312 Articles

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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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My 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)

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Signs 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.

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Talking about a Revolution: An Interview with Camille Otrakji 

"If you've been following events in Syria, you'd know that the English-language press is mostly deeply critical of the Assad regime (while the Arabic press displays a slightly wider range of views). I thought it would be worth trying to present a minority report on the situation from a Syrian friend of mine, although, as you will see, he argues precisely that his position is actually held by a very significant majority (albeit a rather quiet and frustrated majority) of Syrians.

Camille Otrakji is a Syrian political blogger based in Montreal. Although he tends to keep a low profile, Otrakji has been, for the past several years, at the forefront of many of the most interesting and influential online initiatives relating to Syrian politics. He is one of the authors and moderators at Joshua Landis's Syria Comment, and the founder of Creative Syria, a constellation of websites including Mideast Image (a vast collection of original old photographs of Middle Eastern subjects) and Syrian Think Tank (an online debate site hosting many of Syria's top analysts). Last year, Otrakji courted controversy with a new initiative devoted to the subject of Syrian-Israeli peace, entitled OneMideast.org. He agreed to speak with me about the latest events in Syria, and I'm sure that his views will generate plenty of discussion."

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We Make Radical Media You Make Adverts 

A corporate media group has trade-marked the phrase "Radical Media" and is trying to ban Peace news, New Internationalist, Red Pepper and others from using it in the title of a conference?

Following a recent Diary item in the Guardian, indymedia is today reporting on the story that a corporate media group has forced us to change the name of our conference. Readers are invited to attend a demonstration outside @Radical Media's London office, Tuesday, 3rd May 2011, 5pm, London W1T 7AA.

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The Transborder Immigrant Tool: Violence, Solidarity and Hope in Post-NAFTA Circuits of Bodies Electr(on)/ic 

This polyvocal, collectively authored paper describes the Transborder Immigrant Tool, a border disturbance art project developed by the Electronic Disturbance Theater. The paper outlines the motivations behind the tool and elaborates a notion of Science of the Oppressed as a methodology for developing locative media projects in solidarity with social movements. A shift is identified from Tactical Media to Tactical Biopolitics in contemporary media art. Walkingtools.net is also introduced as a platform for sharing technical information about locative media projects in order to create an ecology of projects. Poetic sustenance, part of the Transborder Immigrant Tool's functioning, is discussed in a context of Inter-American Transcendentalism.

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the banality of cyberpunk, short notes on wikileaks 

a year ago wikileaks was as known as any other hacker project on the
chaos computer congress in berlin. its organizers which you remember
only by surname were talking about technical and organisational
issues, smoking a joint and gathering collaborators and co-developers.
like often german or swedish hackers were running the backend of this
project. they like the technocratic part where organisation and code
goes together. here is where wikileaks has its center, and the idea of
it was rather a channel, a protocol, or a p2p network to allow more
transparency in information. the opposite movement against closing
down on information which belongs to the public, and a direct result
of a cyberpunk worldview, where an oligarchy of  a few corporations
runs the world.

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Free/Libre Culture Forum Declaration 

We can no longer put off re-thinking the economic structures that have been producing, financing, and funding culture up until now. Many of the old models have become anachronistic and detrimental to civil society. The aim of this document is to promote innovative strategies capable of defending and extending the sphere in which human creativity and knowledge can prosper freely and sustainably.

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Tompkin Square Riot Memories 

What follows are personal accounts from various people who were present on that fateful night in Tompkins Square on August 6, 1988. They observed and experienced firsthand the bloodlust of the marauding cops invading our neighborhood from all over the city. Twenty years later, these memories are still fresh in the minds of those who were there, as though it all happened just yesterday....

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Electronic Markets & Activist Networks 

The two very different types of digital formations examined here make legible the variable ways in which the socio-technical interaction between digital technology and social logics produce distinctive outcomes. These differences point to the possibility that networked forms of power are not inherently distributive, as is often theorized when the focus is exclusively on technical properties.

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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?

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make world paper 2 

The World Social Forum, organized twice in Porto Alegre 2001 and 2002, not only prompted a flurry of autonomous self-organization, crossborder organization, and creative media interventions. It also initiated an intense process of analysis and reflection on the tricky question of a 'global' dynamic of self-organization.

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UniCommon the revolt of living knowledge 

Invent the future, reverse the present

The extraordinary months of struggle we experienced have changed us profoundly, and at the same time have changed the students and the precarious workers who have been animating with passion and continuity the conflicts of the past two academic years. They have opened spaces previously unthinkable, reversed temporality, reshuffled each one's identity. From Paris to London and Rome down to the Mediterranean a very solid spectre is haunting the world: a generation's rebellion against the policies of austerity and cuts in education which particularly affect young people, their future, the future of Europe otherwise in decline.

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Wikileaks and Freedom, Autonomy and Sovereignty in the cloud 

"We have to be very attentive and united at a state level to fight against what is a threat to democratic authority and sovereignty,"
- French government spokesman Francois Baroin speaking out against wikileaks releasing US diplomatic cables.

"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."
- A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, John Perry Barlow

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