alleshannes.

Since people follow rather stable routines, it is possible to predict their behaviour (within a range of certainty) from analysing their activities in the past. One important research in this direction was carried out in the context project at the University of Helsinki from 2002-2005, with a focus on what places people go and where they meet.

Today, tremendous amounts of behavioural data is generated through web log statistics, tracking cookies and beacons, and mobile phone positions (cell towers and GPS). New mechanisms evolve that make this data also usable, even in real time (e.g. Google’s Map Reduce algorithm). This is the result of a Structure Big Data conference that promises an “inevitable, even irresitible surveillance society” (Jeff Jonas, an IBM engineer quoted in a Computerwold article)

While the ability to “look into people’s minds” scares privacy experts, it also promises to deliver perfect filters for users who feel lost in the tremendous stream of news and information. And it offers them a personalized experience of services.

Another point of concern:

The higher the amount and variety of data collected, the more unique the data sets are that a single person produces. One example is the website visitor identification through the browser footprint. It might look pretty generic on first view, but since it includes the fonts installed, version numbers of plugins, etc., very few people actually have the same browser footprint.
While the data itself is usually collected in a “non-identfying, anonymized form”, the combined data sets render anonymity an illusion.

In their preface, the curators of Ars Electronica 2010 sounded pretty alarmistic. Not to put too fine a point on the summary, you could phrase it with “the world is on fire, act now, there is no time for pessimism (or maybe even thinking)”. Before I went, I had my doubts whether a call for immediate action combined with an apparently clear goal to get the world “back on the right track” (i.e. repair it) would get us into a mode of “no alternative” (TINA). If there was no alternative, asking questions, reflecting, disagreeing would have to be regarded as a waste of time…

Tove Kjellmark's "Destruction of the Ego" Robot needs a repair (itself).

Technology and democracy

Of course, you can read the initial statement as a provocation, and the actual discussions were more balanced and aware of the two sides many measures to “save the world” have. The relations and tensions between technology and democracy formed a core topic on this festival around “Art, Technology, and Society”. Andreas Lehner of the CCC underlined the importance of hacker organisations for democracy with a quote of Albert Einstein: “Think also about the fact that it is the engineers who make true democracy possible. ” But while they (often) lay the foundations and enable communication and exchange, in a democracy, they should not be the ones to take decisions. As Amelia Andersdottir (MEP for the Piratpartiet) reported from her own experience, many decisions in today’s politics come prefabricated from expert organisations like the WTO. The European or national parliaments have little left to change – and often lack time and expertise to fully understand the concepts and even more to improve them. Additionally, more funding and experts form an advantage for large companies in the competition of opinions. This is not a conspiracy by “them” (a somewhat diffuse enemy Ralf Schmerberg wants to bash in his movie Problema), but a self-reinforcing process that needs to be changed.

Beautiful "216 prepared dc-motors/filler wire 1.0mm" by Zimoun. By their sheer number, they create a wide range of sounds you would hardly expect.

Privacy

Today’s technology even enables a level of hypercommunication that goes further than most of its users want it, into the most private aspects of life. Google Streetview and Facebook were not in the center of discussions but a permanent subtext. (Maybe this is also because today’s developments in this area spread in realtime and solid critique is delayed, as Geert Lovink put it).The Austrian philosopher Andreas Hirsch even claimed that there is nothing left but an illusion of privacy. This brought up a fruitful debate with two remarkable statements:

Even this illusion is still valuable to Derrick de Kerckhove, because as long as we think of a private space, we can also think of a public space, reserved for arguments that are not meant personal. Joitchi Ito, who actually lives a pretty transparent life himself (deliberately), still was not convinced: Privacy is needed so that civil actions gain enough momentum before they are under public/governmental control (and possibly restrictions). If their is no private space anymore, there won’t be any strong impulses for the public space, the res publica. Privacy is an essential prerequisite to make “repair” possible for re(s)publics and democracies.

(You could also think of China as an extreme form of the expert society refered to by Andersdotter above, which might prescribe unacceptable standards for your way of life.)

Looking into the courtyard of the former Tabakfabrik Linz, the venue of the Ars Electronica.

Open tools

A strong grassroots movement (at least at ars electronica) is dedicated to opensource technology. Open software is much more common and accepted today (just think of Mozilla’s Firefox), but it is not software alone anymore.

Unhappy with today’s versions of social networks, Maxwell Salzberg presented the Diaspora project that aims at making the flow of (user) data more transparent and thus giving users a better control of privacy (Gert Lovink added similiar projects like GNUsocial, AppleSeed, and status.net). I personally find this extremely important, not only because of the significance social networks have today, but also because the architecture of the new systems will have to offer solutions for some tricky problems (like interoperability, widespread acceptance, ease of use).

Head mounted open source eyetracker (hardware side)

When you hit the borders of opensource software, you will soon want additional hardware. The Free Art and Technology Lab, together with the Graffiti Research Lab, Open Frameworks, and the Ebeling Group created a do-it-yourself eyetracking system (with claimed 50$ costs in hardware) called the Eyewriter. They initially created it for a friend who suffers of ALS/Lou Gehrig’s Desease and can’t moeve anything but his eyes. While eyetracking as an expensive technology is not new, this package of hardware instructions and powerful software puts it into the hands of everybody, to explore, adapt, and improve.

MakerBot in action

Material/3d printers used to be another high-tech, high-cost device. Now there is the makerbot to print out the 3d models of the general public. And from being the attraction itself it already tends to become a supporting part of other artworks, like in Daan van den Berg’s Merrick.

The parts of Matthew Gardiner's Oribotic project are also created with a 3d printer.

Even “bio technology” is now tinkered with. There are more speculative designs for debate, like Catherin Kramer’s Community Meat Lab. It combines the (future) in-vitro growing of meat with a community based form of production. While open sourcing biotec, she also tries to avoid the gap between food producers and consumers of today’s industrialised supply systems. Ready to build (it yourself) are the low tech/recycled The Windowfarms Project by Britta Riley.

Britta Riley's Windowfarms

Interestingly enough, considerable exhibition space was given to industrial companies in the Repair Fair – some of them surely a proof for former utiopias and brave enterpreneurship. Other big ones like Siemens or Linz AG apeared in a strange contrast to the rest of the exhibition, being as responsible for the often bemoaned state of the enviroment as well as potential contributors to “reparation”.

Repair for originals!

For many people who create opensource technolgy today, disassembling devices because they were broken has often been the first step into working with technology. This is contained in one of the statements in the platform 21 Repair Manifesto, (to me) one of the most important documents of the ars:

7. To repair is to discover.

[...]

10. Repairing is indiependence.
Don’t be a slave to technology – be its master. If it’s broken, fix it and make it better. And if you’re a master, empower others.

straight forward repair by filting in situ: Woolfiller by Heleen Klopper

Additionally, they gave me a very enlightening explanation for “authenticity”, the feeling that certain things are somehow weaved into our personal history. We often tend to cling to old stuff, even when new products were easily available (a marketing department’s nightmare: happy people don’t buy new stuff, and authenticity is hard to synthesize). When you repair something after an accident or because it is worn out, you focus especially on the parts of a thing which make you aware of your “common experiences”. And repairing causes an self-reinforcing exchange with a thing: you dedicate time and effort and this makes it even more important and unique to you.

9. Repaired things are unique.
Even fakes become originals when you repair them.

At the Shoe Goo repair station, Arne Hendriks applies "street knowledge" from skaters to make you shoes live longer.

The more I get into relation detection via communication data, the more services come to my mind. But of course, I don’t invent this wheel for the first time (Pete Warden’s blog brought a lot of evidence to me): In an article two years from now (already!) ZDnet UK has a nice portrait about the emerging business of email analysis. A positive focus is put on Clearwell Systems because of their special (unique?) ranking algorithm (oha! — I bet Google pays very close attention). Its software

weighs the background data and content of each email for several factors, including the name of the sender, names of recipients, how many replies the message generated, who replied, how quickly replies came, how many times it was forwarded, attachments and, of course, keywords.

Well, so do I… But in the light of a fully grown business, ranking emails gets away from a personal (autonomous) assistant that is just nice to have, handy and good for reflection. With the huge amounts of email produced every day and about every topic relevant to any business process, corporate email archives contain pretty any information a manager, and — more delicately — a prosecutor can desire:

Email has come to be viewed as a source of truth. If you want to know what really happened, you look at the email.

As it became clear to me, too, during my research, collecting and archiving (intercepting?) all electronic conversations improves the the basis for statistical analysis and heuristics and hence the quality of the ranking a lot. A lot of entities (Google, security authorities) are after our data, consequentially.

Pete Warden has to receive an honrable mention once more because his position of “trying to generate a useful index with no human intervention” resonates with my basic motivation, too. I find his blog to be imensly interesting and very relevant for my thesis: Like expoiting the time information inherent to email that I thought of using in some kind of “contact profiling”, all the privacy issues entangled, especially in business context, and drawing profit from the knowledge that accumulates often unnoticed in a company (or workgroup). And he complains about the missing Gmail Api, too. All written in a very comprehensive manner.

A proposal for a new law faces a lot of controversy at the moment: The TKÜ (Law for the Surveillance of Telecommunication). Unfortunately, a lot of people are completely unaware and uninformed about the problems at hand — especially if they are not reading a lot of things online. I think, this is very problematic for two main reasons (a lot more can be found easily via the link in the corner of this site): the relation data stored is more sensitve than we might think and our believe that state authorities are good guys is not necessarily true.

Isn’t it all a minor problem as they are just storing the relational data (who with whom when and where) and don’t record e.g. the voice (they do but via another law)? Acutally, content is completely irrelevant: The whole field of Social Network Analysis strives to map entire social networks (you and your friends and their friends…) based on communication (one very good example is MIT’s Reality Mining Project). They can even estimate your general happiness: spending time with their friends usually makes people more content. As the analysis produces very concrete and specific patterns it is suited ideally for a pattern based search for criminals/terrorists. Especially “home grown terrorists” will have very sharp disruptions in their social life. All data sets should not only be stored but scanned carefully for suspicious behaviour if we want to take prevention seriously!

Still no problem because we don’t have to hide anything! We even stopped downloading files from dubious sources, so the copyright industry’s desires behind the law can’t harm us, either. But what if your friend becomes a suspect? Remember that you are linked with pretty much people with only six in between? I’m pretty sure you will find a true terrorist much closer in your “network”. And you can get a lock-in from prosecution authorities yourself, too! Visiting Afghanistan for whatever reason (relatives? NGO project?) is not a good idea, clearly, but probably not very likely for most of us, either. So Guantanamo is away far enough (you could get “extracted“, still) but serves as a first example why naively believing in the good state is a bad idea: While the U.S.A. can still be regareded a democracy and a constitutional state, all you know about that becomes irrelevant once you find yourself in “the camp”. No civil rights as you are outside the U.S. and of course Europe (if you consider yourself a civilian) and no rights from the Geneva Convention(if you consider yourself a soldier). No perspective to get heard by a lawyer, either.
For all Germans, there is a very recent example from at home: A sociologist working for Humboldt University, on cities in particular, got arrested for being part of a “terrorist community” (it’s all about communities…). It’s not that he really did something but that he was providing the “intellectual basis” for others — via his scientific research. Once you are suspected of terrorism you lose a lot of rights, e.g. talking to your attorney privately. It’s the attorney you need to get you out of prison, unfortunately.

While it is certainly necessary to provide security for the people, there are some limits that should be respected in order not to lose our freedom in tight situations.
On Nov, 6th, we can give our concerns a voice!

When moving aroud a lot it would be nice to sit down just anywhere, open the laptop and go online instantly. At least in the cities we find often a couple of access points in the neighbourhood but they are usually locked. For good reasons because how do you know what other people will do on the web via your connection? …

In the context of my mini-exhibition of spam art at the FHP, I had a very inspiring conversation with Christopher and Martin (who study at the FHP as well). It started off from the exhibits themselves and that spam might be the Basis for the Pop-Art of our time as it is more typical than a Coke Bottle.

On the other hand, it is a radical interference with our communication needs and intentions, which should be one of the reasons for the strong emotions (fierce hatred?) towards it. That relation builds the link to my master thesis, which is focused on the organisation of our addressbook according to our communication behaviour.

At the moment, it seems as if we face a heavy communication overlaod: Twitter, Skype, ICQ, Blogs (with shoutboxes and comments), SMS-connectivity, Plazes, Facebook/StudiVZ, messages even via last.fm. Is there a goal everything is converging to, one “integrated commuication application”? How intense and instantaneous do we want our communication to become? Sometimes it looks as if we try to connect our brains. Or at least, we make publicly listenable what we usually would mutter to ourselves at best. Is it all about being afraid of feeling “un-connected” and alone when anyone else is excited about the new possibilities for interpersonal conncections? …

Today, Prof. Dan Smith who is engaged with the development of Service Design at the Glasgow School of Art visited Reto Wettach at the FH Potsdam. The topics of our talk made me have a closer look on Livework in London, a company focused on Service Design.

While this field of design can be considered emergent itself it deals a lot with new technologies and possibilities as well. In a kind of hands-on-research, Livework developed the loome (edit: original page vanished, but some info is left here) service that lets you sell your private data like bank transfer and grocery shopping histories to the highest paying company (one of the involved designers sold a personal record of 800 pages for 150 GBP on ebay as a proof of concept). …

Identity in digital media, as discussed by Dick Hardt and Kim Cameron.

Dick Hardt proposes in his OSCON 2005 Keynote an identification system for the virtual world modelled after reality: Some authorities issue ID-certificates to the user and she can use these IDs independently for a variety (best: all) of services (e.g. shopping). The service doesn’t have to ensure the integrity of the user by contacting some 3rd party authentification authority with every login (as it is now) and the user has one ID for everything (simple). That’s (very roughly) what he tries to sell with sxip.
…