facial recognition: US$1B 'just in time' for the RNC in NYC

2004-05-03 Thread t byfield
 [the public response to this -- compared to responses to
  similar efforts in, say, london -- will be a useful study
  in contrasts. it's the first i've heard of it; it seems 
  likely that the systems in question have already been 
  discredited elswehere. (hilariously, just the other day i
  got responses to FOIAs i'd filed with the NYS/NJ port 
  authority -- two years after i filed them.) -- cheers, t]

http://www.ny1.com/ny/TopStories/SubTopic/index.html?topicintid=1&subtopicintid=1&contentintid=39441

 NYPD Planning To Install Its Own Surveillance Cameras

 MAY 02ND, 2004

 The NYPD is reportedly planning to install hundreds of cameras
 around the city that can automatically recognize the faces of
 suspected criminals or terrorists. 

 There are already tens of thousands of private surveillance
 cameras trained on city streets and buildings. According to the
 New York Post, the NYPD wants to install its own centralized
 system. 

 NYPD Deputy Commissioner James Onalfo is working on a plan for up
 to $1 billion in new computer and camera equipment, according to
 the Post. Facial recognition technology would allow police to
 pick out and follow suspects in high-crime areas and near
 potential terrorist targets. 

 Police reportedly hope to install many of the cameras before this
 summer's Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden.

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notes for the future - after Free Cooperation

2004-05-03 Thread Brian Holmes
[apologies for cross posting, and - ]

My appreciation to those who let it all hang out and cooperate in Buffalo, and
generally on the Free Cooperation list. I personally had a great time and
Nathalie Magnan back in gay Paree was with us in spirit retrospectively as I
told her all about it!

It was a pleasure to do the opposite of the typical academic shtick in a
literally desktop environment.

On the last night of the conference Christoph Spehr and I had a conversation
around a Thai dinner table that sparked many ideas, which I'd like to share
with you. I am told that some people at the conference already found our public
ruminations a little abstract and Eurocentric, and I'm afraid this attempt at a
look into the political future may not be much better. Plus I'm also not sure
that Christoph will entirely recognize our conversation when I get done with it
- but anyway, here goes:

Both of us basically think that the staying power of the long-lived, nasty,
dinosaur-toothed political compromise known as neoliberalism is just about
over. Wave it goodbye with massive protest and no regret. Its death throes are
burning down cities, an ugly situation which may yet get worse. But the
abysmally unequal exchange of finance-driven globalization has unleashed such
deep conflicts - both those unfolding violently since September 11 and the
civic unrest of the worldwide antiglobalization movement - that the hegemony
originally put together by Reagan and Thatcher is likely to become unglued. It
just ain't working. The long economic crisis that began in Mexico in 1994,
peaked with the Argentine default, the Enron and Worldcom bankruptcies, the
falling value of the dollar, and now has made a permanent war footing look like
a viable alternative to the Imperial elites, is only the most obvious sign of
this likely collapse. Another is the systematic paranoia of the total
information obsession, which will not stand despite the fact that "we have the
technology." Symmetrical to this control obsession is the epistemological
fragility of instantly produced-and-traded knowledge: despite and sometimes
even because of the transmission magicians, no one is sure anymore of what the
data might mean, and the volatility of the conceptual and informational
environment has made coherent governance almost impossible. Meanwhile a
groundswell of critique, still almost inaudible for you in the US, is daily
growing. The defeat of Aznar's party in Spain is a harbinger of the end. For
the Latin American governments and peoples - Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia,
Venezuela - it's already clear that there is no alternative to the task of
finding another way to run society. And now part of our job, everywhere, for
years still to come, is to push these bastards out along with their ideas and
their values and their geostrategies and their legal procedures and their
organiz ational models and their modular management and their cynical Gucci
ties and their bloodsucking IP ideologies, not to mention - to touch closer
bases with some of you - their start-up opportunism and their shameless
cooptation of practically any kind of art that glitters. Vampires go home! It's
time to seriously revile the living dead, and start taking care of the walking
wounded.

And by the way, don't forget to go on destroying the core programs of the WTO,
IMF, World Bank, Davos, WIPO, EU, NAFTA, FTAA, and the others. International
institutions for vital negotiations? OK - but not with even of a shadow of the
programs we have known for the last 25 years. Total opposition otherwise, to
the GATS first of all. It's the only way to start living again.

While the transition drags on, what we can fear on the peripheries of the
world-system is simply more war: whether the outright obscene agression of the
Imperial center, as we see right now, or the covert fomentation of local
fascist (that is, armed, right-wing, elite-driven) resistance to any attempts
to change the rules of social cooperation toward a more egalitarian system. I'm
thinking here particular of dangerous Latin America (and today, of Caracas).

What we can expect to see in the center is a classic displacement of the basic
violence of economic relations into the political sphere where arguments and
ideologies dispute the stage, before becoming governing regulations. I'm
thinking of Eurostan, of the upcoming swing to rose (colored glasses, means:
social democracy). And if you think it's green, try washing it first!

Among the interesting perspectives (and this is already obvious) is the fact
that the inclusion of libertarian ideas (i.e. anarchism for you Yanks) in the
neoliberal construction can no longer hold. Thatcher-Reagan / Clinton-Blair was
convincing because it was supposed to make you free of big government; that's
down the tubes. Blair has outlived himself and his Home Secretary Blunkett now
proposes jailing people for just associating with (suspected) terrorists, which
is not exactly an encouragement of free association

ED MEESE DRAFTED FOR THIRD-PARTY TICKET

2004-05-03 Thread Foundation News
May 02, 2004
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

ED MEESE DRAFTED FOR THIRD-PARTY TICKET
Heritage event speaker calls for third-party Meese ticket

At a Heritage Foundation luncheon Friday in Chicago, Edwin Meese III was
drafted to run for President on a third-party ticket. The speaker
condemned Bush as an inadequate free-markets candidate, calling the
administration's war in Iraq "the biggest market distortion in the history
of humankind" and "crony corporate welfare on a truly gigantic scale."
Meese, Attorney General under Ronald Reagan, was in attendance but did not
immediately respond.

On Thursday night Meese presented the Heritage Foundation's Salvatori
Prize in American Citizenship to Virginia Walden-Ford, Executive Director
of DC Parents for School Choice. Ms. Walden-Ford, a mother from Washington
DC, successfully led a local battle to provide private school vouchers for
students, including her own son, trapped in gutted public schools. Her son
is now serving in the US Marines. 

The luncheon concluded the Heritage Foundation's 27th annual Resource Bank
meeting in Chicago. This year's event celebrated the 60th anniversary of
"The Road to Serfdom," a seminal free market treatise by Friedrich Hayek.
The conference focused on limiting "market distortions" such as Medicare,
and on ending "corporate welfare" including protectionary tariffs.

Edwin J. Feulner, President of the Heritage Foundation, declared, "Too
many conservatives lose hope. They doubt that the liberal welfare state
can be brought to collapse In short, they doubt that The Heritage
Foundation's Vision for America can be achieved."


The complete text of the Meese nomination follows. For video of the
nomination, visit http://www.socialstability.org/video/meese.mp4

"I would like to salute that very brave woman, Virginia Walden-Ford, who
yesterday proved to us that through individual initiative and free
markets, all of us can rescue our children from shoddy government
education so they can learn what they need in order to compete in a free
American marketplace.

"But there is a nine-hundred pound gorilla in the room. Instead of
fighting in the free American marketplace, this brave woman's son is
fighting for what I think we all, or many of us here agree is a case of
crony corporate welfare, a market distortion on a truly gigantic scale.

"Ms. Walden-Ford's story convinced me that our political choices in the
next election are simply not adequate. And I propose that on this historic
anniversary of The Road to Serfdom, we take a giant step for Hayek's free
market by drafting a real free-markets candidate. And why not Edwin
Meese?"

"To the next President and Commander-in-Chief of the United States of
America, Ed Meese!"


The Heritage Foundation is an influential conservative think tank in
Washington DC. 



CONTACT: Charla Benedict  mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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Transeuropean Picnic

2004-05-03 Thread Felix Stalder

Transeuropean Picnic

Historic events are odd things, mostly disappointing. They feel either like 
empty routines of calendarial arbitrariness (200 years French Revolution, the 
millennium) or utterly imposed (9/11, war in Iraq). Either way, they usually 
render one passive, through boredom or powerlessness. History, it seems, is 
always made by others. The EU enlargement, somehow, doesn't really fit this 
pattern, eventhough it had plenty of both in it.

Yet, it is also, or perhaps primarily, an unfinished event, one whose actual 
meaning goes far beyond the "overcoming the divisions of the cold war" or any 
other of the standard themes trotted out by celebratory speakers on market 
squares across the continent. Its meaning, really, will only slowly emerge, 
through the accumulation of everyday practice. The EU, after all, famously 
lacks a vision.

How could such a practice look like from the point-of-view of open media 
cultures? To think about this, kuda.org, together with v2, issued an 
invitation to gather in Novi Sad, Serbia for a transeuropean pic-nic on the 
weekend of the enlargement [1].

Of course, being in Serbia, one cannot help but be reminded that this great 
process of unification is also a process of creating new boundaries, of 
establishing new visa regimes, border controls and barriers to mobilities 
(which my spell checker insists to render as 'nobilities'). Yet, bringing 
together a hundred people from some 20 countries between the Netherland and 
Georgia on a shoe-string budget and have them picnic on the porch of Tito's 
hunting cabin in the midst of a pristine national park, one felt equally that 
new possibilities were opening up, in the cracks of the major narrative.

This, as became more clear to me during the discussions, has to do with the 
particular character of this thing, the EU, that is growing before our eyes. 
Most importantly, the EU is not a state. It doesn't raise taxes, doesn't have 
a military or a police force, doesn't create laws (only directives to be made 
into laws at the national level), or issue passports. It doesn't even have a 
sports team. Yet, it is also not a meaningless exercise of an out-of-control 
bureaucracy issuing 'symbols' and creating well-intentioned but freefloating 
'discourses'. Rather, the best way to think of the EU, it seems to me, is as 
a gigantic coordination mechanism. It has a relatively small hub 
('Brussels'), trying to get others nodes in a network -- some bigger, others 
smaller than itself -- to behave in a way that things can flow between them 
more easily. The enlargement just added a lot of nodes to this network. The 
coordinating hub's main function is to issue pointers that help to direct 
these massive material and immaterial flows.

The strange thing about these pointers is their consistency. They are hard and 
soft at the same time. By directing flows, they create new pools of 
opportunities, while draining others off their resources. For example, many 
educational institutions in Europe are going through painfull restructuring 
processes at the moment, not just because of funding problems, but because of 
attempts to reorient themselves according to EU pointers ('Bologna reform') 
hoping to then profit from the new opportunities created by the flows of 
people, projects and money being pumped through a somewhat more standardized 
European educational landscape. Of course, no institution is forced to do 
that -- that's the soft part. However, not doing it will amount to a 
self-marginalization virtually nobody is willing to accept -- that's the hard 
part.

The EU, then, is a myriad of such circulation systems whose main power rests 
on its ability to include or exclude nodes. The main difference between 
inside and outside of a network is that opportunities are created exclusively 
inside the network (through the circulation of flows of all kinds) whereas 
outside, marginality is structurally re-enforced all the time (by being 
bypassed).

The important thing is that the EU is not one but a myriad of circulation 
systems. Many overlap and reinforce one another -- the enlargement is also a 
process of accelerating such consolidation -- but the degree of overlap is 
much smaller than in a traditional nation state (say, the US). And this, it 
seems to me, is where independent cultural practices come in. They can 
contribute that this consolidation of the patterns of inclusion / exclusion 
do not become absolute. They can extend the networks to include nodes other 
than the officially sanctioned ones, thus making sure that not only 
opportunities flows beyond the borders (if there is one aspect of the EU that 
is state-like, then it's the Schengen Treaty), but that new opportunities are 
created precisely because the cultural micro-networks are different from the 
official ones.

This is not an 'Anti-EU' strategy, which was made clear by many is picnickers 
is luxury that only those who inside the EU can afford. Rather, i

Remember Falluja (Haaretz)

2004-05-03 Thread Brian Holmes
Call it "mediology" - if you must. By way of Giselle Donnard.
*** 

Remember Falluja

www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/421014.html

By Orit Shohat

During the first two weeks of this month, the American army committed war
crimes in Falluja on a scale unprecedented for this war. According to the
relatively few media reports of what took place there, some 600 Iraqis
were killed during these two weeks, among them some 450 elderly people,
women and children.

The sight of decapitated children, the rows of dead women and the shocking
pictures of the soccer stadium that was turned into a temporary grave for
hundreds of the slain - all were broadcast to the world only by the Al
Jazeera network. During the operation in Falluja, according to the
organization Doctors Without Borders, U.S. Marines even occupied the
hospitals and prevented hundreds of the wounded from receiving medical
treatment. Snipers fired from the rooftops at anyone who tried to
approach.

This was a retaliatory operation, carried out by the Marines, accompanied
by F-16 fighter planes and assault helicopters, under the code name
"Vigilant Resolve." It was revenge for the killing of four American
security guards on March 31. But while the killing of the guards, whose
bodies were dragged through the streets of the city and then hung from a
bridge, received wide media coverage, and thus prepared hearts and minds
for the military revenge, the hundreds of victims of the American
retaliation were practically a military secret. The only conclusion that
has been drawn thus far from the indiscriminate killing in Falluja is the
expulsion of Al Jazeera from the city. Since the start of the war, the
Americans have persecuted the network's journalists - not because they
report lies, but because they are virtually the only ones who manage to
report the truth. The Bush administration, in cooperation with the
American media, is trying to hide the sights of war from the world, and
particularly from American voters.

This week, for the first time, the Americans permitted pictures to be
published of the coffins of dead American soldiers being sent back home.
Until this week, such pictures were forbidden. Therefore, it is no wonder
Bush's poll results are better than ever, even though the number of
Americans killed in Iraq in April has reached 115.

Is the occupation of Iraq hindering terrorism, or inflaming it? Will the
number of dead soldiers - in contrast to the number of Iraqi victims -
prompt a reassessment? It is clear that the American war crimes will not
reach the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Today, America sets
the world's moral standards. It alone decides who will be judged, who is a
terrorist, what is legitimate resistance to occupation, who is a religious
fanatic, and who is a legitimate target for assassination. That is how
four Iraqi children, who laughed at the sight of a dead American soldier,
merited being killed on the spot.

Ariel Sharon's government can thus cite a great authority for its own
actions, and there are no visible limits to its plan to create a new
security order in the Gaza Strip and in the territories in general. To the
Israeli government, not crossing the red lines that America sets for its
friends is more important than resolving the conflict with the
Palestinians.

The ethical dilemmas in Israel over the targeted killings must make the
American government laugh. After Falluja, Israel Defense Forces commanders
can feel easier with their consciences - and especially with the
consciences of those who refuse to carry out such operations. The one-ton
bomb that was dropped on an apartment building in Gaza in order to
assassinate Salah Shehadeh, which also killed 14 civilians, is almost like
throwing candy compared to the number of bombs the Americans dropped on
the houses of the residents of crowded Falluja. And there, too,
incidentally, the Marines' commander said they did their best in order to
avoid hurting civilians. "We brought to this action our experience from
World War II, Korea, Vietnam ... The operation in Falluja will be
remembered and studied for many years to come," he said.

What can the perplexed Israeli learn from this cynical comparison? Ariel
Sharon can feel that he was simply persecuted in the Sabra and Chatila
affair. Those who like to say that "the whole world is against us" will
choose to talk about the double standards applied to America and Israel
with regard to, for instance, Israel's destruction of the Jenin refugee
camp. But anyone who has absolute, rather than relative, moral standards
can conclude that we should not be learning from the Americans - not with
regard to the consumption of junk food, not in the area of human rights,
and not even in the area of democracy and freedom of expression.

The practical difference ought to be obvious. America is a superpower,
which can evidently do what it pleases, and it can withdraw from the war
in Iraq whenever it wants. Israel has no place to which to wi

Re: review of Paul Miller's Rhythm Science

2004-05-03 Thread McKenzie Wark
Matze asks:

> > Rip, mix, play: Information leaks and escapes from the boundaries of the
> > object.
>
>the boundaries of the object? what could that be?

I see information as having an abstract relation to materiality.
Information does not exist without a material form, but it has no
necessary relation to that form. For example, the cd in computer's drive
is a material object, but I can extract the information on it while
leaving the material object intact. Thus, information, when it becomes
digital, can 'leak' from the bounds of the object.


> >The trouble with writing is that it escapes the body*
>
>mh, as if writing would be a simple bodyly product of the body and not a
>symbolic one.

This goes back to Plato's Phadrus, and the difference between writing and
speech. Writing is the sign that can escape from the necessity of a body
to support it, which is always the case with speech. Or at least it was,
until recording took away the privileged relation of the sign to the body.
On which see Kittler.

>questioning: where does information (this strange
>im-material) come from? though it is the »king's argument« of the
>school of informationalism (digital information goods are free from loss
>and so on) the argument of a "new ontology" is to short.

I was thinking after I wrote the review that this is the question to ask,
and you asked it! My provisional answer is that, by analogy with the
labour theory of value, I want a cognitive theory of information. The
ideology of information 'naturalises' it, obscuring the work of cognition
in its production. Cognition is here a kind of labor, but with special
qualities, or rather, it is labor that is qualitative, that produces the
new. And so:  an ontology of information as what escapes from the material
but which must always return to it, and of the labor that produces it as
qualitative difference.

Thanks for the questions -- if the answers are inadequate, its just a
measure of the size of the problem.



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Baghdad newspaper Al Sabah cuts Pentagon ties

2004-05-03 Thread jo
Iraqi staff quits US funded Al-Sabah newspaper Journalists announce launch
of new independent newspaper May 3, 2004
 The journalists and other staff of Iraq's biggest daily newspaper,
Al-Sabah, have decided to step out of the Iraqi Media Network and start a
new, politically and financially independent daily newspaper, AL-SABAH
AL-JEDID. The decision came after more than a month of fruitless attempts
to convince the US media contractor Harris Corp to let Al-Sabah have its
independence as agreed one year ago and after a series of measures to
take over the newspaper. Yesterday May 2 a last ditch attempt to obtain a
settlement failed. Harris and CPA didn't agree to make the newspaper
independent. The newspaper's editorial committee of journalists voted to
cut all links with the IMN. Harris came to the newspaper late in the
evening and removed the text of this decision of the editorial committee
from the front page. After the journalists heard about this, a first in
the history of the newspaper, they went back to the newspaper and changed
the front page again. We shall announce the place and time for a press
conference for tomorrow (May 4) later today. We count on the support of
all democratic journalists in this country, Iraqi and foreign.
Breach of agreement
Our choice has been in the making since March 20, when decree 66 on Iraq's
Public Service Broadcasting was published. Without any consultation with
the journalists and other staffers who created Al-Sabah after the last
war, Harris Corp, the American contractor hired to rebuild Iraq's radio
and television, convinced the CPA to include Al-Sabah in decree 66, which
means making it forever part of the Iraqi Media Network. This was a breach
of the agreement with CPA's first chief, general Jay Garner, that Al-Sabah
should become financially independent as soon as possible, an agreement
that was confirmed in successive meetings with the people responsible in
the CPA for the development of the Iraqi mass media and with SAIC, Harris'
predecessor. Political independence was assured from the beginning,
because Al-Sabah wanted to be an example for other non-governmental,
non-partisan, and professionally produced democratic newspapers in Iraq.
For that reason, Al-Sabah set out, successfully, to gain contracts and
advertisements that would provide extra income for the newspaper. At the
end of 2003, it created a website (www.alsabaah.com), which also became a
success story, with now over sixty million hits. When on February 14, 2004
Harris took over from its predecessor SAIC, Al-Sabah was ready to stand on
its own feet and we told Harris so. In the last days of SAIC in Baghdad, a
new printing press was bought to replace the 25 years old machines of the
former regime. With that pr inting press Al-Sabah could start its life
without any further financial support.
Pseudo-independence
 To our surprise Harris Corp did everything to prevent Al-Sabah from
becoming independent and tried to sell us the idea that Al-Sabah would be
independent as part of the IMN. On paper, Iraqi television and radio have
been declared independent through decree 66, and with them, on Harris'
request, Al-Sabah. In reality the so-called Iraqi Public Service
Broadcasting will be not only dependent on foreign funding but run by a
foreign company that has refused from the beginning any transparency in
its dealings with Iraqi entities. Al-Sabah newspaper can also not accept
to be under the control of a Board of Governors appointed first by
governor Bremer, and later Iraq's prime minister, let alone accept, as
decree 66 stipulates, that the Director General of the IMN will also be
the formal editor in chief of Al-Sabah. This structure, developed by the
CPA's media advisor Simon Haselock, who tried to do something similar in
Kosovo, is not a recipe for independence and success, it is a recipe for
failure and resentment, because it doesn't let the Iraqis do their own
thing and learn. If Al-Sabah could learn to stand on its own feet, why
not Iraqi television and radio? When Harris will leave after two years
and foreign donors pull the plug, the Iraqi media will have to reinvent
themselves completely.
Harris-Fewares in Al-Sabah
How it is to have Harris running the IMN, we have already experienced in
Al-Sabah. Fewares, the Kuwaiti company working with Harris, simply slowly
takes over the editorial, political and financial management of Al-Sabah,
without any negotiations, laying out no division of labour, no guidelines,
without any editorial policy document or whatever. The Palestinian
representative from Fewares felt free to censor advertisements, called
journalists to criticize their articles without consulting the editor in
chief, brought in foreign accountants and was turning the building into a
fortress, as if this was going to provide better security than the
independence of Al-Sabah. He tried to seduce people to stay with
Fewares/Harris by offering them, only verbally by the way, higher wages,
training ou

interview with ambientTV.NET

2004-05-03 Thread annie doubt
Interview with London-based ambientTV.NET ('active
members' Manu, Mukul, Mariko, Mo-Ling, Michael, Chris,
Bill, Kertal)- a crucible for independent,
interdisciplinary practice ranging from installation
and performance, through documentary, dance, and
gastronomy, to sound and video composition and
real-time manipulation. Conducted by Nadeem for decode
magazine end of last year, but it was transcribed only
now. enjoy!
Ann



B: You describe your work as interdisciplinary,
ranging from installation and performance through
documentary, dance, live audio-video manipulation and
music composition, to gastronomy. . . can you really
combine these disciplines? 

Mariko: For sure. Food is so undervalued in Britain.
But we love it! And in AV DINNERS, we show our love
for it by developing themed menus, caressing the
ingredients with cameras and microphones, writing odes
to the courses . . . and feeding guests! 
Mo-Ling: In AV DINNERS 1: EPIC EROS, the theme was the
erotic potential of food, and we prepared and served
an ambrosial succession of dishes to our guests (who
had won a tough online gastronomy quiz to get here),
accompanied by the digitally manipulated sights and
sounds of the preparation, and with a poem for each
course by Shane Solanki. Online particiants were
treated to one video stream and three audio streams,
including Shanes poetry which translated smells and
flavours into words and sounds. And remote partipant
groups  as far afield as Helsinki and Baghdad 
projected our images, or listened to our audio, while
cooking and eating along with us and conversing with
our dinner guests via an online chat channel.   

B: You all have such different art-related and
technological backgrounds, how do you make sure this
integrate harmoniously?
Michael: What helps is that each of us has a mixed
background, combining painting and net.art, or science
and music, or dance and film theory . . . so we're
pretty well integrated intra-personally, which makes
interpersonal integration fairly easy.
Manu: Various disciplines, but common approaches. Each
of us looks hard at the conditions of possibility of
our disciplines. Though we have varied backgrounds and
skills, we share a critical approach, curiosity,
passion. 
Mukul: It's important that we're a close and informal
group, and though we recognize particular
specializations or talents, everyone pitches in at all
levels - from embarking on the most abstract flights
of fancy to project execution, PR, admin, fixing the
lights . . . 

B: ambient TV.NET is a cosmopolitan mix of artists.
Are your differing cultural backgrounds important, or
indeed integral, to the work you produce? 
Mukul: How could a group not be cosmopolitan in a
metropolis? You'd have to make a committed effort not
to be. I was part of the so-called "Asian Underground"
scene in the 1990s and that was populated by Germans,
Jamaicans, Icelanders, Chelmsfordians, black British .
. . 
Mo-Ling: Isn't such cosmopolitanism the main - perhaps
only - reason for putting up with the expense and
noise and filth of this city? 
Michael: There are markers of identity other than
ethnicity, language group, gender etc., that might be
more pertinent to the creation of work. . . eg., being
capoeiristas, or critics of unfettered capitalism, or
filesharers, or lovers of odd time signatures, or
subscribers to certain mailing lists . . . 

Are all your projects very focused around digital
technologies? Under one description of the work you
produce, you use the term 'social technologies'. What
do you mean by this?
Michael: Technology doesn't fall through a social
vacuum; it is both structured by, and structures, our
cultural horizons. Technological development is
informed by all manner of political, commercial,
aesthetic, and ideological imperatives. Much domestic
technology spins off from military research. What
might seem like technical details create new freedoms
and new constraints in the ways we imagine and
materially sustain ourselves. All technology is social
technology . . . the epitome being information and
communications technologies. We want to offer
different cultural imperatives, models based on other
than profit or territoriality, concentrating on social
networks, lines of communication, friendships and
encounters . . . sitting down to eat together,
orchestrating a group of musicians on several
different continents, . .
Chris: My photography might be digital now, but its an
evolution of using film. Its just easier to work with
digital cameras. I still remember trying to develop
negative film in the old days in Bosnia, in the middle
of winter, using melted snow to make developing fluid.
With
digital cameras everything is so immediate, you can
see the results right away. But the image is still
made with my eyes and my hands.
Mukul: We're not uncritical fans of digital - we can't
afford better. A digital sound studio is smaller,
lighter, neater, and much cheaper than a similarly
capable  but better sounding   analogue studi