square white world

small corners, tricks of light and sound; odours that find recess in me, a cup to sit in for a second or two; enough to weigh down an indentation, an impression; the echo of a memory that is not there, or should not be.

…

a gin that projected light, chopped into pieces to coincide with blinks, so that an impression of movement was achieved. Always the same movement, endless. The same woman on the same stairwell, taking the same three steps, continuously; a horse running to nowhere; a naked patriarch, swinging an axe. He says that the more one watches, the more their time becomes real, and the watcher’s time leaks out, becoming insignificant, the same as watching the water for too long.

- B. Catling, The Vorrh, Honest Publishing, Croydon, 2012, pp. 187-9

A prayer almost found its way to his lips. It began in the icy fear of his heart, the ventricles white with the frost of anticipation, and travelled outwards to become a pressure, like wind against the meat sails of his lungs. Funnelling up, it passed like a shadow through the rehearsal of his vocal cords, up into his mouth, tongue and lips, before being garrotted by the thin, taut wire of his mind.

- Ibid., p. 217

A huge, brown cow stood next to the bed. It wobbled, balanced comically on train tracks made of meat jelly, as the doctor sat below it, pulling at its udders; streams of hissing tea jetting into his white enamel pail. He filled his syringe from the steaming fluid. It misted the glass tube of the instrument, filling the room with its moist, bovine vapour. The cow smiled through the fog with the most natural expression of quiet delight.

- Ibid., p. 282

The vibration passed through them, through the turning ball of life, through the furniture and the floors, and all the way down to the well, where its harmony increased and spun, igniting tiny engines that ignited tiny engines that ignited tiny engines.

- Ibid., p. 449

Subject: Invitation to the Social Swarm

Dear fellow people from the Internet.

We know that social network services changed the way  we handle information and relationships.

But we also know that social network services create certain problems that come with storing  large amounts of personal information.

We are concerned about our privacy on those services. The centralized nature of current social networks forces users to trust third parties that are not trustworthy.

We do not have to surrender to technology as it is.

We have to shape technology in a way that is suited  to human nature.

This is why the goal should be to create a network that enables all of its users to communicate freely.

They must be able to use it in the way they want to, without being hindered by restrictions like censorship or the risk of losing control of their own content.

It is not about creating an alternative to existing social network services – it is about creating something even better.

There are different approaches to bringing this about, and they all have different up- and downsides. You are working on them. We are working on them.

So we ask you to join forces, with us and with each other, to create what we all are hoping for, what is driving us and what we need: A free and secure means of communication for everybody and everything.

To achieve this, we think the social network must satisfy these requirements:

1. Free software.

2. Good usability.

3. Decentralization.

4. End-to-end encryption.

5. Mandatory privacy: no plaintext data stored on servers.

6. Scalability.

7. Innovation over standards.

8. Better than what we currently have.

We would love to see you on our mailinglist:

https://mail.foebud.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/socialswarm-dev

To have a closer look at the project, go to our wiki:

http://socialswarm.net

Best wishes,

the folks of Social Swarm

Dear Social Swarm owner,

The following message under the subject heading “ignored options” was blocked twice when I tried to send it.

I have removed my hypertext link to squarewhiteworld – so let’s see if it’s that.

I don’t think it is spam. But perhaps you know better.

Best,
…

Dear Social Swarmers,

I find it strange that no option other than “earnest and honest privacy,” as Klaus Schleisiek put it, is being considered. What about open and public discussion and social intercourse with optional anonymity?

I am inspired by the idea of the listserv – and the Wiki – since these forms of interaction are subject- or theme-led and to an extent non-identitarian.

I am negatively inspired by the existing social media: but more for reasons of profiling and boxing of people into homogeneous blocs than for impinging on privacy; my objection is politico-aesthetic, not moral.

I’ve been working since March this year on a website based on these ignored ideas. Unfortunately, where I am in the world, New Zealand, makes it necessary for me to seek private sector funding to build a demonstration model and proof of concept, which is the task I am currently involved in – raising funds, validating need -, rather than public funding.

An irony. Since the idea has to be tangibly realised, needs to have gained sufficient commercial momentum in order that it is tangibly realised, before I can make it open source.

Another aspect of my idea that might interest discussants is that it is determinedly non-anglocentric. It enables multiple languages to be addressed, viewed, engaged with in the same view or browser window.

If you are interested, please contact me.

Best,

…

20 EU member states are now

under rightwing governments

in different shades

of blue

C’est incroyable. Le G20 – le sommet rassemblant les gouvernements les plus puissants du monde – se réunit demain pour discuter de la crise économique mondiale, et qui sponsorisent l’événement? Les banques et les entreprises!

• de l’équipe d’Avaaz

What some would call the death of the political is only the birth of a new world and new politics: the success of the 1970s reaction and the appearance of a “No Future” tendency linked to the creation of an Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) that neatly slices up the planet. With the IWC, individuals are all the more subjected since they cannot localise power. The world market is presented as an efficient instrument for putting poverty into a “grid” and “enmeshing” marginalisation. Despite the global grid overlaying the social universe, the revolution and hence hope are not things of the past.

- François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. Deborah Glassman, Columbia University Press, New York, 2010, p. 299

As Foucault had sketched it out, power is everywhere and first of all in us. We must “make do with it.”

- Ibid., pp. 299-300

[-The following went to Spectre -]

State arts funding does not have the interests of the artist or of art at its centre as its reason. It is rather a symbolic – political and economic and ethological – allowance that such things might emerge as artists and arts which if they do may be managed and organised, judged and branded.

The critical economy appears to be the next major franchise, of the semantic Web, for example, as copyright on material expression ceases to stick, given digital dissolution, and ownership of opinion arises, stratifies and propagates through personalisation of services, through P2P recommendation. +, like, :> … However, arts funding provides pre-eminently for the ecology that supports managers, organisers, and critical apparati, even if the latter often give the impression of parasitism. When societies do not allow the critical threshold of economic freedom to be reached such that a stage of emergence can be insured, then what is at risk is an ecology or network.

The state in removing itself from the art/arts equation by withdrawing funding eliminates a hub from this network. This may not destroy the network but its deleterious effects will ramify throughout it.

The current system of tertiary student loans in New Zealand we know to cost more to run than the previous system of student allowances. In fact, this was known before the system was implemented. Likewise, looking only at economic indexes, cutting state funding for the arts, above an ascertainable threshold of sufficient funding, costs the state more than continuing its support.

How is it possible to ascertain the amount of funding that suffices? Where the existence of significant arts institutions is threatened, where that significance is given the larger meaning of ‘acting as a hub for the (artistic, social, civic, ethological, economic, political, critical, and so on) network,’ is where the threshold lies.

Theatres and cinemas are clearly hubs, but that the former is also an artistic hub, bringing the company responsible for the work together in the same institution as that in which it is shown. Theatre therefore displays even more hub-like characteristics when it has a resident company and is not simply the venue for visitors.

Much of this discussion seems to have recycled notions of economic lean-ness or efficiency, whereby the arts in Europe have grown fat, Brad Brace for one advocating a crash diet and the dynamic individualism of a lean mean art-making machine. [visit him here] Is an excess of funding than what suffices in sustaining significant arts institutions adequate justification to cut state funding?

I would like to live in a society in which such a problem arises. Justification is usually from the macroeconomic, with all the attendant ironies that even minor financial institutions are worthy of state bail-outs. And as they devolve on macroeconomic arguments they have recourse to the unscientific theories of fashionable economic thinking, or ideology.

It is this idea that cutting state funding somehow works or creates benefits that needs to be demolished.

[-The following is the elsewhere of Deep Europe referred to here -]

respectrespectrespectre…

reading with interest the causes and claims, from Nederlands, to Brasil, Slovenia, England, cutting funding for the arts and culture, I would like humbly to submit another explanation, other, that is, than economic expediency, or ignorance and gross (and net) stupidity on the part of policy-makers. The state is scared.

I would suggest that it is the institutional throat that is being cut, having seen a similar culling of institutions in NZ: cutting funding goes together with removing the autonomy of arts and cultural institutions, same as universities – any erstwhile politically autonomous institution, and therefore locus of critique. But when I say critique, I mean at the level of a power, which is that of institutions, of the power.

Where is the undermining of the power actually occurring that governments might be frightened? At a wholly other level. Yet the muting of institutional critique can be seen as a reaction to certain events, the recent financial crisis among them, the ongoing crisis around energy consumption/production – and its economics – included. I suggest this muting to be in reaction and to entail two actions on the part of states and nations: cutting funding to and removing autonomy from educational, arts and cultural institutions.

Best,

Simon Taylor

[- here is Spectre -]

[- what follows followed -]

cultural value is being substituted for economic value, yes … as the state sells out … to its own hunger for justification, authenticity, that “altes Europa” rag … and betrays itself.

Dear Institute,

It is sad that the Arts and Humanities have not survived their own critique, a revisionism with which scholars, teachers and students – following the ‘discipline’ – have been engaged for at least the last fifty years. But it is no surprise. Surprising is how complicity – at the level both of institutions and of individuals – can be advocated for as a way … to do what? protect jobs?

Or is there a value here out of reach of the techno-corpocratic estimation of STEM [wiki] subjects (and subjections), out of reach, that is, of political meddling in institutions?

The loss of autonomy of institutions where Arts and Humanities have had a place appears to be the flaw being exploited to political ends (on economic pretexts). But I would rehearse an argument I have advanced elsewhere: the state will eat its own before admitting its powerlessness before the corporational network; and eating its own begins with denying society, public life exists, except in order to be consumed; it has as its main dish the institutions under the aegis of which erstwhile civic life has been conducted; and ends in a Promethean petrochemical flambé of the financial organs feeding the ‘growth of trade,’ and ‘national economies,’ which organs are assumed to regenerate, like livers, overnight! but which have long since ceased to be organic and will expire in the smoke of the energetic consumption that sustains them. With a faint smell of burning rubber.

Best,

Simon Taylor

[- posted here - in this thread -]

- according to Ji Ruan – who reserves some rights over this photograph, if not the graffito – all over Hong Kong: Who’s afraid of Ai Weiwei / 谁在害怕艾未未

Calin Dan writes [Spectre, 16/04/11]: “why on earth do we need a celebrity to have problems in order to begin looking in the direction of a country that rolls over practically ALL of our standards concerning individual affirmation, freedom of speech and information, protection of the environment, free affirmation of ethnic and religious identity?”

He calls his commitment to political activism personal, saying, “If you don’t speak out, if you don’t clear your mind, who are you?” And his mother’s proud of him.

Ai Wei-wei: You can’t just say that the system is flawed, you have to work through the system and show it in all of its detail and that’s the only way that you can ultimately make a critique.

Ai Wei-wei declared the Communist Party’s demolition of his new Shang-hai studio complex, which he filmed and broadcast live online – the studios had taken him two years to build – to be one of his most powerful artworks ever.

Do ever examine yourself to see why is it that you are so fearless compared to other people?

Ai Wei-wei: I am so fearful. That’s not fearless. I’m more fearful than other people, maybe. Then I act more brave, because I know the danger is really there. If you don’t act, the danger becomes stronger.

The case of Ai Wei-wei is simply not relevant to New Zealanders; the fate of Ai Wei-wei is just not relevant for New Zealanders: