Manovich

Easier to find it this way... Manovich Article.

Political Censorship

A few notes for myself.
You are all welcome to check out the sites.

China tightening Online freedoms
Reporters without boarders
Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents
Blogging vs. Journalism
Electronic Fronteir Foundation
Combating CBDTPA
Tinsel-Town, a short Flash about CBDTPA

All for now, more later...

The not-so-free Internet

When Canadian Internet law expert Michael Geist tried to download his e-mail in a Beijing hotel room recently he ran into what he thought was nothing more than a technical hiccup.

"I'd be downloading and all of a sudden it would be cut off," said Geist. "And at first I thought it was a coincidence and the network had a glitch."

Well, no. It kept happening again and again.

Geist -- who holds the Canada Research chair in Internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa -- had run smack into everyday Chinese censorship of the Internet.

What was happening, he later discovered, was that a filtering program was going through his e-mail word by word, term by term, and when it hit a something it didn't like, bam, goodbye to his download.

Geist started looking for methods to beat the system, which was also blocking his access to some websites...

So far, at least, the conventional wisdom is -- like that of Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) co-founder John Gillmore more than a decade ago -- that the Internet always manages to route around problems.

"It certainly has been the conventional wisdom," said Ronald Deibert, who director of The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies. "The problem is that the conventional wisdom is being increasingly challenged."

Deibert -- whose Citizen Lab is a member of the OpenNet Initiative that creates technological tools to help citizens evade state Internet censorship -- said that countries are becoming increasingly intent on and more adept at controlling online information.

Five years ago, he said, there were perhaps two countries -- China and Iran -- that were imposing Internet filtering and now there are dozens, including Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

He said that, as with any kind of censorship, only a small minority of people try to get around it.

"What happens in countries like China and Iran is that the government is secretive about it and yet there are stiff penalties for people caught violating those ambiguous regulations, said Deibert. "It creates a climate of self-censorship. In other words, people become very cautious because they're afraid."

Interestingly, said Deibert many countries use western technologies to do filtering, as shown by analysis by the OpenNet Initiative, which connects computers clandestinely to filtered networks.

OpenNet includes The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and the Advanced Network Research Group at the Cambridge Security Program at Cambridge University.

"We have people who work with us inside countries, often at great risk to themselves," said Deibert. "They go into a hotel in the country, plug into the Internet and run tools that we provide for them and that we've kitted up on their laptops. What we're essentially doing is mapping the Internet infrastructure from the inside out."

The OpenNet Initiative recently discovered that a product called SmartFilter, marketed by United States-based Secure Computing, was being used in Iran, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

"So they definitely see a market and they're pushing their product," said Deibert. "Of course, they deny they've sold that particular product to Iran because there are sanctions against Iran right now in the United States. They say it might have been downloaded illegally."

Deibert said that Citizen Lab and OpenNet Initiative is developing new software called Psiphon to allow those in such places as China and Iran to get access to an uncensored Internet.

"The way our system works is if you have friends or family in a country where censoring takes place, you would have them connect with your computer with a couple of simple changes to their browser," said Deibert. "They wouldn't have to install anything. Then you would run a program on your computer that would allow them to surf through your computer."

There are other programs available for this. Circumventer, for example, allows those who install it on their computer to connect to proxies, which in turn access information and sidestep the filters.

"The problem is that the Chinese government is now aware that there is something called Circumventer, and so it's a cat-and-mouse game," said Deibert.

Not that long ago, said Deibert, the Voice of America, the U.S. State Department's propaganda arm, worked together with a company called Anonymizer to create a circumvention system for Iran.

"We connected two computers in Iran and connected them to the Anonymizer service and ran tests where we requested literally hundreds of thousands of Web sites."

What they found in place on the Voice of America software were porn filters that blocked sites by searching for such terms as "ass" which meant that if you tried to look up a U.S. embassy it was blocked.

"They had decided, somewhat mysteriously on their own -- there wasn't any public discussion about this -- that the American taxpayer wouldn't want Iranians surfing porn," said Deibert.
article found @ : http://www.news.utoronto.ca/inthenews/archive/2005_09_23.html
origanally: The Vancouver Sun

Class presentation of work. Afterthoughts.

I think things went well tonight. Although afraid of boring people out of their minds, I think maybe only Trogdor! may have done that.

Some things that I didn't touch on that I think are important in looking at other people's work is their influences. Now, for the most part, when asked to look at your influences when presenting your work as an artist, I get the feeling that people want to know whose work have you looked at or used or taken some grain of insight from in the creation of your (my) work.
For some odd reason, it has been a consistantcy in my mind that the people you use as influences should be of the same medium of yours as well. The problem wih this to me is that the people I would claim as influences to my work, who use the same medium as I (Ansel Adams, Andre Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Don G. Anton) for the most part, do not have art that resembles mine in many ways.

The goals and meaning of their art does have resemblences, but it is in the ways that the goals are met, rather than the physical embodiment or aestheticness of the object.

There are a number of resources as well outside of photography that I draw upon, and in fact , I would have to say that more of my influences come in the forms outside of photography rather than from within the medium.
ie.
This Man, whose mind played so couragiously in the evolution of the art world as we know it.

This director and his films are probably the closet I will venture to photography in this list. He has a well deserved name in his business.

Amazingly enough, I find inspiration in music. I actualy think this is a form of art that has become so ingrained witthin our culture, that we start to fail to see it as such, much like advertising. Check out These guys or This Bunch and even The boys to get a hint of what helps to drive my work.
( Or you can go Here and see what I really listen to.)

Writers such as Paulo Coellho, Cervantes, Alexandr, Bradbury, Bach, and this man with whom I will end this abbreviated list.

I would even have to say that the ability of this man is so fantastic in the sense that he has captured an overwhelming majority of the nations attention in regards to art. Some may say it is anything but. Alas, it still stands as probably the most recognized name in contemporary art today in the nation. ***WARNING: Clicking This Link May Cause Brain Hemorrhages*** (And yes, i would say his work too has been an influence)

And some humor if you will, can be found Here. I didn't want to leave you with the hemorrhage link. Now, this site, has some great and some not so great "toons". But be warned, they certainly have commentary to provide to certain sects of society. Choose well.

Semiotics post

Semiotic's For Begginers



Maybe one of the easiest to understand and yet most complex to grasp ideas. With the presumption of existance, we find ourselves comptemplating interpretation and meaning of that interpretation, how an interpretation is arrived at, and sometimes even go so far as to explain why we arrive at that interpretation.
Ofcourse, the meaning of the word and caricature of "interpretation" must be agreed upon or found before we can get any further.
Logically, the totality of the arguements that are put forth fall apart when the system is used against itself, without the presumptive meanings being assumed. But the arguements and the ways in which they are derived do find interesting theories and logics that lead to questions of interpretation, quite possibly the truer meaning of semiotics itself. (The questioning of meaning, or the meaning of meaning if you will).

One of the more interesting arguments that is used in a supportive manner is that the components of language need to be practically invisiable as or carry no interpretive meaning of themselves in order for them be effective in carrying the greater meaning of what they make up. For example, in the written, or pixels displayed markings that are perceived of here in the word Bat, the individual letters of B, a, and t do not carry a meaning in and of themselves when they are combined in this fashion, but rather represent a whole. Simply put, the meanings of any individual components are overlooked in order to see the greater whole. Gestalt therory. Without the assumptive knowledge of the rules of the language, but with the understanding of the sounds we hear in our minds of the letters, we can run into the problem of seeing Bat in symbols (if you will) and deriving its meaning in our mind as Be a tee (or) tea. Quite different from the animal, or the stick used in a game that is meant(?) to come to mind.
What is interesting to me here is that we find without some other form of confirmation for our interpretation we are left to assume that we understand follows the same rules, the same paradigm.

The eassy it self seems well written, but I wonder too if the language itself is not a bit presumptive about it's audience. I understand that the need for exactness in explaining the meaning of meaning, but at the same time, when looked at from the system of semiotics, it can easily be derived that this is simply not a beginners resource, for in order to understand the whole of things, one must have some grasp of many, if not all of it's parts.

New Start for Art and Tech

It is about time my DSL got up and running.