<nettime> art project vs internet censorship

[peter zorn <pz@werkleitz.de>]

Launch of the Art project picidae

Open Mind and Open Source -- how the Art project picidae circumvents
Chinese Internet censorship

Art project versus Golden Shield (Chinese Internet censorship)


Whoever is visiting the Olympic Games next year in Beijing, will
have to forego the information on Wikipedia or BBC. The Chinese
Internet censorship -- also called Golden Shield or Chinese Firewall
-- suppresses these sites among many other critical ones of the
government.

The Art project picidae started as an exploration of individual
perception, led to a new view on the Internet and allows us to
circumvent Censorship. picidae withstood the test of the strictly
controlled Chinese Internet Cafes.

picidae is not a hacker software. The concept of picidae is simple and
hard to encrypt by censorship.

The artists Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud live in Berlin and     .
Zurich With their projects they explore grey zones of individual     .
perception                                                           .

In 2006 Wachter and Jud got the European Media Artists in Residence
Exchange (EMARE) residency at Werkleitz Media Art Center in Halle.
During their residency they developed picidae.

In the spring of 2007 Wachter and Jud started for an experiment
a journey to the end of the Internet. In Chinese Internet Cafes
everybody has to be registered and the rooms are observed. Even
under these aggravating circumstances Wachter and Jud were able to
circumvent Chinese censorship. They were able to call so-called
inaccessible sites regarding human rights, democracy, Tibet, and even
the Tiananmen massacre.

picidae beats holes into the Golden Shield. Websites that are
reachable on the server's location can be invoked via pici-server. The
picture serves as digital encryption. Images cannot be searched by
censorship programmes for restricted keywords.

China, Iran, Korea, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Uzbekistan and
Vietnam are known for active Internet censorship. But also in Germany,
France and Switzerland there exist disabled web sites. Sometimes a
message appears on Google pages that some search results have deleted.
What has been deleted remains in the dark. With picidae as a community
project a new view on the world wide web can emerge.


The artists: Christoph Wachter & Mathias Jud will present their work
for the first time on Tuesday, 6th of September at 19:30 at the
Werkleitz Gesellschaft e.V. Zentrum f?r k?nstlerische Bildmedien
Sachsen-Anhalt (Center for Art and Visual Media of Saxony-Anhalt)
Schleifweg 6 D-06114 Halle/Saale.

The Art project is now reachable on www.picidae.net .

Contact:
Christoph Wachter & Mathias Jud
www.picidae.net
contact@picidae.net

-- 
Werkleitz Gesellschaft e.V. ? Schleifweg 6 ? D-06114 Halle ? Germany
T +49-(0)345-68246-11 ? F +49-(0)345-68246-29 ? www.werkleitz.de
Steuernummer 111/143/09151 ? Finanzamt Halle (Saale) Nord
Amtsgericht Halle VR 2277 ? Gesch?ftsf?hrung Karsten Stempel




#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@kein.org and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org