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

The recent research project and series of exhibitions After Neurath revisits the work of Otto Neurath, renaissance man of the Vienna Circle who had attempted to relate the puzzle of social change by pictorialising knowledge. Marina Vishmidt assesses Neurath's attempt to bridge the world between art and non-art in the terms of current debate and draws a materialist line under any positivistic expectations of the exhibition as research [1]

Two anthologies published last year, Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems and Art and its Institutions: Current Conflicts, Critique and Collaborations attempt to grasp a ‘world art world’ undergoing profound transformation within the ‘horizontal’ and globalised matrix of post-fordism. But how impartial are the diagnoses of art world professionals, and indeed how ingenuous the calls for democratisation from within their left-liberal ranks?, asks Jonathan Harris

This article discusses a new law or 'right' regarding intellectual property proposed by' a tiny handful of big corporate players'. The new right seeks to push beyond copyright law and copyright holders 'rights' to further the existing concentration of publishing and broadcast media in the hands of a few large companies and corporate networks. As is traditional in this field the measures proposed appear to be grossly unfair and hopefully unworkable. Re-posted from [Commons-Law] mailing list.

A new zone of media theory, netporn, revealed itself at this October’s The Art and Politics of Netporn conference in Amsterdam. Willing voyeur Sebastian Olma remained largely unaroused – except by the Italians, who were quite affecting

`In The Companion Species Manifesto, Donna Haraway has substituted dogs for cyborgs, but who or what is wagging the tail of the new post-humanism? Review by Tim Savage

Donna Haraway’s 100-page pamphlet: The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness deserves a central place at the table of a newly emerging conversation exploring ‘the question of the animal’. Yet since what we know as ‘the human’ has always been defined against a seemingly endless taxonomy of putative others – be they ‘dehumanised peoples’, ‘plants’, inanimate ‘objects’, or ‘animals’ – what 'humanity' is conceptualised as finds itself fundamentally at stake with this question too. Recent contributions to this topic include Giorgio Agamben’s new book The Open: Man and Animal (2004), two recent anthologies entitled Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal and Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Post-humanist Theory, as well as a number of Jacques Derrida’s recent musings. Deleuze and Guattari’s earlier work about ‘becoming-animal’ also finds pride of place at this human/animal/table interface too.

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?