The New York Times > Magazine > Questions for Laurie Anderson: Post-Lunarism

The New York Times > Magazine >Questions for Laurie Anderson: Post-Lunarism
a snippet from interview with the first NASA artist in residence, Laurie Anderson:

Q: Since you don’t identify with astronauts, what moved you to spend a year at NASA?

A: I like the scale of space. I like thinking about human beings and what worms we are. We are really worms and specks. I find a certain comfort in that.

Add comment Datestamp: January 30th, 2005

:: CIUDAD TRANSMOBIL ::

:: CIUDAD TRANSMOBIL ::
And on display at Queens Museum until Feb. 6th.

About: The goal of CDTRMBL (ciudad transmobil) is the creation of an environment to foster active involvement of Latin/Hispanic new immigrant non-artists to share their views and opinions using mobile wireless devices such as cell phones and/or PDA’s capable of uploading image and text data to a mobile log -moblog- hosted by a web server .

Add comment Datestamp: January 29th, 2005

Picture205_31Oct04.jpg

Testing out flickr. Patruckotic!

Add comment Datestamp: January 28th, 2005

EPIC Alert 12.02 (01/27/05)

EPIC Alert 12.02 (01/27/05)
My friend Chris Hoofnagle recently uncovered this about Acxiom via a FOIA request:

Acxiom Lobbied for Broad Exemptions to Privacy Law After 9/11

EPIC has obtained documents showing that commercial data broker Acxiom lobbied to water down key federal privacy laws immediately after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Acxiom sought broader access to “credit headers” and drivers information to develop a system for “identity and information verification that can be used by organizations such as airlines, airports, cruise ships, and large buildings and other applications to better determine whether a person is actually who they say they are.”
The Acxiom amendments would have created large loopholes in federal privacy legislation. For instance, Acxiom’s amendments to the DPPA would have allowed state motor vehicle administrations to release Social Security numbers, photographs, and possibly biometric information to any government agency or business “in order to authenticate the identity or information relating to an individual.” That language is broad enough to justify release of drivers’ information for almost any transaction, down to opening an account at a video rental store!

Request your data files from Acxiom using the Swipe Toolkit.

Add comment Datestamp: January 28th, 2005

O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2005 — An Invitation to Attend the 4th Annual O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference

O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2005
An Invitation to the 4th Annual O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference:
“Citizen engineers are throwing their warranties to the wind, hacking their TiVos, Xboxes, and home networks. Wily geeks are jacking Jetsons-like technology into their cars for music, movies, geolocation, and internet connectivity on the road. E-commerce and network service giants like Amazon, eBay, PayPal, and Google are decoupling, opening, and syndicating their services, then realizing and sharing the network effects. Professional musicians and weekend DJs are serving up custom mixes on the dance floor. Operating system and software application makers are tearing down the arbitrary walls they’ve built, turning the monolithic PC into a box of loosely coupled component parts and services. The massive IT infrastructure of the ’90s is giving way to what analyst Doc Searls calls ‘do-it-yourself IT.’”

Add comment Datestamp: January 28th, 2005

The New York Times> Search> Abstract

To Try to Net Killer, Police Ask A Small Town’s Men for DNA
ABSTRACT - State and local police seeking clues to three-year-old killing of fashion writer Christa Worthington are trying to get DNA samples from every man in Cape Cod hamlet of Truro, Mass, or as many as will agree to test.

Add comment Datestamp: January 27th, 2005

Zapped! @ New Langton Arts

New Langton Arts
Zapped! is a participatory workshop with machine artist Beatriz da Costa, robotics engineer Jamie Schulte and digital media artist Brooke Singer. The workshop is presented in conjunction with Cyphorg Citizens and Unwitting Avatars, a net art exhibition at www.newlangtonarts.org which charts the shifting boundaries between individual, corporate, and civic spaces in an era where techniques of personal data collection threaten an all-out assault on the privacy of citizens.

Add comment Datestamp: January 27th, 2005

Iraq visual language survival guides for military personnel

Boing Boing: Iraq visual language survival guides for military personnel
A company named Kwikpoint makes them, and the military hands them out to personnel. The guides help English-speaking personnel communicate with prisoners, would-be-detainees, interrogatees, and so on. Don’t speak Farsi or Iraqi Arabic? Need to tell a prisoner to drop trou and get horizontal beneath your boot, pronto? Point to the infographic.

Add comment Datestamp: January 27th, 2005