Don’t Give Me the Numbers – an interview with Ben Grosser about Facebook Demetricator. Matthew Fuller Ben Grosser is an artist, composer, and programmer based in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. His work is highly attuned to the role of computation in changing and producing aesthetics, knowledge and social formations and much of it is available to view [...]
Sean Dockray is an artist and a member of the organising group for the LA branch of The Public School, a geographically distributed and online platform for the self-organisation of learning. Since its initiation by Telic Arts, an organisation which Sean directs, The Public School has also been taken up as a model in a [...]
Olga Goriunova is curator and Annet Dekker is co-producer (as part of aaaan.net) of the multi-venue exhibition ‘Fun With Software’ (in Bristol) and ‘Funware’ (in Eindhoven and Dortmund). The exhibition has many aspects to it, being in some ways a retrospective of certain strands in software art, a set of propositions about the nature of [...]
This interview follows on from a project called “Coal Fired Computers (300,000,000 Computers – 318,000 Black Lungs)” carried out in Newcastle in spring 2010 for the AV Festival. The project, by Graham Harwood, Matsuko Yokokoji with Jean Denmars involved a means of producing a physical diagram between components in production as they undergo transformations across [...]
Steve Goodman is author of “Sonic Warfare, sound, affect and the ecology of fear”, a book just published by MIT Press. Tracing the politics of sound in ways that develop some of the arguments made in certain branches of Industrial Music and in the darker waves of Techno and Jungle, Sonic Warfare proposes a vivid [...]
Mark Fisher is the author of ‘Capitalist Realism, is there no alternative’ out recently from Zer0 Books http://www.o-books.com/obookssite/book/detail/358/ As a blogger he writes K-Punk http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/ Capitalist Realism is one of the most acute diagnoses of contemporary politics as it is played out in one small island off the coast of Europe. After skewering the marketisation [...]
Open Source Publishing is a recently founded graphic design agency that uses only Free Software tools. Closely affiliated with the Brussels based digital culture foundation Constant, OSP aims to test the possibilities and realities of doing graphic design using an expanding range of Free Software tools. On the way, they produce some great designs, test [...]
MF: How do you figure ‘the body’ or the biopolitical in your discussion of viruses? Clearly it would be possible to simply fall into the trap of equating computer viruses with biological ones, to mistake the metaphor for the thing named. On the other hand it is possible to trace the ways in which the [...]
“Jungle laws, animals laws, seabed laws: what are you defending mate?” Lee Scratch Perry Matthew Fuller: Your use of the term ‘sex’ is used, in Lynn Margulis’ words, in the following way: ‘Sex in the biological sense has nothing to do with copulation; neither is it intrinsically related to reproduction or gender. Sex is a [...]
A: So why this interview? It’s supposed to be a mistake to view technologies as having human qualities. Anthropomorphism is a conceptual sin remember…
MF: you recently completed ‘Tigertxt’ a project working with Amber Nectar, the football fanzine of Hull City to produce a temporary SMS network for the zine and for the fans of the club. What kind of situation was Hull City in when the project started, how did the connection with Amber Nectar come about? RB: [...]
MF: In your new book, ‘The Factory of Unhappiness’ you describe a class formation, the ‘cognitariat’ – a conflation of cognitive worker and proletarian, working in ‘so-called jobs’. You’ve also previously used the idea of the ‘Virtual Class’. What are the qualities of the conitariat and how might they be distinguished from this slightly higher [...]
MF: What are the questions you are asking about the structure of the web, and about the software that is being developed to use it that suggest the approaches to it deployed in WebTracer? NP: Well aware of the legacy of webmapping as a supposed demystifying device and fetishised formalistic perversion of form I do [...]
An interview with 0100101110101101.ORG about life_sharing Matthew Fuller Q.: In your text describing the project, you mention that ‘A computer, with the passing of time, ends up looking like its owner’s brain’. Do you mean this in the way that any collection of objects of a certain type (ie books; bathroom cupboards full of half-used [...]