[Originally posted by Marc Garret on Thu, 21 Feb 2008 on NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity] Distant: http://www.furtherfield.org/mgarrett/distant/ Statement about why I am Making Net Art Once More: I have been going through some changes regarding what type of personal, individual artwork that I wish to explore these days. Even though I am involved in various high-tech projects which are mainly collaborations, that are related to larger projects. I wish to return to making Net Art, reconnect to what has always been my favourite form of creativity and

The Department of Politics, International Relations & European Studies at Loughborough University (GB) invites applications for a fully-funded Faculty Studentship to undertake doctoral research from October 2008 in any area related to the Department's research interests. Dr Ruth Kinna and Dr Dave Berry would like to hear from anyone interested in studying for a PhD in any area related to anarchist history, politics or theory. Ruth Kinna is a Senior Lecturer in Politics. She has published notably on William Morris and Peter Kropotkin, and is the author of 'Anarchism: A

French Author Alain Robbe-Grillet Dies
Laurent Lemel

PARIS - Alain Robbe-Grillet, an avant-garde author who dispensed with conventional storytelling as a pioneer of the postwar "new novel" movement in France, died Monday. He was 85.

Robbe-Grillet died at Caen University Hospital in western France, where he had been admitted over the weekend for cardiac problems, hospital officials said.

By LAURENT LEMEL, Associated Press Writer Mon Feb 18, 5:15 PM ET PARIS - Alain Robbe-Grillet, an avant-garde author who dispensed with conventional storytelling as a pioneer of the postwar "new novel" movement in France, died Monday. He was 85. Robbe-Grillet died at Caen University Hospital in western France, where he had been admitted over the weekend for cardiac problems, hospital officials said.

Multitudes-Icônes Launched

Multitudes is pleased to announce the inauguration of its new website, Multitudes-Icônes, which is dedicated to contemporary art

Multitudes-Icônes was launched during a workshop organized by Multitudes at Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany (Documenta Halle, June 25-28, 2007). The site brings together three parallel projects: Multitude’s counter-project in response to the invitation to participate in Documenta 12; an artist residence project in which artists have been invited to engage with the site in order to produce a specific project; and, finally, archives of texts and Icônes portfolios (projects about and by artists) published in the journal since its inception in March 2000.

Multitudes was asked by the Documenta 12 organizers to respond to the exhibition’s three questions/themes (“Is modernity our antiquity?“; “What is Bare Life?“; and “What is to be done?“). The journal’s answer was to create a counter-project on Multitudes-Icônes called Critical and Clinical Documentation. On the site, the three questions were reformulated (that is, appropriated and détourned) and addressed to artists in a provocative way. Artists were asked to situate their work in relation to Documenta 12’s themes but also in relation to their participation or non-participation in the exhibition. The ensemble of responses—visual, verbal, sonorous—constitute alternative, multiple, and ironic points of view, or “critical and clinical” perspectives, regarding the exhibition’s themes and Documenta itself. The website’s organization of the artists’ responses provides an open framework, allowing users to articulate relations between replies, creating hybrid interventions, and transforming each user into a curator-artist of another, virtual-real Documenta.

"Gypsy Caravan"

Louis Proyect, Unrepentant Marxist

Scheduled for theatrical release in June (NYC, the 15th; Los Angeles the 29th), “Gypsy Caravan: When the Road Bends” is a film that is very much in the mold of “Buena Vista Social Club” and just as likeable. It also evokes the 1993 “Latcho Drom” (”safe journey”), another great film about Roma music.

It documents a six-week tour in 2001 by some of the greatest Roma musicians in the world, who are seen performing, socializing with each other in hotels and on the bus, and participating in village life back home. It is directed by Jasmine Dellal, who directed “American Gypsy: a Stranger in Everybody’s Land” for PBS in 2001, and filmed by Albert Maysles, the legendary director of “Gimme Shelter,” a record of a Rolling Stones tour, and other works.

The tour was organized by the World Music Institute (WMI), a New York-based nonprofit whose concerts I have reviewed in the past and who I have contributed money to. Given New York’s relentless drive toward high-rise yuppie hell, the WMI is one of the remaining cultural artifacts that make life livable here. Furthermore, the culture of the Roma people is about as at odds with the profit-driven world of real estate and banking as can be imagined. Besides their cultural legacy of some of the world’s greatest music, these unfairly maligned peoples can teach us about how to live better lives. Macedonian Esma Rezepova, one of the tour’s starring performers, put it this way: “The Roma have never made war or invaded another country.”

African Cinema Giant Ousmane Sembene, 84, Dies
Led Cinema's Advance in
Africa

Agence France-Presse

The Senegalese filmmaker and writer Ousmane Sembene, a
pioneer of African cinema, died at his home in Dakar,
Senegal, his friends and family said Sunday. He was 84.

He had been ill since December.

Born into a fisherman's family in 1923, he worked as a
mechanic, carpenter and builder in Africa and Europe
before being drafted by the French Army in World War
II. Those experiences gave Mr. Sembene, a self-educated
writer, material for films as well as books like The
Black Docker, God's Bits of Wood and The Money
Order.

He said that he decided to go to film school, in
Moscow, after realizing that "pictures are more
accessible than words." That led him to what he called
"fairground cinema."

"I can go to a village and show the film," he explained
in 2005, "because everything can be filmed and
transported to the most remote village in Africa."

His career began in the 1960s with black-and-white
shorts like "Borom Sarret," about a poor cart-driver.
His "Black Girl From ..." (1966), about a Senegalese
girl who becomes a servant in France, is considered the
first full-length feature by an African filmmaker.

One of his last films, "Moolaadé" (2004), was a
denunciation of female genital cutting and won a jury
prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

He also won two prizes at the Venice Film Festival, in
1968 and in 1988. The first was for "The Money Order,"
the second for "The Camp of Thiaroye," which recounts
the violent repression by French troops of protests by
Senegalese soldiers demanding their pay. He was among
the first African artists to warn of the danger of
excesses in the post-colonial era and to call for "a
radical change in African policies."

The former Senegalese president Abdlu Diouf said Africa
had lost one its greatest filmmakers and a "fervent
defender of liberty and social justice."

A tribute from Mali's culture minister, Cheick Oumar
Sissoko, himself a filmmaker and a friend of Mr.
Sembene, said that "African cinema has lost one of its
lighthouses."

"The man only worked fully in Africa and for Africa,"
he said. Mr. Sembene "led Africa to understand its
identity and build its cultural horizon."

PERFORMANCE: COPIES & CONTEXTS IN THE AGE OF CULTURAL ABUNDANCE

Magnus Eriksson and Rasmus Fleischer

We are both co-founders of Piratbyrån, a Swedish group that has been
around for four years. Piratbyrån explores how file-sharing and other
copying technologies interact with creativity and change how people
relate to everyday culture. We analyze tendencies and cases and
discuss possible future scenarios and opportunities.

Internationally we are mostly known for starting up the The Pirate
Bay, which we no longer run but are in close contact with. By this
and many other projects, campaigns, performances, talks and media
appearances, we have intervened in the discussion known as "the file-
sharing debate".

Almost exactly a year ago, at the time of the last Reboot conference,
The Pirate Bay was taken down in a controversial raid that involved
about 180 confiscated servers and pressure on the Swedish government
from US officials and lobby groups. Still today, over 100 servers
remain in custody and the prosecution is just about to be delayed for
several months more.

The raid was followed by demonstrations just three days after co-
hosted by Piratbyrån and other piracy organisations as well as
political parties from different sides of the Swedish political
spectrum. At the very same day, The Pirate Bay came back online.

Since then, a lot of light has been put on the alleged Swedish
"pirate safe haven" and we have had an extensive public debate in
Sweden on file-sharing issues. Although it's great that we have this
debate, it is often stuck in pre-internet frameworks, copyright
abstractions and outdated perspectives.

Piratbyrån is often perceived as being primarily anti-copyright and
we often have to answer questions on how artists should make a living
if there was no copyright. On this topic we have very little to say
for several reasons: Talking about that implicates that we have (at
least until now) a perfectly working copyright economy that has
somehow provided wages for artists, an economy that would be
nullified by a future removal of copyright laws.

What we instead prefer to talk about is the present: The concrete and
complex workings of cultural economies, the cracks and grey zones in
contemporary copyright, and the massive sharing of files that is
already going on.

Desert Autonomous Zone

Jesse Walker

From Reason

Somewhere in the northern New Mexico desert, a grizzled gardener called Robbie is praising the prickliness of his home. "The cops don't like to come out here," he says proudly, "and this place is built on being left alone by the authorities. People say to the government, 'Fuck you. Chinga tu madre. We don't want your government, and you can get out of here.'"

Robbie is a folksinger, a self-described "middle-aged hippie," and one of the rich cast of characters who populate Off the Grid, a film now playing the festival circuit that will make its New York debut at Lincoln Center on August 16. Jeremy and Randy Stulberg, a brother and sister team, originally set out to make a documentary about U.S. citizens living abroad. Then they discovered a tribe of expatriates here at home, fleeing the American mainstream in a way that only deepened their American identity. The Stulbergs filmed them instead, with riveting results.

In 15 square miles of abandoned land, about 400 misfits—aging hippies, disillusioned veterans, teenage runaways—have built a community where no one cares if you smoke pot, fire your rifle all day, let your kids drive your car, or walk around naked in the desert heat. It's a landscape of beat-up old trailers, shacks jerry-rigged from recycled materials, solar panels, little farms, greenhouses, and at least one tipi. "Where I live is the last remaining land of America that is left," says Dreadie Jeff, another Mesa resident. "You can do what you fucking want there."

The local culture defies easy stereotypes. "Going into this community with this traditional mainstream liberal ideology," Jeremy says, "we realized all our preconceived notions were bullshit. These people were extremely into their Second Amendment rights, and they were also into marijuana legalization. They don't fit into these molds." There's a touch of madness to the place as well. Mama Phyllis, a Mesa woman who used to be a psychiatric nurse ("I couldn't do that anymore," she says, and leaves it at that), calls it "the largest outdoor insane asylum." The governing philosophy is a mix of anarchism, patriotism, New Age stoner wisdom, and a militia-style distrust of the state. Early in the film Dreadie Jeff, a veteran of the first Gulf War, exclaims that his military oath was not "to defend this land, it's not to defend the people, it's not to defend the motherfucking asshole president of the United States. My military oath goes, 'I solemnly swear to defend the Constitution of the United States of America from all enemies, foreign and domestic.'" The Constitution's "biggest enemy," he adds, is "this fucking government that is in place right now."`

Radical Politics & Publishing in Eastern Europe Discussion

Tuesday June 5th @ 7pm

ABC No Rio, Gallery Space

156 Rivington Street (between Clinton & Suffolk)

Come join us for an informal discussion about radical politics and publishing in Eastern Europe with Gediminas Baranauskas from the Lithuanian publisher Kito Knygos. Kito Knygos is the publisher of a variety of books on radical politics and arts in Lithuanian by authors such as Noam Chomsky, Guy Debord, Valerie Solanas, Hakim Bey, Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, Kurt Vonnegut, and Henry Miller.