Re: Re: <nettime> Sorry... (FWD)

[Philip.Pocock@t-online.de (philip pocock)]

is it not time to consider or call for an embargo on australian media 
art works (as well as any stemming from uncle sam and his 'coalition of 
the willing')??

my intuitive humanist canadian nature tells me it is time to think about 
such an action. i can imagine that the high-cost high-tech 
industrialization of new media aesthetics from promoter-designer jeffrey 
shaw are acclaimed by western industrial sponsors as they glorify 
western industrial might, showing those powers-that-be how to co-opt the 
new energy of new digital media to old industry ends, only to buttress 
what charlie chaplin disparaged in 'modern times', at the cost of no 
money left in institutions shaw and company control for what young 
artists working with new media and networks are radically investigating 
and creating at low- almost no-cost. such australian-inspired cultural 
politics sends young radical media artists a discouraging message, a 
message that new media is only supported if and when it invests a 'big 
blue magic' in its submissive role extending the 'heroic' 
military-industrial complex electro-mechanical conveyor belt control 
over any radical use of media, seen as irrational when not serving what 
w. burrough's calls 'the Board' of 'Control'.

is it not time to speak out against such negative new media cultural 
politics, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions in 
support of 'picasso persiflage' complexes we are learning to call 'media 
stars' when new media collectives outside the world of the 'coalition of 
the willing' find themselves broke and in the shadow at the end of the 
'digital art pecking order' with the industrialization of works like 
'shaw's looming in the foreground, supported full force by a thinking 
process that needs rethinking?

shaw's recent material, expensive, energy-sucking inflatable nostalgic 
spin off of a 60s-style worlds fair buckie fuller 'dome' in 'future 
cinema' turns its new media participants into servo-electro mechanical 
image-gristmilling subordinates, pixel-pumping galleon slaves, pumping 
and grindin to catch bunker-window-style glimpses of improperly, 
voyeuristically mythologizing, and visually-cliché exoticized human 
beings, thev entire mechanical circus activity sending an antiquated and 
industrial-paradigm-occupied message that does not embrace cultural 
tolerance or new media as offering a collaborative 'noosphere' of 
collective understanding. the user must submit to the machinery in order 
to get the digital pay-of. is such work not questionably supporting the 
general world political stance of this artist's country of origin at the 
current moment? true, it iis difficult to equate art and nationality, 
but my intuition tells me that it is time to realize that cultural 
production is our best bet at a pan-foreign ministry and radical other 
art forms are now perhaps the best diplomat, or communicator. such 
australian aesthetics as promoted by shaw, currently a cultural 
politician in australia promoting such aesthetics worldwide,  only 
furthers the polluting idea of industrial progress into realms of new 
media which are perhaps, imho, one of the last holdouts for cultural 
diplomacy and translocal tolerance. and his expensive space-taking works 
are in essence siphoning funds from meaningful radical experimental new 
media collaborative projects. should the online community not consider 
speaking out, or are we as douglas davis wrote in the 70s still a 
'cottage industry' where to speak out is ostracizing and the prices is 
to be labeled a subversive disturbance and ignored?

this mail follows up my critique of lev manovich's 'soft' approach to 
co-opting new media, and misrepresenting current new media database 
paradigms in order to prop up, update and fog critique of any mechanisms 
perpetrated for american global media executive control. his 'soft 
cinema' work is a digital mannerist version of any cnn or western 
nightly news report. his database algorithms, 'rule-based' are even less 
imaginative than cnn editors searching for images to tack onto to an 
'approved' fixed pre-recorded soundtrack. is it not time to expose such 
tactics that try to conscript database concepts and make them backward 
compatible to tv news? what message does that send young media artists, 
whose work seems dysfunctional when works like manovich's are considered 
as a measure?

soft cinema's preset soundtrack, decorated with pretty pictures 
madison-avenue-ad-agency-styled a la piet mondrian (for no good reason 
other than cosmetic) is primarily a closed information system, the GUI 
being manovich himself he proclaims in humility. this banal product 
parades itself as a database new media cinematic work. such works as 
this which conscript the language of new media to revisit the 20th 
century american propaganda machine built from misinterpreting 
precedents in bolshevik experimental cinema (d. vertov) sends a clearly 
muddy and damaging message to young digital media artists who would 
imagine from manovich's example that a database is nothing more than a 
malleable dossier, archive or library of author-controlled and censored 
data a la fbi-goes-digital. in doing so lev manovich confuses the slogan 
of new media with old ones and helps 'The Board' to gat a database 
facelift for an ailing and credibility-losing american propaganda media 
industry, at the cost of radical alternative open, collective database 
new media initiatives which do not pander to the misunderstandings of 
new media in sponsor circle looking to get some of that 'media magic' 
into the affectivity of their military-industrial complex message, 
threatened of course by an open database algorithm which manovich either 
avoids, is unable to program or considers peripheral, when in fact it is 
the distinguishing quality of the 'language of database media'. any who 
study 'soft cinema' will soon find the single wizard behind the curtain 
in oz, and realize they are in an eye-candy-colored virtual prison that 
appears labyrinthian yet remains inalterable by users, just a regular 
penitentiary design.

is it not in new media that a cultural politic or a politic for cultures 
as pushed for by the jeffrey shaw and the lev manovich, both imho 
subliminally promoting with their ideas and designs the industrial and 
medial messages of the 'coalition of the willing'  - australia and 
america?  or am i off the deep end?

i encourage an informal communication-based non-organized movement 
supporting a full embargo and discourse concerning the current 
mechanisms and messages pushed by american and australian new media 
producers.

Am Friday den, 14. February 2003, um 04:29, schrieb Patrick Lichty:

This came through on another list. It makes me want to cry, or scream
out, or something -- to think that Australia has come to this under the
disgustingly oppressive Howard government. It's a bit long, but important
reading.

Betty Betty McLellan
P.O. Box 688
Townsville Q
Australia 4810
Phone: +61 (0)7 4772 6060
Fax: +61 (0)7 4772 6544
email: bettymc@austarnet.com.au

From: "Ron Gray / Irene Gale"
To:
Subject: Guantanamo Bay Rules used in Australian Detention Centres
Date: Thu, 9 Jan 2003 16:41:31 +1030

Dear all, Please forward this on to your contacts - and take some action
about it!

Irene

The following is from the Victorian Greens refugee spokesperson, Pamela
Curr. It makes chilling reading. The question is whether Australia is
becoming another redneck USA, or brownshirt Germany (if, indeed, there's 
any difference)?
 <...>

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