October 2011.
The fight opposing financial dictatorship is erupting. The so-called 'financial markets' and their cynical services are destroying the very foundations of social civilization.
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....
ReadFrequently at frontiers we are asked, "Anything to declare?"
The wisest thing to do when faced with the scrutiny of a border
official is to say that you have "nothing to declare", and quickly move
on. Crossing borders usually entails an effort not to say too much, or
at least to get by with saying very little. A degree of reticence is
the mark of the wise and experienced traveller.
The Next Five Minutes is a conference, exhibition and tv program that wants to leave behind the rigid dichotomy between the mainstream, commercial and national tv on one hand and marginal independent tv on the other. Although these differences may still be important, N5M wants to focus on tv-makers crossing the borders of tv-making and going into the spaces that the tv-world still has to offer.
Ah, the oil industry. While most people are resigned to the knowledge
that large petroleum manufacturers are at least partly to blame when it
comes to destroying Third World infrastructures, propping up meritless
dictators, or encouraging blind consumerism in the face of an
environmentally poisoned and diseased future ? the question I often ask
is 'What about the music'?
And while they are fiendishly scarce, the oil industry, like many other
bastions of capitalism, indeed produced a number of privately pressed,
in-house motivational musicals, and several squeaked out on LP (for
employees only, of course). They're known as industrial shows: lavish
stage productions that serve to entertain, educate, and encourage
employees to do their job with gusto.
As new technologies make it possible to move more information faster than ever before, we are dazzled by the millions of gigabytes that move across the world in nanoseconds. We are infatuated by bandwidth, digital television by gadgets and gizmos. Yet we hardly ask questions about the quality of the information: what is it that we are communicating? Is it relevant? Will it make the world a better place? And does all this information add up to knowledge?
ReadMarch 17th, 2005
How did it come to this?
Only a perverse authoritarian logic can explain how Critical Art
Ensemble (CAE) can at one moment be creating the project "Free Range
Grain" for the Risk exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt,
reconfiguring it for The Interventionists exhibition at Mass MoCA in a
second moment, and then suddenly have a CAE member in FBI detention.
The U.S. Justice Department has accused us of such shocking crimes as
bioterrorism, health and safety violations, mail fraud, wire fraud, and
even murder. Now, as we retool "Free Range Grain" for the Risk
exhibition at the Glasgow Center for Contemporary Art, the surreal
farce of our legal nightmare continues unabated.
This essay provides a short and insightful overview of alternative television projects in the Italy of Berlusconi.
Tactical Media emerged when the modest goals of media artists and media activists were transformed into a movement that challenged everyone to produce their own media in support of their own political struggles. This "new media" activism was based on the insight that the long-held distinction between the 'street' (reality) and the 'media' (representation) could no longer be upheld. On the contrary, the media had come to infuse all of society.
ReadThe events of the century's turn, from Seattle to New York, have shown that a sweeping critique of capitalist globalization is possible, and urgently necessary-before the level of violence in the world dramatically increases. The beginnings of such a critique exist, with the renewal of "unorthodox" economics. [1] But now one can look further, toward a critique of contemporary capitalist culture.
ReadAppeal to all free people of the world: Let's work together to stop
daily massacres, arrests and displacements in Syria. Let's work together
to bring down the murderous Assad regime in Syria.
This is an appeal to all Syrian communities and to all free people
around the world to organise processions and sit-ins in front of United
Nations offices in all around the world...
Translating the abstraction—and banalities—of the Anthropocene into readable cartography has resulted in many past attempts that often ended up reproducing those same qualities. But, as Brian Holmes asserts in this essay, we seem to have found ourselves in a moment where collaboration, engagement, and new forms of knowledge exchange are breaking that deadlock. Tracing his own involvement with artistic practices that both engage with and attempt to represent a “political ecology,” Holmes explains how the evolving, collaborative cartographic practice that brought the "Mississippi. An Anthropocene River map" into being simultaneously reveals and interrogates the power structures of Anthropocence society.
ReadNow that the grassroots movement that started inadvertently with the Arab Spring has gone global, it is necessary to cast a backwards glance to try and figure out, with some perspective, the dynamics of what has happened, physically and conceptually, over the last year. We propose a simple vision of the process of uprising in 2011, which was consolidated on the past 15th of October as a new culture of popular resistance and creativity. We also aim to point out the recent or enhanced concepts born in the collective consciousness of society during this period.
ReadThesis 0
"What do I think of WikiLeaks? I think it would be a good idea!"
(after Mahatma Gandhi's famous quip on "Western Civilization")
The Speculative Archive for Historical Clarification is a long-term project that produces documents that investigate the political and cultural implications of state self-documentation. Its work focuses on the processes through which covert government activities are documented, classified for reasons of national security, and, at times, selectively declassified. Founded in 1999 by Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, SAHC has recently completed a series of interviews with government officials involved in the regulation and release of secret government information. Below are excerpts from three of these interviews.
ReadIn their curatorial statement for the exhibition, Really? Art and Knowledge in Time of Crisis (2024), Mi You and David Garcia explore how artists address the erosion of trust in knowledge and the rise of disinformation through investigative and critical practices.
Introduction
By Andrew Boyd & Dave Oswald Mitchell
"The clowns are organizing. They are organizing. Over and out."
-Overheard on UK police radio during action
by Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, July 2004
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."
"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
I am interested in a certain sense of wanting to be "in" something: to participate in it, to connect with it, to synchronize with it, to be caught up with it, rather than to visually possess it. The desire to be attuned to something that is happening, or that might happen at any moment -- not necessarily as a conscious thought, but as a vaguely felt expectation. The desire to move toward something that is (or might be) happening, in order to absorb its force, touch it, taste it, surrender to it -- rather than simply to observe it.
Read