How to prevent go HERE
maandag 31 januari 2011
zondag 30 januari 2011
zaterdag 29 januari 2011
The Dark Side of the Free and Open–Interview with Geert Lovink @ Ars Electronica, Linz, September 4, 2010. By Mateja Rot
Mateja Rot: You entitled your lecture on the Open Source Life symposium at Festival Ars Electronica 2010 The Meaning of Open is Obfuscated. Can you explain what is so problematic about ‘open’?
Geert Lovink: The core of the debate is the following: is there something wrong with the implementation of ‘open’ or should we attack the ‘open’ concept heads on and reject it all together? I am working on this with the Australian theorist Nate Tkacz. The idea of ‘non-commodity production’ is a start here. That’s what is clearly good about things called open: that they are not commodities. The problem is then how to sustain people who want to produce non-commodities within a commodity driven society. When we advocate free and open, and rally against copyright, we have to become aware of the larger economic context, in particular in this long era of recession. Geeks and academics with a stable income have little idea about precarious living conditions. We have to always ask: who is speaking? Who is pushing artists to give away their products for free? Why do they limit their examples to innocent amateurs and refuse to speak about young professionals? Do they have any idea what it means that you cannot make a living from your profession?
More HERE
donderdag 27 januari 2011
woensdag 26 januari 2011
Your Facebook Activity is Now an Ad
Facebook is launching a new ad format called "Sponsored Stories," which allows participating advertisers to promote your Facebook activity by turning it into homepage ads seen only by your friends. This activity can include liking a Facebook page, checking in via Facebook Places or sharing content to the News Feed from a Facebook application. :-(?)
dinsdag 25 januari 2011
The Inside Story of How Facebook Responded to Tunisian Hacks
"It was on Christmas Day that Facebook's Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan first noticed strange things going on in Tunisia..."
Read HERE
Paulo Coelho and Sean Parker Conference at DLD
Paul Coelho with Sean Parker (who was the founder of napster and portrayed by Justin Timberlake in “The Social Network”).Question:"Did you like the movie?"
maandag 24 januari 2011
Domestic use of aerial drones by law enforcement likely to prompt privacy debate
AUSTIN - The suspect's house, just west of this city, sat on a hilltop at the end of a steep, exposed driveway. Agents with the Texas Department of Public Safety believed the man inside had a large stash of drugs and a cache of weapons, including high-caliber rifles.
As dawn broke, a SWAT team waiting to execute a search warrant wanted a last-minute aerial sweep of the property, in part to check for unseen dangers. But there was a problem: The department's aircraft section feared that if it put up a helicopter, the suspect might try to shoot it down. READ ON HERE
As dawn broke, a SWAT team waiting to execute a search warrant wanted a last-minute aerial sweep of the property, in part to check for unseen dangers. But there was a problem: The department's aircraft section feared that if it put up a helicopter, the suspect might try to shoot it down. READ ON HERE
Wikileaks Rest in Peace
The original Wikileaks initiative is dead, replaced by a bloated apparatus promising 260,000 cables at slower than a snail's pace. At the rate of 20 cables a day it will take 13,000 days to finish -- some 35 years.
The original merits of Wikileaks have been lost in its transformation into a publicity and fund-raising vehicle for Julian Assange as indicated in the redesign website which billboards him.
Its once invaluable, steady stream of documents, packaged in its own, no-frills format, is now a tiny dribble of documents apparently regulated by a compact with a few main stream media which amplify the material well beyond its significance. Days go by when nothing new is offered except outpouring of manufactured news about Assange and a slew of trivial news and bombastic commentaries for and against the initiative.
READ CAREFULLY HERE
The original merits of Wikileaks have been lost in its transformation into a publicity and fund-raising vehicle for Julian Assange as indicated in the redesign website which billboards him.
Its once invaluable, steady stream of documents, packaged in its own, no-frills format, is now a tiny dribble of documents apparently regulated by a compact with a few main stream media which amplify the material well beyond its significance. Days go by when nothing new is offered except outpouring of manufactured news about Assange and a slew of trivial news and bombastic commentaries for and against the initiative.
READ CAREFULLY HERE
zondag 23 januari 2011
zaterdag 22 januari 2011
donderdag 20 januari 2011
woensdag 19 januari 2011
still Leaking
dinsdag 18 januari 2011
maandag 17 januari 2011
vrijdag 14 januari 2011
Allan Kaprow
How to Make a Happening
Side 1
This is a lecture on how to make a happening. There are 11 rules of the game.
1. Forget all the standard art forms. Don’t paint pictures, don’t make poetry, don’t
build architecture, don’t arrange dances, don’t write plays, don’t compose music,
don’t make movies, and above all, don’t think you’ll get a happening out of
putting all these together. This idea is nothing more than what operas always did
and you see it today in the far-out types of discotheques with their flashing lights
and film projections. The point is to make something new, something that doesn’t
even remotely remind you of culture. You’ve got to be pretty ruthless about this,
wiping out of your plans every echo of this or that story or jazz piece or painting
that I can promise you will keep coming up unconsciously.
2. You can steer clear of art by mixing up your happening by mixing it with life
situations. Make it unsure even to yourself if the happening is life or art. Art has
always been different from the world’s affairs, now you’ve got to work hard to
keep it all blurry. Two cars collide on a highway. Violet liquid pours out of the
broken radiator of one of them, and in the back seat of the other there is a huge
load of dead chickens that is spilling out all over the ground. The cops check it
out, plausible answers are given, tow trucks carry off the wrecks costs are paid
and the drivers go home to dinner.
3. The situations for a happening should come from what you see in the real world,
from real places and people rather than from the head. If you stick to imagination
too much you’ll end up with old art again, since art was always supposed to be
made from imagination. Take advantage of readymade events: a factory fire, the
fire trucks screaming to it from all sides, the water, the police barricades, the red
blinkers—a natural. Or after a storm at the shore the debris washed up can be
terrific. Or just take an afternoon off and watch women trying on dresses in a
bargain basement. An awful lot can be done with images like these. If you get
stuck for ideas, an exception to the slice-of-life idea is the greatest source book of
our time, the yellow pages of the telephone directory. Break open the book at
random, put your finger down at some point in the page and you’ll come up with:
private detective service, rug cleaning at home, cement blocks, airport limousine
transport, judo lessons. You can get more out of these than out of all of
Beethoven, Michelangelo, and Racine put together.
4. Break up your spaces. A single enactment space is what the theatre traditionally
uses. You can experiment by gradually widening the distances between your
events; first at a number of points along a heavily trafficked avenue, then in
several rooms and floors of an apartment house where some of the activities are
out of touch with each other, then on more than one street, then in different but
nearby cities, finally all around the world. Some of this can take place traveling
from one area to another using public transportation and the mails. You don’t have
to be everywhere at once. You don’t even have to be everywhere. The places
you’re in are as good as the places other participants are in.
5. Break up your time and let it be real time. Real time is found when things are
going on in real places. It has nothing to do with the single time, the unified time
of stage plays or music. It has even less to do with slowing down or speeding up
actions because you want to make something expressive or you want it to work in
a compositional way. Whatever happens should happen in its natural time.
Suppose you consider how long it’d take to buy a fishing pole in a department
store just before Christmas, or how long it’d take to lay the footings for a house.
Well if a group wanted to do both in a happening, one of them would have to wait
until the other was done. Maybe if it rained, that’d decide which came first. Of
course, two groups could arrange both actions at the same time if that was wanted.
But it isn’t really necessary, except when people coming from different places
have to catch the same train. Otherwise, why not let the amount of time you do
something depend on what is practical and convenient for the particular actions in
the happening. You can waste an awful lot of time trying to coordinate things.
6. Arrange all your events in the happening in the same practical way. Not in an arty
way; avoid sonnet form, cubist multiple viewpoints, dynamic symmetry, the
golden section, the twelve tone technique, theme and variation developments,
logical or mathematical progressions and so forth. If a chicken cackles, roosts,
pecks and lays eggs, take it for granted there’s plenty of form there already.
Nature can never appear formless because of the way the brain is made, so why
worry? Just take things as they come, and arrange them in whatever way is least
artificial and easiest to do. A gal was reading in the subway until, as if she’s
expecting it, her hairdresser gets up from another seat and unpacks his gear, and
spends the next hour giving her a fancy do, calm-as-you-please, like it was his
shop. A lot of people all covered with some sticky stuff were lying perfectly still
all across a big lawn. The wind blows yellow and red leaves over them until
they’re covered solid. A truck loaded with shredded newspaper comes and carts
them off. Fifteen or more cars on the Long Island Expressway going along with
their brights on like a funeral. Now and then stream clouds of thin plastic film
from their windows. They pull in the stuff quickly each time. Well suppose these
three situations made up your happening? The subway thing would be easier to
do, say, at 4 a.m. when the trains are pretty empty. You could count on lots of
leaves dropping off the trees in late October when it’s still warm enough to lie on
the ground. And the procession of cars could be done on any day, just so long as
everyone has his car handy at the time. The theory of alternating contrasts like
night—day, night—action, quiet—action could cause you to arrange the three
events closely together in the order of cars, subway, leaves. But that might be
inconvenient, so string them out in whatever way is best for the participants, a
week apart if necessary. Some surprises might occur if you just forgot all the
composition lessons you were taught. I remember that being flexible paid off one
time. A group of people was to go to an automat and eat lunch when it was busy
and crowded. At a signal, they would push a plate off the table, let it break, and
quickly leave. The order of the events had to be switched around with another
one. When it did take place, at that same moment a bus boy dropped a whole load
of dishes on a floor. It couldn’t have been more planned than that, but it wasn’t
planned at all.
7. Since you’re in the world now and not in art, play the game by real rules. Make
up your mind when and where a happening is appropriate. If your image calls for
the president and vice presidents of Chase-Manhattan sitting in their biggest vault
and throwing gold coins around like babies, and you can’t get them to do it, then
forget it and go on to something else. If you need to cut down lots of timber with
chain saws whining and trees cracking, find a guy who needs some woods thinned
out anyway. If you want a bulldozer to chew up some ground, find out where a
development is going up and work the happening into the driver’s regular job.
You’ll save a hundred dollars a day and might learn something about ground
leveling. If you want to work with kids, discover what they really can do and like
to instead of giving them something fancy you’d like to do but won’t. Let them
build something out of piles of trash, paint up some old cars in a junkyard, dig a
huge hole at the beach. If you want to have all your participants start naked,
swimming, making love or whatnot, there are times and plenty of places where it
wouldn’t stir up any dust. On the other hand, if you like being busted by the cops,
you might think of working jail into the happening.
8. Work with the power around you, not against it. It makes things much easier, and
you’re interested in getting things done. When you need official approval, go out
for it. You can use police help, the mayor, the college dean, the chamber of
commerce, the company exec, the rich, and all your neighbors. Be your own
public relations man; convince them all that what you’re doing is worthwhile
because it’s enjoyable to play, just the same as it’s enjoyable for them to go
fishing. Its not a snap, of course, but they’re convincible, and once on your side
you can almost go to the moon.
9. When you’ve got the go-ahead, don’t rehearse the happening. This will make it
unnatural because it will build in the idea of good performance, that is, ‘art.’
There is nothing to improve in a happening, you don’t need to be a professional
performer. It’s best when it is artless, for better or worse. If it doesn’t work, do
another happening. In any case, it’s unnecessary to rehearse situations like eating
your way through a room full of food, tearing down an old house, throwing love
letters into a field and watching the rain wash off the ink, driving a bunch of cars
off in different directions until they run out of gas. These aren’t perfectible
actions.
10.Perform the happening once only. Repeating it makes it stale, reminds you of
theatre and does the same thing as rehearsing: it forces you to think that there is
something to improve on. Sometimes it’d be nearly impossible to repeat anyway
—imagine trying to get copies of your old love letters, in order to see the rain
wash off those tender thoughts. Why bother?
11. Give up the whole idea of putting on a show for audiences. A happening is not a
show. Leave the shows to the theatre people and discotheques. A happening is a
game with a high, a ritual that no church would want because there’s no religion
for sale. A happening is for those who happen in this world, for those who don’t
want to stand off and just look. If you happen, you can’t be outside peeking in.
You’ve got to be involved physically. Without an audience, you can be off on the
move, using all kinds of environments, mixing in the supermarket world, never
worrying about what those out there in the seats are thinking, and you can spread
your action all around the globe whenever you want. Traditional art is like college
education and drugs: it’s fed to people who have to sit on their butts for longer
and longer amounts of time to get the point, and the point is that there’s lots of
actions somewhere else, which all the smart people prefer to just think about. But
happeners have a plan and go ahead and carry it out. To use an old expression,
they don’t merely dig the scene, they make it.
Side 2
Now what about some examples of happenings. The impression most people have is that
they’re a wild and mad deluge of events pouring down, something like this:
Everybody’s at a train station. It’s hot. There are lots of big cartons sitting
all over the arcade. One by one they start to move, sliding and careening
drunkenly in every direction, lunging into commuters and one another
accompanied by loud breathing sounds over the public address system.
Now it’s winter and it’s cold and dark, and all around little blue lights go
on and off at their own speed while three large gunny sack constructions
drag an enormous pile of ice and stones over bumps, losing most of it, and
blankets keep falling over everything from the ceiling. A hundred iron
barrels and gallon wine jugs hanging on ropes swing back and forth,
crashing like church bells, spewing glass all about. Suddenly mushy
shapes pop up from the floor and painters slash at curtains dripping with
action. A wall of trees tied with colored rags advances on the crowd,
scattering everybody, forcing them to leave. Eating is going on incessantly,
eating and vomiting and eating and vomiting, all in relentless yellow.
There are Muslim telephone booths for all with a record player or
microphone that tunes everybody in on everybody else. Coughing, you
breath noxious fumes of the smell of hospitals and lemon juice. A nude
girl runs after the racing pool of a searchlight, and throws water into it.
Slides and movies projected in motion over walls and hurrying people
depict hamburgers, big ones, huge ones, red ones, skinny ones, flat ones
and so on. You push things around like packing crates, words rumble past
whispering, “Dee-dah, Bah-room, Lovely, Lovely, Love Me.” Shadows
jiggle on screens, power saws and lawn mowers screech just like the
subway at union square. Tin cans rattle, soaking rags slush and you stand
up to shout questions at shoeshine boys and old ladies. Long silences
when nothing at all happens when—bang—there you are facing yourself
in a mirror jammed at you. Listen, a cough in the alley. You giggle, talk to
someone nonchalantly while eating strawberry jam sandwiches. Electric
fans start, wafting breezes of new car smell past your nose as leaves bury
heaps of whining, burping, foul pinky mess.
Actually, the happenings are much less complicated, and there’s a stronger give and take
between the environment and its participants. A typical program will read like this:
Naked women eat giant bowls of Cheerios and milk atop a mountain of
used tires. Children disgorge barrels of whitewash over the mountain. A
hundred yards away, men and women swimmers in brightly colored
plastic pools continually leap out of the water to catch with their mouths
rubber gaskets festooned with lifesaver candies that hang from chains of
mens’ belts. The mountain is taken down tire by tire and moved into the
pools, and the water spills out. The children tie the adults together with the
belts, they pour whitewash over the now-still heaps of bodies. Then they
buckle dozens more of the belts around their necks, waists, and legs. They
take the remaining lifesavers to a factory-fresh tire shop and offer them for
sale in laughy voices.
A program is nothing more than a short list of situations or images jotted down on a few
sheets of paper. Sometimes they have some notes attached at the end. These programs are
sent out to a group of people that might be interested in participating. Those who are
come to a meeting where the happening is discussed and the practical details of who does
what and when are ironed out. Then, as soon as possible, the piece is put into action.
I’d like to read three programs now, but before I do, it ought to be clear that what I read is
just literature, not the happenings themselves.
Soap
1st morning: clothes dirtied by urination
1st evening: clothes washed
(in the sea)
(in the laundromat)
2nd morning: cars dirtied with jam on a busy street
cars cleaned
(in a parking lot)
(in a car-wash)
2nd evening: bodies dirtied with jam
bodies buried in mounds at the sea edge
bodies cleaned by the tide
The notes to “Soap” read as follows:
1st morning and 1st evening:
Each person privately soils some article of his own
clothing. This is essential, for it refers to one’s real
experiences as an infant. In this act the person mingles his
own water with the water of the sea or laundromat, and
consequently makes the cleansing of his clothing
inescapably personal.
2nd morning:
Cars should be methodically and thoroughly smeared with
jam, within the sight of passers-by. The washing should be
done as diligently. If a commercial car-wash is used, one
should have this done as though nothing were out of the
ordinary. Any questions asked should be answered in as
noncommittal a way as possible.
2nd evening:
A vacant stretch of beach is best. Either couples or
individuals may perform this. There should be long
distances between each individual or couple. In the case of
couples, one person covers the partner (who is preferably
naked) with jam, digs a hole for him (or her) with sand to
the neck, and sits quietly watching until the tide washes the
partner clean. Then they depart.
The next happening is
Calling
In the city, people stand at street corners and wait. For each of
them a car pulls up, someone calls out a name, the person gets in,
and they drive off. During the trip, the person is wrapped in
aluminum foil. The car is parked at a meter somewhere, is left
there locked, the silver person sitting motionless in the back seat.
Someone unlocks the car, drives off. The foil is removed from the
person, he or she is wrapped in cloth or tied into a laundry bag.
The car stops. The person is dumped at a public car garage and the
car goes away. At the garage, a waiting auto starts up. The person
is picked up from the concrete pavement, is hauled into the car and
taken to the information booth at Grand Central Station. The
person is propped up against it and left. The person calls out names
and hears the others brought there also call. They call out for some
time. Then they work loose from their wrappings and leave the
train station. They telephone certain numbers. The phone rings and
rings, finally it is answered, a name is asked for, and immediately
the other end clicks off. In the woods, the persons call out names
and hear hidden answers. Here and there they come upon people
dangling upside-down from ropes. They rip the people’s clothes off
and go away. The naked figures call to each other in the woods for
a long time until they’re tired. Silence.
The notes to “Calling” read as follows:
1. Places other than the train stations and times are to be
decided just prior to performance.
2. Performance should preferably take place over two days,
the first in the city and the second in the country.
3. At least twenty-one persons are necessary to perform this
happening properly. For this number, six cars are required.
Thus, there would be three persons waiting at street
corners, a car containing three people including the driver,
to pick each one up, and a matching number of second-
stage cars also manned by three people to carry the
wrapped persons to the railroad station. But this basic
number of participants can be multiplied proportionately
for as large a group as is desired.
4. Names used throughout are to be the names of those
involved.
5. Wrappings of foil and cloth should be as thoroughly
applied as possible, the face covered except for a breathing
gap.
6. Second-stage cars should be parked at a pre-chosen self-
service garage, widely separated from others. Drivers then
proceed to parts of city where first-stage cars are parked at
meters. There, the two drivers exchange car keys, the first-
stage trio hurrying to garage positions where they enter the
autos and await the arrival of the human packages. The
latter, of course, are brought by the second-stage trio.
Timing for this and all other stages of the event must be
worked out exactly.
7. The cars depositing packages at garages next proceed to the
homes of their drivers where phone calls will be received.
8. After the human packages unwrap themselves at the
information booth, calls should be made from a public
booth to the drivers of the last mentioned cars. Phone is
allowed to ring fifty times before it is answered. Answerer
says only, “Yes?” Caller asks if it is x, stating the right
name, and x quietly hangs up.
9. The people hanging from ropes in the woods are those who
drove and accompanied the cars the day before. An
exchange of positions takes place here, underscored by the
inverted positions on the ropes, with the former package
people taking the active role. There should be no less than
five bodies suspended, although all car people may choose
to hang this way. If less than the total of, say, eighteen, the
others should sit motionless between each rope and join in
the answering and the calling of names. When called from
afar by the package people, the answer is simply, “Here.
Here,” until each body is found and violated.
10. The package people arriving at the woods call out the
names of the car people hidden over a wide area among the
trees. Moving as a group, they follow the sounds of the
voices and reach each dangling figure. Its clothes are
rapidly cut off and after all have been so treated, the group
leaves. Each suspended person and those sitting beneath
him should cease answering to their names when found.
Gradually the answering will diminish to silence, and at
that point they start to call out each others’ names like
children lost.
The last happening is called:
Raining
Black highway painted black
Rain washes away
Paper men made in bare orchard branches
Rain washes away
Sheets of writing spread over a field
Rain washes away
Little gray boats painted along a gutter
Rain washes away
Naked bodies painted gray
Rain washes away
Bare trees painted red
Rain washes away
The notes are simply that
Times and places need not be coordinated and are left up to
the participants. The action of the rain may be watched if
desired.
(c) Allan Kaprow
Published by Primary Information, 2009
How to Make a Happening
Side 1
This is a lecture on how to make a happening. There are 11 rules of the game.
1. Forget all the standard art forms. Don’t paint pictures, don’t make poetry, don’t
build architecture, don’t arrange dances, don’t write plays, don’t compose music,
don’t make movies, and above all, don’t think you’ll get a happening out of
putting all these together. This idea is nothing more than what operas always did
and you see it today in the far-out types of discotheques with their flashing lights
and film projections. The point is to make something new, something that doesn’t
even remotely remind you of culture. You’ve got to be pretty ruthless about this,
wiping out of your plans every echo of this or that story or jazz piece or painting
that I can promise you will keep coming up unconsciously.
2. You can steer clear of art by mixing up your happening by mixing it with life
situations. Make it unsure even to yourself if the happening is life or art. Art has
always been different from the world’s affairs, now you’ve got to work hard to
keep it all blurry. Two cars collide on a highway. Violet liquid pours out of the
broken radiator of one of them, and in the back seat of the other there is a huge
load of dead chickens that is spilling out all over the ground. The cops check it
out, plausible answers are given, tow trucks carry off the wrecks costs are paid
and the drivers go home to dinner.
3. The situations for a happening should come from what you see in the real world,
from real places and people rather than from the head. If you stick to imagination
too much you’ll end up with old art again, since art was always supposed to be
made from imagination. Take advantage of readymade events: a factory fire, the
fire trucks screaming to it from all sides, the water, the police barricades, the red
blinkers—a natural. Or after a storm at the shore the debris washed up can be
terrific. Or just take an afternoon off and watch women trying on dresses in a
bargain basement. An awful lot can be done with images like these. If you get
stuck for ideas, an exception to the slice-of-life idea is the greatest source book of
our time, the yellow pages of the telephone directory. Break open the book at
random, put your finger down at some point in the page and you’ll come up with:
private detective service, rug cleaning at home, cement blocks, airport limousine
transport, judo lessons. You can get more out of these than out of all of
Beethoven, Michelangelo, and Racine put together.
4. Break up your spaces. A single enactment space is what the theatre traditionally
uses. You can experiment by gradually widening the distances between your
events; first at a number of points along a heavily trafficked avenue, then in
several rooms and floors of an apartment house where some of the activities are
out of touch with each other, then on more than one street, then in different but
nearby cities, finally all around the world. Some of this can take place traveling
from one area to another using public transportation and the mails. You don’t have
to be everywhere at once. You don’t even have to be everywhere. The places
you’re in are as good as the places other participants are in.
5. Break up your time and let it be real time. Real time is found when things are
going on in real places. It has nothing to do with the single time, the unified time
of stage plays or music. It has even less to do with slowing down or speeding up
actions because you want to make something expressive or you want it to work in
a compositional way. Whatever happens should happen in its natural time.
Suppose you consider how long it’d take to buy a fishing pole in a department
store just before Christmas, or how long it’d take to lay the footings for a house.
Well if a group wanted to do both in a happening, one of them would have to wait
until the other was done. Maybe if it rained, that’d decide which came first. Of
course, two groups could arrange both actions at the same time if that was wanted.
But it isn’t really necessary, except when people coming from different places
have to catch the same train. Otherwise, why not let the amount of time you do
something depend on what is practical and convenient for the particular actions in
the happening. You can waste an awful lot of time trying to coordinate things.
6. Arrange all your events in the happening in the same practical way. Not in an arty
way; avoid sonnet form, cubist multiple viewpoints, dynamic symmetry, the
golden section, the twelve tone technique, theme and variation developments,
logical or mathematical progressions and so forth. If a chicken cackles, roosts,
pecks and lays eggs, take it for granted there’s plenty of form there already.
Nature can never appear formless because of the way the brain is made, so why
worry? Just take things as they come, and arrange them in whatever way is least
artificial and easiest to do. A gal was reading in the subway until, as if she’s
expecting it, her hairdresser gets up from another seat and unpacks his gear, and
spends the next hour giving her a fancy do, calm-as-you-please, like it was his
shop. A lot of people all covered with some sticky stuff were lying perfectly still
all across a big lawn. The wind blows yellow and red leaves over them until
they’re covered solid. A truck loaded with shredded newspaper comes and carts
them off. Fifteen or more cars on the Long Island Expressway going along with
their brights on like a funeral. Now and then stream clouds of thin plastic film
from their windows. They pull in the stuff quickly each time. Well suppose these
three situations made up your happening? The subway thing would be easier to
do, say, at 4 a.m. when the trains are pretty empty. You could count on lots of
leaves dropping off the trees in late October when it’s still warm enough to lie on
the ground. And the procession of cars could be done on any day, just so long as
everyone has his car handy at the time. The theory of alternating contrasts like
night—day, night—action, quiet—action could cause you to arrange the three
events closely together in the order of cars, subway, leaves. But that might be
inconvenient, so string them out in whatever way is best for the participants, a
week apart if necessary. Some surprises might occur if you just forgot all the
composition lessons you were taught. I remember that being flexible paid off one
time. A group of people was to go to an automat and eat lunch when it was busy
and crowded. At a signal, they would push a plate off the table, let it break, and
quickly leave. The order of the events had to be switched around with another
one. When it did take place, at that same moment a bus boy dropped a whole load
of dishes on a floor. It couldn’t have been more planned than that, but it wasn’t
planned at all.
7. Since you’re in the world now and not in art, play the game by real rules. Make
up your mind when and where a happening is appropriate. If your image calls for
the president and vice presidents of Chase-Manhattan sitting in their biggest vault
and throwing gold coins around like babies, and you can’t get them to do it, then
forget it and go on to something else. If you need to cut down lots of timber with
chain saws whining and trees cracking, find a guy who needs some woods thinned
out anyway. If you want a bulldozer to chew up some ground, find out where a
development is going up and work the happening into the driver’s regular job.
You’ll save a hundred dollars a day and might learn something about ground
leveling. If you want to work with kids, discover what they really can do and like
to instead of giving them something fancy you’d like to do but won’t. Let them
build something out of piles of trash, paint up some old cars in a junkyard, dig a
huge hole at the beach. If you want to have all your participants start naked,
swimming, making love or whatnot, there are times and plenty of places where it
wouldn’t stir up any dust. On the other hand, if you like being busted by the cops,
you might think of working jail into the happening.
8. Work with the power around you, not against it. It makes things much easier, and
you’re interested in getting things done. When you need official approval, go out
for it. You can use police help, the mayor, the college dean, the chamber of
commerce, the company exec, the rich, and all your neighbors. Be your own
public relations man; convince them all that what you’re doing is worthwhile
because it’s enjoyable to play, just the same as it’s enjoyable for them to go
fishing. Its not a snap, of course, but they’re convincible, and once on your side
you can almost go to the moon.
9. When you’ve got the go-ahead, don’t rehearse the happening. This will make it
unnatural because it will build in the idea of good performance, that is, ‘art.’
There is nothing to improve in a happening, you don’t need to be a professional
performer. It’s best when it is artless, for better or worse. If it doesn’t work, do
another happening. In any case, it’s unnecessary to rehearse situations like eating
your way through a room full of food, tearing down an old house, throwing love
letters into a field and watching the rain wash off the ink, driving a bunch of cars
off in different directions until they run out of gas. These aren’t perfectible
actions.
10.Perform the happening once only. Repeating it makes it stale, reminds you of
theatre and does the same thing as rehearsing: it forces you to think that there is
something to improve on. Sometimes it’d be nearly impossible to repeat anyway
—imagine trying to get copies of your old love letters, in order to see the rain
wash off those tender thoughts. Why bother?
11. Give up the whole idea of putting on a show for audiences. A happening is not a
show. Leave the shows to the theatre people and discotheques. A happening is a
game with a high, a ritual that no church would want because there’s no religion
for sale. A happening is for those who happen in this world, for those who don’t
want to stand off and just look. If you happen, you can’t be outside peeking in.
You’ve got to be involved physically. Without an audience, you can be off on the
move, using all kinds of environments, mixing in the supermarket world, never
worrying about what those out there in the seats are thinking, and you can spread
your action all around the globe whenever you want. Traditional art is like college
education and drugs: it’s fed to people who have to sit on their butts for longer
and longer amounts of time to get the point, and the point is that there’s lots of
actions somewhere else, which all the smart people prefer to just think about. But
happeners have a plan and go ahead and carry it out. To use an old expression,
they don’t merely dig the scene, they make it.
Side 2
Now what about some examples of happenings. The impression most people have is that
they’re a wild and mad deluge of events pouring down, something like this:
Everybody’s at a train station. It’s hot. There are lots of big cartons sitting
all over the arcade. One by one they start to move, sliding and careening
drunkenly in every direction, lunging into commuters and one another
accompanied by loud breathing sounds over the public address system.
Now it’s winter and it’s cold and dark, and all around little blue lights go
on and off at their own speed while three large gunny sack constructions
drag an enormous pile of ice and stones over bumps, losing most of it, and
blankets keep falling over everything from the ceiling. A hundred iron
barrels and gallon wine jugs hanging on ropes swing back and forth,
crashing like church bells, spewing glass all about. Suddenly mushy
shapes pop up from the floor and painters slash at curtains dripping with
action. A wall of trees tied with colored rags advances on the crowd,
scattering everybody, forcing them to leave. Eating is going on incessantly,
eating and vomiting and eating and vomiting, all in relentless yellow.
There are Muslim telephone booths for all with a record player or
microphone that tunes everybody in on everybody else. Coughing, you
breath noxious fumes of the smell of hospitals and lemon juice. A nude
girl runs after the racing pool of a searchlight, and throws water into it.
Slides and movies projected in motion over walls and hurrying people
depict hamburgers, big ones, huge ones, red ones, skinny ones, flat ones
and so on. You push things around like packing crates, words rumble past
whispering, “Dee-dah, Bah-room, Lovely, Lovely, Love Me.” Shadows
jiggle on screens, power saws and lawn mowers screech just like the
subway at union square. Tin cans rattle, soaking rags slush and you stand
up to shout questions at shoeshine boys and old ladies. Long silences
when nothing at all happens when—bang—there you are facing yourself
in a mirror jammed at you. Listen, a cough in the alley. You giggle, talk to
someone nonchalantly while eating strawberry jam sandwiches. Electric
fans start, wafting breezes of new car smell past your nose as leaves bury
heaps of whining, burping, foul pinky mess.
Actually, the happenings are much less complicated, and there’s a stronger give and take
between the environment and its participants. A typical program will read like this:
Naked women eat giant bowls of Cheerios and milk atop a mountain of
used tires. Children disgorge barrels of whitewash over the mountain. A
hundred yards away, men and women swimmers in brightly colored
plastic pools continually leap out of the water to catch with their mouths
rubber gaskets festooned with lifesaver candies that hang from chains of
mens’ belts. The mountain is taken down tire by tire and moved into the
pools, and the water spills out. The children tie the adults together with the
belts, they pour whitewash over the now-still heaps of bodies. Then they
buckle dozens more of the belts around their necks, waists, and legs. They
take the remaining lifesavers to a factory-fresh tire shop and offer them for
sale in laughy voices.
A program is nothing more than a short list of situations or images jotted down on a few
sheets of paper. Sometimes they have some notes attached at the end. These programs are
sent out to a group of people that might be interested in participating. Those who are
come to a meeting where the happening is discussed and the practical details of who does
what and when are ironed out. Then, as soon as possible, the piece is put into action.
I’d like to read three programs now, but before I do, it ought to be clear that what I read is
just literature, not the happenings themselves.
Soap
1st morning: clothes dirtied by urination
1st evening: clothes washed
(in the sea)
(in the laundromat)
2nd morning: cars dirtied with jam on a busy street
cars cleaned
(in a parking lot)
(in a car-wash)
2nd evening: bodies dirtied with jam
bodies buried in mounds at the sea edge
bodies cleaned by the tide
The notes to “Soap” read as follows:
1st morning and 1st evening:
Each person privately soils some article of his own
clothing. This is essential, for it refers to one’s real
experiences as an infant. In this act the person mingles his
own water with the water of the sea or laundromat, and
consequently makes the cleansing of his clothing
inescapably personal.
2nd morning:
Cars should be methodically and thoroughly smeared with
jam, within the sight of passers-by. The washing should be
done as diligently. If a commercial car-wash is used, one
should have this done as though nothing were out of the
ordinary. Any questions asked should be answered in as
noncommittal a way as possible.
2nd evening:
A vacant stretch of beach is best. Either couples or
individuals may perform this. There should be long
distances between each individual or couple. In the case of
couples, one person covers the partner (who is preferably
naked) with jam, digs a hole for him (or her) with sand to
the neck, and sits quietly watching until the tide washes the
partner clean. Then they depart.
The next happening is
Calling
In the city, people stand at street corners and wait. For each of
them a car pulls up, someone calls out a name, the person gets in,
and they drive off. During the trip, the person is wrapped in
aluminum foil. The car is parked at a meter somewhere, is left
there locked, the silver person sitting motionless in the back seat.
Someone unlocks the car, drives off. The foil is removed from the
person, he or she is wrapped in cloth or tied into a laundry bag.
The car stops. The person is dumped at a public car garage and the
car goes away. At the garage, a waiting auto starts up. The person
is picked up from the concrete pavement, is hauled into the car and
taken to the information booth at Grand Central Station. The
person is propped up against it and left. The person calls out names
and hears the others brought there also call. They call out for some
time. Then they work loose from their wrappings and leave the
train station. They telephone certain numbers. The phone rings and
rings, finally it is answered, a name is asked for, and immediately
the other end clicks off. In the woods, the persons call out names
and hear hidden answers. Here and there they come upon people
dangling upside-down from ropes. They rip the people’s clothes off
and go away. The naked figures call to each other in the woods for
a long time until they’re tired. Silence.
The notes to “Calling” read as follows:
1. Places other than the train stations and times are to be
decided just prior to performance.
2. Performance should preferably take place over two days,
the first in the city and the second in the country.
3. At least twenty-one persons are necessary to perform this
happening properly. For this number, six cars are required.
Thus, there would be three persons waiting at street
corners, a car containing three people including the driver,
to pick each one up, and a matching number of second-
stage cars also manned by three people to carry the
wrapped persons to the railroad station. But this basic
number of participants can be multiplied proportionately
for as large a group as is desired.
4. Names used throughout are to be the names of those
involved.
5. Wrappings of foil and cloth should be as thoroughly
applied as possible, the face covered except for a breathing
gap.
6. Second-stage cars should be parked at a pre-chosen self-
service garage, widely separated from others. Drivers then
proceed to parts of city where first-stage cars are parked at
meters. There, the two drivers exchange car keys, the first-
stage trio hurrying to garage positions where they enter the
autos and await the arrival of the human packages. The
latter, of course, are brought by the second-stage trio.
Timing for this and all other stages of the event must be
worked out exactly.
7. The cars depositing packages at garages next proceed to the
homes of their drivers where phone calls will be received.
8. After the human packages unwrap themselves at the
information booth, calls should be made from a public
booth to the drivers of the last mentioned cars. Phone is
allowed to ring fifty times before it is answered. Answerer
says only, “Yes?” Caller asks if it is x, stating the right
name, and x quietly hangs up.
9. The people hanging from ropes in the woods are those who
drove and accompanied the cars the day before. An
exchange of positions takes place here, underscored by the
inverted positions on the ropes, with the former package
people taking the active role. There should be no less than
five bodies suspended, although all car people may choose
to hang this way. If less than the total of, say, eighteen, the
others should sit motionless between each rope and join in
the answering and the calling of names. When called from
afar by the package people, the answer is simply, “Here.
Here,” until each body is found and violated.
10. The package people arriving at the woods call out the
names of the car people hidden over a wide area among the
trees. Moving as a group, they follow the sounds of the
voices and reach each dangling figure. Its clothes are
rapidly cut off and after all have been so treated, the group
leaves. Each suspended person and those sitting beneath
him should cease answering to their names when found.
Gradually the answering will diminish to silence, and at
that point they start to call out each others’ names like
children lost.
The last happening is called:
Raining
Black highway painted black
Rain washes away
Paper men made in bare orchard branches
Rain washes away
Sheets of writing spread over a field
Rain washes away
Little gray boats painted along a gutter
Rain washes away
Naked bodies painted gray
Rain washes away
Bare trees painted red
Rain washes away
The notes are simply that
Times and places need not be coordinated and are left up to
the participants. The action of the rain may be watched if
desired.
(c) Allan Kaprow
Published by Primary Information, 2009
donderdag 13 januari 2011
Vivant Leakers!
A site to report on "cyber-bullies, who promote illegal murder or harm to Assange or his associates. HERE
woensdag 12 januari 2011
Sarah Palin_O enlighten us!! turn it off after minute 1 "hmm,our exeptional country... !"
...or maybe not, "...if men and women would be angels there would be no need for governments!" OMG!! Angels are flying somewhere around in heaven,if that's what she means then we all should DIE...then yes, then you don't need governments any longer!! Sarah Palin you are a true necrophile & fascist character indeed,...!!! Can you believe this?? How can anyone listen to this and not go crazy (again)??
dinsdag 11 januari 2011
Nostalgia for now
Nostalgia is a tricky thing. It’s not just that apps like Hipstamatic add a fade and a blur, and a single-color cast to a scene, imbuing it with more presence than perhaps it had claimed for itself. That’s all right, presence is absent, it lives in the mind’s eye, if at all. Imbue at will. Nostalgia’s trickiness is measured in the values embedded in the algorithms. That striped t-shirt on your back? That empty afternoon coffee mug? That corpse with the artfully lifeless fingers? All gesturing towards some time in the past when life was slower, when colors had time to fade, when transitions were softer and easier on the heart, when possibilities beckoned. Never mind that there was no time like that; or rather, that all times are. In our memories, it exists. And in our digital outputs.
READ ALL HERE
maandag 10 januari 2011
Narcissism normalised
Recently a NYTimes article announced that narcissism is being deleted from the tomb for psychiatric disorders. Narcissism will not appear in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (due out in 2013, and known as DSM-5). What happens when what was once morally objectionable behaviour ( egotism, vanity, conceit, selfishness) is no longer a 'legitimate' social deviance? Is narcissism now so deeply embedded in the collective psyche that it is now 'normal'? Is this the ultimate end of the neo-liberal exhalation of the individual, celebrity culture, a century's worth of advertising and the corporatisation of everyday life?
MORE HERE
zondag 9 januari 2011
Thoughts on the DOJ wikileaks/twitter court order
The world's media has jumped on the news that the US Department of Justice has sought, and obtained a court order seeking to compel Twitter to reveal account information associated with several of its users who are associated with Wikileaks.
READ ANALYSIS HERE
READ ANALYSIS HERE
Dave Miller_ violence of the scene
This drawing is based on and inspired by some recent news articles,
and is mostly factual, though some bits I've made up. It's not really
finished yet, but would really appreciate feedback, and suggestions on
what I could do with it - any ideas on where I could show it/ send it?
Is the format any good, or better as a book, or a screen based thing.
I also wondered if this could make a decent computer game?
HERE
zaterdag 8 januari 2011
US DOJ subpoenas my twitter account info
It’s a warm and fuzzy feeling to know that somewhere, far away, people are thinking about you. Last night I received this rather interesting e-mail from twitter:
Kessel, Jan-07 11:20 am (PST):
Dear Twitter User:
We are writing to inform you that Twitter has received legal process requesting information regarding your Twitter account, @rop_g. A copy of the legal process is attached. The legal process requires Twitter to produce documents related to your account.
Please be advised that Twitter will respond to this request in 10 days from the date of this notice unless we receive notice from you that a motion to quash the legal process has been filed or that this matter has been otherwise resolved.
To respond to this notice, please e-mail us at
This notice is not legal advice. You may wish to consult legal counsel about this matter. If you need assistance seeking counsel, you may consider contacting the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Sincerely,
Twitter Legal
MORE
vrijdag 7 januari 2011
Think Again: The Internet
They told us it would usher in a new era of freedom, political activism, and perpetual peace. They were wrong.HERE
How dictators watch us on the web
The internet is meant to help activists, enable democratic protest and weaken the grip of authoritarian regimes. But it doesn’t—in fact, the web is a boon for bullies.
HERE
donderdag 6 januari 2011
OVEREXPOSED! "Resolutions for 2011: continue quest for world domination."
Accused former spy turned Moscow It Girl Anna Chapman had a busy holiday season, launching a full-bore publicity assault showing off both her titian allure and a diversified portfolio of talents. She joined the leadership of pro-Kremlin Molodaya Gvardia youth movement, became the celebrity face of a Moscow bank, and finally broke months of silence when she engaged in her first public interview on the Russian television talk show "Let Them Speak."
China: An alleged list of banned SMS terms
Elaine Chow from Shanghaiist reports on an alleged list of banned SMS by major mobile companies in China in 2010. The documents, distributed by @zuola via Twitter, are claimed to be composed by a SMS service company, Boer, which tried to inform their users on all the banned terms adopted by major mobile companies including China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom.The terms can be grouped into 6 major categories including:
1. National security and political terms, which consists of more than 700 terms such as “Cultural revolution”, “Xinjiang independence”, “Propaganda department”, “national security”, “anti-corruption”, “violence”, “riot”, “June 4″, “people”, “human right”, “democracy”, “CCP” and etc.
2. Around 200 Falun Gong related terms
3. Around 200 sensitive news related terms such as “telling the truth”, “petition”, “SCMP”, “Asia Magazine”, “suicide”, “public opinion”
4. More than 600 vulgar terms, such as “fxxk”, “gambling”, “sex”, “pornography”, “naked”, “dick”, “breast”, “fart”, “loser”, “dog shit”, “slut”, “illegal”, “bomb”, “adult movie”, “heroin”, “chat chat”, “prostitute”, “lonely”, “apartment”, “fake money”, “oral sex”, “waiting for you”.
5. Around 800 names, including historical figures, political leaders and dissidents.
6. Around 500 commercial spam.
Others are sensitive English terms and number combination (such as 8964).
As Elaine Chow points out “there's some doubt to whether these words are actually anything close to an official black list, or if they were just compiled by netizens gleefully supposing what the relevant bureaus would want to censor.” Since the censorship criteria and mechanism is non-transparent, different companies may have a slightly different set of filtered terms in different period of time, ordinary citizens are kept in the dark and it is very difficult to get hold of the full picture.
HERE
NAD HERE
woensdag 5 januari 2011
look art: art in a nostalgic (text-based) online virtual environment
Ars Virtua Open Call for Proposals: look art - art in a nostalgic (text-based) online virtual environment :: 3 Commissions @ $400 each :: Deadline: January 31.
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2011: A Brave New Dystopia - Chris Hedges
The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.
READ ON
dinsdag 4 januari 2011
Office Bromance
A half hour special about the sometimes depressing, always absurd existence of cubicle dwellers Darren and Craig. Featured segments include: how to handle a hot co-worker's party evite; viral videos paralyze productivity and threaten to take over the world; knowing when it's time to murder a MySpace account; rumors of downsizing lead to a LinkedIn stampede; and frivolous status updates require an interoffice Twitter intervention.
maandag 3 januari 2011
Look out for Metamodernism this year! we're making everything over_ inna romance
The postmodern years of plenty, pastiche, and parataxis are over. In fact, if we are to believe the many academics, critics, and pundits whose books and essays describe the decline and demise of the postmodern, they have been over for quite a while now. But if these commentators agree the postmodern condition has been abandoned, they appear less in accord as to what to make of the state it has been abandoned for. In this essay, we will outline the contours of this discourse by looking at recent developments in architecture, art, and film. We will call this discourse, oscillating between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, metamodernism. We argue that the metamodern is most clearly, yet not exclusively, expressed by the neoromantic turn of late associated with the architecture of Herzog & de Meuron, the installations of Bas Jan Ader, the collages of David Thorpe, the paintings of Kaye Donachie, and the films of Michel Gondry. (VIA) & HERE
WikiLeaks, Open Information and Effective Use: Exploring the Limits of Open Government
DECEMBER 29, 2010 BY MICHAEL GURSTEIN
WikiLeaks is Open Information writ large.
…the Open Information Foundation (has the intention) to bring to the world of information, what Open Source had brought to the world of software. Namely, the free exchange of ideas and knowledge, without borders, without limits and without financial constraints. Hopefully, by breaking down the traditional, properitary (sic) barriers to gaining knowledge, everyone can grow.
It is a bit surprising that there has been relatively little and mostly rather defensive discussion on the fairly obvious connection between WikiLeaks and the various manifestations of the “open” movement and particularly “open information”, “open data” and “open government” and what it tells us about the opportunities, limitations and risks of “open” in a governmental context.
Open data is a philosophy and practice requiring that certain data be freely available to everyone, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control.
READ ON
WikiLeaks is Open Information writ large.
…the Open Information Foundation (has the intention) to bring to the world of information, what Open Source had brought to the world of software. Namely, the free exchange of ideas and knowledge, without borders, without limits and without financial constraints. Hopefully, by breaking down the traditional, properitary (sic) barriers to gaining knowledge, everyone can grow.
It is a bit surprising that there has been relatively little and mostly rather defensive discussion on the fairly obvious connection between WikiLeaks and the various manifestations of the “open” movement and particularly “open information”, “open data” and “open government” and what it tells us about the opportunities, limitations and risks of “open” in a governmental context.
Open data is a philosophy and practice requiring that certain data be freely available to everyone, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control.
READ ON
Meet the Persident_ In surreal Russia, fake presidential tweets are much more relevant than the real ones.
In his off-hours, a seemingly dutiful government servant in Czar Nicholas I's Ministry of Finance would pass the time jotting down little aphorisms. Some were obscure in meaning: "Not every general is stout by nature." Or, "If you have a fountain, plug it up. Let the fountain too have a rest." Others mocked the state for which the official, a heavy-browed and dimple-chinned man named Kozma Prutkov, worked. "Our land is rich; there is just no order in it," he wrote of Russia under Nicholas, a reactionary authoritarian who personally censored the poet Aleksandr Pushkin and whose education minister came up with the dubious motto of "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality." Prutkov's very existence -- a doltish, maudlin bureaucrat in a state overflowing with them -- was itself an admonition to the regime.
READ ON
zondag 2 januari 2011
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