08.03.2008 Holland Doc

The digital documentary channel Holland Doc launched privacy project, a platform challenging young people to show in a short movie what they feel privacy is about. What is the borderline between private and public space? What secrets will you reveal on the internet, your webcam or your cell phone and what are the secrets you will never reveal? Are companies and the government allowed to know everything about you? Or are there certain things which you wish to keep to yourself? This is the assignment that students of all Dutch art academies tackled. 28.02.2008 Computers, freedom and privacy: technology policy '08

cfp2008 +18th Annual CFP conference May 20-23, 2008 Omni Hotel New Haven, CT CALL FOR PROPOSALS This election year will be the first to address US technology policy in the information age as part of our national debate. Candidates have put forth positions about technology policy and have recognized that it has its own set of economic, political, and social concerns. In the areas of privacy, intellectual property, cybersecurity, telecommunications, and freedom of speech, an increasing number of issues once confined to experts now penetrate public conversation. Our decisions about technology policy are being made at a time when the architectures of our information and communication technologies are still being built. Debate about these issues needs to be better- informed in order for us to make policy choices in the public interest. This year, the 18th annual Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference will focus on what constitutes technology policy. CFP: Technology Policy '08 is an opportunity to help shape public debate on those issues being made into laws and regulations and those technological infrastructures being developed. The direction of our technology policy impacts the choices we make about our national defense, our civil liberties during wartime, the future of American education, our national healthcare systems, and many other realms of policy discussed more prominently on the election trail. Policies ranging from data mining and wiretapping, to file-sharing and open access, and e-voting to electronic medical records will be addressed by expert panels of technologists, policymakers, business leaders, and advocates. Open participation is invited for proposals on panels, tutorials, speaker suggestions, and birds of a feather sessions through the CFP website. Suggested topics for discussion include: * Information Privacy * Anonymity Online * Government Transparency * Voting Technology * Online Campaigning * Social Networks * Citizen Journalism * Cybercrime & Cyberterrorism * Digital Education * Copyright and Fair Use * Patent Reform * Open Access * P2P Networks * Information Policy and Free Trade * Media Concentration * Genes & Bioethics * Electronic Medical Records * Web Accessibility * Open Standards * Network Neutrality * High-Speed Internet Access Policy * Freedom of Information * Technology Policy Administration Submission Deadlines: Panel, Tutorial, and Speaker proposals: March 21, 2008. Birds of a Feather Session (BoFs) proposals: April 21, 2008. Panel, Tutorial, and Speaker proposals accepted by the Program Committee will be notified by April 7, 2008. Registration available online at http://www.regonline.com/Checkin.asp? EventId=193762. 27.01.2008 Camhead comes alive

At the 37th International Filmfestival Rotterdam the short film Camhead will be presented for the first time. It is the debut of director Daniel van den Broeke. Security cameras are made for only one purpose: registration of misery. Camhead comes alive and tries to break away from his function as a security camera. When he runs into an illegal party in the harbor of Rotterdam, he starts to see things in a different light. This adrenaline-driven film is completely recorded with a security camera and shows the raw side of Rotterdam. Teun Kuilboer plays the title role. The music was written by producer Kubus from Zwolle, who wrote two tracks especially for this film. A comic about the film was made by the Amsterdam Comic Guerilla and handprinted by Sandra Kleine Staarman. Camhead started out as "the camhead chronicles", and in many ways the making of the film and the comic have become chronicles of their own. The original idea was a monologue before the white screen. Florian, the leader of the punks telling his story, bringing alive the reality of the film and relating his own downfall. Camhead would be shot by Florian on stage. A final scene would then show Maas to be the real murderer of Lotte. A comic story was to serve as a mystifycation of Camheads personality. Relating the background of this tragic hero character. Daniel van den Broeke created the story and the short, futuristic cult-film that will see its first screening at the International Filmfestival Rotterdam. Film and comic started to live their own lives during the past two years, just like the security camera that became Camhead. They influenced each other. The results of which you see here. Screening 1: 29 jan Schouwburg om 17.00 uur (premi�re) Screening 2: 30 jan Lantaren 1 om 14.30 uur (Made in Rotterdam 3) Screening 3: 1 feb Venster 1 om 22.15 uur 16.09.2007 Forum on Quaero: A public think tank on the politics of the search engine by Tsila Hassine, Vinca Kruk, Daniel van der Velden, Gon Zifroni; Maastricht, NL.

Michael Zimmer, Richard Rogers, Florian Schneider, Maurits de Bruijn, Jacques Chirac declared to be the European challenge to Google? A public alternative to Silicon Valley-born commercial search engines, funded by the French state, in service of the public good, in the true tradition of the grand projet? An information machine capable of reclaiming European language and intellectual heritage in the age of globalization? No. Quaero is the name of a consortium of technology firms and research labs working together on multimedia and web search projects. It is a state-sponsored effort to stimulate private French technological competitiveness. But still, the issues that the idea of Quaero has constitute a formidable challenge. Internet search engines are political projects proper if only because they give and take power; they represent science, technology, (trans)national politics, private enterprise, culture, territoriality and language in ever different combinations. On 29 and 30 September 2007, the Jan van Eyck Academie, in Pays-Bas, organizes the Forum on Quaero, taking the concept of the search engine as a pubic project as a starting point. Inclusion and exclusion (sometimes by hands-on censorship). Search services, retrieving and storing increasing amounts of private information from them. The majority of web search is carried out through only a few, very large corporate search engines which communicate ideas about their role in the world via their brand identities. These may lead to distorted impressions of what the commercial search engine as a institution really entails. This conference aims to bridge the gap between politics, policies and practices in the field of web search. Some questions: 1. The ideal of access to information, become the modus operandi of political bias? Can we envisage scenarios for the search engine as a public domain institution? 2. Used to archive and present (institutional) concepts of cultural heritage and democracy? 3. Demos as the force that structures information. Can we work towards a of data to coexist and enrich each other? borders? The Forum encourages and facilitates audience participation; it is meant as a public think tank, a live sketchbook around new questions for the search engine. Saturday 29 September and Sunday 30 September Admission: EUR 25 for 2 days, including lunch, dinner, drinks and publication. Registration: By e-mail to Anne Vangronsveld: anne.vangronsveld@janvaneyck.nl Additional programme information, press information Metahaven Design Research: office@metahaven.net phone: +31 (0)6 24276797 / +31 (0)6 48316543 Click right and save as to download the flyer "Forum on Quaero: A public think tank on the politics of the search engine. 24.08.2007 "Goodbye Privacy - ARS Electronica, Linz

"Goodbye Privacy" is the theme of this year's Ars Electronica, the festival extraordinaire of art, technology and society in Linz, Austria. September 5 - 11, 2007, the focus will be on these late-breaking phenomena of a new culture of everyday life being played out between angst-inducing scenarios of seamless surveillance and the zest we bring to staging our public personas via digital media. In Ars Electronica's inimitable fashion, elaborations in the form of symposia, exhibits, performances and interventions will proliferate beyond the confines of conference halls and exhibition spaces, and spread across the whole city. Artists, experienced network nomads, theoreticians, technologists and legal scholars will approach this year's theme from quite different perspectives: 1. What do we have at our disposal to counter the intrusions of control and surveillance technologies? 2. How can the new cultural paradigms of Web 2.0 communities be made to generate social dynamics that can also display relevance in the real world? 3. How can we prevent the loss of individual control over our digital personas? 4. What sorts of new strategies are there to reinvent privacy in the transparent world of digital media? 5. How can we shatter the pre-configured virtual public spheres of the entertainment industries and mold new ones ourselves? 6. How can we bring the entire cultural diversity of our societies to bear in these newly emerging public, social realms? Regardless of whether this is a matter of the interior spaces and city squares of the real public sphere or the new public domain of digital networks-the network of cameras, biometric sensors, RFIDs, log files, Trojans, etc. is becoming ever more tightly woven. Immense databases and highly developed algorithms automatically interlinking and evaluating all these traces consummate this new dimension of surveillance. But itÕs not just the depth of field and high resolution of this digital reconnaissance thatÕs significant in this context; itÕs also the fact that access to the necessary technologies and the compiled data is increasingly shifting out of the purview of official state-authorities and into the hands of commercial and individual interests. And we thus find ourselves once again in a state of peculiar ambivalence: Showcasing ones customized persona, staging ones own image is the order of the day. Go public and feature yourself or its GAME OVER! The individualization and personalization of online media once constituted a countervailing world juxtaposed to the formula-driven, homogenized public sphere of the electronic mass media, but in the age of Second Life, MySpace and YouTube, individualization is now mainstream and the search is afoot for the next upgrade, for what awaits us in the aftermath of the self-invention/self-promotion hype of the Web 2.0 epoch. Once we dismiss the cul-de-sac of a purely rejectionist stance and get on with the search for suitable forms of subculture, things start to get interesting indeed. After all, the Digital Revolution is something with which we've grown quite familiar, but what in the world might be in store when the Digital Rebellion breaks out? 02.04.2007 Mingle - SpyLab

In 2006 artists from Beijing and New York formed the new media research collective SpyLab. SpyLab asks some basic questions. What is privacy? What is distance? What is interconnectivity? How far away can we be and still effectively collaborate? Do participants on an artwork need to know they are participating? How much fun can we have spying? SpyLab pieces steal content from afar, from unknowing contributors, and ask the gallery audience to join in the fray. SpyLab artist's Skype their ideas to one another around the globe, and get pissed off when the Internet is down. SpyLab investigates the nature of distance communication and cross-cultural collaboration. What are the rules? What do we define as successful interaction? Are we achieving a reasonable understanding? As SpyLab has developed and executed projects with members working from halfway around the globe, these questions have become constants. Mingle is the first of three pieces SpyLab is building in 2007. A voyeuristically interactive new media sound installation, Mingle eavesdrops on unsuspecting gallery goers and uses their conversation as fodder for sound experimentation. A user chooses one of several sound sources (or a mix of them), and using a custom touch interface creates a sound poem. These sound sources are "recording stations" consisting of suspended microphones within the gallery space, and identified by the SpyLab logo affixed to the gallery wall with vinyl applique. Sound sources are located across the gallery, within eyesight of the Mingle podium. The poem then loops until another is created. The results are played back under a "sound isolation dome", providing for relative privacy and placement flexibility within the gallery environs. Both a visual and aural curiosity and a funky rhythmical instrument, Mingle manages to be entertaining, annoying, and mysterious all at once. Mingle consists of a main control podium placed underneath a suspended acrylic sound isolation dome, and several distant "observation" locations. The podium contains an intuitive circular touch-screen interface that controls the sound input (conversations and noise from one or both of the "observation" locations) and the algorithmic processing of said.

The main control pedestal is 32" (81cm) high and 28" (71cm) in diameter, fabricated with lacquer coated MDF substrate and stainless steel leg supports. The circular surface is approximately 4' (10cm) thick. Contained within the surface is an 18" (46cm) diameter touch screen and the digital control unit (a Mac Mini). The sound isolation dome is 30" (76cm) diameter acrylic, suspended 84" (213cm) off the floor above the main control pedestal. The sound source within the dome is a unidirectional stereo speaker, pointed directly down.

The Mingle interactive interface is programmed using a combination of the open-source sound control language ChucK and Flash.

The interface allows the user to choose the sound source from multiple sources (or a combination). The user then adjusts the sampled playback by manipulating simple concentric wheels. Playback occurs as a continuous loop, and continues even after the user ceases manipulation of the controls. The manifestation of the actual Mingle recording stations is flexible. The stations consist of a simple vinyl logo stating Mingle Collection of sound occurs either through suspended microphones in the immediate vicinity of the recoding station, or directional microphones mounted on the sound isolation dome at the main control pedestal. The recording stations should be located within view of the main control pedestal, so the user can determine where a "conversation" is occurring. There is no specific distance from the main control pedestal required, though the further the better. Space requirements for the main control pedestal are approximately 2mx2m, and for the recording stations negligible (recording stations could actually be placed within the proximity, or within the environs, or even on top of, other artworks). 01.04.2007 SpyLab - Tsinghua University Beijing - Parsons New York collaborative art project, with Sven Travis and Huang Haiyan

The new media research collaboration SpyLab makes art from video, sound, and environmental data from around the globe, from unknowing and knowing contributors. Its projects examine the realities of cross-cultural communication: What are the rules? What do we define as successful interaction? Are we achieving a reasonable understanding? Thursday 12 April, 17.00 - 18.30 hrs Location: V2_Studio, Rotterdam, NL Entrance: free 31.03.2007 Artists Against 419

Flash-mobbing AA419 describes its action as flash-mobbing but in actuality, this activity is called a virtual sit-in. Virtual sit-ins entail large numbers of individuals intently visiting a target site and downloading pages or requesting large numbers of information, with the intent that their requests will cause a rapid drain of bandwidth, thereby exhausting the site's quota so that it goes offline. A computer flash-mob is a similar case where the sites sudden popularity brings an unexpected large numbers of visitors which the server is unable to handle. In some cases, particularly when a small web-hosting company is involved, the volume of traffic can be so large that access is slowed to all sites on the server, but as soon as the hoster pulls the criminal site, things return to normal. No site is "mobbed" until at least two letters have been sent to the hosting company warning them that they are hosting a fraudulent site, detailing the evidence and requesting that it be pulled for violating the hoster's terms of business. The Artists would rather have webhosters cooperate to clean up the web, and a virtual sit-in is used as a tool of last resort. The artists have had considerable success in closing these sites, since out of the 10.500 sites listed in their database, 583 are still active and some of these will be very recent additions. 14.01.2007 State of the Union - Brad Borevitz

The launch of Brad Borevitz's State of the Union (SOTU) website anticipates the 2007 State of the Union address scheduled to be delivered to Congress and the American people by George W. Bush on January 23rd. Lamenting the triumph of iconicity over rhetoricity, Borevitz describes the gradual changes in political speech from argument to brand. The project asks us to consider if evidence for this assertion exists in the language of the State of the Union address which stands as a controlled sample of political speech over the course of U.S. history. State of the Union provides searchable access to the corpus of all the State of the Union addresses from 1790 to 2007. Using visualization software, the site allows a user to explore how specific words gain and lose prominence over time, and to link to information on the historical context for their use. State of the Union focuses on the relationship between individual addresses as compared to the entire collection of addresses, highlighting what is different about the selected document. From this information, users are invited to try and understand the connection between politics and calls it into being.

According to Borevitz a democratic system of government depends on communicative practices that are founded on rhetoric: an art of persuasion. This implies a public sphere as the ground of a competitive exchange of argument and counter argument. Reason theoretically rules such a domain, where syllogistic conventions determine the outcome of a competition of ideas based on the strength of evidence and the logical coherence of their exposition. What has displaced this rhetorical arena is a screen on which assertions are projected. It may be that these assertions compete for attention, but they don't entertain argument or tolerate critique. Assertions are immune from denigration based on counterfactual evidence, or the revelation of faulty logic. Competition in this environment is a matter of precedence, authority, style, volume, frequency, and ultimately saturation. Contemporary political ideas, which take the form of memes circulating in the soup of our media saturated world, are formally equivalent to the fragments of iconic identity circulating as agents of corporate entities, the brands. Politics is branding, the media practice of producing identity as awareness and desire, through the deployment of declarative language and image. Not only have commercial interests produced a scarcity of actual public space by their domination of the landscape and their occupation of the commons, they have gained almost total control over the virtual spaces of communication, and colonized the language of political discourse itself. Brad Borevitz is an artist whose work focuses on language, politics and software. He has produced websites, videos, software applications, and robots, all of which have at their core a deep commitment to understanding the political and cultural implications of computer technology. He is currently a participant in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program. He holds an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California San Diego. The State of the Union website can be visited at www.stateoftheunion.onetwothree.net. 06.01.2007 In search of the suspicious - Marc Bijl

For Marc Bijl's video "In Search of the Suspicious," he and a friend were able to pass themselves off as security officials in a Berlin subway, unsettling commuters. Fake security guards inspect people in a Berlin subway station, askin them too walk through the metal detector, cheking their baggage and identification papers. On the background there is a placate with the text Security written with gothic letters. Bijl is interested in social structures and their (mis)use of slogans, logo's, symbols and code's. His counter-cultural (video)performances and (illegal) interventions play with our perception of what takes place in public space while his installations or objects are icons of temporarely fanaticism wich can lead to nationalism, terrorism, religious fanaticism and finally death. But, according to the artist, human nature is attracted to these simplifying structure methods (logo's, symbols, (political) slogans, prayers, or even advertisements) more than it needs freedom to do without all that information. There is a romantic desire hidden in his attempt to understand the world we live in. Bijl is a leading proponent of a 'hardcore' aesthetic which provocative and interventionist at the same time. A John Osborne-like angry young man, he belongs to the new generation of creative artists who have risen alongside the no-global movements of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Instead of using violence and direct action, he has chosen to make his art visible in public spaces, squares, subway stations, on billboards, and among other signs produced by so-called 'corporate culture'. Employing a "Sex Pistols-style" and admitting his debt to '70s counterculture, his imagery is involved with the illegal practices of social activism and with the strategies of urban guerrillas. Bijl places at the center of his art a discussion on the given idea of public space, denouncing the insecurity which threatens our daily lives behind the smoke screen of the media world. Seen from this point of view, different icons express the same function: Nike's swoosh as well as Che Guevara's portrait, Beuys with his felt hat, national flags, Warhol and his Olympus, the bronze cross of the Wehrmacht. These all provide life-savers through the mediatic filter, concealing truth and making reality look artificial. Graffiti, slogans, flags, controversial performances, and the hijacking of industrial logos (following Guy Debord's lesson), of names and authorship - all this constitutes part of Bijl's catalogue. On exposurerotterdam you are welcome to watch Bijl's video files. 08.11.2006 Injunction Generator - Ubermorgen

The Injunction Generator is an artistic software module by Austrian artists Ubermorgen which claims to generate on request legal injunctions and personalized documentation in .rtf/.pdf format to force a website into taking its contents offline. Carrying on with their principles of "radical corporative marketing strategy" (media hacking), the artists produced an effective and credible interface which helps creating one's own documented cease-and-desist request, which is then automatically sent to the DNS administrators, to the site's owner and to some journalists to trick them into supporting the "public trial". The project is published at ipnic.org, an acronym which mimics the official protocols (Internet Protocol - Network Information Center), revisited as "Internet Partnership for No Internet Content". This sarcastic provocation (a "public shutdown service") was conceived after experiencing a similar mishap during the Voteauction art project, which in 2000 invited American citizens to put up their vote for auction. At the time an email injunction by an American court was sent to the Swiss internet service provider hosting the site, who immediately took them offline even though emailed documents aren't legally considered official and even though Switzerland is outside of American jurisdiction. Ubermorgen was founded in 1999 by Maria Haas (a.k.a. Liz or Lizvlx) and Hans Bernhard (a.k.a. etoy.HANS, etoy.BRAINHARD, hans_extrem, e01). The company which is registered in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Bulgaria, is active in the fields of software development, license agreements, applied design and consulting services for multinational companies as well as action, performance and mass media communication art. Ubermorgen characterizes its activities as Èmedia hackingÇ and propagates its content via "guerilla marketing tactics" and so-called "shock marketing". Ubermorgen's Injunction Generator (2001) automatically generates mass injunctions which are used as a weapon against critical websites, or as a means to cash in on lawyer charges because of alleged trademark infringement, breaches against imprint duty or personality rights. Ubermorgen writes: "is there any web-site you wanna take off the web using a highly subversive method? on our server, you auto-generate an "INJUNCTION" [.pdf/.rtf format], a standard court-order, claiming the target-website to operate on an illegal basis. this document will then be sent to the appropriate dns-registrar [dns=domain name service], to the owner of the website and possibly to some journalists for legal and public processing. all you have to do is to simply fill out a form and send it off, it will take you not more than 15 minutes. if the website is taken down we will inform you via email." The Injunction Generator automatizes and democratizes what normally remains reserved to big companies with a strong financial backing: the spreading of cease-and-desist letters without any kind of legal basis. In order to suppress the distribution of allegedly critical information about its products or the company's behaviour, corporations threaten individuals almost routinely with legal consequences or high penalties. In many cases, the fact of threatening alone leads to a considerable narrowing of the freedom of expression: "(T)he law is used by whoever has the most cash to victimize those without it." (The Yes Men) 06.11.2006 [V]ote-auction.com - Ubermorgen The idea for the Injunction Generator can be traced back to another project developed by ubermorgen in 2000: [V]ote-auction.com.

Under the plausible slogan "Bringing capitalism and democrazy closer together!" and in time with the US presidential elections in 2000 (W. Bush vs. Al Gore) American citizens were offered the possibility to auction off their vote via an Internet platform called [V]ote-auction.com to those bidding highest. In the most enviable way this project thus reflected on the deep entanglement of capital and (voting) power. While the individual selling of votes is strictly forbidden in all the states of the US as well as on the federal state level, this prohibition is constantly being undermined by massive (legal) campaign contributions of big companies. The response in the mass media was overwhelming. Various US state attorneys announced a total of 13 legal proceedings against ubermorgen.com. In four US states actual law-suits were started (Missouri, Chicago, Massachusetts and Wisconsin) and temporary injunctions were issued. Because of a decision of a court in Illinois the website's domain was blocked twice, but it was brought back online in time for the election under a slightly changed name. CNN reported seven times about [V]ote-auction and on October 24, 2000 the entire 30-minute justice show Burden of Proof, entitled "Bidding for Ballots: Democracy on the Block", was dediated to the project. A total of 450 million media consumers are said to have been informed about the project. In the end, when it turned out that the representatives of [V]ote-auction could not be held liable for any kind of illegal activities, the pending law-suits were closed (except in Illinois). 03.11.2006 Google Will Eat Itself (GWEI) - Ubermorgen

Google Will Eat Itself (GWEI) (a project in collaboration with Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio) is a purely conceptual piece, and it is a paradox. It can be reduced to the simple instructions of how to have a ever-growing giant eat itself (auto-cannibalistic) while the project itself empowers the giant to grow even faster. I would not say that GWEI criticizes Google, it rather experiments with the new global click-economy we are now all part of. We perform our perverted research inside Googles most sensitive business field (The Adsense Program is Google's main revenue booster). Google cannot be anyone's friend. Companies are no friends, they are not people and thus no friends. I cannot stand it when people use human emotions in connection to legal entities and/or marketing constructions. Well and then, i would personally prefer friends that do not possess omnipresence, i rather go for the personal understanding and private chitty-chat than the global know-it-all. Regarding the criticizing of google - i guess, we are just trying to improve the system. As an experiment. the google people had a great idea when they set up the advertising scheme on google. But just like with any other system and/or software, you can code additional functions to enhance the existing software and take it further. This is what they call progress, isn't it? How did Google react to your action? Just a couple of weeks ago we received the first official Google letter from their legal department in Hamburg (Germany). They are extremely friendly in their wording and they ask as to consider that our project is against Googles Terms and therefore illegal. Also they state that they understand that it is an art project but still we had to stop immediately. For us this is new territory because Google usually does not communicate human-to-human (they have machines doing that for them). Our favourite vintage Apple System Sound is: "Sosumi". 29.10.2006 Shoeveillance - proud to be watched - Marc Böhlen

Shoeveillance is a surveillance system that tracks pedestrian traffic in public buildings, prevents data misuse and allows for data pleasure. A camera is installed in a door frame a few inches above ground with a narrow angle lens such that nothing above knee height is visible to it. An algorithm parses the image data for objects that resemble feet and shoes only. From the goings and comings of shoes, the system tallies pedestrian traffic. As opposed to collecting data where people are loaf to share it, shoeveillance takes it from the culture of shoe wear and its public parading. It encourages us to enjoy our vanities and prevents this pleasure from being misused for nefarious ends. In the same way buildings are designed for particular purposes, technologies can be designed for special needs and wishes. In the future I imagine a similar richness in AI typologies as Architecture has in buildings. When invasive technologies become part of our lived fabric they must be tamed and disciplined. This approach overlaps to a strong degree with that of art-activisism. It is also different. If you leave the development of technology to market forces alone, the solutions leave out too many market-irrelevant, but important, interesting and pleasurable factors. Realtechsupport tries to cast engineering problems in a light that includes their social/cultural context, and tries to make this a design parameter that needs to be 'solved' (addressed, discussed, solved) with the same diligence as the isolated technical problem. Shoeveillence is a good example of this approach. Shoeveillence is capable of monitoring the passage of people in to and out of a room (and by extension a building). It acknowledges the fact that, in this world, this might be necessary [There is a fire in a 100 story building Ð is there anyone on the 91st floor?]. At the same time, it counters data-creep and prevents data that is not "needed" from being collected. [The camera sees only feet and legs up to knee height; the machine algorithm finds directionality of motion and objects that look like shoes only]. Text by Marc Böhlen 25.10.2006 Amy and Klara - Marc Böhlen

Towards machinic male-dicta and synthetic hissy fits Amy and Klara have similar interests. They both read Salon.com - premium content, of course. But they do not get along. Not at all. Maybe Klara's thick German accent bothers Amy. And neither of them particularly likes the color pink. Unfortunately for Amy and Klara, they live on the same block and have pink houses! And when they get agitated they tend to fall into mutual accusations and rants. Yes, it can get rather ugly at times. Best then just to leave them be and to stay clear of the synthetic hissy fits. Amy and Klara are robots capable of synthetic text to speech generation and automated speech recognition. Anyone who has ever listened to computer generated speech knows the strange feeling of hearing a voice that sounds human but feels alien. Synthetic speech has achieved such levels of 'naturalness' that it can be confused with the voice of a living human being. However, this naturalness is shallow; not even skin deep. In synthetic speech we are confronted with a new fallout of automation technologies. It is not only the disconnect between a human voice and a box that produces it that can make one feel uncomfortable. It is also what these voices have to say to us. The language of synthetic speech recognition and synthesis systems is a highly selective subset of the full, rich and messy body of linguistic corpora that comprise our oral and written languages. Exclamations are absent, questions are rare and the vocabulary is generally optimized for commerce. Visit Amy and Klaras home Text by Marc Böhlen 04.10.2006 Evidence Locker - Jill Magid

In 2004, Jill spent 31 days in Liverpool, during which time she developed a close relationship with Citywatch (Merseyside Police and Liverpool City Council), whose function is citywide video surveillance- the largest system of its kind in England. The videos in her Evidence Locker were staged and edited by the artist and filmed by the police using the public surveillance cameras in the city centre. Wearing a bright red trench coat she would call the police on duty with details of where she was and ask them to film her in particular poses, places or even guide her through the city with her eyes closed, as seen in the video Trust. Unless requested as evidence, CCTV footage obtained from the system is stored for 31 days before being erased. For access to this footage, Magid had to submit 31 Subject Access Request Forms - the legal document necessary to outline to the police details of how and when an 'incident' occurred. Magid chose to complete these forms as though they were letters to a lover, expressing how she was feeling and what she was thinking. These letters form the diary One Cycle of Memory in the City of L- an intimate portrait of the relationship between herself, the police and the city. On Evidence Locker you are welcome to download One Cycle of Memory in the City of L with daily video files. 02.09.2006 System Azure - Jill Magid

Jill Magid hand-glued rhinestones to security cameras at the Amsterdam Headquarters of Police using permanent adhesive. Although the ornamenting policy was reserved, the cameras remain in place. Ever since George Orwell's 1984 made 'Big Brother' and 'thought police' shorthand for the totalitarian threat to liberal society, surveillance cameras have been regarded as precursors to an emerging dystopia. But when Jill Magid convinced officials at the Amsterdam police headquarters to pay her to decorate their surveillance cameras with rhinestones -parodying them as cheap, showy emblems of power- she realized the extent to which they were more props in the theater of public space. In 2002 Magid -an American artist based in Amsterdam- approached th epolice with her proposal, which was part of an ongoing exploration of intimacy and surveillanc. 'When I presented myself as an artist, no one would speak to me,' she says. 'So I invented a company, System Azure Security Ornamentation, I called them up and said, 'I'm a security ornamentation professional.' The title made all the difference, and soon she was meeting with police administrators to discuss the public's relationschip with surveillance. 'The negotiations were really interesting,' Magid says. 'When I first met with them, they were questioning whether they wanted surveillance to be visible at all.' She pointed out that if the cameras were inteded to serve as a deterrent, it would make sense to emphasize their presence. 'After a few meetings -when they decided that they did want the cameras to be seen- we got into easthetics, and they forgot all about surveillance and security,' she says. Magid presented them with the Police Signature series, a striped scheme that dressed the cameras in the tribal colors of the department - green for 'justice', red for 'full love', blue for 'strictness', and white for 'integrity'. Summer 2003, after six months of negotiations, Magid climbed the ladder to hand decorate the headquarter's cameras, and administrators began floating the idea of rollin out the ornamentation citywide. But earlier this year the police board had a change of heart and brought the rhinestoning too an end, saying that they wanted to keep a low profile on the cameras. Magid planned to respond with a 'Bring Back the Glam' compaign -featuring rhinestone coveredd placards- when she was tipped off that Amsterdam's red light district would be installing 26 new cameras. The local 'Beursstraat' police station -which has its own policies separate from headquarters- immediately bought her pitch that covering the cameras with red rhinestones would transform the meanin of red in red light from prostitution to 'full of love'. The new bejeweling was set fall 2003, pending approval from the city. Through her role as Head Security Ornamentation Professional for System Azure, Magid found that in contrast to traditional liberal views, the current reality of surveillance is more farce than science fiction. The rationale for installing the cameras is filled with contradictions, and often no one actually watches the monitors after the cameras are put up. 'I like to compare them to gargoyles,' Magid says. 'They are visual Band-Aids that emptily represent safety.' Text by Stephen Zacks. Metropolis, October issue 2003