kagablog

mary corrigall has started her own blog

read her opinions and insights into the south african art condition here: http://corrigall.blogspot.com/

About MEANWHILE8

The theme behind this edition is “Living in a dream world”, and will be presented in the format of a blog.

The whole edition will run along a time line of 64 days, with a new submission being added every 3 days. Any additional work will also be added as it is a blog after all.

After the 64 days lines will be closed to signal the end of MEANWHILE8. MEANWHILE8 will therefore be frozen in time between 2009-08-01 and 2009-10-03.

Submissions are welcome……

send to henkesterhuizen@gmail.com

nikhil singh’s new artblog is here

an interesting blog worth watching

http://gogolscoat.blogspot.com/

CUBAN dissidents have found a brave new figurehead in Yoani Sanchez, a blogger whose observations about life in one of the world’s last communist bastions have angered the state and made her a global celebrity.

Sanchez, a 33-year-old philologist, has attracted a loyal fan base with her gentle mockery of the regime in Havana, which seems to be at a loss over how to rein in “cyber-space rebels”.

“They regard me as an enemy of the state,” said Sanchez last week in a telephone interview. “That is because the blogging phenomenon has opened up a crack in government control which is almost impossible to repair.”

Although it is read all over the world, Sanchez’s blog, Generation Y, is blocked in Cuba. However, like Soviet-era homemade samizdat copies of censored books, it circulates on computer memory sticks and CDs as well as on paper.

“I know that I am being read because people recognise me in the street,” said Sanchez, who sometimes has had to pose as a Swiss tourist so as to be able to post her blog on the internet from a Havana hotel. “People come up to me all the time to wish me luck.”

The government of Raul Castro, 77-year-old brother of the retired Fidel, accuses her of being part of a “counter-revolutionary” conspiracy. Elsewhere she is regarded as a hero: Time magazine recently named her among the 100 most influential people in the world.

Last year Spain awarded her one of its most prestigious journalism prizes.

She was not allowed out of the country to collect it - nor to attend the party held yesterday in Italy for the publication of Cuba Libre, a collection of her blogs - but her prominent international profile protects her in a country where dissidents routinely end up in jail.

Besides being denied an exit visa, she has found her freedom to travel inside Cuba restricted. “We’re treated like schoolchildren: we need permission to go anywhere,” she said with a laugh. “I’ve been misbehaving so I’m not allowed.”

She believes that the election of President Barack Obama in the United States will put pressure on the government to allow more political openings. In the end, though, change will be imposed by the Cubans themselves, she predicted.

“People are waking up from a long cycle of silence,” she said, adding that technology such as digital video and the internet was making it much more difficult for the government to maintain its control.

“My philosophy,” said Sanchez, who is under constant surveillance by the state security apparatus, “is that if they watch me, I’ll watch them. I make videos of things all the time, which I put on the internet.”

Her blog last week featured a visit to one of Havana’s hotels by Sanchez and her husband. Sanchez filmed while he asked a receptionist if he could buy an hour’s internet access. The woman explained to him that new rules forbid Cubans from logging onto the internet from hotels.

Sanchez said this would not affect her blog, however. “We’re slippery people,” she laughed. “If they want to restrict us, we’ll always find other ways.”

Necessity has prompted extraordinary creativity among Cubans, she says, adding that homemade computers built from black-market parts have proliferated in recent years.

In a posting on Friday, she highlighted the case of an “alternative technician” friend who had bartered his watch for a microprocessor to make his computer.

He dreams of leaving the country and marrying a foreigner who would give hima new computer on his wedding day “to which he would not have to add any bolts”.

Other recent postings include film of Sanchez speaking out against censorship at an arts performance in Havana. She has also encouraged people to bang their pots and pans at night in protest. Film of these cacerolazos, as they are known, has appeared on the internet.

The government has branded her antics “a provocation against the Cuban revolution” but Sanchez puts a brave face on harassment by the state.

“They’re trying to make mea radioactive person,” she said. “But I don’t like the role of victim. I try to respond with a smile.”

As for the Castro “dynasty”, she believes that it has run out of steam. “The Cuban system is like one of those gravity-defying houses in Old Havana,” she said. “How does it stay up? Maybe one day they pull a small nail from the door and the house comes tumbling down. In today’s Cuba, that small nail could be anything.”

Perhaps it will be her.

this article originally published here

Diary of a Star is a critical take on blogging that appropriates selections from the Andy Warhol Diaries.

This project started on 2/28/2004 and ended on 12/31/2007. Originally, I expected to finish it in one year (thirty selected diary entries per year blogged per month), but in the end it took me three years; and this is the only thing that changed from the critical outline that follows below. When necessary, I planned to take no more than a month off from the diaries because of other commitments, but as it turned out at times I took several months off. This could not be helped. What should matter is the integrity of the accounts currently present in this blog. You will find many voices on both sides of the blog, simply because that’s life: people live, and die. If after browsing through the entries you feel like dropping me a line for critical feedback or just a question, please don’t hesitate to do so: eduardo_at_navasse_dot_net

Eduardo Navas
12/31/2007

more here

Hello Artists and Friends

The organising page for the special project on Internet Art for the 2009 Joburg Art Fair is complete and live.

http://jafnetart.digitalarts.wits.ac.za/

Enjoy.

Tegan Bristow

Interactive Digital Media Lecturer
Digital Arts Division
Wits School of Arts
084 206 0625
011 717 4604
tegan.bristow@wits.ac.za

About Traceblog

Traceblog is a daily ghost log of Eduardo Navas’s online searches, created with TrackMeNot (TMN). While Navas surfs the web, TrackMeNot is activated with the aim to cover his online surfing. TrackMeNot is a browser extension designed for search engine obfuscation. The developers define the Firefox plug-in as follows:

TrackMeNot is a lightweight browser extension that helps protect web searchers from surveillance and data-profiling by search engines. It does so not by means of concealment or encryption (i.e. covering one’s tracks), but instead, paradoxically, by the opposite strategy: noise and obfuscation. With TrackMeNot, actual web searches, lost in a cloud of false leads, are essentially hidden in plain view. User-installed TrackMeNot works with the Firefox Browser and popular search engines (AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN) and requires no 3rd-party servers or services.

Keeping track of people’s surfing activity has become an essential element for data-mining, which is often used by private and public as well as state entities to better understand people’s trends. Traceblog is developed to reflect on a new stage that global culture is entering, which follows a recent period when millions of people around the world willingly shared information about themselves online, via social networks such as Facebook, Flickr, and Myspace, as well as Youtube, not to mention thousands of blogs. This sharing is still at play, and is becoming ubiquitous. The argument behind Traceblog is that social networking and online transparency encompass the solidification of Web 2.0. The result is that everyone is encouraged to be more social under the subtext of constant exposure, at times indirectly and others directly informed by the concept of the celebrity. Everyone can be star in Youtube, if an uploaded video becomes viral, or everyone can feel extremely popular when amassing thousands of friends and “fans” in Myspace and Facebook.

Navas’s logs of pseudo surfing are published on Traceblog to reflect on the archiving of daily activities of any individual who surfs the web. And to ask online surfers to reflect on the real implications of the current state of online tracking. The project in many ways is the opposite of Diary of a Star, in which Navas commented on the Andy Warhol Diaries, while often sharing some personal information of his own. Traceblog, does the opposite: It shows Navas’s unwillingness to share information, while exposing how information can be taken from him. Traceblog also presents the surfing-logs in a way that is unappealing and hard to read by the online user, something blogs are usually designed to avoid. This is done to reference the actual form in which the logs would be stored in a database.

TrackMeNot has received some criticism on its effectiveness, as can be attested by selected links provided on the blog’s top right handside of the front page. Traceblog is not primarily concerned with how well TrackMeNot performs; instead it utilizes the Firefox extension for critical commentary on the preoccupation of losing one’s privacy.

the blog has indeed functioned as muse or a museum for many of its contributors simply because it is actively requiring you to put something there of worth, from your life’s diary words images music or thoughts poetic or herectic and without prejudice, whilst galleries in their literal sense functions from a place of pre-judging what is quality or what isnt.. making it impossible to see reach and be inspired by other things about art or artists
the blog interfaces with its audiences and creates a kind of episodic visceral saga.. an ongoing dialogue with its self and with others who follow.

the art that is shown on it can be made with all kinds of things and from all kinds of things.. digital posting with cellphones pee holes and whatever have you..
as for making a buck euro or a yen, it enables others to freely roam through the reaches of your innerself, where as in a gallery its price sheet and alot of blah blah from the blahicans with their expensive post post words of advise or malice.
their beguiling effects of having both is that one is active seeking and the other is meditatingly being there for others to log on in their time and see..

dunno, this blog has a kind of charisma that at times can be overwhelming. it functions more as a springboard for ideas and passions and all that is associated with common community goals..healthy community..that is
far more reaching than galleries can do or be..still it is also a place where people come to see enlist explore and know.. someone or something new.

I know I might not be able to offer an academic view on this, I am simple minded and my logic has a simple quality. For me, art on screen is mentally and aesthetically very real and very valuable. It is priceless when it comes to critique, feedback, praise and insult, exposure and creation. Sometimes I create pieces especially for the kagablog. When my muses party too hard and they all lie with hangovers, the blog serves as perfect inspiration to create something. Blogs are muses, critics, art communities…but it’s not exactly putting bread on the table. Is the only way to survive as a fine artist to make a name for yourself by hanging work in a gallery, where people actually enter to potentially go an buy something? If your work has previously been posted on the internet, are your works still ‘ exclusive’ to the ones who roam the galleries? Is it like a photograph or a print with one print made instead of 1000? Is posting on the net not like making a 1000 prints and exclusively exhibiting in a gallery like making one print? work has more commercial value in a gallery. I think. The tangible still has the biggest impact on the eye.

I don’t know, I just want to know.
??

marmite and cecilia, some questions: i’m genuinely curious as to why both of you express the assumption that the work posted on a blog such as this one somehow has questionable intrinsic value.
why do you perceive this online curated space to be qualitatively different to any other curated space?
how is the experience different?
what is the nature of a blog, as a chronological, dialogical document? a record of ephemera? a photo album? a chronicle of interaction? an elaborate ego-trip?
why is there a problem to you if it shares some characteristics with a diary - isn’t that the original point of a weblog?
what is “less” real about it than art displayed anywhere else?
what is less substantial, less transcendent, “boemelaar”ish about art published online?
how does commercial value come into this?
what is wrong with developing a supportive online community to offer critique?

these are not rhetorical questions. i would really be interested to hear peoples’ views.

Linking to flagged sites will cost you

The Australian communications regulator has issued a stark warning that websites who link out to ‘banned’ hyperlinks are liable to fine of up to Aus $11,000 a day.

The news comes after web forum Whirlpool was threatened with the fine for posting a hyperlink to a blacklisted anti-abortion website.

Wikileaks blacklisted

One of the newest additions to Australia’s ‘blacklisted hyperlinks’ list is Wikileaks; the website that publishes anonymous submissions of sensitive info on everything from corporations, religion and governments.

The blacklisting of certain pages of the site has come about after Wikileaks posted a list of websites at the tail end of 2008 that comprised the ’secret internet censorship’ list for Denmark. On this list were over 3,500 sites that were censored or banned in the country.

Disturbing picture

While Australia’s list of blacklisted sites currently stands at 1,370, the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that that list could increase to around 10,000 sites – most of which are of illegal pornographic content, but could also includes sites that house incendiary political discussions.

“The Government is embarking on a deeply unpopular and troubling experiment to fine-tune its ability to censor the internet,” said communications spokesman Senator Scott Ludlam of Australian opposition party Greens.

“If you consider this kind of net censorship in the context of Australia’s anti-terror laws, it paints a disturbing picture indeed.”

On its website, Wikileaks, which leaked the news that the government had banned it for leaking information, simply said: “The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship.”

Currently, it is not illegal for internet users in Australia to click on the sites found on the web blacklist. The people targeted by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) are webmasters linking out to the sites that the government have flagged up as inappropriate.

This could all change, however, if a mandatory internet filtering censorship scheme is implemented – something that is being debated at the moment.

Via Sydney Morning Herald

first published on techradar.com

as of now the tearoom books blog is here

The kagablog is a medium specific use of the internet to collapse the distinction made, in the analogue domain, between the work of art and the place where the work of art is exhibited. The gallery and the artwork have fused.

the kagablog has come to represent a unique theatre of consciousness where one can be absolutely contemporary without any excuses. and not to be taken lightly is the fact that the blog is informed by the alchemy of your awareness and insights which you outline so perceptively above.

it is no mean feat to be contemporary in the truest sense of the word and many do not understand (as with common sense) how important this is as an artist.

for myself, and i know for many others, the kagablog represents a light that keeps one abreast of current ideas and trends in virtually every field - music, film, theatre, crime, art………………….. that is intelligent, challenging. needless to say this does not mean that one has to agree with everything on it - it is that kind of blog - and one doesn’t have to.

it is thus that you have created a very special platform that has an inclusive exclusivity in the blogosphere that i have not found anywhere else on the net.

helgé janssen

there is an instant attachement to the blog(and its ecosystem) for good or bad or for what it is.
this internal policing is not to be there because that appeals to good taste and moral opinions from which its contributors and viewers are moving away from.. i for one is one of these said contributors (594 entries and counting )

dunno.. i believe as mista k. about its internaleffects on the systems of my belief.. my sense of revealing showing and becoming.
the openness to say when im falling
and when i have fallen..i words image or audio or all ..

if that be art to read or view then so be it..
i do this everyday public or private. cus wickedness is soluable in my art..

ps.1.the kagablog.. has become an outlet for my outpourings.. my innervoicing rage passion love.the heavyness of being.. darkness and light.. ugliness and beauty..(for all i beleive)
trust and more trust in that my voice isn’t muffled or muzzled
isnt bullied or pushed into a corner of good or bad taste but rather a strong as hell voice in a dark world.. of conservative and wicked
silence
and finger pointing.

one’s own aesthetic, one’s own sense of what is morally right, what is beautiful, is what is most difficult to transgress. of course i read this in john cage’s silence when i was a teenager, but i never really understood what he meant until now. when you hit your forties there is a strange kind of sediment that builds up. one’s sense that one now really does know something. that one’s life experience justifies one’s narrow-sightedness. that one’s own foolish limitations are now acceptable precisely because one has become old enough to see that one’s earlier, youthful opinions were mostly, indeed, foolish. it is so difficult to stretch out and stand on one’s toes and see that one’s own taste and opinions and morals are in fact, still merely transient moments, still mainly foolish and limited. and thus we are perennially stuck in this cage of our own sense of the rightness, the correctness of our perception, of our taste.

the kagablog is a rigorous exercise for me in breaking down the prison of my own taste, in rupturing the confines of what i personally hold to be “good art” or “bad art” or “beautiful” or “correct”. through the kagablog i have been able to interrogate my own aesthetic principles, my own thinking about what i like and why i like it. working on the blog has had a huge impact on my own filming practice, my way of editing, my writing. blogging has broken down my very stiff, very strict ideals in writing and framing, loosened me up as it were. and this process is never finished. it is in this sense that i call the kagablog an artwork, in this sense that i describe blogging as an artistic practice

aryan kaganof

Welcome to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report, which will be released in five consecutive daily segments. Since 2004, our annual study has unearthed and analyzed the trends and themes of blogging, but for the 2008 study, we resolved to go beyond the numbers of the Technorati Index to deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind. For the first time, we surveyed bloggers directly about the role of blogging in their lives, the tools, time, and resources used to produce their blogs, and how blogging has impacted them personally, professionally, and financially. Our bloggers were generous with their thoughts and insights. Thanks to all of the bloggers who took the time to respond to our survey.
Blogs are Pervasive and Part of Our Daily Lives

There have been a number of studies aimed at understanding the size of the Blogosphere, yielding widely disparate estimates of both the number of blogs and blog readership. All studies agree, however, that blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream.

The numbers vary but agree that blogs are here to stay

* comScore MediaMetrix (August 2008)
o Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US
o Facebook: 41.0 million | MySpace 75.1 million
o Total internet audience 188.9 million
* eMarketer (May 2008)
o 94.1 million US blog readers in 2007 (50% of Internet users)
o 22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12%)
* Universal McCann (March 2008)
o 184 million WW have started a blog | 26.4 US
o 346 million WW read blogs | 60.3 US
o 77% of active Internet users read blogs

keep reading here

check out holli’s blog here

kagablog contributor sarah jane mary hills has just started her own blog. you can check it out here

They often ignore traditional market-related views and can provide a platform for passionate individual opinions, writes Gary Cummiskey

THE past five years have witnessed a surge in print book publishing in SA, while focus on internet publishing has not been so prominent, mainly because of low internet access in the country which is only at about 6%-7%. There have however been some forays into online literary publishing, and blogs in particular offer scope.

Poet and publisher Goodenough Mashego, in Shatale, Mpumalanga, is the creator of Kasiekulture, which offers some often cheeky and humorous commentary by Mashego and others on literary, cultural and sociopolitical issues. Mashego says Kasiekulture was started in 2006 as a new medium to promote “alternative literature, arts in the periphery and cultural activities in the fringes”.

The Kagablog is the brainchild of filmmaker, novelist and poet Aryan Kaganof, in Cape Town. More of an online literary and arts journal than a commentary blog, such as Kasiekulture, the Kagablog has numerous contributors from various countries. It usually has several daily postings, including music, film, visual art, poetry, fiction, criticism and photography.

Kaganof says: “I started up the Kagablog in late 2005. I was interested in creating a forum for writers, poets, artists, academics and digital explorers of all persuasions to present work. This forum would, unlike the mass media as we know it, not be market-driven, either in the sense of its content always relating to new product, or in the sense of having to pander to the consideration of what the readership wants.

“I invited contributors whose work I admired, respected, believed in and or loved. Once in as a contributor there is no editorial censorship. In this way too, the blog works very differently from market-driven mass media.”

Mashego says he gets huge satisfaction from posting material by other writers and cultural practitioners.

“While I still post lots of my thoughts and my understanding of what’s going on, what makes Kasiekulture different from many blogs is that I do post material from other people as long as it’s in line with what I’m doing. It could easily have been an online magazine in the sense of a website, but that route for me has been exhausted and is not that cost-effective. I have reviewed most mainstream books, films in the fringes, alternative music, cultural festivals and heritage sites and commentated on literary issues.”

An advantage of online publishing is, of course, that one can the ability to monitor readership through a hit counter, and, depending on the quality of the software used, obtain fairly comprehensive geographic information about visitors.

Mashego says: “I have an average of 56 visitors on a good day. Per month it would definitely be more than 1500 visits. Most of those who visit from SA access the internet from their workplaces. Most of my readers are white, given that I have more visitors from the US and Europe than Africa. In the US it seems most of the visitors are seem black, given the comments I get when I hit at people such as Molefi Kete Asante and some rappers. Locals love light-hearted opinions and political commentaries.”

Kaganof says his hit-rate can vary quite dramatically. “For instance, from November last year to February this year, the blog was getting more than 250000 hits per a month. But then when I moved to Sweden for five months from March it dropped off a bit as I was unable to give the blog as much attention as I usually would.“About half the readership is located in geographical SA, but there are a lot of hits from the US and from the Netherlands.”

Neither of the initiatives receive sponsorship. Kaganof says the Kagablog is a labour of love.

Mashego says, “I don’t think the Google Adsense strategy works. They say you apply and they post content-related ads. Yeah, they are content-related and they appear on my blog but I still have to see the money. The trick here is that as a blogger you can’t really monitor if anyone clicked on the ad, which means you depend on them to tell you that you have made a few dollars or not. I’m still waiting for a big local advertiser with a soft spot for art and culture.”

There is also the issue of SA’s low internet penetration, which raises the question of the feasibility of online publishing aimed at local audiences, but as Kaganof says, 6%-7% is better than nothing at all, and it is growing.

Mashego says, “Blogs are feasible. The penetration of the source might be very low but the information carried on these blogs reaches more people. That is why I think they have a role to play. The shortfall is just that print has not seen the importance of collaborating with blogs to help them cover the whole country. Also, newspapers should realise that if they browsed blogs they could find material to syndicate on their newspapers and pay the blogger.”

A criticism that has been made against of the blog concept is that it skips the editorial process usually involved in print or broadcast media, thereby allowing a situation where anyone can become a published writer. In SA particularly some people do not regard them as having any value.

Mashego says, “They should be taken seriously. Some time back I posted a comment after the AIDS-related death of a kwaito artist and a journalist quoted it on her tribute to the artist. This means somebody saw the seriousness of the blog and its content. We might not have reached a point where we are an alternative to print, but given that most newspaper websites carry the same stories you find in print, blogs should be regarded by South African audiences as an alternative. For example, if there is a rugby or soccer game that finishes after 9pm a blogger is likely to post the story before print or television media, which have broadcasting time frames or print deadlines. Blogs don’t have that. Acceptance is gradually coming, once people realise the staleness of stuff they read in newspapers and see on TV.

“Blogs can also be incentives for people to read books. There are books I have reviewed on Kasiekulture and then I got mail from readers asking me how they could buy copies. Some inquiries came from libraries wanting to have those the titles on their shelves.”

Kaganof takes a harder, more critical view of whether blogs are taken seriously in SA.

“The only things taken seriously in SA are drinking and sport. I cannot allow myself to be contained by the mediocre opinions of the market. What matters is that I take blogs seriously, that the contributors and the readership takes them seriously.

“Look at the print publishing industry: too many books are published and thrown out into the marketplace in the hope that something sticks. It’s just a huge jumble sale out there, and it is exhausting for readers to keep up with it all. And that’s why people retreat, they turn inwards, they find refuge in the classics, in what they already know, because it is impossible to read through all the books that are thrown at them.

“The blogging phenomenon is something entirely different. It’s a distinct medium of its own. If anything, I think blogs stimulate people to buy books because they give readers access to so many fresh critical voices who are writing from a position of passion rather than the established critical voices who write from jaded positions of power and assumed authority.”

First published in Business Day’s books and publishing supplement, November 15, 2008

first published on the web by dye hard press

Since Friday, it’s been impossible to access popular blogging platform Blogger or any *.blogspot.com domain from a Turkish IP address, due to a ban imposed by a court in the south east of Turkey.

Previously it was rumoured that Adnan Oktar, by some considered the leading Muslim advocate for creationism, might have caused the new ban, since he successfully got Wordpress and Google Groups banned in the past, as well as evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’ website. However, this rumour was refuted by someone pointing out that Oktar operated in Istanbul courts and the verdict banning Blogger was passed in Diyarbakır, at the other side of Turkey.

Blogger’s banned in Turkey screenshot
Click to enlarge.

It’s now reported that it is not Oktar that got Blogger banned, but Digiturk, a subscription based digital TV platform that owns the rights to the live broadcasting of Turkish football league games. Apparently, Digiturk asked Blogger to take several blogs or blog entries down containing links to pirated transmissions of the live games. Blogger did nothing, Digiturk went to court and under Turkish intellectual property law, they managed to get Blogger banned completely, effectively banning millions of websites that have nothing to do with Turkish football or pirating.

Digiturk’s court cases in the past have managed to block Justin.tv and MyP2P TV for the same reasons.

Turkey’s NATO membership and EU ambitions seem paradoxical to the infringement on the freedom of press and speech of its citizens, residents and visitors by banning sites like Blogger and YouTube. The EU’s making a blacklist of censoring countries and are creating software for people in these countries to use to bypass the censorship (see: Global Online Freedom Act).

Thanks to safak for his tip about Digiturk!

Some useful links to unblock YouTube/Blogger (blogspot)/other blocked pages in Turkey:

* http://atunnel.com/
* http://unblocked.org/
* http://unblockyoutube.org/

this article first appeared on basbasbas.com