#tiziana terranova

[oo111111]

Excerpt from Tiziana Terranova's After the Internet. Digital Networks between Capital and the Common.

[fundgruber]

There is a constitutive tension between the network (a diagram composed of nodes and links), the individual (the concept of the autonomous, rational subject) and the dividual (its datafied digital shadow) in that strange phenomenon called “social production” or “social cooperation,” which both liberal and Marxist theories identify as a key source of the production of value in contemporary societies.

Tiziana Terranova, A Neomonadology of Social (Memory) Production, In: Memory in Motion Archives, Technology, and the Social Herausgegeben von: Ina Blom , Trond Lundemo und Eivind Røssaak, 2016, S. 288

[siciliatv]

Si è concluso al Villaggio Mosè ad Agrigento l’VIII Capitolo Elettivo dell’Ordine Francescano Secolare (OFS) di Sicilia, un evento di profonda rilevanza spirituale e organizzativa che ha visto il rinnovo delle cariche regionali e ha costituito un’occasione per rafforzare la missione e l’identità dell’OFS nella società. L’incontro è stato presieduto dal Ministro Nazionale OFS Italia, Luca Piras, con la presenza della Viceministra Sara Mentzel e di fra Giuseppe Carta ofm, assistente nazionale OFS. Hanno partecipato i ministri provinciali fra Nino Catalfamo dei Frati Minori, fra Pietro Giarracca dei Frati Minori Cappuccini, fra Gaspare La Barbera dei Frati Minori Conventuali e fra Calogero Favata dei Frati Francescani del Terzo Ordine Regolare. Presente anche Suor Giusi Di Dio, madre superiora generale delle Suore Francescane dell’Immacolata di Lourdes.   Il Capitolo ha vissuto intensi momenti di preghiera, guidati, nelle sue varie articolazioni, da S.E. fra Calogero Peri, vescovo di Caltagirone; don Giuseppe Cumbo, vicario generale dell’Arcidiocesi di Agrigento; e fra Giuseppe Carta, i quali hanno accompagnato i partecipanti in un cammino spirituale verso il discernimento e la condivisione.   La giornata di sabato è stata caratterizzata da un dibattito ampio e costruttivo, aperto dalla lettura delle relazioni del Ministro, dell’Economo, degli assistenti spirituali e della referente della Gifra. Carmelo Vitello, Ministro Regionale uscente, ha parlato con passione della vocazione francescana alla lettura dei “segni dei tempi” e della necessità di una presenza che costruisca legami autentici e umani. «La Chiesa e la nostra vocazione ci chiamano a scrutare l’orizzonte», ha dichiarato Vitello, «con occhi aperti alla realtà e alla missione dell’OFS nella società di oggi».   Il pomeriggio ha visto il coinvolgimento attivo dei partecipanti che, in un clima di fraternità, hanno avanzato proposte e condiviso idee per riscoprire “la bellezza della Sicilia” – espressione usata dal Ministro Nazionale Piras. Questo spirito di fraternità ha permesso un confronto profondo e aperto, riconoscendo il valore del lavoro svolto dal Consiglio uscente e delineando prospettive per il futuro.   La domenica mattina è stata dedicata alla fase elettiva. Carmelo Vitello è stato confermato Ministro Regionale dell’OFS Sicilia, mentre Tiziana Frigione della fraternità di Messina è stata eletta nuova viceministra, subentrando a Claudia Pecoraro, ora Consigliera Nazionale e segretaria. Il nuovo Consiglio Regionale comprende: Giovanni Mocciaro (Gangi), Giuseppe Pulvirenti (Carrubba), Rosario Allegra (Palermo), Paolo Capodici (Palermo), Maria Loiacono (Paternò), Giuseppe Di Grande e Giovanna Alicata (Augusta), Vito Terranova (Salemi), Giorgia Scelsa e Pietro Di Garbo (Termini Imerese), Umberto Virgadaula (Vittoria).   A conclusione del Capitolo, S.E. Alessandro Damiano, arcivescovo di Agrigento, ha presieduto la Celebrazione Eucaristica, rivolgendo un appassionato invito ai nuovi eletti: essere una “linfa nuova” all’interno della Chiesa. L’arcivescovo, facendo riferimento al Vangelo del cieco Bartimeo, ha sottolineato la necessità di recuperare la capacità di “vedere” e rispondere ai bisogni del prossimo, ricordando l’importanza di nutrire le relazioni e rafforzare i legami comunitari e con Dio, in sintonia con il recente documento finale della seconda sessione del Sinodo dei Vescovi.   Il Capitolo dell’OFS di Sicilia ad Agrigento ha rappresentato un momento di profondo rinnovamento e comunione, una tappa fondamentale per confermare l’impegno francescano al servizio della Chiesa e della società. I nuovi eletti avranno ora il compito di tradurre in azioni concrete lo spirito di fraternità e le visioni emerse, mantenendo vivo il dialogo tra cielo e terra che caratterizza la vocazione francescana. Read the full article

[spectralarchers]

Oh, oh, oh, Henry Jenkins is AWESOME! Check out "Pop Cosmopolitanism: Mapping Cultural Flows in an Age of Media Convergence" (from 2006) as well, where he explains the difference between CORPORATE convergence and GRASSROOTS convergence:

"Corporate convergence – the concentration of media ownership in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of multinational conglomerates who thus have a vested interest in insuring the flow of media content across different platforms and national borders. Grassroots convergence – the increasingly central roles that digitally empowered consumers play in shaping the production, distribution, and reception of media content."

But also!!! good fandom academia texts!

Judith Butler: "Implicit Censorship and Discursive Agency" (1997)

and!

Abigail de Kosnik, "Fandom as Free Labor" (2012):

"Online fan productions constitue unauthorized marketing for a wide variety of commodities – almost every kind of product has attracted a fandom os some kind." ... "Fans are eager to praise what is right about an object, point out what is wrong, and propose solutions and new directions for the development of that object because they think that fandom is what completes and perfects the object." ... Media fans, Jenkins observes, write fan fiction and fan commentary, and make art and music and videos, as a way to create their version of a text, the text as they would like it to be, the text that serves their needs best. From Jenkins, we learn that fan labor is often the work of customization, the making of mass-produced things into things that serve individuals' particular and peculiar desires and wishes."

(and Tiziana Terranova's "Free Labor" from 2000 which de Kosnik's text is based on:

"[Free Labor is] this excessive activity that makes the internet a thriving and hyperactive medium, [...] a feature of the cultural economy at large and an important, yet unacknowledged, source of value in advanced capitalist societies")

and!

Matt Hills, "Proper Distance' in the Ethical Positioning of Scholar-Fandoms: Between Academics' and Fans' Moral Economies" (2012)

and!

Christian Fuchs, "Social Media and Capitalism" (2013):

"Corporate social media are not a realm of user/prosumer participation, but a realm of Internet prosumer commodification and exploitation. The exploitation of Internet prosumer labour is one of the many tendencies of contemporary capitalism. It is characteristic for a phase of capitalist development, in which the boundaries between play/labour and private/public become blurred."

and!

Melanie Kohnen, "The Power of Geek: Fandom as a Gendered Commodity at Comic-Con" (2014)

and!

Lev Manovich: "The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From MassConsumption to Mass Cultural Production" (2009):

"The explosion of user-created media content on the web (dating from say, 2005) has unleashed a new media universe. (Other terms often used to refer to this phenomenon include social media and user-generated content). ... Manovich also says that Web 2.0 has triggered "a fundamental shift in modern media culture" ... "The developments of the previous decade [...] led to the explosion of user-generated content available in digital form: web sites, blogs, forum discussions, short messages, digital photos, video, music, maps, and so on." ... "Since the companies that create social media platforms make money from having as many users as possible visit them [...], they have a direct interest in having users pour as much of their lives into these platforms as possible." ... "[Conversations between users and fans] play increasingly important roles in shaping professionally produced media. Game producers, musicians, and film companies try to react to what fans say about their products, implement fans' wishes and even shape story lines in response to conversation among cultural consumers.

and!

Suzanne Scott "Who's Steering the Mothersip? The Role of the Fanboy Auteur in Transmedia Storytelling" (2013):

"Defined by Henry Jenkins (2007) as "a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience," transmedia storytelling has been celebrated by media scholars as a narrative model that promotes collaborative authorship and participatory spectatorship. […] Transmedia stories are defined by their ability to expand: they expand and enrich a fictional universe, they expand across media platforms, and they empower an expansive fan base by promoting collective intelligence as a consumption strategy"

anyways fandom academia is <3333 y'all

💥🙌👏

[maddalenafragnito]

ART FOR RADICAL ECOLOGIES MANIFESTO | book launch & panel

At GATHERING INTO THE MAELSTROM | Sale Docks 19 april 2024

Panel with contributors: Françoise Vergès, Manuel Borja Villel, Ashley Dawson, Oliver Ressler, Raluca Voinea, Ovidiu Tichindeleanu, Francesco Martone, Andreco, Maddalena Fragnito, Federica Timeto,, Emanuele Braga, Marco Baravalle.

The book Art for Radical Ecologies (manifesto) (forthcoming bruno, Venice 2024)  is the second volume of the IRI Series whose aim is to produce knowledge in common and around commoning situated at the intersection between art, pedagogy and activism for a transition towards post capitalism.

The Art For Radical Ecologies Manifesto was co-written in a series of assemblies between 2021-2022. Art is a powerful tool for imagining different types of ecological relationships beyond the anthropocentric paradigm. At the same time though, our manifesto states the importance of positioning ourselves as art workers within the struggle for climate justice, starting by refusing the use of art as greenwashing and the sponsorship of oil and fossil fuels companies. Our manifesto tries to look beyond the current neoliberal regime of the arts, with its ties to class, gender, race and species forms of oppression. The book features the voice of artists, museum directors, scholars and activists who address the link between art and ecology from different perspectives: class, decoloniality, transfeminism and antispecism.

Contributors: Léna Balaud , Marco Baravalle, Mike Bonanno The Yes Men, Manolo Borja-Villel, Emanuele Braga, Andrea Conte Andreco, Ashley Dawson, Isa Fremeaux & Jay Jordan: The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, Oliver Ressler, Francoise Vergès in conversation with Maddalena Fragnito and Marco Baravalle, Tiziana Terranova, Federica Timeto, Ovidiu Țichindeleanu & Raluca Voinea, Rosa Jijon & Francesco Martone in converstaion with Boloh Miranda, Anamaria Garzón, Sofía Acosta Varea.

Edited by: Marco Baravalle, Emanuele Braga, Gabriella Riccio, Federica Timeto (Institute of Radical Imagination)

with the support of FfAI Foundation for Arts Initiatives & L’internationale online

The book is published by bruno

To purchase the publication please contact bruno, Venice

[hikikomoridrumlab]

"I would suggest that these speculative technologies might function as a critique of binary or digital systems, which function by dividing the world into quantifiable pieces. Zeno’s paradox of motion is therefore also the paradox of computation, that things exist beyond our delimitation of the world into phenomenologically knowable objects, and that while mathematics and by extension computation function despite these contradictions there nonetheless exists a Beyond that is illegible, or that we fail to recognize. In seeking alternatives to ways of knowing that are mediated by computing technology, it is my hope that we might identify an alternate logic of illegibility that might be opened up to produce a critique of new media objects. In choosing this, perhaps the earliest moment at which such an inquiry is made possible, it seems meaningful that such questions are being posed by two queer men who met only briefly and, perhaps appropriately, were unable to come to an agreement, or even understand the questions the other sought to answer. While it is no doubt true that queerness is not the only means by which we might ask these questions of technology, or through which we might seek an alternative to the universalizing structures of new media technologies, it is my suggestion that queerness is the ideal lens through which to examine a negativity that exists outside of or beyond – one that begins with two queer men in the earliest moments in the history of computation."

[personal-reporter]

Ju Buk Festlval 2023 a Scanno

Gli effetti socio-economici del periodo 2020 - 22, la guerra, la rivoluzione delle donne in Iran, la rotta migratoria balcanica e quella mediterranea sono il cuore della terza edizione del Festival letterario tutto al femminile Ju Buk, che nel gergo locale sta a indicare la bisaccia del pastore transumante,  diretto dalla sociologa e giornalista Eleonora de Nardis Giansante, che si terrà dal 28 al 30 luglio a Scanno, antico borgo nel Parco nazionale d’Abruzzo, molto amato dai fotografi Cartier Bresson e Giacomelli, sotto gli alti patrocinii del MiC e della Regione Abruzzo. Il festival è dedicato alle donne che trasmettono i fili della Memoria e in grado di capovolgere stereotipi e scrivere nuove grammatiche di rapporti tra generi. Aprirà la giornata dedicata alla narrativa l'esordiente abruzzese Kristine Maria Rapino con Fichi di marzo (Sperling&Kupfer) che racconta  le vicende di una famiglia di pastai della Majella, seguita dalla scrittrice siciliana che vive tra Roma e Parigi Anna Giurickovic Dato con Il grande me (Fazi). La seconda giornata, per le saggistica, vedrà sul palco la giornalista Tiziana Ciavardini con il suo lavoro Ti racconto l’Iran. I miei anni in terra di Persia (Armando) e l’economista femminista Azzurra Rinaldi, direttrice della School of Gender Economics di Unitelma Sapienza, con Le signore non parlano di soldi (Fabbri) poi interverranno donne da molti paesi che raccontano di terre diverse. La terza giornata avrà come protagoniste la giallista Piera Carlomagno con Il taglio freddo della luna (Solferino) e l’afropartenopea Djarah Khan con  l’acclamato Ladri di denti (People). Nel segno della staffetta generazionale tornerà  il premio Ju Buk Opera Prima, affidato alla direzione artistica di Valeria Gargiullo, enfant prodige di Salani e vincitrice dell'ultimo Premio John Fante. Madrina dell’evento sarà l’attrice Valentina Melis, attivista per i diritti civili e le pari opportunità e testimonial dell’associazione Differenza Donna, mentre durante le presentazioni sarà possibile ammirare le opere dell’artista abruzzese Giusi Michini, sculture contemporanee create in esclusiva, traendo ispirazione dai temi portanti di Ju Buk. Nelle scorse edizioni il festival aveva ospitato grandi firme della letteratura italiana, da Nadia Terranova a Valeria Parrella a Donatella Di Pietrantonio ed ora torna con i suoi tre giorni di libri e cultura di genere, per lasciare anche stavolta un segno rilevante nel panorama dei festival letterari estivi. Read the full article

[domascaini]

Blog 11 - COM 311

Before the world became a technological domination

This reading is about the introduction to Tiziana Terranova's "After the Internet" (MIT Press 2023) demonstrates an excellent way to gain a more contemporary perspective on the Internet's overall evolution, on how the Internet changed century by century.

The article examines the 2010s as the decade that significantly changed the development of the Internet and enabled it to become a tool for many aspects of daily life, including communication and connection. Social media websites like Facebook, Instagram, and Amazon got their start during this time. Terranova also discusses the privatization of the Internet, specifically how it currently functions as a collection of privately-owned platforms, most of which are managed by big tech companies. Throughout the essay, the term "Corporate Platform Complex" (CPC) is mentioned, especially during the pandemic years of 2020 and Covid-19. There was a massive increase in online business, and the rise of the CPC became a big deal because, since the lockdown began, people were not allowed to leave their houses. So, companies got creative and managed their business differently. Many clothing brands opened online platforms to make shopping easy and still run their business. Food deliveries were also created to make it easy to deliver groceries to people by those who owned the business

The 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic and Platforms

At the beginning of the pandemic, the education system went into a crisis on how to continue education. Therefore, all schools had to adopt a new online system to make it possible for students to learn from home. Consequently, many companies that form the Corporate Platform Complex (CPC) created various platforms that were accessible to everyone.

The lockdown helped big tech companies economically because it increased their product sales very rapidly, especially computers, which were necessary for online education to take place.

Regarding from pandemic boom of CPC, it is not already in development way before the pandemic too. The lockdown was the last push that, made the CPC needed to fully dominate the world.

Reflection:

In these four months of this course, I have learned a lot about the world of technology and communication in general. The materials we have read and seen have helped me deepen my understanding of the topics. I gained a more in-depth understanding of the emergence of the Internet and its purpose. Before this course, I was not aware of the development of Web 1.0 and 2.0. I have also learned that the internet is a dangerous place, regardless of age, because our data can be stored and used without our knowledge or consent. I realized that this generation cannot imagine living without technology because it has become an integral part of our lives.

[lavidaessiendo]

el algoritmo capitalista

Contrariamente a algunas variantes del marxismo que tienden a identificar completamente a la tecnología con el “trabajo muerto”, el “capital fijo” o la “racionalidad instrumental” y, por tanto, con el control y los dispositivos de captura, parece importante recordar que, para Marx, la evolución de la maquinaria indica también un nivel de desarrollo de los poderes productivos que son liberados pero nunca completamente contenidos por la economía capitalista. Lo que interesaba a Marx (y lo que hace a su trabajo relevante todavía para aquellos que luchan por un modo de existencia postcapitalista) es la manera en que la tendencia del capital a invertir en tecnología para automatizar y, por tanto, para reducir los costos del trabajo al mínimo, potencialmente libera un “excedente” de tiempo y energía (trabajo) o un exceso de capacidad productiva en relación con el trabajo fundamental, importante y necesario de reproducción (una economía global, por ejemplo, debería primero que nada producir suficiente riqueza para que todos los miembros de la población planetaria fuesen adecuadamente alimentados, vestidos, curados y alojados). 

Sin embargo, lo que caracteriza a la economía capitalista es que este excedente de tiempo y energía no es simplemente liberado, sino que es reabsorbido constantemente en el ciclo de producción de valor de cambio, lo que conduce a la creciente acumulación de riqueza por parte de unos pocos (el capitalista colectivo) a expensas de muchos (las multitudes). La automatización, desde el punto de vista del capital, debe siempre, por lo tanto, ser compensada con nuevos modos de controlar (o sea, de absorber y agotar) el tiempo y la energía así liberados. Debe producir pobreza y estrés donde debería existir riqueza y ocio. Debe hacer del trabajo directo la medida del valor aun cuando es evidente que la ciencia, la tecnología y la cooperación social constituyen la fuente de la riqueza producida. Esto conduce así inevitablemente a la destrucción periódica y generalizada de la riqueza acumulada, en las formas de agotamiento psíquico, catástrofe ambiental y destrucción física de la riqueza por medio de la guerra. Crea hambre donde debería haber saciedad, coloca bancos de alimentos a la vera de la opulencia de los súper ricos. Es por esto que la noción de un modo de existencia postcapitalista debe hacerse creíble, es decir, debe llegar a ser lo que Maurizio Lazzarato describe como un resistente foco de subjetivación autónomo. Un nuevo orden postcapitalista basado en el común (un commonismo) puede apuntar no solo a una mejor distribución de la riqueza comparada con aquella insostenible que hoy existe, sino también a la recuperación del “tiempo disponible”, esto es, tiempo y energía libres de trabajo para ser utilizados en desarrollar y profundizar la noción misma de lo que es “necesario”.

Tiziana Terranova, El Algoritmo Capitalista en Revista Anfibia.

[stacktivism]

Into the Red Stack

Gabriele de Seta on China’s digital entrepreneurs, infrastructures and platforms.

A vast majority of current discussions about digital platforms and their infrastructural ambitions focuses on the “Big Four” that are often earmarked under the acronym GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon). In his Platform Capitalism, Nick Srnicek describes how these companies share the common trait of having transformed a single product (a search engine, a smartphone, a social networking service, an e-commerce website) into a platform offering free services and capable of generating revenue through the exploitation of network effects and the extraction of user data. In the Chinese context, the GAFA companies are commonly mirrored by the BAT (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent) trio of local platform companies that currently dominates the national Internet market. Similarly developed into platforms from pre-existing web search, e-commerce or entertainment services, the BAT companies have consolidated their dominance through acquisitions and investments in domains ranging from big data and AI to logistics and finance.

Benjamin H. Bratton has extensively theorized “the Stack” as a model useful to navigate the vertical overlaying of infrastructures and platforms with the geopolitics of informational and national sovereignty. For Bratton, the Stack is the result of various sorts of planetary-scale computation, coming together to form an “accidental megastructure” that is also a new architecture of sovereignty. While Bratton rubrics the future configurations of this accidental megastructure under the looming image of a “Black Stack,” Tiziana Terranova proposes to reimagine a new nomos of the post-capitalist commons as a “Red Stack,” composed by the three transversal and nonlinear levels of virtual money, social networks, and bio-hypermedia.

The Stack model, along with its speculative mutations that attempt to prototype planetary-scale computation through color gradations (the opaque black of cybernetic black boxes, the sanguine red of post-autonomist politics), offers glimpses of sociotechnical assemblages to come and design futures that might never be. And yet, by grounding their claims in a largely Euro-American experience of infrastructural imperialism and platform capitalism, these formulations overlook a geopolitical site where a different sort of Stack is already consolidating its interlocking layers: China.

(via Into the Red Stack | Hong Kong Review of Books)

Extremely interesting stuff // JAY 

[fundgruber]

Network culture after the knowledge graph

How did we arrive at the present moment, where every museum or art history institute somewhere on its website has a screenshot of a data visualization of a network graph? The network graph visualization seems to be the emblem of a new style of theory. An aesthetic for an aesthetic theory. For some a graph is representation of universal knowledge, as if the end of the universal museum coincides with the birth of a universal semantic archive online - in its worst sense of the word universal though, born and cared for in the Western industrial/imperial powers. For some it is the opposite, a space where we can encode arguments, as in the project by the universalist British Museum to build a conflictual graph with the 'Research Space', or where we can include decolonial epistemologies as in the 'Amazonas Future Lab' of the universalist Berlin Ethnographic Museum which only produced a prototype which is offline now, or 'Digital Benin' which remixed colonial collections into one graph and added local ethnography. This second perspective on graphs is clearly influenced by the decolonial movements around museum collections. But there are more dynamics at play than the conflict between an universalist graph or an inclusive graph.

One the hand, the networked museology is outcome of a long history to use computational analysis in art history and ethnography. On the other hand, its current popularity is unimaginable without analyzing the new economy of the last two decades. Google is the key example of how profit generation in the knowledge economy has evolved. Any attempts to understand the popularity of network visualizations without shedding light on the network economy of knowledge profitabilty are short-sighted. In order to understand network culture in the digital humanities and digital heritage, we need to take a broader look at its central driving force, which is to make profit from knowledge. Network culture, in the lense of the autonomist marxist Tiziana Terranova, is something contested. It is on the one hand collaboration and creativity using communication networks and on the other hand a way to turn quality into quantity, to make profit in the "social factory", through using this free labour of creative collaboration. The fact that bothers and moves Terranovas theory then, is how computing is not just a means of making calculations and processing data, but is modelled itself as an ecology, becomes organisms and social culture. This means, that the vast media networks, the mass of images on screens, a directly connected to our remaining ecology of where and how we live, move, work, rest. This connection is not so much an interface, the screen not so much a barrier between these ecologies, but the flows traverse this all embracing ecology of network culture.

All of this was written at a breaking point between the open source and network enthusiasm of the 1990s, the crash of the connected new economies connected to it, and the birth of Big Tech in the field of network culture, most prominently Google. The focus of Terranova helps us to theorize Google beyong Zuboff's lense of cybernetic business practices of surveillance and prediction. With Terranova we see how it is less and more at the same time. Zuboff buys into Big Tech's claim of offering a tighter grip on consumers: tracking and targeting (compare the criticism of Doctorow of falling for such claims), while Terranova focusses on the class relation in new forms of labour, and new forms of making profit.

With the current business bubble around artificial intelligence, the question of how to turn the creative mess of online communication into something profitable has taken center stage. We just witnessed the Wild-West phase of this bubble, with Big Tech scraping the net for content to process for their AI models. Also we see a consolidation phase, a performative step of more orderly business, not stealing anymore (everything is scraped now anyways...), towards tailored commercial offers (such as personal assistants and on-device AI).

The interchangeable themes of business hypes of the last decades were Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality, Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence. With network culture we can see beyond the superficial quality of these hypes and towards the knowledge economies they are connected to. A blockchain is a cryptographically controlled way of data provenance, its selling point was decentralisation. VR/AR are means to present knowledge beyond the usual screen/media/document logic, a challenge connected to the web since its introduction in the 1990s. Artificial intelligence is a way to turn free labour on the web into training material for generative algorithms, by claiming that it is not a breach of copyright or privacy if you can't directly see the initial material in the outputs. These three amount to an aesthetic (AR/VR), infrastructure (blockchain) and automatization (AI) for the knowledge economy. At its core is ways to gather, store and present the traces of communication, of creation, of labour.

It is worth noting then, how these new ways of generating space, infrastructure and profit are related with current ways of archives, collections and research. And what space is left for theory. Theory understood as building the terms and concepts, that allow for a grasp of developments, forces and agents - for an involved view of history. The view is different if you focus on explaining everything through advertising and consumtion (Zuboff), or through labour (Terranova). Scientists/researchers as the producers of theories, should account more for their involved view on history, if you stare long enough at your research device, a screen connected to the networks, it might stare back at you.

[globalhappenings]

The City of Women Award to Elisabetta Sgarbi and Boldrini

The City of Women Award to Elisabetta Sgarbi and Boldrini

(ANSA) – ROME, DEC 13 – The publisher Elisabetta Sgarbi, the writer Nadia Terranova, the poetess Luigia Sorrentino, the journalist Tiziana Ferrario, the writer and radio presenter Loredana Lipperini and the former president of the Chamber Laura Boldrini: are the winners of the first edition of the “Le Città delle Donne” Award. The award ceremony will take place on Thursday 16 December at 6.00 pm…

[fatehbaz]

In 1858, a British official in colonial Bengal named William Herschel asked Rajyadhar Konai, a local contractor, to imprint his inked hand on a contract that had already been signed. After years of experimenting with handprints, Herschel sent copies of Konai’s fingerprints to London for Francis Galton, a eugenicist and cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton went on to argue that fingerprints were an accurate marker of identity and racial difference. [...]

Herschel’s early biometric colonial experiments intimated colonial pathologies, as he and his counterparts strained to make colonial subjects into signs of representation legible to European rulers. [...] Herschel’s early system [...] was conditioned by “a colonial administration dependent on writing and signatures in a largely illiterate [of English language] colonial society; administrators’ fear of massive fraud by means of false signatures; British administrators unable to discern unique facial and other identifying qualities among the masses of their Indian subjects (“they all look the same”); and last but far from least, the decisive ingredient in the discovery of fingerprinting, the use of the hand and thumb as a type of modernizing sorcery by the colonial bureaucracy.”

Despite the fingerprint’s mimetic quality as a seeming signature of the body, the main challenge was elsewhere. Galton struggled unsuccessfully for years to come up with a mathematical method of classifying fingerprints. In fact, it was once again in colonial Bengal that Edward Henry, along with Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose, developed a mathematical method for the classification of fingerprints, which was exported to South Africa and later to metropolitan Europe. [...]

---

Allan Sekula once wrote that the central innovation of nineteenth-century police photography was not the camera but the filing cabinet. 

The fingerprint cabinet Henry pioneered in Bengal closely paralleled the Bertillon system in Europe. Under colonialism, the “bureaucratic-statistical” police regime efficiently reduced the body to a number for retrieval. 

Fingerprinting emerged during a time of multiple colonial technologies aimed at developing knowledges of the colonized. The colonial laboratory was the site of statistical techniques, periodic census surveys, and the introduction of photography into carceral regimes. [...] Anthropometry faded away in later years, but the fingerprint-linked biometric regime has remained, becoming even more widespread in the contemporary era. [...] 

What Breckenridge calls “biometric government” implemented technologies that shaped the colonial social: notably the efforts to bind subject populations to the sanctity of the contract, and the surveillance of criminalized social groups and individuals. [...] These [...] biopolitics and disciplinary regimes in the West become blurred in a global regime of colonial difference [...]. Slaves and bonded workers were transported from colonial possessions to plantation economies; enumerative technologies and frameworks of biometric government moved with these circulatory patterns, as did [...] racial and ethnological schemes. [...] The [... re-invigoration] of colonial biometrics [... in] the global security regime after [... 2001] frames the vast expansions of biopolitical technologies in the twenty-first century.

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All text above by: Ravi Sundaram. A section by Sundaram from the essay “Colonial Infrastructures and Techno-social Networks” co-authored by Tiziana Terranova and Ravi Sundaram. e-flux Journal Issue #123. December 2021. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

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introduction

Political art often depresses societies that are usually already familiar to their "situation" and although it has the important task of deconstructing topics that are sometimes idly talked about, many times it works as a contribution towards the normalization of a problem. Despite its shortcomings, political art has functioned as a new tool to establish precedent imperatives to find information that is often difficult to digest. Although it may sound cynical that a privileged white man (as many of us are) criticizes political art, since having happily walked alongside the rest of the 1% for many years involves a set of strange consequences. Such lively hood may appear to be a kind of comfort, in a way, having lived in a part of society that turns out to be stupid and Philistine to then reject it indicates that there is an understanding of it. Said understanding is a fundamental part of a tacit and constant change that turns privileged peoples into paradoxical artists (or professionals of any field) who in empirical matters are nourished by different philosophical and artistic foundations, in order to create works that in addition to elevating themselves with the latter; represent a change in life that works as the perfect example of a possible and fruitful metamorphosis.

Art that only works to swell the pockets of gallery owners and collectors is very easy to find in biennials, museums, galleries and fairs, but there must also be art that comes from the neo-conceptual and grows in a Hegelian way. In other words, that it improves with the recognition of the past error and thus overcomes. Political art is a vehicle that has been observing the injustices of the contemporary world in very valuable ways and that has also promoted artistic innovation for many years (especially in Latin America, artists such as Doris Salcedo, Ana Mendieta, Gabriel Orozco, Wilfredo Prieto, Tania Bruguera , Teresa Margolles, Pedro Reyes, Rubén Ortiz Torres, Yoshua Okón and Minerva Cuevas (among others)), but now there are new generations of artists who rarely focus on models other than those that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. Post-Modernism has already ended due to the fact that today there are techniques and technologies that did not exist two years ago (not to mention twenty years ago), and that therefore can be used for the creation of works never before possible. Take for example the oeuvre of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, his work is indisputably unprecedented and not only because he talks about relevant subjects using the proper means, but because he employs unusual techniques and technological advances in order to create.

So what is the solution, if any exists?

The answer may lie within art, hidden in one of the most elitist galleries in the world, but the solution does not. The reality is that we can paint with blood, sweat or urine, but the victims of drug trafficking are not going to dissipate, nor is corruption or nepotism (an interesting term to analyze in the art world) going to stop nor any of the negative consequences of necrocapitalism¹ unless a structural change is brought about in the irresponsible sociological and political maneuvers within third world governments. Us artists must not be so pretentious as to affirm the consequences of our works, not only because ambiguity exists and discourses are subject to different interpretations. Rather, we should encourage viewers to think, question, and use their intellect in order to forge a strong and educated way of thinking. If artistic work is seen as a way to impose certain totalitarian constructs, then art becomes a style of << snobbish fascism >> that instead of proposing, delimits what is politically correct and incorrect in an absurd and arbitrary manner. When this happens, it is not possible to speak about certain issues that are actually being taken for granted and that are difficult to understand empirically, causing confusion within the communication between the different socioeconomic sectors, ending up in making the social contrasts even worse.

This thought seeks to influence a society in a way that understands its past generations and tries to confront the paradigms of any spectator by alluding (sometimes in very ambiguous ways) to the possible improvement within the structural flaws of neoliberalism or, where appropriate, of the structure in force within its context. The first step to be able and understand or conceive the approach of any work that can be related to the thought that continues to be raised here is current philosophical and political knowledge; but of a responsible and as objective reading as possible. Objective in the sense that a firm leftist or rightist posture is rejected and that thus includes a well-founded compression of both sides. It is also imperative to understand (always through reading) that the current political and philosophical waves of thought are as stable as a kayak in the open sea and that they are constantly changing. For this reason, this writing can be better seen as a conscious thought of the uninterrupted change that the information today implies and that the artistic work; using concepts, shapes, and results, don't just employ a default or recognizable style in any of the terms listed below:

Esthetic Concept Shape Technique Registry

This writing serves as a foundation for an intellectual art, which will probably be seen more by the privileged than by the proletariat, but which regardless of that encourages viewers to stop promoting ignorance and neo-liberal or leftist cynicism. This writing is part of the thinking of the artists who seek the acceleration of thought from our work and invites any other (artist or not) to stop looking for answers on the internet and to start formulating ideas in an educated and well-founded way; always understanding that reason is subjective. If the work of art makes viewers think and in doing so inculcates new ideas as well as new paradigms, perhaps tomorrow some dysfunctional system can be improved.

This thought comes from the works and ideas of the following artists, thinkers and philosophers: Irmgard Emmelhainz,, Carmen Winant, Melanie Bühler, Bernadette Wegenstein, Yoshua Okón, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Teresa Margolles, Gabriel Orozco, Wilfredo Prieto , Tania Bruguera, Pedro Reyes, Rubén Ortiz Torres, Armen Avenessian, Nick Land, Franco "Bifo" Beradi, Tiziana Terranova, Laboria Cuboniks, Benedict Singleton, Hito Steyerl and Mark Fisher.

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ART FOR RADICAL ECOLOGIES MANIFESTO

World Congress for Climate Justice, Milan 12-15 October 2023

Institute of Radical Imagination participates in the framework of the World Congress for Climate Justice, Milan 12-15 October 2023. Conceived as a First International aimed at opening up a space of discussion between explicitly anti-capitalist climate movements, activists and intellectuals from all over the planet, with the ambition of defining a common agenda and ideological perspective in the shared transnational space of the ecosocial struggles of the present.

With 200+ delegates and 60+ movement.

📍State University of Milan, via Festa del Perdono 7, Cloister Legnaia (Aula EcoLab) 🗓 12 October 2023 🕦 H 14:30 – 16:00

ART FOR RADICAL ECOLOGIES PLATFORM

ASSEMBLY #3

impulsed by Institute of Radical Imagination aims at co-writing the 

ART FOR RADICAL ECOLOGIES MANIFESTO

Participants a.o.

Institute of Radical Imagination (Marco Baravalle, Emanuele Braga, Sara Buraya, Maddalena Fragnito, Gabriella Riccio, Federica Timeto), The Yes Men (Mike Bonanno) and Barbie Liberation Organization, Andreco Climate Art Project, Ashley Dawson, Terike Haapoja, Andrea Natella, Noura Tafeche, Serpica Naro, Dirty Art Department (Jerszy Seymour, Theo Dietz e Rosa Meulenbeld), Effimera (Giorgio Griziotti), Tiziana Terranova, and the contribution in remote by Arts for the Commons A4C (Rosa Jijón and Francesco Martone) and Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Isabelle Fremeaux & Jay Jordan)

The Milano World Congress for Climate Justice is the opportunity to bring together art and performing arts workers to continue a discussion that will lead to the collective writing of a manifesto on the role of art in the struggle for climate justice and in the creation of new ecologies (which take into account the intersection of environmental and social facts). If the pandemic had already dramatically underlined the consequences of extractivist anthropization, the war in Ukraine (in addition to its immediate death toll) is a manifestation of what Andreas Malm has called ‘fossil fascism’, a mix of authoritarianism and fossil fuels that weakens the already insufficient measures to combat global warming. The scarcity of Russian gas has brought coal back into vogue and, in Italy, the construction of new re-gasifiers is on the agenda. The decision to organize the workshop at the World Congress for Climate Justice 2023 reflects our belief in the importance of freeing art from the capture of institutional circuits. We want to experience, as participants in social movements, aesthetic-political concatenations that interpret creativity as a radical character of the social and not as a commodity. The participants also share the conviction that the fight for climate justice is, necessarily, a fight against and beyond extractive capitalism, even in its green version (actually an attempt to turn the crisis into new accumulation). The workshop will involve discussion and co-creation starting from the practices of the invited guests around certain central themes: the use of art as a method of inquiry and visualization in the climate crisis; the production of activist art forms that look at the performativity of direct action; art as a ground for radical imagination in designing new ecologies that reshape the relationship between human and non-human; art as an archive of movement practices, and so on.