mediaspace_09
Festival for Expanded Media 22. - 25. January 2009

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What was: Capital (It Fails Us Now)

Gang Of Four / Capital (It Fails Us Now)

The moment I was born I opened my eyes
I reached out for my credit card
I know I never did my own suit
Capital it fails us now come and let us seize the time x2
On the first day of my life I opened my eyes
Guess where with superstars surrounded by luxury-eagers
I need a prison I need a hot fire
No credit no goods
Come on back I say
They say we’re bankrupt
Capital it fails us now come and let us seize the time x2
Capital it fails us now…
Oh no! I left it in my other suit!
One day all will be living on credit
Bankrupt
I’m still in credit—just
One day all men are living on credit…

.. and a 2005 / 2006 show in Tallinn and Oslo, which used that same title:
Capital (It Fails Us Now)

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….”

aesthetics of current affairs in blue

Just came across this announcement of a new exhibition displaying the ‘Aesthetics of Capital’ .. and wondering if putting aesthetics into the blue helps to understand the current developments …

In his Capital + Code exhibition, Richard Kriesche homes in on interconnections, focusing on the structure of phenomena. In the Aesthetics of Capital light installation (2008) especially created for the Kunsthaus Graz, he bathes everything in a technoid computer-blue light. The installation uses eight projectors and visualization software (which also sees use in the money markets) to project market-type fluctuations on the interior wall of the building. The constantly changing images are real-time responses to search questions on Google involving different combinations of the words art, work, capital and freedom. The images are an indication of an elusive global state.

view >>> animation

Ronnie and the Depression

“A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours.” -Ronald Reagan, 1980

.. 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

D.I.Y. - The artist as model of the crisis

My favorite example of our topic the role of artist Damien Hirst in regards of the crisis got a new contribution by a today’s SZ (Süddeutsche Zeitung) article. While the ‘hardcover copy’ of the newspaper titles ‘Mach’s doch selbst’ Daminen Hirst: Der Künstler als Leitbild der Krise the internet version reads as following:

Kunst und Krise / Mal gewinnt man, mal verlieren die anderen
Damien Hirst wusste schon die florierende Wirtschaft zu nutzen - nun meistert er ihr Scheitern. Der Künstler als Leitbild der Krise.
Artist and crisis / At times one wins, at times others loose
Damien Hirst knew how to use the flourishing economy - now he masters its failure. The artist as model of the crisis.
>>> just quickly posting the link (german only / here a private english translation pdf can be found

… more to follow

Media-Space: New Media Art – Past, Present, Futures

Discovering another namesake: The Australian Media-Space Journal just published it first issue based on papers which were presented at the 2007 International Digital Arts and Culture Conference themed ‘The Future of Digital Media Culture’.

The papers in this issue were selected from the perthDAC 2007 conference proceedings, and each contribution presents and critically situates either existing creative works or works-in-progress, or future-casts the possibilities of specific forms of new media art. […]

Each of these papers makes a significant and critical contribution to our understanding of new media art and its possible futures. We hope you find this first issue of Media-Space Journal both stimulating and provocative.

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)

asymptote NYSE

Almost exactly five years ago time.com started a review on the 1999 asymptote NYSE cyber project with these lines:

We live in an era that puts little stock in stability. Solidity and permanence read as rigidity and torpor. The future will be only more unruly, tossed and pulled by disparate forces like a piece of bread among sea gulls. So where does this leave architects, whose work is all about permanence? Buildings are supposed to be hefty, purposeful and unyielding. How can you create structures that embody a quicksilver society when they have to stand still?

ARCHITECTS DESIGN IN CYBERSPACE AND REAL SPACE FOR THE NYSE
ASYMPTOTE PROJECTS
Next Phase: Asymptote 3.0

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