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 ...

How did the internet go from the utopian free-for-all, open source heaven, libertarian last frontier to the current state of permanent surveillance, exhibitionism and paranoia? This duplicity is the underlying thread that links the artists, activists, and researchers in The Black Chamber, an exhibition, a symposium, an urban intervention and a publication. The Black Chamber aims at discussing the delicate and often awkward role of art and imagination in the age of mass surveillance, stressing the multiple connections between post-studio art and independent research, grassroots reverse engineering, and new forms of political activism in the age of networks. Not just an exhibition ...

Carnivore is a Processing library that allows you to perform surveillance on data networks. Carnivore listens to Internet traffic (email, web surfing, etc.) on a specific local network. Using Processing you are able to animate, diagnose, or interpret the network traffic in any way you wish.

Every time you connect to the internet, you pass through time, space, and law. Information is sent out from your computer all over the world, and sent back from there. This information is stored and tracked in multiple locations, and used to make decisions about you, and determine your rights. These decisions are made by people, companies, countries and machines, in many countries and legal jurisdictions. Citizen Ex shows you where those places are. Your Algorithmic Citizenship is how you appear to the internet, as a collection of data extending across many nations, with a different citizenship and different rights in ...

******************************************************** Colors Personal Edition Cory Arcangel – 2009 http://www.coryarcangel.com ******************************************************** See more at: http://www.coryarcangel.com/things-i-made/code-colors-personal-edition/#sthash.UCqspiLR.dpuf

How to conceptualize online sociability in the 21st century? To answer this question, Communities at a Crossroads looks back at the mid-2000s. With the burst of the creative-entrepreneur alliance, the territorialisation of the internet and the commercialization of interpersonal ties, that period constituted a turning point for digital communitarian cultures. Many of the techno-libertarian culture’s utopias underpinning the ideas for online sociability faced systematic counter evidence. This change in paradigm has still consequences today. Avoiding both empty invocations of community and swift conclusions of doom, Annalisa Pelizza investigates the theories of actions that have underpinned the development of techno-social digital assemblages ...

Before the rise of the Web and our contemporary digital cultures, computer networks had already been imagined, tested, and used worldwide. This special issue retraces some of the technological, cultural and social paths that shaped the development of networks in six different areas of the world. The papers and the final conversation between two leading scholars of this issue touch some crucial topics of network histories from a variety of cultural, geographical and disciplinary perspectives. The issue combines studies and researches based on theoretical and empirical analyses in the U.S., Europe, Brazil and South Africa. Among the most relevant case studies, ...

Zach Blas in conversation with Laurel Ptak, Art in General’s Executive Director & Curator, on the occasion of Blas’s exhibition Contra-Internet at Art in General and his lecture-performance Metric Mysticism at e-flux. Zach Blas is an artist and writer whose practice confronts technologies of capture, security, and control. Currently, he is a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. His recent works respond to biometric governmentality and network hegemony. Read more about the exhibition, on view through April 21, 2018, at artingeneral.org. Read Zach Blas’ essay in e-flux journal #74 (June 2016): “Contra-Internet”

For millions of internet users around the globe, the search for new knowledge begins with Wikipedia. The encyclopedia’s rapid rise, novel organization, and freely offered content have been marveled at and denounced by a host of commentators. Critical Point of View moves beyond unflagging praise, well-worn facts, and questions about its reliability and accuracy, to unveil the complex, messy, and controversial realities of a distributed knowledge platform. The essays, interviews and artworks brought together in this reader form part of the overarching Critical Point of View research initiative, which began with a conference in Bangalore (January 2010), followed by events in Amsterdam (March ...

In October 2012, a one-day online symposium created a platform for discussing the practice of cyberformance—live performance that uses internet technologies to connect remote participants. The 12-hour event featured 10 presentations and attracted an audience of over 100 from around the world who engaged in a lively, vibrant conversation. CyPosium: The Book presents a selection of artefacts from the CyPosium—presentation texts, chat log excerpts, discussion transcripts, edited email conversations, creative chat excerpt essays and illustrations—along with invited articles that respond to the event. The contributors hail from a wide range of artistic practice both online and offline, and their writing ...

NM speaks with Kevin Driscoll, author of The Modem World: A Pre-history of Social Media (Yale University Press, 2022), which examines the physical — and social — technology that underpinned the DIY side of networked technology’s evolution in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Parallel to institutional network culture were the proto-dark-forest communities of BBS networks and other pre-www systems. From FidoNet to De Digitale Stad (DDS) Netherlands, Kevin maps out this early territory, with a brief history of the French Minitel system along the way. Through his work, Kevin asks us to consider what it really means to be “autonomous” online and what ...

Privacy, copyright, classified documents and state secrets, but also spontaneous network phenomena like flash mobs and hashtag revolutions, reveal one thing – we lost control over the digital world. We experience a digital tailspin, or as Michael Seemann calls it in this essay: a loss of control or Kontrollverlust. Data we never knew existed is finding paths that were not intended and reveals information that we would never have thought of on our own.  Traditional institutions and concepts of freedom are threatened by this digital tailspin. But that doesn’t mean we are lost. A new game emerges, where a different set of rules ...