Re: more repression in Italy = thought crime

[ricardo dominguez]

'Mental Participation': anti-globalisation protestors arrested for
thoughtcrime

Amongst the 23 anti-globalisation protestors questioned and arrested today
in Italy there are some who are accused not of acts of violence but of
'mental participation' ('compartecipazione psichica') and 'pscyhological
support' [in the Genova actions].

In the paper that orders the arrest, judge Elena Dalosio writes: 'it's
clear that not only those who materially took part in the devastation
should be prosecuted, but also those facilitated the acts or gave strength
to their purpose. These people should be prosecuted even if they didn't
conduct any material act.'

'This is a case', the judge writes, 'of very serious resistance, with the
aim of disturbing police intervention. The behaviour of those who were on
the scene of the riots, together with the most violent ones, gave strength
to these people by their very presence. Their acts were not crime in
themselves, but aided the criminal intentions of the others with their
moral support."

 - -  from "La Repubblica" newspaper

- Original Message -
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 8:45 AM
Subject:  repression in Italy


[.]





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Re: joxe's empire of disorder

[richard barbrook]

Hiya,

>One only has to look at the flurry of legislation --
>the Communications Act and Digital Millenium Copyright Act in the US.
>Or the remarkable amount of GATT and then WTO time taken up with
>issues of patent and copyright protection. These are relatively new
>developments, and their significance is not really plumbed by the
>tools of historical materialism as we have them to hand.

Passing laws is not the same thing as making people obey them. The DCMA or
the EU Copyright Directive haven't stopped the sharing of information
among Net users. As even the simplest versions of historical materialism
point out, the legal superstructure can - at best - only slow down the
evolution of the socio-economic base...

Later,

Richard


---
Dr. Richard Barbrook
Hypermedia Research Centre
School of Communications and Creative Industries
University of Westminster
Watford Road
Northwick Park
HARROW HA1 3TP



landline: +44 (0)20 7911 5000 x 4590

mobile: 07879-441873

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"Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it." - Isidore Ducasse, Comte de
Lautréamont.
---

The HRC is involved in running regular cybersalons at the ICA in London. If
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repression in Italy

[lop1912]

The noglobal protesters who had been arrested in Cosenza two weeks ago have 
been released. They were accused of subversion.
The same day of their liberation, 22 people in various Italian cities have 
been arrested. They are accused of illegal actions against the State during 
the Genova antiG8 demonstrations.

One should remember that in Genova the police killed a young man, Carlo 
Giuliani. The police who shot the boy has been acquitted some days ago.
One shold also remember that in Genova the police destroyed the locals of 
the Mediacenter, and brutally assaulted young men and women.

Is the Italian mafialike regime turning fascist?

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Re: On the state of net art

[Florian Cramer]

Since many people responded to me off-list, I should write a postscript
to my posting.  Everyone seems to have overlooked that the
correspondence between John Berndt (a Neoist and experimental musician
from Baltimore) and LLoyd Dunn (editor of the Mail Art/anticopyright
zine PhotoStatic/Retrofuturism and member of the Plunderphonics
collective Tape-beatles) was taken, to quote myself...

> From: PhotoStatic no. 37/Retrofuturism no. 10, August 1989


There's of course no point in denying my prankish intentions. Still, I
didn't alter the wording of the original correspondence, but only
bracketted out parts which referred to non-digital media (such as audio
tapes and print magazines). 

By the late 1980s, the term "Network" (via Robert Filliou's coinage of
"The Eternal Network") had largely overcome the older label "Mail Art",
thus embracing all kinds of fringe activities and (to use a term by Inke
Arns and Andreas Broeckmann) "small media" which mainly circulated via
personal snail mail.

Practical proofs are book titles like "The Magazine Network" by Géza
Perneczky [1991] or "Networking Currents" [1986] and "Eternal Network"
[1995] by Chuck Welch. The whole range of pre-Internet network culture
comes better across, though, in Ivan Stang's book "Heigh Weirdness by
Mail" [Simon & Schuster, 1988] and in back-issues of the review zine
Factsheet Five, or, respectively, the book "The World of Zines" compiled
by Factsheet Five editors Mike Gunderloy and Cari Goldberg Janice
[Penguin, 1992].

So it's perhaps not too accidental that internal debates on "network
culture" and "network art" from 1989 could be easily recycled into
contempary net culture/net art discourse.

-F


Another postscript concerns McKenzie Wark's Nettime review of the Ray
Johnson exhibition and his mention of the COPY LEFT | COPY RIGHT in
particular. In my private archive, I found a 10-volume Mail Art edition
published in Zurich in 1985 under the title "copy-left, work in progress,
pornographic - erotic - body art". The cover emblem is a 
copyright sign flipped horizontally:

  -,x
  .xaWQM9HWH9Q###Q&x_
   .d###?^ .xx_  "9Q#Nx
  dQ#@" d###QQQWMWQ#b_  '9WQ&,
 xQ#?` }##@^  '##A,   ?Q#b
W#Q~   '?Y <   `Q#$
   j##baQ######
   ]##P]Q###,   ###r
   W##[   }D^  ]W##~
M##,  4#Qa,   ]O###"   .#P~
 9Q#h, Y#QQba8QQP"Q##^
  "9##Ax-'???"??"??"   ,d##P
'Y#Q###bxaQ##Y`
   `""?Y#QQQY??^


[Enlarged detail, converted into ASCII Art; I put the original scan
online under
.]

-- 
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/
http://www.complit.fu-berlin.de/institut/lehrpersonal/cramer.html
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Maps for the Outside

[Brian Holmes]

[Those of you who were at the No Border camp in Strasbourg last 
summer, or at the Hub in Florence during the ESF, probably received a 
copy of the maps made by Bureau d'Etudes with collaboration from 
several others (including myself). You can find one example at 
http://utangente.free.fr/index2.html. To give background on the 
projects and their relation both to art practices and political aims, 
I wrote the this text for "Geography - And the Politics of Mobility," 
an upcoming expo in Vienna (info below). I'll also be raising some 
methodology questions at World Information this Friday morning in 
Amsterdam. - BH]
***

Maps for the Outside:
Bureau d'Etudes, or the revenge of the concept

The closure of the gallery space is a classic conceptual gesture. 
Witness this proposal by Robert Barry: "My exhibition at the Art & 
Project Gallery in Amsterdam in December, '69, will last two weeks. I 
asked them to lock the door and nail my announcement to it, reading: 
'For the exhibition the gallery will be closed.'" (1) Conceptual art 
can be defined, not simply as the refusal of the commodified object 
and the specialized art system, but as an active signage pointing to 
the outside world, conceived as an expanded field for experimental 
practices of intimacy, expression and collaboration - indeed, for the 
transformation of social reality. (2)
Thirty-two years later, in October-December 2001, the French 
group Bureau d'Etudes reiterated the gesture, sealing off the 
exhibition space of Le Spot, a converted industrial building in the 
port city of Le Havre. Instead of a simple sign, they confronted the 
visitor with a book, Juridic Park, which upon closer inspection 
proved to be a detailed set of maps to the "legal subsoil" of the 
city. But these maps, like the more recent cartographic projects, do 
not simply embrace the outside of one of modernity's specialized 
subsystems. Rather they detail the proliferating closures of a 
totally administered society, where almost every square inch of 
terrain is strictly codified for exclusive, proprietary uses.
The name of the group, "Bureau d'Etudes," denotes an expert 
consultancy, a study office for technical research. Theirs is an 
intensely precise apprehension of the world, shot through with 
flashes of dark humor. But their work in its broadest dimensions is 
also the foundation, or perhaps the springboard, for an antagonistic 
utopia.

Beginnings
In 1998, with the exhibition Archives du Capitalisme, Bureau d'Etudes 
started producing organizational charts showing the proprietary 
relations between financial funds, government agencies, banks and 
industrial firms. A number of these graphic charts, or "organigrams," 
were deployed as part of an installation including black-and-white 
photographs of heads propped up on wooden pickets (presumably CEOs), 
as well as a scale model of a proposed new parliament building, to 
articulate the voting rights of those with real power in today's 
society. The exhibition was an autonomous project in an artist-run 
space, at the time called the "Faubourg," in the city of Strasbourg. 
For a subsequent show entitled Le Capital, mounted by Nicolas 
Bourriaud in the city of Sete, an organigram detailing the relations 
between the French state and a panoply of major transnational 
corporations was blown up to wall size. Squares and rectangles of 
varying proportions, each identified with a name (Societe Generale, 
Dresdner Bank, Mitsubishi, Pirelli, etc.) were connected with a 
labyrinth of elaborately traced channels, printed in black against a 
white ground. The result was something like an all-over painting for 
the computer and finance-obsessed 1990s: an aesthetics of 
information. In other words, one of the historical failure-points of 
what has been called "conceptual art."
Sooner or later, artists working on the analysis and 
transformation of social reality must face the obvious question: How 
to escape the formats, publics and modes of exchange that are offered 
by the gallery-magazine-museum system? The answer is a gradual 
process, a social and psychic experiment. Invited to a group 
exhibition for which, as usual, they would not be paid, Bureau 
d'Etudes responded by creating a "zone de gratuite," Free Land, where 
treasures and all kinds of junk could be deposited and taken away 
without the intermediary of money. The experiment of the free zone 
was pursued in a gallery/living space in Paris, where theoretical 
curiosity and the more practical prospect of something-for-nothing 
drew a variegated public. Expanding on the question of the artist's 
real social status in an age of casual labor and mass 
intellectuality, Bureau d'Etudes worked with Alejandra Riera, Andreas 
Fohr and Jorge Alyskewycz to launch the "Syndicat Potentiel" or 
"Potential Union," a proto-political association addressed to 
intellectual and cultural producers whose aspirations take them 
outside all professional categori

Re: joxe's empire of disorder

[Keith Hart]

Felix,

I am not suggesting that Manhattan in 2000 is the same as Constantinople
in 1000. Obviously two centuries of machine revolution have made a big
difference to the way we live. I was just trying to correct a myopic
tendency to think of change as whatever is considered new by a
self-selected minority of the world's population. I was trying to say the
world is a lot older than we often like to think. More specifically, I
argued that the fusion of capitalism with the state in the last 150 years
led to a highly dangerous synthesis of agrarian civilization and the
machine revolution, leading to a century of war, genocide and appalling
disaster. It was indeed the first world war that provided the crucible for
discovering the modern state's talent for mass murder, although the
American civil war was the first proof of that, the key event in the
launch of state capitalism.

Nor was I thinking of medieval Europe as the origin of the institutional
complex I described. It was in fact Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago that
inaugurated Childe's 'urban revolution'. Here cities, the state, money as
we still know it, writing, bureaucracy, the first stirrings of world
religion all emerged at once, so that a small urban elite could control an
unfree rural labour force. I have always considered it one of Marx's great
contributions that he realised capitalism was an extension of that system
of extraction (from surplus labour to surplus value). But the liberal
revolutions of which I wrote were against the state, as were most
progressive movements of the mid-19th century, and that is what
distinguishes them from a neo-liberalism that depends on state power.

Although I admit to some rhetorical excess, I was challenging a modernism
that claims we have somehow escaped all that. How can we explain that 4 in
5 Americans today think that God loves them? That the main opposition to
the way the world is run now comes from the adherents of the last world
religion to be invented? That the US government is actively contemplating
bombing Baghdad as a solution to its problems? Another name for Iraq is
Mesopotamia, of course. It is curious that the leading power of our
'modern' world should pick it as a target. Maybe as a way of sustaining
the mantra that agrarian civilization is dead and we are different.

We are differnt, but also profoundly the same. The scary part is what
happens when people pursue the old purposes with the new means at their
disposal.

Keith





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Bruce Sterling: Viridian Note 00351, Decaying Media

[geert lovink]

From: "Bruce Sterling" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, December 03, 2002 1:17 PM
Subject: Viridian Note 00351: Decaying Media

Key concepts: intellectual property, planned obsolescence,
DVDs, Viridian Embrace Decay Principle

Attention Conservation Notice:  It's really a "Dead Media
Project" note disguised as a Viridian Note.

Links: Dead Media Project, now dead, but lying there
almost perfectly preserved as "new media" die off in
droves.  Go ahead, take all the dead media you like!
Maybe you'd like to run the project!
http://www.deadmedia.org/notes/index-numeric.html

Communication Arts magazine 9th Interactive Design
Competition.
http://www.commarts.com/CA/magazine/comp/

Wacky retro-tech casemods. Rush against the tide
of obsolescence by making your computer resemble
your Mom's toaster.
http://www.retrosystem.com/
http://www.mini-itx.com/projects.asp

Weird old TV sets, all teched-up.
http://www.predicta.com/

Rebuild an Apple I.
http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,56426,00.html

Ludicrous tattooing robot.  Nice graphic, though.
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_718442.html


Source: Ron Harris, Associated Press
http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/news/local_regional/ap_cdselfdestruct12012
002.htm

Now you see it, now you don't!
By Ron Harris / Associated Press
Sunday, December 1, 2002


   "SAN FRANCISCO == On a dismal, rainy day after watching
Mel Gibson battle the English in 'Braveheart,' wouldn't it
be nice to simply throw away the DVD instead of slogging
the rental back to Blockbuster?  (((I'd bet good money Ron
Harris didn't write this blockheaded lede paragraph.)))

"Technology that makes DVDs self-destruct in a few
hours or days has already been developed, raising the
prospect of a world without late fees.

"In one recent promotion, Atlantic Records made a
limited run of DVDs containing footage of the hip-hop
group Nappy Roots that was viewable only for a few hours
before the disc 'expired.'  (((Has the *group* expired
yet?  Must we wait long?)))

"MGM Studios used self-destructing DVDs with music
videos and trailers to promote the new James Bond movie,
'Die Another Day.' Movie critics were told the DVD would
self-destruct in 36 hours == a nod to 007's gadget-
providing character Q.  (((I can imagine some serious
alternative uses for auto-decaying storage media. For
instance, pirates would find them very handy for
destroying legal evidence against themselves.)))

"And self-expiring discs also showed up at MTV's
recent Latin American awards show in Miami.  ((("Los
desaparecidos.")))

"But to reach consumers more broadly, any promising
technology needs to make sound business sense.  (((Dream
on, pal == I'm on the Internet!))) In an entertainment
industry where profits depend in part on multiple rentals
and late fees, disposable discs represent a disruptive
technology, and none of the big players have endorsed it
publicly.  (((The late-fee scam is a particularly
ingenious way to profit off human fallibility.)))

"New York-based Flexplay, which ensured the timely
deaths of these promotional DVDs, has yet to produce any
full-length movies with the technology, in which chemical
changes eventually render discs unusable."

Link: The Flexplay FAQ
http://www.flexplay.com/faq.html
(((Good for them:  "Flexplay encourages all users to
recycle their Flexplay DVDs. Flexplay is working with
several organizations to establish post-consumer DVD
recycling practices.")))

 "Providence, R.I.-based SpectraDisc developed similar
technology and has courted most of the major studios, but
none has been willing to sign a production deal."

Link:
Spectra is also into some hairy ubicomp tagging stuff.
http://www.spectra-science.com/marking_tracking.html
http://www.spectra-science.com/document_processing.html

"'The decision process has been in stall mode now for
at least a year and a half,' said SpectraDisc chief
executive Nabil Lawandy. 'It's all in the hands of the
content providers. They have the leverage along with
distribution.'  (((Boy, no wonder the tech is in "stall
mode." Why, during the Dark Ages, the whole of Western
Civilization was in "stall mode.")))

"Flexplay's chief executive, Alan Blaustein, agrees
the science is ready to go, even if Hollywood is not."
(((Well, that ought to solve Bill Joy's problems about
"relinquishing technology" == just make Hollywood our
technology czar across the board.)))
Link:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html

"Another reason major studios could be wary is that
Flexplay and SpectraDisc may not have resolved potential
intellectual-property issues surrounding their patented
technologies.  (((Has anybody anywhere ever really
"resolved" their "intellectual property issues"?  I mean,
without being totally dead and utterly forgotten?)))

"Both Flexplay and SpectraDisc add a chemical time-
bomb to DVDs that begins ticking once the package is open
and the discs are exposed to air.  (((I have to like this,
somehow. Think of