For his first web-based project, Cuban artist Wilfredo Prieto invites visitors to take part in a moment of silence via the internet, with no stipulations or expectations aside from the willingness to cede control of one’s computer while the minute is observed. Once launched, the ineluctable sixty seconds begin to pass. Your screen becomes black, and attempts to escape the moment with mouse or keyboard interaction are unheeded. Why would anyone agree to surrender control of the device that is so central to daily life? For many people, computers serve as the key repository of information and the primary conduit of ...

Abstract Browsing is a project that consists of both software and physical objects. The browser plugin is a free software that you can easily install. When you turn on the plugin, you can surf the web but all web content is reduced to abstract compositions (colored rectangles). It shows the skeleton of the web. It’s like seeing an X-ray of a building, showing the structural elements. Web pages are built of many elements, information is organized and categorized. Things we use every day but are not aware of. Invisible parts. Websites are constantly tweaked to maximize their efficiency, separate from aesthetic ...

The mediality of transmission and the materiality of communication result today more than ever in “acting at a distance” – an action whose agency lies in a medium. This book provides an overview into this crucial phenomenon, thereby introducing urgent questions of human interaction, the binding and breaking of time and space, and the entanglement of the material and the immaterial. Three vivid inquiries deal with histories and theories of mediality and materiality.

Aesthetic Programming explores the technical as well as cultural imaginaries of programming from its insides. It follows the principle that the growing importance of software requires a new kind of cultural thinking — and curriculum — that can account for, and with which to better understand the politics and aesthetics of algorithmic procedures, data processing and abstraction. It takes a particular interest in power relations that are relatively under-acknowledged in technical subjects, concerning class and capitalism, gender and sexuality, as well as race and the legacies of colonialism. This is not only related to the politics of representation but also nonrepresentation: ...

For The Download’s first free and open project, Deanna Havas offers a solution to earn back your membership donation once required to access The Download. By participating in Havas’s Affiliate Program (2013) the user can set up their own affiliate website to generate traffic to its host site, deannahavas.com. As an affiliate publisher, you will be reimbursed relative to how much traffic you drive to the site, which is calculated via metrics like pay per click and cost per impression. The package includes a small website, banner ads, and media ready to use for your microsite as well as step by step ...

Can computers be creative? Is algorithmic art just a form of Candy Crush? Cutting through the smoke and mirrors surrounding computation, robotics and artificial intelligence, Joanna Zylinska argues that, to understand the promise of AI for the creative fields, we must not confine ourselves solely to the realm of aesthetics. Instead, we need to address the role and position of the human in the current technical setup—including the associated issues of labour, robotisation and, last but not least, extinction. Offering a critique of the socio-political underpinnings of AI, AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams raises poignant questions about the ...

This week we are visiting with emerging conservation professional Anna Mladentseva. Throughout the course of her undergraduate and masters studies at University College London, Anna has been building some very fresh philosophical and ethical frameworks for how we think about the conservation of software based art, net art in particular, and her perspective is refreshingly grounded in a very sort of hands-on technical approach. In our chat we delve into the ins and outs of studying Flash, reframing how we think about an artist’s relationship to their source code, and what it means when a conservator is flagged as a ...

In her 2012 White Shadows: What is Missing from Images lecture at the Gdansk Academy of Fine Arts in Poland, Hito Steyerl speaks about how new technologies force us to reformulate important questions about the making visible, capturing, and documenting of information. In the first part of her talk, Steyerl focuses on the use of 3D scanning in forensic crime scene investigations. Steyerl explains how the 3D scanner, or LiDAR technology (Light Detection And Ranging), sends laser beams that reflect off of the surfaces of the objects that are being scanned. In this process, each point in space is measured ...

Birth, Art Gallery, Death is a minimalist triptych in the form of a screensaver package by Elna Frederick, an obscure artist from Computers Club. With white as life and black as death, each screen saver panel marks a stage in the cycle of consciousness. Birth is the genesis of consciousness through a birth canal of white arriving out of darkness. Art Gallery, where black is conspicuously absent, is the finite enclosure of a lifetime. Its contents are the thoughts and creations arising in consciousness; representations of life. Death, represented by black slowly descending upon a white screen, is ultimately a ...

Cory Arcangel, 2009 http://www.coryarcangel.com An OSX app which plays a quicktime movie one horizontal line of download at colors−personal−edition.com “When you’re too relaxed it’s not good to create” − David Guetta

Today, communication unfolds merely between two or more conscious entities but often includes an invisible third party. Inspired by this drastic shift, this volume uncovers new meanings of what it means “to communicate.”

Generative music is a term used to describe music which has been composed using a set of rules or system. This series of six episodes explores generative approaches (including algorithmic, systems-based, formalised and procedural) to composition and performance primarily in the context of experimental technologies and music practices of the latter part of the 20th Century and examines the use of determinacy and indeterminacy in music and how these relate to issues around control, automation and artistic intention. Each episode of this RWM series is followed by a special accompaniment programme of exclusive music by some of the leading sound artists ...