Felix Stalder's extended essay, Digital Solidarity, responds to the wave of new forms of networked organisation emerging from and colliding with the global economic crisis of 2008. Across the globe, voluntary association, participatory decision-making and the sharing of resources, all widely adopted online, are being translated into new forms of social space.
ReadInke Arns, curator and artistic director of Hartware MedienKunstVerein (www.hmkv.de) in Dortmund, Germany, since 2005. She has worked internationally as an independent curator, writer and theorist specializing in media art, net cultures, and Eastern Europe since 1993. She lived in Paris (1982-86), finished school in West-Berlin in 1988, studied Russian literature, Eastern European studies, political science, and art history in Berlin and Amsterdam (1988-96) and in 2004 obtained her PhD from the Humboldt University in Berlin, with a thesis focusing on a paradigmatic shift in the way artists reflected the historical avant-garde and the notion of utopia in visual and media art projects of the 1980s and 1990s in (ex-)Yugoslavia and Russia.
ReadA biography on Christoph Schlingensief.
By Till Briegleb.
It's time to create the pop stars of activism,
the idoru of communication guerrilla,
it's time to threaten and charm the
masses by the ghosts coming from the
net, to play the myth against the myth,
to be more nihilist than infoteinment!
- etoy -
For many reasons, the 80's, years of the Mitterand socialist government, were years in which grass roots movements got institutionalized and traditional activism was "out". The logic of the Republic (everybody is equal without distinction) allied with traditional individualism and clanic behaviour ("la guerre des chapelles") forbid the emergence of non dominant/non normalized subjectivities. This tradition is still alive today. The 68 generation didn't feel necessary to pass on their knowledge to younger generations. From their point of view, they created new ways to go about the world by themselves, so should the new generations. The notion of alternative and activism became stigmatized. It wasn't a very tactical in those years to position oneself in terms of an alternative. As a result, by the beginning of the 90, the most visible part of the intellectuals and the grass roots movements seams to be lobotomized.
Read1. 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.
Shahidul Alam is a photographer, internet pioneer and activist from Dhaka, Bangladesh. He is also the founder
and director of the Drik picture library and media-centre in Dhaka.
Oleg Kireev (born 1975) - art- and mediacritic, editor and curator,
writer, critic and activist, founder of the Ghetto collective, Moscow.
Participated in a number of media-political campaigns ("Against all
parties", 1999) and actions ("Barricade at Bolshaya Nikitskaya", May
1998). Author of articles on art and politics in the Russian and
international press ("Novaya gazeta", "Nezavasimaya gazeta", "Flash
art", "Siksi", "Mute"
Indymedia is the name given to a particular network with a rather uneven global reach, to which many hundreds of local independent media projects, mostly web-based, have been affiliated at one time or another. It is also the name for a particular approach to news media - one that attempts to avoid hierarchal production and hence promote grassroots reports on events.
ReadTHE 30TH CONFERENCE OF THE DISRUPTION NETWORK LAB
KUNSTQUARTIER BETHANIEN - BERLIN & STREAMING
[ Archived streaming videos at: https://www.disruptionlab.org/artivism#video ]
How can art and activism be combined to tackle burning social issues, surveillance, unethical corporations and corrupt governments?
A programme of panels, workshops, and artistic productions curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli.
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.
ReadIn 1996, Adams Wood, Jeff Taylor, and A. Mark Liiv were working as activists on a forest defense campaign in Idaho. With a Hi-8 camera, they documented violations of timber sales agreements and confrontations between angry loggers and non-violent protesters as a way to keep people safe, as a tool in legal defense, and as an alternative to mainstream corporate media, which was biased in favor of the timber industry. The activists managed to pull off a 41-day road blockade, and the future founders of Whispered Media were shooting it. They cut their first video and called it ROAD USE RESTRICTED. The succinct but intense twelve-minute video was a great success, becoming part of several activist-run road shows and inspiring many a tree-hugger to haul it out to Idaho, which, says Liiv, "is not on the way to anywhere."
ARTPLAY, Small Hall, Moscow, Russia
Dates: October 23rd - November 6th, 2013
In the second half of the 20th century, anarchist artists from PROVO,
feminist movement Dolle Mina, Amsterdam squatters and media activists
influenced Dutch state politics and changed public opinion with their
sensational actions. What were they fighting for and what has become of
activist art today? The exhibition tells the story of creative protest
movements in the Netherlands from 1960s till 1990s, when those movements
flourished, and also includes pieces by contemporary artists working
with political themes today.
Working with new media in the part of South Asia that I come from is something like crossing a tightrope on a bicycle. The bicycle which could have helped me along were I on my way on flat ground makes the crossing that much more precarious. Consider the bicycle to be the single computer and the internet connection which I use along with at least seventeen other people, friends, colleagues, neighbours and complete strangers.
ReadThere is a last enterprise that might be undertaken. It would be to seek
experience at its source, or rather, above that decisive turn where,
taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomes properly human
experience. (Bergson, 1991: 184).
An Analysis From #jan25 to #geziparki
ReadThe second edition of DICTIONARY OF WAR, July 22 and 23 in Muffathalle Munich
Read
