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Deviant Funk Music Club v Monoklu
Nova deViator presents Deviant Funk Music Club & WNDV Serija deViatorjevih allnighterjev v Klubu Monokel se nadaljuje. Tokrat in v veselje nekaterih fenic in fenov tudi z malo večjo pomočjo Wande, ki bo prispevala vokalizacije in video-vizualizacije. All for fun, all for opennes and difference. Ob tem tudi iniciiramo novo frakcijo, v katero se dejansko lahko včlanite: DFMC – Deviant Funk Music Club. Torej tisti, ki vam resno sede (oziroma vam preprečuje sedeti) konkreten in fokusiran elektro-funk (resistance punk), se lahko trajnostno priključite na informacijske kanale. Vstopnina/entrance:  Letak za cenejši vstop Posted on 6 February 2012 | 3:00 pm Male Victims of Sexual Assault
The Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network is attempting to raise awareness of this issue. As part of their campaign, they are sponsoring this really interesting two-minute video made by my colleague, Dr. Broderick Fox, professor of Art History and Visual Arts at Occidental College: UPDATE: In the comment thread, Umlud posted a provocative paragraph from an article by Christopher Glazek at N+1 that I thought was worth including:
(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages) Posted on 4 February 2012 | 6:00 pm History of Henna Tattoos
Henna Derived from the plant Lawsonia Inermia henna is commonly found in regions of North Africa, Egypt, areas of the Middle East and of course India. The leaves of the plant are dried and ground up then mixed with carrier oil or binding agent to make excellent dyes in shades that vary from pale woody browns to the deepest, richest reds. Over the centuries a variety of uses have been found for henna. It has been found to be an excellent hair dye, nail tint, mild astringent and even has a use as a sedative. However it is better known for its prolific use in body art around the world. History Evidence of henna tattooing has been found to date back more than five thousand years. Henna tattooing was a practice that was thoroughly embraced by the ancient Egyptians. Having gained a reputation throughout history as being quite a vain culture, they found ways of using henna to enhance their natural features to make themselves more attractive. It was used to alter their hair colour, stain the skin and nails and mixed with other pigments to form designs for the body. Different Cultures The process of receiving a henna tattoo is believed to have spiritual significance, connecting the body with the soul and the universal energies that surround it. For the Indian Bride however the process of receiving her henna tattoo’s or Mehndi show that she is to be idolised and revered. Once they are in place she is not permitted to take part in any work until the designs have disappeared from her skin. In the poorer countries of the world henna was and is still used as a safe and inexpensive method of body adornment. Again in the Middle East it is brides who receive the delicate henna work on their skin and countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq consider the application of henna to provide good luck to its wearer. Pregnant women in Morocco have henna designs pained around their ankles as forms of protection, with families having their own sacred designs that are passed down through the generations. The henna designs that are seen in Africa are more geometrical that designs seen elsewhere, nothing like the flowing ornate designs used in other cultures. Though Celtic designs are quite complicated with intricate knot work they too can be perfected by a henna professional, and look stunning when completed. Modern artists draw on cultures from all over the world to provide the perfect henna tattoo for their clients adding a subtle twist of their own to make their designs truly unique. Posted on 16 January 2012 | 10:00 am News / 120131 Resistance Joys and PleasuresPosted on 1 February 2012 | 2:54 pm Audio / Zvočiti/Sounding 2010Posted on 13 February 2012 | 9:33 am Maja Delak: Shame/Sramota
Posted on 11 January 2012 | 6:09 pm [nettime] The Medium is Not the Message
Dear graduates, Let me make a wild guess: Perhaps it has become more difficult for you to say what media are - and what media studies are - than a few years ago when you began to study them. A paradox of “media” is that, in our time, they seem to be everywhere at first glance yet nowhere when it comes to critical study. Every person on the street would agree that our everyday life is permeated by electronic media, the Internet, mobile phones, electronic gadgets. Everyone is aware of their economic impact. Even the link between these communication technologies to cultural and social movements is not esoteric anymore, in the year after WikiLeaks and two days after the Pirate Party won nine percent at the state elections in Berlin. If we look at university media studies, however, we see that only few departments exist and that of those few, most are journalism or film studies departments at their core. You could even philosophically debunk and dismiss the notion of “media” itself, with its legacy of 19th century physics and outmoded concept of the ether. What exactly is a medium, as something supposedly in between a sender and a receiver, if senders and receivers are nowadays routinely included in the concept of “media”? If you have faced these issues in your studies, you experienced first hand that the notion of media is not set in stone, but under a constant semantic shift. The implication of this is quite positive: Since “media” are always something in the making, and even something contested, you can (and inevitably have to be) their makers, and help giving them the meaning you find important. The best thing that can be said of media studies is that they carry less idealist baggage than the historically more established humanities. In their best manifestations, media studies have blurred or even removed the boundaries between theory and practice. This is even true for the so-called media theory. Benjamin, McLuhan, Enzensberger, Baudrillard, Haraway, Kittler, Manovich, Hayles - if we drop some text book names of more or less canonical media theoreticians, we see that their works are bastards: speculative, controversial, fringe and of rather dubious reputation within the larger humanities, even within media studies themselves. None of them even had media study degrees like you have. As far as I know, most of your professors here don’t have them either. (Neither do I have any such degree, by the way.) Media studies are full of such paradoxes. Perhaps the most famous one is the sentence that institutionalized media studies, McLuhan’s “the medium is the message”. If you look at it closely, then this statement is a performative contradiction much like the liar’s paradox: It uses the medium of language (or of print, here we already get into the intricacies of properly identifying a medium) to formulate a message that transcends that medium. Or, in other words: if the medium is the message, then the sentence that “the medium is the message” is an exception to that statement. McLuhan’s historical pretext for this Zen-like and often misunderstood statement were the modern arts of the 20th century. In abstract painting, painting no longer depicts something else, but is pure painting, so the medium is the message. The same is true for sound poetry and for a text that was McLuhan’s major inspiration, James Joyce’s novel “Finnegans Wake” whose language is above all about language. But this ultimately means that in McLuhan’s media theory, the underlying message were not mass media but the modern arts. I see an upside and downside to this theory. The problematic side is how l’art pour l’art got transformed into a paradigm of communication media: we watch TV in order to watch TV (not news, sports, drama). The “global village” that McLuhan proclaimed had, in my reading, nothing to do with today’s Internet and community media activism, it was even the opposite - the kind of community created by people around the globe sitting in front of TV and watching the Apollo moon landing. It was a deeply conservative vision of new media. Just at this time, we witness how, in the Netherlands and elsewhere, the sector of new media arts is being scrapped and redefined as “creative industries”. The same is happening in higher education. Those who deplore this should however not forget that this is just what McLuhan did in the 1960s: He was the theoretician and paid counseling guru of the creative industries of his time. He taught its executives how to learn from the modern arts. His “global village” was not a critical but a commercial vision for tv networks. A lot of media theory has been either pro-establishment or uncritical, but often in very idiosyncratic ways: If we think how Baudrillard and Enzensberger turned against their earlier Marxism or how Kittler and Sloterdijk just recently courted the German yellow press publisher Hubert Burda. The subtext underneath these strange alliances is that media studies are the humanities discipline with the broadest impact outside its own culture. While the position of an English professor studying Shakespeare is comparatively safe and uncontroversial (even given the precarious state of the humanities), it is not of immediate interest to any political or economical party (even if it is political such as the Shakespeare philology of Stephen Greenblatt). Media studies, on the other hand, has a more widely recognized social urgency. Policy makers and industry leaders expect media studies and media arts to deliver innovative visions. (This is the reason why my own job has now been changed from teaching new media to art students to research and development for the creative industries in the Rotterdam region.) Prominent media theorists have often been to seduced into lucrative second jobs as media industry consultants and water down their critical distance - a problem even more rampant in the contemporary visual arts where often the same people work as curators, critics and consultants for private collectors. For me, the performativity of media theory became visible after the dotcom crash in the early 2000s. Not only did Internet companies crash in America and pretty much everywhere in Western Europe. In my home country, there was also the “stupid German money” bubble, investment money that financed Hollywood B movies like “Driven” (with Sylvester Stallone) and A movies like “Gangs of New York” (by Martin Scorsese). This was only possible thanks to German government tax cut programs for investment into new media. Contrary to the Anglo-American notion of new media, the German term encompasses all electricity-driven media and thus also radio, tv and film. This difference in terminology was powerful enough to offset a few billions on the world financial markets. In the light of the financial system crisis, we can only wonder what other seemingly abstract theories created, and destroyed, market value. The upside of this is that media studies is not on a safe ground, but risky - not just in a metaphorical, wannabe sense. Aside from this systemic aspect, there is also an individualist dimension. McLuhan institutionalized media studies as a discipline driven by passions, underground passions that never matched nominal research subject. In McLuhan’s case, avant-garde arts, for others: politics, sexuality, money, too, to name a few. In all these cases, the medium is not actually the message. What’s more, media have been and continue to be designed and tweaked to these political, sexual, economic ends. If I had the time to have a seminar with you, and not just a traditional lecture, my question to each of you would be: What is _your_ passion? How do you channel it into your media practice and theory? What drives you into a field where most of you will not have clearly predefined jobs (such as a literature graduate becoming a publisher’s editor) but where you will have to define your own profession? I am not advocating an ideology or fetish of the “new” in “new media”. I am currently working in a project with third year Bachelor students who were born in 1990 and for whom the term “new media” makes no sense anymore. More than that, it’s obvious that the real “new media” (in the sense of contemporary, edgy, passion-driven means of communication) these days are not digital, but analog: zines, artists’ books, Super 8 films and analog photography, cassette tapes (and vinyl records to a lesser degree). They are not merely embraced in a nostalgic retro trend, but as truly self-made media whose production and social sharing escapes the control of Google, Apple and Facebook - and in this sense, they are the new ‘new media’. If this describes the practice, what does it mean for new media studies as a critical discipline? With the exception of publications like JunkJet or BLIK (from Utrecht): What are the zines, what is the Super 8 of new media studies, metaphorically speaking? I consider this important because those media that were new ten or twenty years ago have become so conventional that they invite corresponding conventionality in criticism and scholarship. As two paradigmatic examples, I would like to choose Apple and Wikileaks, the most successful computer and digital lifestyle company versus the Internet project that made the biggest headlines last year. On the surface, they couldn’t be more different: Here the most valuable company of the world that operates top-down and sells products, here a grassroots, non-commercial activist project. But both of them are quite similar in their reviving of classical notions of media. Apple’s business model has always been to merge media and product design: software and hardware that become one organic whole. The iPhone and iPad have perfected this as empty slates where each touchscreen app running full screen pretends to be its own medium: a camera, a map, etc. Since those media - including iTunes music and films - have been made tangible single products again, you can sell them as products, like in the 20th century. That also means that all classical categories of media criticism can safely remain in place. Apple’s business model and media concept is easy to understand while Google’s business model of media as free networked services financed through a hidden underlying layer of commercial services is much more difficult to penetrate. Google and Facebook, however, seem to be the only companies left who can run this “new economy” business model successfully, a model that can, as it seems, be profitably run only by mono- or duopolies. This doesn’t invalid Yann Moulier Boutang’s diagnosis of “cognitive capitalism” (which he presented at the Societies of the Query conference here in Amsterdam), but relativizes it. I dare to predict that the programs of “knowledge economies” or “creative economies” will end up having a similar fate. Instead of a pure service economy with neo-colonially outsourced fabrication, there will hopefully be a return to an economy that will locally reintegrate intellectual labor and physical production. To come back to my second example: WikiLeaks is more like Apple in the sense that it operates within a classical media paradigm, the realm of whistleblowing and mass media political journalism. For those who have seen media studies as merely a synonym of journalism studies, WikiLeaks (next to online journalism) is the godsend Internet phenomenon that fits that paradigm, and requires almost no methodological updates of mass media studies scholarship. I have been in discussions with Geert Lovink that new media studies seem to be disappearing as a discipline of its own, and swallowed by the social sciences and cultural studies. Or perhaps they are turning again into somewhat boring journalism and communication studies. You, the graduates of this department, can change this state of affairs. Or you make the same choice made by most people working in the media field today: go into a different field of work and research to creatively apply your expertise and mindset there, like the Pirate Party is currently trying to do in politics. So when the UvA asked me for a guest lecture on “The Future of New Media Studies”, I was not sure whether I was the right person to defend it. On top of not having a degree in media studies, I have never had a job in this discipline, but taught in a comparative literature department, then in an art school and now in a polytechnic. If the value of media theory and media studies has been, historically, to foster experimental thinking and experimental humanities, from Walter Benjamin to Wendy Chun, then the disciplinary label is of rather secondary importance. When I studied experimental humanities in the late 1980s, it was called Comparative Literature, when I went to the USA as an exchange student in the early 90s, it had become Cultural Studies, and by the early 2000s, it was new media studies. My concern at this point is that the new name will be Creative Industries. Since part of my work is for the arts, it has been my experience that “new media” is best used as an umbrella to fit practices that misfit established disciplines. Everyone pretends to love interdisciplinarity, but once you actually try to get a job or some project funding, you will see that this far from the reality. From 2007 to 2009, I was one of four jury members for net art subsidies in Vienna, a city that still generously supports this area of artistic production and cultural activism. Again and again, we ended up subsidizing projects that were not strictly Internet art or activism, but for example film installations or sound art festivals, never mind the fact that separate city funds for film and music did exist. But the music fund would not support anything that was not a concert, and the film fund would not support anything that wasn’t a theatrical screening. If you laugh and dismiss this as conservative Austrian politics, then you should know that it’s almost the same in this innovation-loving country. For the same reason, an experimental music institute like STEIM in Amsterdam and an anarchist music/ film/ performance/ hacklab venue like WORM in Rotterdam were put into the “e-culture” sector of Dutch arts funding, and will therefore be forced to be “Creative Industries” in the future. Let me stay with moving images for a little while. In former times, when film was synonymous with new media, experimental film and video were synonymous with media art. We not only see it in the strong film heritage of media studies, up to Lev Manovich’s “Language of New Media” in its reliance on Dziga Vertov. In the arts, an institute like Montevideo/NiMK is still a video art archive at its heart. What I have been witnessing in my own work, for example in conferences that we organized in Rotterdam, is how film culture has become conservative in the literal sense of being mostly concerned with its self-preservation. While experimental films in the 1960s such as Wilhelm and Birgit Hein’s “Rohfilm” exposed the materiality of the celluloid in order to destroy the dream factory of the mass medium, contemporary experimental film exposes the very same materiality - sprockets, grain, dust, edge lettering - as a nostalgic celebration of an analog medium that is about to disappear. (Just follow the respective discussions on analog versus digital on the “Frameworks” mailing list.) Micro cinema networks like Kino Climates see themselves as preservers of film and cinema culture. In its worst manifestations, contemporary artists books have become a graphic design genre, taught at schools like Werkplaats Typografie, celebrating the materiality of the paper book. This brings us back to McLuhan and the medium as the message: It is a sure sign of a dead medium when a medium is fetishized for its own sake. Therefore, 20th century abstract painting was not a good model for media theory. When books are about “book culture”, then they are dead. When films are about “film culture” and film theaters about “film theater culture”, they are dead, when vinyl records are about “vinyl culture”, then they’re just zombies, zombie films are dead since they got co-opted into “b movie culture”, etc. Zines died in the 1990s when they became swallowed into the encyclopedic “zine culture” books by Factsheet Five and Re/search, and did not became alive again until they reinvented themselves as informal, ephemeral media. Or, to express it in positive terms: A medium is alive as long as it can be quick and dirty. Wilhelm and Birgit Hein’s “Rohfilm” was such a dirty film. Therefore, it was only logical for the two filmmakers to proceed into the realms of sexuality and pornography in their later work. (I met Wilhelm Hein this weekend, so I am still under the impression.) So let’s once more radicalize the hypothesis: A medium is alive as long as it is being used for pornographic ends. This gives us pretty clear indications about the respective booms and busts of print, VHS video and DVDs, for example. Cinema is rather dead since there are no more porn cinemas. Musea, it conversely follows, are not dead media because there is still a thriving sex museum in the near neighborhood of this institute. I am mentioning these trivia because I would like to encourage you to walk off the beaten paths (to quote the name of Wilhelm Hein’s and Annette Frick’s current zine, “Jenseits der Trampelpfade”) and beware of false trust in expertise. One example: It took me personally a long time to see that the foundations of what I had studied as structuralist literary theory were entirely speculative, and often based on false scientism. So it seems to me as if the title of this lecture, “The Future of New Media Studies”, is blatantly irrelevant to you because it is not interesting what media studies will be, but what _you_ will do and whether it will be interesting. Whether this practice will still be called “new media studies” is of secondary importance. Often enough, disciplinary specialism has just been a token of the emperor’s new clothes. For example, I am almost sure that hardly any new media studies professor actually knows the technically correct definition of “analog” and “digital”. If you need a proof, just take the popular term “Digital Humanities”. It would not exist, except as an embarrassment, if the scholars gathering around it knew more than just the colloquial notion of “digital”. When I was a teenager in the West-Berlin of the 1980s, the most vital subcultural current were the self-acclaimed “genius dilettantes” which included the bands Die T?dliche Doris and Einst?rzende Neubauten. I sympathize with the dilettantes but less so with the romanticist legacy of the “genius”. For experimental humanities, and whatever future of new media studies under whatever name, I would like to modify this term into another paradox, the “dilettante expert”. Expertise is the classical foundation of all geekdom, whether it is encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespeare, of the Star Trek universe or the registers of an 8-bit controller. Dilettantism is the unavoidable condition of drawing the bigger picture. It can end up badly like with the pseudo-mathematics and pseudoscience in the books of Lacan, Kristeva, Baudrillard and Deleuze debunked by Sokal and Bricmont, especially to the extent that some of their discourse - Lacan’s in particular - lacked doubt and humbleness. Sokal and Bricmont published “Intellectual Imposters” in 1997. Retrospectively, it seems to have marked an end of speculative cultural studies and media theory, except for shrinking niches in the contemporary arts and in political activism. And deservedly so, I would say, because you could see the grand media theorists shutting up very quickly when the new media technologies became a reality and you could no longer get away with theorizing about “virtual reality” while not being able to operate your own laptop. (For a certain period from roughly 1997 to 2007, this was the running gag of new media studies conferences.) You are among the first generations of people with postgraduate degrees in media studies who actually, pardon my French, know their shit. You are experts enough to permit yourself some dilettantism again and dare to become universalists. If this is your ambition, then my only message would be: Don’t take the medium for the message, and don’t take media studies for the message either. Posted on 11 January 2012 | 11:41 pm Eight unfinished song fragments..  Posted on 5 January 2012 | 11:16 pm The Fabulous Clitoris: More than Meets the EyePosted from The Fabulous Clitoris: More than Meets the Eye Most people, if you ask them, will say that the clitoris is a little nub at the top of where the inner lips of the vulva meet. But, this external part of the clitoris, the glans, is only the tip of the iceberg. “The fact is, though, that most of the clitoris is subterranean, consisting [...] Posted from The Fabulous Clitoris: More than Meets the Eye Posted on 3 January 2012 | 2:22 pm all things amazing: super-vintage
all things amazing: super-vintage Posted on 14 December 2011 | 5:49 pm Influential women of punk
It's a great pleasure to be given the chance to be a guest blogger here at the F-Word. In order to give you some idea of what I'm like, I thought that I'd make my first post here a short introduction to the music that's influenced me throughout my life. Thanks to my mum, I grew up listening to the punk of the 70s and 80s. There were few very popular female bands (as shown by this F-Word series on the subject), but the ones we did listen to have stuck with me until now. My favourite of these were X-Ray Spex. Although X-Ray Spex only released one album, Germ Free Adolescents, they managed to pack so much energy, entertainment and discordant anger into it that even after listening to it approximately eight hundred million times (well, what else was I supposed to do when I was 13 and refusing to leave my bedroom because nobody understood me, other than listen to it on repeat?), I have still never tired of hearing those songs. As a frontwoman, Poly Styrene packed a punch. When she died last April I cried like a baby for about ten hours, got very drunk and wrote this tribute to her. As mentioned in the post, the first song I ever heard of theirs, and for this reason still my favourite, was The Day The World Turned Day-glo, a post-apocalyptic tour de force with saxophones (I am yet to be dissuaded from my theory that there is nothing in the world that cannot be improved by the addition of brass instruments): The first time I encountered the 'befuck' phenomenon (being unsure whether you want to be or fuck someone, but being slightly obsessed with them nonetheless, as articulated by @SonniesEdge) was when I started listening to Parallel Lines by Blondie. Although losing their edge in the early eighties with forays into disco and some quite frankly cringeworthy rap, this album had me hooked, and got me into their less popular eponymous first album, which featured a great song called Platinum Blonde as a bonus track on the 2001 re-release. (It was around this time, after an ill-fated experiment with bleach, that I realised that some people will just never suit blonde hair, and I am one of those people). Another band to influence me when I was growing up were The Slits. They had pretty much everything I wanted in a band (they were an all female punk band; I had low expectations), and they were awesome. With a raw, dirty sound and a collective attitude problem, The Slits were admirable not just for their music, but because when they started they faced massive opposition because they wanted to make the music, not be the groupies. Viv Albertine did an episode of Robert Llewellyn's Carpool last year where she talks at length about the history of the band and what they went through, which is well worth the twenty minute watch. My favourite song of theirs is Typical Girls, which is unfortunately all still true: Through The Slits, I found myself listening to Bikini Kill and L7. As a very angry teenaged budding feminist and active misanthrope, they went down extremely well, and opened me up to a whole new world of riot grrl. Even nearly ten years after first hearing them, it's a toss-up as to which one of these two songs will be the theme tune when a film is inevitably made of my life:
It's kind of sad to notice that I wasn't actually around when any of the aforementioned bands were in their heyday. There certainly appeared to be a dearth of female bands during my childhood, except for one - The Distillers. This band were probably the only female (or female-fronted, depending on the incarnation) band to get given airtime or column space by the media I consumed as a teenager. And oh god, Brody Dalle was cool. I have never wanted to befuck someone so much. My bedroom was so covered in pictures of her that I actually had to 'in' myself to my mum several times when she sat me down and told me that she really wouldn't care at all if I were a lesbian. They gave me hope and showed me that there was still a place for women in punk. The first time I heard them was when I was transfixed by the video for City of Angels, and it still gives me the shivers a bit: So there you have it, a short guide to music that remains a constant influence on me. I'd be really interested in hearing what stuff has influenced other people in the comments. At some point in the month I'll hopefully also be posting about female punk bands that are currently active and touring, and other must-hear bands. Image by anuko, shared under a Creative Commons Licence. Posted on 4 January 2012 | 4:04 pm devfraghttp://deviator.si/on/devfrag/deviantovifragmenti/devfrag_111221_transmittance2_1h_edit.mp3 Posted on 24 December 2011 | 8:43 pm transmittance #2 day6 12/dec [excerpt]
Posted on 12 December 2011 | 5:50 pm Transmittance #2 day1 7/dec/2011 timelapse
Posted on 8 December 2011 | 10:19 am Live Stage: Transmittance #2 [online + Ljubljana]
Transmittance explores collaboration which is local, global, networked and broadcasted. It involves an artistic group of performers, visual artists, musicians and computer programmers to research performative possibilities of streaming, broadcasting and telepresence forging new types of performance and audience. With focus on critical and socially-aware artistic languages this work is based on asking questions about body, self and society - opening non-dualistic perspectives. The project tries to rethink the notions of spectatorship and spectacle, ways of watching and seeing and the audience as spectators from the outside. In framework of free telepresence technologies it is a quest to open new spaces of visibility for performance and new media art and while critically deconstruct also actively bypass power structures that have a hold on physical spaces of artistic representation. Emphasis is made on creative use of free and open source software and its impact on artistic process and collaboration. The project develops a specific method of improvised performance which allows compositional freedom beside specific prepared scenes at the same time and in the process collide different specifics of various artistic media (performance art, expanded cinema, sound art, new media realities). Transmittance is a project proposed by Maja Delak & Luka PrinÄŸiÄŸ. Transmittance_#2 is in collaboration with: Loup Abramovici, BoÅ¡tjan BoÅ≤iÄŸ, Maja Delak, Matija Ferlin, Jakob Leben, Ana PeÄŸar, Luka PrinÄŸiÄŸ, Maja Å orli, Igor Å tromajer, Jelena Å∏drale and NataÅ¡a Å∏ivkoviÄΩ. Produced by: Emanat Institute, Ljubljana Previous Transmittance phases: Transmittance #1.5, Ljubljana/Graz [26/8 2011] with Maja Delak, Luka PrinÄŸiÄŸ, ESC Gallery, Graz, Reni Hofmueler and “mur.sat” project // organized by Emanat Institute, ESC Gallery Graz Transmittance #1 Pula,.hr [27/5 2011] with Marko BolkoviÄΩ, Maja Delak, Matija Ferlin, Luka PrinÄŸiÄŸ, Messmatik, Rea Korani, Mauricio Ferlin, Marcel Mars/Nenad RomiÄŸ // executive production by: Egle VoÅ¡ten // produced and organized by: Polis Jadran Europa Pula, Emanat Institute Ljubljana // financially supported by: Ministry of Culture Croatia, Municipality of Pula, Ministry of Culture RS, City Municipality of Ljubljana // supported by: Region of Istria, Tourism Office Pula Transmittance #0, Teatro Petrella, Longiano, Italy [19/12 2010] Maja Delak & Luka PrinÄŸiÄŸ (Wanda & Nova deViator) // preparation of the tools / open rehearsal // with Adele Cacciagrano, Tihana Maravic, Silvia Mei, Fabrizio Zanuccoli // program VIA DEL CONFINE, The East Side (of the moon) // curator: Nhandan Chirco // organized by: YANVII, Rad’Art Project/Artéco, Teatro Petrella, Emanat Institute Dirty Dozen BodyLab, Berlin, Ljubljana [28/8 2010] Luka PrinÄŸiÄŸ & Maja Delak - research of streamed interactive performance by invitation of Kathleen Reynolds (Berlin team: Michel Abdoul / Pascal Baes / Joao Costa / Awatef Fettar / Oscar Garcia / Dusan Pejcic / Kiril Bikov / Kathleen Reynolds / Aï Suzsuki / Gill Viandier / Raphaël Vincent / Vero Mota) http://transmittance.si || http://wndv.si || http://emanat.si Posted on 11 December 2011 | 8:45 pm transmittance#2: timelapse from day1
Posted on 8 December 2011 | 10:22 am The Perfect Body Is a LieLaurie and Debbie say: Fashion models are, almost by definition, people with “perfect bodies.” That’s how they get chosen. Bodybuilders have become, for a large segment of the populace, the symbol of a different kind of “perfect body.” Let’s take a look behind that perfection.
Coleman, stepping off the stage after a competition, is dependent on supplemental oxygen. “The strain of intense dieting, dehydration and muscle-flexing,” says Zed Nelson (who took the picture) “places high levels of strain on the heart and lungs, rendering many contestants dizzy, light-headed and weak.” So, the image we see on the stage, of a man who has refined his body and built up his strength in a way we can envy and wish to achieve (or come close to), is a lie. Lisa Wade at Sociological Images paired this image of Coleman with a photograph of Victoria’s Secret Angel, Adriana Lima, who discussed her pre-shoot regimen in a recent interview. For the last three weeks, she’s been working out twice a day. “It is really intense, it’s not really the amount of time you spend working out, it’s the intensity: I jump rope, I do boxing, I lift weights, but I get bored doing that. If I am not moving I get bored very easily.” She sees a nutritionist, who has measured her body’s muscle mass, fat ratio and levels of water retention. He prescribes protein shakes, vitamins and supplements to keep Lima’s energy levels up during this training period. Lima drinks a gallon of water a day. For nine days before the show, she will drink only protein shakes – “no solids”. The concoctions include powdered egg. Two days before the show, she will abstain from the daily gallon of water, and “just drink normally”. Then, 12 hours before the show, she will stop drinking entirely. Lisa’s point is that “Bodybuilders and models, then, represent aesthetic extremes of masculinity and femininity, but their bodies aren’t the natural extension of male and female physicalities. Instead, achieving the look requires significant sacrifice of one’s body.” In other words, like the bodybuilder’s strength, the model’s health, attractiveness, and desirability are a lie. Trust us, she’s nowhere near so desirable when she’s drinking her daily gallon of water, or parching herself to drop eight pounds in twelve hours. In this context, it’s heartening to read Chloe at Feministing, writing about Norway’s minister of equality, Audun Lysbakken (why doesn’t the U.S. have a secretary of equality?), who “is pushing for advertisers to begin disclosing when their billboards have been retouched.”
Similar campaigns have happened in the United Kingdom and France, and some ads have even been banned in the U.K. for being excessively retouched. Lysbakken and her counterparts in other countries are trying to make sure everyone sees and notices what many of us already know–pictures like the one just above are a complete, total, and irredeemable lie. As Chloe points out, awareness of retouching and Photoshop is not sufficient. Many young women who understand that the images are photoshopped still want to look like the resulting picture. Forcing advertisers to reveal their lies would likely have the secondary effect of having fewer advertisers use retouched photographs. And having fewer deceitful images out there would help change people’s goals. Similarly, revealing just how much models and bodybuilders wear out and destroy their bodies so they can pretend to “perfection” can help us all re-evaluate what we really want to look like–and what it would cost. Posted on 6 December 2011 | 7:01 am Delicate
“Xenia”, by Brian Shumway. Part of his True Men project.
Posted on 5 December 2011 | 7:00 pm 6° Streaming Festival (NL) on VisualcontainerTVMOTION BASED COLLAGES RELOADED Posted on 1 December 2011 | 11:07 am |
"Far from weakening or undermining marriage, as homophobes claim, many same-sex couples seem..."“Far from weakening or undermining marriage, as homophobes claim, many same-sex couples seem hell-bent on shoring up an institution that is, for many heterosexuals, failing, discredited and irrelevant. While the push for same-sex marriage is an issue of equality, which I support, it also signifies the rising conservatism of the LGBT community and a loss of radical vision. It reeks of assimilationism and conformism with the straight status quo. As we celebrate gay pride in London this Saturday, with its calls for marriage equality, the sceptical, questioning attitudes of the early lesbian and gay liberation pioneers will be almost entirely absent.” Posted on 16 July 2011 | 10:44 am Drowned CityIt’s not surprising that there’s relatively few films made about pirate radio, when being collared with illegal broadcasting equipment or running a station can land you in jail, with an unlimited fine, or, in the infamous case of DJ Slimzee, receiving an ASBO banning you from the upper floors of buildings in London. Drowned City, a documentary by UK filmmaker Faith Millin that’s been gestating over the past year or so, is an attempt to rectify that situation. From the title I was expecting some apocalyptic, Ballardian essay film – the name, it turns out, comes from a track by Dark Sky – but viewing a selection of rough cuts suggests the opposite. It’s a personal, intimate film dealing with those who risk their livelihoods (and lives) keeping the pirates on air. Some of the stories are familiar from urban myth or recycled anecdotes – driving around for places to put aerials, shinning up pylons – but this is one of the first times the pirates speak for themselves, albeit often with hooded faces and under the cover of darkness. The narrative of Drowned City is the familiar one of people doing it for the love of the music, but it’s no less emotionally engaging for that. One pirate recalls picking up secondhand broadcast equipment and messing around with it with mates in the back garden, culling what he needed to know from YouTube and the net. There’s footage of pirates shinning up electricity pylons overlooking London and the surrounding counties and accessing power for transmitters by breaking into electricity substations (surely cast iron proof that they’re not doing it for self-interest). Of more direct political import are accounts of pirates getting placed on lengthy periods of bail after arrest, and having their partners questioned for supposedly supporting their activities. From these anecdotes, the behaviour of Ofcom, the quango that regulates radio and telecommunications in the UK, seems odd – they expend serious money and police resources to keep small pirates off the air, with relatively little in the way of explanation. “They disrupt the vital communications of the safety of life services, particularly air traffic control,” runs one rather shaky-sounding argument on the Ofcom website – surely air traffic control doesn’t rely on the FM band? The film is apparently still evolving as more figures from the pirate underworld are drawn into the film; as yet all that exists in the public domain are some relatively brief teasers, essentially just standard trailers for the forthcoming film. But judging by the work in progress, Drowned City could turn out to be an important document. The intimate conversations with the pirates show you some of the toil, the dirt under the fingernails, and the scars of those who struggle to keep pirates on the air. “They take from, rather than contribute to, the communities they claim to serve,” states the Ofcom website. Drowned City looks like it could offer a positive counter to that argument. Drowned City teasers:
Posted on 31 May 2011 | 5:39 pm Revolution in AmericaWill Corporatocracy or Democracy prevail?by Micah M. White From Adbusters #95: The Philosophy Issue
You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly. Audio version read by George Atherton – Right-click to download This is a sincere call for an American Revolution against the decadent, vile plutocrats driving our nation into the ground. Super-consumers, sinister bankers, celebrity whores dine on foie gras and truffles while more than 25 million Americans are unemployed and 2.8 million homes are in foreclosure. A cabal of greedy bastards has turned America, the pioneer of modern democracy, into a corporatocracy where a handful of nonhuman megacorps own our government, political parties, courts, schools and media. The opulent one percent are sucking us dry even as they push us, debt-ridden and redundant, over the precipice. Only an insurrection against their monied despotism can save us now. Making the case for the overthrow of the American corporatocracy is a serious matter. From the perspective of the plutocrats in power, it is a criminal, seditious, treasonous act punishable by a lengthy prison sentence. Therefore we must be absolutely certain that ours is a righteous rebellion. We must be confident that although our revolution may be illegal from their perspective, it is supremely legitimate, commendable and obligatory from the perspective of universal, natural law. And so that we may guard against recklessness, we must be judicious and put the actions of the American government on trial before deciding if the sentence of execution by popular revolution is necessary and just. Our case for a forceful disbanding rests on the charge that the American regime is illegitimate and antidemocratic because it is a danger to Americans as citizens, to America as a nation and to Homo sapiens as a species. Acknowledging that insurrection is only warranted when there is no other avenue to fully removing the corrupt from power, we will contend that all other tactics have already been tried unsuccessfully. Every politician in office today, Democrat and Republican alike, accepts corporate bribes and is therefore corrupt. Their election is perverse evidence that they groveled before corporate lords and do not serve the will of the people. We know this because on January 21, 2010, the US Supreme Court told us who runs the nation by granting corporations the freedom to donate unlimited amounts of money to political candidates. As it is already an established statistical fact that the candidate who spends the most money wins in 9 out of 10 races, it is undeniable that we live in an era where anyone genuinely opposed to the corporate takeover of America, and unwilling to compromise, will never be elected. That makes the government a dangerous enterprise that is a hazard to individual freedom. Not content with stripping us as citizens of our sovereignty, our corporate-backed rulers have instituted a foreign policy that delights in permanent war and international instability. From cynically squandering billions of dollars of taxpayer money each year in gifts to the apartheid state of Israel or in military support given to keep Arab tyrants in power, everything about America’s foreign policy is wrong, pro-war, anti-freedom and unjust. Two preemptive wars in the last decade … ongoing occupations with new war crimes daily … secret drone attacks on civilians … military bases encircling the world … a nefarious, unelected military-industrial complex sows discord abroad and guarantees that our nation will never live in peace. And then there is the deepest charge of all: America’s corporatocracy is committing a crime against humanity. Nature is dying, sentient species are disappearing, catastrophic climate change threatens us all. And yet the ideology of rampant consumerism reigns supreme in America. Ecocide is the official policy of these mammon worshipers who use their military might to keep the oil flowing and industrial pollutants pumping. Glaciers are melting, oceans are acidifying, climate wars are looming. If America is not overthrown, the cancerous growth of capitalism will not end until all life on Earth is extinct. Everywhere we look there are signs of moral decay, political corruption and fascistic tendencies. However, activists have not been passive. For decades, since the end of democracy in America first became undeniable, we have tried every tactic to avert catastrophe. We have voted, written letters, donated money, held signs, protested in marches, clicked links, signed petitions, tweeted websites, written books, taught classes, knitted sweaters, learned how to farm, turned off the television, programmed apps, engaged in direct action, committed petty vandalism … All this has been for naught. Popular revolution remains the only reasonably viable tactic remaining. In the 18th century, America’s founding fathers were in the same situation as we are today. They also sought justification to start a rebellion against a despotic empire that claimed to be their rightful government. They knew that what they intended to do was illegal from the king’s perspective, but they found solace in a higher law, a universal law that takes priority over temporal authority. The thirteen colonies made the case for insurrection in the Declaration of Independence of the United States and thereby permanently enshrined as inalienable “the Right of the People to alter or abolish” the government. The precedent of our own history grants us the right to revolt. Further, the seriousness of corporate America’s threat to the world puts us under obligation to act. Now we will sweep the parasites out of power and reinstate the rule of the people. Micah White is a contributing editor at Adbusters Posted on 22 April 2011 | 2:18 am Right Wing Radio Duck goes HTML5
We’re big fans of remix artist Jonathan McIntosh, who’s created classics like So You Think You Can Be President? (mashing a popular dance show with 2008 presidential debates), Buffy v. Edward (matching the vamp-killing feminist icon against the bloodsucker from Twilight), and most recently, Right Wing Radio Duck (in which Donald Duck falls under the spell of talk radio host Glen Beck). Jonathan’s work always shows how principles like fair use, transformative works, and the video essay can help us communicate in ways we couldn’t before the democratization of video. Now, Jonathan is pairing his penchant for meticulously crafted works of remix art with an eye toward the technical possibilities of HTML5 video. Using the popcorn.js video library developed by Mozilla’s Web Made Movies project and students at Seneca College, he’s given Right Wing Radio Duck a brand new treatment. The new web version of RWRD gives a second-by-second breakdown where the source audio and video comes from. Jonathan explains:
It’s like unwrapping an onion and seeing the layers inside, and testifies to how much work went into making this thing. We’re excited to see what else people build with tools like popcorn.js, and where HTML5 video goes next! Posted on 31 January 2011 | 6:03 pm Marc Quinn
'Buck & Allanah' http://www.life.com/image/98881309 
'Chelsea Charms http://www.life.com/image/98880958 
'Allanah & Buck' http://www.life.com/image/98880961 All photos from Marc Quinn's exhibition 'Allanah, Buck, Catman, Chelsea, Michael, Pamela And Thomas' at White Cube Gallery. May 6, 2010 in London, England. Photos: Danny Martindale/WireImage Posted on 27 December 2010 | 4:03 pm André Kertész - Distortion n° 41, 1933
Distortion n° 41, 1933 [with André Kertész self-portrait] Gelatin silver print later print, 18,5 x 24,7 cm Collection of Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris André Kertész - Retrospective 26 February 2011 until 15 May 2011 (Main Gallery & Gallery) Opening: Friday, 25 February 2011, from 6 p.m. till 9 p.m. At 7 p.m., the exhibition will be introduced by Michel Frizot and Urs Stahel. FOTOMUSEUM WINTERTHUR Grüzenstrasse 44+45 , CH-8400 Winterthur (Zurich) http://www.fotomuseum.ch Tues-Sun 11 am to 6 pm, Wed 11 am to 8 pm Posted on 21 February 2011 | 5:36 pm Nicola Costantino, "Soccer Ball", 1999
Daros Latinamerica Collection, Zürich. Photo by Peter Schälchli, Zürich. Source: http://www.e-flux.com/ e-mail Posted on 26 February 2011 | 3:38 pm Women’s History Month: Sylvia RiveraFor the last day of Women’s History Month, I give you Sylvia Rivera, proud, out, trans woman who participated in the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969, and only a year later watched as gender and trans rights were disappeared from the new Gay Rights’ movement’s agenda.
Shelters seems like an exaggeration, since the only other I know of is Transy House (which was around the corner from where we lived in Park Slope). I’m pleased to see the Day of Silence and GLSEN are honoring her as well this year. Posted on 31 March 2011 | 7:34 am Luis de Bethencourt: the motherf*)#^g manifesto for programmingfor all those who have experienced pain by corporate management, specially middle management...
this has been toned down. read the original and complete manifesto here Posted on 31 March 2011 | 12:48 pm Queered Pitch“Sound itself is queer.” I was struck by this quote from Drew Daniel of Matmos while flicking through a video of a Q&A I did with them at Mutek last year (the Mutek people have kindly just put it online, a series of four interviews from the 2010 edition that they’re putting up in the run up to this year’s event). Queerness is what exceeds values and structures, he explained. So if sound qua sound exists outside language and and the usual hierarchies of taste, then is sound queer? While Drew Daniel was riffing on this idea (22 minutes into the interview) I was in the presenter’s chair with one half of my brain pre-occupied with thinking of the next question to throw back at him. But nearly a year on it resonated with ideas that have been rattling around my head in the meantime. Right now I happen, oddly enough, to be listening to disco genius Patrick Cowley’s “Menergy”. Disco was able to evoke desire precisely because it could be so direct and, hey, crude. From pop to metal to rave to noise, music can be so complex, chaotic and endlessly fascinating because in formal terms it is so cognitively simple and sensorially direct compared to other artforms. I’m not well-placed to comment on the idea of queerness in sound – check the clip for Drew’s more eloquent thoughts – but this kind of thinking, exploring how way sound escapes objective analysis and exists outside most conceptual frameworks, at least gets us a little closer to why music has such power. Posted on 28 March 2011 | 12:51 pm Live Stage: Ted Nelson [Melbourne]
Fish, they say, aren’t aware of water. Most people, including computer scientists, don’t notice the hidden assumptions and traditions that have structured today’s computer world and digital documents. These assumptions push the real problems into the laps of users and programmers. Almost nobody notices the consequences of this locked cosmology.
People are satisfied, or intimidated, because they don’t know anything else is possible. There is no right or wrong computer world; what is wrong is that there is only one computer world, with no other choices. We will consider some alternatives. Theodor Holm Nelson is an American designer, generalist, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the terms “hypermedia” and “hypertext” in 1963, and is also credited with first use of the words micropayment, transclusion, virtuality, intertwingularity and dildonics. He is the most important computing visionary of our time. The main thrust of his work has been to create a different kind of electronic document which allows many forms of connection, instead of the “paper simulation” of Word, PDF and the World Wide Web. Nelson founded Project Xanadu in 1960, a project that has inspired a whole generation of computer programmers, hobbyists and developers. The effort is documented in his 1974 book Computer Lib/Dream Machines and the 1981 Literary Machines. He has just published an autobiography, Possiplex. For a video snapshot of Ted Nelson’s challenge to computing norms see: PRESENTED BY: Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation Posted on 20 March 2011 | 5:41 pm chibird:Heard the news this morning, drew this in response. ^^...
chibird:Heard the news this morning, drew this in response. ^^ Wishing for the world to be okay. Inspired by Ponyo. (via stfuconservatives:howisthisprolife) Posted on 12 March 2011 | 1:25 am Confessions of a Radical Prof Wellesley hired me in 1978 as the college’s first and only radical economist. I was hired in response to student pressure: while doing their junior year studies abroad, students had been exposed to theories other than mainstream American neoclassical economics and they wanted these views represented at school. The department posted a job for someone to teach what they called “competing paradigms of economics.” I was a PhD candidate in economics at Yale, where I studied with David Levine (Yale’s one Marxist economist … he didn’t get tenure). I applied and was hired. All Wellesley economics faculty were required to teach two of the required “core” courses. I was assigned to introductory and intermediate microeconomics and given the mainstream textbook, but I refused to teach mainstream economics straight. Instead, I presented the material in the textbook, critiqued it and taught the outlines of the alternative, radical view. I remember feeling that by criticizing the economics bible I was engaging in a deeply subversive activity. I used to imagine that a huge arm would reach into the classroom, pick me up and carry me off. Luckily nothing of the sort happened. Instead, based on my popularity with students and the success of my first book, An Economic History of Women in America, I received a permanent, tenured position. Once tenured, I could relax a bit and take more risks with my teaching. I began to realize that my critiques of mainstream economic theory and advanced capitalist economy seemed to be backfiring. From the very first time I presented the supply and demand framework to my intro econ students, for example, I pointed out that supply and demand curves only determine prices in perfectly competitive markets … which don’t exist. I considered this key to my students’ education, especially since mainstream economists apply the framework inappropriately so often, yet many of them continued to forget this key fact on their tests. Teaching about market equilibrium, a situation in which there is neither shortage nor surplus of a product, presented another particularly bothersome failure. I always took care to explore the fact that equilibrium – where the supply and demand curves cross, and quantity supplied equals quantity demanded – does not mean that everyone is happy, or that basic needs are met. Many people could, in fact, be starving because they are too poor to be able to “demand” what they need. Even when no lines or shortages exist, people can still be dying from starvation. Despite my lessons, many of my students were unable to point out the falseness of the statement “everybody is happy in equilibrium” on their tests. They left my class accepting the free market/neoliberal line that government policies which intervene in markets – such as minimum wages or rent control – are inherently bad because they prevent markets from getting to equilibrium. I wanted to pull my hair out. It seemed the more I critiqued mainstream economics, the more I strengthened its hold on most of my students. At first I tried to heighten my criticism of mainstream economic theory, and to begin it earlier in the course. I would criticize supply and demand curves and marginal utility curves before I even drew them. As I taught the theories, I would interlace critique in virtually every sentence. This approach, however, frustrated my students: why was I teaching it to them if it was wrong? How could they learn the material if I didn’t present it to them completely before attacking it? While some of my students – usually those who were radical themselves – understood and appreciated my criticism, many of them found it confusing, alienating and discouraging. A similar problem emerged with my radical critique of advanced capitalism. My classes on radical economics presented the neo-Marxist view that large corporations dominated the economic landscape: oppressing workers, brainwashing consumers through advertising to keep them enslaved by the work/spend cycle and manipulating the government to do their bidding through campaign financing and bribes. I juxtaposed this view with that of our mainstream text, which obscured corporate power by focusing on small, helpless firms controlled by sovereign consumers who – when market failures made it necessary – use their votes to get the government to intervene on their behalf. I was amused – and dismayed – to find that many of my students’ exams showed they actually thought I had been teaching them about two different countries! Even as I adjusted my teaching to make sure my students understood that these were two views of the US economy, however, I realized another problem. The students who believed in the radical view were also convinced that large corporations were so powerful that nothing could be done about them. Instead of inspiring my students to radical activism, I had taught them to be cynical and resigned about the prevailing economic dysfunction and injustice. If they couldn’t do anything about it, they figured, why not at least get rich by becoming an investment banker? Then I learned about the spiritual principle of non-reaction. When you react to someone, you are letting him determine your behavior rather than choosing it yourself. My teaching was largely reactive: by centering on a critique of the text I was continually “reacting” to the book rather than achieving my goal of demolishing mainstream economics – in my students’ heads and in the world. My radical critiques of large corporations were also a reaction, and only emphasized corporate power to such a degree that it made my students feel helpless. I began to evolve a new way of teaching that focuses less on mainstream economic theory and powerful, profit-motivated corporations. Now we begin the term identifying both pressing economic problems and the global warming crisis. I point out the problems associated with consumers, workers and firms acting in self-interested and materialistic ways. I present, discuss and give examples of the emerging “solidarity economy,” which is based on socially responsible or “high road” economic values, practices and institutions: ethical consumption, fair trade, socially responsible corporations. This puts materialistic competitive consumerism and traditional profit-motivated corporations on the defensive. From this point of view one wonders why anyone ever believed that a solely profit-motivated corporation, dedicated to serving its owners (the stockholders), would be able to do right by its other stakeholders: consumers, workers, suppliers, government and the environment. Or why anyone would imagine that buying more and more material things would bring true fulfillment. One of my most successful assignments this term was based on the PBS documentary Affluenza and Me, which analyzes contemporary consumer culture in the us as an illness. The symptoms of this “affluenza” are overwork, time shortage, debt, breakdown of family relationships, ecological destruction, etc. We also read and discussed an excerpt from P.A. Payutto’s book Buddhist Economics, which presents enlightened consumption as building well-being through resistance to advertising and cravings, knowledge of one’s true needs and service to the whole. I no longer teach the core aspects of mainstream microeconomics as some superpower theory. I now present microeconomics as a theory that understands some aspects of the economy but misses others. It’s a theory whose models can only be used if their limitations are acknowledged, and if they are supplemented by other concepts and understandings. The supply and demand curve framework, for example, can be very helpful in elucidating problems in contemporary labor markets – such as below-subsistence level wages caused by an excess of labor. I no longer teach my student about corporate power as an overpowering monolithic force but as something which has to be continually constructed through the collaboration of consumers, workers, managers, government officials and laws. I show them that it is something that needs to be radically reconstructed through socially responsible behavior. I teach my students how to make their microeconomic decisions – as consumers, workers, entrepreneurs, parents and citizens – in ways that create well-being for themselves and their loved ones. I teach them how to use their economic power to express and actualize their deepest values – to repudiate the false god of money and the prevailing economic religion of the market. I teach them that enlightened self-interest involves behaving in a socially responsible manner, since we all depend on each other … and on the whole. We all have to do our part to save both the planet and ourselves – there is plenty that we can do by aligning our economic decisions with our true values. Julie Matthaei is an economics professor at Wellesley College and a cofounder and board member of the US Solidarity Economy Network (www.ussen.org). She coedited Solidarity Economy: Building Alternatives for People and Planet, available at lulu.com/changemaker.
Julie Matthaei
Posted on 15 July 2009 | 8:10 pm |
Used as a form of expression for centuries, man has tattooed his skin to signify life changing transitions, status and wealth and of course has used ink of many types to make a strike for individualism. Originally it was plant dyes that were used and above all of the products that were used there were two that rose to the fore as being excellent as skin staining pigmentations, one was indigo and the other Henna.
The Medium is Not the Message: On the Future of New Media Studies by 
Transmittance #2 - Telepresence Performance :: December 13, 2011; 8:00 pm (CET) :: 
[Image: Ted Nelson at at Keio University, Japan 1999 (image Belinda Barnet)] 
