Research into RFID and the Internet of Things

As part of my work with KURATOR, on their kurator software, some of my work has been published in circulating contexts by Cont3xt.

Curating Internet-based Art in a media of its own developed into a multifaceted communication process on content among users of all backgrounds and provenances. Net curators are deemed cultural context providers, meta artists, power users, filter feeders or simply proactive consumers. Curating (on) the Web, as termed it in 1998 already, not only creates a public space for Net Art protagonists, but also enables them to participate in creating their own public space, which often takes on the form of discursive models. Handling technological developments and knowledge about existing channels of communication are integral parts of net curating, as are providing resources, initiating collaborations and remaining in contact with international networks.

Read more at www.curating.cont3xt.net

Joasia Krysa of KURATOR, has invited me to join their team to aid in the development of the latest version of their kurator software, and I have happily accepted. It’s a really interesting project and I’ve included a description below, and visit the kurator.org website for more information.

kurator is an open source software application designed as an online curatorial system and a platform for curating source code that can be further modified by users. The project is experimental in that it merges the process of programming with curating to challenge the role of the curator in the process of selection, contextualisation, presentation ad dissemination of online artworks, by emphasising not the aesthetical or functional properties of art works but the source code itself. The project follows the structures and protocols of traditional curating and implements a system that partly automates these procedures. It translates curatorial protocols into modular software protocols, breaking down the curatorial process into a series of commands or rules. The software aims to extend these in an unpredictable, unprescribed, and uncontrolled manner in addition to the vagaries of the user’s input and any modifications they make. In this way the project recognises recent practice and discussions around ‘software art’ and posits the idea of ‘software curating’. The project speculates upon the production of software beyond a closed proprietary model to a collaborative open source model as a tool for future public development.

The Evenings of… Four events in which special guest curators, artists and theorists who have developed unique positions in art and culture are invited to create their own à la Carte ‘Evening of …’, as a platform to expose, showcase and question today’s state of unstable media.Composes IM / EX_PORT TAG as a night of Real Play in 2 parts …Thursday 12 April, 20.00 – 22.00 and beyondLocation: ro theater and Rotterdam container harbourAdmission: 10,- / 8,- reductionMarguerite Charmante in collusion with Fleshgordo created the Ludic Society in Bilbao Spain in 2005 as an international association of game practitioners and thinkers who seek to provoke the new artistic research discipline of ludics or indulgent play. Set in 2 parts IM / EX_PORT TAG is club night stressing the conceptual disjunction between game and play, and their transgression into real life and surveillance technology. Usually for members only, on this night anyone can gamble for membership through a tagging play moving from the city into the transient zone of Rotterdam’s harbour. SMS “play tag!”An evening with… Margarete Jahrmann, Max Moswitzer, Duncan Shingleton, René Bauer, F.E.Rakuschan, D. Carmen Rusch, Nikolaus König and Olli Leino.

Originally posted: www.deaf07.nl

Wednesday 21-24 March 2007, from 10.00 daily Plymouth Art Centre The Gamegold Sweatshop Workshop! from 21st-24th March 07 at the local sweatshop, Plymouth Arts Centre, UK.A Pit Stop workshop for “Real Play” is heldby the LS Every participant can become a game figure with an implant and be prepared for the Judgement Day Real Play. As an option the tag can be swallowed in an initiation ceremony. Workshop topics: Capture the flag, tag teams, game play development, last man standing, tool kit box, being tagged, tagging cities. Workshop exercises: Tag and de-valuate objects, re-programme tags and toy gadgets, adding the value Zero. The conceptual disjunction of play and game is elaborated in an exemplary ludic way. The rule of play (necessary for a game, but not to play), the bondage, the constraint, is intentionally chosen to evolve a ludic poetics.Each Real Player gets a special Quest. First: tag the city with a stencil graffiti to achieve a Full City Tag (=the complete city is systematically tagged). Fully subjectively and collectively, every player can pass judgement by tagging objects, buildings, vehicles, persons and is judged by wearing a RFID Tag under the skin. Second: scan tags with the Wunderbäumchens and change the Internet of things into the value Zero. Third: take souvenir photographs of Plymouth tags and the Plymouth. The Real Play extends the game zone into a situated locative play in a real city. Come and judge with your tag!DISCLAIMER: Every participant becoming a 3rd Life Game figure has to bear the consequences by using the Reality Engine in the PLAY. Ludic Society is not responsible for any physical or mental damage during and afterwards the PLAY.

We are at the brink of entering into an age of everything you own being numbered, identified, catalogued, and tracked. Radio frequency technology, or RFID, is a technology that is now rapidly being developed by corporations and governments who see the possibilities and advantages of managing large bodies of objects. Tagged with an RFID chip, an object will have a unique digital identity and play a pivotal role in joining the physical world with the digital. As this technology moves into products, sensitive documents and even the human body, an Internet of Things will emerge consisting of blogjects, spimes, cybrids, wearables and smartifacts; networked objects that are capable of communicating what they are, and what is going on in the space around them. Forever part of the object, RFID transponders are designed to respond whenever they receive a signal, continuously transmitting information to whomever chooses to read it. Does RFID become the ultimate marketing exercise? The means of complete control? Finally removing all anonymity and privacy in a continuous stream of invisible communication. Is this the moment where the real world and the Internet become inseparably linked, occupying the same space, becoming the same reality? A merging of 1st and 2nd Life, where your car knows what you eat, your fridge knows who you talk to, and your phone knows where you go.