Image source: Flckr

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The past, present and future of the web are presented in the above diagram. The image is peculiar for proposing a linear development towards AI. It appears that we are about to enter Web 3.0,or perhaps we may already be there. The mashup, social media sharing, and social networking, are presented as transitional elements from Web 2.0 to 3.0. However, It is not clear to me what lightweight collaboration might be.

Below are some interesting articles on the future of the web:

Dean Giustini, Web 3.0 and Medicine. British Medical Journal. December 2007

Nova Spivack, The Third-Generation Web is Coming

Resource, World Wide Mind Project

Tristan Zand, Web 3.0 back to the real world / back to our sense, June 2006

Various articles by John Markoff at the NY Times:

Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense
By JOHN MARKOFF. Published: November 12, 2006 … Referred to as Web 3.0, the effort is in its infancy, and the very idea has given rise to skeptics who …November 12, 2006 – By JOHN MARKOFF – Business

What I Meant to Say Was Semantic Web – Bits Blog
Until web 3.0 comes around or the monitors allow our comments I would like to hear more. …. John Markoff. Reporter, San Francisco …October 19, 2007

John Markoff – Bits Blog By John Markoff. Radar Networks is introducing Twine.com, a service that uses semantic Web technology, sometimes called Web 3.0, to improve sharing …

Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art) – A Juried International Competition :: Call for Proposals – Deadline: December 15, 2008

http://turbulence.org/networked/

Five writers will be commissioned to develop chapters for a networked book about networked art. The chapters will be open for revision, commentary, and translation by online collaborators. Each commissioned writer will receive $3,000 (US).

Project Committee: Steve Dietz (Northern Lights, MN), Martha CC Gabriel (net artist, Brazil), Geert Lovink (Institute for Network Cultures, The Netherlands), Nick Montfort (Massachusetts Institute for Technology, MA); and Anne Bray (LA Freewaves, LA), Sean Dockray (Telic Arts Exchange, LA), Jo-Anne Green (NRPA, MA), Eduardo Navas (newmediaFIX), Helen Thorington (NRPA, NY)

Networked Partners: New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (NRPA) :: newmediaFIX :: LA Freewaves :: Telic Arts Exchange.

“A networked book is an open book designed to be written, edited and read in a networked environment.” – Institute for the Future of the Book

Networked Goals: (1) to commission five chapters and publish them online using Wiki/blog technology to enable the public to revise, update, debate and translate them; (2) to present public forums to publicize the online book and solicit participation in its development.

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Image source: Lessig blog

Lessig’s book on Remix was just released. Like his previous books, the emphasis is on the future of intellectual property. Unlike his other books, Lessig appears to focus on the act of “rip, mix and burn” that he often used to discuss different aspects of online culture. In “Remix” this act is the critical framework to discuss the future of creativity.

People heavily invested in the fine arts might find the use of the term “art” misleading, though. Lessig appears to use the term in broad terms to refer to creative acts that are becoming more common due to the spread of Remix principles.

I’m looking forward to this book making the rounds in networked culture. I hope it proves itself to be Lessig’s most popular publication of them all. Sadly, he claims that it will be his last on the issue:

This is (I expect) the last book I’ll write in this field. Dedicated to Lyman Ray Patterson and Jack Valenti, it pushes three ideas — (1) that this war on our kids has got to stop, (2) that we need to celebrate (and support) the rebirth of a remix culture, and (3) that a new form of business (what I call the “hybrid”) will flourish as we better enable this remix creativity.

I wrote this book last year. Many of the themes were described in 18 minutes in my TED talk. I am very eager to have it out.

Text source:
http://www.lessig.org/blog/2008/08/coming_this_fall_remix.html

[photo: joi ito]

This interview was originally published on Vague Terrain for their August 2008 Digital Dub Issue.

Paul D. Miller, AKA DJ Spooky is a multitasker. He is known for his music productions, as well as his art and film projects. He also has been writing about art and culture for many years. In the last few years, Miller has worked with Trojan Records to develop compilations about Reggae and Dub with a critical yet playful take on the complexities of Jamaica. Most recently, he edited Sound Unbound for MIT Press, a book which comprises a set of texts about the influence of sound in media and culture at large. In the following interview, DJ Spooky, discusses his current projects in a global context, and motivates us to move beyond basic binaries onto a more productive and creative state.

Eduardo Navas: In your most recent Recording Project “Creation Rebel” as well as “DJ Spooky Presents In Fine Style 50,000 Volts of Trojan Records!!!” you write short historical essays about the culture of Reggae, Dub and the Big Sound System. You are also very careful to present your position as a cultural insider, given that you used to visit Jamaica as a kid; and you also state that you were approached by Trojan Records, rather than the other way around, which would otherwise place you, regardless of ethnicity, in a position of “explorer” or Neo-colonial. Based on all this can you explain how you see colonial ideology at play in Jamaica today?

DJ Spooky: The situation Jamaica faces today is part of a global cycle of hyper capitalism – even the Cayman Islands used to be part of Jamaica… anyway, yeah, the whole system is based on production models that privilege the “developed” economies over the “developing” ones. From Mugabe in Zimbabwe to Thabo Mbeki in South Africa, Kim Jong Il in North Korea, or Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and Ahmadinejad in Iran, people in “developing” economies are faced with rulers just as flawed as anything the U.S. can summon up with people like Bush or Reagan. I tend to think that everything is connected. My Trojan records project is an exploration of the archives of one of my favorite record labels during a time of intense political upheaval. But it’s also about showing how people make music out of their circumstances.

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Adriene Jenik lecturing at Calit2

Images and text source: gallery@calit2

Note: The following is an interview published for the exhibition SPECFLIC 2.6 and Particles of Interest: Installations by Adriene Jenik and *particle group* on view from August 6 to October 3, 2008 at gallery@calit2. In this Interview Jenik shares the creative process behind her ongoing multi-faceted installation SPECFLIC, which points to a future where books have become rare objects.

Adriene Jenik combines literature, cinema and performance to create works under the umbrella of Distributed Social Cinema. For Jenik, this term means that the language of cinema has been moving outside of the conventional movie screens on to different media devices, which today include, the portable computer, GPS locators, as well as cellphones. Earlier in her career, Jenik worked with video and performance, and eventually she produced CD-Roms, such as “Mauve Desert: A CD-ROM Translation” (1992-1997). Jenik’s practice took a particular shift towards network culture when the Internet became a space in which she could bring together her interests in film, literature, and performance. “Desktop Theater: Internet Street Theater” (1997-2002) was a virtual performance which took place in an online space. It was based on Samuel Becket’s play Waiting for Godot. In line with these works, SPECFLIC 2.6 is the result of Jenik’s interest in the relation of networked culture to film, literature and performance. The installation, then, is also another shift in Jenik’s interest in the expanded field of storytelling. In the following interview, Jenik shares the influences and aesthetical concerns that inform SPECFLIC 2.6

[Eduardo Navas]: You describe your ongoing SPECFLIC project, currently in version 2.6, as “Distributed Social Cinema.” Given that your installation takes on so many aspects of contemporary media, could you elaborate on how you arrived at the parameters at play around this concept?

[Adriene Jenik]: SPECFLIC was initially inspired by the recognition that cinema was moving beyond a single fixed image at an expected scale to one of multiple co-existent screens with extreme shifts in scale. I was seeing video on miniature screens, as well as gigantic mega-screens, and seeing these screens move about in space and wondering what types of stories could take advantage of these formal and technological shifts. I’ve long been involved in thinking through layered story structures and at the beginning of SPECFLIC, I could “see” a diagram of the project imprinted on the inside of my eyelids. That original retinal image burn has since been honed and shaped in relation to the needs of the story and the responses of the audience and performers.

The SPECFLIC 2.6 installation takes excerpts from material that was created for SPECFLIC 2.0, and follows on the heels of SPECFLIC 2.5, which was commissioned by Betti-Sue Hertz and presented at the San Diego Museum of Art in Spring of 2008. For SPECFLIC 2.5, I stripped away all of the live, interactive aspects of the piece, and instead, emphasized aspects of the story that might have been more in the background of the live event. This type of “versioning” is something that is in evidence in software creation, but has also become a method for developing an art practice that can expand and embrace new research and technologies. Distributed Social Cinema is a form that takes into account the importance (for me) of the public audience for a film. As cinema-going practice becomes “home entertainment,” I’m interested in what is at stake in cinema as a public meeting space. At the same time, I’m playing with the intimacy of the very small screen, the ways in which having part of a story delivered into someone’s pocket adds a layer of meaning in its form of delivery. The SPECFLIC 2.5 installation was an attempt to consolidate some of these aspects of distributed attention and “voice.”

Granted the opportunity for networked interaction within the gallery@calit2, for SPECFLIC 2.6 I have rethought the installation to develop in concert with audience contributions. So the project is very much evolving in response to what I learn from each previous iteration as well as the opportunities afforded by the space, encounter with the audience, and technological framework.

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Adriene Jenik installation at the SDMA

Images and text source: gallery@calit2

Note: This text was written for the exhibition SPECFLIC 2.6 and Particles of Interest: Installations by Adriene Jenik and *particle group*, at gallery@calit2, from August 6 to October 3, 2008. The text outlines how dematerialization is at play ideologically and materially in contemporary life, and how it might be at play in the not so far future.

The installations “SPECFLIC 2.6” by Adriene Jenik, and “Particles of Interest” by *particle group*, on view at the gallery@calit2 from August 6 to October 2, 2008, ask the viewer to consider a not-so-distant future in which we will be intimately connected in networks not only through our computers, but also via nanoparticles in and on our very own bodies. Both projects respond to the pervasive mediation of information that is redefining human understanding of the self, as well as the concept of history, knowledge, and the politics of culture.

Information access to networked archives of books and other forms of publication previously only available in print is becoming the main form of research as well as entertainment. Access to music and video via one’s computer and phone as well as other hybrid devices has come to redefine human experience of media. From the iPhone to the Kindle, visual interfaces are making information access not only efficient in terms of time and money, but also in terms of spectacle. Accessibility usually consists of a combination of animation, video, image and text, informed in large part by the language of film and the literary novel.

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Image and text source: NYTimes

Published: May 28, 2008

BEER has long been marketed as a sociable beverage, from a campaign for Budweiser that carried the theme “When gentlemen agree” to the Löwenbräu jingle that began, “Here’s to good friends.” Now, another beer brand, Coors Light, is extending its presence in the new media with efforts on the social networking Web sites Facebook and MySpace.

To promote a new wide-mouth Coors Light can, two clips of the “perfect pour” have been posted on YouTube. New media like Facebook and MySpace have also been enlisted by Coors Brewing.
Enlarge This Image

On Facebook next week, consumers 21 and older will be able to send their friends invitations to meet for Coors Light.

Read the entire article at NYTimes

Still of Lutz Dammbeck, THE NET: THE UNABOMBER, LSD AND THE INTERNET, 2003

Text: El Pais, Image: Observatori

Originally published: 6/12/08

(Spanish Only)

Regreso al futuro. El Festival Observatori, que se celebra en Valencia hasta el 29 de junio, vuelve a sus orígenes, centrándose en la vertiente más experimental de arte digital.

La novena edición, titulada After the Net, toma como punto de partida el documental La Red: Unabomber, LSD e Internet, de Lutz Dammbec, para explorar el lado oculto de los avances tecnológicos, la arquitectura de los trabajos en red y las raíces históricas de los sistemas abiertos, que emplea para reactivar los principios fundadores de la ética hacker

Entre las obras que se enfrentan a las dinámicas comunitarias en red destaca Antisocial networking, un almacén de proyectos, coordinado por Geoff Cox, que investiga la naturaleza de las plataformas sociales en Internet. Entre esas propuestas se encuentra Logo_wiki, de Wayne Clemens, donde intenta demostrar cómo militares, empresarios e instituciones gubernamentales son autores de miles de alteraciones de páginas en la enciclopedia libre Wikipedia.
Contradicciones

Las contradicciones del software libre se plasman en Hello process, de Aymeric Mansoux y Marloes de Valk, que revela la paradoja de los sistemas de código abierto, a través de una máquina que ejecuta un software libre con un proceso tan complejo, que le convierte otra vez en un sistema impenetrable.

Entre las instalaciones destaca Chatroom, de Jeff Gompertz y Caen Botto, que se apropia de los videochat del público y los retransmiten manipulando la imagen de los rostros, creando un efecto parecido al de los salones de espejos de las ferias.

La producción española está representada por una retrospectiva de José Antonio Orts, pionero de un trabajo que integra tecnología, objetos, luz y sonido.

La selección de sus obras, que incluye algunas inéditas, arranca con el primer circuito sonoro fotosensible interactivo, que realizó en 1970 con tan sólo 15 años, punto de partida de todo su trabajo posterior, entre ellos instalaciones interactivas y unas esculturas sonoras fotosensibles.

La exposición se completa con la sección openKURATOR. Destacan el minimalista Netart for poor people, de Carlos Katastrofsky, y Con el tiempo contado, una obra digital efímera del español Javier González que lleva la cuenta regresiva de su existencia.

OBSERVATORI: www.observatori.com

Image and text source: Wired Magazine

June 23, 2008

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don’t have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don’t have to settle for models at all.

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine buy zovirax crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.

Read the entire article at Wired Magazine

Text source: USA TODAY

Originally published on 5/20/08

SAN FRANCISCO — The future of magazine publishing increasingly is appearing on a digital display — not just a newsstand.

Advancements in software and hardware are making it easier for a growing faction of consumers — including coveted younger readers called screen-agers — to read their favorite publications on the Internet or download and read them later offline.

“It’s not Jetsons. It’s real,” says Richard Maggiotto, CEO of Zinio, one of a dozen or so companies that specialize in creating digital editions of magazines and newspapers.

Read the entire Article at USA TODAY