[Fwd: [nobordercamp2007-sd] Circus of (Im)Migration tour reportback]
Original Message Subject: [nobordercamp2007-sd] Circus tour reportback Date: Mon, 14 May 2007 14:42:25 -0700 (PDT) From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Here's a brief reportback from our lovely clowny tour of the west coast. The Circus You'll all see the content of the circus tonight, but overall we got a lot of good feedback about the circus performance. We had fairly large crowds in olympia, eugene, santa cruz and san francisco from 30-100 people. The audience sizes in berkeley and portland could've been better. But in berkeley there was a lot of traffic of students passing by who at least saw what we were doing and were intrigued/confused. In portland, although the crowd was small, they were alomst all organizers and expressed a lot of interest in the No Borders Camp. Workshops We did workshops in Olympia, Portland and San Francisco and got really positive feedback in each place. There were people in each place that said they want to start a clown gaggle. In portland, the folks who came to our workshop were still talking about it the next night at the Root Force tour event. Also in portland, a lot of people talked about the usefulness of our games for any collective, not just clowns, for improving our ability to move in the street and for building group affinity, cohesion and friendships. New Projects Some of the most exciting developments were people talking about new projects. Seeing clown gaggles in portland, sf and santa cruz would make us extremely happy and would be a real accomplishment for the tour. Also, in SF people responded to our interactive theater skit about the immigration raids by talking about plans to start a Migrawatch in SF. In Santa Cruz, a lot of people expressed interest in helping the recently started Migrawatch. No Borders Camp Outreach In Portland, San Francisco and Santa Cruz we ended the circus by discussing the No Border Camp, in Olympia and Eugene we did a quite summrative overview and gave out zines, and we also talked about it in every workshop. Some people were just hearing about it for the first time, but many people said "I'm definitely going." We had a great conversation with a person from Portland Sin Fronteras who said that they want to organize a regional encuentro for the northwest in Portland, as it seems like the "next step" in mobilizing their communities for the camps. Also, we met someone in San Francisco who wants to work on a San Francisco regional meeting as well, which people in Santa Cruz were also excited about attending. Critiques One critique or suggestion that came up repeatedly was that we should do our circus performance for audiences made up of mostly migrant people. While our audiences were mostly white and young, we have lots of thoughts about doing our circus for migrant people - in migrant camps etc. While act 3 does use forum theater for a collective/collaborative learning process to encourage one to be perhaps more empowered and prepared in case of an immigration raid by ICE. with our agreement that we would like to work toward translating and developing the circus more intentionally to share with the migrant community. nevertheless, we feel that the information needs to get out to as many people as possible and that hopefully the organizers we did reach out to will help spread the information and organize with that new information in mind. Also, we don't want to try to tell migrant people their stories, which we don't know about as intimately as they do. What we do want to continue to do is is to work with communities to share and exchange ideas to learn from them and build our understanding and relationships/friendship with groups led by people of color and/or migrant people doing these kinds of performance, like Teatro Jornalero, Day Laborer Theater in San Francisco or the performance groups in Tijuana and Ensenada who have approached up about working on a La Otra CIRCA. Still, we realize that we and the organizers we know have a lot of work to do in building closer relationships with the many diverse communities outside the young anarchist community on the west coast. What's Next One big idea that came out of this tour is an idea to start something like a Borderlands Performance Laboratory. We're hoping to create a space for all kinds of radical performance against borders and neoliberalism, but a virtual space without a physical location, open to anyone anywhere who wants to collaborate, but coming first out of collaborations with groups in the San Diego / Tijuana border lands. Also, we're hoping to do another traveling circus, building on what we've learned, but traveling across the Southwest of the US and the Northwest of Mexico. Now that we see how expensive it is, we're hoping to apply for grants for the next tour to enable more people to be able to travel and continue to spread clown love, joyous resistance and a passion for destroying borders. http://circasd.org -- blog: http://d
MUTE VOL 2 #5 - Climate Change Issue
M | U | T | E | __ rread it! __ 10 May 2007_ MUTE VOL 2 #5 SPRING/SUMMER ISSUE MAY '07 It's Not Easy Being Green - The Climate Change Issue is out now online and in print: http://www.metamute.org/en/Mute-Vol-2-5-Its-Not-Easy-Being-Green-The-Climate-Change-Issue This issue of Mute seeks to defuse the ideological bomb of climate change, expose the plundering and non-reproduction of global resources as a problem of capital not mankind per se, and investigate the ends to which the spectre of eco-catastrophe is being used Articles include: * Capital Climes by Will Barnes Liberal critics assume that climate change is a ?man-made? process, not a natural phenomenon. Against this view, Will Barnes argues that global warming does indeed have an inhuman agent behind it ? not nature but capital http://www.metamute.org/en/Capital-Climes * Act Macro: Technological Alternatives to Green Austerity By James Woudhuysen The emerging capitalist War On Global Warming concentrates on adapting technology and behaviour ? particularly other nation-states? ? to mitigate environmental damage. Transformative technological and social innovation is better than meddling micro-action, argues James Woudhuysen http://www.metamute.org/en/Act-Macro-Technological-Alternatives-to-Green-Austerity * Climate Change CO2lonialism By Tim Forsyth and Zoe Young In their tango with grassroots green activists, inter-governmental policy makers are taking the lead. Tim Forsyth and Zoe Young analyse the ?new green order? and the carbon offset colonialism that accompanies it http://www.metamute.org/en/Climate-Change-CO2lonialism * Promised Lands By Kate Rich It?s not just the founders of hippy communes or artists like Amy Balkin who are looking for ?a breathing space from the State? in which to experiment with freedom and free-time. Big IT companies like Google apparently share their ideals. With a commitment to ?me time?, the production of ?universal access?, and (energy) sovereignty, corporates are leveraging the dream of the commons http://www.metamute.org/en/Promised-Lands-Google-and-Morningstar * Apocalypse and/or Business as Usual? The Energy Debate After the 2004 US Presidential Elections By George Caffentzis Since 2004 the rhetoric of Bush?s republican party has turned curiously green, integrating climate change as a legitimation for neoliberal imperialism. At the same time the unintended consequence of America?s unsuccessful adventures has been to enrich an ?anti-neoliberal? class of oil rentiers in Africa, Latin America and Asia. George Caffentzis plots the changes in the US energy policy as it turns from eco-naysayer to ecowarrior http://www.metamute.org/en/Apocalypse-and-or-Business-as-Usual.-The-Energy-Debate-After-the-2004-US-Presidential-Elections * Heavy Opera By Anthony Iles John Jordan and James Marriott's operatic audio tour set in London?s Square Mile is intended to awaken city workers to the impact of financial systems on climate change. But not only does And While London Burns misgauge how much the suits already know, its hysterical tone also harmonises too easily with the coming new eco-order. Review by Anthony Iles http://www.metamute.org/en/Heavy-Opera * BPerkeley Inc.? By Iain A. Boal As a lead in to Mute?s climate change special issue, Iain Boal reports on BP?s recent biofuel deal with University of California, Berkeley. In the name of a planetary emergency, the oil behemoth has both managed to greenwash biotech research and further entrench campus capitalism http://www.metamute.org/en/BPerkeley-Inc * Also in this issue... Zombie Nation By Paul Helliwell As the scarcity essential to the cultural commodity is undermined by digital abundance and social networking, social relations and the unique ?live? performance are all that's left to sell. Mass market music increasingly resembles relational art with its dream of waking the ?zombies? of consumer culture, but are the citizens of Web 2.0 society born again or undead? Paul Helliwell shuffles through the mall... http://www.metamute.org/en/Zombie-Nation * Expropriate, Accumulate, Financialise By Chris Wright and Samantha Alvarez David Harvey is an influential academic theorist of the spatial, cultural and economic forms of neoliberal capitalism. Chris Wright and Samantha Alvarez contrast his analysis with that of Michael Hudson, whose Super Imperialism exposed the fiscal foundations of neoliberalism some 30 years earlier http://www.metamute.org/en/Expropriate-accumulate-financialise * Further articles and reviews, already announced, are by Anthony Davies, Howard Slater and Peter Suchin * SUBSCRIBE HERE: http://www.metamute.org/taxonomy/term/3480 FOR A LIST OF STOCKISTS: http://www.metamute.org/node/254 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics o
Can Organized Networks Make Money for Designers
Design Mai Digitalability Symposium Tools, Talents and Turnovers: New Technologies in Design Berlin, 12-13 May, 2007 http://www.designmai.de Session: Working Environment and New Business Models 'Can Organized Networks Make Money for Designers?' Ned Rossiter My interest in this talk is to consider what the political concept of organized networks might mean for designers wondering how to make a buck. I know for sure that I won't be able to offer a one-size-fits all business model, so if that's what you were hoping for, then be disappointed now. Instead, I will focus on what I consider the primary conditions that attend the practice of collaboration in an era of network cultures and informational economies. My hypothesis is that without paying attention to the way networks are built and what makes them tick, you can forget about the rest, which includes whatever money-making potential you might glean from your design activities. This is a matter of structural and organizational fundamentals that underpin collaboration. Having said there's no magic-bullet for money-making in this talk, in the second part I will sketch one proposal: the creation of new institutions for design education that reside outside the formal system of the art school and university. For it is in new modalities of education, I believe, that designers have a particularly strong contribution to make in terms of advancing knowledge and practices in their field, while creating an open resource that serves as a means of income generation and research financing. This is my proposal for a new business model. Organized Networks and Creative Collaboration First, let me briefly outline the concept of organized networks. Over the past 30 years or so we have witnessed the institutions of modernity - universities, governments, firms, unions - struggle to reconcile their hierarchical structures of organization with the flexible, partially decentralized and transnational flows of culture, finance and labour. There is much phenomena, in other words, that escapes the managerial gaze of modern institutions. In other ways, of course, we find increasingly sophisticated technologies of surveillance and data tracking deployed to determine our movements and practices. But this does not result in increased efficiencies or productivity in terms of the management of people and things. Just the opposite, in fact. Accompanying these moribund technics of what can be called networked organizations is the emergence of organized networks. Whereas networked organizations can be understood as modernity's institutions rebooted into the digital age, organized networks, by contrast, are social-technical forms that co-emerge with the development of digital information and communication technologies. Organized networks do not need to try and recalibrate existing institutional practices into social-technical dynamics of digital media. Instead, they need to undergo a scalar transformation that enables the possibility of sustainability for the proliferation of practices across numerous social-technological platforms, many of which are highly unstable and fragile. Let me give some examples. Putting aside all the hype around Web2.0, there's no question that the rise of social technologies have enabled a massive increase in the number of people experiencing new forms of creative collaboration. There's an exceptional busyness to online social life and, it must be said, exhaustion. The digital elite can do two things: log off and outsource. Welcome to the Cult of Wilderness2.0. Where Nature was once packaged as a Sacred Tour in the 19th century as a means of restoring health to upper-classes tired of the city's industrial lungs, today it reappears in the form of a holiday from the keyboard and the capacity to earn money from another sucker who crunches the code. This is the plight of creative labour. Indeed, it is the common that, in its exploitation, also enables the possibility of refusal. The precondition for escape, however, is organization. The challenge for the loose relations of network cultures - within which creative labour resides - is to find the social-technical means through which new institutional forms may emerge. But don't get me wrong: I am not suggesting unionisation as a panacea for creative labour. Collaboration is the key resource for the invention of new institutional forms. German media activist Florian Schneider understands collaboration as 'working together with an agency with which one is not immediately connected'.[1] Importantly, such a notion of collaboration does not assume participants share something in common; rather, it recognises 'the common' as that which is constructed precisely through relations of difference, tension and dispute. What, in other words, constitutes the common of creative labour when different
