The Lens of Images. Desire, Commodities, Media and Hacking
by David Cox

Database offers the technological means as well as the methodological basis for searching, indexing, seeing patterns between media elements. Narrative offers the moral container within which those elements can be organised in such a way that they reinforce the broader moral standpoint. Hacker culture is about living ones life as if authority had already been done away with, as if ones own liberty were a birthright and access to all things were not only possible, but to be expected. [...] Database is a natural extension of the quality of computers, but only hackers can redeem computers from the shackles of work, and all that goes with it. Where the provisionality of meaning proliferates, there you will find the possiblity of life beyond commercial society.

Nuovo teatro digitale
di Virginia Stefanini

Nella definizione più essenziale di teatro [...] non c'è nulla che afferisca all'ambito del tecnologico, del [...] digitale. Allo stesso tempo, non potendo trascurare il fatto che l'incontro fra teatro e nuovi media sia in corso e stia producendo dei frutti, non risulta affatto facile tracciarne un profilo preciso, da un lato a causa della velocità di sviluppo delle tecnologie impiegate dai nuovi mezzi di comunicazione, dall'altro perché i risultati stentano ancora a trovare visibilità se non presso gli addetti ai lavori [...]. Ho preferito quindi concentrare l'attenzione su un'analisi [...] di come le modalità di comunicazione introdotte dai nuovi media e dalle tecnologie che li supportano stiano incontrando l'arte teatrale, invitandola a ripensare ai propri modi attraverso alcune tematiche fondamentali come quelle di interattività, di realtà "aumentata", di simulazione tecnologica.

[...] I was imagining "Roaming Producers", trying to figure out what this could mean: people who move while producing and produce while moving. And then, I noticed that, actually, I don't like these people. Or rather, I'm even afraid of "Roaming Producers". Some of them really scare me. And that is because I was not so much thinking of Roaming Situationists, but rather of Roaming Deleuzians. These are people who see themselves as nomadically roaming the rhizomes of Capitalism. People who have a fan relation to some of these Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts. There were a lot of them around during the Nineties, and probably still today. So I started a typology of some of these Roaming Producers, which, until now, is titled "Some Roaming Producers I Do Not Like".

The Digital Artisan is Dead! Long Live the New Product!
Agreeing on Standards as a Strategy for Independence
by Micz Flor

The Digital Artisan was conjured up to describe a new mode of collaborative working. Its shortcomings are twofold: its failure to provide an accompanying redefinition of the outcome (i.e. product) of its collaborations and a thorough understanding of the qualitative changes in collaboration itself. It could be argued that by proclaiming the necessity of generalised standards and interfaces between products, we seem to be re-entering the first phase of the industrial revolution all over again: re-confirming the rule of standards as the key to mass-market conveyor-belt production. In which case, it seems even more significant to stress the importance of collaborative work on standards and interfaces, as well as demanding that such standards and interfaces should exist in the Public Domain by default, thus resisting the 'destiny' of private property.

Open Source DNA?
by Eugene Thacker

[...] biotech fields like bioinformatics are practically demonstrating the ways in which boundary between the body and technology are being transformed, and, in some cases, effaced altogether. No longer is the body the privileged domain of "nature," just as our technologies are more than inert objects we simply control and use. It appears that biotech research is delving deeper into the carbon-silicon barrier, and finding not a barrier at all, but rather a permeable membrane that is constantly changing its shape. [...] While there are pragmatic examples of the ways in which computational approaches are advancing biotech research [...], bioinformatics places flesh and data in such an intimate proximity that it challenges us to think of technology beyond the tool, just as it challenges us to think of biology as much more complex than a "master molecule" residing in nature.