311 Articles

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Occupy and the Provision of Public Space: The City's Responsibilities 

The occupation of key public spaces by Occupy Wall Street, as a means of calling attention to more basic problems, raises questions of the role of public spaces that need to be urgently dealt with. The basic questions about the organization of society, democracy, inequality, social justice, public priorities are deep-going and require long-term answers. They should not be pre-empted by the immediate needs for space, not should any space be fetishized. But spatial issues need to be dealt with immediately and urgently. 

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The tactics of occupation: Becoming cockroach 

The global occupy protest movement is proliferating by "contagion, epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes".[1] Furthermore, it materialises and disperses in multiple ephemeral processes of transformation that construct a common for the multitude of protestors. The common produced by the global occupy movement is not a mutually shared opposition to the capitalist crisis, nor a collective identity (of the "indignados" or of the 99%), nor a consensual political project (for real, authentic democracy). The common does not even embody an identical strategy of occupying public space, but rather to a series of becomings that question established categorizations and taxonomies that normalize the production of subjectivities and the organisation of life.

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Migrant Navigator Xtra Tools 

No borders = No nations? History of unification of the Europe is militant: Roman Empire > Napoleon's Empire > 3rd Reich. Economy is powerful weapon. Now this has all changed! Test yourself: Say at least three differences of the European Union with previous forms of European unification. Compare the results with your family, friends, neighbours and people you don't like. Than try it with the Migrant Navigator to see the difference!

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Do It With Others (DIWO): Participatory Media in the Furtherfield Neighbourhood 

The Furtherfield community utilizes networked media to create, explore, nurture and promote the art that happens when connections are made and knowledge is shared - across the boundaries of established art-world institutions and their markets, grass-roots artistic and activist projects and communities of socially-engaged software developers. This is a spectrum that engages from the maverick media-art-makers and small collectives of cross-specialist practitioners, to projects that critique and change dominant hierarchical structures as part of their art process.

This text will provide a brief background as to how Furtherfield, a non-profit organization and community, came about and how it extends the DIY ethos of some early net art and tactical media, said to be motivated by curiosity, activism and precision, [01] towards a more collaborative approach that Furtherfield calls Do It With Others (DIWO).

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We Demand The Impossible: 

An Interview with John Jordan and Gavin Grindon

Furtherfield interview with Gavin Grindon and John Jordan from the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination about the User's Guide to (Demanding) the Impossible. Published by Minor Compositions.

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Manifesto of the association Real Democracy Now (English) 

We are ordinary people. We are like you: people, who get up every morning to study, work or find a job, people who have family and friends. People, who work hard every day to provide a better future for those around us.
Some of us consider ourselves progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not. Some of us have clearly defined ideologies, others are apolitical, but we are all concerned and angry about the political, economic, and social outlook which we see around us: corruption among politicians, businessmen, bankers, leaving us helpless, without a voice.
This situation has become normal, a daily suffering, without hope. But if we join forces, we can change it. It's time to change things, time to build a better society together.

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The GHI of Tactical Media 

Tactical media are the field being worked by artists adopting a positive attitude towards contemporary digital technology, in a critical, innovative spirit. Media artists reveal a preoccupation with aesthetics as a concept, not with a particular style. This trend is part of the creation of a new language for the communications network era, a user language which is successful as art because it transmits an effective activism. Media activists are a hybrid of artist, scientist, theoretician and political activist that shuns labels and categorizations. Their creations are characterised by integration of user and machine in the work itself, so that interactivity has an important place within it. The concept of tactical media allows Art with a capital and grassroots political activism to be combined and, in this sense, we could include in it the tactical struggle that is part of anti-globalisation movements. Media activists point to the power of tactics as a means of breaking down the barriers between mainstream values and alternative ones, between professionals and amateurs and even between people who are creative and those that are not.

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Engaging Ambivalence 

Interventions in Engineering Cultures

The most significant underwriter of engineering research in the United States is the Department of Defense, largely acting through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA exists to channel funds from the military to academic and corporate research labs in exchange for technological innovations that serve the needs of its clients - the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. As DARPA public relations officers are fond of pointing out, innovations funded by DARPA grants may also find expression in civilian applications, particularly in the communications and aerospace industries.

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