Invitation 3rd Futurological Symposium
'Free Cultural' Spaces
on Friday 20 July, 2013 in Ruigoord, Amsterdam

Dear friend(s),

In 2013 Ruigoord celebrates its fortieth anniversary as a free cultural space. The whole year through manifestations will take place in honor of this wonderful fact. The climax however will be on the week before and the week after the 24th of July; the day the village was squatted.

To commemorate this event we are planning a 3rd Futurological Symposium 'Free Cultural Spaces' from a global perspective.

Silvia Federici Talk Reproduction and Women's Struggles in an Era of "Primitive Accumulation"
Monday, Dec. 10, 2012 @ 6PM
THE WENNER-GREN FOUNDATION, NYC

Silvia Federici, author of Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle, will discuss the ongoing neoliberal restructuring of the global political economy and reproductive labor, focusing on the crisi that "new enclosures" are producing in our everyday lives, and the struggles that women internationally are making, in response to it, to create new forms of social cooperation and reproductive "commons."

"Dictionary of Operations"
Konrad Becker

A Performance by Konrad Becker and Discussion
with Ayreen Anastas, Stephen Duncombe and Fran Ilich
Moderated by Jim Fleming

Thursday, December13, 06:30 PM
Austrian Cultural Forum
11 East 52nd Street, New York, NY 10022
(212) 319-5300

The Austrian Cultural Forum is pleased to present this event featuring Austrian electronic media pioneer Konrad Becker, in conjunction with the exhibition Against The Specialist: Contemporary References to Arnold Schoenberg in Image and Sound.

WITH: Ayreen Anastas (16beaver), Stephen Duncombe (NYU), and Fran Ilich (author/artist)
Moderator: Jim Fleming

Konrad Becker's "Operations" highlights the subtext of the politics of information and the underlying framework of media reality in digital networks. If every communication is an oracle, who owns meaning which authorizes legitimate knowledge? Dictionary of Operations reflects illusory mirror worlds and excavates media-archaeological ghost stories that continue to haunt the world. Tracing the omnipresent trails of monsters, zombies and ghosts in the infosphere it declares "To be human is to be haunted, bound in chains to a past dominating the present."

"Operations" is a performance series based on a series of books published by Autonomedia. Dictionary of Operations, is the third in a series of new lexica. After defining the field of Tactical Reality (2002) and Strategic Reality (2009), this manual to the contemporary cognitive environment analyzes 72 terms to access the operative logics of social and anti-social media.

Konrad Becker will perform excerpts from "Operations": a spoken word electro-poetry show of psycho-acoustic beats that explores mimetic communication machines. "Operations" evokes the phantasmagoric qualities of digital media environments. The performance unveils media history to be haunted by reoccurring themes of ghosts, mirror worlds and dangerous trans-communications.

Dictionary of Operations, Autonomedia 2012 ISBN: 978-1-57027-261-5

New InterfaceIssue of the global emancipation of labour
Interface
For the global emancipation of labour: new movements and struggles around work, workers and precarity

Volume four, issue two of Interface, a peer-reviewed e-journal produced and refereed by social movement practitioners and engaged movement researchers, is now out, on the special theme "For the global emancipation of labour: new movements and struggles around work, workers and precarity”.

Interface is open-access (free), global and multilingual. Our overall aim is to "learn from each other's struggles": to develop a dialogue between practitioners and researchers, but also between different social movements, intellectual traditions and national or regional contexts.

Open Utopia Launch December 5th NYC
Stephen Duncombe and Bob Stein - Launch for Open Utopia
Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - 5:30PM - 7:30PM
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor

Join Stephen Duncombe (Gallatin and MCC, NYU) and Bob Stein (Institute for the Future of the Book) for the launch of Open Utopia, an open-source project based on Sir Thomas Moreʼs Utopia. Using the platform Social Book, users can add their own notes, criticisms, or anecdotes to the text which can be read by everyone.

The Creativity of the Common
Nuovo Cinema Palazzo

The following considerations are food for thought derived from and developed throughout a series of meetings and debates with the occupants of the Teatro Valle occupato and other subjects sharing the process of creation of the “common”.

The constituent dimension of the common good
Let’s begin with the centrality and historical urgency of the practice we are producing with the creation of the common good. We believe that what the traditional legal models are now compelled to face is, more than the regression of state sovereignty, the relation between constitutions and social autonomies, and the regulatory claim of the first over the latter.

To this regard, our effort is not employed in the direction of a wholehearted defense of the Constitution, nor towards its absolute abolishment. It is rather aimed at creating a dialectic relationship with those institutions in which we find a potential “gap” for creative intervention, therefore penetrating the legal system, regaining the means of affirmation of our struggle, of collective action, and of a new battleground for ourselves and others.

The Strike Wave and New Workers' Organisations: Breaking out of Old Compromises
Leonard Gentle

Over the past weekend, the striking mineworkers of Amplats gathered at a mass rally in Rustenburg and howled their defiance of a series of ultimatums issued by the company. At De Doorns, farm workers are on a wildcat strike - the latest of a series that has become a feature of the South African landscape over the last three months, knocking Mangaung off the front pages. Something is stirring from below…and it is time we got beyond the fear and trepidation that have become the stock response in the media.

After the Marikana massacre President Jacob Zuma appointed the Farlam Commission and also convened an emergency Social Dialogue meeting of Business, Labour and Government in October. The partners released a statement calling on strikers to return to work and for the police to defend law and order and noted that “the wave of unprotected strikes…[could]…undermine the legal framework of bargaining.”

Rural Rebels and Useless Airports: La ZAD – Europe’s largest Postcapitalist land occupation.
Laronce

October 2012, Notre dames des Landes, France.
Chris leans forward, her long fingers play with the dial of the car radio “I’m trying to find 107.7 FM“ … a burst of Classical music, a fragment of cheesy pop. “ Ah! Here we go! I think I’ve got it?” The plastic pitch of a corporate jingle pierces the speakers: “Radio Vinci Autoroute: This is the weather forecast for the west central region…happy driving to you all. Traffic info next.” Chris smiles.

The narrow winding road is lined with thick hedgerows. Out of the darkness the ghostly outline of an owl cuts across our headlights. We dip down into a wooded valley, the radio signal starts to splinter. The well-spoken female voice fractures into static, words tune in and out and then another kind of sound weaves itself into the airwaves. We rise out of the wood onto a plateau, the rogue signal gets clearer, for a while two disturbingly different voices scramble together – the slick manicured predictable sounds of Radio Vinci wrestles with something much more alive, something rawer – a fleshier frequency.

Colectivo Situaciones Talk November 20th NYC
Between Impasse and Insurrection: Notes on the Crisis of Neoliberalism from Argentina 2001 to the Present
With Verónica Gago and Diego Sztulwark of Colectivo Situaciones, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Tuesday, November 20th 7PM
Join us for a talk and discussion with Marina Sitrin, author of Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina.
Co-sponsored by the Committee on Globalization and Social Change | Graduate Center CUNY, Room 5307 | 365 Fifth Ave, New York, NY 10016

The moments of political and economic crisis in Argentina in 2001, specifically the 19th and 20th of December do not merely mark an event, a day, or even a year. Rather 2001 is an active principle, a key to thinking about this past decade from the perspective of the crisis of neoliberalism between impasse and insurrection. It is a method, a way of looking by seeing the crisis in motion and in time. It becomes a premise with its multiple meanings, spaces, and temporalities.

This talk will be given by Verónica Gago and Diego Sztulwark, members of Colectivo Situaciones and of the Buenos Aires-based radical press Tinta Limón. Colectivo Situaciones is a collective of militant researchers based in Buenos Aires. For more than twelve years, they have participated in numerous grassroots militant-research projects with unemployed workers, peasant movements, human rights groups, neighborhood assemblies, and alternative education experiments. Their published works include several articles and books, among them Genocide in the Neighborhood (Chainlinks, 2010) and 19&20: Notes for a New Social Protagonism (Autonomedia/Minor Compositions/Common Notions, 2011).

A Letter to Bifo
Sandy's Sister

Dear Bifo,

What are we welcoming you to in post-Sandy New York? How to welcome a friend to a disaster site, especially when the disaster is surpassing our capacity to see it, yet alone bear witness, or act up to it, in response or relation to it.

What is the context here in New York, you and many other comrades must be wondering?

The storms came and went, and we are living in their wake. The city is what you would expect after a very intensive period of resistance, the energies have dispersed but remain tethered. The struggles have coalesced around a few more focused initiatives. What exploded last Fall here in the city is clearly not finished. A lot of people remain involved on an almost daily basis and at this moment, a lot of the work of the last year has translated into organizing relief efforts from the grounds of the most devastated parts of the city.