Armin Medosch's blog

A Canadian Story - Railways, Telephones, Satellites, an Interview with Robert Adrian X

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Robert Adrian X is one of the true pioneers of art as telecommunications. This file presents just a few random samples from an interview with him about the need for a history of media art. Bob mixes his thoughts about the meaning of communications with his memoirs about working those technologies from the late 1970s onwards. The beginnings were characterised by the specifically Canadian situation, a vast country that needed telecommunications to keep its ends together.

Contradictions of a Tiger Cub, Part I

Video sequence taken during recent Vietnam trip. What strikes me is the contradicition between Vietnam's apparent dynamism, allegedly having joined the club of fast growing economies as a 'tiger cub' - in reference to the other Asian 'tiger economies' such as Taiwan, South Korea or Thailand - while at the same time this catching up modernisation process starts from a very low level.

Check out this river view of a village between Can Tho and Cai Be, in the Mekong delta.

Greening the Network Commons

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In 2001, Shu Lea Cheang created Steam the green, Stream the field (Cheang, 2001-02), a work which anticipated a major shift in the discourse and practice of post-media art by 10 years. Shu Lea Cheang insists on calling herself a 'self-styled' artist, emphasising her autonomy to define her activities as art. Her projects highlight the potential of the coming together of social self-organisation with a social and trans-media art practice that combines landscapes and datascapes, the natural and the digital commons.

Fields - an Index of Possibilities

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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.

Die quantitative Revolution des Finanzwesens und dessen Crashs

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Dieser Artikel präsentiert in geraffter Form die sogenannte quantitative Revolution des Finanzwesens und dessen Crashs, aber auch dessen Widersprüche und Defizite als System. Anstatt Informationsgesellschaft sollten wir eigentlich Zeitalter des informationstechnisch gestützen Finanzkapitalismus sagen. Die paradigmatischen Leittechnologien - im technopolitischen Sinn - sind die Finanzmärkte und ihre Tools - Formeln, Bildschirme, Netzwerke, Computer. Diese "Revolution" ist begründet auf Finanzmathematik und die Computerisierung und Vernetzung der Börsen; ideologisch vollzog sie sich gleichzeitig mit dem Aufstieg des Neoliberalismus.

Fieldwork, Part I: The Field as Unit and Multiplicity

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No one who suggests to do work under the title Fields should be surprised if it turns out to be fertile. Or maybe even too fertile, where the naming of the one concept, field, generates a multiplicity of connections with other things nearby, fields, whose interconnections can be thought of as pathways, channels, tracks, boundaries, trees-structures, rhizomes, lines of flight, trajectories, networks ...

Technopolitics - Die Grenzen der Informationsgesellschaft sprengen

In diesem Artikel wird zunächst das Projekt Technopolitics kurz vorgestellt, was als Hintergrundinformation zur bevorstehenden Veranstaltung Technopolitics@Codedcultures am 27. September in Wien dienen soll. Im zweiten Teil werden konkrete Inhalte der Veranstaltung angesprochen. Es geht darum, über den Bildschirmrand der Informationsgesellschaft hinauszusehen und zu verstehen, inwiefern die Informationsgesellschaft mit konkreten und materiellen Entwicklungen - wie etwa Energie- und Umweltproblematik - in Verbindung steht.

Beyond Information

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Information in the terms of information theory is the likelihood of the selection of messages in relation to all possible messages. Thus, if a selection is made from a number of possibilities which are all equally likely or unlikely, the information is high. The mathematical theory of information is linked to the concept of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. This says that the available degree of ordering of matter - and thereby the energy contained in it - is decreasing.

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