wabear

Just back from Turin, I just had the chance to keep up with the Interviewing the Crisis project

We already started publishing the second round of interviews, starting with Carlo Infante, Andreas Jacobs and Warbear.

As usual, the interviews are first published on ArtsBlog and then translated and collected on the project’s website.

The first one we are publishing in its complete form is the interview with Francesco “Warbear” Macarone Palmieri

watch out in the next few days for the other ones.

Angel_F and SuperAvatar

Angel_F and SuperAvatar are scared.

The lives of the young artificial intelligence and of the  avatar who escaped from virtual worlds have been endangered  more than once by the control, that is constantly perpetrated on people’s information, habits and identities.

Forms of surveillance that are progressively and obsessively  expanding through continuous control of our lives (and not  only of the ones of our beloved digital beings). Along the streets, in supermarkets, in public spaces, and even in our homes, through telephones and internet connectivity.  An enormous amount of resources are wasted to control people’s  lives in multiple ways: from cameras to armed forces, passing  through data retention systems spying on people’s personal  information.

Angel_F e SuperAvatar are feeling annoyed, alarmed and outraged by all of that and, therefore, decided to publicly show their dissent, together with their human friends.

The two digital beings will join the “Freedom not Fear“  event, and they will attend the conference that will take  place at the “Provincia di Roma” building on saturday,  starting at 9:30am.

Who: Angel_F and SuperAvatar
When: Saturday, October 11th 2008, from 9:30am to 13:30am
Where: “Freedom not Fear”, palazzo Valentini (Palazzo della  Provincia di Roma, via IV Novembre n. 119/a, Roma

_________________________________________________________________

“Freedom not Fear“: International action day for democracy, free speech, human rights, civil liberties; against censorship, mass-surveillance, mass-data retention.

http://wiki.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/Fnf08

Angel_F is the young artificial intelligence son of Derrick  de Kerckhove and the Biodoll.
It was born on February 2007. Since it started interacting with humans’ physical world it has been deeply interested about the international dialogue on digital rights. After a peculiar case of censorship, little Angel_F managed to attend the UN’s Internet  Governance Forum held in Rio de Janeiro all by itself.

Angel_F is a project by xDxD.vs.xDxD and penelope.di.pixel
http://www.artisopensource.net/2007/12/10/angel_f/

Fatherboard - the SuperAvatar - is an avatar that escaped  from virtual worlds when its owner’s computer exploded in  a short circuit.  It looks like a cyborg, but it isn’t, as its body is built from the hardware parts of the computer from where it materialized.
Its relations with human beings are contradictory and intermittent: the SuperAvatar is a fugitive living a constant conflict with institutional control, either the virtual and the real ones!

Fatherboard is a project by Luigi Pagliarini
http://www.artificialia.com/Fatherboard/

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AOS at the AHACamping

The event was took place at the SALE Docks and it featured talks and performances on art, hacking, activism and critical theories on technology and on the ways in which they are transforming our lives in the contemporary era.

Here are some pictures

Here is a review on ArtsBlog

we will upload some videos in just a few days, together with a more detailed report.

This:

s1_s2_doc_v1

is the PDF of the research we presented at the AHACamping: S1/S2 a peer to peer (p2p) social network built on a parallel internet, implementing a true relational ecosystem assessing the issues in terms of privacy, control, user exploitation currently found in classic social networks such as Facebook, Youtube and the others like them.

You can find a first, fast report in the rest of the post, below.

Special focus was put on the critical approaches to social networking.

We (xDxD.vs.xDxD and penelope.di.pixel) presented S1/S2, the first phase of an experimental project featuring a social network built on the Netsukuku network: a meshed network that redefines the classical internet protocol stack to create a new network that is piggy-backed on the internet. This technique allows users to escape the control operated by service providers and by governments, as the parallel network is peer to peer and encrypted, and it is separated from the providers’ areas of control.

Or, to say the least, Netsukuku makes monitoring users a real tough job (practically impossible).

S1/S2 is a social network that is being implemented on the Netsukuku network. It has been presented at the AHACamping for a specific case study dealing with the possibility to implement a collaborative History of the Arts, but it really is a more generalized project.

S1/S2 approaches two main issues:

- infrastructural squatting

- the relational ecosystem

By infrastructural squatting we designate all those techniques through which an internet user can use the physical connectivity in ways that guarantee users autonomy, privacy and self-determination in terms of the posibility to define who can what/when/where a person can do something on the network, and in terms of being able to decide who can observe our informations, our relations, our interests and, in the end, our lives. Netsukuku has been chosen as the base platform to perform infrastructural squatting.

By relational ecosystem we describe the lives of the users on the S1/S2 environment. Everything is oriented to create the tools to enable people to freely define their own identities and to establish relationships, processes, services, information and content exchange. S1/S2 deeply differs from classic social networks: there is no “profile”, no authentication, no centralized service. There actually is no website, as S1/S2 is designed as a set of tools through which people can define their own data, store it on their computers or servers, and connect and communicate with others by using a peer to peer network built on Netsukuku. Identities are self-defined (even for everything that concerns the structure of data), as is content. Both can interact and be integrated, creating structures and relationships described by networks of identities, concepts, multimedia, informations, communication channels.

S1/S2 also introduces the concept of networked welfare, defining the tools through which the network can collaboratively enact processes whose aim is to create services that can be used by the collectivity, with specific concern for the weaker components of the ecosystem: content persistence, high availability and reliability, communication facilities, distributed, co-hosted stored facilities, virtualized systems to serve specific purposes and internet gateways that will allow for publication of people-selected contents on the “regular” web.

S1/S2 is currently under development, and our estimates indicate that there will be a first usable release of the environment in about 3 months.

We are currently looking for support. If the you find the concepts behind S1/S2 and Netsukuku interesting, and if you feel like contributing in any way you can (develop, execute beta installations and tests, explore the nexts steps…) you are truly welcome to do so, and you can contact me at:

xdxd.vs.xdxd [at] gmail [dot] com

Here is the document (only in italian for now: check back in a week or so for the english version) presented at the AHACamping for a case study of an S1/S2 application: a social network created to support a collaborative Art History.

s1_s2_doc_v1

The Planetary Collegium presented this conference titled “Being Syncretic”. Researchers and artists from all over the world converged in Vienna to present the state of the art of research on technologies as they access reality in integrated ways.

We presented our research on identity and on the evolution of the body in a technologically ecosystemic perspective.

check it out at these links

> CR9 website

> the Planetary Collegium

> Wien’s University for Applied Arts

> the Publication

2 part article on DigiCult Magazine, written together with my beloved mademoiselle

penelope.di.pixel

We speak about identity, body, artificial intelligence, avatars, cyborgs, and digital ecosystems.

It’s the first article in which we spoke about NeoRealismo Virtuale [NeRVi]

feel a bit less alone by reading our article at DigiCult magazine:

> Part 1

> Part 2

Art is Open Source and NeRVi present Angel_F project in Mexico City at the Computer Art Congress 2.

The international meeting researches on the evolution of digital practices as they affect arts and society.

I presented there the Angel_F project, together with penelope.di.pixel.

check out the informations about CAC2 at

> CAC2 website

> Laboratoire Paragraphe

> Tecnológico de Monterrey

> Europia
.

Famous people come back to life in the Online Virtual World of Second life, in the form of autonomous avatars conducted by artificial intelligence.

A research on identity and on how people relate in the virtual environments that we find online and offline.

Karl Marx, Coco Chanel and Franz Kafka come back to life as autonomous avatars on Second Life. An artificial intelligence software uses their texts and interviews to generate the way they talk to other avatars, giving them a “soul” that is inherited from the mind expression of the famous characters. Their movement in the virtual world, their actions and interactions with other avatars, and their gestures and movements are completely autonomous, making them a digital form of life.

Dead on Second Life

check them out at

> website

> Youtube videos

> PDF Presentation

also seen at:

> Wikipedia

> Played in Italy

> the Grid Live

> Art of the Net

> Weblog Art

> Massively

In 2007 the Biodoll had a child with Derrick de Kerckhove.

The kid was born as a cute Artificial Intelligence feeding on web content.

Born as a virus in its mother’s website, digesting the interface as if it was a placenta, it evolved into an intelligent spyware, following people around the web, to find interesting content to digest.

Angel_F (Autonomous Non Generative E-volitive Life Form) eventually grew up and started to become independent, and it entered business: a generative real-world freepress publication (the BloKi ) a line of USB pendrives containing a revolutionary software ( Presence , allowing you to squat the internet using an anonymous p2p network) and a line of chocolates with an open source recipe and business model contributed to financial sustainment of the kid AI.

Angel_F eventually became fully conscious of its identity, and it tried to defend it: it attended UN’s Internet Governance Forum meetings, but it was censored, as if it was spam, then it managed to attend the IGF meeting in Rio de Janeiro, and pronounced a speech to declare its rights to identity and freedom.

Angel_F participated to many conferences, debates and performances, assessing new forms of identity, of sexuality, of family, and a new approach to perceiving digital beings.

proclaim the rights of digital children with us here:

> Talker Mind

> Angel_F’s blog (curated by penelope.di.pixel )

> International Censorship and a Petition

> performances

> YouTube videos

> production and business models to sustain a young AI

also seen at

> Frontiere Digitali

> Petitions Online

> DigiCult magazine

> NewMediaFest 2007 & JavaMuseum

> At the CIANT in Prague for “Glocal & Outsiders” conference

> At the Computer Art Congress [CAC2] in Mexico

> Festival della creatività di Firenze

> FE/MALE 2

> Interferenze

> Knowplace

> Arcoiris.tv

> Internet Governance Forum intervention

> Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep

> on SlideShare

> with Arturo di Corinto at the University

What are the challenges artworld is facing in the time of globalization and increasing technologization?

At the conference I presented the Biodoll project and Angel_F.

In collaboration with CIANT (International Centre for Art and New Technologies), Center for Global Studies (Academy of Sciences and Charles University), Prague Biennale 3.

check it out here

> website

> flickr

> Prague Biennale

> Center for Global Studies

> CIANT

women i met online on dating and social networks. the perspective from webcam chats fade into memory as absence becomes the medium for a possible presence