It's time to create the pop stars of activism,
the idoru of communication guerrilla,
it's time to threaten and charm the
masses by the ghosts coming from the
net, to play the myth against the myth,
to be more nihilist than infoteinment!
- etoy -
by ZKP
TRANSLATED MESSAGE:
The global data-network is on everyone's lips. Initiatives that plan
and promote the further extension of the nets in the big style
originate in politics and economy. Goal of this engangement is an
efficiency-oriented and economy- centered utilization of the new
structures of communication. The capacity of these projects is already
proven within a wide range of areas and especially curious people are
working with it yet. However, one can also judge this development
skeptically.
(C) Mark Dery 1996; all rights reserved; reproduction in any medium without author's written permission forbidden.
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.
ReadWritten for Interstanding - Understanding INteractivity conference, Tallinn, Estonia November 23-25, 1995 - RFC Draft 1.1
Humanity has always invested heavily in any scheme that offers escape from the body. And why not? Material reality is such a mess. Some of the earliest "religious" artefacts, such as Neanderthal ochre burials, already suggest a belief in immortality. All modern (i.e. post-paleolithic) religions contain the "Gnostic trace" of distrust or even outright hostility to the body and the "created" world. Contemporary "primitive" tribes and even peasant-pagans have a concept of immortality and of going-outside-the-body (ec-stasy) without necessarily exhibiting any excessive body-hatred. The Gnostic Trace accumulates very gradually (like mercury poisoning) till eventually it turns pathological. Gnostic dualism exemplifies the extreme position of this disgust by shifting all value from body to "spirit". This idea characterizes what we call "civilization".
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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.
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 30TH CONFERENCE OF THE DISRUPTION NETWORK LAB
KUNSTQUARTIER BETHANIEN - BERLIN & STREAMING
[ Archived streaming videos at: https://www.disruptionlab.org/artivism#video ]
How can art and activism be combined to tackle burning social issues, surveillance, unethical corporations and corrupt governments?
A programme of panels, workshops, and artistic productions curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli.
[Originally published in: The New York Times Book Review, 28 October 1984, pp. 1, 40-41.]
gruesse von ELEKTRO
From: Pit Schultz
Status: RO
Techno: Psycho-Social Tumult
Ausgestrahlt im Deutsch-Franzoesischen Kulturkanal ARTE November 1995.
In den fuenfziger Jahren hat Albert Einstein gesagt, dass wir es mitdrei Bomben zu tun haetten. Die erste, die Atombombe, sei bereitsgezuendet. Die zweite sei die Informatikbombe; die dritte, dieBevoelkerungsbombe, werde im 21. Jahrhundert explodieren. Gegenwaertigexplodiert die Informatikbombe. Neue Technologien, insbesondere dieMoeglichenkeiten zur Schaffung virtueller Welten, veraendern Kultur,Politik und Gesellschaft grundlegend. Zu diesem Thema diskutieren heuteabend im Gespraech der Stadtplaner und Philosoph Paul Virilio undFriedrich Kittler, Medienspezialist an der Humboldt Universitaet inBerlin.
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]
Read1. 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.
International public seminar on the new forms of protest and their media, hosted by De
Balie, centre for culture and politics in Amsterdam, on Friday September
30, 2011.
Have you ever heard of the Leica Revolution? No?
A corporate media group has trade-marked the phrase "Radical Media" and
is trying to ban Peace news, New Internationalist, Red Pepper and
others from using it in the title of a conference?
Following a recent Diary item in the Guardian, indymedia is today
reporting on the story that a corporate media group has forced us to
change the name of our conference. Readers are invited to attend a
demonstration outside @Radical Media's London office, Tuesday, 3rd May
2011, 5pm, London W1T 7AA.
If media theory over the last 40 years largely understood media as hopelessly contaminated by capitalism, the quietism implied by this critique also met its challenge in Guattari's concept of 'becoming-media'. Here Clemens Apprich revisits key media political debates to imagine post-media approaches in the age of social media.
ReadIn the United States, fascism presently unfolds as a simulation. The fascist simulation constitutes itself as a pixelated sea of livestreams, images, posts, and comments, circulating widely as its own networked, autonomous model of reality. It is enacted as an ensemble of people, social media platforms, presidential tweets, superspreader events, confederate flags, television chyrons, informatic infrastructures, automatic rifles, toxic masculinities, MAGA hats, racist hashtags, and video game servers. It is fascist ideology reified through consumer technology.
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