Cultural Production and the State

San Diego, March 23–26, 2005

Papers are currently being accepted for the National Popular Culture &
American Cultural Association’s Joint Conferences being held in San Diego March 23–26, 2005.

This year a new Area has been developed entitled “Cultural Production and
The State.” This Area has been created to explore the ways in which
cultural production reproduces and/or undermines the State.

This Area is currently seeking new and provocative papers that illustrate
the critical role popular culture assumes in constructing our collective
understandings of the political landscape(s) in which we live.

NomIg writes

"Revolution: USA"

A Coldcut/NomIg Project

Revolution USA is an online, multimedia political art project put together by Coldcut and collaborators NomIg. Using samples of the last 40 years of American presidents and media figures, we have created an online Archive of Political Corruption and Scandals.

This site features an interactive timeline of major US political scandals and corruption with an integrated database containing: pertinent video clips and samples for download and streaming; pictures; a textual description of each event and offsite links for further research. The site contains hundreds of clips of US politicians in ‘awkward’ moments and other relevant footage, free audio loops and tracks created by Coldcut which are available for download (currently totaling over 13GBs).

carter writes:

Scandinavian Exhibition on American Activist Art

After spending one month in Vancouver, B.C., working with Adbusters I came to New York yesterday. I am curating an exhibition with the name "America vs. America". We want to give activists and artists a medium to speak to an audience of 7 cities in Scandinavia during spring and summer of 2005. The process of this fall's work and the response we get on the exhibition in Scandinavia will be put together into a documentary film. The idea is to try and create contacts across the Atlantic and to show the Scandinavian people a little bit of what the grassroots in the US are doing. We do this because we know that not all americans are stupid, ignorant, lazy Hollywood-plastics who vote for Bush and think that war is a good thing for democracy — many people in Europe and Scandinavia do think that way though.

"Keep Warm, Burn Britain!" Screening, New York, Oct. 3, 2004

"Keep Warm, Burn Britain!" is filmmaker Ross Lipman's documentary/memoir of
the
squatting movement in England in the mid 1980s. It chronicles the lives of
the anarchists, outcasts, and punks who lived in a small enclave of
abandoned buildings south of the Thames in East London; an area known in
the anarchist community as "Squatter's Paradise". After a brief outsider
renaissance the buildings were destroyed and their dwellers dispersed; a
forgotten moment in the broadscale gentrification of Docklands
Development.

"Keep Warm, Burn Britain!" moves freely from the chaotic lives
of the squatters to the broad social canvas in which their tales unfold;
buildings and lives swept up in the sea of change that swallows cities and
time.

"The Living Thought of Gilles Deleuze" Conference

University of Copenhagen, Denmark, November 3-4, 2005

One of the prominent themes in the writings of Gilles Deleuze is an
understanding of thinking as being alive. Thinking is conceived as an
affirmation of life, and life itself is affirmed by thinking as something
that is alive. In other words, the relationship between life and thinking
is an affirmative relationship, in which life is affirmed by thinking and
thinking affirmed by life. The notion of the double affirmation in
Nietzsche et la philosophie (1962) is revolving around such an affirmative
relationship between life and thinking.

A Hacker Manifesto

McKenzie Wark

Ours is once again an age of manifestos. Wark's book
challenges the new regime of property relations with all
the epigrammatic vitality, conceptual innovation, and
revolutionary enthusiasm of the great manifestos. — Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire

Type hello to the nascent "hacker class," McKenzie Wark's loose
confederation of fixers, file sharers, inventors, shut-ins,
philosophers, programmers, and pirates... The Lang College
professor's ambitious A Hacker Manifesto Googles for signs of
hope in this cyber-global-corporate-brute world of ours, and he
fixes on the hackers, macro-savvy visionaries from all fields who
"hack" the relationships and meanings the rest of us take for
granted. If we hackers-of words, computers, sound, science,
etc.-organize i
nto a working, sociopolitical class, Wark argues,
then the world can be ours. — Hua Hsu, Village Voice

A double is haunting the world — the double of
abstraction, the virtual reality of information,
programming or poetry, math or music, curves or
colorings upon which the fortunes of states and armies,
companies and communities now depend. The bold aim
of this book is to make manifest the origins, purpose,
and interests of the emerging class responsible for
making this new world — for producing the new
concepts, new perceptions, and new sensations out of
the stuff of raw data.

"Creative Philosophy: Theory and Praxis"

Call for Papers for Angelaki special issue on "Creativity"

Co-editors Felicity J. Colman (University of Melbourne) and
Charles J. Stivale (Wayne State University)

This Angelaki issue on "Creativity" seeks essays with collaborative, hybrid, and polyvocal research, linkages, and models of creativity in philosophical thought and artistic practices (e.g. literature, architecture, music, visual arts, new media, cinema). The thematic of creativity asks how creative interfaces operate, what forms of generic skills and community resources inform contemporary relations between ideas and creative expression and representation, and how and where creativity is produced.

"The Dromocratic Condition" Conference:

Contemporary Cultures of Acceleration

University of Newcastle upon Tyne, March 12–13, 2005

Theories of contemporary culture have foregrounded the significance of 'late
capitalism' or 'post-Fordism' (Jameson; Harvey); simulation and
'hyper-reality' (Baudrillard); information technology and the 'inhuman'
(Lyotard); the 'panopticon' (Foucault); 'communicative action' (Habermas);
'desiring-production' and schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari); risk (Ulrich
Beck); and the cyborg (Haraway).

An alternative theorisation — which intersects with these perspectives, but
diverges from them — views acceleration as the defining feature of the
contemporary era. The French cultural theorist Paul Virilio has coined the
term 'dromocracy' (from the Greek dromos: avenue or race course) to
characterise this position. Under Virilio's 'dromocratic' reading of
history, scientific, technological, societal, military, and cultural change
is propelled by the pursuit of ever-increasing speed. Our own era — with its
fibre-optic cables, satellite-linked communications networks, supersonic
aircraft, and cruise missiles — is, Virilio suggests, approaching the limits
of acceleration, and teeters on the edge of the 'integral accident' - the
true end of modernity.

Introducing "The New York RAT"

The first issue of “The New York RAT”, a new, seasonal, anarchist
publication will come out this Fall. It will serve as an informational
resource for our local anarchist communities, outlining New York City-based
groups and collectives that are actively working on projects that others
can plug into. Although traditionally fragmented, the NYC Anarchist scene
is vibrant and strong, with new collectives and projects sprouting up all
the time.

DVDs

The Velvet Light Trap

A Critical Journal of Film & Television

Issue Number 56, Fall 2005

Issue Theme: DVDs

Less than a decade after their entry into the market, the impact of DVDs has already become visible in media production strategies, legal and economic policy, marketing and distribution, exhibition environments, and audience reception habits. Decisions on style and content during shooting of film and television programs increasingly take into consideration possibilities for cross-media consumption. Recent years have also seen increased visibility of short forms such as making-of documentaries and other bonus features. Direct to consumer sales have created lucrative markets for otherwise marginal films and television programs and have affected habits of consumption. The home viewing environment, finally, opens possibilities for interfaces with other end-user entertainment technologies.

The Velvet Light Trap invites papers exploring issues surrounding DVD technology as part of audiovisual culture and practice. In addition to papers focusing on technology, we seek papers that examine DVDs in relation to questions of aesthetics, narrative construction, genre, production, promotion/distribution, exhibition, and reception — including issues of economic consumption and cultural use — from local, national, or global perspectives.