The latest issue of The Occupied Times of London is devoted to the question of technology in contemporary forms of political contestation. The main question thrown up by the editors is to ask: "What is technology for?" (TMF editors)
ReadThe American military network ARPAnet was conceived as a way to maintain uninterrupted communications in the event of nuclear war. Ancestor of the Internet and foundation of the Global Information Infrastructure, ARPAnet springs from exactly the same source as the "pushbutton war" that lay behind it: the change of scale provoked by the early 20th century discoveries in physics, within an industrial society capable of organizing the productivity - including the scientific productivity - of thousands of agents. Here, no doubt, is the real birthplace of the information society: a society massively penetrated by the sciences and technologies of information and telecommunications, using them to carry out the design of the planet or at least, that of its components (with design replacing politics). A society whose governmentality entails the knowledge of the real, that is to say, the transformation of reality into information. A society whose governmentality unfolds between its smallest common denominators (atomic, electronic, magnetic, genetic, chemical) and its largest common denominators (climate, planet, solar system), by way of laws, formulas and norms that determine its productivity, means, and possible destinies.
ReadInternational Festival of Streaming Media
De Balie, Paradiso, Melkweg
Amsterdam, October 6 - 8, 2000
"Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is
an idea [?] and ideas are bulletproof."
- From the film V for Vendetta
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.
ReadA project of Krzysztof Wodiczko and Robert Ochshorn
The veteran vehicle was developed in order to give a public voice to veterans struggling with the difficulties of returning to civilian life.
The exposure of undercover policeman Mark Kennedy in the eco-activist movement revealed how the state monitors and undermines political activism. This book shows the other grave threat to our political freedoms - undercover activities by corporations.
Read[Originally published in: The New York Times Book Review, 28 October 1984, pp. 1, 40-41.]
This workshop follows on from the Moving Forest event on July 4 as a coda, giving a time for reflection and for developing the argument and experience of the work along other lines. It involves participants, organisers and guests, and people from CCW, CCS, RADA and activists, artists and others from across the sprawl.
ReadA live benefit concert and performance event with Snowcrash (.nl), The Yesmen and Critical Art Ensemble in support of artist Steven Kurtz and scientist Robert Ferrell, both threatened by an unjustifiable prosecution for "bioterrorism".
Presented in collaboration with:
Transmediale Festival, Berlin
& The Arts Catalyst, London
Abstract of the lecture by Peter Lamborn Wilson
For the 'Next Five Minutes" Conference, Amsterdam, january 1996
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.
Berlin · May 12 2017:
Conference series by Disruption Network Lab e.V.
Whistleblowers and truth-tellers persecuted for blowing the whistle, critical thinkers and activists meet to discuss countermeasures to detention and repression.
The 11th event of the Disruption Network Lab to celebrate the upcoming freedom of Chelsea Manning and launch the new book by John Kiriakou (CIA anti-torture whistleblower). Directed by Tatiana Bazzichelli.
With: John Kiriakou (CIA anti-torture whistleblower, USA); Annie Machon (former MI5 intelligence officer, UK/BE);
Annegret Falter (Chair Whistleblower Netzwerk e.V., DE); Magnus Ag (Senior Programm Officer, Freemuse, DK/DE); Silvanos Mudzvova (Artist Protection Fund Fellow in residency at The University of Manchester, ZWE/UK).
Conceptual Overview
The products we purchase are the inventory of our lives. To chain
stores, this inventory is cataloged through the Universal Product
Locator symbol (UPC). The UPC symbol is known as a barcode. Barcodes
are now found everywhere in our world, extending outside of product
inventory into our comic books, our science fiction, our films, and
even our tattoos. These codes represent the fears of literally becoming
numbers or becoming digital that are in many of us. These are not fears
we wish to dismiss. The RE-CODE.COM project brings together the
tactical media actions of the Carbon Defense League and the video and
performance hijacks of Conglomco in a way that takes online action
outside of the box for real world instigation. Looking at the heavy
reliance on digital systems in chain stores utilizing the UPC barcode
system, we see a problem or a virus in the system. The virus is the
human. We are the nightmare of the digital to some extent. We are the
squeaky wheel.
Exploring the radical shift in the boundary between fiction and reality in a world increasingly governed by ‘post-truth’ politics
Exhibition @ FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), Liverpool, 2 March 2017 - 21 May 2017
Public Opening: Thursday 2 March / 6 - 8pm / All galleries
From: Bruce Sterling <bruces {AT} well.com>
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1998 22:59:27 -0600 (CST)
Sender: owner-nettime-l {AT} basis.Desk.nl
Key concepts: art movements, Internet, reputation economics, arts grants, Europe, Interfund
Utopian ideas - like "Spaceship Earth" - are round, multidimensional, interrelated: their archetypal map is the Milky Way, the infinite constellations. But rational thinking is instrumental, linear, it distorts: and that's exactly the problem with the Mercator map, the most common world projection. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, created a "Dymaxion map" to undo those distortions. First the earth becomes a geometric figure, an isocahedron: its 20 triangles are then disjointed and laid flat, so the land masses radiate from a nexus in the north, without splitting continents or enlarging the polar regions.
The twin phenomena of immediacy and of instantaneity are presently oneof the most pressing problems confronting political and militarystrategists alike. Real time now prevails above both real space and thegeosphere. The primacy of real time, of immediacy, over and above spaceand surface is a ~fait accompli~ and has inaugural value (ushers a newepoch). Something nicely conjured up in a (French) advertisementpraising cellular phones with the words: "Planet Earth has never beenthis small". This is a very dramatic moment in our relation with theworld and for our vision of the world.
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