nettime Venice Biennial Africa Pavilion: Electric Africa and the digital
silent, it reminds us again and again and again, that we live its presence in every part of our life every day. The mix is an art project that accompanies my installation at the Venice Biennial Africa Pavilion. Enjoy!! Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid, NY/Luanda 2006-2007 Electric Africa: Ghost World - A Story in Sound Dj Spooky Presents a Project for the Dokolo Foundation at the Venice Biennial 2007 In Africa, When an old man dies, it is like a library burning to the ground a quote attributed to Leopold Senghor Mega Mix! Por Por Akwaaba Welcome! Car Horn Orchestra of Ghana Intro: Lafayette Afro Rock Band Darkest Light mixed w/Max Roach and Abdullah Ibrahim Streams of Consciousness (NY and South Africa) Intro collage African Anarchist Radio Malcolm X The Roots of Savagery mixed w/ Max Roach/Abdullah Ibrahim Streams of Consciousness (NY/South Africa) Tony Allen Crazy Afro Beat w/scratches by Rob Swift Vs Dj Spooky (NY and Nigeria) X Plastaz Msimu kwa msimu (Tanzania) Alif Douta Mbaye(Senegal) K'naan Soobax (Somalia) Kelis Trick Me (dancehall mix) (USA) Fela Kalakuta Show (Mix Master Mike, Lateef and The Gift of Gab Remix) (Nigeria) Lotfi Doubla Kanon Bled Miki (Tunisia) MC Solaar featuring Ron Carter Un Ange En Danger (France/Senegal) Akon Locked Up mixed w/ Nelson Mandela Moments in Black History (Brad Sanders) (NY/Senegal/South Africa) Angola National Anthem - Angola, avante! Author: Manuel Rui Alves Monteiro (b.1941); Composer: Rui Alberto Vieira Dias Mingao Mixed w/Malcolm X The Root of Civilization Dj Spooky featuring Tapper Zukie Revolution Dub (NY/Jamaica) Yves La Rock featuring Roland Richards Zookey (France) Stewart Copeland The Rhythmatist: Samburu Sunset (Kenya) Frederic Galliano featuring Pancha Angola Frederic Galliano featuring Pinta Tirru Entra No Roda (Angola/France) Bunny Lee Meets King Tubby African Roots and Reggae - (Jamaica) Cesoria Evora - Angola (original + Carl Craig remix) -Dj Spooky remix (Cape Verde Islands/Detroit/NY) David Byrne and Brian Eno My Life in The Bush of Ghosts: Vocal Outtakes (New York/London) Fela Zombie (Nigeria) (remix) King Britt Obafunke Theme (Philadelphia) mixed w/ Interlude Idi Amin speaks (Uganda) Orson Welles Citizen Kane (L.A.) President Obasanjo Move by J Dilla (Detroit) Ryuichi Sakamoto Riot in Lagos mixed w/ Nigerian National Anthem (Japan/Nigeria) Baka Forest People of South East Cameroon - Water Drums (Cameroon) mixed w/ Foday Musa Suso World Wide Funk (DJ Spooky remix) (Gambia) Master Musicians of Jajouka featuring Talvin Singh You Can Find the Feeling mixed w/ Abdul Nasser Independence Forever (Morocco/Egypt/India) Duke Ellington Afro-Eurasian Eclipse (NY) Oum Kalthoum Hob Eih (Egypt) - Dj Spooky remix Mixed w/Tectonic Heat Sensor Charlie Dark Afro Dreaming(UK-Ghana) The Monks of Keur Moussa Nous Te Louons, Pere Invisible (Senegal) Ginger Baker/Tony Allen (UK/Nigeria) - drum solo mixed w/ Drexciya Polymono Plexusgel (Detroit) Zimbabwe Legit Shadows Legit Mix Dj Shadow remix (Zimbabwe/San Francisco) Soweto Gospel Choir Rivers of Babylon (South Africa) Konono No1 Kule Kule (Congo) Abdullah Ibrahim Mindif (Dj Spooky remix) (South Africa/NY) # 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]
nettime Baudrillard - in memoriam, for The Nouvel Observateur
this is a memoriam for Baudrillard that Sylvere Lottringer organized for Fr= ance's Nouvel Observateur. It'll be out next week. I just thought I'd pass = it to the list. Greetings from Istanbul! in peace, Paul aka Dj Spooky Istanbul Baudrillard: A Remembrance of Things Unpassed By Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid I first met Jean Baudrillard at a conference Sylvere Lottringer of Semiotex= t(e) organized in Las Vegas several years ago. The idea of the conference = was about chance processes. Needless to say, with the Whiskey Casino as the= backdrop for the conference, and randomness as the main motif of the situa= tion, the soundtrack of the constant churning of slot machine wheels and pu= lleys, and the continuous movement of the attendees between speeches and ga= mbling, it all seemed totally appropriate. Baudrillard gave his speech dres= sed in a gold suit in simulation of Elvis, and I ran my speech through vari= ous software processes to turn it into the sound of water. When I look bac= k at the moment, it seems crystal clear that we were at the edge of an aest= hetic and philosophical ocean turn in how people put ideas together in the = era of hyper media. Since that time, simple things like wireless networks, = the ubiquity of the Ipod, global media events like 9/11 or the SARS virus, = have all brought home how prescient his thought was. The world knows Baudri= llard as the philosopher who gave us a cautionary tale about simulation, an= d if the events of today =E2=80=93 the war in Iraq, the economics of global= ization, Katrina=E2=80=99s destruction of New Orleans =E2=80=93 have told u= s that in no uncertain terms, we live in a world with a more and more tenuo= us grasp of the =E2=80=9Creality=E2=80=9D underpinning the myths of the pre= sent day. In a world where bleak man made landscapes and the psychological = effects of technological, social and environmental developments cannot be d= enied, his words were a beacon of how we can reason through the myriad ways= that we humans have displaced the natural world. For me as a just graduati= ng student in the early mid 90=E2=80=99s, Baudrillard seemed like a figure = who cut through the haze of post-everything American cultural malaise. I st= udied French literature at a time when it seemed that America was enthralle= d by the end of the Cold War =E2=80=93 my studies were populated with peopl= e like Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Althusse= r, Lacan, bounded by Badiou. Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray, Wittig=E2=80=A6 Th= e list goes on but you get the point: these figures are part of a pantheon = where, perhaps, one of the common themes is a simple cry for new ways to pe= rceive how the mass media-landscape inadvertently invades and splinters the= private mind of the individual.=20 What Baudrillard did for me was make the world safe for doubt: doubt about = the intentions of governments, corporations, ideologies, and yes, people. L= ike J.G. Ballard or Bruce Sterling, his work hovered between descriptions o= f the world in present tense and the strange and uncanny networks that hold= together =E2=80=9Cthe real.=E2=80=9D For him, like the 'simulacrum' follow= ing DeBord's 'spectacle' where 'revolution' became synonymous with natural = skin care and something everyone did against the name of 'freedom.' I don't= mean to say anything here, I wonder about the doubting that once swayed th= e world, Today, I wrote this piece traveling on a flight between Tokyo and Istanbul,= and as I sit here and use a wireless network in the coffee lounge of the H= otel Buyuk Londra, I re-read him as doubting everything =E2=80=93 it=E2=80= =99s as if Baudrillard says never model a thought about anything unless yo= u can say it to yourself. The thought lingers, and links to a meta critiqu= e: it posits modern thought as withdrawn, proffered as kind of a peripheral= speech. At the birth of the 21st century, at the birth of the new New Worl= d, of suicide bombers, insane Presidents, multi-media equipped private armi= es and fundamentalist militas, his words bear reviewing: Baudrillard =E2=80= =93 a voice that says the seductions of reality are what we now hold dear.W= e speak the world. Reform, remix, re-engineer the consent of the Western w= orld. We need this analysis more than ever. Vietnam is now long gone. Mute,= May 68 almost forty years ago and most of us young people have never thoug= ht of burning monks, Chariman Mao, Stalin, or the origins of half of todays= problems. I think back to an almost innocent moment in the mid 1990=E2=80= =99s when Baudrillard with a gold suit, made people remember that the chanc= e processes of the world are what give us joy. With a simple flourish, I th= ink that he set the tone for many young artists, writers, and musicians, to= remember a simple thing: that another world is possible. Tokyo/Istanbul 3/15/07 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission
nettime Bruce Sterling Column in Wired ends
So I'm at the Hotel Tropico in downtown Luanda, Angola for the Luanda Triennial, about to take a flight to Paris, and I look down at the hotel lobby coffee table and see Wired Magazine's current issue. Wired Magazine in Africa! Wired is one of the few magazines I still bother to read, and I always looked forward to seeing what Bruce Sterling and Lawrence Lessig were up to. They were some of the few voices that seemed to have a more omnivorous appetite for global culture and digital media, than your average theory type, or pompous critic. I'm one of the few black people Wired Magazine ever did a feature on (there are about 4 of us! and yes, we all know one another), and after inviting Bruce Sterling to join the Afro-Futurism list serv that I helped start way back in the ancient late 90's, I realized that Bruce is one of the few digital media people who gets it. I.e. doesn't have really dumb ideas about people of color that seem to burden so much of the discourse around contemporary art and politics. So it was with sadness that I read his column saying that he's wrapping things up at Wired. Bruce - yo! keep up the good work, and best wishes for 2007. We need voices like yours more than ever! in peace, Paul aka Dj Spooky # 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 The 13 Scariest People in America
A reasonable look at some of the more colorful characters in rightwing America. My favorite is Arizona's Joe Arpaio - who should probably be voted a #1 reality TV show on youtube for Prison Love 'cause he's, like, really into putting webcams in prisoners cells... Paul http://www.alternet.org/story/43586/ The Thirteen Worst People in America: Scariest Cop: Joe Arpaio / Sheriff, Maricopa County, AZ by Charles M. Young A huge swath of Arizona that includes Phoenix, Tempe and Scottsdale, Maricopa County attracts journalists and politicians from around the world, all hoping to learn penal reform theory from Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who opens his gates to everyone except reporters known to be critical. He brags on the department website that he has nothing to hide and nothing to fear, and except for the occasional prisoner who gets beaten to death (R.I.P. Scott Norberg), he probably doesn't have anything to hide or to fear. Most of the press considers him a colorful character who dresses his inmates in pink underwear, feeds them $.45 meals and houses them in tents where the temperature can exceed 140 degrees and the inmates have to breath the stench from a nearby dump and animal crematorium. A true pioneer of women's liberation, he has instituted chain gangs for women as well as men. Both sexes must listen to patriotic songs, and recordings of Arpaio reading self-help books throughout the day. Although he forbids raunchy magazines (as well as coffee, cigarettes, Kool-Aid and hot meals), his recent jailcam experiment, live Web broadcasts of inmate life including toilet sessions, was a huge hit, and was quickly linked to by porn sites around the world. When inmates sued for invasion of privacy, Arpaio had to shut it down, but it was a rare setback for America's Toughest Sheriff, as he likes to bill himself. Under a novel interpretation of the state's smuggling law, his most recent stunt is arresting illegal immigrants and giving them the pink-underwear-and-patriotic-song treatment. Having been elected four times by America's scariest voters, Arpaio can (and does) intimidate anyone who objects to his Guantanamo of the Sonora. Why waste cruel and unusual punishment on mere Islamofascists when we've got all these criminals on the border and a shredded Bill of Rights? Welcome to the future of law enforcement. Scariest Presidential Candidate: Sam Brownback / Senator (R-Kansas) by Mary Reinholz Once a moderate in the Bob Dole mold, Sen. Sam Brownback has morphed into a zealous man of God intent on protecting millions of fetuses from what he calls the yearly holocaust of abortion. Brownback actually considers fetuses to be full-blown American citizens. Just another religious nut stalking the corridors of power? Well, yes, but this ambitious pol is the favored 2008 presidential candidate of the radical right. Brownback seems hell-bent on establishing not just faith-based initiatives, but faith in politics -- i.e., an authoritarian Christian theocracy. The man speaks softly but pushes the Passion of the Christ in the culture wars, blasting gay marriage, porn, stem cell re-search and, most recently, assisted suicide. One of Brown-back's glorious moments came when he proposed introducing a bill in the Senate that would compel pregnant women considering abortions to provide anesthetics for their fetuses. But no matter how over the top his political posturing, no one seems to be laughing at Brownback's bid to succeed Bush -- certainly not the influential Bible-thumpers supporting him like Pat Robertson and Chuck Colson. Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania) sponsored Brownback's conversion to Roman Catholicism in 2002, and he was later baptized in a chapel run by the secretive lay society Opus Dei. On the economic front, the pious Senator perceived no moral quandary in accepting $42,000 from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Along the way, Brownback apparently has had access to the deep pockets of his wife, the former Mary Stauffer, whose family used to own a media conglomerate. Brownback's 1995 bout with potentially fatal cancer intensified his right-to-life ardor, but his religious beliefs didn't stop him from living, until recently, in a $600-a-month apartment in a $1.1 million Capitol Hill townhouse owned by members of Congress and subsidized by a secretive religious organization, known variously as The Fellowship and The Foundation and registered with the IRS as a church. Brownback is a regular member of one of the group's prayer cells. Perhaps he prays for the Supreme Court to display the Ten Commandments since the courts, believes Brownback, have overstretched separation of church and state to mean removal of church from state. Scariest Judge: Edith Hollan Jones / Chief Justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit by Paul Drexel Imagine you're a woman working at a company where male colleagues send you X-rated notes, hit on you, and repeatedly grab your breasts -- even once pinch your
nettime Torture, Torture, Torture!!!
This is a cross post of an mini essay by Naeem Mohaiemen. read on! Paul State Of Exception, After The Torture Vote - Naeem Mohaiemen About culture's re-engagement with the war on something, Martin Amis recently said: As Norman Mailer said when 9/11 happened, the temptation to charge in should be resisted because what happens with writing is that you receive the stimuli and they go down into your subconscious, and what settles settles, and what doesn't doesn't. You find, after a couple of years, that you've got something to write about. It's part of your silent anxiety about what Don DeLillo calls the world hum. The world hum right now is last week's stunning vote to authorize new powers to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions on torture. Aziz Huq of NYU Brennan Center (and Visible Collective) calls it a bill that strikes harder at American liberties and at the fundamentals of American government than any since the authorization of the Japanese internment. Even the NYT was moved to apoplexy: [The new law] allows the president to identify enemies, imprison them indefinitely and interrogate them - albeit with a ban on the harshest treatment - beyond the reach of the full court reviews traditionally afforded criminal defendants and ordinary prisoners. Taken as a whole, the law will give the president more power over terrorism suspects than he had before the Supreme Court decision this summer in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that undercut more than four years of White House policy. We are now in that space that Francois Saint Bonnet called the space of imbalance between public law and political fact. Looking at the proposal for a suspension of the French constitution, Giorgio Agamben traces two models - one where wartime powers spread into civilian space, the other wherein individual liberties are suspended from the constitution. The merging of these two trajectories produces the state of exception. The argument that a sitting President of the United States has the power, unique among all signatories to the Geneva Conventions, to reinterpret what constitutes torture, is a full-force realization of a state of exception. It can also take on the contours of notstand (state of necessity), state of siege, or emergency powers. But not yet that trigger-term: martial law (that's for Thailand, so the yammering classes can breathe a sigh of relief). How will the citizens of this nation respond? Voting for Democrats at midterms is one very micro (but tangible) baby step. But more systematic, wide-ranging meditations on the changing nature of the soul of continental United States are needed. Protest action is mounting after last week's vote. Some of it is incandescent with purpose. Organized groups are doing a lot more than just writing. Artists, activists, lawyers, clergy, labor, academics, and many other levels of society are mobilizing for this week's nationwide protests to Drive Out The Bush Regime. Two key events: October 2: Mobilizing Meetings October 5: National Protests [details below] Is this wishful thinking, visual resistance, building capacity, symbolic theater, or all of the above? Only way to find out is to attend the meetings and rallies, starting with tonight. In a word: participate No time for armchair analysts. References October 5: Drive Out Bush Regime http://www.worldcantwait.net Aziz Huq on Military Commissions Act of 2006 http://writ.corporate.findlaw.com/commentary/20060926_huq.html Aziz Huq on Terror 2016 http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/09/28/terror_2016.php Ariel Dorfman on Torture http://tinyurl.com/lnfza Torture Not An American Value http://tinyurl.com/zy7j2 This Is What Waterboarding Looks Like http://www.davidcorn.com/archives/2006/09/this_is_what_wa.php How Would A Patriot Act? http://tinyurl.com/m9hm9 Comfortably Numb http://tinyurl.com/zkv9y Banned On Airplanes: Craig Murray's New Book http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1867840,00.html # 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 Exquite Corpse - Totems Without Taboos
This is an essay I've written as the foreward to an anthology on the classic gameThe Exquisite Corpse: Collaboration, Creativity, and the World's Most Popular Parlor Game edited by Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Davis Schneiderman, and Tom Denlinger, to be published by University of Nebraska Press (2007). This collection is the first set of original essays to provide a broad retrospective on the legacy of the Corpse project-and we are defining this legacy fairly loosely, with representation from historical, literary, collaborative, moments (etc.). The vibe is open and the text, I guess, is too. enjoy! Paul aka Dj Spooky Totems without Taboos: The Exquisite Corpse By Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid Database aesthetics, collaborative filtering, musical riddles, and beat sequence philosophy aren't exactly things that come to mind when you think of the concept of the exquiste corpse. But if there's one thing at I want to you to think about when you read this anthology, its that collage based art - whether its sound, film, multimedia, or computer code, has become the basic frame of reference for most of the info generation. We live in a world of relentlessly expanding networks - cellular, wireless, fiber optic routed, you name it - but the basic fact is that the world is becoming more interconnected than ever before, and it's going to get deeper, weirder, and a lot more interesting than it currently is as I write this essay in NYC at the beginning of the 21st century. Think of the situation as being like this: in an increasingly fractured and borderless world, we have fewer and fewer fixed systems to actually measure our experiences. This begs the question: how did we compare experiences before the internet? How did people simply say this is the way I see it? The basic response, for me, is that they didn't - there was no one way of seeing anything, and if there's something the 20th century taught us, is that we have to give up the idea of mono-focused media, and enjoy the mesmerizing flow of fragments we call the multi-media realm. For the info obsessed, games are the best shock absorber for the new - they render it in terms that everyone can get. Play a video game, stroll through a corridor blasting your opponents. Move to the next level. Repeat. It could easily be a Western version of a game that another culture used to teach about morals and the fact that respect for life begins with an ability to grasp the flow of information between people and places. I wonder how many Westerners would know the term daspada - but wait - the idea that we learn from experience and evolve different behavioral models to respond to changing environments is a place where complexity meets empathy, a place where we learn that giving information and receiving it, is just part of what it means to live on this, or probably any planet in the universe. What makes Exquisite Corpse cool is simple: it was an artists parlour game to expose people to a dynamic process - one that made the creative act a symbolic exchange between players. Some economists call this style of engagement the gift economy - I like to think of the idea of creating out of fragments as the basic way we can think and create in an era of platitudes, banality, and info overload. Even musicians and artists - traditionally, the ciphers that translate experience into something visible for the rest of us to experience - have for the most part been happy for their work to be appropriated by the same contemporary models for material power that have created problems for their audiences - power and art happily legitimizing each other in a merry dance of death, a jig where some people know the rules of the dance, but most don't. But this death, this dematerialization - echoes what Marx and Engles wrote about way back in the 19th century with their infamous phrase all that is solid melts into air. Think of the exquisite corpse concept as a kind of transference process on a global scale. When you look at the sheer volume of information moving through most of the info networks of the industrialized world, you're presented with a tactile relationship with something that can only be sensed as an exponential effect - an order of effect that the human frame of reference is simply not able to process on its own. At the end of the day, the exquisite corpse is just as much about renewal as it is about memory. It depends on how you play the game. The way I see it, is this: whenever humanity tries to really grapple with the deep issues - life, death, taxes, you name it - it becomes a game, and I like to think that like most human endeavors, exquisite corpse is all about chance processes. For example, the Indian game of daspadaor Snakes and Ladders as its commonly called, has its origin in documents from India around 2nd century BC. It's said that it was used as a game
nettime Shooting War: Futuristic Web Comic Echoes Reality
At the risk of actually saying this is a funny comic strip about an embedded journalist in Iraq, well... all I can say is that it's a solid graphic novel on-line. The URL for the comic: info: http://smithmag.us/shootingwar/about/ and the actual comic: http://smithmag.us/shootingwar/chapters/chapter-1/ Paul aka Dj Spooky a decent article: Futuristic Web Comic Echoes Reality By Zack Pelta-Heller, AlterNet Posted on June 16, 2006, Printed on June 16, 2006 http://www.alternet.org/story/37632/ It's the year 2011. John McCain is our unpopular president, the war in Iraq rages on, gasoline is $10 a gallon, and Tom Cruise and Mary-Kate Olsen have just called it quits. When videoblogger Jimmy Burns captures on camera a suicide bomb blast that rocks a Brooklyn Starbucks (destroying his apartment above), he's immediately hired by maverick network Global News and packed off to Iraq. That's the eerie world of Shooting War, an arresting web comic from author Anthony Lappâ© and artist Dan Goldman. Only a half-dozen chapters of Shooting War have been published on SMITH magazine since May 15, yet this episodic series has already become a prescient commentary on the future of warring Iraqi factions, globalization and citizen journalism's struggle against mainstream media. The world of 'Shooting War' is half where I think things are headed and half satire, Lappâ© told me by phone. As executive editor of Guerrilla News Network, Lappâ© identifies with Jimmy Burns' dilemma in working for the ficticious Global News. Burns is a vulnerable hero with aspirations of fame and money, but his politics are grounded, Lappâ© explained. So does he sell out to reach a wider audience? According to Lappâ©, Global News is akin to Al-Jazeera (and for that matter, political blogs), in that it prides itself on being uncensored. Shooting War was born out of Lappâ©'s own experiences in Iraq. In the fall of 2003, Lappâ© filmed BattleGround: 21 Days on the Empire's Edge, a documentary that recorded the onset of the Iraqi insurgency. I was standing in the Sunni Triangle, Lappâ© said, when it occurred to me that this war is so surreal because you have teens raised on Play Station 2 who know nothing of Iraqi culture, yet are trying to create an infrastructure and government. While Lappâ© initially conceived Shooting War as an animated film, he realized that developing it as an electronic graphic novel might be a better way to reach the younger generation. Like Lappâ©, illustrator Dan Goldman recognizes his audience's proclivity for video games, and has even subtly acknowledged this penchant in the narrative. During a U.N. press briefing in Chapter 5, a bored NBC reporter is seen playing a PSP videogame fighting Iraqis. We're trying to keep things very meta, Goldman says with a laugh, though we want to keep the story line very realistic. When I'm drawing this, my satirical bones are definitely twitching. Goldman already had a couple of graphic novels under his belt before Shooting War. Prior to the 2004 presidential election, Goldman co-wrote Everyman, in which the last two presidential elections were swindled through faulty Diebold voter machines. What was uncanny about Everyman -- aside from basically predicting the outcome of the 2004 election -- was that it featured a rising third-party candidate with a surprising resemblance to Barack Obama, even before Obama delivered his famous address at the Democratic National Convention. Both Lappâ© and Goldman regard web comics as a sub-genre with endless potential. The format of an online graphic novel is so exciting, Lappâ© said, because there's built-in anticipation of turning to the next screen, the next panel, the next chapter. Shooting War has already explored some of the new possibilities afforded by a medium traditionally found in print. A gritty Flash trailer depicts animated scenes from Chapter 1 set to a soundtrack Lappâ© recorded in Iraq, and Lappâ© and Goldman have made their series even more interactive by creating a 2011 Headline Contest on their blog for fans. Technology has changed the way we tell stories, says Larry Smith, founder and editor of SMITH, the reader- generated online magazine that presents a new episode of Shooting War each week. While we didn't invent web comics, Shooting War is an electronic graphic novel with universal appeal. Smith, along with Lappâ©, Goldman, and artist Dean Haspiel, believes web comics are invaluable for their ability to establish a fan base and generate early buzz even before sending the graphic novel to a print publisher. Haspiel, who's collaborated with Harvey Pekar and Jonathan Ames, among others, said, There's an immediate gratification to web comics, and they cost nothing to create except time and talent. Haspiel and Goldman helped found ACT-i-VATE, a virtual studio collective of 12 web comic artists. More and more, web comics are becoming an essential stepping stone for graphic novelists
nettime Entertainment Nation: The Nation Magazine's culture issue
This is a remix of an article I have in the current issue of The Nation Magazine. It goes on newstands today/tomorrow Digital Music Revolution by Paul D. Miller his article can be found on the web at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060703/miller Ten years ago, when we first focused national attention on the dangers of the US media cartel, the situation was already grim, although in retrospect it may seem better than it really was. In the spring of 1996 Fox News was only a conspiracy (which broke a few months later). CNN belonged to Turner Broadcasting, which hadn't yet been gobbled by Time Warner (although it would be just a few months later); Viacom had not yet bought CBS News (although it would in 1999, before they later parted ways); and, as the Telecommunications Act had been passed only months earlier, local radio had not yet largely disappeared from the United States (although it was obviously vanishing). One could still somewhat plausibly assert, as many did, that warnings of a major civic crisis were unfounded, overblown or premature, as there was little evidence of widespread corporate censorship, and so we were a long way from the sort of journalistic meltdown that The Nation had predicted. Thus was the growing threat of media concentration treated much like global warming, which, back then, was also slighted as a controversial issue (the experts being allegedly at odds about it), and one whose consequences, at their worst, were surely centuries away--a catastrophic blunder, as the past decade has made entirely clear to every sane American. Now, as the oceans rise and simmer and the polar bears go under, only theocratic nuts keep quibbling with the inconvenient truth of global warming. And now, likewise, few journalists are quite so willing to defend the Fourth Estate, which under Bush amp; Co. has fallen to new depths. Although its history is far from glorious, the US press has never been as bad as it is now; and so we rarely hear, from any serious reporters, those blithe claims that all is well (or no worse than it ever was). Contrary to the counterclaims in 1996, there was, as The Nation noted then, copious hard evidence of corporate meddling with the news, and also, even more important, lots of subtler evidence of reportorial self-censorship throughout the media cartel. And yet what stood out as egregious back then seems pretty tame today, now that the press consistently tunes out or plays down the biggest news, while hyping trivialities, or, if it covers a disaster, does so only fleetingly and without pointing fingers. (New Orleans is now forgotten.) The press that went hoarse over Monica Lewinsky's dress is largely silent on the Bush regime's subversion of the Constitution; its open violation of the laws here and abroad; its global use of torture; its vast surveillance program(s); its covert propaganda foreign and domestic; its flagrant cronyism; its suicidal military, economic and environmental policies; and its careful placement of the federal establishment into the hands of Christianist extremists. Whether it's such tawdry fare as Jeffrey Gannon's many overnights at Bush's house, or graver matters like the Patriot Act, or the persistent questions about 9/11, or the President's imperial signing statements or--most staggering of all--the ever-growing evidence of coast-to-coast election fraud by Bush amp; Co., the press has failed in its constitutional obligation to keep us well informed about the doings of our government. In short, our very lives and liberty are at unprecedented risk because our press has long since disappeared into the media--a mammoth antidemocratic oligopoly that is far more responsive to its owners, big shareholders and good buddies in the government than it is to the rest of us, the people of this country. Surely other factors too have helped wipe out the news: an institutional overreliance on official sources; the reportorial star system, with its corruptive salaries and honoraria, and all those opportunities to hobnob with important criminals; the propaganda drive against the liberal media; the stupefying influence of TV, which has dragged much of the print world into its too-speedy orbit; etc. The fundamental reason for the disappearance of the news, however, is the media cartel itself. Fixated on the bottom line, it cuts the costs of real reporting while overplaying cheap crapola; and in its endless drive for more, it is an ally of the very junta whose high crimes and misdemeanors it should be exposing to the rest of us. It is past time, therefore, to go beyond the charting and analysis of media ownership, to boycotts, strikes and protests of the media cartel itself. # 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
Re: nettime report_on_NNA
Tobias - I regret I wasn't able to make it. I'm in a remote spot in Switzerland at the moment, but followed the progress of the event with interest. Glad to see that it went well! We should try something in NYC. I think that the list has been a bit flat for a while, but hey, there's always more than one way to do things, and your event seems like a step in the right direction. Best wishes, Paul aka Dj Spooky # 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 Sound System Politics: Bass Culture
These are the liner notes to a Box Set CD I've done with Trojan Records. Trojan Records is a legendary record label started by Arthur Duke Reid in Kingston, Jamaica in the late 1960's. It's archive encompasses some of the most renowned Jamaican artists in history, and the box set I've compiled for Trojan Records is a slice of material from their catalog. It's a double CD with out takes and extremely rare versions of Jamaican material from the last 40 years. Paul aka Dj Spooky Liner notes for Trojan records: In Fine Style: Dj Spooky Presents 50,000 Volts of Trojan Records Heel up, Wheel up, come back, rewind: Trojan Records by Paul D. Miller When Trojan records asked me to do a selections from their archive, one of the first things that went through my mind was this: how do you mix a music that changed the world? It's been about sixty years since Jamaica has become an independent country, and it seems like the music that comes from this tiny island in the Caribbean is having more of an impact than ever. Trojan records founder, Arthur Duke Reid, used to drive Trojan trucks around Kingston with huge speakers blasting his soundsystem, and that's the urban legend of how the name of the soundsystem cum record label started. Duke was a former policeman, and it comes as no surprise that the ruff and rude sounds of the Kingston underground were the staple of his sound. Trojan Ltd. was car company that made sturdy trucks that were to become the staple of the colonial market export of cars. The metaphor of Trojan, a car company, mapped onto the Greek legend of Troy, is as fitting as any fiction. The Trojans of ancient Greece were a royal line founded by Zeus and Electra, and if the myths of the past are any thing to keep in mind when we think of Jamaica, you can see the update: Trojan horses, stealth units, sound systems that were able to be in plain site, while changing the cultural operating system o fthe entire world. Soundsystems were portable discos, mobile platforms for different styles. They were the preferred method of spreading a style because they were nomadic in a way that the monumental clubs of the U.S. and U.K. couldn't dream of. =46rom the vantage point of the 21st century, they can only be viewed as the predecessor of the ipod. Portability, quickness, stealth copies of hit songs, versions - all of this leads us to the idea of remix culture and mash-ups that are the digital world inheritance from these analog media. With the material that I selected for this compilation, I wanted to avoid the obvious songs of Jamaican history, and focus on the more esoteric materials that collectors and producers could relate to. For example, when the Prodigy sampled Max Romeo and The Upsetter's 1976 I Chase The Devil (Lucifer) I thought it would be a good start to think about how the same sample popped up on Kayne West's production of Jay Z's hit Lucifer - I think you'll relate to the out take version I included in the compilation with Lee Scratch Perry's version Disco Devil. With people like Lee Scratch Perry and his staple of singers like Susan Cadogan (a former librarian!), you can hear the heat of a Kingston nite in songs like her hit Fever and her 1974 smash single Hurt So Good a cover version of Millie Jackson's song by the same name. When you hear Copyright law in Jamaica was never tight - everything was a copy of something else, and you can think of the whole culture as a shareware update, a software source for the rest of the world to upload. And if you stretch your ears, you can see the future of digital music in the drum machine riddim of Sleng Teng - a rhythm made at King Jammy's on a Casio MT-40 home keyboard. Just think: reggae is the expression of a nation under immense pressure - from IMF loans, from colonialism's after affects, the falling price of bauxite and its relationship to a Third World economy based solely on natural products like sugar cane and bananas=8A Jamaica created its own economy in sound with the relentless bass pressure of an island where music, and access to the right styles and sounds could make or break your career. The pressure to find the right rhythms created a hothouse of innovation. Can you imagine the world without Bob Marley - well, he used to screen records as a clerk for Coxsone soundsystem. He'd literally screen through the sounds of the current day to tell Coxsone which records to copy! Today with artists like Matisyahu in Brooklyn doing Hasidic Jewish versions of reggae, to stuff like Japan's Ranking Taxi to all sorts of stuff coming out of Brazil, India, Tunisia, Germany, France=8A the list goes on. You get the idea. Before hip-hop was global, the Jamaican scene had somehow, on the down-low, followed the idea of diaspora. The logic of diaspora - of taking music from a region and spreading it across the world - is reggae's core essence, and when I put this mix together, I wanted to go from my downtown NYC to London and Kingston, to parts of the world I'd
nettime The Sudden Stardom of the Third-World City
Hi Rana - it was with pleasure that I read your post - FINALLY, the list is getting exciting again. I was just in New Zealand with Suketu, and am happy to report his book Maximum City won the Kiriyama Prize, which is a kind of Pacific Rim/South Asia equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize in the U.S. New Zealand, which gets about 80% of it's energy supplies from solar, thermal, hydro, and wind power, is a great example of a European society that is coming to grips not only with the upcoming energy crisis that the West has fueled, but also, it's at least got a level comfort with diversity and multiculturalism than almost anything one can find in Europe. All I can say is yeah, Europe is tired, America is tired. The theory scene is wy tired. Rana, all I can say is please post more! Andreas, Keith - Rana is a guy... It's been really funny to see you both refer to him as a her Cultural Sensitivities 101, eh? Paul ps. In light of the issues I think that Rana has broached on the list, I think I'll post an article by Mike Davis on New Orleans - America's own Third World city, right in the heart of the Red States! Rana - try visiting there sometime! http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060410/davis The Nation [from the April 10, 2006 issue] Who Is Killing New Orleans? By MIKE DAVIS Afew blocks from the badly flooded and still-closed campus of Dillard University, a wind-bent street sign announces the intersection of Humanity and New Orleans. In the nighttime distance, the downtown skyscrapers on Poydras and Canal Streets are already ablaze with light, but a vast northern and eastern swath of the city, including the Gentilly neighborhood around Dillard, remains shrouded in darkness. The lights have been out for six months now, and no one seems to know when, if ever, they will be turned back on. In greater New Orleans about 125,000 homes remain damaged and unoccupied, a vast ghost city that rots in darkness while les bon temps return to a guilty strip of unflooded and mostly affluent neighborhoods near the river. Such a large portion of the black population is gone that some radio stations are now switching their formats from funk and rap to soft rock. Mayor Ray Nagin likes to boast that New Orleans is back, pointing to the tourists who again prowl the French Quarter and the Tulane students who crowd Magazine Street bistros; but the current population of New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi is about the same as that of Disney World on a normal day. More than 60 percent of Nagin's constituents--including an estimated 80 percent of the African-Americans--are still scattered in exile with no obvious way home. In their absence, local business elites, advised by conservative think tanks, New Urbanists and neo- Democrats, have usurped almost every function of elected government. With the City Council largely shut out of their deliberations, mayor-appointed commissions and outside experts, mostly white and Republican, propose to radically shrink and reshape a majority- black and Democratic city. Without any mandate from local voters, the public-school system has already been virtually abolished, along with the jobs of unionized teachers and school employees. Thousands of other unionized jobs have been lost with the closure of Charity Hospital, formerly the flagship of public medicine in Louisiana. And a proposed oversight board, dominated by appointees of President Bush and Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, would end local control over city finances. Meanwhile, Bush's pledge to get the work done quickly and mount one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen has proved to be the same fool's gold as his earlier guarantee to rebuild Iraq's bombed-out infrastructure. Instead, the Administration has left the residents of neighborhoods like Gentilly in limbo: largely without jobs, emergency housing, flood protection, mortgage relief, small-business loans or a coordinated plan for reconstruction. With each passing week of neglect--what Representative Barney Frank has labeled a policy of ethnic cleansing by inaction--the likelihood increases that most black Orleanians will never be able to return. Lie and Stall After his bungling initial response to Katrina, Bush impersonated FDR and Lyndon Johnson when he reassured the nation in his September 15 Jackson Square speech that we have a duty to confront [New Orleans's] poverty with bold action We will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives. In the event, the White House sat on its pledges all autumn, mumbling homilies about the limits of government, while its conservative attack dogs in Congress offset Gulf relief with $40 billion worth of cutbacks in Medicaid, food stamps and student loans. Republicans also rebelled against aid for a state that was depicted as a venal Third World society, a failed state like Haiti, out of step with national values.
nettime Brands and Identity in the Age of Neuroscience
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8535feedId=online-news_rss20 How brands get wired into the brain 18:31 04 January 2006 NewScientist.com news service Shaoni Bhattacharya A person's liking for a particular brand name is wired into a specific part of the brain, a new study reveals. The research may provide an insight into the brain mechanisms that underlie the behavioural preferences that advertisers attempt to hijack. It has long been known that humans and animals can learn to associate an irrelevant stimulus with a positive experience, for example the ringing of a bell with food, as in the case of Pavlov's dogs. And neuroimaging studies have recently implicated two regions buried deep in the brain - the ventral striatum and the ventral midbrain - as having an important role in this learning. But now work led by John O. Doherty, currently at Caltech in Pasadena, US, shows that the actual level of preference is encoded in these brain regions, and that people access this information to guide their decisions. The key message of our study is that we are able to make use of neural signals deep in our brain to guide our decisions about what items to choose, say when choosing between particular soups in a supermarket, without actually sampling the foods themselves, says Doherty, who did the research while at University College London, UK. This is because we can make use of our prior experiences of the items through which we fashioned subjective preferences - do I like it or not? he told New Scientist. The next time we come to make a decision we use those preferences. Pavlovian conditioning Doherty and colleagues at UCL and the University of Iowa, US, ranked the preferences of human volunteers for blackcurrant, melon, grapefruit and carrot juice, and for a tasteless, odourless control drink. The researchers scanned the volunteers brains using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect enhanced blood flow in various brain regions the greater the flow, the greater the neural activity in those areas. They developed a Pavlovian-type association by flashing a geometric shape on a computer screen and giving a squirt of juice into the volunteers's mouths. However, the volunteers did not realise that they were being conditioned in this way they were simply told to press a button to indicate on which side of the screen the shape had appeared. The team measured how the volunteers had become conditioned by measuring their anticipation of the juice squirts following an image by measuring the dilation of their pupils. Fast food poisoning The fMRI scans revealed significant responses reflecting learning in the ventral midbrain and the ventral striatum. Crucially, they found that the strength of the response correlated with the volunteer's like or dislike of the juice. Stronger neural responses occur in these regions to a cue that is associated with a more preferred food said Doherty. This shows that when you see a cue that is predictive of a reward, you are able to access information about your subjective preferences. Doherty says this kind of brain programming may have an evolutionary function in helping humans and animals predict both good and bad experiences in their environment. For instance, if you learn that a particular fast food outlet gave you food poisoning the last time you ate there it is going to be in your interest to know not to go there again once you see the sign for that shop in the street he says. Journal reference: Neuron (DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2005.11.014) # 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 Paris Burning [u]
All I can say is, as usual, hypocrisy is hypocrisy is hypocrisy. Is this the same Finkielkraut who wrote In the Name of Humanity and Defeat of the Mind? Hypocrisy never ceases to amaze. I'm sure if it was 1968, he'd be out there marching and singing songs etc etc I'd like to see him - as an experiment for example - send a job application under an assumed name. One that sounds white and another that sounds arab - who can say what the result would be, but yeah... the reason the suburbs are burning isn't about Islamic extremism - its because people see the hypocrisy at every level, every day - all the time. I lived in Paris for a year a while ago and was stopped by the police - papiers? - literally everyday. When they found out I was African American, everything was cool, but they would really hassle the Africans from the continent. It disgusted me... Anyway, I'm really disappointed that Finkielkraut, like Zizek, can't deal with the nuances of why this stuff is happening. Paul # 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 Delueze/Guattari: Remix Culture
as a platform - I want to make sure to remind people, that yes, I'm an artist... It's really weird how much people are set against the idea of existing in multiple contexts. Mono-reality... something like that. It's boring. Again, the D G connection about multiple situations occurring simultaneously - reflects the post post modern scenario - it's not about deconstruction, but reconstruction - of building a new vision of how we can live and think in the info ecology we've built for ourselves. And so on, and so on, and so on... 4) I find very interesting that in Cinema 1-Movement and image Deleuze talks about D.W.Griffith cinema, referring to image-action (the example he refers to in particular is Intolerance), and Griffith=92s articulation of the narration, that offers two examples of civilization: (black people/white people). It almost seemed to me that your remix of Birth of a nation, especially when played live, originates, with the obvious differences, from Deleuze's same critical ground... your opinion on that Civilization, as Freud pointed out so long ago, is about rules and boundaries but it also inspires a kind of continuous renewal. At heart, civilizations are control mechanisms - they're psychological more than they're physical. They are meta-tools. For me, at the moment, it seems like the West is in a serious crisis of meaning. The Enlightenment went dark in the mass mechanized warfare of the two world wars, and the shattered remains were burned in the fire of Vietnam. Pretty much nothing remains. My music asks: how do we create new forms of meaning from these hollow ideals? We've moved far past Plato's Republic into a realm where the civic aspects of culture as software are the new frames of reference. Software (credit card debt, individual assigned names on line, domain names, DNS routers, encription, computer aided design that builds airplanes, routes electricity, guides DNA analysis etc etc there's alot more but you get the point) regulates individual behavior - both on and off line - in the post industrialized world. Software for thinking: it's an invisibly coercive concept. I like Deleuze's take on Intolerance but you have to remember that film acts as a crucial myth device for a world based on the consumption of images. I think that we need to analyze film from the viewpoint of not only what the Situationists called psycho-geography - a place that posits movement between radically different environments as a causal principle in the way that we organize information, but what the . That's the dj situation - origin, and destination blur - they become loops, cycles, patterns. The way to explore them is through the filter of woven meaning. Black culture has been the world's subconscious for most of the last several centuries - it has been the operating system of a culture that refuses to realize that its ideals have died long ago. The threads of the fabric of contemporary 21st century culture, the media landscape of filaments, systems, fiber optic cables, satellite transmissions, and so on - these are all rhizomatic. They are relational architectures - the move in synchronization. The meshwork needs to be polyphonic. The gears move in different cadences, but they create movement. They need to be pulled apart so that we can break the loops holding the past and present together so that the future can leak through. Perhaps this is where we break with the old situation of black white - that stuff is really dumb any way. It's all a lot more complex than that dualism. This is the new operating system I envisage when I remixed Birth of a Nation - the collapse of Wagner, the collapse of the Western scripts of linear progress, the renewal of a world where repetition is a kind of homage to the future by respecting the past. Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, Tunis, Tunisia - 11/20/05 # 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 The Largest Theft in History
Blackwater Mercenaries in New Orleans, a decayed FEMA, and of course, G.W. and crew still get crazy paid. Bizness as usual... Paul http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article313538.ece What Has Happened to Iraq's Missing $1bn? By Patrick Cockburn The Independent UK Monday 19 September 2005 One billion dollars has been plundered from Iraq's defense ministry in one of the largest thefts in history, The Independent can reveal, leaving the country's army to fight a savage insurgency with museum-piece weapons. The money, intended to train and equip an Iraqi army capable of bringing security to a country shattered by the US-led invasion and prolonged rebellion, was instead siphoned abroad in cash and has disappeared. It is possibly one of the largest thefts in history, Ali Allawi, Iraq's Finance Minister, told The Independent. Huge amounts of money have disappeared. In return we got nothing but scraps of metal. The carefully planned theft has so weakened the army that it cannot hold Baghdad against insurgent attack without American military support, Iraqi officials say, making it difficult for the US to withdraw its 135,000- strong army from Iraq, as Washington says it wishes to do. Most of the money was supposedly spent buying arms from Poland and Pakistan. The contracts were peculiar in four ways. According to Mr. Allawi, they were awarded without bidding, and were signed with a Baghdad-based company, and not directly with the foreign supplier. The money was paid up front, and, surprisingly for Iraq, it was paid at great speed out of the ministry's account with the Central Bank. Military equipment purchased in Poland included 28-year-old Soviet-made helicopters. The manufacturers said they should have been scrapped after 25 years of service. Armored cars purchased by Iraq turned out to be so poorly made that even a bullet from an elderly AK-47 machine-gun could penetrate their armor. A shipment of the latest MP5 American machine-guns, at a cost of $3,500 (£1,900) each, consisted in reality of Egyptian copies worth only $200 a gun. Other armored cars leaked so much oil that they had to be abandoned. A deal was struck to buy 7.62mm machine-gun bullets for 16 cents each, although they should have cost between 4 and 6 cents. Many Iraqi soldiers and police have died because they were not properly equipped. In Baghdad they often ride in civilian pick-up trucks vulnerable to gunfire, rocket- propelled grenades or roadside bombs. For months even men defusing bombs had no protection against blast because they worked without bullet-proof vests. These were often promised but never turned up. The Iraqi Board of Supreme Audit says in a report to the Iraqi government that US-appointed Iraqi officials in the defense ministry allegedly presided over these dubious transactions. Senior Iraqi officials now say they cannot understand how, if this is so, the disappearance of almost all the military procurement budget could have passed unnoticed by the US military in Baghdad and civilian advisers working in the defense ministry. Government officials in Baghdad even suggest that the skill with which the robbery was organized suggests that the Iraqis involved were only front men, and rogue elements within the US military or intelligence services may have played a decisive role behind the scenes. Given that building up an Iraqi army to replace American and British troops is a priority for Washington and London, the failure to notice that so much money was being siphoned off at the very least argues a high degree of negligence on the part of US officials and officers in Baghdad. The report of the Board of Supreme Audit on the defense ministry contracts was presented to the office of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Prime Minister, in May. But the extent of the losses has become apparent only gradually. The sum missing was first reported as $300m and then $500m, but in fact it is at least twice as large. If you compare the amount that was allegedly stolen of about $1bn compared with the budget of the ministry of defense, it is nearly 100 per cent of the ministry's [procurement] budget that has gone Awol, said Mr. Allawi. The money missing from all ministries under the interim Iraqi government appointed by the US in June 2004 may turn out to be close to $2bn. Of a military procurement budget of $1.3bn, some $200m may have been spent on usable equipment, though this is a charitable view, say officials. As a result the Iraqi army has had to rely on cast-offs from the US military, and even these have been slow in coming. Mr. Allawi says a further $500m to $600m has allegedly disappeared from the electricity, transport, interior and other ministries. This helps to explain why the supply of electricity in Baghdad has been so poor since the fall of Saddam Hussein 29 months ago despite claims by the US and subsequent
nettime Katrina: The Spectre of a Soviet-Style Crisis in the U.S.
I remember waking up a teenager in the late 1980's and realizing that when the Berlin Wall fell, it was all over for the Soviet Union. I wonder if Katrina spells a similar fate for the U.S. Paul http://www.lefigaro.com/debats/20050912.FIG0354.html?083700 Emmanuel Todd: The Specter of a Soviet-Style Crisis By Marie-Laure Germon and Alexis Lacroix Le Figaro Monday 12 September 2005 According to this demographer, Hurricane Katrina has revealed the decline of the American system. Le Figaro. - What is the first moral and political lesson we can learn from the catastrophe Katrina provoked? The necessity for a global change in our relationship with nature? Emmanuel Todd . - Let us be wary of over-interpretation. Let's not lose sight of the fact that we're talking about a hurricane of extraordinary scope that would have produced monstrous damage anywhere. An element that surprised a great many people - the eruption of the black population, a supermajority in this disaster - did not really surprise me personally, since I have done a great deal of work on the mechanisms of racial segregation in the United States. I have known for a long time that the map of infant mortality in the United States is always an exact copy of the map of the density of black populations. On the other hand, I was surprised that spectators to this catastrophe should appear to have suddenly discovered that Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell are not particularly representative icons of the conditions of black America. What really resonates with my representation of the United States - as developed in Apr=E8s l'empire - is the fact that the United States was disabled and ineffectual. The myth of the efficiency and super-dynamism of the American economy is in danger. We were able to observe the inadequacy of the technical resources, of the engineers, of the military forces on the scene to confront the crisis. That lifted the veil on an American economy globally perceived as very dynamic, benefiting from a low unemployment rate, credited with a strong GDP growth rate. As opposed to the United States, Europe is supposed to be rather pathetic, clobbered with endemic unemployment and stricken with anemic growth. But what people have not wanted to see is that the dynamism of the United States is essentially a dynamism of consumption. Is American household consumption artificially stimulated? The American economy is at the heart of a globalized economic system, and the United States acts as a remarkable financial pump, importing capital to the tune of 700 to 800 billion dollars a year. These funds, after redistribution, finance the consumption of imported goods - a truly dynamic sector. What has characterized the United States for years is the tendency to swell the monstrous trade deficit, which is now close to 700 billion dollars. The great weakness of this economic system is that it does not rest on a foundation of real domestic industrial capacity. American industry has been bled dry and it's the industrial decline that above all explains the negligence of a nation confronted with a crisis situation: to manage a natural catastrophe, you don't need sophisticated financial techniques, call options that fall due on such and such a date, tax consultants, or lawyers specialized in funds extortion at a global level, but you do need materiel, engineers, and technicians, as well as a feeling of collective solidarity. A natural catastrophe on national territory confronts a country with its deepest identity, with its capacities for technical and social response. Now, if the American population can very well agree to consume together - the rate of household savings being virtually nil - in terms of material production, of long-term prevention and planning, it has proven itself to be disastrous. The storm has shown the limits of a virtual economy that identifies the world as a vast video game. Is it fair to link the American system's profit-margin orientation - that neo-liberalism denounced by European commentators - and the catastrophe that struck New Orleans? Management of the catastrophe would have been much better in the United States of old. After the Second World War, the United States assured the production of half the goods produced on the planet. Today, the United States shows itself to be at loose ends, bogged down in a devastated Iraq that it doesn't manage to reconstruct. The Americans took a long time to armor their vehicles, to protect their own troops. They had to import light ammunition. What a difference from the United States of the Second World War that simultaneously crushed the Japanese Army with its fleet of aircraft carriers, organized the Normandy landing, re-equipped the Russian army in light materiel, contributed magisterially to Europe's liberations, and kept the European and German populations liberated from Hitler alive. The Americans knew how to dominate
nettime Project for a New Atlantis [pt 12]
Table of Contents: Project for a New Atlantis Paul D. Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED] Project for a New Atlantis pt 2: On Flooded Cities Paul D. Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2005 10:14:10 -0400 From: Paul D. Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Project for a New Atlantis Between this and Kanye West's apt observation that George Bush Doesn't Care about Black People on the Aid Marathon for Katrina victims, I can only say - like that old Led Zeppelin song when the levee breaks it's all about reconstruction. Katrina 3: Two Anti-Hurricane Projects (on landscape climatology) Project 1: How do you slow down a hurricane? In the June 2005 edition of The Economist Technology Quarterly (subscription required), we read about Moshe Alamaro, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, [who] has a plan. Just as setting small, controlled fires can stop forest fires by robbing them of fuel, he proposes the creation of small, man-made tropical cyclones to cool the ocean and rob big, natural hurricanes of their source of energy. His scheme, devised with German and Russian weather scientists and presented at a weather-modification conference in April, involves a chain of offshore barges adorned with upward-facing jet engines. Each barge creates an updraft, causing water to evaporate from the ocean's surface and reducing its temperature. The resulting tropical storms travel towards the shore but dissipate harmlessly. Dr Alamaro reckons that protecting Central America and the southern United States from hurricanes would cost less than $1 billion a year. Most of the cost would be fuel: large jet engines, he observes, are abundant in the graveyards of American and Soviet long-range bombers. The creation of manmade tropical micro-storms, using heavy, greenhouse gas-burning jet engines towed through the waters of the equatorial Atlantic on what are, for all intents, artificial islands... is really a pretty ridiculous idea. Yet it reminds me of a long-standing BLDGBLOG project that has otherwise gone unpublished. Till now: Project 2: The Aeolian Reef In Virgil's * Aeneid *, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, we read about Aeolia, the weather-breeding isle: Here in a vast cavern King Aeolus Rules the contending winds and moaning gales As warden of their prison. Round the walls They chafe and bluster underground. The din Makes a great mountain murmur overhead. High on a citadel enthroned, Scepter in hand, he molifies their fury, Else they might flay the sea and sweep away Land masses and deep sky through empty air. In fear of this, Jupiter hid them away In caverns of black night. He set above them Granite of high mountains - and a king Empowered at command to rein them in Or let them go. (Book 1, Lines 75-89) Thus: BLDGBLOG's Aeolian Reef . To be fair, this all began as nothing more than an idea for a new, artificial island that would be added to the Cyclades archipelago in Greece. It would be somewhere between Constant's Babylonic mid-sea pavilion - - - an oil derrick - - - the Maunsell Towers - - - and a kind of massive, off-shore, geotechnical saxophone. Full of vaulted tubes and curved ampitheaters - and complex twists through a hollow, polished core - this modern Aeolus, an artificial island, would produce storms (and even, possibly, negate them). A modern Aeolus, in other words, would be a weather-breeding isle - or a weather-cancelling isle, as the case may be: because then there was Katrina. What would happen, I thought, if you built a manmade, weather-cancelling isle that could *stop hurricanes from forming*? I realized, of course, immediately, that you would actually need hundreds of these saxophone-like, anti-hurricane islands - even an entire manmade archipelago of them - because the atmospheric paths of storms are far too unpredictable. You would need, that is, an Aeolian Reef. The Aeolian Reef - and the current author, who cannot draw, hint-hint, would *love* to collaborate with any BLDGBLOG readers who want to illustrate some of these things - would consist of oil derrick-like platform-islands built in climatologically influential patterns throughout both the Gulf of Mexico and the larger, equatorial Atlantic. The Aeolian Reef would: 1) trap and redirect high-speed winds from any burgeoning tropical storms and hurricanes , thus preventing them from actually forming; 2) provide incredibly exciting meteorological/atmospheric observation platforms far out at sea; and 3) be readily exportable to other countries and other climates, for other purposes - land-based anti-tornado clusters, for instance. This would therefore take the subject of an earlier BLDGBLOG post a few steps further: it would use architecture, or landscape
nettime Scripted Space: Film Form, Film Formlessness
from a dying tree. We reflect deeply uncertain times. Again: the natural and the artificial blur with blinding speed. In the 19th century Karl Marx would say all that is solid melts into air. In our era, we repurpose that phrase and remix it: all that was solid becomes software. Music is a mirror held up to the world to see what stares back. The image is what we can make of it. Sound track/image track. All mutable, all mutually conditioning. goto Scripted SpaceSample Clip begins Norman M. Klein, film historianC:dir Where does that leave our public culture today? We return to arrangements vaguely similar to the Baroque mercantile public world of 1620 A.D. but dominated by new systems of power - under the cybernetic impact of metaconsumerism (from warfare to computer games). This eccentric blend of miniature and the massive produces monuments for transconsumerism, like the Rococo ceilings in Las Vegas super malls, and IMAX cinemas, a faux sky, a transnational special effects sunrise, instead of the hundreds of thousands of lights that mapped the Coney Island amusement parks in 1910. Beside it, like princely lords, a baronial warlord capitalism takes on the heraldry and paradox of mercantilism in 17th century Rome or =46lorence. Entertainment, public space, and electronic feudalism become essentially indistinguishable. Not that this is new. Feedback systems have always been essential to special effects =8A Scripted space implies code as the foundation for any kind of media environment. It was Oscar Wilde who said so many years ago; mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways. I like to think of this essay as an exercise in collage thinking, of starting the reader on a path into the other writers, artists, and musicians who inhabit this cinema mediated realm. Turn the page and a different story emerges from each text. Endscriptedspace:endtext I'm not exactly sure where its all going, but then again: I know this - for those who are open to the world and the information that describes it, its going to be a very very very fun century. Make your own mixes! This is a text that says simply: play instead of pressing play. gototextfileoriginalflipmode Paul D. Miller alias Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid NYC 2005 # 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 Revised: Scripted Space: Film Form/Film Formlessness
Hey People - for some reason the footnotes got=20 clipped off, plus it was late at nite, and I=20 forgot to mention that the festival was. So I'm=20 resending the essay's final draft. The Festival,=20 by the way - it's called Sonar and its one of=20 the largest electronic music festivals in Europe.=20 The book that accompanies Sonar is called The=20 Sound of Speed. I've written the introduction.=20 It has essays and interviews from a wide variety=20 of artists involved with the electronic music=20 scene plus film directors and multi-media=20 artists. More info: www.sonar.es Sorry 'bout the mix-up, but hey, that's what=20 happens when you finish an essay at 5 a.m. and oh yeah, it's f*cking multi-cultural contemporary art. The Sound of Speed preface by Paul D. Miller=20 a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid with Darren Aronofsky Coldcut Matthew Herbert Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid and others pax, Paul =46ilm Form/Film Formlessness In Nature we never see anything isolated, but=20 everything in connection with something else=20 which is before it, beside it, under it, and over=20 it. Goethe, 1825 The Perfect Beat - can never really be found,=20 it's the search that makes the event happen Afrika Bambaataa - Looking for the Perfect Beat, 1979 gototextfileoriginalflipmode What happens when you see an image, but=20 hear no sound? What happens when you hear a=20 sound, but see no image? These are rhetorical=20 questions in search of rhetorical answers. The=20 method of the inquiry is what drives the=20 investigation. Thought holds the bits and pieces=20 of the process together, but that's my point.=20 These days it almost seems as if media has become=20 an entire ecology for most of the developed=20 world. With our cell phones able to beam us high=20 resolution videos, our 'podcast attention span=20 searches for the next download almost like a=20 character out of William S. Burrough's Beat=20 imagination. Our bill boards switch images with=20 blinding speed, our advertisement drenched urban=20 landscape that stretches from the city to the=20 suburbs, and the exurbs beyond. These=20 hyper-accelerated phenomena of what I like to=20 call prosthetic-realism are the principle=20 metaphors for a culture that has shifted away=20 from the physical objects of the 20th century, to=20 the wireless imagination of the 21s. Today, our=20 contemporary information ecology is a coded=20 landscape: it is a Sphinx that asks a riddle for=20 which there is no answer - how do you make sense=20 of the datacloud? The mix has absorbed all of=20 this. Artificial or real, nature or nurture - the=20 idea of nature has been displaced by the man made=20 environment of the urban NOW. All of this we take=20 for granted. We wake up in the morning, and we=20 turn on the computer to download the days=20 details. We move in a stream of data that almost=20 seems insatiable. Bits and bytes are how we=20 define the information around us. In our info=20 experience economy, they are omnivourous and ever=20 present. Go to: To put it in some perspective, a Terabyte=20 could hold about 3.6 million 300 Kilobyte images=20 or maybe about 300 hours of good quality video. A=20 Terabyte could hold 1,000 copies of the=20 Encyclopedia Britannica. Ten Terabytes could hold=20 the printed collection of the Library of=20 Congress. A brontobyte is million million=20 petabytes, enough to store everything that's ever=20 been filmed, taped, photographed, recorded,=20 written, spoken, and probably even thought . At=20 the current moment, humanity produces about 5=20 petabytes of data a year - most of it is data=20 transmissions - cell phones, faxes, and whatnot.=20 The basic implication is that database aesthetics=20 are the way we think - the creative act in this=20 environment is as much about how we explore the=20 information that we live in, as it is about how=20 to play with the density. Collage? Forget it - its last century's news. Bricolage? So very 1920's. =46luxus? C'mon=8A Neo-Expressionism? C'mon=8A that went out in the 1970's. It's tired. New term: Scripted Space Public Expression, private space: a flux of=20 architectures frozen and then dethawed. Think of=20 the description as the liquid play of software,=20 wetware, and hardware. Like Warhol: From A to B=20 and back again. The loops these beats are made=20 from move between the realm of the visual and the=20 audio, the tactile and the invisible. They=20 describe the space in between all of the defined=20 points on the landscape to create a mesh of=20 invisible correspondences. A new axiom remixes=20 the old: from landscape to datascape and back=20 again, we live the exchange. Call it=20 transactional realism. Scripted space: Architecture is nothing but=20 frozen music. Music is nothing but liquid=20 architecture. We dethaw the process. This is the=20 experience economy. It's generally agreed that the first known use of=20 music with the cinema was on December 28
nettime Of Men and Monuments
well.. this is a piece done for 21C - we're just in the final phases of setting it up as a quarterly, and julian Laverdiere is one of the people who designed the cover for the new issue. He was, along with Paul Myoda, and also one of the principal folks involved with designing up the Towers of Light/Tribute in Light Memorial for the World Trade Center victims. Like Maya Lin's 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial - the Towers... sought to commemorate a dilemma of American culture - a dilemma usually implies a situation that requires a choice between options that are or seem equally unfavorable or mutually exclusive. One monument was about permanence and the American aspiration to monumentalism. The other, made of light, was about transparency and impermanence. Light and text - permanence and impermanence - these are issues that info culture faces - in the tradition of Virilio, this is certainly no Albert Speers with lights intimating a 1000 Year Reich, but then again, hey... under the Bush Admin. maybe it could be after all, Leni Riefenstahl was a pretty good film maker too... this is art that asks - imperial time aspires to be universal, but how are we to think about the forms that represent the idea of empire? Anyway... read on here's the essay. you can check the rest at www.21cmagazine.com pax, Paul Of Men and Monuments, Vessels and Vectors... Julian Laverdiere 's Art of Uncertainty: Goliath Concussed at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery NYC by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid in architecture form is a noun, in industry form is a verb R. Buckminster Fuller In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone, Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws The only shadow that the Desert knows. I am great Ozymandias, saith the stone, The King of kings: this mighty city shows The wonders of my hand. The city's gone! Naught but the leg remaining to disclose The sight of that forgotten Babylon. We wonder, and some hunter may express Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness Where London stood, holding the wolf in chase, He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess What wonderful, but unrecorded, race Once dwelt in that annihilated place. Horace Smith, Ozymandias 1817 Horace Smith composed this sonnet on 27 December 1817, during an evening sonnet-writing session with P.B. Shelley, but the echo, the sense of quotation of content and context is what I want to evoke with this piece. Think again: Rhetorical bodies, matter and memory, teleplex tautologies, suture and synedoche... codes and modes... like I always enjoy saying: it all just flows. It's been a long time since 1869 when the U.S., as an aspiring regional super-power, laid the first trans-continental telegraph and railroad lines throughout the newly reconsolidated polity that the Civil War had given birth to. It was an ambitious project, but like all American endeavors of size it had a small beginning. During the month of May 1869, in the middle of Utah, and at a place very few of us would ever check out, a silver spike hammered into the a railroad track that was almost finished completed a continent wide circuit in the newly linked transcontinental rails. The spike set off a electronic trigger pulse that was supposed to celebrate the occasion: a current moved through the newly connected and then infantile networks linking the East and West, and spread throughout the rail and telegraph lines like some newly remade disembodied Paul Revere howling through the wires. In New York and in San Francisco two cannons - one facing the Atlantic and the other, the Pacific Ocean - fired a shot triggered by the phantasmal pulse sent from the joining of the railroads in the middle of America, making the newly ambitious U.S.'s sense of Manifest Destiny telephonically clear to the rest of the world - from the heart of the country a silver spike closed the circuit on reality as our ancestors knew it. The rest, as it's always said, is another story. Ah, the logic of history. Like the poem that I begin this essay with, its something that at first glance evokes a series of historical allusions, and then one realizes the legerdemain - it's not Percy Shelley's, but an echo, a remix, a quote within a quote. One could argue that that's the sense of uncertainty of origin that Laverdiere strives to convey with his work. The above mentioned event is true but hovers someplace in my imagination at a point mid-way between Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, with dashes of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow thrown in for good measure. That's what Julian Laverdiere's work is like: it puts a spin on a commonplace situation and for better or worse creates a place where fiction and reality, like everything else these days, seem to be completely meshed with one another. In Forbidden Aspirations for Ascendancy, Laverdiere's first solo show at Gallery Andrew Kreps back in 2000, one entered a room where two capsules sat
nettime Norman Mailer's The white man unburdened
not have been able to demonstrate how well he wore the uniform he had not honored. Jack Kennedy, a war hero, was always in civvies while he was commander in chief. So was General Eisenhower. George W. Bush, who might, if he had been entirely on his own, have made a world-class male model (since he never takes an awkward photograph), proceeded to tote the flight helmet and sport the flight suit. There he was for the photo-op looking like one more great guy among the great guys. Let us hope that our democracy will survive these nonstop foulings of the nest. Copyright © 1963-2003 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved. Nothing in this publication may be reproduced without the permission of the publisher. Illustrations copyright © David Levine unless otherwise noted; unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] with any questions about this site. The cover date of the next issue of The New York Review of Books will be August 14, 2003. None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Port:statusOPEN wildstyle access: www.djspooky.com Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid Office Mailing Address: Subliminal Kid Inc. 101 W. 23rd St. #2463 New York, NY 10011 # 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]
nettime Manuel Delanda - 1000 Years of War
well..., I'm an editor there... I guess I should pass on stuff every once in a while. Also - if you're looking for a more ummm... abbreviated version of Manuel on this kind of thing, check www.djspooky.com/articles.html Paul 1000 Years of War: CTHEORY Interview with Manuel De Landa Manuel de Landa in conversation with: Don Ihde, Casper Bruun Jensen, Jari Friis Jorgensen, Srikanth Mallavarapu, Eduardo Mendieta, John Mix, John Protevi, and Evan Selinger. Manuel De Landa, distinguished philosopher and principal figure in the new materialism that has been emerging as a result of interest in Deleuze and Guattari, currently teaches at Columbia University. Because his research into morphogenesis -- the production of stable structures out of material flows -- extends into the domains of architecture, biology, economics, history, geology, linguistics, physics, and technology, his outlook has been of great interest to theorists across the disciplines. His latest book on Deleuze's realist ontology, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002), comes in the wake of best-sellers: War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), where De Landa assumes the persona of the robot historian to bring the natural and social sciences into dialogue vis-a-vis using insights found in nonlinear dynamics to analyze the role of information technology in military history, and A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History (1997), where he carves out a space for geological, organic, and linguistic materials to have their say in narrating the different ways that a single matter-energy undergoes phase transitions of various kinds, resulting in the production of the semi-stable structures that are constitutive of the natural and social worlds. When Evan Selinger gathered together the participants for the following interview, his initial intention was to create an interdisciplinary dialogue about the latest book. In light of current world events -- which have brought about a renewed fascination with De Landa's thoughts on warfare -- and in light of the different participant interests, an unintended outcome came about. A synoptic and fruitful conversation occurred that traverses aspects of De Landa's oeuvre. I. War, Markets Models CTHEORY (Mendieta): In these times of a war against terrorism, and preparing against bioterrorism and germ warfare, do you not find it interesting, telling, and ironic in a dark and cynical way that it is the Western, Industrialized nations that are waging a form of biological terrorism, sanctioned and masked by legal regulations imposed by the WTO and its legal codes, like Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). Would you agree that the imposition of GMO -- genetically modified organism -- through WTO, NAFTA, and IMF, on the so-called developing world is a form of legalized biotech and biological terrorism? And then, as a corollary, what are the prospects for global justice and equity in light precisely of the yawing gap between developed and underdeveloped nations that is further deepened by the asymmetrical access to technologies like genetic engineering and genomic mapping? Manuel De Landa: Though I understand what you are getting at I do not think it is very useful to use this label (biological terrorism) for this phenomenon. The point, however, is well taken. The way in which corporations are encroaching around the most sensitive points of the food chain is dangerous: they direct the evolution of new crops from the processing end, disregarding nutritional properties if they conflict with industrial ones; the same corporations which own oil (and hence fertilizers and herbicides) also own seed companies and other key inputs to farming; and those same corporations are now transferring genes from one species to another in perverse ways (genes for herbicide resistance transferred from weeds to crops). When one couples these kind of facts with the old ones about the link between colonialism and the conversion of many world areas into food supply zones for Europe (from the creation of sugar plantations to the taking over of the photosynthetically most active areas of the world by Europe's ex-colonies) we can realize that this state of affairs does have consequences for equity and justice. The key point is not to oversimplify: the Green Revolution, for example, failed not because of the biological aspect, but because of the economic one: the very real biological benefits (plants bred to have more edible biomass) could only be realized under economies of scale and these have many hidden costs (power concentration, deskilling of workforce) which can offset the purely technical benefits. The question of Intellectual Property rights is also complex. We should be very careful how we deal with this, particularly considering many of us bring old moral clichés (private property is theft) into the debate without being aware of it. I believe this issue needs to be handled case by case (to solve the inherent conflict
nettime Islam - The Religion of technology
from a list-serv that focuses on the linkages between science and Islamic culture. Kalam has had some interesting insight into how science has been a propaganda tool (forensics, development of bio-weapons, the Iraqi radar sensor hoaxes that the U.S. and Britain used as an excuse to continuously bomb the country for the most of the last decade... etc etc). The current round of posts is focusing on how historically, science in Islam was focused on mathematics (even the term algebra, and algorithm, amongst others, derive from Arabic etc etc) Paul Kalam [Arabic], lit. speech, something spoken; in diction language: parlance; talk, discourse; in grammar, a sentence; also, a quasi inference. A powerful movement within Islamic thought (sometimes imperfectly translated as Islamic scholasticism). Mutakallim: a practitioner of Kalam (pl. mutakallimun). http://kalam.org/mailman/listinfo/kalam_kalam.org kalam-post [EMAIL PROTECTED] Religion of Technology: Text of the Rockford College graduation speech by Chris Hedges I want to speak to you today about war and empire. Killing, or at least the worst of it, is over in Iraq. Although blood will continue to spill -- theirs and ours -- be prepared for this. For we are embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige, power, and security. But this will come later as our empire expands and in all this we become pariahs, tyrants to others weaker than ourselves. Isolation always impairs judgment and we are very isolated now. We have forfeited the good will, the empathy the world felt for us after 9-11. We have folded in on ourselves, we have severely weakened the delicate international coalitions and alliances that are vital in maintaining and promoting peace and we are part now of a dubious troika in the war against terror with Vladimir Putin and Ariel Sharon, two leaders who do not shrink in Palestine or Chechnya from carrying out acts of gratuitous and senseless acts of violence. We have become the company we keep. The censure and perhaps the rage of much of the world, certainly one-fifth of the world's population which is Muslim, most of whom I'll remind you are not Arab, is upon us. Look today at the 14 people killed last night in several explosions in Casablanca. And this rage in a world where almost 50 percent of the planet struggles on less than two dollars a day will see us targeted. Terrorism will become a way of life, and when we are attacked we will, like our allies Putin and Sharon, lash out with greater fury. The circle of violence is a death spiral; no one escapes. We are spinning at a speed that we may not be able to hold. As we revel in our military prowess -- the sophistication of our military hardware and technology, for this is what most of the press coverage consisted of in Iraq -- we lose sight of the fact that just because we have the capacity to wage war it does not give us the right to wage war. This capacity has doomed empires in the past. Modern western civilization may perish, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr warned, because it falsely worshiped technology as a final good. The real injustices, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, the brutal and corrupt dictatorships we fund in the Middle East, will mean that we will not rid the extremists who hate us with bombs. Indeed we will swell their ranks. Once you master people by force you depend on force for control. In your isolation you begin to make mistakes. Fear engenders cruelty; cruelty, fear, insanity, and then paralysis. In the center of Dante's circle the damned remained motionless. We have blundered into a nation we know little about and are caught between bitter rivalries and competing ethnic groups and leaders we do not understand. We are trying to transplant a modern system of politics invented in Europe characterized, among other things, by the division of earth into independent secular states based on national citizenship in a land where the belief in a secular civil government is an alien creed. Iraq was a cesspool for the British when they occupied it in 1917; it will be a cesspool for us as well. The curfews, the armed clashes with angry crowds that leave scores of Iraqi dead, the military governor, the Christian Evangelical groups who are being allowed to follow on the heels of our occupying troops to try and teach Muslims about Jesus. Hedges stops speaking because of a disturbance in the audience. Rockford College President Paul Pribbenow takes the microphone. My friends, one of the wonders of a liberal arts college is its ability and its deeply held commitment to academic freedom and the decision to listen to each other's opinions. (Crowd Cheers) If you wish to protest the speaker's remarks, I ask that you do it in silence, as some of you are doing in the back. That is perfectly appropriate but he has the right to offer his opinion here and we would like him to continue his
nettime William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and Ethnomathematics
is national editor at The American Lawyer. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/23/magazine/23CRASH.html?ex=1047027608; ei=1en=b5465666bfebf361 None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Port:statusOPEN wildstyle access: www.djspooky.com Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid Office Mailing Address: Subliminal Kid Inc. 101 W. 23rd St. #2463 New York, NY 10011 # 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]
nettime Bennu's piece hip-hop digest
in it is read on our bodies and our art. At many turns, I find it hard to (all at once) distance myself from what is hurtful about the way many industry players (of different races, in all positions) are playing (with) hip-hop, love my self fiercely and loudly, make art that is influenced by the other art I find attractive, and allow myself to be represented by forms that, while still moving, are often and perhaps inextricably woven with ideas which are against me. But as a woman I am allowed less authority with which to represent hip-hop and therefore carry less of the burden of the violence and wastefulness which hip-hop has come to represent in the media. I haven't always needed to articulate my distance from hip-hop in the way Bennu and other black men in my generation do because not all of what is thrust upon them is thrust upon me. I'll end by saying that I read the statement as a claim to power, a rejection of what hates us, and an affirmation of Bennu's selfhood. But saying Fuck Hip-Hop is not a dismissal of the music, it is the impassioned goodbye of one who, loving the sinking ship, nevertheless chooses to swim. Peace, Mendi nettime-l-digest [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: However I still think Bennu's piece did not display contemporary familiarity with the field he was talking about, and this limits its uses for critique. (I'm not saying he doesn't have that familiarity, but it's not much in evidence in the article). I'm really not sure how Bennu's article is supposed to do anything other than reflect a certain feeling that a well-defined minority of hip-hop listeners will hold. (I guess that makes it hip-hop in the sense that I can see all that groups heads nodding - yeah, damn right! :). But I don't think it's going to change the minds of anyone. As much for methodology as content, I'd prefer someone like Oliver Wang's take. He supports true hip-hop as critically as any other journalist out there (even venturing into areas like Spin to do it), rather than running it down. check it out y'all if yr interested... (his mixtapes are also sweet) . . . Carl Guderian [EMAIL PROTECTED] If Bennu's had it with hip-hop, then good. The sooner intellectuals write off hip-hop, the better. Then it can be itself, for better or worse. Carl (occasionally DJ REX84) # 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] None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Port:statusOPEN wildstyle access: www.djspooky.com Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid Office Mailing Address: Subliminal Kid Inc. 101 W. 23rd St. #2463 New York, NY 10011 --_-1169992263==_ma Content-Type: text/enriched; charset=us-ascii fontfamilyparamGeneva/paramHI Coco, Mendi, Ken, Art, Danny et al folks - sorry about the delay in communications. I've been mad hectic with various tings... and that slows communications down...you know how it goes... Coco - your points in your piece about intellectual culture and hip-hop are well taken. There's an immense disconnect between those who think theory and culture as it's practiced are or should be divorced from one another. I tend to think of everything in terms of blurs, and don't necessarily see any distinction between race, class, social hierarchy, and sound as a signifier and emblem of how culture functions in the age of cybernetic replication. For any of us that take hip-hop seriously, this has been a grave issue for a while: how to deal with turning your world inside out - private discourse made publice, an artificial scarcity of expression in a world of hyper controlled communications. Does this sound too dry? Sometimes a story works better: I remember being in Tokyo around this time last year and doing a show with an old friend of mine, Dj Krush, and some new folks on the block, Anticon. Anticon are young white kids from middle America. They were doing a collaboration with Krush - a song called Song for John Walker - the white kid who joined the Taliban... needless to seay, the backstage vibe was all about dialog and we were all just kicking it. Krush's wife walked in and handed him a samurai sword before his set, and everyone in the room was... ummm... kind of silent. In a moment like that, the strageness (strange-mess) of global culture, hip-hop, and the overall reality of my surroundings as a dj who operates on a global level, crsytalized before my eyes: there was no way I was operating in the normal Aerican fashion of taking things for granted. we all sat there and paused for a second (it really felt like a video still in some art
nettime FUCK HIP HOP: A Eulogy to Hip Hop
for Artists on the Fence. None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Port:statusOPEN wildstyle access: www.djspooky.com Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid Office Mailing Address: Subliminal Kid Inc. 101 W. 23rd St. #2463 New York, NY 10011 # 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]
