In Pictures: Tending Networks Symposium

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Putting the old back into new media

Alessandro Ludovico is no stranger to technology - he worked with a group on the controversial Amazon Noir project. Scripts repeatedly mined the booksellers "Look Inside this book" feature, piecing back the hundreds of random pages into complete novels, then redistributing them via P2P (Peer to Peer) filesharing software. Together with Paolo Cirio, he also staged "Google Will Eat Itself" a couple years ago, filtering funds received from Google AdWords to purchase stock in the global search giant. So at the "still/open" artists workshop in Melbourne last week, as Janine Randerson reports, his topic was very surprising. Paper.


Ludovico's talk, the Persistence of Paper deconstructed the hailed 'paperless office', and elaborated on the strength of the humble book as an historical record amidst a very transient web, an autonomous lo-tech solution which is "reliable and not dependent on the lack of tcp/ip waves or electricity". He moves on to suggesting "just in time" publishing - newspapers or magazines that are feverishly updated until a few moments before cheap offline production onto paper.

Helmut Smitt's "Pamphlet" work riffs on this new ease of publishing, allowing visitors to type in a message and have a printer spit out a brochure from the 10th floor of a tower block. Services like online publisher lulu.com make significantly bigger works possible - send a PDF, choose distribution methods, and even get an ISBN. Gmail announced it's "Paper Gmail" feature, allowing printouts of archived mails, as an April Fools Day joke. But users, and reporters fell for it, some even requesting it after they uncovered the prank.

Tracking the trackers: Unmasking wiki

Next month US based artist Wayne Clements will present a new variation of his un_wiki project specifically for Window. Clement’s Neutral 3 script filters through electronic encyclopedia Wikipedia’s recent pages log, ignoring hundreds of edits on boyfriends, tech trends, and local events, in search of something more sinister. The software contains a list of ‘shadowy editors’ – from defense departments in the US and Australia through to corporate giants like Deutsche Bank, Shell Oil and the Ford Motor Company.

Using tracing technology developed by Virgil Griffith, the artist is able to link the editor with the edited. Griffith created the software "to create minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike", and has so far succeeded. Australian Department of Defense staff are now banned from editing articles after it was discovered the department has made over 5000 edits. Dell, the American Rifle association, and both Democratic and Republican parties were also caught in the fallout, being linked to 'improving' articles that were potentially damaging.

Of course, Wikipedia "conflict of interest" policy is ineffectual and debateable. Who better to create that article on a new technology than the developer? The organiser of a local event is the perfect contributor for an wiki article on it. The problem lies in the potency of the information - from relatively harmless "graffiti" remarks on Helen Clarke's page, to rewrites of presidential administration history, and changes to crash articles by the airline responsible.