Search results for 'environment'

article

INFOBAHN BLUES 

Since American Vice-President Al Gore made his famous speech in California a couple of years ago, it has become impossible to scan any news medium without finding at least one reference to the "Information Superhighway". The Information Superhighway metaphor - specially tailored for Mr. Gore's California audience - is so brilliantly simplistic it seems to have blown the mind of every media editor in the Western Hemisphere. With an Information Superhighway you just plug in your modem and roll your data out onto the ramp and into the dataflow where it zips along the freeway until it hits the appropriate off-ramp. Finding data is the same - it's all nice straight data-lanes with on and off ramps and well-banked curves.

Read
    article

    Minor Media Normality in the East 

    1. Autogenerative Europe

    In our imagination, eastern Europe was always black and white. Traveling to East Germany or Poland meant suddenly leaving colorful western Europe and entering a movie from the forties or fifties. Later we simply couldn't remember having seen any color, not the green of the trees, nor the red of the brick buildings. When we went to the movies to see a film by Wajda, Kieslowski or Tarkowsky, the filmmaker's experiments with color only reinforced our image of the east as gray. Europe clearly had an ideologically motivated neurosis when it came to the perception of color.

    Read
    article

    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.

    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

      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
      article

      We Demand The Impossible: 

      An Interview with John Jordan and Gavin Grindon

      Furtherfield interview with Gavin Grindon and John Jordan from the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination about the User's Guide to (Demanding) the Impossible. Published by Minor Compositions.

      Read
      article

      My Postmodernism - My '80s 

      Filmmaker and activist Gregg Bordowitz's passage through the 1980s mirrors the course of AIDS activism in that decade. From the very first ACT up demonstration in New York to the triumphal storming of the FDA headquarters outside Washington, DC, he deployed his art in the battle against AIDS. Bordowitz leads off this two-issue series of personal chronicles of the decade, recounting his experiences as an activist and guerrilla filmmaker at the forefront of the fight.

      "Art does have the power to save lives, and it is this very power that must be recognized, fostered, and supported in every way possible."
      - Douglas Crimp, introduction to AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (MIT Press, 1988)

      Read
      article

      Putting the Demo Back in Democracy: March Against the Moguls. 

      That guerrilla video is now the subject of historical reflection is probably a sign of its demise. There has been a recent flurry of archival and publishing activity centering on experiments made in the '70s. In 1997, the Chicago-based Video Data Bank released Surveying the First Decade, a compilation of work from the early days of video, and Oxford University Press published Deirdre Boyle's Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited, the definitive study of the video movements of the late 1960s and '70s. These reflections on the utopian impulse in early video provide an opportunity to think about the present state of media in this country, in particular those movements that have attempted to create electronic space for non-commercial views that run counter to the mainstream.

      Read
      article

      The GHI of Tactical Media 

      Tactical media are the field being worked by artists adopting a positive attitude towards contemporary digital technology, in a critical, innovative spirit. Media artists reveal a preoccupation with aesthetics as a concept, not with a particular style. This trend is part of the creation of a new language for the communications network era, a user language which is successful as art because it transmits an effective activism. Media activists are a hybrid of artist, scientist, theoretician and political activist that shuns labels and categorizations. Their creations are characterised by integration of user and machine in the work itself, so that interactivity has an important place within it. The concept of tactical media allows Art with a capital and grassroots political activism to be combined and, in this sense, we could include in it the tactical struggle that is part of anti-globalisation movements. Media activists point to the power of tactics as a means of breaking down the barriers between mainstream values and alternative ones, between professionals and amateurs and even between people who are creative and those that are not.

      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

      Post-media operators: "sovereign & vague" 

      No one recognises these powers as their own

      (Why Theory?) We have to dispense with the idea that theorising occurs after the creative event; that a poem or a track or a text is made and then, as part of its process of dissemination, there follows the theorising of the piece. Such a theorising is normally attributed to those known variously as critics, reviewers and essayists.

      Read