Re: What is the meaning of Trump's victory?

[Armin Medosch]

Hi

> Also, Trump won on ALL white demographics, including affluent, college
> educated, and female identifying.

I find this a point worth dwelling on for a bit. In an article written
by Paul Mason I found this statement:

"Donald Trump has won the presidency – not because of the
“= white working class”, but because millions of
middle-class and educated U= S citizens reached into their soul
and found there, after all its conceits were stripped away, a
grinning white supremacist. Plus untapped reserves of misogyny."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/globalisation-de
ad-wh= ite-supremacy-trump-neoliberal

I have also seen some numbers - but unfortunately don't remember
where, can someone help? - which confirmed that the majority of white
males voted for Trump which included college educated and wealthy
people; also a small majority of white women voted for Trump; and
Hillary was on a par with white non-educated poor workers.

I think it would be worth finding reliable numbers because the
standard explanation for Trump's victory but also the successes of the
European far right is that this is due to the rage of uneducated poor
whites, the nasty side of the working class, the losers of
globalisation. A look at the numbers however suggests that this is not
the case, that those proletarian loosers of globalisation form only a
relatively small part of Trump's constituency, and that many of those
who voted for him were 'normal' republicans. Similarly here in Europe
many voters of Strache and Le Pen are not in any real financial
distress right now. A sizable part of their constituency are middle
class or petit bourgeoisie.

Why is this important? Because the standard explanation now really has
become a 'mantra' in liberal media, an automatic, reflex-like
explanation which is not questioned any further. And this is dangerous
because it prompts wrong answers to a real political dilemma. By
blaming only a specific social strata of being vulnerable for the
rhetoric of populists, the answers concocted by the liberal elites
stretch from either trying to be more populist than populists or
ringfencing a democratic centrist voters block (where this is still
possible) against the rising tide.

Yet in any case it absolves European and American societies from
questioning their own believes and value systems. It fits into the
value system of the liberal section of society to blame 'uneducated'
people, 'workers' for supporting the Trumplers, but stops them from
looking who are those other people who voted for Trump and what are
their motivations?

This has already been the case with fascism, as the Italian and German
working class have been blamed for it, while in reality they suffered
most from it. It is also an old argument that goes back to Marx and
the question of the 'urban mob' in the 19th century: can people with a
low status in society with little education produce complex political
ideas or are they just suspect to fall for this or that kind of
populism. And a proper Marxist answers is of course yes, they can;
because they are exposed to the sharp end of capitalism they
understand the world better and become the revolutionary avant-garde.
Historically this has led to several betrayals of the working class by
the bourgeoisie, where the latter used the first for a revolution - as
in France in 1848 - and then backstabbed them only to become
themselves shafted by a generalissimo. The current boureoisise /
liberal elite is capable of carrying out a similar betrayal albeit
maybe more unwittingly and on a global scale.

The bourgeois / liberal argument is pointing at 'others' at people who
are 'not them', rather than engaging with the rightist elements among
their own class, the moneyed middle class which, in the name of its
economic success, exploits exactly those globally inequalities in
which race and class still play an important role. Racism and misogyny
are pretty good explanations but only if seen in a more structural
sense, as Brian proposes. The 'working class' has become
geographically dispersed and those who really produce the goods are
highly invisible for us, while badly paid service jobs in the rich
countries are mainly done by migrants or ex-migrants. At the same time
you do have a workers aristocracy in countries such as Germany where
you do still have well paid post-Fordist jobs.

The non-thinking mantra of the liberal elites absolves them from
looking into structural issues where Eurocentrism with its mechanisms
of 'othering' fails very badly (even its own goals). This goes into
many other areas such as the same unthinking unquestioning way in
which 'our model of media freedom' our fantastic free press is
suddenly resuscitated as a bulwark against Erdoga-Putins and
filterbubble-Trumplers, or the way in which 'our democracy' is
defended as the only possible democracy.

Well, this has become quite long, I actually when I started writing
only wanted support in facts regarding real voter 

Re: Cybernetics and the Pioneers of Computer Art

[Armin Medosch]

Hi Thomas

our discussion may seem redundant at times of depressing world
political events. However, let me nevertheless explain a bit where I
am coming from. You insinuate that I just wrote this posting to
'advertise' my book, not taking into consideration that I may have
other motivations as well.

I passionately believe that art history, or any history, cant be done
in the old way, where you have a number of works, which are treated as
mere facts - without any further explanation of how those facts relate
to other events in the world - so that those facts enter a timeline
which fetishises 'firsts' which then come to form a canon. In that way
you will always favour western centric narratives because the
historical records have already been produced within such a scenario;
history is always rigged in favour of certain privileged narratives. I
therefore think we need to 'provincialize' Western art history and
make sure it is not mistaken for art history as such.

Currently at Haus der Kunst Munich der is a large scale exhibition on
Postwar Modernism which tries to recalibrate the narrative on postwar
modern art, a project by Okwei Enwezor who is setting standards in
that regard. I think we cannot fall behind that. However, Okwei is
showing a formally relatively conservative art, his approach does not
include a reflection of art and technology, art and science practices.
When we now do that work we should also take a leaf out of Okwei's
book and throw open the mechanisms of canonisation and what counts as
fact and what enters our timelines. Clinging to a ridiculously narrow
set of four pioneers then, the three N's plus Mohr is not helpful.
Secondly this issue of 'facts' - a work as a datum on a timeline - and
its relation to other issues, to the historical context or the human
lifeworld, for lack of better words. I find it negligent to cut those
networks and present those works against a neutral historical
background, as if you could isolate the art and the technology from
everything else. Both the art and the tech were products of their
time, they carry the imprint of the era and when we write about it now
we have the duty to reconstitute those networks that constituted the
meaning o tose works and artifacts in the first place.

Moreover, part of that history has been the history of science and
technology in the Cold War. I cannot treat cybernetics as a 'neutral'
concept and then look how artists so wonderfully used it to make art.
I cannot do that because, for instance, the inventor of cybernetics,
Norbert Wiener, quickly let his first book follow a second book, The
Human Use of Human Beings, a bestseller at the time, in which he
explained the social ramifications of cybernetic and information
theory. Those works that you present so neutrally have the Cold War
history written all over them. Luckily, other disciplines come to our
aid, such as science studies, technology studies, and the various
sub-branches of it. Another important area connected to computer art
is the history of automation and changes in labour relations. Those
contextual and theoretical issues are part and parcel of 'computer
art' history. Not having them I find dangerous, it contributes to a
society of non-reflection, non thinking.

To give an example of what I mean I present a quote by artist Gustav
Metzger who  wrote about cybernetic serendipity in Studio
International in 1968/69: "At a time when there is a widespread
concern about computers, the advertising and presentation of the ICA's
'Cybernetic Serendipity' as a 'technological fun-fair' is a perfectly
adequate demonstration of the reactionary potential of art and
technology. [...]  No end of computers composing haikus, but no hint
that computers dominate modern war, that they are becoming the most
totalitarian tools ever used in society."

Gustav's writing set an early example how to engage critically with
those artistic endeavours. This is the way to go and this is my
investment. Maybe some people in Zagreb will be disappointed to hear
this but I did not write my book on New Tendenices because I have a
special fascination with their art or with Yugoslavia. I have chosen
that case study because it allowed me to connect the early history of
art and media, art and technology with social issues and thereby
demonstrate the value of applying a historical and technopolitical
methodology to an art historical subject. Unfortunately I can already
sense that the mainstream of digital art and media art histories is
simply going to ignore that and is continuing with its business as
usual, either living in a phanmtasmagorical 'forwever now, forever
new' or writing  decontextualized and depoliticized histories. For
this very reason I do not hesitate to use the possibilities available
to me to 'advertise' my book because I sincerely hope it is about so
much more than just an interesting detail of postwar art history, and
therefore I also post the link again:

Re: Cybernetics and the Pioneers of Computer Art

[Armin Medosch]

dear Thomas,

I really hate to say this, because I really respect your work, you are
a very good researcher but this piece once more perpetuates the myth
of a purely Western computer art and cybernetics. A few years ago this
might have been an oversight, one could have said there was not enough
information, but now it starts to look like it is done on purpose, or
there is an unwillingness to learn that there was a cybernetic
movement in the former East, that an absolute hotspot of art,
cybernetics and information theory was New Tendencies in Zagreb from
1961 to 1978, whereby in particular in summer 1968 there was an
exhibition and symposium in Zagreb on 'computers and visual research'
followed by a much larger exhibition and symposium in May 1969 with
participation if dozens of artists and in the symposium of, among
others, Umberto Eco, artwork by artists such as Gustav Metzger and an
outdoor computer controlled 'media facade' by Vladimir Bonacic, all
that documented not only in a catalogue of which exists also an
international version but in 9 issues of the journal Bit International
(which you actually have in your bibliography), of which the first
three issues were entirely dedicated to information aesthetics.

All this is documented for English readers in the book that was
conceived by Darko Fritz and then put together by Margit Rosen under
the title "A Little Known Story ...", and now also in my book New
Tendencies - Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution
(1961-1978), both books came out at MIT Press and they actually
complement each other, one is a document sourcebook, my book a
historicial and political contextualisation. In addition to that
Monoskop is tirelessly putting out material on art, cybernetics an
information aesthetics in the East and new stories are written or wait
to be written, such as the amazing Argentinian CAYC group and also new
material gets published on the Japanese, south Asian and Eastern
European context, see for instance the historical section of the
latest issue of Acoustic Space #15 Open Fields ... and this is just
what I know off the back of my mind. I don't know who is helped by
perpetuating a purely Western centric version of the history of
cybernetic art. There is also more work coming out on cybernetics,
sans art, in the east, which was a really strong movement among the
intelligentsia and had a big impact also on culture via science
fiction.

Of course you are entitled to hold lectures of any content that you
like but maybe give it another title such as "The story of Western
cybernetics and Western pioneers of computer art in a Cold War
context" or some such thing but please do not claim that these were
THE PIONEERS and thus sidelining artists such as Bonacic, Zdenek
Sykory, Waldemar Cordeiro and many others.

For those interested in that other, a little bit more inclusive story
please check out my book https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/new-tendencies
kind regards
Armin

 .

On Mon, Nov 7, 2016 at 10:05 PM, Thomas Dreher  wrote:
>The English translation of my lecture on "Cybernetics and the Pioneers
>of Computer Art" (Sprengel Museum Hannover, 16th October 2016) is
>online.
>URL: http://dreher.netzliteratur.net/4_Medienkunst_Kybernetike.html



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Re: Thomas Frank: Forget the FBI cache; the Podesta emails

[Armin Medosch]

this is a very bad article, I don't see the point of publishing it on
nettime. the guarduian should never have published it. this is a
critique of the elites? oh me god, how far has so called quality
journalism sunk ...


On Wed, Nov 2, 2016 at 2:59 PM, Patrice Riemens  wrote:

> original to:
> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/31/the-podesta-emails-show-who-runs-america-and-how-they-do-it
>
> Forget the FBI cache; the Podesta emails show how America is run
 <...>

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Re: alex van der bellen wins austrian presidentials!!!

[Armin Medosch]

Hi Patrice and all,

I happen to live in Austria and I would warn against false
dichotomies. It is simply not true that those who voted for the
rightwing populist Hofer are all, what is called in German "looseres
of globalisation;" maybe there are some but a quite large number
of people who vote for them are fairly well of. They tend to live
in rural areas and small towns (where they have never seen any
refugees), they have houses and garages, well paid jobs or small
businesses. The going might be a bit tougher than in the past, but
that's complaining on a high level. So there might be other patterns
at work, a bit like the Dutch middle class's retreat from society, a
disengagement on a larger scale (50%). I think we need more work like
Merijn Oudenampsen's study of how populism works. Also, in Austria,
historically, the biggest support for the Nazis was from the petty
bourgeoisie, not from workers. Those beer swelling, sausage muncheing
prolls do exist, but there are not that many of them left anymore and
there is that other class which I deem more dangerous, the volkswagen
audi driving who combine their lederhosen with techno, are ambitious
and extremely egocentric who are now "making it" and don't want any
obstacles and less tax in a country where remnants of the welfare
state actually do exist

all best
Armin




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Re: notes from the DIEM25 launch

[Armin Medosch]

dear Alexander,

thanks for your additional explanations. Yes, when I write economy I
also mean political economy. So in fact your explanation brings me
back to the proposal I have made. The separation between fiscal policy
and monetary policy is enshrined in legislation relating to the ECB
(European Central Bank). It means that the ECB is prohibited by law
from giving money directly to governments to invest in social welfare.
What the ECB has been and is doing is buying government bonds from
Investment Banks to the amount of about 60 billion per months, up to a
total of 1,6 trillions. All this money goes only to the biggest
investment banks and 80% of it is used to buy back government bonds.
Why they are doing that is exactly what you mention, the hope that
this would help to curb deflation. The ECB hopes that those investment
banks who get rid of some more risky government bonds will now use
that freed up money to invest into the economy.

However, the past year in Europe, and over a longer period in USA and
UK has shown that they don't. From all that money that is artificially
created by the ECB, or the Federal Reserve very little is actually
going into investment into real business. Most of it ends up in
financial "assets" which can be anything, really.Investment banks keep
creating highly complex and potentially toxic types of assets such as
collateral debt obligations (CDOs) which were partly responsible for
the 2008 crash and are highly back in fashion. Some of that ECB and
Federal Reserve money certainly has found its way into China and other
places with non-democratic governments, low wages and no workers
rights, not even to speak of environmental rights. In other words,
quantitative easing has created a new asset bubble which is right now
falling apart rather noisily if you follow stock exchanges.

In short, this plan with 'quantitative easing' (creating accounting
money and giving it to invstment banks) has not worked. There are even
some extreme free market advocates, especially in Germany, who think
that this bond buying program has infringed on holy free market
principles - the central bank shall not get involved directly into the
economy, the only way it ought to do so is monetary policy (which is a
core neoliberal orthodoxy and the cause of much suffering). There is a
court case and a whole dossier on this (in German) by public TV
https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/staatsanleihen-ankauf-ezb-101.html

But this idea that the central bank shall not be concerned with the
economy is NOT a law of nature. It is part of a set of key
institutional decisions which together form the institutional system
of neoliberalism. The institutional system of neoliberalsm cannot be a
holy cow for any progressive movement. I thought Varoufakis is such a
great economist. Why does not he address this issue which is staring
one into the face: when the ECB can create 60 billion Euros per month
and give it to investment banks, it can also create that amount of
money and give it to governments for social tasks - for education,
health, pensions, refugees, natural protection and so on and so forth
(not weapons buying and stupid roads building).

I mistyped in my last email: it would not take 60 but only 6 months
for the economies of those states to get going again. Combine that
with all the other good proposals that Alex brought up, such as a 15
Euros per hour minimum wage, deflation would not be an issue any
longer.

Yes to a social Europe, but no to a Europe that behaves like a nation
state with borders on its outside. Europe could be open and social
too, cosmopolitan and globally networked.

But the idea that radical transparency would be the key to a more
democratic Europe strikes me as almost dangerously naive. Transparency
and accountability was the 1997 mantra of Tony Blair. The problem is
not that we don't know that shit is happening but that even when we
point it out, those in power arrogantly ignore it. Those in power
think they can ignore the left and just sit out any protest such as
Occupy without so much as blinking.

Change needs to come from the economic base and not the
superstructure. That's why the ECB should print money (or rather
create accountancy money) and give it to us all.

best
Armin


On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 9:09 PM, Alexander Karschnia  
wrote:

> Dear Armin,
>
> I am afraid that the picture you got from the DiEM meeting was
> incomplete: the second of the three sessions during the day-time
> meeting of the "working group" was about economy.  The DiEM initiative
> seems inspired by the "modest proposal" that Varoufakis made last year
> together with Stuart Holland Galbraith and James K. Galbraith: the
> bottom-line is that the existing institutions and contracts do not
> have to be changed, but just used in a different way. This
> bottom-line-sentence was repeated by Varoufakis during the evening. In
> that respect, the proposed change is not radical, but very 

Re: notes from the DIEM25 launch

[Armin Medosch]

   hello,

   what this discussion shows sofar is the value of this list, nettime. I
   was neither there, nor have I listened in to the stream, but I have the
   impression that I have a pretty good idea of this meeting by now,
   thanks to everyone.Â

   What strikes me as particularly disappointing is that this high-powered
   self-selected elite of saviours of EU-Europe have no other policy
   proposal than increased transpareny

   It's the economy stupid and to bring about any real change the economic
   base needs to change, sorry for my vulgar Marxism.

   One very concrete proposal how this could happen would be to change the
   way how 'quantitative easing' is done. Currently, the ECB is creating
   money and uses it to buy government bonds from investment banks, that
   is, about 80% of the 60 Billion Euros created monthly by the ECB is
   used in that way. This is based on an orthodoxy in current economic
   thinking: the separation of monetary policy and fiscal policy.Â

   Now we all know that since 2008 governments have subscribed (in some
   cases not entirely voluntarily) to austerity policies that became
   necessary after they saved the banking system from collapse. Those
   austerity policies are in turn responsible for the prolonged economic
   crisis (not just in EU Europe). This economic crisis has long since
   turned into a social crisis and now also a political crisis. I would
   like to remind that the real effect of this economic crisis is not just
   that businesses suffer but even more so that the life-chances of a
   whole generation, that important cultural, scientific and social tasks
   remain undone, and that all this in turn plays into the hands of the
   far right.

   There would in principle - except for some stupid EU legislation which
   can and should be changed - no obstacle to the ECB creating the same
   amount of informational money per month and give it to governments and
   the EU commission to finance education, culture, social works, support
   for refugees, you name it. Do that for 60 months to the tune of 60
   billion Euros per month and I guarantee the economic crisis would be
   over, people would be happier and more self-confident and happier and
   more self-confident people would demand democratic changes themselves;
   a happier, more confident and more democratic Europe would engage in
   more open and constructive ways with the world and could make more
   credible demands for democratic change elsewhere.

   The ECB should start the printing machine for us all and not just
   investment banks, because the latter is a receipt for disaster because
   it creates only another asset bubble which may lead - or is in the very
   process of doing so - another, this time really big global financial
   crisis which governments may find themselves unable to cushion (and all
   that is not just m idea but said by economists off the record).Â

   all best

   Armin

   Â Â  Â Â

   On Sun, Feb 14, 2016 at 9:22 PM, Michael Gurstein  wrote:

 Sorry to intrude in this Euro-centric (myopic) discussion but just as 
DIEM25
 was being presented Bernie Sanders was winning the New Hampshire primary 
for
 the US Democratic party nomination on the basis of rebuilding US democracy
 and being a facilitator of a "democratic revolution" and "socialism" in 
the US.

<...>

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Re: FW: VW

[Armin Medosch]

 Hi,

   Â well said:

 What VW tells us (and why "motivation" is worth looking at) is that
 when push comes to shove we really really need some structures of
 accountability that are responsive to "our", the public's needs and
 not the shareholders and that multistakeholderism as a system of
 governance is basically giving away the keys to the kingdom.

   which leads me to a slightly different topic, this fascination for
   "civil society" that has become so endemic, especially also with regard
   to the current refugee crisis. While the states are failing to organize
   this migration with some dignity, the heroism of civil society becomes
   fetishized. Although I would not regard myself as a statist, there is
   something suspicious in this construction. This article from Rastko
   Mocnik provides some perspective on the notion of civil socitey from a
   post-Yugoslav position

   
http://www.internationaleonline.org/research/real_democracy/6_the_vagaries_of_the_expression_civil_society_the_yugoslav_alternative

   last not least a short report from a small, unimportant country in the
   center of Europe:yesterday the post-Haider Freedom Party won 30+
   percent of the votes in Upper Austria, an economically strong region
   whose capital is Linz which hosts Ars Electronica. Now guess what, the
   F-Party celebrated its victory in the rooftop bar of Ars Electronica
   Center
   best
   Armin

   Â Â
   Â

 Mike
 -Original Message-
      From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org    Â
 [mailto:nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org] On Behalf Of t byfield
 Â  Â  Â Sent: September 27, 2015 12:08 PM
 Â  Â  Â To: nettim...@kein.org
 Â  Â  Â Subject: Re:  VW
 Â  Â  Â On 25 Sep 2015, at 20:59, Michael Gurstein wrote:
 Â  Â  Â > Thanks Ted, very useful.
 Â  Â  Â >
 Â  Â  Â > I guess what I'm curious about is the motivations, individual 
and/or
 Â  Â  Â > corporate thought processes/incentives etc. that underlie the 
initial
 Â  Â  Â > decision to go down this path and then the multitude of 
decisions at
 Â  Â  Â > various levels up and down the organization to continue on this 
path.
 Â  Â  Â <...>
 Â  Â  Â Michael, your line of questions seems to be a high priority for the
 Â  Â  Â media: today's NYT top story is "As Volkswagen Pushed to Be
 No. 1,      Ambitions Fueled a Scandal." Personally, I don't
 think there's been much      innovation in the motivation dept
 since, say, Sophocles, so the      human-interest angle isn't
 very interesting, IMO. If anything, it's the      primary
 mechanism in diverting attention from the real problem, namely,  Â
 Â  how to address malfeasance on this scale. Corporations are
 treated as      'people' when it comes to privatizing profit, but
 when it comes to      liabilities they're become treated as
 amorphous, networky constructs,      and punishing them becomes
 an exercise in trying to catch smoke with      your hands.
 Imagine for a moment that by some improbable chain of events    Â
 VW ended up facing a 'corporate death penalty,' there remain all
 kinds      of questions about what restrictions would be imposed
 on the most      culpable officers, how its assets would be
 disposed of, and what would      happen to its intellect
  ual property. (It'd be funny if the the VW logo      was
 banned, eh? I'm not suggesting anything like that could actuallyÂ
 Â  Â  happen, of course.) The peculiar details of this scandal could
 spark a      systemic crisis of a different kind, one that makes
 evading guilt more      difficult. The 'too complex for mere
 mortals' line won't work in this
 Â  Â  Â case: VWs have come a long way since the Deutsche
 Arbeitsfront or R.
 Â  Â  Â Crumb-like illustrated manuals about _How to Keep your
 Volkswagen      Alive_, but not so far that people will blindly
 accept that they can't      understand them. Popular
 understanding of negative externalities in      environmentalism
 is decades ahead of its equivalent in finance. And it    Â
 doesn't hurt that Germany, which has done so much to bend the EU to
 its      will, looks like it'll be the lender of last resort.
 Â  Â  Â  <...>

 <...>


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Cities of the Sun: Urban Revolutions and the Network Commons

[Armin Medosch]

nettimers,

it has been my pleasure recently to give keynote lecture at the Hybrid
City 03 conference in Athens. I have now put the lecture version
online:

In this talk, I want to bring together two notions: the city as
utopia and project; and the recent developments, over the past 10
to 15 years, with regard to the development of a network commons.
The network commons is one among a number of other initiatives that
propose alternative future developments, from alternative and creative
uses of technology, to alternative energies to alternative economies
and ecologies. Those propositions, however, have remained separate.
The thesis that I propose is that as long as those propositions remain
separate, they will either be absorbed or destroyed by capitalism.
There will be some change but ultimately nothing really will change,
the world will not become a better place, which is, as I assume, that
what really interests us all and brings us together here. We thus need
a coherent and collective vision that is anchored in reality. As the
locus of this vision I have identified the city as utopia and project.


full text http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/1358




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Re: what if we were all right but all wrong?

[Armin Medosch]

Dear Alex,

thanks for this. I also share your analysis. A few weeks ago I have
written a piece which I didn't post on nettime, but I do it now:

http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/1335

It goes into a slightly different direction: How can we effectively
voice opposition when the old media have reached levels of
manipulation reminding of the dark days of the cold war and the
internet has been commodified to such a degree that a small island
like nettime is a very welcome oasis again?

Yet to return to your posting, the overall feeling is that something
is changing but it does not yet have a name or gestalt. It is probably
not communism and also not commonism. To underpin this notion of a
watershed in public sentiment a little anecdote:

Last night there was a large pro-refugee demonstration in Vienna,
Austria. The police says 20.000 but their estimates are always on the
conservative side, I would say 30.000 at least. The main shopping
street, Mariahilferstrasse, was full with people from beginning to
end. It was quite heartwarming, a lot of fresh faced youngsters in
white t-shirts (because thats what the organisers told participants to
wear).

On the other hand it reminded me a bit of that anti-Iraq war demo in
London where 1.5 million went. It was this "not in my name" feeling,
something to do with post-christianity and not wanting to be guilty
of inhuman behavior, but an absence of any deeper political analysis.
Last night's demo had no slogans except for "love", "together" and
"refugees are welcome here" and the speeches also dwelled on such
simple humanistic themes. On one hand slogans probably need to be so
simple to mobilize so many, but on the other hand the absence of any
deeper political analysis means that those 30.000 will not form the
nucleus of a new political movement ... which made me a bit sad in the
end ...

best regards
Armin




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Re: nettime Europe: from bad to worse

[Armin Medosch]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

dear Felix

your analysis seems unusually dark, since I know you usually as a mildly
optimistic person. Well, in fact I share most of it, and said so
recently on my website http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/1331 in an
article comparing the current situation to Polanyi's analysis of the
1920s and 1930s.

The amount of confusion in European papers is both, amazing and scary.
Many seem to equate a no in the referendum with Greeks exit from the
Eurozone and maybe even the EU. While this may be the outcome in the
long run, and there is no doubt that the actions of Merkel, Hollande,
Disselblom are immensely dangerous to the European project, I would like
to warn against automatically linking those events.

Syriza have always said they want to stay in the EU and in the Euro.
Maybe they can do that by applying capital controls. An example has been
provided by the irrepressible Dr. Mahathir during the Asian financial
crisis. When Malaysia was hit by that crisis originating in Thailand,
he, as prime minister of Malaysia, refused to swallow the IMF pill and
introduced capital controls. I am definitely not a fan of Mahathir with
regard to all his other policies, but this one seems to have worked.

Quoting from this studay

Compared to IMF programs, we find that the Malaysian policies produced
faster economic recovery, smaller declines in employment and real wages,
and more rapid turnaround in the stock market. 

https://www.sss.ias.edu/files/pdfs/Rodrik/Research/did-Malaysian-capital-controls-work.PDF

I cant vow for the quality of this study above, but I just wanted to
remind of the irrepressible Doctor who keeps being a real pain in the
ass for his successors. Ah lot of what he says and thinks is absurd, but
lets not forget how he was ostracized for breaking through the
neoliberal orthodoxy by applying capital controls.

But given that example, maybe Greece can toughen it out financially. The
IMF loan? Negligible, thats something to work itself through the courts,
like Argentine's default, it can take years. A country is not broke
because of such a small debt. And now holiday season starts. If the
situation in Greece remains quiet, tourist cash will be flowing in.

Greece can stay in the Euro, strengthen its hand politically through a
referendum which is a vote on the current 'package' but not on leaving
the Euro, and thus keep negotiating. Above all, what they should
accomplish, is politicising the whole conflict. Thus, Greece could
become a real pain in the ass of the neoliberal crony capitalists of
Europe and the world

best
Armin


...


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Re: nettime Claire Bishop’s Game: Sub

[Armin Medosch]

Hi,

it is indeed perplexing that Bishop manages to write a pretty good book
about participation whilst leaving out any mentioning of media art or
digital art or whatever you call it. I do not concur however, that this
is the main problem. It is equally problematic, as David does, to
perpetuate this thinking in camps and then once more sullenly remark how
unfair it is that the art world keeps leaving us out. I think a bit
more self-criticism of the digital art scene is overdue.

Maybe there are other reasons rather than just ignorance why those
curators tend to think that this is a place where they don't even have
to look? A lot of digital art is simply, to paraphrase Herbert Marcuse's
term affirmative digital culture (tentative title of a piece I hope to
write in the not too far future). One needs to have pretty good overview
and knowledge of the digital art scene to know that there is also a
critical leftwing in this field. Those leftwingers are, within the
digital art scene, outsiders, don't have much of a voice or
institutions. So, established curators like Bishop can be forgiven for
not looking enough in that direction. Rather than raising accusations it
would be our task - when I say our, I mean those with an interest in
non-affirmative digital arts -- to educate those elements in the art
scene who might be open to such suggestions.

My experience also is that something has changed in recent years. There
are now younger artists, curators and scholars in the contemporary art
world who have no fear of engaging with computers and the net. It is now
quite naturally part of their environment, and they don't perform such
exclusions as insinutaed by thsoe who thimk in camps. In the
institutional art system, now the big retrospectives of postwar
modernistic avant-gardes are rolling in. Zero, Black Mountain College,
E.A.T, these are all precursors of media art. It remains to be seen how
the mainstream art world now deals with those huge topics but it is
interesting that these types of movements / places / initiatives are
becoming part of the canon. The media art world, to quote Darko Fritz,
still suffers amnesia international.
http://darkofritz.net/text/bitomatik_Fritz_eng.pdf

There exists the conference series Media Art Histories, but it suffers
from chronic depoliticization of subjects and it perpetuates this
thinking in camps which leaves media art incapable of addressing its own
shortcomings. For instance, media art has, for a very long time, defined
participation in merely technical terms, as interactive art. It still
kept doing so, holding up interactive art as a symbol of a shining
future, when actually everywhere around participaton had become a new
imperative, from top down - the latter something that Bishop points out
in Artificial Hells. This would be some really interesting sub-thread to
explore, how it came that participation changed from a demand of the
grassroots left to something imposed from the top by third-way social
democrats. Aspects of such work have been carried out, in relation to
urban development, by an initiative called The London Particular who had
links with Mute magazine. Having said that, Josephine Berry's review of
Bishop's book. the Ghosts of Participation, is something I can only
warmly recommend 
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/ghosts-participation-past

The best bit is, when Josephine accuses Bishop of lacking theoretical
spine. Maybe, Jospehine, you might want to elaborate?
best regards
Armin
 



-- 
Prof.Armin Medosch, PhD, MA
Professor of Theory and History of Art and Media, 
Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade
http://www.fmk.singidunum.ac.rs/
Research Journal
http://www.thenextlayer.org/



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Re: nettime nottime: the end of nettime

[Armin Medosch]

Hi Mod squad, you are not serious, are you? Lets get 50 together!!!

While the deficiences of nettime that you describe are real, it is still
the only place where I can reach out to a nearly global crowd of
critical thinkers, and it still has an impact which I can verfiy by the
stats of my website and by direct qualitative feedback. when I send
something to certain other lists it gets drowned out by announcements or
mindless techno-babble. and while the identity of those who frequently
post here confirms to stereotype, mostly male white and over 40, or much
older ;-) I would assume that the demographic composition of subscribers
is much more diverse than that. and mailinglists have been an
anachronism since the www, so that's no argument at all

please reconsider
best regards
Armin


On 2015-04-01 07:35, nettime mod squad wrote:

 Dear Nettimers, present and past --
 ...


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nettime the return of the network commons

[Armin Medosch]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1


Hi,

some of you have probably already noticed this via fb or rss, I am writing a
new book on, working title, The Rise of the Network Commons.

It returns to the topos of the wireless commons on which I worked during
the early 2000s. In this new version, combining original research from
my German book Freie Netze (2004) and new research conducted in the
context of the EU funded project Confine, the exciting world of wireless
community network projects such as Guifi.net and Freifunk, gets
interspersed with philosophical reflections on the relationship between
technology, art, politics and history.

In chapters yet to come, I want to treat this topic more
internationally, thus interested to learn about projects from all over
the world. Currently, I am preparing the next chapter on social
technologies starting with firmware hack of OpenWrt in 2003 aftre GPL
violation. What interest me in particular is the relationship between
development of a technology and its usage, follwoing notions such as
participatory design and social technologies ... again, grateful for any
useful hints, experiences, stories

Here is the work in progress
http://thenextlayer.org/NetworkCommons

Even if a chapter is already written, it does not mean that it has
achieved stable form. I am happy to accomodate input on all aspects of
the project. Publishing early draft texts is part of my chosen
methodology in this case

looking foreard to hearing from you
best
Armin


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nettime Fields - patterns of social, scientific, and technological transformations.

[Armin Medosch]

Dear Nettimers,

Being aware that this is not a list to send announcements to, I would
like to share a few thoughts with you, written today specifically for
this occasion.

I would like to invite you to the exhibition Fields which will open at
the Arsenals Exhibition Hall of the Latvian National Museum of Art May
15 - August 3, 2014. You can find the full announcement here:

http://www.thenextlayer.org/fieldsexhibition

Fields was from the start devised as a discoursive event. What I mean
by that is that, as an exhibition, it had set itself a task. It asked
as a research question

Which expanded fields of artistic practice offer new ideas for
overcoming the crisis of the present and developing new models of a
more sustainable and imaginative way of life.

30 years ago the second half of the sentence would simply have read
developing progressive forms of social change or something like
that. But anything that has 'progress' included has simply become
impossible. It seems that the necessary critique of false universals
of modernism now prevents us from conceptualising anything progressive
at all.

Yet the need for change is almost too obvious.

In our press release we have written:

The changing role of art in society is one where it does not just
create a new aesthetics but gets involved in patterns of social,
scientific, and technological transformations. Fields, jointly curated
by Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits and Armin Medosch, presents an inquiry
into patterns of renewal and transition.

Those patterns of renewal and transition are the challenge that we
have posed for ourselves with this exhibition.

We live in a world where technological systems have acquired
great importance. It is like society is hooked into them, like a
life-support system. But at the same time those systems have become
the problem, not the solution. If we look at energy, agriculture,
transport, systems of production, it is clear that the ideology of
limitless expansion is driving us straight into catastrophe. Everybody
knows that, but while there are many initiatives, mainstream society
seems to be blindly following its course, unable to change. In this
situation new patterns are urgently needed, new ways of thinking,
but not just that, new ways of interacting with the world, with
technology, with nature. An ecological turn is overly due, but to
achieve this seems almost utopian within current social relations.
In this situation art can provide new models, new directions, but
those are models, like in a mini-mundus world. Art gives Form to the
imagination, Herbert Marcuse wrote. And this artistic imagination we
are talking about in Fields is involved in the construction of a new
society.

Art produces projections of a different social reality, where
the forces of nature are used in new and imaginative ways and in
combination with social mechanisms which are maybe less dominated by
power from above, more driven from a power from within, from our own
desires and our own potential. Fields thus is about what Toni Negri
called potenza constituente and about an ontological inquiry. As
things currently stand those activities and propositions presented
in Fields are quite marginal. However, the big hope is that despite
all the forces that are focused on preventing any real change from
happening, the power of the multitude would aggregate all those
desires and suddenly acquire critical mass, This is one of the
characteristics of network society. We don't need to ask permission to
change the world, we don't need to look to the state or corporations
to do it for us, we can start right now, through or own critical and
constructive inquiries. And if that resonates with other people it can
go viral, and you suddenly have a new movement (or at least a trending
hash-tag).

I admit we are terrible optimists, we still think we can change the
world, or that at least we should try. So let me give you a few
examples. On one hand we have work in the exhibition that is critical
vis-a-vis the powers that be. However, even work that is coming more
from a critical direction is sometimes subverting power in a deluge
of laughter. Think of Hayley Newman's work for instance. She comes
from a tradition of performance from the fine arts. She made herself a
'self-appointed artist-in-residency in the City of London', you know,
the financial district where they run the algorithms that destroy
the planet. So she printed a name card and walked into a bank branch
and asked if she could do a bank rubbery. It is no misspelling, from
'to rub a bank', make a frottage, a technique where you put a paper
over something and then rub it with a pen or piece of graphite/chalk
so that the underlying form comes through. In that way, she has
rubbed several dozens of banks and together they become a Histoire
Economique, like a natural history of the banks in the City. That's
how we will exhibit them, in vitrines, like dried plants in the
natural history museum. The artist reminds us

nettime Fields - patterns of social, scientific, and technological transformations.

[Armin Medosch]

Dear Nettimers,

Being aware that this is not a list to send announcements to, I would like
to share a few thoughts with you, written today specifically for this
occasion.

I would like to invite you to the exhibition Fields which will open at the
Arsenals Exhibition Hall of the Latvian National Museum of Art May 15  -
August 3, 2014. You can find the full announcement here:

http://www.thenextlayer.org/fieldsexhibition

Fields was from the start devised as a discoursive event. What I mean by
that is that, as an exhibition, it had set itself a task. It asked as a
research question

Which expanded fields of artistic practice offer new ideas for overcoming
the crisis of the present and developing new models of a more sustainable
and imaginative way of life.

30 years ago the second half of the sentence would simply have read
developing progressive forms of social change or something like that. But
anything that has 'progress' included has simply become impossible. It
seems that the necessary critique of false universals of modernism now
prevents us from conceptualising anything progressive at all.

Yet the need for change is almost too obvious.

In our press release we have written:

The changing role of art in society is one where it does not just create a
new aesthetics but gets involved in patterns of social, scientific, and
technological transformations. Fields, jointly curated by Rasa Smite,
Raitis Smits and Armin Medosch, presents an inquiry into patterns of
renewal and transition.

Those patterns of renewal and transition are the challenge that we have
posed for ourselves with this exhibition.

We live in a world where technological systems have acquired great
importance. It is like society is hooked into them, like a life-support
system. But at the same time those systems have become the problem, not the
solution. If we look at energy, agriculture, transport, systems of
production, it is clear that the ideology of limitless expansion is driving
us straight into catastrophe. Everybody knows that, but while there are
many initiatives, mainstream society seems to be blindly following its
course, unable to change. In this situation new patterns are urgently
needed, new ways of thinking, but not just that, new ways of interacting
with the world, with technology, with nature. An ecological turn is overly
due, but to achieve this seems almost utopian within current social
relations. In this situation art can provide new models, new directions,
but those are models, like in a mini-mundus world. Art gives Form to the
imagination, Herbert Marcuse wrote. And this artistic imagination we are
talking about in Fields is involved in the construction of a new society.

Art produces projections of a different social reality, where the forces of
nature are used in new and imaginative ways and in combination with social
mechanisms which are maybe less dominated by power from above, more driven
from a power from within, from our own desires and our own potential.
Fields thus is about what Toni Negri called potenza constituente and about
an ontological inquiry. As things currently stand those activities and
propositions presented in Fields are quite marginal. However, the big hope
is that despite all the forces that are focused on preventing any real
change from happening, the power of the multitude would aggregate all those
desires and suddenly acquire critical mass, This is one of the
characteristics of network society. We don't need to ask permission to
change the world, we don't need to look to the state or corporations to do
it for us, we can start right now, through or own critical and constructive
inquiries. And if that resonates with other people it can go viral, and you
suddenly have a new movement (or at least a trending hash-tag).

I admit we are terrible optimists, we still think we can change the world,
or that at least we should try. So let me give you a few examples. On one
hand we have work in the exhibition that is critical vis-a-vis the powers
that be. However, even work that is coming more from a critical direction
is sometimes subverting power in a deluge of laughter. Think of Hayley
Newman's work for instance. She comes from a tradition of performance from
the fine arts. She made herself a 'self-appointed artist-in-residency in
the City of London', you know, the financial district where they run the
algorithms that destroy the planet. So she printed a name card and walked
into a bank branch and asked if she could do a bank rubbery. It is no
misspelling, from 'to rub a bank', make a frottage, a technique where you
put a paper over something and then rub it with a pen or piece of
graphite/chalk so that the underlying form comes through. In that way, she
has rubbed several dozens of banks and together they become a Histoire
Economique, like a natural history of the banks in the City. That's how we
will exhibit them, in vitrines, like dried plants in the natural history
museum. The artist reminds us

Re: nettime Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world

[Armin Medosch]

Hi MP,

it is not so difficult. There's capital, and its not homogenous. There are
capitals of a different era and of a different kind - such as industrial,
agro-business, and financial capital. There are different modes of
production and social relations that go with it. It is not about 'for' or
'against' or naive versions of 'good' and 'bad' but if we want to
understand the world we live in - and to preempt any questions, I think to
some degree this is possible - then we need to engage with such concepts
that great social scientists have developed

regards
Armin



On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 5:54 PM, mp m...@aktivix.org wrote:

 On 10/03/14 15:32, Armin Medosch wrote:
  is clearly old capital against new capital - the enemy is Google.

 so, old capital is a bad thing and new capital is a bad thing, or
 what's the moral of this?
 ...


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Re: nettime The secret financial market only robots can see

[Armin Medosch]

On 09/30/2013 01:12 PM, Felix Stalder wrote:

OK. It's the machines. You convinced me. Now, what?

Felix


silent chuckle ...

I wanted to throw in my 2pence already a while ago. Last year I had
the opportunity of investigating the matter journalistically, through
a series of interviews, and I was lucky to find a couple of insiders
who would talk.

In principle, it is important to differentiate between different forms
of algorithmic trading. There are on one hand, large investment banks
and hedge funds who hold large portfolios of different types of stocks
and equities; they also need fast computers and fast lines, but just
because they need to keep track of lots of different positions and
their relations to each other - together with news and lots of other
things happening in real time;

those are the companies who employ Quants, people with high level
mathematical and/or theoretical physics knowledge to design the
software and the 'products' traded, but the trading itself is not
really high-frequency, the final decisions are still made by humans
and there are a number of trades a day or even more, but nothing
approaching nano-second stuff.

High Frequency Trading is a special case of algo-trading and that
really is a world of its own; according to one insider, the big
investment banks and hedge funds are not really good at it at all,
because it is based on a different mentality - very much a kind of
nerd / hacker type mentality - so that mostly new companies are doing
it who follow this special mindset. the algorithms used are relatively
simple, you don't ned the brain of a quant to write one, but it has
to be very reliable; the strategies applied are aiming at very low
risk as opposed to the risky 'over the counter' deals of hedge funds;
software base is mostly Linux and open source and the entry level
for firms relatively low; my source claimed that HFT was actually a
'democratization' of speculation, because in a few years everybody
would be able to do it.

I was also surprised to learn about conditions in this industry. You 
could say that this was a kind of Fordism of financialism, where you 
have very few analysts but many coders and data base maintainers; they 
are all employed with 38 hours jobs, lots of holidays and on the job 
training and, while salaries are higher than almost everywhere else, 
they are very much lower than totally out of poportion bankers' boni.


This just confirms that there is a general tendency in society to 
mystify the workings of machines, whereby the commodity fetishism 
applied to machines just conceals the real mechanisms of social power as 
carried out by people, corporations, powerful interest groups. HFT is 
not that bete noir of banking as what it has been protrayed by some. If 
it is a good thing I dont know and have serious doubts about the 
'democratization'.


Well, yes, maybe there are 'epistemological spaces' in those nano-second 
trades that are inaccessible to humans, but so-what? There are probably 
also inaccessible epsitemological spaces in the vast amount of data 
collected by NSA and others (something that Virilio suggested in Vision 
Machines).


The point is that while we can fret about 'inhuman' thought structures 
philosophically, precious life-time and energy is NOT spent on 
uncovering or countering the doings of those less than 1 % who ruin the 
planet for all, as Brian pointed out.


there is a philosophical aspect to that discourse on umans/non-humans 
that has someting to to with Virilio, Latour and Barad which I would 
love to elaborate on more now, but unfortunately I have some other work 
to do today in order to 'earn a living' as the saying goes


best
Armin





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nettime From Total Recall to Digital Dementia - Ars Electronica 2013

[Armin Medosch]

From Total Recall to Digital Dementia - Ars Electronica 2013

by Armin Medosch (translated from the German by Simone Boria; The German 
version of this article appeared in Versorgerin #99, Aug 31st 2013 
http://versorgerin.stwst.at/artikel/aug-31-2013-1635/von-total-recall-zur-digitalen-demenz)


Year by year Ars Electronica gets larger, greater and more successful. 
One visible sign of this success are the blinking lights of the ACE at 
night, like an upgraded spaceship out of 'Close Encounter of the Third 
Kind'.


The festival now also has a venue, the former tobacco factory 'Die 
Tabakfabrik', that can cope with the rising numbers of visitors each 
year. Ars Electronica is a success story, no doubt about that. At the 
same time the Festival has developed a dynamics of its own, whereby the 
size of the program gives the impression that quantity comes before 
quality. The festival has defined as its primary objective to ignite a 
debate around art, technology and society,. But this debate often seems 
to be held in a quite one-sided way.


This year's subject matter at Ars Electronica is Total Recall- the 
Evolution of Memory. The interpretation of the topic relies -- at least 
regarding the conference -- for most parts on the natural sciences and 
primarily on neuro-science, including also a few biologists and 
geneticists as speakers. The one and only cultural science panel deals 
with prehistoric memory. Topics such as different memory cultures or the 
role and function of archives as a critical resources, that question 
(our) understanding of history and the present, are only occupying a 
niche position at Ars Electronica.


And yet Ars Electronica only continues with a long tradition, by 
uncritically incorporating a positivistic view of science whilst riding 
the waves of hype about technological innovations. The point is, that 
this criticism isn´t new either. In 1998, when Ars Electronica chose the 
topic of 'Infowar' media philosopher Frank Hartmann wrote (1):


„Interestingly enough, the word „culture“ has hardly been heard at this 
conference, which in the end is part of a cultural festival. The social 
aspects of cyberwar have been excluded. It seems to me that one wanted 
to decorate oneself with a chic topic that reflects the Zeitgeist, while 
avoiding any real risk by putting the screen of the monitor as a shield 
between oneself and the real danger zones.


These are the words of the same Frank Hartmann who will speak at the Ars 
Electronica conference as one of the few non-natural scientists this 
year. Ars Electronica manages to discuss the Evolution of Memory in an 
utterly de-politicised manner, and that only months after Edward Snowden 
exposed the existence of the NSA´s gigantic surveillance program that 
exceeds anything that we have known before. Even the film Total Recall 
with Arnold Schwarzenegger presents a more critical stance, at least 
there we have a proper uprising.


Part of Ars Electronica's tradition is the transfer of natural 
scientific terms into cultural and social fields. Timothy Druckrey 
noticed this already in 1996, when Ars Electronica happily took Richard 
Dawkin's pseudo-science of Memetics on board. Druckrey complained that 
“despite of all that aura of universality that surrounds genetic 
research, [...] reflection on cultural impact gets lost. And further:


“In the whole discussion around viruses, ecosystems and networks 
biological metaphors are omnipresent. The collapsing boundaries between 
physics and genetic science give the impression that systems-ideology 
has formed a unifying field where the so called “universal” language of 
molecular or gene technology works in the same way as software does in a 
mechanical world.  Scientific practice becomes consequently rather 
instrumental than analytical, rather interactive than observing 
(monitoring), and is far more interested in the technical production 
than in epistemology. (2)



What is so bad about that? Richard Barbrook formulated it more casually, 
during his critical deconstruction of meme-theory: in Linz, Hitler' 
favourite city and cultural capital, one should be very careful with 
biological metaphors (3). Boris Groendahl, in the same year, couldn´t 
resist to include a similar reference in his posting on the Rizhome 
mailinglist. And in 1997, when Ars Electronica dealt with the topic of 
humans as information machines, myself diagnosed that it suffered from a 
chronic illness of 'metaphoritis' (4).


The pseudo-scientific metaphors that Ars Electronica loves so much, 
usually taken from genetics and biology, and in recent times 
increasingly from neuro-science, lead to the naturalisation of social 
and cultural phenomena. Things that are historical, made by humans and 
therefore changeable, are assumed to be of biological or of other 
natural causes, thereby preventing to address the real social causes. In 
addition, such a manoeuvre legitimates the exercising of power. By 
saying

Re: nettime dark days

[Armin Medosch]

Hi, Felix,

why so negative? Of coure everything that you say in the first paragraph 
is true, but that can also be interpreted differently. Yes, it seems our 
governments are showing more and more their real faces, yes, there is a 
bourgeois authoritarianism, a term you yourself have used, and it is 
still growing. But resistance is also growing, Turkish civil society is 
not taking it anymore and here also people start to understand that they 
are getting cheated, that they are told lies, that nothing can  be 
relied on anymore, you can even shut down public television over night.


BUt the alternatives are also getting developed. I would like to point 
to a piece I have written on the occasion of the launch of Seeds 
Undergfround by Shu Lea Cheang tonight in Linz. The piece is about her 
work but raises also a theoretical question regarding an emancipatory 
media practice ...


Greening the Network Commons

In 2001, Shu Lea Cheang created Steam the green, Stream the field 
(Cheang, 2001-02), a work which anticipated a major shift in the 
discourse and practice of post-media art by 10 years. Shu Lea Cheang 
insists on calling herself a 'self-styled' artist, emphasising her 
autonomy to define her activities as art. Her projects highlight the 
potential of the coming together of social self-organisation with a 
social and trans-media art practice that combines landscapes and 
datascapes, the natural and the digital commons.


more

http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/1462

All best
Armin




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nettime mapping the FIELDS

[Armin Medosch]

 and event, beginning 
with Transmediale 2013, where the initial matrix of Fields gets jointly 
developed. This work is a step to the launch of the final exhibition 
Fields from May 15 to August 03 as part of Riga Culture Capital 2014, at 
Arsenals Exhibition Hall of National Art Museum in Riga. Fields is 
co-curated by Armin Medosch, Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits, and will get 
produced by RIXC in collaboration with a growing number of networks and 
partners.


regards
Armin


..

Art, Technology and Social Change
http://www.thenextlayer.org/




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Re: nettime The insult of the 1 percent: Art-history majors

[Armin Medosch]

Hi,

more semantic analysis 

 I know this began as an anarchist mailing  list but 
 let's be honest about power and its sources, okay?

Apart from the fact that I doubt that nettime ever was anarchist in
any clear-cut way, although it always had an anarchistic streak, I
find that phrase 'let's be honest' highly problematic and just like
'complex' it serves a certain purpose of cutting discussions short.
Should we 'be honest' and agree that there was never such a thing as
leftist politics? Even in the USA, Mr. Stahlman, there were powerful
mass movements of workers and intellectuals who faced down the elites
and forced them to make serious concessions. Even today many types
of struggles where new types of 'mass intellectuiality' are pitched
against elite rule are going on, and to my eyes, are even greatly
intensifying at this very moment. So 'let's be honest' there has
been maybe always a tendency of the elites trying to rule completely
unchallenged, yet lets work to not allow them to get there, because
actually they are quaking in their boots ;-)

venceremos

Armin





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Re: nettime What do you think about .art?

[Armin Medosch]

Hi,

I happened to meet Desiree last night and therefore think that her mail
does not explain the issue as well as she did in our conversation. 

Our old 'friend' ICANN (Ted, we miss your comments on that;-) is
releasing new generic Top Level Domains. It is posible that some
business interests would grab .art to make a lot of money from already
suffering artists. 

So Desiree was wondering if it was possible to launch a last minute bid
to mobilise people really interested in and involved in art. Maybe the
necessary application fee could be crowdsourced and maybe an art
friendly internet business could be found to manage the gTLD. 

Desiree's business model is, if I have understood that right, once the
domain starts generating profits to channel that back to artists in
need. Good idea.

Of course for some on this list this will trigger memories of namespace
etc. 

cheers
Armin
 

On Tue, 2012-03-06 at 23:59 +, Desiree Miloshevic wrote:
 Hi
 
 There is a limited opportunity to apply for dotART domain name by April 12.
 







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