podopolog

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Let’s see how real the art sector can get !

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< 03.02 > Transmediale Conference: Anonymous Codes: Disruption, Virality and the Lulz,Panel with Jacob Appelbaum (us), Gabriella Coleman (us), Dana Buchzik (de) and anonymous , Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli (it/de), Chaired by Krystian Woznicki (de/pl) :: 14h, at HdKW, Berlin

( also live streams for those on other planets, check here. )

Probably the most important day of Transmediale’s programming is Friday, with the above panel, a keynote with Jodi Dean at 18h, a panel on Crashed Economy at 13h w/ Steve Lambert, Kate Rich, Jaromil, and more…  War Machines, Panel with Tsila Hassine (il), Ziv Neeman (il) and Frank Rieger (de) Moderated by Christopher Salter (ca/de), 11:30h  … check the whole day’s program, cause we’re still getting our heads around it…

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Some interesting backround: An article on Gabrielle Coleman’s work re: Anon at Nation For Change, and the link to her piece – Our Wierdness Is Free – for Triple Canopy.

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In/Compatible 2012 v.1 : Do the New Guinea Pig Dance, or Else…

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And meanwhile, important things happening on the ground in the local Berlin news:

Today is the 1 year anniversary of Liebig 14’s eviction and action/ events are scheduled , and Schokoladen and Club Der Polnischen Versager eviction date is now set for Feb.22nd, they are inviting everyone for a breakfast… and … Another possible outcome !

More on those stories as soon as we can…

tbc

{ “The ATM Trek and lost civilizations” by Podrescu }

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An XLTerrestrials’ “Kickstarter”:

We are in the midst of producing a roaring new CiTiZEN KiNO show (and global tour)… as usual to save the world, and to eat … cake … If you would like to be a co-sponsor, co-producer or merely invest in “the most inventive work to hit the stage since Euripides and/or Mama Mia” (Time’s Up). “More titillating than a Russ Meyer film romp for teenagers !” (some Film Journal).  “Walter Benjamin on Ayahuasca and Twitter!” (Adbusters).  Contact us now… and you will get rich off of our labor and filthy lucrative genius !

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tbc

{ taken from deBug’s intro to Transmediale 2012, w/ Ubermorgen : PsychOS }

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< 31.01- 05.02> Transmediale’s 25th festival In/Compatible, at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) and around Berlin.

For anyone who likes to gorge on a countercultural feast, this year’s Transmediale has stuffed the house with a smorgasbord, a veritable whos who of indignados in the art sectors. Sure to be an indigestible event… as it should be.

Too many names to pluck out as highlights, but we have to admit when we first glanced it our jaws dropped. And then of course we do not forget that every year we cover the festival, we get equal doses of inspiration and queasiness.  So much techno-hype,  safe art containers, another kind of showbiz at work, the gallery-esque bubbles, and yet each time there’s this massive convergence of so many at the top of their thrashing game, you can almost taste the holes in the fence and the bricks through the window.

25th year of a festival that began as a VideoFilmFest -in 1987 – ” it was in order to provide a platform for media forms and formats marginalised by the established and standardised culture of film festivals and the cultural production of the time.” ANd It’s exciting to see the attitude of the new curatorial team ready to deconstruct oneself and take an inward aim : ” Instead of blowing out the candles on a birthday cake, we have decided to make visible the incompatibilities within the festival.”

The trick will be, as always, to see how much one can actually export into the current ( dire ) situations, or will it just be another spectacular plug-in that doesn’t fit ? Standby for XLt reports. In the worst case scenario, you can still feed all your corporate-installed fetishes for a technotopian tomorrowland.

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< 05. 02 > Oh and btw, we have a little participation in an Exquisite Media Corpse game called “Zombie Play” put on by Mark Butler and the Ludic Salon, with some great contributing guests like Natascha Adamowsky, Shu Lea Cheang , Steve Lambert, and many more. We’ll be discussing the results on Sunday < feb 5 > at HdKW. ( ReSource Program , 13h , see  link above).  One of our own “slides”, which unfortunately due to its ‘re-appropriated nature’ ( copyright kram) was not able to be used in the official TM press release:

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What’s interesting here for the XLt was not the 2 juxtaposed images themselves, the mechanical woman which we’ve used over and over now to address the Techno Fascist era, but all the details that surface from putting 3 media parts ( “slides”) together for this year’s viral insert to TM, during a hectic january as we were assembling other shows. The (green-ed) image comes from a mechanic’s (strange erotica) calendar from one the world’s largest auto manufacturer’s, and is now again being used as an XLterrestrials’ Citizen Kino project poster for our “Electric Sheep Revisited” program, that we’ll take on a tour in 2012 to expose the machine fetishes that are mangling our inhabitable environments, and wrangling our human behaviors through all those corporate factory servo farms, which ain’t no strawberry fields.

Speaking of behaviours….

:::

+

{ still from Miio or My Identity is Open, an FH student film }

< 26.01 > Interflugs present “Behaving Differently” with Constanze Kurz (Chaos Computer Club) und Dmytri Kleiner (Telekommunisten Network): The Price and Value of Free Culture, West Germany venue in Kberg at 19h.

“The State (…) is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.” Gustav Landauer
A lecture series on models of resistant economies in art and cultural work. Organised by Interflugs, the autonomous students organisation at the UdK Berlin.

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tbc

{ Schokoladen in Ackerstr., under threat of eviction. }

Notes On…

The Work of Art in the Age of The Digital Replicant v.1

( work-in-progress )

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To begin, many thanks to Chaos Clubbers, Telekommunisten, Interflugs… and the Mindpirates programmers, for illuminating Many things last night!

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Dear Mindpirates: ” Great atmosphere last night ! So glad to see someone setting up extended family, lush living room jam session nites … like slow food for the ears and mind/body-belly. We had just come from an intense,  deeply Nerdy, Very political … but also ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY discussion on Netwrks + Free Culture set up by Interflugs – an autonomous students’ Org at UDK. And then coming afterwards to Mpirates home base was like … OH SHIT! … WITHOUT exquisite PHYSICAL SPACE, i.e. living FREEZONES, all this internetz debate is just the pus in the boil. ( Funny how Travis’ sampled txt loop at the end of the jam – poking fun at all that buzz + babble about net + gadgets – read my mind completely).  Keep on jammin in a free real world !”  Podrescu, psychomedia analyst + composter for player pianos.

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Resistance to corporate culture requires a questioning of the virtual migration, and the digital pipelines. The age of mechanical reproduction advanced to the digital stage has in fact greatly mutated our concepts of what culture can be. Capitalism, or more specific to say transnational Corporate Capitalism, has uploaded some strangely alluring + viral notion into our heads, that we must all strive to aim our ‘cultural hoses’ towards the globalized user (the prosumer).

In most cases this migration feels more like a trick of the current Evil Operating System – the content + culture + distro + news fabricating mafia – to shape and capture all our creative output with… an easy net.  Delusions form that to survive making art + culture would mean we must ultimately connect w/ audiences everywhere, to exist within this dangerously limited but ubiquitous OS. To brand ourselves on multiple platforms. To feed our souls into the webbed machines. To become one’s own spewing public relations unit. This all lends itself to mind-melding with globalization culture meets the “filthy rich fantasy”, than perhaps becoming some sweet and socially productive realm of Free Communications.

Should an artist, or any cultural producer, (always) aim for that globalization net and marketplace, an idea now entrenched by the silicon vulture ideal ?

It is fun, intriguing  and stimulating for us to generate some interest in our art or our concepts in some faraway remote… Japan, Russia , the Philippines, Taipei or Timbuktu, Topeka. But in reality what happens on the ground, in one’s own immediate community, is where you live and breath the Art World, and where one tries to live fully in the present moment. Are we just stepping into an extremely superficial + hyper-capitalist (art) market when we plug into this game? What occurs when we all try to reach beyond our immediate environments before we have contributed to painting our own neighborhood w/ our creative gifts?

Signs are all around us that this shell of the corporate netherworlds has cracked, and the realities are rushing in. The necessities of utilizing all our arts to DEFEND our own hood, and to make a living where one exists a sustainable praxis, may far exceed in its relevance to an inhabitable future than the seductive trend to become a node in a simulated alias version of the whole !

XLterrestrials do not deny that there’s a powerful allure to become a transnationalist mass mediated art star… “connected” … or reaching out and around for knowledge and friendships throughout the great diversity of this planet. But this focus on making our mark on the web to “make it”… has the artworld running around like Little Big dogs trying to piss on every tree at once. And what goes on for art in these containers is often laughable to everyone except the institutions which are funding it.

If we take the music world as one example …

Music has become one of the forms that made a somewhat logical transition to this digital reproducibility, and now it’s hard to see the difference of what the musical culture is in its fullest and most potent form, a full-bodied and spatial event.

Following the Interflugs talk at West Germany, a great series of lectures called Behaving Differently,  we went to the Mindpirates space which has set up a whole week of live jam sessions ( 4-6 hours long or more ) … in a kind of lush living room environment. It wasn’t exactly free culture, yes, a little commerce + bar biz goin on. And it was connected w/ a kind of marketing hipness – with some semi- electro underground celebs from mostly the US?, a scene which the XLt has grown a little weary of.  But it was still a powerful reminder that music, and environments to share them in together, are the primary and essential use of music, the place where music lands to engage life forms.

Music is Not about consuming it in enclosed packages, packets + files, to keep up with the hipper joneses, to find the latest coolest flavor of the month, to listen to on gadgets and in isolated headspace.

Sure we can do that, and it may help us thru our difficult + highly cubiclized days… but we would fare better not to forget that music in all its glory is both a shared intimate ( + public) experience. ( big hall + stadium concerts are btw another pet peeve, but we’ll leave that one aside for now ).

And somehow this concept of SHARING has become a mass communications and technicality fixation, or worse a bastardized piss stream on the corporate game board.  And here we are, currently enduring the new digital post-modern ‘freedom fighters’ discussing the means to up the ante in a digital arms race, out-maneuver the culture mafia for a few months, to slip our friends that new track or remix which anyway the entertainment industry had stuffed onto our brain-shelf.

Of course we know and fully respect the heavy-hitter hackers are aiming for user/ producer formulas and formats, so we are not a society of downloaders, petrified consumers, but co- creators… but even this struggle gets a little tangled in the “techno dope” of all those global mechanical + wired tentacles + consume portals. Those mediums that have turned our art forms into the self-referential logic of PIPELINES!

There Are HUGE political reasons to fight for all manner of positive social outcomes via the digital spectrum, if only not to become thoroughly colonized by the new wave of (military+consumer) technologies. And there is a whole potential to create a new territory from the ashes of the existing corporate wastelands. Of developing whole labor practices and social production that are not environmentally dependent + destructive! But we should be aware of the impacts this media+capital arms race /  factory is having on our cultures. And avoid the pitfalls of reductionist bureau-like communications and exchanges, and only making ourselves so easily plumped for the spiritless empire’s fast-foodly feasting.

ANd speaking again in regards to this one form of cultural production, Music is nothing but a product ( and an intellectual exercise) without the spaces to make it and celebrate it together!

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For Berliners this means fewer and fewer Opps for sharing ‘pure’ music experiences (social events) without our Schokoladens, our Klub der Republiks, a Mindpirates Verein ( not currently in danger) , a Tacheles, a Maria, Kiki Blofeld, etc, etc.etc….

And for those reading elsewhere, we realize your fight may be far more extreme. For as metropolises and urban space go these days, Berlin by comparison, is still considered an oasis, abundant with cultural spaces.

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{ Klub der Republik, – Fbook link – the latest neighborhood club about to fall }

p.s. A crucial footnote, or angles for more investigations : Clubs are only one level of this struggle for freezones… More importantly how often do you experience a non-commercial artists’ or citizen’s HOME, where you come together to experience a great concert, a great creative gathering, where people met up to share food and art as a way of life, as a common ritual, a non-bizness related art event?

We don’t just want club spaces, WE WANT THE WHOLE FUCKIN BAKERY !

That is to say we want art + culture production to occur in the places that we live, not relegated to some club district, some ‘joy division’ depot ( the name derives from a military brothel) where you are allowed to tank up on the art products for a price ! And Neither will we be reduced to producing art worlds only upon tools fit for office-typing slaves, and extracting from our minds so as to be folded into the virtual and disembodied confines !

To borrow from a fascinating series of events/lectures some years ago in Berlin, is our cultural production ours or is it the “Oil Of The 21st Century” ( referring specifically to the fight against commodification , intellectual property captures, control flows. ) ?  We can already see the net has done a fine job turning the user into the product. (Rushkoff). And this may not only be because of who controls the environment,  but that the nature of code environments may just simply be gearing us towards production of a Replicant culture.

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In Part 2 : We will have to address some incredible thoughts and ideas brewing in the free culture struggles… ideas from the Interflugs discussion last night from Dmitry Kleiner, Frank Rieger and Constanz Kurz et al… controlling the means of cultural production !! Kulturwertmarkt !! etc.

( but we had to rant first : )

[ added :It may be awhile before we can analyze this further from the XLt perspective of "Media Self-Defense", but in the meantime here's Dmitry Kleiner's description and analysis of the proposed Kulturwertmarkt project, which is a new autonomous "pipeline" or an alternative economic lifeline structure for cultural production in the digital era. ]

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< this week > Schokoladen concerts

< this weeK > Mind Pirates Jam Sessions

< Last week > KDR’s Finale, 10 days , 100 djs – R.i.P.

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And while not directly related to this story, but a great new indie venue w/ lots of hungarian and balkan flavors, XLT recommends:

< 28.01 > Chinese Man at Szimpla’s Badehaus, invite at fbook

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tbc

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{ C-Kino Retrospex }

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< 21.01.12 > Please come to the detroit contemporary gallery at 5141 Rosa Parks in Detroit from 6:00PM-11:30PM to celebrate all the different perspectives of the apocalypse in the show PAOCALYPSE  :  APOCALYPSE . The is art and interactive performances from many local, national and international artists. The show is FREE and ALL AGES.
Sincerely,
KT Andresky
Exhibition Director
detroit contemporary
CAID DIVISION

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XLt PRINTS NOW AVAILABLE ( donations only , contact pOd )

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{ CitiZEn Kino # 9 : Electric Sheep Revisited }

For a full XLterrestrials list, see below:

Read the rest of this entry »

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Have you Heard?! The NET is ON A SOPA STRIKE ! Today, Jan 18th !

[ XLterrestrial analysts think this concept may need to be expanded for more than a day, but for now: try limiting yur use, and try and get a sense of what it would be like to not just have Free Communications, but also to be Free from The Net ... a little more often ! Yur own behaviors + disciplines may become your best allies in the struggles against the latest colonial virus! After all, the world feels like it's been undergoing a corporate digital pickling for the last couple decades. And the net infrastructure is neo-liberal globalization's best friend, not necessarily yours, contrary to the abundant hype. Perhaps the best defense will be to consider the offline world your communities' greatest sanctuary from the late-capitalist feeding frenzies and the post-industrial de-natured and disembodied wastelands. )

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But true, the net could be far worse. Stop Sopa Now !

Here’s more on the Sopa Strike! :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackout
http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa ( concise video )
and if yur into petition-thingees:
http://sopastrike.com

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{ 2012 : Year of the Water Dragon }

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So much news flying at us, we’re going to throw up some things very quick and then fill out more info as soon as we can…  2012 is off to a fierce leap into new territories …

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< 11.01 > TONIGHT > Rauch Haus had a fire during the holidays ( arson suspected ), and the S036 venue is having a BIG benefit concert 2NITE w/ a killer Soli line-up… don’t miss it !!! Core Tex Records tells the story, with all the details.

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< 14.01 >  XLterrestrials, Ponte Carlo and Rotes Antiquariat are putting together an evening of Performance, Readings, Film, and Afterparty w/ dj/vj Podmoney… “THE ANARCHIST BANKERS” a tribute to Rosa Lux and Karl Lieb… @ Knochenbox, Fhain , 21h …. more coming soon!

w/ an excerpt from CiTiZEN KiNO (#13) : ” WE WANT THE WHOLE F–KIN BAKERY ! “

+ guest performances from Paul Labrecque ( Sunburned Hand of the Man ), Gambeex, and Uwe Berger

( FBook invite here )

www.rosa-luxemburg-konferenz.de
www.rotes-antiquariat.de
http://xlterrestrials.org/
http://pontecarlo.de/
http://jellyair.com/

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More info ahead > Transmediale and Berlinale in February,  AND…

This year’s XLt Leni Riefenstahl Award  goes to George “Star Wars Monger” Lucas, the epic idiot who purchased prime Presidio Park “real estate” (formerly a national park, i.e. PUBLIC LAND ) to build a new movie studio and produce more Hollywood Shit like “Red Tails”… a full review coming soon.

>>> And other things to blow yur mind, and liberate your body, your soul, and yur hood !

{ eric joyner’s ‘robots + donuts’ expertise, link below. }

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work-in-progress

Note: This was our preface piece, written the night before 28c3 began … and now we’re working on a 2ND musing, in response to the many inspiring insights gathered thus far. Cory Doctorow’s incredible talk the first night, has triggered many thoughts… and many concerns and alarms, which relate to some of what we address here below, but we want to examine it further. And be sure to check out our streaming notes, resources + links at 28c3 v.1, previous post.

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Musing darkly on robots, donuts and 2011 ( part 1 )

It has been a profoundly disturbing 2011! And Oddly we’ve gotten in the habit of ending our gregorian earth calendar years in the presence of the “orphan hackers” at Chaos Communications Congress (#28), which offers a varied mix from radical resistance inspirations to a depressing glimpse of the techno-alienations that continue spreading like a slow terminal brain + body + community fungus. Don’t get us wrong, we love this deep-thinking community, and we have immense admiration for the pioneers who are, for the most part, seeking to establish a community ethic + code + platforms, to cultivate a fertile ground out of their customized cracks in the dominator system.

We so often begin our musings here in the Podopolog by finding the potent images that will accompany our often thinking-a-loud texts. Perhaps it has a little to do with having been marinated in visual mediums for so (too) long, to need this crutch, a little sensationalism, some provocation, some comic remedy, this quick cut-to-the-chase.  We’ve used Eric Joyner’s brilliant paintings once before ( and hope he’ll be ok with it again, no time to contact now ), which give a perfectly cracked + baked analysis of what we’ve come to describe as California Technotopian Ideology,  and the Assembly-line Culture. Does it also work as well for our mass-produced “reality tunnels” in the international spheres and increasingly on-gadget planet?

The painting above called “Summer” happens to hit home a few stark ‘Winter” realities…  thinking of our earlier days on the Cali coast, having observed the strange harvests of Silicon Valley intoxicate and toxify our (ontological) shores for many years. And now in 2011, we can’t help but think of the barely reported implications and unknowable longterm effects of Fukushima, spilling its hubris, its lies, its eternal poison, its superhuman-made stew into the Pacific. A godzilla-like mind-of-its-own walking out into the depths.

Nuclear energy and the information age, can these two technological paths be analyzed as parallel tracks ??

Well, we’ve experimented with this analogy before. For us, we have often seen a lot of the IT world as something that’s been dumpster-dived from the Military Industrial Complex. And becoming the centerpiece of the new Military Entertainment Complex. Can such things be redeemed and/or tamed for civilian use? Some brave new worlders have crawled in to seek the new black gold, others are trying to re-purpose it for better living, some will bring it to the underground party, cause the time + money’s running out, and we are just getting by on the ‘dirty’ new language, and happy to have whatever’s around to … ur, um, eat ?! …

The donuts may symbolize for us this inedible, factory line, this abstract code, and/or consumable objects lacking the more tangible local community concepts or praxis, lacking any of the deliciously personal + unique artistry ( not mass replicable) for a nutritious and modest , and literal person-2-person, garden variety.

And, contrary to much technotopian thinking, we’ve used this analogy for the purpose of pointing out that Some technological tracks are deadly cul de sacs, experiments which need to be aborted. Some genies we’ll need to stuff back in there bottles as much as they ever can be. Those Pandora genies, those genies which are also agendas + vested interests wielded over us by elites w/ little intention for public good. And could Some genies give you the power to get those things, which you later wished you hadn’t ?!

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An increasingly expansive, vibrant and radical hive is the hacker world. One of the most promising new social phenomenon of today is the community hacklabs, sprouting everywhere like wild mushrooms! And yet we have to ask, can the language(s) which brought about this truly rapidshare mindfuck of globalization, at a rate previously unimaginable, redeem us!? Yes, all those lovely tools and infrastructure ( i.e. the net , the digitalia ) are an essential part of  the most unprecedented consolidation of wealth and corporate power in human history, and yet we still think that these technological/communication/media tools in ever-more-ubiquitous forms will be our way out ? Is that a sane conclusion, in the given predatory climate ?

Granted we Are in a technological + consumer arms race, and kind of hard to imagine now an exit without a means of self-defense ( and new means of productivity that doesn’t rely on earth’s finite resources ), and yet fresh daily articles are strange eye-openers: 1. Long-range drones now being used by the Sea Shepherds to track illegal whalers, and 2. Tim Pool, occupy archivist , experimenting with DIY “occu-copters” to monitor police (link). Sure, clever + tactical appropriations, but are they like 2-steps fwd and 3-steps back in terms of creating intelligent + sharing communities? Do they become seeped in the spy/control/war games? It certainly does not break with the DNA of the colonizers and empire. It is certainly not always a development in better living or healthy social productivity, over the logic of markets and ‘progress’ at all costs. And in fact, the dangers also lie in the fact that currently every technological invention is far more appropriable by big industry with its seemingly endless reach for capitalization and exploitation. And everything that lands on the global market can become a menace rather than progress to the whole.

[ A third story from another angle came in while writing this. via a Bruce Sterling tweet. 3.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16323437 "This vending machine with machine-vision must have Philip K. Dick chuckling." ]

Are we winning this game, this war, or empowering the enemies? Escaping or opting-in ? Hard to say, but 2011 for us felt like we got our asses kicked Again !

Which gets at our current XLt themes: Nearly every technological invention in the currently militarized-capitalist operating system can be co-opted against community. So long as the dominant operating system is in place, so many technological advances have the potential to become a new (bio-)hazard,  lead to heavier alienation, weaponry, and/or a more idiotic and fragmented consumerism ! Is there a territory, a species, of “organic invention”, that can be less utilized by the dark operating system ?

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But we don’t want to end with mere critique and analysis, we want to open up a dialogue and debate. And we wish to propose a few pro-active maneuvers to our CCC – and 28c3 – orphan family on the eve of 2012 over the next few days!

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i.e.

Would it be useful to devise a creator’s scale?

M  < ———- | ———- | ——– | ———- | ———- >  H

For now, a bit of a ridiculously simplified scale to measure the possible outcomes of a technological tool in relation to its machine or human closeness. Putting our creativity on a map to see if it has more organic than machinic function. More community tool than weapon ? More socially constructive than mere technological advance? More artistic + unique than replicateable ? etc..  Graphs To be elaborated and played with….

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Jussi Parikka  tweets 2day : “Codes—by name and by matter—are what determine us today, and what we must articulate if only to avoid disappearing under them completely.”

But we’re not so sure. The more we allow ourselves to be determined and demeaned by code, make ourselves at ease with it, the more we allow ourselves to be fed into the non-living logic + system. And into the mechanisms of the fully militarized capitalism.

Sure all the post-humanists and technotopians and addicted hyper-faustians will scoff, but they seem ready to don their helmets and migrate to the robot + donut world, daring to launch themselves into the cold black space. Where the incompatible monster/machine heads out to take a dip in a rusty junked ocean, and the sugar-glazed bad dreams wash up like some disneyland oil spill.

Many are migrating into the donut hole !

While some of us still prefer the art of a living, evolving, un-plastinated, un-vacated earth.

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tbc…

( CC+C , #27 ? }

< 27.12 – 30.12 > 28C3 : Chaos Communications Congress : Behind Enemy Lines, BCC at Alexanderplatz, Berlin

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:: RESOURCES + NEWS ::

LIVE Streams : http://28c3.fem-net.de/ ( from anywhere : ) – Thx Fem-net !!!

:: Twitter resources : #28c3 | @cbase | exiledsurfer | …

:: CCC site, full 4-day schedule, speaker abstracts, etc. ( site currently down, see Mirror )

:: View with your friends in your town, follow remote locations here : #nonerdleftbehind

… … …

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:: DAY 1 ::

:: Speedracer analysis already up on Morozov’s keynote by Dmytri Kleiner, and yes there’s a Telekommunisten Stammtisch 2nite < tues. > ( see link ) !!

:: XLT synopsis thus far : all in all we think the technology’s under control … and yur hair should be standing on end !

:: CCc wiki back up, and very cool to see all the places re-streaming, No Nerds Left Behind , and it’s not too late to set up yur own local/public viewing, wherever u are just get in touch w/ em ! Still 3.5 days to go : )

:: 28c3 archives already up on 28C3 channel @ Youtube, i.e. Anne Roth ( which we missed ), and Cory Doctorow’s talk, which has got the XLt analysts excited to play with in the lab ! standby.

:: DAY 2 ::

:: Telekommunisten’s Dmytri Kleiner begins this 28c3 day with an important dialogue – taking off from Doctorow’s talk last nite : “The Coming War on General Computing.” See: @doctorow, In order to stop the net from being squared, we need change the way we produce and share.

:: Being the psycogs that we are ; ) the XLterrestrials already wrote a letter to the many blue Navi-like Doctorows of CCC, called Musing darkly on robots, donuts and 2011. BUt now that we’ve heard the actual illuminations and his clever and poetic tact, we’re working on a further counterpoint, but with comraderie and inclusion of this proposed other world.

:: Sven’s useful #28c3 summary of congress URLs

:: wow, cbase has a no-smoking policy … that almost works.

:: DAY 3 ::

:: Astounding glimpses into the digital arms race, YIkes! i.e. the Tor talk (day 2). And basically everything at 28c3 is intense, and fast curves. DEEP Respex to those on the front lines! But after 2 days, it feels like the best thing for XLt to do is to retreat, and further develop the analysis of the “virtual migration” and figuring out “media self-defense” particularly for the average users, but also some cautionary tales and debate ( and how to articulate that ) for the wholly immersed. There is this sensation that 28c3 can act like a massive distortion field to things that really matter on the ground !

:: And did we mention our heads hurt. And that there’s a sun out.

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… … ….

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Last weekend we got handed a fresh Datenschleuder #96 – zine/organ of the Chaos Computer Club – Thx Ingo ! And reminded us it’s high time to post some news about the upcoming Chaos Congress. This year’s challenging keynote is from Evgeny Morozov – “Marriage From Hell: On the secret love affair between Dictators and Western Technology Companies” ( abstract at 28c3 / fahrplan ) … and Cory Doctorow ( abstract ) presenting this year too. Very hot spot, more news coming sooon !

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” While it’s old news that authoritarian regimes regularly rely on censorship and surveillance technology supplied to them by Western companies, 2011 was a year (thanks, in part, to the Arab Spring) when it became a hot issue in the public debate. While politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have recently committed to ban the sale of such technologies to dictators, it’s not clear whether such measures would prove effective (or merely drive the sale of such technologies underground) or simply stimulate the growth of Chinese, Russian and Indian companies. More disturbingly, there is still very little awareness – at least among the general public – that many of the tools that are currently exported to authoritarian states have been designed to help fight “The Global War On Terror” and are thus inextricably linked to domestic policies of Western states. “

E. Morozov, author of The Net Delusion, How Not To Liberate The World

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Is Chaos finally catching up to XLt analysis ??! Are we ready to talk about all those Things your mama- nerds never told you about Technotopia and Fascho-Digitalia ?! ; )

If you’re using _______ ( add technology name here ), you’re probably pretty fucked !

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Sure to be a hard and heavy dose this year !

… Uh Oh, Another terrible ratio of men to women speakers ! We’re counting about 13 out of 120. But you knew that problem already, right ?!

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{ the wonderful still brushed work of eric joyner }

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the psycho-tropic-al setting just before 28c3 hits town !

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28C3, v.2: Musing darkly on robots, donuts and 2011 - the XLts have been busy short-circuiting a really Race-to-the-Bot-like year to avoid a 2012 loop ! (below)

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{ Cern }

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{ latest Banksy }

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{ evol jam }

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Incredible stillness.
The white hole in the sky
reaches for 2133
and her (sterilized) holster.

Art undoes the clothed essentialists
and leaves em out to freeze overnight,
while the artificial intelligentsia
sucks this hairball
of tactical bandit poetry.

We slipped out long ago,
Not in protest…
like 2-d ducks at a shooting gallery.
But to burn the ministry of cocooned misery
to the ground !

an XLt analyst

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Speculation on Cern + Higgs boson, your wilder thoughts ??

We’ve been reading a few articles for the laymen on this “goddam particle” biz ( according to Higgs himself that was what he Wanted to call it, but his editors wouldn’t let him – via Marcell Mars, thx ), and they are incredibly fluffy and quite ridiculous!

What are the theoretical + practical + COMMERCIAL applications of this £10bn project? U know, the ones that lie behind the PR niceties of pure science and mysteries of the universe ! HAh!

We all know what happened to nuclear science, to rocket (and petrol) fuel technologies, to biotech, to telecommunications ; ) … Anyone want to speculate on what’s actually coming down the mutant capitalist-science pipeline ??? Personally we’re picturing microwave- popcorn-people coming soon to a Walmart shelf nearest you ! ; )

We await some feedback from other XLterrestrials out there. Meanwhile we’re gonna look up what Michio Kaku might have pondered on the subject, and read between the lines of the wikipedia entries.

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tbc