The $256 Question
By Stan Cox, AlterNet.
Posted July 25, 2005.

LINK

By prosecuting Steven Kurtz and Robert Ferrell, is the Justice Department trying to clamp a lid on political art or looking to chalk up a win by exploiting fears of bioterrorism?
by Stan Cox

Interview with Joseph Nechvatal by Évelyne Rogue (Music2Eye)

Paris, February 2004.

Évelyne Rogue: Since 1986, you’ve been working with ubiquitous electronic visual information, computers and computer-robotics. Your computer-robotic assisted painting and computer animations are shown in galleries and museum throughout the world. How do you explain this choice?

Q: So, let's start with the basics of Who, What, When, Where and How. How did The Department of Ecological Authoring Tactics, Inc. (DoEAT) group start?

A: It began with some food projects I had started, thus the acronym, but it grew out of wanting to relieve myself from the institutional burden of being solely responsible for my thoughts and actions and to offer others this same shelter. It is not total anarchy, it is actually quite organized, it is simply adopting a methodology that many artistic, governmental, and corporate entities use to decentralize authorship.

WORDS MADE FLESH
Code, Culture, Imagination
Florian Cramer

Media Design Research
Piet Zwart Institute
institute for postgraduate studies and research
Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam

A b s t r a c t: Executable code existed centuries before the invention of the computer in magic, Kabbalah, musical composition and experimental poetry. These practices are often neglected as a historical pretext of contemporary software culture and electronic arts. Above all, they link computations to a vast speculative imagination that encompasses art, language, technology, philosophy and religion. These speculations in turn inscribe themselves into the technology. Since even the most simple formalism requires symbols with which it can be expressed, and symbols have cultural connotations, any code is loaded with meaning. This booklet writes a small cultural history of imaginative computation, reconstructing both the obsessive persistence and contradictory mutations of the phantasm that symbols turn physical, and words are made flesh.

Download as a PDF here

Join the SwarmTheMinuteMen.com and Electronic Disturbance Theater
Virtual Sit-In Against Anti-Immigrant Websites, from Wednesday July 20th
- Friday, July 22nd

To join, click here:EDT or click here for http://swarmtheminutemen.com

///

This, the second action coordinated by SWARM [1], is an attempt to move beyond the minutemen [2] - as one group of people working against migrants and migratory movement – to a systemic logic. This logic that pervades American society [3] is canonized in Academia and institutionalized in the US border Patrol. [4]

Rabbit takes a leap forward in race to network devices
By Thomas Crampton International Herald Tribune
SUNDAY, JULY 17, 2005

OXFORD, England For Rafi Haladjian, the next leap ahead in technology starts with a toy called Nabaztag.

A plastic box shaped like a rabbit, with pastel ears and facial features akin to Hello Kitty, it has a few flashing lights, a rudimentary speaker, one button and a name derived from the Armenian word for rabbit.

An interview with Olia Lialina on artificial.dk:

Stars Fading on the Web
- An Interview with Olia Lialina

Olia Lialina is a pioneer of net.art, especially known for the often remixed piece 'My Boyfriend Came Back From the War'. She is currently professor of New Media at Merz Academie, Stuttgart.

Pranksters hijack 'banal' TV news

Richard Luscombe in Miami
Sunday July 3, 2005
The Observer

LINK to article
A campaign of 'hacktivism' aimed at improving the quality of local television news has left reporters fearing on-air ambushes from a giant tiger or a cheese-flinging martial arts expert. Shock tactics have been employed by a New York-based group that says it has had enough of TV stations feeding viewers an insipid diet of minor car accidents, petty crime and house fires in which nobody gets hurt.