The Other Campaign at Mexico's Internal Border

March, 2006
John Gibler

On February 14, the day sub-comandante Marcos arrived in the city of Puebla as part of his six-month journey across the country to listen to the voices of the underdogs of the Mexican left, the national newspaper La Jornada carried on its front page the most convincing advertisement for the Zapatistas' Other Campaign to appear in print.

London based experimental media centre 'Backspace' opened in 1996. Through its provision of web services for locals and enthusiasts it became a place frequented by artists and those wanting to experiment with the emerging internet technology. It closed in late December 1999 and is now a Starbucks coffee shop.

As part of Node-London a 'reanimating' of Backspace took place at the Starbucks on Sunday 5th March 2006.

Via Mute:
http://www.metamute.org/en/radio-buckspace

I just put this piece up on the IFC channel. It's rough footage for a larger installation work called Assembled Cinema. Actually they vetted the piece and put it up so now there is a voting process. I'm pretty excited about this piece. If you get a chance to vote on it please do.

http://medialab.ifc.com/film_detail.jsp?film_id=1354

Civilization stands on a precipice. A series of disasters can unravel the built-up infrastructure of a country. This is the way empires fall. Water supplies dry up and cities are abandoned. Storms and earthquakes destroy food supplies and roads. Disasters are always about disruption of normal routines. Think of an anthill. The ants are busy bringing food back to the nest. You come along and destroy the hill with your foot. The ants now have to shift into emergency response to get back to normal. What had taken them a certain amount of time to build is ruined in a moment. If this happens enough times the ant colony becomes unsustainable and is abandoned. It’s every ant for himself.

In her contract with negative space - making it the sine qua non of her oeuvre - Rachel Whiteread generally creates sculptures that beg the interaction of humanity while remaining forbidding, unpopulated, aloof. A ceremony, and therefore a narrative, is implied by her austere castings of the volumes beneath a ceiling, around a stairwell, against a bookshelf, inside a water tank. But this narrative is conspicuously denied. We are set adrift, frustrated in our attempt to give significance to her plinths, altars, sarcophagi. We are thrown back upon an academic contemplation of their formal qualities, all the while yearning to assign them some specific context of human activity, some aspect of the anecdotal, vernacular, religious. But her sculptures remain obdurately obscure to our interpretation. They are, in a word, sphinxlike.

Although Whiteread's work is self consciously monumental, her embrace of the void renders moot any discussion of progress or history, issues which often accompany the civic monument, and which, in fact, are the impetus behind the public commissioning of most monuments.

Long and informative article from Wired's Webmonkey about what's coming up and what's just the same old BS.

A selection:

Internet Hype

Hype has very few positive uses and tends to cloud arguments and fool people. Avoid internet hype if you can. If it helps you get investment for your startup, all the power to you.

What it is
Because the internet still has the potential to revolutionize industries, and because winners tend to grow exponentially big, every stage of the internet since the Mosaic browser launch has been filled with hyperbole and hype. Plus, Silicon Valley venture capitalists make a living by burning other people's money, and this creates hot air. We have seen several waves of internet hype before (do VRML or "The Long Boom" ring a bell?) Web 2.0 just is the latest example.

manhassat

In case you are wondering about the next Documenta theme I've been on the Empyre list doing the intellectual equivalent of Curly from the Three Stooges doing the early floor spin (pre hip-hop) without going anywhere.

by Manila Indymedia

A group of online activists offered an alternative space to protest after the Government violently prohibited the streets and freedom parks to exercise
public assembly and practice freedom of speech. The online activists calling themselves BrigadaElektronica electronic disturbance group organized an “electronic sit-in”- bringing street protest actions on cyberspace.

The electronic disturbance group is once again announcing their second electronic sit-in campaign, targeting the Malakanyang website, PNP and Office of the President.

Hola Gregory,

b.a.n.g lab is hosting a VR Sit-In (NOT A DOS - a DOS works/a VR Sit-In is symbolic and does not work) on the French Prime Minister's sites in solidarity with the Univesity Students, Unions and large segment of French Civil Society.

This project was intiated by my border hacklab group as a way to understand the methods and history of Electronic Civil Disobedience that I have been developing as a practice since the mid-80's.

"Where all your rights have become only an accumulated wrong, where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to gather the fruits of their own labors, and, even while they beg, to see things inexorably withdrawn from them – then, surely, it is a braver, a saner and a truer thing to be a rebel, in act and deed, against such circumstances as these, than to tamely accept it, as the natural lot of men." - Roger Casement, Irishman, (1864-1916).