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lotu5 | 1 Oct 01:07
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Radical Porn: Intercourse Between Fantasy and Reality, pdf and mp3 online

http://sharingissexy.org/node/860

The wonderful folks over at Arse Elektronika already have the mp3s form 
their conference up on their website! So we can share our talk with you, 
and we'd love, love, love to have your feedback on it, so post a comment 
here!

The focus of our talk was on looking at the notion of the real in 
radical porn, and how deciding what bodies are real and are not may 
exclude some people. We propose that perhaps we can talk more about 
power dynamics in porn, as a qualifier of what makes it radical, instead 
of talking about who is real and who isn't. We propose that porn 
performers should have complete control and final say over the final 
product.

But we also said a lot more than that! So give it a look and a listen 
and let us know what you think!

Listen to the mp3 here:
http://www.monochrom.at/arse-elektronika/2008/mp3/Arse_08_Sharing_is_Sexy.mp3

PDF of our slides, made with Open Office, here:
http://www.sharingissexy.org/files/sis-arse-talk.pdf

Listen to the rest of the talks here:
http://www.monochrom.at/arse-elektronika/schedule.html

--

-- 

gpg:  0x5B77079C // encrypted email preferred
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mez breeze | 1 Oct 04:29
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Tentative Spaces: An Introduction

 Tentative Spaces: An
Introduction<http://arsvirtuafoundation.org/research/2008/09/25/tentative-spaces-an-introduction/>
Posted September 25th, 2008 by Greg J
Smith<http://arsvirtuafoundation.org/research/author/greg-j-smith/>

Discussions addressing the connection between *architecture and
gaming<http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/tactical-landscaping-and-terrain.html>
* cycle in and out of design discourse with some regularity. And why not?
The experiential qualities of surface, volume and movement in game space are
compelling, immersive and, quite importantly, shared points of reference.
Conversations about this relationship often address the fact that the
underlying means of production in both disciplines are fundamentally
connected through an assortment of shared tools and methodologies. Beyond
advances in software and hardware, we could definitely point fingers at the
uncanny *digital materiality <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-1000>*of James
Cameron and the influential *design
practice<http://books.google.ca/books?id=vtnlOPhpbU8C>
* of *Greg Lynn <http://www.glform.com/>* for causing a conflation of
architectural, animation and visual effects culture. Origins aside, it is
important to note that both architecture and gaming are equally invested in
the representation of space, and both have codified standards for "sound
construction". This works at the diagrammatic level of vectors and polygons
and experientially when discussing the qualities of immersion in specific
narrative spaces, be they* inhabited* or *played*.

There are a number of pitfalls to be avoided when reading space in gaming.
One must resist the urge to completely aestheticize gaming, avoid eclipsing
play with narrative and acknowledge that game space telescopes outwards from
play and also encompasses various layers of control and perception which
augment and inform immersion. These layers include interface, the *picture
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Felix Stalder | 1 Oct 10:36
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Piracy and commercial fishing

The NYT has a fascinating story about the current piracy drama off the 
coast of Somalia. What makes that one different is that the pirates 
happened, by chance it seems, upon a ship carrying weapons officially 
destined for Kenia, but according to the pirates, actually for Dafur. How 
does the NYT know this? Well, the pirates these days have official 
spokespeople, one Sugule Ali in this case, the only person on the ship who 
is "authorized to be quoted". 

Anyway, what is interesting is the origin of piracy in Somalia, as act of 
self-defense against robbery by commercial, presumably European, Chinese, 
and Japanese fishing fleets. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/01/world/africa/01pirates.html?hp

The piracy industry started about 10 to 15 years ago, Somali officials 
said, as a response to illegal fishing. Somalia’s central government 
imploded in 1991, casting the country into chaos. With no patrols along the 
shoreline, Somalia’s tuna-rich waters were soon plundered by commercial 
fishing fleets from around the world. Somali fishermen armed themselves and 
turned into vigilantes by confronting illegal fishing boats and demanding 
that they pay a tax. 
“From there, they got greedy,” said Mohamed Osman Aden, a Somali diplomat 
in Kenya. “They starting attacking everyone.” 

--- http://felix.openflows.com ----------------------------- out now:
*|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions.Scheidegger&Spiess2008
*|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 
*|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005
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Jonathan Lukens | 3 Oct 00:47
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the usage of network


It seems to me that I hear more and more people using the word network
to describe groups of things that aren't necessarilly organized as
networks. This seems especially true of people using the phrase
"social network" who are often just talking about groups of people
which may have little or no interconnection.

I'm no expert on this (or anything else), and I've no desire to
police language. I just wonder if the word will mean something quite
different to most people by the end of my life. That's likely just
what words do.

-Jon
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Morlock Elloi | 3 Oct 17:40
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Re: the usage of network

It's marketoid-speak, naming things after wishful thinking, after the promised
result, to make them more sellable. In case of businesses purporting to enable
people to connect, it makes marketing sense to call their customers
collectively with the name that suggests that they already *have* connected, as
to entice more audience and newcomers, who hope that they will "connect",
become a part ("20,334,344 alreaady connected"), and eventually get laid.

The actual network part of social networking part probably consists of a very
sparce matrix of two or few member sets.

> It seems to me that I hear more and more people using the word network to
> describe groups of things that aren't necessarilly organized as networks.
> This seems especially true of people using the phrase
> "social network" who are often just talking about
> groups of people which may have little or no interconnection.
> 
> I'm no expert on this (or anything else), and I've no desire to police
> language. I just wonder if the word will mean something quite different
> to most people by the end of my life. That's likely just what words do.
> 
> -Jon
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Paul Miller | 3 Oct 23:09
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Capital and Language: Christian Marrazi


There's been such a focus on market forces over the last week that it  
basically seems like "perception of the event has subsumed the actual  
event to the point that global financial markets, catastrophe theory,  
and the intersection of linguistics and contemporary finance have all  
blurred into one another. If there's one thing stuff like "credit  
default swaps" and "collateralized debt obligations" have shown us is  
simply that the more tenuous the relationship between finance and  
reality becomes, the more we move into the realm of what it's really  
like to live in an information economy. One of my favorite theorists  
on this kind of topic is Christian Marrazi. He has a new book out
"Capital and Language"

I thought I'd send this to the list, and a recent essay.
Paul

Capital and Language:
 From the New Economy to The War Economy
by Christian Marrzi
Introduction by Michael Hardt
MIT Press/Semiotexte

Description:
The Swiss-Italian economist Christian Marazzi is one of the core  
theorists of the Italian postfordist movement, along with Antonio  
Negri, Paolo Virno, and Bifo (Franco Berardi). But although his work  
is often cited by scholars (particularly by those in the field of  
"Cognitive Capitalism"), his writing has never appeared in English.  
This translation of his most recent work, Capital and Language  
(published in Italian in 2002), finally makes Marazzi's work available
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Ed Phillips | 4 Oct 01:58
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Mark to Mars (U.S. Congress rolls over on Bailout Bill)

Folk wisdom of the Freddy Jameson bootleg variety has it that the
Bourgeoisie brought reason in the form of open and free markets to a
dark world of rattle shaking and fetish, of feudal opacity.  No
sooner, however, so the wisdom goes, did opacity and obscurantism
return again in the very form of the product itself.

Transparency is a word one hears much of, as in the transparency of
free markets, as in the bringing of transparency to the world in the
form of free markets. Efficiency, transparency and economy so the
thinking goes emerges from the supposed spontaneous ordering of an
open market. So the thinking goes. Not only does the reality of global
capitalism not fit this model, neither does in fact, the thinking. The
banking and the shadow banking networks are truly opaque and grossly
inefficient and they are revealing themselves to be so at the moment
in which they need most to come into some light of reason.  They are
too thin and too shy for any market; here they appear as anorexic
virgins.  The pontiffs of the central banks and institutional
economists themselves seem to not be able to come into the light of
reason either. They treat a monster as gingerly as if it were a
virgin. The veil must not be pierced. "Confidence" might be lost if
the veil were pierced.

The enormous forces of production unleashed by development have come
home to roost and brought deflation to the very centers of financial
capital that were previously benefiting from deflating service and
goods pricing. Rather than seeing the light and the fact of deflation
in housing, or the bursting of the housing bubble, the bankers cower
and wait. They obscure and fudge and attempt to inflate and print
their way out of what they see as a black hole. It is not the black
hole it looks to be. It could be a chance for reason. It could be an
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Konrad Becker | 4 Oct 18:28
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"Systems Panic" Days


In times of crisis we all need a little security. For your safety and
pleasure Brian Holmes' speech at the "World Security Days" Vienna.
(A significant contribution to the rather scary debate on artistic
practice...)

Cheers, K

PS: new video on urban peacekeeping and black operations
feat. Brian Holmes, Eva Horn and many others,
http://www.global-security-alliance.com/world-security-days/video

***

"Security Aesthetic = Systems Panic"

This isn't the first time I've participated in the events of the
Global Security Alliance. Previously I spoke under the fictional name
of Frank Beauregard, director of the Paris-based "Risk A" division,
with some slick European ideas on "security aesthetics" for cultural
peacekeeping. The chic aesthetic future of security tried to look
good in the face of an explicit critique of warlike, ineffective
Anglo-American practices used in Iraq and Afghanistan. But what I want
to talk about today, in case anybody missed it, is the implicit angle
of Beauregard's critique, and the target of GSA operations in general.
None other than the deep paranoia and drive toward total paranoid
control that's now being expressed in even the "fuzziest" realms of
security society, namely culture.

Let's approach this whole thing philosophically. Where does security
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Keith Hart | 4 Oct 13:32
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Re: Mark to Mars (U.S. Congress rolls over on Bailout Bill)


Keep at it, Ed. This is stirring stuff. Your way of talking about
capitalist transparency and feudal fetishism reminded me of one of
my favourite books ever: George Caffentzis Clipped Coins, Abused
Words and Civil Government: John Locke's Philosophy of Money (1989,
Autonomedia, New York).

Locke believed that democratically accountable government was
undermined by the linked debasement of money and language. You
couldn't tell if coins were what they were supposed to be and
politicians never said what they meant. He got his friend Isaac Newton
appointed to the Mint, where he came up with a sovereign that 'rings
true' if it hasn't been adulterated, and he launched the dictionary
movement as a counterpart to his political philosophy. Transparency as
a political and economic virtue still has something to be said for it,
but the concept itself, like much else from the liberal revolution,
has been corrupted by its contemporary use for purposes opposite to
those originally intended.

Surely, what is new about neoliberalism is the perverted use of
liberal ideas to mystify the reversion of capitalism to its feudal
origins. Marx understood that capitalism was feudalism in drag: that's
why he coined the expression surplus value. But, in his anxiety
to rush to the next stage, he also subscribed to the notion that
capiralism had replaced feudalism. This idea of history as a line of
discrete stages is a major obstacle to thinking through the present
crisis.

Bush capitalism is literally the Old Regime: autocratic rule,
unhindered looting by the big corporations, colonial war, torture,
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nettime's_digestive_system | 5 Oct 06:35

that's all she wrote digest [x3: marcin, sondheim, mez]

"Walus.Marcin" <Edeer.Cengiz@...>
     I Will Not Zap The Mosquito
Alan Sondheim <sondheim@...>
     yet more on gamespace edge
"mez breeze" <netwurker@...>
     16/09/2008 - 6/8/2008

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

From: "Walus.Marcin" <Edeer.Cengiz@...>
Subject: I Will Not Zap The Mosquito
Date: Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:45:27 +0000

who prefer what and why? Vigour

Idolatry

Assuming

Griefs

Rhyming

Assuming
 Lisp

Evans

Vigour
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Gmane