuation and syntax of traditional programming languages. Children can then share their interactive stories and games on the Web, the same way they share videos on YouTube, engaging with other kids in an online community that provides inspiration and feedback.

"Until now, only expert programmers could make interactive creations for the Web. Scratch opens the gates for everyone," said Mitchel Resnick, Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab and head of the Scratch development team.

Digg and the HD-DVD crack

I admire something about this statement:

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Following the linking to stories about the HD-DVD crack (as in code) Digg.com took down all references to it after getting cease and desist notices. A mass protest followed with thousands of entries posting the code on Digg.com.

And then last night:

Last night, the AACS LA's attempts to keep an HD DVD crack under wraps backfired in a spectacular fashion. Pandora's Box is now wide open and there's no going back now.

Democracy in action or mob rule? An interesting thing.

Riots in Copenhagen

This is a 1944 riot in Nørrebro, Copenhagen during the German occupation of Denmark

I have been watching the present situation in Nørrebro in Copenhagen with interest. For the past three days police and activists have been battling in the streets of the suburb around the 'Young Peoples House' that has been a thriving center for culture for over 20 years and is now being closed as the recently acquired property of a Christian sect. The new owner of the house decided to evict the young people when they used the word "Hell" in a banner they hung from the wall of the building.

It seems this is not the first time Nørrebro has seen civil insurrection on a mass scale. In 1944 the Danish people resisted the Nazi occupation on the same spot. A large collection of videos on the 2007 riot are being amassed on YouTube. As I write several thousand activists have assembled at Rådhuspladsen and it seems there will be another night of action in Copenhagen tonight. With the G8 coming up in Berlin in June this year we could be in for a European summer of anti-fascist street actions.

A Million Penguins too Many?

Big Tony stretched his arm, yawned, and lazily flicked the channel from world news to a documentary on photography which aroused his interest only because of the scantily clad bathing models currently in front of the camera.

If you are wondering where this is going check out A Million Penguins a wiki novel project that was unveiled yesterday by publishing giant Penguin. This is the opening paragraph of chapter one as of midnight Friday 2nd February 2006. It may have changed by now. It is being presented in the terms of an experiment, but it could be easily called publicity.
I am not sure the term novel should be applied to a wiki that builds on a narrative network. It will be interesting to see if another term emerges along the way. According to the 'About' page for the project:

Can a collective create a believable fictional voice? How does a plot find any sort of coherent trajectory when different people have a different idea about how a story should end – or even begin? And, perhaps most importantly, can writers really leave their egos at the door? Typically, a writer will acknowledge in print the efforts of their book’s editor, copy editor and agent, since they each will have read the work in draft form. But such acknowledgments regularly include a disclaimer along these lines : “Any errors that remain are, of course, my own”.

Oh look, in the time I took to write/paste the above, the opening paragraph is now:

Big Tony stretched his arm and gave himself one final yank. He yawned, and lazily flicked the channel from world news to a documentary on photography which aroused his interest only because of the scantily clad bathing models currently in front of the camera.