Manni

"Here are some great links sent to me by Pamela from Goucher, they are very useful resources, so I am..."

"Here the latest on Black Yield Institute, published by Civil Eats:

https://tinyurl.com/y2ephb4c..."

"Hello Pamela @mxpjthompson, thanks for sharing about the work you have been doing with your students..."

"I Love Kevin's take on food and its relation to community, commoning and the potentials, which are i..."

"And hi again...so, we are very excited and looking forward to come and join you in Baltimore to inve..."

"Hi everybody! Very much looking forward to it all. I will write more later but for now here are some..."

We checked 100 years of protests in 150 countries. Here’s what we learned about the working class and democracy.
The success of mass protests depends on who is doing the protesting.

'...Industrial workers have been key agents of democratization and, if anything, are even more important than the urban middle classes. When industrial workers mobilize mass opposition against a dictatorship, democratization is very likely to follow.'

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/24/we-checked-years-protests-countries-heres-what-we-learned-about-working-class-democracy/

Wearable face projector, projects a face onto your face and tricks the face recognition surveillance technology:

https://tinyurl.com/yx9v6977

How to Be an Anticapitalist today? The brilliant sociologist, late Eric Olin Wright:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/12/erik-olin-wright-real-utopias-anticapitalism-democracy/?fbclid=IwAR2xVnbY0JZqg1gRJDxlKBWYPRUxpijD0onLf6BUQ-2eeud0o5_IMGVWpuQ

An audio-visual archival resource focusing on radical activism around Australia, particularly during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s (although resources are not restricted exclusively to this time period).

The archive recovers "lost" and rare independent Australian documentaries (also vérité footage of historical significance) in order to preserve these films, videos and audio for posterity before they reach end of life and disappear permanently.

The focus is on visual/aural material.....the archive currently has 204 film streams and 91 audio streams.

http://radicaltimes.info/

"This is cool too:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-49582520..."

There is a reason we call each other "comrades" and not "friends" on the Memefest network.

Here a new book From Jodi Dean: Comrade
An Essay on Political Belonging

When people say “comrade”, they change the world

In the twentieth-century millions of people across the globe addressed each other as “comrade”. Now, it’s more common to hear talk of “allies” on the left than it is of comrades. In Comrade, Jodi Dean insists that this shift exemplifies the key problem with the contemporary left: the substitution of political identity for a relation of political belonging that must be built, sustained, and defended.

In Comrade, Dean offers a theory of the comrade. Comrades are equals on the same side of a political struggle. Voluntarily coming together in the struggle for justice, their relationship is characterised by discipline, joy, courage, and enthusiasm. Considering the generic egalitarianism of the comrade in light of differences of race and gender, Dean draws from an array of historical and literary examples such as Harry Haywood, C.L.R James, Alexandra Kollontai, and Doris Lessing. She argues that if we are to be a left at all, we have to be comrades.

https://www.versobooks.com/books/3060-comrade

Vida
3 years, 9 months ago

Thanks Oliver, sounds like an interesting essay. Especially for those of us who grew up with this notion of camerade.
Cheers

"During the introduction of a recent speech by Donald Trump at Turning Point USA Teen Student Action Summit, someone — reportedly by accident and has since been fired from Turning Point — pasted into the slides a 2016 faux seal created by Charles Leazott that features an eagle holding wads of cash and golf clubs with a ribbon that says, in Spanish, “45 is a Puppet”. Score one for the resistance."

https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/45_is_a_puppet.php

For those who are interested in how to build and run a small social network site, certainly an alternative to Facebook or Twitter, here is a great guide:

https://runyourown.social

"Keeping the social network sites small is essential for customization that will meet everyone's needs. Kazemi doesn't suggest going over 100 users. Smaller communities are easier to manage both technically and socially, but it also creates an intimacy where it's possible to know everyone in the group, creating a truly private, curated space. "

Full article here:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kzmjde/facebook-and-twitter-suck-so-heres-how-to-make-your-own-social-media-network

Donald Weber writes about photography as a discipline, profession and practice, which still has a long journey to make for to be able to think the conditions of its own production. This work is part of a larger body of work Donald and I are developing, one day it will be a book. A next text related to the ideas Donald is talking about here is in the making. Highly recommended reading!

https://tinyurl.com/y6d9fhtg

"@Bernadette- you mean from 'Global Liberal Media" into "Democratic Media"?..."

"Thanks for this SanFrancisco- if you have any more examples on Culture Jamming coming from Argentina..."

The Baffler on Spotify and how its main value for brands and advertisers is to know really a lot about our emotional states via their mood based playlists.

https://thebaffler.com/downstream/big-mood-machine-pelly

There is several reasons I am posting this. First, it is time to bring this wonderful text, the original text by Mark Dery, which first theorized the term Culture Jamming - in fact Dery has coined the term- to you.

So here is: Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs

http://markdery.com/?page_id=154

I find the concept of Culture jamming still very useful, although the practice of CJ was in the last two decades abused, coopted, critiqued for being just an empty fashion etc. I always thought that in order to do it well, Culture Jamming needs superb understanding of communication, design and art in relation to meaning making in our media, well in the world.

Now, the media has changed and changed again, and the question is how is Culture jamming useful in the current social media, surveillance driven media sphere. But it is and even if we engage just in the visual graphic part, it can do "something".

So what can it do today, I am asking you? And this is what I aim to start figuring out more with my master of communication design students here at RMIT. As part of a set of semiotic strategies, named Re:Coding we will look into that. But I would need your help- what are good examples of CJ, what are good CURRENT examples of CJ? How would you run a project on CJ with students?

Here is a video of one that I love from our friend Vladimir Turner, and the whole project is here:

http://sgnlr.com/works/outside/house-of-cards/#

Any ideas and examples would be welcome.

What great memories! Culture jamming 2002, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Perhaps the first culture jamming action in Slovenia- in a night action we jammed a national campaign on the importance of brands and branding. Big Slovenian brands had billboards all over in order to promote the value of brands and the importance of buying well known brands.

We used a stencil and jammed billboards on major crossroads or other prominent locations. This was in the middle of the process for the first Memefest and in no minor way we were influenced by the Culture Jamming concepts and culture in thinking about our first festival. Especially No Logo by Naomi Klein and the Adbusters magazine were important at that time.

sgnlr
4 years, 1 month ago

bigup

oliver
4 years ago

Thanks sgnlr- what are you up to these days? Have you been doing any interventions recently? Also, did you check the links I gave you in relation to doing a PhD in Melbourne?