Syndicate: ars electronica 98: INFOWAR

[Andreas Broeckmann <abroeck@v2.nl>]

The theme of the ars electronica 98 festival in Linz has been announced as:

INFOWAR

In 1998, under the banner of "INFO WAR", the Ars Electronica Festival of
Art, Technology and Society, is appealing to artists, theoreticians and
technologists for contributions relating to the social and political
definition of the information society. The emphasis here will lie not on
technological flights of fancy, but on the fronts drawn up in a society
that is in a process of fundamental and violent upheaval.


The information society - no longer a vague promise of a better future,
but a reality and a central challenge of the here-and-now - is founded
upon the three key technologies of electricity, telecommunications and
computers: Technologies developed for the purposes, and out of the logic,
of war, technologies of simultaneity and coherence, keeping our civilian
society in a state of permanent mobilisation driven by the battle for
markets, resources and spheres of influence. A battle for supremacy in
processes of economic concentration, in which the fronts, no longer drawn
up along national boundaries and between political systems, are defined by
technical standards. A battle in which the power of knowledge is managed
as a profitable monopoly of its distribution and dissemination.

The latest stock market upheavals have laid bare the power of a global
market, such as only the digital revolution could have fathered, and which
must be counted as the latter¹s most widely-felt direct outcome. The
digitally-networked market of today wields more power than the
politicians. Governments are losing their say in the international value
of their currencies; they can no longer control, but only react. The
massive expansion of freely-accessible communication networks, itself a
global economic necessity, imposes severe constraints on the arbitrary
restriction of information flows.

Any transgression of a critical control functions in the
cybertechnologies¹ sphere of responsibility and influence puts central
power wielders in a hitherto unheard-of position of vulnerability and
openness to attack. The geographic frontiers of the industrial age are
increasingly losing their erstwhile significance in global politics, and
giving way to vertical fronts along social stratifications.

Whereas, in the past, war was concerned with the conquering of territory,
and later with the control of production capacities, war in the 21st
century is entirely concerned with the acquisition and exercise of power
over knowledge. The three fronts of land, sea and air battles have been
joined by a fourth, being set up within the global information systems.
Spurred on by the "successes" of the Gulf war, the development of
information warfare is running at full speed. Increasingly, the attention
of the military strategists is turning away from computer-aided warfare -
>from potentiation of the destructive efficiency of military operations
through the application of information technology, virtual reality and
high-tech weaponry - to cyberwar, whose ultimate target is nothing less
than the global information infrastructure itself: annihilation of the
enemy¹s computer and communication systems, obliteration of his databases,
destruction of his command and control systems. Yet increasingly the vital
significance of the global information infrastructure for the functioning
of the international finance markets compels the establishment of new
strategic objectives: not obliteration, but manipulation, not destruction,
but infiltration and assimilation. "Netwar" as the tactical deployment of
information and disinformation, targeted at human understanding. These new
forms of post-territorial conflicts, however, have for some time now
ceased to be preserve of governments and their ministers of war. NGOs,
hackers, computer freaks in the service of organised crime, and terrorist
organisations with high-tech expertise are now the chief actors in the
cyberguerilla nightmares of national security services and defence
ministries.

In 1998, under the banner of "INFO WAR", the Ars Electronica Festival of
Art, Technology and Society, is appealing to artists, theoreticians and
technologists for contributions relating to the social and political
definition of the information society. The emphasis here will lie not on
technological flights of fancy, but on the fronts drawn up in a society
that is in a process of fundamental and violent upheaval.

see also: http://web.aec.at/infowar/eng.html