This is a blog. A contemplative online presence aimed at presenting, commenting, scrutinizing and/or discussing a wide range of topics in the sphere of media, politics, technology, social justice, art, civil dissent and other subjects in our increasingly globalized network society.

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Closing down (for now)

Posted on | September 13, 2013 | No Comments

Due to lack of time I am closing down the Freeform101 blog. The current version and archive will be taken offline now, but in a few days (hopefully) reappear as an archive on autofunk.dk/freeform101.

Thanks for following!

-Christian

The Yes Men are revolting!

Posted on | October 24, 2012 | No Comments

It may seem that the only times I post here it is to endorse crowdfunding projects – but believe me, that is not intentional. Still, I’d like to point to yet another funding campaign, this time on Kickstarter. The infamous and brilliant Yes Men are launching a new documentary project titled “The Yes Men are revolting” for which they need our help.

The campaign seems to be going viral; after 24 hours more than a quarter of the goal has been reached.

“Hackitat” – a new crowdfunded film about political hacking

Posted on | August 4, 2012 | No Comments

Hackitat is a new Swedish-produced documentary project to highlight the motivation behind the wave of politically charged so-called hacktivism (see definition further down on this blog) that has swept the globe in the last couple of years, lead ao. by groups such as Anonymous, LulzSec and, in effect, Wikileaks.

The project is being crowdfunded via Indiegogo and will be released under a Creative Commons license (this was confirmed over Twitter). I’ve donated.

The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Posted on | May 11, 2012 | No Comments

In an interesting comment on Scienceblogs.com, Claire L. Evans writes: In his seminal 1991 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” the video artistDouglas Davis writes that digital bits “can be endlessly reproduced, without degradation, always the same, always perfect.”

Digital Decay from universe on Vimeo.

The statement follows the above video art piece that challenge this notion and at the same time serve as a comment to the famous 1935 article “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” by Walter Benjamin, in which he observes how mechanical reproduction of art pieces can release art from the elite bourgeoisie and “allowing mass audiences to, in a sense, “own” the work.”
A development, Claire also comments, that is accelerated immensely today with the Internet and computer technologies we have cheaply available.

Read the entire article here.

Explaining hacktivism // #infographic

Posted on | March 30, 2012 | No Comments

We’re getting really big on infographics (actually, we’ve been for a while). This time we’re presenting the work of the Frugal Dad blog that have produced a beautiful and visually appealing infographic explaining the new hacktivism buzz that is sweeping the globe. Hacking has really been taking a new activist role in society in recent years and this infographic explains it well.

Hacktivism Infographic

Source: frugaldad.com

 

Hypocricy in Hollywood // #piracy #lobbyism

Posted on | March 4, 2012 | No Comments

Paralegal has made this brilliant infographic highlighting the hypocricy in the movie industry when it comes to piracy. One of the things worth noticing the most is how their most profitable source of income – box office sales – are continuing to grow, but still they are spending over 120 million dollars annually (equal to sales of more than 15 million tickets) on lobbying for political initiatives such as ACTA, SOPA and PIPA that seeks to censor the Internet and jeopardize netneutrality and even basic human rights of free expression – simply to increase their revenue.

The sharing economy as faciliated by Uniiverse // #commons

Posted on | February 28, 2012 | No Comments

Uniiverse is a new portal devoted to harnessing the vast resources of unused commodities in each of our homes by linking people together to share these commodities either for free or for self-determined fees. Quite interesting idea, which – if the crew behind the site can manage to get enough people on board – could really make a difference.

Go ahead and watch the teaser below – and sign up at uniiverse.com. I did.

Everything Is A Remix pt. 4 // #sharing #copyright #ip

Posted on | February 20, 2012 | No Comments

The brilliant Everything Is A Remix-documentary series by New York-based filmmaker Kirby Ferguson has reached it’s fourth chapter, which carries the headline “System Failure” – and as usual it is highly worth a watch. One of the highlight quote goes:

“Our system of law doesn’t acknowledge the derivative nature of creativity. Instead, ideas are regarded as property, as unique and original lots with distinct boundaries. But ideas aren’t so tidy. They’re layered, they’re interwoven, they’re tangled. And when the system conflicts with the reality… the system starts to fail.”

Watch the full episode:

Everything is a Remix Part 4 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Read more about the documentary series here.

The Future Belongs to the Curious: A Manifesto for Curiosity // #inspiration

Posted on | January 15, 2012 | No Comments

The people at Skillshare has crafted a video that is simply irresistible and immensely inspiring – about the need for us to stay curious:

Brought to me by the wonderful curators at Brainpickings.

 

Copying as religion – P2P as in Priest2Priest // #lulz #copyright #religion

Posted on | January 8, 2012 | No Comments

Brokep aka. Peter Sunde of Flattr (ao.) writes on his blog (with reference to the recent news that “Kopimistsamfundet” – “The Society of Kopimism” – was officially accepted as a new religion in Sweden) that he’s “been following the church up closely and wanted to post my views on why this is an important move.” This turns out to be quite funny and enlightening.

He goes on to specify that it made him “think that it might be beneficial to look at what we (as, in this editor’s rendition, a broad term for technology libertarians, hackers, nerds, open culture activists etc.) do as a religious movement. One of the fun things working with The Pirate Bay has always been that we’ve started lots of fun crazy projects. Some work, some (most) fail. I started researching what kind of angle it would give us if we registered a religion.”

The key thing here is that as a religious group in Sweden, it turned out, you actually have more privacy (legally) than other assemblies and organisation. In other words, religious groups are more protected constitutionally than other types of groups. The idea behind this is that the laws allowing for, for instance, surveillance of groups and individuals may not legal if they’re members of an officially religious group.

Now comes the funny and compelling crux of the post: “In some religions (I don’t know about Kopimistsamfundet yet, maybe they can answer) there’s a Seal of Confession – which means that when you talk to a priest in the congregation, the priest have to keep what you say confidential. This is respected in some countries as law, where the courts can not make the priest testify against the individual. And some religions – at least the Mormons as far as I know – consider all members of the church to be a priest. This is probably the thing that I love the most with kopimism as a religion – we can have yet another form of P2P communication – Priest2priest. With no legal right for anyone to listen in to the conversation perhaps. This must be researched.”

Indeed it must. Read the full blog post here.

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  • About this blog

    Welcome to the autofunk.dk/freeform101_web blog, a contemplative online presence aimed at presenting, commenting, scrutinizing and/or discussing a wide range of topics in the sphere of media, politics, technology, social justice, art, civil dissent and other inspiring and/or troublesome subjects in our increasingly globalized world and network society.

    The blog is edited by Christian Villum.

    The 'megasolutions to microproblems' tag is a word remix of a compilation series title coined by Soul Jazz Records
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