Friday 03rd September 2010 12:15:06 PM

mediaspace_09 > an online curator discussion

 Mediaspace




For the first time Wand 5 e.V. was announcing an open competition to select the media-space 09 curatorteam. There were no limitations on the means of implementation. The purpose of this open competition was to establish a new experimental space - an >open space< in which artists can perform. (>> more)

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Next Phase: Asymptote 3.0

Building Momentum

Damien Hirst: Beautiful Inside My Bank Account Forever...

Damien Hirst X Levis Fall 2008 Spin Denim Auction

Rolexes fly off the shelves as Icelanders seek safe investments

Sign of the Times: National Debt Clock Runs Out of Digits

Burak Arikan - Back to Materiality

Barrick Gold

Algorithmic trading

This Federal Bailout Proposal is a Disaster

Rolexes fly off the shelves as Icelanders seek safe investments

Sign of the Times: National Debt Clock Runs Out of Digits

Show Me The Money: The Map of the Market

Back to Materiality.

smart money / map of market

Global Downturn ‘Is an Earthquake, not a Tremor’

The recently mentioned Spiegel series brings now an interview with former World Bank President James Wolfensohn, who talks about the global financial crisis and his hope that Barack Obama will be the right president to lead the US out of recession.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Wolfensohn, you are known to be an advocate of socially responsible capitalism. How do you view the Wall Street community these days?

Wolfensohn: Well, I think the Wall Street community is preoccupied by survival. We’re having a downturn of unprecedented proportions, and so it’s not surprising that issues of global social responsibility are pushed to the back. That doesn’t mean that it is correct and it doesn’t mean that we are still not better off in this country than in many other countries.
(continue reading)

Cultural Codes

via Brian Holmes blog an excerpt from THE AFFECTIVIST MANIFESTO / aka / Artistic Critique in the 21st Century:

“…. Artistic activism is affectivism, it opens up expanding territories. These territories are occupied by the sharing of a double difference: a split from the private self in which each person was formerly enclosed, and from the social order which imposed that particular type of privacy or privation.

 

When a territory of possibility emerges it changes the social map, like a landslide, a flood or a volcano do in nature. The easiest way for society to protect its existing form is simple denial, pretending the change never happened: and that actually works in the landscape of mentalities. An affective territory disappears if it isn’t elaborated, constructed, modulated, differentiated, prolonged by new breakthroughs and conjunctions. There is no use defending such territories, and even believing in them is only the barest beginning. What they urgently need is to be developed, with forms, rhythms, inventions, discourses, practices, styles, technologies - in short, with cultural codes. An emergent territory is only as good as the codes that sustain it. Every social movement, every shift in the geography of the heart and revolution in the balance of the senses needs its aesthetics, its grammar, its science and its legalisms. Which means that every new territory needs artists, technicians, intellectuals, universities. But the problem is, the expert bodies that already exist are fortresses defending themselves against other fortresses.

 

Activism has to confront real obstacles: war, poverty, class and racial oppression, creeping fascism, venomous neoliberalism. Yet what we face is not only soldiers with guns but above all cognitive capital: the knowledge society, an excruciatingly complex order….”

.. just some numbers …

Barry Ritholtz: “In doing the research for the “Bailout Nation” book, I needed a way to put the dollar amounts into proper historical perspective. If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars.
 
People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let’s give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history.
 
Crunching the inflation adjusted numbers, we find the bailout has cost more than all of these big budget government expenditures – combined:
 
• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3.92 trillion”

via boingboing

The Capital Crime

‘Das Kapitalverbrechen / The Capital Crime‘ is the title of the coming week’s cover story of the german magazine ‘Der Spiegel’. It is an extensive report, which attempts to create a timeline for the understanding of the developing of the current financial crisis.
For the moment I only want to pick out two points, which I thought specifically interesting and/or telling and will either post here english references from the net or my own translation. I won’t add further comments for the moment, but highly appreciate any feedback.

point 1) “Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.” brought up by Warren Buffet, one of the richest guys worlwide, as early as March 2003. >>> BBC reference / alternet reference

point 2) “If you just take and pass on mortgages, thus remove them spatially from the borrower and tie them to bundles together with other mortgages somewhere else, you depersonalize them from the original business. You cut the connections. And you ignore the nature of globalization, where everything is interconnected. But indeed you cannot cut connections any longer, as everything returns, because anything has an effect on everything. You bet on houses in Ohio and thereby might ruin the national economy in Iceland. You should be aware of these facts.”
excerpt taken from a german ‘Der Spiegel’ quote of Dov Seidman

These points reminded me again of Strange Weather ….. “In an increasingly confusing world, Strange Weather offers the opportunity to draw connections between the seemingly mundane details of your everyday life, and shifts in the increasingly unstable global environment.”

Postcapital

This announcement for an upcoming exhibition in the Stuttgart Kunstverein, which will end just a few days before media space 09 will hopefully start, just caught my attention. Thus its focus seems slightly different, it still sounds interesting and related to our thematic choice.

(May be someone of the Stuttgarters can visit and report a bit?? ; ) … )

“Postcapital” revolves around the far-reaching changes having evolved worldwide in social, political, economic, and cultural realms over the last two decades, their watershed moments emblematized in the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the attacks on September 11, 2001.
 
[…..] Emerging here is the question as to what extent capitalist societies have changed in absence of their erstwhile counterparts and which new walls have been erected through the global politics following events of 1989 and 2001.
 
The triumphal course of capitalism and of the Western democracies has by no means proved to guarantee peace, security, and stability, as the conflicts in former Yugoslavia, the war in Iraq, or, even more recently, the slumps in the U.S. financial markets have demonstrated. “Postcapital” is an attempt at reading the complex and divergent realities of the twenty-first century by virtue of their forms of representation: the review of an age whose prelude has been pinpointed by Andújar as localized between 1989 and 2001.
 
The English term “postcapital” references financial capital as well as capital cities. As such, the project explores both the transformations of capitalist societies and the shifting of their urban loci of power.
 
In 1989, the first cornerstones were laid at the Genevan research institute CERN for the World Wide Web, the significance of which for the transition from industrial to knowledge society has been sufficiently noted. “Postcapital” therefore alludes less to the utopias of a vanquished capitalism than to those upheavals affecting all areas of life that are both spawned and exacted by the networked age of information. In view of contemporary information and storage media, knowledge is, according to the artist’s theory, no longer acquired by visiting archives but rather through life in the networked archives. Thus, an essential role is inherent in the interpretation of information….

(read on)

stocks on ‘morning after’

Though I know that Burak has a smart money screenshot on his blog of the more red looking day of the recent period I thought it would be an interesting addition to show one of today’s ‘morning after’. (.. linked now ..).

The Map of the Market. (’Map of the Market’ is the brainchild of Martin Wattenberg>> description)

Just one of today’s headlines:
Wall Street rally buoys Asian markets but Europe slips

global accident?

Just as it fits so much to today’s actuality I like to post some excerpt of Arthur and Marilouise Kroker’s City of Transformation / Paul Virilio in Obama’s America article, which I came across on networked_performance.

It also hints to the fact that politics and financial issues are knowingly that much intertwined .. so will stockmarkets rise with the win of Obama? .. if he wins. Or will subconscious fear stand in the way of a substancial change which would effect the world globally? And which signal will it send out to the world when the country that stands so generally for ‘the western mind’ can overcome such deep preconceptions?

Are we beyond Speed and Politics? What characterizes contemporary politics is the unstable mixture of speed information and slow movements. Like the slow implosion of the manufacturing economy, the slow rise of evangelical visions of catastrophe, the slow ascent — the slow ubiquity — of the speed of technology, the slow descent of culture into the cold state of surveillance under the sign of bio-governance. You can see it everywhere. In the world economy, the speed of mortgage backed securities, credit swap debt offerings, and complex derivatives always seeks to move at the speed of light. Iceland is the world’s first country actually liquidated by hyperreality with debts amassed at light-speeds now constituting 10 times its national wealth. Like Michel Serres’ the perfect parasite, the Wall Street financial elite has worked a perfect number on the host of the world economies — implanting unknown levels of toxic debt everywhere in the circulatory system of finance capital, from China and Japan to the European community. Waking up to the danger of hot debt moving at light-speed when it is definitely too late, Japanese bankers suddenly declaim that “It is beyond panic.” Wall Street types say it is “panic with a capital P.”
[…]
In 1996 Virilio may have originally predicted a “global accident” that would occur simultaneously to the world as a whole. Only twelve years later in the last autumn days of 2008 — exactly 40 years after the tumultuous political events of 1968 — is it possible that Virilio’s “global accident” has itself been accidented? Slowly, inexorably, one resistor at a time, one mobilization, one march, one individual dissent, one collective “no” at a time, with what Antonio Gramsci called the dynamism of the popular will, the global accident flips into a global political transformation. Signs of this at first political, and then technological, recircuiting of the popular will are everywhere. Entire empires have suddenly vanished, global social movements are everywhere on the rise, imperialisms have been checkmated, and the first tangible hints of a truly transformational politics is in the air.
[……] >>> read entire article

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