Some youtube activism links. I received this today from the P2P Foundation email list & thought I'd pass it on...
marc Regina Jose Galindo (Guatemala City, Guatemala) "Huellas" (1:02) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D46p71QdCTc from BOMB Magazine: "A slight young woman in a black dress walks barefoot through the streets of Guatemala City, carrying a white basin filled with human blood. She sets the basin down, steps into it and then out, leaving a trail of bloody footprints from the Constitutional Court building to the old National Palace. The corrupt Constitutional Court had recently allowed the former military dictator, General Ríos Montt, to run for president despite the Constitution’s barring of past presidents who gained power by military coup. A Guatemalan who didn’t know that it was a performance titled Who can erase the traces?—or even who had never heard of performance art—would have had no trouble understanding the symbolism: the ghostly footprints representing the hundreds of thousands of civilians murdered, overwhelmingly by the Army, during the long years of war and after; the persistence of memory in the face of official policies of enforced forgetting and impunity. I’ve read (and have contributed) plenty of words, a surfeit of words, about violence and injustice in Guatemala. That trail of bloody footprints was the most powerful statement I’d encountered in ages." Bilin Activists (Bilin Village, Palestine/Occupied Territories) "Protest Reenacting the Movie Avatar" (3:25) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KStnbXWfnuk from bilin-village.org: Bil’in is a Palestinian village that is struggling to exist. It is fighting to safeguard its land, its olive trees, its resources… its liberty. By annexing close to 60% of Bil’in land for Israeli settlements and the construction of Israel’s separation wall, the state of Israel is strangling the village. Every day it destroys a bit more, creating an open air prison for Bil’in’s inhabitants. The occupation of Palestine by the Israeli armed forces was condemned by United Nations’ Resolution 242, and by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The village of Bil’in reenacted James Cameron’s new film Avatar during today’s weekly demonstration. Five Palestinian, Israeli and international activists were painted blue, with pointy ears and tales, resembling the Avatar characters. Like Palestinians, the Avatars fight imperialism, although the colonizers have different origins. The Avatars’ presence in Bil’in today symbolizes the united resistance to imperialism of all kinds. Erroristas (Buenos Aires, Argentina) "Palestino - Estada de Israel" (4:50) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1nYWjXrGWM Press Statement from the Erroristas Collective "This action, carried out by the people and collectives supporting errorism, will take place in Buenos Aires, errorist city and only urban zone in the world where Palestine and Israel intersect on a map. The street signs themselves and the intersection of these two streets, will be used as geographic reference points so that Argentina and other societies of the world will pay more attention to the terrible current situation in Gaza and the urgent necessity for a cease fire and peaceful solution to this historic conflict." Zapatistas (Chiapas, Mexico) "Zapatista Airforce" (0:28) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BliFqcIgdqs&playnext=1&list=PL2711FC916DA54802&index=1 From Wikipedia: Tactical Media entry "In 2000, Mexico's Zapatista Army of National Liberation social movement decided to launch a "tactical air force." The Zapatistas air force consisted of hundreds of paper airplanes. After throwing the planes over the fence of a federal barrack, confused troops were quick to point their rifles at the paper intruders, creating an image that conveyed a very strong message of peace versus war—the target ultimately being the government." I would add that the key to this action's success (along with all of those undertaken by the Zapatistas) is to clearly emphasize the huge imbalance of power between the Mexican government (backed by the US) and an army of largely unarmed indigenous peasants. Paper airplanes made by children succeed in communicating this important point (an earlier strategy was for Zapatista soldiers to march "armed" with wooden toy guns rather than real ones, which they didn't have and could never afford). Fran Ilich (webmaster for Zapatistas) "Interview with Fran Ilich" (7:31) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhbOSmSI9is From a LatinArt.com interview: "LatinArt: In your talk in San Cristobal you referred to the internet as a neo-liberal space and as a reflection of urban gentrification. Could you elaborate on that? Fran Ilich: It’s a superior stage of neo-liberal urban development. By definition, the public space is eradicated, its non-existent online. Of course there were investments in fiberoptics and other technologies but later these were privatized by corporations. The only kind of space where people meet are servers. But most of these servers are owned by private companies. All communication comes through satellites or telephone companies, domain names are controlled by private registries, etc. There used to be a public space called usenet. It was a series of servers that mirrored what was on other usenet servers. Unfortunately, it was really expensive to keep up with this amount of information. If you could compare it to other forms of public space you could compare it to ham radio. In the city we go to shopping malls. The internet is kind of the same thing. There is no actual public sphere...everything is privately owned." Institute for Applied Autonomy (Los Angeles, United States) "Bridging the Gap" (7:46) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9RiS5OEBsQ The other very significant project that IAA did (in partnership with experimental geographer Trevor Paglen) was called Terminal Air, which is an app that allows you to follow the flight path of any plane from one airport to another. This project was done as part of an investigation into the Extraordinary Rendition kidnap program, which utilized unmarked corporate airplanes rather than showy military crafts in order to kidnap terror suspects and take them to other countries to be tortured. By using plain, unmarked aircrafts, one of the US government's most clandestine programs was effectively "hidden in plain sight," as they say. http://www.appliedautonomy.com/terminalair/index.html _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
