efeefe

--- Agrippa a book of the dead appeared in 1992 as a collaboration between artist Dennis Ashbaugh, author William Gibson, and publisher Kevin Begos, Jr. The Agrippa Files is a scholarly site that presents selected pages from the original art book; a unique archive of materials dating from the book’s creation and early reception; an emulation [...]

-----Original Message-----
From: Serafin Talisayon

In the Philippines, we scanned and studied 10 best practices from more than 950 anti-poverty projects. Why were they successful?

The answer surprised us: the communities concerned were successful because the projects leveraged on the wealth of intangibles that the "poor" communities already had: network of relationships (social capital), access to natural resources (natural capital + social sanction), dedicated leaders (human capital), useful linkages outside (stakeholder capital), collaborative practices (cultural capital), indigenous knowledge (intellectual capital), etc.  All these are described in our freely-downloadable e-book: "Community Wealth Rediscovered: Knowledge for Poverty Alleviation" fromwww.cclfi.org/kpa_ebook our website.

Many local communities are "poor" only in tangible assets -- they are wealthy in intangible assets. People who call them "poor" are people whose development paradigm is based on financial or material mental models. They have a blindfold and I suspect many of them don't know it. "Poverty" is a concept inside their heads.

Encaminhado por Michael Gurstein.

Project Description

Oraculismo is an ongoing project willing to raise some critical issues related to information access and social dynamics, as well as pointing at analogies between magic and technologic learning. It brings a critical perspective about the ubiquity of internet access via wireless networks in urban contexts. Oraculismo intends to create wireless installations that are freely replicable, in order to create local experiences that can either be understood as environments for gaming, learning or information access. One of its methods is going further in the idea of de-mithifying technology, by attempting to create new myths that include the ideas of dynamic, social and collective exchange of information.

The public face of Oraculismo will consist of open wireless (wi-fi, 802.11x) networks that behave as shamanic totems or oracles, by interacting with visitors and offering negotiated information. These totems will be able to interact with people through different online tools, such as a chatterbot that, depending on the dialog, may point to a local network URL that can be accessed only once. Secrets, keywords, incremental stages for gaining access are elements to play with. Oraculismo will run on free software and will hopefully adopt alternatives for autonomous power supply.

Oraculismo needs little to start being developed. There are already plenty of alternatives offering free and open source software to manage wireless hotspots, as well as great examples of projects that offer free information in burn stations or similar artifacts. Doing the same with wireless networks is a step further in that direction, but on the other hand the negotiation is there to remind us that there are some kinds of learning in which it is not just a matter of just clicking and downloading bits.leia mais >>

From an e-mail I wrote discussing the theme of the debate in Futuresonic late this week:

Pois então. Dei um tapa no texto que tinha publicado aqui anteontem e mandei ver. É pra uma comission do Rhizome pro ano que vem. Se você conhecer algum usuário de lá, fale pra votar em mim. Se gostar, claro. Texto abaixo, pra quem não é cadastrado no site:

Mandei isso hoje pra uma chamada, mas ainda tá bem tosco. Nos próximos tempos quero refinar a proposta.
Summary
Wireless networks are usually regarded as connectivity environments, a way for people to reach information not available locally. If in one hand that brings clear benefits - information can be accessed from virtually anywhere -, on the other hand people often loose the sense of local. The goal of Oraculismo is to bring back the importance of ritualized, local and acquired access to information, by creating data-filled,  local wireless networks. Riddles, secrets and magic analogies are its tools.
Project description
Oraculismo is an ongoing project that means to rise some critical issues related to information access and social dynamics, as well as pointing to analogies between magic and technologic learning. It brings a critical perspective about the ubiquity of internet access via wireless networks in the urban context. Oraculismo intends to create installations that are freely replicable, in order to create local experiences that can either be understood as games, learning or information access. The public face of Oraculismo will consist of open wireless (wi-fi, 802.11x) networks that behave as shamanic totems or oracles, interacting with visitors and offering negotiated information. These totems will be able to interact with people through different online tools, such as a chatterbot that, depending on the dialog, may point to a local network URL that can be accessed only once. Secrets, keywords, incremental stages for gaining access are elements to play with. Oraculismo will run on free software and will look into alternatives for autonomous power supply.

Há umas semanas recebi uma chamada pra enviar 'histórias de sucesso' em um site do programa informação pra todxs da Unesco. Deixei meio de lado, mas hoje de manhã cortacolei uns parágrafos em inglês sobre a MetaReciclagem que tinha aqui e enviei lá. E aceitaram.

Sunday morning I woke up in Berlin with my mind telling me I should change some things in my presentation at transmediale. I started to play with the text and eventually got rid of almost everything I have written before, because I thought there was something way more important than repeating the common web 2.0 criticism: it is a stock market hype; it weakens p2p while centralizes traffic in order to earn profit out of users' ability to create and maintain relationships; and so on. Not that I disagree with that kind of criticism, but I don't think I have much to add to that. There's a great article by Dmytri Kleiner & Brian Wyrick in Mute about that. Now, my impression is that sometimes the criticism is totally focused in the business model and in the fact that somebody is making money out of it, and it is not the users. I personally don't care as much about amateur video producers making money as I care about trying to create communication technologies that feel more human. And that should be the starting point to what I have tried to speak at the panel. Below is the script I wrote in the couple of hours before the panel (and during a part of my colleagues' talk, I must admit). It is far from objective or polished, and I have the feeling I might have slipped away from the topic, but it is a beginning. In the following days I might add some new thoughts to it...

  leia mais >>

Slides attached.

I have been doing more reading in a week than I used to do in a month, and I always keep a notebook (those made of paper, not electronic ones, remember?) in order to make notes. This week I was opening and reading, with no discipline, Negri and Hardt's Multitudes, one book by Paulo Freire and another about him, Deleuze and Guattari's Mille Plateaux vol. 1, Hakim Bey's TAZ, the last year UnCommon ground session reader, and some of the hundreds of PDFs I'm willing to read in the near future. In between, William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and Calvin and Hobbes. All that while reorganizing metareciclagem website and thinking about the two presentations to make in Amsterdam in two weeks. Follow some notes I got from my notebook.

Knowledge Transfer is an illusion. Teaching as an intransitive verb. Teaching as ethics. A political act, always.

The contents of MetaReciclagem? Howtos. People who get together not because they oppose to something, but because of an interest in how things work. Metaphorical learning - opening and tinkering with hardware may be the same as hacking software, as playing with the meaning and ethimology of words, as sharing cooking recipes, as building your own drums, or piling up bricks in one's home or in a community center back in the neighbourhood. All those actions are a continuum. Opening up means deviating, overcoming the invisible and often invented limitations of purpose, lifetime or meaning. There's an ethics behind deviation, one of non-conformity, of inventing and creating things. Treating the world as raw materials.

Still active. New people every week in the mailing list. A 16 yr old skater, a 15 yr old boy on "MetaReciclagem" classes. And they are not treated as n00bies (except when they ask for it ;) leia mais >>