Search results for 'speed'

article

The Role of the Engineer in the Information Age 

When looking at technology, we barely see machinery, let alone the people who made it. We seem to take technology and its development for a given, neglecting the process of its creation. We live off the fruits of the tree, without examining its roots.

Read

    article

    Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class 

    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.

    Read



    article

    Frequently Asked Questions: Digital Work 

    How does digital work differ from its analogue forms?

    Although developed for military and corporate purposes, digital technologies also create oportunites for working people. With these amazing tools, we are not only able to invent new aesthetic forms, but also can work in more satisfying ways. Above all, digital technologies can allow us to rediscover the dignity of artisan labour without losing the material benefits delivered by the analogue working methods of Fordism. Over the past two centuries, industrialisation has slowly replaced skilled craft labour with repetitive factory and office work. In the Fordist factory, even the pace of working can be determined by the speed of the assembly lines. For most of this century, people have grudgingly accepted the boring nature of their jobs. In return, they have been given enough wages to buy large amounts of goods and services produced by Fordist industrialisation. However, once their living standards are sufficient, most people also want to enjoy satisfaction in their work. They don't just want money, but also respect.

    Read

      article

      "The Desire to be Wired" 


      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.

      Read


        article

        Holding Out for Un-alienated Communication 

        "In August 1996, we called for the creation of a network of independent media, a network of information. We mean a network to resist the power of the lie that sells us this war that we call the Fourth World War. We need this network not only as a tool for our social movements, but for our lives: this is a project of life, of humanity, humanity which has a right to critical and truthful information."

        These were the words of Subcomandante Marcos, speaking in 1997 from Chiapas in the midst of the Zapatistas' guerrilla information war against the Mexican state and the neocolonialism reflected in NAFTA. Marcos's powerful statement and Zapatista stories of struggle were circulated from the jungle of Chiapas on mailing lists, listservs, and websites, capturing the imagination of activists around the world and galvanizing a wave of new grassroots media projects. Perhaps no project more purely embodied this response than the Indymedia network, which was launched in November 1999 at the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings and quickly grew into a global network of news websites.

        Read


        article

        Signs of the Times 

        Friday, October 05, 2001 12:20 PM
        subject: Activism After September 11

        Dear Friends,
        This essay was published today in The Nation. It's an attempt to discuss what the atrocities of September 11 might mean to those of us who are publicly critical of corporate power and the current global economic model. There are no easy answers to this question so the essay is more of a meditation on symbolism and tone than a political roadmap.

        Take care,
        Naomi

        Read


        article

        Small, Furry Mammals 

        The McLibel media strategy arose from a simple premise: this story has to be told. Most people have been affected by McDonald's in one way or another - working in a store, being nagged by children, stumbling through litter, suffering ill-health or enjoying their burgers - and the corporation's influence continues to increase as they relentlessly pursue their "global domination strategy" (to use their own words). Two people investing their lives to stand up to such a force has got to be a great story in anybody's book.

        Read

        article

        CAE: Framing Tactical Media 


        Anyone involved with "tactical media" (TM) before its famed christening in 1996 at the Next Five Minutes had to know that naming this cultural/political tendency was going to have some very negative repercussions. The naming was the first step in doing what TM feared the most°Xclaiming cultural territory doomed to house haunting archives. Once given an official title, so many nasty processes could begin - most significantly, the construction of historical narratives. So many narratives already exist explaining this ephemeral, immediate, specific, and deterritorialized process of cultural production that seemed so urgent to so many radical subjects in the early 90s.

        Read

        article

        Parasitic Media 

        By Nathan M Martin for The Carbon Defense League, September 2002
        A parasite is defined as ?an organism that grows, feeds, and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host.? The tactics of appropriation have been co-opted. Illegal action has become advertisement. Protest has become cliché. Revolt has become passé. These disputes have reached the definition of rhetoric. They are the usual suspects. Having accepted these failures to some degree, we can now attempt to define a parasitic tactical response. We need a practice that allows invisible subversion. We need to feed and grow inside existing communication systems while contributing nothing to their survival; we need to become parasites. We need to create an anthem for the bottom feeders and leeches. We need to echo our voice through all the wires we can tap but cloak our identity in the world of non-evidence, and the hidden.

        Read

          article

          Fuzzy Biological Sabotage 

          If the left has learned anything from resistance against capital driven technocracy, it is that the democratic process is only minimally useful for slowing the profit machine of pancapitalism. Since corporations and other capital-saturated institutions own the process, and tend to function outside national democratic imperatives, other methods of power appropriation have to be developed. In the case of biotechnology, the resistance is unfortunately in a position of reactivity. Corporations have already infiltrated most governments and markets at such a furious pace that all that can be done is attempt to slow them down, while cells and organizations regroup and decide on a way to address the many problems that have already arisen, and the many potential accidents that are in front of us.

          Read


            article

            Distance versus Desire 

            The desire to transcend distance and separation has accompanied the history of media technology for many centuries. Various attempts to realise the demand for a presence from a distance have produced beautiful imaginaries such as those of telepresence and ubiquity, the electronic cottage and the reinvigoration of  the oikos, and certainly not least among them the reduction of physical mobility in favour of an ecologically more sustainable connected life style.  As current systems of hypermobility are confronted with an unfolding energy crisis and collide with severe ecological limits - most prominently in the intense debate on global warming - citizens and organisations in advanced and emerging economies alike are forced to reconsider one of the most daring projects of the information age: that a radical reduction of physical mobility is possible through the use of advanced telepresence technologies.

            Read

            article

            Mediate YourSelf! 

            At the end of the third 'Next 5 Minutes' conference on tactical media (March 1999) in Amsterdam, an interesting discussion emerged around the question of how the minor media practices elaborated and highlighted in this vibrant event would ever reach a wider audience for lack of being covered by any mainstream outlet. At one point, some people from the back of the room (unfortunately I don't know anymore who exactly, I believe an Italian group), shouted: 'We don't want to be mediated - we mediate ourselves!'

            Read

            article

            Electronic Civil Disobedience, Simulation, and the Public Sphere 

            What counts in the long run is the "use" one makes of a theory....We must start from existing practices in order to retrace the fundamental flaws.
            --Felix Guattari, "Why Marx and Freud No Longer Disturb Anyone"

            In 1994, when Critical Art Ensemble first introduced the idea and a possible model of electronic civil disobedience (ECD) as another option for digital resistance, the collective had no way of knowing what elements would be the most practical, nor did it know what elements would require additional explanation. After nearly five years of field testing of ECD by various groups and individuals, its information gaps have become a little more obvious and can finally be addressed.

            Read