Dr. Shahidul Alam Detained and Released on Bail - Demand to Drop all Charges: #FreeShahidulAlam 

Dr. Shahidul Alam, internationally renowned photographer, activist, founder and Managing Director of the Bangladesh multimedia company, Drik, founder of Chobi Mela International Photography Festival and Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, was forcibly abducted from his home on the night of 5 August.

Shahidul Alam was granted bail on November 15, 2018 and released from jail, but still faces a maximum of 14 years in prison if convicted.

News and updates #freeshahidulalam

• art,
• activism,
• majority world,
• photography,
• Bangladesh

Art and the Human 

The punk band Pussy Riot, which I belong to, is a musical group that conducts unexpected performances in different urban spaces. Pussy Riot's songs address topical political issues. The interests of the group members are: political activism, ecology, and the elimination of authoritarian tendencies in the Russian state system through the creation of the civil society.

• politics,
• art,
• Religion,
• Russia,
• prison

Manifesto 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.

• politics,
• art,
• Religion,
• Russia,
• prison,
• women's rights

Escaping Assad and Revolution in Rojava 

An 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?

• politics,
• war,
• Revolution,
• feminism,
• design,
• post-governmental organisation

Political Ecology Begins When We Say "Black Lives Matter" 

"They say it's a joke they say it's a game." The slogan was launched on the Chicago streets by the group We Charge Genocide, in the middle of a demo demanding reparations for victims of police torture. The folks on the street chanted those words, we hurled them out of our mouths in staccato bursts, while looking round at the passers-by who pretended not to notice. What the chant means is either enigmatic, or it's painfully obvious. There is a kind of disdain that minimizes a death or a beating or a torture or a life sentence for black people in the name of lawfulness, efficiency, morality and humanist ideals. That kind of disdain has made democracy impossible in the US - and other places too.

• cartography,
• activism,
• social justice,
• democracy,
• BlackLivesMatter

Border Camp 99 

Borders are there to be crossed. Their significance becomes obvious only when they are violated--and it says quite a lot about a society's political and social climate when one sees what kind of border-crossing a government tries to prevent.  Everybody knows that it is increasingly easy for money, goods, and capital to cross the borders of nation-states and territories; that the spreading of information can no longer be restricted; that social, political, or economic conflicts cannot be reduced to national affairs anymore. 

• campaign,
• activism,
• migration,
• no border,
• tactical camping

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.

• campaign,
• state repression

Rehearsal of Memory 

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 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.

• politics,
• art,
• infopolitics,
• net criticism,
• media criticism,
• participatory media

TERROR FEEDS: Inside the Fear Machine 

Outer Spaces Conference Series 2017

An analysis of ISIS and its media strategy, the meaning of cyber jihad, and why people enrol as foreign fighters.

The 12th conference of the Disruption Network Lab
Directed by Tatiana Bazzichelli. Studio 1, Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin.

• media,
• infopolitics,
• post-governmental organisation,
• fear,
• info-activism,
• media criticism,
• middle east

Human rights, testimony, and transnational publicity 

In the period between the end of the cold war in 1989 and the events of September 11, 2001, human rights became the dominant moral narrative by which world politics was organized. Inspired by the momentous political and cultural transformations taking place at the time, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the spread of global communications technologies, promoters of human rights discourse optimistically predicted that a transnational public sphere dedicated to democratic values would emerge (We now know, of course, that such predictions were wrong, as early post cold war hopes gave way to the harsh realities of contemporary globalization).

• feminism,
• theory

The Manifesto of John Doe: The Revolution Will Be Digitized 

In a statement issued to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the so-called "John Doe" behind the biggest information leak in history cites the need for better whistleblower protection and has hinted at even more revelations to come.

Titled "The Revolution Will Be Digitized" the 1800-word statement gives justification for the leak, saying that "income inequality is one of the defining issues of our time" and says that government authorities need to do more to address it.

• infopolitics,
• globalisation,
• precarity,
• info-activism,
• economics,
• finance

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

• art,
• biotechnology,
• science,
• fear

The dark side of Camping 

Camping can be so nice. Crawling out of dewy plastic in the early morning, with a pinch of sleep still in your eyes, braving the unbearably hot sun, yet invigorated and ready to take on the day with as much indifference as possible to the ongoing struggle with nature. Surely everybody knows that the secret of success is to fight the laws of petty bourgeois civilisation with minimal equipment and therefore gain a flexibility that is capable of suspending the otherwise ruling power relations for a clearly defined amount of time.

• campaign,
• activism,
• migration,
• no border,
• borders,
• tactical camping

N5M3 South Asia Forum Presentation 

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.

Video Warriors 

In 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."

The Corona Reboot 

An attempt to provisionally theorize the emergence of new subjectivities in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic.

• theory,
• biopolitics,
• ecology,
• earth systems,
• virus

Ten Premises For A Pandemic 

How much has changed in just a few days. Here is another text I've composed in an attempt to continue to think about the pandemic, and our lives within it. I hope it's of use, however minorly, as we all try to come to some kind of terms with the novel transformations, precarities, and struggles emerging in every direction.

~i

• art,
• theory,
• biopolitics,
• ecology,
• earth systems,
• virus

Pussy Riot Statement 

Pussy Riot : Art or Politics?

• politics,
• art,
• Religion,
• Russia,
• prison,
• women's rights

The Information war 

Humanity has always invested heavily in any scheme that offers escape from the body. And why not? Material reality is such a mess. Some of the earliest "religious" artefacts, such as Neanderthal ochre burials, already suggest a belief in immortality. All modern (i.e. post-paleolithic) religions contain the "Gnostic trace" of distrust or even outright hostility to the body and the "created" world. Contemporary "primitive" tribes and even peasant-pagans have a concept of immortality and of going-outside-the-body (ec-stasy) without necessarily exhibiting any excessive body-hatred. The Gnostic Trace accumulates very gradually (like mercury poisoning) till eventually it turns pathological. Gnostic dualism exemplifies the extreme position of this disgust by shifting all value from body to "spirit". This idea characterizes what we call "civilization".