nettime-l@bbs.thing.net

[Paul D. Miller]

Table of Contents:

   Project for a New Atlantis   
   
 "Paul D. Miller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>   
 

   Project for a New Atlantis pt 2: On Flooded Cities   
   
 "Paul D. Miller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>   
 



--

Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2005 10:14:10 -0400
From: "Paul D. Miller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Project for a New Atlantis

Between this and Kanye West's apt observation that "George Bush 
Doesn't Care about Black People" on the Aid Marathon for Katrina 
victims, I can only say - like that old Led Zeppelin song "when the 
levee breaks" it's all about reconstruction.

Katrina 3: Two Anti-Hurricane Projects (on landscape climatology)
Project 1: "How do you slow down a hurricane?"
In the June 2005 edition of The Economist Technology Quarterly 
(subscription required), we read about Moshe Alamaro, "a scientist at 
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, [who] has a plan. Just as 
setting small, controlled fires can stop forest fires by robbing them 
of fuel, he proposes the creation of small, man-made tropical 
cyclones to cool the ocean and rob big, natural hurricanes of their 
source of energy. His scheme, devised with German and Russian weather 
scientists and presented at a weather-modification conference in 
April, involves a chain of offshore barges adorned with upward-facing 
jet engines."

"Each barge creates an updraft, causing water to evaporate from the 
ocean's surface and reducing its temperature. The resulting tropical 
storms travel towards the shore but dissipate harmlessly. Dr Alamaro 
reckons that protecting Central America and the southern United 
States from hurricanes would cost less than $1 billion a year. Most 
of the cost would be fuel: large jet engines, he observes, are 
abundant in the graveyards of American and Soviet long-range bombers."
The creation of manmade tropical micro-storms, using heavy, 
greenhouse gas-burning jet engines towed through the waters of the 
equatorial Atlantic on what are, for all intents, artificial 
islands... is really a pretty ridiculous idea.
Yet it reminds me of a long-standing BLDGBLOG project that has 
otherwise gone unpublished. Till now:

Project 2: The Aeolian Reef
In Virgil's * Aeneid *, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, we read 
about "Aeolia, the weather-breeding isle":

"Here in a vast cavern King Aeolus
Rules the contending winds and moaning gales
As warden of their prison. Round the walls
They chafe and bluster underground. The din
Makes a great mountain murmur overhead.
High on a citadel enthroned,
Scepter in hand, he molifies their fury,
Else they might flay the sea and sweep away
Land masses and deep sky through empty air.
In fear of this, Jupiter hid them away
In caverns of black night. He set above them
Granite of high mountains - and a king
Empowered at command to rein them in
Or let them go." (Book 1, Lines 75-89)

Thus: BLDGBLOG's Aeolian Reef .
To be fair, this all began as nothing more than an idea for a new, 
artificial island that would be added to the Cyclades archipelago in 
Greece. It would be somewhere between Constant's Babylonic mid-sea 
pavilion -


- - an oil derrick -


- - the Maunsell Towers -


- - and a kind of massive, off-shore, geotechnical saxophone.
Full of vaulted tubes and curved ampitheaters - and complex twists 
through a hollow, polished core - this modern Aeolus, an artificial 
island, would produce storms (and even, possibly, negate them).
A modern Aeolus, in other words, would be a "weather-breeding isle" - 
or a "weather-cancelling isle," as the case may be: because then 
there was Katrina.
What would happen, I thought, if you built a manmade, 
weather-cancelling isle that could *stop hurricanes from forming*? I 
realized, of course, immediately, that you would actually need 
hundreds of these saxophone-like, anti-hurricane islands - even an 
entire manmade archipelago of them - because the atmospheric paths of 
storms are far too unpredictable.
You would need, that is, an Aeolian Reef.
The Aeolian Reef - and the current author, who cannot draw, 
hint-hint, would *love* to collaborate with any BLDGBLOG readers who 
want to illustrate some of these things - would consist of oil 
derrick-like platform-islands built in climatologically influential 
patterns throughout both the Gulf of Mexico and the larger, 
equatorial Atlantic.
The Aeolian Reef would: 1) trap and redirect high-speed winds from 
any burgeoning tropical storms and hurricanes , thus preventing them 
from actually forming; 2) provide incredibly exciting 
meteorological/atmospheric observation platforms far out at sea; and 
3) be readily exportable to other countries and other climate

Katrina: The Spectre of a Soviet-Style Crisis in the U.S.

[Paul D. Miller]

I remember waking up a teenager in the late 1980's and realizing that when the
Berlin Wall fell, it was all over for the Soviet Union. I wonder if Katrina 
spells
a similar fate for the U.S.

Paul



http://www.lefigaro.com/debats/20050912.FIG0354.html?083700

Emmanuel Todd: The Specter of a Soviet-Style Crisis

By Marie-Laure Germon and Alexis Lacroix
Le Figaro

Monday 12 September 2005

According to this demographer, Hurricane Katrina has revealed the decline of the
American system.

  Le Figaro. - What is the first moral and political lesson we can learn 
from
the catastrophe Katrina provoked? The necessity for a "global" change in our
relationship with nature?

  Emmanuel Todd . - Let us be wary of over-interpretation. Let's not lose
sight of the fact that we're talking about a hurricane of extraordinary scope 
that
would have produced monstrous damage anywhere. An element that surprised a great
many people - the eruption of the black population, a supermajority in this
disaster - did not really surprise me personally, since I have done a great deal
of work on the mechanisms of racial segregation in the United States.  I have
known for a long time that the map of infant mortality in the United States is
always an exact copy of the map of the density of black populations.  On the 
other
hand, I was surprised that spectators to this catastrophe should appear to have
suddenly discovered that Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell are not particularly
representative icons of the conditions of black America. What really resonates
with my representation of the United States - as developed in Apr=E8s l'empire -
is the fact that the United States was disabled and ineffectual. The myth of the
efficiency and super-dynamism of the American economy is in danger.

 We were able to observe the inadequacy of the technical resources, of the
engineers, of the military forces on the scene to confront the crisis. That 
lifted
the veil on an American economy globally perceived as very dynamic, benefiting
from a low unemployment rate, credited with a strong GDP growth rate. As opposed
to the United States, Europe is supposed to be rather pathetic, clobbered with
endemic unemployment and stricken with anemic growth. But what people have not
wanted to see is that the dynamism of the United States is essentially a 
dynamism
of consumption.

  Is American household consumption artificially stimulated?

 The American economy is at the heart of a globalized economic system, and 
the
United States acts as a remarkable financial pump, importing capital to the tune
of 700 to 800 billion dollars a year. These funds, after redistribution, finance
the consumption of imported goods - a truly dynamic sector. What has 
characterized
the United States for years is the tendency to swell the monstrous trade 
deficit,
which is now close to 700 billion dollars. The great weakness of this economic
system is that it does not rest on a foundation of real domestic industrial
capacity.

 American industry has been bled dry and it's the industrial decline that
above all explains the negligence of a nation confronted with a crisis 
situation:
to manage a natural catastrophe, you don't need sophisticated financial
techniques, call options that fall due on such and such a date, tax consultants,
or lawyers specialized in funds extortion at a global level, but you do need
materiel, engineers, and technicians, as well as a feeling of collective
solidarity. A natural catastrophe on national territory confronts a country with
its deepest identity, with its capacities for technical and social response. 
Now,
if the American population can very well agree to consume together - the rate of
household savings being virtually nil - in terms of material production, of
long-term prevention and planning, it has proven itself to be disastrous. The
storm has shown the limits of a virtual economy that identifies the world as a
vast video game.

  Is it fair to link the American system's profit-margin orientation - that
"neo-liberalism" denounced by European commentators - and the catastrophe that
struck New Orleans?

 Management of the catastrophe would have been much better in the United
States of old. After the Second World War, the United States assured the
production of half the goods produced on the planet. Today, the United States
shows itself to be at loose ends, bogged down in a devastated Iraq that it 
doesn't
manage to reconstruct. The Americans took a long time to armor their vehicles, 
to
protect their own troops. They had to import light ammunition. What a difference
from the United States of the Second World War that simultaneously crushed the
Japanese Army with its fleet of aircraft carriers, organized the Normandy 
landing,
re-equipped the Russian army in light materiel, contributed magisterially to
Europe's liberations, and kept the European and German populations liberated 
from
Hitler alive. The Americans knew how to domin

The Largest Theft in History

[Paul D. Miller]

Blackwater Mercenaries in New Orleans, a decayed FEMA, and of course, G.W. and
crew still get crazy paid. Bizness as usual... Paul


http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article313538.ece


  What Has Happened to Iraq's Missing $1bn?
 By Patrick Cockburn
 The Independent UK

 Monday 19 September 2005

 One billion dollars has been plundered from Iraq's defense ministry in one 
of
the largest thefts in history, The Independent can reveal, leaving the country's
army to fight a savage insurgency with museum-piece weapons.

 The money, intended to train and equip an Iraqi army capable of bringing
security to a country shattered by the US-led invasion and prolonged rebellion,
was instead siphoned abroad in cash and has disappeared.

 "It is possibly one of the largest thefts in history," Ali Allawi, Iraq's
Finance Minister, told The Independent.

 "Huge amounts of money have disappeared. In return we got nothing but 
scraps
of metal."

 The carefully planned theft has so weakened the army that it cannot hold
Baghdad against insurgent attack without American military support, Iraqi
officials say, making it difficult for the US to withdraw its 135,000- strong 
army
from Iraq, as Washington says it wishes to do.

 Most of the money was supposedly spent buying arms from Poland and 
Pakistan.
The contracts were peculiar in four ways. According to Mr. Allawi, they were
awarded without bidding, and were signed with a Baghdad-based company, and not
directly with the foreign supplier. The money was paid up front, and, 
surprisingly
for Iraq, it was paid at great speed out of the ministry's account with the
Central Bank. Military equipment purchased in Poland included 28-year-old
Soviet-made helicopters. The manufacturers said they should have been scrapped
after 25 years of service. Armored cars purchased by Iraq turned out to be so
poorly made that even a bullet from an elderly AK-47 machine-gun could penetrate
their armor. A shipment of the latest MP5 American machine-guns, at a cost of
$3,500 (£1,900) each, consisted in reality of Egyptian copies worth only $200 a
gun. Other armored cars leaked so much oil that they had to be abandoned. A deal
was struck to buy 7.62mm machine-gun bullets for 16 cents each, although they
should have cost between 4 and 6 cents.

 Many Iraqi soldiers and police have died because they were not properly
equipped. In Baghdad they often ride in civilian pick-up trucks vulnerable to
gunfire, rocket- propelled grenades or roadside bombs. For months even men
defusing bombs had no protection against blast because they worked without
bullet-proof vests. These were often promised but never turned up.

 The Iraqi Board of Supreme Audit says in a report to the Iraqi government
that US-appointed Iraqi officials in the defense ministry allegedly presided 
over
these dubious transactions.

 Senior Iraqi officials now say they cannot understand how, if this is so, 
the
disappearance of almost all the military procurement budget could have passed
unnoticed by the US military in Baghdad and civilian advisers working in the
defense ministry.

 Government officials in Baghdad even suggest that the skill with which the
robbery was organized suggests that the Iraqis involved were only front men, and
"rogue elements" within the US military or intelligence services may have 
played a
decisive role behind the scenes.

 Given that building up an Iraqi army to replace American and British troops
is a priority for Washington and London, the failure to notice that so much 
money
was being siphoned off at the very least argues a high degree of negligence on 
the
part of US officials and officers in Baghdad.

 The report of the Board of Supreme Audit on the defense ministry contracts
was presented to the office of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Prime Minister, in May. 
But
the extent of the losses has become apparent only gradually. The sum missing was
first reported as $300m and then $500m, but in fact it is at least twice as 
large.
"If you compare the amount that was allegedly stolen of about $1bn compared with
the budget of the ministry of defense, it is nearly 100 per cent of the 
ministry's
[procurement] budget that has gone Awol," said Mr. Allawi.

 The money missing from all ministries under the interim Iraqi government
appointed by the US in June 2004 may turn out to be close to $2bn. Of a military
procurement budget of $1.3bn, some $200m may have been spent on usable 
equipment,
though this is a charitable view, say officials. As a result the Iraqi army has
had to rely on cast-offs from the US military, and even these have been slow in
coming.

 Mr. Allawi says a further $500m to $600m has allegedly disappeared from the
electricity, transport, interior and other ministries. This helps to explain why
the supply of electricity in Baghdad has been so poor since the fall of Saddam
Hussein 29 months ago despite claims by the US and subseque

United Nations World Summit on ICANN + Root Domain Issues

[Paul D. Miller]

As I get ready for my speech at the United
Nations World Summit on the Information Society,
one of the things that strikes me as kind of
eerie, is the weird paradox of how much the U.S.
still controls the internet's root domain. The
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers sets the tone for how countries,
corporations, and NGO's receive their status on
the internet. It reminds me of the way the
European powers carved up various nations
arbitrarily with the Treaty of Berlin or the
later Treaty of Versailles - geography and power
were basic colonial foundations of the world
order of the day, and what strikes me as really
resonant is how the European powers of that era
are now colonized by the U.S. information economy.

.uk (england)
.fr (france)
.de (germany)
.es (spain)
.cn (china)
.jp (japan)

etc.

you name it. The U.S. owns it. You get a lease on
your country's name, and that's about it. Anyway,
just a thought about historical parallels. 

I'll be discussing these issues at the UN World
Summit coming up in Tunisia Nov 15th through the
20th from the point of view of: essentially, how
does this affect creativity and artistic
production - after all, it's just a metaphor, eh?

  The URL for the Summit is
http://www.smsitunis2005.org/plateforme/index.php?lang=3Den

Paul


Tug of war  over Net at Tunis summit

By Victoria Shannon International Herald Tribune


http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/11/13/business/net.php
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2005

PARIS When Libya lost the use of its Internet
domain ".ly" for five days last year, it had no
choice but to plead for help from a California
agency that reports to the U.S. Commerce
Department.

Anyone looking to do business with a .ly Web site
or to e-mail a .ly address was likely to
encounter a "file not found" or "no such person"
message. For anyone on the Internet, Libya was
just not there.

In a time when Internet access is critical to
world commerce - let alone to casual
communication - even a five-day lapse is a
hardship. And when one government has to beg
another to let its citizens be visible again on
that net, it can be a damaging blow to its own
sovereignty, as well as perhaps a matter of
national security, even if the cause was a
glitch, as in the Libyan case.

What if, by historical chance, it was France or
Britain that controlled country domain names on
the Internet? Would the United States settle for
asking another government to fix its own
addresses?

That kind of power to hinder or foster freedom of
the Internet, centralized in a single government,
is the key issue for many of the 12,000 people
expected in Tunisia this week for the United
Nations summit on the information age.

Managing operators of country-level domain names
like .ly, .de and .co.uk is one way that the
United States, through the California-based
nonprofit agency Icann, controls the Internet.
This organization is a consequence of the
network's development from research in U.S.
universities, laboratories and government
agencies in the 1970s.

Icann, which is short for the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers,
serves as a central authority in what is an
essentially decentralized, neutral and ungoverned
global network of computer networks. So that one
computer can easily find another, Icann runs the
addressing system, giving out blocs of unique
identifiers to countries and private registries.

It was the Icann board, for instance, that
approved a new suffix of .xxx for Internet
addresses to indicate adult-rated content this
summer, but it postponed implementing the address
after objections from the Commerce Department.

=46our years of high-level talks on Internet
governance conclude with the Tunis summit, and on
its eve, a figurative ocean separates the U.S.
position - that the Internet works fine as it is
- from most of the rest of the world, including
the European Union, which says that the Internet
has become an international resource whose center
of gravity must move away from Washington.

Whether these final debates break the deadlock
and produce any agreement to give other
governments more sway over Internet policy was in
some doubt last week. Even a recent discussion of
Internet governance between President George W.
Bush and Jos=E9 Manuel Barroso, president of the
European Commission, had not brought the sides
any closer.

"Our strong preference is to have a document that
everyone can be proud of," said David Gross,
deputy assistant secretary of state, who is
leading the U.S. delegation, along with Michael
Gallagher, assistant secretary of commerce.

"We would be sorely disappointed not to have a
document at all, but that would be better than to
have a bad document," Gross said from Tunisia,
where the negotiations resumed Sunday before the
official start of the summit meeting Wednesday.

A delegate from the European Union insisted that
the EU's call for a new intergovernmental body to
set the principles for running the Internet still
stands and that the soli

Delueze/Guattari: Remix Culture

[Paul D. Miller]

it's
relationship to turntables - the concept fits solidly. Composers have been using
the "fold" for many centuries - the main issue is that they haven't had the 
tools
to describe the process. D&G gave us those tools - I guess I look more to stuff
like Grand Master =46lash's "Adventures on the Wheels of Steel," Steinski and
Double D's "Hip-hop Lessons" than John Oswald, but we're both driven by the same
concept. The idea of collage drives my mixes - that's the point. Contemporary 
art
- art that explores the economies of scale that software allows us to explore -
points to the idea of the "input-output" schemata that Delueze and Guattari 
talked
about with their concept of the body without organs. I think it's a good 
analogy.
I really want to set music up as a platform - I want to make sure to remind
people, that yes, I'm an artist... It's really weird how much people are set
against the idea of existing in multiple contexts. Mono-reality... something 
like
that. It's boring. Again, the D & G connection about multiple situations 
occurring
simultaneously - reflects the "post post modern" scenario - it's not about
"deconstruction," but reconstruction - of building a new vision of how we can 
live
and think in the info ecology we've built for ourselves. And so on, and so on, 
and
so on...


4) I find very interesting that in "Cinema 1-Movement and image" Deleuze talks
about D.W.Griffith cinema, referring to image-action (the example he refers to 
in
particular is "Intolerance"), and Griffith=92s articulation of the narration, 
that
offers two examples of "civilization": (black people/white people). It almost
seemed to me that your remix of "Birth of a nation", especially when played 
live,
originates, with the obvious differences, from Deleuze's same critical ground...
your opinion on that


Civilization, as Freud pointed out so long ago, is about rules and boundaries 
but
it also inspires a kind of continuous renewal. At heart, civilizations are 
control
mechanisms - they're psychological more than they're physical. They are
meta-tools. For me, at the moment, it seems like the West is in a serious crisis
of meaning. The Enlightenment went dark in the mass mechanized warfare of the 
two
world wars, and the shattered remains were burned in the fire of Vietnam. Pretty
much nothing remains. My music asks: how do we create new forms of meaning from
these hollow ideals? We've moved far past Plato's Republic into a realm where 
the
"civic" aspects of culture as software are the new frames of reference. Software
(credit card debt, individual assigned names on line, domain names, DNS routers,
encription, computer aided design that builds airplanes, routes electricity,
guides DNA analysis etc etc there's alot more but you get the point) regulates
individual behavior - both on and off line - in the post industrialized world.
Software for thinking: it's an invisibly coercive concept. I like Deleuze's take
on "Intolerance" but you have to remember that film acts as a crucial myth 
device
for a world based on the consumption of images. I think that we need to analyze
film from the viewpoint of not only what the Situationists called
"psycho-geography" - a place that posits movement between radically different
environments as a causal principle in the way that we organize information, but
what the . That's the dj situation - origin, and destination blur - they become
loops, cycles, patterns. The way to explore them is through the filter of woven
meaning. Black culture has been the world's "subconscious" for most of the last
several centuries - it has been the operating system of a culture that refuses 
to
realize that its ideals have died long ago. The threads of the fabric of
contemporary 21st century culture, the media landscape of filaments, systems,
fiber optic cables, satellite transmissions, and so on - these are all 
rhizomatic.
They are relational architectures - the move in synchronization. The meshwork
needs to be polyphonic. The gears move in different cadences, but they create
movement. They need to be pulled apart so that we can break the loops holding 
the
past and present together so that the future can leak through. Perhaps this is
where we break with the old situation of "black" "white" - that stuff is really
dumb any way. It's all a lot more complex than that dualism. This is the new
"operating system" I envisage when I remixed "Birth of a Nation" - the collapse 
of
Wagner, the collapse of the Western scripts of linear progress, the renewal of a
world where repetition is a kind of homage to the future by respecting the past.

Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, Tunis, Tunisia - 11/20/05




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Re: Paris Burning [u]

[Paul D. Miller]

All I can say is, as usual, hypocrisy is hypocrisy is hypocrisy.

Is this the same Finkielkraut who wrote "In the Name of Humanity" and "Defeat of
the Mind?" Hypocrisy never ceases to amaze. I'm sure if it was 1968, he'd be out
there marching and singing songs etc etc

I'd like to see him - as an experiment for example - send a job application 
under
an assumed name. One that sounds "white" and another that sounds "arab" - who 
can
say what the result would be, but yeah... the reason the suburbs are burning 
isn't
about Islamic extremism - its because people see the hypocrisy at every level,
every day - all the time.

I lived in Paris for a year a while ago and was stopped by the police - 
"papiers?"
- literally everyday. When they found out I was African American, everything was
cool, but they would really hassle the Africans from the continent. It disgusted
me... Anyway, I'm really disappointed that Finkielkraut, like Zizek, can't deal
with the nuances of why this stuff is happening.

Paul


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Brands and Identity in the Age of Neuroscience

[Paul D. Miller]

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8535&feedId=online-news_rss20


How brands get wired into the brain
18:31 04 January 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Shaoni Bhattacharya

A person's liking for a particular brand name is wired into a 
specific part of the brain, a new study reveals. The research may 
provide an insight into the brain mechanisms that underlie the 
behavioural preferences that advertisers attempt to hijack.

It has long been known that humans and animals can learn to 
associate an irrelevant stimulus with a positive experience, for 
example the ringing of a bell with food, as in the case of Pavlov's 
dogs. And neuroimaging studies have recently implicated two regions 
buried deep in the brain - the ventral striatum and the ventral 
midbrain - as having an important role in this learning.

But now work led by John O. Doherty, currently at Caltech in 
Pasadena, US, shows that the actual level of preference is encoded 
in these brain regions, and that people access this information to 
guide their decisions.

The key message of our study is that we are able to make use of 
neural signals deep in our brain to guide our decisions about what 
items to choose, say when choosing between particular soups in a 
supermarket, without actually sampling the foods themselves, says 
Doherty, who did the research while at University College London, UK.

This is because we can make use of our prior experiences of the 
items through which we fashioned subjective preferences - do I like 
it or not? he told New Scientist. The next time we come to make a 
decision we use those preferences.

Pavlovian conditioning
Doherty and colleagues at UCL and the University of Iowa, US, ranked 
the preferences of human volunteers for blackcurrant, melon, 
grapefruit and carrot juice, and for a tasteless, odourless control 
drink.

The researchers scanned the volunteers brains using a technique 
called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect 
enhanced blood flow in various brain regions the greater the flow, 
the greater the neural activity in those areas.

They developed a Pavlovian-type association by flashing a geometric 
shape on a computer screen and giving a squirt of juice into the 
volunteers's mouths. However, the volunteers did not realise that 
they were being conditioned in this way  they were simply told to 
press a button to indicate on which side of the screen the shape had 
appeared.

The team measured how the volunteers had become conditioned by 
measuring their anticipation of the juice squirts following an image 
by measuring the dilation of their pupils.

Fast food poisoning
The fMRI scans revealed significant responses reflecting learning in 
the ventral midbrain and the ventral striatum. Crucially, they found 
that the strength of the response correlated with the volunteer's 
like or dislike of the juice.

"Stronger neural responses occur in these regions to a cue that is 
associated with a more preferred food" said Doherty. This shows that 
when you see a cue that is predictive of a reward, you are able to 
access information about your subjective preferences.

Doherty says this kind of brain programming may have an evolutionary 
function in helping humans and animals predict both good and bad 
experiences in their environment.

For instance, if you learn that a particular fast food outlet gave 
you food poisoning the last time you ate there  it is going to be in 
your interest to know not to go there again once you see the sign 
for that shop in the street he says.

Journal reference: Neuron (DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2005.11.014)





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Censoring Boing Boing: A Case in point

[Paul D. Miller]

One of the things that always makes one chuckle is the subtle way 
that we've probably moved into a far more totalitarian world than the 
Soviets could have imagined in their wildest dreams. The internet was 
made to withstand nuclear war, but it can barely hold its own in the 
face of politics!

Paul

By XENI JARDIN
Published: March 9, 2006

AMERICAN technology firms are taking heat from the public and 
Congress for helping China's government police the Internet. But this 
controversy extends well beyond China and the so-called Internet Gang 
of Four: Google, Yahoo, Cisco and Microsoft. Just how many American 
companies are complicit hit home for me last month when dozens of 
readers of BoingBoing.net e-mailed us to say they had been suddenly 
denied access.
Luba Lukova

The cause was SmartFilter, a product from a Silicon Valley company, 
Secure Computing. A recent update to the nannyware's list of no-no 
sites had started blocking our site as containing "nudity." This is 
absurd: a visit to BoingBoing might yield posts about iPod-shaped 
cakes and spaceship blueprints, but not pornography. SmartFilter's 
data managers later told us that even thumbnails of Michelangelo's 
"David" could land a site on the forbidden "nudity" list.

Many of our locked-out readers were trying to view BoingBoing from 
libraries, schools and their workplaces. That is regrettable but not 
tragic, as American viewers generally have other options. But after 
regular visitors from Qatar and Saudi Arabia complained, we 
discovered a more worrisome problem: government-controlled Internet 
service providers were using SmartFilter to effectively block access 
for entire countries.

Secure Computing refused to provide me with a list of the governments 
that use its filters. However, the OpenNet Initiative, a partnership 
between the University of Toronto, Cambridge University and Harvard 
Law School, has compiled data on how such products are used in 
foreign nations where censorship is easy because the governments 
control all Internet service providers.

The initiative found that SmartFilter has been used by 
government-controlled monopoly providers in Kuwait, Oman, Saudi 
Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates. It has also been 
used by state-controlled providers in Iran, even though American 
companies are banned from selling technology products there. (Secure 
Computing denies selling products or updates to Iran, which is 
probably using pirated versions.)

According to OpenNet, filtering products from another American 
company, Websense, have also been used by a state-controlled service 
provider in Iran, ParsOnline. Yemen uses Websense products to filter 
content on its two government-owned service providers. Websense 
software, the initiative says, filters out "sex education and 
provocative clothing sites, gay- and lesbian-related materials, 
gambling sites, dating sites, drug-related sites, sites enabling 
anonymous Web surfing, proxy servers that circumvent filtering, and 
sites with content related to converting Muslims to other religions."

The initiative also found that Myanmar, arguably the most repressive 
regime in the world, uses censorware from the American company 
Fortinet. And Singapore's government-controlled Singnet server uses 
filtering technology from SurfControl, a company formed from the 
merger of several censorware companies that is now technically 
British but has its filtering operations headquarters in California.

One of our most laudable national goals is the  export of free speech 
and free information, yet American companies are selling censorship. 
While some advocates of technology rights have proposed consumer 
boycotts and Congressional action to pressure these firms into 
responsible conduct, a good first step would be adding filtering 
technologies to the United States Munitions List, an index of 
products for which exporters have to file papers with the State 
Department. While this won't end such sales, it will bring them to 
light and give the public and lawmakers a better basis on which to 
consider stronger steps.

If American companies are already obligated to disclose the sale of 
bombs and guns to repressive regimes, why not censorware?

Xeni Jardin is a co-editor of BoingBoing.net .


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The Sudden Stardom of the Third-World City

[Paul D. Miller]

Hi Rana - it was with pleasure that I read your post - FINALLY, the 
list is getting exciting again.

I was just in New Zealand with Suketu, and am happy to report his 
book "Maximum City" won the Kiriyama Prize, which is a kind of 
Pacific Rim/South Asia equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize in the U.S.


New Zealand, which gets about 80% of it's energy supplies from solar, 
thermal, hydro, and wind power, is a great example of a European 
society that is coming to grips not only with the upcoming energy 
crisis that the West has fueled, but also, it's at least got a level 
comfort with diversity and multiculturalism than almost anything one 
can find in Europe.

All I can say is yeah, Europe is tired, America is tired. The theory 
scene is wy tired.

Rana, all I can say is please post more! Andreas, Keith - Rana is a 
guy... It's been really funny to see you both refer to him as a 
her Cultural Sensitivities 101, eh?

Paul


ps.
In light of the issues I think that Rana has broached on the list, I 
think I'll post an article by Mike Davis on New Orleans - America's 
own Third World city, right in the heart of the Red States! Rana - 
try visiting there sometime!


http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060410/davis The Nation
[from the April 10, 2006 issue]

Who Is Killing New Orleans?

By MIKE DAVIS

Afew blocks from the badly flooded and still-closed
campus of Dillard University, a wind-bent street sign
announces the intersection of Humanity and New Orleans.
In the nighttime distance, the downtown skyscrapers on
Poydras and Canal Streets are already ablaze with
light, but a vast northern and eastern swath of the
city, including the Gentilly neighborhood around
Dillard, remains shrouded in darkness.

The lights have been out for six months now, and no one
seems to know when, if ever, they will be turned back
on. In greater New Orleans about 125,000 homes remain
damaged and unoccupied, a vast ghost city that rots in
darkness while les bon temps return to a guilty strip
of unflooded and mostly affluent neighborhoods near the
river. Such a large portion of the black population is
gone that some radio stations are now switching their
formats from funk and rap to soft rock.

Mayor Ray Nagin likes to boast that "New Orleans is
back," pointing to the tourists who again prowl the
French Quarter and the Tulane students who crowd
Magazine Street bistros; but the current population of
New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi is
about the same as that of Disney World on a normal day.
More than 60 percent of Nagin's constituents--including
an estimated 80 percent of the African-Americans--are
still scattered in exile with no obvious way home.

In their absence, local business elites, advised by
conservative think tanks, "New Urbanists" and neo-
Democrats, have usurped almost every function of
elected government. With the City Council largely shut
out of their deliberations, mayor-appointed commissions
and outside experts, mostly white and Republican,
propose to radically shrink and reshape a majority-
black and Democratic city. Without any mandate from
local voters, the public-school system has already been
virtually abolished, along with the jobs of unionized
teachers and school employees. Thousands of other
unionized jobs have been lost with the closure of
Charity Hospital, formerly the flagship of public
medicine in Louisiana. And a proposed oversight board,
dominated by appointees of President Bush and Governor
Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, would end local control over
city finances.

Meanwhile, Bush's pledge to "get the work done quickly"
and mount "one of the largest reconstruction efforts
the world has ever seen" has proved to be the same
fool's gold as his earlier guarantee to rebuild Iraq's
bombed-out infrastructure. Instead, the Administration
has left the residents of neighborhoods like Gentilly
in limbo: largely without jobs, emergency housing,
flood protection, mortgage relief, small-business loans
or a coordinated plan for reconstruction.

With each passing week of neglect--what Representative
Barney Frank has labeled "a policy of ethnic cleansing
by inaction"--the likelihood increases that most black
Orleanians will never be able to return.

Lie and Stall

After his bungling initial response to Katrina, Bush
impersonated FDR and Lyndon Johnson when he reassured
the nation in his September 15 Jackson Square speech
that "we have a duty to confront [New Orleans's]
poverty with bold action We will do what it takes,
we will stay as long as it takes to help citizens
rebuild their communities and their lives."

In the event, the White House sat on its pledges all
autumn, mumbling homilies about the limits of
government, while its conservative attack dogs in
Congress offset Gulf relief with $40 billion worth of
cutbacks in Medicaid, food stamps and student loans.
Republicans also rebelled against aid for a state that
was depicted as a venal Third World society, a failed
state like Haiti, out of step with nat

Sound System Politics: Bass Culture

[Paul D. Miller]

These are the liner notes to a Box Set CD I've done with Trojan Records.

Trojan Records is a legendary record label
started by Arthur "Duke" Reid in Kingston,
Jamaica in the late 1960's. It's archive
encompasses some of the most renowned Jamaican
artists in history, and the box set I've compiled
for Trojan Records is a slice of material from
their catalog. It's a double CD with out takes
and extremely rare versions of Jamaican material
from the last 40 years.

Paul aka Dj Spooky

Liner notes for Trojan records:

In Fine Style: Dj Spooky Presents 50,000 Volts of Trojan Records

Heel up, Wheel up, come back, rewind: Trojan Records
by Paul D. Miller

When Trojan records asked me to do a "selections"
from their archive, one of the first things that
went through my mind was this: how do you mix a
music that changed the world? It's been about
sixty years since Jamaica has become an
independent country, and it seems like the music
that comes from this tiny island in the Caribbean
is having more of an impact than ever. Trojan
records founder, Arthur "Duke" Reid, used to
drive "Trojan" trucks around Kingston with huge
speakers blasting his soundsystem, and that's the
urban legend of how the name of the soundsystem
cum record label started. "Duke" was a former
policeman, and it comes as no surprise that the
ruff and "rude" sounds of the Kingston
underground were the staple of his sound. Trojan
Ltd. was  car company that made sturdy trucks
that were to become the staple of the colonial
market export of cars. The metaphor of Trojan, a
car company, mapped onto the Greek legend of
Troy, is as fitting as any fiction. The Trojans
of ancient Greece were a royal line founded by
Zeus and Electra, and if the myths of the past
are any thing to keep in mind when we think of
Jamaica, you can see the update: Trojan horses,
stealth units, sound systems that were able to be
in plain site, while changing the cultural
operating system o fthe entire world.

Soundsystems were portable discos, mobile
platforms for different styles. They were the
preferred method of spreading a style because
they were nomadic in a way that the monumental
clubs of the U.S. and U.K. couldn't dream of.
=46rom the vantage point of the 21st century, they
can only be viewed as the predecessor of the
ipod. Portability, quickness, stealth copies of
hit songs, "versions" - all of this leads us to
the idea of remix culture and "mash-ups" that are
the digital world inheritance from these analog
media. With the material that I selected for this
compilation, I wanted to avoid the obvious songs
of Jamaican history, and focus on the more
esoteric materials that collectors and producers
could relate to. For example, when the Prodigy
sampled Max Romeo and The Upsetter's 1976 "I
Chase The Devil (Lucifer)" I thought it would be
a good start to think about how the same sample
popped up on Kayne West's production of Jay Z's
hit "Lucifer" - I think you'll relate to the out
take version I included in the compilation with
Lee "Scratch" Perry's version "Disco Devil." With
people like Lee "Scratch" Perry and his staple of
singers like Susan Cadogan (a former librarian!),
you can hear the heat of a Kingston nite in songs
like her hit "Fever" and her 1974 smash single
"Hurt So Good" a cover version of Millie
Jackson's song by the same name. When you hear
Copyright law in Jamaica was never tight -
everything was a copy of something else, and you
can think of the whole culture as a shareware
update, a software source for the rest of the
world to upload. And if you stretch your ears,
you can see the future of digital music in the
drum machine riddim of "Sleng Teng" - a rhythm
made at King Jammy's on a Casio MT-40 home
keyboard. Just think: reggae is the expression of
a nation under immense pressure - from IMF loans,
from colonialism's after affects, the falling
price of bauxite and its relationship to a Third
World economy based solely on natural products
like sugar cane and bananas=8A Jamaica created its
own economy in sound with the relentless bass
pressure of an island where music, and access to
the right styles and sounds could make or break
your career. The pressure to find the right
rhythms created a hothouse of innovation. Can you
imagine the world without Bob Marley - well, he
used to screen records as a clerk for Coxsone
soundsystem. He'd literally screen through the
sounds of the current day to tell Coxsone which
records to copy! Today with artists like
Matisyahu in Brooklyn doing Hasidic Jewish
versions of reggae, to stuff like Japan's
"Ranking Taxi" to all sorts of stuff coming out
of Brazil, India, Tunisia, Germany, France=8A the
list goes on. You get the idea. Before hip-hop
was global, the Jamaican scene 

Transforming the Tate Modern: Notes for a Multi-Media Intervention

[Paul D. Miller]

This brief essay is a blurb I wrote for my upcoming concert at The Tate Modern
Museum in London.

The concert will be on May 26th in London. There'll be lots of folks. More
details:

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/musicperform/ubsopeningsthelon=
gweekendnew.htm


Public Vs Private: Through a Scanner Darkly
By Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky

Prelude: the following essay is for a remix of a project around Walter Ruttmans
infamous "Symphony of a City" film that I will present with The Tate Modern 
Museum
in London, May 2006. The film will projected throughout the museum's "Turbine
Hall" as a large scale intervention. The idea is to use the museum as a 
projection
canvass.

Here goes:

We live in the era of the world city. So much of what we see is about what we
project out into the world. Your eyes have a perceptual architecture. They break
light waves and particles into some kind of coherent meaning that the mind then
organizes, and makes into metaphors, thoughts, and of course, images. As an
artist, a lot of what I do is about getting people to look outside the frames of
reference that so many of us have been conditioned to accept. I live in NYC, and
you can pretty much expect that most people have a reference point that the city
provides: subways, poster placards, the sides of buses and lately, their cell
phone networks that send info on various developments - news, videos, art=8A you
name it, it's being broadcast. You walk down the street in NYC, and you see, in
one form or another, a world tapestry made from almost every media outlet
available to modern humanity.

Back in the late 1960's and early 1970's the situation was different, 
but
you could see where it was going. Trains were being "bombed" daily because that
was the way kids felt they could bypass the authorities and get their message 
out
- the ideal of being "all city" was the driving force for so many artists - from
films like "Graffiti Rock" to "Wildstyle" to "Style Wars" you can see the same
dialectic at work - there was a deep tension between public space and private
expression. During the period of the late 1970's NYC spent over $100 million
dollars to combat the idea of private expression in public spaces, and from the
result, a new artform was born. The city didn't invest in training artists, or
developing young minds - it went to war with kids to keep public spaces blank.
Today, you can see who won the war: advertising adopted the same strategies as 
the
kids, and no modern bus or train would be complete without a bumper to bumper 
slew
of ads. What more can be done to saturate the landscape with a howling emptiness
of our dreams? What more can be done to actually give people some meaning, some
kind of connectedness to the way we actually live? The world is made of 
meanings -
values that are shared, values that connect us to one another in a way that
digital media is making clear. In a world where every move you make on-line 
leaves
a trace, whether it's the collaborative filtering process of last.fm, or the way
people post almost every moment of their lives on websites like youtube.com and
myspace.com, the end result is the same: you have profile of someone's values,
tastes, and the way they express almost all aspects of the their outward 
identity.
Graffiti was the underground response to the same issue: how do you as a young
person create a situation where you can express yourself through the media 
around
you?

To me, the whole debate of ownership - intellectual property, digital rights
management, the whole scenario - it all needs to be updated. Think of the
situation as a kind of ecology: who owns the air? Who owns your DNA? Who owns 
your
memory? I think that we're so caught up with the issue of ownership, that we've
forgotten some of the fundamental issues that make up the fabric of a culture. 
If
you look back in time, other cultures dealt with intellectual property from the
vantage point of a world where digital media didn't exist, and people pretty 
much
had to make copies of the material - whatever it was, books, scrolls, whatever, 
by
hand. For us, the digital copy is a color on a painters palette - it's something
to be used, abused, and flipped.


Why should we watch a film like "Berlin: Symphony of a City," almost 80 years
after it was made? I like to think of it as a historical document made of
fragments, a touchstone for the multi-media world we inhabit today. Basically,
it's an insight into the patterns of life and living in a major metropolis -
Berlin in the late '20s - but it's also a testimony of how urban life ebbs and
flows in the patterns held together by cinema and editing techniques.

Walter Ruttmann made history with his 1927 masterwork "Opus: Berlin - Symphony 
of
A City" by creating a film that looked at the c

A Theory of Verticality: Eyal Weizman's architecture of Occupation

[Paul D. Miller]

This is part of a series of articles Eyal Weizman has published.
This is with Opendemocracy.org the new urbanism, and its. This is 
something that no wall can contain.

I enjoy Eyal's work because it indexes the kind of power
structures that are being imposed on the Palestinian lands with a
dynamic understanding of how these control mechanisms mesh with
architecture. The other articles Ayal has written were compiled
in a book entitled: A Civil Occupation: The Politics of Israeli
Architecture with Rafi Segal



as the intro at
http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article.jsp?id=2&debateId=45
&articleId=801 goes:

Weizman introduces the experience of territory in the West
Bank, which explodes simple political boundaries and "crashes
three-dimensional space into six dimensions -- three Jewish and
three Arab".

Since the 1967 war, when Israel occupied the West Bank and the
Gaza strip, a colossal project of strategic, territorial and
architectural planning has lain at the heart of the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict.

The landscape and the built environment became the arena of
conflict. Jewish settlements -- state-sponsored islands of
'territorial and personal democracy', manifestations of the
Zionist pioneering ethos -- were placed on hilltops overlooking
the dense and rapidly changing fabric of the Palestinian
cities and villages. 'First' and 'Third' Worlds spread out in
a fragmented patchwork: a territorial ecosystem of externally
alienated, internally homogenised enclaves located next to,
within, above or below each other.

A new understanding of territory had to be developed to govern
the West Bank. The Occupied Territories were no longer seen as a
two-dimensional surface, but as a large threedimensional volume,
layered with strategic, religious and political strata.

New and intricate frontiers were invented, like the temporary
borders later drawn up in the Oslo Interim Accord, under which
the Palestinian Authority was given control over isolated
territorial 'islands', but Israel retained control over the
airspace above them and the sub-terrain beneath.

This process might be described as the 'politics of verticality'.
It began as a set of ideas, policies, projects and regulations
proposed by Israeli state-technocrats, generals, archaeologists,
planners and road engineers since the occupation of the West
Bank, severing the territory into different, discontinuous
layers.

The writer Meron Benvenisti described the process as crashing
"three-dimensional space into six dimensions -- three Jewish and
three Arab". Former US president Bill Clinton sincerely believed
in a vertical solution to the problem of partitioning the Temple
Mount. Settlement Masterplanners like Matityahu Drobless aimed to
generate control from high points.

Ron Pundak, the architect of the Oslo Accords, described
solutions for partitioning the West Bank with a three-dimensional
matrix of roads and tunnels, still on the drawing board, as the
only practical way to divide an undividable territory. And Gilead
Sher, Israeli chief negotiator at Camp David (and a divorce
lawyer) explained it to me as a way of enlarging the 'cake'
before partitioning it.

Over a week, openDemocracy posted Eyal Weizman's extraordinary
series of articles and photo-essays, which fills out this picture
of three-dimensional conflict in devastating detail. These ideas
are extracted from a book he is writing. They offer us a fresh
way of understanding the West Bank in words and pictures.

In the course of the articles, Weizman takes us on a journey
which starts with the hills and valleys of the West Bank
landscape. Reflecting on the significance mountains and valleys
have historically for the Jewish people, he focuses on the recent
mountaintop settlements.

Next he takes us underground to examine the politics of water
and sewage in this contested territory, and the way archaeology
is being pressed into the service of the present (episodes 5
and 6). He then lays out the special case of Jerusalem and the
ongoing battle for its past, above and below ground (episode 9),
before going on to explore the astonishing infrastructure of
bypass roads that weave above and below each other and attempt to
separate the two communities (episode 10).

In his chilling final episode he turns our attention to the way
the Israelis have established control over individual Palestinian
lives, by militarising the airspace over the West Bank.

The series will climax in May with Weizman's definitive new map
of the West Bank patchwork, showing how Israeli and Palestinian
settlements encircle one another. Prepared for the human rights
organization B'tselem, and updating American intelligence maps,
it will be an indispensable aid to understanding the intimacy of
this conflict.






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Re: report_on_NNA

[Paul D. Miller]

Tobias - I regret I wasn't able to make it. I'm in a remote spot in
Switzerland at the moment, but followed the progress of the event with
interest. Glad to see that it went well! We should try something in
NYC. I think that the list has been a bit flat for a while, but hey,
there's always more than one way to do things, and your event seems
like a step in the right direction.

Best  wishes,
Paul aka Dj Spooky





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Entertainment Nation: The Nation Magazine's culture issue

[Paul D. Miller]

This is a "remix" of an article I have in the current issue of The
Nation Magazine. It goes on newstands today/tomorrow


 Digital Music Revolution 
   by Paul D. Miller
his article can be found on the web at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060703/miller




Ten years ago, when we first focused national attention on the dangers
of the US media cartel, the situation was already grim, although in
retrospect it may seem better than it really was. In the spring of
1996 Fox News was only a conspiracy (which broke a few months later).
CNN belonged to Turner Broadcasting, which hadn't yet been gobbled by
Time Warner (although it would be just a few months later); Viacom had
not yet bought CBS News (although it would in 1999, before they later
parted ways); and, as the Telecommunications Act had been passed only
months earlier, local radio had not yet largely disappeared from the
United States (although it was obviously vanishing). One could still
somewhat plausibly assert, as many did, that warnings of a major civic
crisis were unfounded, overblown or premature, as there was little
evidence of widespread corporate censorship, and so we were a long way
from the sort of journalistic meltdown that The Nation had predicted.

Thus was the growing threat of media concentration treated much
like global warming, which, back then, was also slighted as a
"controversial" issue ("the experts" being allegedly at odds about
it), and one whose consequences, at their worst, were surely centuries
away--a catastrophic blunder, as the past decade has made entirely
clear to every sane American. Now, as the oceans rise and simmer and
the polar bears go under, only theocratic nuts keep quibbling with
the inconvenient truth of global warming. And now, likewise, few
journalists are quite so willing to defend the Fourth Estate, which
under Bush & Co. has fallen to new depths. Although its history is
far from glorious, the US press has never been as bad as it is now;
and so we rarely hear, from any serious reporters, those blithe claims
that all is well (or no worse than it ever was).

Contrary to the counterclaims in 1996, there was, as The Nation
noted then, copious hard evidence of corporate meddling with the
news, and also, even more important, lots of subtler evidence of
reportorial self-censorship throughout the media cartel. And yet what
stood out as egregious back then seems pretty tame today, now that
the press consistently tunes out or plays down the biggest news,
while hyping trivialities, or, if it covers a disaster, does so
only fleetingly and without "pointing fingers." (New Orleans is now
forgotten.) The press that went hoarse over Monica Lewinsky's dress is
largely silent on the Bush regime's subversion of the Constitution;
its open violation of the laws here and abroad; its global use of
torture; its vast surveillance program(s); its covert propaganda
foreign and domestic; its flagrant cronyism; its suicidal military,
economic and environmental policies; and its careful placement of
the federal establishment into the hands of Christianist extremists.
Whether it's such tawdry fare as Jeffrey Gannon's many overnights
at Bush's house, or graver matters like the Patriot Act, or the
persistent questions about 9/11, or the President's imperial "signing
statements" or--most staggering of all--the ever-growing evidence of
coast-to-coast election fraud by Bush & Co., the press has failed
in its constitutional obligation to keep us well informed about the
doings of our government.

In short, our very lives and liberty are at unprecedented risk because
our press has long since disappeared into "the media"--a mammoth
antidemocratic oligopoly that is far more responsive to its owners,
big shareholders and good buddies in the government than it is to the
rest of us, the people of this country.

Surely other factors too have helped wipe out the news: an
institutional overreliance on official sources; the reportorial star
system, with its corruptive salaries and honoraria, and all those
opportunities to hobnob with important criminals; the propaganda drive
against "the liberal media"; the stupefying influence of TV, which has
dragged much of the print world into its too-speedy orbit; etc. The
fundamental reason for the disappearance of the news, however, is the
media cartel itself. Fixated on the bottom line, it cuts the costs of
real reporting while overplaying cheap crapola; and in its endless
drive for more, it is an ally of the very junta whose high crimes and
misdemeanors it should be exposing to the rest of us. It is past time,
therefore, to go beyond the charting and analysis of media ownership,
to boycotts, strikes and protests of the media cartel itself.








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Shooting War: Futuristic Web Comic Echoes Reality

[Paul D. Miller]

At the risk of actually saying this is a funny comic strip about an
"embedded journalist" in Iraq, well... all I can say is that it's a
solid graphic novel on-line.

The URL for the comic:
info:
http://smithmag.us/shootingwar/about/

and the actual comic:
http://smithmag.us/shootingwar/chapters/chapter-1/

Paul aka Dj Spooky

a decent article:


Futuristic Web Comic Echoes Reality

By Zack Pelta-Heller, AlterNet
Posted on June 16, 2006, Printed on June 16, 2006


It's the year 2011. John McCain is our unpopular
president, the war in Iraq rages on, gasoline is $10 a
gallon, and Tom Cruise and Mary-Kate Olsen have just
called it quits. When videoblogger Jimmy Burns captures
on camera a suicide bomb blast that rocks a Brooklyn
Starbucks (destroying his apartment above), he's
immediately hired by maverick network Global News and
packed off to Iraq.

That's the eerie world of "Shooting War," an arresting
web comic from author Anthony Lappé and artist Dan
Goldman. Only a half-dozen chapters of "Shooting War"
have been published on SMITH magazine since May 15, yet
this episodic series has already become a prescient
commentary on the future of warring Iraqi factions,
globalization and citizen journalism's struggle against
mainstream media.

"The world of 'Shooting War' is half where I think
things are headed and half satire," Lappé told me by
phone. As executive editor of Guerrilla News Network,
Lappé identifies with Jimmy Burns' dilemma in working
for the ficticious Global News.

"Burns is a vulnerable hero with aspirations of fame and
money, but his politics are grounded," Lappé explained.
"So does he sell out to reach a wider audience?"
According to Lappé, Global News is akin to Al-Jazeera
(and for that matter, political blogs), in that it
prides itself on being uncensored.

"Shooting War" was born out of Lappé's own experiences
in Iraq. In the fall of 2003, Lappé filmed
"BattleGround: 21 Days on the Empire's Edge," a
documentary that recorded the onset of the Iraqi
insurgency. "I was standing in the Sunni Triangle,"
Lappé said, "when it occurred to me that this war is so
surreal because you have teens raised on Play Station 2
who know nothing of Iraqi culture, yet are trying to
create an infrastructure and government." While Lappé
initially conceived "Shooting War" as an animated film,
he realized that developing it as an electronic graphic
novel might be a better way to reach the younger
generation.

Like Lappé, illustrator Dan Goldman recognizes his
audience's proclivity for video games, and has even
subtly acknowledged this penchant in the narrative.
During a U.N. press briefing in Chapter 5, a bored NBC
reporter is seen playing a PSP videogame fighting
Iraqis. "We're trying to keep things very meta," Goldman
says with a laugh, "though we want to keep the story
line very realistic. When I'm drawing this, my satirical
bones are definitely twitching."

Goldman already had a couple of graphic novels under his
belt before "Shooting War." Prior to the 2004
presidential election, Goldman co-wrote "Everyman," in
which the last two presidential elections were swindled
through faulty Diebold voter machines. What was uncanny
about "Everyman" -- aside from basically predicting the
outcome of the 2004 election -- was that it featured a
rising third-party candidate with a surprising
resemblance to Barack Obama, even before Obama delivered
his famous address at the Democratic National
Convention.

Both Lappé and Goldman regard web comics as a sub-genre
with endless potential. "The format of an online graphic
novel is so exciting," Lappé said, "because there's
built-in anticipation of turning to the next screen, the
next panel, the next chapter." "Shooting War" has
already explored some of the new possibilities afforded
by a medium traditionally found in print. A gritty Flash
trailer depicts animated scenes from Chapter 1 set to a
soundtrack Lappé recorded in Iraq, and Lappé and Goldman
have made their series even more interactive by creating
a "2011 Headline Contest" on their blog for fans.

"Technology has changed the way we tell stories," says
Larry Smith, founder and editor of SMITH, the reader-
generated online magazine that presents a new episode of
"Shooting War" each week. "While we didn't invent web
comics, "Shooting War" is an electronic graphic novel
with universal appeal." Smith, along with Lappé,
Goldman, and artist Dean Haspiel, believes web comics
are invaluable for their ability to establish a fan base
and generate early buzz even before sending the graphic
novel to a print publisher.

Haspiel, who's collaborated with Harvey Pekar and
Jonathan Ames, among others, said, "There's an immediate
gratification to web comics, and they cost nothing to
create except time and talent." Haspiel and Goldman
helped found ACT-i-VATE, a virtual studio collective of
12 web comic artists. More and more, web comics are
becoming 

Exquite Corpse - Totems Without Taboos

[Paul D. Miller]

This is an essay I've written as the foreward to 
an anthology on the classic gameThe Exquisite 
Corpse: Collaboration, Creativity, and the 
World's Most Popular Parlor Game  edited by Kanta 
Kochhar-Lindgren, Davis Schneiderman, and Tom 
Denlinger, to be published by University of 
Nebraska Press (2007). This collection is the 
first set of original essays to provide a broad 
retrospective on the legacy of the Corpse 
project-and we are defining this legacy fairly 
loosely, with representation from historical, 
literary, collaborative, moments (etc.). The vibe 
is open and the text, I guess, is too.

enjoy!
Paul aka Dj Spooky


Totems without Taboos: The Exquisite Corpse
By Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid


Database aesthetics, collaborative filtering, 
musical riddles, and beat sequence philosophy 
aren't exactly things that come to mind when you 
think of the concept of the "exquiste corpse." 
But if there's one thing at I want to you to 
think about when you read this anthology, its 
that collage based art - whether its sound, film, 
multimedia, or computer code, has become the 
basic frame of reference for most of the info 
generation. We live in a world of relentlessly 
expanding networks - cellular, wireless, fiber 
optic routed, you name it - but the basic fact is 
that the world is becoming more interconnected 
than ever before, and it's going to get deeper, 
weirder, and a lot more interesting than it 
currently is as I write this essay in NYC at the 
beginning of the 21st century. Think of the 
situation as being like this:
in an increasingly fractured and borderless 
world, we have fewer and fewer fixed systems to 
actually measure our experiences. This begs the 
question: how did we compare experiences before 
the internet? How did people simply say "this is 
the way I see it?" The basic response, for me, is 
that they didn't - there was no one way of seeing 
anything, and if there's something the 20th 
century taught us, is that we have to give up the 
idea of mono-focused media, and enjoy the 
mesmerizing flow of fragments we call the 
multi-media realm. For the info obsessed, games 
are the best shock absorber for the "new" - they 
render it in terms that everyone can get. Play a 
video game, stroll through a corridor blasting 
your opponents. Move to the next level. Repeat. 
It could easily be a Western version of a game 
that another culture used to teach about morals 
and the fact that respect for life begins with an 
ability to grasp the flow of information between 
people and places. I wonder how many Westerners 
would know the term "daspada" - but wait - the 
idea that we learn from experience and evolve 
different behavioral models to respond to 
changing environments is a place where complexity 
meets empathy, a place where we learn that giving 
information and receiving it, is just part of 
what it means to live on this, or probably any 
planet in the universe. What makes "Exquisite 
Corpse" cool is simple: it was an artists parlour 
game to expose people to a dynamic process - one 
that made the creative act a symbolic exchange 
between players.

Some economists call this style of engagement 
"the gift economy" - I like to think of the idea 
of creating out of fragments as the basic way we 
can think and create in an era of platitudes, 
banality, and info overload. Even musicians and 
artists - traditionally, the ciphers that 
translate experience into something visible for 
the rest of us to experience - have for the most 
part been happy for their work to be appropriated 
by the same contemporary models for material 
power that have created problems for their 
audiences - power and art happily legitimizing 
each other in a merry dance of death, a jig where 
some people know the rules of the dance, but most 
don't. But this "death," this "dematerialization" 
- echoes what Marx and Engles wrote about way 
back in the 19th century with their infamous 
phrase "all that is solid melts into air." Think 
of the exquisite corpse concept as a kind of 
transference process on a global scale. When you 
look at the sheer volume of information moving 
through most of the info networks of the 
industrialized world, you're presented with a 
tactile relationship with something that can only 
be sensed as an exponential effect - an order of 
effect that the human frame of reference is 
simply not able to process on its own. At the end 
of the day, the "exquisite corpse" is just as 
much about renewal as it is about memory. It 
depends on how you play the game.

The way I see it, is this: whenever  humanity 
tries to really grapple with the deep issues - 
life, death, taxes, you name it - it becomes a 
game, and I like to think that like most human 
endeavors,  "exquisite corpse" is all about 
chance processes. For example, t

Torture, Torture, Torture!!!

[Paul D. Miller]

This is a cross post of an mini essay by Naeem Mohaiemen.

read on!
Paul

State Of Exception, After The Torture Vote
- Naeem Mohaiemen

About culture's re-engagement with the war on something, Martin Amis 
recently said:
"As Norman Mailer said when 9/11 happened, the temptation to charge 
in should be resisted because what happens with writing is that you 
receive the stimuli and they go down into your subconscious, and what 
settles settles, and what doesn't doesn't. You find, after a couple 
of years, that you've got something to write about. It's part of your 
silent anxiety about what Don DeLillo calls the world hum."

The world hum right now is last week's stunning vote to authorize new 
powers to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions on torture.  Aziz Huq of 
NYU Brennan Center (and Visible Collective) calls it "a bill that 
strikes harder at American liberties and at the fundamentals of 
American government than any since the authorization of the Japanese 
internment."

Even the NYT was moved to apoplexy:
"[The new law] allows the president to identify enemies, imprison 
them indefinitely and interrogate them - albeit with a ban on the 
harshest treatment - beyond the reach of the full court reviews 
traditionally afforded criminal defendants and ordinary prisoners. 
Taken as a whole, the law will give the president more power over 
terrorism suspects than he had before the Supreme Court decision this 
summer in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that undercut more than four years of 
White House policy."

We are now in that space that Francois Saint Bonnet called the space 
of "imbalance between public law and political fact." Looking at the 
proposal for a suspension of the French constitution, Giorgio Agamben 
traces two models - one where wartime powers spread into civilian 
space, the other wherein individual liberties are suspended from the 
constitution. The merging of these two trajectories produces the 
state of exception.

The argument that a sitting President of the United States has the 
power, unique among all signatories to the Geneva Conventions, to 
reinterpret what constitutes torture, is a full-force realization of 
a state of exception. It can also take on the contours of notstand 
("state of necessity"), state of siege, or emergency powers. But not 
yet that trigger-term: martial law (that's for Thailand, so the 
yammering classes can breathe a sigh of relief).

How will the citizens of this nation respond? Voting for Democrats at 
midterms is one very micro (but tangible) baby step. But more 
systematic, wide-ranging meditations on the changing nature of the 
soul of continental United States are needed.

Protest action is mounting after last week's vote. Some of it is 
incandescent with purpose.

Organized groups are doing a lot more than just writing. Artists, 
activists, lawyers, clergy, labor, academics, and many other levels 
of society are mobilizing for this week's nationwide protests to 
"Drive Out The Bush Regime."

Two key events:
October 2: Mobilizing Meetings
October 5: National Protests
[details below]

Is this wishful thinking, visual resistance, building capacity, 
symbolic theater, or all of the above? Only way to find out is to 
attend the meetings and rallies, starting with tonight.

In a word: participate

No time for armchair analysts.


References


October 5: Drive Out Bush Regime
http://www.worldcantwait.net

Aziz Huq on Military Commissions Act of 2006
http://writ.corporate.findlaw.com/commentary/20060926_huq.html

Aziz Huq on Terror 2016
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/09/28/terror_2016.php

Ariel Dorfman on Torture
http://tinyurl.com/lnfza

Torture Not An American Value
http://tinyurl.com/zy7j2

This Is What Waterboarding Looks Like
http://www.davidcorn.com/archives/2006/09/this_is_what_wa.php

How Would A Patriot Act?
http://tinyurl.com/m9hm9

Comfortably Numb
http://tinyurl.com/zkv9y

Banned On Airplanes: Craig Murray's New Book
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1867840,00.html





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The 13 Scariest People in America

[Paul D. Miller]

A reasonable look at some of the more colorful characters in rightwing
America. My favorite is Arizona's Joe Arpaio - who should probably be
voted a #1 reality TV show on youtube for "Prison Love" 'cause he's,
like, really into putting webcams in prisoners cells...

Paul

http://www.alternet.org/story/43586/

The Thirteen Worst People in America:

Scariest Cop: Joe Arpaio / Sheriff, Maricopa County, AZ

by Charles M. Young

A huge swath of Arizona that includes Phoenix, Tempe and Scottsdale,
Maricopa County attracts journalists and politicians from around
the world, all hoping to learn penal reform theory from Sheriff Joe
Arpaio, who opens his gates to everyone except reporters known to be
critical. He brags on the department website that he has "nothing to
hide and nothing to fear," and except for the occasional prisoner who
gets beaten to death (R.I.P. Scott Norberg), he probably doesn't have
anything to hide or to fear.

Most of the press considers him a colorful character who dresses his
inmates in pink underwear, feeds them $.45 meals and houses them in
tents where the temperature can exceed 140 degrees and the inmates
have to breath the stench from a nearby dump and animal crematorium. A
true pioneer of women's liberation, he has instituted chain gangs for
women as well as men. Both sexes must listen to patriotic songs, and
recordings of Arpaio reading self-help books throughout the day.

Although he forbids raunchy magazines (as well as coffee, cigarettes,
Kool-Aid and hot meals), his recent jailcam experiment, live Web
broadcasts of inmate life including toilet sessions, was a huge hit,
and was quickly linked to by porn sites around the world. When inmates
sued for invasion of privacy, Arpaio had to shut it down, but it was
a rare setback for "America's Toughest Sheriff," as he likes to bill
himself. Under a novel interpretation of the state's smuggling law,
his most recent stunt is arresting illegal immigrants and giving
them the pink-underwear-and-patriotic-song treatment. Having been
elected four times by America's scariest voters, Arpaio can (and does)
intimidate anyone who objects to his Guantanamo of the Sonora. Why
waste cruel and unusual punishment on mere Islamofascists when we've
got all these criminals on the border and a shredded Bill of Rights?
Welcome to the future of law enforcement.

Scariest Presidential Candidate: Sam Brownback / Senator (R-Kansas)

by Mary Reinholz

Once a moderate in the Bob Dole mold, Sen. Sam Brownback has morphed
into a zealous man of God intent on protecting millions of fetuses
from what he calls the yearly "holocaust" of abortion. Brownback
actually considers fetuses to be full-blown American citizens.

Just another religious nut stalking the corridors of power? Well, yes,
but this ambitious pol is the favored 2008 presidential candidate
of the radical right. Brownback seems hell-bent on establishing not
just faith-based initiatives, but "faith in politics" -- i.e., an
authoritarian Christian theocracy.

The man speaks softly but pushes the Passion of the Christ in the
culture wars, blasting gay marriage, porn, stem cell re-search and,
most recently, assisted suicide. One of Brown-back's glorious moments
came when he proposed introducing a bill in the Senate that would
compel pregnant women considering abortions to provide anesthetics for
their fetuses.

But no matter how over the top his political posturing, no one seems
to be laughing at Brownback's bid to succeed Bush -- certainly not the
influential Bible-thumpers supporting him like Pat Robertson and Chuck
Colson. Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania) sponsored Brownback's
conversion to Roman Catholicism in 2002, and he was later baptized in
a chapel run by the secretive lay society Opus Dei.

On the economic front, the pious Senator perceived no moral quandary
in accepting $42,000 from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Along
the way, Brownback apparently has had access to the deep pockets of
his wife, the former Mary Stauffer, whose family used to own a media
conglomerate.

Brownback's 1995 bout with potentially fatal cancer intensified his
right-to-life ardor, but his religious beliefs didn't stop him from
living, until recently, in a $600-a-month apartment in a $1.1 million
Capitol Hill townhouse owned by members of Congress and subsidized by
a secretive religious organization, known variously as The Fellowship
and The Foundation and registered with the IRS as a church. Brownback
is a regular member of one of the group's "prayer cells."

Perhaps he prays for the Supreme Court to display the Ten Commandments
since the courts, believes Brownback, have overstretched "separation
of church and state" to mean "removal of church from state."

Scariest Judge: Edith Hollan Jones / Chief Justice of the U.S. Court
of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit

by Paul Drexel

Imagine you're a woman working at a company where male colleagues
send you X-rated notes, hit on you, and repeatedly grab your breasts
-- even onc

Bruce Sterling Column in Wired ends

[Paul D. Miller]

So I'm at the Hotel Tropico in downtown Luanda, Angola for the Luanda 
Triennial, about to take a flight to Paris, and I look down at the 
hotel lobby coffee table and see Wired Magazine's current issue.

Wired Magazine in Africa!


Wired is one of the few magazines I still bother to read, and I 
always looked forward to seeing what Bruce Sterling and Lawrence 
Lessig were up to. They were some of the few voices that seemed to 
have a more omnivorous appetite for global culture and digital media, 
than your average theory type, or pompous critic.

I'm one of the few black people Wired Magazine ever did a feature on 
(there are about 4 of us! and yes, we all know one another),  and 
after inviting Bruce Sterling to join the Afro-Futurism list serv 
that I helped start way back in the ancient late 90's, I realized 
that Bruce is one of the few digital media people who "gets it." I.e. 
doesn't have really dumb ideas about people of color that seem to 
burden so much of the discourse around contemporary art and politics.


So it was with sadness that I read his column saying that he's 
wrapping things up at Wired.

Bruce - yo! keep up the good work, and best wishes for 2007. We need 
voices like yours more than ever!

in peace,
Paul aka Dj Spooky


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Baudrillard - in memoriam, for The Nouvel Observateur

[Paul D. Miller]

this is a memoriam for Baudrillard that Sylvere Lottringer organized for Fr=
ance's Nouvel Observateur. It'll be out next week. I just thought I'd pass =
it to the list. Greetings from Istanbul!

in peace,
Paul aka Dj Spooky
Istanbul


Baudrillard: A Remembrance of Things Unpassed

By Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid

I first met Jean Baudrillard at a conference Sylvere Lottringer of Semiotex=
t(e) organized in Las Vegas several years  ago. The idea of the conference =
was about chance processes. Needless to say, with the Whiskey Casino as the=
 backdrop for the conference, and randomness as the main motif of the situa=
tion, the soundtrack of the constant churning of slot machine wheels and pu=
lleys, and the continuous movement of the attendees between speeches and ga=
mbling, it all seemed totally appropriate. Baudrillard gave his speech dres=
sed in a gold suit in simulation of Elvis, and I ran my speech through vari=
ous software processes to turn it into the sound of water.  When I look bac=
k at the moment, it seems crystal clear that we were at the edge of an aest=
hetic and philosophical ocean turn in how people put ideas together in the =
era of hyper media. Since that time, simple things like wireless networks, =
the ubiquity of the Ipod, global media events like 9/11 or the SARS virus, =
have all brought home how prescient his thought was. The world knows Baudri=
llard as the philosopher who gave us a cautionary tale about simulation, an=
d if the events of today =E2=80=93 the war in Iraq, the economics of global=
ization, Katrina=E2=80=99s destruction of New Orleans =E2=80=93 have told u=
s that in no uncertain terms, we live in a world with a more and more tenuo=
us grasp of the =E2=80=9Creality=E2=80=9D underpinning the myths of the pre=
sent day. In a world where bleak man made landscapes and the psychological =
effects of technological, social and environmental developments cannot be d=
enied, his words were a beacon of how we can reason through the myriad ways=
 that we humans have displaced the natural world. For me as a just graduati=
ng student in the early mid 90=E2=80=99s, Baudrillard seemed like a figure =
who cut through the haze of post-everything American cultural malaise. I st=
udied French literature at a time when it seemed that America was enthralle=
d by the end of the Cold War =E2=80=93 my studies were populated with peopl=
e like Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Althusse=
r, Lacan, bounded by Badiou. Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray, Wittig=E2=80=A6 Th=
e list goes on but you get the point: these figures are part of a pantheon =
where, perhaps, one of the common themes is a simple cry for new ways to pe=
rceive how the mass media-landscape inadvertently invades and splinters the=
 private mind of the individual.=20
What Baudrillard did for me was make the world safe for doubt: doubt about =
the intentions of governments, corporations, ideologies, and yes, people. L=
ike J.G. Ballard or Bruce Sterling, his work hovered between descriptions o=
f the world in present tense and the strange and uncanny networks that hold=
 together =E2=80=9Cthe real.=E2=80=9D For him, like the 'simulacrum' follow=
ing DeBord's 'spectacle' where 'revolution' became synonymous with natural =
skin care and something everyone did against the name of 'freedom.' I don't=
 mean to say anything here, I wonder about the doubting that once swayed th=
e world,
Today, I wrote this piece traveling on a flight between Tokyo and Istanbul,=
 and as I sit here and use a wireless network in the coffee lounge of the H=
otel Buyuk Londra, I re-read him as doubting everything =E2=80=93 it=E2=80=
=99s as if Baudrillard says never model a thought about  anything unless yo=
u can say it to yourself.  The thought lingers, and links to a meta critiqu=
e: it posits modern thought as withdrawn, proffered as kind of a peripheral=
 speech. At the birth of the 21st century, at the birth of the new New Worl=
d, of suicide bombers, insane Presidents, multi-media equipped private armi=
es and fundamentalist militas, his words bear reviewing: Baudrillard =E2=80=
=93 a voice that says the seductions of reality are what we now hold dear.W=
e speak the world.  Reform, remix, re-engineer the consent of the Western w=
orld. We need this analysis more than ever. Vietnam is now long gone. Mute,=
 May 68 almost forty years ago and most of us young people have never thoug=
ht of burning monks, Chariman Mao, Stalin, or the origins of half of todays=
 problems. I think back to an almost innocent moment in the mid 1990=E2=80=
=99s when Baudrillard with a gold suit, made people remember that the chanc=
e processes of the world are what give us joy. With a simple flourish, I th=
ink that he set the tone for many young artists, writers, and musicians, to=
 remember a simple thing: that another world is possible.

Tokyo/Istanbul 3/15/07


#

Venice Biennial Africa Pavilion: Electric Africa and the digital

[Paul D. Miller]

s Tutuola. William Gibson said back in the 
ancient early 90's: The future is already here, it's unevenly 
distributed. I like to think that the mix is about the future of 
Africa and its global diaspora as much as it is about the past. 
History is never silent, it reminds us again and again and again, 
that we live its presence in every part of our life every day. The 
mix is an art project that accompanies my installation at the Venice 
Biennial Africa Pavilion. Enjoy!!

Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid, NY/Luanda 2006-2007

>>Electric Africa: Ghost World - A Story in Sound
>>Dj Spooky Presents a Project for the Dokolo Foundation at the 
>>Venice Biennial 2007
>>
>>"In Africa, When an old man dies, it is like a library burning to 
>>the ground" a quote attributed to Leopold Senghor
>>
>>
>>Mega Mix!
>>Por Por Akwaaba Welcome! Car Horn Orchestra of Ghana
>>Intro: Lafayette Afro Rock Band "Darkest Light" mixed w/Max Roach 
>>and Abdullah Ibrahim "Streams of Consciousness" (NY and South 
>>Africa)
>>Intro collage
>>African Anarchist Radio
>>Malcolm X "The Roots of Savagery" mixed w/
>>Max Roach/Abdullah Ibrahim "Streams of Consciousness" (NY/South Africa)
>>Tony Allen "Crazy Afro Beat" w/scratches by Rob Swift Vs Dj Spooky 
>>(NY and Nigeria)
>>X Plastaz "Msimu kwa msimu" (Tanzania)
>>Alif "Douta Mbaye"(Senegal)
>>K'naan "Soobax" (Somalia)
>>Kelis "Trick Me" (dancehall mix) (USA)
>>Fela "Kalakuta Show" (Mix Master Mike, Lateef and The Gift of Gab 
>>Remix) (Nigeria)
>>Lotfi Doubla Kanon "Bled Miki" (Tunisia)
>>MC Solaar featuring Ron Carter "Un Ange En Danger" (France/Senegal)
>>Akon "Locked Up" mixed w/ Nelson Mandela "Moments in Black History 
>>(Brad Sanders)" (NY/Senegal/South Africa)
>>Angola National Anthem - "Angola, avante!" Author: Manuel Rui Alves 
>>Monteiro (b.1941); Composer: Rui Alberto Vieira Dias Mingao
>>Mixed w/Malcolm X "The Root of Civilization"
>>Dj Spooky featuring Tapper Zukie "Revolution Dub" (NY/Jamaica)
Yves La Rock  featuring Roland Richards "Zookey" (France)
Stewart Copeland "The Rhythmatist: Samburu Sunset" (Kenya)
>>Frederic Galliano featuring Pancha Angola
>>Frederic Galliano featuring Pinta Tirru "Entra No Roda" (Angola/France)
>>Bunny Lee Meets King Tubby "African Roots and Reggae" - (Jamaica)
>>Cesoria Evora - Angola (original + Carl Craig remix) -Dj Spooky 
>>remix (Cape Verde Islands/Detroit/NY)
>>David Byrne and Brian Eno "My Life in The Bush of Ghosts: Vocal 
>>Outtakes" (New York/London)
>>Fela "Zombie" (Nigeria) (remix)
>>King Britt "Obafunke Theme" (Philadelphia) mixed w/
>>Interlude Idi Amin speaks (Uganda)
>>Orson Welles "Citizen Kane" (L.A.)
>>President Obasanjo "Move" by J Dilla (Detroit)
>>Ryuichi Sakamoto "Riot in Lagos" mixed w/ Nigerian National Anthem 
>>(Japan/Nigeria)
>>Baka Forest People of South East Cameroon - Water Drums (Cameroon) mixed w/
>>Foday Musa Suso "World Wide Funk" (DJ Spooky remix) (Gambia)
>>Master Musicians of Jajouka featuring Talvin Singh "You Can Find 
>>the Feeling" mixed w/ Abdul Nasser "Independence Forever" 
>>(Morocco/Egypt/India)
>>Duke Ellington "Afro-Eurasian Eclipse" (NY)
>>Oum Kalthoum "Hob Eih" (Egypt) - Dj Spooky remix
>>Mixed w/Tectonic "Heat Sensor"
>>Charlie Dark "Afro Dreaming"(UK-Ghana)
>>The Monks of Keur Moussa "Nous Te Louons, Pere Invisible" (Senegal)
>>Ginger Baker/Tony Allen (UK/Nigeria) - drum solo mixed w/
>>Drexciya "Polymono Plexusgel" (Detroit)
>>Zimbabwe Legit "Shadows Legit Mix" Dj Shadow remix (Zimbabwe/San Francisco)
>>Soweto Gospel Choir "Rivers of Babylon" (South Africa)
>>Konono No1 "Kule Kule" (Congo)
>>Abdullah Ibrahim "Mindif" (Dj Spooky remix) (South Africa/NY)
>>


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Scripted Space: Film Form, Film Formlessness

[Paul D. Miller]

hat Eisenstein would link montage to
his state apparatus (he made films dedicated to
Lenin after all=8A), Smith made films that
reflected his milieu. Multi media - the speed of
sound, the sound of speed, reflects this like an
archaeology of broadband. See how those old 56k
modems work in the era of Land Area Networks, and
cellular relays, and think of what it was like to
play records at a "Beat" party of the 1950's with
projections. For us, the Beats have become our
beats. We move to rhythms dispersed like
waveforms, our sounds are alive like the last
living leaf from a dying tree. We reflect deeply
uncertain times. Again: the natural and the
artificial blur with blinding speed. In the 19th
century Karl Marx would say "all that is solid
melts into air." In our era, we repurpose that
phrase and remix it: all that was solid becomes
software. Music is a mirror held up to the world
to see what stares back. The image is what we can
make of it. Sound track/image track. All mutable,
all mutually conditioning.

>goto>
Scripted Space>Sample Clip begins> Norman M. Klein, film historian>C:dir>

Where does that leave our public culture today?
We return to arrangements vaguely similar to the
Baroque mercantile public world of 1620 A.D. but
dominated by new systems of power - under the
cybernetic impact of metaconsumerism (from
warfare to computer games). This eccentric blend
of miniature and the massive produces monuments
for transconsumerism, like the Rococo ceilings in
Las Vegas super malls, and IMAX cinemas, a faux
sky, a transnational special effects sunrise,
instead of the hundreds of thousands of lights
that mapped the Coney Island amusement parks in
1910. Beside it, like princely lords, a baronial
warlord capitalism takes on the heraldry and
paradox of mercantilism in 17th century Rome or
=46lorence. Entertainment, public space, and
electronic feudalism become essentially
indistinguishable. Not that this is new. Feedback
systems have always been essential to special
effects =8A Scripted space implies code as the
foundation for any kind of media environment. It
was Oscar Wilde who said so many years ago; "mere
color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with
definite form, can speak to the soul in a
thousand different ways." I like to think of this
essay as an exercise in collage thinking, of
starting the reader on a path into the other
writers, artists, and musicians who inhabit this
cinema mediated realm. Turn the page and a
different story emerges from each text.
End>scripted>space:endtext>
I'm not exactly sure where its all going, but
then again: I know this - for those who are open
to the world and the information that describes
it, its going to be a very very very fun century.
Make your own mixes! This is a text that says
simply: play instead of pressing "play."
goto>text>file>original>flipmode

Paul D. Miller alias Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid

NYC 2005


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Revised: Scripted Space: Film Form/Film Formlessness

[Paul D. Miller]

Hey People - for some reason the footnotes got=20
clipped off, plus it was late at nite, and I=20
forgot to mention that the festival was. So I'm=20
resending the essay's final draft. The Festival,=20
by the way - it's called "Sonar" and its one of=20
the largest electronic music festivals in Europe.=20
The book that accompanies Sonar is called "The=20
Sound of Speed." I've written the introduction.=20
It has essays and interviews from a wide variety=20
of artists involved with the electronic music=20
scene plus film directors and multi-media=20
artists. More info: www.sonar.es

Sorry 'bout the mix-up, but hey, that's what=20
happens when you finish an essay at 5 a.m.

and oh yeah, it's f*cking multi-cultural contemporary art.



The Sound of Speed preface by Paul D. Miller=20
a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid
with

Darren Aronofsky
Coldcut
Matthew Herbert
Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid


and others

pax,
Paul



=46ilm Form/Film Formlessness


"In Nature we never see anything isolated, but=20
everything in connection with something else=20
which is before it, beside it, under it, and over=20
it."

Goethe, 1825


"The Perfect Beat - can never really be found,=20
it's the search that makes the event happen"
Afrika Bambaataa - Looking for the Perfect Beat, 1979

goto>text>file>original>flipmode

What happens when you see an image, but=20
hear no sound? What happens when you hear a=20
sound, but see no image? These are rhetorical=20
questions in search of rhetorical answers. The=20
method of the inquiry is what drives the=20
investigation. Thought holds the bits and pieces=20
of the process together, but that's my point.=20
These days it almost seems as if media has become=20
an entire ecology for most of the "developed=20
world." With our cell phones able to beam us high=20
resolution videos, our 'podcast attention span=20
searches for the next download almost like a=20
character out of William S. Burrough's "Beat"=20
imagination. Our bill boards switch images with=20
blinding speed, our advertisement drenched urban=20
landscape that stretches from the city to the=20
suburbs, and the exurbs beyond. These=20
hyper-accelerated phenomena of what I like to=20
call "prosthetic-realism" are the principle=20
metaphors for a culture that has shifted away=20
from the physical objects of the 20th century, to=20
the wireless imagination of the 21s. Today, our=20
contemporary information ecology is a coded=20
landscape: it is a Sphinx that asks a riddle for=20
which there is no answer - how do you make sense=20
of the datacloud? The "mix" has absorbed all of=20
this. Artificial or real, nature or nurture - the=20
idea of nature has been displaced by the man made=20
environment of the urban NOW. All of this we take=20
for granted. We wake up in the morning, and we=20
turn on the computer to download the days=20
details. We move in a stream of data that almost=20
seems insatiable. Bits and bytes are how we=20
define the information around us. In our info=20
experience economy, they are omnivourous and ever=20
present.

Go to:

To put it in some perspective, a Terabyte=20
could hold about 3.6 million 300 Kilobyte images=20
or maybe about 300 hours of good quality video. A=20
Terabyte could hold 1,000 copies of the=20
Encyclopedia Britannica. Ten Terabytes could hold=20
the printed collection of the Library of=20
Congress. A brontobyte is million million=20
petabytes, enough to store everything that's ever=20
been filmed, taped, photographed, recorded,=20
written, spoken, and probably even thought . At=20
the current moment, humanity produces about 5=20
petabytes of data a year - most of it is data=20
transmissions - cell phones, faxes, and whatnot.=20
The basic implication is that database aesthetics=20
are the way we think - the creative act in this=20
environment is as much about how we explore the=20
information that we live in, as it is about how=20
to play with the density.

Collage? Forget it - its last century's news.

Bricolage? So very 1920's.

=46luxus? C'mon=8A

Neo-Expressionism? C'mon=8A that went out in the 1970's. It's tired.

New term:
Scripted Space

Public Expression, private space: a flux of=20
architectures frozen and then dethawed. Think of=20
the description as the liquid play of software,=20
wetware, and hardware.  Like Warhol: From A to B=20
and back again. The loops these beats are made=20
from move between the realm of the visual and the=20
audio, the tactile and the invisible. They=20
describe the space in between all of the defined=20
points on the landscape to create a mesh of=20
invisible correspondences. A new axiom remixes=20
the old: from landscape to datascape and back=20
again, we live the exchange. Call it=20
transactional realism.

Scripted space: Architecture is nothing but=20
frozen mus

Religious Sect Announces First Cloned Baby

[Paul D. Miller]

but mice, cats, goats, pigs and cows have been
successfully cloned. Primates have not, but scientists
argue that the techniques of human embryo manipulation have
been refined in the dozens of in-vitro fertilization
clinics, making it theoretically easier to clone a human
than a monkey.

The typical success rate with animals is about 2 percent,
said George Seidel, a researcher at Colorado State
University who has cloned cattle, "so one would have to
have at least 50 such operations."

Also, Dr. Seidel said, cloned animals have a high rate of
unexplained defects, including malformed kidneys, hearts
and lungs, and often die within days of birth. "Ten percent
abnormalities might be acceptable for cloning cows," he
said. "But it's completely unacceptable for human
children."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/27/health/27CND-CLON.html?ex=1042037160 
&ei=1&en=6c4987994442b0ee


============
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe 
they are free"
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Port:status>OPEN
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Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Office Mailing Address:

Subliminal Kid Inc.
101 W. 23rd St. #2463
New York, NY 10011

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FUCK HIP HOP: A Eulogy to Hip Hop

[Paul D. Miller]

d my
space now and we've got to go our separate ways.  I will always love you,
but it's time for me to move on.
 
Yo, what happened to peace?
 
Peace.
 

Pierre Bennu is an award-winning filmmaker, poet, artist and performer. He
is, along with wife Jamyla, a founder of exittheapple, a creativity
collective focusing on film and digital media, visual arts, literature,
dance, and music. He is the author of Bullshit or Fertilizer?: Tough Love
for Artists on the Fence.




"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe 
they are free"
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Port:status>OPEN
wildstyle access: www.djspooky.com

Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Office Mailing Address:

Subliminal Kid Inc.
101 W. 23rd St. #2463
New York, NY 10011




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Bennu's piece & hip-hop digest

[Paul D. Miller]

for myself, I know I want control over my own representation. I want
>hip-hop but I don't want hip-hop. So what, right? But it's not just a question
>of what I like, it's also what gets associated with me or with my people's
>music. "The consumption of racialized spectacle," as Coco Fusco wrote,  "often
>functions as a substitute for [interpersonal or inter-group race relations]"
>and that has real impact on our lives and the reading our or work. It's
>important to realize that some of us are just listening to the music we like
>and some of us had better duck when an industry head decides to make an image
>in the medium because whatever happens in it is read on our bodies 
>and our art.
>At many turns, I find it hard to (all at once) distance myself from what is
>hurtful about the way many industry players (of different races, in all
>positions) are playing (with) hip-hop, love my self fiercely and loudly, make
>art that is influenced by the other art I find attractive, and allow myself to
>be represented by forms that, while still moving, are often and perhaps
>inextricably woven with ideas which are against me. But as a woman I 
>am allowed
>less authority with which to represent hip-hop and therefore carry less of the
>burden of the violence and wastefulness which hip-hop has come to represent in
>the media. I haven't always needed to articulate my distance from hip-hop in
>the way Bennu and other black men in my generation do because not all of what
>is thrust upon them is thrust upon me.   I'll end by saying that I read the
>statement as a claim to power, a rejection of what hates us, and an 
>affirmation
>of Bennu's selfhood. But saying "Fuck Hip-Hop" is not a dismissal of 
>the music,
>it is the impassioned goodbye of one who, loving the sinking ship, 
>nevertheless
>chooses to swim.
>
>Peace,
>Mendi
>
>  nettime-l-digest <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>However I still think Bennu's piece did not display contemporary familiarity
>with the field he was talking about, and this limits its uses for critique.
>(I'm not saying he doesn't have that familiarity, but it's not much in
>evidence in the article). I'm really not sure how Bennu's article is
>supposed to do anything other than reflect a certain feeling that a
>well-defined minority of hip-hop listeners will hold. (I guess that makes it
>hip-hop in the sense that I can see all that groups heads nodding - "yeah,
>damn right!" :). But I don't think it's going to change the minds of anyone.
>As much for methodology as content, I'd prefer someone like Oliver Wang's
>take. He supports true hip-hop as critically as any other journalist out
>there (even venturing into areas like Spin to do it), rather than running it
>down.  check it out y'all if yr interested... (his mixtapes are also sweet)
>
>. . .
>
>
>  Carl Guderian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 
>
>
>If Bennu's had it with hip-hop, then good. The sooner intellectuals write off
>hip-hop, the better. Then it can be itself, for better or worse.
>
>Carl
>(occasionally DJ REX84)
>
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"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe 
they are free"
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Port:status>OPEN
wildstyle access: www.djspooky.com

Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Office Mailing Address:

Subliminal Kid Inc.
101 W. 23rd St. #2463
New York, NY 10011
--_-1169992263==_ma
Content-Type: text/enriched; charset="us-ascii"

GenevaHI Coco, Mendi, Ken, Art, Danny et al 
folks - sorry about the delay in communications. I've been mad hectic
with various tings... and that slows communications down...you know how
it goes...  Coco - your points in your piece about intellectual culture
and hip-hop are well taken. There's an immense disconnect between those
who think "theory" and culture as it's practiced are or should be
divorced from one another. I tend to think of everything in terms of
blurs, and don't necessarily see any distinction between race, class,
social hierarchy, and sound as a signifier and emblem of how culture
functions in the age of cybernetic replication. For any of us that take
hip-hop seriously, this has been a grave issue for a while: how to deal
with turning your wo

William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition" and Ethnomathematics

[Paul D. Miller]

s that, as it stands, much of mathematics
education depends upon assumptions of Western culture and
carries with it Western values. Those with other traditions
are, as a result, often turned away by the subject or
unsuccessful in learning it. And, for them, the process of
learning mathematics, particularly when unsuccessful -- but
even when successful -- can be personally debilitating as
it detracts from and conflicts with their own cultural
traditions. . . . [In] the United States, the concern has
been stimulated by the realization that our educational
approaches have yet to come to grips with the fact that we
ourselves are a multicultural society.''


Dirk Olin is national editor at The American
Lawyer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/23/magazine/23CRASH.html?ex=1047027608&; 
ei=1&en=b5465666bfebf361






"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe 
they are free"
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Port:status>OPEN
wildstyle access: www.djspooky.com
Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Office Mailing Address:

Subliminal Kid Inc.
101 W. 23rd St. #2463
New York, NY 10011
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resending - The Ascent of the Software Civilization

[Paul D. Miller]

 and investment in - the notion of
computing as a utility-like service that could be delivered
to offices and homes to solve all manner of problems. The
idea flopped because it proved to be too complex a
challenge to write the software needed to distribute
computing as a service from a central time-shared machine
to many users. Besides, microcomputers, later called
personal computers, were about to arrive, putting
affordable computing on desktops thanks to the miracle of
the microprocessor.

Today, the utility concept is making a comeback. This time,
the industry is betting that 30 years of advances in
software, hardware and networking can deliver utility
computing. I.B.M. is promoting "on demand" computing, and
Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and others have similar
offerings. Companies like Salesforce.com are offering
software as a service in an emerging market for so-called
application service providers, or A.S.P.'s. "Because the
concept was never fully tested in the 1970's," Mr.
Campbell-Kelly writes, "history has few lessons to offer
the A.S.P. industry." Well, the A.S.P. start-ups certainly
hope so.

As software became a product in its own right, marketing
became more important. In the fledgling personal computer
industry, some of the tactics were particularly inventive.
In 1980, George Tate, a former electronics industry
salesman, began marketing a database program he named dBase
II. There was no "I," but "II" suggested a second, improved
product. This ploy was not uncommon. But in 1983, Mr. Tate
took the more imaginative leap, renaming his company
Ashton-Tate.

"There was no Ashton," the author writes, "but it was
considered a euphonious and high-sounding name."

Mr. Campbell-Kelly argues convincingly that Microsoft's
stature in the software industry as a whole tends to be
overstated. After all, he notes, Microsoft dominates only
about 10 percent of the industry, while it has no such sway
over large portions of the software business like corporate
software, software contractors and consultants.

"If this book serves no other purpose," he writes, "I hope
it will serve as a corrective to the common misconception
that Microsoft is the center of the software universe
around which all else revolves."

Mr. Campbell-Kelly is dismissive of the federal antitrust
suit filed in 1998. "Exactly why the action was brought
remains a mystery," he writes. He is fastidious with
footnotes, but there are none near that sentence. It's his
opinion, period.

He may not understand the Microsoft antitrust suit, but he
lucidly analyzes Microsoft's mastery of using software and
business acumen to build a lucrative technology platform.
In Microsoft's case, of course, the technology platform is
the Windows operating system. The company encouraged and
helped software developers write programs that run on the
Microsoft platform, increasing the value of Windows and
prompting even more applications to be written on top of
Windows. Economists call this commercial snowball "network
effects."

It is nothing new, really. I.B.M., as Mr. Campbell-Kelly
explains, did the same thing with its operating system for
the I.B.M. 360 mainframe and follow-on products.

And Sony, in video game consoles, deftly used software to
build its technology platform and a thriving ecosystem of
game developers supporting its PlayStation platform. Once
Sony mastered the economics of software, Sega's Sonic the
Hedgehog never had a chance.ÝÝ


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/business/yourmoney/09SHEL.html?ex=10
48263373&ei=1&en=2828262198037ab4








"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe 
they are free"
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Port:status>OPEN
wildstyle access: www.djspooky.com

Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Office Mailing Address:

Subliminal Kid Inc.
101 W. 23rd St. #2463
New York, NY 10011

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Islam - The Religion of technology

[Paul D. Miller]

from a list-serv that focuses on the linkages between science and 
Islamic culture. Kalam has had some interesting insight into how 
science has been a propaganda tool (forensics, development of 
bio-weapons, the Iraqi radar sensor hoaxes that the U.S. and Britain 
used as an excuse to continuously bomb the country for the most of 
the last decade... etc etc). The current round of posts is focusing 
on how historically, science in Islam was focused on mathematics 
(even the term algebra,  and algorithm, amongst others, derive from 
Arabic etc etc)


Paul


Kalam [Arabic], lit. speech, something spoken; in diction & language: 
parlance; talk, discourse; in grammar, a sentence; also, a quasi 
inference. A powerful movement within Islamic thought (sometimes 
imperfectly translated as Islamic scholasticism).

Mutakallim: a practitioner of Kalam (pl. mutakallimun).




http://kalam.org/mailman/listinfo/kalam_kalam.org
"kalam-post" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Religion of Technology:

Text of the Rockford College graduation speech by Chris Hedges

I want to speak to you today about war and empire.

Killing, or at least the worst of it, is over in Iraq. Although blood will
continue to spill -- theirs and ours -- be prepared for this. For we are
embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as
damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige, power, and security.
But this will come later as our empire expands and in all this we become
pariahs, tyrants to others weaker than ourselves. Isolation always impairs
judgment and we are very isolated now.

We have forfeited the good will, the empathy the world felt for us after
9-11. We have folded in on ourselves, we have severely weakened the delicate
international coalitions and alliances that are vital in maintaining and
promoting peace and we are part now of a dubious troika in the war against
terror with Vladimir Putin and Ariel Sharon, two leaders who do not shrink
in Palestine or Chechnya from carrying out acts of gratuitous and senseless
acts of violence. We have become the company we keep.

The censure and perhaps the rage of much of the world, certainly one-fifth
of the world's population which is Muslim, most of whom I'll remind you are
not Arab, is upon us. Look today at the 14 people killed last night in
several explosions in Casablanca. And this rage in a world where almost 50
percent of the planet struggles on less than two dollars a day will see us
targeted. Terrorism will become a way of life, and when we are attacked we
will, like our allies Putin and Sharon, lash out with greater fury. The
circle of violence is a death spiral; no one escapes. We are spinning at a
speed that we may not be able to hold. As we revel in our military
prowess -- the sophistication of our military hardware and technology, for
this is what most of the press coverage consisted of in Iraq -- we lose
sight of the fact that just because we have the capacity to wage war it does
not give us the right to wage war. This capacity has doomed empires in the
past.

"Modern western civilization may perish," the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr
warned, "because it falsely worshiped technology as a final good."

The real injustices, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, the brutal
and corrupt dictatorships we fund in the Middle East, will mean that we will
not rid the extremists who hate us with bombs. Indeed we will swell their
ranks. Once you master people by force you depend on force for control. In
your isolation you begin to make mistakes.

Fear engenders cruelty; cruelty, fear, insanity, and then paralysis. In the
center of Dante's circle the damned remained motionless. We have blundered
into a nation we know little about and are caught between bitter rivalries
and competing ethnic groups and leaders we do not understand. We are trying
to transplant a modern system of politics invented in Europe characterized,
among other things, by the division of earth into independent secular states
based on national citizenship in a land where the belief in a secular civil
government is an alien creed. Iraq was a cesspool for the British when they
occupied it in 1917; it will be a cesspool for us as well. The curfews, the
armed clashes with angry crowds that leave scores of Iraqi dead, the
military governor, the Christian Evangelical groups who are being allowed to
follow on the heels of our occupying troops to try and teach Muslims about
Jesus.

Hedges stops speaking because of a disturbance in the audience. Rockford
College President Paul Pribbenow takes the microphone.

"My friends, one of the wonders of a liberal arts college is its ability and
its deeply held commitment to academic freedom and the decision to listen to
each other's opinions. (Crowd Cheers) If you wish to protest the speaker's
remarks, I ask that you do it in silence, as some of you are doing in the
back. That is perfectly appropriate but he has the right to offer his
opinion here and we would like him to continue

An Open Letter to Michael Powell: The Future of Music Coalition

[Paul D. Miller]

; 
using the "usual alarmist political attacks designed just to prevent 
change." With all due respect, we may be sounding an alarm but we are 
not alarmist noisemakers. We are the concerned citizens and small 
business owners whose welfare you are charged to protect. We ask for 
your respect and protection.

We believe the record demonstrates both the value of existing media 
ownership rules and the dangers in permitting widespread 
consolidation of ownership. We also believe the FCC has been 
negligent in listening to important stakeholder groups, like 
musicians, recording artists and radio professionals, to ensure their 
testimony is on the record. The de facto boycott of field hearings by 
you and Commissioners Abernathy and Martin makes us question how 
interested some commissioners are in understanding the public's 
interest in these matters. Finally, a refusal to allow Congress and 
the public to view and debate your specific proposal would be a 
tremendous disservice to the American public and the citizens who 
depend on these media structures for their livelihoods.

We strongly urge you to give the public a true voice in these 
policies, which will forever alter the way citizens receive their 
news, information and entertainment.

Sincerely,


Carmine Appice
Jackson Browne
Jimmy Buffett
David Crosby
Neil Diamond
John Doe
Don Henley
Indigo Girls (Amy Ray & Emily Saliers)
Billy Joel
Lenny Kaye
Toby Keith
Ian MacKaye
Ray Manzarek
Ellis L. Marsalis, Jr.
Mya
Tim McGraw
Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky


Sam Moore
Thurston Moore
Stevie Nicks
Joan Osborne
Van Dyke Parks
Pearl Jam
Sandy Pearlman
Tom Petty
Bonnie Raitt
Kevin Richardson
Patti Smith
Stephan Smith
Michael Stipe
Tom Waits
Jennifer Warnes
Saul Williams
Nancy Wilson

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Re: Users are the Real Media Masters?

[Paul D. Miller]

Geert - it's interesting to see the Right wing viewpoint focus on how the
market will somehow "magically" transform people from greed driven
opportunists to respectful and enlightened denizens of a commons held
together by respect for discourse (this coming from the same people who
revere the Drudge Report - (another right wing lunatic!!). In economics,
this is all about what people have come to call the "Tragedy of the
Commons" a term popularized by Garrett Hardin's 1968 article of the same
name published in the journal "Science". Basically Hardin put it like this
- if enough people share the same resources (in America, this is some kind
of absurd joke...), and someone finally goes into a kind of winner take
all mentality, then NO ONE really wins, because the resources are used up
in the struggle to attain economic mastery of the resources - The fallacy
in the logic of the commons lies in the failure to recognize that all
households are attempting to do the same thing. Thus, on average, one unit
of gain for a household actually produces a net one unit of cost for each
household. However, selfish households accumulate wealth from the commons
by acquiring more than their fair share of the resources and paying less
than their fair share of the total costs. Ultimately, as population grows
and greed runs rampant, the commons collapses and ends in "the tragedy of
the commons" (Garrett Hardin, Science 162:1243, 1968).

Hardin argued in his "Tragedy...": Population, as Malthus said, naturally
tends to grow "geometrically," or, as we would now say, exponentially. In
a finite world this means that the per-capita share of the world's goods
must decrease. Is ours a finite world? A fair defense can be put forward
for the view that the world is infinite or that we do not know that it is
not. But, in terms of the practical problems that we must face in the next
few generations with the foreseeable technology, it is clear that we will
greatly increase human misery if we do not, during the immediate future,
assume that the world available to the terrestrial human population is
finite. "Space" is no escape. A finite world can support only a finite
population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero. (The
case of perpetual wide fluctuations above and below zero is a trivial
variant that need not be discussed.) When this condition is met, what will
be the situation of mankind? Specifically, can Bentham's goal of "the
greatest good for the greatest number" be realized?"

Personally I tend to think that the radio/TV spectrum is a finite
resource, and the FCC ruling is probably going to (hopefully) cause a big
political headache for the Bush Administration... for a little bit more of
a progressive view of this stuff, check out Lawrence Lessig's "The Future
of Ideas" or the Future of Music coalition's website - there's lots of
analysis on this kind of thing - again, from multiple viewpoints - much of
humanity's world is treated as a "commons" wherein individuals have the
right to freely consume its resources and return their wastes. The "logic
of the commons" ultimately produces its ruin as well as the demise of
those who depend upon it for survival. Oh well

more info

the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization:
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/index.jsp


Lawrence Lessig's "Creative Commons"
http://www.creativecommons.org/

and there's some great analysis of thi stuff at:

Future of Music Coalition:
http://www.futureofmusic.org/



>(This article comes from CATO, a fundamentalist rightist think tank in
>Washington DC that saw itself forced to respond to recent protests
>against ..
.
.


SNIPed /nettime




========
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free"
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Port:status>OPEN
wildstyle access: www.djspooky.com

Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Office Mailing Address:

Subliminal Kid Inc.
101 W. 23rd St. #2463
New York, NY 10011

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Manuel Delanda - 1000 Years of War

[Paul D. Miller]

well..., I'm an editor there... I guess I should pass on stuff every once in a
while. Also - if you're looking for a more ummm... abbreviated version of
Manuel on this kind of thing, check 

www.djspooky.com/articles.html

Paul


1000 Years of War:
CTHEORY Interview with Manuel De Landa

Manuel de Landa in conversation with: Don Ihde, Casper Bruun Jensen, Jari Friis
Jorgensen, Srikanth Mallavarapu, Eduardo Mendieta, John Mix, John Protevi, and
Evan Selinger. 


Manuel De Landa, distinguished philosopher and principal figure in the "new
materialism" that has been emerging as a result of interest in Deleuze and
Guattari, currently teaches at Columbia University. Because his research into
"morphogenesis" -- the production of stable structures out of material flows --
extends into the domains of architecture, biology, economics, history, geology,
linguistics, physics, and technology, his outlook has been of great interest to
theorists across the disciplines. His latest book on Deleuze's realist
ontology, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002), comes in the wake of
best-sellers: War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), where De Landa
assumes the persona of the "robot historian" to bring the natural and social
sciences into dialogue vis-a-vis using insights found in nonlinear dynamics
to analyze the role of information technology in military history, and A
Thousand Years of Non-Linear History (1997), where he carves out a space for
geological, organic, and linguistic materials to "have their say" in narrating
the different ways that a single matter-energy undergoes phase transitions of
various kinds, resulting in the production of the semi-stable structures that
are constitutive of the natural and social worlds. When Evan Selinger gathered
together the participants for the following interview, his initial intention
was to create an interdisciplinary dialogue about the latest book. In light of
current world events -- which have brought about a renewed fascination with De
Landa's thoughts on warfare -- and in light of the different participant
interests, an unintended outcome came about. A synoptic and fruitful
conversation occurred that traverses aspects of De Landa's oeuvre. 




I. War, Markets & Models
CTHEORY (Mendieta): In these times of "a war against terrorism," and preparing
against "bioterrorism" and "germ warfare," do you not find it interesting,
telling, and ironic in a dark and cynical way that it is the Western,
Industrialized nations that are waging a form of biological terrorism,
sanctioned and masked by legal regulations imposed by the WTO and its legal
codes, like Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). Would you agree that the
imposition of GMO -- genetically modified organism -- through WTO, NAFTA, and
IMF, on the so-called developing world is a form of "legalized biotech and
biological" terrorism? And then, as a corollary, what are the prospects for
global justice and equity in light precisely of the yawing gap between
developed and underdeveloped nations that is further deepened by the
asymmetrical access to technologies like genetic engineering and genomic
mapping? 

Manuel De Landa: Though I understand what you are getting at I do not think it
is very useful to use this label (biological terrorism) for this phenomenon.
The point, however, is well taken. The way in which corporations are
encroaching around the most sensitive points of the food chain is dangerous:
they direct the evolution of new crops from the processing end, disregarding
nutritional properties if they conflict with industrial ones; the same
corporations which own oil (and hence fertilizers and herbicides) also own seed
companies and other key inputs to farming; and those same corporations are now
transferring genes from one species to another in perverse ways (genes for
herbicide resistance transferred from weeds to crops). When one couples these
kind of facts with the old ones about the link between colonialism and the
conversion of many world areas into food supply zones for Europe (from the
creation of sugar plantations to the taking over of the photosynthetically most
active areas of the world by Europe's ex-colonies) we can realize that this
state of affairs does have consequences for equity and justice. The key point
is not to oversimplify: the Green Revolution, for example, failed not because
of the biological aspect, but because of the economic one: the very real
biological benefits (plants bred to have more edible biomass) could only be
realized under economies of scale and these have many hidden costs (power
concentration, deskilling of workforce) which can offset the purely technical
benefits. 

The question of Intellectual Property rights is also complex. We should be very
careful how we deal with this, particularly considering many of us bring old
moral clichés ("private property is theft") into the debate without being
aware of it. I believe this issue needs to be handled case by case (to solve
the 

Norman Mailer's "The white man unburdened"

[Paul D. Miller]

er
was easily within helicopter range of San Diego but G.W. would not have been
able to show himself in flight regalia, and so would not have been able to
demonstrate how well he wore the uniform he had not honored. Jack Kennedy, a
war hero, was always in civvies while he was commander in chief. So was General
Eisenhower. George W. Bush, who might, if he had been entirely on his own, have
made a world-class male model (since he never takes an awkward photograph),
proceeded to tote the flight helmet and sport the flight suit. There he was for
the photo-op looking like one more great guy among the great guys. Let us hope
that our democracy will survive these nonstop foulings of the nest.  

Copyright © 1963-2003 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved. Nothing in this
publication may be reproduced without the permission of the publisher.
Illustrations copyright © David Levine unless otherwise noted;
unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with any questions about this site. The cover date of the next issue of
The New York Review of Books will be August 14, 2003.



"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free"
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Port:status>OPEN
wildstyle access: www.djspooky.com

Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Office Mailing Address:

Subliminal Kid Inc.
101 W. 23rd St. #2463
New York, NY 10011

#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
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The Fela Project

[Paul D. Miller]

This is a remix of an essay and art piece written/created for the show based on
Fela Anikalupo-Kuti called "Black President  - the Legacy of Fela Kuti." I took
several records of Tony Allen - who was Fela's drummer and often collaborative
song-arranger, and did a remix based on an architectural manifesto for a new
Kalakuta Republic - the physical aspects are posters created as street
advertisements, and the actual sounds of the project were taken from various
samples of Tony Allen's classic records of "Afrobeat" music over the last 30
years - drum solos, horn riffs etc etc all an architecture of sound and rhythm.


Manifesto for "A Different Utopia: Project for a New Kalakuta Republic 2003"

can be found at:
http://www.djspooky.com/differentutopia.html



A Different Utopia
Project for a New Kalakuta Republic 2003
By Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid 


In a world of constant upheaval and continuous transformation, sometimes we
look to music as a way of escaping the problems of the world. Fela did the
opposite: his music was about immersion in the ebb and flow of the conflicts
that described and circumscribed the nation state he inhabited. His home was
Nigeria, a place of so many contradictions and fictions that it might as well
exist as a story, a fable spun from the fevered imagination of a very strange
storyteller. The name "Nigeria" itself is an inheritance from a colonial past
bequeathed to the confused and angry people who found themselves confined and
defined within its borders after the colonial powers decided what would be the
best route to economic balance between Europe and Africa. As a country, Nigeria
and most of the Sub-Saharan continent were created on maps drawn on a
palindrome of political and economic expedience - all of which did not involve
those who were most relevant to the process: the people who actually lived
there. 

"The Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely
fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires. The
Metropolis is an addictive machine, from which there is no escape, unless it
offers that too...  Through this pervasiveness, its existence has become like
the Nature it has replaced: taken for granted, almost invisible, certainly
indescribeable..." Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York

In the world of post-colonial Africa, what Fela did was foster a unique
circumstance - he created a utopia. His "Kalakuta Republic" was a way of
producing a space that reflected his desires as an African to build an
independent cultural zone, a place that literally, following the definition of
the term "utopia" didn't exist. The "Kalakuta Republic" was essentially a space
that reflected his values and needs - something all too rare in the post World
War II African political and cultural landscape. It was an artificial place in
the midst of an artificial situation what could be a better metaphor for
contemporary Africa? Place one mirage in front of another and you get a hall of
mirrors, a place where reality comes only by design, and that's a good starting
point to look at the "Kalakuta Republic" By creating a social space bounded by
and founded on African needs, he had to secede from the imaginary space of mass
culture that was called "Nigeria" to create a new story, a new fiction founded
on music, and culture indigenous to the people who lived there. Fictional
spaces and imaginary cities - new forms demand new functions - that's what Fela
told us with his Shrine Project. The logic of the "Kalakuta Republic" flows
from a twisted cross-roads of modernity on the edge of the post-modern: where
other young countries like Brazil would bring in someone like Oscar Niemeyer to
construct a new capital like Brasilia, or Le Corbusier, at Chandigarh, India,
in the 1950's or the United States with Pierre L'Enfant's 1791 design of
Washington D.C., Nigeria, with Fela, was pressed by so many demands in so many
different directions that his new city had to improvise on the spot in response
to a scenario where, to say the least, the people running the government didn't
want a new more dynamic architecture to represent their "new" nation state.
Unlike the European notion of  "Utopia" as a planned and designed place of
Reason and Rationality bequeathed from Thomas Moore, Plato, and Francis Bacon.
Fela's "republic" would be made invi al city blocks. The city Fela found
himself in was a "found-object" to be manipulated and remixed at will, and
essentially, that's what provides the foundation for my investigation into his
concepts of architecture. 

The "A Different Utopia" project imagines a remix of the architecture of Fela's
"Kalakuta Republic" along lines imagined by proportion and ratio - it poses two

World On Fire: Amy Chua

[Paul D. Miller]

At the recent Ars Electronica one of the things that struck me was the
simple fact that the whole "code" scenario that it was based on had a
resonance with the way we craft identity and ethnicity - codes of conduct,
codes of creativity... the catch phrase amongst theorists (myself
included) was one of the "socially embedded" values in code.  Amy Chua has
done an interesting take on this kind of thing esp. viz.  the idea that
the "American way" ain't such a golden dream after all.  I wonder what the
reaction in say, Riyadh, would be if you pop the question: "fries with
that shake?" The joke, I guess, would be on you. Pat does a decent job of
explaining the scenario...

Paul



http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=929

In her recent book, World on Fire, Yale University professor Amy Chua
argues that it is the resentment of long-standing minority domination that
has so much of the world's citizens ready to take up arms. Pat Sewell
examines the author's contentions and assesses her sweeping proposals for
solving the most challenging problem facing global society since the
Second World War. YaleGlobal

Mixing Free Market, Minority Domination and Democracy Results in World On Fire

Pat Sewell
YaleGlobal

Many Americans trust that unleashed markets and universal suffrage
elsewhere will yield general material betterment, domestic tranquillity,
and amity among democracies old and new. Thomas Friedman proclaims a
"Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention", asserting "no two countries
that both have McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other".

But do freer markets and oxygenated "democracy" instead defy established
expectation by mobilizing the wrath of the many? Do open markets and
popular incitement sometimes kindle backlash and serve to excuse
suppression by the few? Amy Chua contends that when injudiciously
introduced, as most often happens, wide open markets and hot-housed
majoritarianism form "a principal, aggravating cause of group hatred and
ethnic violence throughout the non-Western world". On regional and global
planes, too, the dynamic of World on Fire augurs ill for stability, not to
mention peace.

Amy Chua, New York: Doubleday (2003)

Chua outlines this dynamic early and with characteristic clarity:  "When
free market democracy is pursued in the presence of a market-dominant
minority, the almost invariable result is backlash.  This backlash
typically takes one of three forms. The first is a backlash against
markets, targeting the market-dominant minority's wealth. The second is a
backlash against democracy by forces favorable to the market-dominant
minority. The third is violence, sometimes genocidal, directed against the
market-dominant minority itself."

This study illuminates widespread global patterns of violence without
oversimplifying them. It exposes and highlights the ethnic underpinnings
of world politics. Chua maintains that Western globalists and
anti-globalists alike miss the "ethnic dimension of market disparities" by
seeing only class warfare rather than recognizing ethnic struggle. She
pulls no punches in arguing an array of cases buttressed by evidence
carefully drawn from a variety of sources. Testimony based on her personal
experience lends further strength to the work. World on Fire offers
fascinating as well as luminous reading.

"Ethnicity" here invites characterization. The concept enjoys quite a wide
scope in the present context. Identification with a group transcending
primary face-to-face relationships keys a "shifting and highly malleable"
sense of belonging to a kinship web projected over time and across space.
Physical differences, geographic origin, linguistic, religious, or
alternative cultural lines may mark this identity. Examples of Chua's
ethnic market-dominant minorities include Chinese in Southeast Asia;
"Whites" in Latin America; Jews in Russia; Croats in the former
Yugoslavia; Ibos, Kikuyus, Tutsis, Indians and Lebanese, among others, in
Africa. Numerically preponderant "indigenous" peoples likewise take on
distinct ethnic identities. Their persistent poverty relative to the
conspicuous enrichment of others, indignities on a grand scale and in
interpersonal relations, and the apparent prospect of instant change, when
aroused by electoral encouragement to popular participation and heralded
by a charismatic leader, provide conditions apt to trigger confrontation.
"Ballot boxes brought Hitler to power in Germany, Mugabe to power in
Zimbabwe, Milosevic to power in Serbia -- and could well bring the likes
of Osama bin Laden to power in Saudi Arabia."


Identity in Chua's predominantly ethnic usage faces its sternest test when
applied to Americans as a planetary market-dominant minority. We become a
"close cousin" of ethnic minorities, "a national-origin minority" relative
to the world's other peoples. Like the market-dominant minorities that
stir reaction within state ambits, Americans, "wielding disproportionate
economic power", let alone brandis

Principia Dischordia: Sound and Architecture - A project

[Paul D. Miller]

this is a project I'm doing with New Architecture magazine, and here's the
essay. Greg Lynn does crazy biomorphic kind of "blob"  architecture,
Bernard tschumi is designing the Acropolis Museum in Greece, and the New
Museum of African Art in NYC, and Marcos Novak writes wild manifestos
about nanotech and architecture. Each one is doing a mini version of these
kinds of architecture for the mag...

my essay is below as always, there's a bit of irony. I'm not
necessarily a chairman Mao fan.. but the propaganda angle and the living
conditions in China based on Utopian architecture were too juicy to pass
over...

pax,
Paul



Principia Dischordia: A new project on Sound and Architecture for New 
Architecture Magazine

http://www.newarchitecture.net



"Principia Dischordia" is an architectural environment with contributions from:


Bernard Tschumi: http://www.tschumi.com
Greg Lynn: http://www.glform.com/
Marcos Novak: http://www.centrifuge.org/marcos/
Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid: http://www.djspooky.com


each architect will have a statement (provocation) concerning their 
work and the project. There will be a limited edition multi-media and 
audio CD to accompany the issue with music by Dj Spooky that 
Subliminal Kid as a commentary on the architectural projects.

essay/provocation:

Principia Dischordia
by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid


"We should go to the masses and learn from them, synthesize their
experience into better, articulated principles and methods, then do
propaganda among the masses, and call upon them to put these principles
and methods into practice so as to solve their problems and help them
achieve liberation and happiness..."

Chairman Mao Tse-tung

"Get Organized!" (November 29, 1943), Selected Works, Vol. III, p. 158.

"Nothing is less capable of deluding us than the illusion of fake
properties, of cardboard and painted canvas which the modern scene gives
us... There is in the simple exposition of real objects, in their
combinations, in their order, in the relationships of the human voice with
light, a reality which is self sufficient and has no need of any other to
live. It is this false reality which is theater and it's that which is
necessary to cultivate... The False in the context of the true, that is
the ideal definition of the mise en scene."

Antonin Artaud, "The Theater and Its Double"

A Provocation: If/When

At a certain point in time, and at a certain place - a phrase:  
architecture is nothing but frozen music. What happens when we reverse
engineer the process? Form becomes flux, solids melt into ideas, concepts,
blueprints, codes and contexts. Buildings are nothing but condensations of
rules, of points, of lines - and their agreement to form structure in time
and space. That's about it. What "Principia Dischordia" posits is an
emotive snapshot of the architectural process.

If/When:

Vectors: Cultural Capital> goto: neo-flux: all that is solid melts into
air, and back again.

If/When:

Fact multiplied by Fiction becomes Faction

Appropriation:

If/When:

Emerson versus Goethe versus Schiller: "genius borrows nobly" Emerson said
in his "Of Quotation and Originality." The quote becomes a
roman-mallaparte where almost any turn of phrase is linked to historical
anecdote: "Many of the historical proverbs have a doubtful paternity.
Columbus's egg is claimed for Brunelleschi.  Rabelais's dying words, "I am
going to see the great Perhaps" (le grand Peut-être), only repeats the
"IF" inscribed on the portal of the temple at Delphi. Goethe's favorite
phrase, "the open secret,"  translates Aristotle's answer to Alexander,
"These books are published and not published." Madame de Staël's
"Architecture is frozen music" is borrowed from Goethe's "dumb music,"
which is Vitruvius's rule, that "the architect must not only understand
drawing, but music." Wordsworth's hero acting "on the plan which pleased
his childish thought," is Schiller's "Tell him to reverence the dreams of
his youth," and earlier, Bacon's "Consilia juventutis plus divinitatis
habent." (ref:  http://www.emersoncentral.com/quotations.htm)


If/When:

We live in a hall of mirrors where nature and nurture have become partners
in a pas de duex, a ballet in which a duo seem to float in and out of one
anothers gestural patterns as they move across the stage. The proscenium
space becomes the interaction of the characters that represent the
narratives unfolding. So to with the buildings that surround us. The rules
of engagement as a processional sonic scenario where any sound can be you.
Wavelength, amplitude, modulation, and striation - all of these point to
an anology between sound and physical structure

Of Men and Monuments

[Paul D. Miller]

well.. this is a piece done for 21C - we're just in the final phases 
of setting it up as a quarterly, and julian Laverdiere is one of the 
people who designed the cover for the new issue. He was, along with 
Paul Myoda, and  also one of the principal folks involved with 
designing up the "Towers of Light/Tribute in Light" Memorial for the 
World Trade Center victims. Like Maya Lin's 1982 Vietnam Veterans 
Memorial - the "Towers..." sought to commemorate a dilemma of 
American culture - a dilemma usually implies a situation that 
requires a choice between options that are or seem equally 
unfavorable or mutually exclusive. One monument was about permanence 
and the American aspiration to monumentalism. The other, made of 
light, was about transparency and impermanence. Light and text - 
permanence and impermanence - these are issues that info culture 
faces - in the tradition of Virilio, this is certainly no Albert 
Speers with lights intimating a 1000 Year Reich, but then again, 
hey... under the Bush Admin. maybe it could be after all, Leni 
Riefenstahl was a pretty good film maker too... this is art that asks 
- imperial time aspires to be universal, but how are we to think 
about the forms that represent the idea of empire? Anyway... read 
on


here's the essay.
you can check the rest at www.21cmagazine.com

pax,
Paul




Of Men and Monuments, Vessels and Vectors...
Julian Laverdiere 's  Art of Uncertainty: "Goliath Concussed" at the 
Lehmann Maupin Gallery NYC


by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid


  "in architecture form is a noun, in industry form is a verb"
  R. Buckminster Fuller


In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows.
"I am great Ozymandias," saith the stone,
"The King of kings: this mighty city shows
The wonders of my hand." The city's gone!
Naught but the leg remaining to disclose
The sight of that forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, and some hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the wolf in chase,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What wonderful, but unrecorded, race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

Horace Smith, "Ozymandias" 1817


Horace Smith composed this sonnet on 27 December 1817, during an 
evening sonnet-writing session with P.B. Shelley, but the echo, the 
sense of quotation of content and context is what I want to evoke 
with this piece. Think again: Rhetorical bodies, matter and memory, 
teleplex tautologies, suture and synedoche... codes and modes... like 
I always enjoy saying: it all just flows. It's been a long time since 
1869 when the U.S., as an aspiring regional super-power, laid the 
first trans-continental telegraph and railroad lines throughout the 
newly reconsolidated polity that the Civil War had given birth to. It 
was an ambitious project, but like all American endeavors of size it 
had a small beginning. During the month of May 1869, in the middle of 
Utah, and at a place very few of us would ever check out, a silver 
spike hammered into the a railroad track that was almost finished 
completed a continent wide circuit in the newly linked 
transcontinental rails. The spike set off a electronic trigger pulse 
that was supposed to celebrate the occasion: a current moved through 
the newly connected and then infantile networks linking the East and 
West, and spread throughout the rail and telegraph lines like some 
newly remade disembodied Paul Revere howling through the wires. In 
New York and in San Francisco two cannons - one facing the Atlantic 
and the other, the Pacific Ocean - fired a shot triggered by the 
phantasmal pulse sent from the joining of the railroads in the middle 
of America, making the newly ambitious U.S.'s sense of Manifest 
Destiny telephonically clear to the rest of the world - from the 
heart of the country a silver spike closed the circuit on reality as 
our ancestors knew it. The rest, as it's always said, is another 
story. Ah, the logic of history. Like the poem that I begin this 
essay with, its something that at first glance evokes a series of 
historical allusions, and then one realizes the legerdemain - it's 
not Percy Shelley's, but an echo, a remix, a quote within a quote. 
One could argue that that's the sense of uncertainty of origin that 
Laverdiere strives to convey with his work.

The above mentioned event is true but hovers someplace in my 
imagination at a point mid-way between Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, with 
dashes of Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" thrown in for good 
measure. That's what Julian Laverdiere's work is like: it puts a spin 
on a commonplace situation and for better or worse creates a place 
where fiction and reality, like everything else these days, seem to 
be completely m

Exabyte boogie!

[Paul D. Miller]

Well... I guess it's a bit of an update on the sheer volume of 
information flowing out there...
when can I get my exabyta i-pod?

Paul


Editorial Observer: Trying to Measure the Amount of Information That 
Humans Create

November 12, 2003
  By VERLYN KLINKENBORG


Do you know what an exabyte is? I didn't until I started reading a new
report, called "How Much Information? 2003," from the University of
California at Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems. An
exabyte turns out to be a billion gigabytes. Most new computers, by
comparison, come with hard drives around 40 to 100 gigabytes in size.

The authors of the report estimate that in 2002 the human species stored
about five exabytes of new information on paper, film, optical or magnetic
media, a number that doubled in the past three years. Five exabytes, as it
happens, is equivalent to all words ever spoken by humans since the dawn
of time.

To gauge how much new information humans now produce in a given year, you
have to imagine digitizing and storing all of it, including forms of
information that aren't already digital and forms that aren't usually
stored, including all e-mail messages, all the Web pages on the entire
Internet and all telephone conversations.

As the authors point out, "The striking finding here is that most of the
total volume of new information flows is derived from the volume of voice
telephone traffic, most of which is unique content." In 2002, that
telephone traffic added up to about 17 exabytes, more than three times all
the words ever spoken by humans until that point.

Staring at numbers and comparisons like this, which are more than merely
boggling, is enough to make you wonder just what information is. Perhaps
it seems obvious to say that information of the kind that can be stored
and counted up is created and consumed entirely by humans. So let me say
it another way. Our idea of information is meaningless to the rest of
creation. The cocoon of data and language that humans live in goes
undetected by the rest of earth's organisms. In all those exabytes of
chatter there are words, of course, that refer to something beyond the
narrow bounds of human experience. But vast quantities of what gets
cataloged as information are purely self-referential, talk about the act
of talking, so to speak. That is partly what makes us human.

I find myself wondering about other kinds of information. The precise
pattern in which the autumn leaves lie in my pasture would not be
"information," according to the analysts at Berkeley, unless I took a
photograph of it, preferably a digital one. But even without the
photograph, the pattern is information, shifting momentarily under a cold,
bright wind out of the west. If you were to ask how much information the
earth contains, as a whole, one way to answer the question would be to
assess the number of bytes present in all the DNA on earth, once it had
been digitized. But that is too static an answer for me. It treats each
being as a museum specimen, ready to be closed away in a dark drawer
somewhere, and it rules out the possibility that movement itself and the
interaction of all these beings is also information. If it's somehow
plausible to treat all the interrupted cellphone conversations in 2002 as
a kind of information, then it should be plausible to think of all the
bird songs and insect noises uttered in that calendar year as information,
too.

It's worth pointing out that "information," in the Berkeley sense, is a
wholly biological enterprise on our part - not that different, in a way,
from the webs that spiders build. But after reading the report all I could
hear in its pages was the silence of the rest of nature, nature's lack of
"information," its inability to yield storable data.

Yet that is not my experience. I spend part of every week wired to the
world, with an intravenous connection to the Internet. I read and talk and
listen. And yet even in my office I am inundated with what cannot be
calibrated. The body language I witness when a politician stops by is
information to me, but not "information." The unsettled emotions I
experience as I read through my stack of newspapers every day is
information, too, but not "information."

And when at last I go home to the country, I step out of the pickup truck
and into a world of pure information, all of it entirely, gloriously
ephemeral. The moon is low in the southern sky. The ducks, disturbed by my
headlights, stir in their pen and make delicate, reassuring noises. The
bare tree branches cross and cross again against the stars on the horizon.
One of the pigs rolls over in his house, and I can hear the weight of his
body as he settles into his hay. These observations are now "information,"
but what they are to me cannot be measured.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/12/opinion/12WED4.html?ex=1069613597&ei
=1&en=21ba830b8d07ed5f




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