.dpi, Feminist Journal of Art and Digital Culture, No. 27: Hacktivism (2013) [English/French]

“Founded by artist-run-centre Studio XX in 2004, in Montreal, the publication .dpi has recently undergone a major transformation in order to assert itself as a feminist journal of art and digital culture. In 2013, with continuing administrative and technological support from Studio XX, the journal .dpi became an independent project, with a new platform (beta version) and new team including permanent editor in chief, Sophie Le-Phat Ho, and a new editorial committee composed of Julie Alary Lavallée, Amber Berson, Esther Bourdages, Christina Haralanova, Corina MacDonald, Katja Melzer, Candace Mooers and Deanna Radford.

In a time when social gains are threatened, funding for artist-run-centres is precarious, and the need for intelligent critique is urgent, the new crew at .dpi wishes to respond to a real need for the creation of an interdisciplinary community of those at once curious and critical of technologies, feminisms and art.

Bringing together a dozen local and international participants, .dpi 27 presents a themed section on hacktivism coordinated by Christina Haralanova, a feminist activist and researcher who is interested by freedom in technology and open-source software. Hacktivism: the Art of Practicing Life and Computer Hacking for Feminist Activism brings together unique perspectives and critiques of the current state of hacktivism, a fusion of hacking and activism.”

Published in Montreal, April 2013
ISSN 1712-9486

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Geert Lovink, Miriam Rasch (eds.): Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives (2013)

The Unlike Us Reader offers a critical examination of social media, bringing together theoretical essays, personal discussions, and artistic manifestos. How can we understand the social media we use everyday, or consciously choose not to use? We know very well that monopolies control social media, but what are the alternatives? While Facebook continues to increase its user population and combines loose privacy restrictions with control over data, many researchers, programmers, and activists turn towards designing a decentralized future. Through understanding the big networks from within, be it by philosophy or art, new perspectives emerge.

Unlike Us is a research network of artists, designers, scholars, activists, and programmers, with the aim to combine a critique of the dominant social media platforms with work on ‘alternatives in social media’, through workshops, conferences, online dialogues, and publications. Everyone is invited to be a part of the public discussion on how we want to shape the network architectures and the future of social networks we are using so intensely.

Contributors: Solon Barocas, Caroline Bassett, Tatiana Bazzichelli, David Beer, David M. Berry, Mercedes Bunz, Florencio Cabello, Paolo Cirio, Joan Donovan, Louis Doulas, Leighton Evans, Marta G. Franco, Robert W. Gehl, Seda Gürses, Alexandra Haché, Harry Halpin, Mariann Hardey, Pavlos Hatzopoulos, Yuk Hui, Ippolita, Nathan Jurgenson, Nelli Kambouri, Jenny Kennedy, Ganaele Langlois, Simona Lodi, Alessandro Ludovico, Tiziana Mancinelli, Andrew McNicol, Andrea Miconi, Arvind Narayanan, Wyatt Niehaus, Korinna Patelis, PJ Rey, Sebastian Sevignani, Bernard Stiegler, Marc Stumpel, Tiziana Terranova, Vincent Toubiana, Brad Troemel, Lonneke van der Velden, Martin Warnke and D.E. Wittkower.

Publisher Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, February 2013
INC Reader #3
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 Unported License
ISBN 9789081857529
386 pages
via Anne Helmond

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E. Gabriella Coleman: Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (2012)

Who are computer hackers? What is free software? And what does the emergence of a community dedicated to the production of free and open source software–and to hacking as a technical, aesthetic, and moral project–reveal about the values of contemporary liberalism? Exploring the rise and political significance of the free and open source software (F/OSS) movement in the United States and Europe, Coding Freedom details the ethics behind hackers’ devotion to F/OSS, the social codes that guide its production, and the political struggles through which hackers question the scope and direction of copyright and patent law. In telling the story of the F/OSS movement, the book unfolds a broader narrative involving computing, the politics of access, and intellectual property.

E. Gabriella Coleman tracks the ways in which hackers collaborate and examines passionate manifestos, hacker humor, free software project governance, and festive hacker conferences. Looking at the ways that hackers sustain their productive freedom, Coleman shows that these activists, driven by a commitment to their work, reformulate key ideals including free speech, transparency, and meritocracy, and refuse restrictive intellectual protections. Coleman demonstrates how hacking, so often marginalized or misunderstood, sheds light on the continuing relevance of liberalism in online collaboration.

Publisher Princeton University Press, 2012
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License
ISBN 1400845297, 9781400845293
264 pages

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google books

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The CryptoParty Handbook (2012)

This handbook is designed to help those with no prior experience to protect their basic human right to Privacy in networked, digital domains. By covering a broad array of topics and use contexts it is written to help anyone wishing to understand and then quickly mitigate many kinds of vulnerability using free, open-source tools. Most importantly however this handbook is intended as a reference for use during Crypto Parties.

Facilitated by Adam Hyde
Core Team: Marta Peirano, Asher Wolf, Julian Oliver, Danja Vasiliev, Malte Dik, Brendan Howell, Jan Gerber, Brian Newbold,
Assisted by Teresa Dillon, AT, Carola Hesse, Chris Pinchen, ‘LiamO’, ‘l3lackEyedAngels’, ‘Story89′, Travis Tueffel
Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 Unported license
386+ pages
via Julian Oliver

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Tero Karvinen, Kimmo Karvinen: Make a Mind-Controlled Arduino Robot: Use Your Brain as a Remote (2011)

Build a robot that responds to electrical activity in your brain—it’s easy and fun. If you’re familiar with Arduino and have basic mechanical building skills, this book will show you how to construct a robot that plays sounds, blinks lights, and reacts to signals from an affordable electroencephalography (EEG) headband. Concentrate and the robot will move. Focus more and it will go faster. Let your mind wander and the robot will slow down.

You’ll find complete instructions for building a simple robot chassis with servos, wheels, sensors, LEDs, and a speaker. You also get the code to program the Arduino microcontroller to receive wireless signals from the EEG. Your robot will astound anyone who wears the EEG headband.

This book will help you:
- Connect an inexpensive EEG device to Arduino
- Build a robot platform on wheels
- Calculate a percentage value from a potentiometer reading
- Mix colors with an RGB LED
- Play tones with a piezo speaker
- Write a program that makes the robot avoid boundaries
- Create simple movement routines

Publisher O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2011
ISBN 1449311547, 9781449311544
98 pages

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google books

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Culture Machine journal 13: Paying Attention (2012)

“This issue of Culture Machine sets itself two interrelated tasks in response to the scope and implications of these interrelated positions concerning attention, consciousness, culture, economics and politics. Firstly, it interrogates the notion of attention as it is elaborated in approaches to the attention economy and to media as forms of attention capture. The essays by three leading contributors to thinking in and around these themes, Bernard Stiegler, Tiziana Terranova, and Jonathan Beller, have such an interrogation as their principal task. They develop different, overlapping and sometimes contrasting perspectives on how a critical reposing of the question of attention might reframe its purchase on the central themes of the relation between interiority and exteriority, minds and media, economics and culture. The interview with Michel Bauwens, and the essays by Ben Roberts and Sy Taffel, are also working toward this end in that they identify various limitations and exclusions of the predominant articulation of the attention economy and move toward alternative, more productive, ethical or socially just formulations.

The second task of this issue is pursued in the essays of Tania Bucher, Martin Thayne, Rolien Hoyng and the three contributions to the additional section of the issue. These three – from Ruth Catlow, Constance Fleuriot and Bjarke Liboriussen – represent less scholarly but no less acute strategic inquiries into the thinking and re-making of what Stiegler calls attentional technics. Together, these contributions address particular instantiations of media forms, design practices and phenomena – from Facebook and Second Life to pervasive media design and Istanbul’s digitally mediated City of European Culture project – as a way of exploring and critically inflecting the implementation of the attention economy. This second mode moves from material phenomena to theoretical analysis and critique, while the first goes the other way. As we have argued, however, the necessity of the traffic between them is a central tenet of how we endeavour to pay attention to contemporary digital technoculture in this issue.” (from the introduction)

Edited by Patrick Crogan and Samuel Kinsley
Part of Open Humanities Press
ISSN 1465-4121

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Libre Graphics Magazine 1.4: The Physical, the Digital and the Designer (2012)

The fourth issue of magazine on open source graphic design and graphics.

Editorial team: Ana Carvalho, Ginger Coons, Ricardo Lafuente
Publisher: Ginger Coons, May 2012
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license (CC-BY-SA)
ISSN 1925-1416
52 pages

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