EAR Studio

Terre Natale, or Native Land, Stop Eject, the exhibition organized by Raymond Depardon & Paul Virilio and originally shown at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris will now be on view at the new cultural center in Bilboa, the AlhondigaBilbao, from May 18 through August 1, 2010.

EXIT – "Remittances, sending money home" Map Extract
Uploaded by FondationCartier. – Arts and animation videos.

Part of Terre Natale, “Exits, Parts 1 & 2,” was created by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Laura Kurgan, Mark Hansen, and Ben Rubin.

You can check out the AlhondigaBilbao website for Terre Natale here.

And the website for Terre Natale, with more information and many great images, here.

-Kali

On April 14th hosts of the WNYC radio show Radiolab, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, presented the first in a series of live evening Awe-maggedon events “designed to tickle the mind and surprise the eyes.”

Jad and Robert invited Ben and Princeton University Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Iain Couzin to inaugurate the event series with presentations about their work. Both Ben and Iain showed projects that examine and encourage new thinking about swarms and communication. From locusts to the stock market, the evening was full of fascinating and entertaining topics and provocations for just the kind of cacophonous chatter that interest both Ben and Iain.

You can watch a video of Awe-maggedon here.

-Kali

What is missing? Has it never been there or has it been removed? Does available information exist that is not looked at, read or used?

The Artefact Festival, at the STUK Arts Center in Leuven, Belgium, ran from February 9-14, 2010 and featured Ben Rubin’s artwork, Dark Source, as part of its exploration into the meaning of archives, secrecy, memory and silence.

Dark Source shows the inner workings of a commercial electronic voting machine, the Diebold AccuVote-TSTM touch-screen voting terminal that has recently been adopted in many U.S. states. What you see [in Dark Source] is a representation of the software program that runs inside this machines. To be specific, it is a printout of version 4.3.1 of the AccuVote-TSTM source code — 49,609 lines of C++. 720 pages of the printout are suspended, and several hundred additional pages can be accessed on microfiche.

Calling its source code a trade secret, Diebold has asserted its proprietary interest in protecting its intellectual property. Therefore the code, which had been obtained over the internet following a 2002 security failure at Diebold, has been blacked out in its entirety in order to comply with trade secrecy laws.

What is on display, then, is not the forbidden source code, but rather the state of affairs in which we find ourselves today, one in which the critical infrastructure of democracy in the United States is becoming privately owned, and being private, is also being made secret.

You can see more photos of Dark Source on EAR Studio’s Flickr page here.

Ben acquired the source code for Dark Source with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. You can learn more about EFF, Diebold and electronic voting machines here.

-Kali

Read about Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen’s LISTENING POST, and nine other fascinating artworks, in Hugh Hart’s great Wired.com article about the London exhibition, “Decode: Digital Design Sensations.”

-Kali

In 1998, www.earstudio.com was a great web site; Randy Zwirn designed a beautiful and clean look, and we kept it up to date in fits and starts for almost ten years.  But the fits and starts got less and less frequent as we got busier and the site got crankier, and a visitor to the site today might think that I had died back in 2007, since nothing has been updated since then.

We’re working on a new modern site that we will launch later this spring, but in the meantime, this blog will be a place to see what we’re working on right now.

Please visit often!

Ben