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 ...

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 ...

These past few years, the fairly ancient concept we call “truth” has been bandied about the place quite a bit. Our social trust barometers, for a long time calibrated with “politician” on one side and “scientist” at the other, have been thrust into stormy weather. People like Donald Trump and Richard Dawkins have buried the needle into extremes of rhetorical squall, political uproar and techno-scientific demand, operationalising belief and fact in excessive ways — destructive of both self and others. The rest of us, muddling through this other ancient concept we call “modern life”, try and poise ourselves somewhere in ...

As the revolutions across the Arab world that came to a head in 2011 devolved into civil war and military coup, representation and history acquired a renewed and contested urgency. The capacities of the internet have enabled sharing and archiving in an unprecedented fashion. Yet, at the same time, these facilities institute a globally dispersed reinforcement and recalibration of power, turning memory and knowledge into commodified and copyrighted goods. In The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows, activists, artists, filmmakers, producers, and scholars examine which images of struggle have been created, bought, sold, repurposed, denounced, and expunged. As a ...

Robotics and soft AI are bringing everyday changes both to the work field and to our free time. How does this condition reflect itself on the artistic practice? Can we humans liberate ourselves from our anthropocentric viewpoint and accept the intellective superiority of machines? Will we be able to overcome our fear of automation? In the utopian view of a fully automated production, not only work ethics should be re-thought, but also our certainties about aesthetics.

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.

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 ...

Chelsea Knight and Martine Syms Hosted by The Shandaken Project and Storm King Art Center New Windsor, NY Sunday September 6th, 2015, 3pm-evening The Center for Experimental Lectures invites you to join us sixty minutes north of New York City for our fourth annual Labor Day weekend event hosted by the Shandaken Project, for new lecture-performances by Chelsea Knight and Martine Syms. The day’s program will begin at Storm King Art Center at 3pm, and continue into the evening on the contiguous campus of The Shandaken Project at Storm King. Chelsea Knight will present an experimental walking tour of Storm King beginning at the Visitor ...

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.

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 ...