:: Thursday, June 09, 2005 ::

Feign globally - Legislate locally, or How to Make a Sieve Without Holes:
Two spyware bills pass U.S. House: Spy Act and I-Spy Act seek to protect personal information
::Lora McPhail::
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Make sure to read this week's feature
"Speakers Corner Revisited or Sound and Free Speech in the City" BY::Ana Boa-Ventura, below in the Weekly Features section
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So far we saw a lot of netart projects that were inspired by the searchengine Google, as for example Douwe Osinga's "Google Hacks" or Christophe Bruno's "Google Adwords Happening". Recently another interesting Google project by Israeli artist Tsila Hassine, called Shmoogle, was launched. Shmoogle in which the "G" of Google is replaced by "Shm" refers to Yiddish (German Jewish dialect). When you add a "shm" to a word in this dialect, you mean in fact to take away its importance in humouristic fashion. The project is a simple but very effective change to the way Google deliversit's results. Instead of the the standard way Google comes up with it's results of a search, the most important (read most linked) pages get always the highest pagerank, Shmoogle gives you random results of a search. Which pratically means that instead of those sites everybody already knows or sites that manipulate themselves to the top of a Google by creating loads of "fake" links you get a more a democratic result which make this extraordinary simple work, a piece with large political economic implications.

Url: Shmoogle

::Peter Luining::
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This month on empyre, blogs are the subject of discussion, check the guest list:

--> abe linkoln has a tattoo and wrote this funny email once.
---> jimpunk uses the tools of dataculture to create cinematic, yet linguistically-based work that asserts computer control over the browser.
---> Chris Ashley is an artist, writer, and educator living and working in Oakland, California who posts an HTML drawing every day, and regularly posts writing about art on his weblog
--> New Yorker Tom Moody mades low-tech art with MSPaintbrush, photocopiers, and consumer printers. His blog was recently recommended in the Art in America article "Art in the Blogosphere."
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Some Recommendations

www.santiago-cty.cl

Santiago-city urban caos is a multimedia video proyect on line from Chile. 20 short experimental videos that use the city , the people, and the conecction between this elements like primal matter to conform a net-art product, that talk about make an estetic view about the concept "city", mixing documental and video experimental language.

contact to : info@santiago-city.cl

Camouflage Comics by Aarnoud Rommens
Statement: Camouflage Comics: Dirty War Images aims at producing reflections - both in the form of verbal and visual material - on the interplay between art, dictatorship and human rights in general and the legacy of the Argentine "dirty war" (1976-83) in particular, with a focus on comics.

"Project Features"
features.nmartproject.net is happy to present during June 2005
its 5th feature:

Geert Dekkers (the Netherlands)and his weblog - an interactive netart piece, entitled:
"a drawing a day on nznl.com"

Project statement:
nznl.com is in essence a weblog, the twist being that the software is so written that a drawing is expected every day at exactly 00:00 Central European Time. The subject matter varies from day to day somewhat, but is almost invariably linked to a plan -- that is, something to be done in the future. Most drawings feature a "white cube", and some goings-on therein.
nznl.com is an ongoing work. As all things must, it did start at a certain point in time (May 19. 2002), but from there on it is a straight line into the future.A nznl.com digest is published weekly on major net.art lists.
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