Judith Butler: Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street | eipcp.net In the last months there have been, time and again, mass demonstrations on the street, in the square, and though these are very often motivated by different political purposes, something similar happens: bodies congregate, they move and speak together, and they lay claim to a certain space as public space. Now, it would be easier to say that these demonstrations or, indeed, these movements, are characterized by bodies that come together to make a claim in public space, but that formulation presumes that public space is given, that it is already public, and recognized as such. We miss something of the point of public demonstrations, if we fail to see that the very public character of the space is being disputed and even fought over when these crowds gather. Of course, this produces a quandary. We cannot act without supports, and yet we must struggle for the supports that allow us to act. For politics to take place, the body must appear.
Steve Jobs 1955-2011. | DARC – Digital Aesthetics Research Center Newspapers and gadget magazines are overflowing with praise and remembrance, and there is no doubt that one of the big IT company leaders and visionaries has died. In many places he is praised as an aesthete that made computers and gadgets with stunning design and great wow-factor. This is of course true, but in DARC we should remember him for how he made new IT-formats or genres popular like the PC with graphical user interface (which Apple didn’t invent but popularized), the iPod and the iPhone. Also it is significant that especially the success of the iPhone is built on culture and cultural consumption, both in the way that it integrates the musical culture of the iPod and iTunes and in the way it extend it to software culture, which it has transformed into a mobile app-culture. The iPhone and other IOS devices are cultural interfaces and cultural computing – and this is what made it different from the more engineering driven visions of e.g.
Twitter Psychology Psychological research on Twitter reveals who tweets, how much, what they talk about and why. There are now 190 million Twitter users around the world producing 65 million tweets each day. 19% of US internet users now say they use Twitter or a similar service to share updates about themselves—double the figure from the previous year (Pew, 2009). So who tweets? Why? What are they talking about? And what is so engaging about all those little textual transmissions? Since Twitter didn’t exist until 2006, psychologists have had little chance to explore it, but some of the early research suggests a social network unlike those that came before. Before we get onto the research, though, here’s a quick intro for Twitter newbies: What is Twitter? Twitter is a cross between a social network and a blog. The video above shows you what it looks like on a mobile phone. 1. But Twitter doesn’t always feel like a conversation as people use it in different ways. 2. 3. 4. 5. 7. 8. 9.
Searching For Mark Pilgrim [[ MARK IS FINE and his work is not lost. Please see the update and addendum later in the post. —E. ]] Just yesterday, I took a screenshot of the title page of Dive Into HTML5 to include in a presentation as a highly recommended resource. This is very reminiscent of Why the Lucky Stiff’s infosuicide, and it’s honestly shocking. “Embracing HTTP error code 410 means embracing the impermanence of all things.” —Mark Pilgrim, March 27, 2003 (diveintomark.com) Update 5 Oct 11: Jason Scott just tweeted the following: Mark Pilgrim is alive/annoyed we called the police. So there you have it. Addendum 5 Oct 11: Several people have asked me if I know why Mark took this step. Mirrors of Mark’s work have started appearing (see the comments for some of them) and so his legacy, if not his presence, will not be lost.
Ostalgia Trips The end of August marked the 31st anniversary of the Gdánsk Agreement, the accord which is usually seen as having kick-started the demise of communism. Today, Adam Michnik, millionaire and owner of Agora Media LLC, speaks at the Edinburgh Book Festival as a ‘famous dissident’, while Poland takes over presidency in the EU. But somehow no one questions why, in contemporary capitalist Poland, none of the workers’ postulates in the Gdánsk Agreement of 1980 have been achieved. The more distant the collapse of the Berlin Wall becomes, the more miraculous the events around 1989 seem to be. The more capitalist these former republics become, the more nostalgia for communism seems to grow. The irony is that Žižek consciously built his career on this post-Soviet sentiment, while being one of its more lucid critics. Ostalgie means and captures much wider contemporary cultural phenomena than the mere recuperation of the once-rough life under the system. About the author
Glitch Reality II - analogue-to-digital-to-analogue translation by @m_pf Following from Glitch Reality No1 commissioned by It’s Nice That for Nike, Glitch Reality 2 by Matthew Plummer-Fernandez and David Gardener is a new iteration of exploring physical objects in glitch form. The process is an interesting one, applying digital methodology to alter physical objects. Matthew Plummer-Fernandez explains: A tea set was created by purchasing non-matching tea set components, scanning them with a Z-corporation 3D scanner and roughly repairing the digital mesh files. Also below is short animation experiment Matthew made using a crude 3D scan of his friends baby Harriet. The meshing algorithm curiously created a caccoon from fragments of scanned baby pram, which inspired the title of the piece. See more images and ver 1 on M P-F’s website: cargocollective.com/plummerfernandez | It’s Nice That | David Gardener (re-discovered via neural)
Museums and artists take a stand against the dominance of social media Artists play a crucial role in visualizing power relationships and disrupting subliminal daily routines of social media usage. They are often first to deconstruct the familiar and to facilitate an alternative lens to understand and critique these media. As a matter of fact, Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel, is one of the artists who pressingly calls for resistance to social media. In the exhibition Photography Calling, Geoffroy / Colonel offers a penetration wall space at the Sprengel Museum Hannover museum to exhibit censured material from 9 October–10 November 2011. “Exhibit what has been rejected by the social media! This intervention not only draws attention to the issue of censorship, but also to copyright, responsibilities and the ability of museums to provide a more ‘human’ experience and methods in collecting and exhibiting expressions. [vimeo] FB Resistance Workshop at Transmediale 2011
Demos | Publications Populist parties and movements are now a force to be reckoned with in many Western European countries. These groups are known for their opposition to immigration, their ‘anti-establishment’ views and their concern for protecting national culture. Their rise in popularity has gone hand-in-hand with the advent of social media, and they are adept at using new technology to amplify their message, recruit and organise. The online social media following for many of these parties dwarfs the formal membership, consisting of tens of thousands of sympathisers and supporters. This is the first quantitative investigation into these digital populists, based on over 10,000 survey responses from 12 countries. The New Face of Digital Populism calls on mainstream politicians to respond and address concerns over immigration and cultural identity without succumbing to xenophobic solutions.
The Media That Therefore We Are – on Lenore Malen’s video installation « Machinology I wrote this short catalogue text for Lenore Malen’s I am the Animal — also included stills (courtesy of and permission from Lenore Malen) from the exhibition: The Media That Therefore We Are It’s a matter of scales. If you are far enough away, and your perspective is mediated by a layer of concepts, abstractions, and an organizational eye, you might indeed see them as models of ideal society. It’s all order. Everyone does what they are supposed to. But on another scale, it looks very different. Lenore Malen’s I Am The Animal intertwines the various histories, aesthetics, and idealizations of the bee community as well as the bee’s relations withbeekeepers. Our relation to insects is reflected in much more than the narrative aspect of Malen’s work. I Am The Animal poses the question: Can insects be our companion species? So do animals have technology? The three screens of I Am The Animal are rhythmic elements that deterritorialize our vision. Like this: Like Loading...