Re: nettime history lesson
Hi Keith, thanks for the post. Basically the Bush regime had the option of defending the dollar or monetizing the debt. The former would require interest rate hikes which would certainly kill off the housing bubble that is the thread holding up both the US and UK economies and precipitate a crash with immediate and visible domestic consequences. So they opted for playing Texas hold 'em against the rest of the capitalist world, using the world unit of account for chips. Since March the Fed has stopped publishing M3 data, the measure of how many dollars are in circulation, but from the end of 2005 it was clear that they were printing dollars as if there were no tomorrow and continue to do so. The bet is that their creditors will protect their dollar holdings rather than offload them. But, even if they do, the results will be disastrous for everyone. The euro will go through the roof making European goods too dear to sell. Japan will sink into the ocean and China will dissolve into civil war. An important story flew under the media radar just around the slow christmas period, overshadowed in the U.S. newspapers by the deaths of James Brown, Gerald Ford, and Saddam Hussein. Like the non-reporting of the M3 data blackout, the episode in question fits into the continuing tale of waning American economic power, and the inability of the political elites to do much about it. In mid-December a very high profile American delegation led by Treasury Sec Henry Paulson and Fed Chair Ben Bernanke--when was the last time anyone can remember a fed chairman personally leading a foreign diplomatic effort?--went to Beijing, intent on forcing the Chinese into currency flexibility agreements. Chinese Vice-Premier Wu Yi welcomed the delegation and at the end pronounced the meeting an excellent exercise in building trust and understanding. In the actual negotiating sessions, according to a number of accounts I've read, she lectured the visitors like a schoolteacher conducting a remedial history class--and the kind of nationalist history that most raises the hackles of the ahistorical Americans. At the closing ceremonies she conspicuously made no comment on the currency dispute. Whoopee for the Americans. http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2006/12/paulson-bernanke-st rike-o ut.html The delegation returned to a home government grateful for the distraction of Jerry Ford's timely passing, even if he had harsh words for Bush from beyond the grave. Better that than dealing with a media focus spotlight on America's inability to persuade and/or twist arms in Beijing, yet again. Japan is basically stuck with their deal, beholden as they are to the US for its defense. Even more so given the perceived belligerence of N Korea and the slow but steady rise of Chinese military power. China may hold a little less in dollars, but compared to Japan may have more flexibility in selling off their dollars because of 1) their military independence and 2) their willingness to repress their own people. A third and maybe less important factor is the considerable investment coming into China in euros. Point #2 is the wild card. Even though there is a growing Chinese middle class--people who feel a new nationalist pride and who tend to support their government even if they are not party members--there is a greater number of rural poor, about ten million a year of whom move to the cities and have to be absorbed by the urban economies. This absorbtion, right now, is partly made possible by the Chinese currency control formula. The ten million surplus workers a year figure might go on for another twenty years or more. No wonder the Chinese leadership is taking its sweet time making adjustments. The latent threat posed by this enormous tide of internal migration will figure into any decision the Chinese gov makes if and when it feels the need to put the economic hurt on America. In The Great Transformation, Polanyi points out that the others never realised the Nazis were aiming to destroy the existing international system as their strategy for winning the whole pot in the end. Since they themselves had so much at stake in the status quo, it never occurred to them that Hitler was prepared to break up the zhole show. How much more difficult is it for others to imagine why the US government would be prepared to smash a world political economy of which it is the acknowledged leader. But they are, because they know, left to its own devices, power in the world economy is inexorably slipping away. Whenever I get the 'rise of China' rant going a friend of mine who has a talent for the cynical view likes to remind me that the imperial powers of the west, especially England and then America, never have had qualms about changing the rules in the middle of the game, and doing so with guns, bombs, and indignant self-righteousness. Making the game of currency and trade *into* one of guns, bombs, and the rest. That's another way to
Re: nettime Iraq: The Way Forward
Hello nettime, Yes, and a couple of days after this thread started I was stunned to read on my Sunday morning Chicago Tribune the headline Tribune Special Report: How Do We Stop the Carnage? At last! The proper question in the proper terminology, in a big American daily paper! Then my eyes saw the small type in the middle, a sort of Special Report sub-head, which read TEENS AT THE WHEEL. So it wasn't about war at all, just the ever-present tragedy of teenagers getting into fatal traffic accidents. Oh, well. That's the thing, though. While Felix's communitarian critique would suggest that structurally or architecturally-reinforced passivity, a kind of apathetic alienation that rules the country (and in some places it certainly might), I think that is too easy an answer to the question of why Americans are not more concerned with and involved in, say, the anti-war movement. The case is made for a more complex view by the widespread existence of citizens' causes all over the social landscape, as exemplified by the Tribune's report on teen driving. The series was conducted over a whole year and profiles many parents, siblings, and friends of teens killed in car accidents who have taken the experiences and turned them into causes. Some of these people are seriously dedicated to...what? Educating their fellow citizens by speaking out publicly, pressuring or persuading lawmakers to introduce legislation, constantly improving their own knowledge base, partnering with others who have an interest in change--all of these things and more. Basically, these people become politically and intellectually active and put all their (often newly-discovered) powers as participatory citizens to work for their cause, and for the inevitable tribe which forms around a cause. In the Tribune article there was a big picture of a mother-turned-activist, a sort of minor Cindy Sheehan of the anti-speeding contingent of the emerging Safe Teen Driving movement. This newspaper series exposed only one species of citizen-activist. There are scores, maybe even hundreds of types, inhabiting all roles from the expected (ngo intern in DC for the summer) to the boutique (breed-specific dog rescue volunteer) to the surprisingly extant (members of a 'women's board' of a big museum). And it is not simply the variety and distribution of these causes and tribes that impresses me--what's really amazing is the passion and commitment exuded by these people. In America today there is no shortage of warriors for a cause (in regular joe clothing). And no shortage of causes. This is part of the problem. Many points of social life which were once either located in the terrain of apolitical service organizations or only marginally acknowledged if at all, somewhere along the line became the subject of advocacy and even struggle. No doubt about it, in America today the personal is political. Heavy emphasis on the personal, lite on the political. That means there are practically as many causes as there are people. In the meantime, when it comes to the traditional great concerns of an idealized public sphere--matters of war, social policy, and public funds--in America the deliberative mechanisms have become so corrupted by the professionalization of both lobbyists and legislators, the remoteness of the representation, and the taint of electorial fraud, that there is perceived to be no meaningful role for the public anymore in those debates. But the American people will not be denied a carnage around which to organize, even if the big one is out of reach. We will all find our own, and move full steam ahead, even though that means being unable to advocate for the best solution at hand, if that solution has anything to do with The Main Carnage. So, of the many recommendations offered by the Tribune, in its own manufactured 'teachable moment' (as created by wrapping up the epic series with a 'Special Section' of the paper), none of them argue for reducing the overrall amount of traffic on the roads, much less a car-free future. How the earnestness of the politically-innocuous cause can be harnessed to the cause of Ending the Main Carnage, to pull on the same rope, as it were, is the challenge. Boy, once these parents of dead car-wrecked teens, some of whom work with amazing passion to keep other parents from having to go through the same thing, become convinced that a car-free nation is the only way to achieve their goal...that's when we could say the movement (which movement--at that point, does it matter?) has grown. Maybe not in a 'teachable moment' kind of way, during which a greater awareness or re-consideration of one's worldview happens, but in the more human way of assimiliating causes into one's own matrix of demands. Dan W. On 10/01/07, Felix Stalder [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Now, we are in a situation where nobody has any good idea what to do. [...] There are no community rituals, no community centers, often there are no sidewalks. People
nettime text for Under Fire
Below is a short text I wrote to accompany the latest iteration (in the form of an exhibition) of the Under Fire project. According to the project website, 'UNDER FIRE is an ongoing art and research project that explores militarization and political violence. It delves into the structural, symbolic, and affective dimensions of armed conflicts: the organization, representation, and materialization of war.' In the text below, I'm basically providing an answer to the questions 'what might be the usefulness of this project?' and, very simply, 'why are we doing it?' --Dan S. Wang _There is a War Going On._ By the 1980s, the deindustrialized cores of the cities dotting my native American Midwest were so often described as 'bombed out' and resembling a 'war zone' that one had to wonder: why does it seem that everyone but the nation's fathers tells us these are zones of hot conflict? For if there exist momentary and recognizable likenesses between parts of Belfast and parts of Gary, parts of Mogadishu and parts of Detroit, then perhaps the aesthetic commonalities indicate substantive, material underpinnings. I find it reasonable to view these landscapes as the product of the same general phenomenon, war. Once we do, we see that a theater of ongoing armed conflict persists on American soil, in which the citizenry wages a chaotic but low-level war on parts of itself. At the same time it is both mitigated and worsened by a vast and well-funded security apparatus. The American citizenry is armed and waging war at home, neither in an overly organized fashion, nor with much thought given to strategic goals. The incoherence of this unnamed conflict is more evident than ever in the society's overseas wars -- wars that, because of their vast deployments of state-mobilized arms and diplomatic powers, may unleash exponentially greater degrees of turmoil. Anybody with a good sense of how violence permeates American life inside its borders sees the irrationality and mayhem of the American-led War in Iraq without much surprise. _Choose Sides._ Around the world, armed conflicts create an astounding range of horrific effects. Bodies without limbs, mass murder, acute and general environmental devastation, imposed economies of starvation and disease-these are only some of the modern horrors of war. The horrors are also affective and immaterial, and no less consequential. Depression, despair, and post-traumatic disorders are commonly produced by the loss and violence of war. A class of extreme affects, including an ever-proliferating variety of rage and hatreds, thirst for blood and revenge, are not only produced in conditions of armed conflict, but are used as standard weapons by those who learn to channel them. The obvious analysis says that because the entire affective realm is one mediated by symbols, images, and language, which transmits as part knowledge (ideology) and part feeling (aesthetics), artists and cultural workers occupy a special place in the geography of affective conflicts. Whether this is true or not, it must be recognized that a matrix of first world privileges ensures that the temptation to rank the affective realm as the primary terrain of conflict, or to divorce affects from the material world with which they are wholly intertwined, remains strong among cultural workers in the developed world. This is a tendency that must be resisted. _Battle the Feelings_ Considering the material/immaterial terrain of conflict and the ubiquitous but irregular reach of war, we can see that the continuum of conflict intensity, going from entirely unarmed to wholly militarized, maps an uneven distribution of violence rather than a scale of morality. Therefore the question of violence is neither the only, nor the most important, moral problem. We also know that conflicts do not exist as binaries; 'you are either with us, or against us' is the language of fascist states. Armed conflicts always involve more than two mutual antagonists, struggles exist within struggles, factions and stakeholder groups overlap. But every contested situation, no matter how complicated, presents a question to those who consider themselves invested in its outcome: for what and with whom do you stand? Such are the saturation levels of bloodshed that this question of allegiance -- to whom and/or to what, and with what degree of loyalty? -- rather than of violence (is it justified, etc.), is the main moral challenge facing potential partisans. Because each conflict presents its challenge of allegiance differently and according to unique circumstances, potential partisans (i.e., all of us) may find the new geographies of armed conflict and war illuminating. When we map the intersections of war zone affects and military hardware, wartime ideology and security state architecture, consumer surveillance and contractor profiteering, or any other conjoined sets of wartime social practices, we may better calibrate interests and commit to allegiances
nettime May Day report
[This mail, orginally dated May 3, got stuck in a mail queue here @ nettime. Sorry for the delay. Felix] May Day, 2006 Chicago, USA Dear nettime, Today I went to the big immigrants' rights march/rally. I had enough to say about the day even before I received word, just after having returned home from the event, of an untimely loss for the Chicago art/activist world. Michael Piazza passed suddenly over the weekend. Michael was an artist and a local presence for many years, with a memory of radical Chicago that went back to the Seventies. I cannot speak about May Day in Chicago in 2006 without mentioning the concurrent passing of this colleague beloved by so many because Michael himself played an important role in keeping the observance of May Day vital in the city of its politicized birth, including having coordinated a number of projects that took place on the site of the Haymarket incident. I could say a lot more about Michael and the way he lived his life, but I'll keep it short here and simply offer the observation that much of what happens in this city in the area of cultural activism--the way our networks operate, the way people so generously support and collaborate with each other, the way productive exchanges between allies are made possible--bears the imprint of Michael's innovations and values. I think with time we will realize that Michael's work, in its own way, left as long a shadow in this city as did that of the late Carlos Cortez. Check out this interview with Michael on the colorful struggle over Haymarket memory, authored by Nicolas Lampert. http://www.areachicago.com/issue2/haymarket.htm To the immigrants' rights rally, then. It was huge. The New York Times quoted the Chicago police count at 400k while organizers claimed more than 600k. I tramped around the perimeter of the concluding rally site, stopping in different places to get a feel for the local view, observe neighboring clusters of demonstrators, catch fragments of sound and speech floating by. The composite impression I took from the experience was one of hope, but in regard to a very particular problem--what Badiou in _Ethics_ calls 'the problem of the same.' As opposed to the problem of difference. Because here difference was not only on display but joyfully announced, with creative signs, t-shirts, and yes flags doing the work of declaring origins. And yet the aggregate message was one of unity, of the common, of the shared--of 'the same.' When difference is not only tolerated but celebrated--ie the presence of more and greater difference literally applauded by the cheering throng (Organizer: And today the Ghanian community stands with us! Mexican throng: Yay!!!)--how can it be anything else but making visible the depth of the common interest, the common cause, the common struggle. A significant feature of this event (along with the first big one that took place here back in March) was the notable presence of Polish, Croatian, Irish, and Ukrainian immigrants, who together probably made up about 15 percent of the crowd. Unlike the actions in LA, this visible minority of white Euro-immigrants turns the local debate constructively away from racist undertones. The small but tightly organized block of young Irish immigrants, especially, echoes the immigrant history associated with the current city father (Daley junior). You don't want to be too crass about it, but in Chicago it never pays to err on the side of subtlety, either, so it must be said: this undeniably multi-racial character of the local movement has arguably dulled the easiest of the reactionary counterattacks. Seeing peoples normally (around these parts) thought of as 'white' not only joining a Mexican-led movement, but happy to do so, and furthermore, pleased and comfortable to be playing the role of minority...that, I'm guessing, is a complication of the default white supremacist narrative which immediately gums up the psychology of xenophobia. Chicago being the North American center for Polish, Croatian, and Ukrainian immigration, and one of the centers for the Irish arrivals, perhaps stands to render the local movement worthy of continued consideration nationally as the xenophobic reaction inevitably counters in the coming days. That all said, there were two groups underrepresented in bodies and yet still represented. The Black American and the Chinese shared this peculiar status. Neither were very visible as countable bodies, although the black folks seemed to be out in numbers greater than the media reports would have you believe. Nevertheless, considering this city is more than 30 percent black, the numbers seemed pretty small. I have no figures on the numbers of undocumented Chinese in Chicago, but I do know that a friend who was looking for a caregiver for an elderly Chinese woman got more than thirty calls in response to an ad that ran for one week in the lowest circulation local Chinese paper, and all of the applicants were middle-aged women
nettime may day report
May Day, 2006 Chicago, USA Dear nettime, Today I went to the big immigrants' rights march/rally. I had enough to say about the day even before I received word, just after having returned home from the event, of an untimely loss for the Chicago art/activist world. Michael Piazza passed suddenly over the weekend. Michael was an artist and a local presence for many years, with a memory of radical Chicago that went back to the Seventies. I cannot speak about May Day in Chicago in 2006 without mentioning the concurrent passing of this colleague beloved by so many because Michael himself played an important role in keeping the observance of May Day vital in the city of its politicized birth, including having coordinated a number of projects that took place on the site of the Haymarket incident. I could say a lot more about Michael and the way he lived his life, but I'll keep it short here and simply offer the observation that much of what happens in this city in the area of cultural activism--the way our networks operate, the way people so generously support and collaborate with each other, the way productive exchanges between allies are made possible--bears the imprint of Michael's innovations and values. I think with time we will realize that Michael's work, in its own way, left as long a shadow in this city as did that of the late Carlos Cortez. Check out this interview with Michael on the colorful struggle over Haymarket memory, authored by Nicolas Lampert. http://www.areachicago.com/issue2/haymarket.htm To the immigrants' rights rally, then. It was huge. The New York Times quoted the Chicago police count at 400k while organizers claimed more than 600k. I tramped around the perimeter of the concluding rally site, stopping in different places to get a feel for the local view, observe neighboring clusters of demonstrators, catch fragments of sound and speech floating by. The composite impression I took from the experience was one of hope, but in regard to a very particular problem--what Badiou in _Ethics_ calls 'the problem of the same.' As opposed to the problem of difference. Because here difference was not only on display but joyfully announced, with creative signs, t-shirts, and yes flags doing the work of declaring origins. And yet the aggregate message was one of unity, of the common, of the shared--of 'the same.' When difference is not only tolerated but celebrated--ie the presence of more and greater difference literally applauded by the cheering throng (Organizer: And today the Ghanian community stands with us! Mexican throng: Yay!!!)--how can it be anything else but making visible the depth of the common interest, the common cause, the common struggle. A significant feature of this event (along with the first big one that took place here back in March) was the notable presence of Polish, Croatian, Irish, and Ukrainian immigrants, who together probably made up about 15 percent of the crowd. Unlike the actions in LA, this visible minority of white Euro-immigrants turns the local debate constructively away from racist undertones. The small but tightly organized block of young Irish immigrants, especially, echoes the immigrant history associated with the current city father (Daley junior). You don't want to be too crass about it, but in Chicago it never pays to err on the side of subtlety, either, so it must be said: this undeniably multi-racial character of the local movement has arguably dulled the easiest of the reactionary counterattacks. Seeing peoples normally (around these parts) thought of as 'white' not only joining a Mexican-led movement, but happy to do so, and furthermore, pleased and comfortable to be playing the role of minority...that, I'm guessing, is a complication of the default white supremacist narrative which immediately gums up the psychology of xenophobia. Chicago being the North American center for Polish, Croatian, and Ukrainian immigration, and one of the centers for the Irish arrivals, perhaps stands to render the local movement worthy of continued consideration nationally as the xenophobic reaction inevitably counters in the coming days. That all said, there were two groups underrepresented in bodies and yet still represented. The Black American and the Chinese shared this peculiar status. Neither were very visible as countable bodies, although the black folks seemed to be out in numbers greater than the media reports would have you believe. Nevertheless, considering this city is more than 30 percent black, the numbers seemed pretty small. I have no figures on the numbers of undocumented Chinese in Chicago, but I do know that a friend who was looking for a caregiver for an elderly Chinese woman got more than thirty calls in response to an ad that ran for one week in the lowest circulation local Chinese paper, and all of the applicants were middle-aged women without work permits. So they are certainly around, but with the exception of handfuls, they weren't a
nettime More new orleans
I think Ronda's telling is a pretty fair account of the low-priority assigned to the outstanding flood control issues faced by New Orleans for decades. The other aspect of this whole disaster that needs to be mentioned, especially for an international audience, is the city culture of New Orleans, and to some degree the culture of the entire bayou region. But especially New Orleans. I've never been to New Orleans. That I would want to say anything about the city and what it means to me only serves to illustrate the power and reach of that city's culture and history. New Orleans is America's only afro-caribbean-franco-latin city. I think of the city as a capital of a deep-rooted American counterculture found almost nowhere else, and certainly nowhere else in such city-wide breadth and historical density. The crucible effect of such countercultural concentration and longevity has given America and the world, most obviously, a vital, living, legacy of music almost without equal. New Orleans stands alongside Jamaica and Cuba as small places disproportionately influencing global music listening, playing, and dancing. New Orleans, as a music-producing city, has been influencing the world's ears almost since the inception of recorded music. There are any number of iconic present-day musicians traveling with the million or so homeless. I read that Fats Domino was rescued from off his third floor and his entire family lost everything. So did Irma Thomas. Alex Chilton is at some unknown temporary shelter. Peter Holsapple's home was reportedly flooded in nearly 7 meters of water. These are just some of the famous people who come to mind quickly. The hundreds and probably thousands of unknown New Orleans musicians, who play outside for dancing audiences, who fiddle with mixers in their cramped homes, and who sing to the born, the unborn, and the dead, all as a way of life--what about those people? No doubt we see a few of them setting up their cots in the Astrodome and elsewhere. It is not just that New Orleans was a hip, music-filled city. It is that the culture of the city--that same culture that produces the music for which the city is famous--goes against the grain of mainstream America. In completely simplistic terms, the culture suggests that it is possible to choose participation over spectatorship, creativity over consumerism, collaboration over competition, and multi-ethnic/multi-lingual life over homogeneiety and exclusion. Values-wise, the culture's priorities translate into practices of hospitality and tolerance. I should say, I am not imagining New Orleans as having been some kind of heaven on earth. The fact that many people in New Orleans have never prioritized the almightly dollar contributed to poverty levels, which of course breed their own social problems. And then, as long as there is some true presence of tolerance, there is also some abnormal measure of sleaze. It is true of Amsterdam, it is true of San Francisco, and from what I've read and been told, it has always been true of New Orleans. But both of these negatives only reinforce my basic point about the city's culture running on a different track than that of pious, work-obsessed square america. As New Orleans people who have been made homeless fan out to other cities by the tens of thousands, I wonder where the culture shock will be felt most intensely. Mormon Utah? Lutheran Minnesota? The places where the refugees are housed en masse on disused isolated properties, or where they are being housed with volunteers who have opened their own homes in scattered fashion? I also wonder about the human-scaled relationships that will develop as white religious midwestern folk, for example, take in homeless families from New Orleans. No guarantees, but I think there is the chance that the walls that separate people in this country will be broken in some places. I should say, that is what I hope. They could just as well be strengthened. (The opening up of people's homes to strangers is quite an inspiring thing to see happen. On the other hand, the unregulated, unscreened web-based connectors such as craig's list seem also to be attracting some small time profiteers and sleazebags...yesterday I saw an entry posted seeking a Katrina survivor who needs a home, and is a young asian female who likes to cook, and wants to start a new life helping to run a small lodge with a single white guy in Colorado. What is fascinating is that the opening of private homes makes visible the social fault lines in this country on a rarely seen scale--people offering shelter can specify the types to whom they are open. Gay only, single mothers only, christian only, student only, etc, listed all alongside each other in a spirit of helping and generosity. We help who we want to help...this is the new brand of public service in neocon america.) The fate and effect of this diaspora-within-a diaspora is one thing. (Even the great flood of 1927 displaced only an
Re: nettime Just do it! - Intellectual theft as a curatorial
I have seen neither the show nor the catalogue, so I of course I cannot offer an evaluation of those. But it seemed to me that Inke Arns's comments were more about courtesy (and the lack thereof) than a diatribe against rip-offs. John Young's response veer more closely toward the platitudinous than Inke Arns's diatribe. For example, the following, which was posted as its own paragraph: No artist deserves anything except what they can beg, borrow and steal. Sure, but that doesn't seem to address Inke Arns's main point. The issue at hand, as described in the original post, is the fact that the curators--who as members of a profession supposedly in the business of giving credit--didn't share the wealth of attention, not as convention or justice dictates, but rather as simple courtesy. Rip offs happen, but you can do it nicely by passing on the rewards of that which you freely used, or you can be a dink about it. If one decides that the latter is the case, then a little reputation-bashing (very different than belly-aching) may be in order. That is part of the game, too, you know--ie the way things are. To me, the more substantive question is what evidence of intention exists. As described, the catalogue's failings might not even be attributable to the curators, but rather to a book designer who, for example, took liberties by separating texts from author's names. Also, as grounds for criticism, the fact that the book is being commercially distributed means little. When was the last time an exhibition catalogue made money? To sum it up, while I can agree that there are problems with Inke Arns's post, and that publicly calling out a curatorial team and the host institution in fact may be premature in this case, none of that has anything to do with complaints about appropriation being a standard practice. Part of the reason I took an interest in the original post is because it turns out that I will be in Linz at the museum next week, and perhaps will see the catalogue. Maybe I'll change my mind Dan w. # 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
Re: nettime fundigested [rosler, jaeger]
Thirdly, I don't see this 'digital boom' that others have mentioned, nor do I see the jobs that it is preparing us for (Maya Texutre modeling? .ASP/XML/CSS/Perl Programmer? I suppose these are out there but most rely on skills taught at trade schools, DeVRY, or self-taught..) I think Trebor Scholz has written about this. In fact, it seems that budget cuts are happening across the board. If the computing/arts department at UCSD can get additional funding that provides more research opportunities for graduate students, then me and my friends/fellow graduate students will be happy campers. ;) You don't see the digital boom because it is over. You missed its growth stage. It has reached a plateau--just about every art department in North America in the last eight or nine years has managed to stock itself with at least some instructors in new media/digital media, whether that's in a graphic design area, printmaking area, photo area, or in an area simply called new media. Sometimes in all these areas, often starting from zero. The hiring has leveled off. I remember the academic jobs listings in around '96 and '97 suddenly being flooded with ads describing openings for people with electronic/digital/new media skills, all over the country. Only a couple years before, there weren't that many, and then, along with the internet bubble and all the rest, the departments all went mad for digital. I think a lot of them probably didn't feel like they had a choice. Maybe this was the beginning of 'market realities' encroaching on the art department in such a pronounced, immediately effective way. Demanding that faculty (and especially the new media newcomers) come up with self-funding or worse surplus revenue generating schemes seems the logical next step. What interested me at the time (and I guess still does) is that just about every academic job listing included (and still does) the 'EOE' 'WMA' and 'AA' abbreviations at the end of the listing, meaning of course that the department was/is supposedly an Equal Opportunity Employer, that Women and Minorities are encouraged to Apply, and that it adheres to Affirmative Action guidelines in hiring. Compared to the way scores of art departments within several years managed to fill multiple digital media positions, including with a lot of practitioners who were learning skills as they went, making up curriculum, and in many cases possessing a questionable expertise...and yet could not do the same when it came to finding half-qualified women and (especially) minority facultyFor me, that was the real drag, although I must thank the boom for revealing starkly the priorities in play, and the near non-existent market pull of the Affirmative Action partisans. Dan w. # 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
Re: nettime Introducing Daria: An autonomous software artist
Hi Brian, It's a good question why Daria is a she? The short answer is that it follows a long line of precedence of men naming and referring to their machines as female. To a certain extent, this female-biased gender association is less apparent in computers (particularly large networks), in which computers are named for cities, stars, mountains, or people. It is possible though, that the moment we anthropomorphize the computer, we associate a gender, but I don'thave data one way or the other to back up such a claim. Software on the computer is a different story. For an autonomous software system that by design is to be anthropomorphized, it seemed prudent to impart a gender to the system. Hence, I chose to follow the precedence I was familiar with. With regards to the work she creates, the female form has often been used and interpreted within works of art, far more often than the male body. It makes sense to maintain this convention, considering the point/concept of the work (creating and releasing Daria) is to explore the possibilities of autonomous systems interacting with humans and integrating into their society, as opposed to the gender bias of her work. I'm not suggesting that it isn't a valid question, because it is. However, I think that the first issue needs to be raised (can autonomous systems integrate into human society? can we consider autonomous software agents as artists?) prior to questioning the validity of their work. If not, then we have already accepted the software as being a valid artist without going through the process of debate. I'm not sure I agree with the way you've prioritized the questions. Consider: if not enough people donate money and the project fails to support itself and so gets evicted by its webhost, was that because an autonomous system couldn't be integrated into human society, as you say, or was it because Daria's product sucked and nobody liked Daria's art enough to care that it be around? If the question that concerns you primarily is can autonomous systems integrate into human society? can we consider autonomous software agents as artists? then I wonder why you bother anthropomorphizing at all. Once you deliberately anthropomorphize, integration is no longer the intent; you're now trying to assimilate, and that is a different thing. Assimilation is a losing proposition because it invariably heightens difference while attempting to suppress the same. If Daria is supposed to be comparable somehow to human artists, at least more so than other things that are just tools, then all the ways in which Daria is like or unlike artists beg for scrutiny. Among them, the patterns in image choice exercised by Daria, which in her/its case are sexist in an utterly banal way. I'm not saying that the anthropomorphosis kills the project, only that without it I might have been less disappointed by Daria's product. Because once you tell me Daria is an artist, I can only wonder, good artist or bad artist, an artist who makes work that excites, entertains, and edifies, or an artist whose work wastes the time of the viewer? Really, even if we allow that Daria can be an artist, how good an artist can Daria be? If I find the answer to be the negative, then it's a Pyrrhic victory for the assimilationists, no? Where I veer from convention is by creating a solid delineation between Daria and me. Other artists create machines that create art and the question has been raised whether it is the machine or the creator that creates the art? The resounding answer has been that it is ultimately the creator of the machine that creates the art. But what if that isn't the case? I think it raises a number of important questions about identity, ownership, and society that will become increasingly more important as fields such as artificial intelligence and biotechnology continue to advance. I agree that these are important questions. What I suggest is that by so casually relying on those cultural/social conventions as you do at the formative level of Daria's personality, you've conceded the questioning of *those* conventions in ways that may subtly undermine the asking of the others. Dan w. Regards, Brian Quoting Dan S. Wang [EMAIL PROTECTED]: What makes Daria a she? Does it have something to do with all the collaged naked female breasts in her art works? Could we say that her governing algorithm is gendered? dsw # 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
Re: nettime Introducing Daria: An autonomous software artist
What makes Daria a she? Does it have something to do with all the collaged naked female breasts in her art works? Could we say that her governing algorithm is gendered? dsw This may be of interest to those involved with new media, generative art, autonomous systems, and/or matrix-style paranoia. Daria is an autonomous software artist that creates art for users in real-time on her site. As an autonomous entity, she is responsible for her own bills (hosting, hardware, etc.) and employs me to make enhancements to her. You can donate to her via the paypal links on the site. Also on the site is information on how she was created and future plans for Daria. http://daria.muxspace.com/ Comments and criticism welcome to me or her. Brian # 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
Re: nettime influences
I am interested in how people on this list have their activism influenced by intellectuals such as Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri and Slavoj Zizek? I read Empire in a rush about a year ago in preparation for a paper I was writing. I found myself not wanting it to end. I can't really say it changed my approach to activism. Rather, the ideas and analysis contained in that book mostly reinforced my existing outlook on activism: ie that concerning oneself with a number of different issues (but often times addressing them through the medium of a very specific and particular campaign), being comfortable with a variety of tactics, and taking both long and short term perspectives into account, is not a bad thing at all. That's the way most activists I know work anyway, at least the ones who don't burn out. Some of them seem to fight the tendency, so I've been recommending the book to activists because it articulates so well the strengths of multi-centric democratic movements. People influenced by contemporary anarchism, especially it seems, find this book affirming. Not that there is a lot of prescriptive theory; sometimes it just feels good to be told in an intellectually authoritative language that we are much more powerful and effective than we think. You could say I'm a believer. I think the book actually lived up to the hype. BUT...I also promised myself that the next time Hardt and Negri were mentioned on this list I would voice this little joint that's been bugging me... On p 207 in the Counter-empire intermezzo where they're talking about the International Workers of the World as a model of a continually moving, immanent political force, they drop this labor history factoid about the IWW's Wobblies nickname: 'The two accepted stories of the derivation of the name Wobbly illustrate these two central characteristics of the movement, its organizational mobility and its ethnic-linguistic hybridity: first, Wobbly is supposed to refer to the lack of a center, the flexible and unpredictable pilgrimage of IWW militancy; and second, the name is said to derive from the mispronunciation of a Chinese cook in Seattle, I Wobbly Wobbly.' What??? A Chinese cook in Seattle doing some chinglish massacre on IWW gave the union members their nickname? Web investigation turns up this IWW site, which runs through the stories and has the good sense to admit the possibility of stereotyped speech patterns. The L sound is singled out as the problem, as unpronounceable by the Chinese guy. While it might be true that the Fukienese or Cantonese chinglish is weak on the L's, I must point out that wobbly also has an L in it. So? http://www.iww.org/culture/myths/wobbly.shtml The Chinese cook theory may make for a good story, but I also think Hardt and Negri could have elaborated a bit on how bits of contaminated speech are often the entry point of an actor marginal in relation to powerful protagonists. And that this entry does not always present itself contestationally. Maybe the authors felt that the tensions and pitfalls of hybrid language are communicated in the quoted passage, but still, being a Chinese restaurant brat myself, I'd love for it to be spelled out. Now all that by itself wouldn't be worth mentioning, except later I encountered another peculiar and slightly more annoying offhand remark, this time about posse. When on p 408, as they're getting into the Renaissance notion of the posse as the social formation most suited to the kind of resistance they hope for, they must mention but then completely dismiss the African-American hiphop appropriation of the concept and formation: 'Contemporary US rap groups have rediscovered the term posse as a noun to mark the force that musically and literarily defines the group, the singular difference of the postmodern multitude. Of course, the proximate reference for the rappers is probably the posse comitatus of Wild West lore, the rough group of armed men who were constantly prepared to be authorized by the sheriff to hunt down outlaws. This American fantasy of vigilantes and outlaws, however, does not interest us very much. It is more interesting to trace back a deeper, hidden etymology of the term' Again...what??? Of course, the key word in the dis above is probably, as in, Hardt and Negri probably don't what they are talking about here. I've never heard rappers talk about posses in Wild West terms. Not even the wild west-ers Crucial Conflict! My theory is that the hiphop appropriation of posse grows pretty naturally out of the crew/squad formations that gather around group music creation, and that in the ultra competitive world of the emerging rap artist, a measure of group self-valorization is a pretty handy thing. Given the long history of African-American creativity in social formation (beginning with highly plastic and incredibly resilient family structures that survived and adapted under the near-holocaust conditions of slavery) in response to sociopolitical
Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops
I always thought of sweatshops as a creation of the American South. Maybe that's because I grew up in the seventies with the film Norma Rae being my first introduction to the world of textile mills. But according to Encyclopaedia Britannica, the term is derived from the verb to sweat, used as a descriptive management technique in the factories of 1850s England. Sweating the workers became common in the US, the entry goes on to say, in the 1880s with the arrival of large numbers of eastern and southern European immigrants. Talking about Manhatten garment shops, probably. So I think you're right, John. The term doesn't seem to have any particular geographical or national identity embedded within it. Rather, it seems that it is a term that becomes applicable whenever and wherever the conditions of industrialization and the power of employers together make the super exploitation of laborers possible. I think I even remember some sound byte from a radio show or some media piece somewhere asking the question of whether China is now the world's sweatshop. Which right away implies, even in popular usage, that sweatshops are not new, and haven't always been Asian or even Third World. Dan w. Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2004 17:11:51 -0700 From: John [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops A sweatshop is a factory, usually in a developing or Third World country and especially in Asia, where people work for a very small wage, producing products such as clothes, toys, shoes, and other consumer goods. ... # 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
