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.

The New SPACE (The New School for Pluralistic
Anti-Capitalist Education) Presents:

FROM DADA TO ANTHROPOFFERJISM

Erika Biddle

Alternate Tuesdays, 6:00 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.

6 Sessions: January 31, February 14, 28, March 14, 28 and April 4

Tuition: $75 - $100, Sliding Scale

Dada spoke of the violence of everyday life, of disrupting and destructing history; this destruction is a desire to change the world. Dada was a movement that obliterated its memory, but left traces of influence that are visible in the practices of aesthetic revolutionaries throughout the 20th century and today. In this course, we will explore both the Dadaist movement, birthed in Zurich midst the horrors of World War I, and its traces of influence in anti-capitalist artists groups and cultural projects that exist outside of "the art world" and the apparatus of the state. We will survey the work of the Lettrists and Situationists; Gustav Metzger’s theories on auto-destructive/auto-creative art; the LPA (London Psychogeographic Association); Neoism & the Neoist Alliance; Situ-inspired projects; Surrealism in Chicago; "culture jamming" projects; and the "tactical media" and "technologies of resistance" of groups like RtMark and the Critical Art Ensemble.

Erika Biddle is an artist, editor and writer living in New York City. A founding member of Artists in Dialogue, which is committed to the
co-articulation of art and politics, she also works with the radical book publisher Autonomedia. Her video work has been shown in such venues as White Box, Capsule Gallery, Artists Space, Diorama Arts Center, the Cinema Nouvelle Generation Film Festival, Guestroom, and the DUMBO Short Film and Video Festival.

The Depraved Heroes of "24" Are the Himmlers of Hollywood

Slavoj Zizek, Guardian

On Sunday, the fifth season of the phenomenally successful television drama "24" will start in the US. Each season is composed of 24 one-hour episodes and the whole season covers the events of a single day. The story of the latest series is the desperate attempt of the LA-based Counter Terrorist Unit to prevent an act of catastrophic magnitude and the action focuses on the unit's agents, the White House and the terrorist suspects.

NOT BORED! writes:

Guy Debord Film Retrospective
New York City, March 5, 2006

In response to the way he was slandered in the French press during its coverage of the murder of his friend, Gerard Lebovici, on 5 March 1984, Guy Debord withdrew all six of his films from world-wide distribution. It wasn’t until shortly after his death (a suicide) on 30 November 1994 that two of Debord’s films were finally screened on French TV.

Finally, in November 2005, Debord’s films were re-released as a collection. Most of these films have never been screened in New York. In this retrospective, all six of Debord’s films will be shown in chronological order and in the original French. No subtitles. Translations and other relevant printed materials will be available.

5 pm Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952)
7 pm Sur le Passage de Quelques Personnes (1959)
8 pm Critique de la Separation (1961)
9 pm La Societe du Spectacle (1973)
11 pm Refutation de tous les Jugements (1975)
midnight In girum imus nocte et consumimu igni (1978)

Tickets: $30 for the whole evening, $20 after 9 pm, $10 after 11 pm.
Doors open at 4:30pm.

CHASHAMA
217 East 42d Street (between 3rd and 2d Ave.)
New York City

NOT BORED!

Strong Language

Harry Bingham, Financial Times, London

Back in the dark days of 1931, when the League of Nations was looking ever less effectual and the US was plunging deep into economic depression, the librarians of the world were bent on revolution.

Since the advent of the printing press, books have been translated at the initiative of individual publishers and booksellers, with no central record of such translations. To the orderly minds of the world's national librarians, the system seemed little better than anarchic.

It bothered the archivists that the free market could simply call new translations into being without any authoritative record of such things. And so the League of Nations was pressured into setting up the first systematic record of translations, the Index Translationum. In 1946, Unesco took over the chore. In 1979, the system was computerised and a true cumulative database began to take shape.

And though the original project might have been of interest mostly to librarians, the results of their labours are of much wider appeal. Since there is no systematic data on global book sales, the Index has come to be the best available proxy. If you want to ask the question "Who are the most popular authors in the world?" then the Index is the only way to get an answer.

Steve Kurtz Talk - "Art and Discipline"

What: Presentation / Discussion

Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th floor (directions below)

When: Monday Night 12.12.05 @ 7:30 Pm

Who: Open To All

Our short introductions to events sometimes aspire to a provocation for the evening. How is that we have come so far and seemingly done so little to stop it? How is that we are being disciplined to accept this state of endless war? How is it that so much is being done and yet the same tune plays on? War abroad and war at home. Civil Liberties, "human" rights, open
debate, OUT! Torture, abduction, abuse, expulsion, unabashed lies and untold casualties - the stuff of everyday news. Case by case, step by step, it is difficult to tell whether this war without end is reaching its end or sinking into our guts. All be it the language is dramatic, the reality is far more outrageous and devastating.

We are in a state of emergency, a state of exception. What are the implications of this on our activities?

Since the beginning of the case that unfolded against CAE's Steve Kurtz, 16Beaver has attempted to give space to both the intellectual concerns in CAE's work (including the program we organized with CAVS at MIT) and formal
and informal discussions we have held about the situation at our own space.

This Monday, we are happy to invite you to a discussion with Steve Kurtz of CAE. We will begin the evening with a presentation, 'Art and Discipline.' In this lecture Steve will discuss the many forms of disciplinary
authority that Critical Art Ensemble has encountered over the years, as well as how and why these situations came about. We will follow up this talk with a discussion.

________________________________________

About Steve Kurtz

Steve Kurtz is a founding member of Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). CAE is a collective of tactical media practitioners of various
specializations, including computer graphics and web design, wetware, film/video, photography, text art, book art, and performance. Formed in 1987, CAE’s focus has been on the exploration of the intersections between art, critical theory, technology, and political activism. The collective has performed and produced a wide variety of projects for an international audience at diverse venues ranging from the street, to the museum, to the Internet. Critical Art Ensemble has also written five books, and is about to release its sixth work Marching Plague: Germ Warfare and Global Public Health. Kurtz is an Associate Professor of Art at SUNY, Buffalo.

"Art, Truth and Politics"

Harold Pinter

In 1958 I wrote the following:

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal,
nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily
either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the
exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as
a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search
for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The
search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the
dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems
to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so.
But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to
be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each
other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other,
tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the
truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is
lost.

Solve et Coagula writes:

"Gnosticism"
Interview with Tobias Churton by Richard Smoley, New Dawn

Tobias Churton is one of today’s most lively and spirited investigators of that underground stream of the Western tradition known as Gnosticism. He first became interested in the Gnostics while reading for a degree in theology at the University of Oxford in the 1970s.

Soon after leaving, he became interested in exploring these ideas for television. “I’d got it into my head that there had never been any religious television – only programmes about religion,” he later recalled. “I had written a paper on the subject which recommended a new kind of television for this most neglected area, something on the lines of television, a kind of programme which would enter into the very nature of the religious experience and not simply observe it.”

Churton got his opportunity in the mid-1980s, when he produced a series on the Gnostics for British television. To accompany his series, he wrote his first book, The Gnostics, a history of this elusive esoteric movement from early Christianity to modern manifestations in such figures as Giordano Bruno and William Blake, and even in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Ben Spatz writes:

Urban Researh Theater

New York City, Jan.–Feb. 2006

The Urban Research Theater is an institute for practical research in physical and vocal craft. Performance artists, practitioners of traditional forms, and other interested parties are invited to enter into specific lines of inquiry with the human body and voice. The use of props, notebooks, spoken language and other technologies will be strictly limited. This work can be a kind of active meditation, focused on balancing precision with spontaneity. We will practice stretches, exertions, repetitions, precise movement structures, and song fragments as tools for developing quality in awareness.

Winter Work Session: Call for Participants
New York City, January-February 2006

Flyer: http://www.junkriver.org/winter.pdf
Website: http://www.junkriver.org/
Contact: urt@junkriver.org

Nietzsche Circle writes:

"Nietzsche and the Future of Art"
New York City, Dec. 9, 2005

The NIETZSCHE CIRCLE with the support of Deutsches Haus presents

Nietzsche and the Future of Art:

The Effect of Nietzsche's Aesthetics on the Art of the Twentieth Century

A lecture with slides by Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen

At the beginning of the twentieth century, shortly after Nietzsche's death, artists in all the principal fields of artistic endeavor knowingly and openly adopted the philosopher's aesthetic ideas and used them to revolutionize art. In this paper, the authors will examine principal practitioners of the visual arts, literature, and music to locate Nietzsche's influence, an influence that made much of Modernism possible. It is an influence that has not been exhausted. Although over the last 30 years much argumentation has been devoted to announcing the death of art, a study of Nietzsche's aesthetic thought reveals the project that initiated twentieth-century art has yet to be realized fully. The authors will demonstrate that Nietzsche's writings can be distilled into an aesthetic philosophy that charts future possibilities for an art devoted to revealing the truth of the world and that such possibilities are continuing to be explored by contemporary artists.