Post Memes

Art-form, send-up, farce, ironic disarticulation, pastiche, propaganda, trololololol, mode of critique, mode of production, means of politicisation, even of subjectivation -- memes are the inner currency of the internet’s circulatory system. Independent of any one set value, memes are famously the mode of conveyance for the alt-right, the irony left, and the apoliticos alike,  and they are impervious to many economic valuations: the attempts made in co-opting their discourse in advertising and big business have made little headway, and have usually been derailed by retaliative meming. Post-Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production takes advantage of the meme’s subversive adaptability and ripeness for a focused, in-depth study. Pulling together the interrogative forces of a raft of thinkers at the forefront of tech theory and media dissection, this collection of essays paves a way to articulating the semiotic fabric of the early 21st century’s most prevalent means of content posting, and aims at the very seizing of the memes of production for the imagining and creation of new political horizons.With contributions from Scott and McKenzie Wark, Patricia Reed, Jay Owens, Thomas Hobson and Kaajal Modi, Dominic Pettman, Bogna M. Konior, and Eric Wilson, among others, this essay volume offers the freshest approaches available in the field of memes studies and inaugurates a new kind of writing about the newest manifestations of the written online. The book aims to become the go-to resource for all students and scholars of memes, and will be of the utmost interest to anyone interested in the internet’s most viral phenomenon

FinBook: literary content as digital commodity

This short essay explains the significance of the FinBook intervention, and invites the reader to participate. We have associated each chapter within this book with a financial robot (FinBot), and created a market whereby book content will be traded with financial securities. As human labour increasingly consists of unstable and uncertain work practices and as algorithms replace people on the virtual trading floors of the worlds markets, we see members of society taking advantage of FinBots to invest and make extra funds. Bots of all kinds are making financial decisions for us, searching online on our behalf to help us invest, to consume products and services. Our contribution to this compilation is to turn the collection of chapters in this book into a dynamic investment portfolio, and thereby play out what might happen to the process of buying and consuming literature in the not-so-distant future. By attaching identities (through QR codes) to each chapter, we create a market in which the chapter can ‘perform’. Our FinBots will trade based on features extracted from the authors’ words in this book: the political, ethical and cultural values embedded in the work, and the extent to which the FinBots share authors’ concerns; and the performance of chapters amongst those human and non-human actors that make up the market, and readership. In short, the FinBook model turns our work and the work of our co-authors into an investment portfolio, mediated by the market and the attention of readers. By creating a digital economy specifically around the content of online texts, our chapter and the FinBook platform aims to challenge the reader to consider how their personal values align them with individual articles, and how these become contested as they perform different value judgements about the financial performance of each chapter and the book as a whole. At the same time, by introducing ‘autonomous’ trading bots, we also explore the different ‘network’ affordances that differ between paper based books that’s scarcity is developed through analogue form, and digital forms of books whose uniqueness is reached through encryption. We thereby speak to wider questions about the conditions of an aggressive market in which algorithms subject cultural and intellectual items – books – to economic parameters, and the increasing ubiquity of data bots as actors in our social, political, economic and cultural lives. We understand that our marketization of literature may be an uncomfortable juxtaposition against the conventionally-imagined way a book is created, enjoyed and shared: it is intended to be

ECLAP 2012 Conference on Information Technologies for Performing Arts, Media Access and Entertainment

It has been a long history of Information Technology innovations within the Cultural Heritage areas. The Performing arts has also been enforced with a number of new innovations which unveil a range of synergies and possibilities. Most of the technologies and innovations produced for digital libraries, media entertainment and education can be exploited in the field of performing arts, with adaptation and repurposing. Performing arts offer many interesting challenges and opportunities for research and innovations and exploitation of cutting edge research results from interdisciplinary areas. For these reasons, the ECLAP 2012 can be regarded as a continuation of past conferences such as AXMEDIS and WEDELMUSIC (both pressed by IEEE and FUP). ECLAP is an European Commission project to create a social network and media access service for performing arts institutions in Europe, to create the e-library of performing arts, exploiting innovative solutions coming from the ICT

Re-Crafting Games: The inner life of Minecraft modding.

Prior scholarship on game modding has tended to focus on the relationship between commercial developers and modders, while the preponderance of existing work on the open-world sandbox game Minecraft has tended to focus on children’s play or the program’s utility as an educational platform. Based on participant observation, interviews with modders, discourse analysis, and the techniques of software studies, this research uncovers the inner life of Minecraft modding practices, and how they have become central to the way the game is articulated as a cultural artifact. While the creative activities of audiences have previously been described in terms of de Certeau’s concept of “tactics,” this paper argues that modders are also engaged in the development of new strategies. Modders thus become “settlers,” forging a new identity for the game property as they expand the possibilities for play. Emerging modder strategies link to the ways that the underlying game software structures computation, and are closely tied to notions of modularity, interoperability, and programming “best practices.” Modders also mobilize tactics and strategies in the discursive contestation and co-regulation of gameplay meanings and programming practices, which become more central to an understanding of game modding than the developer-modder relationship. This discourse, which structures the circulation of gaming capital within the community, embodies both monologic and dialogic modes, with websites, forum posts, chatroom conversations, and even software artifacts themselves taking on persuasive inflections

INSAM Journal of Contemporary Music, Art and Technology 9 (II/2022)

The Editorial Board of the INSAM Journal of Contemporary Music, Art and Technology decided that both issues of 2022 will be dedicated to one main theme, namely, “Fighting for the attention: Music and art on social media”. We can say that this call for papers went very successfully, as we are now presenting to you INSAM Journal No. 9. In a year which has seen many grave turbulences on socio-economic and political levels on a global scale, we have once again confirmed the importance of social media for communication and the spreading of news, and we have also seen the limitations of these tools. Turning to music and art on social media, our Main Theme section consists of five intriguing papers, Beyond the Main Theme section has two articles, (Inter)Views bring three exciting pieces, and the Reviews one festival report

Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: https://openmonographs.org.Interactivity and Agency: Making-Common and the Limits of Difference -- Dance in Public: Of Common Spaces -- A World from a Crowd: Composing the Common -- Screen Sharing: Dance as Gift of the Commo

Sandbox Culture: A Study of the Application of Free and Open Source Software Licensing Ideas to Art and Cultural Production

In partial response to the inability of intellectual property laws to adapt to data-sharing over computer networks, several initiatives have proposed techno-legal alternatives to encourage the free circulation and transformation of digital works. These alternatives have shaped part of contemporary digital culture for more than three decades and are today often associated with the "free culture" movement. The different strands of this movement are essentially derived from a narrower concept of software freedom developed in the nineteen-eighties, and which is enforced within free and open source software communities. This principle was the first significant effort to articulate a reusable techno-legal template to work around the limitations of intellectual property laws. It also offered a vision of network culture where community participation and sharing was structural. From alternate tools and workflow systems, artist-run servers, network publishing experiments, open date and design lobbies. cooperative and collaborative frameworks, but also novel copyright licensing used by both non-profit organisations and for-profit corporations, the impact on cultural production of practices developed in relation to the ideas of free and open source software has been both influential and broadly applied. However, if it is true that free and open source software has indeed succeeded in becoming a theoretical and practical model for the transformation of art and culture, the question remains at which ways it has provided such a model, how it has been effectively appropriated across different groups and contexts and in what ways these overlap or differ. Using the image of the sandbox, where code becomes a constituent device for different communities to experience varying ideologies and practices, this dissertation aims to map the consequent levels of divergence in interpreting and appropriating the free and open source techno-legal template. This thesis identifies the paradoxes, conflicts, and contradictions within free culture discourse. It explores the tensions between the wish to provide a theoretical universal definition of cultural freedom, and the disorderly reality of its practice and diffusion, appropriation, misunderstanding and miscommunication that together form the fabric of free culture. This dissertation argues that, even though feared, fought, and criticized, these issues are not signs of dysfunctionality but are instead the evidence of cultural diversity within free culture. This dissertation will also demonstrate that conflicts between and within these sandboxes create a democratic process that permits the constant transformation of the free and open source discourse, and is therefore something that should be embraced and neither resisted for substituted for a universal approach to cultural production

Intersections of open educational resources and Information literacy

Comprend des références bibliographiques et un indexALA Editions"Information literacy skills are key when finding, using, adapting, and producing open educational resources (OER). Educators who wish to include OER for their students need to be able to find these resources and use them according to their permissions. When open pedagogical methods are employed, students need to be able to use information literacy skills as they compile, reuse, and create open resources. Intersections of Open Educational Resources and Information Literacy captures current open education and information literacy theory and practice and provides inspiration for the future. Chapters include practical applications, theoretical musings, literature reviews, and case studies and discuss social justice issues, collaboration, open pedagogy, training, and advocacy.Chapters cover topics including library-led OER creation; digital cultural heritage and the intersections of primary source literacy and information literacy; situated learning and open pedagogy; critical librarianship and open education; and developing student OER leaders."--provided by ALAstor

Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain

This book is the result a 12 month research process, in which editors commissioned new works and sought out a range of active international practitioners addressing the question: what does the blockchain mean to art? and how can artists shape and intervene in this emerging technology? Contributions from a range of world-leading and emerging voices in the fields of blockchain theory and art practice were newly commissioned by editors and developed in conversations held at Furtherfield gallery in London during 2016 and 2017. It is the first book of its kind, addressing the meaning of nascent blockchain technologies to art production and dissemination. Continuing Torque Edition's commitment to hybridity in their published editions, the book's thirty chapters are split into three sections: "Documents" presents a range of extant landmark artworks and events; "Fictions" presents newly commissioned creative text and image works; and "Theories" which opens with a essay by Hito Steyerl, includes a number of original essays addressing how blockchain is, and can be, used and thought. The book's release was accompanied by a newly commissioned digital portal developed by Design Informatics at Edinburgh University: using the unique "Finbook" portal, readers can interact with Financial bots based on chapters within the book as they "trade themselves". In their introduction to the book (c. 5000 words) Jones and Skinner place a focus on the "janus faced" quality of the blockchain, as a speculative tool with liberating potential, and an already hyper-financialised entity. They frame the book's unique importance as presenting an alternative range of discourse around the blockchain -- outside of from Fin-tech disciplines -- and express an intention that the contents of the book will open the way for newer and more progressive uses of this technology. This purpose has been widely referenced and acknowledged in reviews and profiles of the book. The book is on its third printed edition, and has been released as a free PDF available on the Torque Editions website. It has been reviewed and profiled in a number of specialist industry and public journals and magazines, including Art Review, Art Monthly, Hyperallergic, We Make Money Not Art, Rhizome and the 2P2Foundation. Further impact for the project includes launch events and invited talks at ArtReview in London, Foundation for Art and Creative Technology in Liverpool, Transmediale in Berlin and Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam, each of which Jones has prepared new material for. It was funded by the European Union via the State Machines project, The Culture Capital Exchange, and Arts Council England