Search results for 'activism'

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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.

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The Re-Code.Com Story 

Conceptual Overview

The products we purchase are the inventory of our lives. To chain stores, this inventory is cataloged through the Universal Product Locator symbol (UPC). The UPC symbol is known as a barcode. Barcodes are now found everywhere in our world, extending outside of product inventory into our comic books, our science fiction, our films, and even our tattoos. These codes represent the fears of literally becoming numbers or becoming digital that are in many of us. These are not fears we wish to dismiss. The RE-CODE.COM project brings together the tactical media actions of the Carbon Defense League and the video and performance hijacks of Conglomco in a way that takes online action outside of the box for real world instigation. Looking at the heavy reliance on digital systems in chain stores utilizing the UPC barcode system, we see a problem or a virus in the system. The virus is the human. We are the nightmare of the digital to some extent. We are the squeaky wheel.

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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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From the Blogosphere to the Street: The Role of Social Media in the Egyptian Uprising 

While the uprising in Egypt caught most observers of the Middle East off guard, it did not come out of the blue. The seeds of this spectacular mobilization had been sown as far back as the early 2000s and had been carefully cultivated by activists from across the political spectrum, many of these working online via Facebook, twitter, and within the Egyptian blogosphere. Working within these media, activists began to forge a new political language, one that cut across the institutional barriers that had until then polarized Egypt's political terrain, between more Islamicly-oriented currents (most prominent among them, the Muslim Brotherhood) and secular-liberal ones.

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The Logos Fight back 

The culture jammers tried to subvert the big brand names. But the smart advertisers now use guerrilla tactics themselves, according to James Harkin

In a recent newspaper interview, Kalle Lasn was interrogated about Adbusters, the Canadian anti-advertising magazine that he founded.


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