Missed stammtisch last tuesday, I’m in Paris with Baruch Gottlieb to set up R15N is Paris for Mau au Pixel.
–> http://bit.ly/XlImWa
This is the 5th R15N exhibition, after Tel Aviv, Berlin, Ljubljana and Johannesburg. Though Baruch and I are in Paris representing the project, it is a project of Telekommunisten, and was created with Jonas Frankki, Jeff Mann and Mike Pearce, along with the organizations that have supported and exhibited the project, including the Israeli Centre for Digital Art, Transmediale, Aksioma, A MAZE and Mal au Pixel.
And, of course, the international network of R15N subscribers! R15N depends on your participation and diligence! So please keep your accounts active and be attentive to messages passing through the system.
Baruch and I will also participate in the “Network Hacks” panel on Saturday, along with our friends and collegues, Alessandro Ludovico, Danja Vasiliev, Julian Oliver and Timo Toots.
There is a sense of “Network Hack” in R15N, in that it was in part inspired by the power asymmetry in the mobile phone network that results from credit avialability. In most parts of the world, including all the location R15N has been presented in, recieving calls on mobile phones is free, but making them requires credit. Thus, for those that don’t have money for phone credit, their mobile is not so much a freedom-enabling communications device that allows them top stay in touch wherever device, but largely a control-tether, that allows parents, schools and employers to keep tabs on them whereever they are.
As R15N initiates all the phone calls as it bridges subscribers together to pass on messages, it is is free to use for all the participants, so it’s a hack in the sense that it can be used without any phone credit.
However, of course, this hack is an illusion, since the calls aren’t really free, but rather paid for by Telekommunisten out of the exhibition budget it recieves from the organizers of R15N exhibitions. It is, like many of the Miscommunications Technologies, a social fiction. Imagining ways communication networks could work if the primary motivation for building them was something other that profit.
So long as investment in communications platforms comes from profit-seeking private financiers, these systems will always be mechanisms for control, and not enablers of freedom.
R15N reveals the volitilaty of information in networks, with every subscriber participating in the passing-on of the data, it becomes clear how vulnerable data is whenever it passes through an intermediary.
As each R15N subscribers knows, whenever a call is not answered, either due to technical failure or lack of diligence on the part of the subscriber, information is lost, and that even when the call is succeeds, the information is subject to the interpretation of the intermediary, who can change or ammend it, record it, and share it outside of the network.
While apparently less drastic, information is just as vulnerable when passed through intermediaries such as social media monopolies as it is when distributed by way of R15N subscribers.
The opening is tomorrow, so please join the community by calling +33 1 81 97 97 11 to sign up, or +33 1 81 97 97 22 to activate/deactivate your account if you are already a subscriber.
I will be back at Stammtisch next tuesday, however the R15N exhibition will continue at La Gaîté Lyrique until the end of the year.
