Pirate Utopias

1
Pirate Utopias

• Artists and Activists that actively explore ways
  to build alternative futures with technology

2
Muhammad Cartoons

• http//cryptome.org/muhammad.htm
• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Drawings
• How do you perceive Jens Haanings work in the
  light of the Muhammad Cartoon controversy?
  Should there be limits to free speech?

3
Google Yahoo accept China censorship

• Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist, is serving a
  ten-year prison sentence in China for sending an
  email to the USA. He was accused of illegally
  providing state secrets to foreign entities by
  using his Yahoo email account.According to the
  court transcript of the evidence that led to Shi
  Taos sentencing, the US internet company Yahoo
  provided account-holder information on him. Shi
  Tao was accused of sending an email summarizing
  an internal Communist Party directive to a
  foreign source. The Communist Party directive had
  warned Chinese journalists of possible social
  unrest during the anniversary of the June 4
  Movement (in memory of the Tiananmen crackdown),
  and directed them not to fuel it via media
  reports.

4
Google Yahoo accept China censorship

• Imprisoned for peacefully exercising his right
  to freedom of expression, a right entrenched in
  international law and the Chinese Constitution,
  Shi Tao is considered a Prisoner of
  Conscience.Companies must respect human rights,
  wherever they operate. Yahoos business ethics
  are becoming questionable due to its role in
  assisting the Chinese government to sentencing
  Shi Tao. The company has signed the Public Pledge
  on Self-Discipline for the Internet Industry,
  effectively agreeing to implement Chinas
  draconian system of censorship and control.
  Take action! Write to Yahoo now, expressing
  your concern about the companys role in
  assisting in the violation of Shi Taos rights.
  Yahoo must use its influence to secure Shi Taos
  release.- http//web.amnesty.org/pages/chn-3101
  06-action-eng

5
Tactical Media

• Tactical Media are what happens when the cheap
  'do it yourself media, made possible by the
  revolution in consumer electronics and expanded
  forms of distribution (from public access cable
  to the internet) are exploited by groups and
  individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded
  from the wider culture. Tactical media do not
  just report events, as they are never impartial
  they always participate and it is this that more
  than anything separates them from mainstream
  media.

6

• To believe that issues of representation are now
  irrelevant is to believe that the very real life
  chances of groups and individuals are not still
  crucially affected by the available images
  circulating in any given society. And the fact
  that we no longer see the mass media as the sole
  and centralized source of our self definitions
  might make these issues more slippery but that
  does not make them redundant.

7

• What makes Our Media Tactical? In 'The Practice
  of Every Day Life' De Certueau analyzed popular
  culture not as a 'domain of texts or artifacts
  but rather as a set of practices or operations
  performed on textual or text like structures'. He
  shifted the emphasis from representations in
  their own right to the 'uses' of representations.
  In other words how do we as consumers use the
  texts and artifacts that surround us.

8

• And the answer, he suggested, was 'tactically'.
  That is in far more creative and rebellious ways
  than had previously been imagined. He described
  the process of consumption as a set of tactics by
  which the weak make use of the strong. He
  characterized the rebellious user (a term he
  preferred to consumer) as tactical and the
  presumptuous producer (in which he included
  authors, educators, curators and revolutionaries)
  as strategic.

9

• An exemplary example of the tactical can be seen
  in the work of the Polish artist Krzystof
  Wodiczko who 'perceives how the hordes of the
  displaced that now occupy the public space of
  cities squares, parks or railway station
  concourses which were once designed by a
  triumphant middle class to celebrate the conquest
  of its new political rights and economic
  liberties. Wodiczko thinks that these occupied
  spaces form new agoras. which should be used for
  statements. 'The artist', he says, 'needs to
  learn how to operate as a nomadic sophist in a
  migrant polis.- The ABC of Tactical Media by
  David Garcia and Geert Lovink

10
Krzysztof Wodiczko

• Krzysztof Wodiczko is internationally renowned
  for his large-scale slide and video projections
  on architectural facades and monuments. Since the
  late eighties, he has developed a series of
  nomadic instruments for both homeless and
  immigrant operators that function as implements
  for survival, communication, empowerment, and
  healing.

11
(No Transcript)
12
(No Transcript)
13
(No Transcript)
14
(No Transcript)
15
(No Transcript)
16
Contemporary Equivalents ?

• Banksyhttp//www.banksy.co.uk/
• Billboard Liberation Fronthttp//www.billboardlib
  eration.com/
• Carbon Defense Leaguehttp//www.carbondefense.org
  /

17
Krzysztof Wodiczko - Homeless Vehicle (1988-89)

• They provide this social group with a street
  tool that responds to basic necessities of
  survival economy such as living, sleeping and
  washing, as well as collecting and reselling cans
  and bottles.(source Adrian Piper, in Generali
  Foundation (ed.), Designs für die wirkliche Welt
  Designs for the Real World, 2002.)

18
(No Transcript)
19
(No Transcript)
20
(No Transcript)
21
(No Transcript)
22
Interview with Wodiczko

• http//www.pataphysicsmagazine.com/Wodiczko_interv
  iew.html

23
Natalie Jeremijenko

• Natalie Jeremijenko, is a design engineer and
  technoartist. Recently she was named one of the
  top one hundred young innovators by the MIT
  Technology Review. http//www.bureauit.org

24
bit plane

• bit plane is a highly compact spy plane, wingspan
  20 inches radio-controlled, video-instrumented
  and deployed over areas of scenic interest.
• Due to its refined dimensions bit plane is able
  to enter territory inaccessible to other
  aircraft. Pioneering flight in an aerial
  reconnaissance over the Silicon Valley California
  1997, bit plane flew solo and undetected into the
  glittering heartland of the Information Age.
  Video generated in this exercise includes footage
  retrieved over no-camera zones Apple, Lockheed,
  Nasa Ames, Netscape, Xerox Parc, Interval
  Research, Atari, Hewlett Packard, Oracle, Yahoo,
  SGI, Sun Microsystems.

25
(No Transcript)
26
(No Transcript)
27
(No Transcript)
28
(No Transcript)
29
bit Suicide Box

• The bit Suicide Box is a motion detection video
  system designed to capture vertical activity.
  Unit includes BITcamera, motion capture card,
  analysis software and utility concealment casing.
  In standard operation any vertical motion in
  frame will trigger the camera to record to disk.
• Bureau installed the Suicide Box for trial
  application in range of the Golden Gate Bridge
  California 1996 an initial deployment period
  100 days metered 17 bridge events. System
  efficacy Suicide Box system supplied public,
  frame-accurate data of a social phenomenon not
  previously accurately quantified. Box placement
  was determined to exploit cultural climate and
  BIT agent proximity San Francisco is gateway to
  the Silicon Valley and both Information capital
  and Suicide capital of the USA.

30

• Where and what is the project here?

31
(No Transcript)
32
(No Transcript)
33

• http//www.worldchanging.com/archives/001450.html
• Interview with Natalie

34
The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto

• Computer technology is on the verge of providing
  the ability for individuals and groups to
  communicate and interact with each other in a
  totally anonymous manner. Two persons may
  exchange messages, conduct business, and
  negotiate electronic contracts without ever
  knowing the True Name, or legal identity, of the
  other. Interactions over networks will be
  untraceable, via extensive re- routing of
  encrypted packets and tamper-proof boxes which
  implement cryptographic protocols with nearly
  perfect assurance against any tampering.
  Reputations will be of central importance, far
  more important in dealings than even the credit
  ratings of today. These developments will alter
  completely the nature of government regulation,
  the ability to tax and control economic
  interactions, the ability to keep information
  secret, and will even alter the nature of trust
  and reputation.
• http//www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.
  html

35
The Yes Men

• http//info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid04/12
  /09/2229248