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aureliomadrid: “Fig. 187. The Psycho-Magnetic Curves.” from...

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 10:34:05 +0100

aureliomadrid:

“Fig. 187. The Psycho-Magnetic Curves.”

from charles guarinus & critiko

Gunfire and Rocket Propelled Grenades, f’real.

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 13:51:57 +0100

Gunfire and Rocket Propelled Grenades, f’real.

Things Lebanese People Like

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 13:47:00 +0100

Remembering “how it was,” “the good old days,” “before”… rizkallaaah.

Constructing ever more elaborate ways to distinguish themselves from each other & the rest of the region: Would You Download A “Lebanese Keyboard”? (via @plus961)

Coping. Making light of serious matters. Finding a peculiar pleasure in saying “welcome to Lebanon” when sh*t goes down.

Care to add any of your own?

Facebook never fails (#8940)

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 06:34:19 +0100

Facebook never fails (#8940)

"There is no lack of anti-capitalists today. We are even witnessing an overload of critiques of..."

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 01:55:52 +0100

“There is no lack of anti-capitalists today. We are even witnessing an overload of critiques of capitalism’s horrors: newspaper investigations, TV reports and best-selling books abound on companies polluting our environment, corrupt bankers who continue to get fat bonuses while their firms are saved by public money, sweatshops where children work overtime. There is, however, a catch to all this criticism, ruthless as it may appear: what is as a rule not questioned is the liberal-democratic framework within which these excesses should be fought. The goal, explicit or implied, is to regulate capitalism—through the pressure of the media, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, honest police investigations—but never to question the liberal-democratic institutional mechanisms of the bourgeois state of law. This remains the sacred cow, which even the most radical forms of ‘ethical anti-capitalism’—the Porto Allegre World Social Forum, the Seattle movement—do not dare to touch.”

- Slavoj Zizek, NLR 64 (via theguywhoinventedfire)

"One often hears that the true message of the Eurozone crisis is that not only the Euro, but the..."

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 01:53:02 +0100

“One often hears that the true message of the Eurozone crisis is that not only the Euro, but the project of the united Europe itself is dead. But before endorsing this general statement, one should add a Leninist twist to it: Europe is dead—OK, but which Europe? The answer is: the post-political Europe of accommodation to the world market, the Europe which was repeatedly rejected at referendums, the Brussels technocratic-expert Europe. The Europe that presents itself as standing for cold European reason against Greek passion and corruption, for mathematics against pathetics. But, utopian as it may appear, the space is still open for another Europe: a re-politicized Europe, founded on a shared emancipatory project; the Europe that gave birth to ancient Greek democracy, to the French and October Revolutions. This is why one should avoid the temptation to react to the ongoing financial crisis with a retreat to fully sovereign nation-states, easy prey for free-floating international capital, which can play one state against the other. More than ever, the reply to every crisis should be more internationalist and universalist than the universality of global capital.”

- Slavoj Zizek, NLR 64 (via theguywhoinventedfire)

"L’illusio, c’est le fait d’être pris au jeu, d’être pris par le jeu, de croire que le jeu en vaut la..."

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 17:48:00 +0100

“L’illusio, c’est le fait d’être pris au jeu, d’être pris par le jeu, de croire que le jeu en vaut la chandelle, ou, pour dire les choses simplement, que ça vaut la peine de jouer.”

- Pierre Bourdieu, Raisons pratiques, Seuil, coll. Points, 1996, p. 153.

An attempt at writing a “Compositionist Manifesto”

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 16:22:00 +0100

An attempt at writing a “Compositionist Manifesto”:

“It is in the dramatic atmosphere induced by Cameron’s opera that I want to write a draft of my manifesto. I well know that, just as much as the time of avantgardes or that of the Great Frontier, the time of manifestos has long passed. Actually, it is the time of time that has passed: this strange idea of a vast army moving forward, preceded by the most daring innovators and thinkers, followed by a mass of slower and heavier crowds, while the rearguard of the most archaic, the most primitive, the most reactionary people, trails behind—just like the Navis, trying hopelessly to slow down the inevitable charge forward. During this recently defunct time of time, manifestos were like so many war cries to speed up the movement, ridicule the Philistines, castigate the reactionaries. This huge war-like narrative was predicated on the idea that the flow of time had one—and only one—inevitable and irreversible direction. The war waged by the avant-gardes would be won, no matter how many defeats. What this series of manifestos pointed to was the inevitable march of progress. So much so that they could be used like so many sign posts to decide who was more “progressive” and who was more “reactionary.”

Today, the avant-gardes have all but disappeared, the front line is as impossible to draw as the precise boundaries of terrorist networks, and the well arrayed labels “archaic,” “reactionary,” “progressive” seem to hover haphazardly like a cloud of mosquitoes. If there is one thing that has vanished, it is the idea of a flow of time moving inevitably and irreversibly forward and which could be predicted by clear sighted thinkers. The spirit of the age, if there is such a Zeitgeist, is rather that everything that had been taken for granted in the modernist grand narrative of Progress, is fully reversible and that it is impossible to confide in the clear- ightedness of any one—especially academics. If we needed a proof of that (un)fortunate state of affairs, a look at the recent 2009 Climate Summit in Copenhagen would be enough: at the same time when some, like James Lovelock, argue that it is human civilization itself that is threatened by the “revenge of Gaia” (a good case if any, as we will see later, of a fully reversible flow of time!), the greatest assembly of representatives of the human race manage to sit on their hands for days doing nothing and making no decisions whatsoever. Whom are we supposed to believe: those who say it is a life-threatening event? those who, by doing nothing much, state that it could be handled by business as usual? or those who say that the march of progress should go on, no matter what?

And yet a manifesto might not be so useless at this point, by making explicit (that is, manifest) a subtle but radical transformation in the definition of what it means to progress, that is, to process forward and meet new prospects. Not as a war cry for an avant-garde to go even further and faster ahead, but rather as a warning, a call to attention, so as to stop going further in the same way as before toward the future. The nuance I want to outline is rather that between progress and progressive. It is as if we had to move from an idea of inevitable progress to one of progressive, tentative and precautionary progression. It is still a movement. It is still going forward. But, as I will explain in the third section, the tenor is entirely different. And since it seems impossible to draft a manifesto without a word ending with an –ism (communism, futurism, surrealism, situationism, etc.), I have chosen, to give this manifesto a worthy banner, the word compositionism. Yes, I would like to be able to write “The Compositionist Manifesto” by reverting to an outmoded genre in the grand style of old, beginning by something like: “A specter haunts not only Europe but the world: that of compositionism. All the Powers of the Modernist World have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter!”.”

The Realtime Manifesto

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:58:10 +0100

The Realtime Manifesto:

“The architectural manifesto defined the modern era. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto started the ball rolling, and Adolph Loos’ Ornament and Crime, Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture and De Stijl followed. All of these are recognized as being amongst the most important pieces of architectural writing of the last century. While it is tempting to think that we may be living in a golden age of manifesto writing now that anyone can start a blog, the carefully-considered architectural manifesto itself doesn’t fit the paradigm of network culture. As editor Justin McGuirk correctly observes in Icon magazine’s “Manifesto Issue” (Icon #50) that “in the early 21st century, there are as many potential manifestos as there are people.” A manifesto is something else entirely when instead of defining the rigid foundations of a movement it attempts to start or join a conversation.”

Glitch Studies Manifesto

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 14:55:45 +0100

Glitch Studies Manifesto

by francisco perez (via hello-zombie)

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 20:23:17 +0100

by francisco perez

(via hello-zombie)

Photo

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 17:56:08 +0100

This came up when I tried seeing my own profile.

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 17:37:38 +0100

This came up when I tried seeing my own profile.

o…k

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 17:31:31 +0100

o…k

via @eglinski

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 15:38:06 +0100

via @eglinski

'A Film Unfinished': To Tell the Untellable

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 15:34:00 +0100

'A Film Unfinished': To Tell the Untellable:

“Again and again in A Film Unfinished, faces turn to the camera. Most belong to residents of the Warsaw ghetto, looking back at the Nazis filming them in May 1942. Preserved in a 62-minute project titled “Das Ghetto,” today they’re both haunted and haunting, their cheeks caved in, their skin stretched tight, and their eyes unavoidable. Like so many faces that look back in so many documentaries, these indicate the subjects’ awareness of their status as such. Their expressions are curious, They are also silent, like all of “Das Ghetto,” an unfinished Nazi propaganda film discovered in an East German vault during the 1950s. Yael Hersonski has reassembled much of that footage for her film—some of it observational and some staged by the German film crew—along with readings from diaries and transcripts, as well as shots of ghetto survivors watching that footage. Comprised of more faces, shadowed in a theater, these shots serve as vivid reflections of your own experience, horrified at what they see. What they see exemplifies one of the most chilling aspects of the Third Reich, “an empire infatuated with the camera,” narrates Rona Kenan, “that knew so well to document its own evil, passionately, systematically, like no other nation before it.” This infatuation is visible everywhere in A Film Unfinished, as German soldiers grab residents’ arms or push them along in the street, as starving children sit on curbs and adults hurry along sidewalks. “The intention of the propagandists can never be determined, only surmised,” says Kenan. No matter their motives, “Das Ghetto” has been used as “a trustworthy document for any filmmaker or museum seeking to show what really happened, to tell the untellable. The cinematic deception was forgotten and the black and white images were engraved in memory as historical truth.”

A Film Unfinished picks at this idea of “historical truth” as if it’s a scab. The resulting discomfort is more resonant than that of “disturbing images of Holocaust atrocities including graphic nudity” that led the MPAA to give the documentary an unusual R rating. For Hersonski’s film insists on the constructedness of all films, fiction and documentary, hers as well as the Nazis’. This complicates their truth, makes it a process of recollection and interpretation at all stages, from shooting to assembling to consuming. “Do you see the garbage?” asks one survivor as she looks at a huge mass of waste. “People threw their garbage out the windows,” she explains, “because they were too weak to go down the stairs.” Her story reshapes the image as you watch, for it has just been described in another way, by one of the Nazis’ cameramen, Willy Wist. He says he was told “to film a large pile of feces in the courtyard of one of the buildings. I remember thinking to myself that either because of the winter or because of the overcrowding, the sanitary installations had stopped working.” Even as he speaks, his memory has turned in on itself, for he also recalls that he was shooting in May, not winter.”

Also also…

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 06:51:12 +0100

Also also…

Also, anyone else find that smiley at the bottom of every wp.com...

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 06:49:18 +0100

Also, anyone else find that smiley at the bottom of every wp.com blog unnerving?

Facebook has finally flipped its lid…

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 06:46:00 +0100

Facebook has finally flipped its lid…

"Like everything else, the self-image splits into a collection of snapshots, each having to conjure..."

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 09:09:10 +0100

“Like everything else, the self-image splits into a collection of snapshots, each having to conjure up, carry and express its own meaning, more often than not without reference to other snapshots. Instead of constructing one’s identity, gradually and patiently, as one builds a house, through the slow accretion of floors, rooms and connecting passages, a series of ‘new beginnings’, experimenting with instantly assembled yet easily dismantled shapes, is painted one over the other: a palimpsest identity.”

- Zygmunt Bauman in Debating Cultural Hybridity (Modood & Werbner) pg 53 (via nosebluntslide + fuckyeahtheorists)