Stepping out of the Sun, Zapatista management rules
Rob van Kranenburg

All I have to do now is the following. I can not quite put it into adequate terms and I therefore hesitate. I do check my lines regularly for lines that make no sense even in those regions where we need to make no sense for a while in the registers that do make sense so. It has to do with my ability to visualise a setting in which people resonate with media through simulating processes. Simulating processes that are actual processes, for in a digitised real, any process might become experiential, might resonate. In such a digitized real, a hybrid reality in which our analogue bodies and digital processing fuse into each other, any data might become information; that is: data to which we relate, resonate.

Libre Commons = Libre Culture + Radical Democracy
David M. Berry & Giles Moss

[...] we think that the only way to consolidate the power and realize the promise of libre culture is through the creation of a radical democratic project. Such a project rejects all bureaucratic tendencies and silencing tactics. It is premised on the political as much as anything else, where the political is understood in its specificity, as a field of agonistic contestation and circuitous re-articulation. Radical democracy offers a positive vision for libre culture, and a constructive response to the question of how libre culture can deepen and extend itself. It is about a multiplicity of singular networks of struggle operating on the terrain of civil society who may seek strategic alliances and articulate as an active political subject under a ‘common’ radical democratic (counter-hegemonic) project.

Marginal Networks: The Virus between Complexity and Suppression
Roberta Buiani

Currently, it seems very difficult to underscore what is culturally hidden or suppressed. Despite the innovative potential shown by the structure and phenomenology of computer viruses, the gallery goer or the observer will be always immediately attracted to the given notion and by the fascinating way in which such notion is apparently being subverted. What lies beneath is always left over or barely noticed. This constitutes an obstacle that still hasn’t been overcome. The cases examined clearly demonstrate the difficulty of viruses’ complexity to stand out. Viruses, as I see them, are to human beings what the handwritten notes are to a book. Once you write them, they become part of the book. If you run out of space, you write between the lines themselves.

Reflections on Conceptual Art and its relation to New Media, a month long conversation at Empyre
Eduardo Navas

With new media we experience works that are not materialized in the conventional sense to which conceptualism reacted. This is in part because new media works are easily reproducible. What is unique about new media is that in its beginnings, in order to be legitimated, it did not face what other mediums had faced in the past, because issues of originality and purposiveness were previously dealt with by other media such as photography and most importantly film. In fact, new media, as a general discipline, was understood so quickly as a vehicle for efficient dissemination that it swiftly moved to affect previously existing media.

Short invective on theatre and virtuality: Five things I don’t want to hear anymore
Antonio Pizzo

The notions of digital virtuality and theatre, because are so close (as I pointed out in my Teatro e mondo digitale, 2003), if come close to each other, multiply their denotative power, producing such a mass of meaning to implode and create a sort of ‘meaning black hole’, where anything is adsorbed and disintegrated. We discuss of simulation and representation without a break; we point at aesthetic values using sociological categories; we act like artists and talk as engineers. Of course, confusion is often a ground to build new ideas. Nevertheless, while artists make their confusion, I think scholars would be better to making some sense.