Search results for 'war'

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Bodies of Fear in a World of Threat 

They wanted the Germs; they got 'em. - Darby Crash

The use of the symbolic abstraction of fear as an exchangeable sign has always been a helpful means to justify and manifest the most perverse needs of authority invested in the expansion of militarized orders and the erasure of individual autonomy. But in the United States after the 9/11 attacks, fear reigns supreme as a fundamental unit of exchange across the entire political, economic, and military spectrum.

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Transcending Post-Communism? 


?In Central and (South-) Eastern Europe the cultural landscape has entered the Post-Soros Era, while still awaiting the arrival of the widely expected EU patronage for the arts and the civil sector ?? (from the original description of the ?Enduring Post Communism? panel)

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    Whistle Blowing for Change 

    Exposing Systems of Power & Injustice
    Conferece & Book Launch:

    Whistleblowing is one of the most difficult means of exposing misconducts and informing the public about unknown facts that must be revealed. It is an act based on ethics, honesty and accountability, that confronts abuses, discrimination, corruption and exploitation. Whistleblowers are people that want to change systems for the better, but that in many cases encounter reprisal and persecution. In other cases, they trust the systems too much, realising too late, and at high personal costs, that these systems are not willing to improve.

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    Crisis / Media 

    Sarai-Waag Workshop at Sarai-CSDS, Delhi March 3-5, 2003

    "The hottest place in hell is reserved for those who tried to stay neutral in times of crisis..."
    - The Inferno, Dante Alighieri

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    Art is not "Bioterrorism' 

    A live benefit concert and performance event with Snowcrash (.nl), The Yesmen and Critical Art Ensemble in support of artist Steven Kurtz and scientist Robert Ferrell, both threatened by an unjustifiable prosecution for "bioterrorism".

    Presented in collaboration with:
    Transmediale Festival, Berlin
    & The Arts Catalyst, London

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    To Shoot an Elephant 

    Synopsis

    "...afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if it's owner fails to control it".

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    ((( i ))) " the whole organism is more than watching " 

    Trouble is in bloom ! Across the globe there's the irrepressible sensation that the indy media makers will spread faster than the Clear Channel acne-brand of entertainment pustules and prozac-like programming, synergize far more dramaticly than the Republican grey goo version of capitalism ...

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    Vectorial Empires 

    01. These are precarious times. These are eventful times. Let us note some of the symptoms of this instability. There is September 11,and the prospect of a new form of American empire that uses September11 as its pretext. There is the global stock market slide, triggered by the collapse of American tech stocks, which altered the lives of chip-makers in Korea and Coltan miners in the Congo. These are instances of what I call weird global media events. They are events because they are singular. They are media events because they happen in a vectoral space of communication. They are global media events because they call a world into being. They are weird global media events because they defy explanation. They subsume every explanation as mere ripples and eddies in their wake.

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    Security through InSecurity 

    Increase the level of paranoia.....
    bombs in the metro.....bombs in Oklahoma......
    bombs in the World Trade Center.....bombs in Mururoa.....
    Who are the real terrorists?

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      Prisoners of Dissent — Locked Up for Exposing Crimes 

      Berlin · May 12 2017:

      Conference series by Disruption Network Lab e.V.

      Whistleblowers and truth-tellers persecuted for blowing the whistle, critical thinkers and activists meet to discuss countermeasures to detention and repression.

      The 11th event of the Disruption Network Lab to celebrate the upcoming freedom of Chelsea Manning and launch the new book by John Kiriakou (CIA anti-torture whistleblower). Directed by Tatiana Bazzichelli.

      With: John Kiriakou (CIA anti-torture whistleblower, USA); Annie Machon (former MI5 intelligence officer, UK/BE);
      Annegret Falter (Chair Whistleblower Netzwerk e.V., DE); Magnus Ag (Senior Programm Officer, Freemuse, DK/DE); Silvanos Mudzvova (Artist Protection Fund Fellow in residency at The University of Manchester, ZWE/UK).

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      Strategies for Tactical Media 

      Conscious of the growing involvement of artists in political protest through their art and the utilisation of conventional and digital media technologies, RealTime's editors approached media theorist McKenzie Wark to comment on where he sees Tactical Media fitting in the bigger picture of power and media.

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      As power becomes traceable: raising the stakes on critique 

      Among the many troubling and bizarre features of contemporary politics, the following apparent paradox can be found: Informationalisation has brought along enormous increases in the traceability of the doings and dealings of the powerful. But the disruptive power of the exposure of these activities to the public, today seems especially low. After information technology, the going about of those in power and their abuses, are increasingly documented, and the resulting records are increasingly susceptible to leakage to the public. Email is an obvious example. In the run-up to the last Iraq war, a message by an official of the National Security Agency (NSA), which requested ? aggressive surveillance ? of UN Security Council Members Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea, made its way to the newspapers.

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        Everybody will be TV 

        Programming produced by any big transnational TV network (CNN, BBC, etc.) is, from the standpoint of an Internet user, similar to an Aggregator site distributing video material. It may also function as a portal providing a variety of material of interest to the viewer. Similarities abound - sections of a transnational TV network correspond to parts of an aggregate site: a program schedule is analogous to a web site index, news programs function as general information about the portal's community, shows represent particular web pages or sections on the portal. Most importantly, both TV network and a Web portal try to fulfill the basic media mission: to define its own reality and broadcast it that reality to potential followers - TV viewers or Internet users.

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        Cartography of Excess 

        Utopian ideas - like "Spaceship Earth" - are round, multidimensional, interrelated: their archetypal map is the Milky Way, the infinite constellations. But rational thinking is instrumental, linear, it distorts: and that's exactly the problem with the Mercator map, the most common world projection. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, created a "Dymaxion map" to undo those distortions. First the earth becomes a geometric figure, an isocahedron: its 20 triangles are then disjointed and laid flat, so the land masses radiate from a nexus in the north, without splitting continents or enlarging the polar regions.

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