User:Dusan Barok/Monoskop library (draft 1)

From XPUB & Lens-Based wiki
Distributed library of media arts and culture

Recent works

Faceleaks

Faceleaks is a Firefox/Chrome add-on which attaches a leak button to Facebook photos, allowing user to leak them to www.faceleaks.info website which has a visual appearance of Wikileaks Cablegate website.

The browser add-on is a Greasemonkey user script written in JavaScript language and subsequently compiled to XPI format compatible with Firefox browsers. The add-on was then pointed to forward the leaked Facebook pictures to the newly registered Faceleaks.info domain, which was designed to mock the Cablegate page at the Wikileaks.org website, including a logo of Facebook default icon mashupped with the official Wikileaks logo. The XPI file was uploaded to the official Add-ons for Firefox website maintained by Mozilla Foundation, along with the short description of the add-on. The information about the project was then sent to the experimental browser software repository, Artzilla.org, which included it in their database. Information about the project was shared via social networks without a direct interference of the author, also following the public presentation of the add-on at the Rebelhuis exhibition in Rotterdam. There was another version of add-on created in PEM format, compiled into CRX format for Chrome browsers, and included in the Faceleaks.info website. The source code for both versions was finally made publicly available and uploaded to Gitorious repository.

In November and December 2010 I was reading a lot about WikiLeaks and observing how the Cablegate story interacts within the media sphere. I perceived it as a convergence of crucial issues at stake for the contemporary politics and as many others I was discussing the potential it creates for political change. There were several threads, a question--of leaking as a creative act, of what is to be and what not to be linked to the public domain, of accountability and reponsibility, of information transparency, and of censorship. I was not able to answer the question of what gives the WikiLeaks organisation mandate to decide what sort of classified information made public is more likely to meet their maxim--to create more "just" world.

I was primarily interested in exploring a technique of leaking and apply a method of modifying a technology shaping the society on the grand scale to see what would happen if the control over leaking is given to a wide spectre of people. When talking to Michael, the moment we got an idea of embedding a leak button within the Facebook page, I realized how such a simple hack would go deep into the very idea a social network builds upon: trust. WikiLeaks use a similar hack to break a conspiracy within a corrupted governing body, giving its participants an anonymous 'leak' option. Facebook platform is entrusted by millions to keep their personal information "classified" to people they trust, and yet many downplay privacy concerns, and play. Faceleaks explore a possibility to break a trust in favor of entertainment.

Social stock market

Social stock market was an idea of software which allows users to trade their friendships acquired at social media websites.

My ground assumption was that a social network profile is a commodity being produced by an user, a product of his or her labour of socialising online, while the sole extractor of its financial value being a network provider selling profiles to advertisers. The users--profile producers--are rewarded by the satisfaction from the ever rising number of friends displayed prominently at their profile pages as a kind of social relevance ratio, as the points the player collected in the social game. I wanted to explore the functioning of economic value system inherent in the social graph, make it more transparent and take it a step further.

That was the biggest issue. I imagined a software, a platform which would mirror social graphs of various networks (Facebook, Twitter, Myspace), increasing value of user each time he or she makes a new friendship, kind of an individual's social market value. The user would be thought as both a company issuing shares (requesting friendships) and a shareholder (having friendships with other users, in other words, owning shares at other companies). This would create an interesting situation, in which the value of all players raise in the most cases, since a friendship in the social network does not seem to be a scarce commodity. In theory, there were thousands of friends available for free, each a few clicks away, since both sides would always benefit from befriending each other. In other words, I was unable to create a more nuanced market situation, for instance to solve the issue of offer and demand, and how to make the friendship the desired object of consumption. Having more time for it, I would dive into issues of immaterial economy.

Rig

Rig was placed in an art gallery hosted by the local city hall as a computer which tries to generate money by running Bitcoin currency mining software. It consisted of a PC tower with a cover removed and a screen displaying the process, accompanied by printouts of cypherpunk and crypto-anarchist manifestos.

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer currency. Peer-to-peer means that no central authority issues new money or tracks transactions. These tasks are managed collectively by the network. The participants store the money (bitcoins) on their computers and run the software to make transactions to others. To generate money the users are optionally running another piece of software, Bitcoin mining client on their machines, called the "mining rigs". The processing power of the rig mining network thus replaces the central authority issuing money. The exhibited computer was simply running a mining software processing and verifying the transactions in the bitcoin network, and during three weeks of the exhibition it mined about 1 cent.

I was primarily interested in exploring a potential the Bitcoin technology has as an alternative economy.

Outline of a proposal for a new work

Throughout the years I collected about 75 gigabytes of experimental films, video art, electroacoustic music, scanned copies of computer-aided paintings, graphics, prints, and numerous publications covering media arts and culture in east-central Europe, which currently sit on my harddrive. I included content I thought is relevant for otherwise under-developed history of media culture in this region. Thinking about how to make the collection public and particularly about limits of online archiving, I started to treat it as a initial phase, a starting point for development of an idea of multimedia resource maintained by a peer network.

Vision

An emergence of a distributed framework for permanent public access to the archive of media arts and culture by creating shortcuts, hacks, tools within, inbetween and top of already existing infrastructures.

Approach

  • Open source art history - provide source documents, so that multiple art histories may be produced
  • P2P topology for non-tech audience
  • Place-based history - ground the works and events to locative context, reterritorialize the art history

Relation to previous work

The project emerged from my previous work on Monoskop, a collaborative wiki research on social history of media art and culture (since 2004), and Monoskop/log, a living archive of writings on art, culture and media technology (since 2009).

Research threads

archive, distributed/peer-to-peer network, art history, taxonomy/tagging

Field

Peer-to-peer archives

  • Private torrent trackers: Karagarga, SurrealMoviez, What.cd. The three probably best sources for movies and music online are exclusive private communities maintaining strict user guidelines and being ruled by benevolent dictatorship of a few.
  • Filesharing sites for ebooks: Aaaaarg, Library.nu. Both are non-invite archives using centralised and third-party file storage.
  • Runme.org software art repository

Curated archives

Ubu, compArt daDA

Software

Discussion

Bibliography

  • Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, 1945 [14] Memex
  • Ted Nelson, A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate, 1965
  • Ted Nelson, Literary Machines, 1980s Xanadu
  • Tim Berners-Lee, 1980 ENQUIRE System
  • in 1903 Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss published their essay on primitive classification systems to show how they are determined by the shape of society [15]
  • Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. University of Chicago Press, 1996. [16]
  • Esther Weltevrede, "Archiving Web dynamics" [17]
  • Alain Depocas, Jon Ippolito, Caitlin Jones (eds.), Permanence Through Change: The Variable media Approach, New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, with Montreal: Daniel Langlois Foundation, 2003. English and French. [18]
  • Sandra Fauconnier and Rens Frommé, Capturing Unstable Media: "Summary of Research Results", March 2003 [19]
  • Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder (eds.), Making Art of Databases, Rotterdam: V2, 2003. [20]
  • Charles Merewether (ed.), The Archive. London: Whitechapel, 2006. [21]
  • Pelle Snickars, Patrick Vonderau (eds.), The YouTube Reader. National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, June 2009 [22]
  • Karin Bijsterveld, José van Dijck (eds.), Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2009. [23]
  • Julian Myers, "Four Dialogues 2: On AAAARG", Aug 2009. [24]
  • Janneke Adema, "Scanners, collectors and aggregators. On the ‘underground movement’ of (pirated) theory text sharing", Sep 2009. [25]
  • Morgan Currie, "Small is Beautiful: a discussion with AAAARG architect Sean Dockray", Jan 2010. [26]
  • Annet Dekker (ed.), Archive2020 – Sustainable Archiving of Born-Digital Cultural Content. Virtueel Platform, 2010. [27]
  • "The AAAARG.org Discussion of the Macmillan Threat", Apr 2010. [28]
  • -empyre- list, "Publishing In Convergence" mailing list discussion moderated by Michael Deiter, Morgan Currie and John Haltiwanger, Jun 2010. [29]
  • Nina Wenhart, "W0rdM4g1x. Or how to put a spell on Media Art Archives", January 2011, [30]
  • Matthew Fuller, "In the Paradise of Too Many Books: An Interview with Sean Dockray", Mute magazine, May 2011. [31]
  • more: [32], [33]