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.
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.
Coal Fired Computers
Click image to enlarge
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
returns into our lives in the form of the cheap and apparently clean goods we consume.
Coal fired energy not only powers our computers here in the UK, but is integral to the production of the 300,000,000 computers made each year. 81% of the energy used in a computer's life cycle is expended in the manufacturing process, now taking place in countries with high levels of coal consumption. The UK currently produces less that one third of the coal it uses, importing the majority of it and therefore displacing 150,000 tons of coal dust into unknown lungs.
Coal Fired Computers brings together these disparate elements into an artwork, allowing us to reflect on the complexities that have created and maintained power, the crisis of fuelling that power and its subsequent health residues.
Commissioned by AV Festival 10 and produced in partnership with Discovery Museum. Supported by Metal Culture, Isis Arts and The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
download the bookletContact: cfc@yoha.co.uk
http://www.avfestival.co.uk
Pharmaconomics
Thursdays at 1pm in RHB137A, Goldsmiths
4th, 11th, 25th February & 4th March 2010
Open lecture series by Bernard Stiegler
Last year, in his lectures at Goldsmiths, Bernard Stiegler explored the question of media today grasped firstly from the point of view of prehistorical science, and secondly, from the questions opened in the story told by Protagoras in the eponym dialog by Plato, and coming from the mythology of Prometheus about the relationship between the mortals and technics. Stiegler argued that mortality is structurally and systematically linked to technicity and producing what he calls a primordial melancholy, which is engendered by the fact that all prosthesis, all technicity, is always both a poison and a remedy, and is what is called a pharmakon by Plato.This year, Stiegler will examine
- why the pharmacological situation in which we live, as technological beings, that is to say as non-beings, always becoming, needs an economy of this pharmacology : an economy which tends to optimise the curative effects of pharmaka and to reduce the toxicological ones.
- why such a pharmacology can never purify the technical remedies of their poisoning side, whereas there is nothing human which is not technical Рeven language, and then, thought.
- Stiegler will show why, if a pharmacology is a grammatology, it needs the development of a history of the supplement that gramma is, and not only a logic of this supplement. Of grammatology announced such a history, but in fact, this one never appeared.
- We will see that this history of the supplement needs to develop
the concept of a process of grammatisation, which is the process of
production of all sorts of gramma which are pharmaka as well.
nubureaucracy and capitalist realism
Friday, 12th February 2010 - 2-4pm Council Room, Laurie Grove Baths
Neoliberalism presents itself as the enemy of bureaucracy, the destroyer of the nanny state and the eliminator of red tape. Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism (Zer0 books, 2009) argues that, contrary to this widely accepted story, bureaucracy has proliferated under neoliberalism. Far from decreasing, bureaucracy has changed form, spreading all the more insidiously in its newly decentralised mode. This 'nu-bureaucracy' is often carried out by workers themselves, now induced into being their own auditors. Capitalist Realism aims to challenge the successful ideological doublethink in which workers' experience of increasing bureaucratisation co-exists with the idea that bureaucracy belongs to a 'Stalinist' past.
This symposium will explore nu-bureaucracy and other related concepts developed in Capitalist Realism, such as 'business ontology' and 'market Stalinism'. How has nu-bureaucracy affected education and public services, and how can it be resisted? What implications might the attack on nu-bureaucracy have for a renewed anti-capitalism?
Respondent, Alberto Toscano, Department of Sociology
What is bathos
Wednesday, 3 February 2010
5 - 6:30 pm, Main Building (RHB) 308
"What is bathos?" - Keston SutherlandKeston Sutherland is lecturer in English at the University of Sussex as well as a poet and founding editor of Barque Press.
Complex Urbanism, a talk by Professor Andrew Benjamin
Tuesday 2 February 2010 - 2 - 4pm, Council Room, Laurie Grove Baths
Terms such as 'complexity' bring with them an assumed logic of addition. Events are taken to have become complex due to the planned or unplanned incorporation of new elements. And yet simple addition is no longer sustainable. For development to be possible another conception of complexity needs to emerge. Moreover, the city is not a neutral site. Differentials of power are at work within the city. A theory of complexity that allows for both design and analysis has to interconnect programmatic development with the unplanned. The texture of the urban will demand therefore another vocabulary. The language of lines and divisions and the feint of neutrality will cede its place to a rethinking of relations in terms 'porosity', fraying' and 'sites of trauma' (amongst others). If there is a philosophical thinking of the city then has to begin with the recasting of relations that such a setting creates.
Andrew Benjamin is Professor of Critical Theory at Monash University, Melbourne, and a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Cultural Studies. He is author of number of books including, 'The Philosophy of Architecture', 'Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism' and, with Charles Rice, recently edited, 'Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity', published by re:press, http://www.re-press.org/
In preparation for this seminar, please read the text 'Towards a Complex Urbanism' available by email from m.fuller@gold.ac.uk
SLUM-TV, Nairobi, Kenya
Wednesday, 20 January 2010
4 - 5:30 pm, Main Building (RHB) 306
Artists' talk and presentation of the Slum-TV media project by Sam Hopkins, Biki Kangwana, and Alexander Nikolic. Slum-TV is a community media project that currently employs 16 full-time members in the Mathare slum in Nairobi, Kenya. Selected footage:
"Mathare Safari"
http://www.youtube.com/user/alekseu99#p/c/4C2517871817C3B6/15/9-eLHtt11wg
"Slum-TV in Gemeinderat"
http://www.youtube.com/user/alekseu99#p/c/4C2517871817C3B6
Al Jazeera coverage of Slum-TV
http//www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S8hvSb8QF4
Bilingual newspaper coverage in Serbian/English
http://www.eroticunion.org/activism/slum-tv-newspaper-free-download/
Attack on Slum-TV by right-wing political party in Vienna City Hall
http://www.eroticunion.org/activism/fpo-attackiert-slum-tv-im-wiener-gemeinderat/
More on the Mathare Safari competition
http://www.eroticunion.org/intervention/mathare-safari-competition-online-submit/
This event is free and open to the public and does NOT require booking.