Graduation Show
Opening: Friday, July 01 2011
Time: 19:00 – 23:00
Open: July 2 – July 15 2011
Wed – Fri: 11:00 – 18:00 hrs / Sat & Sun: 12:00 – 17:00
Finissage: Friday, July 15
Roodkapje, 119-133 Meent
3011 JH Rotterdam, Netherlands

Join us for the 2011 Graduation Show at Roodkapje, Rotterdam. Reflecting upon a variety of issues relevant to today’s networked media culture, the exhibition features works by Birgit Bachler (AT), Özalp Eröz (TR), Megan Hoogenboom (NL), Albert Jongstra (NL), Darija Medić (RS) and Renee Olde Monnikhof (NL).

The networks are abuzz; they are humming with high and low pitches. While some are visible, others are discretely at work “catching flies in the alternet”. Whether manifested online or offline, all of this year’s graduation projects engage in repurposing and reorienting networks to generate alternative perspectives. Birgit Bachler’s, Discrete Dialogue Network, is a telephony-based communication system designed for leaving anonymous voice messages in public space. The project by Özalp Eröz, Virtual Street Art, questions how online networked distribution impacts street art, and its beliefs in authentic local interventions. Megan Hoogenboom’s work, Huenet, physically demonstrates the differences between the public Internet, meaning the World Wide Web as we know it today and encrypted darknets. Exploring how we access the news online, Renée Olde Monnikhof´s Net News Now raises timely questions about professional journalism and the role of the amateur in an age of on-demand media. Albert Jongstra tackles participatory collaboration through a series of hands-on workshops entitled, Participator 3.0. Lastly, Attention: Recalculating!, a project by Darija Medić, challenges our unquestioned belief in technology. By modifying GPS navigation software, her project offers customized ways of taking longer routes through speculative scenarios.

The Discrete Dialogue Network: a telephony-based communication system, Birgit Bachler (2011)

Faceless by Manu Luksch (2007 AT/UK)

Sniff, Scrape, Crawl…
Lecture: Steve Rushton
Followed by a screening of ‘Faceless’ by Manu Luksch
and Suicide Box by (BIT) the Bureau of Inverse Technology
Date: Tuesday, 22/03/2011
Time: doors open at 19:15, lecture begins at 19:30
Location: Mauritsstraat 36, 3012 CJ Rotterdam
Entrance free
Lecture will be streamed at: http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/pzwart_video.html

*Sniff, Scrape, Crawl…* is a series of lectures examining the porous borders of privacy in the digital age.  The next lecture and screening will explore optical forms of surveillance in all of its ominous complexities and perversities.

Lecture by Steve Rushton:

Looking at social networking sites and reality TV shows, Steve Rushton will reflect on how the notion of ‘feedback’ works both as a metaphor and as a material condition in contemporary media. He will pay particular emphasis to reality TV as media that feeds back tropes from an array of cultural sites, such as the social psychology experiment, the ‘flying eye’ and Candid Camera. He will argue that non-scripted TV serves as an aid to the neo-liberal political reasoning which promotes a culture of self-performance, entrepreneurism, privatisation, volunteerism, and responsibilisation.

Steve Rushton is a founding member of *Signal:Noise*, an experimental cross-disciplinary research project that aims to explore the influence of cybernetics and information theory on contemporary cultural life by testing out its central idiom, ‘feedback’, through debates, artworks, publications, performances, events and exhibitions.  He has been a writer and editor for a range of projects with artists such as Rod Dickinson and Thomson & Craighead. His publications include the series ‘How Media Masters Reality’ for First/Last Newspaper, Issues 1-6, Dexter Sinister (2009); ‘New Walden,’ HB2, Issue 1, CAC, Glasgow (2008); ‘Experience, Memory, Re-enactment’, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam/Revolver, Frankfurt (with Anke Bangma and Florian Wüst) (2005); ‘The Milgram Re-enactment’, Revolver, Frankfurt (2003). He also teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute.

Review of Signal:Noise: http://www.furtherfield.org/reviews/feedback-signalnois

Screening of Faceless by Manu Luksch (2007 AT/UK)

Trailer of Faceless

In a society under the reformed ‘Real-Time’ Calendar, without history nor future, everybody is faceless. A woman panics when she wakes up one day with a face. With the help of the Spectral Children she slowly finds out more about the lost power and history of the human face and begins the search for its future.

Faceless was produced under the rules of the ‘Manifesto for CCTV Filmmakers’. The manifesto states, amongst other things, that additional cameras are not permitted at filming locations, as the omnipresent existing video surveillance (CCTV) is already in operation. The UK Data Protection Act and EU directives give individuals the right to access personal data held in computer filing systems. This includes images captured by CCTV recording systems. For a nominal fee (£10), an individual can obtain a copy of this data: financial or medical records, or video recordings. Other legislation states that the privacy of third parties must be protected. In CCTV recordings, this is done by erasing the faces of other people in the images – hence the ‘faceless’ world.

Manu Luksch, founder of Ambient Information Systems (ambientTV.NET,) is filmmaker who works outside the frame. The moving image, and in particular the evolution of film in the digital or networked   age, has been a core theme of her works.   Characteristic is the blurring of boundaries between linear and hypertextual narrative, directed work and multiple authorship, and post-produced and self-generative pieces. Expanding the idea of the viewing environment is also of importance; recent works have been shown on electronic billboards in public urban spaces and open air cinemas in remote rural places.
see: http://www.manuluksch.com/
Ambient TV Net: http://www.ambienttv.net/content/index.php

Next to the film, we will be handing out the CCTV Manifesto:

Then there will be a short screening of a classic surveillance project from the Bureau of Inverse Technology:

The Suicide Box by (bit) the Bureau of Inverse Technology (1966 UK)

A documentary about the BIT Suicide Box, a motion detection video system designed to capture vertical activity. The Unit includes BITcamera, motion capture card, analysis software and utility concealment casing. In standard operation any vertical motion in frame will trigger the camera to record to disk. The Bureau installed the Suicide Box for trial application in range of the Golden Gate Bridge, California 1996; an initial deployment period of a hundred days metered seventeen bridge events.

Bureau of Inverse Technology [BIT] Incorporated 1991 with limited liability Cayman Islands. The Bureau is an information agency servicing the Information Age.
see: http://www.bureauit.org/

The Sniff, Scrape, Crawl… public lecture series has been realised with the collaboration of Research Programme (Lectoraat) Communication in a Digital Age.

Public Lecture: Joris van Hoboken, Nicolas Malevé and Aymeric Mansoux
Date: Wednesday, 16/03/2011
Time: doors open at 18:45, lecture begins at 19:00
Location: Mauritsstraat 36, Rotterdam
Entrance free
streamed at: http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/pzwart_video.html

Screenshot of Naked on Pluto, a multiplayer text adventure game on Facebook

Bringing together artists, programmers and theorists, *Sniff, Scrape, Crawl…* is a series of lectures examining the porous borders of privacy in the digital age. Previous public events  in this series have touched upon a wide rage of topics such as surveillance, data-mining, the function and limits of anonymity, and the profound influence of network architecture on social, political and legal issues.

The next three talks will continue to explore and expand upon these ideas from different perspectives. Joris van Hoboken will be looking at search engines, how they track queries and what impact data retention and profiling has on our civil liberties.  Nicolas Malevé will be speaking about social network platforms and the evolution of national and international legal agreements, while drawing parallels between the processes of homogenization of the web and the processes of legislative harmonization within the EU. Lastly, Aymeric Mansoux will be talking about *Naked on Pluto*. The project, which is a collaboration between Mansoux, Dave Griffiths and Marloes de Valk, is a multiplayer text adventure game on Facebook that explores the perils of centralized social networks.

Joris van Hoboken (NL) is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for Information Law, and his thesis focuses on regulatory aspects of search engines. He graduated cum laude in both Theoretical Mathematics (2002) and Law (2006) from the University of Amsterdam. His LL.M. thesis dealt with the new Dutch regulations on access to personal data in criminal proceedings, i.e. an analysis of how citizens’ interests are implicated in the limitation of such access. Until 1 September 2006, he worked as a paralegal at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and as a co-director of Bits of Freedom, a digital civil rights organisation.
Main site: http://www.jorisvanhoboken.nl/

Nicolas Malevé is an artist, software programmer and data activist developing multimedia projects and web applications for and with cultural organisations. His current research work is focused on cartography, information structures, metadata and the means to visually represent them. He lives and works in Barcelona and Brussels. Since 1998 Nicolas collaborates with Constant, a non-profit association, based and active in Brussels since 1997 in the fields of feminism, copyright alternatives and working through networks. Selection of works: *Copy.cult and the Original Si(g)n*, a project of investigation on the alternatives to author’s rights. www.constantvzw.com/copy.cult/home
*Yoogle!* an online game that allows users to play with the parameters of the Web 2.0 economy and the marketing of personal data. http://yoogle.be

Aymeric Mansoux (FR) is an artist, musician, media researcher and core tutor at the Piet Zwart. In 2003, he founded GOTO10 with Thomas Vriet, a non profit organization and artist collective, with the goal to promote the use and support of free software in electronic music and media art creation. Aymeric has been active in the collective until 2010 and initiated several projects such as: ‘make art’, a yearly international no nonsense festival for software artists using and writing free software; ‘Puredyne’, a popular live GNU/Linux distribution for creative media and the ‘FLOSS+Art publication’, the first collection of essays on FLOSS and digital art production.
Main site: http://su.kuri.mu/
Naked on Pluto: http://pluto.kuri.mu/

The *Sniff, Scrape, Crawl…* public lecture series has been realised with the collaboration of Research Programme (Lectoraat) Communication in a Digital Age.