Turbulence MUST raise $25,000 by December 31, 2007.

I’ve been reading and learning from Turbluence for the past 5 years. They not only publish but also organize events and support artists (see the past comissions). Turbulence is unique in their effort and a great motivation for networked arts. We owe them a lot. No need to say, supporting experimental art practice has no monetary return in the “free market economy”. So please support Turbulence if you:

• are one of the thousands of people who regularly visit Turbulence, Networked Performance, Networked Music Review and / or New American Radio ;
• are one of the hundreds of teachers who use Turbulence works in your new media / digital art courses;
• are an artist who has received a Turbulence, Networked Music Review or New American Radio commission;
• have presented at or attended Upgrade! Boston (Art Interactive or Massachusetts College of Art and Design), Floating Points (Emerson College), or Programmable Media (Pace Digital Gallery) … now is the time to give something back…

or

You don’t know us but you support experimental practice in the arts… Please PLEDGE NOW!

WHAT TURBULENCE ACCOMPLISHED IN 2007

In addition to an exceptional year of supporting artists through commissions, public events, and our world-renowned resource, Networked Performance, we started a second blog called Networked Music Review (NMR). On it you will find in-depth interviews with sonic artists and musicians; world-wide events highlighted in real time; a “Weekly” post spotlighting interesting works, artists and conversations; a monthly newsletter which summarizes each month’s activities; and much more.

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT IN 2008

On November 15, NMR began launching fifteen commissioned works, several of which will premiere live at Programmable Media II: Networked Music, a 2-day symposium at Pace University, New York City in April 2008.

In addition to launching 20 commissioned works, other upcoming highlights include Mixed Realities, an exhibition and symposium at Emerson College, winter 2008; and Re(Connecting) the Adamses, a major exhibition co-presented with Greylock Arts (Adams, Massachusetts) and MCLA Gallery 51 (North Adams, Massachusetts), summer 2008.

“Temporary Land”, 2005

This was a study for exploring the relationship between the city grid and the typographic grid. In the summer of 2005, I designed a type face and a process to type. The image above is generated by three processes: me typing those words, the program deciding on the size each time I hit the key, and the instructions for the fonts.

I’ve been developing a new online stock market for the past two months. The alpha version will be up soon. Hopefully it will help people to retain the value of their immaterial labor in social web services. This is the continuation of my A Stock Market in Life project and experiments done in the Physical Language Workshop at MIT Media Lab. I will post about it later, for now this post is about some inspirations and recent observations that motivate me.

While building the stock market system I got inspirations ranging from my childhood experiences to my observations on today’s Internet economy and techno-cultural genres.

When I was around 15, I worked at a currency exchange office in the world famous Grand Bazaar (satellite view), Istanbul. At the time, Grand Bazaar was the center for determining the gold and foreign currency exchange rate in Turkey. There were no electronics in the heart of the bazaar back then. Just bidders cheering the price of dollars at their hand. My job was to get in this crowd and learn the recent exchange rate between US Dollar and Turkish Liras, and report it back to the office. So that the office can update the exchange rate and sell or buy dollars from this new rate. There was no agency to track and announce the recent price. People were just learning the recent price from each other, face to face, right there in the crowd. Dynamics of this humane structure was one of the inspirations for me to implement a peer-to-peer stock exchange system.

While building the trading interface, I did a quick visual survey about stock markets in different cultures. Of course, most of the stock markets function electronically, but I found interesting scenes from stock exchange centers. I didn’t have a chance to get in the actual NYSE floor (closed to public for “security reasons”). I just found other people’s stock market photographs on the web, mostly on Flickr.

NASDAQ. World’s first electronic stock market NASDAQ is fully abstract. It has only a vitrine for feeding the tourists in Times Square. Photograph by mlesn on Flickr.

Baghdad Stock Exchange. Brokers gathering around hot stocks on the whiteboards. Trades are conducted by hand. Photograph top left, photograph top right, and Photograph bottom by Baghdad Chris on Flickr.

Hong Kong Stock Exchange. People on the floor are for backup – most of the activities occur electronically back at their main offices. Photograph by heycreation on Flickr.

Tokyo Stock Exchange. Although everything is electronic, it seems the agencies are actively serving the traders. Photograph by majurcic on Flickr.

Considering today’s Internet economy and world’s network infrastructure, it is hard to understand why we still have physical centers for stock markets.

What is “the market of spectacles” anyways?

In The Society of Spectacle (1967) Guy Debord says:

“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”

There is a difference between Guy Debord’s Society of Spectacle and today’s networked society of spectacle. Today, the spectacle is digitally measurable.

I went out and took pictures of some iPhone crowd in front of the Apple Store the other day. I put them on the Flickr and this picture got 1,500 views in 12 hours. Many excited people did the same thing. They uploaded live videos to YouTube, they bookmarked iPhone applications to Delicious, they posted the most interesting iPhone stories on the Digg. They generated tons of views to their profiles and traffic to these domains. Their profile’s rankings increased. People linked each other’s iPhone posts. They got more hits on their blog. As a result the whole spectacle was digitally measured and generated value. Once we have a measured value at hand, it can easily change hands in a market environment.

This iPhone happening was called eventstreaming at TechCrunch and O’Reilly Radar blogs. Considering the measurability of spectacles and their critical relation to capital, I call it an instance in the market of spectacles.

After the feed stats company Feedburner is acquired by Google, the AdWords integration to feeds became the dominant discussion. Great! Your blog business can now be managed from a single Google interface right. This also means that your blog traffic data change hands. Feedburner puts a notice in their sign in interface saying that you have a right to opt-out, delete your data. If you take no action by June 15, 2007 (9 days as of today), the rights to your data will transfer from FeedBurner to Google.

“Service of FeedBurner publisher accounts will not be interrupted as a result of the acquisition by Google. You will have a 14-day interim period ending June 15, 2007 to opt-out of allowing Google to service your account. If you take no action by June 15, 2007, the rights to your data will transfer from FeedBurner to Google. Opting out will terminate your user agreement with FeedBurner, permanently delete your FeedBurner account, feeds, and all related statistical data and history, and prevent the transfer of your data rights to Google. To opt-out, contact us via accountx@feedburner.com, provide your FeedBurner account Username, and request to have your FeedBurner account deleted. We will contact you at your registered email address to confirm your deletion request before completing it.”

When YouTube acquired by Google no one asked YouTube users if they wanted to delete their YouTube account or videos. The same thing applies to all those small fish social data aggregating web 2.0 companies eaten by the whales (e.g., recently StumbleUpon swallowed by Ebay). It is nice of the Feedburner team that they are asking if we want to delete our accounts. Although I think that this notice is a legal enforcement to Feedburner since their clients are not only individuals but also companies.

So will you delete your Feedburner account?

I don’t think I will. Although I want to have control on my data, I can’t resist using Feedburner services currently (because of some embedded protocols). But watch us for an alternative action soon. I think this is an important moment to pay attention to how inhumane the data ownership laws in USA: One who aggregates data owns it.

This is a contribution to the discussion started with Trebor Scholz‘s “A critique of sociable web media” email on the IDC mailing list.

So what can we do against networked exploitation?

I think an obvious strategy is to exploit those exploiters. Google Will Eat Itself (GWEI) and Amazon Noir are good examples for finding the holes in sociable web media systems and using the holes for reverse exploitation.

I think another strategy is to stay in context for collective action while all those sociable web media giants are fighting with each other for your attention (aka attention economy). There are many ways to stay in context such as email lists, forums etc. and all that social software actions as Trebor Scholz mentioned: commenting, tagging, ranking, forwarding, linking, moderating, remixing etc. Tools and environments for such actions are mainly provided by giant corporations, and under US laws, one who aggregates information owns it. But we can make our own web services for staying in the context, just like the way we can setup and maintain an old email list technology.

So this brings in the discussion of “open service provider”. As open source software development communities demonstrate, we can collectively create value independent from the capitalist exploitation. If we are in the software-as-service era, support and use open service providers as much as you support open source software. It is very important to intensify and redirect our collective techno-cultural production to a territory that is formed more by individual’s free-will than capital’s interests. But of course making one open alternative for each commercial-social web tool/environment is not all that relevant, it sounds just like making the free version of MS Office. So open service providers can use existing techniques but I think they should invent new types of interaction and aggregation for the good of the community.

I use software-as-service strategy in my artwork. They are not commercial services nor utilitarian. I believe that building an open service is closer to making a cultural product than making a commercial one. As Steve Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble puts it here, the relation of the creative expression to social processes is as important as the materials, processes, and products.

A Stock Market in Life is a market that uses the value generated by the immaterial labor of visitors at different urban spaces in Oklahoma City, Boston, Munich, and Istanbul. These spaces will be connected with each other via a streaming video server for the duration of the Upgrade! A Day in Life event. For each location, sensors mounted in the entrance register how many people are in the room at any one time and send this information to the Stock Market central server. The number of visitors define the fair value for each place. Each location has 100 shares and the shares gain or lose value depending on the speculations in the market and the number of people in the local rooms.

You can contribute to the value either by just visiting the physical locations or by trading in the online stock market. The market is open now, you can sell and buy shares using the buraks you will have when you register – 25ß.

http://market.openio.org

Events take place in the following locations:

Oklahoma City: IAO Gallery
Gallery with large windows to street.

Munich: Muffathalle Cafe
Interior space, no view to outside. Popular cafe, part of complex of club spaces playing world music and often holding avant garde events.

Boston: Art Interactive
Alternative gallery near Central Square, Cambridge, halfway between Harvard and MIT. The space we have for this project is an interior space with no view of the street outside.

Istanbul: Zoo
A kitsch and playful night club in Taksim.

I have attended the Wizard of OS conference in Berlin. Main discussions were around free open software culture technology privacy copyrights licenses and so on. In yesterday’s keynote, Lawrence Lessig simplified the “everybody is producer” paradigm into RO (Read Only) vs. RW (Read Write) culture. Mixing media is good, fight DRM, use open source software, build open source software… He also mentioned that contemporary media technologies are freeing the media production as printing technology did for written words. However there were missing perspectives:

1. Software and hardware are seen as tools for creating media such as image, text, music, movie etc. Today artists use software and hardware as the medium of the artwork itself. We write custom programs running on custom hardware. People not only stare at the artwork, they also interact with them. Furthermore, we produce artwork that run on network of machines. We develop platforms and environments as artwork in which people not only interact with it but also live in it. Issues such as DRM or copyright can not even be discussed in this type of work, because we create cultural systems, not cultural objects.
2. Cultural production is seen only as the work done in the studio or the work done with tools for media production. However, we also do work out of the designated working time and space. This is known as immaterial labor, that is the work done by just living. During the day, in our blend of work and leisure, we not only browse things on the web but also actively contribute to various information aggregation systems from website statistics to search engines, increasing the value of advertising sales or the quality of search algorithms. Moreover, we consciously tag images on image sharing services, we bookmark links in social bookmarking services, we write our opinions about books and so on. These metadata are informational and cultural content of the commodity that contribute to our zeitgeist, aesthetic views, political ideas, and economic wealth. This production can be criticized as art or not, but what is more important is these service providers (Google, Yahoo, Amazon etc.) accumulate data from us, and under US laws, corporations own our cultural products.

We finally opened the Real Time Rome exhibition in Venice Architecture Biennale. I designed and developed 6 visual software in collaboration with Francesco Calabrese. I don’t have words to talk about this project now, so here what MIT news office says:

“The project utilizes data gathered, in real time and at an unprecedented scale, from cell phones and other wireless technologies, to better understand the patterns of daily life in Rome, and to illustrate what ubiquitous connectivity in an urban environment looks like.”