Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto 

In memoriam: Aaron Swartz

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

• infopolitics,
• public domain,
• info-activism

Transborder Immigrant Tool Project Description 

Mexico / U.S Border Disturbance Art Project

• tactical gizmology,
• migration,
• borders

Participationism (re: Re:Group: Beyond Models of Consensus) 

From: beka economopoulos
Date: June 10, 2010 6:07:12 GMT+02:00
Subject: [iDC] Participationism (was "why do we need physical campuses")

Hi all,
(...) Below is (one of) the curatorial statement(s) of a show that Not An Alternative has curated with Upgrade NY! and Eyebeam, called Re:Group: Beyond Models of Consensus, about the subjects of collaboration and participation. After constant debate, the curatorial committee never came to consensus about the thesis for the show, and so we've presented two distinct positions.
Below is that of our group, Not An Alternative. The opening is tomorrow, with a curators talk at 5pm, so if you're in NY and you're ready for a rumble join us there.
Best, Beka

• art,
• activism,
• participatory media

Intro for Net. activism Forum 

Ten years ago, there were few online activists and they believed that "cyberspace" was all theirs, a territory from which to emerge anywhere, outflanking the lumbering second-wave dinosaurs responsible for the Cold War and its successor, the McWorld. In the future that actually unfolded, the dinosaurs learned to boot up computers, connect to the Internet and post Web pages, or pay someone to do all this for them. What was a poor online activist to do? Even the son of Slobodan Milosevic has a Web site, to promote his Belgrade dance club.

• activism,
• net.activism

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).

• infopolitics,
• info-activism,
• surveillance

Art in the Age of Terrorism: 

Dr. Steven Kurtz-the artist accused of bioterrorism in federal court-will make his first public appearance following the dismissal of his case

Thursday, May 29, 2008, 7PM
Eyebeam 540 W. 21st St. (btw 10th and 11th Aves.)
Free and open to the public

• art

Manifesto by N. Tolokonnikova from 05/04/2012 

The Letter written by N. Tolokonniokova in which she outlines the problematics of Gender Equality and other fundamental freedoms in frames of ethical consensus monopolized by the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian State, absent the plurality of the people of Russia and incarceration of Pussy Riot, as its main actors.

• politics,
• art,
• Religion,
• Russia,
• prison,
• women's rights

A call to the Army of Love and to the Army of Software 

October 2011.

The fight opposing financial dictatorship is erupting. The so-called 'financial markets' and their cynical services are destroying the very foundations of social civilization.

• politics,
• infopolitics,
• precarity,
• street protest,
• tactical camping,
• austerity

At Frontiers 

Frequently at frontiers we are asked, "Anything to declare?"

The wisest thing to do when faced with the scrutiny of a border official is to say that you have "nothing to declare", and quickly move on. Crossing borders usually entails an effort not to say too much, or at least to get by with saying very little. A degree of reticence is the mark of the wise and experienced traveller.

• no border,
• borders

Tactical Media, the Second Decade 

The tactical media concept originates in post-1989 Europe when political change coincided with a wild phase in thinking about media technologies. It was the decade when both artists and activists started to discover digital technologies on a massive scale. Prizes dropped and expectations rose to incredible heights.

• tactical media,
• media theory

Don't shoot messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths 

WIKILEAKS deserves protection, not threats and attacks.

• infopolitics,
• info-activism,
• wikileaks

Introduction to the N5M Zapbook 

The Next Five Minutes is a conference, exhibition and tv program that wants to leave behind the rigid dichotomy between the mainstream, commercial and national tv on one hand and  marginal independent tv on the other. Although these differences may still be important, N5M wants to focus on tv-makers crossing the borders of tv-making and going into the spaces that the tv-world still has to offer.

Notes on the Politics of Software Culture 

Software has, over the last few years, increasingly come into view as a cultural technique whose social and political impact ought to be studied carefully. To the extent that social processes rely on software for their execution - from systems of e-government and net-based education, online banking and shopping, to the organisation of social groups and movements -, it is necessary to understand the procedural specificities of the computer programmes employed, and the cultural and political 'rules' coded into them.

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.

• The Yesmen,
• oil

The Law of Web TV 

Internet policy is hard to enforce, but there is no harm in thinking it through. On the other hand, whatever order there is in the Net is generally the result of focussed self-organization: namely that the elements that constitute the medium, technology, market, infrastructure, policy and consumers, fall into place rather quickly and often better than expected.

• community media,
• network cultures,
• streaming media

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.

Crossfire - An Installation by Shahidul Alam on Extra Judicial Killings 

Drik Gallery, Dahka, March 22- 31, 2010.

The Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) was set up on 26th March 2004 to curb corruption in Bangladesh. It consists of members of Bangladesh Police, Bangladesh Army, Bangladesh Navy and Bangladesh Air Force. RAB has increasingly been criticized for the extra judicial killings and torture that have taken place of people in custody.

• grassroot journalism,
• photography,
• Bangladesh

Whispering Spaces / Traces of Absence 

Curatorial Statements for the "Crossfire" exhibition, an Installation by Shahidul Alam on Extra Judicial Killings, Drik Gallery, Dhaka, March 22 - 31, 2010.

• photography,
• Bangladesh

Distance versus Desire 

The desire to transcend distance and separation has accompanied the history of media technology for many centuries. Various attempts to realise the demand for a presence from a distance have produced beautiful imaginaries such as those of telepresence and ubiquity, the electronic cottage and the reinvigoration of  the oikos, and certainly not least among them the reduction of physical mobility in favour of an ecologically more sustainable connected life style.  As current systems of hypermobility are confronted with an unfolding energy crisis and collide with severe ecological limits - most prominently in the intense debate on global warming - citizens and organisations in advanced and emerging economies alike are forced to reconsider one of the most daring projects of the information age: that a radical reduction of physical mobility is possible through the use of advanced telepresence technologies.

• electrosmog,
• im/mobility,
• telepresence