Mirko Tobias Schäfer / Assistant Professor
University of Utrecht Department for Media and Culture Studies
Mirko Tobias Schäfer / Assistant Professor
University of Utrecht Department for Media and Culture Studies
Date August 2008 / Category News
While so far Europe's politicians have luckily been unable to install a centrally organized police authority that spies on its citizens and strips them of their citizens rights, the United States has witnessed the emergence of a powerful and frightening authority that threatens to invade all areas of private life and monitor all citizens. The Department for Homeland Security seems to top all Orwellian nightmares.
How unbalanced and unquestioned power, paired with the excessive use of information technology for surveillance and pattern recognition is undermining democracy and constituting repression is described in a timely novel by Cory Doctorow.
Tags Review
Date April 2008 / Category News
The Viennese Wohnzimmerkonzert featured an evening with MuQua artist in residence Nancy Mauro-Flude, aka Sister0, and London based "pirate, post-postmodernist, rebel and rock star" performer Jesse Darlin'. The concerts literally take place in Costa Caspary's small living room, and as a good host he even provides a buffet and cold beers in his kitchen. The two artists rocked the LabFactory the previous night with Sister0's performance, "My First Burial", and Jesse Darlin''s "I Was A Teenage Porn Star". Tonight was on the whole a fast, fragile and funny performance of songs, poems and some in-between chit-chat; stand-up rock stars forced to low volume. Performing a cappella without microphones, spiced with iconoclastic humour and never taking themselves too seriously, their appearance was an unplugged post-punk version of chamber music for the jilted generation coming of age. Jesse Darlin', subtle and clownish while performing her song "When The Machines Went To Sleep" is evocative of Blade Runner-like replicants. The congenial duo complements one another, as the punk-vaudeville act of Jesse Darlin' provides a constant commentary to Sister0. They draw from a cornucopia of intertextual references to create an indisputable post-ironic winking collage of punk-rock gone coffee party. Subverting any intellectual interpretation the duo manages to literally perform their own commentary and discourse simultaneously in their show.
Beyond Vienna's posh culture venues, limited to an oddly small living room and stripped of sound equipment, Jesse Darlin' and Sister0 remain unquestionably passionate and sovereign artists, convincingly performing straight from the cerebral cortex.
Tags Review
Date March 2008 / Category News
Finally Springer published the long expected volume "Philosophy and Design. From Engineering to Architecture" edited by Pieter Vermaas, Peter Kroes, Andrew Light and Steven A. Moore. It consists of 25 essays reflecting engineering and design as issues for philosophy and ethics. The contributions provide philosophical and ethical analyses ranging from rather traditional engineering to emerging practices in genetics, nanotechnology, software design and information technology. The editor's introductory chapter emphasizes the meaning of design and engineering as a theme for philosophy and maps comprehensively the field according to philosophical, societal and ethical issues. Carl Mitcham, author of "Thinking Through Technology" praises the book as "significant contribution to the expanding field of design studies [...] It is also the first collection of philosophical papers to bridge the divide between critical reflections on design in engineering and in architecture."
Bernhard Rieder and I are pleased to contribute a piece on software design using open source as an example to emphasize the cultural context of engineering.
Get the book at Springer.
Read our article (.pdf)
Tags Book
Date November 2007 / Category News
The right wing party winning the latest elections in Switzerland communicated their political objectives in an online game. As reported by Ian Bogost on Watercoolergames the game's hero is a white cartoon goat called Zottel. In "Zottel rescues Switzerland" the user has to solve missions such as kicking out black sheep "representing criminal foreigners", intercepting passports issued to immigrants and shooting "EU tax collectors" for the sake of a "flourishing Switzerland." (see screen shots)
The shocking aspect of the game is its trivialized racism, presented as a playful and harmless game. It would have been impossible for the Swiss People's Party to launch a version of Ethnic Cleansing a racist First Person Shooter developed by Neo-Nazi label Resistance Records. Even right-wing conservatives would have distanced themselves from the obvious endorsement of violence, white power, and racism. But it is actually that very spirit that the Zottel game thrives on.
Xenophobia and racism are wrapped into a cheerful online game promoting the People's Party's concern for safety, order and independence. Employing stereotypes of criminal immigrants, unwilling to adapt to Swiss law and culture, the People's Party promotes nationalism and hatred for foreigners as funny leisure activity. The obvious implication is actually the call for race war and genocide promoted explicitly in Ethnic Cleansing. The campaign represents the recent trend in European politics making nationalism sociable as protectionist conservative policy.
Date September 2007 / Category News
The festival 'Nieuwe Grond: the Artist as Opinion Leader' features next a series of interesting lectures and performances an event with the notorious Yes Men. The Yes Men have infiltrated the public communication of corporate companies as Exxon, Halliburton, and Dow Chemicals, and deliver lectures as representatives of the World Trade Organisation. Their pranks involve a WTO call for legalizing slavery, a Dow Chemical press release pretending to pay appropriate compensation for the victims of the scandalous Bophal accident in 1984, and a call for replacing the democratic voting system through selling the votes to the highest bidder. Besides the lecture 'Roping and Branding: Riding the Corporate Bull with the Yes Men' the event features the documentary 'The Yes Men'.
Festival, Nieuwe Grond: The Artist as Opinion Leader,
September 27th - 30th, Landgoed De Horst, Driebergen (NL)
Lecture, Roping and Branding: Riding the Corporate Bull with the Yes Men,
Saturday 27th September, 17:30-19:30
Tags Event
[d]vision, the Vienna International Festival for Digital Culture is back with a new festival. Realtime generation is entirely dedicated to the demoscene and realtime animated visuals. Since last year the dvisionaries and their new director Regina Webhofer have been preparing this year's festival with a series of smaller events to present demos and outstanding coders to a broader audience outside the dynamic demo scene sphere. In close collaboration with the scene, [d]vision has set up a full scale festival with an exhibition, demo screenings, lectures, and panel discussions. And the popular nerd venue Werkzeug H hosts a daily demo lounge. After this packed program the festival features a demo party on which scene members from all over Europe compete for coding the best demo.
The festival takes place from July 4 to July 20 at Museumsquartier Vienna, Werkzeug H,and Metalab.
Program and information at [d]vision.
Tags Event
Date April 2008 / Category News
The Dutch television program Tegenlicht (Backlight) at VPRO featured a documentary on Wikipedia. Questioning the construction of knowledge as either expert generated in Encyclopaedia Britannica or collaboratively created in Wikipedia the documentary follows the various perspectives. Interviews with enthusiastic promoters of new technologies contrast with the culture pessimist view represented by self acclaimed "Anti Christ of Silicon Valley" Andrew Keen. However the documentary does not point out that neither Keen nor the techno-enthusiasts are part of the analysis of this question of knowledge in the digital age but one of its symptoms. Reducing cultural production dichotomously to mediocre amateur creations or to a revolution of professional amateurs is rather short sighted.
The documentary's website provides extra information and valuable links to a more comprehensible understanding of the debate and its participants. It also features my comments on Wikipedia.
Tegenlicht/Backlight: Wiki's Waarheid, website at VPRO
The Truth According To Wikipedia, at YouTube
Date March 2008 / Category News
Im transcript Verlag ist das Buch "SUBversionen. Zum Verhältnis von Politik und Ästhetik in der Gegenwart" erschienen. Die Herausgeber Thomas Ernst, Patricia Gozalbez Cantó, Sebastian Richter, Nadja Sennewald, und Julia Tieke versammeln in dem Band Beiträge, die subversive Strategien in Kunst und Medien kritisch reflektieren. Neben Texten zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Subversiven im Allgemeinen, werden subversive Strategien in den Bereichen Theater, Fotografie, Literatur, Film und Mode analysiert und bewertet. Zusammen mit Hans Bernhard von Ubermorgen.com trage ich dazu mit einem Artikel über die Ambivalenz des Subversiven bei.
Tags Book
Date November 2007 / Category News
The first Rotterdam Barcamp ever took place at the Worm. It was a packed evening with very exciting presentations on software development and socio-political issues.
Denis Jaromil Rojo gave a talk on piracy and file sharing and discussed option for anonymous access.
Media design student Danja Vasiliev presented a modified ADSL router that was turned into a camera with automatic picture upload to a server through open WLANs.
Audrey Samson talked about the efforts of the Genderchangers to teach woman in using software. Criticizing open source software development for blindness in gender issues Femke Snelting from Constant hit the mark. The unfolding discussion was filled with gender essentialism and revealed how important it is to revisit developer's culture and its relation to the produced artifacts.
Thiago Noaves from Brazil talked about open source operated online radio broadcasting and how the government's increased funding is changing the Brazilian open source scene.
Socio-political issues were crucial in most of the presentations. It was clear that technology is never just means but reveals society and its regulations and codes. Hopefully the debate will develop further bringing together people from software development as well as from humanities and policy making. The first BarCamp was a good start and hopefully it establishes as regular event.
Date September 2007 / Category News
The recent trend in Germany towards surveillance is threatening civil rights seriously. The right wing minister for Inner Affairs even requires clandestine online searching of personal computers next to wiretapping, and data retention. This would be similar to house searches without even notifying the occupants. The constitutional legality does not approve the practice why CDU and CSU politicians currently try to change the laws. The plans for data retention of all citizen's Internet traffic, phone calls, e-mails and even the logging of geographical location in relation to mobile phone communication will be in effect soon. A growing group of concerned citizens is organizing actions for defending what is left of our civil rights.