Yesterday at the Viper conference: Piotr Cofta from the Trusting Technologies Group at MLE Dublin.
He's a computer scientist, previously worked for Nokia and now works on a device called rCube, a cheap 3x3x3cm RFID reader/writer that's supposed to help equalize the RFID information balance and allows for many kinds of creative usage.
No slides online, but there's the TT position paper.

I've been thinking a while about how the expressive means of the Semantic Web could be used for art, how those abstract but powerful mechanisms and vocabularies could be used for artistic reflection on this new meta-medium.
I don't actually have too good an overview on the net art scene, perhaps there are already lots of folks playing and producing? Hello, is there anybody?
Anyway, I guess I might have found something at Viper Basel today: GeneralNews - Ein Plädoyer für die Abstraktion by Daniela Alina Plewe et al., a web-based software using the Princeton WordNet for semantic alteration of text on the axis abstract<->specific:

General News is an interactive metabrowser which substitutes in real-time the words on websites. The substitutions may be synonym, abstract or more specific than the original expressions. By these variations new descriptions of the world and descriptions of "new" worlds are created.

More, please!

Pictures above are from the Viper exhibition that opened today in Basel, which is the self-proclaimed "swiss-made internationel trend barometer" and one of the world's leading new media art events, including an exhibition, a little conference and quite some events at different locations in the city.
The event seems to be even a bit poshier than last time I went, but I can't tell much about it yet, I just quickly strolled through the (free) exposition tonight. There's lots of screen, of course (see topmost image), some really good (IMHO) installations and presentations (e.g genoTyp) and of course video art both of the instantly charming and the rather inaccessible kind (second and third image).
I hope to meet Miss Strebel and Mister Lovink Friday or Saturday and perhaps to listen a bit to what's being discussed at the Viper Conference titled "GENERATIONS ON THE MOVE".
But alas, I have work waiting for me this weekend. Let's see if I can be a good boy and to my homework before going out to play :)

I'm currently reviewing the 109 submission for LOTS 2005 as a member of the jury, basically doing the quality assurance probably usual at such conferences. I did have to decline some proposals already, mostly because they were just too blurry or because the projects did look like being much too far from being ready and presentable.
Some Swiss FOSS companies seem to be missing this time, but then there are some new and interesting projects and presentation from businesses both local and international and the Swiss public sector.
Promises to be an interesting event, if the other guys in the Fachkommission don't decline my proposals I'll be there, too, speaking about two rather different topics: 'PHP and the Semantic Web' and a presenation on Moodle's success story, free software and open standards in education. We'll see.

I was too busy (girl, company, etc) to report about it, but last week I had the luck to attend a soirée about and by Woody Vasulka, the video legend and founder of the legendary kitchen. His mastery of the medium is really admirable, the corpus of this works is both amazingly broad and deep, the early studies on the lowest level of the video machinery, magnetics and stuff, were indeed striking.
He spoke a bit about his ongoing project, OASIS ("Open Archiving System with Internet Sharing"), a large-scale distributed media art conservation project he leads with Jürgen Enge, formerly at ZKM, but soon at HGKZ. But that highly interesting project does not seem to have a website (?).

Published again:

Soraya Kouadri Mostéfaoui, Hannes Gassert and Beat Hirsbrunner: Context Meets Web Services: Enhancing WSDL with Context-Aware Features. In the proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Best Practices and Methodologies in Service-Oriented Architectures: Paving the Way to Web-services Success, held in conjunction with the 19th Annual ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA'2004, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 24 - 28 October 2004. PP1-14.

Should be published as a chapter in a Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science volume, if I got that right. Beautiful books indeed, and at least a better publisher than last time, even if it's only a single little paper :-)

[ via rdf-interest ]

Article on Sony's «self-organizing alternative to the W3C's Semantic Web» that is «based on just-patented emergent-semantics principles»

Good luck :)

lifeClipper in action!

I'm busy right now, some comments regarding the installation follow tonight, in the meantime you might want to follow the above link and make an appointment for your own trip through the defamiliarized St.Alban neighbourhood.

Saturday I had a first and interesting meeting with Barbara Strebel, one of those rare women that can look back on ten years on the net, bringing THE THING to Switzerland, involved in starting nettime et cetera, a long, long time ago. An internet dinosaur that is very much alive indeed, knowing many of those early pioneers and real online heroes.

Anyhow, she's not actually a techie, rather sort of a "social engineer", dedicated, a bit frustrated about local culture politics and its players, with some bad feelings about former combatants but still with an obviously immense capacity for enthusiasm. We spent almost the entire day together, and one of our many topics was blogging (speckled computing was another), we even tried a live demo and I'm pretty sure she'll also have a weblog soon.. I'd love to see her blogging.

If you've been a long-time attentive reader, you remeber mentioning her a long time ago, and if you know her you might also guess what she thinks about that posting of mine. Anyway, she didn't actually know me before reading my blog, read it, mailed me, and soon after we meet in Basel. The internet seems actually good for something :-)

A report on my lifeClipper experience follows as soon as those guys send me the pictures of me as a wired cyborg - so stay tuned :)
After that, my next report from wired Basel will come from Viper or earlier.