Search results for 'politics'
Critical Art Ensemble Defense Fund
The CAE Defense Fund was created in 2005 as a mechanism to raise funds
for legal bills incurred by Dr. Steven Kurtz and Dr. Robert Ferrell in
what its members argued was a politically motivated attack by the
Department of Justice - one which threatened the constitutional and
fundamental rights not only of the two defendants, but also of
everyone, due to legal precedents that would have been set by an
unfavorable outcome.
In response, thousands of people worldwide organized demonstrations and
raised money for the two men's legal defense through fundraisers and a
variety of other grassroots efforts.
www.caedefensefund.org
Skrunda Signal
Tactical Media and the End of the End of History
As a playful, do-it-yourself approach to media activism and new technologies, tactical media (TM) seemed to have some critical bite when it emerged in the mid-1990s. But is it still radical today?
ReadManifesto 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.
ReadMy 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)
How to Turn Your Liability into an Asset: Media, Art and Politics in Post-communist Bulgaria
The first interview was conducted during the opening of Hybrid Workspace in June 1997, the temporary media lab in the margins of the big art show Documenta X in Kassel (Germany).
ReadHolding Out for Un-alienated Communication
"In August 1996, we called for the creation of a network of independent media, a network of information. We mean a network to resist the power of the lie that sells us this war that we call the Fourth World War. We need this network not only as a tool for our social movements, but for our lives: this is a project of life, of humanity, humanity which has a right to critical and truthful information."
These were the words of Subcomandante Marcos, speaking in 1997 from Chiapas in the midst of the Zapatistas' guerrilla information war against the Mexican state and the neocolonialism reflected in NAFTA. Marcos's powerful statement and Zapatista stories of struggle were circulated from the jungle of Chiapas on mailing lists, listservs, and websites, capturing the imagination of activists around the world and galvanizing a wave of new grassroots media projects. Perhaps no project more purely embodied this response than the Indymedia network, which was launched in November 1999 at the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings and quickly grew into a global network of news websites.
Enter the Swarm: Anonymous and the global protest movements
Felix Stalder explores the swarm politics of the 'endlessly fascinating Anonymous story' in an essay written for Le Monde Diplomatique, where it appeared in a slightly edited version and under a different title.
This version of the text was originally distributed via the international nettime mailing list.
The Blood of the Victim: Revolution in Syria and the Birth of the Image-Event
In March 1993, Kevin Carter took a photo of a starving Sudanese child crawling towards a UN relief camp less than a mile away. A few meters from the weary child stood a vulture, waiting for her death to begin his meal. Birds also must eat, and in southern Sudan they were eating because humans were not.
ReadA context for collecting the new media
At the turning of the year 1992 I received the program and manifesto for the Next 5 Minutes Conference in Paradiso. As professional collector of documents by and about social movements for the International Institute of Social History, the list of videos to be shown caught my attention immediately. This was an excellent opportunity to realize something for which I had been trying already for some time, to make an international sample collection of products from the movement of new independent video makers.
ReadNext 5 Minutes Core Themes
The third edition of the Next 5 Minutes revolved around four core themes:
- The Art of Campaiging
- The Post-Governmental Organisation (PGO)
- How Low Can You Go? The Technical and the Tactical
- Tactical Education
Cartography of Excess
Utopian ideas - like "Spaceship Earth" - are round, multidimensional, interrelated: their archetypal map is the Milky Way, the infinite constellations. But rational thinking is instrumental, linear, it distorts: and that's exactly the problem with the Mercator map, the most common world projection. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, created a "Dymaxion map" to undo those distortions. First the earth becomes a geometric figure, an isocahedron: its 20 triangles are then disjointed and laid flat, so the land masses radiate from a nexus in the north, without splitting continents or enlarging the polar regions.
The Californian Ideology
"Not to lie about the future is impossible and one can lie about it at will"
- Naum Gabo [1]
CAE: Framing Tactical Media
Anyone involved with "tactical media" (TM) before its famed christening in 1996 at the Next Five Minutes had to know that naming this cultural/political tendency was going to have some very negative repercussions. The naming was the first step in doing what TM feared the most°Xclaiming cultural territory doomed to house haunting archives. Once given an official title, so many nasty processes could begin - most significantly, the construction of historical narratives. So many narratives already exist explaining this ephemeral, immediate, specific, and deterritorialized process of cultural production that seemed so urgent to so many radical subjects in the early 90s.
The Fascist Simulation
In the United States, fascism presently unfolds as a simulation. The fascist simulation constitutes itself as a pixelated sea of livestreams, images, posts, and comments, circulating widely as its own networked, autonomous model of reality. It is enacted as an ensemble of people, social media platforms, presidential tweets, superspreader events, confederate flags, television chyrons, informatic infrastructures, automatic rifles, toxic masculinities, MAGA hats, racist hashtags, and video game servers. It is fascist ideology reified through consumer technology.
ReadThe Global Intelligence Files
LONDON - Today, Monday 27 February, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files - more than five million emails from the Texas-headquartered "global intelligence" company Stratfor. The emails date from between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor's web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods.
ReadIndymedia: It's time to move on
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.
ReadSigns of the Times: the Popular Literature of Tahrir
Protest Signs, Graffiti, and Street Art - a special issue of Shahadat
This issue takes as its focus the popular literature of the Egyptian
Revolution. Drawing on protest signs, graffiti, and street art in Tahrir
to read the culture of resistance particular to the Egyptian
Revolution, the curators examine how protesters changed the political
narrative through the use of images, memorials, and expressions of daily
life. Featuring examples from an extensive gallery of online images
culled from the collections of several prominent Egyptian journalists
and activists, the online piece is a visual tour of some of the creative
production of Egypt's Revolution. A collaborative curation project
split between New York City and Cairo, this is ArteEast's first critical
look at the cultural production related to recent political
developments in the Middle East.
- Co-curators, Rayya El Zein & Alex Ortiz.
make world paper 3
Two years after 911 the global cup looks both half full and half empty. It's hard to be optimistic, yet there are plenty of reasons for it. With the Bush-Blair war machine running out of steam, the movement of movements shifts its attention to alternatives for the WTO, Security Council and similar post-democratic bodies. In the moral desert of the Iraq War the structuration of imaginary consent through the repetitive bombardment of the image began to show severe cracks in credibility. These discrepancies within the represented result in a heightened need for action. The Iraq war didn't fool any one and both sides are still reeling a little from the shock. While maintaining their anger, people moved on from protest to a collective search for that other, possible world. What might a global democracy look like? Would it be a system with representatives and 'rights,' or rather a dynamic set of events, without higher aims?
Read