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 ...

This week Miguel Prado and Mattin talk with Mat Dryhurst: interdependent polymath from the Solarpunk intelligentsia. We discuss the pandemic effects of music streaming platforms, the difficult balance between pragmatic and normative approaches, and the Russian doll-hell that is twitter.

Ulus Baker (1960 – 2007) was a Turkish-Cypriot sociologist, philosopher, and public intellectual. He was born in Ankara, Turkey in 1960. He studied Sociology at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, where he taught as a lecturer until 2004. Baker wrote prolifically in influential Turkish journals and made some of the first Turkish translations of various works of Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, and other contemporary political philosophers. His profuse and accessible work and the novelty of the issues he enthusiastically introduced to Turkish-speaking intellectual circles, earned him a widely spread positive reputation in early age. He died in 2007 in ...

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.

Here is a definition of paraphrase: (1) A rewording of something written or spoken by someone else, esp. with the aim of making the sense clearer; a free rendering of a passage. And here is a paraphrase of the definition of paraphrase: (1a) A restatement of someone else’s writing or speech, particularly to clarify the meaning; an approximate version. Can there be a definition, in turn, of paraphrase (1a)? No: a definition captures the general linguistic potential of a word or phrase, abstracted from any particular statement. A paraphrase reprises a particular statement, as (1a) reprises (1). For the same reason, there cannot be ...

Social media has penetrated every aspect of our lives, yet no amount swiping or liking seems to satisfy us. Media theorist and internet critic Geert Lovink tries to overcome the deadlock of platform capitalism.

What would an ideal internet experience be like? Joanne McNeil explores the 30-year history of online life—the communities and identities and hazards—and imagines how we, the users, might recover some of the potential of our technologies.

Lives of Data maps the historical and emergent dynamics of big data, computing, and society in India. Data infrastructures are now more global than ever before. In much of the world, new sociotechnical possibilities of big data and artificial intelligence are unfolding under the long shadows cast by infra/structural inequalities, colonialism, modernization, and national sovereignty. This book offers critical vantage points for looking at big data and its shadows, as they play out in uneven encounters of machinic and cultural relationalities of data in India’s socio-politically disparate and diverse contexts. Lives of Data emerged from research projects and workshops at the ...

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, ...

The catalogue of the exhibition Networked Disruption: Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and Business curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli and presented in spring 2015 at Škuc Gallery in Ljubljana and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka. The exhibition involved actors who directly engage with hacktivism, art, civil liberties and social networking to expose the contradictions of capitalistic logics and power systems and operate at the convergence of business and art, becoming key to unleashing the paradoxes of the social networking phenomenon. In the business world, a disruption is an unexpected innovation that comes from within the market itself. In the ...

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.

New Models speaks with MAT DRYHURST & KEI KREUTLER, two figures central to Berlin’s diverse crypto scene, to unpack the possible impact of Facebook’s Libra coin (provided it succeeds). From the Bitcoin villages of Switzerland to Libra as an arm of US foreign policy, this episode takes the coin’s tagline at face value asking, _were_ everyone to be invited the the global economy… what would that look like, how would that actually be achieved, and what would the fall out be?

We speak with High Snobiety editor-in-chief, THOM BETTRIDGE about content production, retail circulation, and celebrity in 2020. Thom has extensive experience working in media and creative consulting, including, among other things, having served as the executive editor of Interview magazine and of 032c, as well as the managing editor for the creation of the SSENSE editorial platform. He is also very knowledgeable about shoes. Note: This episode was recorded in May prior to the murder of George Floyd and the unrest that followed.

Dubbed the “busiest man on the internet,” polymath TIM HWANG, currently a research fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) at Georgetown University, visits the NM pod to discuss his new book, Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet (FSG, 2020). We also talk GPT-3, predictive policing, DIY platforms, and founding the first-ever conference on memes.

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 ...