Fusion Arts Manifesto
Shalom Neuman

“There is nothing new under the sun,” goes the old adage. What does change, however, is configuration. That change, as another well-known adage has it, “is constant”; in human terms, it is often the agent of modification, of perception.

Resulting technologies emerge, creating opportunities for broader methodologies of utilization: illumination, sonics, motion, communication, architectonics. Hand-in-hand with science - the imperative of which is the observation and manipulation of phenomena - is the artist who sits at the center of this shifting maelstrom of perception. The artist is part magician and part town-crier, busy with the invention and employment of tools meant to facilitate various modes of articulation.

Fusion arts, in the tradition of artists of the Bauhaus, seeks a closer relationship with science as well. Its manifesto is as follows:

Retirees even have the advantage of being able to spend as much time as they require on their internet business whereas many group can only commit imperfect hours outside of their full-time jobs. Well, the modern world is crammed with reports of crime in neighborhoods previously Suddenly Susan full episode considered to be safe and quiet.

Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011
Louis Proyect

About a year or so after Hitchens began writing defenses of the war in Iraq, I stopped reading him. Bombarded as I am from wall-to-wall stupidity on network and cable television, op ed articles by Thomas Friedman, and all the rest, I just found no reason to add Hitchens to the menu.

But when I learned that he had cancer, I began reading everything he had to say about his illness including the final riveting piece in Vanity Fair that made it clear that the end was near:

Design/History/Revolution Conferenmce
New School, NYC, April 27-28, 2012

CFP: Design/History/Revolution
Deadline: December 7, 2011
Conference: April 27 & 28, 2012, The New School, NYC

Keynote speaker: Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of
Architecture & Design, The Museum of Modern Art

Whether by providing agitprop for revolutionary movements, an
aesthetics of empire, or a language for numerous avant-gardes, design
has changed the world. But how? Why? And under what conditions? We
propose a consideration of design as an historical agent, a contested
category, and a mode of historical analysis.

This interdisciplinary conference aims to explore these questions and
to open up new possibilities for understanding the relationships among
design, history and revolution.

Staging Illusion: Digital and Cultural Fantasy Conference
Sussex, England, December 8-9, 2011

Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies &
The Centre for Material Digital Culture present:

Staging Illusion: Digital and Cultural Fantasy
December 8th and 9th, University of Sussex
Tickets £190 (£85 student)

Keynote speakers: Professor Vanessa Toulmin (Director of the National Fairground archive), Dr Sarah Kember (Goldsmiths) and Professor Sally R Munt (Director of the Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies).

Plenary speakers: Dr Astrid Ensslin (Bangor), Dr Melanie Chan (Leeds Met), Professor Nicholas Till (Sussex), and Dr Jo Machon (Brunel).

From magicians and mediums to immersive media, and from the circus to cyborgs, the celebration and/or mistrust of illusion has been a central theme across a range of cultures. Notions of fakery and deception remind us that our identities that are performative. The figure of the ‘mark’ of the fairground scam remains culturally ubiquitous, perhaps more so than ever, in an era of (post) mechanical reproduction. Is new technology a flight from the real or merely a continuation of older cultural forms? Is it necessary, or even possible, to define reality in relation to the illusory? What realms of ‘otherness’ remain to be embraced? This international conference will discuss staged illusions across a spectrum of historical, geographical and cultural contexts, featuring original and exciting papers and performances.

The Original Mad Men
What Can OWS Learn From a Defunct French Avant-Garde Group?
Gary Kamiya

Strange bedfellows don’t get any stranger than this. To the joy of a few
dozen graduate students and culture jammers, and the utter bemusement of
just about everybody else, the most significant American protest
movement in years has been spending time under the sheets with an
obscure French avant-garde movement whose ideas are so crazily
millenarian they make Jacques Derrida look like Mitt Romney.

I’m referring to the peculiar liaison between Occupy Wall Street and the
Situationists – creators of one of those whacked-out intellectual
commodities that have constituted France’s most lucrative cultural
exports for more than a century.

Paul Goodman: Recounting Forgotten Man on the Attack
Richard B. Woodward

Even by the obstreperous standards of other New York intellectuals, Paul
Goodman (1911-72) was a special kind of troublemaker.

Anarchist, utopian, World War II pacifist, pied piper of the '60s youth
revolt, urban planner, Gestalt therapist, uncloseted bisexual and
crusader for gay rights, advocate of sustainable farming, gifted poet
and novelist, he exhibited a wayward independence that made him a party
of one in the American political arena but that also earned him the wary
respect of his peers. Susan Sontag called him one of her heroes. Alfred
Kazin and Lionel Trilling, neither one a fan of Goodman's theoretical
writings, confessed to a secret envy over his "scandalous reputation."