Goldsmiths - University of London

CCS events

Coal Fired Computers (300,000,000 Computers - 318,000 Black Lungs )

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Presented by Graham Harwood (Practical Methods Lecturer Centre for Cultural Studies) Matsuko Yokokoji (YoHa): in Collaboration with Jean Demars (MA in Interactive Media from CCS 2009)

AV Festival 10 - Discovery Museum, Newcastle

12-­14 March 2010

A one-hundred year old, 35-ton showman's steam engine powers a computer with 1.5 tons of coal. Black lungs inflate every time a database record of miners' lung disease is shown on the computer monitors. It feels like you've been invited into a fun fair, but one where the rides log their own accidents ­ a fun fair run by people who long ago became indistinct from the machines they maintain. 

Over three days at the Discovery Museum, with groups of miner activists, Coal Fired Computers articulates relations between Power, Art and Media. A new work by leading UK media artists Harwood and Yokokoji (YoHa), in collaboration with Jean Demars, it responds to the displacement of coal production to distant lands like India and China after the UK miners' strike in 1984/85. 

Coal Fired Computers reflects on the complexities of our global fossil fuel reliance and especially on how coal transforms our health as we have transformed it. Today coal produces 42% of the world¹s electricity, and in many countries this rate is much higher (more than 70% in India and China). This power is produced by descendants of Charles Parson's 1884 steam turbines, also on display in the Discovery Museum. 

It could be said that coal dust gets into everything. Sealed into the lungs of miners it forms visible blue streaks, like veins of coal. According to the World Health Organisation, 318,000 deaths occur annually from chronic bronchitis and emphysema caused by exposure to coal dust. The common perception is that wealthy countries have put this all behind them, displacing coal dust into the lungs of unrecorded, unknown miners in distant lands, however coal

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Hacking Internet Politics

Tuesday 16th March, 2-4pm, Room WB117

Gabriella Coleman

"Old and New Net Wars over Free Speech, Freedom and Secrecy, or How to Understand the Hacker and Lulz battle against the Church of Scientology"

Abstract: Why have geeks been compelled to protest the Church of Scientology vehemently for nearly two decades? This talk starts with this question to present a cultural history and political analysis of one of the oldest Internet wars, often referred to as "Internet vs Scientology." During the 1990s, this war was waged largely on USENET (a large scale messaging board system), while in recent times it has taken the form of "Project Chanology." This project is orchestrated by a loosely defined group called "Anonymous" who has led a series of online attacks and real world protests, often using a variety of media, against Scientology. I argue that to understand the significance of these battles and protests, we must examine how the two groups stand in a culturally antipodal relation to each other. Through this analysis of cultural inversion, I will consider how long-standing liberal ideals take cultural root in the context of these battles, use these two cases to reveal important political transformations in Internet/hacker culture between the mid 1990s and today and finally will map the tension between pleasure/freedom (the "lulz") and moral good ("free speech") found among Anonymous in terms of the tension between liberal freedom and romantic/Nietzschean freedom/pleasure.

Toni Prug

"Series on Commu(o)nism: Open Process, the organizational spirit of the Internet Model"

Abstract: The desires and the sources of emancipatory potential of the commons for the cooperative and egalitarian global togetherness, for a new communism born through the new generation of tools and organizational practices, have temporarily been appropriated and hi-jacked by capitalism under the Open Source and to an extent Creative Commons movements. Through and with the Open Process methods of the founding Internet communities, we can make a significant step towards claiming it back. Commu(o)nism, we could call it, is a new emerging form of communism hacked with open process and new commons. The small (o) in the middle stands for open.
Contact m.fuller@gold.ac.uk for more information. 

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Sthaniya Sambaad ('Spring in the Colony')

5pm, Friday 19 March 2010, Goldsmiths Cinema
A special screening of the feature film by Arjun Gourisaria and Moinak Biswas (105 min. 2009, 35 mm, cinemascope, EST).
Q & A with one of the directors.

Please take a look at www.springinthecolony.com and also the blog www.sthaniya.wordpress.com for responses to the film.

A moving, and funny, story of life in a refugee colony south of the city of Kolkata.

All welcome. Contact john.hutnyk@gold.ac.uk for further information.

War as the Destruction of the Material Support

Coming in April, date/time to be announced...

"War as the Destruction of the Material Support (Freud, Derrida, and the Death Drive)"

Steven Miller

Steven Miller is assistant professor of English at the State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo, and Fulbright Scholar at the Freud Museum, Vienna.