Search results for 'theory'

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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.

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Media Darkness 

Reflections on Public Space, Light and Conflict

There is an unshakable belief in the idea that what defines the mass media is that they produce or constitute, in all their different ways, a public. So while there is agreement on the fact that not every public sphere is a communication medium, many people tend to think that every communication medium constitutes a public sphere - the most recent and prominent candidate being, of course, the Internet. But is this claim as to the public quality of all media, hegemonic as it may be today, really tenable?

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Rise and Decline of the Syndicate: the End of an Imagined Community 

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.


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Grundrisse einer Netzkritik 

1. Toward a European Standard Code for Critical Interchange (ESCCI)

Bezeichnen wir das Internet einfach einmal als 'Kind der Moderne', soist das klassische Genre der Kritik sicherlich ein Teil davon. Im nochandauernden Zeitalter des multikulturellen Massenkonformismus, vollerMikropraxis und Ich-Management, ist die Kunst der Kritik jedoch inVergessenheit geraten. Die hiesigen Kommentare zielen nur noch aufKorrektur von Verhaltensweisen ab. Die Meinungsmacher/innen haben allesAngebotene laengst hinter sich, sie sehen das Ganze wirklichdifferenziert, aus sicherem Abstand. Die glueckliche Tatsache, man seieben nicht engagiert, wird als persoenliche Errungenschaft gefeiert.Solche talking heads ohne Eigenschaften sind aber nutzlos in Zeitenrascher Entwicklungen, sowie das beim Wachstum der Computernetze imMoment der Fall ist.

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The Brazilian Context 

Many are the social, political or economic problems in Brazil. Socially, there's an extremely unequal distribution of wealth. Such a big social unequality is reflected, for example, in the extreme differences between the center and the periphery in the big cities, regional unequalities, criminality, racism. Besides that, we live in an unnoficial police state that acts in defense of the elites, murdering and arresting poorer citzens, because of the color of their skin or social condition.

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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.

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The Little Book Of Ideas 

A small handbook which explains complex economic terms and theories in simple language, to help everyone understand what has caused the economic mess, why it's still continuing, and enable them to engage in the debate about what needs to be changed for the better in our economic system. It is NOT a manifesto. It has been created to stimulate people to engage in discussion, and so to make up their own minds as to what they think should be done to create a better and fairer world.

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Post-media Operators 

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The record industry is in the process of being outflanked by means of the very processes that it has come to rely upon. Since the 60's its continual efforts to create new needs has meant that it nurtured an everchanging musical soundscape that is now mutating at such a pace that it cannot keep track long enough to harness these musical evolutions in the direction of profit. That fact that it doesn't achieve this harnessing has the remarkable effect of making the 'new' last longer! A longevity that comes from our always being able to place ourselves amidst a continual re-definition of these sounds. Even in terms of format, the profit-orientated shift to a CD market which may have meant that back-catalogues could be re-sold has also worked to deliver an on-line tap of musical history at the same time that vinyl pressing has become cheaper. These and other factors feed into the accelerating mutation that in turn creates a dissatisfaction with what the industry can offer.

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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

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Sarai Reader 08: Fear 

Modernity's great promise - the freedom from fear, now lies in ruins. One can argue that this vision was always compromised - modernity (especially in the form that emerged in the West, under Capitalism) always hid its own fears, and hid from its own fears - the fear of epidemics, of urban panic, of the homeless multitude and of criminal activity. This led to a drive for transparency: for separating the civic from the criminal, the civilised and the barbaric peoples, the human from the non human, life from the machine.

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The Internet Freedom Fallacy and Arab Digital Activism 

This article focuses on grassroots digital activism in the Arab world and the risks of what seems to be an inevitable collusion with U.S foreign policy and interests. It sums up the most important elements of the conversation I have been having for the last two years with many actors involved in defending online free speech and the use of technology for social and political change. While the main focus is Arab digital activism, I have made sure to include similar concerns raised by activists and online free speech advocates from other parts of the world, such as China, Thailand, and Iran.

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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.

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