Search results for 'culture'

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At the End of the Tyrolean Way - re: "Elections are a Con" 

"My 'Wahlen sind Betrug' ('Elections are a Con') poster project was selected in November 2011 by a jury using an exemplary open process for the TKI open competition by TKI (Tiroler Kulturinitiativen) on 'No theme'. For the first time in the 10-year history of TKI open, the province of Tyrol (Austria) denied funding for an artistic work selected by a jury of experts.

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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.

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the banality of cyberpunk, short notes on wikileaks 

a year ago wikileaks was as known as any other hacker project on the
chaos computer congress in berlin. its organizers which you remember
only by surname were talking about technical and organisational
issues, smoking a joint and gathering collaborators and co-developers.
like often german or swedish hackers were running the backend of this
project. they like the technocratic part where organisation and code
goes together. here is where wikileaks has its center, and the idea of
it was rather a channel, a protocol, or a p2p network to allow more
transparency in information. the opposite movement against closing
down on information which belongs to the public, and a direct result
of a cyberpunk worldview, where an oligarchy of  a few corporations
runs the world.

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Engineering of Consent 

One of the major challenges facing citizen groups campaigning to prevent, minimize, limit or regulate socially-irresponsible or environment-degrading practices of transnational corporations is how to deal with the corporations' increasing call for 'dialogue' and 'cooperation'. Many transnational corporations say they have seen the error of their ways and have rectified their mistakes. Eager to do their best for 'our common future', they claim to be listen to their critics. Thus 'dialogues' with companies or industry organizations are frequently portrayed as the way ahead for citizen groups seeking corporate accountability, rather than 'confrontational' strategies such as boycotts. What are the dangers and limits of doing so?

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    The Legitimacy of Illegality 

    Webcasting often is seen as an alternative for experiments which would not be able to get a licence for ethertransmissions. The difficulty projects and broadcasting initiatives encounter when trying to get legal airspace has caused a limited view of the possibilities of working within the ether as such. It is already clear that connections between networks like the internet and the ether can be most interesting, but this is of course not the only reason to have a look at the possibilities of broadcasting more closely. The ether is still the easiest way to reach large numbers of people fast. We should always be aware it is there when we need it.

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    Reclaim the Streets: The Film and Other Media Tactics 

    The Disorganisation

    Reclaim the Streets (RtS) cannot be understood as a campaign, although some of its methods are very similar. There are now RtS groups in thirty cities organising illegal street parties. Most of these groups only exist for the event, and many of the activists are involved in local campaigns during the rest of the year. There is no membership or official line although many would like to see a wider global strategy. As a movement, RtS is only four years old, and it could grow in unpredictable ways.

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    Fragmented Urban Topographies and Their Underlying Interconnections 

    Topographic representations of the built environment of cities tend to emphasize the distinctiveness of the various socio-economic sectors: the differences between poor and rich neighborhoods, between commercial and manufacturing districts, and so on. While valid, this type of representation of a city is partial because there are a variety of underlying connections. Further, it may even be more problematic than in the past, given some of the socio-economic, technical, and cultural dynamics of the current era. One step towards understanding what constitutes the complexity of large cities is the analysis of interconnections among urban forms and fragments that present themselves as unconnected.

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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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    The dark side of Camping 

    Camping can be so nice. Crawling out of dewy plastic in the early morning, with a pinch of sleep still in your eyes, braving the unbearably hot sun, yet invigorated and ready to take on the day with as much indifference as possible to the ongoing struggle with nature. Surely everybody knows that the secret of success is to fight the laws of petty bourgeois civilisation with minimal equipment and therefore gain a flexibility that is capable of suspending the otherwise ruling power relations for a clearly defined amount of time.

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    The DEF of Tactical Media 

    Campaigns and Movements Although a global conference, the first Next 5 Minutes, held six years ago(1993), was dominated by the first large scale encounter between two distinctive cultural communities. On the one hand, Western European and North American campaigning media artists and activists and on the other hand their equivalent from the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, dissident artists and samizdat activists, still basking in the after glow of the role they played in bringing down the communist dictatorships. In the excitement of discovering each other, these two communities tended to gloss over their ideological differences,understandably emphasising only the shared practice of exploiting consumer electronics (in those days mostly the video camcorder) as a means of organisation and social mobilisation. We referred to these practices, and the distinctive aesthetic to which it gave rise, tactical media.

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