Predictably the new school did not grace the (recently built) auditorium with wireless access durring the Hot Enough Panel, so instead of the on the go dealio I was going offer here are my scribbled half notes from last nights presentations. Each artist/group ran down the projects they engaged in during the RNC and Jonah Perentti then asked a question or two of each.
Overall it was informative however there seemed to be little time spent on the meta-questions in the realm of political change inscribed within the realm of technological tools. There was much more of a "gee-wiz" vibe than a true theory heavy look at the means-of-resistance. This could have been due to the fact that there seemed to be a subtle rift between those looking for more radical change (nT, Natalie Jeremijenko, Tad Hirsch (for the Institute of Applied Autonomy) and those that were working in a more standard "free speech" left/Democrat hegemonic protest standpoint (Yury Gitman, Joshua Kinberg). Jonah seemed to try and draw out this rift in his closing questions however the lack of time/energy in the room seemed to stint that shift.
Anyway, here are the summaries (and my impressions) of each presentation.
neuroTransmitter who used their com_muni_port project ( (a low wattage radio station in a back-pack) to create a roving "sonic mob" that toured sites of media consolidation. This project was in keeping with much of nT's work in the past, which often deals with issues of site-specificity by reworking physical into ephemeral space. Described as an exercise in demarcating and reworking the differences between ether space and urban space. I found this project salient in the manner which it multiplies voice through the reclaiming of public radio waves. Further the idea of subverting the notion of protest limits by protesting in the air is a nice way to counter the physical intimidation tactics of authorities. Inherently nomadic in nature, and using relatively lo-tech means this project was not only protest but art commenting on the nature of protest - truly civic poetry in the manner of Dante.
Yury Gitman presented his magic bike which I am sure you have all seen. I have never been that impressed with this project outside of its technologic interest. Artistically I find it lacking in any depth. That being said, Yury presented an outline of the history of the bike in activism which was a good starting off point for the role of transportation ideologies in political change. He also attempted to create a postulate of "open" v. "closed" wireless networks, placing WiFi in the former and cell networks in the latter. Ummmm, while from an engineering stand-point wireless protocols may be much more open than those of cell-phones the data networks which supply the pipeline to wireless access points are anything but. These networks are part and parcel of the very same hegemony which potential users of a technology such as the Magic Bike may be working in opposition to. Not to get all theory-head but it seems that using a technology that is in fact controlled at its base source by that which is being opposed, while wily, is too easily controlled by the existing power-structure which can then use that control as a means of enforcing its own rules. In other words, while playing on a team opposite the telcom giants you are essentially playing on their court, with their rules, and their ball. This criticism is not meant to pick on Yury alone (or specifically), this can equally be applied to several of the projects presented, it just slipped in all zen like here.
Next up was Joshua Kinberg. I will assume that most of you know the story of his preemptive arrest and his performative bike. I dig on this project but there was not really much to add in this presentation. None-the-less I love this projects performative aspects, and the ability for anyone with web access to take part in the performance. This distributive aspect - the notion of working through others - makes a layered aspect to that which is performative tasty and diggable (yea, intellectual, I know).
Tad Hirsch presented on behalf of the The Institute of Applied Autonomy specificly talking about the implementation of TxtMob at the RNC. Tad was - as always - informative, talkative and fairly interested in the meta-questions of his project. Of note was his comment in regards to a question (from Jonah if I remember correctly) about the possibility of the police also being able to join lists and receive the same messages that protesters were. He seemed to think that this is a positive thing in that it personalizes the protestors to the police and shows that they are not crazy anarchists. At the same time he noted that with the amount of traffic that was going back and forth across the network during the protests that it would be virtually impossible for a central command station to track movements by checking in on the public messages. While I used this service during the RNC and found it totally helpful, I was disappointed that the fact that some service providers blocked messages sent by the service (apparently due to anti SMS spam filters). This goes back to my questions/concerns in regards to Magic Bike or any and all of these projects which rely upon hegemonicly controlled way-points.
The ever-brilliant Natalie Jeremijenko presented several projects that I had not seen/heard about which were deployed at the RNC. The first up was the Anti-Terror Hotline - a means for audibly documenting "anti-terror" arrests. The person under arrest is supposed to call the line and then just let the phone record what goes down. Those recordings are then placed on the web for listening and annotation. The second project Natalie threw down was a headcount documentation work in progress that is part of some larger projects she is working on with graduate students. The project uses a video camera suspended from a balloon- the video is then analyzed to count frame by frame and then aggregated and count algorithms originally used for counting cells in scientific environments are then used to create an accurate crowd count. These crowd counts can be used to counter the under-counting by authorities at protests and the like. The idea behind both of these projects (and I would argue her artistic project in general) is shifting the standards of evidence, or rather raising them. She is exploring the questions of where power comes from and how that power is tied up in questions of fact and truth as she calls it "information politics". This exploration of epistemology/knowledge politics is timely and, more than any of the other projects (save perhaps nT), is dealing with issues that are related just as much to current art world practice as they are to technological practice. I think it is about time someone rocked out a nice museum show of her work, as tracking it there seems to be some great salient notions that both use and fly above the technological questions/efforts employed.
Posted by thickeye at September 28, 2004 12:26 PM | TrackBack