Collect, train, battle.

In a Japanese franchised fantasy game, players capture cute wild creatures called Pokémon, and train them to become members of powerful fighting teams. If a Pokémon cannot escape the confines of the multi-function Poké Ball, it is considered owned by the Trainer. Volition goes out the window, and it must now obey all commands.

The interior of the spherical Poké Ball is designed to make the enslaved Pokémon feel comfortable, but there are no guarantees that this will happen. It's a world of tough luck and tough love.

Moll Flanders, Prefiguring the Immaterial Worker?
(a draft bit of my thesis...in progress)

Writing on Trade was the Whore I really doated upon.
—Daniel Defoe

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Goodbye Privacy, curated by Ina Zwerger and Armin Medosch for Ars Electronica, was a rich 2 days of presentations and provocations. Some of the papers are available on line at nettime, and maybe in other places...

Here's a link to Brian Holmes's paper, 'Cybernetics and the Control Society':

http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0709/msg00013.html

And Felix Stalder's ' Our New Public Life: Free Cooperation, Biased Infrastructures and Authoritarian States':

http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0709/msg00010.html

Earlier this year I was invited to work as a Guest Curator on Coding Cultures, a project initiated by d/Lux Media Arts in Sydney.

It had 5 main elements: artist residencies (Proboscis from the UK, and mervin Jarman from Jamaica with Camille Turner from Canada); workshops, a symposium, a book, and a country gig in the remote mining town of Broken Hill.

'A Handbook for Coding Cultures' was a small-run free print publication which is also available for download at:

http://dlux.org.au/codingcultures/handbook.html

Last year I drew on some of my Masters research* to write a chapter for a book on Open Source Software.

My text is titled 'Social Technologies and the Digital Commons' and the book is Handbook of Research on Open Source Software: Technological, Economic, and Social Perspectives, edited by Kirk St. Amant and Brian Still.

You can read the contents here:

http://www.igi-pub.com/reference/details.asp?ID=6717&v=tableOfContents

The book is very expensive so I haven't been able to buy a copy myself.

But I have uploaded my text here:

Well, my original proposal for my PhD was very big and completely unrealistic. And the first 18 months have been spent either ignoring it or trying to shape it into something do-able. So now I have a skinny synopsis, and some tendrils of questions...

Working title: Small Media, Soft Ecologies: exploring digital-social interventions

Running Synopsis:

Background to the meal: A soup I am cooking tonight for Furtherfield mob. It's a soft exchange for being their house guest in their flat in Haringey, London--and for FF allowing me to interview them for my PhD research.

Furtherfield are a core of 2 - Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett - who for the past 10 or 11 years have established and nurtured networked art and cultural experimentation - via online and offline playful participatory structures.

Some of their projects are documented here:

http://furtherfield.org