This year’s Piksel festival celebrating ‘Code Dreams’ saw the boundaries between artists, audience, hardware and software blur in the collective pursuit of a machinic unconscious, as well as a highly conscious celebration of FLOSS culture. Review by M. Beatrice Fazi

This year’s Futuresonic festival in Manchester attempted to spark an alternative vision of social networking software. Matthew Fuller, software critic and participating artist, recognises its urgent necessity

Is a rabble run media becoming a possibility? And are artists in the vanguard or blocking the way? The AV media arts festival in the North-East of England last month suggested the ambivalence of artistic interventions into state and corporate broadcasting. Report by Anthony Iles and Josephine Berry Slater

This year’s Transmediale festival in Berlin was themed around the conceptual term ‘Conspire’. Here, Marina Vishmidt reviews its multiple presentations of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ collaborative truth production, and queries some suspicious absences

In this recent archival opus, the fragile legacy of Newcastle based curatorial project – variously incarnated as The Basement Group, Projects UK and, finally, Locus+ – is imaginatively and rowdily conserved. Review of This Will Not Happen Without You by Minnie Scott

An all-too-believeable first-hand account from Spiked (http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3730/) of the heroic Civil Obedience at the pro-Behaviour Modification protest camp outside Heathrow.  (Although Spiked's habit of labelling this lot 'Puritans' seems a bit unfair on 17th century Calvinists, given the latter group's social-levelling tendencies, hatred of superstition and insistence on independent thought.)  There are particularly telling moments when protest spokesman John Jordan says the muddy austerity of the camp exemplifies the kind of 'simple life'