The Secret History of Artists Who Use Lawbreaking as Their Medium

Eva and Franco Mattes’s “Stolen Pieces” series, objects taken from works by (clockwise from top left): Alberto Burri, Vasily Kandinsky, Jeff Koons, Richard Long, Gilbert & George, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, and César.
COURTESY THE ARTISTS

From www.artnews.com

Artists have long gotten away with murder, sometimes literally. After Benvenuto Cellini killed his rival, the goldsmith Pompeo de Capitaneis, in 1534, Pope Paul III—a Cellini fan—reportedly pardoned the Florentine artist, declaring that men like him “ought not to be bound by law.” In 1660 the Dutch painter Jacob van Loo stabbed a wine merchant to death during a brawl in Amsterdam, and then fled to Paris. But, as the art historians Rudolf and Margot Wittkower have noted in their vigorously researched 1963 treatise on the behavior of artists, Born Under Saturn, van Loo had no problem being elected to the Royal Academy there just two years later. His reputation as an artist was what mattered.

Artists have not only indulged in criminal behavior and then been forgiven for it, by philosophers and historians, princes and popes, they have also sometimes openly advertised it. “I do not understand laws,” Arthur Rimbaud wrote in 1873, summing up the attitude of the renegade artist. “I have no moral sense. I am a brute.”

Those lines, as well as Pope Paul’s (which Cellini shares in his autobiography), appear in Mike Kelley’s 1988 installation Pay for Your Pleasure, a long hallway lined with painted portraits of dead white men (intellectuals, artists, and the like) paired with choice quotations from them celebrating destruction, violence, and lawbreaking. It is, viewed from one angle, an indictment of the archetype of the artist as a macho man unbound by legal codes.

Continue reading

Cryptojacking & Crypto-coin miners

From hackerbits.com

What is cryptojacking?

</br>
Cryptojacking is the secret use of your computing device to mine cryptocurrency.

Cryptojacking used to be confined to the victim unknowingly installing a program that secretly mines cryptocurrency.

Here’s the bad news…

In-browser cryptojacking doesn’t need a program to be installed.

I found this out when Jascha, a Hacker Bits subscriber, emailed us about an article in Issue 22 that was doing in-browser cryptojacking.

Below, you’ll find out more about in-browser cryptojacking and how to protect yourself.

How does in-browser cryptojacking work?

In-browser cryptojacking uses JavaScript on a web page to mine for cryptocurrencies.

JavaScript runs on just about every website you visit, so the JavaScript code responsible for in-browser mining doesn’t need to be installed.

If you think it’s nothing, think again…

You load the page, and the in-browser mining code just runs. No need to install, and no need to opt-in.

Currently (Nov 2017), in-browser mining is available for the Monero cryptocurrency.

Read more

Anomaly Detection: The Mathematization of the Abnormal in the Metadata Society

by Matteo Pasquinelli

Canonical example of apophenia: a ‘human face’ recognized on the surface of Mars (photo: NASA, 25 July 25, 1976, Wikipedia Commons)

Introduction

In a book from 1890 the French sociologist and criminologist Gabriel Tarde was already recording the rise of information surplus and envisioning a bright future for the discipline of statistics as the new eye of mass media (that is as a new computational or algorithmic eye,we would say today). In his biomorphic metaphors, he wrote:

The public journals will become socially what our sense organs are vitally. Every printingoffice will become a mere central station for different bureaus of statistics just as the ear-drumis a bundle of acoustic nerves, or as the retina is a bundle of special nerves each of whichregisters its characteristic impression on the brain. At present Statistics is a kind of embryoniceye, like that of the lower animals which see just enough to recognise the approach of foe orprey.¹

This quote can help to introduced four fields of discussion that are crucial in the age of algorithms. First, as the reference to enemy recognition suggests the realm of battle fields and warfare, military affairs and geopolitics (and therefore of forensics, as counter-practice). Second, as this reference brings us to the field of sociology and criminology, to the definition and institution of the ‘internal enemy’ of society (that is the abnormal in the tradition of Foucault and Canguilhem). Third, we see clearly an enemy also from the point of view of labour exploitation, according to which the worker is an anomaly to measure, optimise and often criminalise (as Marxism would records). Forth, we could envision an autonomous agency for the supercomputers of statistics as in the idea of General Artificial Intelligence and the nightmares of so-called Singularity, where it is this very alien scale of computation to become inimical to the human (see the recent neorationalist/accelerationist debate). In these cases, of course, the position of the enemy, of the anti-social individual as much as of the reluctant worker that falls under the eye of statistics and algorithms for data analysis, can be reversed and a new political subject can be described and reconfigured, as the research project Forensic Architecture has recently stressed.²

A further evolution of that primitive eye described by Tarde, today’s algorithmic vision is about the understanding of global data sets according to a specific vector. The eye of the algorithm records common patterns of behaviours in social media, suspicious key words in surveillance networks, buying and selling tendencies in stock markets or the oscillation of temperature in a specific region. These procedures of mass computation are pretty universal,repetitive and robotic, nevertheless they inaugurate a new scale of epistemic complexity(computational reason, artificial intelligence, limits of computation, etc.) that will not bead dressed here. From the theoretical point of view, I will underline only the birth of a new³ epistemic space inaugurated by algorithms and the new form of augmented perception and cognition: what is called here ‘algorithmic vision’. More empirically, the basic concepts and functions of algorithmic vision and therefore of algorithmic governance that I will try to explain are:

pattern recognition and anomaly detection. The two epistemic poles of pattern and anomaly are the two sides of the same coin of algorithmic governance. An unexpected anomaly can be detected only against the ground of a pattern regularity. Conversely, a pattern emerges only through the median equalisation of diverse tendencies. In this way I attempt to clarify the nature of algorithmic governance and the return of the issue of the abnormal under a mathematical fashion.

Read the whole text here

¹Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, New York: Holt, 1903 [first published in French in 1890], p.136.

²See: Forensic Architecture (ed.), Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014. And also: www.forensic-architecture.org

³For a treatment of these issues see: Luciana Parisi, Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.

Oz magazine complete digital archive

 

OZ magazine was published in London between 1967 and 1973 under the general editorship of Richard Neville and later also Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis. Martin Sharp was initially responsible for art and graphic design. Copies of OZ can be viewed and downloaded for research purposes from this site. OZ magazine is reproduced by permission of Richard Neville.

Taken from University of Wollongong

Healing tool by Brian Kane

Healing Tool is art designed for people in cars. A temporary public art installation using digital billboards on interstate freeways.

The goal is to provide a moment of temporary relief and unexpected beauty during the daily grind of commuting.

The piece builds on a body of work which simulates digital experiences in the real world. In this case, simulating the Photoshop Healing Tool to replace or patch over the landscape which is blocked by the billboard.

During the day hours, a series of images from the specific location are shown on the display. We replace the missing background and create a magic dimensional window. A dynamic motion parallax effect occurs as the vehicle passes the location.

During the evening hours, high-resolution images of the moon are shown. Synced to the daily phase, people can view the moon despite the effects of urban light pollution. An image of the Milky Way is shown on new moon night.

The dynamic image sequences provide an additional level of intrigue for frequent drivers and commuters. As the images change hourly and daily, viewers have something to look forward to: a curious and abstract narrative over time.

Thematically, the piece is ambiguously green. It appears to be replacing the artificial with the natural, but it’s really just using technology to simulate a nature replacement. It’s also a form of “unvertising” – a campaign without a message. By removing the marketing message from the advertising space, we create an unexpected moment of introspection. People are allowed to interpret an image based on their own experience, and not necessarily with the singular focus of the advertiser’s intent.

Written by Brian Kane. Find out more at briankane.net

Puss Magazine

 

From 1968 to 1974, a group of underground Swedish artists published twenty-four issues of Puss—”Kiss” in English—an in-your-face explosion of body parts and burning flags. While pissing on and pissing off both the right and the left with their unrelenting satire, the Puss crew seemed to take special delight in punching our own 37th President.

Puss participants included Lars Hillersberg, Lena Svedberg, Carl Johan De Geer, Leif Katz, Ulf Rahmberg, and “US correspondent” Oyvind Fahlstrom. Here’s a google-translation of a 2007 Swedish interview with some of the surviving members.

I stumbled on Puss Magazine in March. A few more stumbles brought me to Boo-Hooray’s extensive exhibit on Puss and Carl Johan de Geer. Boo-Hooray (also responsible for the recent Angus MacLise show) kindly provided these files. You can see much more here and read more about the magazine and artists here.

Taken from 50watts.com/

All things Vice

Eileen Ormsbys (writer and journalist) awesome blog!

Best of recent articles:

The Fall of Atlantis – a Moderator tells

The Race to Create Silk Road 2.0

Interview with a (virtual) drug tsar

Who’s got it in for the Silk Road?

MANAGING LIFE – Conference and Exhibition

Belgrade 2012

25th of May  /  05th of October  /  07th of December

 

25th of May 2012 Biopolitics Today

Roberto Esposito, Professor of Theoretical Philosophy, Istituto Scienze Umane, Naples, Italy. For five years he was the only Italian member of the International Council of Scholars of the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. He was one of the founders of the European Political Lexicon Research Centre and the International Centre for a European Legal and Political Lexicon. Today is one of the world leading philosophers working on biopolitics. He is best known as the author of his books: Communitas (1998), Bios. Biopolitica e filosofia(2004) and Termini della politica. Comunità, immunità, biopolitica (2008).

Matteo Pasquinelli, Writer and academic researcher, member of the international collectives Uninomade and Edufactory. He wrote the book Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (2008) and edited the collections Media Activism (2002) and C’Lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader (2007). He writes and lectures frequently at the intersection of French philosophy, media culture and Italian post-operaismo. His current project is a book about the history of the notion of surplus across biology, psychoanalysis, knowledge economy and the environmental discourse. He lives and works betweem Amsterdam and Berlin.

Lorenzo Chiesa, Philosopher, Reader in Modern European Thought, The School of European Culture and Languages, University of Kent, UK. His research interests are in the area of contemporary French thought, contemporary Italian thought and culture, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxist theory. He is member of the editorial board of Journal of European Psychoanalysis and member of Association Franco-Italienne pour la recherche sur la Philosophie Française Contemporaine. As well he is member of the editorial board of the journal S and member of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique. He is the author of two books: Antonin Artaud. Verso un corpo senza organi (2001) and Subjectivity and Otherness. A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (2007). Chiesa recently completed the translation of Agamben’s Il Regno e La Gloria: Homo Sacer, II, 2 for Stanford University Press as well as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities on the notions of bio-economy and human nature in contemporary Italian radical thought. Now he is finishing two books – For Lacan: Science, Logic, Politics (2012) and The Virtual Point of Freedom (2012) – and a special issue of Journal of European Psychoanalysis on recent philosophical approaches to Lacan. He co-edited The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics (2009).

Maurizio Lazzarato, Internationally known Paris based philosopher and sociologist, co-founder and a member of the editorial board of Multitudes, specialized in studies of relationships of work, economy and society, expert on Gabriel Tarde, works at the University of Paris I. Lazzarato has been specializing in the analysis of cognitive capitalism, and its discontents, hence his work on the P2P-concept of Multitudes, the coordination format in political and economic resistance. His political analysis has been a vital part of the effort of the group of autonomist marxists who have paid sustained attention to the role of language and communication in contemporary  biopolitical configurations of capital.  He has written several research papers and monographs: Lavoro Immateriale: Forme di Vita e Produzione di Soggettività (1997),Videofilosofia. Percezione e lavoro nel postfordismo (1997), Tute Bianchi. Disoccupazione di di Massa et reddito cittadinanza (1999), Post-face à Monadologie et sociologie (1999), Puissance de l’invention. La Psychologie Economique de l’Gabriel Tarde contre economie politique (2002) and Les Revolutions de capitalisme (2004), Etude statistique, économique et sociologique du régime d’assurance chômage des professionnels du spectacle vivant, du cinéma et de l’audiovisuel (2005).

 

05th of October 2012 Bioethics: Science, Biopower and Life

Thomas Lemke, Heisenberg Professor of Sociology with Focus on Biotechnology, Nature and Society at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Goethe University Frankfurt/Main, Germany. He is partner in the PRIVILEGED project – »Determining the Ethical and Legal Interests in Privacy and Data Protection for Research Involving the Use of Genetic Databases and Bio-banks«, funded by the European Commission. He is member of the editorial board of the journal Foucault Studies, co-editor of Distinktion. Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, and member of the International Sociological Association (ISA), the Research Committees »Sociological Theory« and »Sociology of Science and Technology« and the Working Group »The Body in the Social Sciences«. In 2011 Thomas Lemke published two books – Biopolitics. An Advanced Introduction appeared at New York University Press, Foucault, Governmentality, and Critiqueappeared at Paradigm Publishers, and republished new edition of his famous book  Critique of political reason. Foucault’s critique of modern governmentality (Argument Verlag, 5th edition).

Joanna Zylinska, Cultural theorist writing on new technologies and new media, ethics and art, Reader in New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.  She is the author of three books – Bioethics in the Age of New Media (MIT Press, 2009), The Ethics of Cultural Studies (Continuum, 2005) and On Spiders, Cyborgs and Being Scared: the Feminine and the Sublime (Manchester University Press, 2001) – she is also the editor of The Cyborg Experiments: the Extensions of the Body in the Media Age, a collection of essays on the work of performance artists Stelarc and Orlan (Continuum, 2002) and co-editor of Imaginary Neighbors: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust (University of Nebraska Press, 2007). Zylinska has a new book on the idea of mediation, Life after New Media (with Sarah Kember) forthcoming from the MIT Press. Together with Clare Birchall, Gary Hall and Open Humanities Press, she’s just launched the JISC-funded project Living Books about Life.

Steve Fuller, Philosopher/sociologist in the field of science and technology studies, Professor of Sociology at Warwick University, holds the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology, fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences, known for inciting passions and controversial debates over ethical questions. His major areas of research are the future of the University and critical intellectuals, the emergence of intellectual property in the information society, the interdisciplinary challenges in the natural and social sciences, the political and epistemological consequences of the new biology. His major publications are: Social Epistemology (1988),Philosophy of Science and its Discontents (2nd edn.)(1993), Philosophy, Rhetoric and the End of Knowledge (2nd edn) (2003), Science (1997), The Governance of Science: Ideology and the Future of the Open Society (2000), Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History of Our Times (2000),Knowledge Management Foundations (2002) and Kuhn vs Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science (2003), New Frontiers in Science and Technology Studies (2007), Science vs. Religion? Intelligent Design and the Problem of Evolution, and Science (The Art of Living Series, 2010). He is most closely associated with the issues relating to recent developments on the impact of science and technology on the political order, especially concerning our changing conceptions of the biological and what it means to be human.

 

07th of December 2012 Radical Bioart Practices

Stephen Zepke, Philosopher and independent researcher, teaches Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria. He has published numerous essays on philosophy, art and cinema. He is the author of  Art as Abstract Machine: Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari(Routledge, 2005) and the co-editor of two books: Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of New(Continuum, 2008) and Deleuze and Contemporary Art (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). His research interests are: contemporary aesthetics and (bio)political theory.

Jens Hauser, Art curator, writer and video/film maker, Research Associate at the Institute for Media Studies at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. He has organised a large show on biotechnological art at the National Arts and Culture Centre Le Lieu Unique Nantes/France, including eleven artists employing biotechnology as a means of expression, and published L’Art Biotech’ (2003). His forthcoming exhibitions and festival programs deal with the paradigm of skin as a technological interface, and with perceptional aspects of technology related art forms in general. He is also regularly contributing to the european cultural channel ARTE since 1992, and is currently involved in two long-term film projects about bioart.

Memefest, International festival of radical communication, Based in Slovenia, but united across five continents by our dedication to spreading alternative theory and praxis, is an international network of communication experts, media activists, academics, professionals, educators and researchers interested in social change trough sophisticated and radical use of media and communication. As a “festival of radical communication”, Memefest nurtures and rewards innovative and socially responsible approaches to communication. The festival is encouraging students, professionals, artists, researchers, educators, activists and anyone interested in socially beneficial communication to contribute their talents to our collective counter-culture. Memefest is completely independent. It operates as a intermediary non formal institution and connects very different spheres as academia, creative professionals, artists and activists from around the globe.

lifeartbiopolitics.org/

Culture Jamming

Originally published by Mia Turouse for arte creative 

Watch it

The documentary provides a two year research in european Culture Jamming. From the roots in the beginning of the 20th century: Marcel Duchamp or the french avantgarde group Situationist International to postmodern info-war. Modern Culture Jamming is distributing viral information like fake media campaigns to jam the mass media.

For instance he website ‘voteauction.com’ by the media actionist Hans Bernhard which faked a trading platform for american votes. The claim ‘Bringing Capitalism And Democracy Closer Together’ was set up to provoke heavy reactions. The website was shut down by Domainbank Inc. FBI and CIA started researching and CNN produced an issue of ‘Burden Of Proof – Democracy Is On The Block’. His project ‘Google Will Eat Itself’ is classical internet art, which short-linked the virtual money transactions of Google. The aim of GWEI is to buy Google from Google’s money and distribute it to the internet community…

A big media hoax by italian artists 01.org was staged in Vienna at Karlsplatz. In the name of Nike they occupied the Karlsplatz and stated to rename it in Nikeplatz and to built a giant ‘Swoosh’-monument. The citizens of vienna were angry and outraged. Nike started a legal battle about 78.000 Euro.

‘Political Videogames’ are programmed by Paolo Pedercini of molleindustria.it. Molleindustria’s games are about gender, modern labour market, precarious working conditions and industrial production. The games ‘Tuboflex’ and ‘Mc Donald’s Videogame’ are postmodern educational games with a clear message. Molleindustria want to start a serious discussion about the political implications of videogames.

Culture Jamming is the dawn of a new era of activism, media-hacking and info war…

The term Culture Jamming has been coined by the US-American avantgarde-band Negativland. To jam – which describes techniques to limit the effectiveness of an opponent’s communication or detection equipment in a military context – was to Negativland to take existing communication codes and reload them with new meaning.However, this cultural technique is not new, the first known example is Marcel Duchamps ‘Mona Lisa’, the picture of the Gioconda on which Duchamp has painted a moustache and wrote ‘Elle a chaud au cul – She has a hot ass’ on the lower side of the picture. Culture Jamming is a natural instinct of people to take objects and put them together to make something different out of them: To mix symbols of everyday life and make some creative work out of it, to recharge them with new meanings and to re-appropriate them. It’s somehow like the collages of the historical Dada movement, but using contemporary materials from different directions: Not only visual material, but radiowaves, sounds and stories. The basic idea is: Objects are there and you should be able to use them without asking for permission, because they are Public Domain: Symbols, Ideas, Music, Slogans, Logos etc.

Taken from creative.arte.tv/

culture-jamming.de/

Twelve theses on WikiLeaks

by Geert Lovink, Patrice Riemens

Thesis 0

“What do I think of WikiLeaks? I think it would be a good idea!” (after Mahatma Gandhi’s famous quip on “Western Civilization”)

Thesis 1

ture of all eras, however never before has a non-state or non- corporate affiliated group done anything on the scale of what WikiLeaks has managed to do, first with the “collateral murder” video, then the “Afghan War Logs”, and now “Cablegate”. It looks like we have now reached the moment that the quantitative leap is morphing into a qualitative one. When WikiLeaks hit the mainstream early in 2010, this was not yet the case. In a sense, the “colossal” WikiLeaks disclosures can be explained as the consequence of the dramatic spread of IT use, together with the dramatic drop in its costs, including for the storage of millions of documents. Another contributing factor is the fact that safekeeping state and corporate secrets – never mind private ones – has become difficult in an age of instant reproducibility and dissemination. WikiLeaks becomes symbolic for a transformation in the “information society” at large, holding up a mirror of things to come. So while one can look at WikiLeaks as a (political) project and criticize it for its modus operandi, it can also be seen as the “pilot” phase in an evolution towards a far more generalized culture of anarchic exposure, beyond the traditional politics of openness and transparency.

 

Read the whole article