Bodó, B. (2011). Contemporary Urban Archeology. Urban Report(1), 16-23.

 

Contemporary Urban Archeology

Photo: Tamás Budha, Miklós Rácz, András Tábori

The exhibition entitled “Metropolitan archeology” by Tamás Budha, András Tábori and Miklós Rácz was on show at the Holdudvar gallery from mid June to mid July 2010. We met with Miklós Rácz, the archeologist team member to talk about the project. The interview features photos from the exhibition.
Two artists and an archeologist decide to document the city… what does an archeologist do in contemporary culture?

MR: Archeology in a wider context means searching, identifying, naming, preserving and interpreting for contemporary society things which at some distant point in our culture have completely lost their function and meaning for some reason or another. When we narrow the gap between the two points in cultural history, that is, the one performing the archeological analysis and the other being the object of this analysis, we are looking at our own lives from an archeological perspective. This parly acts as a reflection on our archeological methods (why and to what degree is it legitimate to regard our objects of general archeological analysis as alien or distant at all) and partly as a reflection on our age (how we abandon and forget things in our surrounding world of objects and how this tells about ourselves, our lifestyles and our time).

How do you start to read a city when you look at it as an archeologist? All subcultures and groups sensitive to the specificities of urban space have their own methods to find what they are looking for, think graffiti artists, skateboarders or preservationists. How does a person with archeologist’s ambitions go out on the street, look for and find things? What do they regard as noise and what as noteworthy? How do they filter and select?

MR: We came up with the idea of metropolitan archeology at the end of 2008 when we walked through an area by the Nyugati railway station and found several things on the streets for which we could find a shared interpretation and which started to outline the themes of a research. The final impulse was a rusty sign on which we were trying to read the barely legible script from before its repaint. We photographed it and when we started looking for the details we found out that the sign high up on the firewall, which at first glance is completely covered in rust, had once actually been standing beside a road on the border of Hungary and the Czechoslovakian Transcarpathia (between 1920 and 1938). How could it end up here, how did it become an advertising signpost on a firewall in Budapest? This discovery was a striking revelation of the depths to be found behind these phenomena and thus we started to take observations and possible interpretations much more seriously. The concept of the collection came together shortly after this.

How did two artists active in street art and an archeologist come together to form a team?

MR: I had been present from the beginning in shaping the concept. We spent some years together with András at the ÁMRK (presently MNM-NÖK, the Central Storage, Archive and Processing facilities of the Hungarian National Museum) at the Department of Building Research where we worked on documenting protected buildings and building archeology, him as a draughtsman and myself as a researcher. Regarding the practice of building archeology I have learnt from him, as someone not strictly within the preservationist profession, a degree of self reflection and irony. The small printed labels denoting archeological findings sometimes appeared randomly placed on the walls of our office.

I also had another perspective on the environment besides that of archeology as I have a degree in architecture from the Ybl Miklós Polytechnic which I obtained parallel with my studies in Medieval and Early Modern archeology at ELTE Humanities. What mostly interests me is the research of ruins and buildings (and other, more practical matters as well, such as building preservation.)

Everything beyond the stones forming the space of the street is ephemeral. How do you select from this ephemeral world?

MR: At the phase of formulating the concept of collecting and the exhibition we came up with themes for ourselves which created a conceptional background, structuring our focus and our classification process of phenomena in urban space. On observing and documenting the act of analysis and the background processes also motivated us; we expected from ourselves and the others as well to go to the utmost depths of interpretation. The key aspect of selection was the degree to which we could attach a shared interpretation to the captured process and how clearly the cultural context creating the given constellation of objects was recognizable.

It is quite a contrast then that the exhibition contained almost no such interpretations, though almost any and all of the nearly 100 photos could obviously be turned into a book. Why did you choose not to be present in drawing up the context beyond the actions of collecting and selecting?

MR: The current lack of in-depth archeological interpretation and explanation of the material on show is largely due to the tight deadlines of this exhibition. This time we could mainly aim for presenting as archeological phenomena things that otherwise are not seen as such and suggest the possibilities of archeological interpretation. The only specific, long term and targeted documentation analyzed the transformations of an urban pathway.

What parts do you feel your own from this material? Can objects be appropriated? Do you see the age where these artifacts come from as yours? Can the street or its history be appropriated?

MR: I certainly see the age as mine. The phenomena and the streets by the way I don’t, but most of the time I regard their presence very important, they are instrumental in making me feel at home here and now.

Can the preservation of the artifacts be a goal, to extract them from the passing of time, from decay?

MR: In some cases this can be very important, but it necessittes choosing certain categories as inevitable extracts. Painted shop signs and labels, for instance, but even architectural or urban design concepts can be reinforced by consciously preserving certain contexts or sites or the more reflected and focused, thematic applications of the trendy but somewhat self-absorbed aesthetic and architecture of ruin bars (bars in abandoned downtown tenement buildings) in public spaces. Just to give you an example: the original pavement of the close to two thousand years old Roman road to Érd is in almost perfect condition and is now shown exposed as patches in the current low-traffic road on the same level with the asphalt surface. In contrast, the often very exquisite fin-de-siècle cobble stone pavements in Budapest largely disappeared under the asphalt; preserving their details does not even come by as an idea because it does not fit in the routine of dealing with public spaces. The original material is still there though and in certain locations ten meters of a hundred-year-old stone pavement could even serve to calm down the traffic.

A short article on SOPA in one of the most influential weeklies in Hungary

http://magyarnarancs.hu/tudomany/vege-a-szolasszabadsagnak-amerikaban-77994

http://www.mindennapi.hu/cikk/szubjektiv/szekely-kalozok-szevasztok-/2011-12-13/10724

 

In our study we analyze how the mainstream Hungarian online press discussed the events of the Fukushima nuclear accident. We were asked to focus on the Hungarian contexts and analyze the ways atomic energy; the Paks Nuclear Power Plant and the Hungarian energy policy were mentioned and discussed in the context of the Japanese events.

We have conducted our analysis on articles longer than 4000 characters[1], published in the six most important[2] Hungarian online news outlets, between the 11^th of March and the 11^th of May. We used qualitative content analysis methods to study:

-          the sources of information in the articles, their variety, background, etc.

-          the possible bias of sources, and

-          the possible journalistic bias manifest in the use of language.

 

In our analysis we came to the following conclusions.

 

On the individual journalist’s level:

-          We found one reporter, who has a clear (pro-nuclear) bias. He works for the biggest online news portal (index), and was apparently charged with covering the Fukushima events.

-          In other news sources the main issue of reporting was not bias, but difficulties with reporting the highly technical details of nuclear technology, radiation, etc. These difficulties translated into misleading, confusing or simply inaccurate information being published on the events.

 

On the sources:

-          The articles in our study rely on a narrow Hungarian expert base to explain, contextualize and analyze the events in and around Fukushima, nuclear energy and energy policy.

-          The attention and space given to these experts in very unevenly distributed. While the most popular expert is cited in 42% of the articles, the majority of experts have only one or two chances to express their opinion.

-          The most often cited expert is far from being neutral. The head of the Nuclear Technology Institute at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics is an academic expert, who nevertheless has a vested existential interest in the political and popular support of nuclear energy and the public investment in the only Hungarian Nuclear power plant: Paks.

-          This expert has routinely overstepped his core expertise in nuclear technology and was actively communicating in health, geology and energy policy topics.

 

Journalistic handling of sources:

-          Most news organizations rely on a narrow selection of experts sources. Expert sources offering alternative explanations to the causes and consequences of the accident are rare to appear, and they certainly do not appear in the same article. Different approaches, explanations do not have a chance to meet and clash in the same articles.

-          The news organizations fail to address or acknowledge the bias and conflict of interest of their most important expert contributor/source.

 

In relation to the Paks Nuclear Power Plant:

-          The message in the Hungarian online press was that Paks is safe, though we have found no statements to fully support this claim.

 

In summary due to the aforementioned reasons we can establish a clear pro-nuclear bias in the reporting of the events, causes and consequences of the Fukushima incident.

http://zeneihalozatok.hu/

http://piracy.ssrc.org/

http://www.typotex.hu/konyv/aszerzoijogkalozai

This is a two part article in Hungarian about the local p2p informal film markets.

Here is the abstract (if you read hungarian switch to the hungarian version to access the documents):

Throughout the past few years, peer-to-peer file-sharing has become the major form of piracy in developed countries. Debates on its negative impact on the cultural industry and the legal struggle over its criminalization continue into the next decade.
Surprisingly, despite the attention devoted to the subject, research into p2p downloading – especially in Hungary – is still rudimentary, and the majority of empirical studies can only establish circumstantial evidences on the nature of relationship between the legal and pirate marketplaces. Also, data on the consumption of content are typically self-reported (i.e., questionnaire-based), rather than observed which may be appropriate for the offline and legal context but is inadequate (or at best highly inaccurate) in the case of p2p piracy. In this article we look at the interconnections between the p2p and legal marketplaces in the case of the film industry using data collection methods that avoid the pitfalls of questionnaire-based surveys. Central to our analysis is the assessment of two piracy paradigms: substitution and shortage, that is whether pirated content is available through legal or only through illegal channels. In the first part of our article we review the evolution of both marketplaces of audiovisual content, outline the data collection method using real-time transactional data and present the main characteristics of online movie piracy.
Using transactional data (real time observation of p2p downloading activity by users of three major Hungarian torrent trackers) and movie distribution statistics we found that shortage-driven downloaders (pirating old catalogues only) outnumber those downloading only current theatrical releases, while the majority pirates both categories. The analysis of causal relationships reveals nonetheless that demand for a film among online pirates is impacted by its theatrical distribution (number of copies) rather than its actual success at the box
offices, the effect of which is insignificant. This leads to the conclusion that part of the marketing efforts directly contributes to propping up piracy. At the same time, the high diversity of movie genres downloaded by individual users may suggest that p2p pirating is also, to a considerable extent a behavior difficult to describe using conventional sets of sociological factors and as such is characterized by a high degree of freedom whose consequences may include the enrichment of one’s cultural experience, or cultural omnivorousness.

New paper draft. please comment. PDF version here: bodo Sovereignty in the cloud_3_0

Wikileaks represents a new type of (h)activism, which shifts the source of potential threat from a few, dangerous hackers and a larger group of mostly harmless activists — both outsiders to an organization — to those who are on the inside. For insiders trying to smuggle information out, anonymity is a necessary condition for participation. Wikileaks has demonstrated that the access to anonymity can be democratized, made simple and user friendly.

Being Anonymous in the context of Wikileaks has a double promise: it promises to liberate the subject from the existing power structures, and in the same time it allows the exposure of these structures by opening up a space to confront them.  The Wikileaks coerced transparency, however,  is nothing more than the extension of the Foucauldian disciplinary power to the very body of state and government. While anonymity removes the individual from existing power relations, the act of surveillance puts her right back to the middle.

The ability to place the state under surveillance limits and ultimately renders present day sovereignty obsolete. It can also be argued that it fosters the emergence of a new sovereign in itself.  I believe that Wikileaks (or rather, the logic of it) is a new sovereign in the global political / economic sphere. But as it stands now, Wikileakistan shares too much with the powers it wishes to counter. The hidden power structures and the inner workings of these states within the state are exposed by another imperium in imperio, a secretive organization, whose agenda is far from transparent, whose members, resources are unknown, holding back an indefinite amount of information both on itself and on its opponents.

I argue that it is not more secretive, one sided transparency which will subvert and negate the control and discipline of secretive, one sided transparency, it is anonymity. The subject’s position of being “a multiplicity that can be numbered and supervised”, its state of living in a “sequestered and observed solitude” (Foucault 1979) can only be subverted if there is a place to hide from surveillance. I argue that maybe less, and not more transparency is the path that leads to the aims of Wikileaks.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve published a piece in the Infocommunications and Law journal on pricing problems and piracy. In this piece I argue that the problem is not that pirates and ISP are not willing to pay rightsholders, but that legitimate businesses cannot get the right price with which they could outcompete the black market. I argue that if there is a romm for intervention, it must be concentrated on forcing rightholdrs to set a price which reflects local market realities, instead of forcing ISPs or their users to pay a levy for file-sharing.

I’ve published a piece in the Prae literary journal on the Hungarian e-book market.

Necessity knows no laws – the role of copyright pirates in the cultural ecosystem from printing to file sharing networks

This is the title of my PhD turned into a forthcoming book in Hungarian.

In this book my aim was to look beyond the legal and economic readings of contemporary western copyright piracy and understand it as a unique social practice that merits attention not only because of its dubious legality, ubiquity, or the havoc it has played with copyright-based business models, but first and foremost because it shapes the ideas and attitudes of millions of netizens about what intellectual property is and could be; what sharing and online cooperation means in a p2p setting; what privacy is and how it can be protected; how to form and negotiate online identities in an anonymous environment, just to name a few issues. Piracy is not just a drain on the cultural economy, but a powerful productive force whose legacy in social relations will stay with us long after the economic conditions that called it into being –and the power vacuum that enabled it – have passed.
The notion that piracy is more than just a legally contested shadow economy is further supported by the body of research that documents historical examples of copyright piracy either from a social/media history, literary studies perspective (Bender & Sampliner, 1996-1997; Darnton, 2003; Feather, 1987; Heylin, 1995; Judge, 1934; Kaser, 1969; Pollard, 1916, 1920; Rose, 1993; Wittmann, 2004, Johns 2010) or from a legal history standpoint (Khan, 2002; Khan & Sokoloff, 2001; May & Sell, 2006; Redmond, 1990; Scott, 1998). These historical accounts of copyright piracy describe the internal norms of information markets both before and after the establishment of national and international layers of regulation. The faces, motivations, and fates of the copyright pirates are many, but there is  one thing that is common to all of them: they all exist in the extra-legal domain at the edges of state authority. In this semi-autonomous space,  “Honor Amongst Thieves,”  “synthetic copyright”,  entries in the Registry of the Stationer’s Company,  server-enforced share ratios, and other non-legal structures organize pirate activity. In each and every case we find norms that — while competing with the legal –  act to encourage the production of a common pool resource, offer methods to settle disputes and limit free-riding. In other words these bottom up norms sometimes substitute, sometimes replicate  state sanctioned layers of regulation that are missing or being denied.

Why is the study of piracy especially interesting today? For several reasons. First, even though on paper we have seen a steady strengthening of the protection of Intellectual Property, the inability to enforce them resulted in a significantly weaker copyright protection than any time during the last hundred years. That vacuum is partly caused, partly filled by the competing, bottom up norms of  file-sharing communities. The weakened property rights, along with the emergence of file­sharing networks created a de facto common pool of resources from the musical, audiovisual, textual works circulating in the digital underground. This commons has proved to be quite resilient to attacks from the outside as well as to those internal issues that can lead to a tragedy of commons. Many file-sharing communities seem to have successfully solved the problems of managing a common pool resource as well as protecting it from – in this case (re) – enclosure. There is, however, little to no research on the actual mechanisms of how these commons are maintained, protected and replenished. Only a few unconfirmed accounts describe the internal workings of online cultural black markets (b-bstf, Summer 2004; Howe, January 2005).

Second, even from these shallow accounts it is evident that non-monetary incentives and complex social motivations play a crucial role in the existence and successful survival of file-sharing communities and of those resource pools around which these communities gather. To illustrate this point it is worth examining the ways community norms manifest themselves in the technological restraints and defaults (Strahilevitz, 2003). Employed at the level of both software clients (like the design principle of bittorrent) and servers (minimum shared library size or upload/download ratio) technology is fine-tuned to reflect the characteristics of content flows, the relative popularity of different titles, the aesthetic judgments, and the thematic preferences of file-sharers. Global, open, mainstream bittorrent trackers for example set no minimum level of contribution – they rely on the sheer number of users and the loyalty of some to provide the necessary level of resources for all. On the other hand, while many national level trackers prohibit the exchange of current local goods, they highly reward the making available of local back catalogs and out of print works. Some allow only a trusted circle of releasers to provide them with digital copies of new titles. Others allow, even encourage each and every user to upload and seed whatever they see fit. From this latter group some set and enforce highly detailed technical specifications regarding video encoding, sound quality, etc. Others provide the community collaborative filtering tools to assess the quality of contributions. Beyond the technologically enforced compulsory rules, informal community norms encourage voluntary cooperation. The exclusivity, notoriety of some communities guarantees a loyal and enthusiastic user base. Their fame inspires others into competition, trying to replicate their success. Many fail, a few prefer to stay small and secluded, but some develop into big, extraordinarily powerful underground marketplaces.

Third, none of these subtle differences between different pirate communities is described with the current economic and legal language used to discuss copyright piracy, despite the fact that they have profound economic and legal consequences on legal markets and on general copynorms (Schultz, 2006) alike. Current discourse on copyright piracy tends to homogenize a wide variety of fundamentally different practices with reductionist legal /economic arguments.

Following the footsteps of Lessig (2004) I hope that the time is now ripe to step beyond the monolithic understanding of  p2p file-sharing by enriching the currently fragmented research landscape with a social-sciences based piracy research that
- describes the role copyright pirates played throughout the history of printing,
- describes the international flow of intellectual property to explain piratical states such as China,
- based on these findings situates current file-sharing and assesses its impact on legal markets.

Bodó, B., & Lakatos, Z. (2010). Hungarian cinemas and the file-sharing blackmarket. Hungarian Sociological Review. (kéziratban elérhető itt)

Throughout the past few years, peer-to-peer file-sharing has become the major form of piracy in developed countries. Debates on its negative impact on the cultural industry and the legal struggle over its criminalization continue into the next decade. Surprisingly, despite the attention devoted to the subject, research into p2p downloading – especially in Hungary – is still rudimentary, and the majority of empirical studies can only establish circumstantial evidences on the nature of relationship between the legal and pirate marketplaces. Also, data on the consumption of content are typically self-reported (i.e., questionnaire-based), rather than observed which may be appropriate for the offline and legal context but is inadequate (or at best highly inaccurate) in the case of p2p piracy. In this article we look at the interconnections between the p2p and legal marketplaces in the case of the film industry using data collection methods that avoid the pitfalls of questionnaire-based surveys. Central to our analysis is the assessment of two piracy paradigms: substitution and shortage, that is whether pirated content is available through legal or only through illegal channels. Using transactional data (real time observation of p2p downloading activity by users of three major Hungarian torrent trackers) and movie distribution statistics we find that shortage-driven downloaders (pirating old catalogues only) outnumber those downloading only current theatrical releases, while the majority pirates both categories. The analysis of causal relationships reveals nonetheless that demand for a film among online pirates is impacted by its theatrical distribution (number of copies) rather than its actual success at the box offices, the effect of which is insignificant. This leads to the conclusion that part of the marketing efforts directly contributes to propping up piracy. However, the high diversity of the movie genres downloaded by users suggests that p2p pirating is also an activity that is disembedded from the context of personal taste and is thus contributing to the evolution of cultural consumption beyond preexisting preferences and loyalties.