The 66-year-old French philosopher Jacques Rancière is clearly the new go-to guy for hip art theorists. Artforum magazine’s ever-sagacious online “Diary” has referred to Rancière as the art world’s “darling du jour,” and in its recent issue, the magazine itself has described digital video artist Paul Chan as “Rancièrian” — as an aside, without further explanation, no less! For anyone looking for a primer, Rancière’s slim The Politics of Aesthetics has just been published in paperback.
Rancière has the undeniable virtue, for the esoterica-obsessed art world at least, of being something of an odd duck. A one-time fellow traveler of Marxist mandarin Louis Althusser, Rancière split with him after the May ’68 worker-student rebellion against the de Gaulle government, feeling that Althusser, a partisan of the Stalinized French Communist Party, left too little space in his theoretical edifice for spontaneous popular revolt. Against this background of disenchantment, Rancière set out to explore the relationships between philosophy and the worker, rethink ideas of history and try to construct a progressive theory of art.
The Politics of Aesthetics is a quick and dirty tour of a number of these themes. It features five short meditations on various conjunctions of art and politics, plus a lengthy interview with Rancière by his translator Gabriel Rockhill titled “The Janus-Face of Politicized Art,” an introduction by Rockhill and a concluding essay by the art world’s other favorite quirky philosopher, Slavoj Zizek. It is a short but serious book and, in keeping with French intellectual practice, sensuously impenetrable, coming equipped with a glossary of terms for the uninitiated.
“Is there no moral distinction between killing a newborn baby and aborting a fetus? And should an academic paper that seemingly advocated the killing of newborns have ever been published?
Those are the questions at the heart of a controversy that has erupted after the publication of a paper entitled ‘After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?’ in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Two Australian academics, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, argued that the moral status of a newborn baby was identical to that of a fetus. Given that most people view abortion as morally acceptable so, they argued, there is no reason not to see infanticide as morally acceptable, too, even in ‘cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at risk’. Indeed, Giubilini and Minerva reject the term ‘infanticide’, preferring to talk of ‘after-birth abortion’.
The paper, which would normally have been read only by a handful of moral philosophers, was picked by newspapers and websites and caused outrage worldwide. ‘Slaughter newborn kids, say academics’, read the headline in one British tabloid. Australian commentators, American chat show hosts and Catholic bishops weighed in, many claiming that infanticide was the logical consequence of the legalization of abortion. The two authors say that they have received death threats.”
Excerpt of an essay written by Kenan Malik. Continue HERE
Kenan Malik (born 1960) is an Indian-born English writer, lecturer and broadcaster, trained in neurobiology and the history of science. As a scientific author, his focus is on the philosophy of biology, and contemporary theories of multiculturalism, pluralism and race. These topics are core concerns in The Meaning of Race (1996), Man, Beast and Zombie (2000) and Strange Fruit: Why both sides are wrong in the race debate (2008).
His work contains a forthright defense of the values of the 18th-century Enlightenment, which he sees as having been distorted and misunderstood in more recent political and scientific thought. Wiki
“African governments don’t want us thinking that “homosexuality” is within the realm of their “traditional values”. So apparently these leaders, even Nobel Peace Prize winning ones, use that as an excuse to justify the persecution and lack of protection for some of their most vulnerable citizens. Well, it seems that the Angolan government who currently seem to have their hands full (of money?) can’t be bothered to check whether or not popular Kudurista, Titica, fits within that value system… and we’re glad for that. Now, I don’t know the frame through which Angolans are seeing Titica. A little forum and youtube scrolling reveals a divided public (as always).”
Official designation: State of Sabotage, Abbreviation: SoS
SoS is a secular, sovereign and democratic state.
All citizens of the SoS state are to adhere to these principles.
The Constitution is the highest law of the SoS state and is binding for all SoS state authorities. The SoS State Constitution was publicly recited and resolved on September 4, 2005 and has been valid and legally binding since that time.
The SoS state symbols are the colors black and white, the coat of arms in the state flag, as well as the state anthem. The two official SoS state and diplomatic languages are German and English. The assets of the SoS state are the creation, protection, mediation, and positioning of art and culture. SoS is the first sovereign cultural state according to international law. SoS fulfills all criteria required of a sovereign state (territory, population, and state organization), as well as education and training in terms of artistic freedom.
Matthew Gandy is an urbanist and academic who writes and teaches about cities, landscapes and nature. He directed the Urban Laboratory at University College London (UCL) from 2005 to 2011 and has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University, Humboldt University, Newcastle University and UCLA. His extensive writing and knowledge of urban landscapes bring together culture, politics, environment and cinematic representations to produce prescient and alluring research.
What do you think are the highlights and limitations of recent media productions about cities and urban change, particularly in the Global South?
Some of the best writers on cities are journalists. Examples are Jonathan Raban’s “Soft City” about London in the early 1970s and Siegfried Kracauer’s vignettes about everyday life in Weimar-era Berlin. In terms of recent art about cities, there are classic examples such as Hans Haacke’s “Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System” (1971), as well as works by Gordon Matta Clark from the same period that remain very influential.
Recent examples of really important representations of cities include cinema: a film that really stands out is Andrea Arnold’s “Fish Tank” (2009). Arnold uses an architectonic eye to explore landscapes of alienation on the edge of London. Another great urban film is Robert Guédiguian’s “La Vie Est Tranquille” (2000) set in Marseille. It reminds me of other “cross-section” narratives such as Robert Altman’s depiction of Los Angeles in “Short Cuts” (1993), where we learn about the city through intersecting story lines and chance encounters. Examples of this genre from the Global South include Alejandro González Iñárritu’s striking use of Mexico City in “Amores Perros” (2000) and Dev Benegal’s Mumbai in “Split Wide Open” (1999).
What aspects are not being explored in the media?
Cost constraints, distribution problems and so on constantly militate against the possibility for more diverse forms of cultural production. We need space to allow new things to be created and experienced across all creative media.
How do these compare to past cultural representations of cities?
There was undoubtedly a very intense period of creativity in the 1970s, but I think creative production comes in waves, particular conjunctions of time and place: New York in the 1970s, Berlin in the 1990s and early 2000s, arguably London in the 1990s.
Excerpt from a conversation with Andrew Wade from Polis. Continue HERE
Image above: Los Angeles River (2003). Source: Matthew Gandy
I’ve promised to write about the surveillance drone that I’ve been building over the past couple of months. I have always wanted to have my own drone that could send back a live video feed. This is partly inspired by products like the AeroVironment RQ-11 Raven, which is currently in use by the US military, and which you can view in action here. The Raven is basically just a glorified RC airplane, with a sophisticated landing system that allows it to be recovered by a soldier without great pilot skills (which is one reason they cost around $35,000 each).
To get to the bottom line, my drone has taken its first flights, the results of which you can see in a video of my office at Stanford and in a local park.
When my kids were younger I looked into buying an RC helicopter for this purpose and actually tried to wire a camera on a car, but the consumer technology wasn’t up to snuff back then. Now it is.
‘The Dirty Art Department offers itself as an open space for all possible thought, creation, and action. It sees itself as a dynamic paradox, flowing between the pure and the applied, the existential and the deterministic, and the holy and the profane. It is concerned with individuality, collectivity, and our navigation of the complex relationship between the built world and the natural world, and other people and ourselves. It’s a place to build objects or totems, religions or websites, revolutions or business models, paintings, or galaxies.
The Dirty Art Department comes from a common background of design and applied art, it seeks however to reject the Kantian division between the pure and the applied arts. Since ‘god is dead’ and ‘the spectacle’ is omnipresent, it sees the creation of alternative and new realities as the way to reconsider our life situation on this planet.
The Dirty Art Department is open to students from all backgrounds including designers, artists, bankers, skeptics, optimists, economists, philosophers, sociologists, independent thinkers, poets, urban planners, farmers, anarchists, and the curious.’
Unthinkable as it may be, humanity, every last person, could someday be wiped from the face of the Earth. We have learned to worry about asteroids and supervolcanoes, but the more-likely scenario, according to Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, is that we humans will destroy ourselves.
Bostrom, who directs Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that human extinction risks are poorly understood and, worse still, severely underestimated by society. Some of these existential risks are fairly well known, especially the natural ones. But others are obscure or even exotic. Most worrying to Bostrom is the subset of existential risks that arise from human technology, a subset that he expects to grow in number and potency over the next century.
Despite his concerns about the risks posed to humans by technological progress, Bostrom is no luddite. In fact, he is a longtime advocate of transhumanism—the effort to improve the human condition, and even human nature itself, through technological means. In the long run he sees technology as a bridge, a bridge we humans must cross with great care, in order to reach new and better modes of being. In his work, Bostrom uses the tools of philosophy and mathematics, in particular probability theory, to try and determine how we as a species might achieve this safe passage. What follows is my conversation with Bostrom about some of the most interesting and worrying existential risks that humanity might encounter in the decades and centuries to come, and about what we can do to make sure we outlast them.
Excerpt of an article by Ross Andersen at The Atlantic. Continue HERE
How did a small art college in Nova Scotia become the epicenter of art education–and to a large extent of the postmimimalist and conceptual art world itself–in the 1960s and 1970s? Like the unorthodox experiments and rich human resources that made Black Mountain College an improbable center of art a generation earlier, the activities and artists at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (aka NSCAD) in the 1970s redefined the means and methods of art education and the shape of art far beyond Halifax.
A partial list of visiting artists and faculty members at NSCAD would include Joseph Beuys, Sol LeWitt, Gerhard Richter, Dan Graham, Mel Bochner, Lucy Lippard, John Baldessari, Hans Haacke, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Frank, Jenny Holzer, Robert Morris, Eric Fischl, and Dara Birnbaum. Kasper Koenig and Benjamin Buchloh ran the NSCAD Press, publishing books by Hollis Frampton, Lawrence Weiner, Donald Judd, Daniel Buren, Michael Asher, Martha Rosler, and Michael Snow, among others. The Lithography Workshop produced early works by many of today’s masters, including John Baldessari, Vito Acconci, and Claes Oldenburg. With The Last Art College, Garry Kennedy, the college’s visionary president at the time, gives us the long-awaited documentary history of NSCAD during a formative era.
From gallery openings to dance performances to visiting lectures to exhibitions to classroom projects, the book gives a rich historical and visual account of the school’s activities, supplemented by details of specific events, reminiscences by faculty and students, accounts of artists’ talks, and notes on memorable controversies.
About the Author
Garry Neill Kennedy is a Canadian conceptual artist who was awarded the Portia White Prize by the Arts Council of Nova Scotia in 2000 and a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2004. From 1967 to 1990 he was President of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
Gretel Adorno was a remarkable woman about whom far too little is known. Although the recent publication of her correspondence with Walter Benjamin has confirmed the impression that she was a formidable intellect in her own right, she remains largely a mystery. What we do know for certain is that she was deeply devoted to her husband Theodor, whom she married in September, l937. Abandoning a career as a chemist to support his work unreservedly, she seems to have been resigned to his extra-marital affairs, and was so despondent after his death in August, l969 that she made a botched suicide attempt. Among the many services she rendered was the dutiful taking of minutes from the intellectual discussions he thought worth recording. Beginning in March of l938, shortly after his emigration to America and full integration into the life of the Institut für Sozialforschung (then resettled in New York), she wrote down a number of conversations he had with the director of the Institute, Max Horkheimer. She continued to play this role well after they all returned to Frankfurt in the early l950s to reestablish the Institute.
One such conversation took place over several days in March and April, l956, when Horkheimer and Adorno sat down to discuss a variety of pressing issues, political, sociological, and philosophical, and Gretel Adorno was there to record the results for posterity, or at least as an aide memoire for later more formal considerations of the same issues. Never intended for publication, the protocols nonetheless appeared in l989 alongside many other drafts and notes as an appendix to the thirteenth volume of Horkheimer’s collected works. They were blandly entitled “Diskussion über Theorie und Praxis.” Last year, they were translated into English by the venerable Rodney Livingstone for the New Left Review, and shortly thereafter repackaged as a little book with the much more provocative title Towards a New Manifesto.
ICT4D (Information Communication Technology for Development) powerfully frames women’s grassroots video production in the Global South, much of which is distributed widely through YouTube. Often, these videos reproduce racialized and gendered discourses – legacies of colonialism – in their narratives of economic, social, and technological progress. However, there are also videos by women’s groups that defy both the historical linearity and spatial fragmentation of the ICT4D framework. These videos instead remix, reclassify, and globally reconnect women’s experiences in the contemporary moment. Culled from hundreds of online videos produced by ICT4D programs, including those in countries classified as having “Low Human Development” according to the Gender Inequality Index of the United Nations Development Program, these media represent powerful instances of a decolonial aesthetics, an altogether unexpected development. These ICT4D videos make compelling claims for other historical narratives and visions for women’s future lives, identities, and uses of information communication technologies.
Unexpected Development: Decolonial Media Aesthetics and Women’s ICT4D Video Dalida Maria Benfield, Berkman Center Fellow
This event will be webcast Tuesday, April 17, live at 12:30 pm ET.
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
About Dalida:
Dalida María Benfield’s research addresses artists’ and activists’ creative uses of video and other networked digital media towards social justice projects. Her work is focused on the transformational capacities of media art across different scales. As an artist and activist, she has developed production, education, exhibition, and distribution initiatives focused on youth, women, people of color in the U.S., and local and transnational social movements, including co-founding the media collective Video Machete. She received her Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of California-Berkeley in Comparative Ethnic Studies with Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation, Apparatuses, Globalities, Assemblages: Third Cinema, Now, chaired by Trinh T. Minh-ha, considers contemporary media art theory and practice, including work by Cao Fei, Michelle Dizon, and the Raqs Media Collective, in relation to the Third Cinema movement. As a Fellow at the Berkman Center, she is studying race and gender in the online presence of ICT4D programs, as well as working on collaborative projects with the Networked Cultures Working Group, the Cyberscholars Working Group, and metaLAB(at)Harvard.
Filmmaker and director Margarethe von Trotta lecturing about the making of her film Rosa Luxemburg, which she continued after Fassbinders death. Margarethe von Trotta speaking about the german student rebellions in the 1970s, the Rote Armee Fraktion, communism, anarchism, as well as Marx and dialectical history. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe 2009.
I am a multi media Canadian artist who is interested in language and communication; how knowledge is transported and transcribed between humans and other species. I am interested in inter species communication. I have chosen to sculpt and draw collaboratively with the honeybees for the past 14 years. My research has included the bee’s use of sound, sight, scent, vibration, and dance. I am studying the bee’s use of the earth’s magnetic fields as well as their use of the pheromones (chemicals) they produce to communicate with one another, with other species and possibly with the foliage they pollinate.
My research has included residencies in The Netherlands: To research the bees and flowers of The Netherlands; The Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Britain: To sculpt in the park under the direction of 2 beekeepers and their feral bee swarms, and at Passages Centre d’art Contemporain, Troyes, France: to visit the ancient bee walls of France, to meet with Dr. Yves Le Conte, scientist in Avignon, France and to work for 3 months in a studio in Troyes, France.
The bee work can take years to complete due to a short summer bee-keeping season of 7-9 weeks a year. I spend the rest of the year researching, traveling, and preparing work for the next bee-keeping season.”
Centered around a display featuring a living beehive, Guest Workers features sculptural and 2-dimensional work based on collaboration between the artist and honeybees. Directed and shot by Millefiore Clarkes, 2011.
The articles within this issue 8 of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest attest, as a collection, to our belief in the utility of a multiplicity of approaches. A multiplicity of tactics is sometimes used to pragmatically cover for unsolvable differences in what is to be considered as appropriate action within a single protest. We do not use it as a cover though, instead we suggest (as many others have) that it is rich layers of often antagonistic relationships within generally broad trends that make a movement more successful, not less. Nevertheless, to intelligently understand the impact of potential actions is the task of all involved in the movements.Let us explore this multiplicity to its most creative, least reductive potential.
Marco Cuevas-Hewitt – Towards a Futurology of the Present Notes on Writing, Movement, and Time
Meg Wade – Grassroots Modernism as Autonomous Ethos and Practice
Jaleh Mansoor – Poetics, Commitment Ayreen Anastas’s M*Bethlehem and Pasolini Pa Palestine
Mattias Regan – Playing (with) the Impossible Modernism’s Populist Poetics
Victor Tupitsyn – Socialist Modernism and Beyond
Ron Sakolsky – The Surrealist Adventure and the Poetry of Direct Action Passionate Encounters Between the Chicago Surrealist Group,
the Wobblies and Earth First!
Gabriel Mindel Salomon – The Subjective Object Or Harry Hay in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
(originally published in the Journal of Radical Shimming)
Ian Milliss – Losing My Self Some anecdotes about anonymity
Gavin Grindon – Surrealism, Dada and the Refusal of Work Autonomy, Activism and Social Participation in The Radical Avant Garde
(originally published in the Oxford Art Journal). Note: Link opens to PDF
Olive McKeon – Oh What A Mess I’ve Made On Aesthetics and Political Praxis
Sue Bell Yank – Re-casting Institutional Memory The Slow Breakdown of the Art/Politics Divide
Survival Kit Collective – Survival Kit Collective Arcosantian economics, Biospherian aesthetics: a kit for grassroots ecological projects
Protest and Stagnation – Self-generated Discourse in the Context of the Austrian Student protests of 2009/2010
Khristopher Flack – Anywhere is Everywhere Reclaiming Community through production in the Rural Northeast
Tim Jensen – On the Emotional Terrain of Neoliberalism The opposite of despair is not hope, the opposite of depression is not happiness
Libertad Guerra – Uncommon Commonalities Aesthetic Politics of Place in the South Bronx
Luis Guerra – The Bomb Case An Uncelebratory Task
Christopher Lee – Frontlining Currency Speculative Numismatics” as Antagonistic Graphic Design
Public Laboratory – DIY mapping, Popular Participation Ecological and political monitoring in the Gulf of Mexico and beyond
Ultra Red – Andante Politics Popular Education in the Organizing of Unión de Vecinos
“Really, there are a host of questions that arise in the case of polyamory to which we just don’t know the answer. Is polyamory like sexual orientation, a deep trait felt to be at the core of one’s being? Would a polyamorous person feel as incomplete without multiple partners as a lesbian or gay person might feel without one? How many “truly polyamorous” people are there?”
“In the politics of identity, bisexuals are hated because they stand for choice. The game is set up so as to exclude the middle; bisexuals get squeezed out. in the “LGBT” word, the “B” is silent. John Aravosis, for instance, says that if you’re into both genders, “that’s fine” — great! — but “most people” aren’t. First off, that rather defies Freud and the theory of universal infantile bisexuality. But never mind that. The business of “outing,” of which Aravosis has been an eloquent proponent, also revolves around the excluded middle. It’s not a matter of what you think of outing’s ethics, on which there’s plenty of debate. It’s that the underlying presumption is that one gay sex act makes you “gay” — not errant, not bisexual, not confused or questioning: gay, gay, gay. I saw you in that bathroom, for God’s sake! You’re named for life! It’s also that the stigma goes one way only: a lifetime of heterosexual sex acts can’t make up for that one, illicit, overpowering pleasure. As I’ve argued, this both corresponds to our own buried sense, as gays, that it is a stigma, and gives us perverse power. In the scissors, paper, rock game of sexuality, gay is a hand grenade. It beats them all.”
Excerpts from an article written by Scott Long in A Paper Bird
For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states.
In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.” This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scott’s work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen.
The author of several books including Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott is Sterling Professor of Political Science, professor of anthropology, and co-director of the Agrarian Studies Program, Yale University, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Despite the Internet’s global reach, the lion’s share of the content comes from the United States and the rest of the English-speaking world.
If you live in a rich country, the Internet has probably changed the way you consume (and produce) information. But when you look at global-scale knowledge production, things are as they ever were: the Anglophone world dominates with the United States doing the lion’s share of academic and user-generated publishing.
Those are the messages of the Oxford Internet Institute’s new e-book, Geographies of the World’s Knowledge, from which these two graphics were drawn. In the book’s foreword, Corinne Flick of the Convoco Foundation reluctantly concludes that the Internet has not delivered on the hopes that it would make knowledge “more accessible.”
“Many commentators speculated that [the Internet] would allow people outside of industrialised nations to gain access to all networked and codified knowledge, thus mitigating the traditionally concentrated nature of information production and consumption,” she writes. “These early expectations remain largely unrealised.”
We’re not only talking about publishing in academic journals or Wikipedia. The book’s authors, Mark Graham, Monica Stephens, Scott A. Hale, and Kunika Kono, sampled user-generated content on Google and found that rich countries, especially the United States, dominate the production of user content.
The fact of the matter is that people without money can’t afford to get the education necessary to publish in academic journals, Internet-enabled or not. The other fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people in very poor countries don’t spend their time producing content for free. Hope as we might, the Internet isn’t a magic wand that makes the world more equal.
Liz Miller & Martin Allor at Concordia University ask: “How can human rights activists best reach audiences in a multichannel universe that is increasingly inundated with images of war, tragedy and suffering? How to avoid having your campaign lost in the sea of nonstop reality media? The Witness model of advocacy promotes “narrowcasting,” the idea that it is not always how many people see a video but who sees it and what they do with it.
The power consumption of our high-tech machines and devices is hugely underestimated.
When we talk about energy consumption, all attention goes to the electricity use of a device or a machine while in operation. A 30 watt laptop is considered more energy efficient than a 300 watt refrigerator. This may sound logical, but this kind of comparisons does not make much sense if you don’t also consider the energy that was required to manufacture the devices you compare. This is especially true for high-tech products, which are produced by means of extremely material- and energy-intensive manufacturing processes. How much energy do our high-tech gadgets really consume?
The 180 watt laptop
While these reports are in themselves reason for concern, they hugely underestimate the energy use of electronic equipment. To start with, electricity consumption does not equal energy consumption. In the US, utility stations have an average efficiency of about 35 percent. If a laptop is said to consume 60 watt-hours of electricity, it consumes almost three times as much energy (around 180 watt-hour, or 648 kilojoules).
So, let’s start by multiplying all figures by 3 and we get a more realistic image of the energy consumption of our electronic equipment. Another thing that is too easily forgotten, is the energy use of the infrastructure that supports many technologies; most notably the mobile phone network and the internet (which consists of server farms, routers, switches, optical equipment and the like).
Embodied energy
Most important, however, is the energy required to manufacture all this electronic equipment (both network and, especially, consumer appliances). The energy used to produce electronic gadgets is considerably higher than the energy used during their operation. For most of the 20th century, this was different; manufacturing methods were not so energy-intensive.
An old-fashioned car uses many times more energy during its lifetime (burning gasoline) than during its manufacture. The same goes for a refrigerator or the typical incandescent light bulb: the energy required to manufacture the product pales into insignificance when compared to the energy used during its operation.
Text and Images via Low-tech Magazine. Read full article HERE
Artwork: cityscape I & II by Grace Grothaus.
Cotton production, India. Courtesy of Uwe H. Martin
Niger Delta States. Courtesy of George Osodi.
SUPPLY LINES brings visual practitioners with notable bodies of previous work on globalization together with theorists working in areas of spatial culture, geography, art history and cultural theory to critically examine concepts of resource extraction, use, circulation, and representation. It furthermore forges a collaborative and interdisciplinary mode of geographical knowledge production, with the ultimate intent of stimulating ongoing research, education and public interest in the common use of limited resources. In addition to reframing resources, in other words, Supply Lines seeks to reposition the public’s relation to them. In so doing, it aspires to contribute to participatory, community-oriented models of society, which are increasingly crucial as resource conflicts intensify.
This visual research project explores human interactions with natural resources (e.g., water, oil, silver) and the spatial and social relations ensuing from them. Rather than understanding resources as fixed or externally given, the project conceives of them as collectively produced and able to mobilize and interrelate diverse areas with one another: geographically, historically, economically, and culturally. With growing consciousness about the global limitation and unsustainability of vital resources, there is an urgent need for new means of representation to convey the complexity of such social, geopolitical, ecosystemic and climatic relations. This project’s development of new visual and theoretical material aims to contribute to expanding the notion of “resource” from a hitherto primarily economic-industrial domain toward an aesthetic-cultural context.
As the paperless future approaches, certain sorts of publications have inevitably moved into the all-digital realm faster than others. Most of us still prefer paper when it comes to beach novels, for instance, or the cherished volumes of our personal libraries. At the other extreme, scientific journals effectively went all-digital years ago, and thanks to GPS, maps and road atlases are quickly following. Last week saw another milestone: the symbolic funeral of paper encyclopedias, with the inevitable announcement that the Encyclopedia Britannica is ceasing print publication.
Encyclopedias, along with other reference works, would seem particularly obvious candidates for digitization. Paper encyclopedias are large, heavy, and expensive ($1,395 for the final print edition of Britannica). They are nowhere near as easily and thoroughly searchable as their digital counterparts. They cannot be easily updated, still less constantly updated. And they are far more limited in size. The 2002 Britannica contained 65,000 articles and 44 million words. Wikipedia currently contains close to four million articles and over two billion words (this information comes, of course, from Wikipedia).
Excerpt from an article written by David A. Bell at The New Republic. Continue HERE
We live in a time when almost everything can be bought and sold. Over the past three decades, markets—and market values—have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if it came upon us.
As the Cold War ended, markets and market thinking enjoyed unrivaled prestige, and understandably so. No other mechanism for organizing the production and distribution of goods had proved as successful at generating affluence and prosperity. And yet even as growing numbers of countries around the world embraced market mechanisms in the operation of their economies, something else was happening. Market values were coming to play a greater and greater role in social life. Economics was becoming an imperial domain. Today, the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone. It increasingly governs the whole of life.
The years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008 were a heady time of market faith and deregulation—an era of market triumphalism. The era began in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher proclaimed their conviction that markets, not government, held the key to prosperity and freedom. And it continued into the 1990s with the market-friendly liberalism of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who moderated but consolidated the faith that markets are the primary means for achieving the public good.
Excerpt of an article written by Michael J. Sandel at The Atlantic. Read it HERE
Can physicists produce insights about language that have eluded linguists and English professors? That possibility was put to the test this week when a team of physicists published a paper drawing on Google’s massive collection of scanned books. They claim to have identified universal laws governing the birth, life course and death of words.
The paper marks an advance in a new field dubbed “Culturomics”: the application of data-crunching to subjects typically considered part of the humanities. Last year a group of social scientists and evolutionary theorists, plus the Google Books team, showed off the kinds of things that could be done with Google’s data, which include the contents of five-million-plus books, dating back to 1800.
Excerpt from an article written by CHRISTOPHER SHEA at WST. Continue HERE
Department 21 is a project where designers, artists and architects can meet, collaborate and share working space beyond the institutional boundaries of their own disciplines.
Department 21 was set up in 2009 when a group of students at the Royal College of Art, London initiated an experimental cross-departmental studio space, thereby engendering new discussions and ways of working than had been seen in recent years at the college.
Emerging from an institutional context in which individual authorship and outcome-driven projects are the dominant frames for creative production, the project is the result of a need for new, collaborative forms of exchange between students from different disciplines: it is a means to get in touch with other peoples’ practices (and in this way question one’s own practice), as well as being a platform to support collaboration beyond specialties.
The philosophy driving Department 21 is an emancipated vision of postgraduate studentship, where all those entering a space of education have the responsibility to take a position regarding their learning process. Contrary to the commonly found format of short interdisciplinary collaboration with a secure outcome, Department 21 feels it necessary to create premises for individuals to encounter the others’ spontaneous collaborative working methods based on common interests, curiosity and critical dialogue. The ongoing research work of the project is therefore to identify, test and refine methodologies that enable this type of encounter to emerge and thrive.
Designing Economic Cultures is a research project by design duo Brave New Alps that sets out to investigate the relationship between socio-economic precarity and the production of socially and politically engaged design projects.
The fundamental question that the project poses at its outset is: how can designers, who through their work want to question and challenge the prevalent capitalist system, its organisational forms and its problematic consequences, gain a satisfying degree of social and economic security without having to submit themselves to the commercial pressures of the market?
In other words, how can designers, who have a critically engaged practice, keep on developing this practice without selling themselves off or being crushed by the market? Designing Economic Cultures is an attempt to articulate, develop and share a wide range of tactics and structures that allow designers to produce work that contributes to the development of a more autonomous, democratic and heterogeneous society.
The following transformations hold the key to moving to a new political economy. Consider each as a transition from today to tomorrow.
• Economic growth: from growth fetish to post-growth society, from mere GDP growth to growth in human welfare and democratically determined priorities.
• The market: from near laissez-faire to powerful market governance in the public interest.
• The corporation: from shareholder primacy to stakeholder primacy, from one ownership and motivation model to new business models and the democratization of capital.
• Money and finance: from Wall Street to Main Street, from money created through bank debt to money created by government.
• Social conditions: from economic insecurity to security, from vast inequities to fundamental fairness.
• Indicators: from GDP (“grossly distorted picture”) to accurate measures of social and environmental health and quality of life.
• Consumerism: from consumerism and affluenza to sufficiency and mindful consumption, from more to enough.
• Communities: from runaway enterprise and throwaway communities to vital local economies, from social rootlessness to rootedness and solidarity.
• Dominant cultural values: from having to being, from getting to giving, from richer to better, from separate to connected, from apart from nature to part of nature, from transcendent to interdependent, from today to tomorrow.
• Politics: from weak democracy to strong, from creeping corporatocracy and plutocracy to true popular sovereignty.
• Foreign policy and the military: from American exceptionalism to America as a normal nation, from hard power to soft, from military prowess to real security.
This is an excerpt from an essay written by James Gustave Speth at ORION. Read HERE
For all its goodwill, Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 film is dangerous propaganda, pure and simple. It’s not a call to make a notorious celebrity out of Joseph Kony — it’s a call to war.
When and how so many Americans, young people in particular, were convinced, or convinced themselves, that awareness offers the key to righting wrongs wherever in the world they may be is hard to pinpoint. But whatever else it does and fails to do, Kony 2012, the 30-minute video produced by a previously obscure California- and Uganda-based charity called Invisible Children that seeks to “make Joseph Kony famous in 2012″ so that this homicidal bandit leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in central Africa will be hunted down and turned over to the International Criminal Court, illustrates just how deeply engrained in American culture this assumption has now become.
As a film, as history, and as policy analysis, there is little to be said for Kony 2012 except that its star and narrator, Jason Russell, the head of Invisible Children, and his colleagues seem to have their hearts in the right place. But this do-good spirit is suffused with an almost boastful naiveté and, more culpably, an American middle-class provincialism that illustrates beautifully the continuing relevance of the old adage about the road to hell being paved with good intentions. At one point, Russell’s commentary over a scene of a center in a northwestern Uganda town where children who have fled their villages for fear of LRA attacks are seeking shelter is “If [this] happened one night in America, it would be on the cover of Newsweek,” says Russell. Russell’s argument is that the rise of global connectivity means that we are all “living in a new world” of plugged-in citizens who can change the world through the new modes of activism that Kony 2012 exemplifies — earlier in the film he trumpets the fact that there are more people “on Facebook than were on the planet 200 years ago.” But Russell’s is a bogus globalism: His film basically ignores the world outside North America, where the people he is trying to mobilize live, and central Africa, where Kony and his victims are.
Written by DAVID RIEFF, Foreign Policy. Continue article HERE
Oxford Internet Institute
Oxford Internet Institute
Cotton production, India. Courtesy of Uwe H. Martin
Niger Delta States. Courtesy of George Osodi.
....................................
