Syndicate: INFOWAR in and via Budapest!

[Adele Eisenstein <adele@caesar.elte.hu>]

Even if you canâ??t make it to Linz this year, you can still take part in Ars
Electronica 98: INFOWAR!
via C3: Center for Culture & Communication
Budapest I., Országház u. 9
tel.: 36.1/ 214.6856
fax: 36.1/ 214.6872
info@c3.hu
http://www.c.hu/events/ae98/

INFOWAR  Direct Connection
Virtual Ars Electronica in Budapest
Three-day live communication with the Fesztival in Linz via a high-speed ATM
network
Installations and on-line art programmes at C3:
M. Fleischman, W. Strauss, Ch. Bohn: Liquid Views - Interactive multimedia
project
Jodi.org: ctrl-space - Unusual quake-playground, from which the weapons are
missing.
Zoltán Szegedy-M. - Márton Fernezelyi: Demedusator  Freely
buildable/inhabitable
VRML world     
Open-X from Linz: Acoustic Space (in collaboration with Pararadio), Info
weapons
stockpile, 
Ars Electronica Festival Report on-line, Hacker Meeting

INFOWAR â??information.macht.kriegâ?? - Ars Electronica Symposium broadcast
Continuous live dialogue: un-choreographed video conversation, with changing
players and themes, on the border of the private and the public sphere.
8 September 1998, 10.00-13.00, 15.00-18.00
9 September 1998, 10.00-13.00, 15.00-18.00

The guests of C3: CEU-Systems Lab, ICA-Dunaújváros, artists, scientists, and
first and foremost, the public audience.

Programme of the European Media Laboratory Network (AEC, C3, GMD, V2, ZKM)
In Budapest, Linz and Karlsruhe, as well as on the Internet network.

With thanks to MATÃ?V Rt. (Hungarian Telecom) for their assistance in the
development of the experimental ATM connection.

C3, Budapest, 8-10 September 1998, everyday from 10:00-20:00

FROM LINZ

Ars Electronica INFOWAR Symposium

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 from 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 the 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 latter's 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 critical control functions in the
cybertechnologies' sphere of responsibility and
influence puts the central power wielders in a previously unheard-of position
of vulnerability and openness to attack. The geographic frontiers of the
industrial age are increasingly losing their former significance in global
politics, and giving way to vertical fronts along social stratifications. 

In 1998, under the banner of INFOWAR ­ information.macht. krieg, the Ars
Electronica Festival for 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.

INFOWAR on the net: http://www.aec.at/infowar

Ars Electronica INFOWAR Symposium
Participantsâ?? Biographies

Ute Bernhardt/D 
          Author, Managing Director and Member of the Board of the non-profit
organisation Forum InformatikerInnen für Frieden und gesellschaftliche
Verantwortung 
Kunda Dixit/Nepal
          Journalist and Director of The Panos Institute South Asia in
Kathmandu, Nepal, author of â??Dateline Earth: Journalism As If the Planet
Matteredâ??
Tim Druckrey/USA 
          Independent curator, critic and writer concerned with issues of
history, representation and technology 
J. Doyne Farmer/USA 
          Pioneer in chaos research at Santa Fe Institute and Senior Technical
Founder of the Prediction Company 
Michael Geyer/USA/D 
          Historian, Professor at the University of Chicago 
Lucky Green/USA 
          Cypherpunk, President of the Independent Smartcard Developer
Association, Chair of the Cypherpunk GSM Working Group and Senior Advisor on
digital telephony issues for the
Harmless Little Project 
Ingo Günther/D/USA
          Media artist and activist, Refugee Republik 
Joichi Ito/J 
          Developer and producer in the areas of Virtual Reality and
Multimedia

Friedrich Kittler/D 
          Media theorist, Professor of Media History and Aesthetics at
Humboldt
University, Berlin, author of "Discourse Networks" 
Igor N. Panarin/RU 
          Doctor of political science, Professor of the Faculty of National
Security of the Russian Academy, in state service to the President of the
Russian Federation 
Birgit Richard/D 
          Professor for New Media at Johann Wolfgang v. Goethe University in
Frankfurt am Main, author of "Todesbilder. Kunst Subkultur Medien" 
RTMark/USA 
Artist group, channels funds from donors to workers for the sabotage of
corporate products, and for intelligent subversion in general 
Douglas Rushkoff/USA 
Media theorist and author of "Cyberia", "Media Virus", "Children of Chaos" and
the
novel "Ecstasy Club" 
Georg Schöfbänker/A 
Armaments expert, Senior Researcher at the Austrian Study Center for Peace and
Conflict Resolution (ASPR) 
George J. Stein/USA 
Member of the faculty of the USAF Air War College and the Chairman of the
Department of Future Conflict Studies 
Gerfried Stocker/A 
Artist, Founder of x-space, currently Manager and Artistic Director of the Ars
Electronica Center Linz 
Paul Virilio/F 
Founder of the école d'architecture spéciale, media theorist and author of
works including "Pure War", "Speed and Politics" and "Desert Screen" in
conversation (via video conference) with: 
Derrick de Kerckhove/CDN
Director of the McLuhan Institute of Culture and Technology at the University
of Toronto 
Shen Weiguang/RCH 
Futurologist, Member of the Finance Committee of the National People's
Congress
of the People's Republic of China 
Michael Wilson/IRL 
An infrastructural warfare field operations professional with over 15 years'
experience and Managing Partner of the 7Pillars Partners
Moderation: 
Manuel DeLanda/USA
Media expert and author of "War in the Age of Intelligent Machines" and "A
Thousand Years of Nonlinear History", lectures around the world on the
philosophy of science and technology


Tuesday
10.00-13.00
Symposium from Linz
P l e n u m
10:00-10:15     Gerfried Stocker 
10.15-10.45     Friedrich Kittler 
10.45-11.00     Discussion 
11.00-11.30     George J. Stein 
11.30-11.45     Pause/Break 
11.45-12.15     Michael Geyer 
12.15-12.30     Discussion 
12.30-13.00     Birgit Richard 
13.00-15.00     Pause/Break 

15.00-18.00
Symposium from Linz
S e s s i o n - I                               S e s s i o n - I I
15:00-15:30     Douglas Rushhoff        Joichi Ito 
15.30-16.00     Tim Druckrey            Lucky Green 
16:00-16:15     Pause/Break             Pause/Break 
16.15-16.45     Kunda Dixit             Michael Wilson 
16.45-17.15     Pause/Break 
17.15-18.00     Paul Virilio  
in conversation (via viedo conference) with: Derrick de Kerckhove

Wednesday
10.00-13.00
Symposium from Linz
P l e n u m
10:00-10:30     Georg Schöfbänker
10.30-10.45     Discussion
10.45-11.15     Shen Weiguang
11.15-11.30     Pause/Break
11.30-12.00     Igor N. Panarin
12.00-12.15     Discussion
12.15-12.45     Ute Bernhardt
12.45-13.00     Discussion
13.00-15.00     Pause/Break

15.00-18.00
Symposium from Linz
15:00-15:30     J. Doyne Farmer
15.30-15.45     Discussion
15.45-16.15     RT Mark
16.15-16.30     Pause/Break
16.30-17.15     Ingo Günther
17.15-18.00     Closing Discussion

FROM C3
(and even if you are in Linz, you can also visit the following presentations
and installations in Budapest!)

Tuesday, Wednesday
13.00-15.00 
Thursday
15.00
JODI: CTRL-SPACE
C3 gallery Budapest, OpenX Linz

C3 presents: CTRL-SPACE by JODI
Jodi (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) have made a name for themselves with
their radically playful Internet-based body of work located on their
web-domain
(http://www.jodi.org). They make art with HTML, as a painter with pigment and
canvas. They work explicitly with and for the Internet. WWW is their material,
as well as their distribution system.
The first thing one feels when visiting their site is surprise: a blinking
monitor, as if the machine would crash. It is not a crash, however, and
visitors may find hyperlinks to other unusual pages. One can surf for a long
time through a large number of dynamically edited, radically designed pages
without any sort of instructions or textual information. We see only tricky
visuals in a deconstructivist manner, oscillating between play and
provocation,
on the server which shows a different face each week. Children should also
feel
free to visit the site.

They have won numerous awards with their activities, as well as being featured
in last yearâ??s Documenta (X) in Kassel, which is one of the most important
presentations of contemporary art worldwide, as it is no small feat to define
contemporary art for the next five years to come.

As guests of the International Residency Program at C3, they developed
CTRL-SPACE (http://ctrl-space.c3.hu), a network game available from, and
playable on, the Internet. It is a hacked version of the well-known Quake,
using its navigation system, but it looks totally different from the gothic
style of the original (to that, they reply that its even own Mother would not
be able to recognise it). Not only are the weapons missing, but it is designed
in the manner how virtual reality was imagined ten years ago. It functions
as a
meeting-place in cyberspace, a three-dimensional environment where players can
navigate, jump, meet, act and talk with the help of their avatars. All this
from a subjective perspective: the player sees only the others, not her/his
own
avatar. It is for advanced users though, since it begins with a little
installation procedure. One needs special software to visit CTRL-SPACE. If you
are not familiar with software installation, visit http://www.jodi.org
instead.


Tuesday
18.00
M. Fleischman, W. Strauss, Ch. Bohn: Liquid Views
exhibition opening
C3 gallery Budapest, OpenX Linz

LIQUID VIEWS 
Monika Fleischmann, Wolfgang Strauss, Christian Bohn

Get close to the source.
Look at it and discover yourself.
Touch your own image on the surface of the water.
Watch how it disintegrates.

The story of Echo and Narcissus is a metaphor of changing identity through
spatial experience. Liquid Views - the virtual well of Narcissus tells this
ancient story via a spatial installation, in which the visitor is involved
as a
performer experiencing his own observation. Narcissism in the mirror of
society
concerns self-reflection and self-knowledge. Our main interest is to make
visible the communication between the individual and the virtual selves. Touch
and movement are the interface into the virtual world and into a different
spatial experience. At the same time, Liquid Views is understood as a metaphor
for the act of being on-line; i.e., in our second nature as navigators over
the
high seas of cyberspace, immersed in the telecommunication world. 


Thursday
16.00 
Presentation by the CEU Systems Laboratory
C3 gallery Budapest, ClosedX Linz

The CEU Systems Laboratory aims to introduce recent advances in computer
modeling and simulation to the study of complex human
(social-political-economic-environmental) systems. The presentation summarizes
the laboratory's WWW based telemodeling project, followed by a simple
interactive network game, based on a model of a famous social dilemma.


Thursday
17.00
ICA-D Presentation of ICA-D C3 gallery Budapest, ClosedX Linz
Representation of the ICA-D
Selection from the productionsof the ICA-D artist residency
program in 1998: videos by
John Wood - Paul Harrison (GB), Cristoph Draeger - Martin Frei (CH),
compositions by
Béla Faragó, László Tölgyes - György �rvai 

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Vasmû u. 12.
2400 Dunaújváros
HUNGARY
vox/fax: +36 25 412 220
e-mail: ica-d@dunanet.hu
http://www.ica-d.hu

The ICA-D is operated by the Public Fund for Modern Art. Since September 1997,
the ICA-D, as an exhibition space, presents contemporary visual art
exhibitions, as a producer, initiates new projects and aims to take part in
theoretical activities (research, symposia, publications). The co-directors
and
chief curators of the ICA-D are art historians, Ms. Lívia Páldi and Mr. János
Szoboszlai. The ICA-D does not have an operational budget for its activity,
and
therefore, all the projects are individually financed by sponsors.

Projects until September 1998:

21 visual art exhibitions (including solo shows: Mirjam Staub (CH), Nicolas
Baginsky (D), John Wood-Paul Harrison (GB), Attila Szûcs (H), András Braun
(H),
Dezsõ Szabó (H), and group shows: Who By Fire No.1. (6 artists from Croatia),
The Dawns Are Silent and The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
5 music performances (including: Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre,
Hungarian Radio Electroacoustic Studio, young Hungarian poets rap-gigs)
7 lectures and discussions (including: Discussion on the Institutional
Frame of
Art, Sex and Erotics in Art, Art and Culture in Serbia)
1 international symposium (Who By Fire No.1., The Institutional Frame of
Contemporary Art in Central-Eastern Europe)
1 theatre performance (P. Handke: Abusing the Audience (by the Natural
Disasters Collective))
artist-in-residency program: The ICA-D invites artists to stay and work in
Dunaújváros.  The ICA-D, as a producer, deals with fundraising, producing and
publishing. (Artists who already have participated: John Wood-Paul Harrison
(D), Christoph Draeger-Martin Frei (CH), Barbara Visser (NL); the following
candidates for the future: Attila Csörgõ (H),  János Kósa (H),  András
Kapitány 
(H))
publications (5 catalogues and brochures, 21 invitation cards produced by
ICA-D
desktop publishing)

new website from 12 September 1998!
http://www.ica-d.hu

museum communication program (Lectures and seminars for local teachers who
create new art programmes for children, to run preferably in the building of
ICA-D)


Thursday
18.00
Colin Andrews:
"eh, ça va la vache or i can see your lips moving...." 
C3 gallery Budapest, ClosedX Linz

â??eh, ça va la vache 
or 
i can see your lips moving....â??

â??eh, ça va la vache or i can see your lips moving....â?? is an interactive
work in
which the artist acts as a ventriloquist rehearsing his stage act with his
dummy.
User interaction causes the ventriloquistâ??s lines and those of the dummy to
become confused. Their words, and by association, their roles, become fluid
and
interchangeable, as it becomes unclear as to from which one the voice is
emanating.

a presentation in C3 by 
Colin Andrews, Scotland,
EMARE (European Media Artist Residential Exchange) resident 
10 september 1998, at 6 p.m.


Thursday
18.30
PocketTV
C3 gallery Budapest, ClosedX Linz
Real videos by 
Eike, Gábor Gerhes, Tamás Komoróczky, Kriszta Nagy, Hajnalka
Németh, Zsuzsanna Rebeka Pál, János Sugár, Péter Szarka, Tibor
Várnagy, Gyula Várnai 

PocketTV
Eleven short stories oscillating between the personal and impersonal, public
and private, old and new, big and small, benefiting from all the advantages
and
disadvantages of RealVideo: video becomes transmission, and the screen becomes
the size of a palm on the basis of the personal instead of the new, and the
available as opposed to the complicated: itâ??s a real PocketTV which follows
its
own rhythm, and not that of the technological progress.

Participating artists:  Eike, Gábor Gerhes, László Kistamás, Tamás Komoróczky,
Kriszta Nagy, Hajnalka Németh, Zsuzsanna Rebeka Pál, János Sugár, Péter
Szarka,
Tibor Várnagy, Gyula Várnai


Thursday
19.00
Márton Fernezelyi - Zoltán Szegedy-M.: DEMEDUSATOR
C3 gallery Budapest, ClosedX Linz

DEMEDUSATOR is a shared virtual world developed by its visitors. Any creative
participant can "publish" his/her creatures - let it be a complete virtual
world or sound, movie, text or picture - by placing them in a 3D world
explorable by any (Web)surfer. People can reflect to another's files by
uploading something near to the creatures of others.

>From the technical side, the system enables the users to add their parts to
the
VRML scene. The uploaded files appear in the form of encrypted sculptures to
the observers; the original media can be descrypted(viewed) by touching the
silent objects. The system of the encryption creates an interface for the
users
to explore the world without having to download all the multimedia files.