OI – series premiered at  [DAM Berlin] ‘Reply All’ solo show, Jan 27 – March 10,  2012 4 unique pieces 50 x 5 x 160 cm LED signs, wooden rod, wooden board Aram Bartholl 2012 Dedicated to the Open Internet! (…it s really hard to capture the awesome brightness of these panels …)

  How did we track the crossfader during the Art Hack Day?!? ZOMG!! So many questions! The answer is very simple! We used a VCA Mixer. Specifically the Vestax PMC-07 Pro. Because you know… we’re pro like that. I hear you asking now, “But, sir! WTF is a VCA Mixer?!?!” Well, I’m glad you asked. Allow me to explain: VCA or Voltage Controlled Amplifier means that instead of sending the audio signal to the crossfader the mixer instead sends a voltage which in turn controls the volume level for each channel. This makes determining the position of the fader very easy; simply measure the voltage for each channel. In the case of the PMC-07 Pro the voltage that is sent to the crossfader is 10V DC. We used an Arduino Uno to monitor the voltage. It maxes out at 5V. Not wanting to explode the Arduino with 10V we used a simple voltage divider on each channel utilizing two (four total) 1 megaohm resistors. We would have been a lot better off using 100 kilohm resistors. Using an opamp would have been even more betterer but… we didn’t have any of those.

Because we’re so damn pro and didn’t have any of the parts to make a proper Y cable we just soldered everything to the crossfader.

Go team awesome!

  Yes, I hear you. You’re wondering, “That’s all well and good, but how am I supposed to hook it all up?!?”

  Simple! Follow these amazeball instructions. The PMC-07 Pro uses a 4 pin connector on the crossfader. The outside pins are power and ground the middle pins are for the channels. Use a volt meter to determine which pin is power and which pin is ground. Plug ground into one of the ground pins on the Arduino and the two center pins from the fader through a voltage divider and into two analog pins on the Arduino. We used A0 and A1. You do not need to hook anything up to the 10V power pin on the mixer. Got it?

  Here I drew you a picture too! CLICK TO EMBIGGEN

The Arduino sketch we used can be found here. In summation here is a list of items you must procure to do this:

Vestax PMC-07 Pro mixer (Any VCA mixer will do, just drop the voltage to 5V or less.) Four 100 kilohm resistors An Arduino A proper Y cable for the PMC-07 Pro. Instructable for building it is here Arduino sketch found here

Build your Y cable. Make a couple voltage dividers. Hook it up like the picture above and BLAMO!

Vaknade i morse och kunde inte sluta tänka på vad som egentligen menas med “cybersecurity”. Kanske hade jag drömt något om det? Cybersecurity har en slags neutral klang hos sig, som om det handlade enbart om åtgärder mot virus eller att se till att obehöriga inte får tillgång till datorsystem. Men jag kunde inte skaka av mig känslan av att något mer står på spel. Detta är mina försök att utröna detta. Tack till IRC för diskussioner som hjälpte fram distinktionerna!

Problemet med cyber security, förstått som “cyberspace security”, är att cyberspace inte existerar1. Det finns ingen digital dualism. Eller omvänt uttryckt, cyberspace är överallt. Det är något vi alltid befinner oss i vare sig vi för tillfället är påkopplade eller avkopplade. Därmed blir vi kvarlämnade med endast *security – strävan efter att radera alla störningsmoment i ett samhälle där allting kontrolleras av datorstödda system. Cyber i cyberspace refererar som bekant till cybernetics, vilket är vetenskapen om “command and control” inom formella system. Cybersecurity strävar sålunda efter ett samhälle där varje command åtföljs av en control utan störningsmoment på så vis att kommandot med säkerhet uppnår den önskade effekten. Med andra ord finns en risk att cybersecurity exanderar till att skydda mot allt som riskerar att störa de globala flödena – så kallad flow contol.

Om cyber expanderar till att omfatta samhället som helhet, finns det då någon gräns för vad som kan uppfattas som hot mot cybersecurity? Det finns uppenbarligen ingen sådan spatial gräns, eftersom hot mot cybersecurity kan uppstå varsomhelst i ett samhälle med allnärvarande cybersystem. Däremot finns det en topologisk(?) gräns. Cyberhot innefattar alltid hot som sker inom ett system. Ett cyberhot kan aldrig vara externt, utan bygger på något slags intrång av en extern aktör eller en omvandling av en intern aktör från en brukare till en hotfull agent. Exempelvis är det inte ett cyberhot om någon spränger ett datorstyrt kraftverk, däremot om ett virus i datorsystemet orsakar haveri. Den efterföljande förödelsen kan dock vara exakt den samma. Hur hanteras då ett externt hot mot ett datorstött system? Det faller under den vanliga anti-terrorismen. Det ska visa sig att anti-terrorism och cybersecurity kan ses som två sidor av samma mynt.

Men först tillbaks till detta med extern och intern i förhållande till system. Som explosionsexemplet visade har detta inte att göra med att spatialt vara innanför eller utanför systemets fysiska manifestation. Explotionen förstör systemet fullkomligt och håller sig därför inte alls till någon omringande fysisk gräns. Innanför och utanför ska istället förstås systemteoretiskt. I Luhmanns systemteori kan innanför ersättas med begreppet information. Information för Luhmann är inte något som existerar “där ute”. Istället är det något som systemet självt skapar. Något blir information för systemet när det omvandlar extern stimuli – retningar – till något som blir begripligt för systemet. På så vis kan Luhmann påstå att samhällen inte består av människor utan av kommunikation. Visserligen kan samhället vara beroende av att människor skapar den här kommunikationen, men det gör de inte en del av samhället. På samma vis är kablarna och servrarna nödvändiga för cybersystmet, men de är inte en del av det. Därför måste ett cyberhot vara något som cybersystemet förstår som information. Detta kan förstås både vara ett virus som tar sig in via internet, eller en anställd som har tillgång till systemet som trycker på fel knappar.

Så långt har vi alltså ställt upp att: - Interna hot – cybersecurity - Externa hot – anti-terror

Dessutom har det konstaterats att dessa olika hot inte är hot för olika typer av system. Det finns inte speciella cybersystem i samhället, utan alla samhälliga system har en mer eller mindre portion “cyber-aspekter” hos sig. Istället är det två slags hot som samma typer av system (eller samma typ av infrastruktur, mer korrekt). Är det här dock en vattentät definition eller finns det fortfarande oklarheter. Vad är internt och externt för ett system? Går det alltid att avgöra vad ett system gör till infomation eller inte. Kan vi tänka oss ett hack som gör att denna definitinon inte håller? Detta är lite kanske lite hollywoodmässigt, men tänk ett hack som går ut på att ett system hettas upp på en viss punkt som gör att det producerar ett error som får systemet att flippa ur. Är det terrorism eller cyberattack enligt denna defintion? Är uppdelningen mellan information och energi absolut eller en fråga om konvention? Det hela kompliceras ytterligare av att cybersystem inte bara ska förstås som datorsystem. I själva verket är de i de flesta verkliga fall hybrider av datorsystem och precisa instruktioner för mänsklig agens, alltså protokoll för beteende. En av de vanliga hackermetoderna – social engineering – vittnar inte minst om det. De villkor under vilka en säkerhetsvakt ska släppa in eller inte släppa in en person i serverhallen är lika mycket en del av systemet som om det vore ett kodlås där. Social engineering skulle alltså vara en cyberattack, dock vore det inte en cyberattack att klubba ner vakten och ta nycklarna. Även om utfallet i båda fallen är att man kommer in i serverrummet. Hur är det med en kortslutning förresten? En kortslutning kan sabotera ett system externt på samma sätt som en sprängladdning kan göra det. Men en kortslutning kan också producera information för systemet, t.ex. skicka ut “1” till en annan komponent i systemet istället för “0”. Kanske är gränserna definitionsmässigt absolut skiljda, men i praktiken kan det kvitta om det är ett internt eller externt hot mot systemet – effekten blir densamma. Välkomnar kommentarer om detta!

Hittils alltså en början till en arbetsdefinition av cybersecurity och cyberattacker. Vad det får för praktisk inverkan får gärna diskuteras här nedan och blir kanske frågan för ett framtida inlägg.

  Tillägg om cyberspace: Cyberspace som term för internet idag kan både avfärdas som ontologiskt felaktig och som historiskt felaktig (vilket tas upp här). Det historiska avfärdandet består i att för tidiga datoranvändare var verkligen internet en anna plats, helt skiljd från deras övriga liv, men att detta nu inte längre är sant. Detta verkar vara grunden för William Gibsons avfärdande av termen idag. Den ontologiska kritiken däremot syftar till att internet aldrig varit skiljt från övriga samhället, även om det kunde verka så för dessa datoranvändare. Skiljelinjen går nog vid om man väljer att ta användaren eller systemets objektiva uppbyggdnad som utgångspunkt.↩

  I’m ecstatic to announce my new position at Adafruit Industries, heading up the wearable electronics group. It feels great to finally be able to tell you all about my new chapter starting today. Here’s my farewell post on MAKE with a little recap of my greatest hits in the four years I made CRAFT videos, blogged my socks off, and co-hosted Make: Live.

I made a little VHX playlist, the soundtrack to rocking my transition. See y’all around the web!

Drop your files at the [DAM] Berlin deaddrop !!

A piece by Julika Nehb  about my solo show at [DAM] Berlin in Kunst Magazin http://www.kunst-magazin.de/aram-bartholl-analoger-aufruhr/ (german)

Aram Bartholl – Analoger Aufruhr Publiziert am 31. Januar 2012 von Julika Nehb

Aram Bartholl: Map, seit 2006, Installation im öffentlichen Raum, Skulptur, 6 x3,50 x 0,35 m, Courtesy Galerie DAM Berlin.

Sie befinden sich: Hier! Wie eine Welt aussehen kann, in der virtuelle Zeichen das Erscheinungsbild der Wirklichkeit prägen, und nicht umgekehrt, ist eine Frage, der Aram Bartholl in seiner aktuellen Ausstellung “Reply All” in der Galerie [DAM] Berlin nachgeht. Diese ist im Herbst von der Tucholskystraße in die Neue-Jakobsstraße umgezogen – und auch ohne überdimensionale, von googlemaps inspirierte Ortsangaben zu finden. Bartholls Arbeiten üben nicht nur einen rein ästhetischen Reiz aus, sie laden verspielt-humorvoll zu Grenzgängen zwischen Online- und Offlinewelt ein. Dabei schwingt das Bewusstsein potentieller politischer Wirksamkeit stets mit. Konsequent bedient sich Bartholl daher performativ ausgerichteter künstlerischer Formen wie Interventionen im öffentlichen Raum, Performances und Ready-Mades.

Aram Bartholl: DeadDrops, seit 2010, Urbane Intervention, Courtesy Galerie DAM Berlin

Der digitale Datenaustausch zwischen Unternehmen wird unmöglich, wenn Bartholl USB-Sticks in Gebäudewände einmauert: das vermittelt die Arbeit “DeadDrops”. Nicht nur um physisch erlebbare Entschleunigung, sondern um die Entdigitalisierung des Digitalen geht es dem Künstler: “Im Netz entwickelt sich alles extrem schnell. Ich habe das Bedürfnis, etwas zu schaffen, was sich um dieses Thema dreht, aber trotzdem Bestand hat”. Auch zu netzpolitischen Phänomenen wie der Internet-Guerilla-Bewegung “Anonymous” nimmt Bartholl Stellung. Jeder Besucher der Ausstellung kann selbst eine Guy-Fawkes-Maske herstellen und bekommt dadurch die Möglichkeit, Teil der Bewegung zu werden – oder zumindest mit dem Gedanken daran zu spielen: In der “Anonymous”-Bewegung spiegelt sich die Idee eines freien, netzbasierten Informations- und Kreativitätskollektivs, das ohne hierarchische Organisation, ohne determinierte Identität politische Handlungsfähigkeit demonstrieren kann.

Aram Bartholl demonstriert bei der Performance “How to vacuum Form” die Herstellung der Guy-Fawkes -Masken.Foto: Julika Nehb Das Werk des in Bremen geborenen Bartholl wurde 2011 durch eine Ausstellung im MoMA geadelt. Die Ausstellung in Berlin läuft noch bis zum 10.3.2012. Galerie [DAM] Berlin, Neue Jakobsstrasse 6-7, 10179 Berlin-Mitte, Di-Fr 12-18h, Sa 12-16h. by Julika Nehb  about my solo show at [DAM] Berlin in Kunst Magazin http://www.kunst-magazin.de/aram-bartholl-analoger-aufruhr/

A piece about Dust on Kill Screen by Michelle Young http://killscreendaily.com/articles/block-quotes-dust-dust

Block Quotes: Dust to Dust

By Michelle Young

It might be easy to question the logic of building a 1:1 scale model of a Counter-Strike map out in the desert (read: life-size!). But for Aram Bartholl, this is a natural progression of his work that explores the permeable line between online and offline worlds. What’s even more remarkable is that he’s been doing this since before social media became our zeitgeist. Dust, which will be built this year with a commission from Rhizome, goes beyond elevating popular culture into the realm of art. Bartholl’s project questions  the physical nature of reality and highlights the moment of discomfort that occurs when something in the digital world infiltrates real space. In a 2004 public installation, Bartholl made replicas of the recognizable wooden crates from Counter-Strike’s “de_dust” (or “Dust”) map, highlighting their change in function from a packing medium in real life to a strategic and spatial mechanism for a competitive shooter. At the same time however, like the environment of “Dust” itself, the crates were “generic, duplicatable and locationless,” underscoring the repetitive elements of game design. In 2006, Bartholl began dropping oversized Google Map markers—a signifier of our tech-enabled lives—into real spaces. In doing so he whimsically acknowledged the revolutionary shift Google has placed on how we perceive location, something the company would later repeat with architecture (Google 3D), cities (Google Street View), and now building interiors (Google Interior View). “The goal of the Google Map intervention is to elicit an unsettling feeling,” Bartholl says. “You know [the Google Map marker] so well, but it doesn’t belong there.” In 2010’s Dead Drops, USB sticks embedded into walls required you to physically attach your laptop to access and share files. Bartholl says Dead Drops was partially about making it an “adventure to go back outside,” reviving the surprise of not knowing what you will find. Dust takes this all further: it’s about placing you into the online world, but in a physically real place. It’s a reversal of the Google Marker—you may know the space of Dust well, but you don’t belong there. The project is ultimately less about identity or belonging, however, than a shared experience in popular culture. At the height of its popularity, “Dust” was the most-played first-person shooter map in the world.

Is Counter-Strike’s “Dust,” tested and tweaked repeatedly for navigability, lines of sight, and timing, actually more real than today’s generic retail megaprojects or cities like Dubai?

“So many people have been to the same worlds in computer games that it becomes cultural heritage at some point … and why not build a museum or memorial to space which only exists on computer screens?” he asks. Dust also marks a certain moment in the evolution of videogames. In his Rhizome proposal, Bartholl writes that unlike games today, with their endless terrain, “game spaces of the 1990s were still limited in size due to graphic card and processor power limitations. A respectively small and simple map like ‘de_dust’ offered a high density of team play with repetitive endless variations.” Finally, Dust is a commentary on the artificiality of real spaces. Is Counter-Strike’s “Dust,” tested and tweaked repeatedly for navigability, lines of sight, and timing, actually more real than today’s generic retail megaprojects or cities like Dubai? Unlike elsewhere in the online world, Bartholl says that in a game space, “space becomes a very present quality. There’s a plot but you’re free to go in many directions. You have to figure out where to go, and once you’ve been at that space, you remember it.” Furthermore, it’s more difficult to passively take in cues because we’re viewing on a 2D plane. As such, “architecture is a very important quality in that it controls the game very much. You need to recall every centimeter in these game maps,” Bartholl says. Equally fascinating is reading about the creation of “Dust” from its designer David Johnston, who admits the map was a combination of “thievery and luck,” inspired by screenshots from the then-unreleased Team Fortress 2 and built one room at a time. Bartholl also sees a lot of cliched architecture in game design, citing World of Warcraft, and doesn’t feel that gaming architecture has kept up with the development of its action dynamics. “I’m still waiting for the point where ‘realism’ has been achieved and games become more abstract again,” he says . To that end, Dust isn’t going to be an exact replica of the game map—it’s going to be deliberately constructed from concrete, without any distinctive colors or textures, to create that level of abstraction. His hope is that gaming may have a real place in high culture. Bartholl would love to see a famous architect like Zaha Hadid designing videogames. Currently building models for Dust at different scales with architects and engineers, he hopes to set it up in a remote place—in the desert in Saudi Arabia or China. He wants people to have to travel to see Dust, and hopes the site can “become a mecca, a quasi-religious place for the gaming scene.” Block Quotes covers the architecture of videogames and their relationship with the real world (and vice-versa). Michelle Young is the founder of Untapped Cities, a website about urban architecture and design. She holds a degree in art history from Harvard and is an urban planning masters candidate at Columbia University. You can find her on Twitter at @untappedmich and @untappedcities.  by Michelle Young released on: http://killscreendaily.com/articles/block-quotes-dust-dust

Last semester I taught a ‘How to … ‘- class at University Cologne, as part of the ‘What’ next?’ symposium/series  at Institut für Kunst & Kunsttheorie. Selected student works bel0w. Congrats everyone! It was fun!!

by Bastian Hoffmann

by Philipp Schorlemer

by Olga Gubar

by Darja Shatalova

whokilledtheinter.net,  great piece by Jerome Saint-Clair a.k.a. @_01010101

This text is featured in “The Reader - North/South, River Run” produced by The School of Photography at the University of Gothenburg. The book is edited by Kerstin Hamilton and put together from lectures given at a course with the same name as the title of the book in the summer of 2011. It features among others: Annika von Hauswolff, Karl Palmås and a cartoon about Fredrik Svensk. My lecture on hacking and photography was held a sunny day in a park in Gothenburg

Introduction The term hacker is today a widely used and multi-faceted term that mean very different things to different people. Some associate it only with credit card scams and breaking into computer systems. For others, it is a label to attach to one’s activity to give signal that it is unconventional, edgy and smart. To understand how all these meaning can be attached to a single word, I will make an exposé of the history of hacking to see how the different meaning has been attached to the word at different periods.

The history of hacking

60’s The roots of hacking can be found in American academic institutions like MIT in the 50’s and 60’s. At this time, a new kind of academic subculture grows in the student clubs. It is a culture of people who are very brilliant but who don’t care about grades, going to classes or getting academic carreers. Students who follow the institutionalised academic path are called ‘tools’ and are frowned upon. Instead these people are obsessed with technical systems such as managing the electrical switches of complicated railroad models.

Computers at this time consist of the mainframe computer; a single, room sized machine of which students and researchers have only limited access time and whose rules and regulations are closely guarded by the bureaucrat technicians called ‘the priesthood’. Only programs that are part of serious research are allowed to be run on the mainframe.

The system obsessed students were desperate to get their hands on the mainframe and would sneak in at night to run their own programs without the permission of the priests. The practice of hacking emerges here as a way to accomplish a certain computing task with much less resources than when using the prescripted way. To make the most out of the limited time, the students had to learn to use the computers even more efficiently than the operators themselves.

The first use of the term hack was a name for a typical college prank; like dressing all the trees on campus in aluminium foil over night. Here is where hacking gets associated with tricks, humour and the unexpected. Also for the computer users the term hack was associated with tricks such as putting two wires together with tape to make the machine do something that was not in the manual. At first hacking was used as a degratory term such as “that is MERELY a hack” but later it was seen as something positive. Someone who was able to get something to work with merely a hack was someone who understood the system better than the people who followed the manual, perhaps even better than the constructor of the system. Even today many hacks is about accomplishing a certain task by consuming much less resources than the prescribed way, or making more of the resources than you were supposed to; such as turning discarded hardware into useful machines.The hack has become a democratisation of technology, at least for the one who is skillful enough to perform it; someone who is able and willing to put in the hours can shortcut established paths for gaining resources, influence and power.

70’s The next stop of the history of hacking is the 70’s with the revolution of personal computing. What is interesting in this period is that computers had become a symbol of personal liberation of the kind that the American hippie counter-coulture movement had been trying to bring about. Only ten year earlier, when the counter-culture was launched as the free speech movement at Berkeley, computers were seen as the enemy. They were considered bureaucratic machines that turned individuals into nothing more than a record in a database. They were looked upon as dehumanizing control machines associated with the bureacracy of the American state apparatus. A decade later the situation is reversed. This can partly be subscribed to changes in the technology itself with computers becoming smaller and not requiring huge resources to build. The PC revolution was spawned at amateur computer clubs such as the homebrew computing club where people like Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates were participating. But as Fred Turner points out in “From Counterculture to Cyberculture” (2006), a smaller computer does not necessarily make it personal, in fact it can be a tool to integrate the individual even more closely to the corporation. A cultural shift in the view of systems in the counter-culture movement was also necessary. To understand this we have to go back 25 years again, even before the original hackers at MIT. Back to the final stages of the second world war and the birth of cybernetics - a discipline with military origins which later became a symbol of counter-culture.

40’s The father of cybernetics is Norbert Wiener. A mathematician who during the Second World War was given the task of contructing a system to increase the ability to shoot down moving airplanes. To do this, Wiener constructed a feedback system where the human aimed at the airplane; the system calculated the speed of the airplane and thus the trajectory it needed to shoot in order to hit the plane. As we can see, already at the birth of cybernetics there is a coupling of human and machine: the human cognition of seeing the airplane and the system cognition of calculating the speed. A feedback system constantly gathers information about its environment and can therefor adjust itself and adjust the environment until it comes into balance. Cybernetics does not distinguish between humans and machines, they are both components in the feedback system where everything is turned into information for the system: they are both information processing devices. Here, one can see both the association with cybernetics systems reducing humans to machines as well as how the coupling of human and machine can enhance the freedom of the human, enhance her power to act. Cybernetics became hugely influencial partly thanks to the ability to use the new computers to calculate system behaviours and process information. It was launched as a discipline that would unite all other academic discipline and the cyberneticians organised conferences and dining clubs where technicians, researchers from the natural and social sciences — such as biologists, physicists, anthopologists and sociologists — were invited. Everything could now be seen as a feedback system of information processing.

People begun to see cybernetic feedback systems in everything from technical to social and biological phenomena. For example the idea of an “eco-system” — that nature is a system balancing itself through feedback between animals, plants and climates — comes from cybernetics. The political implications of cybernetics also had a huge impact. Cyberneticians saw a human world constructed of simple, linear systems with no feedback where command and control flow from top to bottom. This was the cause of social unrest, planning errors and chaos in society. A cybernetic feedback system on the other hand could collect information about society and the impact various decisions had and thus recalibrate itself in order to remain stable.

These broad gatherings of people from different disciplines under the banner of cybernetics eventually reached some people associated with the counter-cultural movement such as Steward Brand and Ken Kesey. They were involved in the growing movement of communes in the US, a movement that had rejected traditional mass movement political action and turned to autonomous communes where new kinds of technology and tranformation of conciousness would bring about societal change. Central to this view was that everything was connected. Steward Brand even named his magazine “The Whole Earth Catalogue” and legend has it that he was influencial in having convinced NASA to allow Apollo 17 to turn back towards earth and take the photograph known as “The Blue Marble”, the first photograph that capture the whole earth at once, which Brand thought would provoce a planetary shift in conciousness.

Brand, Kesey and their peers started to bring in the idea of the feedback system into the movement. They saw the feedback system as a non-hierarchical process where every entity was a peer that communicated to other peers. If everything is a feedback system of information, it means that everyone and everything is connected and co-dependent. In their cybernetic view, power was located within the system itself, not in a particular individual. Brand, Kesey and the others started to introduce the ideas from cybernetics in the form of cultural experiments. One such experiment that was popular was to gather a dousin or so people in a circle. In the middle were cut up water hoses entangled in a mess, just as many as there were particpants. Each participant grabbed two ends of the hoses and put one against the ear and one against the mouth. Then they began to listen and speak and start conversations through the hoses, but the one that spoke to your ear was most likely not the same person you spoke to through the hose at your mounth. What emerged was a conversation at the level of the system rather than one between individuals. Experiments inspired by cybernetic feedback systems thus became a way to explore consciousness, identity, art and social arrangements. It is not hard to see how these experiments are echoed in the utopian promises of the personal computer and the world wide web. They would be the tools that was thought to bring about a playful, non-hierarchical, expressive and harmonized humanity made up by empowered individuals. We can see a difference compared to the early hackers at MIT who were interested in systems as an external object of study. Now, freedom was associated with becoming a part of the system yourself. One can debate whether this really is a form of freedom or whether a human more tightly coupled with the cybernetic system just becomes even more controlled, although the speed, intensity and acceleration of the system can give a sensation that can feel like freedom since the system flows without resistance.

Here we have two versions of control operating. In the simple system you have the pyramid structure of power where power flows from an elite at the top down to the masses. The masses are limited and restricted by the despot at the top of the pyramid. Cybernetics as very different from this model since it also stipulates that feedback should flow from every part of system and be able to influence it. This seamingly democratic model is what appealed to the counter-culture. But this cybernetic feedback is also another form of power where every entity of the system has to produce information about its behaviour in order for it to be fed into the system. The lack of obvious restrictions comes at a price, which is that all movements must be registred by and fed into the cybernetic system. In today discussions on political power we are precisely located between these two. And we don’t know exactly which power to trust. Surveillence society or despotic society?

80’s After this detour we are back in the Personal Computer revulotion. Companies like Apple, Microsoft and Oracle are formed, promising a new computing era away from the mainframe era of IBM. Computers are put in everyone’s hands and for the first time it becomes a matter of consumer electronics. This also means that commercial rules start to apply to computer enthusiasts. But once again, the hackers have no intention of following the rules. Games and software are now sold with copy protection to prevent people from sharing the information. And here we see the advent of cracking copy protection. It becomes a competition of skill among hackers to crack new forms of copy protection before everyone else, to show that you are the most skillful. The challenges of this lead to the formation of hacker groups — people working together to crack games faster than a single person could. Around this cracking of copy protection, a whole subculture is born. The cracked games are distributed with an intro showing which hacker group cracked the game and this intro features animated computer graphics and computer generated music. Because cracked games are distributed on floppy discs that do not have much space on them, another skill competition arises from making as advanced animations and music as possible using as little memory as possible. This so called “demo scene” grows quickly during the 80’s and leads to huge “demo parties” where animation, music and programming skills are shown off in battles with others. The hacker becomes a media figure at this time and is often featured in dramatic stories about computer security breaches, credit card scams and large-scale piracy. This will eventually force a distinction in the hacker community between hackers and crackers where hackers say that they are improving systems while the crackers are breaking them.

So far, one thing is missing from this picture which is associated to the word hacker by anyone today - the network. Computers had been networked a long time with the origins of the internet stretching back to Arpanet in the 50’s. But the first home-made computer networks are formed in the 80’s using modems over the telephone line. People start to set up BBS’s in their homes. The Bulletin Board Systems was an early forefather to the modern internet forum (and perhaps the first digital “social media”). When you call someone’s BBS you get back a bulletin board with information, files and messages left by other people (unless the line is busy by someone else calling, of course…). On these BBS’es, the first virtual communities start to form (for example The Well featuring a certain Steward Brand). But there is a catch. In order to reach the coolest BBS’es and network with the best people you often have to call long distancne, and long distance is expensive. Once again the hacker steps forth and plays by different rules than the others. This is the era of phreaking.

Telephone lines at this time was strictly analog and operated by control tones being sent to the telephone switches. When you punched in the numbers on the keypad of a pay phone, all you were doing was sending tones with different frequencies to the telephone switch, telling it how to connect you. As a coincidence, it was found that a whistle that came as a gift in the “Captain Crunch” cereals had the precise frequency that was necessary - 2600hz - to signal to the switch that you were allowed to make a free long distance call. Soon, all hackers were calling each other for free all over the world. Phreaking was an essential component for allowing the virtual communities to be able to span the entire globe and dramatically increase the level of knowledge and information exchange in the hacker community.

90’s The 90’s sees the birth of severals ways in which hacking becomes political when the world wide web and profilation of computers in corporations and state institutions makes it an important infrastructure of society.

Free software, although it started in 1983 when Richard Stallman started the GNU-project to develop a free operating system, did not really kick off until the early 90’s when Linus Torvalds develops the Linux kernel. Free software features a legal hack — the GPL license — which states that a GPL licensed code can be used, copied and modified freely by anyone for any purpose as long as it retains the GPL license of any software that uses its code. This prevented free code to be locked in by corporations and forced anyone using code snippets from free software to also release their software with the GPL license.

The 90’s also see the birth of another very excplicitly political hacker movement that goes by the name hacktivism. This was created by political activists who tried to transport methods from street politics — such as demonstration, blockades, strikes and sit-ins — to the digital realm. The most famous of the early examples is the Electronic Disturbance Theatre who in 1994 did a DDOS-attack against the website of the Mexican Government in solidarity with the Zapatistas. However, apart from the political rethorics, one can question if they really accomplished something new. Both the political terminology they used and what they did with computers was standardised use. But still, we can see the hacktivist legacy echoed in the actions of groups like Anonymous today.

And as the culmination of the cyberpolitical 90’s, former Grateful Dead member, now cyberevangalist John Perry Barlow writes “A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace”(1996). There cyberspace is declared to be a new frontier of freedom where the laws and norms of the industrial society have no reach and identities and communities were formed without the restrictions of the flesh.

Parallell to the cyberpositive political evangelists, internet entrepreneurship explodes as the web becomes a commercial sphere, all reaching its climax with the dot com bubble bursting in early 2000.

2000’s So what happened in the last decade? Hacking became everyones tool. Little tricks spreading like wild fire across the internet. Unlock your phone, bypass the registration of the software, copy the copy-protected files. You don’t need skills or personal contacts anymore. Even your grand mother is file-sharing. The model of hacking and open source became general models of organising and taking action, called “abstract hacktivism” by Palmås and von Busch. As computing spreads to become the fabric of society, no area is far from being hacked. The expansion of computation into every domain of life makes it possible to view everything as code, as a computer system that can be manipulated. Every area of society can utilize free sharing of information and non-hierarchical networks. It also works the other way around; code underlies everyting in society. Lawrence Lessig says that this means that today, “code is law”; the code sets the boundaries of what actions are possible. A clear parallel to the cybernetic vision of one discipline to rule them all; then, feeback system, now, software and networks.

At the same time, the internet became a militarized critical infrastructure with the last years even seeing the emergence of such a retro-sounding term as “cyberwar”. The dual character of cybernetics as military and counter-culture at the same time is echoed in the present condition.

Situated cybernetics Hacking in art opens up vast new domains of exploration and non-standardized use of tools and situations, but it comes at a price. To introduce the hacker perspective into an artform like photography runs the risk of reducing projects to technical cleverness and put focus only on the process and the resources it makes use of. The only lasting result is a documentation of this process trying to represent it, which by definition is inferior to the now mythical hack. There is also a risk of becoming enchanted by the seemingly unlimited possibilities of the hacker.

The practices of hacking seem to reveal great potentials for intervening in and subverting systems, but perhaps this is an illusionary empowerment only illustrating that the real powers have moved elsewhere. That the control over systems has moved to lower and more complex layers of the technological society leaving hackers and other creative types with a sandbox where they are free to play around on conditions set by the network owners who even encourage a creative participation as a free generator fo content for the networks.

It is therefor a need to be careful when approaching hacker practices. Because, what can be gained from introducing a hacker perspective is a close engagement with the material objects, systems and structures that make up the environment of the creative practice and by that gain a new perspective on its aesthetics. Technological systems can limit, direct and control human experience and perception, allowing only part of the human potential to be expressed. However, technology also has the power to intensify the human senses, making them see and feel more than they would without it, making them able to perceive and touch objects that would otherwise have been withdrawn, below or above the threshold of what the human sensory apparatus can experience. The benefit of looking at a creative practice from a cybernetic lens could therefor be to shine new light on the human and the human potential rather than revealing technological systems.

There are two oppesed but intertwined storiess of cybernetics still present today. One is about subsuming all of reality to one feedback system, reducing everything to information for the system, a cybernetics of a control and surveillence society where every movement becomes registred data for the system. The other is about cybernetics as a technique for letting go of control. Of coping with the complexity of a given situation without reducing and trying to control it. You could call them transcendental cybernetics (aiming to capture the world within a system) and situated cybernetics (directed to a specific situation).

Situated cybernetics celebrates the inventive and creative character of cybernetics, while rejecting its totalizing claims. It can acknowledge cybernetics as a skillful craft of engaging with complex systems; useful in many practices, necessary to be able to cope with increasing complexity; but rejecting the idea that everything can and should be captured by cybernetic systems. The best hacks, the best cybernetic performances, are the one’s that does not brag about being able to achieve absolute control of a system, but the one’s that shows how the world always comes with surprises and unexpected turns, always exceeds our attempts at controlling it, but that given the right skills and tools, this chaotic complexity can be coped with, endured and even enjoyed.

Examples of photo hacks

Pinhole Camera Photography of course has always been a machinic artform and the camera is always present for reality to inscribe itself physically on the film. It has been no stranger to modifications and amateur constructions in its history, but at least until the digital camera it has not been more than a simple system, lacking any mechanical or electrical feedback loops. Here, a simple schematic for building one’s own pinhole camera, a system without feedback.

Camera Automata When hacking is introduced into an art practice, it shifts the interest from the final product to the process. A duck roams a tourist area equipped with a digital camera, a sensor and a printer. When someone tries to take a picture of the duck, IT takes of picture of the photographer and prints the photograph out its back. Feedback is introduced between the sensor, the processing device and the actuator. The process in which it intervenes is both a sociotechnical one, being about both the social practice of tourist photography as well as the material and technical actors involved in it.

Taeyoon Choi - Cameraautomata

Fulgurator Hacking in art gives plenty of opportunities to enact hacking in its original definition of a prank. Here a camera is modified in such a way that the back is removed, replaced by a flash that lights the camera from the back, through a film with an image or a text imprinted, through the lens and onto the surface the camera is pointed to. On top of the camera sits an automatic flash trigger that will trigger as soon as another person close by takes a photo using flash. The result is that the fulgurators image is projected on the surface that someone is taking a picture of during a milisecond — too fast for the eye to pick up, but enough for it to be imprinted on the resulting photograph. Hacking has always been about the humorous intervention in a system. I believe it was Deleuze who said that comedy is when a human behaves as an object and vice versa. Here the human, through the stimuli caused by the hack becomes an object in the system set up by the artist, unwillingly following the plot he already staked out with the hack. In hacking, getting a human to perform a certain task by tricking them into it (for example by claiming to be from the IT department in need of a password) is refered to as social engineering.

Julius von Bismarck - Image Fulgurator

The Mirror In this example we encounter something different than in the others. Here, an end result is produced in the form of a traditional portrait, but it is made with a hack as clever as it is simple. In front of the camera sits a one way mirror enabling the camera lens to capture the portrait while the portaitee sees only their own face, thus becoming aware of and adjusting their facial expression — feedback at its simplest. The hack is certainly part of the aesthetic experience of the work and it clearly leaves a mark on the final photograph, but it does not occupy center stage. We are not simply looking at the documentation of a cleverness.

Monica Ruzansky - The Mirror

copy/paste from http://www.gestalten.com/event/aram-bartholl-conversation-evan-roth

Aram Bartholl in Conversation with Evan Roth Book Launch and Talk at Gestalten Space

Date: February 2, 2012 Time: 19:00 Location: Gestalten Space, Sophie-Gips-Höfe, Sophienstraße 21, 10178 Berlin Language: English

To celebrate the release of Aram Bartholl’s first monograph Aram Bartholl: The Speed Book, Gestalten will host a talk with the artist in conversation with Evan Roth. Fellow artist and researcher Evan Roth will start the evening by introducing us to the experimental work of Aram Bartholl, which explores the place where space and cyberspace mingle and mangle each other—a realm that uses as little technology as possible while still speaking a digital language. Together, they will guide us through wonderfully skewed visions of our society under the influence of the internet. On this occasion, Evan Roth will also present a series of his own new web-based pieces. We’ll ring out the event with drinks and music.

FacebookTwitter Share this

Aram Bartholl’s work explores the power structures, the social systems, the cultural innovations, the inner dynamics, the languages, and the products that are shaping our age. His new book, which is being released internationally this month, is the artist’s first comprehensive monograph offering entry to his diverse oeuvre.

Evan Roth is an artist and researcher based in Paris who explores the intersection of free culture and popular culture, making work simultaneously for the contemporary art world and the “bored at work” network. Roth is co-founder of the Graffiti Research Lab and the Free Art & Technology Lab (F.A.T. Lab), a web based, open source research and development lab, and produced the first open source rap video in collaboration with Jay-Z.

→ RSVP on Facebook

We know what the white girls say, and what flute player say, and even what black guys say to pregnant girls. But what don’t you know who said what to whom? Has anyone said this shit? A live search engine for all the shit people say. Over 700 videos at last count.A collaboration with Lindsey Weber and Tanner Ringerud at BuzzFeed. Speed Project: 8 hours