[spectre] Politics and Practices of Secrecy: Free Symposium @ King's College London
'Politics and Practices of Secrecy' In the wake of the Snowden revelations about the surveillance capabilities of intelligence agencies, this interdisciplinary symposium gathers experts to discuss the place and implications of secrecy in contemporary culture and politics. Keynote: 'Secrets of the Dark Net: Jamie Bartlett' 14 May, 6.30-8.30, Edmund J. Safra Lecture Theatre Jamie Bartlett, author of The Dark Net and member of the think tank, Demos, will be giving this keynote lecture on the secret side of the Internet. Bartlett will discuss some of the net's most shocking and unexplored subcultures including trolling, neo-Nazis, child pornography, bitcoin and crypto-anarchy. He will examine how people behave under the conditions of real or perceived anonymity online, and what it means for society today. Artist Zach Blas will be a respondent to Jamie's lecture, discussing his latest project on what he calls the Contra-Internet. Recognizing the Internet as a premier arena of control today, contra-internet is both a refusal of, or exodus from, the internet and also an attempt to build aesthetico-political alternatives to its infrastructures. Free registration: http://secretsofdarknet.eventbrite.co.ukhttp://secretsofdarknet.eventbrite.co.uk/ Conference 15 May, 9-5.30, Edmund J. Safra Lecture Theatre 9-9.15: Introduction: Secrecy's Frame Clare Birchall (King's College London) Matt Potolsky (University of Utah) 9.15-10.45: Roundtable 1: Between Opacity and Openness Mark Fenster (University of Florida) 'Secrecy and the Hypothetical State Archive' Zach Blas (University of Buffalo) 'Informatic Opacity' Mikkel Flyvverbom (Copenhagen Business School) 'Transparency, Secrecy and the Limits of Knowledge' Vian Bakir (Bangor University) 'Deceptive Organised Persuasive Communication: (a) Misdirection and (b) Secretly Altering Reality to Fit the Lie you want to Tell' 11.15-12.30: Roundtable 2: Aesthetics of the Secret John Beck (University of Westminster) 'Photography's Open Secret' Neal White (Artist, Bournemouth University) 'Secrecy and Art in Practice' Clare Birchall (King's College London) 'Art After Snowden' 1.30-3.00: Roundtable 3: Open Secrets Jack Bratich (Rutgers University) 'Spectacular Secrecy and the Secret Sphere: Rumsfeld, Anonymous, and Snowden' Deme Kasimis (Yale University) 'Passing as Open Secrecy: Migrants and the Performance of Citizenship in Classical Greek Thought' Adam Piette (Sheffield University) 'The Open Secret of Nuclear Waste' Matt Potolsky (University of Utah) 'Beyond Fiction: The NSA and Representation' 3.30-4.45: Roundtable 4: Covert Spheres Timothy Melley (Miami University) 'The Democratic Security State: Operating Between Secrecy and Publicity' Øyvind Vågnes (University of Copenhagen) 'Drone Warfare and the Language of Precision' Hugh Urban (Ohio State) 'The Silent Brotherhood: Secrecy, Violence, and Surveillance from the Brüder Schweigen to the War on Terror' 5.00-5.30: Summary: Secrecy's Future Free registration: http://politicsofsecrecy.eventbrite.co.uk/ Dr Clare Birchall Institute of North American Studies, King's College, London. www.kcl.ac.uk/instituteofnorthamericanstudies? __ SPECTRE list for media culture in Deep Europe Info, archive and help: http://post.in-mind.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/spectre
[spectre] RADIOACTIVITY, a podcast mini-series looking back into two seminal free radio stations – Radio Alice in Bologna and Radio Tomate in Paris
The RADIOACTIVITY http://rwm.macba.cat/en/radioactivity-tag podcast mini-series looks into two seminal free radio stations – Radio Alice in Bologna and Radio Tomate in Paris – as singular case studies in which self-management, decentralised organisation and DIY coincide. The mini-series is an introduction to the free radio movement that sprung up in several countries in the seventies as a way of giving voice to actors who were outside the media establishment: an alternative to the dominant narrative that can also be seen as precursor of the horizontal rhizome structure of digital networks. *RADIOACTIVITY #1. Radio Alice. Interview with Franco Berardi* Link: http://rwm.macba.cat/en/specials/radio-alice-franco-berardi/capsula Born in Bologna, Franco Berardi is an activist and Marxist theoretician. His work is a critical analysis of the media and its impact on capitalist structures. Bifo's curriculum is proof of this inexhaustible interest in the role of the media, not only because of the many works he has written, but also through his involvement in numerous alternative dissemination, education and communication projects, from the legendary Radio Alice, which he co-founded, to the more recent telestreet movement and Orfeo TV channel. *Radio Alice was a free radio project that was created in Bologna in the late seventies by a group that brought left-wing activists together with artists who worked with counterinformation, or what Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (one of the core members) called ‘the creation of divergent realities’*. Perhaps to the surprise of the powers that be, the liberalisation of the radio airwaves that brought with it the country’s first free and non-commercial radio stations soon gave way to a local, short-range guerrilla movement that ruptured the long, tedious monopoly of the state media. Radio Alice was by no means the only free radio experiment in Italy, but in spite of its short lifespan – the station initially operated from 9 February 1976 to 12 March 1977 – it had a strong influence on the social and political life of the capital of the Emilia-Romagna region. Reflecting the opinions, obsessions, and stories of its listeners and organisers, and establishing itself as a creative platform in the new non-commercial radio space, this small neo-dada bastion was an important piece in the jigsaw puzzle of life in Bologna, eventually amplifying the voice of the popular uprising and the clashes between students and the police in early 1977 (the chain of events that eventually led the station to be shut down). The strong personality of Radio Alice was more than just the sum of the points of views of the original collective (Franco Berardi, Paolo Ricci, Filippo Scòzzari and Maurizio Torrealta, among others). Rather, it can be seen as a complex collage of the ideas of the autonomous movement (which emerged in Italy in the sixties) mixed with the influence of the Situationists, the pre-punk seed that was starting to spread in Europe, and the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. *Timeline* 00:49 The Italian situation in the seventies 02:41 Information as diverging reality 06:27 The spread of free radio in Italy 08:54 Desire, punk, DIY ethics 11:56 Technology as a facilitator of new movements 14:55 Coexistence and conflict in Radio Alice 16:44 Financial and organisational issues in Radio Alice 17:55 A chronology of the fall of Radio Alice *RADIOACTIVITY #2. Radio Tomate. With François Pain* Link: http://rwm.macba.cat/en/specials/radio-tomate-francois-pain/capsula *Radio Tomate has gone down in history as one of the main players in the French free radio scene of the late sixties*, but François Pain is a direct link between it and the situation in northern Italy during the same period. Initiatives such as Radio Alice in Bologna were more than just the initial spark for the French movement: the precarious technological infrastructures (homemade transmitters) were also a result of the experience gained in Italy in a few short but intense years of underground work. The interesting thing about this comparison is the enormous difference between the legal frameworks of the two countries. In the late seventies, Italy had freed the airwaves, opening the doors to dozens of small independent broadcasters. Meanwhile, in France, the first broadcasts by Pain and his collaborators were totally illegal. Before François Mitterand came to power, and the subsequent legalisation of private radios (a gesture that also gave a green light to all kinds of non-commercial projects), Radio Tomate and similar collectives operated completely underground. In this sense, they effectively continued the work of pirate radios such as Radio Luxembourg and Europe no. 1, which had successfully dodged government prohibition since the mid-fifties, and had become popular beyond expectation. Fruit of the (often conflictive) cooperation of a group of left-wing militants, thinkers and artists, Radio Tomate was launched in 1981 with
[spectre] Networked Disruption: The Exhibition - Opening March 11, Ljubljana
Networked Disruption: Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and Business Group exhibition and side programme Curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli Produced by Aksioma - Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana - in collaboration with several partners: www.aksioma.org/networked.disruption Exhibition @ Škuc Gallery, Stari trg 21, Ljubljana, Slovenia / March 11 – April 3, 2015. Opening March 11, 8pm With: Anna Adamolo, Anonymous, Billboard Liberation Front, Burning Man Festival, Cacophony Society, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Julian Oliver, Laura Poitras, Les Liens Invisibles, Luther Blissett, Mail Art, Neoism, Peng! Collective, Suicide Club, Telekommunisten, Trevor Paglen. Seminar @ Kino Šiška, Trg prekomorskih brigad 3, Ljubljana, Slovenia /March 11 – 12, 2015: http://www.aksioma.org/press/networked.disruption.zip With: Annie Machon (UK), Bani Brusadin (ES), Baruch Gottlieb (CA/DE), Dmytri Kleiner (CA/DE), Florian Cramer (DE/NL), Ida Hiršenfelder (SI), Janez Janša (SI), John Law (US), Loretta Borrelli (IT), Luther Blissett (IT), Tatiana Bazzichelli (IT/DE), Vittore Baroni (IT), Vuk Ćosić (SI). In the business world, disruption means to introduce into the market an innovation that the market does not expect. This innovation comes from within the market itself. Transferred into the field of art and activism, disruption means to generate practices and interventions that are unexpected, and play within the systems under scrutiny. Art, hacktivism and business are often intertwined, generating a feedback loop of revolutions and co-optations that is functional to the development of capitalism. Capitalism needs our revolutions because they generate new lifestyles, products and practices that create new markets and consumer desires. Similarly, systems of power need our resistance and opposition because they serve to increase security and forms of control. We need to find new strategies that go beyond the mere act of opposition and that are harder to appropriate. Networked Disruption is an exhibition and a series of events produced by Aksioma and Drugo more in collaboration with several partners and curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli. The exhibition, hosted by Škuc Gallery in Ljubljana and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka, is centred on the concept of Networked Disruption, as an opportunity to show new possible routes of social and political action in the line of disruption. It is based on Bazzichelli's book Networked Disruption: Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and the Business of Social Networking/(DARC Press, The Digital Aesthetics Research Centre of Aarhus University, 2013). The exhibition shows a diverse constellation of networking projects that aims to actualise – and to question – the notion of networking: Anna Adamolo, Anonymous, Billboard Liberation Front, Burning Man Festival, Cacophony Society, Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša, Julian Oliver, Laura Poitras, Les Liens Invisibles, Luther Blissett, Mail Art, Neoism, Peng! Collective, Suicide Club, Telekommunisten, and Trevor Paglen. In this exhibition we adopt the concept of disruption from business and we propose works that emerge from within political, economical, technological and art systems. They play with their power logic generating virality, anonymity, semantic confusion, multiple truths, and disruption. Diverse points of view are combined, among the groups and within the groups themselves. By keeping such connections open without reaching a curatorial synthesis, we invite visitors to create their own path in the line of disruption. The artworks and collective projects are conceptually and visually interlinked in the exhibition spaces, which constitutes a network of networks. By applying the strategy of working from within”, some sections of the show are conceptualised in collaboration with people deeply involved in the networks under scrutiny: Vittore Baroni (Mail Art), Florian Cramer (Neoism), Gabriella Coleman (Anonymous), John Law (Suicide Club and Cacophony Society), Andrea Natella (The Luther Blissett Project) and members of the Anna Adamolo network. This choice reflects the perspective that a new methodology of curating a research should open a metaphorical (and physical) space to encourage and provoke feedback loops among theory and practice, and among subjects and objects of analysis. In the exhibition and seminar, we involve actors who directly engage with hacktivism, art, civil liberties and social networking exposing contradictions of capitalistic logics and power systems. Such interventions hijack the logic of business itself, appropriating and détourning it by operating disruption. The challenge is to collectively rethink oppositional hacktivist and artistic strategies within the framework of (social) networking, information economy and increasingly invasive corporations and government agencies. Project's webpage: http://www.aksioma.org/networked.disruption Seminar full programme and
[spectre] (fwd) STIP: PhD Scholarship, Socially Engaged Art in Eastern Europe since the 1960s, Aberdeen
From: Dr. Amy Bryzgel a.bryz...@abdn.ac.uk Date: Mar 4, 2015 Subject: STIP: PhD Scholarship Aberdeen Application deadline: Apr 30, 2015 PhD Scholarship: Participatory and Socially Engaged Art in Eastern Europe since the 1960s University of Aberdeen Elphinstone PhD Scholarship: A number of Elphinstone PhD Scholarships are available across the arts, humanities and social sciences at the University of Aberdeen, linked to specific, individual research projects. These Scholarships cover the entirety of tuition fees for a PhD student of any nationality commencing full-time study in October 2015, for the three-year duration of their studies. One Elphinstone Scholarship is available for a PhD on a topic related to 'Participatory and Socially Engaged Art in Eastern Europe since the 1960s' (description below). http://www.abdn.ac.uk/cass/graduate/elphinstone-scholarships-373.php PhD Topic: Participatory and Socially Engaged Art in Eastern Europe since the 1960s Supervisor: Dr. Amy Bryzgel This project aims to examine the phenomenon of participatory and socially engaged art in the specific socio-political context of Eastern Europe since the 1960s. Projects may focus on any area of the former communist and socialist countries of Central, Eastern or Southern Europe, including single-country case studies or cross-country comparisons. In a region of the world that had as its ideological aim, at least in theory, the building of communism, with collective self-management and socially inclusive policies, what was the function of socially engaged artistic practices, which aimed to bring communities together in an ameliorative capacity, in this environment? How did these activities parallel or diverge from the aims of the state? Did participatory art succeed in creating a collective environment that socialism was aiming to build? This project will build on foundational studies by Miwon Kwom and Claire Bishop and seek to understand the particular function of participatory and socially engaged art in the unique political environment of state-sponsored socialism. For more information, please contact Dr. Bryzgel (a.bryz...@abdn.ac.uk). Proposals should be no more than 2,000 words, and include a discussion of Aims and Objectives, Research Questions, Research Context, Methodology and Critical Approach. Possible research Topics: Participatory and Socially Engaged Art in Communist Central and Eastern Europe, c. 1960-1989 Participatory and Socially Engaged Art in the former Yugoslavia Participatory and Socially Engaged Art in Eastern Europe since the Fall of the Berlin Wall Other topics within the main subject area are also welcome; please inquire with Dr. Bryzgel. Selection will be made on the basis of academic merit. Individuals with a strong research background in the field of Eastern European contemporary art and/or performance art, from either an art history or visual culture background, are encouraged to apply. Applicants should have the necessary language skills needed to undertake the proposed research, and should indicate potential funding sources for travel to conduct field research abroad if it is necessary to the proposed project. http://www.abdn.ac.uk/cass/graduate/history-of-art-386.php How to Apply: To apply for an Elphinstone PhD Scholarship, you should apply for a PhD http://www.abdn.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/apply.php online stating: 'Elphinstone PhD Scholarship' in the Intended Source of Fundingsection The name of the lead supervisor (Amy Bryzgel) in the Name of Proposed Supervisor section The title of the specific research project in the Outline Summary section Candidates should simultaneously register their desire to be considered by emailing the Graduate School Administrator, Ann Marie Johnston, at a.m.johns...@abdn.ac.uk Deadline for submission of applications: Thursday 30th April 2015. Reference / Quellennachweis: STIP: PhD Scholarship Aberdeen. In: H-ArtHist, Mar 4, 2015. http://arthist.net/archive/9617. H-ARTHIST Humanities-Net Discussion List for Art History E-Mail-Liste für Kunstgeschichte im H-Net Editorial Board Contact Address / Fragen an die Redaktion: hah-redakt...@h-net.msu.edu Submit contributions to / Beiträge bitte an: http://arthist.net/mailing-list/mode=contribute Update your subscription / Abo-Verwaltung: http://arthist.net/admin/ -- __ SPECTRE list for media culture in Deep Europe Info, archive and help: http://post.in-mind.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/spectre
[spectre] Tapestries? - Patrick Lichty Interviewed by Tilman Baumgärtel
Sorry for any cross posting... Tapestries? - Patrick Lichty Interviewed by Tilman Baumgärtel http://furtherfield.org/features/interviews/tapestries-patrick-lichty-interviewed-tilman-baumg%C3%A4rtel The American artist Patrick Lichty is best-known for his works with digital media: as part of the activist group RT Mark and as designer of digital animation movies for their follow-up The Yes Men, he has been recognized as a net artist with a political bend. He has been working with digital media since the 1980s, and has created works with video, for the Web and for Second Life. At the moment, Lichty has a solo show “Artifacts” at DAM Galerie in Berlin ( http://bit.ly/1DTNvt9). However, the artist, who is teaching at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and has recently published a book of theoretical essays on Networked Cultures (http://bit.ly/1aLdAB6), is not showing media works, but tapestries. Tapestries! What's going on? Tilman Baumgärtel finds out. __ SPECTRE list for media culture in Deep Europe Info, archive and help: http://post.in-mind.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/spectre
