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Posted on by admin Announcement, ideas, news, tools

D-Cent @ Nesta

Our friend Jaromil will come to London to present D-Cent @ the Nesta showcase conference.

D-CENT is a Europe-wide project bringing together citizen-led organisations that have transformed democracy in the past years, and helping them in developing the next generation of open source, distributed, and privacy-aware tools for direct democracy and economic empowerment.

There will be presentations from the D-CENT team demonstrating the technology and highlighting key insights learnt from direct democracy activity in Barcelona, Reykjavik, Helsinki and Madrid.

The Internet Society in Netherlands (isoc.nl) has nominated ten innovative and interesting initiatives to receive the Internet Innovation Award 2016. Were very happy to announce that D-CENT Freecoin is among the nominees. The winner will be selected and rewarded on the 14th of January at the Internet New Years event in Amsterdam.

The ISOC Internet Award is handed out to an important new internet initiative. It is a sign of high social recognition of achievements to improve the Internet and its use.

IMG_8752_ed_webAll our team is honored by the nomination. We are happy that our work on digital social currencies is being recognised already in such an early stage of development,” smiles Denis Roio, better known as Jaromil of Dyne.org, the D-CENT partner who has been designing and developing Freecoin.

D-CENT Freecoin is a set of tools to let people run reward schemes that are transparent and auditable to other organisations.

Freecoin is made for participatory and democratic organisations who want to incentivise participation, unlike centralised banking databases. It aims to leverage the use of social digital currencies in a reliable, simple and resilient way.

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Read more about the Freecoin from D-CENT blog: http://dcentproject.eu/category/freecoin

The winner of the ISOC Internet Award 2016 will be selected and rewarded on the 14th of January at the Internet New Years event in Amsterdam.

The decision will be made by a professional jury consisting of Erik Huizer (SURF), Valerie Frissen (SIDN funds), Astrid Oosenburg (PvdA), Marjolijn Bonthuis (ECP) and Teun Gautier (Publeaks).

Entropical

GitHub

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Open Science Conference Sao Paolo

We presented the after.video book project during the Besides the Screen / Open Science Conference in Sao Paolo. Adnan Hadzi & Pablo De Soto discussed the Drone Hackademy & Algorythmic Noir, a dystopian “future-opolis.” It became the location for their experimental film noir. Pushing the envelope of cinematic form, the film is edited live in real time by a custom programmed computer they call the “serendipity machine.” It delivers a changing narrative, culled from 3,000 clips, 80 voice-overs and 150 pieces of music, that could run forever and never plays the same way twice. The unexpected juxtapositions create a sense of suspense alluding to a story that the viewer composes. Driven by key words, the work seamlessly comes together as a movie that is not a movie. The film draws on the abstractions and reflections on transcendence of the artist Kasimir Malevich, and the fate of Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin, seen through the lens of science fiction and film noir.

The film follows the observations and surveillance of a geophysicist named Holz (Jeff Wood), stuck in a 1970s-looking metropolis operated by the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company. Voiceovers and dialogues forge the implied narrative—wire-tapped telephone conversations, reel-to-reel tapes, snippets of a job interview between Mr. Holz and his employer and a mysterious woman referred to simply as “Dispatch.” According to the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, whiteonwhite is a fascinating investigation into space and time, utopia and dystopia, fractured narration, train travel and landscapes marked by economic and ecological upheaval.

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Percussion and distortion modules

‘000‘ is about aberrant analogue distortion and percussion devices for both stand-alone and Eurorack format. The Spanish/German øpen-hardware team will present at the London Music Hackspace for the fist time their new set of analogue percussive tools, followed by a DIY workshop where participants can build their complete stand-alone – or Eurorack-compatible modular drum system.

An introduction to analogue percurssive synthesis, concept and module design of an aberrant modular drum machine. The talk will also cover the ethos and philosophy of the open hardware team. Come ask questions and test the modules!

The talk will serve as a prelude to the workshops which will take place on the weekend of the 4th and 5th of December. You can choose the modules for the workshop in this link.

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Datacide

Datacide launches two books at the Anarchist Book Fair.

A major project in the works for quite some time, this is a complete reprint of the issues 1-10 of datacide, which originally appeared from 1997-2008. Titled “EVERYTHING ELSE IS EVEN MORE RIDICULOUS”, the 364 page volume collects unique material, most of which has been out of print for many years, charting a one-of-a-kind history of the counter-cultures associated with electronic music and free festivals.
“The free space of the party met the free space of the page and then you got a dynamism that encouraged expression and perversions and tangents because the covers held it together as a nomadic movement and you were convinced that music had catalysed it all and that music was somehow inherently political as it sidestepped rhetoric and dogma, and absented us from control addicts and the free space of the page was a kind of historic party, a kind of invisible college, a launching pad for driftage.” Flint Michigan

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Bacalao!

James Stevens & Adnan Hadzi are in Athens attending Hybrid City III where co-collaborators in next years MAZI project met together for the first time to hold a workshop at the event, discuss respective projects and get to know one another.

andreospanosadnanArmin Medosch gave closing keynote speech and just published the supporting document here!

Our work complete, here we are with Adnan, Andreas and Panos before diner at the beach.. !

This weekend YT will present a quick review of  Consume.net at the Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network annual conference where members of the group will meet in Athens to celebrate progress and discuss future plans for development, wider inclusion and enhancements.

AMWN node=10636

AMWNnode10636kidperiscopeUp Periscope! is a printed media campaign to run at street level which presents an opportunity for passers by to investigate AWMN and see the view from the rooftop of each node location eg. Senius 10636. Each poster presents a QRcode for easy linking to the many panoramic images stored on the WIND node database.

AMWNnode10636can I see my apartment from here? then there is a good chance of making a link back.

So it is a tool for network builders to help identify viable locations to interlink with the free information infrastructure and promote AWMN. Over 1000 high speed wireless network nodes span Athens and across Greece, linking villages and cities alike.

YT and Adnan last visited Athens during New Babylon in 2014 and set out to introduce  reStreet workshop group to the delights of file synchronization with SYNC and Syncthing, QRcodes and button badges.

 

Our friend Mathias Jud visited us in London “Our visit to London last month finally realizes in an online Video. We have been invited to give a talk at a TED Global event. It was a good experience but also quite demanding with rehearsals, mandatory events and a strange diner at the house of the James Bond producer … and somehow asked not to talk about before the event. However the video has been put online today”, when producing a TED talk on Art that lets you talk back to NSA spies.

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Contact workshop during Hybrid City III conference

SPC took part in the CONTACT workshop during the Hybrid City III conference, meeting collaborators of the MAZI project.

diversity

An indoors/outdoors workshop which explores citizen engagement in the smart city toward more conviviality and human interactions, shifting the perspective from sensors to senses, from Internet-based locative media to offline DIY networks, from algorithmic matching to genuine serendipity, from powerful mediators to local actors.

CONTACT wishes to explore the advantages of offline networks and smart city concepts for the design of technology that can serve face-to-face meetings and local communities. We will first provide a short introduction to certain important concepts that help us guide the workshop participants through a collaborative process of hybrid space design: Do-It-Yourself networking, urban interaction design, field research methodologies, and the role of the stranger. Then we will go out to the streets of Athens to explore the surroundings of the conference’s venue, to analyze the spatial and social aspects of different places, and to identify locations that are candidates for hybrid urban interventions toward our objectives of conviviality and human interactions. After our collective walk, we will gather in a public space to think together about possible applications and possible processes to design them, including software, hardware, surrounding artifacts and performance. We will focus on ways to take advantage of the special characteristics of DIY networking — ownership, de facto physical proximity, anonymity, and inclusive access — to facilitate contact between strangers, in t,his specific part of the city. The next day, building on the number and competencies of the participants, we will develop a few prototypes of selected applications and organize an urban intervention in some of the selected locations.

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MoneyLab#2: Economies of Dissent

The Institute of Network Cultures presents MONEYLAB#2: ECONOMIES OF DISSENT on Thursday 3 & Friday 4 December 2015 at Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam– an international symposium hosting artists, activists, programmers and academics that probe, challenge and hack today’s global economy.

What political imperatives shape the economy of dissent? What different views on the redistribution of wealth and the exchange of value are out there? How can we re-design our financial infrastructures?

The important first steps are being taken beyond moral outrage and towards systemic interventions in the global austerity economy. We witness an impressive amount of financial counter-concepts, works of art, digital currencies, tools and hacks giving shape to an emerging economy of dissent. This economy operates across borders, on different scales, from sole acts of defiance to a sovereign ‘oxi’, and is expressed variously as: strategy, circumvention, innovation, visualization, and making-do.

Posted on by admin Deptford.TV, news, projects, Report

H3333333333K

On the occasion of the new construction for the HeK and Atelier Mondial at Freilager-Platz at the Dreispitzareal, the culture department of the Christoph Merian Foundation, in cooperation with the department kulturelles.bl of the Department for Education, Culture and Sports and the Swisslos-Fonds Basel-Landschaft, carried out a single-stage international “Art at the Building” competition by invitation.

The jury, chaired by Nathalie Unternährer, head of the culture department of the Christoph Merian Foundation, selected from among the six complete and qualitatively outstanding submissions the project proposal “H3333333333K” of !Mediengruppe Bitnik.

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Action timed, envisioned..

James Stevens shared the great news of MAZI getting the Horizon2020 grant, on the SPC blog:

Despite the numerous claims raised by UK councils and GLA to establish public wireless service for all, few examples have made it out of the boardroom and even then, fall to commercial pressure or operational chaos before long.

mazi_logoWe are hopeful that the very recently awarded fund for MAZI project starting early in 2016, will re-energize interest and activity along Deptfords Creekside, with a program supporting development of local innovation over the next 3 years that will galvanize existing networks and promote fresh collaborations.

DagePano2015

This image is taken from the roof above the DAGE shop on Deptford High Street, one of the dozen surviving OWN nodes which continues to offer public access and mesh with the other points in the area. It retains a unique status in London, an operational model of ‘collectively owned and operated broadband infrastructure’, but by just a thread!

lateralaniBuilding and co-coordinating public access networks is very tricky and time consuming operation but increasingly affordable and relevant. As we wake up to the realities of state surveillance and data mining of our interactions, we may well find the recent interest in off-line networking adds a layer of obscurity that’s preferable.

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Reclaim our University

Reclaiming Our University Conference at Goldsmiths

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The marketisation of Higher Education has radically undermined the idea of the university as a public institution – gearing institutional priorities towards what is financially profitable rather than socially and culturally worthwhile.

In this context of intense competition between universities for students and research funding, there has been a dramatic growth of capital projects, advertising budgets and Vice Chancellors pay. Meanwhile students face a huge debt burden, and staff, a working environment characterised by unmanageably high workloads, stress, inequality and insecurity.

Read the report.