Date: Mon, 06 Apr 1998 11:04:08 -0400
Subject: Info War Festival


http://web.aec.at/infowar/

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Ars Electronica Festival 98
INFOWAR - information. macht. krieg.
7. - 12.9.1998
Linz, Austria

Presse - Information [Excerpts]
20.3.1998

Ars Electronica, one of the world's most highly-acclaimed
festivals at the interface of art, technology and society,
has been presented annually since 1979.

INFOWAR, the title of this year's festival, places the strategies
of data-supported wars - from the Gulf Conflict to the skirmishes
of cyberguerillas - into the focal point of artistic as well as
theoretical and scientific interest, to thereby shed light on the
internal logic of the information society in connection with war.

Numerous events, installations, network projects, performances and
a symposium make up the festival's program to confront and deal
with this subject.

Symposium INFOWAR

September 8 - 9, 1998 New weapons systems and military strategies
will not exclusively occupy the middle point of these discussions.
The aim is to elaborate on "information as a strategic weapon,"
the power of the media as political power, the new potential hot
spots of conflict and new images of "enemy" in an information
society characterized by global economic and financial markets.
But this also has to do with hacker myths, cryptography, electronic
bugging operations, and the serious concerns regarding national
security versus private citizens' fears of the complete loss of
the right of privacy.

This symposium will deploy works of art and artistic responsibility
as methods for coming to terms with these issues and achieving
increased sensibility toward them.

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Introduction

The information society - no longer a vague promise of a better
future, but a reality and a central challenge of the here-and-now
- is founded upon the three key technologies of electricity,
telecommunications and computers: Technologies developed for the
purposes, and out of the logic, of war, technologies of simultaneity
and coherence, keeping our civilian society in a state of permanent
mobilisation driven by the battle for markets, resources and spheres
of influence. A battle for supremacy in processes of economic
concentration, in which the fronts, no longer drawn up along
national boundaries and between political systems, are defined by
technical standards. A battle in which the power of knowledge is
managed as a profitable monopoly of its distribution and
dissemination.

The latest stock market upheavals have laid bare the power of a
global market, such as only the digital revolution could have
fathered, and which must be counted as the latter=B9s most widely-felt
direct outcome. The digitally-networked market of today wields more
power than the politicians. Governments are losing their say in the
international value of their currencies; they can no longer control,
but only react. The massive expansion of freely-accessible
communication networks, itself a global economic necessity, imposes
severe constraints on the arbitrary restriction of information flows.

Any transgression of a critical control functions in the
cybertechnologies=B9 sphere of responsibility and influence puts
central power wielders in a hitherto unheard-of position of
vulnerability and openness to attack. The geographic frontiers of
the industrial age are increasingly losing their erstwhile
significance in global politics, and giving way to vertical fronts
along social stratifications.

Whereas, in the past, war was concerned with the conquering of
territory, and later with the control of production capacities, war
in the 21st century is entirely concerned with the acquisition
and exercise of power over knowledge. The three fronts of land, sea
and air battles have been joined by a fourth, being set up within
the global information systems. Spurred on by the "successes" of the
Gulf war, the development of information warfare is running at full
speed. Increasingly, the attention of the military strategists is
turning away from computer-aided warfare - from potentiation of the

destructive efficiency of military operations through the
application of information technology, virtual reality and high-tech
weaponry - to cyberwar, whose ultimate target is nothing less than
the global information infrastructure itself: annihilation of the
enemy=B9s computer and communication systems, obliteration of his
databases, destruction of his command and control systems. Yet
increasingly the vital significance of the global information
infrastructure for the functioning of the international finance
markets compels the establishment of new strategic objectives: not
obliteration, but manipulation, not destruction, but infiltration
and assimilation. "Netwar" as the tactical deployment of information
and disinformation, targeted at human understanding.

These new forms of post-territorial conflicts, however, have for
some time now ceased to be preserve of governments and their
ministers of war. NGOs, hackers, computer freaks in the service of
organised crime, and terrorist organisations with high-tech expertise
are now the chief actors in the cyberguerilla nightmares of national
security services and defence ministries.

In 1998, under the banner of "INFO WAR", the Ars Electronica Festival
of Art, Technology and Society, is appealing to artists, theoreticians
and technologists for contributions relating to the social and
political definition of the information society. The emphasis here
will lie not on technological flights of fancy, but on the fronts
drawn up in a society that is in a process of fundamental and violent
upheaval.




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