http://web.aec.at/infowar/ ----- 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. ----- 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 latter¹s 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 cybertechnologies¹ 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 enemy¹s 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.