Burlesques Contemporains at the Jeu de Paume – June 6th – September 6th, 2005
Art Dirt Redux - mp3
This show is the brainchild of Christophe Kihm who is a managing editor at Art Press (the French equivalent of Artforum). Each year Art Press does a special edition on a critical point of view. In 2003, Kihm did the special edition and the theme was le burlesque. For the Jeu De Paume exhibition the other contemporary French art magazine Beaux Arts did a special edition catalog. “… burlesque is linked to action. Originally, it was a practice that involved an entire array of physical techniques and action. Its’ range is fairly broad, in that a body’s response to space is determined by constantly changing contexts and situations. Burlesque can even be expanded to include artistic gestures and ideas when a process of reversal similar to that exerted on a body (by means of force, competence. Gravity, etc.) is applied. A definition of seeing always includes the act of setting a distance, which always has something to do with morality. On the other hand, I think that there is something amoral about burlesque.” Christophe Kihm, Burlesques Contemporains catalog, page 25.

An Interview with Ricardo Dominguez by Hans Peter Kartenberg

Ricardo Dominguez on virtual sit-in's and the upcoming trial against on-line activists in Germany. Hans Peter Kartenberg e-mailed the co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) on 2005-6-12.

> On your website at thing.net there was a call for a virtual sit-in on the website minutemanproject.com from May 27th to May 29th 2005. Who are the minutemen and what was the idea of that action?

Swarm The Minutemen was an e-action developed by a group of activists in the San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico border along with Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), in order to call attention to The Minutemen. The Minutemen are a non-governmental group of people vowing to patrol the US/Mexico border with guns in order to stop migrant people from crossing the border. They represent an intensification of the trend of violence towards migrant people and people of color that has increased since 9/11. They have received right wing state government support from Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and from anti-immigrant media. EDT called for a three day virtual sit-in in solidarity with Swarm who had called for a number of e-actions to take place: a 24/7 telephone call campaign, a fax action, an e-mail action and sound pollution actions on the border. Since the Minuteman say they love the silence of the desert - because they can hear the dirty rats (the people trying to cross the border) making noise - by creating lots of loud sounds it would keep the Minutemen from finding, stopping and harassing these people. These on/off line actions took place on the same days the Minutemen were holding a convention in Las Vegas.

*b.a.n.g* Micro_Gestures at the Edge of Invisibility will be an On/Off line space for MFA artists in the Visual Arts Department at UCSD to explore and present works at the edge of invisibility, at the edge of the digital and biological, at the edge of micro-robotics and nano-art, from in-virtu to in-vivo works and back.

8 june 2005

about 750 words

d a f f o d i l f o r t y - t h r e e

monthly news of experiments in public writing at
http://www.softopia.demon.co.uk

w h a t ' s n e w ?

There were 12 new items in May and 2 so far in June.

The new items can be seen at
http://www.softopia.demon.co.uk/2.2/whats_new.html

I hate that idea, too, not that I like Brian Eno's solution better (or that he looks all that great):

"I started to notice that you could buy keyboards of such complexity that you basically press one note on them and you've got a career as an ambient artist. I thought, there doesn't seem much challenge in that any longer." Instead, he says, he has been trying to rethink the way songs are written. His voice on the album comes laden with effects, in an attempt to "break down the idea that the voice represents the personality of the music and that that voice is my voice, speaking to you - I hate that idea".

Brian Eno interview in the Guardian on why he tried to unseat Tony Blair.

Communique 16: The Future of Media Activism Jammers,

Media activism, in all its disparate strains, is slowly but surely becoming a movement. In part, it's being spurred by the rise of information insecurity. But also by the growing realization that our corporate media system has a profound effect on nearly every other social and political issue we face. People, desperate for change, are organizing around media like never before. There's a feeling that media reform is truly the issue of issues, and that the wind is finally in our sails.

The June 2005 gatepage for artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to Internet art, features the C5 GPS Media Player:

artport.whitney.org

The C5 GPS Media Player was developed in conjunction with The C5 Landscape Initiative, a series of projects initiated by C5 that involve mapping, navigation and search of the landscape using GIS (Geographic Information Systems). The Landscape Initiative examines the changing conception of the landscape as we move from the aesthetics of representation to those of information visualization and interface.

Employees at Wal-Mart who can't afford the company medical plan are adivsed to apply for Medicare so we all subsidise the billionaires who own the company.

Robert Greenwald is making a documentary about Wal-Mart and is asking people to send in stories and/or video for the project.