[V]ote-auction, by Austrian group Ubermorgen, gave voters the opportunity to sell their vote in 2000 during the election campaigns opposing Al Gore an George W. Bush.
"Bringing capitalism and democracy closer together" was Ubermorgen's statement.

None of the votes were actually sold, any transaction would have involved too many risks for Ubermorgen as well as for the sellers (who would have commited a criminal offence). The group erased the data immediately so there was no trace of any transaction.

The project gained enormous media attention, the legal system started an investigation in 14 States, so did the FBI, the CIA, etc. In total the project generated 2 500 news features.

Ubermorgen calls this type of action "actionism" and "media-hacking." This intrustion into mass media requites only cheap and low-tech instruments.

Ubermorgen also created The Injunction Generator, a software module which claims to make on request legal injunctions and personalized documentation in .rtf/.pdf format to force a site into taking its contents offline (just like ubermorgen was obliged to do with Vote auction).

The Golden Nica of Net Vision wa awarded to Casey Reas and Ben Frey for Processing, a free software now used by students, architects, designers, researchers, hobbyists, etc.

The alpha version was launched in August 202 and the beta one in March 2005.

Before processing programming was mainly something done in a scientific context. Processing is a programming language and environment built for the electronic ars and visual design communities, allowing them to get their ideas as quickly as possible out of their head, without having to worry too much about codes.

It takes programming out of the hands of geeks. Designed for beginners the free Open Source tool:
- provides immediate visual results and
- three modes of programming complexities,
- supports a broad range of topics,
- simply exportable to web,
- valuable formats,
- online communities learn from one another,
- available on the major platforms (windows, mac, linux).

Other tools inspired by processing:
Wiring, and soon Processing Mobile, a programming environment and library for writing software for mobile phones.

The impact of processing still has to be seen. It will probably take a few years to show what processing has changed.

Picture from
Tribe.