I'm very excited to say that I was selected to be a participant in the upcoming workshop on " Digital Networks and Physical Space":http://medialab-prado.es/article/2_encuentro_inclusiva-net_redes_digitales_y_espacio_fisico_redes_digitales_y_espacio_fisico at Medialab-Prado in Madrid! They selected ten projects to be developed collaboratively during the two-week long workshop, and my "mobile":http://zeitkunst.org/blog/2008/01/20/paper-accepted-for-isea/ "media":http://zeitkunst.org/blog/2007/12/07/fluid-networking-for-activists/ project, now called "Fluid Nexus":http://medialab-prado.es/article/2_encuentro_inclusiva-net_resumen_de_proyectos_seleccionados, was chosen as one of the ten. Now there is an "open call for collaborators":http://medialab-prado.es/article/2_encuentro_inclusiva-net_convocatoria_para_participar_como_colaborador_en_el_taller, so if you're interested in working on this project, or any of the other ones, definitely respond to the call! Also, the source code for the Fluid Nexis project is now housed at "sourceforge":http://sourceforge.net/projects/fluidnexus/. There's not much there yet, but I have uploaded the first stabs at the code to the "svn repository":http://fluidnexus.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/fluidnexus/.

Many people have had an account on "tumblr":http://tumblr.com for a while now. But I'm getting to it late. Basically tumblr is a service that is designed to let people post short snippets--of text, links, photos, audio, etc.--on a special site, leaving their blog for longer posts. For me, it's great, as there are a ton of things that I look at during the day, that I'd like to write about, but aren't worth an entire blog post. Plus, it's a good way for me to keep track of the myriad things I look at during the day for research and stuff. The ephemera that are too ethereal even to be posted on this blog. Here it is: "zeitkunst.tumblr.com":http://zeitkunst.tumblr.com.

I'm incredibly happy to write that my paper was accepted for "ISEA 2008":http://isea2008.org/! ISEA stands for the "International Symposium on Electronic Art":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-Society_for_the_Electronic_Arts and is one of the premier new media/digital art/emerging technologies conferences out there. I was bummed that I wasn't able to go the conference that happened in 2006 in San Jose, but am really excited to be going to the conference this year in Singapore! My paper is about the "fluid networking":http://zeitkunst.org/blog/2007/12/07/fluid-networking-for-activists/ project I blogged about earlier. The title, as it is right now, is somewhat unwieldy: "Reinterpreting networks of people as fluid for political purposes". The full abstract is below. I'll certainly be writing more about this in the coming months, and will hopefully be blogging parts of the conference when I'm there! *Abstract*: Social networks have become not only an online artifact used by millions, but also a means of describing real-life interactions between people. Humans as nodes, and social connections between people as edges; the metaphor is the graph or network, inheriting all of the abstracting nature of this mathematical formalism. Even within science and technology studies, and specifically actor-network theory, is there use of the network metaphor to describe complicated assemblages of human and non-human actors. Yet this reappropriation of a computer science term is not without its problems, specifically the way in difference is erased when a human is transformed into a node that is simply like all the others. The network itself is political, as the choice of who is represented is vitally important and too-often ignored. This paper begins as a critique of network views of reality, starting with the view that to completely represent the world through a graph is an impossible task. I then move into a consideration of actor-network theory, and the ways in which this expansion of the network to include non-human actors is still problematic as a result of the need to make choices of who or what to represent. These joint critiques enable me to see human and non-human assemblages as fluid and ever-forming and breaking. I end with a description of a present project of mine that uses mobile phones as participants in these ad-hoc associations as carriers of data. The mobile phone, via temporary Bluetooth connections, acts to pass messages from one person to another, without a top-down topology, bypassing centralized networks and enabling activists to continue communications surreptitiously, even when access to other technologies, such as the Internet or phone network, are disabled or destroyed. Fluidity becomes an asset with the software designed to take advantage of the movement of people for political purposes.

This is the first in hopefully a number of posts about various crafty things I've made and will make. I've mostly been someone who just thinks and writes in my life, i.e., a boring academic. Minus the music playing, of course. But high school and college were filled with the reading of books and sometimes-intriguing, often dulling research papers. Sure I performed experiments, which are a craft of their own, as any STS researcher can tell you. But they didn't, _couldn't_, involve the creativity that shows itself when you try to make things on your own. Of course I'm making a caricature of myself here, but it'll have to do. Anyway, on to the SNOWFLAKES! I wanted to make something a little bit different for presents this past holiday. Gift cards are "no good":http://everyoneisasith.blogspot.com/2007/12/i-hate-gift-cards.html if you want to get something thoughtful. And being a poor grad student left me with little dough to be able to spend on some things people _really_ wanted. So I decided to make something, to create an item that could be useful for just about anyone: a christmas tree ornament. I love the snow, and I love snowflakes. Especially when they gather together into piles and piles and feet of snow, covering the trees with white fluff (or slush, depending on the temperature). Snowflakes seemed to be the obvious thing to make, especially since I wanted to use... A "LASER CUTTER":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_cutter ! These things are awesome. They fulfill my childhood dreams of a hyper-, mega-, super- future, filled with lasers that do all of our bidding. And these things exist! I got to use "them":http://fab.cba.mit.edu/content/tools/machines/universal_laser/ when I was at the Media Lab, and I still have the ability to cut things with them when I'm in town. Now is not a good time to get into how much stuff a laser cutter could cut if a laser cutter could cut stuff. But can also be quite green, as you can cut plywood, instead of non-biodegradable items such as plastics and acrylics. You first need to create an outline of what you want to cut. Not being the best drafter in the world, but knowing how to trace, I found some snowflakes online, and using the pen tool in Illustrator, and the selection tool in photoshop, I created some pretty interesting outlines. I like how my unsteady hand, and the imperfections of the selection tool made outlines that aren't perfect, that have a little wave, non-perfect corners, and asymmetries. I then cut the ornaments out from 1/8" thick plywood and strung them up with some thread. I painted them with winter-appropriate blue acrylic paint on both sides...and I think the colors turned out well! Connected two or three of them together, through the holes of one of the snowflakes, is a good way to make a mobile-like ornament as well. Here are the pdf files for the ornaments: "ornament one":http://zeitkunst.org/media/pdf/ornament1.pdf, "ornament two":http://zeitkunst.org/media/pdf/ornament2.pdf, "ornament three":http://zeitkunst.org/media/pdf/ornament3.pdf, "ornament four":http://zeitkunst.org/media/pdf/ornament4.pdf. I've decided to license these designs under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license, which basically means you can use them free of charge for non-commercial purposes, and make changes to them and share them, as long as you use the same license. The ornaments should print out at a good size without any scaling, but since it's all vector art, feel free to change the size to whatever you might want. Definitely let me know if you like what you see, or if you end up using them in your own projects!