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lotu5 | 1 May 2009 02:59
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Trans-border Tools by EDT

This is a draft of a document we are working on, and it was presented at
the recent symposium at Calit2 entitled "Violence, Technology and Public
Intervention" in conjunction with Carlos Trilnick's Anti-Personnel Mines
installation at the gallery <at> calit2. [ More info
http://gallery.calit2.net/portal/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=76&Itemid=55
]

(A question of Trans/Kant towards the end) - EDT

The Transborder Immigrant Tool: Violence, Solidarity and Hope in
Post-NAFTA Circuits of Bodies *Electr(on)/ic*

A talk by the Electronic Disturbance Theater

First we would like to thank UCDArNet and gallery <at> Calit2 for inviting us
to speak today on this very important panel. We are honored to be on this
panel with people whose work we respect so much. And thank you to Carlos
Trilnick for his very important artwork about anti-personnel mines. As he
discussed in his talk, mines are in use at numerous international borders
around the world including Peru, Chile and Colombia, adding to the
senseless violence of imaginary dividing lines. This
multi-layered/multi-voice essay was co-written with the Transborder
Immigrant Tool artist/researchers – poet Amy Sara Carroll, new media
artist Brett Stalbaum, artivist Ricardo Dominguez and mixed reality artist
Micha Cárdenas (a multitude).

Border Context, Walking, Deaths

     Consider the incommensurability of the following two re/presentations
of walking: The first from Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Walking”
(Continue reading)

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Geert Lovink | 1 May 2009 10:31
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Re: Debating German Media Theory in Siegen

Thanks, Stefan, for these important insights. The fact that there is a 
considerable interest, worldwide, in what German media theory is all 
about, and the lack of even basic knowlegde, is striking, and 
illustrates the isolation of this field as a whole.

Let me say it once again. Germans from West-Germany do not like the 
connotation 'German'. It reminds them of the war, Nazis and all that. 

For many outsiders German is a language spoken in large parts of 
Europe, in fact it is the largest one spoken in Europe. They associate 
it with continental Europe. German Media Theory therefore is not an 
attempt from my side to construct or reconstruct some Bismarckian or 
Hitlerian national project aimed to dominate and colonize the EU and 
the world (or accuse people of such an attempt). German in this 
context is a reference to the language in which these texts are wriiten.

The reference to German is made as a concious attempt to wake up 
German policy makers, from both the cultural and academic world  that 
something needs to be done. The world is very interested in the works 
discussed here but have no access to it. We're not only talking about 
translations into English, but in a wide range of languages. In the 
past publishers would do this. This is no longer the case. However, 
throughout the German speaking world, excellent thinkers are still 
waiting for something to happen. But nothing will. The world has 
changed. Apart from translations we also need introductory books and 
anthologies.

Indeed, my definition of German media theory is broad and rather 
subjective. An objective academic approach might fail at this stage. 
Maybe my broad approach comes with distance over the years. One starts
(Continue reading)

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Alex Foti | 1 May 2009 08:48
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best mayday wishes (and oh yeah, i have a book out)

Dear sisters and comrades,

may the mayday force be be with you: let's make'em pay for the crisis!

i seize on the occasion provided by our common day of struggle and
agitation, to let you know Agenzia X has just released my book (1/3 of
the text is in english, rest in italian):

Anarchy in the EU: pink, black, green movements in the Great Recession
(http://www.agenziax.it/oc_main.php?pid=29&sid=30)

You can:

i) buy it heavily discounted at the milano mayday: we'll sell it from
the NO OIL section of the parade
(http://playground.noblogs.org/post/2009/04/28/no-oil-mayaday) where
no precarity activists from tokyo, vienna, luzern will cheer on a
mondo mayday of pedestrians, bikes, solar-powered, radio-diffused
soundsystems.

ii) buy it from agenzia x, by sending a request to press@...
(it's 16 euros plus shipping)

iii) buy it from italian online and offline bookstores (copies should
be available this week)

iv) get the pdf, by sending me an e-mail message (you won't get the
wondrous color stickers designed by Zoe Romano, tho)

A mondo mayday of transnational solidarity,
(Continue reading)

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zoekat | 1 May 2009 14:16

R: [Euromayday] best mayday wishes (and oh yeah, i have a book out)

Stream video from milano mayday: www.mogulus.com/euromaydaymilano

-- msg. originale --
Oggetto: [Euromayday] best mayday wishes (and oh yeah, i have a book out)
Da: Alex Foti <alex.foti@...>
Data: 01-05-2009 08:48

Dear sisters and comrades,

may the mayday force be be with you: let's make'em pay for the crisis!

i seize on the occasion provided by our common day of struggle and
agitation, to let you know Agenzia X has just released my book (1/3 of
the text is in english, rest in italian):

Anarchy in the EU: pink, black, green movements in the Great Recession
(http://www.agenziax.it/oc_main.php?pid=29&sid=30)

You can:

i) buy it heavily discounted at the milano mayday: we'll sell it from
the NO OIL section of the parade
(http://playground.noblogs.org/post/2009/04/28/no-oil-mayaday) where
no precarity activists from tokyo, vienna, luzern will cheer on a
mondo mayday of pedestrians, bikes, solar-powered, radio-diffused
soundsystems.

ii) buy it from agenzia x, by sending a request to press@...
(it's 16 euros plus shipping)
(Continue reading)

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jaromil | 1 May 2009 15:03
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Re: best mayday wishes to Turkey


re all,

On Fri, May 01, 2009 at 08:48:33AM +0200, Alex Foti wrote:
> A mondo mayday of transnational solidarity,

The May Day  is also the anniversary of  the Taksim Square massacre[1]
in  1977, when  extreme  right wing  snipers  opened fire  on May  Day
demonstrators in Istanbul, killing 34 people.

Just a few days ago the Turkish parliament passed a law making May 1 a
national  holiday again.  It was  taken  off the  public holiday  list
following a military coup in 1980.

Still, there is very little coverage  on the media about this news and
what is happening in Istanbul  today: an unnatural silence, while even
the Istanbul  Indymedia website has been defaced[2]  by some religious
fundamentalists.

It  seems that protests  in Turkey  are cut  out from  media coverage,
while several  social networking websites are  unreachable from within
the country.  A recent  article "Deepening Crisis, Growing Resistance:
Workers in Turkey"[3]  gives a good overview on  the situation and the
plans for  this 1st  may, while  the following press  agency is  all I
could find so far about today's riots:

   ISTANBUL (AFP)—Several  hundred May Day  demonstrators clashed with
   police in central Istanbul Friday in battles which saw water cannon
   fired and  several arrests made.  Turkish riot police  staged three
   charges against hundreds of  demonstrators in the Sisli district of
(Continue reading)

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ari | 1 May 2009 22:13

Reclaim the heights. Bury the G8!


http://www.radicaleyes.it

Post Abruzzo sustainable relief by The Diggers 2.0.

APPEAL TO THE GLOBAL MULTITUDES

Seize this chance to build sustainable autonomous community structures

Capital engineers destruction and circulates myths of future prosperity.
Its crisis should be met with the shock and awe of the full energies of
the multitude.

Break your backs creating a post-industrial, post-capitalist commons.

A call to the global multitude to descend upon Abruzzo for the 7-11th July
and help rebuild it in the image of the future!

SWARM at radicaleyes.it

[Email and get on the mailing list]

We've negotiated, we've demanded, we've blockaded, we've gone global,
we've tried being glocal. We've smashed and been mashed. Now it's time to
build the commons - our future.

Ten years after Seattle what we build is what matters. Let's ignore the
spectacle of the summit. Let them see how it's done.

A sustainble form of life, where solidarity issues out of the rubble like
(Continue reading)

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Antonio A. Casilli | 2 May 2009 10:39
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"Wiki, c'est fini?"


(excerpt from Bodyspacesociety.eu May 01, 2009)

[...] Is Wikipedia showing its dark side? Two eloquent examples,
both occurred on Feb. 2009: the “Precarity controversy” and the
“Wikipedia art legal dispute”. I tend to consider these two incidents,
respectively, as the Invasion of Russia and the Waterloo of the famous
online encyclopedia. That is, if a French dictator from the 19th
century ran it.

The controversy over the article Precarity can be summarized
as follows: after a relentless struggle between a group of
European autonomist marxists (regarding precarity as the set of
material conditions of temp workers in postindustrial societies)
and one isolated social christian contributor (interpreting it
as the existential condition of man in the presence of God’s
transcendence), the former filed a semi-protection request,
preventing all anonymous edits and de facto equating all expressions
of dissent to an act of vandalism. I, for one, lined up with the
autonomous marxists, and provided my reasons in this Nettime post
<http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0902/msg00042.html>.
My point of view has changed since then, especially in the light
of the final outcome. The article has been “balcanized”, both
ideologically and geographically, with the European marxists on the
one side and the (non European?) social christians on the other.
Consensus has not been reached. Coertion and mutual usurpation
triumph. Way to run a collaborative environment.

The “Wikipedia art” legal dispute took place around the same
time. Initiated by Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, the project
(Continue reading)

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Armin Medosch | 2 May 2009 09:26
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Re: Debating German Media Theory in Siegen


I am not sure if the world really needs 'German' media theory right
now. First of all the term 'German media theory' does indeed suggest a
focus on the German nation, whilest leaving out or forcibly connecting
to it (Anschluss) other works in the German language by authors from
Switzerland and Austria, or Czech/Brasil as in the case of Flusser.

That what indeed could count as a 'German' media theory is, as Stefan
Heidenreich said, the socalled Kittler school. I am not inclinced
to go into any in depth discussion here of this work but would just
like to note two tendencies in passing. First, even the translator
of the English edition of Grammophone, Film, Typewriter, is quite
critical of Kittler and calls him a 'reactionary postmodernist' -
and that would be a quite good description of that strand of german
media theory. And, second, why I say that can be illustrated by the
following example:

In 1995 when Ars Electronica dedicated itself to the newly opened up
web, Kittler contributed a short statement to the catalogue which said
that artists/theorists who hoped that the net had an emancipatory
dimension were wrong, because the net had been invented by the
military and therefore its core was all about encryption and secrecy.
This wild thesis has been thouroughly disproven by empiricism, it has
been shown to be wrong, and theorists need to be held to account for
the validity of their theories. so why would the world need more of
that?

More funny is of course the question, how german is 'grammophone, film
...' as it mostly seems to rely on mcLuhan, Focault and Lacan for its
theoretic foundations.
(Continue reading)

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MILTOS MANETAS | 2 May 2009 15:13
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Re: "Wiki, c'est fini?"


The Internet Pavilion which will open in a month, for the very first
time officially included at the Venice Biennial, is inviting anyone
who feels doing it, to participate and create a Wikipedia Embassy in
Venice representing the ideas and ideals of Wikipedia.

A larger project, Embassy of Piracy, is to be soon announced in
the context of the Internet Pavilion and the PirateBay. There are
things that companies appropriated and this is fine but some of these
things belong to us and we should be free to represent them. You are
Wikipedia, you are Facebook.

Best to all

Miltos Manetas

ps: contact me directly at m <at> manetas.com for details and partecipation.
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Edward Shanken | 3 May 2009 02:49
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Re: Debating German Media Theory in Siegen

Until recently from the other side of the pond, I have a different
view of these matters.

First, Geert isn't the only one using the term "German" media theory
or capitalizing Media Theory.  "New German Media Theory" was the theme
of a fairly recent issue of the US journal, Grey Room, no 29 (Winter,
2008), edited by German scholar Eva Horn, and including essays by
youngish scholars including Claus Pias, Bernhard Siegert, and Cornelia
Visman/Markus Krajewski.  While I can understand the argument for a
German "Sonderweg" and am interested in understanding what that could
be and how it is being historicized, Gumbrecht's assertion that there
are no "media studies faculties in other countries," is not a "fact,"
and it's odd that Geert agrees with this fallacy, since we teach
together in the Media Studies department at the University of
Amsterdam and there is another Media Studies program just 40
kilometers away at Utrecht University.

In the 1990s, as the German "Sonderweg" was arguably taking shape, my
cohorts in the US were so few and widely dispersed both departmentally
and geographically that we barely knew of each other.  For example,
Alex Galloway and I overlapped at Duke but we studied in different
departments with different supervisors, bibliographies, methods, and
agendas, and didn't meet until years later in New York.  Everyone read
Kittler of course, and my mentors led me to English translations of
Schivelbush and Asendorf's fascinating Batteries of Life, though
without any awareness of a special "German" approach to media theory.
Zielinski had been translated into English by the mid 1990s but was
not a key figure in US discourses and the term media-archaeology was
not part of our vocabulary, even though some of us intuitively found
ourselves doing it. Given the Germanic roots of modern art historical
(Continue reading)

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Gmane