“Hackitat” – a new crowdfunded film about political hacking

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 […]

The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction

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 […]

Hypocricy in Hollywood // #piracy #lobbyism

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 […]

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

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 […]

Hollywood vs. YouTube + Copyright history // #copyright #doctorow

As always, author and technotarian Cory Doctorow nails it very accurately in this interview when asked to explain the Hollowood/film entertainment lobby vs. YouTube debacle – as well as account for the history of entertainment industry responses to technological evolution.

The future of money // #futureofmoney

The emerging awareness that the way we today assess value – that is, through monetization – is becoming increasingly problematic is something that is incredibly interesting, I think. The below video (written by Gabriel Shalom, Venessa Miemis and Jay Cousins), uploaded to vimeo by Berlin studio KS12 and posted with a nice article on sharable.net […]

Make your own newspaper from independent sources #fivefilters #media

A group of developers/hackers lead by Keyvan Minoukadeh has set out to develop a service application – FiveFilters.org – that will enable the public to get non-corporate news-coverage of contemporary news topics – by easily hacking corporate media itself. In practice, the application helps you scan a physical corporate newspaper clipping via your webcam and […]

“Dead Drops” – an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space #art_activism #newyork #fatlabs

FAT Labs’ Aram Bartholl has launched a new inspiring project. He writes: ‘Dead Drops’ is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. I am ‘injecting’ USB flash drives into walls, buildings and curbs accessable to anybody in public space. You are invited to go to these places (so far 5 in […]

Why We Hack: The Benefits of Disobedience #hacking

Brilliant piece on the equally brilliant Lifehacker blog. Excerpt: “Sometimes disobedience is necessary and good when rules fail us, and it’s at the core of why we hack. Hacking is a means of expressing dissatisfaction, confounding the mechanism, and ultimately doing better. Here’s why it’s so important.” (…) What they Mean When I Say “Hack” […]

Using augmented reality to hack public space #berlin #improvedreality

With artists being pushed further and further away from city centers in urban areas across the western hemisphere – mainly due to gentrification and rapidly growing real-estate prices – the natural canvasses of the cities are increasingly being conquered by commercial messages rather than, say, street art. A development that is changing the faces of […]