Monotremu in Rumänien: “Das ist kein Schwanz”/”Ceci n’est pas o pulă”
* “radius of art“: Internationale Konferenz zum Thema Kreative Politisierung des öffentlichen Raums/Kulturelle Potenziale für soziale Transformation. Mittwoch, 8. / Donnerstag, 9. Februar 2012, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, Schumannstr. 8, Berlin; u.a. mit Michelangelo Pistoletto (Aktionskünstler/Gründer der Stiftung „Cittadellarte“, Italien), Basma El Husseini (Kulturmanagerin/-aktivistin, Ägypten), Jonatan Stanczak (The Freedom Theatre, Palästinensische Gebiete), Bisi Silva (Kunstkritikerin/Direktorin des „Center for Contemporary Art“, Nigeria), Pooja Sood (Künstlerin/Kulturmanagerin, Indien), Shelley Sacks (Künstlerin/Gründerin der „University of the Trees“, England), Jordi Pascual (Gründungskoordinator des „Committee on Culture of United Cities“, Spanien), Dan Baron Cohen (Umwelt-/Kulturaktivist, Brasilien), Antanas Mockus (ehem. Bürgermeister von Bogota, Direktor der Federici Group, Kolumbien), Alessandro Petti (Leiter „Decolonizing Architecture Art Residence“, Palästinensische Gebiete)” Via: Mail
* “Art Hack Day is an event dedicated to cracking open the process of art-making, with special reverence toward open-source technologies. Between January 26 – January 28, artists and collaborators will inhabit 319 Scholes to create and explore the participatory nature of technology, bringing together hackers whose medium is art and artists whose medium is technology. The event will be streamed to online audiences, who will be encouraged to participate through various platforms to be listed soon on the ArtHackDay.net website.” Via
* Buchtipp: Leah Lievrouw: “Alternative and Activist New Media” (Polity Press, 200 pages, 2011, English, ISBN-13: 978-0745641843). “Defining new media has always been tricky. Here, the author gives a clear and thorough definition of new media based on three components: the device/artifact which enables the ability to communicate, the communication activity/practice, and the social arrangements and organizational forms created around the artifact and the practice. This is a strong base that, coupled with an explicit reference to “Remediation”, the famous book by Bolter and Grusin, is used to develop Lievrouw’s extended concept of “mediation”, which she suggests both intensifies communication and makes it more participative. Lievrouw ranges over five different fields of investigation: culture-jamming, alternative computing, participatory journalism, mediated mobilization, and commons knowledge. Taking Dada and Situationism as initial reference points, she goes through different classic artworks (by Surveillance Camera Players, RTMark, Jonah Peretti, for example) analyzing the hacktivist initiatives of sharing the DeCSS code embraced by 2600 The Hacker Quarterly magazine and the whole history of Indymedia. According to the author, media activism represents a cultural “turn” which leads to a more contemporary concept of “mediation” as previously explained. What if we’re already beyond this turn? In that case, we’ll hopefully soon see this kind of consistent analysis applied to the next phase of alternative (new) media, such as the alternative use of social media, the ubiquitous possibilities of mobile digital publishing and the building and sharing of alternative archives.” Via: Neural
* Striking against censorship: “PROTECT-IP is a bill that has been introduced in the Senate and the House and is moving quickly through Congress. It gives the government and corporations the ability to censor the net, in the name of protecting “creativity”. The law would let the government or corporations censor entire sites– they just have to convince a judge that the site is “dedicated to copyright infringement.”"
* “On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of do it, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Independent Curators International (ICI) are teaming up to investigate and archive the evolving exhibition, which is now the most wide-reaching in the world, and they need your help. ICI is launching a call for documentation of do it exhibitions done spontaneously, residentially, on a small scale or a large scale—essentially any and all material from a realization of do it that may have been excluded from the official exhibition history. ICI and Obrist are aware that many independent and little-known iterations of the exhibition have taken place, and as the do-it-yourself ethos forms the foundation of the exhibition’s premise, material on these more impromptu or makeshift shows is of great import to the exhibition at large. do it began in 1993 with a discussion in Paris between the artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier with Obrist about whether an exhibition could be made from a series of instructions: How would an artist’s work be transformed if others made the artwork? To see what would happen, they invited 13 artists to send instructions, which were then translated into 9 different languages and circulated as a book.”
