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Saul Williams reciting |
Saul William's new prose-novel
SAID THE SHOTGUN TO
THE HEAD is an epic poem in
the voice of a homeless man that
is telling of the coming of a female Messiah that he has known intimately.
Maybe you know her,
maybe you'll meet her TODAY.
[ click to read excerpt ]
Of Men and Monuments,
Vessels and Vectors...
Julian Laverdiere's Art of Uncertainty
by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid
[ click to
view
]
Coldcut's "Re:Volution"
mix.
An hour of revolutionary sonics...
stream it while you read!
[ click for track
listing ]
[
click to listen to Real Audio stream ]
Inside the new media workflow
of Propagate, a film collaboration
between [sic] and Shepard Fairey.
[ click to view
]
How to crack the clouds from
your Super Mario cartridge.
Courtesy of Cory Archangel / BEIGE.
[ click to view
]
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After spending the bulk of his life cranking out
pulp paperbacks
for peanuts, the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick is now finally
recognized as one of the most visionary authors the genre has ever
produced. While masterminds like Arthur C. Clarke anticipated technological
breakthroughs, Dick, whose speed-ravaged heart called it quits in
1982 when the man was only 53, foresaw the psychological turmoil
of our posthuman lives, as we enter a world where machines talk
back, virtual reality rules, and God is a product in the check-out
line.
Phillip
Glass: "This is a film that does address social change and
the way we live our lives. It has become an urgent question and
is no longer just theoretical. It’s not to say that these
films are meant to provide an answer. Recently I looked at Naqoyqatsi
in a different way than I ever had before. I kind of leaned back
and had my eyes half closed. I looked at the images and disconnected
my brain entirely. I just let the images flow into me. I was able
to apprehend the state of the world, our social world, in a way
that I hadn’t before. Usually, I looked at the film in terms
of it being cohesive; did the movements follow each other and make
sense? When I dropped that entirely I began to look at it in terms
of it being a mirror of the world we lived in. Then the question
is what did I think of that world?"
From image and text to audio and video to performance, politics get mixed and remixed. What could be next? Here’s a scenario; a hacktivist interrupts the feed into the teleprompter that is scrolling the words for the SOTU address to G W Bush. Too much on automatic pilot to notice, Bush reads the hacktivist’s words to millions of people. What we get is a live remix using the president himself as the splice between artist and audience.
The Panopticon is a
structure wherein the watched cannot see the watchers, but know
they are being watched: At the periphery an annular building, at
the center a tower. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe
from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small
captive cells in the periphery. But this light creates a veil placed
over surveillance, for the light that illuminates each cell also
blinds each prisoner to the presence of guards, or the lack thereof,
as it may be. Each cell then becomes a stage for an unknowable audience;
each prisoner alone, individualized, at once performing for no one
and everyone; each guard capable of seeing each cell and all prisoners
at once at their will. Thus creating an economy in surveillance
– one doesn’t need many guards in a panotpicon and they
don’t need to always be there or always be aware – the
actors (or prisoners as it were) will perform the same whether someone
is watching or not, for they do not know whether someone is watching
or not.
"When I first saw
the explanatory graphics for these projects I was enamoured by the
bold naivete of their bureaucratic aesthetics. Finally, here is
an American visual tradition that possesses the same weird charm
as the Mexican and Indian urban street graphics that are making
their way into expensive little Phaidon editions. Though Jazz is
the Classical archetype of the "Only Truly American,"
these digital images are from the Hip-hop era of sampling and graffiti...
here are the chrome arrows, characters, and text-crowded fields
to prove it. Naturally I tried to click on them as if they were
image maps, hoping that such interactivity would yield elaborations
on icons like the woman in the red dress who operates a lathe at
a uranium plant, the sometimes grinning caucasians getting their
faces "recognized," and the "policy makers"
and "analysts" working with the Genoa Projects. The DARPA/IAO
Remix implements those image maps and fleshes out the narratives,
explains or comments on the technological processes behind the faces,
and "exposes" those who hide behind sweeping titles like
"policy makers."
There is nothing there, according to the Australian Federal Government, in the planning of a radioactive waste dump in the Woomera region in South Australia. The indigenous people of the area tend to disagree. And, due to the fact that the site is in the Prohibited Area run by the Australian Department of Defence, most people are unlikely to get a look at the site.
The traditional Islamic cities such as Fez, Isfahan and Damascus fully utilized technologies but these technologies were based on the same principles that had guided the Islamic tradition; hence there was no incongruity in their development. Now they are coming under increasing dangers of various kinds due to the intrusion of modern technological advances that have no regard for the sacred dimension of these cities or for the living space that they enclose.
Above my writing desk hangs a quote from Franz Kafka urging writers
to create books that “can be wielded like a pickax to shatter
the frozen sea within the reader’s mind.” If a book
didn’t change the way the reader thought about the world,
then Kafka deemed it not worth writing. I have taken Kafka’s
words as my credo. May this book set your mental ice floes grinding
against each other.
.."Free-coloured Philomise had been making eyes at her; well-off brown man with his own coffee plantation and plenty slaves to work it, but no, our master didn't want a coloured to have her. Gave her instead to that yeasty-smelling carpenter imported to San Domingue-him from some backwards village in the ass end 2.of France. And Georgine was puffing herself up now she had a white man, never mind he didn't have two coins to rub together. True, she had cause maybe to be happy. Pierre was looking after her well. She might get two-three free children out of it too, and if she gave him enough boys, her Pierre might release her from slavery finally. When she was old.."
"From my own point of view, the way that a concept like hope
can be made useful is when it is not connected to an expected
success — when it starts to be something different from optimism
— because when you start trying to think ahead into the future
from the present point, rationally there really isn’t much
room for hope. Globally it’s a very pessimistic affair, with
economic inequalities increasing year by year, with health and sanitation
levels steadily decreasing in many regions, with the global effects
of environmental deterioration already being felt, with conflicts
among nations and peoples apparently only getting more intractable,
leading to mass displacements of workers and refugees ... It seems
such a mess that I think it can be paralysing. If hope is the opposite
of pessimism, then there’s precious little to be had. On the
other hand, if hope is separated from concepts of optimism and pessimism,
from a wishful projection of success or even some kind of a rational
calculation of outcomes, then I think it starts to be interesting
— because it places it in the present."
"We’re in the first age where everybody can communicate
with just about everybody else. It’s phenomenal and so completely
different to any other period of human history that I don’t
think anyone has fully understood the implications. We were talking
earlier about why I’ve returned to doing Fine Art, and I think
it’s partly because it’s a controllable environment.
The scale of global culture now and the relentlessness of superficiality
are so amorphous a power, that privacy and intimacy become really
radical. I think that’s something that’s really worth
exploring now, unplugging from the networks, and separating oneself.
With that you rebuild trust, conversation and friendship."
excerpt from the interview..
The very day he was proclaimed President Elect, Lula announced
his priority economic programme: to end the slow starvation facing
50 million Brazilians; and his first international initiative: to
hold out a hand to the Argentineans. What he announced were not
minor micro-economic or diplomatic options, but radical transformations
in ways of governing, an inversion of priorities and a new clear-cut
ethic with no grey areas. He was announcing that
The Global
Consciousness Project at Princeton University studies mass psychic
influence on random number generating. The ability of subjects to
influence random number generation with their thoughts has been
repeatedly verified. For this study, Princeton placed 50 random
number generators in cities around the world. The researchers wanted
to see if global events or crises would lead to perturbations in
the numbers, and statistical deviations from the mean. The greatest
anomaly was recorded on September 11, 2001. The generated numbers
deviated dramatically from the usual average, climaxing several
hours after the terrorist events. But the most extraordinary aspect
of the results was that the statistical deviation began more than
an hour before the first plane hit the World Trade Center.
The over there of the grief:was input where she dismantle the insanity medium of the chromosome that invades that the brain+X gram of the dog. Boy_roid of waste material inclination=of so=the mass of flesh of their control deficiency was scattered to the brain-universe......telephony..... [scan the body of the hyperlink of the fear=cell:the storage of desire!--MHz
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The
Remix of Politics
The
Panoptic Transition
The
DARPA/IAO REMIX (unauthorized)
The Australian
Federal Government is Planning a Radioactive Nuclear Waste Dump
in the Woomera Forbidden Area
Science,
Art and Society in the Islamic Civilization
The
Salt Roads
Navigating
Movements
Painful
but Fabulous
The Investiture as Culture
The
Serpent Temple
Switchback
Uncanny
Networks: 
The
Road To Excess: