MyCreativity

Convention of International Creative Industries Researchers
First Announcement

Date: 17-18 November, 2006

Venue: Club 11, Post CS Building, Amsterdam

Organisation: Institute of Network Cultures, HvA and Centre for
MediaResearch, University of Ulster

Concept: Geert Lovink & Ned Rossiter

More information: info@networkcultures.org, Sabine Niederer.
www.networkcultures.org/mycreativity

Introduction

Emerging out of Blair's Britain in the late 90s as an antidote to
post-industrial unemployment, early creative industries discourse was
not able for a promotional hype characteristic of the dot.com era in
the US. Over the past 3-5 years creative industries has undergone a
process of internationalisation and become a permanent fixture in the
short-term interests that define government policy packages across
the world. At the policy level, creative industries have managed to
transcend the North-South divide that preoccupied research on
the information economies and communication technologies for two
decades.

Today, one finds countries as diverse as Austria, Brazil, Singapore
and New Zealand eagerly promoting the promise of exceptional economic
growth rates of "culture" in its "immaterial" form. Governments in
Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, and the Netherlands have initiated
creativeindustries policy platforms with remarkably similar
assumptions andexpectations given their very different cultural and
politicalenvironments.

Despite the proliferation of the creative industries model, it
remainshard to point to stories of actual "creative innovation", or
to be evensure what this might mean. What is clear -if largely
unacknowledged - is that investment in "creative clusters"
effectively functions to encourage a corresponding boom in adjacent
real estate markets. Here lies perhaps the core truth of the creative
industries: the creative industries are a service industry, one in
which state investment in "high culture" shifts to a form of
welfarism for property
developers.This smoke and mirrors trick is cleverly performed through
a language of populist democracy that appeals to a range of political
and businessagents. What is more surprising is the extent to which
this hype isseemingly embraced by those most vulnerable: namely, the
contentproducers (designers, software inventors, artists, filmmakers,
etc.) of creative information (brands, patents, copyrights).

Filmmaker Garrett Scott, 1968–2006

Friends and colleagues,
We were deeply saddened to learn of filmmaker Garrett Scott's unexpected death in San Diego Thursday, March 2, at the young age of 37. He will be remembered, among other things, as a genuine and heartfelt person whose care and compassion extended beyond his friends to a commitment to understanding and improving the world. He was a generous, caring and courageous spirit, and these personal qualities defined his influential and award-winning filmmaking. Scott is best known for two acclaimed documentary films, Cul de Sac: A Suburban War Story, and Occupation:Dreamland. The former, Scott's debut film documenting the bizarre episode of a San Diego man's tour of suburban destruction in a stolen US Army tank, was well reviewed and screened at the 2002 Toronto Film Festival. Occupation: Dreamland, which Scott co-directed with Ian Olds (who also edited and co-wrote Cul de Sac), was a rich and complicated examination of American soldiers' torturous and often conflicted experiences in Iraq. The film received wide attention, including an Independent Spirit Award and a New York Times Critic's pick. Before his death, Scott was busy developing new projects, including a documentary film about the US in Afghanistan, and a historical documentary about San Francisco in the 1970s. Garrett was born and raised in San Diego California, attended graduate school at University of Wisconsin, and was living in New York City. We encourage you to share Garrett's work with as many people as possible, so that his important contributions will live on. Below are some links to reviews and interviews with Garrett Scott.

Christopher Cook


New York Times review of Occupation: Dreamland
Feature interview with Filmmaker Magazine:, Film Buzz review of Occupation: Dreamland, Interview with Buzz Flash, Trailer of Occupation: Dreamland

"Rachel Corrie, A Message Crushed Again"

Katharine Viner, Los Angeles Times

Three years after American activist Rachel Corrie died under an
Israeli bulldozer in Gaza, her words are being censored for political
reasons.

The flights for cast and crew had been booked; the production
schedule delivered; there were tickets advertised on the Internet.
The Royal Court Theatre production of "My Name Is Rachel Corrie," the
play I co-edited with Alan Rickman, was transferring later this month
to the New York Theatre Workshop, home of the musical "Rent,"
following two sold-out runs in London and several awards.

We always felt passionately that it was a piece of work that needed
to be seen in the United States. Created from the journals and
e-mails of American activist Rachel Corrie, telling of her journey
from her adolescence in Olympia, Wash., to her death under an Israeli
bulldozer in Gaza at the age of 23, we considered it a unique
American story that would have a particular relevance for audiences
in Rachel's home country. After all, she had made her journey to the
Middle East in order "to meet the people who are on the receiving end
of our [American] tax dollars," and she was killed by a U.S.-made
bulldozer while protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes.

But last week the New York Theatre Workshop canceled the production —
or, in its words, "postponed it indefinitely." The political climate,
we were told, had changed dramatically since the play was booked. As
James Nicola, the theater's 's artistic director, said Monday,
"Listening in our communities in New York, what we heard was that
after Ariel Sharon's illness and the election of Hamas in the recent
Palestinian elections, we had a very edgy situation." Three years
after being silenced for good, Rachel was to be censored for
political reasons.

Free Culture's "Creative Commons" Art Show
New York City, March 1, 2006

Over the last couple of months, Free Culture@NYU members have
been working hard to curate an art show that we are proud to say
is the first of its kind — one that is focused on highlighting
artists (who happen to be students in New York) who are using
Creative Commons licenses in their works. Creative Commons
licenses provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for
authors, artists, and educators. They have built upon the "all
rights reserved" concept of traditional copyright to offer a
voluntary "some rights reserved" approach." For more information,
check out www.creativecommons.org

PLP Takes the Agit-Prop Challenge:

Three Music Albums from the Progressive Labor Party

Spencer Sunshine

Reviewing:

"Power to the Working Class" — "A World to Win" — "Songs of the International Working Class"

I've always been a connoisseur of Leftist agit-prop bands. The thumpier, the better, as long as the political program is in their lyrics, and not just in the music (John Cage) or politics of the individual members (U2's Bono).

Mostly, I have been drawn to punk bands, including the Dead Kennedys, Crass, Chumbawamba, Bikini Kill (and later Le Tigre), D.O.A., the Ex, Gang of Four, D.I.R.T., the Subhumans (both the Canadian and UK bands, and Citizen Fish as well), Zounds, Reagan Youth, Tribe 8, Nausea, and the Dils (and the list could go on and on.). And while there's occasionally good political rock (Steve Earle, MC5, John Lennon, Stereolab), it's much easier to find a worthy reggae group (Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mad Professor, Sister Carol and the 'conscious reggae' genre — and, of course, Bob himself).

I also like the occasional industrial or hip-hop act, in particular Tchkung!, Consolidated, Public Enemy and the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy (pre-Spearhead), as well as Afrobeat bands like Fela Kuti and Antibalas. I'm aware of the "Red Folk" tradition, as well as the feminist (Roches, Ani Difranco) and environmental (David Rovics, Casey Neill) folkies, but neither ever particularly moved me. Nor did the "alternative rock" of Rage Against the Machine (an ex once quipped: "I lean towards their politics and away from their music") or their progeny, System of A Down.

Since seeing the Infernal Noise Brigade (INB) in Seattle in 1999, I have been an active groupie of the "anarchist" marching bands, especially NYC's own Hungry March Band (HMB) and Rude Mechanical Orchestra (RMO). You can dance your booty off and, more importantly, refer to them by their acronyms! But their non-linguistic ontology makes them non-agit-prop almost by definition.

Politically, the punk bands almost all leaned towards, or were activists in, the anarchist tradition. Crass are the best example; they even forged their own unique ideological brand of ethical pacifist (but militantly atheist), individualist, feminist, pro-animal rights anarchism. Gerry Hannah, the original bassist of the Canadian Subhumans, was jailed in the early '80s for his participation in Direct Action, the group that bombed a Canadian company that made weapons components for cruise missiles. The hip-hop and reggae bands tend towards a Lefty Black nationalism or pan-Africanism. The marching bands are "anarchist" in an aesthetic more than a political sense; nonetheless many are active anarchists or sympathisers, and they frequently participate in the contemporary mass protest scene (both the RMO and INB were arrested en masse at Union Square during the protests against the Republican National Convention).

But the question that presents itself is this: can the Communists hold their own in the field of agit-prop music?

Return of the Suppressed

Keith Sanborn, Art Forum

"Guy Deord made very little art, but he made it extreme," says Debord of himself in his final work, Guy Debord, son art et son temps (Guy Debord: His Art and His Time, 1995), an "anti-televisual" testament authored by Debord and realized by Brigitte Cornand. And there is no reason to doubt either aspect of this judgment. While Debord has been known in the English-speaking world since the 1970s as a key figure in the Situationist International and as a revolutionary theorist, it is only in the past decade that his work as a filmmaker has surfaced outside France. One reason is that, in 1984, following the assassination of Debord's friend and patron Gérard Lebovici and the libelous treatment of both men in the French press, Debord withdrew his films from circulation. Though the films were not widely seen even in France, four of them—by the time they were withdrawn—had been playing continually and exclusively for the previous six months at the Studio Cujas in Paris, a theater financed for this purpose by Lebovici.

The communiqué issued by Debord soon after Lebovici's death reads: "Gérard Lebovici having been assassinated, to the applause of a joyful press and a servile public, the films of Guy Debord will never again be projected in France." Three years later, in a letter to Thomas Levin, Debord amended this to: "I should have said: Never again anywhere."

CARY GRANT: STYLE AS A MARTIAL ART

A conversation with Wu Ming 1 (2005)

At the end of 2004, we took part in an international three-day conference on Cary Grant at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin, organized by professor/script-writer Giaime Alonge, who teaches History of Cinema at the Università di Torino. The following interview took place a few months later and will be included in the book collecting that conference's papers and proceedings. If the first answer sounds familiar, that's because it's an extended version of an answer we gave to "3am Magazine" in the same days.

GIAIME ALONGE - What gave you the idea to include Cary Grant in 54? What do you find fascinating in this character?

WU MING 1 - The first chapter in which Cary appears includes a long pseudo-historical and pseudo-theoretical tirade, a sort of marxist analysis of the Grant-myth and his value in the proletarian struggle.

The purpose was satirical, it's a parody of the attempts to rationalize why we like something, or someone. We are inclined to think of other people as bidimensional figures, we don't grasp the depth, we see a square where there's a hypercube. We don't expect a person's ego to be fragmented; we point at inconsistencies and, in our turn, try to show ourselves as consistent, every part has to fit well with all the rest. If someone asks you: "How does your love for Country & Western music fit in with your ideas on the origins of stars-and-stripes reactionary rhetoric?"; or: "You claim to be an ecologist, how can you say you like that car?", the temptation is to force that passion of preference back under the umbrella of your ideology that passion or preference. "Radicals" go out of their way to prove that the music they listen is "radical", leftists explain why a certain kind of shoes doesn't belong to the Right etc.
In the above-mentioned chapter an indefinite omniscient narrator rambles on Cary Grant, the working class, and socialism. This is also a pre-emptive self-parody. It was like saying: when you ask us the reason why we included Cary Grant in our novel, our answer will be something similar to this. At the same time, we exaggerated and added a sentence by Marx turned into a joke ("In a classless society, anybody could be Cary Grant"). It's as we issued a notice: don't take this description too seriously. It makes sense, more or less. It's fascinating. But it came later. We included Grant - availing ourselves on a mistake by Wu Ming 2 - because we like him, we find him intriguing, we like his style. I met the not-yet Wu Ming 4 eleven years ago, he'd just graduated and was about to begin university. The first time I entered his room, I saw a big poster of Cary Grant on the wall. It's not the movie star you expect to find above the bed of a nineteen year old. We have always admired people with style, those who knew how to turn their style into a martial art. "Style as a martial art" is also the name of a column I used to write for a local small mag in the late Nineties.

I hope this answer was intelligible. To avoid misunderstandings, I want to specify that I do listen to Country & Western, but I hate cars. I could never find them attractive. To me even the most glamorous Lamborghini is just a sad and lethal piece of plate.

GA - I beg your pardon? What was the misunderstanding with WM2?

WM1 - Well, leafing through a 1954 magazine, he found an article on the film stars preferred female readers loved the most. Gary Cooper topped the list. WM2 jotted in a hurry "G.C." on his notebook. A few weeks later, going through his scrawls he read "C.G." instead of "G.C." and thought: Cary Grant. At our meeting he told us: "Cary Grant was the most popular actor among the female readers of such magazine." Inspiration! Cary Grant! Lets get hold of the films and biographies!

Centro Cultural Pablo de la Torriente Brau

VIII SALON Y COLOQUIO INTERNACIONAL DE ARTE DIGITAL

Eighth International Digital Art Exhibit and Colloquium

International Call

The Centro Cultural Pablo de la Torriente Brau, with the support of the Historiador de la Ciudad de La Habana (the City Historian), HIVOS, ENET / ETECSA Cubasí Portal, and the collaboration of the Union of Cuban Artists and Writers (UNEAC), the Cuban Institute of Art and Cinema (ICAIC), CUBARTE Portal and the National Museum of Fine Arts (Museo Nacional de Bellas) Artes, announces the Eighth International Digital Art Exhibit and Colloquium (VIII Salón y Coloquio Internacional de Arte Digital) with the purpose of promoting artistic and cultural values created with new technologies.

The Digital Art Exhibit, which will open on June 19, 2006, will show once again the current work in this field and favor exchange and reflection among creators and specialists engaged in these new forms of expression.

The event covers two areas; the National Digital Art Exhibit, of a competitive nature, and a non-competitive International Digital Art Exhibit, where works by artists from other countries will be shown. The works of the International Exhibit will be shown online and in video programs several halls in Havana.

Montreal Anarchist Theatre Festival Call for Submissions

Montreal's newly created 'Anarchist Theatre Festival' is now seeking submissions of
anarchist theatre pieces to be staged May 8 & 9, 2006. This will be North America's
first ever festival of anarchist theatre.The festival is part of Montreal's annual 'Festival of Anarchy' that leads up to the city's
7th annual 'Anarchist Bookfair,' May 20 & 21st, the largest anarchist event in North America.
We are looking for theatre pieces about anarchists, anarchist ideas, history, or any subject
related to anarchism. We will consider plays or monologues that are original new work, or
that have already been performed, or that have been written by anarchists (historical or
contemporary). The pieces can be either full productions or staged readings in either French or
English.

We are looking for work that is anti-State, anti-capitalist, non-sexist,
non-homophobic, anti-Empire, anti-authoritarian, etc. We want anarchist content written by either
anarchist playwrights or writers who are sympathetic to anarchism. ( Please see the 'Principles'
section of the web site of the < ahref="http://anarchistbookfair.taktic.org">Montreal Anarchist Bookfair for a more detailed description of
appropriate guidelines for 'anarchist' content.

Marc garrett & Ruth Catlow writes:

"States of Interdependence"

NODE.London

A collaborative text written by Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow, for Media Mutandis: A Node.London Reader (to be published in February 2006)

There is a Sufi fable in which a group of foreigners sit at breakfast, excitedly discussing their previous night’s exploration. One starts saying “…and what about that great beast we came across in the darkest part of the Jungle? It was like a massive, rough wall.” The others look perplexed. “No it wasn’t!” says one, “It was some kind of python”. “Yeah…” another half-agrees, “…but it also had powerful wings”. The shortest of the group looks bemused — “well it felt like a tree trunk to me.”

This fable aptly illustrates many aspects of the NODE.London experience. The name, which stands for Networked Open Distributed Events in London, indicates the open, lateral structure adopted to develop a season of media arts. It is intentionally extensible, suggesting possible future NODE(s), Rio, Moscow, Mumbai etc. As participants/instigators in the project’s ongoing conceptualization and praxis, we are just two individuals positioned on the interlaced, scale-free networks of NODE.L (more on these later). As such, our descriptions of this collectively authored project are inevitably incomplete and contestable, with a complete picture emerging only in negotiation with others.