From: Bruce Sterling <bruces {AT} well.com>
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1998 22:59:27 -0600 (CST)
Sender: owner-nettime-l {AT} basis.Desk.nl
Key concepts: art movements, Internet, reputation economics, arts grants, Europe, Interfund
Among the many troubling and bizarre features of contemporary politics, the following apparent paradox can be found: Informationalisation has brought along enormous increases in the traceability of the doings and dealings of the powerful. But the disruptive power of the exposure of these activities to the public, today seems especially low. After information technology, the going about of those in power and their abuses, are increasingly documented, and the resulting records are increasingly susceptible to leakage to the public. Email is an obvious example. In the run-up to the last Iraq war, a message by an official of the National Security Agency (NSA), which requested ? aggressive surveillance ? of UN Security Council Members Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea, made its way to the newspapers.
About his CD-ROM production called ROM
The production of this interactive programme has been commissioned by
Video Postive 1995 and the construction of the artwork is set to take
place during January to April 1995.
The most important issue concerning the representation of sexuality in
the media is, whether human dignity is being honored or not. Respect
has many forms and those forms have many layers, and really there is no
one else but ourselves to be the judge of the way we are being treated.
Yet when and where basic human rights are not granted, the feeling of
being deeply rooted in one's dignity (if not entirely unimaginable) is
but a dream. This world is certainly not the best of all worlds and
there is always a battle to be fought and battles will have to be
fought again and again. Some so mean and savage that they can only be
fought by those prepared to go till the end.
VakuumTV was founded in February 1994 on the initiative of László
Kistamás. Its members presented weekly broadcasts on Monday nights at
the most popular cultural club in Budapest, Tilos az Á. Needless to
say, the designation 'VakuumTV' was not meant to refer to any kind of
conventional television channel which could be received on TV sets in
commercial circulation. Rather, its founders envisioned a live show in
which a large frame separating the stage from the audience imitates the
experience of watching TV for the audience. Thus VakuumTV can be
received only where this frame is set up.
Public Agency in Hybrid Space
Lead-essay for the theme issue "Hybrid Space" of OPEN, Journal for Art and the Public Domain, #11, (Amsterdam / Rotterdam, 2006).
The Negative Dialectics of the Net
In his essay, "Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime", Jean-François Lyotard observes that capitalism, technoscience and the pictorial avant-garde of the twentieth century share an 'affinity to infinity'. All three point towards a sensibility that is constitutive for the experience of the modern world.
Essay written in August 2002 for the New York University Tactical Media Lab, organised by the NYU Center for Media, Culture and History.
Motivated by the theories of Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig, Geert Lovink and David Garcia, Brazilian Internet users, activists and artists are, more and more, developing attractive activism and tactical media projects.
Read
?In Central and (South-) Eastern Europe the cultural landscape has entered the Post-Soros Era, while still awaiting the arrival of the widely expected EU patronage for the arts and the civil sector ?? (from the original description of the ?Enduring Post Communism? panel)
The antiwar demonstrations of February 15, 2003 proved it: theself-organization of free singularities is possible on a planetaryscale. And that was an event, despite all that followed. In amanifesto-text written just after those demonstrations, I used thelanguage of Negri and Hardt to say that the multitudes could create arift in Empire. In a context where the Aristocracy (the greattransnational companies) had been weakened by a string of financialdisasters, where the Monarchy (the political and military command ofthe earth) had fallen apart in serious dissension, I wanted toencourage the democratic action of the Plebe, against the scorn of theAmerican, British, Spanish and Italian leaders. It was a moment thathad multiplied the world's political stages, overflowing thetraditional mechanisms of representation.
1. Desire.
I come from a social and cultural context which has its languagetaboos, and among them a strong one refers to the libido. Desire is,therefore, something rather personal, and connecting it to the publicsphere might personalize the approach in a naive sense I learned toavoid. But since the same topic has been voiced last year in thecalling papers of the Enschede Photo Biennial, we might be dealing herewith a common place, therefore with a language defensive reflex, andthis is something useful to talk about.
To: nettime-l {AT} bbs.thing.net
Subject: <nettime> Rise and Decline of the Syndicate
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 15:52:49 +0100
The Syndicate mailing list imploded and went down in August 2001, destroying the life-line of the Syndicate network. The network had been in a shaky situation for a while, due - we believe - to the destabilisation of the problematic balance between personal contacts of list members, lurking and filtering-and-not-reading-let-alone-posting subscribers, and a growing number of self-promoters who used the list as a personal performance space and disregarded the social rules of the online community.
The avant-garde never gives up. And tactical media has produced (at least) three different theaters of operation to wage its struggle: media activism, pure tactical aesthetics, and net conceptualism. The first allows for "formal" net.art tactics (materialist, structural), the latter two allow for "real" net.art tactics (native presence, site-specificity).
ReadAn interview with a Syrian activist in exile, code-named Sami, published by Occupy.com draws attenton once more to the radical experiment in real-life bottom-up matriarchal democratic design unfolding against all odds in the autonomous Kurdish region of Rojava in Northern Syria. We are republishing two short texts here on this subject matter to speculate about the question if 'Rojava' could offer a repeatable model for post-governmental political design?
The four-day conference on the campus of the Universidade Estadual de
Campinas (Unicamp) brought together many key persons from the tactical
media movement of Brazil and some of their counterparts in the
Brasilian government.
The movement is converging from roots in
free radio, free software, hardware hacking, art and social movements.
It is currently focussed around a large-scale project master-minded by
Claudio Prado and supported by the Ministry of Culture: ?Pontos de
Cultura? (Culture Spots) which is aiming to empower up to 600 cultural
projects with free software-based multimedia production and publication
facilities.
"World War III will be a guerilla information war, with no division between military and civilian participation." -- motto of Tactical Media Crew, borrowed from Marshall McLuhan
ReadTechnology 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.
Read(C) Mark Dery 1996; all rights reserved; reproduction in any medium without author's written permission forbidden.
The twin phenomena of immediacy and of instantaneity are presently oneof the most pressing problems confronting political and militarystrategists alike. Real time now prevails above both real space and thegeosphere. The primacy of real time, of immediacy, over and above spaceand surface is a ~fait accompli~ and has inaugural value (ushers a newepoch). Something nicely conjured up in a (French) advertisementpraising cellular phones with the words: "Planet Earth has never beenthis small". This is a very dramatic moment in our relation with theworld and for our vision of the world.
Read