information – Radical Atoms https://ars.electronica.art/radicalatoms/en Ars Electronica Festival 2016 Tue, 28 Jun 2022 13:26:43 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.6 STWST 48×2 https://ars.electronica.art/radicalatoms/en/stwst-48x2/ Mon, 01 Aug 2016 16:02:04 +0000 https://ars.electronica.art/radicalatoms/?p=1812 Following STWST48 in 2015, Stadtwerkstatt, the nerve center of Linz’s free/open culture, hosts STWST48x2, 48 hours of non-stop happenings along the Danube. The programs for STWST48x2 aim to showcase many of Stadtwerkstatt’s cultural initiatives, including the information lab, the Eleonore artist residency, radio FRO, Café Strom and STWST club.
The information lab takes up “the nature of information” as a matter of inquiry, investigating the interplay between reality and information, with installations by Taro the mushroom project, KARKATAG rehearsal, Franz Xaver Inform the Water, Tanja Brandmayr f.o.g. Ballett and Pamela Neuwirth Purple Haze. The Vienna-based Technopolitics is invited to present its Tracing Information Society—a Timeline.
Since 2009, the Station Messschiff Eleonore has gathered local and international temporary residents for meetings, debates, research and lab works. This summer, the Eleonore residency RADIO ACTIVE – SINK and SWIM pays homage to radioart pioneer Tetsuo Kogawa and brings together nine  radio broadcast projects—Xavier Faltot La Chambre à Air, Elaine W.Ho & Ming Lin Widow Radio Ching, Eva Ursprung courtship sound of piranha, Sarah Grant & Danja Vasiliev QFM, Rasa Smite & Raitis Smits Pond Radio, Nicolas Montgermont Axis Mvndi, Magmadam Prototipa, Enrique Tomas SDR Music, Ryan Jordan Currents Below The System.

Other programs include freq:club with oscillating frequencies that suspend the night till daybreak; Radio FRO’s 105.0 MHz broadcast and Café Strom holding court. With a special radio jam session in collaboration with the MS Stubnitz in Hamburg, STWST48x2 launches Eleonore’s Beacon radio project, 7067 khz—it’s not a test, calling for a daily radio signal broadcast on 7067 khz from the earth-bound inhabitants.

Credits:

STWST48x2 is a Stadtwerkstatt initiative presenting art projects including Taro the mushroom project, KARKATAG rehearsal, Franz Xaver Inform the Water, Tanja Brandmayr f.o.g. Ballett, Pamela Neuwirth Purple Haze, Technopolitics Tracing Information Society—a Timeline, Xavier Faltot La Chambre à Air, Elaine W.Ho & Ming Lin Widow Radio Ching, Eva Ursprung courtship sound of piranha, Sarah Grant & Danja Vasiliev QFM, Rasa Smite & Raitis Smits Pond Radio, Nicolas Montgermont Axis Mvndi, Magmadam Prototipa, Enrique Tomas SDR Music, Ryan Jordan Currents Below The System

STWST48x2 crew members: Michael Aschauer, Shu Lea Cheang, Jörg Parnreiter, Christine Pavlic, Felix Vierlinger, Franz Xaver

]]> BEHIND THE SMART WORLD RESEARCH LAB https://ars.electronica.art/radicalatoms/en/behind-the-smart-world-research-lab/ Mon, 01 Aug 2016 15:47:39 +0000 https://ars.electronica.art/radicalatoms/?p=2614

Agbogbloshie is a district in the teeming metropolis of Accra in West-African Ghana. The world’s largest electro-waste dump is located here. 22 hard-drives brought back to Austria from this dump are the starting point for the ‘Behind the Smart World’ research Lab. Alongside the material and exploitative dark sides of the dirty business with electronic waste. The project brings together artistic positions dealing with the value of digital information and our constant production of data. We leave not only material traces that have disastrous effects on people and our environment, but also digital traces, the value of which is to be called into question.

Linda Kronman & Andreas Zingerle (KairUs)
FORENSIC FANTASIES: Not a Blackmail

Forensic fantasies is a series of three artworks dealing with data breaches of private information. In the artworks we use data that was recovered from hard-drives that were dumped in Agbogbloshie, Ghana. Reports suggest, that at this e-waste dump, criminals extract data from hard-drives to demand payments from their owners. ‘Not a Blackmail’ examines the possibility to blackmail a pre-owner of a hard-drive. Besides finding data of the owner it is crucial to be able to contact the person to express ones demands. From one hard-drive we could find out who it had belonged to. The artwork consists of one package, containing the recovered data and a letter.

Linda Kronman & Andreas Zingerle (KairUs)
FORENSIC FANTASIES: Identity theft

‘Identity theft’ focuses on the phenomena of romance scamming. Scammers conduct id-theft by copying bulks of images of people to create fraudulent profiles on social media platforms. The scammers pose to be in love with their victim and after gaining their trust they lure them to give gifts and money. One of the ‘Behind the Smart World’ hard-drives contained several images of ladies. We suspect that the images were copied to this hard-drive to create and sustain fraudulent profiles. In this artwork 18 of the fraudulent online profiles using the same images found on the hard-drive are combined with Nollywood clips that thematises the topic of romance scams.

Linda Kronman & Andreas Zingerle (KairUs)
FORENSIC FANTASIES: Found footage stalkers

‘Found footage stalkers’ takes a closer look at images found on one of the ‘Behind the Smart World’ hard-drives. Scanning through the private photos enables very personal insights into the life of the pre-owners of this hard-drive. It is similar to the feeling of stalking someone unknown online, one starts to create a story to these fragmented digital representations. By presenting the photos in an album we approach the material as ‘found footage’, the practice of gathering material flea markets for remixing and creating new artworks. Hence the artwork confronts earlier practices of using ‘found footage’ with now digital materials found amongst our trash.

Fabian Kuhfuß
SHOPIMATION

When I looked into the first restored ‘Behind the Smart World’ hard-drive, I realised that there was no longer a folder structure. I decided to build up a new structure and it became apparent that a lot of thumbnails had been stored on the drive. These commercial thumbnails are placeholders for the aesthetical reflection of the ‘original owner’. ‘Shopimation’ is an approach to get closer to an unknown individual by researching his or her ‘aesthetic dreams’. As the techno-imagination of Vilém Flusser is an approach of coding a function of the meaning of techno-pictures, ‘Shopimation’ could be a code to translate the very private dream of who one would like to be.

Raphael Perret (CH)
RECYCLING YANTRA

The installation ‘Recycling Yantra’ is on one hand a series of videos, documenting the informal e-waste recycling in Delhi, and on the other a contemporary interpretation of the tantric symbol ‘Smara-hara Yantra’ (Remover of Desire). The videos show how computers are collected, repaired, traded and taken apart over several steps, until all components are fed back into the production of new goods again. The yantra, composed of materials collected from the recycling process, is an energy diagram, comparable with a talisman which, in its original meaning, is supposed to help people free themselves from desire and the urges of consumer culture.

Recycling Yantra / Raphael Perret
Photo Credit: Raphael Perret

Martin Reiche
SHELL PERFORMANCE

‘Shell Performance’ is an open-source software art installation that transforms an operating system into a performative space. The performance is fueled by the data that is available on all attached internal storage devices. The underlying software is a Linux shell script that is constantly scanning the contents of the hard drives for files. Running on the data retrieved from one of the ‘Behind the Smart World’ hard-drives, ‘Shell Performance’ questions integrity of data as much as issues of privacy, highlighting the questionable relationship we have with data and our urge to save everything to protect us from potential losses through malfunctions.

Michael Wirthig
HEADCRASH

The most interesting thing of the ‘Behind the Smart World’ hard-drives is the magnetic disc itself. It is the physical place where all kind of personal data is saved on. In former works I’ve made various studies about the relationship between inner and outer worlds. Therefore I dissected the hidden world of a number of different appliances to turn them inside out, e.g. disassembling machines. For ‘Headcrash’ I extracted the discs of 2 Ghana hard-drives and explored the surface with a microscope. 1500 photos of the inside and outside influences of the discs, like scratches or dust result in a 1 min tour de force about the inner world of these drives.

Linda Kronman & Andreas Zingerle (KairUs), Fabian Kühfuß, Raphael Perret, Martin Reiche
MAPPING THE SMART WORLD

‘Mapping the Smart World’ examines the life cycles of consumer electronics and network technologies. By mapping the key locations for mining, refining, production, storage and the urban mining of e-waste we want to bring forth the complex chains of development and production that enables our networked lives. The ‘Mapping the Smart World’ reveals locations of both stunning R&D, increasingly effective use of resources as well as dystopian working conditions and ecological disasters. The interactive map was realised during the ‘Mapping the Smart World’ ArtLab as a part of the ‘Vorbrenner’ program at the ‘Freies Theater Innsbruck’.

]]> LabOratorium—An Alchemical World Lab https://ars.electronica.art/radicalatoms/en/laboratorium-ein-alchemistisches-weltlabor/ Mon, 01 Aug 2016 13:17:32 +0000 https://ars.electronica.art/radicalatoms/?p=2563 The LabOratorium exhibition being staged during the festival scrutinizes the alchemists of our time and the forces that impel them to do what they do.  One spontaneously associates the word alchemy with the—eternally frustrating—handiwork of transforming base metal into gold, the endless search for the Philosopher’s Stone, or even with the likes of Paulo Coelho—quirky geniuses in antique laboratories full of odd apparatuses and bubbling flasks full of spooky substances.
Festival-goers visiting the LabOratorium won’t be receiving any prefab answers; instead, they’ll get an invitation to come along in search of the alchemists’ still-fascinating approaches and their current protagonists. To this end, the entire exhibition space is being transformed into a playful World_Lab in which a colorful assortment of stations offers opportunities for research, discussion, interacting and hacking. You might say we’re relaunching the mission to discover the Philosopher’s Stone. The issues we’re confronting thereby have to do with the information society, globalization, technology, medicine and ethics.
Visitors can take part in workshops, project presentations, discussions, hack attacks and experimental formats designed to come to terms with pressing issues together with invited artists and scientists.

Text: Michael Badics, Senior Director AE Solutions

Eye to eye with Sally

Since the first Ars Electronica in 1979, ubiquitous digitization and computerization have been continually revolutionizing both the arts and industrial production.

Orbital Perspective

On October 1, 2013, I left my dream job, the job I had worked my entire life to achieve, a job that took me to the depths of the ocean and to space. I left my career as a NASA astronaut for one compelling reason, to be able to share a very unique perspective our planet full time.

The Hearing Implant Company

MED-EL, Medical Electronics, headquartered in Innsbruck is a leading provider of hearing implants worldwide. The family-owned business founded by DI Dr. Ingeborg and Prof. Erwin Hochmair is one of the pioneers of the industry.

G60_HACIENDA

G60_HACIENDA is the test bed to transform the idle land in the hi-tech campus in Shanghai, China into the self-sufficient neighborhood. It will redefine public space via techno-advanced co-creation to form an integrated ecosphere of human, nature and technology, providing a new type of demo space of the future scenarios in urban living, knowledge acceleration and transferring, advanced industry clustering, forming the next economy for the City.

Impact Hub Vienna

Impact Hub is a unique global ecosystem of resources, inspiration, and collaboration opportunities that creates a sustainable and inclusive future. The Impact Hub Vienna community is made up of entrepreneurs, social investors, freelancers, advocates, campaigners, creatives, artists, consultants, professionals—addressing local and global challenges.

BEHIND THE SMART WORLD RESEARCH LAB

Agbogbloshie is a district in the teeming metropolis of Accra in West-African Ghana. The world’s largest electro-waste dump is located here. 22 hard-drives brought back to Austria from this dump are the starting point for the ‘Behind the Smart World’ research Lab.

Schmiede Hallein

Schmiede Hallein (Hallein Forge, a city in Salzburg) is a playground of ideas. This conclave of makers and prototyping jamboree is a setting for self-determined development, testing cooperation and brainstorming.

GRAMEEN CREATIV LAB – CIRC RESPONSIBILITY

Digitization is rapidly transforming the world of work—complexity is growing; speed is on the rise; developments are less and less predictable. This shifts the focus onto the question of what makes human beings irreplaceable in comparison to computers, and in what respects people could be superior to intelligent machines.

Without Borders

During times in which the world’s borders are becoming increasingly hard and fast, people without borders are gaining importance.

]]>