Wish I could come up with something to say. Can't. It looks like Wiseman did a great ad for anybody who wanted to go to UCB.
Birgeneau was picked for precisely how smooth and apparently sympathic he appears to be, right up to the ultimate crunch. Then he makes the call and the cops take over. Does anybody think Birgeneau didn't know or didn't understand what it meant to have Wiseman wandering around with his crew? This was the ultimate PR test and if the film is like the clips I've seen, UCB won hands down as the star of deception. If you don't know what to look for, how could you possibly find it? Since I know something about the background for the robotics and bio-mechanics labs, I'll try to use it as an example. What you see are several techs around a low-quad student using a mechanically assisted body with legs to walk. Later they are having a talk up on the device. This was really cool stuff, tech dreamland, and the amount of research, innovation, and accomplish were stunning. What the fuck is the problem here? First of all the funding sources are probably VA, NSF, NIH, and some bio-med consortimum, because it takes millions to get shit like that going and working. Now what's not in the picture is the world of disability and society, and a general sense of how to make that society accessible, in otherwords the whole socio-political, and economic realities and context within which such devices are supposed to function. Who can buy this device? How can it be used everyday? Does it do anything that isn't already available by other means, like the cool pushchair the disabled student dropped back into after he tested the device? In some moods I care about one side or the other. My tech half, wants in on the play. My social science says this is fun for engineers but not real people. It may be useful in a well equiped Rehab or VA center. But where the hell are they these days of endless cuts and total denial we have thousands of permanently disabled vets? It's just an example of what was not in the camera frame. I just thought of another little nightmare I discovered. Most of the technology, particularly the computer and programming running the device in `real time' has direct application to guess what? Drones. That's the big chill here, so you bet some of the military have funding in this bio-med stuff. See? What's wrong is not in the camera, so how can you see it? Here's quote from the other site noted: ``The “Day of Action” that took place on October 7, 2010, in which a central reading room of the main library on the UC Berkeley campus was briefly occupied by 600-800 protesters, was part not only of a longer historical trajectory but also of a geographically dispersed movement of struggle against austerity and the privatization of higher education, one that resonates at both a national and a global level. It was a system-wide day of action across both UCs and CSUs. There were rallies, sit-ins, and banner drops at every UC campus. There was a virtual sit-in that temporarily shut down the website of the UC Office of the President. Around the country, from Louisiana to Wisconsin, October 7 saw 76 coordinated actions take place. The point, then, is not that the protest at UC Berkeley was in reality highly effective or even particularly well executed. In fact it was highly criticized from within the student movement at the time. Rather, what’s missing from the film is any sense that the protest was part of something bigger, a wedge of antagonism both distributed across and situated in time and space. The lack of context thus intensifies the illegibility of the action.'' http://reclaimuc.blogspot.com/2013/10/frederick-wisemans-at-berkeley-or.html So that's what was not on camera and it was pivotal to why the UCB protest was proforma at best. The choice of library was important in that was were students studied and would notice. Nobody intended to break anything because its a nice place and is friendly to study there. Occupying Wheeler was another story. It's an important classroom building, centrally located, and near Sproul. But the Wheeler event wasn't during Wiseman's visit... CG _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
