Search results for 'war'

article

Top 5 Musicals Produced By the Oil Industry 

Ah, the oil industry. While most people are resigned to the knowledge that large petroleum manufacturers are at least partly to blame when it comes to destroying Third World infrastructures, propping up meritless dictators, or encouraging blind consumerism in the face of an environmentally poisoned and diseased future ? the question I often ask is 'What about the music'?

And while they are fiendishly scarce, the oil industry, like many other bastions of capitalism, indeed produced a number of privately pressed, in-house motivational musicals, and several squeaked out on LP (for employees only, of course). They're known as industrial shows: lavish stage productions that serve to entertain, educate, and encourage employees to do their job with gusto.

Read
article

Information Devolution 

As new technologies make it possible to move more information faster than ever before, we are dazzled by the millions of gigabytes that move across the world in nanoseconds. We are infatuated by bandwidth, digital television by gadgets and gizmos. Yet we hardly ask questions about the quality of the information: what is it that we are communicating? Is it relevant? Will it make the world a better place? And does all this information add up to knowledge?

Read
    article

    When Thought Becomes Crime* 

    March 17th, 2005

    How did it come to this?

    Only a perverse authoritarian logic can explain how Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) can at one moment be creating the project "Free Range Grain" for the Risk exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, reconfiguring it for The Interventionists exhibition at Mass MoCA in a second moment, and then suddenly have a CAE member in FBI detention.   The U.S. Justice Department has accused us of such shocking crimes as bioterrorism, health and safety violations, mail fraud, wire fraud, and even murder.   Now, as we retool "Free Range Grain" for the Risk exhibition at the Glasgow Center for Contemporary Art, the surreal farce of our legal nightmare continues unabated.

    Read
    article

    The Concept of Tactical Media 

    Tactical Media emerged when the modest goals of media artists and media activists were transformed into a movement that challenged everyone to produce their own media in support of their own political struggles. This "new media" activism was based on the insight that the long-held distinction between the 'street' (reality) and the 'media' (representation) could no longer be upheld. On the contrary, the media had come to infuse all of society.

    Read
    article

    The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique 

    The events of the century's turn, from Seattle to New York, have shown that a sweeping critique of capitalist globalization is possible, and urgently necessary-before the level of violence in the world dramatically increases. The beginnings of such a critique exist, with the renewal of "unorthodox" economics. [1] But now one can look further, toward a critique of contemporary capitalist culture.

    Read
    article

    The Watershed in Your Head - Mapping Anthropocene River Basins 

    Translating the abstraction—and banalities—of the Anthropocene into readable cartography has resulted in many past attempts that often ended up reproducing those same qualities. But, as Brian Holmes asserts in this essay, we seem to have found ourselves in a moment where collaboration, engagement, and new forms of knowledge exchange are breaking that deadlock. Tracing his own involvement with artistic practices that both engage with and attempt to represent a “political ecology,” Holmes explains how the evolving, collaborative cartographic practice that brought the "Mississippi. An Anthropocene River map" into being simultaneously reveals and interrogates the power structures of Anthropocence society.

    Read
    article

    A new culture of resistance: from WikiLeaks to the squares 

    Now that the grassroots movement that started inadvertently with the Arab Spring has gone global, it is necessary to cast a backwards glance to try and figure out, with some perspective, the dynamics of what has happened, physically and conceptually, over the last year. We propose a simple vision of the process of uprising in 2011, which was consolidated on the past 15th of October as a new culture of popular resistance and creativity. We also aim to point out the recent or enhanced concepts born in the collective consciousness of society during this period.

    Read
    article

    1 in 32 

    The Speculative Archive for Historical Clarification is a long-term project that produces documents that investigate the political and cultural implications of state self-documentation. Its work focuses on the processes through which covert government activities are documented, classified for reasons of national security, and, at times, selectively declassified. Founded in 1999 by Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, SAHC has recently completed a series of interviews with government officials involved in the regulation and release of secret government information. Below are excerpts from three of these interviews.

    Read
      article

      Postscript on the Societies of Control 

      1. Historical

      Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school ("you are no longer in your family"); then the barracks ("you are no longer at school"); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It's the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini's Europa '51 could exclaim, "I thought I was seeing convicts."

      Read
        article

        Wikileaks and Freedom, Autonomy and Sovereignty in the cloud 

        "We have to be very attentive and united at a state level to fight against what is a threat to democratic authority and sovereignty,"
        - French government spokesman Francois Baroin speaking out against wikileaks releasing US diplomatic cables.

        "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."
        - A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, John Perry Barlow

        Read
        article

        Absorption and Exposure 

        I am interested in a certain sense of wanting to be "in" something: to participate in it, to connect with it, to synchronize with it, to be caught up with it, rather than to visually possess it. The desire to be attuned to something that is happening, or that might happen at any moment -- not necessarily as a conscious thought, but as a vaguely felt expectation. The desire to move toward something that is (or might be) happening, in order to absorb its force, touch it, taste it, surrender to it -- rather than simply to observe it.

        Read
        event

        Stream Art Day at Framer Framed 

        UKRAiNATV together with THE VOID (INC) came to co-organize a day long event at Framed Framed in Amsterdam. Part of the ongoing exhibition "Really? Art and Knowledge in Time of Crisis" this event will focus on streaming practices, hybrid and tactical media, stream art and expanded tv... With an open invitation to both in-person and online audiences, we will explores how media can be used as a tool for collaboration during times of crisis. It includes hands-on activities like PeerTube transmission tests, live stream workshop together with talks and creative performances.

        Read
        article

        Media, Activism and Society of the Spectacle 

        Our ability to move into a collectively imagined future has been trapped in an ever-present now, composed of continually transmitted images. The spectacle accompanies us throughout our lives. News, propaganda, advertising, entertainment and social media present a continuous stream of imagery, projecting a constant justification for how our culture is formulated. When Guy Debord first published The Society of the Spectacle in 1967, the digital revolution was still decades away and the technological capacity to project images into every corner of our lives was far less developed than it is today. The spectacle is no longer simply all of the time; it is also everywhere. More than ever before, Debord's words apply: "Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation."

        Read