Antidatamining, or the art of killing financial markets a little every day

All throughout the month of February 2012 the Net artist collective RYBN is in residence at the Gaîté Lyrique, one of the hotbeds of the emerging art & technology scene in Paris. If you are in the French capital, I highly recommend paying them a visit.

I became acquainted with RYBN last year, when I met some of its members at a conference at the French National Library where I was delivering the closing speech, while they had presented their most recent project, Antidatamining VIII. ADMVIII (for short) is a trading bot, i.e. an artificial intelligence making real investments on real stock exchanges, collecting data and impacting financial markets worldwide. The bot monitors and maps data flows to create real-time digital visualizations such as charts, soundscapes, and timelines. It has an online page (where you can see how well it is doing, its net liquidity, the value of its shares, etc.) and a Twitter account providing details about ongoing orders.

Source: Antidataminig – Offshoring map visualization

ADMVIII is not your run-of-the-mill social commentary about market greed and pervasive financial panic in modern life. The goal of the project is to detect economic imbalances and discrepancies introduced by robot trading. As the bot actually executes buy and sell orders online, it represents a détournement of automatic trading technologies. As such it is intended to highlight their social consequences – and their potential disasters.

janvier 29, 2012 | Filed Under unclassified | 2 Comments

One of the greatest comedians of our time: Slavoj Žižek

I’m serious: the marxiste célèbre and #Occupy Wall Street avuncular philosopher Slavoj Žižek is really a funny man. Case in point, this excellent coffee table book containing a collection of the jokes he spices up his impenetrable prose with (complete with references to the original texts).

Žižek employs jokes like Plato resorted to myths as heuristic devices designed to convey a logical meaning. Thus, they are used iteratively — the Marx Brother one-liners about self-identity or refusal of choice, the Rabinovitch anecdote about realism, the skeptical paradox about the fiancée who’s late for a rendez-vous…

Find a selection of the best scanned pages on the publisher’s website, and discover the maieutic value of laughter. (Also discover that this is a project of the Mickey Mouse Club ft. the norwegian artist Audun Mortensen, and that the book is actually printed in a very limited edition of 1…) Read more

janvier 4, 2012 | Filed Under social capital | Leave a Comment

La farce du e-G8 et la tragédie du cognitariat (S01E01)

Le premier épisode d’une série BD qui devrait plaire aux grands comme aux petits…

Click to enlarge

» Go to the next episode

mai 27, 2011 | Filed Under social networks | Leave a Comment

Doctoring Fukushima: from nuclear catastrophe to natural bodily function

In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident, an interesting video has been circulating. Disguised as an educational animation targeting children, it is actually an anonymous pro-nuclear propaganda feature based on a tweet by media artist Kazuhiko Hachiya. Nuclear Boy (a character representing Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant) has a bad case of stomach-ache. A series of defecation-based incidents ensue. Doctors take turn to ease his condition and hopefully they will help him avoid ‘Tchernobyl diarrea scenario’.

Scatological humor aside, what is interesting here is the concurring efforts to medicalize and to naturalize a nuclear disaster. If the explosion of a reactor is comparable to defecation, it becomes a natural bodily function. It is thus inscribed in the normal course of events. It is even vital that Nuclear Boy ‘passes some gas’ at some point. In this case, like in others I’ve been discussing in this blog, the negative effects of human-made technologies are normalized by inscribing them into a medical discourse about the body. As far as medical knowledge is summoned up to provide scientific backing to the claim that ‘everything is for the best’, the entire event becomes a moralizing hygiene lesson comparable to those that early 20th institutions used to deliver to the masses.

avril 10, 2011 | Filed Under body | 3 Comments

« L’homme transcendé » de l’artiste japonais Suguru Goto (31 mars 2011)

Au Cube d’Issy-les-Moulineaux, une performance artistique pour explorer l’extension des potentialités dans la relation homme-machine : l’interaction entre les images vidéo représentant des corps virtuels et le corps de l’artiste Suguru Goto présent sur scène, qui peut, grâce à son BodySuit, transformer ces images en temps réel. Un puzzle se crée autour des différences et des ressemblances entre corps réel et virtuel.

Festival Némo

Le Cube – 20, Cours Saint Vincent 92130 Issy-les-Moulineaux
Tél. 01 58 88 3000 Fax. 01 58 88 3010

Le jeudi 31 mars 11

Read more

mars 30, 2011 | Filed Under body | 3 Comments

Linux Virgin : notre fétichisme technologique quotidien

Au hasard de mes archives je retrouve un vieux message de la liste de diffusion du Lancaster Linux User Group annonçant la mise en ligne de la série Web érotico-artistico-satirique Linux Virgin (2005). Au fil des épisodes, toujours le même scénario : sous le regard d’un voyeur-geek, une dominatrice-hacker tout de cuir habillée forçait une jeune femme à… installer un serveur Linux. Allégorie de notre fétichisme technologique quotidien (et des rapports de domination qu’il sous-entend), cette création d’un groupe d’étudiants de la Columbia University a laissé peu de traces de son passage sur la Toile. En bon cyber-archéologue, je suis allé la dénicher afin d’apporter de la matière à discussion pour la rencontre sur Corps et Internet, à laquelle je participerai avec le psychanalyste Yann Leroux mardi 21 décembre 2010, à 19h00 à La Cantine (51 rue Montmartre, Passage des Panoramas, 12 Galerie Montmartre, 75002 Paris). PS. Malgré ce préambule, la vidéo ne contient pas de nudité ni de gros mots : elle est complètement SFW (Safe For Work).

décembre 19, 2010 | Filed Under body | 6 Comments

« I sing the body suspicious », genetic scientist says

by Antonio A. Casilli (Centre Edgar-Morin, EHESS) ^[1]

If you are willing to venture off the beaten tracks, Paris art scene might still meet your expectations in terms of authentically thought-provoking experiences. As part of the Swedish Institute’s festival « Hors les murs », Mildred Simantov and Nils Thornander have designed Information Partielle. Definitely an exclusive exhibition: it is accessible only by appointment and it takes place in a private apartment in the northern part of the French capital. The exhibition is on until March 26, 2010, and it’s worth an hour of your oh so precious time. Just drop a line to the following email address: sanzokuhnam@orange.fr. Don’t forget to mention you are a proud reader of Bodyspacesociety. Not only that will improve your chances of getting in – that’ll also provide you with an interpretative frame-set to help you navigate through this most disparate collection of objects.

Mildred Simantov et Nils Thornander (c) Alexandre Callay

mars 14, 2010 | Filed Under body, social capital, space | 2 Comments

« Jamais-toujours »: an experiment in urban writing

by Antonio A. Casilli (Centre Edgar-Morin, EHESS) ^[1]

First off, the big news: Marianne Heier‘s exhibition Jamais-Toujours is now on at the Stenersen Museum, Oslo, Norway. It runs from January 14th to March 14th, 2010. If you are around, definitely go! If you are not, tell, tweet, email your friends who might be around – to definitely go!

Last time we met in Paris, Marianne Heier and Marco Vaglieri (her « partner in crime » and, incidentally, the gentleman you see writing in this picture) explained to me the central piece to the exhibition is a video-photo installation containing a reference to the famous graffiti « Don’t ever work » – Ne travaillez jamais – which philosopher Guy Debord inscribed on a wall in rue de Seine, somewhere in the 1950s. Marianne’s work has thus to be regarded as a détournement/reversal of the situationist slogan, a bitter commentary to the failure of a political attempt to « free men from labour ».

In this sense, one can understand the artist’s statement as to how the title « Never-Always » must « be read as a testimony of how the relation between production and investments has changed » since the post-WWII European youth movements. But Marianne Heier’s installation also plays out as an archeology of urban writing, one of the most relevant forms of expression within these movements. Jamais-Toujours is based on thorough bibliographical and fieldwork research in order to track down the exact address, down to the very same portion of the wall where Debord first wrote his situationist slogan – and to replace it by its contemporary actualization. Ironically, the immediacy, the quest for authenticity, the desire to represent « life as it is » which initially motivated these forms of écriture urbaine is here replaced by painstaking attention to the design of an artistic experience whose features and competencies match those required by – well, work.

janvier 26, 2010 | Filed Under space | 3 Comments

« How come it’s BLUE? » The origins of James Cameron’s Avatar

By: Antonio A. Casilli (Centre Edgar-Morin, EHESS, Paris) ^[1]

By now you all must have a pretty clear opinion of James Cameron’s Avatar. Is it the new Star Wars? Or is it just another CGI-ridden crapbuster movie? You are entitled to your own opinion. As I am not a film critic, my job is not to change it. What this movie represents to me, and to many a colleague of mine, is a chance to resuscitate some forgotten pieces of cultural analysis written in the last 15 years – approximatively the time this movie has been in the making. As a concept, the avatar has a long history.

Visual genealogy: left The Lawnmower Man (1992); right Avatar (2009)

And a long history also means a lot of bibliographic references. And some of them still come handy to understand what the hell Cameron’s film is about. It’ like a garage sale, where I give away those old records I used to cherish a lot, so that some freshman neighbour with deejaying penchants can make a mashup mp3 out of them.

A few years ago, for example, the French journal Communications published an article of mine whose title, quite self-explanatorily, would read something like: Blue Avatars, about three strategies of cultural borrowing at the heart of computer culture.

Antonio A. Casilli (2005). Les avatars bleus, Autour de trois stratégies d’emprunt culturel au cœur de la cyberculture. Communications, 7 (1), 183-209

Yeah, well… maybe not that self-explanatorily, after all. Anyhow, in this article I gave form to a socio-visual genealogy of the avatar, as one of the main archetypes of contemporary culture.

Now I assume some of you don’t speak French. Also, some simply can’t be bothered to go through 30 pages of socio-babbling. So here I provide a summary of the main results of the article.

décembre 20, 2009 | Filed Under body, social networks | 15 Comments

Soirée-débat « Science et Art »

L’émission radiophonique Recherches en cours en collaboration avec le centre d’art et de recherche Betonsalon, organise une soirée-débat consacrée à la relation entre Art&Science.

Intervenants: Monique Sicard (CNRS, spécialiste des rélations entre Art et Science), Emmanuel Rebus (Artiste/Mathématicien), Eduardo Kac (plasticien du vivant) et Gérard Azoulay (directeur de l’Observatoire de L’espace du CNES) dans le studio-radio éphémère réalisé par le collectif Marcello&Fils.