Collaboration is becoming more and more frequent under Network Culture. For me, some of the most stimulating work during the last few years has been collaborative projects with AUDC and members of netPublics. This has been made far easier in the last few weeks with the release of Writely, a web-based word processor capable of collaborative work and compatible with Microsoft Word. One of Writely’s best features is a button that sends an email to your collaborators without forcing you to leave your browser. One little touch, like many in Writely, that makes a difference.
Month: December 2005
An Architektur 14 and 15
The collective An Architektur releases two new publications, An Architektur 14 on the Camp for Oppositional Architecture that the group sponsored and An Architektur 15 on European Migration Geographies. Since the brief for issue 15 is not available in English online, I#039ve reproduced it below:
bq. An Architektur 15 / FFM Heft 11: European Migration Geographies, Poland
Borders and camps are spaces of migration control. They both serve the supervision and organization of migrants and at the same time are used as rest and transit zones of migration. It is exactly in their juridical and spatial antitheses where a specific feature of the migration regime manifests itself. This aims less at a final stage of a hermetic sealing-off, than at a strategic regulation and disfranchisement and thus reacts on the independent dynamics of migration.
An Architektur 15 / FFM 11 is a cooperation of the Forschungsgesellschaft Flucht und Migration and An Architektur within the project TRANSIT MIGRATION. It is also part of the exhibition “Projekt Migration”, which can be seen in Cologne at present. See www.projektmigration.de, www.ffm-berlin.de
My essay, Towers of Concentration, Lines of Flight appeared in An Architektur 05, Mission Critical Facility.
Del.icio.us Network Culture
Time to explore the network culture tag in del.icio.us. If you’re using firefox, the del.icio.us toolbar is a great interface for the service. Meanwhile, Revealicious allows you to visualize the relations between del.icio.us tags.
Cuckoo IP
Another example of Network Culture showed up today. We Make Money Not Art carries a piece by Tobie Kerridge called CuckooIP that demonstrates what our ubicomp world of networked objects might be like. CuckooIP is connected to the telephone system. You call the clock, leave a message and select a time for it to be delivered. At the appropriate moment, the CuckooIP springs to action and recites your message. Together with Nikki Stott, Kerridge is also responsible for biojewelry.
See Tobie’s web site for more great networked projects, such as a bottle full of brine shrimp that are in suspension until the network informs the object that inmate 990 has been executed in Texas. When that happens, the shrimp are coaxed out of suspension and life comes out of death.
Making Visible the Invisible at the Seattle Public Library
George Le Grady sent a link to his excellent project, Making Visible the Invisible at the Seattle Public Library, in which aggregated data about circulation in the library is revealed in real-time to patrons. It’s definitely worth taking a look. If the dominant mode of art in postmodernism is critical appropriation, I’m increasingly thinking that Network Culture is dominated by the aggregator. Remix isn’t the right term for this, that’s a leftover from postmodernism. What’s so new about remix compared to, say, hip-hop? Data aggregation, on the other hand, was largely unseen in the postmodern era but is flourishing today in culture.
See more at his fascinating web site.
