nettime Interview_with_Su_Tong: Created_in_China
Interview with Su Tong: Created in China By Ned Rossiter, September 2005 In September 2005 I met with Su Tong, Executive Director of Created in China Industrial Alliance (CCIA, http://www.ccia.net.cn/), a non- governmental organization responsible for the cultural development program of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. CCIA is in no way restricted to implementing policy directives, however. As an organization relatively autonomous from the Chinese government, CCIA pursues a range of activies in cultural and media production. Along with conducting its own research, CCIA also undertakes magazine and book publishing, video production, exhibitions, and is committed to facilitating cultural production in regional China. By doing this kind of bridge-building work, CCIA is attempting to counteract the perception of cultural arrogance attributed to Beijing by those living in other cities or regions. The interview began in a style appropriate for someone like myself -- a newcomer to China, having first visited to the country around 15 years earlier as a student during a mid-semester break, and then returning in May 2005 to teach a transitional program at Tsinghua University for an MA in international media studies I coordinate at Ulster University in Northern Ireland. Following a tour of CCIA -- a large office in the sea of high-rise buildings that compose Beijing's city-scape, and with views on to the Olympic games site -- Su Tong started the interview by asking me to introduce the research projects I was involved in. This set the tone for a wide-ranging discussion on the creative industries in China and the role of networks in relation to creativity. I explained that I was just starting off on a comparative project on international creative industries, collaborating with researchers in Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, and our interest was in detailing some of the complexities and variations of creative industries in an international frame. I noted that many countries and regions such as Netherlands, Austria, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Brazil have their own policies of developing creative industries and that frequently the government policies are too restrictive and simplistic. I suggested that by studying the local variations across different countries, our research hoped to obtain an evaluation of how creative industries are operating globally. Generally speaking, there is no single creative industry; there are many creative industries in the world. I finished my introduction by asking Su Tong if he could tell me a bit about the current development of creative industries in Beijing, and to describe the role of CCIA in this development. Su Tong: Let me start with an introduction of the major projects we are involved in and our role in developing creative industries in China. In 2004 the Chinese Pacific Academy and some other organizations initiated a coordinated action in developing a creative China. We are the core member of this team. Last year, one of our major jobs was to import and introduce the concept of creative industries into China. This concept had caught our attention since 2003. We then started to promote this concept through a series of activities in 2004. Another major job we have been dedicated to was to combine the development of creative industries and 2008 Beijing Olympics. The Olympics, without a doubt, will bring a lot of opportunities to creative industries in China. We have also been working on facilitating the marriage between creative industries and Chinese traditional industries and traditional culture. We are hoping to make good use of the new global industrial resources of the creative industries to advance the development of the local creative industries. As far as we know, the concept of the creative industries has been very influential. We are quite surprised by how fast the term has been welcomed by the public. Last year when we started to promote the concept, it was still a very new term to the public as well as to the government. But there has been an immense and very prompt response from all channels over a one-year period. Through this experience we have realized how vigorous a concept the creative industries is, and as a result, we are even more determined to conduct further research in the field of creative industries. There are three aspects to our role in the development of Chinese Creative Industries. Firstly, we have defined our research as the study of the changes brought about by Creative Industries in the transformation of societal structures as well as in the socio- economic systems. We are hoping to carry out some further in-depth examinations of how Creative Industries have influenced the society, the social structure, and the economy in China. Secondly, we are also interested in philosophical and theoretical studies relevant to Creative Industries. In both western and eastern cultures there have been very rich and
Re: nettime Mona Cholet/ le Monde Diplolmatique: France's precarious graduate
On her anonymous blog, Séverine, a 28-year-old Parisian graduate, posted this: I'm from the intellectual underclass. One of those who fry their brains, read megabytes of books, magazines, web pages, political pamphlets and petitions, and never get anything out of it. I'm like an engine guzzling fuel just to stay in overdrive, burning up mental energy for nothing (1). Séverine's working life has bounced between internships, welfare benefits, temping and unemployment. Thanks for posting this, Patrice. I know quite a few of these people. The situation ie often heart-breaking, for individuals and the cohort as a whole. But I have trouble placing it in a framework of comparative social history. What is new and what old about it? It may be that what is new is rising militancy (compare the New York graduate student union) and a higher incidence of acute despair. At least people are speaking out now and the new media give them a means for expressing oneself without censorship. The universities everywhere are facing a crisis of function and funding, but especially in the state-regulated higher education systems of Europe. Excess supply in the job market is probably higher than ever before. And I am well aware that I came into the job market at a time (1970) when conditions were much more favourable than now. But. But... Universities have long specialised in exploiting precarity, none more than my alma mater, Cambridge. It is a scandal that permanet jobs are being replaced with casual employment at low piece-rates and senior academics take leave to write their books in order for replacement teachers to do their job for a pittance. But this system was pioneered by universities like Cambridge long before I turned up there. The powers always knew that they have a pool of excess teaching and research fodder who would rather stay in school that get out into the world and probably feel that anywhere else than where they are would be a personal loss. So they keep them all stringing along for an irregular supply of peanuts. At the extreme, those who stay in have opted for self-exploitation. I spent the last two years of my PhD without any overt source of income. I even got married in this period. I recall eating spaghetti with red wine in a small rented flat. It wasn't a bad life. We got by. I felt a lot poorer later when I was a lecturer with a mortgage, car and the rest of it. I took on bits of teaching and research assistance, calculating that if I wrote my thesis instead of doing the work, my professors wouldn't have th ecourtage to call my out for it, since they knew it was exploitation. I got away with it. Now I probably wouldn't. It was a more benign time for sure, but the system was already in place. It is not new. Or take the way of life of countless American students who spend ten years completing a PhD (an average figure in some subjects). A bit of TA-ing, wait at table in a diner for a few hours, smoke some pot with friends, write a page of the thesis, cruise the mailing lists. The life is so seductive, it is not surprising they prefer to remain an ABD than join the army of unemployed PhDs. The main difference between this and Severine's plight is that she thinks she's frying her brains and gets nothing from it all. And she has a public for this. I don't know what to make of it politically or of this whole precarity movement. The old Stalinists and ATTAC-ers of mondediplo obviously think there is some mileage in it. At the very least, if the crisis of late academia (my label for universities past their sell-by date) is to be addressed, we need to be able to place the predicament of young people daye within a framework of realsitic comparison. But then I joined stayed in school for the rest of my life in order to avoid having to get a real job. Keith # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime Deleuze's Ontology as Expressed in the Global Indymedia Network
Hey all. I just submitted this paper to EGS. I thought you might enjoy/appreciate it. I'd love to have some feedback. Thanks. lotu5 // Deleuze's Ontology as Expressed in the Global Indymedia Network By: Michael Cardenas Introduction: Delanda, Deleuze and Indymedia In Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Manuel Delanda tries to explain Gilles Deleuze's ontology in straightforward language for an audience of scientists and analytical philosophers of science (Delanda, 7). He tries to untangle the language of Deleuze, a writer who allowed for much play in his language, jumping between various concepts and frequently renaming those concepts. Still, in his writing, Gilles Deleuze developed a rich ontological framework with which one can view the universe. This ontology is based on a rigorous mathematical approach which Delanda explains in great depth. In this paper I will explain a few components of Deleuze's worldview, as explained by Delanda, using the example of Indymedia, the global Independent Media Center movement. The global Indymedia site, describes Indymedia as a network of collectively run media outlets for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of the truth. (Independent Media Center, About Indymedia) Within the network itself, each collective organizes itself autonomously, without a top-down leadership, while still acting within a framework created by the Global Indymedia Points of Unity. Throughout the paper I will refer to various texts written by different local collectives. My intention is not to create a complete, thorough representation of the network, which is global and very diverse, but to use a few samples which relate strongly to ideas expressed in Deleuze's ontology. While I realize that Deleuze's ontology serves perfectly well to explain far more simple entities, such as a chair, it is my hope that this analysis will reveal some interesting dynamics because of the affinity between Delanda's motivations and those of the Indymedia network. Delanda states that one of the conclusions of his book is that the very idea that there can be a set of true sentences which give us the facts once and for all, an idea of a closed and finished world, gives way to an open world full of divergent processes... the kind of world that would not sit still long enough for us to take a snapshot of it and present it as the final truth. The Indymedia Network works to challenge the claim to objectivity, or truth, of corporate media outlets by providing a space where people can tell their own stories and comment on other's stories, in an ongoing process, in order to help create social change. The processes that create this space will be further illuminated throughout this paper. Multiplicities not Things Delanda explains Deleuze's how realist ontology replaces the concept of essences with dynamical processes and the multiplicity. (Delanda, 5) Where many realist traditions are based on the transcendental concept of essence, describing for example the ideological category of a chair, Deleuze replaces that simplistic idea with the multiplicity, a nested set of vector fields related to each other by symmetry-breaking bifurcations, together with the distributions of attractors which define each of its embedded levels. Delanda goes on to describe the relation of this concept to group theory and its difference from categories, which define individuals in a population a aberrations from the abstract instead of processes, which are defined by the set of individuals they describe. The global Indymedia network can be seen as a result of a number of social, technological and economic processes itself: ubiquitous cheap internet access, a tradition of media activism including newspaper propagandists and pirate radio dj's, corporate globalization. At the same time, the Indymedia network is embodied by a number of processes. Indymedia defines itself as a non-hierarchical network, not as a federation, coalition or collective. Networks are defined by communication among a disparate set of nodes. As a network, Indymedia can itself be seen as a population of collectives, or as a multiplicity described by the characteristics of the collectives in the network. The Global Indymedia Points of Unity, agreed to by all collectives in the network, state: The Independent Media Center Network (IMCN) is based upon principles of equality, decentralization and local autonomy. The IMCN is not derived from a centralized bureaucratic process, but from the self-organization of autonomous collectives that recognize the importance in developing a union of networks. (Independent Media Center, Global Indymedia Principles of Unity) As such, there is a wide degree of play across a number of variables such as number of participants, focus on various mediums, degree of cooperation with local communities, degree of transparency of process, openness to differing political viewpoints,
nettime dictionary of war
Dear nettimers, may I take the liberty to invite you with a rather lengthy and detailled posting to join a project we are currently setting up in the tradition of a series of events that started with the makeworld festival in 2001 http://www.makeworlds.org/1/index.html went on with NEURO--networking europe in 2004 http://neuro.kein.org and also included last years Fadaiat*/Borderlineacademy. During the latter event in the old castle of the city of Tarifa in the very south of Spain, at the Straits of Gibraltar, while meeting with about two hundred artists, activists, theorists in a dedicated open space environment it happened that we were realizing that although we might sort of share some basic beliefs, convictions or attitudes there is a certain lack of understanding since specific keywords or buzzwords were conceived in tremendously different ways and notions. Not that I would consider this a bug or a problem one should fix and get rid of, but sitting together and thinking about what is to be done next we thought that there might appear an enormous potential for the creation of further and possibly very productive understandings and/or misunderstandings: Spontaneously we organized an almost six hour long session in which various different people entered the stage and presented in alphabetical order one term or terminology that seemed crucial to them. It partly failed entirely and partly worked terrificly well. But in the following weeks and months we tried to develop this rather off-handed performance idea further on and decided to look for funding. In two weeks from now, on June 2 and 3, 2006, the first edition of DICTIONARY OF WAR will take place as a collaborative platform for creating concepts on the issue of war. At four public, two-day events over the next few months in Frankfurt, Munich, Graz and Berlin altogether 100 concepts will be invented, arranged and presented by scientists, artists, theorists and activists. The aim of DICTIONARY OF WAR is to make the creation or revaluation of concepts transparent into more or less open processes in which we can and need to intervene; at the same time, the aim is to develop models that redefine the creation of concepts on the basis not of interdisciplinary but rather undisciplined, not co-operative but rather collaborative processes. Such platform is explicitely not meant as a sort of specialized wikipedia with a focus on war. We are looking for concurrent versions, divergencies, critical debate and discussions rather than identifying a common understanding and imposing so called definitions. There are no limits except a certain time frame for the actual performances; every contributor or concept person is free to choose whatever medium, format or genre in order to present the concept. The DICTIONARY OF WAR is an experimental project and entirely under construction. It will be generated at least on three levels: First of all it will be produced concept by concept in alphabetical order during four performance sessions at different places: an art school, a concert hall, a theatre and a museum. Every contribution is going to be properly video recorded and then made available near on real time on the website where it can get further elaborated, enriched with additional material and discussed. After the first four sessions a book will be published that collects 100 concepts. Participation on this project is not limited to those who can actually make it to one of the four events we are planning so far. You are invited to register at the platform and use this customized multi-user weblog system (based on the excellent code of drupal4.7) in order to participate, contribute a concept, compile your own versions, pick up the RSS-feeds, remix them etc. http://dictionaryofwar.org In times of war this mailinglist has repeatedly turned out as a very particular and valuable communication channel: I remember the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, but also of course the subsequent debates after 9-11 or before and during the latest Iraq war. The new war, post-modern war, global war -- almost every major military operation over the last years has evoked a new debate about the new character of war and this discussion has not been restricted to a few specialists but heavily affected political activists as well as cultural producers. Lastest after 2001 state of war has turned into a normality. Five years of global war have turned the world upside down, in a way that the extent of the ongoing changes cannot be fully conceived yet. DICTIONARY OF WAR is about polemics in various respects: It seeks confrontation with a reality that is characterised by the concealment of power relations the more that one talks about war and peace. But it is also about finding out to what extent war may function as an analyzer of power relations that constitutes current changes. Changes that have been producing ever new wordings and all sorts of labels that indicate that
nettime HandsOfftheInternet, says ATT
Maybe it's time that they be taken to task for what is clearly a misleading advertising campaign? Sure. But then, I have yet to see an advertising campaign that wasn't misleading, Soenke http://www.saschameinrath.com/node/403 [UPDATE 1] HandsOfftheInternet.com -- More Sock-Puppetry from the Telecom Ministry of Propaganda. HandsofftheInternet.com is yet another prime example of astroturf in action. I can only suspect that telecom incumbents pay some sort of professional PR group to create websites like this specifically to misinform and mislead the public. So I decided to start an investigation to figure out who HandsOff actually was. Here's what I've found: Looking at the footer on HandsOff, but that didn't provide any information on who was actually running the site. The about us section just said things like Hands Off The Internet is a nationwide coalition of Internet users. Which begs the question, Who are the members of this 'national coalition of Internet users? This lead me to take a look at the Membership Organizations section -- and low and behold, membership organizations included: ATT Bell South Cingular Communications The National Association of Manufacturer and a host of industry front groups Now, this is rather enlightening, and I probably could have stopped there. But what happens if you delve deeper? A quick whois registrar search of HandsOfftheInternet.com shows that the domain was registered back in 2002 (by someone who, I suspect, is in no way affiliated with its current manifestation); however, it was updated in April 2006 and the name service set to 1and1.com. Strangely enough, so is DontRegulate.org -- which houses an incredibly misleading cartoon that leads back to HandsOff. What's interesting about the whois query is not what it shows, but rather, what it doesn't show. There's no real information on who's actually running either HandsOff or DontRegulate. In fact, one only gets information like, Registrant Name:Oneandone Private Registration (for DontRegulate) and the old registration info for HandsOff. Which is extremely strange... it almost makes one think that whoever is running both groups has something to hide. Which left me wondering, well, what about the Chairmen for HandsOff? Given that all other information has been carefully hidden from public view, who is this Mike McCurry and what does he do for a living. As it turns out, Mike McCurry works for Public Strategies Washington... What, I hear you ask, is Public Strategies Washington? Here it is, direct from their website: PSW is: A full-service government relations and lobbying firm, PSW provides the kind of special insights into the workings of Washington that are essential in developing and executing a successful lobbying strategy. Now wait a second, whatever happened to the national coalition of Internet users? Maybe there's more grassroots action through the Grassroots Enterprises, which McCurry is also on the Board of Directors of? So what does Grassroots do? According to their website: Grassroots Enterprise works for a wide range of corporations, trade associations, nonprofit organizations, and industry coalitions to help them recruit, educate, and mobilize potential supporters...most of our clients take advantage of our extensive experience in building web-based communications and advocacy programs, as well as our expertise in message development, grassroots and grasstops organizing, and political strategy...Our proprietary software platform, Grassroots Multiplier=AE has all the key features needed to wage effective online campaigns...Much of our client work and clients are confidential. So here's the big questions: Who is funding HandsOfftheInternet.com? If there's not a smoking gun here, why are the linkages to funders being obfuscated, the whois entries hidden, and the affiliations so damning? Who gave the funding for the series of huge ads run in such publications as The Washington Post, Roll Call, and The Hill? I still didn't have a direct link to who was behind HandsOff... And yet, someone must have slipped up somewhere -- just a thread that might begin to unravel things. Which lead me to HandsOff.org -- the URL listed in the big ads run in various DC papers. A whois of HandsOff.org just happened to have an administrator named Tom Stock lists -- that and the following information: Admin Organization:TSE Enterprises, L.L.C Fascinating -- who was TSE Enterprises? From their website: TSE Enterprises, LLC has been engineering web sites and portals, interactive multimedia, and electronic multimedia (EDM) campaigns for public relations, public affairs, and political groups nationwide. Maybe it's time that HandsOff came clean about who's funding this grassroots effort? Maybe it's time that they be taken to task for what is clearly a misleading advertising campaign? [UPDATE 1] May 17: Chris Wolf, co-chairman of HandsOff, has now admitted
