Computing Culture Group

Mako is off to Europe where he’ll visit three conferences to deliver talks:

• The iCommons iSummit (essentially, the Creative Commons
  conference). Mako will be talking about philosophy of free culture movement
  and continuing his pitch for a set of goals for free culture and the
  Definition of Free Cultural Works. The conference wil be in Dubrovnik, Croatia
  between 14-18 June and Mako will be giving a talk on 16 June.
• Mako will be at DebConf 7, this years instance of the annual Debian Conference. He’ll be giving a an overview of academic work on Debian on 21 June and facilitating a round-table discussion among Debian derivatives. The conference is in Edinburgh between 18-23 June.
• For 26-28 June, Mako will be a guest of Eric von Hippel in Copenhagen
  for a small meeting/workshop of people interested in and working on
  issues around von Hippel’s idea of user innovation.

The Director is giving a keynote on human rights, enframing, and new media at Brock University’s Immersive Worlds conference today.

Annina is showing her pre-MIT project Sinister Social Network in the exhibition My Own Private Reality at Edith Russ Haus in Oldenburg (Germany). Last month, she showed another pre-MIT project, Rock ‘N’ Scroll, in the exhibition Soundbytes also at Edith Russ Haus.

The Director, along with his colleagues Henry Jenkins and Mitchel Resnick, was just awarded a 5m, four year grant by the Knight Foundation to start a Center for Future Civic Media. We’ll start work on the Center this summer, so watch this space for announcements.

Mako’s project Selectricity tries to take election technology designed for governments and make it available for for everyone else. It tries to use the state of the art from the more traditional election technology world to build tools both to help people make better decisions in their every day life and to, in the process, rework their own relationship to the tools and processes of democracy.
The project was just given a grant to fund continued development as part of the Digital Incubator initiative by MTV and Cisco. More on the project is on the weblogs of the Director and Mako and in the more traditional press as well.

It’s with joy and pride that we announce Kelly Dobson’s successful defense of her doctoral dissertation, “Machine Therapy.”
Kelly presented her most recent project, OMO, as well as the others that have made her an international phenomenon. At least one audience member was spotted crying from happiness with the presentation.
Video of her defense will be online soon.

On Saturday April 26, 2007, Mako will be giving a talk with Elizabeth Stark from Harvard Law School and Harvard Free Culture at the Media in Transition 5 conference on creativity, ownership, and collaboration in the digital age held at MIT.

Mako and Elizabeth will be presenting a paper called, “Fighting Back in the War on Share: Trangressive Reactions to Copyright” where they will paint a picture of the explicitly political dimension of many peer-to-peer filesharing groups and online media pirates. Their talk will part of a panel on Disruptive Practices.

Although not an official part of the program, Noah Vawter will be appearing at the 4th Circuit Bending Festival in New York City from April 27th-April 29th. His mission there is to meet with some 2006 graduates of his One-Bit Groovebox workshop and teach them how to modify the code inside the box, which is based on Computing Culture’s Number Six microcontroller platform!

“By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas in December.”

I’m not going to say that Kurt Vonnegut was the most subtle novelist I’ve ever read, but he was clearly one of the most talented social critics to have lived and worked in the US in the last century.
When I was living in Troy, NY I read Player Piano, a novel about engineering and automation, set in a town called Ilium. I am embarassed to say it, but I actually looked on the map, because Ilium was supposed to be equidistant to Albany and Schenectady — both real towns. It was supposed to be full of engineers, which, of course, is true for much of upstate New York. My father pointed out, to my chagrin, that Ilium was the latin name for Troy. That immediately tripled the resonance of the book, about the process by which peoples’ skills and intelligence are taken, turned into mechanisms, and made obsolete. I was working on the DJ I, Robot project, and the novel was more or less describing what I was doing. Even later I learned that Player Piano was a direct response to Norbert Weiner’s Cybernetics, published four years afterwards and still at the beginning of the cybernetics bubble.
I am trying to imagine what kind of heaven Vonnegut would have wanted to go to, and I’m torn about whether he’d have wanted to watch the planet or not, as he felt and expressed extraordinry pain for human folly. But Vonnegut wasn’t a misanthropist. He didn’t hate the player, he hated the game (and player pianos). He hated what people seem capable of doing to each other, precisely because he loved the people.
Perhaps the amateur astronomer Charles W. Juels figured out the whole heaven thing ahead of time. In 1999 he named an asteroid — #25399 — Vonnegut. Peaceful, but close enough to keep an eye on things. And to potentially still have an impact.