Search results for 'evidence'

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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."

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A New Geography of Power? 

The formal political system today faces a new geography of power. Globalization and the new technologies have contributed to the shrinking of state authority and the explosion of a whole series of new actors engaged in governance activities. The current phase of the world economy is characterized by significant discontinuities with the preceding periods and radically new arrangements. This becomes particularly evident in the impact of globalization on the geography of economic activity and on the organization of political power. There is an incipient unbundling of the exclusive authority over its territory we have long associated with the nation-state.

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Product Placement in Learning Environments 

Technology companies have a long history of placing their products inschools and other learning environments. The reasons vary. Placement isdone through in-kind donations, competitive grants, achievement awards,and funds earmarked for technology projects. Most of the companies seetheir products as ways to enhance education, and many will claim therevolutionary or transformative nature of their wares. All of them hopeit will be a prelude to increased market-share.

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    The Information war 

    Humanity has always invested heavily in any scheme that offers escape from the body. And why not? Material reality is such a mess. Some of the earliest "religious" artefacts, such as Neanderthal ochre burials, already suggest a belief in immortality. All modern (i.e. post-paleolithic) religions contain the "Gnostic trace" of distrust or even outright hostility to the body and the "created" world. Contemporary "primitive" tribes and even peasant-pagans have a concept of immortality and of going-outside-the-body (ec-stasy) without necessarily exhibiting any excessive body-hatred. The Gnostic Trace accumulates very gradually (like mercury poisoning) till eventually it turns pathological. Gnostic dualism exemplifies the extreme position of this disgust by shifting all value from body to "spirit". This idea characterizes what we call "civilization".

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      http://new . territories / appropriation . of . medical . discourse / art . com 


      Nina Czegledy and Inke Arns presented the material described in the following text during the afternoon programme at V2_Organisation Rotterdam on Sunday, January 21st, 14.00 - 18.00 hrs.

      On an imaginary journey in the territories of current medical practice and visual art, we observe the disintegration of former boundaries and discover the emergence of a new discourse involving new metaphors and new mythologies. In the course of this voyage we witness the crystallization of a process which began in the Enlightenment and today is linked together by electronic technologies. Mediated by television, and lately the Internet, the concepts involved here, have contributed to the construction of a simulated reality in both medical science and art which imprisons attention and redirects it from the subject of the activity reproduced.

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        Tompkin Square Riot Memories 

        What follows are personal accounts from various people who were present on that fateful night in Tompkins Square on August 6, 1988. They observed and experienced firsthand the bloodlust of the marauding cops invading our neighborhood from all over the city. Twenty years later, these memories are still fresh in the minds of those who were there, as though it all happened just yesterday....

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        Parasitic Media 

        By Nathan M Martin for The Carbon Defense League, September 2002
        A parasite is defined as ?an organism that grows, feeds, and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host.? The tactics of appropriation have been co-opted. Illegal action has become advertisement. Protest has become cliché. Revolt has become passé. These disputes have reached the definition of rhetoric. They are the usual suspects. Having accepted these failures to some degree, we can now attempt to define a parasitic tactical response. We need a practice that allows invisible subversion. We need to feed and grow inside existing communication systems while contributing nothing to their survival; we need to become parasites. We need to create an anthem for the bottom feeders and leeches. We need to echo our voice through all the wires we can tap but cloak our identity in the world of non-evidence, and the hidden.

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          Ban Facial Recognition Europe 

          Text campaign and research Ban Facial Recognition Europe, by Paolo Cirio. 2020

          This petition introduces the campaign for the permanent ban of Facial Recognition used for identification and profiling in all of Europe. An initiative by the activist Paolo Cirio and thanks to the research and analysis of European Digital Rights (EDRi).

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          Syrian Hands Raised: User Generated Creativity Between Citizenship and Dissent 

          As much as images of violence, civil war, and sectarian strife become prominent in the media narrative of the Syrian uprising, little gems of innovative cultural production, artistic resistance, and creative disobedience continue to sprout across the virtual alleys of the Internet. These creative gems are also the germs of a viral peer-production process at work at a grassroots level in the new Syrian public sphere. Such acts of creativity - mash-ups, cartoons, slogans, jokes, songs, and web series - are probably too small and inconsistent in impact compared to the horrific magnificence that shelling, bombing, sniping, and killing scenes that provide daily fodder to global television viewers. It is also challenging to discover them; in fact, as remarked by Tunisian blogger Sami ben Gharbia at the Arab Bloggers meeting in Tunis (3-6 October 2011), Facebook is not the most suitable platform for activists to store, archive, tag, search for content, and give it a context.

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          Realizing The Promise of Open Source in the Non-Profit Sector 

          Every so often, a technology or protocol emerges that is touted as a ?magic bullet? either by the company or consortium promoting it or a core group of enthusiasts using it. Examples of this are WAP, OS/2, ISDN etc? The technology is initially promoted as having ?earth-changing? significance that will revolutionize the way things are done. Eventually most of these either fall by the wayside or take their rightful place as effective [but less hyped] mainstream tools in a much larger toolbox of solutions. The problem with the magic bullet approach is that it over-promotes particular technologies and often obfuscating the real benefits they could provide if evaluated and positioned in a more realistic context. For the for-profit community investing in failed magic bullets, the fallout is typically nothing more than an unfortunate R&D decision which can be expensed before moving on to the next IT investment.

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            Fuzzy Biological Sabotage 

            If the left has learned anything from resistance against capital driven technocracy, it is that the democratic process is only minimally useful for slowing the profit machine of pancapitalism. Since corporations and other capital-saturated institutions own the process, and tend to function outside national democratic imperatives, other methods of power appropriation have to be developed. In the case of biotechnology, the resistance is unfortunately in a position of reactivity. Corporations have already infiltrated most governments and markets at such a furious pace that all that can be done is attempt to slow them down, while cells and organizations regroup and decide on a way to address the many problems that have already arisen, and the many potential accidents that are in front of us.

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