THE THING Hamburg:A Temporary Democratization of the Local Art Field

THE THING Hamburg was an experimental Internet platform whose vocation was to contribute to the democratization of the art field, to negotiate new forms of art in practice, and to be a site for political learning and engagement. We, the authors, were actively involved in the project on various levels. In this paper, we trace the (local) circumstances that led to the emergence of the project and take a look at its historical precursor, we reflect on the organizational form of this collectively-run and participatory platform, and we investigate the role locality can play in the development of political agency. As a non-profit Internet platform built with free software, the project also invites a reflection of the role technology can play for the creation of independent experimental spaces for social innovation and how they make a difference against the backdrop of corporate social media. Relating the project to both the conceptual innovations of the Russian avant-garde as well as media-utopian projections shows that THE THING Hamburg stands in the tradition of an art that expands its own field by invoking a self-issued social assignment. Challenging the norms and in stitutions of the art field does not remain an exercise in self-referentiality; it rather redefines the role of art as an agent for political learning and how the use of technology in society at large can be emancipatory. And just as small projects like the THE THING Hamburg draw on old utopias for their contemporary negotiations of art, they equally produce more questions than they provide answers

Digital Engagement: Personality Is The Context Of The Text

This paper examines digital-technology as a tool and an environment with the individuals’ personality at the intersection of the two: Its impact on social memory and the unbound document. With the ubiquitous embedding of digital networked technology in society and the emergence of the unbounded document, humans increasingly obtain information by grasping snippets of decontextualized text sourced through non-human entities from globally dispersed databases that have stripped out context. Then in a Kafkian way humans’ have to build from the middle to make sense of the information snippets. The paper explores how the inherent nature of the individual can be amplified or diminished by the technology and concludes that only through awareness of the digital-engagement process individuals can hope to resist or appropriate technology to their advantage. It highlights that custodians and gatekeepers of the unbounded document carry a far greater burden, as their awareness has to extend to society and the scaffolding of social memory

Through the keyhole: Ethnographic analysis of cyber violence in Egypt

Internet has long existed in Egypt, however sudden scholarly interest came after the 2011 revolution. The global scholarly body tended to couple internet accessibility to the so-called Arab-spring, without studying the other forms and politics of internet as an evolution, and almost none have delved in the dungeons of Cyber violence in the MENA Region, needless to say in Egypt. It focuses mainly on individual-to-individual perpetration of violence, how, when and why people variably define unsolicited intervention with their data as violence , and how, when and why, they choose other notions to define such incident(s). By doing so, it opens up questions about notions such as surveillance, privacy, kinship, control and care, sovereignty, legibility, legitimacy, marginalization and rights. The structure is seen as a vertical gradient, each chapter is a dominant colour that seeps into the one the follows. While cyber violence is visualized as a circular gradient that floods into the center, while having nodes of colours around the edges that signify the prominent hue of the violence perpetuation and the effects of other nodes on its hue. While this thesis is premised primarily on the Castellian view of the network society, various other scholars constitute the rest of the pillars of this thesis to engage more with notions of the state, the social, capital, violence, technology. From Weber, Deleuze, Das, Tilly, Arendt, and Fanon, to Haraway, Bernal, Spivak, Latour and McLuhan, these theories try to give justice to the multitude of entanglements produced by the 9 interlocutors whose stories are extremely rich and telling. From Family, to friends, to work managers, to intimate partners, to totally anonymous persons; the perpetration of violence varying in justifications between care and control, have illustrated the Chimeras that our cyber selves are. Through engaging and living the ups and downs with my interlocutors, I have come to realize the complexities that violence studies involve, beside those that Internet analysis have, through interviews, side talks, countless private messages, and cyber security measures, I have also understood the levels upon which social-scientists deal with their data, as well as themselves in the data, and how interlocutors and the social handle them

The Strange Persistence of Tactical Media

This edited volume offers an in-depth exploration of Dutch media art from 1985 onwards from many different perspectives. “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.” (Garcia / Lovink, 1997) The quotation above is the opening paragraph of The ABC of Tactical Media which in some respects can be seen the founding text, the closest there is to a manifesto for Tactical Media.1 It was written to coincide with the second edition of the Next 5 Minutes, the media arts festival where Tactical Media was first identified and named. Reading it just over two decades later it is strange to see how many of the fundamental problems of technological exploitation and exclusion still resonate with today’s battles for digital sovereignty and have not diverged substantially from the formula described above

Educational Perspectives on Mediality and Subjectivation

This open access book examines the complex relationship between education, media and power. Exploring the entanglement of education media and power structures, the contributions use various examples and case studies to demonstrate how subjectivation processes and digital structures interact with one another. The book asks which modes of subjectivation can be identified with current media cultures, how subjects deal with the challenges and potential of digitality, and how coping and empowerment strategies are developed. By addressing theoretical as well as empirical evidence, the chapters illuminate these connections and the subsequent significance for media education more widely

Information Freedoms and the Case for Anonymous Community

What we have witnessed in the last decade in the context of social upheaval, social activism, and resulting social movements is testament to the need for a re-evaluation of what constitutes community in a networked world, and what role the individual subject plays within social networks, systems of social, corporate, and state control, and networks of resistance. New processes of subjectivation are emerging and rather than being grounded in identity, sociality is being reconfigured, and it is in this process that this dissertation focusses on anonymity as a means of working through these new configurations. This integrated article dissertation explores the concept of anonymity and emerging practices of community in three chapters. The first examines anonymity in the context of civil liberties through a critique of privacy. By analyzing legal, social, and cultural understandings of privacy, this chapter problemmatizes the privacy defence against excessive tracking and monitoring of speech and behaviour, and suggests ways of incorporating anonymous practices in order to discover more robust methods of collectively empowering ourselves in the digital environment. The second chapter explores anonymity as a political process that can be illustrated in the cases of Wikileaks, Anonymous, and Occupy, presenting the various ways in which anonymity is mobilized in information activism as a resource for political action. We can see a common thread running through the variety of methods of dissent employed by the above mentioned groups. This commonality centres on the way anonymity figures (sometimes subtly, other times prominently) in identity formation, subjectivity, trust, revolt, authority, connection and communication. This thesis is an exploration of the role of anonymity at the intersection of these functions of community. The third chapter traces contemporary theoretical explorations of radical community through the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, and Giorgio Agamben, and identifies characteristics of anonymity in strategies of being-in-common

Rhythm, Rhythmanalysis and Algorithm-Analysis

The contemporary Western world has been shaped if not actually born from the algorithm, it has been said. We live in a computational culture, more specifically an algorithmic culture, as Alexander Galloway pointed out more than a decade ago. One of the excellent New Economics Foundation reports puts it thus: “[algorithms] have morphed from curating online content to curating and influencing our lives.” Indeed, capitalism’s current financialized mode depends entirely on algorithmic calculation, as the basis of derivatives, high speed trading and the new fintech sector, for example. Platform capitalism relies on algorithmic machine learning and AI, as does manufacturing. Expert systems for medical diagnosis and robot surgery are built from algorithmic machine learning. Political campaigning exploits the micro-targeting of social media messages, as we have learnt from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, not to mention the Snowden revelation of the most extensive government mass surveillance operations the world has ever seen. Pattern of life analysis has been literally adopted in the algorithms of the “kill chain” of drone bombers

Anonymity Versus Privacy in a Control Society

Society is becoming increasingly more securitized with surveillance technologies having entered a phase of ubiquity, with their components built into many of our daily digital devices. The default state of tracking, monitoring, and recording has fundamentally changed our social and communicative environments. Through the lens of surveillance, everything we do and say can be potentially categorized as a “threat.” Our technological devices become the means by which social control becomes informationalized. A common tool of resistance against these pervasive surveillance practices takes the form of arguing for greater privacy protections to be implemented through information privacy and data protection laws. However, beyond the complexity of the privacy discourse itself, there are diverse information environments not easily parsed by law where the tension between transparency and secrecy complicates privacy practices. The main purpose of this article is conceptual. I consider what the practice of anonymity can offer that privacy does not. From a legal perspective, highlighting the nuances between privacy and anonymity helps us to understand the extent to which our speech and behaviors are becoming increasingly more constrained in the digital environment. In cultural and social contexts, privacy and anonymity often connote differing values; privacy is commonly considered a moral virtue, while anonymity is often maligned and associated with criminal or deviant behavior. In contrast to this understanding, I argue that anonymity should be reconsidered in light of the deterioration of privacy considerations as privacy practices are reframed as contractual resources that are co-opted by both the market and the state. Anonymity, more broadly construed as a mode of resistance to surveillance practices, allows for a more flexible, consistent, and collective means of ensuring civil liberties remain intact

Zehn Jahre Netzbewegung: Konflikte um Privatheit im digitalen Bürgerrechtsaktivismus vor und nach Snowden

Der Artikel untersucht die Konfliktlinien zwischen den sogenannten Datenschutzmaximalisten und Post-Privacy-Apologeten im politischen Diskurs der Netzbewegung in Deutschland. Damit lenkt er den Blick auf ihren zentralen Diskurs über Privatsphäre. Dieser ist von einem Widerspruch zwischen dem liberalen Subjektverständnis des Datenschutzparadigmas und der Subjektposition der Avantgarde vernetzter Individuen, die der politische Diskurs der Netzbewegung artikuliert, gekennzeichnet. Die Analyse leistet einen Beitrag zum Verständnis der Mobilisierungsschwäche der Netzbewegung nach den Snowden-Enthüllungen