An interesting looking Kickstarter project. "The anthology will emphasize women's speculative fiction from the mid-1970s onward, looking to explore women's rights as well as gender/race/class/etc. from as many perspectives as possible. The contributors are not yet established so we hesitate to name names, but rights  to reprint stories from Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, Joanna Russ, and James Tiptree Jr. would be sought in addition to a wealth of newer voices in the field. Ann and Jeff consider the anthology "to be an opportunity to contribute to the existing conversation about feminist speculative fiction, a conversation that has taken many forms over the years and has a long and established history." Funding covers the editors' fee, contributor fees/advances, book design, printing, as much advertising and promotion as possible. To help the project get off the ground the editors have agreed to take a small honorarium as their fee, with no share of royalties."

I just liked "THE EAGLEMAN STAG" on Vimeo:

»Contemporary Art faces a potentially terminal crisis. Contemporary Art has sold itself as a non-spe[…]« —

"On Wednesday, David Willetts, UK universities and science minister announced a plan to make all UK government funded research available to the general public under a collaboration with Jimmy Wales. "Giving people the right to roam freely over publicly funded research will usher in a new era of academic discovery and collaboration, and will put the UK at the very forefront of open research," he said."

"In March Levin and his former ­student Shawn Sims released a set of digital blueprints that a 3-D printer can use to create more than 45 plastic objects, each of which provides the missing interface between pieces from toy construction sets. They call it the Free Universal Construction Kit. The tens of thousands of consumers who now own devices such as MakerBot’s $1,100 Thing-O-Matic can download those files and immediately print a plastic piece that connects their Lego bricks to their Fischertechnik girders, their Krinkles to their Duplos, or half a dozen other formerly incompatible sets of modular plastic blocks, sticks and gears… Even so, Levin calls his project a “shot across the bow” of any company that wants to limit and control how their physical designs are copied, remixed or improved in the future. “Yes, it’s just a toy. But it’s also a harbinger of what’s to come. Things are going to get complicated.”"

"It’s a no-brainer that architecture has inspired videogames—in fact the quest for “realism” in three-dimensional space has been a driving force in the technological advancement of gaming. The New Aesthetic, an artistic exploration of the line between digital and actual, was solidified in pop consciousness with a dedicated panel at the 2012 SXSW Interactive Festival. Pixelation is a hallmark, though the New Aesthetic remains a bit nebulous. The term applies equally to QR codes placed in high-fashion ads, to Tetris-like installations of water in real-space on the streets of SoHo, and to the psychedelic colors captured on moving objects by Google satellite. And what about videogames inspiring architecture? Architecture has always been a reflection of the world around us, both functionally and aesthetically, but a building’s form does not merely follow its function. The two forces in fact work synergistically. Modernism has long been misunderstood to be simply about the honest expression of materials (read: ugly)—as argued by architect Cesar Pelli, “Modernity is not defined by specific materials or aesthetic qualities but rather, the ‘authentic expression of contemporary construction.’” In light of this theoretical idea, I think it’s odd that the New Aesthetic has focused on pixelation, when if anything, the trajectory of technological advancement has been about the reduction of pixilation."

Anonymous emerged from the rich (and sordid) world of online message and image boards such as 4chan, which Auerbach identifies as A-culture: a space formed in opposition to recognition, prestige, and celebrity—in other words, what we so often imagine to define social life online. “The growth of these anonymous spaces marks the first wide-scale collective gathering of those who are alienated, disaffected, voiceless, and just plain unsocialized,” Auerbach writes in “Anonymity as Culture,” his incisive study of the denizens of the Internet’s nether regions and their attitudes toward homosexuality, suicide, hate, and Brazilian scat-porn. “These are people whose tweets will not make the headlines. They do not wish to create a platform that enables them to be heard by the world; they want to shut out the world.”

Within the last decade, the contemporary art scene has witnessed a return of utopia and utopian thinking. Whether detectable as an impulse, critically reassessed as a concept, or cautiously or daringly articulated in a specific vision—utopia continues to matter. This publication investigates the meanings of utopia in contemporary art. Theorists, critics, and curators discuss the different ways of thinking and performing utopia in contemporary art from a broad range of angles. The essays explore the current relevance of utopia as well as how people in different societies live, think, act, and imagine… Utopia & Contemporary Art is a collection of essays by curators, art critics, academics and art historians who explore the meaning and place that the concept of utopia has taken in art.

"There has been so much art centred around the Occupy experience that it is, even this early, possible to ask whether we are seeing the emergence of an Occupy “style” - a tangible artistic movement in response to this major political event in American life that could upset the world of the white-walled galleries. “It’s been interesting,” says Read. “A lot of the work coming out of Occupy is not concerned with how it will be perceived by a buying public. It’s not designed to be bought, but shared - it’s designed to be made available as widely as possible. “It’s attracted an audience, and wherever you get an audience you get art critics. The art itself is super ‘copyleft’ - people are putting out their work as posters.”"

The Twenty-first century is invisible. We were promised jetpacks but ended up with handlebar moustaches. The surface of things is the wrong place to find the 21st century. Instead, the unseen, the Infrathin—those tiny devices in our pockets or the thick data-haze which permeates the air we breathe — locates us in the present. And in this way, The New Aesthetic is not so much a movement as it is a marker, a moment of observation which informs us that culture—along with its means of production and reception —has radically shifted beneath our feet while we were looking the other way. As such, The New Aesthetic handily articulates the importance of the new writing, situating it and its modus operandi within broader cultural trends.

As the intro to the exhibition says, the works displayed include real brains. Complete brains, bits of brains, brains that have been freeze-dried, dessicated or galvanized. The slices of Albert Einstein’s brain seem to gather much attention from the press and visitors alike. I doubt the fascination would have filled its original owner with euphoria. He had indeed expressed the wish to be cremated intact. The remains of the physicist are in awkward company. They are shown next to a phial of tissue allegedly coming from William Burke’s brain. With his accomplice William Hare,Burke made a living from murdering poor people and selling their bodies to Dr Knox’s anatomy school. He was hung on 28 January 1829. Ironically, Burke’s body was dissected, exhibited to the public in the Edinburgh University Museum and souvenirs were made and sold from his skin. Other brains on show includes the one of suffragette Helen H Gardener, the left hemisphere of mathematician Charles Babbage’s brain, and the segment of a suicide victim, with a bullet lodged in it. This one came with a text explaining that bullet wasn’t “the fatal one”."

"Rather than the slightly denuded interaction seen in contemporary avionics, this might be a full-body experience; relying on the subtle interactions of physical gesture, or multi-sensory feedback—across touch, hearing, proprioception as well as sight. Here, the plane itself becomes an interface again, as a genuinely embodied interaction (after Paul Dourish’s phrase). No more prodding of on-screen buttons—buttons that are not even buttons. Instead, the pilot is immersed and integrated with the aeroplane itself, freed from the fear of flying through avionics, yet free to experience the physicality of flying through a more embodied form of interface. Thus, the act of flying might become closer to the elegiac state described in JG Ballard’s “The Unlimited Dream Company”, closer to the eternal dream of flying itself: ”I saw us rising into the air … benign tornadoes hanging from the canopy of the universe.” What kind of interface might enable that feeling?"

"In addition to its academic remit, Politics of Place is founded on the belief that current postgraduate research can make significant contributions to contemporary academic and political debates concerning the relationship between people and place. Given its intended function as a transitional space for researchers seeking to become professional academics, the journal values original research that presents considerations of hitherto marginalized texts and themes." This could be an interesting journal to submit to.

"Watching Rudy Ramirez in this film, you realize that the prototypical Mexican border crosser in American genre cinema is an alien hunter: a representative of American property chasing criminals, revolutionaries, or stolen property. And that what they are really seeking is not the completion of their missions, but their desire for freedom from the alienating confines of their own society. The Texans in the Western are always chasing a killer, or Comanches, or Pancho Villa, but, when they go over, it is also their own escape to freedom—sometimes the hedonistic freedom of Prohibition-era Juarez; sometimes the freedom to fully express primitive instincts of profound violence, as in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian; sometimes even the freedom to try to create a better community… Of course, the reality of crossing over—either way—rarely works out that way. Causing one to ask: do you really need to cross the border to escape its confines? Might we find the liberated territory in our minds by more thoroughly interrogating the representational territory of the border? There are many entry points to the Interzone, and even more exits—sometimes through borders that disappear overnight."

An interesting looking series of CC articles from the 2012 Design Activism and Social Change Conference in Barcelona 2011

A book about protest posters.

File sharing community for streaming and downloading media. A replacement forum for Quicksilverscreen?

Use as the fastest BitTorrent application - Just paste the link to your required torrent on your favourite tracker or upload torrent-file from your computer and download faster than ever.

A sharp piece on the futurism we live with today, by @cstross & @warrenellis: http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=13972 #Accelerando

International edition
Founded and edited by Jacqueline de Jong (Hengelo, Copenhagen, Paris)
In May 1962 the first issue was published, in December 1967 the last (6).

The Situationist Times appeared in an edition of 1000 for the first issues; thereafter expanding to 2000. Contributors a.o. Armando, Gruppe Spur, Asger Jorn and Pierre Alechinsky. 27,7 x 22 cm.

"So what happened to the century that trusted in the future? If we look to the year 1977, we find it to be especially important in the history of mankind. It is the year Charlie Chaplin died, a moment that that, to my mind, marked the end of a possibility for a kind of a humane and gentle modernity. It is the end of a contradictory, controversial perception of time in modernity, the time of the horrible machine, invading and destroying my life. That same year, Uri Andropov, former head of the KGB, wrote a letter to Leonid Brezhnev, explaining that the USSR had five years left to close the gap with the United States in the field of information technology, or all would be lost. We all know how that story ended. But 1977 is also the year that, in a small Silicon Valley lab, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created user-friendly interfaces bearing the Apple trademark. This is not about the Indiani Metropolitani in Rome and in Bologna, but about Sid Vicious crying “no future” in 1977: the future is over—don’t think about your future, because you don’t have one. In a sense, this cry was the final premonition of the end of the modern age, of the end of industrial capitalism and the beginning of a new age of total violence. If capitalism is to go on in the history of mankind, then the history of mankind must become the place of total violence, because only the violence of competition can decide the value of time."

"What happened in Stafford’s work was that he was talking about organization and how things organize themselves in this new way. And there was one sentence in the book which I think I still remember, he said ‘instead of trying to organize it in full detail, you organize it only somewhat and you then rely on the dynamics of the system to take you in the direction you want to go.’ And this became my sort of motto for how I wanted composition to be. As I said, I started a correspondence with Stafford, and we did some presentations about this idea, both in music and science, in Canada. Around about the end of the ’70s, I started to become aware of another field of activity, which at that time was represented by just one single example in my experience. And this was the cellular automaton game called “Life,” by the mathematician, John Conway. I won’t go into that now because I don’t have time, but to give you a very simple glimpse of what that was about, I think to science, it sort of had the kind of impact that Duchamp’s urinal had in art. It’s sort of such a simple idea, which was so glowingly far-reaching that you thought my God, everything’s different now."

"Dutch artist and graphic designer Jacqueline de Jong joined the Situationist International in 1960. De Jong suggested the publication of an English language newsletter in November of 1960, to be co-edited with British Situationist Alexander Trocchi (who was in prison at the time). The publication was widely discussed at Situationist conferences in 1961, and the first issue of The Situationist Times was published in May of 1962. This year also saw the escalation of the long-standing friction between the aesthetic side of the Situationists and the political side, resulting in the expulsion of the German and Scandinavian Situationists. De Jong resigned/was expelled in February 1962 because of her solidarity with the German Situationist Group SPUR whom Guy Debord had expelled earlier. As the divide between Debord's Situationist circle and the Scandinavian and German Situationists widened, De Jong remained impartial. Key contributors to the Situationist Times included Debord, Asger Jorn, Gruppe SPUR and others from "both sides" throughout its years of publication."

"There are a lot of politics involved: some overt and readable, and some more subtle. Other openly political pieces include Josh On’s They Rule, which is a pillar in the history of interactive websites. Also, there are pieces that are about active citizens like Ushahidi. And, there are pieces that are about clear and empathetic information, like BBC Dimensions. The Homeless City Guide is also in that realm — there are different scales of politics represented in this show, from the very intimate to the cosmic. I would say that of course there are designers that still make furniture and products, and they might not express all their politics into an iPad or an iPod; but still, I consider political every action of making. And how much you can express yourself. As a designer you have to look professional, so sometimes you will have a great commission that enables you to really make your voice heard and other times, you will have to have side jobs that are your own art."

"National identities clash with globalization: this is a reality of today’s world, and reverberations of this conflict are evident in contemporary design discourse. On one hand, the national is still much valued as a precious cultural resource. On this topic, in a recent issue of Domus, MoMA Design Curator Paola Antonelli recently wrote about “digging deep into local culture in order to achieve the universal sublime”. Notes Antonelli: “Local traditions have in recent decades proved to be the most meaningful way to move beyond modernism without giving up the great qualities of modern design”."

"Scanning through the blog I think of David Greene (of the sixties avant garde architecture group Archigram), and his quasi-imaginary ‘Institute for Electric Anthropology’ (ref), which he has used since the early-1970s to talk about the ways in which new technologies and communication networks alter modern life. The NA blog certainly constitutes some kind of electric anthropology, and could even become a department in Greene’s ‘Invisible University’ project? Several other commentators have made connections to the work of earlier twentieth century avant garde art movements. In the panel discussion Joanne McNeil of Rhizome talked about how technology changes perception, referencing the work of Cubists and Futurists. Several others have also asked whether this constitutes (or needs) a manifesto of some kind? Sterling suggests that the NA material is ‘like early photography for French Impressionists, or like silent film for Russian Constructivists, or like abstract-dynamics for Italian Futurists.’ This all makes some sense, as this is in many ways a classic modernist research project: the material is after all object trouvé, an assemblage of found ready-mades, stuff circulating in the world. Perhaps we should read the tumblr blog as a neo-Dadaist assemblage, a reworking of a Kurt Schwitters Merzbau? Or perhaps it is better to think of it in terms of the kind of contemporary artworks that have a strong curatorial aspect within the art itself? Something like say some of the work of the Otolith Group, or Mark Leckey? Thinking about it as an art project only gets us so far though… let’s look at the material a bit more closely…"

"The New Aesthetic embraces an unusual creative technique: aggregation. It rejects the demands of the manifesto in favor of the indiscriminateness of the collection. Like any mess, it’s a bit ghastly to look upon. Sterling calls it a “gaudy, network-assembled heap made of digitized jackstraws.” From Hummel figurines to tumblr image blogs, collecting has a long history of kitschiness… For another part, the New Aesthetic fails the ultimate test of novelty: that of disruption and surprise. Misguided as they may seem a century hence, avant-garde movements like Futurism and Dada were not celebrating industrialism nor lamenting war so much as they were replacing familiar principles with unfamiliar ones on the grounds that the familiar had failed. The New Aesthetic is not surprising, but expected. After all, the artists now wield the same data access APIs, mapping middleware, and computer vision systems as the corporations. In some cases, the artists are the corporations. A really new aesthetics might work differently: instead of concerning itself with the way we humans see our world differently when we begin to see it through and with computer media that themselves “see” the world in various ways, what if we asked how computers and bonobos and toaster pastries and Boeing 787 Dreamliners develop their own aesthetics. The perception and experience of other beings remains outside our grasp, yet available to speculation thanks to evidence that emanates from their withdrawn cores like radiation around the event horizon of a black hole. The aesthetics of other beings remain likewise inaccessible to knowledge, but not to speculation—even to art."

"The New Aesthetic is a visible eruption of the mutual empathy between us and a class of new objects that are native to the 21st century. It consists of visual artefacts we make to help us imagine the inner lives of our digital objects and also of the visual representations produced by our digital objects as a kind of pigeon language between their inaccessible inner lives and ours. It’s the trace of interaction designers, surveillance drones, gesture recognition systems, fashion designers, image compression techniques, artists, CCTV networks, and filmmakers all 'wondering about one another without getting confirmation'."

Excellent piece by @PatrickRiot on how data is changing rules of engagement for art & information in today's Guardian http://t.co/Ix1VxsZQ

This is a curious collection of articles, photography and interviews about the Scandinavian Situationists (also known as the Nashites). The pieces are easily accessible and informative, if at times a bit dry and somewhat pedantic. What I found most appealing was the honesty of the interviews with Jacqueline de Jong, editor of The Situationist Times. De Jong talks with candour about the treachery of the famous 1962 split, the subsequent artistic explorations of the commune at Drakabygget, in southern Sweden, and the role of women in the movements in which she was involved. Debord, Jorn and Vaneigem are all to easily shrouded in a certain reverential mystique common to left-wing heroes. This book does away with that, particularly in its dealings with Jørgen Nash and his longtime collaborator Jens Jørgen Thorson. Nash and Jørgen are presented as artistic gangsters, provocateurs who were never accepted by the bourgeois art establishment. In what little is presented of their notes the reader starts to see a definitive move away from the exclusivity of the Situationist International and towards a more distinctively Scandinavian revolutionary practice - one of openness, participation and self-critique.

My views on Radiohead are stolen from Steven Wells: http://t.co/103iXz8H

For Mckenzie Wark a détournement of the legacy of the Situationist International must include the taking of paths less travelled. Since May '68 a veritable micro-industry of critical theory has emerged - a commoditisation of revolution - producing, to paraphrase Wark, enough books to rebuild the barricades. The only way any one work can contribute to this today, while at the same time remain true to its spirit, is by being both within and against the sprawl of its historical weight. Wark attempts to achieve precisely this, taking the reader upon a meandering dérive through the minor characters and side stories of the Situationist International: Isou, Chtcheglov, Bernstein, Lefebvre, Jorn, de Jong, Spur, Trocchi and Constant. The Beach Beneath The Street is an ambitious book. It is consistent in both style and content - faithful, I think, to the character of the period and movement which it describes. Like the Situationist International however it lacks the coherence expected of academia. This is intentional, and makes for an entertaining read, but those seeking a rigorous study of the subject should perhaps consider looking elsewhere.

Slavoj Žižek, Occupy Wall Street: what is to be done next?, The Guardian, 24 April 2012. http://t.co/cPQrsxcW

Just finished 'Rebel Cities' tonight. There is a brief review over at pinboard.in.

This blogspot collates CodeCrafted's Minecraft videos. exploring the wondrous possibilities of redstone in Minecraft.

Deleuze's lectures on Foucault. In French. Audio and transcriptions.

Glower allows you to add interaction to rasterized data tiles, by DevSeed / Mapbox

This book offers a multitude of voices on the changing character of recent social movement. The authors tell us that the graduate without a future, the loss of faith in party politics, the lack of canonical texts/media-outlets, the possibility for fast and anonymous communications and actions online, and the changing characteristics of power and subjectivity (precarity and the entrepreneuriat) all mark a move towards a more anarchic politics. Some implore social movements to move beyond their current defensive rhetoric and instead insist on new, more deeply democratic modes of organisation. Others demand that they fight back and wound capital more deeply than they have themselves been wounded. This multitude of voices is the book's strength, but it is also it's weakness: that there is no coherent strategy or responsive methodology. We are left instead with numerous provocations and numerous questions still to be addressed.

In this article Merrifield lays out the thesis for his upcoming book on politics of the encounter. He argues first that the idea of a right to the city is too abstract and too vague to be useful as a cry and a demand for urban change. Then he goes on to suggest that the affinity politics of the encounter is a more suitable slogan - one that does not necessitate material or temporal bounds. 'Here Comes Everybody' is then a class that does not require organisers or professional activists. A process without a subject. The questions become: how do we sustain the affinity or common in the encounter? what does this do to space? what new subjectivities and encounters arise? My feeling is that the subject of 'everybody' is being pulled in two directions. In the first instance towards the identity produced by Facebook, Google and data mining. And as its negation, towards the identity of Anonymous. This reinscribing of identity is a form of power being mapped onto the urban. It changes space and the city but also affinity and the encounter.

"Two maps overprinted with an echocardiogram, cut into strips and woven into a bowl, set within a la

"One Mans Land is a contour map of a young mans face etched into steel. Generated from stereo images

In the book's final chapter, which was obviously written as a hurried response to recent events, David Harvey makes the following claim: "What Tahrir Square showed the world was an obvious truth: that it is the power of bodies on the streets and in the squares, not the babble of sentiments on Twitter and Facebook, that really matter." For me this captures exactly what is wrong in Harvey's analysis. Rebel Cities is a tremendous work that clearly explores challenges facing anarchist, autonomist and reformist responses to entrepreneurial urbanisation. He calls for a syncretisation of different struggles over urban identity and labour, and ultimately suggests that the biggest challenge - that of scale - will demand some consolidation be made to regional or state organisational power. His failing: an inability to realise the importance of the interconnected subjectivities of the precariat. Long gone are the days when Harvey placed concerns of gender and race beneath those of class. He clearly listened to his critics of the late 80s. My hope is that his writing will one day will return to the right to the city and pause to reconsider the effects of digital and network culture on the production of urban space and subjectivity.

A letter Philip K Dick wrote after his first glimpse of Blade Runner
http://t.co/xrn8Ev0J

Fascinating article on scientists finding ways to make yourself smarter: http://t.co/HL3qWeSI

RT @daviddarts: Riseup server seized by FBI

RT @annegalloway: Ursula K. Le Guin lecture: "Cheek by Jowl: Animals in Children's Literature"

"The spirit of lulz is not particular to Anonymous, the Internet, trolling, or our times. The Dadaists and Yippies shared a similarly rowdy disposition, as did the Situationists and Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers; more recently, the Yes Men have tightly fused pranksterism and activism, in one instance presenting a three-foot-long golden penis (“employee visualization appendage”) at a WTO textile-industry conference as a means of controlling workers, to the applause of the management-class crowd. These transgressions serve many purposes, upending the conventions—and highlighting the absurdities—of a political system within which substantive change no longer seems possible, and generating the kind of spectacles that elicit coverage from the mainstream media. But the aforementioned groups were conceived as radical political enterprises, with a limited purview and a vanguardist composition. What sets Anonymous apart is its fluid membership and organic political evolution."