Virtual

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.

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.

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.

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the assumption that the concepts of authenticity, ownership, uniqueness and seriality are, within the digital domain, no longer valid.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.

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 happens when reality becomes digital for the first time?

The passage from the virtual through the possible to the real is the fundamental act of creation ... Ontology is not an abstract science ... Now the new virtualities, the naked life of the present, have the capacity to take control of the processes of machinic metamorphosis. (Hardt & Negri, 2000).

When Reality and Virtual encountered, a new form of commodity was born. Whereas consumption becomes immaterial, the object is Imaginary.

And if property was out of date? Another inversion is possible.