We understand the end of something all too easily in the negative sense as a mere stopping, as the lack of constitution, perhaps even as decline and impotence, the end suggests the completion and the place in which the whole of history is gathered in its most extreme possibility.[1]
Read
1. Desire.
I come from a social and cultural context which has its languagetaboos, and among them a strong one refers to the libido. Desire is,therefore, something rather personal, and connecting it to the publicsphere might personalize the approach in a naive sense I learned toavoid. But since the same topic has been voiced last year in thecalling papers of the Enschede Photo Biennial, we might be dealing herewith a common place, therefore with a language defensive reflex, andthis is something useful to talk about.
Nina Czegledy and Inke Arns presented the material described in the
following text during the afternoon programme at V2_Organisation
Rotterdam on Sunday, January 21st, 14.00 - 18.00 hrs.
On an imaginary journey in the territories of current medical practice
and visual art, we observe the disintegration of former boundaries and
discover the emergence of a new discourse involving new metaphors and
new mythologies. In the course of this voyage we witness the
crystallization of a process which began in the Enlightenment and today
is linked together by electronic technologies. Mediated by television,
and lately the Internet, the concepts involved here, have contributed
to the construction of a simulated reality in both medical science and
art which imprisons attention and redirects it from the subject of the
activity reproduced.
1. Internet culture will bring the US, Western Europe, and the UK closer in to mental alignment,
The most important issue concerning the representation of sexuality in
the media is, whether human dignity is being honored or not. Respect
has many forms and those forms have many layers, and really there is no
one else but ourselves to be the judge of the way we are being treated.
Yet when and where basic human rights are not granted, the feeling of
being deeply rooted in one's dignity (if not entirely unimaginable) is
but a dream. This world is certainly not the best of all worlds and
there is always a battle to be fought and battles will have to be
fought again and again. Some so mean and savage that they can only be
fought by those prepared to go till the end.
Arthur Kroker, Canadian media theorist and is the author of 'ThePossessed Individual', 'Spasm' and 'Hacking the Future'. Over the pastyears he, together with Marilouise Kroker, were often in Europe andmade appearances at Virtual Futures, V-2, Eldorado/Antwerpen, etc.Recently, they have also been discovered in German-speaking countries.Both are noted for their somewhat compact jargon, which made theirmessage appear to drown somewhat in overcomplex code. But "DataTrash"`(1994) changed all that. The long treck through the squashydiscourses had not been in vain. Firmly rooted in European philosophy,yet not submerged, Arthur Kroker has found his topic: the virtual class.
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.
Since American Vice-President Al Gore made his famous speech in
California a couple of years ago, it has become impossible to scan any
news medium without finding at least one reference to the "Information
Superhighway". The Information Superhighway metaphor - specially
tailored for Mr. Gore's California audience - is so brilliantly
simplistic it seems to have blown the mind of every media editor in the
Western Hemisphere. With an Information Superhighway you just plug in
your modem and roll your data out onto the ramp and into the dataflow
where it zips along the freeway until it hits the appropriate off-ramp.
Finding data is the same - it's all nice straight data-lanes with on
and off ramps and well-banked curves.
The Internet was started in the 1970's by the U.S. Defense Departmentas a communications tool and is now being bought out by I.B.M., M.C.I.and other megaCorporations. April, 1995 marked the closing of theNational Science Foundation's part of the internet, and signaled thebeginning of the end of the publicly funded computer networkinfrastructure.
Introductory essay for the second editon of the Next 5 Minutes festival of tactical media, 1996.
1. Historical
Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school ("you are no longer in your family"); then the barracks ("you are no longer at school"); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It's the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini's Europa '51 could exclaim, "I thought I was seeing convicts."