Face to Facebook is the latest project by Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio, the third work in a series that began with Google Will Eat Itself and Amazon Noir. These works share a lot in terms of both methodologies and strategies. They all use custom programmed software  in order to exploit (not without fun) three of the biggest online corporations (Google, Amazon and Facebook), exploiting conceptual hacks that generate unexpected holes in their well oiled marketing and economic system. Face to Facebook is currently on view as an installation at Transmediale Festival in Berlin.

This is how the authors explain this new, provocative net artwork:

“Stealing 1 million Facebook profiles, filtering them with face-recognition software and then posting them on a custom-made dating website, sorted by their facial expression characteristics.
In an attempt to free personal data as Facebook’s exclusive property we spent a few months downloading public information from one million profiles (including pictures).Immersing ourselves in the resulting database was a hallucinatory experience as we dove into hundreds of  thousands of profile pictures and found ourselves intoxicated by the endless smiles, gazes and often leering  expressions. After a few weeks we had to face the evidence. All that people wanted was to attract new people, have more  relationships, to express and receive love through their digital traits. But they were trapped by Facebook  owning their data and restricting their actions with primitive privacy rules. They wanted more than just their restricted circles of “friends” and they wanted it quickly and easily.
Our mission was to give all these virtual identities a new shared place to expose themselves freely, breaking Facebook’s constraints and boring social rules. So we established a new website (lovely-faces.com) giving them justice and granting them the possibility of soon being face to face with anybody who is attracted by their facial expression and related data.
Now they are there, in full effect, free to keep in touch with a whole world of men and women and anything in between. And we accomplished our mission: the final piece of the free relationships interface is now running.”

http://face-to-facebook.net
http://lovely-faces.com
http://www.transmediale.de

Subvertize!
Don’t let anyone else put the hands on your imaginary. Just subvertize and manage it by yourself: collect, detourn, alter and share it with other people like you!

Share Share Share …
Share your pictures with your friends, family and everyone else. Your subvertized images are now visible to everyone.

Subvertag!
Let your images finally be. Give’em a title, add any stupid notes and organize them into delirant subverTags: become part of an insignificant, collective, visionary escape from common sense.

Don’t waste time! Become a real Subvertr one!!
Try it now!! Subvertr is FREE!
Get it at http://www.subvertr.com

www.ronaldmchummer.com

Art & Activism at Mejan Labs
31.8 Ò 8.10 2006
Welcome to the opening on
Thursday 31st of August at 5-8 pm
www.mejanlabs.se

Mejan Labs, Akademigrând 3, SE-111 52 Stockholm, Sweden Tel: +46 (0)8-796 60 30, info@mejanlabs.se
Hours: Tue-Fri 11am-5pm, Sat-Sun 12-4pm, closed Mondays

www.amazon-noir.com
www.edith-russ-haus.de/english/stipendien2006.html
www.ubermorgen.com

Franco Berardi (Bifo)
Skizomedia. Trent’anni di mediattivismo
pp 144 – euro 13,00
www.deriveapprodi.org

GLAMOUR AND GLOBALIZATION:
FOOTBALL, MEDIA AND ART
Hartware MedienKunstVerein at PHOENIX Halle Dortmund
May 5 – July 16, 2006
Guentherstr. 65
44143 Dortmund
Tel. ++49.231.823 106
Fax ++49.231.88 20 240
www.hmkv.de

The significant influence of these interfaces, along with the direction and intensity of implicit and explicit acceptance and rejection modes, are being detected and questioned through subversive activities and reactions in different forms of expressions by artistic practices. The project follows an empirical method through various researches carried out by different artistic practices focusing on various kinds of interfaces of control mechanisms operating in the social, political, economic, cultural, geo-political, and psychological layers of our daily lives. In the same line of thought, this project is also an attempt to detect tactics and rejection mechanisms along with the “off the record” strategies against the pressures and conditions of these mechanisms.

under.ctrl graz launch: “interfaces of control mechanisms”, which is planned as an event in process with various performance formats, will put forward observations on the various aspects of the mechanisms that control our lives, in connection with their designed interfaces. Throughout these 3 days, Forum Stadtpark will host sound performances, installations and screenings of works and documentaries (in a definite time frame with a controlled but composite schedule) along with a panel that will be publicized after the event. Therefore, it will operate as a platform of discussion on how these interfaces are shaped and alter our lives in different local contexts. loosing.ctrl (Turkish-Israeli project) -as one of the sub channels of the series- will also be presented with a screening programme. under.ctrl graz launch will bring a specific emphasis to the local context through the works of Austrian artists and a local activist group.

participants
The participating artists of under.ctrl are Nooshin Farhid (Iran/UK), Hristina Ivanoska (Macedonia) Effie and Amir (Israel/Belgium), Zhou Hongxiang (China), Ran Slavin (Israel), Anabala (Turkey), Sala Manca (Argentina/Israel), Ligna (Germany), Erhan Muratoglu (Turkey), Michael Zinganel (Austria), Pragmatic Sanction (Austria), Vuk Cosic (Slovenia), Nicole Pruckermayr & IOhannes zmölnig (Austria), Yane Calovski (Macedonia), FOS (Denmark) and Igor Stromajer & Brane Zorman (Slovenia).

Participating artists of the loosing.ctrl screening programme are Yael Bartana (Israel), Erhan Muratoglu (Turkey), Ruti Sela & Maayan Amir (Israel), Can Turkinan & Özlem Sulak (Turkey), and Hatice Guleryuz (Turkey).

The panelists are Andreas Leo Findeisen (Austria), Marina Grzinic (Slovenia), Vuk Cosic (Slovenia) and Emre Erkal. Erhan Muratoglu and Basak Senova of NOMAD (Turkey) will be acting as moderators.

www.nomad-tv.net/under_ctrl

RADICAL SOFTWARE is an exhibition including some recent examples of radical software. The name pays explicit homage to the magazine founded by Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot in 1970, that had the merit to combine, for the first time, political considerations and use of the media (in that case mainly video and television).
But, if the deep nature of these projects is political, the initial target of the subversion they put into effect is rarely so; and, even when it is, the blow it receives is never direct, but it is the ultimate consequence of an attack directed elsewhere, similar to a bullet hitting the mark after being diverted by a series of obstacles that are as many primary targets. This is the case, for example, of Bush Bot 0.4, of the ROVERBOTICS Group: which, after insinuating doubts – with the support of manipulated images – that George W. Bush may be a cyborg, demolishes his politics, creating the software that nourishes his totally artificial intelligence, allowing people to talk to him and even dictate his new speeches, through a simple chat system. No doubt Bush is the target, but the blow is struck by drawing on a by now classic story – Simulacres by Philip K. Dick – and by parodying artificial intelligence algorithms. In the same way, Mc Donald’s Videogame, of the Italian game factory Molleindustria, attacks the famous fast food chain, by subverting the form, by now highly widespread, of advertising videogames. Where Next, realized by the same Molleindustria in collaboration with the advertising agency Guerrillamarketing, attacks the spectacular way adopted by the media when presenting terrorism and their ferocious abuse of forms of betting games and the most common advertising tactics as well as that extraordinary instrument of location that is Google Earth, with a type of political incorrectness that is directly proportional to the implications of what it reports. Both these products are very distant from Software Art from a formal point of view and yet they are very close to it from a conceptual point of view.
Different is the case of GWEI (Google Will Eat Itself), realized by UBERMORGEN.COM in collaboration with Italian Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio, that takes to the extreme consequences the algorithm of capitalism entirely adopted by Google, but it does that to induce one of the powerful companies in the world to devour itself in an extreme form of digital cannibalism. The critical scope of Software Art doesn’t even spare the culture of shared knowledge based on hacker culture and the activism of the media.
Un wiki, by Wayne Clements is a very simple software that limits itself to retrieving and making visible the log file with contents refused by the open and democratic community of Wikipedia: a crafty speculation on the paradoxes of a system that matches the maximum opening made possible by the software and a substantially oligarchic structure as the only guarantor of the contents quality.
Antimafia (2003), of the Italian group [epidemic] is instead software that automates and coordinates collective actions. Based on a “peer to peer” action, it makes it possible to share hacking actions without any intervention from the user – apart from the activation of the programme – and without a leader that coordinates the action. It might seem the definitive solution to the problem of the effectiveness of protests online, the “killer application” of net activism; in reality, the first victim of this programme is activism itself, deprived of any human components and above all of leadership. Which justifies the strange story of this project, rejected and censored by the same community it was meant for. A censorship which was actually caused by an error of perspective: if Floodnet, software made available to a community for a collective action online, was in every respect a work of net.art, Antimafia, read in that light, failed miserably; if it is re-read as Software Art, instead, it hits the mark splendidly, showing that “the code is not harmless” and revealing the weak point of activism that withdraws when it discovers that it can be really dangerous.
If Antimafia is a subversive interface disguised as commercial software, emulating the “packaging” of famous security software, most Software Art projects make the interface the object of subversion. This is an attitude inherited from the first net.art. from JoDi which tears the browser to pieces in controversy with corporative hi-tech. The premise is that standard interfaces convey a specific ideology, and that defacing, violating, reconstructing them in new forms can be a form of re-appropriation and liberation.
I/O/D’s motto, “software is mind control, get some” very well explains both Peter Luining and Italian K Hello’s formal games as absolutely harmless conceptual experiments in practice, yet capable of pulling down in a moment the castle of metaphors on which the graphic interface with windows is based. In the same way Scream by Amy Alexander manages at last to give us the satisfaction of a physical outlet (in this case, a scream) that can produce immediate repercussions on the stability of the interface.
Others contest the surface, the froth of the data, like Slavic Marketa Bankova with Scribble, software that superimposes “graffiti” to the CNN homepage, with the same pleasure as a child destroying the Lego
castle he has just built. This is the case of Super Mario Movie, where Cory Arcangel breaks the world of Super Mario into pieces and follows ts fall with satisfaction, turning the horizontal flow into an endless vertical collapse, and depriving the game of any possible interaction. A subtle subversion, that disguises itself behind the pleasure of fruition but isn’t less radical for that.
Finally, entirely focused on language is the operation carried out by ][MEZ][, one of the best heirs of the code poetry tradition. For ][MEZ][ language, even the usually immediate language of a blog is a programming code that can be disassembled and reconstructed, being aware that if the Net has something to share with Babel, this is the confusion of languages. For this reason its "mezangelle", an idiom that merges natural language with IT code, becomes part, on one side, of the great tradition of language experimentation going from Dante to Joyce, and, on the other side, picks up a great lesson from Dada and Surrealism, i.e: discussing a society means firstly to attack its logical and rational structure, exactly embodied by the language.

RADICAL SOFTWARE
curated by Domenico Quaranta
PIEMONTE SHARE FESTIVAL 2006 – LIMITLESS
TORINO, ACCADEMIA ALBERTINA, 08.03.2006 – 12.03.2006
www.toshare.it

[ITALIAN BELOW]

Remixing the landscape: ecco ciò che si propone il collettivo creativo di S.Francisco Rebar group. Appropriarsi di elementi comuni del paesaggio e modificarli, mixarli insieme per ottenere un risultato che alteri la usuale percezione e fruizione di alcuni topos cittadini. Esempio principe di questa volontà è il progetto Park(ing) che, come illustra ironicamente già il titolo, è riuscito a trasformare un parcheggio a tempo in un parco a tempo.
Il 16 Novembre 2005 il gruppo Rebar, dopo aver pagato due ore di sosta in un parcheggio di S. Francisco, ha trasformato il posto macchina in un piccolo giardino pubblico, srotolandovi sopra un tappeto erboso e aggiungendovi anche un albero e una panchina.
L’insolita installazione è durata da mezzogiorno alle 2 del pomeriggio, esattamente la durata dell’importo pagato per il parcheggio e non ha visto arrivare interferenze dall’autorità pubblica, nè ha creato disordini nella gente. Anzi. Il pubblico ha cominciato ad usufruire dell’insolito spazio sedendosi sulla panchina, godendosi l’ombra dell’albero, togliendosi le scarpe e leggendo un libro. Insomma riappropriandosi di uno spazio e di un tempo che la cementificazione e lo stress sembrano sottrarre sempre di più all’uomo.
Non a caso il gruppo Rebar ha scelto per questa azione una zona di S.Francisco dominata dai posti auto (più del 70% dello spazio urbano è dedicato al parcheggio) e con una grande concentrazione di uffici.
Terminata la durata del parchimetro il manto erboso è stato riarrotolato e il giardino smantellato e trasportato in un altro luogo precedentemente scelto in cui poter continuare a vivere e a testimoniare la necessitá di questo genere di spazi per la vita dell’uomo.

www.rebargroup.org/projects/parking/

(lucia mariani)

http://www.mcvideogame.com
http://www.molleindustria.it

[ITALIAN BELOW]

United we stand. Europe has a mission è il titolo di un film inesistente, un blockbuster in stile hollywodiano. La sceneggiatura è “un brillante mix di stereotipi provenienti dai film di spionaggio e dalla fantapolitica, in cui la nazione che salva il mondo da una crisi internazionale non è più l’America, ma l’Europa“. Il nuovo tiro mancino degli 0100101110101101.ORG.
Il progetto consiste sostanzialmente nell’invenzione e nella promozione di un film inesistente. La campagna avviene tramite affissione di manifesti, pubblicazione di pagine pubblicitarie e altre tattiche di comunicazione virale. Le strade di Berlino, Bruxelles, Barcellona, Bangalore e New York sono già state tappezzate con centinaia di poster, durante il primo stadio del progetto, iniziato alla fine del 2005, ma la campagna è destinata ad andare avanti, coinvolgendo tutti i media: tv, radio, siti web, stampa generalista e specializzata.
La trama del film? E’ il 2020. Con la scusa della corsa al nucleare del Nord Corea, gli USA dichiarano guerra alla Cina (un evento a lungo termine che molti osservatori internazionali considerano possibile). Il presidente europeo richiede immediatamente l’intervento di una Task Force, una squadra di 5 agenti noti solo come l’Inglese, il Francese, il Tedesco, l’Italiano e lo Spagnolo. La loro missione: risolvere segretamente la crisi internazionale prima che sia troppo tardi, disarmando le due superpotenze senza servirsi della forza. Ma dopo operazioni di spionaggio, sabotaggio hi-tech e infinite avventure, quando la vittoria è dietro l’angolo, la missione sembra fallire. Come farà l’Europa a risolvere la crisi internazionale?

Dal 10 dicembre il progetto è in mostra presso la Postmasters Gallery di New York.

[ITALIAN BELOW]

Tool for armchair activists è il nuovo progetto firmato Troika, già autore di Sms Guerrilla Projector. Si tratta di una macchina per protestare “da remoto”. Composta da un dispositivo mobile per la ricezione dei messaggi e da un grande megafono, può essere installata di fronte ai palazzi del potere, magari su un lampione. Per manifestare comodamente, anche dalla poltrona di casa. Basta mandare un sms…

http://www.troika.uk.com/armchair_activists.htm

[ITALIAN BELOW]

From Tomorrow on è una conferenza su Arte, Attivismo e Tecnologia e sul futuro dei media indipendenti. L’incontro avrà luogo il prossimo 28 e 29 ottobre 2005 presso il Centro internazionale per l’arte contemporanea, Cornerhouse a Manchester. Tutta la discussione verrà trasmessa online in tempo reale.
Segnaliamo tra gli speaker la presenza dell’italiana Agnese Trocchi, conosciuta anche come *macchina*, un’entita digitale nata nella BBS AVaNA, con base a Roma. Tra gli altri, alcune importantissime personalità internazionali come Saul Albert, Pit Schultz e Dee Dee Halleck.

http://www.cornerhouse.org/exhibitionedinfo.asp?ID=757
http://www.streaming.cornerhouse.org/fto.htm

www.where-next.com
www.guerrigliamarketing.it
www.molleindustria.it

www.schillerfestival.com/Utopie/10_Reversed.html

Davide Grassi è direttore di Aksioma, un’istituzione culturale no-profit con sede a Ljubljana. Aksioma promuove progetti che si servono delle nuove tecnologie per investigare e discutere le strutture della società contemporanea, concentrandosi su produzioni che esplorano questioni sociali, politiche, etiche ed estetiche e usando la Rete come un laboratorio creativo per lo scambio e la distribuzione di idee e conoscenza.

www.demokino.net
www.aksioma.org
www.problemarket.com

(domenico quaranta)

http://ceskysen.cz

www.microrevolt.org
www.turbulence.org

I diversi incontri, in lingua italiana, si strutturano in tre parti: un’introduzione teorica, una presentazione di opere video o al computer, un dibattito con il pubblico. A conclusione degli incontri, e’ prevista una cena con prodotti tipici sardi (a cura di Lino De Palmas), per unire il piacere di sperimentare con le tecnologie a quello di degustare piatti appetitosi, anch’essi parte della creativita’ artistica italiana.

Per informazioni:
Sardisches Kulturzentrum Berlin (Circolo Sardo di Berlino e.V.)
Zillestr. 111, Charlottenburg.
Info: 030/34356635
www.sardanet.de
Costi: 15 euro a partecipante (comprende partecipazione all’incontro + cena sarda).