The exhibition Waves has been opened on Friday 9th of May. Some first press coverage from:

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net

We have been reviewed by neural it
http://www.neural.it/art/2008/04/street_radio_oral_tradition_di.phtml

I particularly like the last part of the article where it says:

"The Street Radio project can then be interpreted as the nth disproof of the short-sighted forecast stating that oral tradition would have been wiped out by the computer society. Today we can notice an emergent new form of orality that should be defined as a "tertiary", in the School of Toronto tradition, that taught us to consider the electronic-era orality as a secondary one."

The experimental workshop day taxi-to-praxi at Goldsmiths started off with a positive vibe as about 35 people met in the seminar room underneath the 'squiggle' whereby this group consisted of about one third of people from Goldmiths, one third from other universities and one third of unaligned individuals working as artists or curators. After Prof Janis Jeffries, convenor of the PhD in Arts and Computation opened the session, a lively and stimulating day unfolded. In this account I try to piece together from notes and memories what were some of the main issues which emerged.

The Copenhagen Free University (CFU), together with other "self-institutions" such as the Universite Tangente http://utangente.free.fr/ in Paris and the University of Openness, London, successfully promoted the notion of the need to create ones own institutions and hijack the meaning of the established institutions. The free university exists outside the hierarchical and commercialised model into which Europe's universities have been turned. The CFU promoted a more egalitarian system where everybody could use the tag 'university' to their own ends. The CFU ceased its activities by the end of 2007 and in connection with the abolition of the institution its founders, Henriette Heise & Jakob Jakobsen have written the following statement:

In die Diskussion um den Schutz der Privatsphäre bzw. deren zunehmenden Verlust haben sich einige fundamentale Denkfehler eingeschlichen, weshalb diese Anliegen, so sie als defensive Verteidigung eines Menschenrechts aufgefasst werden, zum Scheitern verurteilt sind.

Taxi to Praxi
This text expands on some of the topics mentioned in the original call for participation for the taxi-to-praxi workshop. It explains some of the motivations and the general ideas behind the research day but is by now way a complete summary of all the topics we would like to address. Currently to this text have contributed Lindsay Brown, Adnan Hadzi and Armin Medosch. If you feel that you would like to add something, please feel free to rewrite this text or create a new one. To create a new revision, do the following: Once you are in the edit section with this article open, apply your changes and then go to the bottom and click "create new revision". You can also use the text field "Log Message" to explain your revisions.

The local newspaper Basingstoke News has carried Rosy's press release and some punters found it necessary to react. So, even though we haven't yet launched the application we are already being critiqued.
http://www.thisishampshire.net/news/hampshirenews/display.var.2111648.0....

This image shows the network topology of the mesh network created by Hivenetworks in Southampton for the Hidden Histories project. Interestingly, it is not really congruent with the physical topology. You can clearly identify the gateway and from there it goes to node 1 but then it gets all meshy, and this is exactly what you want. Each node 'sees' more than just one other node, some have 4 or more connections. Well, lets see what will happen when the trees grow leaves.

This is an image of a youthful Billy Reid, well known in the 1930ies as bandleader of Billy Reid and his piano accordion orchestra. Billy started out as a boiler maker apprentice in the Southampton docks.

Anyone who can bung me some tunes from Billy is very welcome.

Arthur Lloyd website
http://www.arthurlloyd.co.uk/index.html

Music Hall performers: this site has also some audio tracks and images.
http://home.clara.net/rfwilmut/musichll/musich.html

A discography but no samples
http://www.214b.com/MHDisco.html

This appeal reached us from jaromil via the Bricolab Mailinglist

[Bricolabs]

Subject: [Bricolabs] Outrageous disaster: Ogg/Vorbis spec taken out of HTML-5 Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2007 12:32:34 +0000 (13:32 CET)

re all,

i urge you to take act against the exclusion of Ogg/Vorbis/Theora
audio/video streaming technology from the HTML-5 specification:

Why whirlwind? 'Whirl', because we have been criss-crossing the country by plane, using the Brazil Pass, a special offer for visitors from abroad who want to visit different cities during a set period of time. But why 'wind', that is another question. Maybe it has to do with the air, that warm tropical air which received us in Rio de Janeiro with a variety of smells, from sweet flowers and other plant smells to the stench of open sewers in the Favela; wind, also because of the frequent tropical thunderstorms which we have encountered; and wind also because of ...

Eine Rezension des Buches “Imaginary Futures” von Richard Barbrook.

Als sich die USA in der Ära des Kalten Krieges auf eine Spirale des Wettrüstens mit der Sowjetunion einließen, tobte zugleich auch ein ideologischer Kampf. Die Führungsschichten beider Seiten versuchten, indem sie den Anspruch auf die Zukunft erhoben, auch die Gegenwart zu dominieren. Die Sowjetunion hatte dabei den Vorteil, das von einer Befreiungs-Utopie geprägte Geschichtsbild des Marxismus auf ihrer Seite zu haben.

Let me put it this way: generally speaking there are things implicit and things explicit -- and at the hackmeeting the overwhelming majority of things to know and find out were implicit. It is in the nature of the self-organised event with flat, or, rather no hierarchies that those things that matter do usually not come with a large banner in human readable code that explains everything. There is not really a spokesperson, there are few figureheads, even fame is implicit, is something to be known and shared between insiders. What is to be found out is mostly based on direct human relationships. Everything else is largely a question of the 'vibe'.

This year the annual Italian hackmeeting happens for the 10th time. On September 28, 29 and 30 the various hacker tribes of Italy descend on the historic city if Pisa. Hosted by the social centre Rebeldia 5 minutes walk from the train station the meeting continues the tradition of self-organisation. As opposed to other fairly expensives hacker campings further north financial contributions here are entirely voluntary and in return participants are actually expected to share some of the work.