Author: d.tv

Posted on by d.tv news, reports

Surrender to Surveillance

Our friend Heath Bunting gives a talk @virtualfutures:

Virtual Futures presents a discussion on technologies of surveillance, the infringements on privacy by the state, restrictions of individual freedom and the mutation of identity. Underlying the platforms that make digital communication possible are massive stealth efforts in social profiling. This reality has become passively accepted by a user base who are sold the promise of personalisation and customisation in exchange for allowing increased data extraction and analysis.
Corporations target social life itself, aiming to monitor their users ever more effectively and regulate certain types of action. As identity, social interaction and profit overlap it threatens core human values such as freedom and privacy, as well as posing new ontological questions concerning what constitutes identity. Join an artist who has been described as ‘a disciplined advocate of a transgressive social and political anarchy’ a professor who is exploring the impact of digital media on society and politics, a journalist who specialises in privacy, and others to discover how we might develop a toolset for escaping the ever-intensifying surveillance and monitoring of our society.

Virtual Futures presents a discussion on technologies of surveillance, the infringements on privacy by the state, restrictions of individual freedom and the mutation of identity.

Underlying the platforms that make digital communication possible are massive stealth efforts in social profiling. This reality has become passively accepted by a user base who are sold the promise of personalisation and customisation in exchange for allowing increased data extraction and analysis.

Corporations target social life itself, aiming to monitor their users ever more effectively and regulate certain types of action. As identity, social interaction and profit overlap it threatens core human values such as freedom and privacy, as well as posing new ontological questions concerning what constitutes identity.

Join an artist who has been described as ‘a disciplined advocate of a transgressive social and political anarchy,’ a professor who is exploring the impact of digital media on society and politics, a journalist who specialises in privacy, and an expert on corporate data monopolies to discover how we might develop a toolset for escaping the ever-intensifying surveillance and monitoring of our society.

Fireside Chat

Heath Bunting, Artist

Heath Bunting is known as an early practitioner of the net.art movement. As his online biography reports, “He is banned for life from entering the USA for his anti-genetic and border crossing work. He has had multiple works of art censored and permanently deleted (including all copies and backups) by the UK security services.

He has had an artwork exploded by the SAS and is prevented from talking about this in public. He has been detained, arrested multiple times and classified as a terrorist by UK security services for his art projects. He is subject to constant global state and corporate hostile interventions. He is denied full access to the internet and is almost constantly unemployed as a result of being politically blacklisted. In an environment where the UK Ministry of Defence can publicly state that their primary global adversary is the non-state individual artist, he now produces his art projects securely and in secret.

He has been approached by both state and corporate security organisations on several occasions, but mostly declined these offers of work, especially when it involved the assassination of social justice activists. His main work, The Status Project, involves using artificial intelligence to search for artificial life in societal systems. Aside from this, he is currently training artists in security and survival techniques so they can out-live organised crime networks in the forest during the final crisis.

Panelists

Prof. David Berry, Co-Director of the Sussex Humanities Lab and the Research Centre for Digital Materiality, University of Sussex (@BerryDM)

Prof. Berry researches the theoretical and medium-specific challenges of understanding digital and computational media, particularly algorithms, software and code. His work draws on critical theory, political economy, medium theory, software studies, and the philosophy of technology.

Heath Bunting, Artist

Early practitioner of the net.art movement.

Wendy M. Grossman, Technology Journalist (@wendyg)

Freelance technology writer specializing in computers, freedom, and privacy. She has written for the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, Scientific American, New Scientist, Infosecurity Magazine, and Wired, and was the 2013 winner of the Enigma award for lifetime achievements.

Roger Taylor, Chair, Open Public Services Network (@RTaylorOpenData)

Roger Taylor is an entrepreneur, regulator and writer. He is chair of Ofqual, the qualifications regulator, and works with The Careers & Enterprise Company on the use of technology and data in career decisions. He has written two books: God Bless the NHS (Faber & Faber 2014); and Transparency and the Open Society (Policy Press 2016) which outlines the dangers of government and corporate data monopolies. He founded and chairs the Open Public Services Network at the Royal Society of Arts; he is a trustee of SafeLives, the domestic abuse charity; and he sits on the advisory board to HM Inspectorate of Probation. He has worked with governments, NGOs and leading media organisations globally on the use of open data and public reporting. Roger began his career as a journalist working as a correspondent for the Financial Times in the UK and the US and, before that, as a researcher for the Consumers’ Association.

Dicussion moderated by:

Luke Robert Mason, Director of Virtual Futures (Moderator) (@LukeRobertMason)

Schedule

06:30pm – 07:00pm: Registration & Drinks

07:00pm – 07:30pm: Fireside chat with artist Heath Bunting on ‘The Staus Project.’

07:30pm – 08:30pm: Panel Dicussion on ‘Surrender to Survailance’ with Prof. David Berry, Heath Bunting, Wendy M. Grossman & Others (TBC)

8:30pm – Late: Audience Q&A, Drinks & Networking

Posted on by d.tv news, Report, reports

Layered stakes

The very recent death of friend and collaborator Armin Medosch has us all shocked. A stomach cancer diagnosis in December 2016 was all too late to avert such rapid and devastating effects.

We last met at a memorable post Hybrid Cities dinner in Athens, September 2015,  where he had talked on ‘Cities of the Sun’ and recalled early wireless network adventures in Hackney, celebrating the network commons process so many of us continue to work on. Perhaps there is a recording of the keynote he presented there..? I just found this interesting talk on the rise of Network Commons, one more of so many on a wide range of subjects!

Tributes from friends and colleagues around Europe are stacking up in Nettime.org each pinpointing personal reflections on his great character, warmth and passion for the social in digital, a critical eye on culture, network politics, his commitment and courage. Obituaries in Rizhome, Wired and Telepolis now also detailing a life’s work and lasting impact. Now also a book! wow so perhaps this account will continue to be amended for a while!

Memories flying thick and fast, thinking back over many years of his intensity and enthusiasm. We first met in autumn of 1995 when he arrived at Obsolete offices in Clink Street, fresh from a bruising experience aboard ms.Stubnitz. His passion then, fixed on non-linear video archives, but we were already too distracted by WWW to take it on. It wasn’t long before he was in regular contact, at Backspace, activating Cybersalon, co-ordinating Artservers Unlimited , always making Waves!

His constructive involvement in so many activities, with such critical sensibility, influenced and inspired us all. During so much of this period we were all effected by the ‘rush’, spinning ahead of the times. We ranted about DIY networking ideas that fused as Consume, morphed with Berlon into a mesh awakening that grew internationally.

Armin wrote for Mute, Telepolis, Acoustic Space and formulated the MA in Digital Theory at Ravensbourne College. He launched into work on The Next layer blog whilst compiling of his New Tendencies Phd at Goldsmiths and delivered talks at many public events across Europe. With the publishing of most recent book New Tendencies, he was again traveling to promote ideas and expand minds with flair and passion. Now as ever he has rushed on to cross the gap ahead of us all, to who knows where!

See you on the other side mate. Thanks for everything.

Posted on by d.tv Deptford.TV, mazi, news, projects, Report, reports, research, ReSynced

Hoy Meet-ups

This coming Monday 23rd January we will again meet up with Creeknet friends to continue some great conversations and push on with DIY network research. Our host for the last few Mazi Mondays has been the Hoy Kitchen on Creek Road at the Deptford and Greenwich border by Creek Bridge. We have been starting with teas/lunch at noon and drifting on in discussion till 4pm.

Claire is the proprietor of Hoy and grew up in the Hoy Inn as it was previously known. Her family moved into the area from Belfast in the 70’s at a time when SE8 was comparatively naked, few street lights, road signs and empty buildings in a very industrial maritime landscape. The pub was a notorious social hub and she has many stories about these earlier times to tell!  Her great familiarity with local history, society and current wave of transformation is proving most entertaining and illuminating.

When Quayside redevelopment took off in the streets all around them  during the 90’s her family faced fresh and unexpected challenges. Land which had always been linked to the Hoy was assumed part of the property development package. It triggered a fight to hold on to access and the infamous Hoy Steps. Successful but lengthy resistance has meant that the steps have been retained but a road wraps around the building to the new build properties adjacent.

Perhaps as a consequence, Claire has good contacts with local business including Millenium Quay who have responsibility for the recently installed swing bridge. She has also suggested making historical steps accessible for the first time since the dispute!

The illustrious privateer Sir Francis Drake may well have been knighted by Queen Elisabeth by the Hoy Steps, his ship ‘The Golden Hind’ certainly ended it’s days in the creek, scrapped to shore up the sea wall of the creek. Today the replica boat is a popular tourist destination in Clink Street by London Bridge very close to our very own Backspace which prevailed till turn of the last century!

Please join us in February when we will meet-up at Stephen Lawrence Centre for a further three weeks of more practical workshops At these events we will work with low-cost technologies to host and promote a range of DIY neighbourhood publishing tools, discover more about the options for OWN mesh access meet its resident groups and friends from that area of the river by Brookmill Park.

Cast in this light and with rising sense of expectation from those around us,  we set out on the second phase of neighbourhood engagement and activity around our Mazi pilot – Creeknet. It explores use of DIY networking methods and promotion of ‘offline‘ information systems, that express awareness, sustainability and determination for greater data autonomy.

To date, we have met with a wide range of local people living and working alongside Deptford Creek, each with a view on local issues and an intensity to shape outcomes in whatever form of public campaign or personal agenda they may fix on. Help us identify the tools for success in such situations and to foster the development of home grown options to introduce into the MAZI toolkit.

We begin a series of weekly meetings and workshops at venues up and down the creek this month, to channel some energies into discovery, discussion and expression on subjects closest to heart. The quality of lived environment tops that chart, as any local resident, worker or student will assert. Unbridled property speculation, deteriorating air quality and wealth disparity, contribute to the sense of dis-empowerment, isolation and anxiety for the future.

Much we have learned, as the storm of chaos around us builds, reminds us that we can never again take personal freedoms and privacy for granted. As of 30th December, the Investigatory Powers Act permits targeted interception of communications, bulk collection and interception of communications data by UK government and intelligence agencies.

Educating and informing ourselves on conditions of change are now critical steps for us to take for future health of communities, cultures and capital. Our faith in each other, open collaboration and social justice are at stake. Your insight, inventiveness and expertise are key to unlocking neighbourhood value and identifying solutions to act on locally.

During February, we are hosting Creeknet meet-ups at Stephen Lawrence Centre where friends of Brookmill Park and Deptford Creek will gather to share stories and publish reports.

As part of the MAZI pilot we are all working together to install interactive beacons along the creek where significant points of interest and DIY network activity coincide.

We have booked three weekly meetings in this riverside lecture room, starting Monday 13th Feb so please join us there between 12 and 4pm. Please register so we know how may to expect at lunch!

Our emphasis is to support the many local groups along the creek as they promote their respective activities and publish to their networks. In preparation, we have been resetting some of their legacy, corrupted and entangled WordPress installations, so a clean start is possible!

Friends of Brookmill Park are now ready to bring their designs into effect to feature the nature and diversity of the park, planting plan and to begin animal species monitoring.

Terry Edwards is a local musician and model gardener who leads the Crossfields Estate community garden project Wonky Prong and has begun posting and planting again in time for spring. He may well join Karen Barnes on Wednesday’s open mic event at the Birdsnest.

She has been very busy scanning some of the many pinhole camera prints she has made in situ around Deptford as well as on occasional trips to Westminster. They feature at thearmed909 alongside accounts of living and working in the area.  The Undercurrents gallery in the back room of the Birdsnest has been showing Minesweeper art and photographs of the boat that survived the devastating fire in January. Karen recently added a Piratebox to collect up some memorabilia and share donated audio recordings and artwork. Next time you pop in for a pint, try logging on to check the collection.

Friends of Deptford Creek, started by those living on house boats in the creek also have a refreshed website to voice their current concerns not least in light of redevelopment plans effecting their mooring and land access at 2 Creekside. John Cierach is also the owner of 3 Creekside where we recently reviewed the plans for development to feature stacked shipping containers and reworked mooring strategy that won’t include all the current boats!

A Kumu map of working relationships between interested parties along Deptford Creek is emerging form the mud of our interaction. Further interventions and activity will continue to extend these impressions, your comments and contributions are most welcome.

What are the shitboats you may well ask

Posted on by d.tv Uncategorized

Knitted out

The quest for suitable, sustainable network equipment is an ongoing and fascinating one.  New products with great capabilities, low cost and power, compactness and accessibility, hold much promise.

The first to catch my eye during a recent visit to Raylab is this GPRS shield v1.0. It’s a compact and versatile board featuring audio I/O, generic GSM module and 12 GPIOs. It is also fully compatible with Arduino modules so that existing controllers, radios and sensor packs fit right in!

Next on the desk was long awaited Huzzah! IoT ‘feather‘ which Alexei ordered some weeks ago and so popular it’s rarely in stock. Preliminary test returns simple but reassuring responses.. This tiny board boasts memory, processor very low power consumption and frilled with many connection options, amazing value at £12.

A third product blinking innocently away across the desk,  had been delivered just that afternoon. Vocore.io is a fully featured mini OpenWRT SoC (system on chip) module with ethernet and USB dock, wireless and RAM enough to make itself indispensable. £40 ish.

Our MAZIzone assignment to identify and utilise the best of options for neighborhood activities and network development have already drawn us close to a series of interesting options for environment sensing , information storage and energy management. It’s a fragmented story so far, but one that we are bringing into focus, piece by piece.

When we next link up with guys at University of Thessaloniki research department in Volos there will be much to discuss. They have been working with a selection of off the shelf and custom pico pc boards and adapters to interface a wide range of environment sensors to track temperature to radiation and drive Bluetooth, Zigbee, Wifi and LTE radios.

Posted on by d.tv mazi, news, Report, reports, research

Meanwhile zone

We have begun hosting Mazi Mondays meet-ups aboard the WWII Minesweeper boat on Deptford Creek where local people can come along to meet with members of the Minesweeper Collective as they collect ideas and prepare resources to extend the Mazi Zone into their space. Join us there from 1-5pm each week – entrance on Norman Road..

Boats now clustered at this mooring point already share energy and information resources but seek to extend their range with a set of low powered sensors to collect and publish environmental data, sound recordings and a visual record of their day to day existence in and about Deptford Creek. [images]

The Minesweeper Collective lead on refurbishment of the boat and operate the creative program on the boat with regular screen printing workshops as well as monthly Undercurrents exhibition in the nearby Birdsnest public house. This month they present ‘a doll a day’ collection of tattooed and undressed fabric doll sculptures.

Don’t miss images by Artist and musician Karen Barnes, seen here with legs out of her portable pinhole camera, preparing to capture Saturday drinkers gathered outside on Deptford Church Street. Something like this! (will swap out once we have a copy)

Refurbishment of OWN infrastructure continues with update of the antenna installation at APT on Creekside, linking back to Minesweeper and within easy range of Birdsnest.

This view from APT roof of this spring 2016 shows the remnants of Faircharm Estate, all part of the rapid changes sweeping Deptford and so much of South East London

Posted on by d.tv mazi, news, Report, reports, research

Swept overboard

Yesterday a few of us from the Wireless Wednesday workshop visited the Minesweeper on Deptford Creek to meet with collective members and take a few photographs in advance of their fundraiser this weekend and Mazi workshops on the boat in Spring. T his coincided with a visit from three representatives of Thames Tideway to meet up with concerned residents of boats moored in the area, all seeking more information. There was a tentative yet friendly exchange and a good deal of information about the timetable and nature of work surfaced as a result.

Thames Tideway is a private company working with Thames Water to build the London super sewer network. Tideway is owned by a consortium of investors that comprises Allianz, Amber Infrastructure, Dalmore Capital and DIF. The construction site in the east end will be delivered by a joint venture of Costain Ltd., Vinci Construction Grands Projets and Bachy Soletanche. This contract is known as Tideway East, with work taking place from Bermondsey to Stratford. Here is a short film showing each of the construction sites

Groundwork for the main shaft at Greenwich Pumping station opposite Creekside Education Centre has already begun. The plan is to dig an 18m diameter shaft down to a depth of 65m for the tunnel. The ha’penny hatch pathway on the Greenwich side to Norman Road will be rerouted and then possibly closed during the work, despite appearances at the moment. Mined materials will be pumped across or under the existing pathway and railway line, into the Jewsons site for processing.

Material from related shafts and tunneling construction between here and Chambers Wharf, will also be extracted here to be loaded onto 100 trucks a day or more likely, river barges for removal. By August 2016, the sea wall at Jewsons requires reinforcement to enable installation of a mooring cradle, to support the 500 GT barges, leaving little space for existing moorings!

Sometime before early 2017 a channel 0.5m (from lowest riverbed level) and 8m wide will be dredged at low tide to enable large barges access at high tide. Such huge earthworks could well destabilise the riverbed for any boats normally in contact with it most of the time. Once the dredged channel is ready, the ‘cradle’ is in place and processing plant for the mined materials is operational, then there will be at least two barges per day for further five years!

So, “are you all ready?”

A ‘Greenwich Pumping Station Community Liaison Working Group’ meeting was held in September 2015 at Creekside Education Trust but unfortunately no public were invited nor attended due to communication error! Further meetings are being planned so all are advised to attend and find out more about the scale and duration of the plans already underway. In the meantime neighborhood bloggers are busy tracking the situation, improving awareness of the complexity and compromise at the scale of such intensive civil engineering. Perhaps this is a good moment to invoke DNA the recently acknowledged Deptford Neighborhood Action group!

Posted on by d.tv mazi, Report, reports, research

reCirculate

Now as December starts there are several threads to lead us into 2016 that we have been discussing with friends and associates.

The shaping up of Deptford Creek pilot for Mazi has already resulted in a series of encouraging exchanges and outline planning with local projects. Creekside Education Trust, Minesweeper Collective and Birdsnest Pub have all expressed interest and we are looking forward beginning work with them and others as we go along. Mid January YT will meetup with project partners in Volos to sort out details for the first phases.

 

 

YT also traveled up to visit Open University to meet with Mazi partners there and made a short visit to the National Computer Museum at Bletchley Park with Mark Gaved. Mark has been working on Salsa a system of bluetooth responders which we like very much..

During 2012 we worked on research project DeckspaceTv and then up to early 2014 adopted emerging data synchronization tools during operation of reSync which are now both again available in report form. YT will return to Transmediale in Berlin this year as we are collaborating to present a day of offline network development presentations and talks from it’s leading exponents.

Posted on by d.tv Uncategorized

Data Traces: Big Data in the Context of Culture and Society

IXDM will host a conference on data traces.

Big Data describes a passage into a new era in which the power of data induces a radical transformation of a society whose actions and productdata_traces01ion of knowledge rely increasingly on the accumulation and evaluation of data. The conference ‘Data Traces. Big Data in the Context of Culture & Society’ draws upon this prospect and delves into critical questions of Big Data in dialogue with international experts, academics and artists. It addresses the paradigm of a data-driven society and reflects life in an increasingly datified world. The conference is organized by the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures at the Academy of Art and Design FHNW and HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel). The conference is part of the exhibition ‘Poetics and Politics of Data’ at HeK. Further infos can be found on the IXDM website & the HEK website.

Posted on by d.tv Events

Landestelle & HEK @ Art Basel

Our friends Wisard Bros performed the MidiFizz DJ-set at Landestelle.

20130822-094633

Read more about the Landestelle project (in German).

At Liste Art Fair HeK presents four artistic positions, Aram Bartholl, Constant Dullaart, Raquel Meyers and Evan Roth under the title PEBKAC IMHO.

“Search the web for ‘iPhone reverse product placement’, and you will find a clip from the first ‘Sex and the City’ movie (2008), in which the character Carrie gets handed an iPhone and shrieks; “I don’t know how to work this’. Shot the year the first Apple smartphone was released, the clip overtly illustrates our current relationship to technology. Carrie was not in the know, did not understand popular technology. Left at the altar, not in control of her life, not able to master new technology. We as the viewer do want to understand how technology works, want control, not be left at the altar, and get an iPhone. read more.

topelement

The action of the art group “diezelle” started by 5PM (19 June) in front of Art Basel, as a protest against the police action during the ArtBasel 2013. Another group gathered on the Claramatte for a parallel demonstration using homemade tanks made out of cardboard, shouting: “What is art”

 

Posted on by d.tv presentations

FOMO – Fear of Missing out @ ICA

!Mediengruppe Bitnik presents their work at the Fear of Missing Out conference (ICA London) together with Peter Sunde from Kolmisoppi.

Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi discusses his work within the organisation Konsthack. Best known for co-founding the controv#FOMO2ersial The Pirate Bay, Kolmisoppi is a Berlin/Kuopio-based Scandinavian hacker/artist working with projects that have the potential to change society. In particular, he deals with questions of intellectual property rights.

The Q&A with Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi is led by Matthew Fuller.

Artists !Mediengruppe Bitnik present Random Darknet Shopping Bots, Mail Art and Surveillance Algorithms, giving insight into their latest work around bots. Retracing their recent explorations into the Darknets – from Memes to Onionland – !Mediengruppe Bitnik examine anonymity as a form of anti-identity and the approach of applying loss of control as a means to challenge established structures and mechanisms.