From Dining in Refugee Camps to dOCUMENTA 13: The Art of Seeking Sahrawi Independence

There are few recurring global exhibitions of contemporary art more renown, prestigious and selective than dOCUMENTA, held every five years in Kassal Germany. Which is what makes it so very remarkable that one of the highlights of last year's dOCUMENTA 13 was the inclusion of a refugee encampment made by what are arguably among the least known people on the face of the earth--the Sahrawi of North Africa.

Organized by New York artist Robin Kahn, philosopher Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), and dOCUMENTA 13's Creative Director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and with photo documentation by Artforum critic Kirby Gookin and artist Edi Escobar, the installation was intended to bring attention to the Sahrawi's 38-year struggle for independence. Even more remarkable is that the cross-cultural collaboration came about as the result of a dream. Not a dream of success, as the art world is plethorically marked by, but by a literal dream that came to one of the organizers when asleep. As for whose dream and what it led to, I defer to Robin Kahn's exuberant account below.

2013 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints
Radical Heroes for the New Millennium!
James Koehnline and the Autonomedia Collective

Autonomedia's Jubilee Saints Calendar for 2013! Our 21st annual wall calendar, with artwork by James Koehnline, and text by the Autonomedia Collective.

Hundreds of radical cultural and political heroes are celebrated here, along with the animating ideas that continue to guide this project — a reprieve from the 500-year-long sentence to life-at-hard-labor that the European colonization of the "New World" and the ensuing devastations of the rest of the world has represented. It is increasingly clear — at the dawn of this new millennium — that the Planetary Work Machine will not rule forever!

Celebrate with this calendar on which every day is a holiday!

32 pages, 12 x 16 inches, saddlestitched

isbn 978-1-57027-259-2 : price $9.95 : 32 pages

Pay for two, and we will send a third calendar for free!

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.

"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

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.

Culture and Crisis
Paul Werner

I] Whew! that was close! I had planned to give this lecture in French; fortunately, the organizers contacted me and asked me to lecture in English instead; and there's no equivalent for "Big Bird" in French. So. Welcome, Everybody! Hello! Hello!... Hey, kids! Can you say PRODROMIC? Prodromic: It's a historian's term, as well as medical. It means that certain events can give a sense of how later events are going to unfold, without necessarily suggesting a cause-and-effect relationship. A prodrome is purely heuristic… never mind.

Preoccupying
Alan Moore

[Alan Moore is a writer and anarchist, and the author of Watchmen and V for Vendetta. Having written for the Occupied Times back in January, he returns to OT to discuss anarchy, war, and the roots of the modern education system.]

OT: Having previously suggested that many of the problems humanity faces flow from a tiny number of “leaders” and the current political and economic system they maintain, what do you identify as the main problems in the political and commercial makeup of our society?

AM: I think that with the inevitable erosion of those false certainties which shored up the reality of previous generations, we have seen a subsequent collapse in our sense of societal significance and, not entirely unconnected, in our sense of personal identity. We are no longer certain what the social structures we inhabit mean, and therefore cannot gauge our own value or meaning in relation to those structures. Lacking previously-existing templates such as blind patriotism or religion, it would seem that many people mistake status for significance, building their sense of self on what they earn or on how many people know of their existence. This appears to lead to a fragmented and anxiety-fuelled personality as the most readily-adopted option, which it may be imagined is a desirable condition for those seeking to herd large populations in accordance with their own often-depraved agendas.

"Open Letter to Critics Writing About Political Art"
Stephen Duncombe & Steve Lambert

Last weekend Creative Time held their fourth annual summit on the current
state of artistic activism. Over two days, scores of political artists from
around the world gave short presentations and organized longer workshops. Hundreds of people participated.

The critical response, so far, has been underwhelming: few critics
attended and those that did had little substantive to say. It would be easy
to account for the overall silence and dismiss the surface commentary with
some snarky criticism of our own about a bullshit art world with their
head up their ass who can't recognize that something important is
happening right in front of them. And while this may be self-righteously
satisfying, it is not very helpful. We want to help.

WikiLeaks and the Anarchistic Roots of Global Uprising
Nozomi Hayase

There has been increasing interest in anarchism, with people around the
globe writing and talking about it. A whole new generation is beginning
to discover anarchists from the past like Emma Goldman and Alexeyevich
Kropotkin and a new documentary is in the works. The word anarchy is
swimming through twitter feeds and Facebook shares, coursing through
avenues of the public mind. Ideas of mutual aid and voluntary
association are becoming more and more relevant as the world stands in
dire need of solutions to the current ballooning crisis of economic and
political corruption.

In San Francisco's Mission District, the Black Bloc Breaks Some Windows and Fails to Make an Impact
Max Crosby

Gentrification is a process where a working class, low-income neighborhood is colonized by the affluent and transformed into a bourgeois area. The 'embourgeosification' of a formerly proletarian quarter often begins when authentically impoverished low-income artists and bohemians move in. Minimum-toil-culture types are drawn to a low-income area by cheap rents, and are also often animated by an authentic antipathy for the larger homogenous corporatized society around us. Their marginal presence is followed by a proliferation of artsy enterprises: high-end galleries, shops, bars and restaurants drawing mainstream prosperous types to shop and consume in an area once thought to be too dark, dirty and (usually) non-white for upper middle class tastes. The gentry come to shop and party, and end up moving in, driving up the cost of rental housing, annexing affordable housing altogether, helping to drive hardcore wage slaves and the poor out of their homes and remaking an area in the image of the gentry's grasping, conspicuously consuming, conformist selves.