Via: martha rosler
i am surprised at Brian Holmes for presenting this document this way,
though I note that your wording, Brian, ultimates begs the question.
A curator with an ethic of solidarity perhaps, but to many readers
I've heard from (since this has been circulating for a week), this
appears to be a case of someone stepping in front of the material
they wish to put before the public and thereby, as they say, making
himself (or his labels) the story.
Perhaps solidarity can be evoked and supported in the viewers by not
predetermining quite so firmly the rhetorical turns that might
accompany it. (Of course, what one discusses in house is different
from what the viewer sees, and the document in question is not part
of an exhibition but a letter circulated out of an impasse...over a
word.)
in soildarity
martha rosler
> This is part of a series of articles Eyal Weizman has published.
> This is with Opendemocracy.org the new urbanism, and its. This is
> something that no wall can contain.
>
> I enjoy Eyal's work because it indexes the kind of power
> structures that are being imposed on the Palestinian lands with a
> dynamic understanding of how these control mechanisms mesh with
> architecture. The other articles Ayal has written were compiled
> in a book entitled: A Civil Occupation: The Politics of Israeli
> Architecture with Rafi Segal
On that topic, Mike Davis recently gave a talk in San Diego about
slums and their relationship to resistance movements. Here is a
partial transcript and an audio link from san diego indymedia:
http://sandiego.indymedia.org/en/2006/05/116000.shtml
"On May 11 in International House's Great Hall at UCSD, urbanist,
author and Professor of History at UC Irvine Mike Davis spoke to
an audience of about 200 people about slums. Citing the UN-Habitat
report, "The Challenge of Slums," Davis outlined the tragic facts
about slums, including 1 billion current slum dwellers, an overlapping
1 billion people with no formal connection to their national or the
global economy, and 2-3 billion people over the next half century
most likely destined for slums. Summarizing his recent book, "Planet
of Slums," Davis argued that slum expansion has reached a limit
- an absence of free squatable land and the declining ability of
slum dwellers to occupy survival niches has given rise to sectarian
violence, child abandonment and other rational responses to desperate
circumstances. He concluded with the hopeful picture of slums as
incubators for burgeoning resistance movements.
Includes audio and partial transcript."
lotu5
Via: "Paul D. Miller"
This is part of a series of articles Eyal Weizman has published.
This is with Opendemocracy.org the new urbanism, and its. This is
something that no wall can contain.
I enjoy Eyal's work because it indexes the kind of power
structures that are being imposed on the Palestinian lands with a
dynamic understanding of how these control mechanisms mesh with
architecture. The other articles Ayal has written were compiled
in a book entitled: A Civil Occupation: The Politics of Israeli
Architecture with Rafi Segal
as the intro at
http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article.jsp?id=2&debateId=45
&articleId=801 goes:
Weizman introduces the experience of territory in the West
Bank, which explodes simple political boundaries and "crashes
three-dimensional space into six dimensions -- three Jewish and
three Arab".
Since the 1967 war, when Israel occupied the West Bank and the
Gaza strip, a colossal project of strategic, territorial and
architectural planning has lain at the heart of the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict.
The landscape and the built environment became the arena of
conflict. Jewish settlements -- state-sponsored islands of
'territorial and personal democracy', manifestations of the
Zionist pioneering ethos -- were placed on hilltops overlooking
the dense and rapidly changing fabric of the Palestinian
cities and villages. 'First' and 'Third' Worlds spread out in
a fragmented patchwork: a territorial ecosystem of externally
alienated, internally homogenised enclaves located next to,
within, above or below each other.
A new understanding of territory had to be developed to govern
the West Bank. The Occupied Territories were no longer seen as a
two-dimensional surface, but as a large threedimensional volume,
layered with strategic, religious and political strata.
New and intricate frontiers were invented, like the temporary
borders later drawn up in the Oslo Interim Accord, under which
the Palestinian Authority was given control over isolated
territorial 'islands', but Israel retained control over the
airspace above them and the sub-terrain beneath.
This process might be described as the 'politics of verticality'.
It began as a set of ideas, policies, projects and regulations
proposed by Israeli state-technocrats, generals, archaeologists,
planners and road engineers since the occupation of the West
Bank, severing the territory into different, discontinuous
layers.
The writer Meron Benvenisti described the process as crashing
"three-dimensional space into six dimensions -- three Jewish and
three Arab". Former US president Bill Clinton sincerely believed
in a vertical solution to the problem of partitioning the Temple
Mount. Settlement Masterplanners like Matityahu Drobless aimed to
generate control from high points.
Ron Pundak, the architect of the Oslo Accords, described
solutions for partitioning the West Bank with a three-dimensional
matrix of roads and tunnels, still on the drawing board, as the
only practical way to divide an undividable territory. And Gilead
Sher, Israeli chief negotiator at Camp David (and a divorce
lawyer) explained it to me as a way of enlarging the 'cake'
before partitioning it.
Over a week, openDemocracy posted Eyal Weizman's extraordinary
series of articles and photo-essays, which fills out this picture
of three-dimensional conflict in devastating detail. These ideas
are extracted from a book he is writing. They offer us a fresh
way of understanding the West Bank in words and pictures.
In the course of the articles, Weizman takes us on a journey
which starts with the hills and valleys of the West Bank
landscape. Reflecting on the significance mountains and valleys
have historically for the Jewish people, he focuses on the recent
mountaintop settlements.
Next he takes us underground to examine the politics of water
and sewage in this contested territory, and the way archaeology
is being pressed into the service of the present (episodes 5
and 6). He then lays out the special case of Jerusalem and the
ongoing battle for its past, above and below ground (episode 9),
before going on to explore the astonishing infrastructure of
bypass roads that weave above and below each other and attempt to
separate the two communities (episode 10).
In his chilling final episode he turns our attention to the way
the Israelis have established control over individual Palestinian
lives, by militarising the airspace over the West Bank.
The series will climax in May with Weizman's definitive new map
of the West Bank patchwork, showing how Israeli and Palestinian
settlements encircle one another. Prepared for the human rights
organization B'tselem, and updating American intelligence maps,
it will be an indispensable aid to understanding the intimacy of
this conflict.
Via: Trebor Scholz
Whitney Biennial 06: An Afterword
Judith Rodenbeck and Trebor Scholz
The articles have been written and the doors of the Whitney
Biennial are now closed.
It is an historical truism in cultural production that after
World War II, but especially after the freedom struggles of
the late 1950s and 1960s, to think of art along traditionalist
lines as devoted to beauty (or even only to itself) became
suspect. More pressing were questions of authority and interest,
of exclusion and inclusion, and critical art practices took on
such post-Duchampian topics as "Who conditions the context in
which artworks are situated and by which they are certified?"
Aesthetics for many became a productive problematic for art
rather than a field delimited by notions of "the beautiful" as
its proper expression; no longer attached to the ineffables of
the beautiful or the sublime, a new aesthetics was, rather,
addressed to the play of cognition and sociality. And this has
been the case in advanced practices of the last 50 years.
Reviews of the Whitney Biennial of 2006, however, found much of
the press up in arms about absence of beauty in the exhibition.
(Though as Calvin Tomkins pointed out in the New Yorker, the
one reliable thing about the Biennial, decade after decade,
has been that Hilton Kramer will object to it on exactly these
grounds.) Many critics writing about this Biennial juxtaposed
the absence of the "pretty" with the presence of collaborative
works, the latter understood as "political" sheerly by virtue of
multiply-credited authors. But is collective or collaborative
production necessarily a) "political" (whatever that means)
and b) therefore un-aesthetic? (And is the "not-beautiful"
necessarily the un-aesthetic? Kant himself wrote that the ugly
could be sublime.) The question of beauty versus politics seems a
smokescreen, or at least a critical misfire.
The question of beauty versus politics assumes that "beauty"
equals aesthetics and does not equal politics. Yet the so-called
"absence of beauty" at the Whitney (and there is plenty of
beauty, actually) was not necessarily due to a presence of
politics. In many of the works on view what was absent all
too often was not only craft and precision and but historical
consciousness; these were overtaken by (relatively) privatized
narratives invested with semi-public anxieties--imagination
for the reality television era. And even the "beautiful"
paintings were more political in this show than the much touted
but utterly dopey Peace Tower, which we can't even think of as
"colossal" in its failure. Aside from its silly siting (for a
real statement it should have been in the middle of Madison
Avenue, blocking traffic and accessible to intervention) this
nominally collaborative piece was clubby and the contributions,
indexed together, came off as puerile and self- rather than
message-centered, presenting as "democratic" and "free speech"
something manipulated, in-crowd, and homogeneous. By contrast,
working thoroughly within the art world and, unlike the Peace
Tower, fully cognizant of that fact, the chocolate appropriations
by Kelley Walker reinserted politics and a level not just
of actuality but of contemporaneity into Warhol's race-riot
silk-screens. Peter Doig's paintings also stood out. And the
Francesco Vezzolis Caligula trailer bears up over repeated
viewings, becoming more and more sinister and hilarious each
time; tired as it may have been after its trip from Venice to New
York it cannot help but win fans.
Was there a different aesthetic that emerged because the show
contained so many collaborative projects? While there were
collectives like Bernadette Corporation, Deep Dish TV Network,
and Critical Art Ensemble in the exhibition, the biennial was
not a call for a collaborative aesthetics. The show merely
acknowledged the fact that collaboration, cooperation, and
consultation are important features of the contemporary cultural
landscape. That such inclusion of collaborative practices or
collectives "stretches conventional definitions of art and artist
even further," as Holland Cotter claimed in the New York Times,
is hard to fathom in 2006. Artists have not just discovered
working together. Where were all those critics who suddenly
discovered that artists collaborate (or even form networks)?
The post-readymade dialectic--between the display-as-art and the
forensic trace--that seems to be driving much art these days was
not only ever-present but seemed in fact to drive this Biennial,
too, in both its selection and its installation, from the pairing
in the Whitney's drab moat of the unfortunate Peace Tower with
a visually and conceptually underwhelming piece by Natalie
Jeremijenko and Phil Taylor to the installation of Francesco
Vezzolis Caligula-as-CSI trailer (complete with velvet cinema
seats) nearby a popcult winnebago and alongside Ed Paschke's
supremely good images of voyeurism. Forensic traces ranged from
accumulations of data to arrays of painted mugshots (the 9/11
crew, dispersed throughout the gallery, anonymous artist) to
photographic techniques (the brilliant "Left Behind" series by
Angela Strassheim) to the list of desiderata for barter (Carolina
Caycedo's art-by-telephone network) to faux pop star obituaries
to the blobs of chewing gum stuck not only on specific works but
also on random walls and artworks.
One might extend the notion of forensics towards the historical,
for this exhibition presents a melancholic autopsy of the 1960s,
from Walker's visually and conceptually smart riffs on Warhol to
Otabenga Jones's strangely arid evocation of the Panther era. In
one of the show-stoppers, DTAOT (Tony Oursler and Conrad, Dan
Graham and Rodney, Laurent Berger, and Japanther) deliver an
autopsy of 1960s hippie culture. While the satirical hippie opera
touches on the artworld's imperative of youth, this is ported
to the present and a certain bitterness is hard to miss. The
biennial did not feature many works that we were crazy about. But
works such as DTAOT's did counter the art world youth obsession
and valued artists who are not the next big thing but have rather
worked for many decades. More extrapolated still would be the
repeated references to Warhol, Bruce Nauman, and Jay deFeo, all
of whom serve as over-strong models for younger artists, along
with the actual inclusion of 1960s bad boys Kenneth Anger, Tony
Conrad, Ira Cohen and 1970s weird girls Sturtevant and Dorothy
Iannone.
What exactly does historical consciousness do? We'd submit that
it's here because that historical work emerged in an era with a
serious political culture and discourse. Some of that historical
work, looked at afresh, now gives forth its culturally critical
secrets in a way that may not have been so clear then--the
intensities of Ed Paschke's painting, for instance, or Tony
Conrad's Flicker are striking. In this regard the strong and
repeated citation in this exhibition of avant-garde music of the
1960s--work that dealt with liminality and limit experiences,
with harmonics and the spatialization of the temporal, with
collective production and experience--seems an interest, at
least on the part of the curators, in exploring experiential
models that have been obscured by the IPO frenzy of the art
market. Yet so much of the reference material for today's young
artists has been obscured in the pedophilic rush to the bank;
artists reinvent the wheel, and usually not very well. And we
live in an era in which mainstream popular music from U2 to the
Strokes and the White Stripes has been largely devoted to the
technical replication of the 1970s sound, while missing the
radical experiential dimension of its production. One of the only
chiefly-sound piece, Jim O'Rourke's "Door," seemed to be largely
opaque to its "viewers," who spent their time clustering at the
entrance of the installation vying for the best static vantage
point from which to watch a slow 3-screen projection rather than
moving around and exploring the acoustic, spatial, physiological
dynamics of the piece.
There were things in "Day for Night" to engage the masses
(contrary to what some critics claimed), from the consistently
narrative photography to the repeated citations of celebrity to
the literal and figurative invocation of graffiti and bubble-gum.
Visually much of the work focused on its own legibility, even
lexicality. This had two aspects: the presence of language,
either written or spoken, as keying device; and the predominance
of figuration, either as bodily representation or as citation.
One was struck by certain repeated motifs that appeared here,
as if the individual artists participated in a hive mind (or
mindlessness): the bunny puppet (recycled now through past works
by Nayland Blake, Pierre Huyghe, and the film Donnie Darko
and here present in photos of pseudo-Satanist ritual and in a
pathetic knock-off of Schwitters Cathedral of Erotic Misery),
the phrase "eat shit and die" (it appeared in works by two
different artists), the bottled excrescence motif (as perfume
and as pickle), the apocalyptic desertification motif (from
conestoga wagon to Unabomber hut to cities in the scrub to the
subtle contribution of the Center for Land Use Interpretation),
the apocalypse itself (not one but two works dealing with the
Rapture), etc. The recurrence of individual riffs is interesting
but irritating; yet more troublesome is their sheer obviousness.
Large exhibitions are 3D visualizations of the social network of
the curators and the artists (and gallerists and curators) they
know. Curators are legitimizers and editors of cultural content;
they can be power-brokers. But what Chrissie Iles and Walker
Art Center deputy director Philippe Vergne did at the Whitney
was much more open, and clearly not about the articulation
of a singular vision. If anything, it seemed clear that the
curators had in mind an exhibition of something other than
the single-author marketable artist: Reena Spaulings and the
Wrong Gallery are complex projects; Sturtevant, and her redo of
Duchamps career, has always been difficult; and the Center for
Land Use Interpretation produces no saleable object. Yet the
institutional commitment here seemed inconsistent.
The biennial recognized the multiple roles that artists take
on today, including that of the curator (Maurizio Cattelan's
Wrong Gallery). But it was hard to overlook the crowding of the
floors (including the Wrong Gallerys contribution, which made
that crowding an aesthetic gesture). Curatorial decisions behind
juxtapositions in the exhibition were often hard to figure out;
there were perhaps just too many pieces in the show. (Globe
and Mail: What a bloody mess.) Often the juxtaposition of
works appeared nonsensical; in other cases, such as the decision
to place Jutta Koethers installation of pathetic disco-black
panels next to the work of one of her historical models, Steve
Parrino, the combined result was a deeply desultory slog. There
were a number of collaborative works, but this show was hardly
"long on" collaboration. The very few new media works were only
awkward visual addenda to the spectacle of the styrofoam graffiti
Stonehenges; sound from one installation leaked over into another
(we were uncertain for a long time if the Paul Chan piece was
supposed to be silent). The screen-based work by Carolina Caycedo
used the computer as documentation device for a mobile barter
project. Her piece and the superb work of The Center for Land Use
Interpretation are hidden away in the maze of the exhibition.
Squeezed into corners near an exit, overlooked by most, was their
computer kiosk featuring the organization's 30 exhibits and many
critical lectures, tours and publications on various uses of land
over the past 12 years. CLUI's contribution to this biennial, one
of the two working computers in the entire exhibition, documented
their research and art initiatives. The computer kiosk served as
archival apparatus. The performative artwork itself could not be
shown.
At the same time, some of the more politically charged pieces
were stashed away near toilets, the museum's gift store, or
the stairwell, or neutralized by curatorial sequencing. While
this might have been a self-conscious curatorial attempt to
enliven the margins, it became especially painful with Deep
Dish TV's very confrontational and amazing presentation of
guerilla documentary, which was, ironically, placed between the
knick-knack stands of the museum shop and the banks of toilets
in the basement. If anything, this biennial fueled suspicions
about the isolationist artworld and the new morphology of the
white cube. The display of Richard Serra's Abu Ghraib protest
poster as an oil drawing alongside Monica Majoli's gorgeous-and
hyper-aestheticized images of intense bondage (and across from a
bathetic photo-memorial to Matthew Shephard) runs serious risk
reducing it to an object of what Susan Sontag called "fascinating
fascism"discharging the political force it had when it was
distributed as a multiple, its original display form. And Jerry
Saltz, writing in the Village Voice, pointed out that only 25
percent of the individual artists on view in the Biennial were
women. This seems lame and weird in 2006; while the nod to
identity politics in the exhibition was strong and clear this
actual gender imbalance nevertheless indicates that the Whitney
is still fighting the battles of the late 1960s--another argument
for the inclusion of all that "historical" work.
Biennials are easy targets and every biennial gets ritually
trashed. Berlinale, Liverpool Biennial, Taipei Biennial, Havana
Biennial, Sharjah International Biennial, the Texas Biennial,
the Istanbul Biennial, Capetown, Kwangju, Sao Paolo.... Every
larger city seems to have its own biennial these days. Phillip
Vergne himself pointed out that "there are now over 200 biennials
in the world." New York itself has another biennial (the Free
Biennial) and the Whitney Biennial even has a critical clone
of its website. This rich landscape gives an event like the
Whitney Biennial much less of an exclusive hold on cultural
capital. Whitney director Adam Weinberg says that the museum
has been rethinking its mission as a museum of "American" art
in a number of complex ways. As for the Biennial, would it
be possible for any show to be an adequate survey? We don't
think so. Either you'd get something radically incoherent--an
adequate survey of art activities using, say, a statistical
model of distribution--or you'd get something coherent--a
possibly adequate survey of a specific tier, arena, or niche
of art activities. The curators acknowledged the limits of a
best-of national biennial by expanding it to a more international
focus while narrowing its thematic orientation. "Day for Night"
juxtaposed internationally circulating artists, familiar from
biennials worldwide, with others who had not shown in museums
before (but dont lack gallery representation). At the same time,
a topical show like this biennial cannot be simultaneously a
signature survey, and the decision to turn "Day for Night" into a
thematic exhibition was fortunate given that the concept of the
Biennial as national survey has outlived itself.
And then theres a broader set of definitional and technical
problems: the media art scene, for instance, is still only
awkwardly incorporated in such museum spectacles. If one holds
this biennial to its expressed mission of being the "signature
survey measuring the mood of contemporary American art" as its
website states, then one may wonder why a significant part of the
contemporary art landscape is left in the dark: digital art, or
what some call "new media art." The show highlighted video works
(32 artists featured videos) and demonstrated a strong focus on
photography (17 artists working in that medium were included). Is
the demand for inclusion of new media art unfair as the inclusion
of computer-mediated work was so clearly not the set goal of
this exhibition? Are conferences, media art festivals or art +
technology spaces such as Transmediale, the Subtle Technologies
Festival, the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts (ISEA), or
the Beall Center at University of California Irvine the only
venues in which computer-mediated artworks can rock out, isolated
from the rest of the art world? Or do "new media" simply need
new venues? The problem is amplified by commentators who, like
The New York Times' Carol Vogel, don't acknowledge the existence
of anything but traditional media when stating that "There will
be a fairly equal representation among mediums: painting and
sculpture, photography, film, video and performance."
The relative absence of new media art is striking for two
reasons. First, the contemporary experience of those visiting
this exhibition is deeply enmeshed with technologies and the
Internet going far beyond TV or cinema screens. In 2006 it is
hard to ignore the wealth of cultural production in the field
of new media. The current explosion of art projects dealing
with social networking (Golan Levin, Chris Barr), information
visualization (Casey Reas, Lisa Jevbratt), or situated locative
technologies (Julian Bleeker) is impossible to overlook. Second,
the Whitney has a history of committing to computer-mediated
art practices. In 2001, the museum put on two exhibitions:
"BitStreams" and "Data Dynamics." The Whitney Museum also
features the "Artport" website, a hub for "new media art," which
is programmed by Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts Christiane
Paul. The larger question is why able curators like Paul are not
more central to institutions like the Whitney. They should be at
least consulted when curating high-budget exhibitions that set
out to represent the American contemporary cultural landscape.
It isn't interesting to say the Biennial is not a good survey.
But it is worth noting that we are so painfully aware of this
fact these days. In the not-so-distant past artists not from New
York had a terrible time getting into the show. This year there's
a cracker from Texas, lots of work from California, photos from
the Midwest, etc; the curators are both European and the linchpin
exhibit, Pierre Huyghes film/installation on the groundfloor, is
by a Frenchman. Another, more probing question to ask about these
exhibitions is to what kind of cultural capital a show like the
Whitney Biennial bestows on works, be they single-author objects
or collaborative and multi-author projects, and how does that
capital get used? To what degree do we need empathy and shared
insight into particular art discourses--that is, accumulated
cultural capital--to "appreciate" the aesthetic when we see it?
And more broadly, to what extent is the aesthetic itself as a
category begging (yet again) for redefinition--or, perhaps more
to the point, revectorizing? Will Deep Dish Television suddenly
acquire cultural cachet and a fat endowment? We doubt it, but if
it did it might be a useful thing, beautiful or not.
Via: Brian Holmes
Here is a tightly argued text, qualifying an important act,
by a rare category of the human species: a curator with an
ethics of solidarity. - BH
Chris Gilbert - statement on resigning 5/21/06
I made the decision to resign as Matrix Curator on April 28,
but my struggles with the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film
Archive over the content and approach of the projects in the
exhibition cycle "Now-Time Venezuela: Media Along the Path
of the Bolivarian Process"
(http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibits/nowtime/index.html)
go back quite a few months. In particular the museum
administrators -- meaning the deputy directors and senior
curator collaborating, of course, with the public relations
and audience development staff -- have for some time been
insisting that I take the idea of solidarity, revolutionary
solidarity, out of the cycle. For some months, they have
said they wanted "neutrality" and "balance" whereas I have
always said that instead my approach is about commitment,
support, and alignment -- in brief, taking sides with and
promoting revolution.
I have always successfully resisted the museum's attempts to
interfere with the projects (and you will see that the ideas
of alignment, support, and revolutionary solidarity are
written all over the "Now-Time" projects part 1 & part 2 --
they are present in all the texts I have generated and as a
consequence in almost all of the reviews). In the museum's
most recent attempt to alter things, the one that
precipitated my resignation, they proposed to remove the
offending concept from the Now-Time Part 2 introductory text
panel (a panel which had already gone to the printer). Their
plan was to replace the phrase "in solidarity" with
revolutionary Venezuela with a phrase like "concerning"
revolutionary Venezuela -- or another phrase describing a
relation that would not be explicitly one of solidarity.
I threatened to resign and terminate the exhibition, since,
first of all, revolutionary solidarity is what I believe in
-- the essential concept in the "Now-Time" project cycle --
but secondly it is obviously unfair to invite participants
such as Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler or groups such as
Catia TVe to a project that has one character (revolutionary
solidarity) and then change the rules of the game on them a
few weeks before the show opens (so that they become mere
objects of examination or investigation). At first, my
threat to resign and terminate the show availed nothing.
Then on April 28, I wrote a letter stating that I was in
fact resigning and my last day of work would be two weeks
from that day, which was May 12, two days before the
"Now-Time Part 2: Revolutionary Television in Catia" opening
(http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibits/nowtimept2/index.html).
I assured them that the show could not go forward without
me. In response to this decisive action -- and surely out of
fear that the show which had already been published in the
members magazine would not happen -- the institution
restored my text panel to the way I had written it. Having
won that battle, though at the price of losing my position,
I decided to go forward with the show, my last one.
One thing that should make evident how extreme and erratic
the museum's actions were is that the very same sentence
that was found offensive ("a project in solidarity with the
revolutionary process in contemporary Venezuela") is the
exact sentence that is used for the first Now-Time Venezuela
exhibition text panel that still hangs in the Matrix gallery
upstairs. That show is on view for one more week as I write.
The details of all this are important though, of course, its
general outlines, which play out the familiar patterns of
class struggle, are of greater interest. The class interests
represented by the museum, which are above all the interests
of the bourgeoisie that funds it, have two (related) things
to fear from a project like mine: (1) of course,
revolutionary Venezuela is a symbolic threat to the US
government and the capitalist class that benefits from that
government's policies, just as Cuba is a symbolic threat,
just as Nicaragua was, and just as is any country that tries
to set its house in order in a way that is different from
the ideas of Washington and London -- which is primarily to
say Washington and London's insistence that there is no
alternative to capitalism.
I must emphasize that the threat is only symbolic; in the
eyes of the US government and the US bourgeoisie, it sets a
"bad" and dangerous example of disobedience for other
countries to follow, but of course the idea that such
examples represent a military threat to the US (would that
it were the case) is simply laughable; (2) the second
threat, which is probably the more operational one in the
museum context, is that much of the community is in favor of
the "Now-Time" projects -- the response to the first
exhibition is enormous and the interest in the second is
also very high. That response and interest exposes the fact
that the museum, the bourgeois values it promotes via the
institution of contemporary art (contemporary art of the
past 30 years is really in most respects simply the cultural
arm of upper-class power) are not really those of any class
but its own. Importantly the museum and the bourgeoisie will
always deny the role of class interests in this: they will
always maintain that the kinds of cultural production they
promote are more difficult, smarter, more sophisticated --
hence the lack of response to most contemporary art is,
according to them, about differences in education and
sophistication rather than class interest. That this kind of
claim is obscurantist and absurd is something the present
exhibitions make very clear: the work of Catia TVe, which is
created by people in the popular (working-class)
neighborhoods of Caracas, is far more sophisticated than
what comes out of the contemporary art of the Global North.
The same could be said for the ideas discussed by the
Venezuelan factory workers in the Ressler and Azzellini film
that is shown Now-Time Part 1
(http://www.ressler.at/content/view/93/lang,en_GB). (Of
course, it is not because these works and the thoughts in
them are more sophisticated that we should attend to them;
what I am saying is simply that it is clearly an evasion and
false to dismiss anti-bourgeois cultural production -- work
that aligns with the interests of working class people -- on
grounds of its being unsophisticated.)
To return to the museum: I believe that the enormous
response to the "Now-Time" cycle -- there were 180 visitors
to the March 26 panel discussion that opened "Now-Time" part
1 and if you google "Now-Time Venezuela" you get over 700
hits -- put the class interests that stand by and promote
contemporary art in danger, exposed them a bit. I suppose
some concern about this may have given a special edge to the
museum's failed efforts to alter my projects.
I think it is important to be clear about the facts that
precipitated my resignation: that is, the struggle over the
wording of the text panel, which fit into months of struggle
over the question of solidarity and alignment with a
revolutionary political agenda. That issue is discussed
above. However, it is also important to understand the
context. Again, it is too weak to say that museums, like
universities, are deeply corrupt. They are. (And in my view
the key points to discuss regarding this corruption are (1)
the museum's claim to represent the public's interests when
in fact serving upper-class interests and parading a
carefully constructed surrogate image of the public; (2) the
presence of intra-institutional press and marketing
departments that really operate to hold a political line
through various control techniques, only one of which is
censorship; finally (3) the presence of development
departments that, in mostly hidden ways, favor and flatter
rich funders, giving the lie to even the sham notion of
public responsibility that the museum parades). However, to
describe museums and other cultural institutions as simply
if deeply corrupt is, as I said, too weak in that it both
holds out the promise of their reform and it ignores the
larger imperialist structures that make their corruption an
inevitable upshot and reflection of the exploitive political
and social system of which they form a part. Such
institutions will go on reflecting imperialist capitalist
values, will celebrate private property and deny social
solidarity, and will maintain a strict silence about the
control of populations at home and the destruction of
populations abroad in the name of profit, until that
imperialist system is dismantled. Importantly, it will not
be dismantled by cultural efforts alone: a successful reform
of a cultural institution here or there would at best result
in "islands" of sanity that would most likely operate in a
negative way -- as imaginary and misleading "proof" that
conditions are not as bad as they are.
In fact, with conditions as they are, a different strategy
is required: there should be disobedience at all levels;
disruptions and explosions of the kind that I, together with
a small group of allies inside the museum, have created are
also useful on a symbolic level. However, the primary
struggle and the only struggle that will result in a
significant change would be one that works directly to
transform the economic and political base. This would be a
struggle aiming to bring down the US government and its
imperialist system through highly organized efforts.
We live in the midst of a fascist imperialism -- there is no
other way to describe the system that the US has created and
that exercises such control through terror over populations
both inside and outside. History has shown that to make
"deals" or "compromises" with fascism avails nothing.
Instead a radical and daily intransigence is required.
Fascism operates to destroy life. It installs and operates
on the logic of the camp on all levels, including culture.
In the face of that logic, which holds life as nothing,
compromises and deals at best buy time for the aggressor and
symbolic capital for the aggressor. One should have no
illusions: until capitalism and imperialism are brought
down, cultural institutions will go on being, in their
primary role, lapdogs of a system that spreads misery and
death to people everywhere on the planet. The fight to
abolish that system completely and build one based on
socialism must remain our exclusive and constant focus.
Chris Gilbert
Via: "tobias c. van Veen"
::::::: CHANGE OF LIVE STREAM :::::::::
(sorry, SAT gave up and went to QuickTime...)
live stream -- en direct de Montral
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bonjour Nettime,
We are broadcasting the Nettime_North_America gathering live from:
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[ http://theupgrade.sat.qc.ca ]
++++++++++++++++
contenu libre / tactical media / open source
hacktivism / medias hackers / no borders / sans frontires
VJs / DJs / net.art / net-performance
grassroots strategies / pense rhizomatique
techno-nomadisme / NETTIME.ORG!
===
[upgrade]
LUpgrade est une organisation autonome, internationale et rhizomatique de
rendez-vous mensuels pour la culture numrique et les arts technologiques.
Upgrade Montral bnficie du soutien gnreux de la Socit des arts
technologiques [SAT], ainsi que de ses rseaux formant Upgrade
International, des divers partenaires avec lesquels il collabore, des
artistes faisant don de leur temps, et de l'nergie bnvole de son
triumvirate organisateur.
http://theupgrade.sat.qc.ca | http://www.theupgrade.net
The Upgrade is an autonomous, international and grassroots organisation of
monthly gatherings for digital culture and the technology arts. Upgrade
Montreal is generously supported by The Society for Arts and Technology
(SAT), through the networks of the Upgrade International, the various
partners we work with, the artists who donate their time and the personal
energies of its organiser triumvirate.
---- bisous from the triumvirate:
tobias c. van Veen
Sophie Le-Phat Ho
Anik Fournier
tobias c. van Veen _Concept Engineer -
Director, Upgrade Montral
http://theupgrade.sat.qc.ca | @ : +
(SAT) Society for Arts and Technology
Montral, Canada | http://www.sat.qc.ca -
Via: "Miguel Afonso Caetano"
Dear Nettimers:
I have recently finished a M.A. dissertation about
Tactical Media that I've talked about here a few years ago
(www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0311/msg00063.html).
I'm sending you here the English version of the abstract
and the table of contents. In the thesis, I make some
criticisms of the concept of tactical media in terms of
its current validity. Also, in the second part I cover in
detail some projects of the vibrant brazilian tactical media
scene: Metareciclagem (www.metareciclagem.org) - who has
received an honorary mention in this year's Ars Electronica
(www.aec.at/en/prix/honorary2006.asp) and the now deceased
Projeto Metfora (http://ogum.metareciclagem.org/metafora).
Since Nettime's 10th aniversary meeting is happening right now
in Montreal, I think it would be good to start a debate here in
the list about the actual relevance of tactical media in the
age of Web 2.0, which has embraced (co-opted?) much of the same
DIY ethos in places like Flickr and MySpace. On the other side,
we're also living in the midst of the "state of exception"/War
against terrorism where every subversive activity is considered
suspicious - the bioterrorism paranoia case against CAE.
Judging from the brazilian example, I think that it is becoming
more adequate to think about tactical media in peripheral
countries like Brazil and India where there's a sense of more
severe urgency in social transformation, of reappropriation of
technology by the people.
Best regards from Portugal,
Miguel Caetano
Technologies of Resistance:
Transgression and Solidarity in Tactical Media
Miguel Afonso Caetano
Resulting from the convergence between media, technology, art
and politics, tactical media are a set of cultural practices
and a theoretical movement which started in Europe during the
first half of the 90s, having spread to North America until
the end of the millenium and, afterwards, to the rest of the
world. Initially taking advantage of video camcorders but also,
later, of digital technologies such as CD-ROMs and the Internet,
the producer of this kind of media acknowledges himself as as
a hybrid, performing simultaneously the role of an artist,
activist, theorist and technician.
These subversive and/or creative uses of information and
communication technologies by individuals who normally don't
have access to them are characterized by experimentalism,
ephemerality, flexibility, irony and amateurship. Based on the
distinction between tactics and strategies developed by Michel
de Certeau and continued by David Garcia and Geert Lovink, this
dissertation examines the way tactical media present themselves
as "media of crisis, critique and opposition". By applying
a theoretical analysis of some collectives, we intend to
demonstrate that the protest tactics of these media production
forms represent a position of permanent struggle against a
concrete and explicit opponent (nation-state, supranational
institution or transnational corporation).
After addressing the dangers that this antagonist model of media
as a weapon of resistance can lead to, we propose an alternative
perspective of tactical media built on an empirical analysis of
two brazilian projects, Metfora and MetaReciclagem. Finally,
we argue that these and other grassroots initiatives adapt the
practices of subversion and resistance visible in the activist
collectives of developed countries to the local settings of
a peripheral country like Brazil. By fostering technological
reappropriation for social transformation, these groups unleash
the creative and communication capacities of these communities,
towards their self-sustainability and autonomy.
Keywords: tactical media, strategies, media activism, alternative
media, hacker, free software, technological reappropriation,
recycling, Brazil.
Table of Contents
Introduction
9
Methodological and Epistemological Notes
12
Dissertation Plan
17
1 - Elements for The History and Characterization of Tactical Media
21
1.1 - Genesis of The Movement
21
1.2 - Main Definitions
25
1.3 - Theoretical Approaches
27
1.4 - Distinction Between Alternative Media and Tactical Media
35
2 - Genealogy of Informational Mobilizations
42
2.1 - 70s and 80s
45
2.2 - 90s
51
2.3 - Mediactivism: From The Right to Information to The Right to The
Self-Management of Communication 54
3 - The Influence of The Free Software Movement and of The Hacker
Ethic 60
3.1 - The Free Software Development Process
69
3.2 - The Hacker Ethic
72
4 - Tactics and its Theorerical Metaphors
75
4.1 - Tactics and Strategies in Michel de Certeau
76
4.2 - Tactics as Dtournement
79
4.3 - Tactics as Rhizome
83
4.4 - Tactics as Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ)
87
4.5 - Tactics as Swarming
92
4.6 - Tactics as Multitude
98
4.7 - Tactics as Smart Mob
103
5 - Tactical Media Practices
110
5.1 - Culture Jamming: Semiological Guerrilla
110
5.2 - Hacktivism: Cyberspace's Counter-power
117
5.3 - Artivism: Crtique and Subversion in net.art
129
5.4 - The Indymedia Information Network: Open-Source Journalism
144
5.4.1 - IMC-Portugal: A Small Case Study
152
6 Contributions For a Critique of The Concept
168
6.1 - "The Alt.Everything of Culture and Politics"
168
6.2 - The Specter of Cooptation by Capital
170
6.3 - The Eternal Return of The Technological Sublime
172
6.4 - The Impossible Subversion of Media
175
6.5 - The Rhetorics of The Enemy and The Terrorist Metaphor
178
SECOND PART
1 - The Brasilian Digital "Jeitinho": "Gambiarras", "Mutires" and
"Puxadinhos" 188
1.1 - Mdia Ttica
189
1.2 Contratv
195
1.3 Re:combo
195
1.4 - Free Radios: Rdio Muda
196
1.5 CMI-Brasil
198
1.6 - Brazil, A Hacker Nation
201
2 - Metfora Project: Chaos and Order in a Collective Intelligence
205
2.1 Events and Projects
210
2.2 - The Participation in Midia Ttica Brasil
216
2.3 The Attempt to Create a NGO and The End
217
2.4 - Leadership and Motivation in a "Chaorder"
222
3 - MetaReciclagem: Reappropriation of Technology for Social
Transformation 226
3.1 - The Replication of MetaReciclagem's Methology
233
4 - Analysis of Survey Data
239
4.1 - Profile of Metfora's and MetaReciclagem's Collaborators
239
4.2 - Opinions Towards Metfora and MetaReciclagem
243
4.2.1 - Political Motivations of The Projects
243
4.2.2 - Distinction Between Digital Inclusion and Social
Reappropriation of Technology 244
4.2.3 - Evaluation of Strenghts and Weaknesses
247
4.2.4 - Personal Visions About Metfora and MetaReciclagem
249
Final Conclusion
251
Bibliography
258
Via: "tobias c. van Veen"
live stream -- en direct de Montral
-->
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<--
=====================
MUTEK & UPGRADE MONTREAL PRSENTENT:
+++++++++++++++++++++
NETTIME_NORTH_AMERICA_GATHERING
NETTIME_AMERIQUE_DU_NORD
CRITICAL PRACTICE RESUSCITATION (CPR)
[ http://theupgrade.sat.qc.ca ]
++++++++++++++++++
bonjour Nettime,
We are broadcasting the Nettime_North_America gathering live from:
-->
http://icecast2.sat.qc.ca/nettime.ogg.m3u
<--
Please use VLC player for Mac / Windows / Linux.
[ http://theupgrade.sat.qc.ca ]
++++++++++++++++
contenu libre / tactical media / open source
hacktivism / medias hackers / no borders / sans frontires
VJs / DJs / net.art / net-performance
grassroots strategies / pense rhizomatique
techno-nomadisme / NETTIME.ORG!
===
[upgrade]
L'Upgrade est une organisation autonome, internationale et rhizomatique de
rendez-vous mensuels pour la culture numrique et les arts technologiques.
Upgrade Montral bnficie du soutien gnreux de la Socit des arts
technologiques [SAT], ainsi que de ses rseaux formant Upgrade
International, des divers partenaires avec lesquels il collabore, des
artistes faisant don de leur temps, et de l'nergie bnvole de son
triumvirate organisateur.
http://theupgrade.sat.qc.ca | http://www.theupgrade.net
The Upgrade is an autonomous, international and grassroots organisation of
monthly gatherings for digital culture and the technology arts. Upgrade
Montreal is generously supported by The Society for Arts and Technology
(SAT), through the networks of the Upgrade International, the various
partners we work with, the artists who donate their time and the personal
energies of its organiser triumvirate.
---- bisous from the triumvirate:
tobias c. van Veen
Sophie Le-Phat Ho
Anik Fournier
tobias c. van Veen _Concept Engineer -
Director, Upgrade Montral
http://theupgrade.sat.qc.ca | @ : +
(SAT) Society for Arts and Technology
Montral, Canada | http://www.sat.qc.ca -
Via: "Jerneja Rebernak"
Art and the City
A conference on postwar interactions with the urban realms
Amsterdam 11-12 May 2006
www.artandthecity.nl
Report by Jerneja Rebernak
Ongoing transformations of the city after the leftover
destructiveness of the Second World War led to a fast conceptual
remaking of physical spaces from the perspectives of architects,
urbanists and designers. However, artists, filmmakers and
institutions helped in carrying on representations about the
collective imaginaries of the city. In this context, it becomes
important to dig into the history of artistic urban activity
from which to understand cities as networks in terms of public
space. This conference was speaking in tones of marking current
theories and research on the urban realm, raging from Isidore
Isou lettrist movement to issues of urban queerscape, elaborating
on Robert Rauschenberg's perspectives on the transformation of
New York City in the 1950s to images of New Babylon and street
art. Understanding the changing role of contemporary urban
geographycal landscape needs an emphasis in conceptualising
and imagining public spheres and spaces as both utopian although
virtual, but visible.
Reimagining a public sphere
Most western cities transformed into commodified and privatised
urban spaces, which caused a declining role of utopian agoras on
a global scale. In his keynote lecture, Malcolm Miles (University
of Plymouth) remained cynical about the existence of a public
space as a physical site, which he himself defines as a romantic
concept, stressing the impossibility of reclaiming something
that has never actually existed. Eventually, their existence is
rather confined in small self-sufficient communities outside
dominant societies where a functional public space can be formed
and sustained. Indeed the urban space is being marketised and
all spaces tend to look the same under global capitalism. Public
spaces depict identity formation under symbolisms of images and
names. He cited Zygmut Bauman, who has argued in his book Liquid
Modernity that the role of critical theory is to defend the
public realm, to seek a reflourishment of the public sphere. In
this case, Miles looks out for metaphorical spaces, starting
his quest for (un)existing public sphere. The iconic images
of the video screen placed in squares create a public media
space, however its content is most of the time only dedicated to
advertising messages to be absorbed by the passing public. Since
Nancy Fraser defines public sphere in terms of the exclusion
of performativity from the standpoint of gender and property,
the metaphorical space that Miles is looking for happens to be
laying in the image of the soviet kitchen, its role representing
a transitional space between the public and the private where
underground and alternative activity literally provoked dominant
status quo. It is in this light that he highlights spaces of
autonomy, like the neighbourhood district of Res Publica in
Vilnius or the learning processes inside rural communities in
Rhajastan, where group activity is shaping the formation of a
new logic of public sphere. In the conclusion of his speech, he
opened up a positive light on existing public spheres outside
the old patterns of residence of the public sphere. It is in the
formation of networks, by sharing knowledge and solidarity that
creates room for an existing public sphere, that new patterns can
be discovered in the micro public spheres around the globe.
New York into Art
In this session, artistic production as well as personal
engagement on social relations in New York City were presented
from the worlds of Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, David
Wojnarowicz and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Robert S. Mattison
(Lafayette College) depicted the perspective of the artist
Robert Rauschenberg on the reshaping of the South Street
Seaport in the New York of the '50s. This area has went under
major transformation in order to become the new financial
district of New York city, with skyscrapers becoming its
symbol icons. This city planning created more homogenisation
and have erased spaces for creativity and artistic production
around the most dynamic city areas. He defines Rauschenberg's
artistic production as having a critical viewpoint on these
dramatic interventions in the urban area. Rauschenberg uses
building material and debris on canvas, which, as Mattison
concludes, represents an antitotalitarian gesture towards the
city programming establishment. His use of construction material
shows us his close relation between ideas of a declining
urban diversity in the city. His perspective on the evolution
towards abstract planning from above can be found in Jane
Jacobs' description of the concept of new psychogeographies of
urban space in her book: The death and life of great American
cities from which Rauschenberg and the whole neighbourhood
artistic production (also John Cage and Merce Cunningham) took
inspiration. In the second presentation for this session, Joshua
A. Shannon (Univ. of Maryland) talked about the artist Donald
Judd and the postmodernisation of New York. The artist uses
minimalistic squares and plexiglass boxes, which resembles the
actual industrial forms of the city. His artwork is defined as
literalism in art, where shapes and forms don't stand for any
kind of metaphor or symbolic expression of reality. It is in
the close similarity with skyscrapers that Judd's work receives
acknowledgments, not to forget the cubical shapes of shipment
containers. It is also in the atmospheres of office design,
where geometrical lines separate spaces and where abstract
lines creates the postmodernisation of New York city, which is
reflected through Judd's untitled pieces.
Urban queerscapes
Royce W. Smith (Wichita State University) emphasised in his
presentation the art of David Wojnarowicz (born in Red Bank, New
Yersey, 1954) and his focus on the representation of bodies in
the urban space, which often through their marginality escape
the lights of dominant social activities. His writings have a
perpetuating angle of thinking about the private being contrasted
with the public, which always carries notions of control. Smith
directed his attention to photographs taken in the late 1970s,
where Wojnarowicz started to use techniques of photomontage
where he questions the licit and illicit boundaries of dominant
and queer bodies inside urban streets, decaying buildings and
private atmospheres. This intervention, if so we could call it,
represents a private intrusion of his body into spaces like
teashops, where he is a guest. One part of the series of those
photographs illustrates himself walking the streets of New York
in a mask of Arthur Rimbaud's young face. Rimbaud's juvenile
rebelliousness and his illuminating talent resembled the artist's
own experience, such as his vagabondage and his early discovered
homosexuality. In fact, Wojnarowicz begins his exploration of
spaces such as the street zone of movies, on one hand those
that shows porn and the classic film industry flicks. It is
in this space that he is being photographed, showing his body
on the side of the street where porn is being shown, making a
statement against the normative body. The series of photographs
closes dramatically with the author being photographed in empty
buildings and ends with him shooting drugs in the toilet. It was
in this pessimistic view about the impossibility of achieving
recognition that Wojnarowicz chose to comment on his own radical
erasure in his further artwork. He writes his own manifesto
of the impossibility to escape the exclusion he receives as a
homosexual. He narrates his own experience, which he galvanised
in words, pictures and objects, outside his own privateness.
Dcollage: Hains' aesthetics of action
Hannah Feldman (Nothwestern University) is currently writing
her book Art during War: Visible Space and the Aesthetics of
Action, Paris 1956/2006 and gave a presentation on the exhibition
La France Dchire (1961) of the artist Raymond Hains. In the
contest of the structures of the Empire as a political entity,
Feldman argues that inside public spaces culture, political
identity and the possibilities for alternative publics that
exclude colonial structures are being created. It was during
the period of colonial dispute over Algeria that in the streets
of Paris an unconscious and collaborative spirit engaged in
contesting the political engagement through claiming the right
to expression in the city. Hains actively polemicised the role
of nationalism and closely engaged with discourses on the
Algerian conflict. In addition, Hains' action of dcollage worked
to overturn the role of mass media, since the public sphere
in the urban geography was visibly declining. He collected
torn political posters from the streets of Paris and combined
them with a technique called dcollage. Hains' work, strongly
motivated by the massification of advertisement, was exhibited
inside galleries and museums, despite the fact those artworks
were not corresponding to regular art objects. The artists
made the forgotten and invisible Algerian conflict legible
through his work, which remained out of the public discourse
in France. Hains' new visual language proliferated into the
French intellectual scene, at the same moment as Debord, who
acknowledged the work of Hains, engages with the concept of the
society of spectacle. Hannah Feldman engaged with Hains political
interventions as vivid examples of the emerging culture that
takes an active stand in the dominion of the privatised public
spheres. She cites Fanon, for whom the location of culture is
to be found in public action. Furthermore, it is inside the
inscription of action that he finds the truth. This model of
cultural action interrupts the normative paths of action in the
public space. Public action becomes a struggle for sovereignty of
representing people that have been yet unrepresented or found in
the shadows of the public discourse. She defines this forms of
interventions as aesthetics of action, which give another angle
to the debate of the public sphere, a positive one, where through
political and cultural action subjects are formed.
A radical take on the public sphere: Constant's New Babylon
Lara Schrijver (Technische Universiteit Delft) presented the
idea of an aesthetic collective through the work of Constant
Nieuwenhuis, one of the innovators of Unitary Urbanism. He
understands creation, mobility and play as being the central
activity of the Homo Ludens (Man the Player). It is this creative
individual that will build a city, the New Babylon, which
in return will allow and create a new type of creativity.
Constant unites politics and art in a totality, which he hoped
would create a new being that does not separate space as a
psychic dimension from the space of action. His drawings and
architectural sketches of the new city are based on the idea of
socialisation and automation of the production, where the nomadic
existence and the unnecessesity of work form this new social
context. The formation of the New Babylon is a revolutionary
and progressive idea that aroused the interest of Guy Debord
and the Situationist International, in fact until 1961 Constant
was active part of the movement. They found mutual interest in
the concept of individuation, where man would be liberated from
everyday work and would reveal his playful human nature in this
nihilistic environment. In this environment, collectivity would
maintain the urban, which will allow individual identities to be
transformed in active as well as creative beings. In contemporary
aesthetic community, moments of association are fragmented and
superficial. In this prototypical space of the New Babylon,
Bauman's ethical community or Tnnies idea of Gemeinschaft
(community) would become crystallised. Lara Schrijver searched
for examples that would nowadays illustrated the idea of New
Babylon. Could the architectural shapes of squares and public
spaces reintegrate this model of viewing a new public sphere
or should public spheres be searched for elsewhere? She sees
the proliferation of New Babylons in the digital space, where
public forums reflect the idea of the individual flexibility in
the creation of mutual as well as singular environments. She
finished her presentation with an enveloped vision of punctual
architectural interventions that will allow a recreation of
communities in public spaces as it is now happening in virtual
networks.
Logo Parc: design projects for the Zuidas area
Daniel van der Velden (graphic designer, Jan van Eyck Academie)
illustrated new design solutions for the Zuidas area, the
business district in Amsterdam South that will soon be built in
a shape of a modern airport city. He acknowledged the many
communicative layers that exist in the city. These layers can
be used by governments and market, which regulates them. There
are less and less possibilities free spaces for communication.
Cities are increasingly becoming 'furniturised' in order to play
an active role in the public space and communicate you need a
big budget. Van der Velden communicates a necessity to express
disagreements in the public space; public spaces where we can all
agree to disagree and to contest forms of power. It means that
these signs of possible accidents in the public space would
communicate their spirit of an open society, a democracy. Some of
the ideas that emerged from the team working on the concept of
Logo Parc are indoor advertising, corporate graffiti as well as
the reintegration of historical monuments inside these areas. The
idea is to build a communicative forest that would reflect the
current spirit of privatised communication in order to critique
branding and the limitation of access (for the homeless for
example) in the new regulated cities.
Jerneja Rebernak
jerneja99(at)gmail.com
Via: Mel Herdon
Today Amnesty International and The Observer newspaper launches a
campaign on internet repression... Their featured case for taking
action, is Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist, who was sentenced to 10
years' hard labour for using the internet to tell people newspapers
were being restricted in their coverage of the anniversary of the
Tiananmen Square democracy protests. Yahoo! gave information to the
authorities that was used in evidence for his conviction.
There is an action on Yahoo! in the campaign, and further actions to be
included periodically over the duration of the campaign. Those
interested who have blogs and sites can also publicise the campaign
using a neat little 'fragment' of suppressed information - a great way
to undermine the very nature of censorship by spreading the content of
censored sites innocuously across the globe.
For those who just want to register their voice, there's the usual
pledge...
campaign site http:www.irrepressible.info
articles in The Observer:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/humanrights/story/0,,1784725,00.html
yours
Mel
