Search results for 'activism'

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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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Border Camp 99 

Borders are there to be crossed. Their significance becomes obvious only when they are violated--and it says quite a lot about a society's political and social climate when one sees what kind of border-crossing a government tries to prevent.  Everybody knows that it is increasingly easy for money, goods, and capital to cross the borders of nation-states and territories; that the spreading of information can no longer be restricted; that social, political, or economic conflicts cannot be reduced to national affairs anymore. 

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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.

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    The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique 

    The 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.

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    The Manifesto of John Doe: The Revolution Will Be Digitized 

    In a statement issued to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the so-called "John Doe" behind the biggest information leak in history cites the need for better whistleblower protection and has hinted at even more revelations to come.

    Titled "The Revolution Will Be Digitized" the 1800-word statement gives justification for the leak, saying that "income inequality is one of the defining issues of our time" and says that government authorities need to do more to address it.

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    Holograms for Freedom 

    The Citizens’ Securities Law’s Reform is an attack on the right of freedom of assembly. This measure restricts citizens’ liberties, and criminalizes their right to protest. Turning a right into an offence for which you can be pursued, detained, and judged.
    To respond to this injustice and to show the future will have to face if this bill continues its course, we saw the need to carry out a different kind of protest that would allow our demands to become unstoppable: the first hologram protest in history.
    A massive protest, through which we will demonstrate, that despite the trammels imposed by the government, they will not silence our voices, and even if we have to turn ourselves into holograms, we will keep on protesting.
    www.hologramasporlalibertad.org/en.html#project

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    Hollaback #Harassmentis 

    What is Hollaback?
    The real motive of street harassment is intimidation. To make its target scared or uncomfortable, and to make the harasser feel powerful. But what if there was a simple way to take that power away by exposing it? You can now use your smartphone to do just that by documenting, mapping, and sharing incidents of street harassment. Join an entire community ready to Hollaback!

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    We are all Khaled Said 

    Against torture in Egypt and inhuman treatment of Egyptians in their own country

    "It's Khaled Said...
    He is a 28 years old Egyptian who was tortured and killed by two policemen in the street where he lived in Alexandria, Egypt. Khaled's death further exposed the Egyptian police brutality and their systematic torture of Egyptians. Khaled died, but many Egyptians have become alive where his picture has now become the symbol of Egyptians' struggle for their rights and freedom."

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    Wikileaks Statement on the 9 Month Anniversary of Cablegate: Release of 133,887 Cables 

    Over the past week, WikiLeaks has released 133,887 US diplomatic cables from around the world - more than half of the entire Cablegate material (251,287 cables). The new release was met with a sustained Denial of Service (DOS) attack during the first 36 hours. WikiLeaks had to rely on back-up servers for some hours. With supporters? help, WikiLeaks was able to bring in additional servers to stave off the attack.

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    The Accenture Files  

    Investigation by the Expose Accenture, the Movement Research Unit, and the Progressive International

    Today, the Progressive International, Expose Accenture and the Movement Research Unit release the Accenture Files, revealing the central role of the world’s largest consultancy in the global right-ward turn towards surveillance, exclusion, and strong-men: The Reactionary International.

    Based on extensive fieldwork, interviews, and a comprehensive review of internal documents, our investigation demonstrates how Accenture has quietly embedded itself deep into the apparatus of security states worldwide, deploying its vast network of resources, wealth and technology to surveil entire populations, fuel the military-industrial complex and channel immense public wealth to private hands.

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    Governmentality of Information 

    The 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.

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    Cartography of Excess 

    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.

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