RE:3 NYTIMES article: Knowbotic Research

Sven, Alex,

replying to: http://netartcommons.walkerart.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/14/0414200&mode=thread

> Is there a paucity of intellectual political debate in the public artistic sphere, on issues around privacy, secuity, and open information?

Don't let us get into a 'i'm more illegal than you are' discussion. alex's point is in a way valid, and it shows that mirapaul's article is imprecise, but that is not a problem, so long as people don't start discuss the mass medias truth value - the point of Mirapauls article (and of his questions) was directed at the *news value* of the story.
if the discussion is supposed to go a for me challenging direction, it needs to continue the analysis of the relationship between technology, art and legality.
There was no real problem until now with the New Museum, they let our project go to articulate the legal bug, it would have been a mistake not to make the legal bug visible after we had met him. Therefore we decided not to portscan from Europe after our legal US port
scanner was shut down. So here is the string i would like to suggest, let us enact the legal bug:

Wendy Seltzer, http://openlaw.org
Your experience here is actually a very interesting part of the project. It demonstrates how private parties can exert control of the public domain well beyond what the law requires. Even with institutional support for your installation, you are often at the mercy of other economic actors -- the ISPs whom the museum and you depend on for connectivity, who in turn depend upon higher-up ISPs to preserve their connections to the Internet. Any player in this chain has the ability to break the connection and prevent you from displaying and contributing to the public discussion, based on its own feelings, contracts, and interpretations of the law, before any judge is called in to determine whether the activity is legal.

Steve Dietz:
The fact that Minds of Concern is potentially undermined by the legal system in the form of a standard or "shrinkwrap" license the New Museum has with its ISP is not insignificant. It is precisely a legal bug and the strategy by which so much of the public domain in the U.S., at least, escapes Constitutional and other legal protections by entering into [voluntarily?] contractual agreements that void and/or supercede these supposed rights.

Commment Mailing List Lachlan Brown:
Indeed, the distinction between assumed rights and legal guarantee of rights, public and private, residesin an interstitial state. Not a 'grey area' to be filled in between the public and private by new conditions for cyber' space, but a contest in which like a Venn Diagramme the public and private vie over the terrain they both occupy.
Add to this the interests of several dozen States, thousands of public service institutions hundreds of thousands of companies and millions of users, well... . What would we call it? War? Wrestling? or Seduction? A Million times a million contests. Cultural confusion.These webs of the law are durable and have easy translation to the new media distributive terrain. Despite word play or administrative/bureaucratic assumptions of power. The really interesting fact is that States, institutions, companies, individuals, but not collectivities like artists, writers, coders, primary producers and so on, are beginning to 'stand-off' this terrain. We might, after all, consider a return to the question of the aesthetic, and then of policy, and thenof law over several years. It will become clear as we do so that we NEED insitutions, new institutions perhaps, that are able to host the work you do.

>This comment made me wonder what kind of legal investigation had preceded the installation of the work - on behalf of the artists, and the curators, and in fact the museum?

I worked with Wendy Seltzer on the legality of the portscanning in the US after the patriot act. The value of being legal as an artist in an art show was set at highest priority from the curators of the Open_Source_Art_Hack show and the New Museum and was the condition of being part of the show. Critical Art Ensemble brought the legal letter from their lawyer to stay in the show, Knowbotic resisted bringing this letter but we blocked information in the net.publication of the analysed security lacks of the NGO servers (we were displaying the security wholes, but we were hiding the relating IP adresses). With this tactical step we coud make the Public Domain Scanner going, and locate more precisely the dimensions of the actual legal questionable dimensions of the net.public domain and thus hit the legal(?) authority of private, economic actors (providers) . As you see 2 different artistic tactical styles inside the same museum show.
Let us look forward on the project of Critical Ensemble, the performance scheduled on the last day of the exhibition.

christian

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(original article)

Invitation to the open source exhibition
curated by Steve Dietz and Jenny Markatou (?)