6PM YOUR LOCAL TIME (#6pmylt) is a networked, distributed, one night contemporary art event taking place simultaneously in different locations, coordinated from one central venue and documented online via a web application. The project, conceived by Fabio Paris for the Link Art Center and developed in collaboration with Abandon Normal Devices (AND) and Gummy Industries, is an OPEN FORMAT and can be used by other organizations and individual curators to set up other #6pmylt events. The Link Art Center itself organized the first two events: 6PM Your Local Time UK, curated in collaboration with AND and coordinated from Furtherfield Commons, London, involving ...

“After Brad Troemel” (ABT) is an artist book conceived for the JstChillin exhibition “Read/Write” at 319 Scholes in Brooklyn in 2011. The book—originally published in a limited edition of 20—took as its conceptual core the characterization of artist Brad Troemel as a genius and a mastermind analyzed through the lens of conspiracy theory and amateur internet sleuthing. According to artist and writer Artie Vierkant, who wrote the introduction to this edition, ABT is not “about Brad Troemel, nor any of the myriad names or identities that are mentioned in its pages. ABT is about the construction of identity in a mediated ...

The MEDIUM issue was produced with Tate Liverpool’s fall 2014 season Making Things Public, where The Serving Library‘s collection of artifacts (http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/display/serving-library) was installed with two related exhibitions: Transmitting Andy Warhol and Gretchen Bender. In addition to our usual PDF and print formats, Bulletins are also available this time as VIDEO, funneled through the form of a speaking asterisk. The asterisk’s Scottish accent is provided by Isla Leaver Yap, assembled into software by Cereproc, Ltd., and coordinated by James Langdon. (You can read more about this at https://sinkhole-audio.net/your-host/.) VIDEOS are linked from each PDF download page, for example, http://www.servinglibrary.org/read.html?id=181250&watch=1. Bulletins arrive from ...

Creative Networks explores the dawn of the Internet culture in the age of network society from the perspective of Eastern Europe. From a theoretical angle the networks are introduced and interpreted as complex socio-technical systems. The author analyzes the development of these networked self-organized formations starting off with ‘virtual communities’ of ‘creative networks’, which emerged during the early phase of the Internet, up to the phenomena of today’s online ‘social networks’. Along with the translocal case studies of Nettime, Syndicate, Faces and Xchange networks (as well as with the other important facets of the 1990s network culture in Europe), the ...

Culture of the Selfie is an in-depth art-historical overview of self-portraiture, using a set of theories from visual studies, narratology, media studies, psychotherapy, and political principles. Collecting information from various fields, juxtaposing them on the historical time-line of artworks, the book focuses on space in self-portraits, shared between the person self-portraying and the viewer. What is the missing information of the transparent relationship to the self and what kind of world appears behind each selfie? As the ‘world behind one’s back’ is gradually taking larger place in the visual field, the book dwells on a capacity of selfies to master ...

Businesspeople talk about art like artists talk about money: gratuitously, without compensation. Hired to talk about money, an entrepreneur will speak in terms of art. Put an artist on a panel and you will often get disquisitions on exchange, capital, and commerce. Both constituencies are compelled by what lies outside their professional responsibility, and the response to this compulsion vibrates between veneration and contempt. For every Übermensch crypto-expressionist billionaire patron, there is one who sneers at the foolish valuelessness of art history and its scribes. For every dedicated anticapitalist artist, there is one who happily understands themselves to be making ...

In the words of its designer, artist Benjamin Grosser, Go Rando “is a browser extension that obfuscates your feelings on Facebook. Every time you click ‘Like’, Go Rando randomly chooses one of the six ‘reactions’ for you. Over time, you appear to Facebook’s algorithms as someone whose feelings are emotionally ‘balanced’ “ — that is, your profile becomes obscured by false emotional noise, rendered less useful to Facebook’s algorithms. Grosser notes that Facebook’s “reactions” capacity enables and abets its expanding role in surveillance, government profiling, micro-targeting of advertisements, and emotional manipulation across the platform. Short of leaving the service entirely, ...

More than ever, creative people find their attention pulled in many directions by digital and networked technologies. Staying up-to-date and responsive to so many forms of online communication often feels mandatory in order to keep working. But, it can be both exhausting and dispiriting to build a creative practice while “extremely online.” With this compilation of essays produced in collaboration with Are.na, the platform for connecting ideas, we asked artists to share their approaches to using the internet more mindfully and creatively.

The meme reopens the basic question of the Party, and offers what is perhaps the minimal basis for organizing a force of rupture in the twenty-first century. The fluidity of the meme makes it possible to join a march, a blockade or a roundabout occupation without having to buy into a “common interest” or the legitimizing “beliefs” of a movement. It does not solve, but simply defers the question of a common grammar of suffering to a later point…The meme authorizes everyone to act on their respective experience of how the ‘elites’ (a deliberately under-constructed enemy) have screwed them over, ...

Part aggregator, part independent journal, NEW MODELS brings together a human-directed selection of information and opinion — including scholarly research, mass media, social media, imageboard threads — from across the culture sector’s increasingly algorithmically-determined and generationally/socially segregated channels. Anchoring NEW MODELS is its propriety content — texts, visual essays, podcasts, videos, and more. For its first podcast, just before May 1, Julian Wadsworth sat down with Caroline Busta, Daniel Keller, and Masha Tian to discuss New Models and the current media ecology — from e-flux to cyber-hitler, Alec Monopoly to MMORPGs.

Mat Dryhurst, Martti Kalliala, and Michelle Lhooq talk to New Models about #gangcrafting in the age of crypto-raves and ownership in a rent-everything world.

Cultural analyst TOBY SHORIN takes us into the Hellmouth of “authenticity” and “originality” production, discussing how the Cthulhu of platform capitalism and distributed networks is evacuating the value of creative work.  

Feat. artist and social theorist JOSHUA CITARELLA who has been exploring how deep online spaces have evolved over the past few years, shaping popular politics in turn — especially among younger people. Last fall when we spoke to Joshua (ep. 6), he had just published a long-form piece on Politigram and the Post-Left. In this ep, we talk to him about his most recent essay, “Irony Politics & Gen Z” (published on New Models this spring), discussing the funnel of online radicalization and what tactics the left needs to consider for more effective off-ramping.

Hashfail is the first in the series of three nation-wide events by Open File investi- gating the distribution and production of art through the use of virtual and digital platforms via sound, performance and digital media. Hashfail coincides with (On) Accordance a project by or-bits. com and Grand Union. A Torrent file is a file distributed via the web through the rapid peer-to-peer ‘seeding’ of information. Becoming representative or pirate and copyright- infringing distribution it is also a mode of sharing that relies upon direct con- nection with other anonymous users of the internet. A Hashfail occurs when ‘seeded’ files have become ...

Paper Tiger Television is a video collective. We look at the communications industry via the media in all its forms. The power of mass culture rests on the trust of the public. This legitimacy is a paper tiger. Investigation into the corporate structures of the media and critical analysis of their content is one way to demystify the information industry. Developing a critical consciousness about the information industry is a necessary first step towards democratic control of information resources.

Co-published by Paul Soulellis, Library of the Printed Web and International Center of Photography, NY

The 10th issue of the “In My Computer” series, Profile Page presents a selection of 100 images out of a much wider project documenting the living rooms in a huge brutalist housing unit with more than 600 standardized student flats, and confronting the pictures with a screenshot of their inhabitants’ Facebook profile page. The result is a study on the “relationship between frameworks and content, uniform design and customization, conformism and originality, social control and freedom, and how it develops within the “virtual” and the “real” world”, as Domenico Quaranta writes in his intro text.

Armin Vit is the co-founder of Under Consideration with his wife Bryony Gomez-Palacio, the site behind popular blogs Brand New, FPO, and SpeakUp. In this conversation, I talk to Armin about how he started writing, why he shut down SpeakUp in 2009, why everyone is critiquing logos now, and how social media is changing the design discourse.

Kelsey Keith is the editor-in-chief of Curbed. Before that, she wrote about design and architecture for Dwell, Architizer, and a variety of other publications. In this episode, Kelsey and Jarrett talk about the late 2000s New York media landscape, cobbling together a freelance career, and her editorial vision for Curbed.

In a special one-year anniversary episode, Michael Bierut returns to the show and turn the tables to interview me. One year after I started the podcast and fifty interviews later, Michael and I talk about my own background and why I started the podcast, my graduate school experience, video essays, how the podcast has changed, and what I’ve learned about design writing over the last year.

Size Matters: Notes towards a Better Understanding of the Value, Operation and Potential of Small Visual Arts Organisations is written by Sarah Thelwall, commissioned by Common Practice, London with support from Arts Council England. The paper seeks to articulate the value of small visual arts organisations within the wider arts ecology. The paper explores the significant potential these organisations have in the present cultural landscape and economy, also detailing the operational and investment challenges they face in realising this. Finally, it advocates a reconsideration of present assessment and investment practices. Common Practice, London is an advocacy group working for the ...

Over 130 million images with the hashtag ‘selfie’ have been uploaded to the social media platform Instagram. In The Allure of the Selfie: Instagram and the New Self-Portrait, Brooke Wendt examines the significant hold that the ‘selfie’, or the digital self-portrait, has over self and society. Media theorist Vilém Flusser observed that society could become programmed to snap pictures for the sole benefit of cameras, as though under a ‘magical spell’, if photographs continued to be undecoded. Wendt examines this magical spell by analyzing users’ self-portraits on Instagram, one of the most popular contemporary platforms for image production. Marshall McLuhan’s reframing of ...

“What are you up to?” asks Worker 7: bot? virtual boyfriend in a computer-generated voice. She replies that she’s busy. As the conversation unfolds, the artist and the online worker, who may or may not be a bot, struggle to understand and connect with each other. Empathy, digital labor, and new ways to serve and care on the network are the subjects explored in Elisa Giardina Papa’s Technologies of Care, commissioned by Rhizome for the Download. Giardina Papa presents portraits of online workers in a 26MB ZIP file; six are identified as women, plus the possible bot. Each portrait is its ...

In their new work research collective Ippolita provides a critical investigation of the inner workings of Facebook as a model for all commercial social networks. Facebook is an extraordinary platform that can generate large profit from the daily activities of its users. Facebook may appear to be a form of free entertainment and self-promotion but in reality its users are working for the development of a new type of market where they trade relationships. As users of social media we have willingly submitted to a vast social, economic and cultural experiment. By critically examining the theories of Californian right-libertarians, Ippolita show ...