LifeHacker

Ambient.TV's Mapping CCTV around Whitehall.



Ambient.TV's Mapping CCTV around Whitehall.

Review by Rob Myers.

Two-part exercise to map CCTV cameras around Whitehall, London, within a zone covered by SOCPA (Serious and Organized Crime and Police Act 2005). A map of the hundreds of cameras in the zone was made over two days of observation. The second part involved mapping the range of one of these cameras, no. 40 in Villiers street, by intercepting its signal as it was transmitted wirelessly without encryption. As passers-by entered the marked area covered by the camera, they were alerted to the its presence and handed a copy of the map of CCTV cameras in Whitehall.

"Mapping CCTV around Whitehall", 2008, is, as its name implies, a performance of mapping Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) security cameras around the UK's parliament in London and a video record of that performance by Ambient.tv's Manu Luksch. Starting with a HAL 9000-like image of a CCTV lens, the video of "Mapping CCTV In Whitehall" has a glitchy techno aesthetic of sound and images with a post-MTV-Style Guide reportage feel. The first half consists of a recording of the police stop-and-search interviewing Luksch under anti-terrorism legislation, with a map of the area superimposed. The second half consists of CCTV views of the range of Camera number 40 being taped out, and of the people caught within those bounds. Words flash on the screen to identify the subjects of CCTV. This redeployment of the language of mass media visual persuasion opens up what we see rather than closing it down, making it a very effective encapsulation of the project's ideas and aesthetics.

Mukul Patel and Manu Luksch codirect Ambient Information Systems (AIS), a crucible for the conception and production of collaborative, interdisciplinary, and critical artworks, events, and tools. They work as artists under their own names and also as ambientTV.NET. They have a history of conceiving works that integrate curatorial and collaborative aspects (e.g., VBI), research (FACELESS and the Data Protection Act), community involvement (BOW SPACE), and hybrid media installations (ORCHESTRA OF ANXIETY). Of particular interest are concrete, contemporary issues that arise at the interface of social and technical infrastructures: access to information, privacy, surveillance. The establishment of participative processes, creation of tools, and archiving and documentation are signal features of recent projects.

VisitorsStudio wins the Grand Prize - netarts.org 2009.



VisitorsStudio is a real-time, multi-user, online arena for creative 'many to many' dialogue, interviews, networked performance and collaborative polemic. Through simple and accessible facilities, the VisitorsStudio web-based interface allows users to upload, manipulate and collage their own audio-visual files with others', to remix existing media. Providing a platform for the exploration of collective creativity for both emergent and established artists from a diverse array of geographical locations and social contexts. Designed so anyone in the world can access it from a 56k modem. Participants upload sound files and still/moving images (jpg, png, mp3, flv, swf) to a shared database, mixing and responding to each other's compositions in real-time. Individuals can also chat with each other and are located in the interface by their own dancing-cursors.

Artivistic: TURN*ON Reviewed by Gabriel Menotti.

This year's edition of Artivistic (Montreal 15-17 October), brings the fields of art, politics and academia together under the theme of TURN*ON - according to its curatorial statement, 'a fragile bridge extending, over a valley of which the depth you cannot see, to a life centered on pleasure, consciousness, togetherness, understanding, and joy'.

Article by Ricardo Ruiz

Since 2005, a series of radical conferences has taken place around Brazil, organized on a discussion list: Sub>midialogy - the art of re:volving knowledge logos by practices and disorienting practices by the immersion in sub-knowledge. Ricardo Ruiz wonders what will happen to all this creative energy now that funding has arrived.

"Some years ago, the elements (ideas, conceptions, practices, people) that compose the current (so-called) Free Culture movement were appropriated by the bureaucrat and the capitalist. The ones that made use of the technologies and available media to the creation of actions that provided the debate on new perspectives of possible social arrangements (obtained by tools such as free licenses, networks of communication, open source software), are today digested by the old apparatuses and social mechanisms that once they have used and questioned. They participated, many times unconsciously, in a "socio-professional training" in order to occupy the same functions established for the maintainers of a system that is distant from what we imagine as a possible human grouping, even more distanced from freedom." submidialogy.

A Mail-Art project across physical and digital networks towards an open exhibition at HTTP Gallery starts today

We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history.- Uncivilisation, The Dark Mountain Manifesto.

The Dark Mountain Project is `a new cultural movement for an age of global disruption.' It aims to `question the stories that underpin our failing civilisation, to craft new ones for the age ahead and to write clearly and honestly about our true place in the world.' Do It With Others (DIWO) at the Dark Mountain is a cultural collaboration for this age. "Uncivilisation," the Dark Mountain Manifesto, calls for a cultural response to our current predicament. Its challenge is offered to network-minded artists, technologists, writers and activists as a provocation - to work together to re-envision the narratives and infrastructures that govern our relationships with the natural world, and how they might be unravelled and rewoven to reconfigure our place in it. As "Uncivilisation" concludes, `The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop.'

Artists, technologists, writers, activists and all other living beings are invited to correspond with each other across physical and digital mail networks. Transmissions and missives may take the form of texts, images, sound, net movies, objects, software programmes and instructions and will be assembled for an exhibition of all outrages, gifts, offers, overtures and bids offering new myths and maps for future uncivilisation at HTTP Gallery.

SOUND ECOLOGIES: LISTENING IN THE CITY

Wednesday 18 November 2009, 10am-4pm
Department of Music, City University London, Northampton Square, London EC1V 0HB

A day of presentations, participatory workshops and informal performance around themes of urban sound, networked sound, locative media and acoustic ecology - the relationship between living beings and their environment, as mediated by sound. Featuring Furtherfield.org (Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett), and guest speakers Stanza, Peter Cusack, Ximena Alarcón and Pedro Rebelo.

The event is free, and open to anyone interested, including musicians, artists, curators, technologists; ecologically inclined thinkers, makers and doers of all kinds.

Perhaps I am not the only one out there who feels like Dr. James Xavier in the film called The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. also known as X made in 1963. "Dr. James Xavier is a world renowned scientist experimenting with human eyesight. He devises a drug, that when applied to the eyes, enables the user to see beyond the normal realm of our sight (ultraviolet rays etc.) it also gives the user the power to see through objects. Xavier tests this drug on himself, when his funding is cut off. As he continues to test the drug on himself, Xavier begins to see, not only through walls and clothes, but through the very fabric of reality!" This film had an mazing effect on me as a young boy. It communicated to me that there was more to this world than the structures we are used to living by, metaphorically and physically.

Review of UBERMORGEN.COM - MEDIA HACKING VS. CONCEPTUAL ART.

Review by Rob Myers of the new glossy hardback publication 'UBERMORGEN.COM - MEDIA HACKING VS. CONCEPTUAL ART' spanning a decade of work by the dynamic duo Ubermorgen.com (Hans Bernhard and lizvlx). A comprehensive and informative study of their conceptual media hacking adventures, including images, essays and interviews by Inke Arns, Florian Cramer, Raffael Dorig, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Peter Weibel and others. Edited by Alessandro Ludovico of Neural.it, designed by Bernhard Faiss.