Ted Byfield on “Two or three things I know about imaginary property”

  • March 27, 2009 2:52 pm

New York based media theorist Ted Byfield will be the first guest in Interventions, a new series of events hosted by the imaginary property (.imp) research group at Jan van Eyck Academie Maastricht. Ted Byfield is a professor at Parsons the New School for Design and visiting fellow at Yale Law School (Information Society project).
In his intervention he will be reflecting on methods and practices that
make up (im)material architectures. Intervention #1 has been video
recorded and can be viewed below.

The launch of imaginary property on paper

  • January 31, 2009 2:06 pm

Undermining
the borders between text and image, between private property and public
space through the design of ‘imaginary’ advertisements and (ironically)
deconstructing some of the basic conventions of a magazine, Imaginary
Property is curating the 77 issue of HTV-De-IJsberg, investigating new
fields of image-production beyond the hard-coded notions of the
commercial versus the editorial.

The € 33.000,- issue

  • January 30, 2009 4:12 pm

On January 30th, 2009, the 77th issue of HTV De Ijsberg was launched at a session of Killer TV at the De Waag, Center for old and new media
in Amsterdam. The entire magazine is devoted to questions of "Imaginary
property". It has been edited and compiled by the researchers of the
"imaginary property" research group at Jan van Eyck Academie Maastricht
in close collaboration with the editorial team of HTV. The magazine as
well as additional material can be visited and downloaded at: http://www.htvdeijsberg.nl

Close Souls, Open Source

  • January 10, 2009 2:11 pm

This is the second last day of the coding week, the prototype rush by Megabug and me, sponsored by the Design department of Jan van Eyck Academy
(many thanks!). The sun is shining and we would really love some
walking in the bush, since the whole landscape is white and silver, and
the snow has covered the country.

New Media Meetings

  • November 26, 2008 1:58 pm

Every second Wednesday of the month, at Goldsmiths college in New
Cross, London, some people are meeting to discuss, around a table,
different projects and researches concerning media art and related
fields of inspection. On November 12th Gabriel Menotti presented a very
interesting text entitled ‘Computation as dynamic topography’, part of
his research at University of Sao Paulo. His approach is presenting
computation as a specif process that cannot be described as simple
text, because, in short, computation is a dynamic event happening
inside a machine, thus it is not text in itself, and probably software
should not be defined as text at all. On November 26th the project Virtual Entity
will be presented and discussed. The door is open and any interested
person is welcome to come in and participate, we are gathering at 18:00
at Whitehead Building, room 117.

Reflections around substances after Haip

  • November 23, 2008 1:55 pm

During the presentation at Haip festival Virtual Entity’s digital world
division into four substances was put under question. Basically the
whole lecture was divided in two segments: from a general presentation
of the project and its current state, the focus went on substances as
relevant categories, including relative problems and possible solutions
to those. These four substances are, in the specific, Text, Audio,
Video, and Image. These are somewhat echoing Aristotle’s four elements
constituting earth, and the celestial globe.
An interesting discussion started, here is a recording of the stream in mp3 or ogg.

Text for Jan van Eyck catalog

  • November 16, 2008 1:52 pm

Virtual Entity is a philosophical research
starting from the assumption that the concepts of authenticity,
ownership, uniqueness and seriality are, within the digital domain, no
longer valid. In fact there is no substantial difference between copy
and original on the Web, and these two categories are not relevant.
Since any file can generate an infinite number of entities identical to
itself, there is no scarcity on the Net, and any resource is
indefinitely available. Assuming possession is related to the numerical
proportion between resources (objects) and potential owners (subjects),
then, whereas resources are not limited, the concept of ownership and
the idea of property become superfluous.

If socialist and communist experiments in real world were limited by
the presence of state ownership, Virtual Entity is proposing the
implementation of a non-property system within the digital domain.

Entoptic phenomena

  • November 11, 2008 1:49 pm

Under suitable conditions light falling on the
eye may render visible certain objects within the eye itself. These
perceptions are called entoptical.

Entoptic images differ from optical illusions because, whereas
illusion is a phenomenon happening in the brain, entoptic phenomena
take place within the observer’s own eye. In this sense, the observer
cannot share this experience with others, because in fact the image is
caged within his eyes.

What does it mean to own an image?
And a non-image?

Haip: an open-source art festival

  • November 3, 2008 1:40 pm

The idea of an open-source art festival emerged inside the multimedia center Kiberpipa, and the first biennial event was held on 2004. Thematic focus of the HAIP Festival 2008, Hacktopia tries to question the results of the actual practice of opensource-technology-supported creative media art and the dimensions of the freedom of expression inside it.The core question is: hacktopia at the continuum of utopia and dystopia.

Where is the freedom of artistic expression in open source media?
How can we hack the paradigms of society?

What does it mean to own an image?

  • September 28, 2008 5:43 pm


What was formerly known as "information society" has turned
into an image economy based on the techniques of imaging information or
turning information into images. Images act as storage units for framed
portions of psychic realities that can be duplicated without
significant loss and can be distributed almost in real time.
Consequently, the image turns out as both subjected to processes of
design and as designing processes of subjectivation.