The Next Layer - Essay

Fields - an Index of Possibilities

Armin Medosch — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 10:54:12 +0000

This text outlines a research strategy and context for the Fields exhibition to take place in Riga in 2014. While not directly about the exhibition, this text explores the notion of Fields as a broadening and deepening of an inquiry began with the exhibition Waves. The notion of the field and its various links into scientific disciplines purports a long term epistemic shift from fixed identities and dualisms to vectors and forces/lines of attraction and repulsion; from a world of fixed entities to one of energies and the exertion of force from a distance.

Continental Drift through the Pampa

Brian Holmes — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 04:05:43 +0000

Recently I and Claire Pentecost went on an artistic research trip in Argentina with local collaborators. What we call a "Continental Drift." This was a perceptual encounter with the productive processes of a country subject to intense neoliberal restructuring. Hopefully next year we will do more collaborative research in a public seminar context in Buenos Aires, both to define Argentina's position as a hi-tech agro-exporter within Neoliberal Informationalism, and to contribute in some small way to the political breakdown of that hegemony, which is being actively sought by many on the official Argentine left. In the meantime you can read the one post I wrote in English during the experience:

http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/this-way-to-the-port

Down by Law: HADOPI's diluted graduated response, iiNet's battle with Big Content

doll_yoko — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 07:30:27 +0000

Coordinated opposition had defanged the final version of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and will continue attacking other supra-national digital enclosures such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Hence powerful copyright advocates including the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) have concurrently operated outside such treaty frameworks to pressure individual governments in an ‘especially aggressive’ way to force ISPs to police copyright infringements (Bridy 2010: 2). To date Britain, France, South Korea, and Taiwan, have incorporated various forms of graduated response into their domestic copyright enforcement systems (ibid.). Furthermore, other countries are exploring ‘private ordering’ options to enforce online copyright (Bridy 2010: 11-15; Toner 2011). These range from ‘cooperative relationships’ between major content distributors and broadband providers in which Internet Service Providers (ISPs) suspend repeat infringers’ accounts (in the United States), to ISPs being the ‘sole arbiter of the customer’s innocence or guilt’ terminating accounts without court orders (in Ireland). In Australia, the ISP iiNet after winning a precedent-setting law suit brought against it by an alliance of mainly US content owners proposed a graduated response model in which an ‘independent body’ meeting ‘community standards’ mediates the interests of all parties

Escaping the Digital Enclosures 1: Networked Battlegrounds produced by the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)

doll_yoko — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 01:44:24 +0000

File-sharing has continued to expand over the past decade regardless of some landmark legal wins against peer-to-peer companies, torrent aggregator websites, and individual file-sharers.

The Return of King Mob

Armin Medosch — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 11:41:50 +0000

The student demonstrations against the rise of tuition fees, the fourth of which took place yesterday, 9 December 2010 signals the return of King Mob to the streets of London.

The Gap Between Now and Then - on the conservation of memory

Josephine — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 13:29:14 +0000

Let’s play hide-and-seek with future generations. We hide. The seeker is not among us yet. He or she lives in another era, a time yet to come. We don’t know if he or she will be a finder. We are not even sure we want or need to be found. We might simply just jump from our lair one day, reveal ourselves, unexpectedly, to win the game.

Post-Privacy or the Politics of Labour, Intelligence and Information

Armin Medosch — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:07:30 +0000

This text argues that the erosion of privacy is not a by-product of information and communication technologies, but a systemic property of informational capitalism. The foundational myths of the information society motivate and legitimise the building of control systems applying probabilistic techniques to control future risks. At the root of this configuration are antagonistic labour relationships which have determined the path of technological development since the Industrial Revolution. Those tendencies have reached a culmination in the recent neo-liberal crisis. The digital commons offers itself as an incomplete and tentative remedy.

THE BRAVE NEW WORLD OF WORK

Armin Medosch — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:45:12 +0000

This text is a first draft, trying to identify key topics for an inquiry into the new organisation of labour. It starts with a historic analysis and then explores the notion of Post-Fordism.Specific sections are devoted to cognitive capitalism, the creative industries, informational capitalism and the split between manual and mental labour. It ends with a modest proposal for an alternative path of development.

Die dunkle Seite von Twitter, Facebook & Konsorten

christof — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 10:33:48 +0000

Warum das Umfeld von Social-Web-Applikationen eine Nutzung abseits von Spaß und Selbstinszenierung unterbindet.

Mit 20.000 Mitgliedern innerhalb einer Woche war die Gründung der Facebook-Gruppe Freiheit im MQ Anfang Juni – bescheiden ausgedrückt – ein Erfolg. Kein Wunder, ging es doch darum, die Gemütlichkeit und Offenheit des Wiener Museumsquartiers gegen die Wächter der MQ-Direktion zu verteidigen. Kein Konsum selbst mitgebrachter alkoholischer Getränke – wenn das kein Anlass ist auf die digitalen Barrikaden zu steigen?

45 Revolutions Per Minute (media history on heavy rotation)

Armin Medosch — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:43:25 +0000

This text riffs on the theme of revolutions thereby referring less to the political act of one class wrestling power from another one but rather to cycical motions caused by the interplay of industrial, scientific, cultural and political motive forces. This approach challenges the prevailing viewpoint according to which class struggle has been replaced by media technologies as the subject of history in technologically advanced free-market democracies. Instead, it tries to develop a more complex understanding of the forces that shape history by working out the dialectical relationship between technological rationality as a means of power and domination and as a means of human emancipation at the same time.