User:Roelroscama/R,W&RM3

Key Themes

 systems
 exploits
 freedom/control
 power relations
 tactical media
 autonomy
 subversion
 citizenship
 playfullness
 intervention
 trolling
 collaboration
 research
 in 
 no
 particular
 order

Descriptions of previous work

Open Drugs

Open Drugs is a database intervention, concluding an investigation into what people might find to be the 'limits' of open-sourcing. If knowledge becomes freely distributed and accessible, at what point do people become uncomfortable? What knowledge should and what knowledge shoudln't be open-sourced?

Using recreational synthetic drugs as a case study we wondered if it would be possible to open-source the production process of XTC, and what the effect of that would be. During the investigation we discovered that in practice the same mechanics applied to the creation and improvement of chemical recipes for drugs as they did to to open collaborative software building. The 'code' is shared through online platforms, incrementally improved by users and made available to all in the community. The technology for making these drugs was in fact already open-sourced.

To communicate this fact we added the Open Hardware logo to existing pills and had these tested at several free test labs throughout the country. By having the pills tested they got registered as existing pills on the market, thus Open Drugs officially exists.

Telewar

Telewar is an ongoing research project by The Force of Freedom and Dave Young on the topic of drone warfare. The project was initiated in november 2012 during a three week residency at Upominki in Rotterdam. The result of the residency was a self-published booklet containing an heavily illustrated essay. In it we try to make some sense of the drone warfare phenomenon by looking at how the users of military UAVs represent themselves both officially and unofficially. This is done by examining places, images or artifacts where an official and regulated narrative on drones intersects with with a more spontaneous and uncensored one. Examples include public facebook profiles of UAV squadrons, the online second hand market for drone-related insigna and offical documents conerning the topic.

The latest iteration of the project consists of two film loops. One is a taxonomy of UAV uniform patches. In this film a collection of patches is categorized and classified into four distinct topics, animals, flight hours, mythology and the earth as a grid. By making this taxonomy and studying the symbols for their connotation and their history the viewer gets a better insight in how UAV operators view themselves and the world. The second film is a lexicon of drone terminology. By juxtaposing military jargon with images it tries to scrutinize the pentagon euphemisms that are used to talk about UAVs and the Global War on Terror.

Traceroute mapping

The traceroute mapping was a research into the political nature of the internet's infrastructure using the so-called traceroute programme, that traces all the different servers one's data passes as one surfs the web. Trough tracingrouting my own browsing history and comparing all the adresses with a GeoIP database I was able to determine through which countries my data was routed. This information was then mapped into diagrams providing me with a very chaotic though insightful picture.

One week of browsing, one of the first visualizations.

Annotations of Contextualizing Texts

Control and Freedom by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

Self-written texts that I find usefull to explain practice

Telewar text

See above

Web Dichotomies

Some notes on the contradictions that manifest itself trough the internet. It's at the same time Empowering/Controlling, WorldWide/American, Public Space/ Market Place, Physical/Cloud.

comment on Bitcoin

a post I made to a discussion on the nettime list