The ACTA threat to the Internets // #acta #freedom

Posted on | November 5, 2011 | No Comments

The magnificent La Quadrature du Net – an advocacy group that promotes the rights and freedoms of citizens on the Internet – has just released three videos to inform Europeans about the ACTA agreement that is currently being lobbied in the EU Parliament.
ACTA is presented as a trade agreement, but is in fact a threat to Internet users’ fundamental freedoms and to EU Internet companies’ competitiveness and free competition. It gives Internet service providers the responsibility to police what their customers do online and gives them the right to ban users without legal proces. The European Parliament will soon decide whether to give its consent to ACTA, or to reject it once and for all.

Watch all three films on the La Quadrature Du Net website.
Find more information about ACTA from the same source here – or from Wikipedia.

Opportunity for communication: Occupy Big Banks with Their Own Junk Mail // #activism #pranks

Posted on | November 2, 2011 | No Comments

In the more pranksy division of the political activism spectrum comes this fun suggestion from the good people over at GOOD, where Wylie Overstreet has a suggestion for a pretty easy and fun way to occupy banks from within; through their own junk mail – or, as he puts it: “Using it as an opportunity for communication”.

From the GOOD blog: “We all receive junk mail; it’s a universal constant, like gravity. And many of the envelopes clogging your mailbox are things like credit card offers and checking account deals from large financial institutions—the same ones whose irresponsibility and greed catalyzed the economic crisis we’re currently enjoying. Those banks’ actions have sparked the “Occupy” protests around the world and a wave of people moving their money to credit unions, but there’s another way to voice discontent. Enclosed with each credit card application is a prepaid weapon for a small protest: a business reply mail envelope.

The banks pay for these in advance, but only if they’re sent back.”

Read the entire article here.

Six Famous Thought Experiments, Animated, from the Open University

Posted on | October 23, 2011 | No Comments

As found on the brilliant Brain Pickings blog:
“From the fine folks at the Open University comes 60-Second Adventures in Thought, a fascinating and delightfully animated series exploring six famous thought experiments.”

See the rest here.

Danish Designs Centre bullying Danish design talents

Posted on | September 20, 2011 | No Comments

Bureau Detours, a talented Danish architecture-, design- and building studio, recently launched the humorous Dennis Design Center initiative; a temporary design center owned by “Dennis”, a fictitious art-enthusiast character (supposedly from Rotterdam in the Netherlands), who set out to change public space in and around Prags Boulevard as part of the recent Metropolis festival.
The name of the design center paid respectful and (typically Danish) humorous wordplay-homage to the Danish Design Centre institute, that serves as a point of entry to the Danish design industry.

Only the Danish Design Centre appearently couldn’t see the fun, because only a few days after Dennis Design Center had entertained the crowds at Prags Boulevard with the creativity of “Dennis” throughout the festival, Bureau Detours received a seize-and-desist letter from Danish Design Centre’s lawyers, claiming trademark infringement and demanding that the exhibition be cancelled from further display and the affiliated website be taken offline right away.

The case has now reached Danish media (Politiken, in Danish) and serves as another perfect example of a national institution that has failed to understand the true nature of creativity and natural branding; namely that such sampling serves to promote their trademark rather than infringe it.

As of writing, the site is still up and the exhibition recently visited the Netherlands.

BOMB: A manifesto of art terrorism // #streetart

Posted on | August 1, 2011 | No Comments

Artist Raymond Salvatore Harmon has put together BOMB, a manifesto of art terrorism, as he bluntly puts it: “BOMB is part personal reflection, part social critique. A pointed and opinionated observation about graffiti culture, media terrorism, art “education”, corporate control, and the ills of the current art world.”

Watch the trailer:

BOMB: A manifesto of art terrorism – RSH from Raymond Salvatore Harmon on Vimeo.

And download the manifesto here (.pdf).

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

Posted on | May 30, 2011 | No Comments

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.

Street art interventions

Posted on | May 14, 2011 | No Comments

Intervention art using posters and spray painting (from Manchester in the United Kingdom). Narcélio Grud is a Brazilian artist and the video is part of a series of intervations that the artist has made through many countries around Europe.

How New Yorkers feel about art

Posted on | April 28, 2011 | No Comments

Check out this interesting video made by our fellow Dane Christian Svane Kolding interviewing New Yorkers about their view of art (as also highligted in the brilliant Brain Pickings blog).

How Do You Feel (About Art)? from svanes on Vimeo.

By the way, sorry for the low posting frequency, I am a bit busy with other projects!

Huff Puff it down // #huffpuff

Posted on | February 15, 2011 | 1 Comment

The sale of independent blogging behemoth Huffington Post to AOL has caused outrage in global blogging communities and is broadly regarded as a shocking sell-out; Huff Post was regarded – both in the community and outside of it – as the prime example of how grass root micro journalism could not only match, but also topple, existing media regimes. Until now, that is, where megacorp AOL has tamed the beast.

Such infamy, however, will not go unopposed: Culture-jammers The Adbusters have launched a new campaign titled ‘Huff Puff’ in which they encourage former Huff Post bloggers to boycot the the Huff Post blog, but also build a new outlet for independent micro-journalism using Twitter and the hash-tag #huffpuff.

They write in their blog:

Socialite Arianna Huffington built a blog-empire on the backs of thousands of citizen journalists. She exploited our idealism and let us labor under the illusion that the Huffington Post was different, independent and leftist. Now she’s cashed in and three thousand indie bloggers find themselves working for a megacorp.

But the Huffington Post is not Arianna’s to sell. It is ours: the lefty writers and readers, environmentalism activists and anti-corporate organizers who flooded the site with 25 million visits a month. So we’re going to take it back.

We’ll stop going to her site. And we’ll stop blogging for her too. Then we’ll give birth to an alternative to AOL’s HuffPo by using the #huffpuff hash tag to tell the world about our favorite counter-culture websites and indie blogs.

We are the ones who built the Huffington Post. And now we will be the ones who will huff & puff it down.

The future of money // #futureofmoney

Posted on | November 29, 2010 | No Comments

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 by Neil Gorenflo, highlights very well some of the ideas behind the out-of-the-cash-box thinking that is starting to permeate into mainstream awareness. How can we create new systems of wealth generation and abundance?

This reminds me of a concrete initiative that I came across in Gothenburg a couple of weeks ago at the FSCONS-conference; dyndy.net -“an effort at building a Pattern Language for Alternative and Complementary Money Systems to inform and empower grassroots communities with concepts and tools to overcome scarcity, instruments and reflections for the Exodus from proprietary money.” Behind it stands a collective of “researchers and practitioners in the fields of philosophy of economics and technology, activists and hackers, developers and visionaries“.

I am looking very much forward to follow this initiative. Read more about it that the official Dyndy website or collect inspiration from the groups Youtube-channel.