Drew Hemment, Charlie Gere (eds.): FutureEverybody: FutureEverything Report (2012)

“This is a report on FutureEverybody, the FutureEverything theme in 2012. It consists of short essays by participants in the FutureEverything 2012 festival [16-19 May 2012, Manchester, England] and an overview of the festival and conference programme by the curators. These offer reflections on the FutureEverybody theme, the art and design projects in the festival, and the issues and initiatives presented within the conference. Each year FutureEverything proposes and develops particular themes, in its annual festival and year round innovation labs. These themes are provocations, designed to open up a space for practice and debate, made tangible through art and design projects which seek to bring the future into the present.” (editors)

Publisher: FutureEverything, 2012
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License
63 pages

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Lee Siegel: Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob (2008)

From the author hailed by the New York Times Book Review for his “drive-by brilliance” and dubbed by the New York Times Magazine as “one of the country’s most eloquent and acid-tongued critics” comes a ruthless challenge to the conventional wisdom about the most consequential cultural development of our time: the Internet.

Of course the Internet is not one thing or another; if anything, its boosters claim, the Web is everything at once. It’s become not only our primary medium for communication and information but also the place we go to shop, to play, to debate, to find love. Lee Siegel argues that our ever-deepening immersion in life online doesn’t just reshape the ordinary rhythms of our days; it also reshapes our minds and culture, in ways with which we haven’t yet reckoned. The web and its cultural correlatives and by-products—such as the dominance of reality television and the rise of the “bourgeois bohemian”—have turned privacy into performance, play into commerce, and confused “self-expression” with art. And even as technology gurus ply their trade using the language of freedom and democracy, we cede more and more control of our freedom and individuality to the needs of the machine—that confluence of business and technology whose boundaries now stretch to encompass almost all human activity.

Siegel’s argument isn’t a Luddite intervention against the Internet itself but rather a bracing appeal for us to contend with how it is transforming us all. Dazzlingly erudite, full of startlingly original insights, and buoyed by sharp wit, Against the Machine will force you to see our culture—for better and worse—in an entirely new way.

Publisher Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House, New York, 2008
ISBN 0385522657, 9780385522656
182 pages

review (Adam Thierer, Technology Liberation Front)
review (Louis Bayard, Salon)
review (John Lanchester, The New York Times)
review (Janet Maslin, The New York Times)

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google books

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Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art) (2010, open draft)

In 2007, Jo-Anne Green and Helen Thorington (Co-Directors, New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. | Turbulence.org) proposed Networked to Eduardo Navas (NewMediaFIX). Along with Sean Dockray (Telic Arts Exchange) and Anne Bray (Freewaves), they developed an application to the National Endowment for the Arts, which funded the project in 2008.

An international Call for Proposals was issued. It defined the project’s Goals and Objectives and invited contributions that critically and creatively rethink how networked art is categorized, analyzed, legitimized — and by whom — as norms of authority, trust, authenticity and legitimacy evolve. A committee of nine reviewed the submissions: four authors were commissioned to develop chapters that are now open for commentary, revision, and translation. A fifth — one of the runners-up — was invited to contribute. Networked is open to additional chapters.

Networked proposes that a history or critique of interactive and/or participatory art must itself be interactive and/or participatory; that the technologies used to create a work suggest new forms a “text” might take.

Chapters:
* Remix and the Rouelles of Media Production
* Deseriis › No End In Sight
* Ulmer › The Learning Screen
* Varnelis › The Immediated Now
* Helmond › Lifetracing
* Freeman › Storage in Collaborative Networked Art
* Munster › Data Undermining
* Lichty › Art in the Age of DataFlo

by Authors and Collaborators of the Networked Book Project.
Facilitator: New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (NRPA).
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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