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Saul Williams reciting
"The Pledge of Resistance"
[Quicktime 7.8MB]
Learn more about the project at
www.synchronicrecords.com &

www.notinournamemusic.com




Saul William's new prose-novel
SAID THE SHOTGUN TO
THE HEAD
is an epic poem in
the voice of a homeless man that
is telling of the coming of a female Messiah that he has known intimately.
Maybe you know her,
maybe you'll meet her TODAY.
[ click to read excerpt ]

 

Of Men and Monuments,
Vessels and Vectors...
Julian Laverdiere's Art of Uncertainty
by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid
[ click to view ]

 

Coldcut's "Re:Volution" mix.
An hour of revolutionary sonics...
stream it while you read!

[ click for track listing ]
[ click to listen to Real Audio stream ]

 

Inside the new media workflow
of Propagate, a film collaboration
between [sic] and Shepard Fairey.
[ click to view ]

 

How to crack the clouds from
your Super Mario cartridge.
Courtesy of Cory Archangel / BEIGE.
[ click to view ]


Philip K. Dick: Speaking with the Dead
An Interview with Philip K. Dick by Erik Davis

After spending the bulk of his life cranking out pulp paperbacks for peanuts, the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick is now finally recognized as one of the most visionary authors the genre has ever produced. While masterminds like Arthur C. Clarke anticipated technological breakthroughs, Dick, whose speed-ravaged heart called it quits in 1982 when the man was only 53, foresaw the psychological turmoil of our posthuman lives, as we enter a world where machines talk back, virtual reality rules, and God is a product in the check-out line.

 

Panel Discussion on the Release of the Film Naqoyqatsi
with
John Rockwell – A & E Editor, New York Times
Jon Kane – Editor/Visual Designer
Godfrey Reggio – Director
Phillip Glass – Composer

Phillip Glass: "This is a film that does address social change and the way we live our lives. It has become an urgent question and is no longer just theoretical. It’s not to say that these films are meant to provide an answer. Recently I looked at Naqoyqatsi in a different way than I ever had before. I kind of leaned back and had my eyes half closed. I looked at the images and disconnected my brain entirely. I just let the images flow into me. I was able to apprehend the state of the world, our social world, in a way that I hadn’t before. Usually, I looked at the film in terms of it being cohesive; did the movements follow each other and make sense? When I dropped that entirely I began to look at it in terms of it being a mirror of the world we lived in. Then the question is what did I think of that world?"
excerpt from the discussion

 

The Remix of Politics
By Rick Silva

From image and text to audio and video to performance, politics get mixed and remixed. What could be next? Here’s a scenario; a hacktivist interrupts the feed into the teleprompter that is scrolling the words for the SOTU address to G W Bush. Too much on automatic pilot to notice, Bush reads the hacktivist’s words to millions of people. What we get is a live remix using the president himself as the splice between artist and audience.

 

The Panoptic Transition
By Joshua Kane

The Panopticon is a structure wherein the watched cannot see the watchers, but know they are being watched: At the periphery an annular building, at the center a tower. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive cells in the periphery. But this light creates a veil placed over surveillance, for the light that illuminates each cell also blinds each prisoner to the presence of guards, or the lack thereof, as it may be. Each cell then becomes a stage for an unknowable audience; each prisoner alone, individualized, at once performing for no one and everyone; each guard capable of seeing each cell and all prisoners at once at their will. Thus creating an economy in surveillance – one doesn’t need many guards in a panotpicon and they don’t need to always be there or always be aware – the actors (or prisoners as it were) will perform the same whether someone is watching or not, for they do not know whether someone is watching or not.
excerpt from essay

 

The DARPA/IAO REMIX (unauthorized)
By David Goldberg

"When I first saw the explanatory graphics for these projects I was enamoured by the bold naivete of their bureaucratic aesthetics. Finally, here is an American visual tradition that possesses the same weird charm as the Mexican and Indian urban street graphics that are making their way into expensive little Phaidon editions. Though Jazz is the Classical archetype of the "Only Truly American," these digital images are from the Hip-hop era of sampling and graffiti... here are the chrome arrows, characters, and text-crowded fields to prove it. Naturally I tried to click on them as if they were image maps, hoping that such interactivity would yield elaborations on icons like the woman in the red dress who operates a lathe at a uranium plant, the sometimes grinning caucasians getting their faces "recognized," and the "policy makers" and "analysts" working with the Genoa Projects. The DARPA/IAO Remix implements those image maps and fleshes out the narratives, explains or comments on the technological processes behind the faces, and "exposes" those who hide behind sweeping titles like "policy makers."
excerpt from intro to the project

 

The Australian Federal Government is Planning a Radioactive Nuclear Waste Dump in the Woomera Forbidden Area
By Ashley Crawford

There is nothing there, according to the Australian Federal Government, in the planning of a radioactive waste dump in the Woomera region in South Australia. The indigenous people of the area tend to disagree. And, due to the fact that the site is in the Prohibited Area run by the Australian Department of Defence, most people are unlikely to get a look at the site.

 

Science, Art and Society in the Islamic Civilization
By Muzaffar Iqbal

The traditional Islamic cities such as Fez, Isfahan and Damascus fully utilized technologies but these technologies were based on the same principles that had guided the Islamic tradition; hence there was no incongruity in their development. Now they are coming under increasing dangers of various kinds due to the intrusion of modern technological advances that have no regard for the sacred dimension of these cities or for the living space that they enclose.

 

Sex, Time and Power:
How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution

By Leonard Shlain
An interview by Tiffany Shlain and an excerpt from the book...

Above my writing desk hangs a quote from Franz Kafka urging writers to create books that “can be wielded like a pickax to shatter the frozen sea within the reader’s mind.” If a book didn’t change the way the reader thought about the world, then Kafka deemed it not worth writing. I have taken Kafka’s words as my credo. May this book set your mental ice floes grinding against each other.
excerpt from the preface

 

The Salt Roads
By Nalo Hopkinson
An excerpt from her latest novel.

.."Free-coloured Philomise had been making eyes at her; well-off brown man with his own coffee plantation and plenty slaves to work it, but no, our master didn't want a coloured to have her. Gave her instead to that yeasty-smelling carpenter imported to San Domingue-him from some backwards village in the ass end 2.of France. And Georgine was puffing herself up now she had a white man, never mind he didn't have two coins to rub together. True, she had cause maybe to be happy. Pierre was looking after her well. She might get two-three free children out of it too, and if she gave him enough boys, her Pierre might release her from slavery finally. When she was old.."

 

Navigating Movements
An Interview with Brian Massumi
By Mary Zournazi  

"From my own point of view, the way that a concept like hope can be made useful is when it is not connected to an expected success — when it starts to be something different from optimism — because when you start trying to think ahead into the future from the present point, rationally there really isn’t much room for hope. Globally it’s a very pessimistic affair, with economic inequalities increasing year by year, with health and sanitation levels steadily decreasing in many regions, with the global effects of environmental deterioration already being felt, with conflicts among nations and peoples apparently only getting more intractable, leading to mass displacements of workers and refugees ... It seems such a mess that I think it can be paralysing. If hope is the opposite of pessimism, then there’s precious little to be had. On the other hand, if hope is separated from concepts of optimism and pessimism, from a wishful projection of success or even some kind of a rational calculation of outcomes, then I think it starts to be interesting — because it places it in the present."
excerpt from the interview

 

Painful but Fabulous
An Interview with Genesis P-Orridge

By Carol Tessitore

"We’re in the first age where everybody can communicate with just about everybody else. It’s phenomenal and so completely different to any other period of human history that I don’t think anyone has fully understood the implications. We were talking earlier about why I’ve returned to doing Fine Art, and I think it’s partly because it’s a controllable environment. The scale of global culture now and the relentlessness of superficiality are so amorphous a power, that privacy and intimacy become really radical. I think that’s something that’s really worth exploring now, unplugging from the networks, and separating oneself. With that you rebuild trust, conversation and friendship." excerpt from the interview..

 

The Investiture as Culture
By Augusto Boal

The very day he was proclaimed President Elect, Lula announced his priority economic programme: to end the slow starvation facing 50 million Brazilians; and his first international initiative: to hold out a hand to the Argentineans. What he announced were not minor micro-economic or diplomatic options, but radical transformations in ways of governing, an inversion of priorities and a new clear-cut ethic with no grey areas. He was announcing that

 

The Serpent Temple
By Daniel Pinchbeck

The Global Consciousness Project at Princeton University studies mass psychic influence on random number generating. The ability of subjects to influence random number generation with their thoughts has been repeatedly verified. For this study, Princeton placed 50 random number generators in cities around the world. The researchers wanted to see if global events or crises would lead to perturbations in the numbers, and statistical deviations from the mean. The greatest anomaly was recorded on September 11, 2001. The generated numbers deviated dramatically from the usual average, climaxing several hours after the terrorist events. But the most extraordinary aspect of the results was that the statistical deviation began more than an hour before the first plane hit the World Trade Center.
excerpt from the essay

 

Switchback
By Kenji Siratori

The over there of the grief:was input where she dismantle the insanity medium of the chromosome that invades that the brain+X gram of the dog. Boy_roid of waste material inclination=of so=the mass of flesh of their control deficiency was scattered to the brain-universe......telephony..... [scan the body of the hyperlink of the fear=cell:the storage of desire!--MHz

 

 

BOOK REVIEWS by Ashley Crawford

Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History
Edited by Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson and Alessio Cavallaro. MIT Press, London/Power Publications, Sydney

Uncanny Networks:
Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia

By Geert Lovink
The MIT Press

The Road To Excess:
A History of Writers on Drugs

By Marcus Boon
Harvard University Press


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© 2003 21C Magazine