RANDOM DARKNET SHOPPER
RANDOM DARKNET SHOPPER (2014)
The Random Darknet Shopper is an automated online shopping bot which we provide with a budget of $100 in Bitcoins per week. Once a week the bot goes on shopping spree in the deep web where it randomly choses and purchases one item and has it mailed to us. The items are shown in the exhibition «The Darknet. From Memes to Onionland» at Kunst Halle St. Gallen. Each new object ads to a landscape of traded goods from the Darknet.
The Random Darknet Shopper is a live Mail Art piece, an exploration of the deep web via the goods traded there. It directly connects the Darknet with the art space (exhibition space). By randomizing our consumerism, we are guaranteed a wide selection of goods from the over 16'000 listed on Agora market place.
The Random Darknet Shopper is a live Mail Art piece, an exploration of the deep web via the goods traded there. It directly connects the Darknet with the art space (exhibition space). By randomizing our consumerism, we are guaranteed a wide selection of goods from the over 16'000 listed on Agora market place.
10.12.14
HUNGARY HQ PASSPORT SCAN
AS A LAST ITEM IN THIS SERIES, RANDOM DARKNET SHOPPER BOUGHT A PASSPORT SCAN FOR 25 USD.
From the description:
«All passport is real, valid, colored, scanned passports for online verification...»
«All passport is real, valid, colored, scanned passports for online verification...»
this little pile of tottering disparates, in which the hard, the liquid and the soft were joined
But suddenly a woman rose up before me, a big fat woman dressed in black, or rather in mauve. I still wonder today if it wasn’t the social worker. She was holding out to me, on an odd saucer, a mug full of a greyish concoction which must have been green tea with saccharine and powdered milk. Nor was that all, for between mug and saucer a thick slab of dry bread was precariously lodged, so that I began to say, in a kind of anguish, It’s going to fall, it’s going to fall, as if it mattered whether it fell or not. A moment later I myself was holding, in my trembling hands, this little pile of tottering disparates, in which the hard, the liquid and the soft were joined, without understanding how the transfer had been effected. Let me tell you this, when social workers offer you, free, gratis and for nothing, something to hinder you from swooning, which with them is an obsession, it is useless to recoil, they will pursue you to the ends of the earth, the vomitory in their hands.
Wintermute-wasted Turing-cops, sensitive silicon, socket-head subversion... skin, interfaces, & mimetic flesh; Fanged Noumena, Digital Delirium, & Stelarc
/ Stelarc \
Memetic flesh as a floating outlaw zone where memes fold into genes, where the delirious spectacle of cyber-culture reconfigures the future of the molecular body. In Ars California, mimetic flesh is neither future nor history, but the molecular present. Pure California Gening. . . . Neither techno-utopian nor techno-phobic, mimetic art in the streets of SF is always dirty, always rubbing memes against genes, always clicking into (our) memetic flesh.
My latest filmic foray into the world of WWE (formerly WWF, the wildlife guys were
getting wild) where cold war agitprop gilded the flesh fight ; Paris 2014
The skin has been a boundary for the soul, for the self, and simultaneously, a beginning to the world. Once technology stretches and pierces the skin, the skin as a barrier is erased.
How can the body function within this landscape of machines? Technology has speeded up the body. The body now attains planetary-escape velocity, has to function in zero-G and in greater time-space continuums. For me this demonstrates the biological inadequacy of the body. Given that these things have occurred, perhaps an ergonomic approach is no longer meaningful. In other words, we can't continue designing technology for the body because that technology begins to usurp and outperform the body.
Perhaps it's now time to design the body to match it's machines. We somehow have to turbo-drive the body-implant and augment the brain. We have to provide ways of connecting it to the cyber-network. At the moment this is not easily done, and it's done indirectly via keyboards and other devices. There's no way of directly jacking in. Mind you, I'm not talking here in terms of sci-fi speculation. For me, these possibilities are already apparent. What do we do when confronted with the situation where we discover the body is obsolete? We have to start thinking of strategies for redesigning the body.
Perhaps it's now time to design the body to match it's machines. We somehow have to turbo-drive the body-implant and augment the brain. We have to provide ways of connecting it to the cyber-network. At the moment this is not easily done, and it's done indirectly via keyboards and other devices. There's no way of directly jacking in. Mind you, I'm not talking here in terms of sci-fi speculation. For me, these possibilities are already apparent. What do we do when confronted with the situation where we discover the body is obsolete? We have to start thinking of strategies for redesigning the body.
Technology is what defines being human. It's not an antagonistic alien sort of object, it's part of our human nature. It constructs our human nature. We shouldn't have a Frankensteinian fear of incorporating technology into the body, and we shouldn't consider our relationship to technology in a Faustian way - that we're somehow selling our soul because we're using these forbidden energies. My attitude is that technology is, and always has been, an appendage of the body.
CTheory interview with Stelarc, hither>>>
Pan-Africanist Pop Art, New Elizabethan cult of personality, and Social Realist portraiture
Melanie Gilligan: The Common Sense, Phase 1
Melanie Gilligan's largest project to date, The Common Sense takes the form of a sci-fi mini-series which looks at how minds, bodies, and interpersonal relations are shaped by technological advancements within capitalism. This experimental narrative drama tells a story that revolves around a future technology which allows one to directly experience another person's bodily sensations and affect, a system that becomes widely adapted altering social interactions until it breaks down and alternative narratives unfold.
Gilligan draws upon a feminist sci-fi tradition that includes the work of writers Octavia E. Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin in which sci-fi is used as a means for both critiquing a social order and proposing a different vision. The story is also influenced by recent social movements and riots across the world responding to the "permanent crisis" of capitalism. Gilligan explores the complex relationship between the technological development as propelled by capitalist accumulation and how interpersonal relations and emotions are instrumentalized in this process. However, the artist also leaves open some uncertainty for possibilities regarding the new conditions technological change can create.
The Otolith Group: In the Year of the Quiet Sun
The post-lens essay-film In the Year of the Quiet Sun, also the title of the exhibition, explores the role of the Ghana Philatelic Agency. This mysterious Wall Street company created the Pan-Africanist Pop aesthetic associated with the independent state of Ghana from 1957 until the overthrow of its first president, Kwame Nkrumah, in 1966. Connecting postal politics depicting antagonistic policies of newly independent states to the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement within the unstable context of the global Cold War, the title also points to the decrease in solar surface temperature that occurs every 11 years.
Occupying two rooms of Casco's new space, the installation Statecraft envisions the short century of decolonization as a political calendar assembled from the medium of the postage stamp. These masscult artifacts were issued to commemorate the independence of Africa's new nation-states, from Liberia in 1847 to South Sudan in 2011. The formation reveals the iconography of independence as a combination of Pan-Africanist Pop Art, New Elizabethan cult of personality, and Social Realist portraiture.
~ fantasy role-playing fantasy ~ DREAMLIFEWORLD
BLOAT !
Book launch & works by WILL BENEDICT and HENNING BOHL
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section 7 Books
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castillo/corrales
holy motors motion capture
denis lavant
a pneumatic habitat that was a cross between a gangland hideout and a Venusian freetraders club... Archigram!
The 1950s, and conventional land planning tools, were trailing in popularity polls. The rediscovery of the avant-garde’s traditional tools satisfied a general anti-bureaucratic sentiment. While English pop scoffed at the new American idols, not without humour and affection, young architects took on the city.
Impertinent, opportunist, and illiterate, Archigram was to architecture what Apocalypse Now’s Playboy Bunnies were to war. Original, skilful, vital, and sincere. Experimentation replaced contemplation. Their architecture was wilful, violent, and provocative affirmation. They emphasised contradictions, making them even more apparent. Certain members of the group had grown up in seaside resorts (hence, perhaps, the semblance of seaside dancehall in their projects).
Their fanzine, nine issues of hyperactive layout between 1961-1974, elevated insolence to an art form. Their mobile machine-cities rekindled a biological and mystical industrial dynamism, long forgotten since the Italians’ brief rise to fame. They cherished ambiguity. They breathed new life into Fuller and Otto, Prouvé and his prefabs, mobile homes and inflatables. They planned to open, in Monte Carlo, the first ever psychedelic sea-food stall, perhaps even the first paper bikini vending machine. Long live appearances and public space!
A transparent igloo for trendy travelling salesmen. Mobile pods for motorised slaves. Suspended capsules for sterile bachelors. Solipsistic inflatable bubbles. Cells for fusional couples with no kids and a definite penchant for small spaces. Theories of decisive movements: changes take place when enough favourable conditions are united. this isn’t a battle of wits, simply readymades, the generation game.
Transforming one’s objects, one’s vernacular into a weapon against the establishment. Combining hippy free love with high-tech space travel research. Neither trees nor greenery, just roads, girls, and speed: the middle classes at home. Neither art nor business, just a flow. Everything must be disposable, random, nomadic. Programmed obsolescence. They’re not into the business of spare parts: their discoveries don’t add up, they multiply. They are, in their own way, far closer to the situationists than their comic-strip-reading counterparts in France.
Archigram : Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron, and Mike Webb.
Text from Yves Tenret's The inflatable as a form of denial, in Air-Air catalogue
constant risks, return uncertain. Oh, a museum of loneliness... MoL x Purge x Dry Hump (Pillow Talk)
Performance of Lee Harvey Oswald’s Last Dream debuted at Oberhausen Short Film Festival as part of Mika Taanila’s Film Without Film programme, presumed 2014. The magazine, published by Pillow Talk, features original content specific to (and beyond) the performance and soundtrack.
get it hither >>>>
It simply unfurls and expands this world (the only one): drained of its opacity... ASR
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A small incomplete history of the rebellious apple that I wrote for new french journal, ANTICHAMBRE de la SUBSTANCE RAYONNANTE, edited by Edgar Sarin.
to find out more about ASR, >>>>>>>
Photo by sati leonne faulks, >>>>
a simulated experience or a dream; simultaneous reality and fantasy; And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee; Ghost in the Shell l'Eve Future FN AK
The Android, as we've said, is only the first hours of Love, immobilized, the hour of the Ideal made eternal prisoner / l'Andréïde, avons-nous dit, n'est que les premières heures de l'Amour immobilisées, l'heure de l'Idéal à jamais faite prisonnière
This spectral vision could cloud my eyes, my senses, my soul; but could I ever forget that she is nothing personal? My self-consciousness cries out to me coldly: how does one love zero? / Vous pourrez troubler mes yeux, mes sens et mon esprit par cette magique vision: mais pourrai-je oublier, moi, qu'elle n'est qu'impersonnelle? Comment aimer zéro? me crie, froidement, ma conscience.
Auguste, comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam; L'Eve Future, 1886
That's all it is: information. Even a simulated experience or a dream; simultaneous reality and fantasy. Any way you look at it, all the information that a person accumulates in a lifetime is just a drop in the bucket.
If the essence of life is information carried in DNA, then society and civilization are just colossal memory systems, and a metropolis like this one, simply a sprawling external memory.
Who can gaze into the mirror without becoming evil? The mirror does not reflect evil, but creates it.
>> Batou x 2, Major Motoko Kusanagi / Ghost in the Shell 1 & 2 / 1995, 2004
When one contemplates the streak of insanity running through human history, it appears highly probable that homo sapiens is a biological freak, the result of some remarkable mistake in the evolutionary process. The ancient doctrine of original sin, variants of which occur independently in the mythologies of diverse cultures, could be a reflection of man's awareness of his own inadequacy, of the intuitive hunch that somewhere along the line of his ascent something has gone wrong.
>> Arthur Koestler / The Ghost in the Machine / 1967
He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.
>> Friedrich Nietzsche / Beyond Good and Evil; Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, 1886
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