Waves, a recent exhibition and conference in Riga curated by RIXC and Armin Medosch, tuned in to artistic engagements with the electro-magnetic spectrum. By exploring the material, if imperceptible, base of the information sphere, this event attempted to escape the conventional fetishisation of message over medium. But here, Rob van Kranenburg argues for a less esoteric, more abrasive confrontation with the 'matrix'

Anthony Iles reviews Republicart's issue on precarious labour

II The revolution shall not be criticised?
In response to ISEA98 Micz Flor, organiser of Revolting temporary media laboratory, asks "why now, why revolution?" Is the current popularity of the term and its associated icons anything more than Middle Youth talking to itself in the latest of a long line of fashionable lingos?

IV Net.Politics Q&A

Jerrel is about to celebrate her twenty-first birthday. It's the special she's been waiting for all her young life - the day on which she joins the Hive, in body as much as in spirit. This is more than your average holy communion for young Jerrel - a surgically facilitated rite of passage from which there's no turning back. A short story by David McKee

Peer-to-peer networks may have given media owners a nasty (and much bemoaned) headache, but they’ve done little to address the crucial issue of media independence. Fileshare systems, which enable massive, distributed, networked sharing activity, offer unrivalled opportunities for short circuiting the intellectual property regimes that control the media industry.

This summer, the Bootlab collective hijacked the net’s new networking protocol for their Juni Radio experiment. The hope is to turn what looks like becoming a corporate hustle into a community radio tool. Darius James joined the merry pranksters

After emigrating from Prague in 1940, Vilem Flusser lived in Brazil for most of his life. The first of his work to be translated into English was that written between 1980-90. Perhaps as a result of his distance from Europe, Flusser’s theory of communication is largely untainted by the structuralist approaches of continental philosophy.

 During the DEAF evening programme curated and hosted by Sadie Plant, artist Brian Duffy showed us the secret, electronically musical, lives of toys he’d purchased for a pound or less at car boot sales and flea markets in and around Birmingham.