nk...another aspect of interest is the way in which the financial realm in itself is a creative act, and artful...with all of the discussion revolving around the perception/reading parallax, I wonder how people in the artistic/academic community may not perceive/read financial creativity as art at all...I suspect such financial activity is a form of art, which contains all of the aspirations, triumphs and failures that any art project may enable, no?
nikos Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org ----- Original Message ---- From: nick knouf <[email protected]> To: -empyre- <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2009 1:07:11 PM Subject: [-empyre-] Artists' responses to the so-called "crisis" Dear empyre, It's strange that it's the 16th of the month (at least where I am), yet there has been little sustained discussion of present-day artistic responses to this so-called financial "crisis"--one that exists in a mythical realm of numbers-that-we-cannot-perceive, but that sadly has very real impacts on people. Responses by students, academics, and activists have not been limited to the resignation of acceptance, nor abstract theorizing in and of itself, but rather have taken, at times, forms of protest and occupation throughout the world, as well as direct actions against banking institutions. (See, in particular the story of Enric Duran: http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20090319182858556 and http://17-s.info/en .) How then might we understand these actions within the context of our own theorizing activities? This should reflect a special concern as to the impact of this "crisis" on academic and cultural institutions. Indeed, the occupations and protests at schools---NYU, the New School, University of Rochester, institutions in Italy and France and Spain and...---suggest the deep worry that many have regarding how the "crisis" might ultimately move to transform culture and learning into more and more reified situations governed by numbers and the market. (The Bologna process is coming to the states: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/education/09educ.html .) In response there have been discussions and interviews about how we can use this time of "crisis" to develop new models that exist in parallel to concurrent struggles to force governments to provide for the basic needs of people. (See in particular "Interviewing the Crisis": http://www.interviewingthecrisis.org/ .) How might we then reconsider actions and activities of the past and present and future---TAZs, tactical media, pirate radio, and many, many, more---in light of calls for more standardization and more "accountability"? And whither the academic institution? Corporations have fairly free reign in many departments at colleges and universities in the United States. Are we to expect even more of these so-called "public-private partnerships" in the future? What is the role of the institution in producing the people who created the "crisis" in the first place? Who will follow the links between the powerful actors in order to map their impact? I present here a recent project of mine that is my own attempt to face some of these issues. MAICgregator (http://maicgregator.org) is a Firefox extension that aggregates information about colleges and universities embedded in the military-academic-industrial (MAIC) complex. It searches government funding databases, private news sources, private press releases, and public information about trustees to try and produce a radical cartography of the modern university via the replacement or overlay of this information on academic websites. MAICgregator is available for download right now: http://maicgregator.org/download . If you want to see what MAICgregator does to a website without downloading it, you can look at some screenshots: http://maicgregator.org/docs/screenshots . This is its first public release, so expect that things might not work properly. I have written an extensive statement about MAICgregator that tries to contextualize it within discourses of net.art, the military-academic-industrial complex, "data mining", and activist artistic practices. As the statement is rife with embedded links, please read it online: http://maicgregator.org/statement I welcome any feedback or discussion that this might provoke; if you want to e-mail the project authors directly, please e-mail info --at-- maicgregator ---dot--- org. http://maicgregator.org/ nick knouf _______________________________________________ empyre forum [email protected] http://www.subtle.net/empyre _______________________________________________ empyre forum [email protected] http://www.subtle.net/empyre
