nettime Publications [13x]
Table of Contents: 10,000 Acts of Artistic Mediation @ UCLA US Department of Art Technology [EMAIL PROTECTED] high tech trash and developing nations Ryan Griffis [EMAIL PROTECTED] new publication Roy Ascott [EMAIL PROTECTED] concrete_maschine (TM) Johannes Auer [EMAIL PROTECTED] Big [B]Other fran ilich [EMAIL PROTECTED] Alt-X Press Releases New Wiley Wiggins Ebook Lori Gaskill [EMAIL PROTECTED] subsol (online publication announcement) joanne richardson [EMAIL PROTECTED] about adbusters' strategy geert lovink [EMAIL PROTECTED] new: sound art archive / Timo Kahlen [EMAIL PROTECTED] borderzap live from munich Jan-Hendrik Brueggemeier [EMAIL PROTECTED] no one is illegal uk book [EMAIL PROTECTED] fAf Jan-Feb03: Blackout: Indigenous New Media Arts Collective linda carroli [EMAIL PROTECTED] =?iso-8859-1?Q?PassDoc_in_the_webEvent__?= =?iso-8859-1?Q?[EMAIL PROTECTED]?= [EMAIL PROTECTED] new URL and email for Left Curve Csaba Polony [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Date: Tue, 4 Feb 2003 10:21:27 -0500 From: US Department of Art Technology [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: 10,000 Acts of Artistic Mediation @ UCLA - --_-1167750372==_ma Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii ; format=flowed Randall Packer 10,000 Acts of Artistic Mediation Tuesday, February 11th, 6pm @ EDA (104 North Kinross) University of California, Los Angeles presented by the UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts (310) 825-9007 Randall M. Packer, Secretary of the US Department of Art Technology in Washington, DC, will announce a new campaign, 10,000 Acts of Artistic Mediation, intended to mobilize artistic forces across the nation in anticipation of the National Election in 2004. The Secretary will also discuss the recent activation of a new artist-driven political party, the Experimental Party, the party of experimentation, in the Department's effort to bring the artists' message to center stage of the political process. The Experimental Party intends to recruit, support, and coordinate viable artists to celebrate the universal spirit of collective expression, to seek volunteers to help speak oracular truths and the most radically liberating critique of reason, and to engage students in acts of appropriation through art and polemic, manifesto and demonstration, love and politics. Calling him a man of great integrity, a man of great judgment and a man who knows the arts, President George W. Bush announced his decision to nominate Randall M. Packer to serve as Secretary of the United States Department of Art and Technology on November 12, 2001. Upon confirmation by the Senate, Packer pledged to renew the war on cultural poverty, reduce the incidence of a one-way exchange of information between an active agent and a passive recipient, and combat discrimination so no American feels outside the field of aesthetic inquiry of the contemporary media arts. ** The Experimental Party http://www.experimentalparty.org The Experimental Party - the party of experimentation - is an artist-based political party that has been formed to activate citizens across the country in an effort to bring the artists' message to center stage of the political process. This is a political awakening, 'representation through virtualization' is the major political thrust of the Experimental Party, it is the driving force. The US Department of Art Technology http://www.usdept-arttech.net The US Department of Art and Technology is the United States principal conduit for facilitating the artist's need to extend aesthetic inquiry into the broader culture
nettime High tech trash
On Wednesday, February 12, 2003, at 07:48 AM, Announcer wrote: From: Ryan Griffis [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: high tech trash and developing nations http://cbc.ca/consumers/market/files/environ/hitech_trash/ a story from last October by the CBC on the transplantation of Computer waste to poor countries, and the environmental/human effects. I just returned from three weeks in Uganda where I was assessing a high tech project involving nicely outfitted computer labs with new gear, wireless Internet connection, etc. in teacher training colleges around the country. A brief note on the Internet in Uganda is here: glocal.crimsonblog.com. Other groups import used PCs by the container load, and as is the case here in Silicon Valley they all become trash eventually. However, the problems of the towns in China that actually strip boards and cables (water pollution, skin disorders, birth defects) are not evident in places like Uganda. Another thing I learned: the main U.S. export to Africa is used clothes, and there is a giant network of importers and a bigger one of re-sellers in most towns. I walked around the main market and waded through hundreds stalls selling just shoes, and another section for women's clothes, and so on. It was an amazing trip, all in all. Report to follow. Steve Cisler # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime The_Network_of_the_World's_Social_Movements
[From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] a list that was established after the hub-project, an independent open space during the esf in florence /fls] The World Social Forum's New Project: The Network of the World's Social Movements By Ezequiel Adamovsky; The Cid Campeador Neighborhood Assembly, Buenos Aires. A new project has been proposed at the World Social Forum this year. The idea is to build a Network of the World's Social Movements. The CUT and other Brazilian organizations have already volunteered their services to flesh out its secretariat. The plan is, as the document that is being circulated states, to achieve a more permanent articulation between the social movements at the global level. Of course, nobody wants to oppose such an idea, and I believe that an articulation of this type is fundamental to the growth of the movement of movements. However, I completely disagree with the route that the project is beginning to take. Moreover, I believe that the failure of the coordination of the Argentinean Assemblies presents us with clues as to why this plan is a bad idea. The WSF does not have to create a network of the movements because this network already exists: we have been constructing this network over the last six or seven years. Certainly, this network is still not strong enough, but we have to build upon what already exists before we can create ONE institutionalized network under the WSF's control. If the WSF attempts to domesticate the existing networks, attempts to provide them with a determined center and a single voice, I don't think it will work. Worse yet, the gravest danger is that the attempt will be a serious set back to the efforts to strengthen the networks that already exist. We know that networks are only able to speak through the multiple voices of their nodes. What happens, for example, if a movement disagrees with something asserted by the network that the WSF controls? Can that movement find a space to speak outside the network, a network that pretends to speak for everyone? The WSF project, in the way it is being considered, would check and inhibit contact between the movements rather than enhance the circulation within the network. Furthermore, my doubts in regard to this project also have to do with the fact that practically none of the social movements has been given the opportunity to discuss it. Rather, it seems as if the decision to go ahead with the project has been taken in advance, by the same organizations that have been controlling the WSF in particular; namely, ATTAC (especially its French contingent), some of the NGO's, the PT and the Brazilian CUT. This is where my doubts increase. Why would the representatives of hierarchical organizations create a structure of coordinated networks, that is to say, a horizontal and decentralized one? The project, such as has been proposed, resembles an attempt to create a new International--hierarchical, centralized, aspiring to represent the totality of the social movements just like the Internationals of the past--rather than a network. Personally, I don't care if the Leninists and Trotskyites still want to establish an International, even after all the failures of the past. It would bother me, however, that they would try to disguise the politics of the past by resorting to the words, the creations and the style of the new movement. People should feel free to create a new International, if that is what they want, but it would be very irritating to see them try to do so by using the World Social Forum, and by appropriating the notion of the network to create something that just amounts to a centralized formal institution, that is to say, the opposite of a network. If it is really a matter of strengthening the coordination of the networks, then the best way of doing so is by encouraging voluntary and flexible coalitions that allow each and every singular node the freedom to decide the particulars of its actions. Coalitions, by definition, do not represent single individuals or the network in its totality, they only represent those that participate in them. A coalition only lasts as long as it has a job to do, or as long as its members want it to last. Nobody in a coalition desires to assume control or take power because coalitions are temporary and indeterminate. Anyone can call for the formation of a coalition: if the job to be done merits attention, then chances are that many nodes in the network will take part in it. The coalition is not the center of the network, only a temporary crystallization within it; a moment when the unstructured connections of the network cohere in stronger agreements. Once the task has been accomplished the coalition dissolves into the network. And of course, singular nodes may participate in multiple coalitions, and the network will allow for as many coalitions as the singular nodes decide to create. I think that it is this
Fwd: nettime High tech trash
its been 6 years since i worked with internet media in uganda - http://www.aporee.org/equator at the time 1997 it took us only 10 minutes for an 18-year-old net-head in kampala to set us up with an account and a pretty speedy 28kb connection with few drops. in germany at that time you had to wait weeks to get an account sometimes. did you meet charles musisi? he was having students type the'new vision' national news onto the net then to pay for a hut a few pcs and some oreilly linux textbooks. in 1997 there was in my view more understanding intrinsic understanding of net culture in uganda among the students i met than among students i worked with in germany! and its not a surprise for many reasons. if you havent contacted charles musis i would recommend it. i met him through gopher in 1995 when he was canvasing worldwide universities for 2400 baud modems to be donated to uganda. he is a pioneer net person who made our site possible. viva uganda! Anfang der weitergeleiteten E-Mail: Von: Steve Cisler [EMAIL PROTECTED] Datum: Wed, 12. Feb. 2003 14:35:05 Europe/Berlin An: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Betreff: nettime High tech trash Antwort an: Steve Cisler [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Wednesday, February 12, 2003, at 07:48 AM, Announcer wrote: From: Ryan Griffis [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: high tech trash and developing nations http://cbc.ca/consumers/market/files/environ/hitech_trash/ a story from last October by the CBC on the transplantation of Computer waste to poor countries, and the environmental/human effects. I just returned from three weeks in Uganda where I was assessing a high tech project involving nicely outfitted computer labs with new gear, wireless Internet connection, etc. in teacher training colleges around ... philip pocock gabelsbergerstr. 1 d-76135 karlsruhe germany mobile/sms +49 1707 369 870 tel +49 721 845 715 fax +49 721 830 2714 the more we share, the more we have. - l.nimoy # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime RE: form
Dear Jeffrey, Of course you are right--the rationales for wealth-mongering have always been complex and varied, and have never themselves directed the mongering: rather, the wealthy have always deployed these opportunely, flexibly, and with cleverness. Indeed, it has never been a case of God commands to cream the poor or Nature suggests to crush the unfortunate, but rather We have found it correct to cream/crush the unfortunate poor, and Nature/God doth find this most meet. Let us thus place the hegemony where you say it belongs: squarely upon the plutocracy, rather than on the orthodoxies that furnish its ever-shifting justification. Your second point is also quite attractively put. Indeed, countries with governments that do things for people seem to have happier people; some concern and control by the state seems to be better (for people) than the law of the financial jungle. But the planned economy I referred to, that characterizes today's most neoliberal countries, is not one planned by a state with the accord of its citizens, but rather is planned by the winners, i.e. the largest corporations, precisely because of the democratic state's planned absence, an absence planned by those same corporations. The health care system in the United States is an excellent example, where the largest HMOs have planned an absence of decent alternatives for all but the fairly well off, leaving everyone else with health care far below the standards of Western Europe or Japan, or, alternately, with no health care at all. This is the law of the jungle writ small! In any case, both of these points bring us back to the initial moments of this discussion of ours, in which I so brutally misunderstood your interest in the WTO's vacant positions as an interest in those intellectual contentions of ours that do not hold water, of which I cited two examples: our positions (a) that the abolition of government intervention will yield prosperity, and (b) that fewer laws against pollution will make the air cleaner. Over the course of our speaking, you have been privy to the exposition of at least five or six more such positions that we at the WTO insist on yet that hold no water at all. And you have observed us wandering into the realms of absolute heresy to find an appropriate fundament, having lost our way everywhere else. Under these conditions, with your eye so priviledgedly on our bankruptcy, I ask you now: what, given such corruptness as ours, might you see as useful or interesting in an engagement with us? Is there a way you might help us to hew a renewed plan of hope and/or action, something based more in reality than our ever-mired past footsteps? Or do you simply wish to learn what you can from our failures? Any or all of these are acceptable. In each case, there can resound a clear Why not? With an eye to the future, always, and despite all with hope, Hengy On Mon, 10 Feb 2003, Wolf, Jeffrey wrote: Hengdorn: Your e-mail certainly raises issues on many levels. It is difficult to know where to begin. I will avoid discussions of Swedenborgiasm (sic), principally because I am unfamiliar with it. (Although, did you know that Daniel Burnham, a principal architect and developer of Chicago, who lived in my home suburb adjacent to the city, was an adherent?) First, your intellectual history of the justification of wealth-exploitation is interesting. Basically you argue that God was a justification for wealth transfer until the mid-19th century, at which point Darwinism (or Nietzschean philosophy, I suppose) superseded the divine as a rationale for exploitation (might makes right). I am not sufficiently grounded in intellectual history to affirm or contradict this claim. You ascribe a considerable degree of hegemony to rather diverse orthodoxies, though. Is it possible that that these broad philosophies were accepted and utilized in more variegated and nuanced ways? For example, just to take an example for literature, Crime and Punishment ultimately seems a rebuttal to Thus Spake Zarathustra, and maybe this exemplifies in microcosm the tension between accepting new rationalist, nihilist philosophies and clinging to the orthodoxy of the Church. Second, you argue that the pre-eminent economies yield a fair degree of state intervention, and fail to conform to the lean, neo-classical model of an unfettered free hand. I tend to agree with you on this, but again the intellectual landscape is cluttered. Clearly certain states have higher levels of state intervention coupled with higher standards of living, lesser disparities in wealth distribution, etc. Yet there seems no absolute basis for justifying these economies as preferable per se. Yes, Japan has higher levels of state intervention. And yes, in many ways one might find Japan a preferable place to live (than the US). Needless to say, though, its financial sector is a shambles, as are several broad macroeconomic indices such as
