Pirate UtopiasArtists and Activists that actively explore ways to build alternative futures with technology

Muhammad Cartoons

http://cryptome.org/muhammad.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Drawings

How do you perceive Jens Haaning’s work in the light of the Muhammad Cartoon controversy?

Should there be limits to free speech?

Google + Yahoo accept China censorship

“Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist, is serving a ten-year prison sentence in China for sending an email to the USA. He was accused of “illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities” by using his Yahoo email account.

According to the court transcript of the evidence that led to Shi Tao’s sentencing, the US internet company Yahoo provided account-holder information on him.

Shi Tao was accused of sending an email summarizing an internal Communist Party directive to a foreign source. The Communist Party directive had warned Chinese journalists of possible social unrest during the anniversary of the June 4 Movement (in memory of the Tiananmen crackdown), and directed them not to fuel it via media reports.”

Google + Yahoo accept China censorship

“Imprisoned for peacefully exercising his right to freedom of expression, a right entrenched in international law and the Chinese Constitution, Shi Tao is considered a Prisoner of Conscience.

Companies must respect human rights, wherever they operate. Yahoo’s business ethics are becoming questionable due to its role in assisting the Chinese government to sentencing Shi Tao. The company has signed the Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Internet Industry, effectively agreeing to implement China’s draconian system of censorship and control.

Take action! Write to Yahoo now, expressing your concern about the company’s role in assisting in the violation of Shi Tao’s rights. Yahoo must use its influence to secure Shi Tao’s release.”

- http://web.amnesty.org/pages/chn-310106-action-eng

Tactical Media

“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. Tactical media do not just report events, as they are never impartial they always participate and it is this that more than anything separates them from mainstream media.”

“To believe that issues of representation are now irrelevant is to believe that the very real life chances of groups and individuals are not still crucially affected by the available images circulating in any given society. And the fact that we no longer see the mass media as the sole and centralized source of our self definitions might make these issues more slippery but that does not make them redundant.”

“What makes Our Media Tactical? In 'The Practice of Every Day Life' De Certueau analyzed popular culture not as a 'domain of texts or artifacts but rather as a set of practices or operations performed on textual or text like structures'. He shifted the emphasis from representations in their own right to the 'uses' of representations. In other words how do we as consumers use the texts and artifacts that surround us.”

“And the answer, he suggested, was 'tactically'. That is in far more creative and rebellious ways than had previously been imagined. He described the process of consumption as a set of tactics by which the weak make use of the strong. He characterized the rebellious user (a term he preferred to consumer) as tactical and the presumptuous producer (in which he included authors, educators, curators and revolutionaries) as strategic.”

“An exemplary example of the tactical can be seen in the work of the Polish artist Krzystof Wodiczko who 'perceives how the hordes of the displaced that now occupy the public space of cities squares, parks or railway station concourses which were once designed by a triumphant middle class to celebrate the conquest of its new political rights and economic liberties. Wodiczko thinks that these occupied spaces form new agoras. which should be used for statements. 'The artist', he says, 'needs to learn how to operate as a nomadic sophist in a migrant polis.‘”

- The ABC of Tactical Media by David Garcia and Geert Lovink

Krzysztof Wodiczko

Krzysztof Wodiczko is internationally renowned for his large-scale slide and video projections on architectural facades and monuments. Since the late eighties, he has developed a series of nomadic instruments for both homeless and immigrant operators that function as implements for survival, communication, empowerment, and healing.

Contemporary Equivalents ?

Banksyhttp://www.banksy.co.uk/

Billboard Liberation Fronthttp://www.billboardliberation.com/

Carbon Defense Leaguehttp://www.carbondefense.org/

Krzysztof Wodiczko - Homeless Vehicle (1988-89)

They provide this social group with a ‹street tool› that responds to basic necessities of survival economy such as living, sleeping and washing, as well as collecting and reselling cans and bottles.

(source: Adrian Piper, in: Generali Foundation (ed.), Designs für die wirkliche Welt | Designs for the Real World, 2002.)

Interview with Wodiczko

http://www.pataphysicsmagazine.com/Wodiczko_interview.html

Natalie Jeremijenko

Natalie Jeremijenko, is a design engineer and technoartist. Recently she was named one of the top one hundred young innovators by the MIT Technology Review.

http://www.bureauit.org

bit plane

bit plane is a highly compact spy plane, wingspan 20 inches: radio-controlled, video-instrumented and deployed over areas of scenic interest.

Due to its refined dimensions bit plane is able to enter territory inaccessible to other aircraft. Pioneering flight: in an aerial reconnaissance over the Silicon Valley California 1997, bit plane flew solo and undetected into the glittering heartland of the Information Age. Video generated in this exercise includes footage retrieved over no-camera zones Apple, Lockheed, Nasa Ames, Netscape, Xerox Parc, Interval Research, Atari, Hewlett Packard, Oracle, Yahoo, SGI, Sun Microsystems.

bit Suicide Box

The bit Suicide Box is a motion detection video system designed to capture vertical activity. Unit includes BITcamera, motion capture card, analysis software and utility concealment casing. In standard operation any vertical motion in frame will trigger the camera to record to disk.

Bureau installed the Suicide Box for trial application in range of the Golden Gate Bridge California 1996; an initial deployment period [100 days] metered 17 bridge events. System efficacy: Suicide Box system supplied public, frame-accurate data of a social phenomenon not previously accurately quantified. Box placement was determined to exploit cultural climate and BIT agent proximity; San Francisco is gateway to the Silicon Valley and both Information capital and Suicide capital of the USA.

Where and what is the project here?

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001450.html

Interview with Natalie

The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto

Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the True Name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable, via extensive re- routing of encrypted packets and tamper-proof boxes which implement cryptographic protocols with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering. Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today. These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation.

http://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html

The Yes Men

http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=04/12/09/2229248