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Netz.Oekologien

Symposium 2.-3. Juli 2010
Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar, Handwerkergasse Völklingen

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Policy

Let's get together, get some land
Raise our food, like the man
Save our money like the mob
Put up the factory on the job

James Brown, “Funky President”

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Law comprises a particularly important part of the social construction of territory and region. This function of the law is often obscured by an enduring emphasis on the study of legal systems that appear more or less coterminous with political jurisdictions. But legal practices crossed boundaries and helped to constitute legal cultures of unruly dimensions. In empire, law traveled with legal officials and also with merchants, sailors, soldiers, sojourners, and settlers.

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This is a five week series of films that were selected due to a research on how cinematic space is constructed and with
which means the filmic space relates and correlates with the construction of social space. This selection of films wants to
draw attention to architecture‘s performative aspect and the space that is constructed in visual media. „The space that
appears in the image (…) is concrete and not abstract or purely mathematical space. And it is (…) to a certain degree,

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This friday at the roundtable I will present a 15-20 min presentation on my recent project. This new body of research develops out of a two year practice based project titled the Museum of Non Participation launched in London in 2009. My research question asks 'What might a collection be for The Museum of Non participation'. I will also be screening my new film The Exception and the Rule, 37min 2009, alongside extracts of Godard's Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) 1967.

by Henriette Gunkel and Christiane König for darkmatter

When District 9 (D9) by Neill Blomkamp was released in August 2009, the film was an immediate box office hit in several countries. This was much to the surprise of critics, reviewers and bloggers, who seemed astonished by the fact that a science fiction film with this impact could originate from South Africa. Internet forum discussions and an E-Symposium emerged as a response to the film, which continues to be the subject of controversial discussion. [1] While many celebrate the film in relation to the ‘generic’ genre of Science Fiction as a promising representative of a thriving African Cinema, others reject the film on the basis of its socio-political message, as yet another racist movie about Africa – with reference to the depiction of both ‘the Nigerians’ and the aliens. [2] In this article, we would like to move beyond a crudely metaphorical reading of representation (‘the aliens stand for X in reality’), and explore the degree to which the film foregrounds its own mediality. This focus moves us beyond a polarizing position that immediately rejects the film as racist, and allows us to engage with a complex and original text unlike so many other films that take ‘Africa’ as their subject.

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Dear All,
This Friday the roundtable will be hosting a conversation on Terrorism and Urban Space to be published in Detritos (www.revistadetritos.com)

The topic of terrorism is extremely vast, so perhaps we could focus on 3 main directions:
1) A definition of terrorism: who has the right to define what is inside or outside the scope of terrorism, and the politics behind it, etc.
2) Terrorism and the politics of exception: allowing us to connect to contemporary policy-making, population control and internal security (war on terror; war on narcotrafic; war on illegal immigration; etc).

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Nine days after the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, it's now clear that the initial phase of the U.S.-led relief operation has conformed to the three fundamental tendencies that have shaped the more general course of the island's recent history. It has adopted military priorities and strategies. It has sidelined Haiti's own leaders and government, and ignored the needs of the majority of its people. And it has proceeded in ways that reinforce the already harrowing gap between rich and poor.

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Lecture by Clare Davies “The connoisseurs of fine living often look back fondly on old downtown Cairo in the 1920s. Everything about life was so French. The pace, the architecture, the settings. Life was unhurried, untouched by pollution and congestion and marked by quaint buildings, café boulevards and premium arcades." So begins an advertisement for the Rivoli compound at Centre Ville, New Cairo, a real estate project of development giant, DAMAC, designed to capitalise on nostalgia for the old city's downtown, an area which now represents to many some of the prime reasons for urban flight: pollution, high population density, and dilapidation. While areas of medieval Cairo are being restored or reconstructed to recapture something of their supposed original appearance, new versions of the city's early "modern" quarters are being rebuilt at its outskirts. As the expansion of the Greater Cairo Region continues apace, the old city offers parallel models for imagining a future Cairo. The newness of New Cairo and the oldness of the old city are shown to be relative, the products of intersecting projects. Clare Davies is a Ph.D. candidate in art history and Erwin Panofsky Fellow at the Institute of Fine Arts. She divides her time between Cairo and New York.

Dear All,
Last seminar we had some productive discussions about potential ways of writing things and assemblies into the theses. In the coming seminar, Thursday-Friday 26-27th, we will follow up on the discussions we started around the texts by Latour and Heidegger. I am keen to return to Agamben's Dispositif as we had not too long to discuss it. So the first part of the day (starting 1030) will be a dedicated to the discussion of this text, in relation to Deleuze's conception of the dispositif.

dispositifs:
Agamben's is here: http://roundtable.kein.org/node/1137#attachments

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Too Early/Too Late shows certain aspects of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s work at their most radical. But what does the film show precisely? What exactly do we see, when watching those “panoramas” of the French and Egyptian cities and countryside around 1980? What we hear may give us clues: something about history is at stake here. So the question could be: when we are looking at a landscape, what do we see of its history? Other artists have worked on this matter. Some of them have also shared with the Straubs other problems and principles: the “Objectivist” poets, a group formed in the USA around 1930, featuring Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff and William Carlos Williams. They wanted a highly innovative poetry that could also be politically radical, a poetry that would engage at the same time vision (they were influenced by Ezra Pound’s Imagism), and history. They proposed solutions that have to do with the films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, and with us.

This is chapter three of Brian Larkin's "Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria", Duke University Press, 2008.

In Signal and Noise, Brian Larkin provides a history and ethnography of media in Nigeria, asking what media theory looks like when Nigeria rather than a European nation or the United States is taken as the starting point.

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Céline Nieuwenhuys and Antoine Pécoud, « Human Trafficking, Information Campaigns, and Strategies of Migration Control », in American Behavioral Scientist, 50, 2007.

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Franco Berardi, "The Image Dispositif", 2004.

In this text Franco Berardi reflects on the role of media today. When the Infosphere is producing narratives which move the consciousness of billions, the main political task is the creation of video-poetic strategies – dispositifs – for constructing new realities.

Tania Murray Li, "The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics", Introduction, Duke University Press, 2007.

The Will to Improve is a remarkable account of development in action. Focusing on attempts to improve landscapes and livelihoods in Indonesia, Tania Murray Li carefully exposes the practices that enable experts to diagnose problems and devise interventions, and the agency of people whose conduct is targeted for reform.

Massimo de Angelis, Chapter 1 (“The beginning of history”), Chapter 16 (“The ‘outside’”), Chapter 17 (“Commons”) in The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital. Pluto Press, 2007.

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Silvia Federici, “All the World Needs a Jolt” in Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004.

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Peter Linebaugh, Chapter 1 (“Introduction) and Chapter 2 (“The Two Charters) in The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All. University of California Press, 2008.

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Tom Williamson. “Enclosure and the English Hedgerow.” Pp. 263-271 in The Cambridge Cultural History: The Romantic Age in Britain. B. Ford, ed. University of Cambridge Press, 1992.

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