Seismopolite Journal of Art and Politics - Reimagining The Political Geography Of Place And Space :: Call for Papers - Deadline: March 5, 2012.

In the coming issue we wish to focus on political geographies, as well as artistic interventions in, and reimaginations of, such geographies. The distinction between “place” and “space” is of particular interest, as it is fundamental not only to much art, but also to our global situation within neoliberal political geography. If time has come for us to reimagine this geography, as well as the interrelationships between, and definitions of “space” and “place”, is it thinkable that art could be an ideal site for such reimagination?

The construction and exploitation of a particularism of the local also seems indigenous to the logic of neoliberalism, in the sense that it relies on the opposition between place and space to be able to expand in the first place. Continue reading

Designing Civic Encounter: Documents and Discussions on Urban Transformation in the Arab World curated and edited by Ursula Biemann and Shuruq Harb. Continue reading

[Sculptor Abdulrahman Katanani is one example of the fact that Arab artists are 'already among us' (Al Jazeera)] On nettime, Prem Chandavarkar wrote:

These are some speculations that have been bouncing around in my head for some time, particularly with reference to architecture — the discipline I practice — but perhaps having wider implications: Ever since the early stages of the modernist movement (since the second half of the 19th century) artistic innovation has been underpinned by the idea of the avant-garde.

The avant-garde are (to use a term from Thomas Kuhn) paradigm shifters. Their work consists of two facets that operate simultaneously. One is a deep critique of current paradigms of cultural production. And the other is production of artistic work that demonstrates a new paradigm and a new set of possibilities. Continue reading

e-flux journal issue 31, with contributions by Keller Easterling, Gean Moreno, Gregory Sholette, Sven Lütticken, Grant Kester.

As we continue to reflect upon the chain of political upheavals of 2011, it may be interesting to consider a particular shift in the status of information technology, now that it has been deployed as such a powerful force in facilitating the rise of a new popular voice.

But first, how did this happen? How did a form of communication — developed in the late 1950s with a well-funded US Defense Department initiative in response to the Sputnik threat, then blossoming in the hands of engineer-entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley of the 1970s into the center of accelerated hyper-capitalism in the 1990s — evolve to become a strange hybrid of a free press, judiciary, and public market? Continue reading

[Figure 1. Scripted Space] The Scripted Spaces of Urban Ubiquitous Computing: The Experience, Poetics, and Politics of Public Scripted Space by Christian Ulrik Andersen & Søren Pold, Fibreculture Journal #19, 2011: Ubiquity:

The computer is moving out into physical and urban reality. Since Mark Weiser’s call for a ‘computer for the 21st century’ in 1991 a migration from the screen and the desktop towards integrating computers and networks into our surroundings has been a part of contemporary computer science research; for example, in augmented reality, ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), and pervasive computing. A number of technological developments (such as big screens, new smart materials, GPS, RFID tags, and ever faster and cheaper wireless networks) have helped carry the research agendas out into ordinary reality. Continue reading

e-flux journal issue no. 30: Americans against capitalism? Arab nations toppling autocrats through peaceful protests? 2011 has been a year of massive popular uprisings — on a completely unexpected scale and from populations that were thought to have been thoroughly subdued. Commentators have predicted that discontent in the Arab world would soon come to a head for so many years that it was beginning to seem unlikely, just as others had begun to dismiss the political potency of popular demonstrations in fiscalized Western democracies. For those who started to think that large-scale, radical optimism was naïve or nostalgic, the events of the past year should be sufficient to prove them wrong. Continue reading

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Resisting the Present. Mexico 2000 / 2012 :: until January 15, 2012 :: Museo Amparo, 2 Sur 708, Centro Histórico, Puebla, Pue, Mexico.

“Every act of resistance is not necessarily a work of art, though in some way it is. Every work of art is not necessarily an act of resistance and therefore somehow it is.” - Gilles Deleuze

Resisting the Present: Mexico 2000 / 2012 offers a look at the young Mexican artistic scene, active since 2000, that has consolidated itself into a new aesthetic and discursive approach. Heirs to the previous generation, which had taken and reinterpreted the entire repertoire of Western art (from American Modernism to Minimalism, through European movements such as Fluxus or Situationism to Conceptualism and South American Neo-constructivism), Continue reading

Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies, Wyspa Institute of Art Alternativa Editions (Ed.), English/Polish, 2007.

In this very moment of widespread and publicly manifested disagreement on how the general framework of the organisation of our lives and economies is being executed, it is crucial to engage critically and practically with changing the reality with which we no longer comply. In the light of this awareness, Wyspa Institute of Art proposes a careful reading of the book that has collected views from different cultural perspectives, forms of organisations and geographies and submits some theoretical and locally tested and implemented alternative proposals. Continue reading

SKOR | Foundation Art and Public Space / NAi Publishers: Open Cahier on Art and the Public Domain, no. 22 — Transparency Publicity and Secrecy in the Age of WikiLeaks.

Taking WikiLeaks as an illustrative example, Open 22 investigates how transparency and secrecy relate to one another, to the public and to publicity in our computerized visual cultures. It examines transparency as an ideology, the ideal of the free flow of information versus the fight over access to information and the intrinsic connection between publicity and secrecy. Does transparency only work in a liberating way? Can it not equally have a concealing or controlling effect? Aren’t certain forms of transparency actually the manifestation of the banality of the contemporary spectacle, which revolves around pure display and the production of affects? What role does the media play in this? Continue reading