Autonet is a project to create a wireless, global internet that can provide more reliability than corporate phone companies by being community based and freely licensed.

The cutting off access to The Pirate Bay by BT in the UK is just another sign of the beginning of the end. The fact that the Great Firewall of China exists signals that the internet is already obsolete and that the Great Firewall of the US is just around the corner. While moves against net neutrality began years ago and have been fought, nasty laws such as HR4437 and the Total Information Awareness program have a way of coming into existence later in the future, slightly modified, under different names. Continue reading

[Image: Kate Armstrong & Michael Tippett / Grafik Dynamo / 2004-2005] Kate Armstrong is a Vancouver-based artist and theorist with a panache for new media powered permutational storytelling. Her work questions the nature of narrative in light of computation, social media and contemporary urban space. She has exhibited widely and is currently en route to Turkey for the March 8th launch of PATH, a bookwork generated by “an anonymous individual living in the city of Montreal between 2005-2007” at the Akbank Art Centre in Istanbul. Above and beyond her creative practice, she is the author of Crisis and Repetition: Essays on Art and Culture, sits on the board at The Western Front artist-run centre and is a lecturer at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts + Technology. Continue reading

Cybernetic Bacteria 2.0 by The Institute of Unnecessary Research :: April 16 – July 22, 2009 :: Talk: April 18, 2009; 5:00 pm :: The Science Gallery, Pearse Street, Dublin, Ireland.

What would a creature with access to humanity’s digital knowledge, the genetic toolbox that drives evolution; the sophistication of the pathogen; and awareness of all our intimate vulnerabilities do? In Cybernetic Bacteria 2.0, the chemical communication of bacteria and the live data streams of our own digital networks (the wireless / bluetooth / RFID activity taking place in and around the gallery) are combined in real time to generate a brand new artificial life form. This installation explores the layers of complexity in both digital and organic communications networks and investigates the relationship of bacteria to artificial life. By Anna Dumitriu (IUR – Director), Dr. Simon Park (IUR -Physarum Dynamic), Dr Blay Whitby (IUR – Head of Ethics), Tom Keene and Lorenzo Grespan U.K. Continue reading

4th Radiator Festival and Symposium: Exploits in the Wireless City :: January 13-18, 2008 :: Nottingham, UK :: Launch Event: January 14, 6:00 -11:00 pm — Broadway Media Centre, Backlit (tbc), Surface Gallery.

Exploits in the Wireless City aims to instigate discussion, debate and new interdisciplinary research networks based on the understanding that the development of digital networks are transforming our notion of space.

GOING UNDERGROUND: Through its artistic interventions, Radiator will put theory into practice with projects and events that both position and challenge the dominant forces at work in the urban environment and explore the new territories opened up by new hybrid spaces. Radiator will set up investigations into this infrastructure by placing 5 artists into the urban confines of British cities in the Going Underground project: Continue reading

Situated Technologies Pamphlets 3: Situated Advocacy – A special double issue featuring the essays: Community Wireless Networks as Situated Advocacy by Laura Forlano and Dharma Dailey and Suspicious Images, Latent Interfaces by Benjamin Bratton and Natalie Jeremijenko.

Advocacy is the act of arguing on behalf of a particular issue, idea or person, and addresses issues including self-advocacy, environmental protection, the rights of women, youth and minorities, social justice, the re-structured digital divide and political reform. In this special double issue — the result of an open call for submissions — we have invited contributions from two pairs of authors considering how Situated Technologies have been mobilized to change and/or influence social or political policies, practices, and beliefs. Continue reading

Radiator Festival: Exploits in the Wireless City and Performing Space Symposium :: January 13-18, 2009 :: Nottingham, UK :: CALL FOR ARTISTS: Deadline: November 25, 2008.

Since the abundant proliferation of digital communication technology, our (living) space has been expanded, transformed, reshaped. In our everyday lives we increasingly connect to mediated interfaces, be it consciously or without knowing. Digital media is increasingly integrated seamlessly into all areas of everyday life and work. The so-called ‘virtual worlds’ created in this way are merging ever more dynamically with our physical environment generating new hybrid spaces, becoming a fixed part of our reality themselves. Continue reading

Fearless City Mobile – Call to Local and International Mobile Media Artists and Technicians: Fearless City Mobile is a two-way social media system for marginalized residents and artists of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES). It is an interactive communication system that uses Mobile Muse 3’s technology platform to confront the digital divide through peer training, skill sharing, collective collaboration, and open learning models.

What do you imagine can be advanced with mobile handsets, live screens, and a low-income inner city community? Small grants (including travel) are available for you to work in Vancouver to demonstrate how mobile can be an instant tool of media creation using a variety of strategies: Continue reading

SURVIVALL, ‘Sur-viv-all’, is a word which reflects the 3 languages used during the project, which formed part of Andre Lemos’ sabbatical research at University of Alberta – English, French and Portuguese. The joint interest of the artists was to reflect on the relationship between the virtual territories of cyberspace, abstract representations of our worlds and the material conditions of life. In this case, the videos collected along the way show not only suburbia in winter snow but the blanket of private wifi signals, both closed and open which were detected at the beginning and end of each ‘letter’. Continue reading

Hidden Histories :: Launch: March 14, 2008; 11:00 am – open ended :: The walk begins in and around the proposed ‘Cultural Quarter’ on Above Bar Street and the Civic Centre complex. You can experience the walk 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through any FM radio receiver or mobile phone with radio capacity. Route maps and radio units can be hired from Southampton’s Tourist Information Centre from March 17. A limited number of or radios will be available for borrowing. Please bring a portable radio or an FM enabled mobile phone.

The Solent Centre for Architecture + Design, in partnership with London based media art innovators Hive Networks and artist Armin Medosch, have been working with Southampton City Council’s Oral History Unit on Hidden Histories, a unique project that turns the city itself into a giant outdoor gallery. Continue reading

The new project by RECYCLISM ™ is hitting, as many media artists are doing yet, the prosperous muse of wireless technologies. 2.4Ghz™ exploits wireless netcams populating the urban space in a very simple but interesting way. BNJMN™ GAULON (alias Benjamin Gaulon) has been riding the streets of a few European cities with a wireless video receiver, like the ones used by parents to remotely watch over their babies. His aim was to detect and record the floating video signals emitted by those network cameras like in the historical work Life’s a User’s Manual by Michelle Teran. Continue reading