Marcos: A penguin in the Selva Lacandona, Part 1
Originally published in Spanish by the EZLN
*************************************
Translated by irlandesa

A Penguin in the Selva Lacandona I/II

(The zapatista is just a little house, perhaps the smallest, on a street called "Mexico," in a barrio called "Latin America," in a city called the "World.")

You're not going to believe me, but there's a penguin in the Ezeta Headquarters. You'll say "Hey, Sup, what's up? You already blew the fuses with the Red Alert," but it's true. In fact, while I'm writing this to you, he (the penguin) is right here next to me, eating the same hard, stale bread (it has so much mold that it's just one degree away from being penicillin), which, along with coffee, were my rations for today. Yes, a penguin. But I'll tell you more about this later, because first we must talk a bit about the Sixth Declaration.

Q: So, let's start with the basics of Who, What, When, Where and How. How did The Department of Ecological Authoring Tactics, Inc. (DoEAT) group start?

A: It began with some food projects I had started, thus the acronym, but it grew out of wanting to relieve myself from the institutional burden of being solely responsible for my thoughts and actions and to offer others this same shelter. It is not total anarchy, it is actually quite organized, it is simply adopting a methodology that many artistic, governmental, and corporate entities use to decentralize authorship.

WORDS MADE FLESH
Code, Culture, Imagination
Florian Cramer

Media Design Research
Piet Zwart Institute
institute for postgraduate studies and research
Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam

A b s t r a c t: Executable code existed centuries before the invention of the computer in magic, Kabbalah, musical composition and experimental poetry. These practices are often neglected as a historical pretext of contemporary software culture and electronic arts. Above all, they link computations to a vast speculative imagination that encompasses art, language, technology, philosophy and religion. These speculations in turn inscribe themselves into the technology. Since even the most simple formalism requires symbols with which it can be expressed, and symbols have cultural connotations, any code is loaded with meaning. This booklet writes a small cultural history of imaginative computation, reconstructing both the obsessive persistence and contradictory mutations of the phantasm that symbols turn physical, and words are made flesh.

Download as a PDF here

Join the SwarmTheMinuteMen.com and Electronic Disturbance Theater
Virtual Sit-In Against Anti-Immigrant Websites, from Wednesday July 20th
- Friday, July 22nd

To join, click here:EDT or click here for http://swarmtheminutemen.com

///

This, the second action coordinated by SWARM [1], is an attempt to move beyond the minutemen [2] - as one group of people working against migrants and migratory movement – to a systemic logic. This logic that pervades American society [3] is canonized in Academia and institutionalized in the US border Patrol. [4]

Rabbit takes a leap forward in race to network devices
By Thomas Crampton International Herald Tribune
SUNDAY, JULY 17, 2005

OXFORD, England For Rafi Haladjian, the next leap ahead in technology starts with a toy called Nabaztag.

A plastic box shaped like a rabbit, with pastel ears and facial features akin to Hello Kitty, it has a few flashing lights, a rudimentary speaker, one button and a name derived from the Armenian word for rabbit.

Night-stalking Stella the cat and my laptop in the garden in Williamsburg:

slideshow

An interview with Olia Lialina on artificial.dk:

Stars Fading on the Web
- An Interview with Olia Lialina

Olia Lialina is a pioneer of net.art, especially known for the often remixed piece 'My Boyfriend Came Back From the War'. She is currently professor of New Media at Merz Academie, Stuttgart.

Pranksters hijack 'banal' TV news

Richard Luscombe in Miami
Sunday July 3, 2005
The Observer

LINK to article
A campaign of 'hacktivism' aimed at improving the quality of local television news has left reporters fearing on-air ambushes from a giant tiger or a cheese-flinging martial arts expert. Shock tactics have been employed by a New York-based group that says it has had enough of TV stations feeding viewers an insipid diet of minor car accidents, petty crime and house fires in which nobody gets hurt.

In Slate Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger tour the most beautiful nuclear test craters in Nevada:

NEVADA TEST SITE, Nev.—Rumor had it she was a whore from Pahrump. But it didn't matter to those who knew her: Everyone agreed Priscilla was the most beautiful.

On June 24, 1957, the U.S. military touched off a 37-kiloton nuclear device over Frenchman Flat, a dry lake bed about 75 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The atmospheric test, code-named Priscilla, was one in a series called Operation Plumbbob. The provenance of the code name remains obscure; the earliest tests were ordered on the old military alphabet (Able, Baker, Charlie), but several tests in the 1950s were named after women. Test site lore persists that some were named for local prostitutes.

New Deal is a key part of the Government's strategy to get people back to work. The final part of our programme is now ready for its launch. If you have been deceased longer than 6 months we can now offer the opportunity to return to work. No more idleness and no more excuses. No more cemeteries taking up prime property development land.

We recognise the valuable contribution the dead can make to a low paid jobs market. No complaints about pay and conditions, a flexible approach to working hours and no pensions contributions (well lets face it, you've had enough of those already) all make you an attractive prospect to the new modern, dynamic global jobs market.