I spent last Sunday in Genoa to attend Resistant Maps, artistic actions in the interconnected urban territory, a conference and exhibition that investigated the 'resistant' practices and theories related to the territory imaginary and how once can inoculate political viruses in the re-thinking of the space. It was a small, unaffected and friendly event but it was also one of the most stimulating and thought-provoking conferences i've attended this year. An unrelated note: i thought i was tired of Italian food but i had forgotten what a gastronomical fairyland the Ligurian region is.

The conference started with Alessandro Ludovico's introduction. Ludovico is a well-known media critic and the editor in chief of the magazine Neural since 1993. The publication was awared a Honorary Mention for Net.Vision at Prix Ars Electronica in 2004. One of the latest projects Ludovico has been collaborating to, Amazon Noir, is in the short-list of the upcoming Share festival.

His intervention was quite short as he only wanted to give some food for thoughts, some input for the upcoming reflection. He first explained how new technologies have re-defined our own perception of space. They include mobile telephony of course but also the now widely available mapping technologies. So far, the representation of territory was coming "from above", it is still owned by governements and strictly protected in Europe. Maps have been freed in the US (that's why an application like Google Maps could bloom.) Lorenzo Tripodi later added that if approved, a EU directive, INSPIRE, might further strengthen the States' monopoly on geographical data.

Thanks to the apparition of these new technologies, maps are not granted anymore by structures of power, they are built by individuals who, drawing on the ideas of the psychogeographical movements, redraw the urban space according to fresh new coordinates. People can now share with others a more personal vision of geographical data (as opposed to the one traditionally in the hands of power.) Personal information can be added to the presentation of a given territory and thus come to be part of the collective memory.

Ludovico highlighted three tools that are representative of the opportunities that collaborative and locative technologies offer us today:

- Delocator, developed by Finishing School, an application that invites citizens to fight the homogenization of café culture imposed by franchised java providers.
- Google is the biggest operator on the net. They might provide us with cool mapping tools and applications but one must not forget that their first aim is commercial profit. MapOmatix is a free software developed by Hackitectura as a collaborative environment for creating and editing maps. The maps can contain physical elements (oil resources, telecomunication antennas,etc), abstract ones (such as human organisations, web servers) but they can also be used to emphasize relations between these entities. Behind this tool is the idea of editing and publishing tactical maps. See for example, their Deportations of African immigrants in Morocco map.
- GarbageScout that uses the API provided by Google Maps to point you to potentially useful things that have been thrown out in the street.

Next speaker was Lorenzo Tripodi who presented Cartografia Resistente, a project rooted in the territory of Florence. The work combines psychogeography, digital mapping and political activism. The idea stems from a desire to explore the territory "from below," to offer other tools able to describe the territory, independently from the copy-righted geo data that government proposes. According to Tripodi, the economy of glabalization is a winning model in Florence. There's very few voices that arise to express any oppostion.

Cartografia Resistente is a wiki, it's flexible and makes the process of sharing of information easier. There also a photo gallery. The group started to collect geographical data two years ago. Two characteristics of the project:

- The way the actors of Cartografia Resistente explore the city is inspired by the situationist practice of the Dérive, they walk without any agenda set, following the whim of the moment.
- Their focus is political, they aim to highlight the transformations that the city of Florence had to face over the past few years.

He ended his talk with a few considerations on the difficulty to sustain a budget-less project that relies only on the availability and energy of its users.

My images on flickr.

A la recherche du temps perdu / In Search Of Lost Time is a performance by Karl Heinz Jeron and Valie Djordjevic.

Using the electronic versions of the first three parts of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece from Project Gutenberg, the performers in white coats are reading the machine-code version of the novel. The text is first deconstructed into its individual parts - the letter and characters - which in turn are decoded into the Ascii-code. Each letter is represented by an individual sequence of eight zeros and ones: for example the sequence “01000001�? refers to the letter A.

In a mock laboratory, one performer is reading the zeros, the second person reads the ones. A third person embodies the CPU (the Central Processing Unit): she interprets the zeros and ones with the aid of an ASCII allocation table, cuts out the corresponding letter from the prepared sheets and turns it over to a fourth performer, Display, who sticks it onto the wall panel where the previous text is collected. Mistakes made by the actors are not corrected, they form an integral part of the performance.

To read out one page of the novel takes about seven performance day – providing the duration of the performance is about 7 to 8 hours. The whole novel cycle has more than 4000 pages (depending on the edition).

Now this is my idea of a great project. La Recherche du Temps Perdu used to be my favourite book. I read parts of it over and over again. That was such a long time ago and i'm really happy that some people out there have found a way to catapult classical French literature into the cheerful realm of new media art.

Photo: Martin Howse from the images of the performance in London.

Related: VSSTV - Very Slow Scan Television.

Hot news from the Amazon Noir – The Big Book Crime project!

The plot:
The Bad Guys (The Amazon Noir Crew: Paolo Cirio, Alessandro Ludovico, Lizvlx and Hans Bernhard) stole copyrighted books from Amazon by using sophisticated robot-perversion-technology coded by Paolo Cirio. A media fight and a legal dispute escalated into an online showdown with the heist of over 3000 books at the center of the story.

The technology:
The Amazon Noir Robots (Sucker01-12) tricked around with Amazon Search Inside the Book function until it gave away the complete volumes of copyright protected books. This was carried out by sending 5.000 - 10.000 requests per book. After this process the data was logically reassembled into pdf-format by the SIB-Book-Generator (see the diagram.)

Amazon Noir was scripted as an internet-movie. The whole digital action (media hack) was carried out in the global massmedia, within the art world and on a highly sophisticated technical level in the clandestine matrix of our global networks.

Amazon USA, U.K., Germany and France were vulnerable targets. During the attack they transformed part of the Search Inside the Book technology to defend the rights of the copyright holders - without actually solving the problem. Over 3000 Books were downloaded and distributed through p2p between April and October 2006.

The end?
In July 2006 Amazon France and Amazon USA threatend to litigate. The matter was resolved out of court October 30th, 2006. Amazon (USA/France) bought the Amazon Noir software for an undisclosed sum - both parties signed a non-disclosure agreement.

Previous posts: The Big Book Crime and Interview with Ubermorgen.

Cemetery 2.0, by Elliott Malkin, is a concept for networked devices that connect burial sites to online memorials for the deceased. The prototype links the gravestone of Hyman Victor, Malkin's great-grandfather, to his surviving Internet presence, including his: Flickr Genealogical Repository, Facebook Memorial Profile, Pedigree Resource File and Family Tree of the Jewish People entry .

The Cemetery 2.0 device maintains a live satellite Internet connection. Visitors to the physical memorial can view related memorials on the device display, while visitors of any of the online memorials will recognize that their browsing is associated directly with the actual burial site. The Cemetery 2.0 device is connected to Hyman Victor's GEDCOM file. The file includes The Kaddish (the Jewish prayer for the dead) to neutralize an inadvertent posthumous baptism.

The artist compiled his findings about into GEDCOM (the universal file format developed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which maintains the largest genealogical database in the world) and uploaded Hyman's GEDCOM to the Pedigree Resource File and The Family Tree of the Jewish People, both of which are based exclusively on GEDCOM.

The notion of a digital cemetery, rows of servers in vaults below a mountain in Utah, raises the possibility of combining the electronic burial with its traditional counterpart. In this sense, the project is a step towards the next-generation cemetery — a networked memorial to the electronic record of a man.

Other works by Elliott Malkin: Crucific for electromagnetic faith and eRuv: A Street History in Semacode.

Related: Digital Remains by Michele Gauler ; Mission Eternity by etoy; Biopresence, by Shiho Fukuhara and Georg Tremmel; and Postmortem.

Jardiland invites you to take part to a real radish races on Internet.

Unlike The Telegarden -where web users collectively interacted with a remote garden, Jardiland allows each web breeder to remotely manage an autonomous robotic module in which her/his individual radish will be able to grow.

A more accessible and autonomous technology has been developed to spread radish racing boxes all over the world and allow a participant to manage their own radish growing device. The growing boxes are all to be simultaneously closed at the onset of the race. Only the selected breeder will have access to the plant management through www.jardiland.org. The player will have to judiciously administer an array of radish growing parameters controlling this tiny biosphere.

The gardener must first plant the seed with a small robotic arm, afterwards s/he must daily bring attention to the radish: water it, feed it with fertilizer, turn on and off a grow-lamp, ventilate the box with a fan, and modulate the temperature through a heater and a temperature sensor.

A limited quantity of water, fertilizer and electrical energy will be allocated to each module at the beginning of the race. In consequence, a clever evaluation and use of these factors will be crucial and decisive for a positive outcome.

A webcam will take 3 photos a day and will allow the web gardener to control the growth of his radish - though only the top of the radish will be visible.

After 21 days the modules are opened, the radishes dug up, and the gardener with the biggest radish takes the prize! Subsequently, every breeder will receive by post the radish she has carefully nurtured.

Jardiland blends farming and food supply with issues of telepresence, tele-surveillance, remotely controlled interaction and web community.

A project by France Cadet and Jean-Pierre Mandon.

Tometaxy.net allows net users to send almost any messages, text and/or images, to a remote and physical public place where the tometaxi team has placed an electronic screen.

Your message will be displayed live at that remote outdoor location on ultrabright screens. And each time a high quality picture of these messages will be returned to you.

Tometaxy.net explores the relation of experiments in virtual and public media, combines the gallery space with real landscapes at remote locations and creates new so-called micro-public realities.

Now, the second stage of the project is slightly more ambitious. In reference to Nam June Paik´s “The Moon is the Oldest TV�?, the tometaxy team is currently constructing a second moon, slightly bigger than a tennis-ball and weighting less than 3 kg, equipped with small displays, antennas and cameras for still images and video, which they would launch into real space. People will be able to send pictures or SMS to this artificial Moon. A small camera will take a picture from space of your message on the picosatellite screen and return this image back to your mobile phone.

This artistic or cultural pico-satellite would be made to counter current political, scientific, technical as well as economical efforts within global and mobile media. They are on the lookout for sponsors btw!

Animation.

A work by Axel Roch, research fellow and guest artist at the ZKM Center for Art and Media.

Team: Andreas Walther (Taiwan), Shunsuke Sunagawa (Japan), Bing Zhang (China), Nathalie Boseul Shin (Korea), Keiko Takahashi (Japan), Philipp Hofmann, Petra Broutschek, Adrian Hampel, Carsten Borchert, Bjoern Semm, Marc Grimm and Janko Sternagel (all Germany).

The project was presented in February at Transmediale and is currently exhibited at Media City, the 4th Seoul Media Art Biennale, Seoul Museum of Art, Korea. Until December 10. Radio interview of Axel on ABC.

While random clicking on Axel's pages i found a list of art projects related to the Moon. Excellent stuff!