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digested < at > nettime----- Forwarded message from marc garrett <marc.garrett-SfeBXGGVbVKL8to6h3CzSA< at >public.gmane.org> -----From: marc garrett <marc.garrett-SfeBXGGVbVKL8to6h3CzSA< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Revisiting...Date: Mon, 05 Apr 2010 16:29:26 +0100To: nettime-l-fO7mttO5ZDI< at >public.gmane.orgSorry for any cross posting...Revisiting...http://www.furtherfield.orgFurtherfield.org has always felt proud to be working with people who dare to explore beyond traditional remits at the intersections of art, technology and social change; whether writing about it, making it or curating it.The array of artworks, activities and outlooks that make up this community is not only diverse, it is always immediate and present, alive and kicking. We are not yet jaded by the opportunities the Internet provides to own, shape and exchange our own cultural production and celebrate the varied and talented individuals and groups who share with us, this ever expansive and dynamic culture. So, we thought it worth reminding you how alive things really are, by inviting you to revisit the reviews/articles/interviews which have been published on the Furtherfield.org website since the end of January this year, 2010.Below is a selection of those reviews...Decode: Digital Design Sensations at V&A.Rob Myers reviews the Victoria and Albert Museum's exhibitionDecode: Digital Design Sensations. Framed as a digital designshow, but it's a landmark survey of art computing in all but name.http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=386SMartCAMP: The Arts on the Social Web. Review by Angela Ferraiolo.Part of New York's Art Week, SMartCAMP, or social media art camp,took place on March 5th and 6th, at the Roger Smith Hotel inNew York, a slightly unusual kind of place in that it's a hotelwith its own production company.http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=385An Interview with Chris Dooks. Interview by Marc Garrett.A 'Polymath' exploring various creative avenues, making his artusing different media. Whether it be directing arts-based TVdocumentaries, explorative psychogeographical projects, design,composing and making music or audio visual installations.http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=382F.A.T Lab at Transmediale.10.Article/interview by Marcello Lussana and Gaia Novati.F.A.T Lab (Free Art and Technology Lab) were found causingtrouble at the Transmediale.10 this year. Marcello Lussana andGaia Novati were intrigued to find out what all the fuss wasabout - some observations and an interview.http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=384HTML Color Codes. Review by Susan Ballard.The Internet exhibition features a selection of internet basedartwork that address the topic of digital color. The centralquestion that the exhibition poses is whether or not artistsworking with the internet are in fact limited to a "ready-made"color palette, a premise that many artists working with film,photography, and mass produced, standardized paint sets haveassumed.http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=383Transmediale.10 - Futurity Now!A collaborative review by Marcello Lussana and Gaia Novati.This year's edition of Transmediale explores the theme futuritynow through connections between arts and technology. MarcelloLussana and Gaia Novati take us through some of the highlightsof the exhibition, conference programme and satellite events.http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=380Digital Pioneers. Review by Rob Myers.At the V & A Museum, An overview of the first decades of thecomputer's history in art and design. including some of theearliest computer-generated works in the V&A's collections,many of which have never been exhibited in the UK before.http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=381If not you not me. Article by Ruth Catlow.This essay accompanies If not you not me, an exhibition ofnetworked performance art by Annie Abrahams. While socialnetworking sites make us think of communication as clean andtransparent, Abrahams creates an Internet of feeling - ofagitation, collusion, ardour and apprehension.http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=378Mark Napier's Venus 2.0. Review by Angela Ferraiolo.Venus 2.0 consists of software written by the artist thatcollects images of the body parts of Pamela Anderson, anerotic icon of our time, from the hundreds of pictures ofher available on the Internet and recreates a mobile,three-dimensional figure out of these flat, fragmentary pictures.http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=379Representing Labor: Ten Thousand Cents and Amazon's Mechanical Turk.Review by Madeleine Clare Elish.Madeleine offers here a review of Ten Thousand Cents, aproject by artists Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima.Although she acknowledges the beauty of the projectMadeleine points to its conceptual ambivalence.http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=376Link to all reviews & interviews:http://www.furtherfield.org/reviews.phpFurtherfield.org believes that through creative and critical engagement with practices in art and technology, people are inspired and enabled to become active co-creators of their cultures and societies.----- End forwarded message -----From: marc garrett <marc.garrett-SfeBXGGVbVKL8to6h3CzSA< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Download Furtherfield's latest broadcast on Resonance FM, Tuesday 6th April 2010.Date: Sun, 11 Apr 2010 12:21:15 +0100To: nettime <nettime-l-fO7mttO5ZDI< at >public.gmane.org>Sorry for any cross posting...Download Furtherfield's latest broadcast on Resonance FM, Tuesday 6th April 2010.A live, jam-packed, hour-long review of what's happening in contemporary media arts culture.Marc Garrett and Charlotte Frost interview:Danja Vasiliev, artist in Residence at Furtherfield.org's HTTP Gallery. London, UK.James Wallbank and Steve Withington from Access Space, UK's first 'Free Media Lab'.http://www.furtherfield.org/resonance/furtherfield_radio_1_april_6th.mp3Other features include a music collaboration from 1975, with Laurie Anderson & Alan Sondheim, violin & mandolin. And other treasures, noise-collages, soundscapes and exploratory music...More information on guests and broadcasts...http://www.furtherfield.org/resonancefm.phpThis programme is part of 'Hyperlink: Media Art Contexts' whose principal aim is to present and promote high-quality contemporary media art work, alongside critical discussion of past, present and future media art in a contemporary art context.--------more info--------->About Furtherfield.orgFurtherfield.org believes that through creative and critical engagement with practices in art and technology people are inspired and enabled tobecome active co-creators of their cultures and societies. Furtherfield.org provides platforms for creating, viewing, discussing and learning about experimental practices at the intersections of art, technology and social change. Furtherfield.org also runs HTTP Gallery in North London.http://www.furtherfield.orghttp://www.http.uk.net/About Resonance 104.4FMResonanceFM is "a laboratory for experimentation, that by virtue of its uniqueness brings into being a new audience of listeners and creators. All this and more, Resonance104.4fm aims to make London's airwaves available to the widest possible range of practitioners of contemporaryart."Resonance 104.4FMhttp://www.resonancefm.com----- End forwarded message -----

Below the introduction to "Critical Strategies in Art and Media" the bookand now online as a video in two parts...http://world-information.org/wii/critical_strategies/en/videosJoin us next Thursday April 15 for a book launch hosted by Ted Byfield —with remarks by Marco Deseriis (NYU), Steve Kurtz (Critical Art Ensemble),Andy Bichlbaum (The Yes Men), Ken Wark (NSU), and Trebor Scholz (NSU) Cheers, K***In September 2009, the World-Information Institute organized a roundtableconference on "Critical Strategies in Art and Media" in New York City. For afull day, digital theorists and practitioners met to debate the future ofart and culture in a fast-changing world and in a shifting economic andecological environment. Profound changes related to global digitalinformation and communication systems challenge the cultural heritage of thefuture and require independent cultural intelligence analysis. Does art haveany relevance beyond the role of the corporate style consultant or thedecoration of digital-product worlds? Is there any need for art beyond itsfunction as status décor, tax-minimizing investment, or a special marketsector?Today the sacred aura and mythical uniqueness of the object, closelyconnected with the cult of beauty emerging with the bourgeois world, isstill the dominant art form. The deeply ingrained economic logic thatmystifies cultural creation and emphasizes unique individuality has neverbeen overcome. Amidst all the pretensions of authenticity, the focus onmeaningless “innovations” and “individual” personalities consistentlyproduces market failures. Meanwhile the cultural peacekeeping industry ofthe military-entertainment complex makes inroads into the imagination, andincreasingly influences behavior at every level. At the same time, theagonizingly dull myth of the “Creative Cultural Industries” — that theybring the fine arts in from the cold and into the productive forces of theeconomy — raises questions about dissent and critique. Thebourgeois-bohemian Creative Class confuses talent with a fetish forlifestyle technology and mistakes ignorance for tolerance. It isn’t just thefinance world that’s ensnared in Ponzi schemes: exploited by finance tocreate meaning for their belief system, arts and culture develop badpractices and mechanisms of self-reinforcing silliness all by themselves. Bynow gestures of rebellion have become the stuff of everyday marketing. Inthe supermarket of farcical Web 2.0 socialism, a naive off-the-shelfcritique comes at a discount. Greenwashing and community kitsch are theorder of the day. This book is based on the statements, debate and interventions moderated bythe editors on September 10 2009, and include a range of additionalcommentaries by the participants. An amalgam of postmodern perplexity andbourgeois disorientation in neoliberal market economies achieves andsustains an abysmal lack of vision. With the decline of postmodern theoryand a growing weakness of neoliberal ideological hegemony, a seriousreassessment of "critical cultural practice" seems necessary.Konrad Becker and Jim FlemingNew York/Vienna, December 2009:: April 15, 2010; 6:30 - 8:15 pm :: Wollman Hall, New School University, 65West 11th St, 5th Floor, New York, NY.Contributions by: Konrad Becker (World-Information Institute), Ted Byfield(Nettime), Amanda McDonald Crowley (Eyebeam) Steve Kurtz (Critical ArtEnsemble), Jim Fleming (Autonomedia), Claire Pentecost (Continental Drift),Peter Lamborn Wilson (Temporary Autonomous Zone). Interventions by FrancoBifo Berardi, Marco Deseriis, Rene Gabri, Brian Holmes, McKenzie Wark, andFelix Stalder."Critical Strategies in Art and Media"Autonomedia 2010 ISBN 978-1-57027-214-1

NB:Maybe two old slogans can be revived in this context:"Avail Public Data Freely, Protect Private Data Strongly" (German ChaosComputer Club motto, late 80s - in yours truly's Indian English rendition;-)"Watching Them Watching Us" (Dutch hackers group Hacktic, in the early90s; the slogan was probably coined by Rop Gonggrijp, then Hacktic's, err,'supremo' ;-))Some more background on Rop Gonggrijp's blog:http://rop.gonggri.jp/The Iraqi shock horror video is not on wikileaks (?), but has a dedicatedwebsite:http://www.collateralmurder.comhttp://www.wikileak.org/Wikileak.org - without 's' - follows critically Wikileaks - with an 's'.........................................................................original at:http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/apr/10/wikileaks-collateral-murder-video-iraq/print(http://bit.ly/bKVbbl)Who watches WikiLeaks?This week a classified video of a US air crew killing unarmed Iraqis wasseen by millions on the internet. But for some, the whistleblowing websiteitself needs closer scrutinyChris McGreal in Washingtonguardian.co.uk, Friday 9 April 2010It has proclaimed itself the "intelligence service of the people", andplans to have more agents than the CIA. They will be you and me.WikiLeaks is a long way from that goal, but this week it staked its claimto be the dead drop of choice for whistleblowers after releasing video thePentagon claimed to have lost of US helicopter crews excitedly killingIraqis on a Baghdad street in 2007. The dead included two Reuters newsagency staff. The release of the shocking footage prompted an unusualdegree of hand-wringing in a country weary of the Iraq war, and garneredWikiLeaks more than $150,000 in donations to keep its cash-starvedoperation on the road.It also drew fresh attention to a largely anonymous group that hasoutpaced the competition in just a few short years by releasing to theworld more than a million confidential documents from highly classifiedmilitary secrets to Sarah Palin's hacked emails. WikiLeaks has posted thecontroversial correspondence between researchers at East AngliaUniversity's Climatic Research Unit and text messages of those killed inthe 9/11 attacks.WikiLeaks has promised to change the world by abolishing official secrecy.In Britain it is helping to erode the use of the courts to suppressinformation. Its softly spoken Australian director, Julian Assange, wasrecently in Iceland, offering advice to legislators on new laws to protectwhistleblowers.Assange, who describes what he does as a mix of hi-tech investigativejournalism and advocacy, foresees a day when any confidential document,from secret orders that allow our own governments to spy on us down to thebossy letters from your children's school, will be posted on WikiLeaks forthe whole world to see. And that, Assange believes, will changeeverything.But there are those who fear that WikiLeaks is more like an intelligenceservice than it would care to admit – a shadowy, unaccountableorganisation that tramples on individual privacy and other rights. Andlike so many others who have claimed to be acting in the name of thepeople, there are those who fear it risks oppressing them.Assange has a shock of white hair and an air of conspiracy about him. Hedoesn't discuss his age or background, although it is known that he wasraised in Melbourne and convicted as a teenager of hacking in to officialand corporate websites. He appears to be perpetually on the move but whenhe stops for any length of time it is in Kenya. Almost nothing is saidabout anyone else involved with the project.WikiLeaks was born in late 2006. Its founders, who WikiLeaks sayscomprised mostly Chinese dissidents, hackers, computer programmers andjournalists, laid out their ambitions in emails inviting an array offigures with experience dealing with secret documents to join WikiLeak'sboard of advisers. Among those approached was the inspiration for theproject, Daniel Ellsberg, the US military analyst who leaked the Pentagonpapers about the Vietnam war to the New York Times four decades ago."We believe that injustice is answered by good governance and for there tobe good governance there must be open governance," the email said. "Newtechnology and cryptographic ideas permit us to not only encouragedocument leaking, but to facilitate it directly on a mass scale. We intendto place a new star in the political firmament of man." The email appealedto Ellsberg to be part of the "political-legal defences" the organisersrecognised they would need once they started to get under the skin ofgovernments, militaries and corporations: "We'd like … you to form part ofour political armour. The more armour we have, particularly in the form ofmen and women sanctified by age, history and class, the more we can actlike brazen young men and get away with it."Others were approached with a similar message. WikiLeaks organiserssuggested that it "may become the most powerful intelligence agency onearth". Its primary targets would be "highly oppressive regimes in China,Russia and central Eurasia, but we also expect to be of assistance tothose in the west who wish to reveal illegal or immoral behaviour in theirown governments and corporations."But the group ran in to problems even before WikiLeaks was launched. Theorganisers approached John Young, who ran another website that postedleaked documents, Cryptome, and asked him to register the WikiLeakswebsite in his name. Young obliged and was initially an enthusiasticsupporter but when the organisers announced their intention to try andraise $5m he questioned their motives, saying that kind of money couldonly come from the CIA or George Soros. Then he walked away."WikiLeaks is a fraud," he wrote in an email when he quit. "Fuck your cutehustle and disinformation campaign against legitimate dissent. Same oldshit, working for the enemy." Young then leaked all of his emailcorrespondence with WikiLeak's founders, including the messages toEllsberg.Despite this sticky start, WikiLeaks soon began making a name for itselfwith a swathe of documents and establishments started kicking back.Two years ago, a Swiss bank persuaded a US judge to temporarily shut downthe WikiLeaks site after it published documents implicating the JuliusBare bank in money laundering and tax evasion. That revealed WikiLeaks'vulnerability to legal action and it sought to put itself beyond the reachof any government and court by moving its primary server to Sweden whichhas strong laws to protect whistleblowers. Since then the Australiangovernment has tried to go after WikiLeaks after it posted a secret listof websites the authorities planned to ban, and members of the US Congressdemanded to know what legal action could be taken after the site revealedUS airport security manuals. Both discovered there was nothing they coulddo. It's been the same for everyone from the Chinese government to theScientologists.Yet WikiLeaks worries more than just those with an instinctive desire forsecrecy. Steven Aftergood, who has published thousands of leaked documentson the Secrecy News blog he runs for the Federation of AmericanScientists, turned down an invitation to join WikiLeaks board of advisers."They have acquired and published documents of extraordinary significance.I would say also that WikiLeaks is a response to a genuine problem, namelythe over control of information of public policy significance," he says.Yet he also regards WikiLeaks as a threat to individual liberties. "Theirresponse to indiscriminate secrecy has been to adopt a policy ofindiscriminate disclosure. They tend to disregard considerations ofpersonal privacy, intellectual property as well as security," he says."One of the things I find offensive about their operations is theirwillingness to disclose confidential records of religious and socialorganisations. If you are a Mormon or a Mason or a college girl who is amember of a sorority with a secret initiation ritual then WikiLeaks is notyour friend. They will violate your privacy and your freedom ofassociation without a second thought. That has nothing to do withwhistleblowing or accountability. It's simply disclosure for disclosure'ssake." Aftergood's criticism has angered WikiLeaks. The site's legaladvisor, Jay Lim, wrote to Aftergood two years ago warning him to stop."Who's side are you on here Stephen? It is time this constant harpingstopped," Lim said. "We are very disappointed in your lack of support andsuggest you cool it. If you don't, we will, with great reluctance, beforced to respond."WikiLeaks has also infuriated the author, Michela Wrong, who was horrifiedto discover her book exposing the depths of official corruption in Kenya,It's Our Turn To Eat, was pirated and posted on WikiLeaks in its entiretyon the grounds that Nairobi booksellers were reluctant to sell it for fearof being sued under Kenya's draconian libel laws.Wrong was angry because, while she supports what WikiLeaks is about, thebook is not a government document and is freely available across the restof the world. From email distribution lists she could see that the piratedversion was being emailed among Kenyans at home and abroad. "I was besidemyself because I thought my entire African market is vanishing," saysWrong. "I wrote to WikiLeaks and said, please, you're going to damage yourown cause because if people like me can't make any money from royaltiesthen publishers are not going to commission people writing aboutcorruption in Africa." She is not sure who she was communicating withbecause the WikiLeaks emails carried no identification but she assumes itwas Assange because of the depth of knowledge about Kenya in the replies."He was enormously pompous, saying that in the interests of raising publicawareness of the issues involved I had a duty to allow it to be pirated.He said: 'This book may have been your baby, but it is now Kenya's son.'That really stuck in my mind because it was so arrogant," she says. "Onthe whole I approve of WikiLeaks but these guys are infuriatinglyself-righteous." WikiLeaks does apparently expect others to respect itsclaims to ownership. It has placed a copyright symbol at the beginning ofits film about the Iraq shootings.Assange has countered criticism over some of the material on the site bysaying that WikiLeak's central philosophy is "no censorship". He arguesthat the organisation has to be opaque to protect it from legal attack orsomething more sinister. But that has also meant that awkward questions –such as a revelation in Mother Jones that some of those it claims to haverecruited, including a former representative of the Dalai Lama, and NoamChomsky, deny any relationship with WikiLeaks – are sidestepped.Despite repeated requests for a response to the issues raised byAftergood, Wrong and others, WikiLeaks' only response was an emailsuggesting to call a number that went to a recording saying it was not inservice.

decayed, innovative, exhausted, tawdry, repetition, exalted, exploited,arousing, stupid, brilliant, unearthlyI need feedback on these - it would be helpful, thanks - Alan -(two pieces in need of critique)The following raises questions about musical/sound form and conceivablytawdry repetition.http://www.alansondheim.org/cardon1.mp3http://www.alansondheim.org/cardon2.mp3(one piece in need of analysis)The following raises questions about the psychoanalytics of net sex inSecond Life and other virtual space; the cartoon-avatar dances and exposesherself - what sort of triggers, if any, are set off? Would this be con-sidered a form of exploitation by proxy? A source of delight and arousal?Certainly any number of elements anywhere can act as catalysts for fantasy- in SL, where sex is statistically one of the main activities amongparticipants, avatar sex is paramount. Years ago, when I engaged in/wroteon net sex, it was clear that ascii diegesis (including real-time lapses,lags, erasures, and so forth) could be overwhelming at times. But eventhis crude (in both senses of the term) movie loop seems to construct anuncanny body whose 'legibility' results in a psychoanalytical surplus orlure.http://www.alansondheim.org/aawhere.mov

[Más abajo en castellano]Thanks to the ongoing collaboration and contributions of endorsers and workshops participants over the last four months, today we are able toannounce the release of*Version 2.0 of the Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge*in order to provide strong, concrete, positive legal opposition to ACTA and to attacks on freedoms in the digital era:http://fcforum.netUse it and spread it.Here some animations to say it:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpAAJZYVlQMhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDpFe3CbVBwhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy7s_JoHGQshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wd4FUrzKZcWe also announce the launch of the next FcForum gathering, which will be held from October 28 to 31, 2010, and where particpants will discuss and set out specific proposals for New Economic Models for artists and civil society.We like you all to participate.Contact:info-5fTJ1hW4IQ3R7s880joybQ< at >public.gmane.orghttp://fcforum.netINTERNET WILL NOT BE ANOTHER TV------------------------------------------------------::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::------------------------------------------------------Carta 2.0 para luchar contra el ACTA:Gracias a la colaboración continua y las aportaciones de los que se han adherido a la Carta y de los participantes en los talleres, hoy publicamos la**versión 2.0 de la Carta por la Innovación, la Creatividad y el Acceso al Conocimiento* *con el fin de oponernos con soluciones legales tajantes y concretas al ACTA y a los ataques a las libertades en la era digital: http://fcforum.net/es/Úsala y difúndela.Aquí unas animaciones que la cuentan:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te5YGzqaUlYhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3bNwCHoZXshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSyr2k9NpPAhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c68ZppjVD-YAprovechamos la ocasión para anunciar el próximo encuentro del FcForum del 28 al 31 de octubre de 2010, en el que debatiremos y estableceremos propuestas concretas de Nuevos Modelos de Economía para artistas y para la sociedad civil.Contacto:info-5fTJ1hW4IQ3R7s880joybQ< at >public.gmane.orghttp://fcforum.netINTERNET NO SERÁ OTRA TV

http://committeetoprotectbloggers.org/2010/04/14/police-raid-anarchist-media-collective-3-days-before-nyc-film-festival/Police raid anarchist media collective 3 days before NYC film festival The Fourth Annual Anarchist Film Festival in being held on Friday April16th, 2010 in New York City. This year?s festival is being held to honorthe life and work of Brad Will, a film-maker and movement activistallegedly assassinated by the Mexican government in Oaxaca on October 27th,2006, as he was filming a popular uprising.On April 13th, according to a statement put out by members of theIndependent Anarchist Media (I AM) Collective:?in Brooklyn NY, the NYPD entered without a warrant 13 Thames Art Space, aBushwick based art and performance space where members of the IndependentAnarchist Media (I AM) Collective have been organizing the Fourth AnnualNYC Anarchist Film Festival in honor of Brad Will.Two plainclothes detectives entered first, followed quickly by a Lieutenantand vans full of blue shirt officers. After corralling everyone present inthe back room, they searched the space and detained two members of thecollective.The I AM collective was preparing for the NYC Anarchist Film Festival, ashowcase of resistance movements and insurrectionary events from around theworld presented from an anarchist and anti-authoritarian perspective.Our response to the raid: regardless of these attacks, the film festivalwill happen as planned on Friday April 16, 2010 at Judson Memorial Church.The voice of decentralized creative communities will not be silenced bypolice repression. They cannot raid us, because we are everywhere.Video of the police raid was posted on the Internet. Federal agents werealso reported to be present at the raid.

I’m currently showing performance documentation of Between Saying and Doing within the context of the exhibition Liminality: The Space Between Worlds at Antena (http://www.antenapilsen.com/current.html) in Chicago (RL) and in Second Life at I AM Columbia Island (http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/I%20AM%20Columbia/136/189/22 ). The show runs until Saturday the 1st of May so if you can try to pop along to one location or the other.The 'location' of the work in Second Life was yesterday (12/04/10) also the site of the second performance, On Exactitude of Similitude, in a series of Second Life performances dealing with ideas of the artist, identity and being and is now premiered and documented only within the Second Life part of the exhibition.What follows is an extract of the statement from the new performance:By positioning my Second Life avatar Garrett Lynch, a representation of my real life (RL) identity Garrett Lynch, in front of my own art work Between Saying and Doing (http://www.asquare.org/works/between-saying-and-doing ) in Second Life, itself a representation of my identity within a representation of a space, this performance continues to purposefully play on ideas of layering and framing between what is 'real' and what is 'virtual'.In addition to wearing the placard worn during the first performance, my avatar wears a head device with a video stream of my RL face in real time, as if attempting to become me. Visually similar to the type of helmet worn by a deep sea diver or an astronaut my avatar attempts to submerge in the unknown. Simultaneously we see both 'me's' through the helmets surface and on it's surface. Is my avatar simply wearing a mask of me or is this a natural reflection? Does my avatar see me as I see my avatar?This mixed representation of me is however not me, it is still unquestionably an avatar and not even forcibly a better/closer representation of me, just a different, reconfigured and perhaps more complex layered assemblage of that representation. A copy of an original, a simulation of the 'real' or a map of the territory, no matter how faithful remains a copy and discussion of the level of similitude is inconsequential. Yet how and with what measure do we and can we without a suggestion of doubt precisely determine and know which is the copy and which the original?a+gar_________________Garrett-Ys7B3onhOT1AfugRpC6u6w< at >public.gmane.orghttp://www.asquare.org/http://www.asquare.org/networkresearch/

Important to be clear that this is not *neighborhood* predictions, likeCrimespotting, which have problems of their own, but predictions aboutwhether a *person* will commit a crime.(http://gizmodo.com/5517231/crime-prediction-software-is-here-and-its-a-very-bad-idea)http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Florida-Department-of-bw-1587995596.html?x=0&.v=1CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SPSS, an IBM (NYSE: IBM) Company, todayannounced that the Florida State Department of Juvenile Justiceselected IBM predictive analytics software to reduce recidivism bydetermining which juveniles are likely to reoffend. Identified at-riskyouth can then be placed in programs specific to the best course oftreatment to ensure offenders do not re-enter the juvenile justicesystem. ...IBM recently also announced that the Ministry of Justice in theUnited Kingdom uses predictive analytics to assess the likelihoodof prisoners reoffending upon their release to help improve publicsafety. With predictive technology from IBM, the Ministry of Justiceis analyzing hidden trends and patterns within the data. IBM SPSSpredictive analytics has helped identify whether offenders withspecific problems such as drug and alcohol misuse are more likely toreoffend than other prisoners....Deepak Advani, vice president of predictive analytics at IBM, said,“Predictive analytics gives government organizations worldwide ahighly-sophisticated and intelligent source to create safer communities byidentifying, predicting, responding to and preventing criminal activities.It gives the criminal justice system the ability to draw upon the wealth ofdata available to detect patterns, make reliable projections and then takethe appropriate action in real time to combat crime and protect citizens.”

www.edu-factory.org***Madrid Countersummit Ended, The Struggle Goes On*Many people were in the students countersummit in Madrid, working hard toget things done these days. Now everything is over, but there are muchthings to be done. This is a short chronicle of what happened in the lastdays.[...]*Students Announce Occupation at the University of Puerto Rico*SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico ??? Students in the Faculty of Humanities and theFaculty of Social Sciences at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedrashave announced their plans to occupy both faculties on April 12th.[...]*Solidarity Appeal from Ukraine: Stop Repression of Student TradeUnion??? *A CALL FOR SOLIDARITY.[...]*DEFEND STUDENT ACTIVISM*In solidarity with the students facing sanctions for recent politicalactivities at UC Berkeley in defense of public education in California. Wecall for the UC Berkeley administration to drop all charges and disciplinaryactions against the students involved in the Architects and Engineeringbuilding sit-in on November 18, 2009, the November 20, 2009 Wheeler protest,those arrested in Wheeler Hall on the morning of December 11, 2009, and thestudents facing sanctions for flyering on campus.[...]--to subscribe the mailing list: edufactory-subscribe-FiNr9IKjHtuYWMdeRD7+nA< at >public.gmane.orgcontact us: info-rRqMck75DIy7Jn3c8fOrWw< at >public.gmane.org

April 19, 2010FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEDOW THROWS A DISMAL PARTY, FEW ATTENDUnderattended "Run for Water" plagued by death, zombies, and dozens of "Dow spokesmen"; truth seems to run freeVideo: Yes Men video coming soon here; other video hereStills: Yes Men pictures coming soon here; numerous others hereContact: Whitney Black (803)466-3786; press-7gEnqoIHJXSEi8DpZVb4nw< at >public.gmane.orgBrooklyn, NY -- Bucolic Prospect park in Brooklyn, NY played host to a bizarre spectacle on Sunday, as a dramatically under-attended Dow- sponsored "Run for Water" was infiltrated and turned upside down by hundreds of furious activists, including a hundred dressed as Dow spokespeople.New Yorkers who came to the park expecting a light run followed by a free concert found themselves unwitting extras in a macabre and chaotic scene as runners keeled over dead, Dow-branded grim reapers chased participants, and a hundred fake Dow representatives harangued other protesters and and handed out literature that explained Dow's greenwashing program in frank detail.The actions called attention to Dow's toxic legacy in places like India (the Bhopal Catastrophe), Vietnam (Agent Orange) and Midland Michigan (Dioxin Contamination), and to the absurdity of a company with serious water issues all over the world sponsoring the Live Earth Run For Water.After race cancellations in London, Milan, Berlin, and Sweden, on-site Dow brand managers were in damage-control mode. But their job was made harder by the hundred fake "Dow" spokespeople who loudly but clumsily proclaimed Dow's position ("Our race! Our earth!" and "Run for water! Run for your life!"), spoke with many runners, screamed at the other protesters, passed out beautifully-produced literature, and all in all looked a whole lot better than the real Dow reps, who seemed eager to make themselves scarce."I don't know what's going on here," said Tracey Von Sloop, a Queens woman who attended the race. "All I know is these people are both crazy, and Dow is f*ing sick. I'm outta here."The event was the latest blow to Dow's greenwashing efforts, the most visible element of which is the "Human Element" multi-media advertising campaign, one of the most expensive, and successful, marketing efforts in recent history. It even won an "Effie Award" for the most effective corporate advertising campaign in North America."Effective," perhaps -- but also completely misleading. To name just a few examples of Dow's water-related issues: Dow refuses to clean up the groundwater in Bhopal, India, site of the largest industrial disaster in human history, committed by Dow's fully-owned subsidiary, Union Carbide. As a result, children continue to be born there with debilitating birth defects. Dow has also dumped hundreds of millions of pounds of toxic chemical byproducts into wetlands of Louisiana, and has even poisoned its own backyard, leaving record levels of dioxins downriver from its global headquarters in Midland, Michigan."We thought it must be a joke when we first heard that Dow Chemical Company was sponsoring a run for clean water," said Yes Woman Whitney Black. "Sadly, it was not. One of the world's worst polluters trying to greenwash its image instead of taking responsibility for drinking water and ecosystems it has poisoned around the world? What an awfully unfunny way to start off Earth Week. We decided the event needed a little comic relief."Irony was piled on irony throughout the race, which Dow absurdly claimed was going to be "the largest solutions-based initiative aimed at solving the global water crisis in history. At one point, organizers were caught on tape dramatically throwing out excess water left over because of an embarrassingly low turnout.Groups organizing the action included the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, New York Whale and Dolphin Action League, the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign, the Wetlands Activism Collective, Global Justice for Animals and the Environment, Kids For A Better Future, The Yes Men, and hundreds of assorted volunteers, activists and mischief makers.

Overidentification and/or bust?Stevphen Shukaitis From Variant, issue 37, Spring / Summer 2010: http:// www.variant.org.ukIn 1987, Laibach, the musical wing of the Slovenian art collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (New Slovenian Art, or NSK), released a reworked version of the Queen song ‘One Vision’. Whereas the original 1985 Queen song was inspired by the group’s participation in Live Aid and espoused a seemingly somewhat vague leftist message of unity and world peace, it was vastly transformed in Laibach’s reworking. While lyrics about there being one race, vision and solution might easily be passed over as innocuous or not even taken notice of in the context provided by a Queen performance, the lyrics’ submerged obscene meaning becomes readily apparent as it is translated into German and played along in a droning, militaristic style. Laibach’s version of the song, far from being a cover or simple copy, through its transformation draws out and amplifies the grotesque parallels between the pleasures of pop culture and fascist modulation of crowd emotion through propaganda and epic scale theatricality. But why did Laibach do this; famous for always remaining in character, are they fascists or not? Laibach’s performances (as well as the work of the rest of the projects within the NSK) are premised on undercutting straightforward distinctions through the use of totalitarian aesthetics and a bastardisation of nationalist themes. Laibach and the NSK operate by displaying the imagery, the codes of fascism and state power, pushing it to its limit, recombining it with other elements, other traditions, forging connections that “expose the ‘hidden reverse’ of a regime or ideology”. Laibach are, and claim to be, fascists as much as Hitler was a painter.This approach of adopting a set of ideas, images, or politics and attacking them, not by a direct, open or straightforward critique, but rather through a rabid and obscenely exaggerated adoption of them, can be referred to as overidentification. While the concept was developed within the theoretical armory of Structuralist (Lacanian) psychoanalysis (and later further developed by thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek and various cultural and political activists), it was the NSK Collective that, through their work, forged it into a tool of cultural subversion and sabotage to be deployed within the ideologically charged context of post-Tito Yugoslavia. In this article, we examine the formation of overidentification as a strategy of cultural- political intervention uniquely formed from this context. Is overidentification useful as a strategy of political intervention for an age marked by the presence of cynical distance within cultural and social spheres? Or have the various phases of political and economic transition that have occurred since Laibach’s founding in the context of the Slovenian/ex-Yugoslavian punk movement rendered such methods of subversion and deconstruction ineffective? Or is it perhaps possible to refound a critical politics and strategy of intervention drawn from the work of Laibach and the NSK, transforming their methods and ideas to the conditions of the present?“The explanation is the whip and you bleed”– ‘Apologia Laibach’ (1987)Since its inception, the NSK expanded to include other activities including philosophy, planning, architecture, and many other aspects that are part of its now proclaimed status as a “global state in time”. In addition to the collective development of shared themes, the various collectives composing NSK emphasise the collaborative nature of the project, not crediting individual members for aspects of the work and frequently changing the composition of the members involved in any given production. As a musical project, Laibach is mainly associated with forms of industrial music (as well as neoclassical and martial styles), evolving from a very harsh and abrasive sound during the early recordings through to one at times involving multiple layers of electronics, heavy metal, compositions arranged in the form of national anthems, and most recently interpreting a series of Bach’s fugues. But Laibach, and the NSK more generally, have achieved prominence, notoriety, and infamy perhaps less so for their particular aesthetic as much as the historical meanings and recontextualisations of the various properties of state ideology used in their performances and productions. ‘Laibach’ itself, for instance, is the German name still associated as the one used during the fascist occupation of Ljubljana.The work of Laibach and the NSK frequently draws upon the aesthetics of totalitarian and nationalist movements, forging a kind of totalitarian kitsch by fusing together elements from varying and completely incongruent political philosophies. For instance, the NSK logo is a combination of Laibach’s cross logo (borrowed from Russian supremacist artist Kasimir Malevich and used as its primary public reference point during the years when using the name Laibach was banned in Yugoslavia), John Heartfield’s anti-fascist axe swastika, an industrial cog, and a pair of antlers (with the base of the design featuring the names of the founding collectives). Even in this small example one can see an ambiguous and strange merging of elements; the way that the anti-fascist emblem becomes transformed within a composition where the relation of the elements to each other changes the meaning contained within each of them.Laibach/NSK’s usage of historical, political, and aesthetic readymades render audible their submerged and hidden codes and contexts that directed the modes of representation, or what Žižek refers to as the hidden underside of systems and regimes. This approach to the use of borrowed historical and political elements forms the basis of what Laibach/NSK refer to as retrogardism, or the formation of the monumental Retro-Avant-Garde. The basic idea of this being the non-repression of troubling or undesirable elements of historical and social regimes in their work. Rather than repressing them, they are highlighted, as they argue that the traumas affecting the present and the future can only be addressed by tracing them back to and through their sources, working through and processing them. As Alexei Monroe argues in his excellent analysis of their work, it is not an approach based on constructing a new future by negating the past (which in general is the usual relation to time found within avant-garde artistic practice), but rather “retrogardism attempts to free the present and change the future via the reworking of past utopianisms and historical wounds”. The impact and effect of Laibach/ NSK’s work is based on the effects produced by the disjunctive synthesis of troubling historical elements and the radical ambivalence contained within this.As has been argued by Žižek and others, socialist democracy was sustained by a set of implicit (obscene) injunctions and prohibitions and a process of socialising people into taking certain explicitly expressed norms. Tactics of overidentification, as employed by Laibach and the NSK – as well as more broadly within the Slovenia punk subculture of the 1980s that gave birth to the genre of “state rock”, or punk music incorporating elements of the discourse of self- managed socialism as critique through overidentification – work precisely by taking the stated norms of a given system or arrangement of power more seriously than the system that proclaims them itself. This operation occurs not through addressing the law itself, per se, or by breaking prohibitions (a more straightforward form of transgression), but rather by teasing out the obscene subtext that underpins the operation of the law and supporting social norms. A strategy of overidentification in order to be effective needs to appear total, and through that it “transcends and reactivates the terror of the social field… the spectral menace of totality gives the phenomenon sufficient ‘credibility’ to sow doubt and disquiet”. And this is precisely how Laibach/NSK’s works function, through giving an impression of totality (by claiming the status of the nation, or the state, or of being a global state in itself) in a manner that lends a degree of credibility to the menacing and disconcerting nature of their aesthetic production.As Susan Buck-Morris explores in her work on transitions within collective imaginaries, dreamworlds become dangerous when they are used instrumentally by structures of power, which is to say as legitimation devices and discourses. Buck-Morris argues that socialism failed because it mimicked capitalism too faithfully. Laibach and the NSK operate by turning this process of mimicry against itself, disarticulating the potency of the dreamworld and utopian promise of Communism that had become embedded within a discourse of legitimation, mixed with the lingering presence of totalitarian and authoritarian elements. Indeed, it is often that the constituted forms of power existing with state structures are based upon the ability to draw from the energies and constituent power of social movements, of utopian dreamworlds, and render them into zombified forms of state. NSK/ Laibach’s interventions were so powerful within the Yugoslav context precisely because of how they amplified and made visible this process of rendering dreamworlds into discourses of state legitimation. The interventions’ disconcerting effects provided ways of working through both the continued presence of authoritarianism and utopian energies, revealing how they are enmeshed in the workings of existing social imaginaries and political discourses.Laibach’s work incorporates a good deal of official Yugoslav discourse on self-management and social democracy, using at times sections of Tito’s speeches and audio recordings, as well as particularly resonant forms of Slovenian history (such as the images and phrases of the anti-fascist partisans, which were quite important for the role they played in state legitimation). It is this reworking of Slovenian and Yugoslav history that invested their early works with such potency, through the way these familiar ideas were made strange and even uncomfortable to audiences through their compounding and juxtaposition with other elements (for instance by fusing them together with ultra-vцlkisch imagery and Germanic phrasing, which was taken to be anathema to nationalist groups). Laibach’s response to this, particularly in relation to the continued controversy over its use of a name which was said to dishonor the ‘hero city’ of Ljubljana, was to continue to adopt a stance of complete identification with Slovenia and Slovene identity, and thus to frame controversy and rejection of Laibach as the rejection of Slovenia itself. This created a form of ambivalent identification in which Laibach both bastardised (in their critics’ views) Slovene identity while at the same time engaging in a quite militant assertion of that very Slovene identity (at points even declaring the German to be a subset of the Slovene). Through the politics and practices of overidentification, Laibach and the NSK hint towards the possibility of breaking the very process of identification, and this is why they were so disconcerting for many political actors in Slovenia in the 1980s.Laibach/NSK’s politics and practices of overidentification are displayed in unique and quite fascinating ways in their organisational practices, or at least the claims they have made about them. This shows through in their alleged structure offered by the NSK organigram from 1986, which takes the logic of alternative forms of institutionalisation to an almost absurd extreme. In the organigram, at least ten different departments in addition to a number of assemblies, councils, and organs, are all paired with or ruled over by the statement of “immanent consistent spirit” that covers and directs all the activity of NSK. This claiming of and overidentification with overly complex, arcane, and nearly incomprehensible state-like structures was observed by the ‘Rough Guide to Yugoslavia’ to bear a striking resemblance to the diagrams used within school textbooks to explains the country’s bafflingly complex political system and structures. It is through this that the spectral menace of totality is activated, for in the case of the NSK it clearly is spectral because the NSK is composed of many more organisational components than it has ever possessed as members. This becomes more so in the case of projects such as the ‘State in Time’, in which the claiming of a state structure existing purely in time is enacted through overidentification with the organisational form and structure of states. In all of Laibach and NSK’s work there is never a clear-cut statement on organisation but rather an exploration of its ambivalences and possibilities; this is an approach that “does not support a utopian or dystopian organisation, but the fantasies of audiences that need to imagine that such possibilities still exist”.The first phase of Laibach’s work is based around the usage and working through of elements and histories that are particularly resonant and provocative within a Yugoslav, and specifically Slovenian context, but often have little to no meaning outside of it. This perhaps comes to its highest point of concentration in the 1986 NSK joint production Krst pod Triglavorn (Baptism Under Triglav), which was a monumental drama roughly based around the history of the forced Christianisation of the Slovenes, interspersed in NSK fashion within many other layers of history and processed through the imagery of the avant-garde (for instance the recreation of Vladimir Tatlin’s proposed monument to the Third International as part of the set design). This production, which took place in a large state-sponsored theater, is interesting not just for the merits of its internal aesthetics, but also in how it illustrates the changing status of Laibach and the NSK within their social context (particularly given the greater importance of state-backing and commissions within socialist systems). That is to say that it marks the transition of Laibach/NSK’s work from its emergence within alternative and subcultural milieus to an acceptance, even if tentative and grudging, by state authorities. It characterises what Monroe refers to as the “Laibachization of Ljubljana”, or the process of confronting and reworking cultural boundaries and norms that occurred during the 1980s; from the point of the banning of Laibach appearing under its chosen name, to their international success with which Laibach’s fanatical identification with Slovenia came to be realised in their being recognised as the most successful of Slovenia artists.Laibach’s rise to prominence in the international mass media occurred at a point in time where attempts were being made to shift the image of Yugoslavia closer to one of a western ‘humanist’ democracy. Laibach’s presentation of itself in terms of a cold neo-totalitarian front (although admittedly one that had softened its self-presentation somewhat from its earliest works, adopting more of a playful approach in some ways) functioned both to invoke forms of authoritarian legacies and images that the Yugoslav government wanted to reject, while at the same time becoming the most prominent and aggressive assertion of Yugoslav (and particularly Slovene) culture on a global stage (although the fusion of Germanic elements within Laibach’s aesthetic meant that they were often taken to be German by casual music fans, even more so during the 1990s with the rising popularity of German industrial bands). Laibach’s success showed that it was “actively connected to the zeitgeist, but specifically to those subterranean, unforeseen elements repressed by mainstream consciousness”, specifically the lingering presence of authoritarian, totalitarian, fascistic elements and militarism in the self-management system itself.If the early phase of Laibach’s work was oriented around interventions which drew heavily upon local histories and references that only resonated within that context, then it shifted to one much more oriented to broader audiences reaching beyond the local or regional context and operating within global cultural and imaginary flows. It is this logic that underlies Laibach’s reinterpretation of the Queen song, as well as all the other covers and reinterpretations that Laibach have engaged in, such as their versions of the work of the Beatles (1989), Europe (1994), Opus (1987), and more recently Laibach, extending the ‘global state in time’ project, have taken to reinterpreting the form of the national anthem itself (2006). In their reinterpretation and reworking of ‘One Vision’, Laibach are not attributing any particular political agenda to Queen per se, but, rather, are engaged in a process of amplifying the ambivalences and tensions that are already contained within Queen’s performance. It is not that Laibach brings a fascist aesthetic to bear on it, but that there is a similarity and underlying dynamic between totalitarian mass mobilisation and capitalist mass consumption. Laibach present this strangeness back to an audience as a reflection and fracturing of the structures and imaginaries through which that crowd has been constructed and constructs itself.Laibach’s reworking and transformation of other artists’ materials render it into, seemingly, almost totally different compositions in terms of their feel and nature through relatively minor changes in tone, orchestration, and lyrics. This approach is somewhat along the lines of what Deleuze and Guattari discuss as the formation of a minor literature, one based not on the development of a new representative form of language but, rather, working within the existing major languages and turning them against themselves to create strange new forms. Laibach and the NSK’s artistic productions, as they take part and intervene in the Yugoslav and regional social political context (and beyond that), create the basis for the formation of what could be described as a minor politics and the minor composition of social movement. Laibach’s reworking and fusing together of widely differing pre-given aesthetic and ideological elements, sources they treat as readymades be to transformed through recombination, can be understood as a particular form of what the Situtaionist International referred to as dйtournement. Détournement, or, literally translated, “embezzling”, involves the combination of pre-existing aesthetic elements and ideas. But while détournement has often been understood in a rather watered down way in terms of forms of culture jamming based on witty recombination and mixing of elements that work based on a fairly easily recuperable form of critique (for instance Adbusters), the work of Laibach and the NSK is much harder to make palatable. Most détournement-based culture jamming relies upon maintaining a kind of critical distance from the elements used, while Laibach’s work functions through a total and fanatical identification with obscene subtexts of the elements they employ. In this sense, Laibach return to a much deeper sense of détournement as the fundamental questioning of worth and communicability in any system of meaning, and the developing of tactics for monkeywrenching the fundamental structures of the production of meaning. Laibach’s amalgamations of ideas, images, and politics does not simply recombine them, but acts to transform the potential of the elements used to create meaning in relation to each other, and through that acts as a form of semiotic sabotage in the public sphere, at times critically damaging the ability of these symbols to operate.Strategies of Overidentification“He who has material power, has spiritual power, and all art is subject to political manipulation, except that which speaks the language of this same manipulation.” – Laibach, 1982But let us consider the role and practice of overidentification in a broader scope. Overidentification as a practice of political intervention might indeed function as the unifying nodal point of a Lacanian left, if indeed such a thing actually existed. Since that period of Laibach’s rise to international attention in the late 1980s, this approach to cultural intervention has been adopted more broadly within political organising, and can be identified in the activities of groups such as the Yes Men, Christoph Schlingensief, Reverend Billy, the Billionaires for Bush, and many others. The argument for such strategies is that in the current functioning of capitalism, the critical function of governance is to be more critical than the critics of governance itself. Functionaries in a system of power, by presenting themselves as their worst critic, thus deprive critique of its ammunition and substance, thereby turning the tables on it. This is to go beyond both the arguments put forward by Boltanski and Chiapello; that critique has been subsumed within capitalism and that, within autonomist politics, reactive forms of social resistance and insurgency still remain a driving motor of capitalist development. This hints at the possibility that strategies for the neutralisation of the energies of social insurgency are anticipated even before they emerge. It is in this context that a strategy of overidentification is argued to be of particular value, throwing a monkeywrench in the expected binaries of opposition and response.The most worked-out conceptualisation of overidentification as a strategy of intervention has been articulated by BAVO, an independent research project focused on the political dimensions of art and architecture, primarily based on co-operation between Gideon Boie and Matthias Pauwels. Although their take on these matters is far ranging (as can be seen by the varied contributions they gathered together for their edited collection Cultural Activism Today), there are a few key points that illustrate well their take on overidentification. First, that we live in post-political times where it is possible for artists and political actors to say anything, but what is said does not matter. Today, it is argued, artists are expected, and even demanded, to play something of a critical function, as long as one does not go too far in that function. In other words, so far as to question the fundamental ideological co-ordinates underpinning social relations, as by doing so “one is immediately disqualified as a legitimate discussion partner, treated like an incompetent, ignorant imbecile who stepped out of line and should better stick to his own field of experience”. From this BAVO argue, following Karl Kraus, that when forced between two evils, one should take the worst option. That is, to abandon the role of pragmatic idealists and to work to force an arrangement of contradictions to their logical end. In their words:“Instead of fleeing from the suffocating closure of the system, one is now incited to fully immerse oneself in it, even contributing to the closure. To choose the worst option, in other words, means no longer trying to make the best of the current order, but precisely to make the worst of it, to turn it into the worst possible version of itself. It would thus entail a refusal of the current blackmail in which artists are offered all kinds of opportunities to make a difference, on the condition that they give up on their desire for radical change.”BAVO adopts such an approach as they argue that other possible strategies, such as working on the grounds of marginal positions or creating forms of exodus, have already been anticipated and accommodated by systems of capitalist governance, and are therefore no longer useful as disruptive strategies. It is within this context that the work of groups such as the Yes Men becomes more interesting, precisely because, rather than putting forth forms of critique that can easily be brushed aside, their tactics of fanatically identifying with the neoliberal agenda thus pushes them further along to obscene yet logical developments of such ideologies. This is the stance Laibach and the NSK employed, one based not on critical distance but erasure of such distance. And it is through this erasure of distance that the Yes Men’s opponents are thrown off guard, precisely because, as BAVO describe it, this form of intervention forces such opponents to betray their articles of faith and passionate attachment to a neoliberal agenda just as its obscene subtext is made clear, and thus “makes it [in this case, the WTO] – rather than its critics – appear weak”.BAVO summarise the most salient features of a strategy of overidentification as being based on these elements:1. Owes its effectiveness to sabotaging dialectics of alarm and reassurance, drawing out the extreme and obscene subtext of a social system, eliminating the subject’s reflex to make excuses for the current order to inventing new ways to manage it better.2. Quickly shifts between different positions, overstating, mocking critique, and producing internal contradictions and points of tension that cannot hold together.3. Sabotages easy interpretations of unproblematic identification either with or against the intervention, making it difficult to be recuperated in any direction.4. Aimed precisely against the reflex to do the right thing.5. Creates a suffocating closure within a system of meaning or relations, preventing escapes from the immanent laws and relations of that system.A strategy of overidentification thus provides one possible antidote to what Peter Sloterdijk refers to as “cynical reason”, or a condition where people know that there is something fundamentally wrong but continue to act as if this is not the case. It is this cynical distance that Jeffrey Goldfarb diagnosed as so prevalent in the US, creating a sort of “legitimation through disbelief,” although one could easily argue that this is much more widespread and just the condition that a strategy of overidentification aims to address and intervene within. One can certainly contest the desirability and effectiveness of such an approach, and such strategies have and continue to create a great deal of debate within political, artistic, and academic circles. Nevertheless, even if the conclusion is eventually reached that such is not an acceptable choice of interventionist strategy in most cases, it nonetheless seems valuable to learn from, especially in making a transition out of a time frame or frame of mind that is paralysed to find any method of intervention because all strategies are already caught in varying webs of power and therefore argued to be compromised. A strategy of overidentification operates precisely by turning this already- caughtness into an advantage by deploying and redirecting energies of capture and constituted power against themselves.Žižek, in an essay on Laibach and the NSK, comments that the reactions of the left to them has first been to take their work as an ironic satire of totalitarian rituals, followed by an uneasy feeling based on not knowing whether they really mean it or not. This is usually followed by varying iterations along these lines, wondering if they really do mean it, or whether they overestimate the public’s ability to interpret their multiple layers of allusion and reference and thus end up reinforcing totalitarian currents. For Žižek these are the wrong questions to ask and angle to take. Instead, it is a question of how Laibach and the NSK, as well a strategy of overidentification, more broadly intervene in a social context marked by cynical distance. From this perspective Žižek asks:“What if this distance, far from posing any threat to the system, designates the supreme form of conformism, since the normal function of the system requires cynical distance? In this sense the strategy of Laibach appears in a new light: it ‘frustrates’ the system (the ruling ideology) precisely insofar as it is not its ironic imitation, but overidentification with it – by bringing to light the obscene superego underside of the system, overidentification suspends its efficiency.”But the question remains to what degree a strategy of overidentification is marked by the conditions that led to its emergence? If overidentification was effective in its ability to disrupt circuits of meaning and the social imaginary within a particular social and historical context, it does not necessarily follow that it will operate similarly in other, possibly significantly different situations. Might then a transition within the imaginary of a politics formed around aesthetic interventions premised upon overidentification be necessary? This is perhaps what one sees in the development of Laibach’s work, which moves from operating as a disruptive mechanism in and against the Yugoslavian national imaginary during the 1980s, but then changes direction following the disintegration of the country. For instance, during the 1990s the NSK launched its ’State in Time‘ project, where it claims to have created a global state and system of governance that is not based in physical space but only in time. This is at one and the same time a movement away from a strategy of disruption of one imaginary, towards a new form of imaginary disarticulation, and can in some ways be seen more to be based on a nostalgic identification with the state form that has been torn apart than an act of overidentification. In other words, it had become possible for Laibach and the NSK to mutate away from disarticulating the Yugoslav imaginary through overidentification and to begin a more positive assessment of the state dynamics it had fused itself too. This is perhaps not so surprising when one takes into account Sharon Zukin’s argument that it is only really possible to fully aestheticise a system or relations of production once it has passed its moment as the hegemonic form of production.The question of transition and intervention within the social imaginary is transformed if one engages an argument such as the one made by Guy Debord, that rather than there existing a sharp and total distinction between Western capitalism and Communism in Eastern Europe, it was, instead, a question of the difference between the workings of a diffuse and a concentrated spectacle. In other words, not of totally different forms but rather of particular compositions of a similar underlying dynamic of power and exploitation. The question then becomes of how a strategy of overidentification either creates or restrains the possibility of intervening within the creation of collective imaginaries within the present. One can perhaps stumble towards the position that overidentification provides another tool in the conceptual toolbox for refounding and reformulating critique. It provides a possible answer to the dynamics analysed by Peter Starr in his exploration of the failed revolt in post-68 political thought. Starr argues that modern revolutionary thought is premised upon radical breaks and departures from the past, one that suppresses previous notions of return and reappearance of social forms. And it is this dynamic of reappearance that gives way to fanatical obsessions with a dynamics of recuperation, as they run counter to the narrative structure of revolutionary politics. Starr argues that the ultimate direction laid out in post-68 thought moves toward a notion of, impossible, total revolution, and thus, failing there, moves towards forms of cultural politics based on subtle subversion. A strategy of overidentification, as well as of the Retro- Avant-Garde, working through the remaining utopian energies and the traumas of the past rather than repressing them, opens up other avenues for reformulating critique and intervention. A strategy of overidentification enacts a transition away from considering the dynamics of recuperation as problems to be avoided, to considering them as possibilities to be exploited and worked through, in, and against; but only against by working in them rather than seeking escape by recourse to an unproblematic outside. It is at this juncture where the question of transition is transformed into one of composition and recomposition, working from within the disarticulation and re-articulation of collective imaginaries.NOTES1. Laibach is a Slovenian avant-garde musical performance group that was founded in 1980. They were one of the founding members of Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) in 1984, along with IRWIN (painting) and Scipion Nasice Sisters Theater (subsequently changed their name to Noordung). Although this article focuses primarily on Laibach’s work, motifs, ideas, and images are frequently shared, developed, and elaborated by the various branches of the NSK, whether independently or as part of joint ventures.2. For a good analysis of fascist aesthetics in relation to the avant- garde, see: Hewitt, A. (1993) Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde. Stanford: Stanford University Press.3. The NSK TIMES. The blog of NSKSTATE.COM4. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, (1984). Kundera wrote, "Whenever a single political movement corners power we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch." For Kundera, "Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch."5. For more on Laibach and NSK’s work in relation to this history and development of the avant-garde, see: Djuric, D. and M. Suvakovic, Eds. (2003) Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-gardes, Neo-avant- gardes, and Post-avant-gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918 – 1991. Cambridge: MIT University Press; IRWIN, Eds. (2006) East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe. Cambridge: MIT University Press.; Badovinac, Zdenka, Ed. (1999) Body and the East: From the 1960s to Present. Cambridge: MIT University Press.6. Monroe, A. (2005) Interrogation Machine: Laibach and the NSK. Cambridge: MIT Press. (p.120).7. One can see a parallel between the development of state rock in Yugoslavia (bands such as O! Kult and Panktri) and developments in the British post-punk scene, such as Public Image Limited claiming to be a communications and production company, or artists moving towards an adoption and overidentification with yuppie aspirations as technique of critiquing them. A number of artists, particularly Joy Division, Human League, and Magazine, drew from state socialist and totalitarian imagery their work, employing a tactic creating ambivalent effects, although perhaps nowhere nearly as disconcerting at Laibach and the NSK’s work. Reynolds, S. (2005) Rip It Up and Start Again. Post-punk 1978-1984. London: Faber and Faber.8. Monroe, A. (2005) Interrogation Machine: Laibach and the NSK. Cambridge: MIT Press. (p.79).9. Dreamworld and Catastrophe (MIT, 2000), Susan Buck-Morris10. Shukaitis, S. (2007) “Plan 9 from the Capitalist Workplace: Insurgency, Originary Accumulation, Rupture” (2007) Situations: A Project of the Radical Imagination Volume 2 Number 2: 95-116.11. There is a wide-ranging field of literature on politics and practices of identification, identity, and the politics of organization. For a good overview see Pullen, A. and S. Linstead, Eds. (2005) Organization and Identity. London: Routledge.. For an exploration of the politics of disidentities, see Harney, S. and N.Q. Nyathi (2007) “Disidentity,” Exploring Identity: Concepts and Methods. Ed. Alison Pullen, Nic Beach, and David Sims. London: Palgrave: 185-197.12. Dunford, M., et al, Eds. (1990) Yugoslavia: The Rough Guide. London: Harrap Columbus. (p244)13. Monroe, A. (2005) Interrogation Machine: Laibach and the NSK. Cambridge: MIT Press. (p113)14. Monroe, A. (2005) Interrogation Machine: Laibach and the NSK. Cambridge: MIT Press. (p155)15. Monroe, A. (2005) Interrogation Machine: Laibach and the NSK. Cambridge: MIT Press. (p75)16. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1986) Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.17. Thoburn, N. (2003) Deleuze, Marx, and Politics. London: Routledge.18. Shukaitis, S. (2008) “Dancing Amidst the Flames: Imagination and Self-Organization in a Minor Key” Organization Volume 15 Number 5: 743-764.19. Djuric, D. and M. Suvakovic, Eds. (2003) Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-gardes, Neo-avant-gardes, and Post-avant-gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918 – 1991. Cambridge: MIT University Press. (p574)20. Stavrakakis, Y. (2007) The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.21. Cederström, C. (2007) “The Lacanian Left Does Not Exist,” ephemera: theory & politics in organization 7(4): 609-614.22. Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello (2005) The New Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Gregory Elliot. London: Verso.23. For more information on BAVO, see http://www.bavo.biz.24. BAVO, Gideon Boie, Matthias Pauwels. Eds. (2007) Cultural Activism Today. The Art of Over-Identification. Rotterdam: Episode Publishers. (p19)25. BAVO, Gideon Boie, Matthias Pauwels. Eds. (2007) Cultural Activism Today. The Art of Over-Identification. Rotterdam: Episode Publishers. (P28)26. BAVO, Gideon Boie, Matthias Pauwels. Eds. (2007) Cultural Activism Today. The Art of Over-Identification. Rotterdam: Episode Publishers.(p29)27. BAVO, Gideon Boie, Matthias Pauwels. Eds. (2007) Cultural Activism Today. The Art of Over-Identification. Rotterdam: Episode Publishers. (p30)28. BAVO, Gideon Boie, Matthias Pauwels. Eds. (2007) Cultural Activism Today. The Art of Over-Identification. Rotterdam: Episode Publishers. (pp32-37)29. Sloterdijk, P. (1998) Critique of Cynical Reason. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.30. Goldfarb, J. (1991) The Cynical Society: The Culture of Politics and the Politics of Culture in American Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.31. Zizek has taken a keen interest in the activities of Laibach/NSK writing several papers, including: 'Why Laibach and NSK are not Fascists?' and 'The Enlightenment in Laibach'.32. Zizek, Slavoj (1993) “Why are the NSK and Laibach Not Fascists?” M’ARS Volume 3/4. Available at www.nskstate.com. Ljubljana: Moderna Galerija.33. Zukin, S. (1989) Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.34. Debord, G. (1998) Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. London: Verso. Starr, P. (1995) Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May ’68. Stanford: Stanford University Press.# 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: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime< at >kein.org

www.edu-factory.org***Bologna Calls Against BolognaProcess*<http://www.edu-factory.org/edu15/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=322:bologna-calls-against-bologna-process&catid=37:meetings&Itemid=55>Connecting transnational struggles, building alternative universities:Bologna transnational meeting on May 6 and 7 2010.[...]*Madrid Countersummit Ended, The Struggle Goes On*Many people were in the students countersummit in Madrid, working hard toget things done these days. Now everything is over, but there are muchthings to be done. This is a short chronicle of what happened in the lastdays.[...]*Students Announce Occupation at the University of Puerto Rico*SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico ??? Students in the Faculty of Humanities and theFaculty of Social Sciences at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedrashave announced their plans to occupy both faculties on April 12th.[...]*Solidarity Appeal from Ukraine: Stop Repression of Student TradeUnion??? *A CALL FOR SOLIDARITY.[...]*DEFEND STUDENT ACTIVISM*In solidarity with the students facing sanctions for recent politicalactivities at UC Berkeley in defense of public education in California. Wecall for the UC Berkeley administration to drop all charges and disciplinaryactions against the students involved in the Architects and Engineeringbuilding sit-in on November 18, 2009, the November 20, 2009 Wheeler protest,those arrested in Wheeler Hall on the morning of December 11, 2009, and thestudents facing sanctions for flyering on campus.[...]*Britain: The Disgrace of the Universities*British universities face a crisis of the mind and spirit. For thirty years,Tory and Labour politicians, bureaucrats, and ???managers??? have hacked at thetraditional foundations of academic life. Unless policies and practiceschange soon, the damage will be impossible to remedy.[...]--to subscribe the mailing list: edufactory-subscribe-FiNr9IKjHtuYWMdeRD7+nA< at >public.gmane.orgcontact us: info-rRqMck75DIy7Jn3c8fOrWw< at >public.gmane.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----Hash: SHA256FYI - this is all very relevant, considering the financial crisis, thenature of the Bilsky suggests the urgence to leave doors open to newmodels http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_re_Bilskihopefully Europe won't be so stupid give up to such a patent system.We should fight this absurdity so that it doesn't happens anywhere -and while we are busy with that, it looks like there is a brightfuture for the BRICO countries eh...- ----- Forwarded message -----New documentary film "Patent Absurdity" is set to expose how thejudicial activism that led to the patenting of software has broken theUS patent system's promise of promoting the progress of science anduseful artshttp://www.fsf.org/news/new-documentary-film-patent-absurdityBOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- Monday, April 19th, 2010 -- The FreeSoftware Foundation (FSF) today announced the online release of thedocumentary film "Patent Absurdity: how software patents broke thesystem" by independent filmmaker Luca Lucarini.http://patentabsurdity.com/The film, funded with a grant from the FSF, explores the case ofsoftware patents, the history of judicial activism that led to theirrise, and the harm being done to software developers and the widereconomy. The film is based on a series of interviews conducted duringthe Supreme Court's review of *in re Bilski*, a case that could haveprofound implications for the patenting of software."The *Bilski* case before the Supreme Court is really the story of thejudicial activism of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, whoduring the 80s and 90s became dominated by patent lawyers who wantedan expansive reading of patent law. They opened the floodgates to thepatenting of software ideas and business methods, previously held bythe Supreme Court to be unpatentable subject matter. The price of thatactivism is being paid by today's programmers, who find itincreasingly difficult to write software without risking being sued,and by businesses who have to face increased litigation and legalfees. Software patents block compatibility and standards, makeprogrammers remove useful features, and are the cause of unknownamounts of frustration in the daily life of many individuals," saidCiaran O'Riordan, the director of the End Software Patents campaign,and a technical adviser to the filmmakers.Dr. Robert Shafer, associate professor of medicine at StanfordUniversity, who created a free, publicly available HIV Drug ResistanceDatabase to interpret HIV drug resistance tests and develop new HIVdrugs (located at http://hivdb.stanford.edu/), described the film inlight of the way software patents have hampered his work: "I'm glad tosee a film that can explain the harm of software patents. I'm alsolooking forward to a favorable outcome in the *Bilski* case. However,biomedical researchers, medical care providers, and their patientscannot afford to wait the many years it will take before any SupremeCourt decision has a practical effect on existing patents. There is ahardcore group of special interests who profit from the system the wayit is now -- the Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit, patentexaminers who essentially receive credit for their work only when theyissue or uphold patents, and the patent bar which benefits fromcross-licensing and patent litigation regardless of how ridiculous apatent is. One of the saddest aspects of my experience has been tolearn that the influence of the patent bar is expanding rapidly withinuniversities through their offices of technology licensing."Featured interviewees in the film include economists Ben Klemens andJames Bessen, and legal scholars Dan Ravicher, Eben Moglen and KarenSandler. The film also includes footage of the press conference at theSupreme Court organized on behalf of plaintiffs Bernard Bilski andRand Warsaw, and their lawyer J. Michael Jakes.Speaking about the release of the film, Luca Lucarini said, "I hopethat my film can bring to light the harm that the US patent system isinflicting on our society through software patents. The goal of thedocumentary is to increase the number of informed citizens educated totake action, and so it has been licensed to allow everyone to shareand distribute copies of the film.""Patent Absurdity" is available under the Creative Commons BY-ND(Attribution-No Derivative Works) license, which encourages sharingand widespread redistribution by all who receive a copy. The film wasmade entirely with free software, in the Ogg Theora format.Because anyone can show the film, the web site is compiling a list ofscreenings, including a premiere at the Connecticut Film Festivalhttp://www.ctfilmfest.com.Highlighted Early Reviews:"...probably the best introduction to a complex area for non-technicalusers" --Glyn Moody, ComputerWorld"It’s well worth watching, both for the opportunity to see so many ofthe people who are influential in software freedom philosophy and lawand for the great explanations of the issues around the *Bilski* caseand the mission creep which has led to software patents. Share it withfriends, as this issue is only going to get more important as theAnti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) promotes criminalization ofpatent infringement." --Simon Phipps, board member of Open Source forAmerica and the Open Source Initiative"It's a 30-minute movie, mostly of interviews. There's a greatBeethoven symphony at the end that starts to degrade as music patentsspring up... In short, it's priceless." --Pamela Jones, GroklawAbout the Free Software FoundationThe Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated topromoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, andredistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development anduse of free (as in freedom) software — particularly the GNU operatingsystem and its GNU/Linux variants — and free documentation for freesoftware. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical andpolitical issues of freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites,located at fsf.org and gnu.org, are an important source of informationabout GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's work can be made athttp://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.About Free Software and Open SourceThe free software movement's goal is freedom for computer users. Some,especially corporations, advocate a different viewpoint, known as"open source," which cites only practical goals such as makingsoftware powerful and reliable, focuses on development models, andavoids discussion of ethics and freedom. These two viewpoints aredifferent at the deepest level. For more explanation, seehttp://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html.Media ContactsPeter BrownExecutive DirectorFree Software Foundation+1 (617) 319 5832<campaigns< at >fsf.org>info-fsf mailing listinfo-fsf< at >gnu.orgUnsubscribe: http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-fsf- ----- End forwarded message ----------BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)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f50n-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----# 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: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime< at >kein.org

original to:http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/apr/18/heather-brooke-uk-secret-stateAleks KrotoskiThe Observer, Sunday 18 April 2010Heather Brooke: 'Let's end the UK's culture of secrecy'The journalist and freedom of information campaigner wants us all to usetechnology to challenge the powerfulHeather Brooke is an award-winning investigative journalist whose researchinto MPs dominated the headlines in 2009. Facing numerous politicalobstacles, Brooke, using the Freedom of Information Act, tenaciouslypieced together the accounts of receipts and credit slips detailing MPs'claims for "additional costs allowances" – from soft furnishings to theinfamous floating duck island – that cost many of them their jobs andwhich has transformed the parties' election agendas.Her investigation not only exposed abuses of the political system, butalso highlighted secrets of information control and censorship that lie atthe heart of a UK government that has operated for years withoutsufficient public scrutiny. Brooke describes the five years of research,hearings and appeals in a new book, The Silent State, and here explainshow access to technology has transformed what the public expects of peoplein power..........................................................................What inspired you to look into the issue of MPs' additional costs allowance?There were hundreds of institutions I was pursuing when I was writing myfirst book, Your Right to Know. It just happened that Parliament proved tobe the most unhelpful, truculent and obstructive. For an investigativejournalist, that's a siren call that something is worth paying attentionto. MPs' attitudes showed that they were willing to expend a lot of energykeeping secrets. I fired off a Freedom of Information (FoI) request. Ifthey had been helpful and had treated me, as a member of the public, assomeone with equality, I would have given them an easy ride. But they wereelitist, arrogant and didn't have much sense of accountability to thepublic, the people paying them to do their jobs.What happened then?It went on for five years, starting with the information commissioner andthen moving to the information tribunal. Each time I won, but the Commonsappealed. I would then cross-appeal and that's how we ended up in the highcourt, where I finally won.Why did it take so long, when the act gives the public the right topublic-sector information?There are exemptions to the FoI act; there are 25 reasons why officialscan refuse to give out information and some of them are really vague. It'salso not properly enforced: information officials are starved of cash sothey can't do their jobs as they want to. There's also a lack of boldnessabout challenging authority. When we had the FoI request to disclose theIraq war memo [the so-called "sexed-up" dossier], it took ages to beresolved. Finally, it was agreed that it should be disclosed, but thenministers vetoed that decision and it was kept secret. There's still asense that power knows best and those in power are better placed to tellus what to do. That's the attitude I want to challenge. These people don'talways know what's best for us; we know what's best for us.What did your investigation expose about the UK system compared to othercountries?There is a very intense culture of secrecy in Britain that hasn't yet beendismantled. What passes for transparency here would serve any secretsociety well. There's a paranoia about the public knowing anything, eveninnocuous things like restaurant inspections. There are all these foodsafety inspectors who go around, paid for by the public, and yet I can'tsee the results of this. What an odd country where simple things arehidden away as if they'll destabilise the country!Governments have always kept information confidential. Why does the publicnow feel it has the right to know?People now have a greater awareness of how other countries treat theircitizens. They have different expectations for how public officials shouldreact to them. They use the web and can shop around, but then they go intoa public service and it's: "You get what you're given." People don't wantthat any more. They want to know the reasons behind decisions. They canalso join forces through the internet, making them more powerful becausethey can become a lobbying group and put pressure on politicians.China and Iran are criticised for how much the state controls information.How different is it in this country?It's less different than we'd like to think. For example, a group ofcomputer programmers was trying to get hold of Hansard, the parliamentaryrecord. They asked for it politely, they didn't get access to it. Theyended up scraping it off the web. The parliamentary officials couldn'tstand this; they thought they should have a right to control who hadaccess to this information. These computer programmers had a huge battleto get access to this supposedly public data so we could see how our MPsvoted and when our MPs had attended debates.Are there any developments that offer hope?There's now an onus on officials to provide a reason if they want to keepsomething secret. In the past, the person who was asking for theinformation had to provide the reason.What do you feel has been the greatest effect of your investigation?The way people look at public services. Before, they took things at facevalue and thought everything was working fine. Taxes are quite high andwhat are people getting in return? We weren't being given enoughinformation about how this money was spent. The investigation was tryingto make people more sceptical, to get them to challenge our leaders.People are now less willing to accept what a powerful person says.Has the investigation affected the party platforms in the election?It's much harder to spin now, to roll a load of PR guff; the public hasseen all that. Now people are looking critically at the posters and thepromises and thinking: "These are the words, but what are the actions?"That's how I think you should judge a politician: discard about 95% ofwhat they say and just look at what they've done.What implications does the recently passed Digital Economy Act have forfreedom of information?The theory is that everyone has access to information, but equally, theact says that we can be switched off if we download something thegovernment doesn't like. That's a very disturbing part of this law. Theidea that you can copyright public information is another form ofcensorship. It's all very well to say that we need to provide people witha living, but what copyright is now being used for is either greed,anti-competitive practices or censorship. The problem is that the act isbeing debated by people who have no clue about technology. We're goingthrough this information revolution and yet our public services haven'tcaught up with the fact that this is a new economy.What are you investigating next?I am taking these ideas of how the internet is changing people'sexpectations of what they have a right to see, of democracy and of power,and investigating how it's changing the way we as a world interconnect andhow this will change politics globally.See Heather Brooke's website at http://heatherbrooke.orgAlso about her book "The Silent State" (2010)

In early 2007, Steve Jobs (of all people!) concluded in his 'Thoughts on Music' that "DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work" [1]. Soon after, one label after the other started selling music in "unstricted" [2] formats, and there was much celebration about the death of DRM. And, there were lots of reasons see things this way: Digital Rights Management Systems were very unpopular with the public. People hated them. Plain and simple. And they were technically unstable, because the encryption, once released to the public, was regularly broken within a few days. And attempts to re-engineer the entire computer operating system to make DRM possible -- Windows Vista -- turned out be be equally unpopular and fraught with internal problems.Fast-forward three years. Increasingly, our data is up in the clouds. The decentralized architectures for digital production of the 1990s are being phased-out. Google is pushing an operating system (Chrome) were all data is being stored online and virtually nothing remains on the computer. The device which individuals own is being reduced to a relatively dumb terminal. The apple IPad, it seems, is optimized for consumption (and thus hailed as the savior of the old, consumer oriented media industries).Much of online social interaction and production takes place on vast, centralized platforms. The older DIY approaches -- from mailing lists to independently run networks such as Indymedia and even p2p networks -- are fading away and are supplanted by super-professional service approaches. There are lots of reasons, and some of them very good ones, for this development. That's not my concern at the moment. More remarkable is that part of this development is the return of DRM. This time, not out in the open, accessible to the user, but completely hidden, built into the deep structure of the platforms themselves. The case in point here is YouTube. It has morphed from a freewheeling platform where users could share whatever they wanted, to a highly controlled system, where all content is scanned and mointored for copyright violation. According to YouTube itself, this works the following way [3]:As they conclude it: "It's up to you." Which sounds great, it's up to you, until one realizes, that are not speaking to us, but to the big content owners.Much of the work done by YouTube and other platforms has been to put the content industry back in control, even though it's a control controlled by the platform providers. So there is considerable tension among the old and new players in the media industries, but as they work out their differences, users are becoming becoming more precarious, more dependent, and more controlled. And the tool to do this is ubiquitous DRM. Each and every file on YouTube is processed through their DRM and, of possible, made entirely dependent on arbitrary decisions of content owners, who can now, at any moment, make disappear files that include portions of their content. A few days ago, Constantin Film decided to use their option and had all films which contained portions of their Hitler melodrama "Downfall (Untergang)" deleted from YouTube. There were hundreds of clips, since changing the subtitles of the scene where Hitler realizes that the war was lost had become a subgenre in itself. [4] This DRM systems know no fair use exemption. Control is total. There is no problem of the files being re-uploaded, the system is effective, real-time and scales effortlessly. And the better YouTube and others become at this, the more pressure will be applied on those platforms which have not yet implemented something similar. Which, it seems easy to predict, will lead to a further concentration in this already highly concentrated field.Of course, individually each of us can be smart enough to avoid these things, and many of us are members in closed file-sharing communities that function without such restrictions. But, socially, we can see how control is creeping back, how DRM is becoming part of the infrastructure, and how it is affecting our speech and culture in ways that are neither predictable nor accountable. With a flip of a button, one which you have no access to, all your nice little remixes can disappear, even if they were online for a long time. It's all up to them!FelixPS: Of course, there is a Hitler parody of this removal up online. Just not on Youtube.http://www.vimeo.com/11086952How long will it take vimeo to implement their own DRM?[1] http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/[2] mp3, is, of course, a proprietary format, and thus restricted, but most people were only interested in copy-restrictions, and not patent issue.[3] http://www.youtube.com/t/contentid [4] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/attack-on-hitler-parodies-now-newest-front-in-copyright-wars.ars--- http://felix.openflows.com ----------------------- books out now:*|Deep Search.The Politics of Search Beyond Google.Studienverlag 2009*|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions.Scheidegger&Spiess2008*|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 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: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime< at >kein.org

the useless chant of hypnotic y-c youI wake up in the middle of the night with nightmares, all the time, beat-ing myself up. I'm constantly haunted by death, regrets, finality: todayfor example - is this the last class I'll ever get to teach? Since myarchives are scattered among two universities, I feel like dead manwalking; I'm already packaged, what I haven't accomplished I'll neveraccomplish. Finality is accompanied by thuds. My current music archive isat the resurrected ESP-disk site - a company that disappeared decades ago.My fiftieth high-school reunion is, I think, now, and I dread the thoughtof going, choosing to die remembered elsewhere. In my bar mitzvah book -yes, we found that going through things at my father's home - among thepictures of dance/prance/pray, I put a picture of the explosion of thefirst hydrogen bomb. The paper is yellowed, as if cosmological physicssuddenly became antiquated. I am waiting for my friends to die. How can Ispeak to Vito Acconci for example of the hurt he caused me; everything isalready dust. Or my father, whose psychological abuse - which he was in noway responsible for - how can he understand at 96, what happened to me -how my depressions, unbearably out of control, began in relation to histemper and my fears of just being alive? I tried suicide as a kid, mixingiodine with milk, which turned out to be an antidote, which is the storyof my life, and the suicide attempt was hidden and probably not thatserious anyway - another regret. Now I'm in the midst of yet another panicattack, it's almost 5am, I'm teaching the last class ever tomorrow, whichwon't be any better than the others in this course, another sleeplessnight - thinking about Rwanda, the unutterable violence we do to oneanother, the fury of this species. And I hypnotize, mesmerize, myself intothe granularity of absence, remaining alive, worried constantly aboutAzure and her survival after me, knowing I will never know, that absolutefinality, that the thud, will create a barrier forever, that I won't evenrecognize the barrier, that I won't be. I worry my collaborators as wellare disappearing - I'm not surrounded by a kind of critique any long,critique that kept me on edge, functioning; now my music is freak-music,my writing freak-writing, my Second Life installations freak-stallations,stalling for time, for the imminence of immanent death. You don't want tobe me. My student, who I worry about, writes she can't make class today,her bf has to go to the VA hospital, she's missed an appointment with himalready, he has canceresesmrmmm, mesmerss e-s eemmee m-e mesmersmm m-m mesmerss m-s mesmerss e-seems$\mmrm\mrmse\rermmr\m10\sr0\mr360\mrmsre1{\*\emmeee2\emmeremm2\emmeermsr2\emmemmr0}\\rerse\mese\mr0\rmemre1033\esse\r0\rm20\rmem1033\rsse\r0\rm20\rmem1033mmmmrmem\rs2160\rs0\rse2160\rse0\rs0\me240\mm240\rerse\mr0\mrm20\rmem1033msresem r-m rsse m-e mem e-m eemr (mesmersee) eeere s-e seeermesesmr,mesmerss.asesmsresmrmmem m-m mermem e-m esee e-e ermmsessemr e-r eee e-e eseeer m-rmmee$mrmeems1m e-m eeeme m-e mre e-e eee m-e msme m-e mesmersesem s-m sr m-rmem w-m$mesmerseem e-m em e-m eee m-e mesrsem (mesrr e-r emmee'e r-e remm e-m eeem-e m$mesmer e-r eemr e-r eer m-r meeesr, oremmeee m-e memee e-e eer e-r emrrw-r wem$mesmerseem m-m me: sssmmsse--mremmm s-m se e-e eee m-e mesmersess m-smmeeer, e$rememeerem--esrr e-r ee m-e msem, mrmmsem e-m eee m-e mesmerss e-s eemssee-e e$rssr m-r msrmsrm s-m sr e-r eesm e-m esee, see e-e essse m-e mesmerss m-smsemm$eeeersem e-m eremeesem m-m meemrm e-m es s-s seeerm, msem, mesmerss m-smss e-s$eee e-e esmee, rsmm e-m esmmrem, memeem, ssr e-r erssmm m-m mesmerss,eesseee, $hypnotic y-c you$

(came thru a pvt cc list)(Btw a good friend told me the other day that a fairly famous - in 'ourcircles' - social/edu activist has abandonned e-mail altogether and onlycommunicates thru FaceBook...)Why Social Sharing Is Bigger than Facebook and Twitterby David Armano  The digital landscape is being reshaped by the news that Facebook isopening up its social graph. Twitter, too, has made waves by acquiringcompanies that made third-party services for Twitter.But if you take a closer look, this is part of a more macro trend thattranscends two social platforms--despite their emerging dominance. Thatmacro trend is ubiquitous sharing: What are you doing? Where are you doingit? Who are you doing it with? What do you like? These used to be thingswe kept to ourselves or shared with our friends and family. Now we'rewilling to broadcast them to whomever is willing to listen.Social media has led to "social sharing," the broadcasting of our thoughtsand activities. It's not a fad. It's a sociological phenomenon,accelerating at light speed. The latest incarnation of social sharing: Aplatform called Blippy allows you to connect to your social system andshare what you bought and how much you spent at retailers like Target,Netflix, Amazon, and Zappos, to name a few. Not only can you log-in tothese services quickly from an existing social network, but you can shareacross multiple networks. Knowing what people are buying when, and howmuch they're willing to spend is creating a feeding frenzy among marketerslooking for the ripple effect.Not even the drumbeat of privacy concerns seems able to slow down thetrend. It was recently reported that Blippy members' credit cardinformation was showing up in Google's search results. Blippy is stillgoing strong though. We are becoming ever more willing to share ever moreinformation with the world. Here just a few implications to consider whenit comes to the changing face of sharing in a social age.* Data Gathering. The more we know about an individual, the easier it isto sell something. Someone will amass socially shared data (this is whereFacebook is placing bets) and businesses will tap it for profit. Google'sintegration of archived tweets reveals that even real time data can besorted and mined. A business may not own the data from all of the sharing,but it's likely they will want it.* Knowledge Sharing & Collaboration. Conflating internal and externalsocial sharing could profoundly affect how we work. Newer internalplatforms such as Chatter from Salesforce not only borrow from theFacebook school of platform design, but they also integrate with externalnetworks such as Twitter. The future of social sharing for the largeorganization could be making the two worlds come together in a securefashion for the enterprise.* Content Distribution. Social sharing becomes the ultimate form ofdistribution. Any business or individual who produces digital content inany form will be tweaking how easily the content can be shared, whether byadding a "like" button or designing the content itself to be sharable.* Social Currency. Sharing on the social web acts as a form of currency.Sharing useful information that might help someone within your networkscores you points and builds equity. Finding a deal and sharing that withothers can put you in someone's favor, and maybe then they will find you adeal. It's important to recognize that all this sharing isn't some uselessimpulse. There are reasons why people are willing to share so much.Creative expression is part of it but also, there's often a benefit,value, to the individual who shares.Social sharing is a major behavioral shift, the most important so far ofthe 21st century. And the information we choose to share with friends,co-workers and even strangers, is re-defining the idea of what's privateand public before our very eyes.[David Armano is a Senior Vice President at Edelman Digital, theinteractive arm of global communications firm Edelman. He is an activepractitioner and thinker in the worlds of digital marketing, experiencedesign, and the social web. You can follow him on Twitter.]

Dear Nettimers,I've just received this incredible information from Eric Alliez. Please redistribute widely. You can find an on-line petition athttp://www.gopetition.com/petitions/save-middlesex-philosophy.htmlbestml___________________Earlier this afternoon all staff in the Arts and Education section of Middlesex University received the following email:Dear colleagues,Late on Monday 26 April, the Dean of the School of Arts & Humanities, Ed Esche,informed staff in Philosophy that the University executive had ‘accepted hisrecommendation’ to close all Philosophy programmes: undergraduate, postgraduate andMPhil/PhD.Philosophy is the highest research-rated subject in the University. Building on itsgrade 5 rating in RAE2001, it was awarded a score of 2.8 on the new RAE scale in2008, with 65% of its research activity judged ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationallyexcellent’. It is now widely recognised as one of the most important centres for thestudy of modern European philosophy anywhere in the English-speaking world.The MA programmes in Philosophy at Middlesex have grown in recent years to becomethe largest in the UK, with 42 new students admitted in September 2009.The Dean explained that the decision to terminate recruitment and close theprogrammes was ’simply financial’, and based on the fact that the Universitybelieves that it may be able to generate more revenue if it shifts its resources toother subjects – from ‘Band D’ to ‘Band C’ students.As you may know, the University currently expects each academic unit to contribute55% of its gross income to the central administration. As it stands (by the creditcount method of calculation), Philosophy and Religious Studies contributes 53%,after the deduction of School admin costs. According to the figures for projectedrecruitment from admissions (with Philosophy undergraduate applications up 118% for2010-11), if programmes had remained open, the contribution from Philosophy andReligious Studies would have risen to 59% (with Philosophy’s contribution,considered on its own, at 53%).In a meeting with Philosophy staff, the Dean acknowledged the excellent researchreputation of Philosophy at Middlesex, but said that it made no ‘measurable’contribution to the University.Needless to say, we very much regret this decision to terminate Philosophy, and itslikely consequences for the School and our University and for the teaching of oursubject in the UK.· Professor Peter Hallward, Programme Leader for the MA programmes inPhilosophy,· Professor Peter Osborne, Director, Centre for Research in Modern EuropeanPhilosophy,· Dr. Stella Sandford, Director of Programmes, Philosophy__________________Late on Monday 26 April, staff in Philosophy at Middlesex University in London were informed that the University executive are to close all Philosophy programmes: undergraduate, postgraduate and MPhil/PhD.Philosophy is the highest research-rated subject at Middlesex University, with 65% of its research activity judged 'world-leading' or 'internationally excellent' in the UK government's recent Research Assessment Exercise. It is now widely recognised as one of the most important centres for the study of modern European philosophy anywhere in the English-speaking world. Its MA programmes in Philosophy have grown in recent years to become the largest in the UK, with 42 new students admitted in September 2009. Middlesex offers one of only a handful of programmes left in the UK that provides both research-driven and inclusive post-graduate teaching aimed at a wide range of students, specialist and non-specialist. It is also one of relatively few such programmes that remains financially viable, currently contributing close to half of its total income to the University's central administration.This decision to terminate Philosophy at Middlesex will have serious consequences for the teaching of philosophy in the UK. This is a shameful decision which essentially means the end of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, a hub for internationally renowned scholarship (http://www.web.mdx.ac.uk/crmep/; staff include Eric Alliez, Peter Hallward, Mark Kelly, Christian Kerslake, Peter Osborne and Stella Sandford). This act of wilful self-harm by the University must be resisted.Please join the facebook group and spread the word: http:// www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=119102561449990And sign the petition http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/save- middlesex-philosophy.htmlCampaign email: savemdxphil-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.orgIt would be helpful if you could send an email to these people, responsible for the decision that has been made.Vice-Chancellor of the University, Michael Driscoll, m.driscoll-7yFXA2EciJlaa/9Udqfwiw< at >public.gmane.org;Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research and Enterprise, Waqar Ahmad,w.ahmad-7yFXA2EciJlaa/9Udqfwiw< at >public.gmane.org;Deputy Vice Chancellor Academic, Margaret House, m.house-7yFXA2EciJlaa/9Udqfwiw< at >public.gmane.org;Dean of the School of Arts & Education, Ed Esche, e.esche-7yFXA2EciJk2hlyV4OGXBQ< at >public.gmane.org(The full set of emails is m.driscoll-7yFXA2EciJlaa/9Udqfwiw< at >public.gmane.org; w.ahmad-7yFXA2EciJlaa/9Udqfwiw< at >public.gmane.org;m.house-7yFXA2EciJlaa/9Udqfwiw< at >public.gmane.org; e.esche-7yFXA2EciJlaa/9Udqfwiw< at >public.gmane.org).If you are able to send such an email, it would be helpful if you blind copied (BCC) it to our campaign email, savemdxphil-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org

.another internet is possible!_ "not only possible but also necessary".the internet which used to be a "beach" until the 2000s, where anotherworld was not only possible bu also in practice. that was what richardbarbrook described as "cyber-communism" at the end of the 90's on thislist. but most of the applications on the internet are being designedto capture our "data body" (as coined by CAE) beginning with the 2000sthrough monitoring for internet ads and other tools of neo-liberaleconomy.our online identity, which used to be anonymous to one degree, hasbecome our physical identity beginning with the facebook. though,social networking may not be evil if the architecture is "free" (likethat of the upcoming GNU social). networking and meeting with thenew people, with the new people whom you will choose and want to benetworked that you can not meet in your physical environment was agreat opportunity on mailing lists, on irc, even on icq. but whomwe are networking on facebook is our high school friends that wehave mostly choosen not to see any more and our families who hadthe control on us telling us what to do and what not to since ourchildhood. on the internet, now we are who we are in our life in the"babylon". we are not free on the internet anymore. we feel the samepressure of control on the internet as we feel it on our daily lives.the internet is not a "beach", not a place to escape to, not a placeto take a breath, not a place to be free, anymore...free distributed p2p architectures are important for internetappilications, where we can also be anonymous if we want to. if wewant to be free... "freenet"s model (http://freenetproject.org/) is agreat opportunity for the possible (but also necessary) future of theinternet. the "freesites" on freenet are not hosted on servers thatare subject to control but on peer's computers in a distributed andencyrpted way. all the activities on freenet are also anonymous. eachpeer shares a part of their disk space for freenet but they cannotreach it directly since the information is encrypted and only a smallpart of that information is stored on their own single computer. ithink this must be the way another internet is possible.cloud computing, what richard stallmancalls SaaS (software as a service -http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html), gives the control of the software to the private companies.online storage applications (like that of dropbox) also give thecontrol of your information to the companies giving that service.in the beginning of the 2000s, i used to advocate that storing thepersonal information on remote servers would totally dematerializethe information which is metariazed on the harddisk of a particularcomputer. so we need "that computer to reach the information. but ifit was on "the internet", not "on the harddisk", then what we wouldneed was "any" computer not "that" computer. when a computer isconnected to the internet thorugh a (lan) cable, it also materializesthe access to information by rendering us dependent on the locationof "the" cable and "the" computer. when the internet connection isfree public wireless connection and when the personal informationcan be reached form any computer, then a hardware, "the" hardware,which also raised the problem of digital divide, would be alterable.a public hardware or a "100 dollar laptop" (of negraponte), even a"zero dollar laptop" (of James Wallbank) will be enough to access andinterpret information, if the the software demanding high computingpower also runs on the "cloud". essentially not the software in thecloud as described as SaaS by richard stallman but software in whati dare say "peer cloud". software running on an architecture likethat of freenet. not on private servers like that of google's (asin googleDocs). AFAIK it is not technically possible yet but if weencourage the work on distributed p2p architectures, it may be oneday.web 2.0 was a great opportunity to democratize the way information iscreated and shared. bu it is not a great opportunity to access it.youtube is banned in turkey for very long. blogger was also banned fora time. web is subject to censorship and control. p2p is the way to bewithout intermediation of any parties. the problem with p2p was thatit is widely being used for sharing files not for running systems. but"freesites" of freenet shows that running system-like applications onp2p can be possible. wouldn't it be great if it was "p2p 2.0" insteadof "web 2.0".so the idea of the "cloud" is not evil if it is not dependent ofprivate servers and "services". it even has the potential of fullydematerializing the information rendering the access to it independentof any particular "hard"ware. i totally agree with what felix haswritten about "the return of DRM". the way to escape from controland property on internet lies on free anonymous distributed p2parchitectures like that of the freenet.another internet is possible! it is not late find the way to the"beach". it is not totally covered with the "pavement" yet like thatof the world. another internet is possbile, first of all to influencethe possibility of another world. http://another.httpdot.net/ .-_-.http://httpdot.net/.-_-./

original to: http://cambridgetab.co.uk/opinion/20025/Middlesex University are in the process of committing an act ofintellectual treason on a par with mass book-burning.On 26th April, philosophy staff at Middlesex University were informed thatall philosophy programmes were to be closed to new students immediately,as the first step in phasing out the entire department. Oh well, justanother unavoidable consequence of the recession and the ensuing educationfunding cuts, right? Well, yes and no; the closure was justified on‘simply financial’ grounds by the Dean of the School of Arts andHumanities, despite the department being (pardon my French) fucking good.No subject at Middlesex received a higher research rating, and nophilosophy MA programme in the UK is larger. Perhaps even moreimportantly, the department is one of the few in the country that throwsitself into the world of ‘continental’ philosophy (as opposed to the‘Anglo-American’ side common across the country). In the Dean’s eyes,though, these are not ‘measurable’ benefits. Yes, that’s right: theuniversity doesn’t measurably benefit from good research or distinctiveprogrammes, apparently. You can be less cynical if you want, but I’m goingto guess that when the old boy says ‘measurable’, he means ‘profitable’.Dr Nina Powers, who received her PhD from Middlesex and is now a SeniorLecturer at Roehampton, is spearheading the media side of a campaign indefence of the department, having written a comment piece for TheGuardian’s website; she describes the move as ‘a step back to whenphilosophy meant white men discussing formal logic over sherry’.Exaggeration perhaps? I may be a white man, and I’ve done my share offormal logic, but I’ve definitely never drunk sherry. But Dr Power has apoint – Middlesex is an ex-poly and has a large proportion of mature orlow-income students. The department specifically and critically addressesquestions such as why philosophy is still so dominated by white males; notonly this, but its courses touch on critical theory, radical philosophy,and links with other sensitive areas outside the domain of the traditional‘what is knowledge?’ ivory-tower. It is unique and well-respected. Is itpossible that the department is seen as ‘difficult’ or ‘embarrassing’ attimes, and this is a factor in closing it? If so, surely this is adisastrous blow to academic freedom?This is what happens when universities are run like businesses. The‘market logic’ is becoming deeper and deeper engrained in our highereducation system – fees, loans, sponsorship, etc. The whole educationsystem is becoming uncomfortably strained as it tries to fulfil ourintellectual desires without departing from the uber-pragmatic approachnecessary to compete in a dog-eat-dog economy. On the one hand, we arepulled towards pure academia: knowledge for its own sake, the humanyearning for discovery and invention. On the other hand we are chainedagainst our will to profit, short-term financial viability, and themanagerial yearning for obscene wages and job perks. But the simple factis the market cannot predict what may be of value to us in the future, orhow people’s lives may be enriched by abstract cultural factors.Much like Sussex students (who have waged a high-profile and successfulstruggle against the cuts), it seems the continental philosophers won’t godown without a fight. At the time of writing, 4 days after the decisionwas announced, the ‘Save Middlesex philosophy’ Facebook group has nearly6,000 members and statements of support have been made by variousacademics from around the world. University and Colleges Union (UCU)members around the country are either set to walk out or itching for theopportunity; I’d put good money on Middlesex UCU joining them. And withstudents campaigning against cuts at other universities in the London area(including UCL, Kings College, Westminster, etc) it surely can’t be longbefore Middlesex students follow their example too. Here’s to a unitedstand against the ‘shameful’ closure of an outstanding department.Until then, anyone want a sherry?