Inclusiva-net #1 New Art Dynamics in Web 2 Mode - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Texts of the 1st Inclusiva-net Platform Meeting July 9 - 13, 2007 Directed by Juan Martín Prada Medialab-Prado in Madrid www.medialab-prado.es - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ISSN 2171-8091 Published by: Área de las Artes. Dirección General de Promoción y Proyectos Culturales. Madrid, 2007 © of this electronic edition 2007: Madrid City Council © Texts and images: The authors ÍNDICE Preface Juan Martín Prada 5 “web 2.0” as a new context for artistic practices Juan Martín Prada 6 Isubmit, Youprofile, WeRank Deconstructing the Web 2.0 Hype Geert Lovink 22 Collective telepathy 2.0 (the interconnected multitudes theory) José Luis Brea 36 The lapses of an avatar: sleight of hand and artistic praxis in Second Life Mario-Paul Martínez Fabre y Tatiana Sentamans 51 Emerging Scenarios in Social and Artistic Practices with Mobile Technology Efraín Foglia 77 The Artist as a Generator of Swarmings. Questioning the Network Society Carlos Seda 88 Cultural Processes on the Net Perspectives for a digital cultural policy Ptqk (Maria Perez) 104 Fossils and monsters: artistic communities and social networks en in the spanish state Lourdes Cilleruelo 121 Tempus Fugit Raquel Herrera 131 The Impact of Web 2.0 Technologies on Cultural Communication Javier Celaya 143 “No List Available” Web 2.0 for Rescuing Libyan Museums from Institutional Oblivion Prototype for the Jamahiriya Museum in Tripoli lamusediffuse 151 Architecturepublic: Multiplayer Interactive Architecture Competition Maria Prieto 170 Laboratorio Live Media, Web2.0 and the necessity of strategic transmissions and live image flows Andrew Colquhoun y María de Marías (Laboratorio Live Media) 182 Transnational Temps Presenta: Eco-scope Andy Deck, Fred Adam y Verónica Perales 195 Fea y Rebelde Fran Ilich 214 memoryFrames Silvia Laura Carli y Andrea Wolf Yadlin 218 Imaginario.cc: collective imagination and decentralized public management Research project “Urbanohumano” Domenico Di Siena 234 Meipi: synergy between digital and physical networks Equipo Meipi 246 Covert Reality Peer Oliver Nau 255 Active Reading: The Story Engine Seth Ellis 262 + + Reader Marina Zerbarini 267 Art Fiction. Snake Preview Curfew, Cinema, Discontinuity Iñigo Cabo 274 PREFACE The collection of texts included in this book comprise a complete approximation to the creative and research lines centred on the exploration of the emerging new social dynamics in the transition to a “Web 2.0” model. The infinity of points of view and types of work represented here reveal many of the profound transformations taking place today in artistic thought and critical consciousness as a whole. In this new phase in the “connected society”, words like participation, contribution, cooperation, or social network are omnipresent, and discovering what is genuinely emancipating about it all is a challenge common to most of the works presented here. The various dissections in this book operating within this second phase of the Web demonstrate its enormous potential and the new opportunities it offers at all levels, promises that critical imagination and creative thought will certainly help to fulfil. We the coordinating team of the 1st Inclusiva-net International Conference would like to thank the contributors to this book as well as all the conference participants, for making it possible to establish a tremendously active space for dialogue, a collective presence that echoes throughout the pages of this book. Juan Martín Prada Director of Inclusiva-net Inclusiva-net · Preface · www.medialab-prado.es · 5 “WEB 2.0” AS A NEW CONTEXT FOR ARTISTIC PRACTICES Juan Martín Prada THE INCLUSIVE LOGIC OF “WEB 2.0” The economic model for what is called “Web 2.0” is based on promoting the desire to share and exchange things, an attempt to make profits from the voluntary collaboration of its users and its potential for compiling data and making them available to the public. The new companies operating on the Internet base their role on promoting cooperative communities and managing access to the data and files contributed. This business model increasingly tends not to sell any product at all to the consumer, but rather sells the consumer to the product, integrating the user and the files he or she contributes into the actual service being offered. The user and his or her contributions are the main content being distributed by networks. They channel and use as an economic force the desire felt by a multitude of users to be part of social networks, to share and make public their interests, to dialogue, to communicate with others, to express themselves publicly, to feel useful, and to cooperate. That is, what is exploited (if we can understand something like that happening today in the field of networks) is users’ capacity to produce sociability and their desire to do so. Now the actual user (instead of only his or her needs) is the true origin and destination of new technological developments. The inclusive logic of Web 2.0 is based on an elementary principal: the more users there are, the better a given application or social network will be. That is, there is a value to volume. The quantitative becomes qualitative in this second stage of the Web. And since the quantitative is one of the key elements of today’s production, it is understandable that the new companies on Web 2.0 are striving to generate a need for belonging and participation, to stimulate our need to feel tied to a group, a digital community, to collaborate and contribute things to share them on the new social networks (be they videos, photographs, comments, etc.). One thing we must keep in mind is that even those people who do not want to contribute to the conformation of these gigantic collective databases will do so collaterally by using them, involuntarily increasing the value of those applications because the routes they use will be offered as orientative data for other users. For example, on many Web sites, once a user has purchased something, he or she is offered information about what products other people bought, what they were interested in, and so on. The way Web 2.0 Inclusiva-net · “Web 2.0” as a new context for artistic practices · www.medialab-prado.es · works is based on managing to add the user to the available information. That is why it has been so often said that today, we are all turning into software components or “bionic software”, and that Web applications “have people inside them”. A recurring simile is comparing Web 2.0 to the 18th century automaton that played chess because a person was hidden inside it1. The “input” for the new Web is the users themselves; however, that does not mean that there is open possession of the databases they generate. Although the majority can be used freely, they are the property of the company that manages them, which also holds the rights to how they will be used in future. This has led to intense criticism, leading to the inevitable development of an intense parallel movement to the one for “free software”: the movement for “free data”. The fact that the central axis of Web 2.0 today is the production and management of social networks proves that it brings together social and economic production. Companies on the new Web try to produce social life, human relations, in an extremely profitable strategy that does not distinguish among the economic, emotional, political and cultural. The design of forms of human relations comprises the instrumental base of production. The new businesses of today are the new economy of the immaterial. The promotion of collective experiences of users, the enhancement of emotional interactions among participants, and making the aggregation of information originating in those networks based on affinity groups possible has required the development of huge efforts to advance in “social software”. That refers to software used to manage the needs and potentials of aggregating data, exchanges and communicative interactions among users in the on-line social networks. In this respect, identifying art works as “social software”, which would seem to fit with what we may understand by the term “net.art 2.0”, would influence the idea that the most committed art practice would aim to reconfigure the ways in which personal and social interactions take place on today’s Internet Web. Of course, many of the principles of what was called more or less improperly “Relational aesthetics” are found, in fact, in the area of the new networks, one of its best possible fields for future development. Inclusiva-net · “Web 2.0” as a new context for artistic practices · www.medialab-prado.es · POWER 2.0 With the process of involvement and inclusion of individuals in economic production and subjective systems which are part of the Web, the new forms of power today are trying to organize our entire lives. In the current network society, power blends into life, becoming abstract. It is no longer exercised over individuals; instead, it circulates through them (we all more or less consciously make it circulate) with the result that it seems logical that the most effective devices for the exercise of power are based on participatory logic, on flows of social activity. In contrast to efforts at homogenization, of treating everyone in the same way, the economic logic of Web 2.0 is based on differentiating and singling out each procedure or allowing each person to use it their own way. The goal is for there to be nothing we can be against, by offering a super-abundance of free choices and freely taken decisions. There is a proliferation of constant strategic games of personal initiatives and freedom. The system aims to correspond to the multiplicity of singularities forming the connected multitude by forcing the multitude into submission through its involuntary conversion into a transmitter of the new forms of power.