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Disembedding from Psycho-Urban Containment
by Ewen Chardronnet
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[Read] |
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Preserving the Commons in the New Information Order
by David Bollier
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Champions of the market have long assumed that there are really only two sectors for governing the world – markets and the state. Markets are supposed to be the vehicle for economic progress while governments take care of everything else, including the excesses of the market. [Read] |
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Remember: Mimesis is a Form Of Creativity
About Music and Equal Opportunities in the Era of the Digital Sample , by Mercedes Bunz
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It is not by chance, that "Get your freak on" from Missy Elliott was among the most sampled pieces of Bastard Pop or Bootlegging, the musical genre that did rise as the hype of summer 2002 and went straight out of the computer, into the internet and up in the charts. [Read] |
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The Emperor's Sword: Art under WIPO
by Brian Holmes
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Two white-marble busts have been placed in the corners of the conference room at the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva. A couple of ancient Greeks. On the left is Aristotle, with an inscription: "The method of investigation is to study things in the process of development from the beginning." So it's a decent start anyway. But on the right is Alexander the Great: "The brave man sees no end to his efforts for good works." [Read] |
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The Right to Read
by Richard Stallman
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For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college--when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan. [Read] |
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Please, Pirate My Songs!
by Ignacio Escolar
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I’m a lucky musician. My group has just scraped sales of
15,000 copies of our first album. In a world where Enrique
Iglesias can sell six million CDs singing as he does , this
modest sum isn’t too much to write home about. [Read] |
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Biopiracy: Need to Change Western IPR Systems
by Vandana Shiva
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The patents on the anti-diabetic properties of ‘karela’, ‘jamun’ and brinjal highlight the problem of biopiracy - the patenting of indigenous biodiversity-related knowledge. [Read] |
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Is art suitable for political argumentation?
An interview with Oliver Ressler
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The work of the Austrian artist Oliver Ressler mainly focuses on socio-political issues. With World-Information.Org he spoke about globalization, genetic engineering, and the connection between art and politics. [Read] |
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Post-electoral Yugoslavia
An interview with Zoran Pantelic/Association Apsolutno
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Zoran Pantelic is a member of the artist group Apsolutno, which was founded in 1993 in Novi Sad. After his dialog tour at the World-Information exhibition in Vienna, he spoke about the current political situation in Yugoslavia. [Read] |
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"A creative virtuality is closely related to affordable spaces"
An interview with Geert Lovink
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The Dutch media theorist and activist on the role of artistic practice in the digital sphere, the need of "Cultural Intelligence" and the overestimation of technology.
[Read] |
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A Game for Love and Fascism
by Keisuke Oki
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"Fascism today will not be the same as fascism in the past." [Read] |
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In the process of establishing electronic networks, artists were among the first to enter the electronic domain, to experiment with and to use information and communication technologies for cultural purposes.
The pioneering artistic exploration of multimedia and the electronic domain has brought about a shift in contemporary art towards digital, web-based, interactive, and
multi-medial production and distribution.
The vital, rich and diverse digital electronic cultures represent a testimony of our time that helps to understand the complexity and nature of life and endows cultural
identities. The digital art of today is the cultural heritage of tomorrow.
While museums start to digitize their collections and thus past times’ cultural testimonies, little effort is undertaken to provide space for today’s art and to establish a vibrant digital artistic practice for future generations. Without reinforced promotion of art in the electronic domain, humankind risks the disappearance of future heritage in a black hole of oblivion.
A major issue of digital art is to point out that tomorrow’s cultural heritage is exposed to a number of dangers the public at large is not aware of yet:
- The rise of powerful media oligopolies resulting in an increasing uniformity and commerciality of content, information warfare, computer viruses and the regression of the public domain in electronic networks threaten to displace a broad artistic expression and production.
- The gap between software, more and more designed for commercial and specialist use only, and a broad application of contemporary technology is widening.
- The rapid development of communication networks and their technological fundaments as well as hard- and software monopolies tend to destroy valuable electronic culture by turning it into unreadable data. The permanent change of file types and storage technologies entails a loss of our own cultural memory.
Securing the future heritage requires appropriate legal, technical, scientific and financial measures. Close cooperation and collaboration between technology developers, artists and scientists can provide the test bed necessary for a rich and diverse electronic culture. This must include the constant upgrading, storage and accessibility of digital art, the enhancement of non-commercial, public electronic networks, as well as the enforced presentation and mediation of electronic art.
Above all, the preservation of the future heritage requires a large-scale increase of awareness. If humankind refrains from these efforts, our generation will transmit an
impoverished, mutilated heritage to the generations to come. [Read] |
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DIGITAL ECOLOGY